Amazon PPC Advertising
Kris and Dustin are fortunate enough to have Dan Rodgers, an Amazon seller, and YouTuber join them to discuss Amazon PPC tips and best practices. The panel dives deep into things sellers should avoid doing when selling on Amazon and when setting up their Amazon advertising platform.
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Amazon PPC Advertising
– Hello everyone and welcome to episode 43 of Two Amazon Sellers and a Microphone. Today Kris and I have a great guest. Dan Rogers is with us. He is an Amazon seller, YouTuber, content creator, investor. Just does it all. Dan, we’re glad to have you on the show. Thanks for coming.
– Yeah, my pleasure, thank you. Thank you for having me on. We just did a very cool YouTube video with Kris, he as on my YouTube channel. So any of those of you interested in learning about Sellozo or how that’s going to help you with PPCs specifically, you guys can check that out as well was posted two days ago, but thank you so much for having me on, I’m excited to jump into this with you.
– Yeah. We’re excited to have you. And we found Dan by just browsing the YouTube channels out there. And he’s probably the most transparent one out there. His content is off the charts. So it’s very nice to have him on because we’re going to be able to go through some stuff that he’s experienced and things that we’d probably need to watch out for us, for Amazon sellers. So this is going to be really relatively good content. So I’m excited to break this down before we get into Dustin, I want to, let’s get some, let’s get some background on you, Dan. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in this space. ‘Cause you know, everybody’s got a good story. Like they’d Google something or they had to make money online. Like how did you get into this space and then we’ll go from there.
– Yeah going back. It’s funny. I remember someone asked me this question the other day, so it’s good timing. But I used to, I would sit in my old workshop with a friend I remember, and we would discuss these ideas, we discussed product ideas, and some of them are really good. Sometimes it was a service idea, but that was really the thing is how can we develop something ourselves, bring it to market and ideation and conceptualization of ideas was rarely the problem, although maybe some of them would not have worked of course, the bigger problem seemed to be, how do you bring that to market. That always appeared to be behind like those hidden doors or reserved for big companies as bringing your idea to market. And so fast forward a year or two, I was rarely looking at the online space and making inroads there through various business models. Some of which I enjoyed some of which I really didn’t enjoy. I got an as I think all people do, they test something out for months on end, which doesn’t end up working. I had a lot of those and then I found FBA, and I realized at that point, that’s the link. That’s how people can bring their ideas to market. You can be anywhere in the world and you can bring your idea to market. And better than that is that here we can actually look at what’s already working. We already can look at what’s selling well and how to develop that further. So although it’s not complete innovation all the time, because some people are of course, just slightly differentiating or some people also launch me-too products. You have the ability to innovate and bring that to market. That the level of innovation you apply up to you, but it is a doorway into having access to the, excuse me, the international market. Because as you know, you’ve got the European Unified Accounts and North American Unified Accounts. So you can now actually develop a product. You might even launch it on Kickstarter or Indiegogo if it’s like a big innovation, and then work into Amazon through like Amazon LaunchPad or similar. Or you just launch directly on Amazon with Amazon FBA But you now have that access. You have that ability. So that’s really how I chose that piece of the online space to focus on. And from there, it’s I remember at that point when I focused, I decided that’s what I’m going to do. I actually sold my car at that point I remember. And I funded in part with that money, my first order, which was about $3,000. And I started that first product, which ended up doing well. I actually still sell that product now. And from that point, I just continued to scale the business. I was also doing other things. I didn’t like stop everything and just do FBA. The reason I also recommend that for others is that it takes time. Your business is going to require re-investment, reordering. And so you don’t want to put too much strain on the business at first by pulling out all the profits. How are you going to scale? Remember, you’ll have to reorder before you sell everything. So you actually need a little extra capital there. You need a bit of a buffer. So to avoid putting too much pressure, I continued doing other things on the side, and that’s what I always recommend people start while they’re still making income elsewhere. And then, now it’s grown to the point I saw on both Europe and North America. And now one order can cost $33,000. So it’s scaled to a really, a much bigger level in a relatively short amount of time, four years or so. And so, yeah, that’s how I kind of got my start, where it came from and where it’s grown to now.
– And what year was that in?
– So that would have been like 2015, 16.
– Okay. The good old days.
