TAS 211 Ask Scott Session #62 – Your Amazon FBA Questions

If you’re an Amazon seller, either through Retail Arbitrage program or through private label products, you know how frustrating it can be when you hit a snag in your business and don’t feel that you have anywhere to turn. Wouldn’t it be great to have a “voice of experience” you could turn to who could guide you through the challenges? That’s EXACTLY what you get on these Friday episodes of the Amazing Seller. Scott Voelker does his “Ask Scott” session to field your questions about Amazon sales and the challenges of doing it right. If you want to submit your questions for Scott to answer on one of these Friday shows, you can find out how to do it on this episode.

How can I improve my pay per click (PPC) campaign so it doesn’t cost so much?

A listener to the Amazing Seller recently called in with a question about his pay per click campaigns. He’s at a point where 70% of his profits is being eaten up by the cost of paying for traffic through Amazon PPC. Something about it just doesn’t feel right and he wants to know what he’s doing wrong. On this episode Scott responds to his question with some insights about how you can modify your PPC campaigns over time to hone in on the exact keywords that are going to bring you the biggest bang for your buck. You can hear Scott’s response on this episode.

What warehouse should I send my products to as an international seller?

Anyone who sells private label products on Amazon Has the option of sending their products to various Amazon warehouses for the option of making sales in various countries. On this episode of the podcast, an international seller calls with a question about where she should send her products to get the best sales. She's also concerned about the kinds of taxes she will have to pay if she is going to send her products to the United States. Make sure you tune in to listen to this episode where Scott replies to her question.

Should I go after a product with lower margins but higher volume?

Scott usually recommends that sellers look for products where they can make at least $10 of profit on each sale. But on this episode of the podcast listener calls in to ask whether it is worth it to sell products that only get $4 to $5 profit on each sale but has a very large volume of sales possible. You might think Scott would say to avoid that kind of product, but he actually says the exact opposite and gives you very clear reasons why he would go for it. You can hear his entire answer on this Ask Scott session of the podcast.

How long does it take for products to rank to page 1 after an initial surge of sales?

On today's episode of the podcast Scott reads A post from a member of his Facebook community, reporting how his product launch has gone. He had some great and initial sales and just looking forward to a very successful product line. But his product is still on page 8 of the Amazon search rankings. He is curious how long it takes for products to rank all the way to page one after an initial surge of sales like he is experienced. On this episode Scott gives some great insights about how products rank within the Amazon framework, and what you can do to boost your products toward the top. You won't want to miss this one.

OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER

[0:03] Scott’s introduction to the podcast!
[1:47] How you can get in on Scott’s next live event.
[3:29] QUESTION ONE: 70% of my revenue is going to PPC. What’s wrong with the way I’m doing it?
[10:36] QUESTION TWO: I’m an international seller and I want to send from China to an Amazon warehouse. How do I choose the right location?
[17:50] QUESTION THREE: Should I go after a product with lower margins but higher volume?
[22:43] QUESTION FOUR: How long does it take to rank for your product after a surge of sales?

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TRANSCRIPT TAS 211

TAS 211 : Ask Scott Session #62 – Your Amazon FBA Questions

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:03] Scott: Well, hey, hey what's up everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Amazing Seller Podcast. This is episode number 211 and session number 62 of Ask Scott. This is where I answer your questions here on the podcast and you guys all know I love this part of the week because well, I get to listen to your questions in your own voice and we get to hang out together for a little while. I just did a periscope the other day and I got to be honest…

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I really am loving them because it's kind of an extension of the Ask Scott sessions where I get to hear or see your questions in real time. I get to interact with you. We literally had over 430 people on live which was amazing. I was actually sitting in the car with my father Papa V, who's actually in the house right now still. We're going to be heading to Miami here. This is going to air after the fact but right now we're getting ready to leave for Miami.

I'm doing a presentation there at Steve Chou event which is the Seller's Summit, which is going to be amazing and I'll have a little recap on an upcoming episode but just wanted to again say that I love, love the TAS Facebook community, the Facebook people that are in there really helping each other out. You guys are awesome and I want you to keep doing it. When you do that, you're not just helping one, you're helping many. There's a lot of people in there that reading even though they might not be contributing. If that's you, I want you to start contributing as well. The Facebook community is awesome, if you guys are not involved head over to theamazingseller.com/fb and you can find that link there and you can request to join.

