Waleed Shahzad from ShipHype joins Dustin and Kris to chat about the inventory restrictions Amazon sellers are dealing with and some things ShipHype can help you with Amazon!
See more about ShipHype at https://shiphype.com/
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– Hello everyone and welcome to episode 32 of, Two Amazon Sellers and a Microphone. Today, Kris and I have a very special guest, Waleed Shahzad from ShipHype. Waleed, how’s it going?
– Hey, I’m awesome guys.
– Yeah, well we’re excited to talk to you. ShipHype is a prep center and this has to be a really good, to talk and also a full 3PL, so it’s gonna exciting just to learn more about what you guys are doing. And just what, how prep centers can help sellers. So I’m excited to dig into this. But before we dive into all of that, Waleed, do you wanna just give us a little bit on your background, sort of how you got started in this space, and anything else you wanna talk about with ShipHype.
– Yeah, for sure. So in the 3PL space basically, I had a previous business before this prep center/3PL and in that business, I’m from Canada, right, and I wanted to go to the States and initially I was looking for a fulfillment service who could help me out in the States. And there are a bunch of options right, but a lot of them were outdated in terms of how they operate and what are the services they can offer. For a company like mine, we had about 10,000 different SKUs, right. This is a lot of SKUs and most of the performance centers weren’t able to facilitate that. So what I had to do to expand my business over to the States so I actually moved to Los Angeles, and I had to go there and set up my own warehouse, set up our own warehouse eventually. And you know it’s not so easy, especially because I didn’t know a single person in California. I was the only person, by myself, I just moved there. And it seems easy, right. Like you just go to a different country, ’cause Canada, USA is pretty similar, but it was difficult because nobody wanted to give me a place for lease because one, I didn’t have a Social Security number at first and once I got that, there’s no credit history and it’s a landlords market over there, right. California super, market, so why should they give space to me when they have 10 other applicants. And the exact same problem, I’m trying to find warehouse space. Same problem when I was trying to find a place to live. And in the beginning, I was actually living at my warehouse because I got a warehouse before I found a place to live, in that previous business. If I had found a fulfillment center that fulfilled my need at the time, right, maybe I wouldn’t have had to go through all that. And it’s not as crazy as it sounds, right. I know it still sounds a bit crazy, but it’s just that there’s, there was a big gap over there. I’m sure there’s a lot of fulfillment centers that do a great job, but it just didn’t work for me right. And just my model didn’t work. So I always realized, I always thought about it every time that I do need a fulfillment service. And there’s a lot of freight forwarding services that existed. And it was just a nice business model that I always appreciated. There’s a lot of other companies which are not fulfillment centers, they’re actually, let’s say you live international, let’s say you live in Japan and you wanna purchase items from the States, you could actually order items and send it to their address in California or New Jersey and then have them shipped back, right. So I always liked that kind of business model a lot, and I thought about it and 3PL is essentially the opposite. Now let’s say somebody in Japan wants to sell items in the States, right, because it’s a huge market, everybody wants to sell in the States. And they can’t, it’s not like my situation where I’m a Canadian and it’s so easy to immigrate, versus if you were living in Japan, then there’s a much rougher process you’ve gotta go through, right. So there’s just a lot of demand for, with a boom of E-commerce, a lot of demand for international companies wanna come to the States. They also wanna come to Canada and with the sale of my previous business, I know exactly what I wanted to do, and that was set up a fulfillment center. And that’s how I got into this industry and I’m loving it.
– That’s really cool. Man, you were bootstrapping it then. I love that kind of story.
– Yeah.
– You just, sleeping in the warehouse. That’s fantastic.
– Yeah I had one of my friends actually come to help me out, right and we didn’t realize how hot it was gonna be in L.A. right, coming from Canada. And it was just and he had some allergy that he was just itching with the. Crazy, crazy stuff.
– So did you, you said you sold your business, your previous business, and went all in here.
– Exactly, yeah. I sold that previous business, my plan was that maybe, ever since I started that previous business, I didn’t take a single day off. So I thought maybe after that I’m gonna chill out, relax for a bit, but just the timing worked out where I didn’t, wasn’t able to get to that. And I was like, “All right, let me get into this right away.” And since that, I’ve been doing this.