– Yeah, it was… But even then I remember people were still speaking about how it’s so competitive. So I don’t think that will ever die. But on that quick, I don’t agree with that kind of saturation. Some places are always going to be saturated, some markets, but I was reading the statistic the other day and I don’t remember the specific number, but it basically produces a number of how many new products are created each year. And it’s a lot, it’s a lot, it’s in the tens of thousands of new products being created for the first time every year. So all of those need to end up on Amazon at some point, and then they’re going to be variated, and variations of them. So there’s, it’s each product almost like a wave. And you don’t want to, it’s like surfing, you don’t want to catch a wave when it’s broken and it’s whitewater. You want to catch it as that swells building. And if you do, then you get good placement, get good reviews. And because of that, as you see in a lot of markets now, if you go on Amazon, you, those sellers tend to stay at the front. Even with more basic offerings, they stay at the front because of the review council and the solidifying of those rankings. So it’s just about finding the right wave really. It’s, I don’t want it to sound like a game, when I say that it’s, it’s not a game, but it’s just about timing. Timing is quite important with this business model. But saying Amazon saturated is not in my opinion, an accurate statement because we’ve got new products all the time.
– Yeah, I like a lot of the things that you touched on there. I like your optimism about Amazon. We hear that a lot about it’s saturated. And of course, we don’t believe that. I mean, we feel like it’s an amazing opportunity, an opportunity that just didn’t exist 15, 20 years ago, to be able to like you said, scale that business quickly to large numbers sort of on your own. I mean, that would have been impossible without the huge investments into warehousing and large product orders and pitching, pitching your products to big-box retailers. And I mean, those things, those things are out the window now at the Amazon business. And I also liked the way that you touched on be careful about starting to pay yourself too soon. That’s a mistake that I made. For sure that slowed me down after I’d already skyrocket for awhile. I slowed myself down by trying to take too much out, because even as you go is, as you grow bigger, it’s still, it can be, it’s fickle. It can a slight drop and sales or a competitor coming on can, and now you’ve got a lot more invested in it can be tricky. But now you’re so, you’ve been a seller for a long time. And now you also have your, the content that you’re creating is just amazing. You’ve got this whole space where you’re just educating and telling everyone their stories and tips. What made you want to do that? You know, what made you want to do that? And you’re just, I’m telling you, we’ve watched a lot of your stuff and it’s fantastic.
– Oh, thank you, Dustin. I appreciate that. And just before I touch on your on the question, I wanted to mention this. You just reminded me is that I began when I was still in South Africa, which is where I’m from. You can probably get my accent, but the reason I wanted to mention that is I find a lot of people, the people who are going to be most concerned with, how can I get my ideas to market, you know? I’m in a kind of more far-flung country, maybe not a first world I started from there. So I think that’s really important. That’s also why in my videos, as you just touched on, in a lot of those, I try and approach it from the perspective of anyone anywhere, not just US-based or UK-based. I think that’s really important. And I think the kind of onboarding for everyone else is going to get better and better because they are some problems with that in sign up for Amazon. But it is a global opportunity. To your question on the content. So initially I started that. And I started that way back even when I was in South Africa, I started this little YouTube channel and really what it was going to be as documenting my journey as I worked online, what worked, what didn’t work. And then of course, now it’s more focused on Amazon because that’s the business model I focused on, but that was originally the point. And the reason, one of my goals in it was that I wanted to kind of test myself to create a YouTube channel, which I think a lot of people feel the need to just test, like all these people, they’re getting listened to on YouTube. What if I can share something there? And that was really the kind of the impetus for it. And then I’ve just continued with it. However, I have to say at first, I mean, there was like two years of almost no growth. Like, I mean, it was, it was really, it was hard to keep doing it. And if I’m honest, I wasn’t that regular with it, but I did not have growth until pretty much, the last 15 months I would say is where we’ve really got traction. I mean, in May it was still at 3000 something subscribers. In may and now we’re approaching 13,000 subscribers. So, but included there is that what I’ve attempted to do and now focus fully on is very high-quality content. We take a lot of time to develop it. That’s our niche. Often the videos that are even in 4k, which is honestly just overkill, because it takes six hours to upload to YouTube alone. But the last video we did the last big production video, we did take almost 100 hours to produce and it’s going out for free. So that’s really, the niche is really high-quality content, totally free. And it’s built an amazing audience because they can tell, I know what I’m talking about. I’m not going in copy-pasting this from a blog, or from someone, this is from me. Like that it’s too intricate. There’s too many intricacies for it to be fabricated or like copy pasted. And so what we’ve ended up with is like this amazing group of people who now are like telling me they watch the ads or they let the ads run so that, that will support us. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. It’s honestly such a cool community. So I’m very appreciative for it. And I take, it’s also a responsibility, people are subscribing and spending their time watching there, so I try to put as much into those as possible and produce content they want to hear, questions they’re asking, et cetera. But that’s basically how the content creation came into being was just testing myself and the journey. And then it became more educated and dedicated to that.