Now the other thing I want to remind you that depending on when you're listening to this, we just did an event and we called it the TAS Breakthrough Live Event and it was in Denver, it was amazing. We had an awesome time and we had 30 Amazon sellers there. We had ten hot seats. It was just an amazing time.

[00:02:02] Scott: I actually recorded the entire thing and it's not going to be for sale or anything like that but what I am going to be doing is putting in a couple of highlights here and there so look for them. What I want you to is if you're interested in seeing any of that stuff head over to theamazingseller.com/live and you can see if there is already a video there. I'll already have it up. If not you'll just see a registration page there where you can be notified if we do another live event but I will have some footage on that page. I also did a periscope which I might put on that page which was of one of the hot seat sessions which was awesome. Again, just wanted to share a little bit of that with you. I know a lot of you wanted to attend and couldn't for whatever reason but we had an amazing time and again that's why these Ask Scott sessions are so awesome.

For me personally it's because I get to hear your voice and that's how I was just even better because we were in a live setting. I'm going to stop rumbling here. One last thing that I want to remind you guys though is if you want to download the transcripts of this episode or any past episode at least the past 25 or 30 now, we have transcripts for you. You can read them on the blog or you can download them. Just head over to this episode in this case would be theamazingseller.com/211 and you'll find all the show notes and the transcripts and any links that we talk about will be there as well.

Alright, guys I'm going to stop rumbling. Now, you guys can tell I'm a little excited here. I'm going to go ahead and listen to the first question of this session of Ask Scott and we're going to go ahead and listen and then I'm going to go ahead and give you my answer. Let's go ahead and do that. What do you say?

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:03:41] Hassan: Hi Scott. You've probably been told this like a million times but your podcasts are simply amazing. I'm Hassan and I've been selling on Amazon for about three months now and so far so good except one thing. Almost 70% of my revenues go on PPC and my ACLS is over 100%. I've tried so many different techniques over the past month or so but have yet to find one that's profitable. My question is, is there a generic formula that other sellers have used which has worked or is there like a trusted software or a service that someone's providing which helps sellers in my situation? Thanks and keep drinking that coffee.

[00:04:34] Scott: Well, hey there. Thank you so much for the question and I would have called you by name but I didn't see your name on the email and I didn't hear you say your name so again I apologize for not calling you out by name. I wish I could, I wish I could give you a shout out, shake your hand but I can't. I wanted to answer this question but I do want to remind you guys, if you ask a question you should leave your name so I can give you a shout out. That would be amazing. Again, if you guys want to ask a question, I should have said this already, head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that, you can record a voicemail, say your first name please and then from there I can go ahead and give you a shout out and directly speak with you.

This question is a good one and I'm going to give you guys a little bit of a story of what I just recently did and this could help you. The one thing you have to understand is you can spend money on pay per click like every day, all day long but if it's not profitable after a certain amount of time, you need to start trimming back the keywords that are bringing everything down. There's probably going to be keywords that are converting really well and there's keywords that aren't converting or converting very poorly. You need to look at the data and then start pulling out the ones that are successful and taking the ones that aren't and either pausing them or lowering the bid on those. Recently, just to walk you through what I recently did as part of my new launch process for this one product and I don't say it's really new, it wasn't too much different but it was a little bit different.

What I did, just as an experiment is I went ahead and I started up three campaigns. Normally I do the auto campaign but this time instead of doing auto, what I did is I did a suggested keyword campaign. I let Amazon look at my listing and then suggest what I should be targeting. I did that and then I also took two of my competitors and I ran a reverse search using keyword inspector. If you guys want any of these tools that I use you can head over to themazingseller.com/resources or just go to the show notes page and you'll find them.