– Was your previous business anything related to Amazon or was it just a separate thing?
– It wasn’t related to Amazon, right. We did sell on Amazon in that business, we used it as a marketplace channel but it was more so a wholesale B2B kind business. And we did test the waters with Amazon and eBay but it’s just not the same when you deal with wholesale.
– Definitely, yeah. It is a different model than doing your private label or your own brand for sure. So interesting about your background there, now that you have this, now that you have ShipHype rocking, can you just dive into a little bit about what a prep center is?
– Yeah, for sure. So a prep center basically helps sellers prepare their items before sending goods into Amazon, right. And different people have different kinds of needs. So depending on your goods and where they’re coming from, your supplier might be able to do the labeling for you. But a lot of suppliers won’t do the labeling for you. And by labeling, I mean the ASI Labels that need to be on each unit you send into FBA. And if they’re not willing to do these services for you then you need somebody who is able to, right. You can get the items shipped over to your house, but you know, as w/volume increases and you don’t have enough space in your house then you need to start looking at a prep center service. And let’s say in the case, even when your supplier is able to do the FNSKU labeling right, it’s not the same because there’s another step after that which is the case forwarding. So Amazon doesn’t let you store as many pieces as you want. And they’re gonna put limitations on how many pieces you can keep of each SKU, based on how many units you’re selling, right. They have an index. And let’s say your supplier’s in Japan, I’ll use Japan again because we just talked about it, and I really wanna go there as well. So let’s say your suppliers in Japan, and now they’re shipping items directly to FBA. With a limit of 200, it doesn’t make sense because that means you’re shipping like four or five cartons and you could ship at sea, but that’s too slow, right. So what a lot of sellers find, that come to us find, is they are using a prep center where they store all of their goods. And as Amazon sells their inventory they can replenish goods to send them back to Amazon. If their goods are located in the States, number one, they can ship out the same day or the next day and Amazon will get it right away. Versus if they’re shipping internationally. Second, shipping is actually feasible, if you’re shipping two or three cartons domestically versus if you’re shipping internationally. And also with Amazon, SKU limitations, a lot of sellers have had to get, have had to remove their inventory from Amazon, right. And especially for Amazon sellers who are international, they don’t have an address where they can send these items back, ’cause Amazon will only send it back to the country in which the marketplaces. So if you’re selling on amazon.ca, they’ll ship the goods back to Canada, any address for free. But nowhere outside of that, same thing in amazon.com. So these problems are some of the biggest ones that sellers come to us with and we’re helping them solve it, and that’s essentially what a prep center is. There are some prep centers who will do additional services and other prep centers who will only stick to certain items.
– That’s really interesting about that. And you’re, so both Kris and I, have probably done every single approach there is, in terms of getting our products to FBA. We’ve definitely had them shipped to our house. We’ve labeled them ourselves. We’ve had our suppliers label them. I’ve used 3PLs in the past, as well. It makes a lot of sense to do so for sure. And all the stuff that you just talked about, all these things coming down the pipe from Amazon are new. These inventory restrictions are new. These things that, these are things that have come out basically since COVID hit. Before when I started selling on Amazon, you could ship 10,000 units in there. There was basically no warehousing fees. They could stay there almost indefinitely and you could just, well let them sell. So and that’s all changed completely, where now a seller, and I didn’t even think about it from the aspect of an international seller. Being an American seller, selling on.com predominantly, I’ve never had an issue where shipping stuff, pulling stuff out, and having it shipped back to me, that would be a huge problem if you were international.
– Yeah it is. And if you have a lot of data and we pull a lot of data, so I’ll give you some recent numbers. So for amazon.ca in the jewelry category, right, there’s approximately eight sellers who are selling more than 10,000 items per month, okay. And that are getting 10,000 plus orders in the jewelry category on amazon.ca. And all eight of those are international clients. International sellers, right.
– Wow.
– So all of them have a huge demand for a prep center. They’re probably using the service like ours or somebody else’s right. Or, once you get to a high enough volume, it might be worth it for them to set up something here themselves. But yeah man, it’s pretty difficult for international. And also for, like you mentioned, I know you guys both have Amazon stores, I watched a couple of episodes and you have jobs too, right. Besides your store and sometimes you realize okay, you can’t find enough time to attend to your job even ’cause you’re thinking about your Amazon store. And also you know-how, it gets busy. You can automate your business almost if you’re using a prep center. I think of a prep center as hiring staff right. So if your business is big enough, you’re gonna start to look at options to free up more time. You might look at options at hiring other people or hiring a prep center.