– And you can tell like Amazon sellers when we go to YouTube and type in Amazon FBA, we look for videos to watch and somebody comes off real salesy and like pitchy, and they try to get you in a type of funnel. It’s an immediate turnoff. And so you can really tell that in the content that you’re just out to provide them good information for people. I mean, back when Dustin and I started probably when you started too, there wasn’t really much out there. You had to go listen to a few podcasts, watch a few videos, but most of them were all about pitching a course or something to join a group or something. So it’s nice to have very transparent information out there. You can type it into YouTube and you can find out what you’re looking for. You can get your questions answered. So the content’s been great.
– Thank you, actually you know, one of my biggest fears is that because it’s free, it’s less valuable. And so, because it’s free, how much should I watch it? So sometimes I almost wish I could charge like a dollar, just to, just that way, it might be seen more, more valuable, but that is something I’ve learned as well, is that, although that’s kind of the positioning and what we’re focused on right now, that is something that I notice is that one benefits to more paid products is that because people are exchanging, it tends to be more valuable. But certainly, that’s not been the case lately. People have been watching. So I’m stoked about that.
– That’s good stuff. I want to touch on, I want to kind of dig, dig a little deeper here. ‘Cause you know, all three of us are selling on Amazon. We all different processes. We all do property searches probably differently. If you can break that down on your end, like when you are product researching, you don’t have to get into the nitty-gritty. But, like when you find a product, how do you go about it? Like negotiation, sourcing, inspections, like what’s that all kind of look like?
– Sure so there’s a couple of things that I’ve worked out here that have become very important with research at first. And the first thing I look for all the time is higher price products. And anyone who follows me is going to get really sick of hearing that. But it’s important because there’s certain fixed costs in this business model, which won’t move things like your FBA fee. Things like even your international shipping fee, these things are based on product size, not price. And so if you have a product, let’s say headphones, you have one pair of headphones sells for $20. One pair of headphones sells for $80. Both of those are the same size products. So they cost the same to internationally shop and they cost the same for FBA, for Amazon to pick and pack and get to the customer. So if you deduct those costs of 20 and then off 80, it’s obvious it’s hitting that $20 products so much more, so much more strain. So higher price products are generally better in terms of profit, but also competition. Because you’ve got a lot of people looking at 20, $25 products. You know, I think it’s moving up because that’s, cat’s kind of out of the bag, of the pricing versus profit. But you have far fewer people competing on like 40, $50 products, far less competition, specifically new sellers there. The second big thing I look for is development potential. And this one’s become much more clear to me this year. Even from my story at the beginning here, when you asked about the introduction. That’s an important innovation, the development that you provide, not selling a me-too product. If you saw the same exact headphones and maybe it’s just a different color, that’s not enough now, you have to develop a product further. It has to be very unique. You have to give people a reason to purchase that. And if you can, you want a sustainable competitive advantage, something that is hard for competitors to imitate. That’s difficult to replicate in the future. And so when I’m doing research, I’m looking for high development potential. So let me give you an example. Kitchen towels would have really bad development potential. Like, how can you make kitchen towels better? The kitchen towels, like, it’s not… I don’t care what the numbers look like. I’m probably not going to be launching kitchen towels because I can create a sustainable competitive advantage. This is very true of products where they are functional in nature. Like kitchen towels, I’m buying it just so I can, clean stuff up in the kitchen. Whereas if we think about gifts, which in my opinion are the highest potential niche on Amazon. Gift products, it could be anniversary gifts, it could be gifts for her gifts for him. Those types of things are huge, huge potential. And the reason why go look at those keywords and you’re going to see the front page is just all different types of products. It’s like people want different gifts based on who that gift’s for. Maybe this person likes coffee. This person likes roses. It depends. But in those products, you’re going to see huge variation. Often you’re going to see that seller has sat down, and literally drawn out the design of that product, brought it to life, and now it’s selling well. And so in that way, it’s the biggest thing I’m