[00:06:38] Scott: I get a lot of people say, “That was great but where do you do it and how do you do it?” and all that stuff. All that stuff is there. What I did was I just found I believe it came back with close to 1000 keywords for these two listings. I broke them down into two campaigns so five hundred per campaign. Then what I did is I put dollar cost per click on each one of those. Now, I let that go for seven to ten days. Then I looked at the converted keywords. I looked at all the keywords that got clicked but no sales and here's what I did. I took all of the keywords, there was about probably twenty keywords out of all those that converted to a sale in the first seven days. I took those out of those campaigns, I started a brand new campaign calling it ‘converted'. Converted, makes sense, right?

They are converted keywords. It lets me know that that is the campaign that has converted keywords. These have converted at least once. Then I took that same bit of a dollar and put them there. Now, every keyword that I pulled out of there I paused. I could have ran a negative keyword against that but I just paused them and then I lowered the bid for the entire campaign to fifty cents per keyword on the ones that had either gotten high clicks and no sales or no impressions. I lowered the bid that way, I can't really get hurt and I can't still get some of that low hanging fruit. I immediately went after the keywords that got sales. Now, I'm taking that same daily budget and I'm running that against just those twenty keywords versus running it against a thousand keywords.

That seems to be working pretty good in this experiment. Now, for me looking at your situation, I would say do something similar. I would go and look at the data. You have to have some keywords that have converted. I would take those keywords, I would pull them out of the campaigns, I'd take all of the keywords that are getting clicks but weren't getting sales, that's bringing your ACLS up higher. It's making it worse. You want to be able to see these numbers and I also think that a lot of people will start and they'll just throw a bunch of stuff out there and that's fine. Then you have to start tweaking and you have to start seeing what's converting, what's not converting.

[00:08:43] Scott: If it's not converting, well now you might have a conversion problem. Do you have enough reviews? If you don't have enough reviews maybe that's the problem. Maybe your pictures are horrible. Maybe you're listing needs to be optimized. Maybe your bullet points aren't talking about the benefits as much. There's a whole bunch of different things we can do to get better conversions and a lot of times it's either the picture or it could be the reviews, the number of reviews they have against. I've also seen people's conversions drop if they get a negative review and that negative review gets voted up to the top. That's going to affect your conversion. There's a lot of different things that we can say here but I wouldn't necessarily say that your pay per click isn't working. It's just that we need to be able to go in there and tweak and refine.

Everyone listening should be doing that exact same thing. Hopefully that's answered your question. I know we always get pay per click discussions. We were at our event in Denver and we had a whole thirty, forty minutes discussion. Could have went for the entire day. We had almost put a time out there because there's always so much discussion around this because there is so much that we can do and you can lose a lot of money but you can also make a lot of money and you can also help yourself get ranked. The big thing to take away here is if you're doing this as part of your launch process, you have to understand that you're also allowing yourself to start ranking for other keywords.

Then from there, that's going to bring up your organic search and now your organic search is by-product of the pay per click that you did. Hopefully that makes sense, hopefully I'm not speaking too fast here about this because I do get excited. Hopefully you guys got that little launch pay per click strategy that I just revealed there. Again, I'm experimenting and you guys should experiment too but just look at your numbers. The numbers are not going to lie and then ask yourself is my listing optimized, do I have the reviews that I need to compete with my competition like all of those different things. Let's go ahead and listen to another question and I'll give you my answer.

[00:10:40] Alina: Hi Scott. My name is Alina. Thank you so much for everything you do for you amazing podcasts, for daily emails and webinars which I find very useful. I downloaded your podcasts on my iPad and I listen to it every day go to work and then from work. Thank you so much. It's an amazing community which you created. It's really lovely to be surrounded by people who do business and try to succeed. My question is, since I'm an international seller, I'm based in Europe and I'm about to launch my first product and I want to send specifically from China to Amazon warehouse and I have difficulties to choose the location because there's so many. There's the UK, US and Canada and I guess if you send it to the US it's going to be mostly popular among US citizens and people who live in US at that moment.

Where is the best place for me to sell since I'm an international seller and do I have to pay yearly taxes based on the region? I read online that if you send for example to California location you have to pay a specific amount of money through the year. Yes, if you could give me an advice about legal rights and all the documentation, I know that you're not an attorney but I don't know whether I have to pay like taxes back here how does it go since I'm an international seller? Do I have to pay to the US or to Europe or to where? I'm not sure and I don't really know who to contact about it. Thank you so much and have a great day.