I can remember the days of, speaking to your point about working full-time jobs. Like a semi would just roll up in the neighborhood just full of pallets. And I have to beat it home, to let the guy in or he’d just stay outside. And the neighbors were like, “What in the world is a semi doing in the neighborhood.”
– Doing delivery hours in your working hours, which sucks.
– Yeah, I’d have to run home real quick and let him in and just throw it all in the garage, and then come back that night and then label everything. So yeah, I’ve been through that. Where do you see, where do you see most of your clients? Is it more of like people doing wholesaling where they’re just trying to get the prep going? Or it’s just more like private label sellers that you’re dealing with? What’s your main focus on there at ShipHype?
– 95% are private label sellers. And we have the last, the other 5% makes up of like, wholesale, arbitrage, book clients, right. But 95% are private label. It makes sense for those guys ’cause they’re the ones who were pushing a high enough volume, where it makes sense for them to actually approach a prep center.
– Got it.
– And you have other services as well. I mean, as a seller myself, I sell not just on Amazon, but Shopify, eBay, Groupon. I sell on a bunch of different platforms as well, getting onto Walmart. You also will fulfill orders that come for those places, correct?
– Exactly, so our main business is as a 3PL right. FBA prep service is one of the services that we offer. Our other service is E-commerce fulfillment, subscription box fulfillment. We can even handle the returns for you. So there’s a lot of people who are shipping out their own orders but they want us to just handle their returns for them right. That, we also do B2B and enterprise fulfillment. So a lot of companies like let’s say, for example, Frigidaire, right. Let’s say they have units, they want us to send them to different distribution stores. So we’re not exactly sending it out to the end clients but we’re refilling stock to their individual stores. And also crowdfunding fulfillment, these are the different services we have as well. Now, coming back to your point about you selling on eBay and Groupon, et cetera, right. Well, you can do as, if you’re signed up with our E-commerce service, you can integrate all of your stores into our platform and all of your orders will get pushed over to our software. And then we just ship it out for them. And this also applies to Amazon because Amazon isn’t just FBA, it’s also FBM. And Amazon is really pushing the sellers to go to FBM, right. And a lot of them are looking for that solution too because of the limits we talked about.
– So Kris and I talk about this all the time, ever since these limits have come on, telling everybody you need to make sure you also have the FBM offering for your product ready, in case you run out of FBA inventory, see you’d continue making these sales. And my nightmare scenario is having 100 orders to fulfill at my house when that goes out. And that, what you guys offer there, it just allows, I feel like, for so many things, it allows you to have one central location where your supplier sends the goods and then you can have sort of on-time delivery whether it’s, individual orders or whether you’re sending it into FBA to replenish. And it really does allow, and Kris and I also are huge believers in automation. It’s the more you can automate, the better you can scale, the better you can do your business. I mean, that’s why we work for Sellozo, so we can automate our advertising. And in automating your inventory like this, like what are you guys doing, it just makes total sense. In terms of, as a seller, like for Kris and I, when does it make sense to hire a prep center or move to the 3PL model? At what stage in your business, does that make sense to do that?
– So this happens really organically, right. Once you have these thoughts of, “Man, I can’t find enough time to eat,” right, at that time, you’re like, “Okay I need to find, I need to find a solution.” And like I was talking about earlier, you start looking at options, like maybe hiring staff, maybe a friend to come to help you out prep the orders, right. But once the volume gets significant enough and if you’re shipping like I would say, if anyone’s doing more than, 2, 300 orders a month, they should look at prep services. Just because even the problem is, even if you’re doing 10 orders per day, right, or let’s say you’re prepping 10, you’re prepping a few items, it becomes, it’s not as simple as, “Okay, I’m gonna take 10 minutes of my day and then just do this,” ’cause there’s a lot of time that goes, a lot of buffer time that adds up from when you get started to by the time you actually finish. And I think when somebody gets to about 300 orders per month they should start looking at a prep service. But the number one indicator is if they think they don’t have enough time. If someone has all the time in the world and they enjoy doing this, right, they should outsource it. The number one, I’m sorry, they should keep doing it. And another thing to keep in mind is like, if you have staff right, that you’re gonna hire for this, that’s actually a really good option too. But the only thing with that is, you also have to manage staff. So you might find that the time you saved, right, you might be ending up spending it on managing staff and you end up in the exact same position where you started. Now prep centers aren’t the right fit for everybody either. It could be that, you’re managing everything so efficiently where having your own staff is the best solution for you, ’cause it’s saving you money. And your staff is just superb and your business is on automation mode.