looking for, is how can I develop this further? Say something I can fix with the product. Is there a way I can better this product? And I don’t one to develop something that’s not visual. So another example would be a product that has a bad app. Let’s say it works with an app. I don’t want to go spend all this time bettering the app because I can’t visually express that on the main images. And because our customers buying a digital space, you need visuals. Yes maybe once they buy the product and use the app, it would be good, but we need to get them to buy the product first. And so I like visual changes far more. Say if we changed like a whiskey gift set for men if we changed that up and it was all made of crystal glass with a beautiful case with some type of design or great carpentry or what have you. This is very visual. And it’s a better gift that this person wants to buy for the other person, and included in the gifting space. I’m going to stick to that because when you buy a gift for someone, it is also self-reflective. So I don’t want to go cheap. You know I’m willing to pay more. And so we also achieve the higher price benefits here as well. So those are the two major things I’m looking for and then lower competition, but more specifically acceptance of low reviews. So you might have 800 reviews, 600 reviews on the front page, and they’re doing good sales, but then you see someone with 35 reviews doing the same amount of sales. Someone with 20 reviews also doing over 300 sales a month. All I’m looking for is ease of entry. Like people not basing it all on reviews, they’re also basing it on what the product looks like on the product itself. And as we just touched on with like gifts, high development, that’s what they looking for. They’re not just looking for the lowest price or the most reviews, they’re looking for the best gift in that case. And that’s where you can come in. And because you’ve spent more time making a better product, you get chosen, not the reviews, but because of your product. So those are the three major things I’m looking at. And then a couple like size and weight things as well.
– Just convinced me to go look at gifts.
– Again this is why we love having guests on to talk about stuff. ‘Cause we just, that honestly is not something that I thought about before, where you’re coming at it from the perspective of the search or the key with the keyword they’re typing in, and then seeing a wildly, vast array of products, as opposed to someone who types in, like you were talking about kitchen towels, and they see 5,000 listings that look identical. That’s a fascinating approach because you’re right. That gift area on all those indicators. I mean, you can differentiate easily. ‘Cause if someone types in anniversary gift for husband, there’s going to be all, there’s going to be all kinds of things on there. They will not be the same product. So you, you immediately stand out. Plus I’d imagine that helps out on your PPC because people won’t click it. If it’s not what they want, instead of like where they if you have PPC running for kitchen towels, they’re going to click yours every single time just to check it out. And there could be, that could make a big difference.
– In those competitions for those keywords. I’m sure they’re like seasonal. They may not run them all year round, so you can pick up a per click that can be super low during the whole year. And then when Christmas comes around, I’m sure they go up, but you know, that’s another area. Your competition for those search terms is probably going to be fairly low all year round. So great feedback. That’s good stuff.
– Also the other benefit that you guys will appreciate is that you have multiple keywords. So, or you have more keywords than usual because you have to be your base product keywords, but then you got all the gift keywords. So mother’s day gift, father’s day gift, anniversary gift, Christmas gift. So you’ve got all those gifting keywords as well, giving you flex over PPC, kind of decreasing risk on visibility. ‘Cause, you’ve got these multiple areas to rank in. And then the other thing with the gifts that I wanted to mention to you, Oh yes, is that you know Q4. Now like Q4, there are some sellers who just, the business is only Q4 the whole year. They only get ready. They sold Q4. They have income for the whole year. That’s how big Q4 is. Q4 is massive. As you guys know the sales, you got to have a lot of stock. So you might solve triple, sometimes quadruple what you saw in the year. in Q4 you could sell triple as much. But with the gifting products, you’ve got these little spikes all year. So you got if your gift is suited, but as I said, you’re going to have mother’s day, father’s day, Christmas, all of those had all days, it could be graduation gifts, it could be an anniversary. So you’re having these little spikes, which also help a lot of birthdays, birthdays all year. So you’re getting these spikes all the time, which can be quite significant as opposed to even quite as strong constant demand product.
– And your return rate is probably super low. No one’s returning anything back. I mean, you someone’s buying a gift. Your return rate is low.
