238 Merch by Amazon by Chris Green part 3 – How to get free traffic – and how, and when, to defend your designs!

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We’re back with Part 3 of my interview with Chris Green from Merch Dojo and today we’re talking traffic and how to drive it to your merch on Amazon.

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203 Dollars Into Pounds -Getting Paid from Amazon International Sales – with Jonny Steel of Payoneer Part 2 of 2

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This is part 2 of our interview with Jonny Steel from Payoneer, the cross-border payment solution helping move money around the globe as efficiently as possible. Today we will be covering the topic of converting dollars into pounds.

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202 How to Sell on Amazon US – Brand Britain with Jonny Steel of Payoneer Part 1 of 2

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The guest for this episode is Jonny Steel, the VP of marketing for Payoneer. Payoneer is the leading B2B cross-border payment platform that helps business pay or get paid. They’re also Amazon’s trusted payment platform. He is here today to help us sell on Amazon US.

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173 How to Sell Your eCommerce Business with Coran Woodmass Part 2 of 2

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Today We learn more about how to sell your eCommerce business with Coran. Continue reading

169 Create Your Own eCommerce Store with Steve Chou Part 2 of 2

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Back on the show today is Steve Chou from MyWifeQuitHerJob.com. Continue reading

168 Get Started with eCommerce and Amazon with Steve Chou Part 1 of 2

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On the show today is somebody who is really a big name in the ecommerce and online training for the ecommerce world, Steve Chou from MyWifeQuitHerJob.com. Today he will be teaching us how to get started with ecommerce off Amazon. Continue reading

163 Seller Optimization Summit with Augustas Kligys

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We have a special guest today, Augustas Kilgys, to help up with seller optimization. Augustas is from Lithuania and Germany which gives him a unique insight into selling. He is also running the Seller Optimization Summit which is going to be going on very soon. If you are interest, please sign up to get more information.

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149 How to Become a Wholesaler with Manuel Becvar Part 3 of 3

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How to Become a Wholesaler

It’s more than just growing your business on Amazon. You have to actively contact and cold call retailers in order to sell your products. It’s the next step in the process. You’ve sold on Amazon, you’ve diversified through other channels, and you’ve built up your brand. If you want to become a wholesaler, you have to take the time to build your brand. It’s not an overnight task. It takes a lot of time to build a brand.

Approach Local Retailers

It might not be a good idea to start large chains like Tesco or Wal-Mart. The better idea would be to find a smaller one in your area. Make contact with the owner or decision maker, and set up a presentation where you can make a pitch on your products. A fallback would be to create a PDF that goes over all the information. You can them email the document to them and follow up a few days later with a phone call.

Go to Exhibitions

You may not have the money to get a booth or a stand, but you can go as a guest. You can find local retails and get their contact information. Then you can send them an email and PDF where you talk about your company and make a pitch. One vital aspect, in order to become a wholesaler, is making these connections.

Build Your Catalog

You can’t go to these retailers and sell some generic widget. It needs to be unique. It also helps to have several products in your catalog before you become a wholesaler. Bear in mind that even though it may take a year or two for your wholesale business to get going, the payoff happens when retailer orders tens of thousands of products at once.

Immense Potential

The great thing about wholesale is the potential. It really is possible to to do great things with it. Whether you want to do it to make some extra income or make it into a large operation. Manuel has done this. He currently does about $300,000 on Amazon, and close to $1.5 million in wholesale. When you factor in his consulting and sourcing income, he is making around $2.5 million a year. The potential is there if you’re willing to put in the time and effort.

Get in touch with Manuel at importdojo.com and get a free eBook and newsletter.

148 Building a Brand with Manuel Becvar Part 2 of 3

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Building a Brand Off-Amazon

As we discussed in the previous episode, building a brand away from Amazon is a very good idea.

Amazon owns you and your listing. They control everything. They can suspend your account at anytime. If you sell exclusively on Amazon, that puts you in a difficult situation. It’s a good idea to have multiple selling channels. That way, if any one goes down for whatever reason, you have other sources of income. Amazon only accounts for about 20 – 30% of Manuel’s income. Now, if something happens to his Amazon account, it wouldn’t shut down his business.

Another reason for building a brand is that Amazon is a race to the bottom on pricing. If you come up with a new product, in a couple months a lot of sellers have copied it and now everyone is lowering prices to get sales. If you have your own ecommerce site or wholesale, you can dictate the prices as long.

Off-Amazon Sales Channel

When building a brand, there are several options when it comes to other sales channels. There is jet.com where you can signup to be a third-party seller. Wal-Mart recently bought them for $3.3 billion. You can also sign up to be a third party seller on walmart.com. When it comes to these these third-party selling routes, it’s important to bear in mind that it may take awhile to be ungated. For those in the UK, you can use tesco.com. The downside to these platforms is that you are still a third-party that is subject to Wal-Mart or Jet or Tesco, etc.