[00:13:09] Scott: Hi Alina. Thank you so much for the question and also the kind words. I really appreciate it and I'm so glad that you're getting value from the podcast. You have a great question or even just a great questions I should say. There's a few different things that you mentioned there that we should probably address. First off it sounds like you're trying to figure all of those different components out before you launch and I get it. We want to know all of the different things before we actually get started. The one thing I would say and the one thing you were asking was like, “What's the best market place that I should launch my product?”

I would say just from knowing the different market places like .com, Amazon.com is going to be the most traffic currently right now but that doesn't mean that your product wouldn't sell really well in Germany. There's nothing saying that that won't happen. Now, for me personally I would pick one market place and try to go into that market place or that Amazon country that you're going to be selling on. I just literally did an interview with a gentleman who sells in Japan. He's telling me that it's a great market place especially since there's not a lot of competition, there's not a lot of reviews happening there because there's not a lot of review clubs that are even allowing or doing it in Japan. It evens the playing field there.

There's a lot of advantages to go into those market places but there's also less traffic. Your sales numbers generally will be lower but let's say that in the US they're selling fifty units a day and maybe you're only selling ten in the international market, maybe Germany or maybe the UK or maybe Japan, whatever it is. You need to make that decision. I would say if you’re starting, I would not try to launch across all the platforms at once. You’re going to overwhelm yourself and you’re going to get confused, I would. I would pick one and then go with that one.

[00:15:09] Scott: The other thing is you were talking about is sales tax and stuff and you’re right. In the States there are a lot of different things with sales tax. There’s a lot of things that I don’t even talk about much because it’s so grey. There’s so many people saying one thing, some people saying the other. I always refer people over to taxjar.com. That is the software that I use to help automate that process. I’ll just be honest, it’s a pain in the butt. It’s an obstacle that some people either aren’t going to deal with so they’re just going to do it illegally or they’re going to say, “Well I’ll do it later,” or they’re going to say, “I’m going to get everything set up.” Then they’re going to start getting it set up, they’re going to see that it’s a pain and they’re going to stop and they’re never going to launch the product.

You really have to decide what is right for you. I would get educated on it. I would go to taxjar.com and I would check them out and I would listen and read and see what they have to say. You can even reach out to their support but you’re right. When you ship in inventory to different locations, “technically” you have a business, a warehouse in that area because that’s what Amazon is, that’s where they have their warehouse so because of that you’re selling physical products if they ship something out of that warehouse, you technically have a business that resides there, it’s what they call nexis. You technically do. Now here’s the deal, you can say, “Well I only ship to two different warehouses.”

That’s great, but guess what, behind the scenes, Amazon could take that inventory without even telling you and then distribute it amongst four other warehouses that you don’t even know about. Again, I don’t want to give legal advice here because I’m in no way shape or form a legal advisor in this so I wouldn’t even want to give legal advice. All I would say is do your homework, do your research and the first place that I would go is taxjar.com. That’s where I would go. But again, going back to what market place to go into, that is your decision and I would do your homework there a little bit too. See what you feel most comfortable with.

[00:17:09] Scott: I know some people that they’re in the UK and you’re going to start there because it’s the least amount of resistance for them. I always try to go down the path of least resistance. Whatever is going to allow you to get to market the fastest that’s usually the route that I go. You can kind of tell by the way I talk, I like to get there fast. Let’s get there fast then let’s start to figure things out. Again, it just depends on where you are in the process. Hopefully that has helped you. Good luck to you. Keep me posted on that. Again I will say this to anyone listening and you as well, don’t overcomplicate the process. Learn what you need to learn now and move forward and that’s something that I refer to a lot. Pat Flynn had taught me this a while ago, that he learned from someone else and that was just in time learning.

Whatever you’re doing right this second, learn that one thing, move to the next thing. Let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:18:06] Speaker: Hey what’s up Scott. Thank you man for the hard work that you’re putting in. I really appreciate it. I’m benefiting a lot and you’re making a difference man in people’s lives. I just have this question right now. I did find a market that I have a lot of experience in. However the margins on the products are very, very low. I would say about $3-$5 if I do bundle it I can make let’s say $8. However, it is something at a high quantity. If I do send in a lot of inventory I can make enough money.