– Yeah. Thank you for reminding me on this one. This is is one of the biggest ones with the gifts, is that the buyer doesn’t use the product. So think about it this way. Your only goal is to provide a product which allows the gifter to provide a gift to the giftee to the person receiving the gift and have the giftee the person getting the gift, have them be happy. Now, regardless of the person who receives the gift, regardless of that recipient’s actual inner feelings. They’re not going to want to come across as unappreciative. They’re going to be stoked. So you’ve helped the gifter do their job. And that’s the end of the buyer having the product at all. So you get a great review and you have to remember that that gifting experience is much more memorable than you receiving a gift for you. I get things from Amazon all the time, it’s like, okay, but if I gift someone a product I got from Amazon, I remember that more. So when the seller asked me for a review, that’s more memorable. I’m more likely to take action. And I’m going to positively take action in most instances, because the person was happy with the gift I gave them. And then the person who has the gift is actually using it. Even if the product doesn’t perform or malfunctions, or what have you, they kind of unlikely to tell the person who gave them the gift, the buyer, because again, it’s going to come off as kind of unappreciative. So generally that good reviews, never going to change, and the buyer the person who left the review, they’re not using the product. So they very unlikely to go change that good review. So it also has a kind of review benefit, but that’s not to say you must have a bad product at all. It’s just a kind of review advantage I wanted to point out to those as well.
– That is so interesting. I’m actually in the middle of some product research right now. And I’m after talking to you, I think I might pivot a tad here and really research that section. I mean, it, what, all the points you bring up are really valid. And it’s interesting cause this, what everyone talks about in product research, trying to hit certain metrics. You have, how many competitors you have, how many reviews they have, what’s the search volume on the keywords, all these things you’re trying to pigeonhole yourself into this perfect product and it seems like this category gifts is like, I mean, it’s open season on it. You could just, there’s so many opportunities there and it allows you to be innovative too in a different way. You don’t have to develop necessarily. You don’t have to invent something new. You just have to make a gift that’s not prettier, funnier, whatever for that particular occasion. That’s fascinating. Well, let’s change topics here just a little bit. ‘Cause I know there’s so many things about the success on Amazon and how quickly you can scale, but there’s a lot of issues that come up too, that I think don’t get talked about a lot. I mean, Chris and I, we talk about solid time. We’ve had a lot of different challenges, issues and in our business. And I know Dan, you’ve got a story for us about an issue that you faced, but it’s not all roses in this business and you have to be ready to take on challenges. And some of them can be a little intimidating or be scared about. I mean, I’ve been hit with trademark issues, patent issues, other things that are intimidating. So just tell us a little bit about, I know you have a story for us, some challenges that you can face or that you face.
– Yeah, sure. I do think this is important. Actually one of the big topics I do on my channel is mistakes. Things that have gone wrong. And those videos tend to do really well. And I think it’s important. People just be aware of this because everything we’ve spoken about to this point, it’s really great, but it can all kind of be ripped away. Even if temporarily it can be for in a day if you don’t do things accurately or you don’t check certain things. So what I want to talk about now is one of the listings I had in this was a product doing very, very well. And I placed a 3000 unit order, and that was normal at this point. And I then usually would sell some of that reorder. And then I would place a reorder for 3000 a couple of weeks, or maybe even like six, eight weeks later, once I’ve got that inventory moving a bit. And so I kinda balance risk in this way by not having too much inventory at one point or at least getting the current order moving significantly before placing the reorder. And so at this point, though, the product was doing so well, Q4 was coming up. I was like, okay, about two weeks off to placing a 3000 unit order, I was like, let’s just place the reorder for another 3000. And I did have some pressure from my supplier, which you should always just be wary of, making a decision for you, not based on your supplier, trying to pull more orders. And so now I’ve ordered 6,000, but I’ve kind of broken my rule in that I haven’t, I haven’t waited long enough to balance the risk in case things go wrong. Because if something goes wrong, I can then, okay, let’s reorder. And so we fix this issue, but I went ahead anyway. And about three weeks later, I got an infringement claim. Well, actually what happened was the listing just disappeared. So when I would go to the listing, I met every single one of the dogs of Amazon. I have a list of, I actually wonder how many of them there are. One day I was trying to count how many dogs of Amazon are there. But at this time point, the listings are gone, Amazon won’t tell me what’s wrong. They won’t tell me what’s happened. And I basically went back and forth to Amazon for six weeks until finally, they told me it’s a copyright infringement. And then eventually provided me the details of the person laying that complaint. And so, that was a really trying six weeks, because at least just tell me what’s wrong