– Yeah, that’s interesting. ‘Cause like I’ve said, in my past, I’ve used prep centers. I’ve used 3PLs and then I haven’t. I’ve had different stages of my business where I’ve needed it and not needed it. I’m potentially getting to the place where I need it again. So we’ll be talking for sure soon after this. For sure but, so if Kris and I are looking at the possibility of jumping into a prep center, what are the things we need to look for?
– The number one thing you need to look for is location, right. You wanna find a prep center, within the area you’re looking for, right. And number two is pricing, right. So pricing obviously matters. It’s one of those things that, for example, customer service, you won’t exactly know what someone’s customer service is like until you actually try it. Or, let’s say Kris tried something and he said, “Hey, this was awesome, you should check it out.” Then, you have that voucher, that vote for that company, and you know their customer service is good. But there’s no other real way to know. One of the things that you can know right away is pricing, right. And you can see a lot of, a lot of prep centers, you’ll find their pricing on their website and they all have different price structures. So some might be charging a monthly fee. Some might be charging by the unit. Some might be charging by the hour, right. And depending on your product, right, a certain price model might work better for you. Like, let’s say someone’s charging by the unit and your item is really big, right. It’s gonna take a longer time to prep that versus if somebody was selling hypothetically, I don’t know a stapler, right. A stapler is small versus if somebody was selling a printer. And if someone’s charging by the hour or by the unit, you might realize that okay, a certain price structure works better for your kind of business, and at the same time, if someone’s charging a monthly rate and some, and if you have an item that’s seasonal, let’s say you’re selling snow shovels right, and in the Summertime, they’re going to charge you when you have no orders and you’re still paying monthly, you’d rather go off for the service which only charges a pay as you go type, structure, right. And based on how you do your accounting and what’s easier for you, do you like to have a per-unit cost, or do you not mind adding up the different components that they’re charging for a knowing exactly what you pay for. But ultimately pricing, it comes down to, what is the structure? What are you comfortable with? And how much it really costs to use the service.
– So as a seller, as a seller, when I order my items from my supplier, what’s that process look like to get started? Like what, if I wanted to use ShipHype, how do I go about getting an account? What’s the setup look like? I might ship it directly to your warehouse in L.A.? Or does it need to come to me first? What, kind of break that down. What’s that look like for a seller?
– So there’s so many ways you can get started. It all just depends on what you’re looking to get done. So my own recommendation is, if your supplier is overseas, not in North America right, try your best to get them to do the FNSKU labeling for you, right. ‘Cause over here in North America, you’re looking at at least, at least the cheapest rate maybe 25 cents per unit, right. And if your supplier can do that for you and some of them will do it for you, right, take advantage of that. They might not even charge you anything extra. And let’s say, you’re selling 1-2000 units per month, if you can save that, that’s really good savings to start off with. And let’s say, they’re not able to do that, then what you wanna do is, the next step is getting the items shipped. So instead of having them shipped to you first and then shipping to the fulfillment center, you can save a lot of money and time, by shipping it directly to the fulfillment center from your supplier. And they will not have any problems in doing that. And the good part about this is, a lot of the, one, your distributor can arrange the shipping right. So they’ll tell you how much it’s gonna cost to ship. But you can even ask your prep center how much they will charge during the shipping from the manufacturer. This way, you’ll also be able to know who has a cheaper rate and what kind of differences are there in their turnaround time. And you might like working with a certain party better, right. And let’s say your supplier, let’s say your supplier has a longer reply time than your prep center does. Or your prep center has a longer reply time, then your supplier does, you have at least both options on who you wanna deal with, as far as the shipping goes, ’cause you don’t wanna be worried about getting updates for, getting updates on your shipping. Now, once the items arrive at the prep center, you need to provide them with what exactly you need to be done right. So there’s so many services, like if you need to have your items bundled or fragile wrapped or put in poly bags or nothing at all. And at that point, you communicate to the prep center through the dashboard or through email, ’cause why I say through the dashboard or through email because not every prep center has a dashboard. Some of them you’re communicating with the phone even, and you let them know what you need to be done. And if you let them know what you need to be done ahead of time, you don’t have to give them instruction multiple times. And this is just a shorter turnaround time. FNSKU labeling, if you need to be done, you let them know. If it’s already done, amazing. And now it’s just a matter of you start selling and replenishing stock to Amazon.