The thing is, is there a limit on how much you can send to the warehouse or should I keep looking for another market where I can make at least $10 and deal with… Will it be easier for me to go into that market or just like I said or should I find another product? I would really appreciate if you answer this question and thank you man.

[00:19:17] Scott: Hey man thanks so much for the question and again I didn't get your first name. Guys if you’re going to leave a question please just leave your first name. I want to be able to say hello. In this case I’m just going to have to say hey man thanks for the question. Anyway let’s get into this though. I like this question because a lot of people are going after they have to make let’s say $15 a unit or even $10 a unit. You guys have heard me say I like to shoot for $10 profit. Does that mean that I wouldn’t go into a product that had volume that could make $5 or $6 per unit and it wasn’t an oversize product? Would I do that? Of course I would. Who wouldn’t do that? That’s just me.

I don’t necessarily look at that as being a negative. Here’s the other thing that I would consider. You just said if you can bundle it you can maybe get that profit margin up. Well there’s your answer. Bundle it as well. Now you’ve got single products, variations let’s call them and then you’ve got some bundles that can go along with that. Then the other thing that I would think of is I would think okay is there another product in this product line that I could create that could sell for more? This could be a lead in offer to that or that could be a variation that’s a lead into your other variations in that listing that could sell for more. A lot of people don’t look at the big picture. They don’t look at the customer path that they can go down or the other items that could be sold to the customer. They just look at that front end sale. A lower priced item, I say a lower priced if you can find something that you’re putting $5 to $7 in your pocket after every sale and there’s volume there.

Like if we’re talking about the same scenario and you’re only selling two a day probably wouldn’t go for that. If I knew that I could sell 10, 15 or 20 a day, I’d look into that. Then especially if I could do multiple variations off of that or bundles off of that and then lead people into another product that sells for $30, $40 that would interest me.

[00:21:16] Scott: It’s again I’m looking, I’m projecting a little bit further out than just that one little space. Now if this is also a product that look like it was trendy, I’d probably stay away from that as well because I wouldn’t want to do all that work for just one season or one part of the trend. I’d want something that was more consistent over time and especially if it had volume then I would really want to look into that. Again, I wouldn’t rule that out. I’d have to look at the entire picture and see what other pieces what other parts of this product line that we could add more value to that we can get that ticket price up. Whether it’s bundling, whether it’s another product down the line or if it’s just the front end offer being able to make $5 to $7 per sale and you can sell 20 a day.

Your numbers still come out to where you’re able to make $50 or $100 or $200 per day on something that does get volume. Me personally, sounds great but again without seeing everything, I wouldn’t really be able to say for sure. If, if that’s the big thing here. If the numbers worked out to where they were $5 to $7 and you had volume and you had something that wasn’t a trend and you could then bundle it and, I have a lot of ands here, if you could then possibly add another product to your line, that could be a more expensive product then by all means that sounds like a great opportunity.

Hopefully that’s answered your question. Guys I’ve got one more question that I want to answer and I also wanted to give a shout out to one of our Facebook peeps out there, our TASers. There’s a question and actually it wasn’t just a question it was more or less like here’s what’s happening right now. I want to give a little congratulations but also I want to answer that question that he was asking to the Facebook community. I can jump in here and give my two cents on this as well. Let me go ahead and read this and I’ll give you a little visual of the picture that I’m looking at right now.

[00:23:15] Scott: Here’s what I’m looking at, I’m looking at a screenshot that says, “$639.84 in product sales and that was for Tuesday and Wednesday.”

Neil Goldsmith, so Neil, if you’re listening, congratulations. Here’s what Neil said, “I pushed my product live last night and have gotten a great response from family and friends. Sold about 16 units so far. Super stoked! My question is how long does it take Amazon to improve your rankings after getting an initial surge of sales? It’s been about 20 hours and I’m still buried on page eight from my main keyword.”