so we can work on it. But it was a problem with a mock on the product, not the brand name this time, but a certain emblem on the product that another company claimed was theirs. And that I was kind of using it to make sales, which was absolutely never my intention. In fact, I never really even thought of it at all. This little emblem. And this is where I want sellers to learn from this. This little emblem was something on the base product from the supplier. So when you go order from a supplier on Alibaba or what have you, they have this base product, the normal thing. And then you go ahead and change it adapted, make it your own. Be very careful of what’s on that base product because they have no obligation to go and check your sales country, like where you’re at. You’re going to be selling this for infringement. They don’t, it’s not the obligations, that’s for you to do. So, even my supply here very established in this industry. And yet this Mark is extremely prominent across a lot of their base products and it’s in direct conflict with a massive U.S. company. So just something to note. But at this point, I needed to obviously change things. So I went ahead and redesigned the smock into my own format. And then I adapted digitally on the listing on Amazon. I adapted all the images, so there was no more infringement present there. And then I began basically legal negotiations with this other company as to whether they would allow me to sell out current inventory. And then I would immediately change this emblem because I’ve had this problem before, where they accepted that proposal. And that time it had to do with a brand name. Now the big U.S company. But that time they were very reasonable and they allowed me to sell out current inventory. And then I could adapt this mock on future orders. In this case, they said, no. So they would not allow that. And furthermore, they would not revoke the claim. Although I had now had to remove all the inventory from Amazon. So physically it’s not for sale with that emblem. And also the digital listing does not have that emblem anymore. It’s completely gone. Still, they will not revoke the claim. And what that means is you will not get the listing back. So we lost a huge listing, hundreds and hundreds of reviews, which was the most painful, I would say out of the whole thing. I’m willing to get down, do the work, change the, I’m willing to do that, send stuff all around the world. But losing years of work in just the blink of an eye because of a little emblem, which might be similar to your mark, was very difficult. So at that point, you kind of just have to get over it. These are huge companies, so you can take them, you can take it higher on the legal ladder, but they’re going to drain you. So you’ve got to almost accepted at this point. This is how it works. It’s not always gonna feel fair, but you have to accept it at this point. You know how Amazon operates on this, is it’s they will cut the head of the snake off. That’s what they do instantly. So they are at no that they are not viable because if they continue to allow your list to be present with inflicting mark, it’s kind of their liability. So the very first thing they do is they cut that off, and now it’s for you to deal with that plaintiff, with the person who laid the claim, and you’ve got to discuss it with them or get them to revoke it, or you can go up the legal ladder. I do hope it changes in the future where it’s more innocent until proven guilty, rather than the other way around. But right now, and this is how it operates. And so I removed all the inventory and I had two lawyers working with the lawyers of this company, but we got a good resolution in this case. I don’t think it’s that common. This is quite an aggressive litigating type of company, but that’s what I would recommend. If this ever happens to you, change the emblem or brand name. Completely changed the digital listing immediately. Get lawyers on it. That’s what I would say is very important so that they can produce a proper letter of appeal for you. That’s going to get you the best result. Very often they’re going to be reasonable. Sometimes you can have a harder one like this. Then at that point, you can establish the outcome. Are they going to revoke it or not? If they will revoke it, that’s awesome because you can just sell the current inventory and then change the emblem. And rarely, nothing rarely changes too much. If they do not revoke it, you must remove the inventory. And now you’ve got a couple of options. You can send it back to your supplier to adapt that emblem. Or you can try to find a U.S.-based company that can try and adapts that emblem for you. What I will say is it’s very very difficult to find a U.S company that can adapt screen printed logos on fabrics or metals. So it can be quite difficult to find that specific thing. So you might have to send it back. For orders that are still in China, if this ever happens, I discussed this with my manufacturer saying, look this has happened. You know, I’m not going to blame you, but also like, I mean, this is a huge problem on your base product that you’ve sold me to sow this market, but in the essence of long-term business, would you mind making this change for free? Because this obviously is a big hit to the business. We’ve lost listing, we’ve paid huge lawyer fees, and it’s going to take us time to build up sales again. And they agreed to that. So we managed to change 3000 of them for free, and then your next big thing is to release the product. And there’s a couple of options here I want to run through really quick, but you can create a brand new listing, with a new GTIN code, start from scratch. Another one is you can use, and just be careful on this. And I’m not recommending this one, but you can use an older listing that you no longer use, but maybe