– From once it’s there, now let’s say I’ve had my supplier ship it to you guys, it’s in your warehouse, and now I’m making a, I’m trying to send an inventory to Amazon and I need three cartons to go to Ontario, the FBA in Ontario. How does that look from, in ShipHype? Do I upload those shipping labels to you? Or do I use your shippers? Or how does that work to get it to the FBA center?
– So you go into the ShipHype dashboard and you’re able to see your products and your master cartons right. So master cartons are also a type of product, so you can see how many master cartons you have in stock of which products. And you’re able to create an order by selecting how many master cartons you wanna send over to Amazon. And once you select that, then you need to get labels from Amazon right. So you’ve processed orders on ShipHype but now you need to provide ShipHype with Amazon labels. And I highly recommend people look for prep centers that will let you use Amazon labels. There are some prep centers, which don’t let you use Amazon labels, and that’s because they’re making a profit in that way. Right, making a profit that way, right, maybe they’re charging less for something else right. But all I’m saying is, Amazon has the best shipping rates and you should take advantage of that. And especially if Amazon is the one arranging the shipping, there’s gonna be way less issues, right. And you know, you use their label and there’s zero problems. Now, once you’ve got the label from Amazon, you just upload data over to the dashboard and ShipHype will put on these, put on the Amazon labels and the UPS labels, and send it over. Now, if you need a LTL service, which means Less Than Truckload, if your items are, if you’re sending large quantities, they need to be sent in on pallets, right. In this case, we’ll arrange the shipping for you and update you with a tracking number, so you can let Amazon know.
– That sounds so easy.
– I know, it does.
– Yeah, we’re trying to make it easy. We actually didn’t have a dashboard at first, right. Our dashboard is still in beta mode. And what I noticed is, we made a list of every single prep center, right. We’ve tried to create accounts on all of them and notice that only about five or six actually have dashboards between the 200 in North America. Which is insane to me, right. And even the ones in which we looked at the dashboard, it was just really hard to use. And, it was harder than I expected. I thought, because this whole process, it seems easy, right. It doesn’t seem like it’s too much. There’s no integration required, especially with FBA. There’s no API, there’s nothing. It’s just super simple stuff. And the dashboards, I didn’t like them, maybe other people like them, but we figured there’s a definite gap in the market where we could just fill it with good software and good service.
– Yeah, I like having a good dashboard. I think Amazon sellers like that too, where they can know what’s going on like a further, the product, you can see what’s happening. So that’s good to know. What’s next? What are you guys working on? What’s coming down the pipeline? What’s something that’s gonna make you guys stick out from all the competition?
– So the dashboard, I think our dashboard, our software, right, we wanna have a product where it just jumps out of the shelf right. And in our case, it’s gonna be our dashboard for us, because none of our competitors have something that’s so compelling, but at the same time, another thing that matters is us expanding into different locations. Because we only have two locations. One’s in Toronto and one’s in Los Angeles, right. There are people who need prep centers in other places. Like someone’s in Ohio, they need a prep center there, or somebody’s in Vancouver, they need a prep center there. We obviously can’t open one in every single city in North America, right. That’s just not feasible. But we wanna do is, we wanna open one on the West coast of Canada. We’re trying to open one by January in Vancouver. And also after that one is open, we wanna open something on the East coast maybe Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York area. So at least this way we have both coasts covered. And when items are coming in from overseas, right, a lot of the people who are shipping items by sea, the port, when they’re shipping from Europe, it goes to the East Coast first. And when the items are shipping from the Asian countries, they go to California first, to Long Beach Port. And this way, at least we’ll be able to be in the major hubs so we can facilitate more customers quicker. That’s what’s next for us. Improving our service and dashboard.