Here’s the deal. First off, I just want to say congratulations but as far as ranking goes, it can take a few days, it could take a week. Now here’s the other thing I should mention, if you’re using any type of super URL or keyword loaded URL whatever you want to call it that does take time if it’s even still working. Some are saying that they’re seeing that it’s not working any more, some are saying that it’s not worth it to do it. I’ve got mixed feelings on that. I recently did one, a product launch without using it and all I did was use some pay per click and then now I’m already starting to rank on page one for like ten or 12 different keywords. Some of them are really good and some of them are just okay but I’m still ranking because I’m running pay per click.

My question here would be, to you Neil, is if you’re not running pay per click right now you should be because what that’ll do is it’ll start pushing keywords or sales through keywords then you can start ranking for these keywords. The other thing is in order to really understand how long it takes to rank, it’s going to be by keyword basis. It takes different times for different keywords depending on how competitive they are. I would give it some time and understand that it’s a process. It’s part of the launch process but I would say as soon as you can I would start pay per click and I mentioned it a little bit earlier like that new little launch strategy that I just used that’s working really well.

[00:25:26] Scott: If you didn’t listen to that part of this, go back and listen to that part where I set up those three campaigns and then just start weeding out the good keywords and then the bad keywords and then start refining. Again just to answer your question, anyone wondering how long does it generally take to rank for keywords, depending on how you did it, if you ran a super URL or a keyword loaded URL, if it’s still working it could take a few days. Again, it depends on how many sales you got through that. The other way we should be talking about is doing it using pay per click and when you do it that way it could take, depending on how many sales you get and how many you get through that keyword it could take weeks before you actually see that. It’s going to vary and I know a lot of people don’t want to hear that but it’s true. You got to be patient, you got to be patient. It will take some time.

The thing is… Here’s the other thing to consider. Let’s say for example you want to get on page one and everyone on page one has 100 reviews. Let’s just say that. Let’s just use that as an example and let’s say you have zero reviews. Well if you get on page one with zero reviews guess what you’re probably not going to convert that well and that could hurt your listing too. What I would recommend is before you really try to get behind it and push yourself to page one, make sure you have a good base set of reviews if your competition does. This way here when you get to page one, you’re not there with no reviews and your conversions are going to be lower because that will hurt your ranking as well. Just a little side note there for you.

Anyway Neil congratulations on going live and thanks for sharing that in the TAS Facebook community. A lot of people went in there commented and gave some feedback and also said congratulations. Awesome, awesome job. Alright guys. This has been a great episode. I always get fired up to do these but this one here was really good. We dug into a lot of different topics. Pay per click always seems to come up but again if you guys want to ask me a question, head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that and, I’ll say it again, leave your first name.

I would love to be able to say, “Hey how you doing Joe,” or, “Thanks for the question Joe,” or whatever or Mary or whatever. It just makes it a little bit more personal and allows me to say hello so definitely do that.

[00:27:41] Scott: The other thing I want to remind you guys if you’re brand new to the podcast, if you guys are brand new and you’ve not attended one of our live workshops where I walk you through the five phases for launching your first product, you’re going to want to head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop and that’s where I will show you… In about 60 to 70 minutes I will teach you exactly those five phases to doing just that. Launching a product on Amazon. Then I’ll also do live Q&A on there as well. You can register for an upcoming one by visiting theamazingseller.com/workshop. Lastly, if you want to check out today’s show notes, head over to this episode and that episode is theamazingseller.com/211. You’ll find all the show notes, the transcripts, any links that we talked about will be there as well.

One small favor that I would like to ask of you, all of you listeners out there is if you could do me a quick favor, just share the podcast with someone that you think would benefit from what we discuss here on the podcast. Only people, only people that you think would want to hang out with us because that’s really what I want this to be. I want this to be a community of people that we would want to hang out on a Saturday afternoon around a barbeque doing this little Ask Scott session. This could be a session where we just talk to each other and give each other ideas. That’s what I want to create here so only people that you think that would gel with us. You can have them just follow the podcast or maybe check out an episode or maybe invite them to the Facebook group, whatever, Periscope, all of that stuff that would be awesome.

Guys that’s it. That’s going to wrap it up. Remember I’m here for you I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to… Come on say it with me, say it loud and say it proud, “Take Action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

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