has a couple of reviews. And I would suggest only doing that if it’s related, like a similar product or something like that, but you can kind of re-purpose that listing for the new product. Again, I wouldn’t do that if it has too many reviews because the net results can look really strange. You can have all these reviews for like a different product, none of the ones you’re selling, but it is a good way to save on like GS1 UPC codes, which are very expensive, you can just repurpose a listing. And then there is another method, but it doesn’t always work. And that is you create a new listing and you add back your suppressed listing. The one that’s got messed up in all of this, you add that back to the new listing as a variation. And the trick here is to try and get it to pull in the reviews from that old listing. Even though that old listing not going to be live, it’s kind of going to be like a dead variation on this listing, but allow you to keep the reviews on this new listing. That does not always work though. In my case this time, it did not work. I think because I kind of completely shut off that listing. So, but it is something worth noting that, if you can save your reviews, you basically didn’t lose anything, but that’s the big thing you run the risk of losing here. And then the last option is you can create multiple marketplace new listings. You can have lower reviews and lower sales, but if you can relist in the U.S. and then use global selling to also sell in Canada, that would be really good. If you have Europe and U.S. perhaps do both, but having a couple of listings is overall going to build up that sales number, a little bit of sales in each could help you kind of get that ball rolling again. And then, of course, you send your inventory, your changed inventory back into the warehouses, and begin selling again with a good launching strategy. But that’s basically what happened. And hopefully, people pick up a couple of strategies from that. Of course, the biggest thing is just to avoid this in the first place, check your brand name, get an IP attorney to check this for you, scan that product, even emblems and logos, you think are fine. If it doesn’t detract value, just remove them from the product, or adapt them to make them your own. But that’s quite important because you could sell, you could literally sell for a year and nothing will happen, when the big companies come is when you’re at the top of page one and killing it. That’s when they come that’s when they see you. And that’s when they come, bring this type of stuff. So you want to fix those problems before getting there, but yeah, that’s exactly… Yeah. That’s how that went down.
– That’s a great cautionary tale to be aware of. I had a very not similar, but a similar issue with my trademark on my brand name. And this, I think this dovetails into what you talked about earlier about why it’s so important to, you really need to diversify, have a lot of products. You don’t want to quit your job, or what’s your main income sources because these things can pop out. Like you’re talking about. I mean, mine happened because I had a… I launched my product back in 2013. It became my, it’s my best selling product at the time too. Probably at the time to something like 300 units a day of this one particular product. And then I wanted to get A-plus content. So I decided to register as a trademark, which I hadn’t for the three years has been running. The second I registered, a huge company came after me saying that I was infringing on their trademark. It wasn’t really that close, but, and it shut me down. And I had six months previously decided to go all-in on Amazon and quit my job. That was some sleepless nights, watching your best selling product go, get suspended during what, after you’ve just gone all-in on it. So that’s a great cautionary tale about that, I think, is this good for people. Real quick I know we have just a little bit of time left a couple of things. One, where do you see this, the Amazon World going in the future. And two just tell everyone how they can find you, where are you? Where is all this great content you’re putting out? Let them know where they can go find you.
– Yeah. Thank you, Dustin. I think, one of the cool things people can do is, they can actually check out the videos I have on my YouTube channel. That’s how you can find me. It’s just Dan Rogers, Rogers with a D R-O-D-G-E-R-S. But on there, you can find videos on, “I show you exactly how to choose a brand name, that’s fanciful,” which basically means kind of made up rather than not trying to be similar to anything else. Go fanciful, make it strange. You know, at this point, no one cares about your brand name so much. I’m not saying have a really bad brand name, but they don’t care that much, rather protect yourself. You can see from a Dustin story, my own story here, which one’s worse, having this fanciful made-up name or losing, like your best ASIN for a couple of months is, so check out those videos for sure. But that’s the main place people can find me just on the YouTube channel and then I’m going to be kind of branching out from there. We got some cool things on the way. But I’d love to see, see some new sellers there. And then with, in terms of the Amazon space where that’s going. So I think it’s only going to get bigger. I mean, that’s for sure we’ve seen with this current situation, we’ve seen I don’t get suppressed. I don’t know how it works now. I think it can even suppress you if you say it. But then we’ve seen with us that the major companies have taken even more market share, and it’s really crushed the smaller companies, which is very unfortunate. But that’s what we’ve seen happening here. And so I think Amazon, I mean, I know people, they never bought on Amazon. They were like, I don’t understand online shopping, and especially