– It’s interesting how you bring up, well, first of all, I love that you’re expanding your distribution areas and where you’re gonna have warehouses but it’s interesting how you bring up just your research into all the other 3PLs that are out there. When I was first looking for this I went and toured a bunch of ones that are local here and some others. And they were so clearly on an old school model, of what they’ve done in the past as a 3PL for large businesses and distribution. And I, they didn’t have the UI or the interface that I could just interact with or I didn’t feel comfortable that they were super knowledgeable about the Amazon world and how all the different nuances that you have to do to get orders into Amazon. So what you’re doing is really impressive, and it’s so specific to that, the Amazon niche as well, that I think as a seller, if I’m able, if I’m in a user interface and I can just upload my shipping labels and pick three or four cartons I want them to go to and know it’s being taken care of, that’s just really impressive, that you guys know what you’re setting up there. I do have a question though for you, ’cause this just came to my mind as someone who has sold in Canada in the past, is there any way where I could ship inventory, my inventory in Amazon? I mean not Amazon, a United States-based warehouse for ShipHype. And then you guys can get it to your Canada for me and facilitate the, whatever needs to happen, the duties to get it over there so I can sell in Canada on Amazon.
– Yeah, so you could send items into our U.S. warehouse, right, but I think it’s better if you just ship directly to our Canadian warehouse from your location, right. We can help you facilitate everything from the customs brokerage to the freight. And because the only reason I say you can ship it to us directly, is it’s gonna be cheaper than having two destinations, right. It’s gonna cost you more money when it comes to our warehouse first and then goes from our warehouse to our Canada warehouse. But definitely, there’s so many clients we ship for who are selling on both platforms, right. And a lot of the times they have inventory distributed in Canada and the USA and what helps us sometimes like emergencies happen and they need to move stuff from one place to the other. They’re able to do that easily between our warehouses as well.
– Very cool.
– Yeah, all right, so all of the sellers that are listening right now, they’ll wanna get in touch with you, they’ll wanna learn more about ShipHype. How can they contact you? How can they get in touch with you?
– The best thing is to go on our website, shiphype.com, right. In the menu, they’ll be able to see the FBA prep service option. And they can also see the different services we have available over there. And in the top right, there’s a big blue button, hard to miss, get started. They can click over there and enter their email. We’ll do a whole onboarding process. We have a call with every client to understand their needs what exactly they’re looking for, what services they need. And then we help them out based on what exactly they’re looking for. And if we can’t help them out we’re more than happy to refer them to somebody else who we think can do a better job than us.
– That’s amazing right there, that you’re willing to take that information and spread it around to other fulfillment centers if you feel like they might be a better fit. Kris, did you have a question?
– No, that’s exactly what we do. We take the onboarding call with everybody. If we’re not a good fit for them we refer them to other tools. So it’s good to see that, there’s a touchpoint there and you’re not just letting them be on their own, that they’re actually gonna have somebody that helps them out.
– Yeah, shows that you really care about them. You’re not just trying to, hang on a client that you’re gonna not be able to do the full service for. So that’s good that you’re doing that.
– Our job as a business is just to, organize land, labor, and capital in the most efficient way. And it makes sense to forward them over to someone else who can provide them more value. We do exactly that.
– Yeah, well that’ll come back to you tenfold for sure. Well, I really think this is interesting because I think this is a topic that a lot of sellers just haven’t had to get into yet, that you know, just storing stuff on Amazon, has been easy-ish up to this point. And it’s been cheap-ish up to this, up to about a couple of years ago. Now it’s getting expensive to have long-term storage, in Amazon’s warehouses. If your business is growing and your garage is full like mine, has been in the past, or your basement is full of boxes, this makes sense. And I highly encourage everyone listening just to get on, checkout ShipHype, click that big blue button, that ‘get started’ button, and just learn what this is all about, ’cause I think it can really, it can be a jumping pad for your business where you can really start to scale. You can start, for me, the reason that it made sense to go through 3PL originally is ’cause I was, I went from doing LTL shipments to full container loads. And once I started doing full container loads, it started to be where I would need to have that split up, re-package, shipped to different, multiple fulfillment centers. And also when I started selling on different channels and I needed a fulfillment center to pick and pack individual sales, it started making sense. So I highly encourage everyone to reach out to ShipHype, check you guys out, see if it can really help springboard their business to the next level. But this has been really fun to talk to you and learn more about this. I learned a lot. I will be certainly talking to you soon about what Kris and I are getting into.