Shopify

The best security would be owning the platform with Shopify. That way you control everything. It takes a lot more work than with Amazon as you don’t have the benefit of them shipping everything. However, the big issue is getting traffic. You can always find people on Amazon, but getting them to come to your site takes work, like all aspects of building a brand.

You have to work on SEO in order to be found. One strategy is to go to other sites where your target audience is. You can find forums or go to Reddit and talk to people that are interested in your category. For example, Manuel is selling VR products so he goes to a Reddit forum about VR and talks to people about a new headset Samsung is releasing. This can drive traffic to your Shopify store which will help your Google rank.

Ads are another way to boost rank and drive traffic. Google or Bing as are effective. You can use Facebook ads for conversion and email signup; not so much for selling products.

It can be more expensive and it takes a lot of work. But if you have good content, good SEO and traffic you can easily rank on page 1 or 2 of Google. That is building a brand that has visibility on the most powerful website on the planet: Google. 

147 Social Media Strategy with Manuel Becvar Part 1 of 3

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Importance of a Social Media Strategy

Today on the show we have Manuel Becvar of Import Dojo. As Will Tjernlund mentioned during his interview, Amazon wants to increase their own private label operation. As Amazon become a larger competitor, you’ll want to establish your brand off-Amazon. Once you have a strong audience, this will not only help you sell more on Amazon, but give you the leverage you need if you wanted to sell on other channels. An important step to this, is creating a social media strategy.

There are differing opinions on social media. Some people say it’s a complete waste of time while others say it’s the cornerstone of their business. Social media can be a huge driver of traffic for your listings. When creating a brand, it’s important not to overlook the critical component that is social media.

Return on Investment

It’s understandable that people may think that social media is a complete waste of time. You’re not going to get instant results. You won’t see anything in a couple months. However, if you stick with your social media strategy, and keep building your social media presence, you will start to see in impact in a year or two. Manuel Becvar doesn’t run PPC ads anymore because of the success of the success of his social media platform. Now he can take the money he would have spent on ads, and use it on continuing to build on social media, and put it into his products.

You will have to invest in your social media. Whether that’s you putting in time, or paying someone to do it. Either way you decide to do it will still be beneficial. Even if you’re paying someone to put out content every week, you will still make more from sales than you would have if you put that money into ads.

Immediate ROI

If you’re creating a brand, then you might not have the audience for it to make much difference. However, you can always outsource it. There are sites, like Famebit, that will bring you together with influencers. These are people have have very large following on social media. You write up a campaign and get offers from different people. They will then review your product and send it out to there tens of thousands of followers. This can drive 2000 – 3000 people to your Amazon listings. Manuel Bacvar estimates that this led to 60 -70 additional sales in the first week. Well worth the $500 he spent on it because he wouldn’t have gotten that kind of return with PPC.

You could even contact them directly. If you go on social media and look up people that have a large audience and send them a message. This will let you target those that would buy your product.

Long Term Approach

As much as we all love to get a quick turnaround on our investments, you have to understand that your social media strategy takes time. Again, you can outsource this if you’d like. You can hire people to run your social media accounts and they will post new content weekly and maintain it.

There are a few techniques you or your VA can do to help grow your audience. The first step, obviously, is to post regular content. You need to be posting at least once a week on most platforms. Go onto other accounts that target the same audience to post similar content and follow their followers. The idea is that once you follow them, they will look at your content and will be more likely to follow you since they are already following a similar account.

Finding Your Audience

When planning your social media strategy, it’s important to target the right people. One way to do that is to target people that have purchased your products. This way you know they are interested in the category you’re selling in.

Manuel has grown his mailing list to over 800 subscribers in 2 ½ years. It’s very simple. As we all know, we need to put information in the packaging. This way we can encourage buyers to leave a review on Amazon, or to contact us, rather than Amazon, if they have an issue. Manuel goes a bit further and offers an additional 6 month warranty if they signup for his newsletter. His products are all coffee based. So now he has over 800 people that he can market to, who are also willing to buy coffee related products. Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be a warranty. If you sell kitchen supplies you could offer a recipe ebook. You could simply offer a discount on their next purchase if they subscribe.

Google Trends and Facebook Ads

You can use Google Trends to help you build an audience as part of your social media strategy. You can look up your keywords and find out where they are popular. Then you can buy Facebook ads targeting those locations. So if you’re looking up hiking and you find that people in Manchester search hiking a lot, you can buy Facebook ads targeting Manchester.

Facebook ads are really good at building your audience and a following. They are effective if the user doesn’t have to buy something right away. So they aren’t useful for directing people to your Amazon listing, but if you direct them to your site and have great content, then they will be more likely to buy your product.