#63 Q & A Tuesday No. 9 – Amazon Inspection & Amazon Price Testing

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Q. 1 Mounir

Hey guys,

I had a great news today: Top seller on my sub category after less than a month 🙂

In order to keep delivering good product, I now need to do inspection before products leave China. I already paid 30% of my new order which will be ready next week and I’m looking for inspection companies to insure the quality.

– What is the best practice: Should I pay for the 70% left before sending the product to inspection or after ?

– Are inspection companies fast enough to process the order or it will take them sometime ? days, weeks ..?

– According to your experience: Could a 250 items – 80g each take more than an inspection workday ? the product is very simple and has very few moving parts.

– Any experience with asiainspection, fbasourcingchina, topwininspection.. ?

Thanks in advance !

Normally an inspection company would visit your factory so you wouldn’t normally “send” your  z  products anywhere.

So normal process

1. Products inspected after completion and before packing for shipping (Pre shipment inspection) according to your inspection and or testing criteria.

2. Report sent to you by inspection company.

3. You either accept or reject the batch.

4. Then if you accept at that point you transfer the remaining 70% to supplier.

If you are struggling with details like this, chances are you need more than just a Facebook Group – you need a peer group and some input from others who have hit your problem and solved it. 

Best thing is a mastermind – there are many options, including the one I run ( more details here) – pick one and go for it, just be sure that you will get real input into your business though.

If mine is full (we have two places left at time of writing), find one to support you, but don’t suffer in isolation!

DEFECTS

Quality control revolves around the concept of 3 levels of defects:

1. Critical defect – this would be something that endangers the user or others,e.g., product could cut someone or cause a fire.
2. Major defect – this stops the product performing its main function, e.g., silicon spatula that does
3. Minor defect – this includes all other defects, e.g., bumps on the surface that should be smooth; discolouration;

When you define tests or inspection points, you need to define whether any defects related are critical, major or minor.

Inspection Level – AQL  – Acceptable Quality Limit – see here for explanation

AQL basically defines the overall quality level of a batch of a product.i.e. the %age of critical, major and minor. There are 3 levels, AQL I (low severity) AQL II (normal severity), AQL III (high severity i.e. highest quality threshold).

AQL II is considered standard for most consumer products. However, I would consider AQL III, since Amazon customers are very fussy buyers and have a weapon in product reviews to instantly damage your reputation.

Inspection Criteria

I would use in order of importance

1. Feedback from your actual consumers. Feedback in the sense of all info e.g. negative reviews, email or phone complaints etc.
2. Negative reviews from related products on Amazon (or even eBay etc if needed)
3. Your own use of your product sample(s) and/or your own experience using similar products.

You probably will have between about 10-20 points for a straightforward product.

I think 250 items if inspected at highest level would be less than one man day

If it is a simple product, I would use someone like www.trigo.com, which I haven’t used personally but some of our guests on the podcast have.

Q. 2

David

EBAY: Anybody use Ebay as a pricing model? For example, take the average selling prices people are using to re-sell your product on Ebay and test this as your selling price on Amazon. If I do this, I could likely dramatically increase my net profit. Just having re-sellers on Ebay tells me my price may be too low. Any thoughts?

My immediate thoughts: Just because someone has listed your product on eBay, doesn’t mean they have made any sales. And if they make sales, we don’t know if the sales volume is significant (and therefore overall profit per week/month etc.)

HOWEVER…the only way to really know is to TEST!

Use splitly.com (which I’ve used) or cashcowpro.com (which I intend to check out) or similar split testing software for Amazon (these are both only valid in the USA at the time of writing)  – you can probably test the price specifically with the criterion of which maximises your profit. Certain splitly can do this. Then you will have some objective data to give you a much more reliable answer.

If you do this, please let us all know, I’d be fascinated by the result!

Watch Q&A Tuesday No. 9 – Amazon Inspection & Amazon Price Testing

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