– Awesome man. And for your listeners, right, like I mentioned before, there’s 200 prep centers across the SA and Canada, right. Maybe we’re not a good fit for them based on location or price, right and there might be a different one that can help them out. So we put together the list. We’d love to share that list with your listeners and hopefully, it helps them out. And if it doesn’t then reach out to us, we’ll still help them.
– Oh, for sure yeah. You could send us that list, and we’ll make sure we put it, attach it to our post and we’ll put a link on our blog where they can see that as well. That’d be invaluable for sure.
– Yeah, if you’re a seller out there, and you just wanna learn more about this, ’cause this is a different type of thing you need to focus on and you need to understand what’s going on. I mean, I think you guys can tell that ShipHype is gonna be something that’s gonna be able to help out. So if you have questions, I would definitely go to their sites and just book an onboarding call with them and just learn how this whole thing works. And then they’ll, they’re gonna be the experts. So you definitely wanna understand what you’re doing first before you just jump into something and you may lose your shirt and so, you may lose a lot of money. So go to their site and understand what you’re doing before you start to sign up for stuff.
– Oh, for sure. And I can tell you when I was looking at this at first, I mean, this is a, it can be a little intimidating, you’re like, “I’m just gonna give some warehouse some faraway warehouse, 10,000 of my units to manage and trust that they’re gonna get it to Amazon.” I could tell you guys just by talking to Waleed for this 30 minutes, he knows his stuff. I would feel immediately comfortable with him, ’cause he’s speaking the language of an Amazon seller. He knows what’s gonna happen, and you definitely have a passion for what you’re doing. So it’s coming through in our conversation. So it’s certainly someplace that I would highly recommend sending it to also. Besides the website, any other place they can check you out? You on LinkedIn, Facebook, everywhere?
– Yeah, I don’t have any personal social media accounts but they could check out ShipHype. And I do have LinkedIn, actually. I don’t remember the URL, but they can search for my name they’ll find it. And another thing you mentioned about talking from a standpoint of Amazon seller, right, I didn’t mention this in my background but before my previous business, my very first proper business was selling on eBay and Amazon. So eBay was my very first business, and I had about $5,000 in the bank when I was in high school. And then I used that to start my E-commerce, E-commerce journey right. And within the first year, I turned my 5,000 into 50,000. I thought I was rich in high school, but, it was a great experience and selling on eBay and Amazon at that time really, I think might be part of the reason why we’re doing prep services today because I know there’s a real pain and a requirement for Amazon sellers to find a better solution for shipping.
– You were rich in high school
– Yeah.
– If you had $50,000
– In high school I was rich,
– You were rich.
– But now, not so much.
– You were that guy.
– I would have been dangerous in high school if I had $50,000.
– 50K, I probably wouldn’t have finished high school.
– so I just decided to finish it.
– Yeah, well you obviously put that money to good use, better than maybe Kris and I would have, during that time. But, man, it’s been fun talking to you. We’ll definitely, we’ll have a link to ShipHype on our, everywhere we’re watching this. We’ll put the links to ShipHype in the podcast notes. We’ll have it on our blog. We’ll have it on the Facebook and LinkedIn live that we’ve got going and YouTube live we’ve got going on. For everyone out there, please make sure that you subscribe to our podcast. Give us a nice rating, if you like what you’re listening to here. Also make sure if you wanna see more of these videos, make sure you go on to Sellozo on Facebook and like Sellozo so that you can get notified when we go live. And you can also find us on YouTube live and LinkedIn live coming up soon. Anyway, Waleed, this has been great man. Really enjoyed talking to you and we’ll be, we’ll have to bring you on again real soon. So we can, ’cause the Amazon landscape changes by the minute. So I’m sure there’ll be all kinds of new things we can talk about, but we’ll have you on again. All right.
– Agreed, thank you so much, guys. It was awesome talking to the both of you.
– You know it.
– Yeah, appreciate it.
– See ya.