older generations, I don’t need it. It’s too much hassle, now they’re experts. They’re better at it than me. So we have this huge kind of the stage, everything has like introductory and maturity and growth and join at the end. That’s kind of just been pushed straight in. We now have a lot of people buying. More people buying means more demand, which means we need a higher supply, which means there’s more opportunities for sellers. So I think the spaces is just growing at a rapid pace. I think it’s always going to have the opportunity. I think the biggest crutch in all of it right now is the 200 unit limit. That is really a hard thing to navigate ’cause you’ve got a bolt-on quite an expensive third-party logistics warehouse situation over here to get around that or wait. And I think we’ve got people doing both. And I don’t know if that’s going to subside. I think that might be the new norm is the 200 limit. So you’ve got an approved from Amazon that your product’s worth having in the warehouse. So there might be something we can have to see off to Q4 in January. We can have to see is that still a thing, but it might be, and that’s kind of good for some sellers, ’cause it’s going to thin out competition. Not everyone wants to deal with that. So overall I think it’s going to grow. I think it’s going to be, there’s going to just be more and more opportunity in the space, everyone’s buying online. What I would personally like to see different though is more a view of sellers as business partners. When it’s going well, we both are making a profit. We both when it goes really bad, it’s kinda you can hardly get an answer sometimes. Also, I think the chat service, the help areas on Amazon used to be a hundred times better. You could actually speak to a person who wouldn’t just link farm you and send you a bunch of links on what to do in the help articles. I can go to the help articles. I came here to speak to you. I can go search there. So, and they completely removed the chat feature on a lot of accounts now, you might’ve seen that. So just my personal gripe would say seller support and just helping your good sellers of people who, are making a significant amount of Amazon’s revenue overall now is just supporting them more. That’s what I would love to see. And it would just make the ecosystem so much better. But how it kind of feels, and I don’t know how you guys feel about it, but it kind of feels like that pot of their system has been reduced to save cost. That’s how it kind of feels. And I spoke to a guy the other day who he used to work pretty high up in Amazon and he used to do, and now what he does is he specifically focuses on ASIN Reinstatement accounting. That’s what he does. And he used to work in these systems and he said this to me, he said, I was saying, I couldn’t get an answer from seller support. And he said to me, “Yes, I wouldn’t recommend you contact support for anything ever.”
– Wow.
– And he used to work in these systems. And so that I think says a lot, it’s, that’s the big place I think would just make the whole venture so much better, and make it a lot easier for sellers. But that said, as you guys have, as I have, you can work around it, but don’t expect like everything to be, laid out for you and a problem arises you probably going to have to do some digging and supports not the best. But overall on Amazon, I think it’s going to just keep growing. I mean, even with the stock price is going through the roof I think the products, number of products is going to increase drastically. So manufacturing currently in the world’s going up a lot. So I think overall it’s just going to be more and more. You’ve also got a lot of people working at home now, so I’m going to be more kind of used to our business model. And so I think overall, it’s going to be a good thing for the space. Although we’ve got some problems currently with inventory limits and not the best support overall, it’s a huge opportunity.
– Yeah.
– Well, yeah.
– I think, I think we agree with the optimism for sure of the Amazon space. And yes, there’s challenges getting in touch with anybody at support or anybody quality of support is difficult. But that’s why the stuff that you’re doing is amazing. The content you’re putting out. I mean that helps me. People can there’s resources out there, whether you’re listening to our podcasts, going looking at Dan’s YouTube channel that are out there that can help. Dan this has been fantastic. We’re going to have to have you on again, because there’s about 9,000 topics we didn’t touch on. Like going over, this has been amazing. Everyone that’s out there listening, go to YouTube type in Dan Rogers, R-O-D-G-E-R-S. His videos are the best out there. The quality is amazing. The content is amazing. You can tell he cares. You can tell he’s passionate about what it is, is a great resource. So please check him out. Dan, it’s been amazing. Thanks for coming on. And we’ll have to get you back on here.
– Thank you so much, Dustin. I appreciate it. And Kris, thank you as well. Yeah, I Enjoyed this. It was actually fun to discuss it. The first one I’ve done like this, but I also think it’s important just to discuss, I like your show, because even like seller support, like we just did, I just complained about is like, I think it’s important for those things because otherwise, you’re sitting there thinking it’s just me. This is just difficult for me, but it’s not it’s, there’s other people, there is a person right now meeting the dogs of Amazon. And I think it’s important that people know that, that there’s a place where we can pull together. So I’m very glad to discuss us in and beyond with you guys today. And yeah, I look forward to joining you in the future.
– Excellent.
– That’s very good.
– We’ll have you back on for sure.
– Thanks, man.
– All right. Have a good one.
– Bye.
– See you.