TAS 217 Ask Scott Session #64 – Your Amazon FBA Questions

Your opportunity to hear and ask your own questions from an experienced Amazon private label seller is here – it’s the Friday “Ask Scott” session. Today’s episode features a handful of questions about adding products to your private label lineup, how to utilize the analytics provided from your Amazon seller account, , and tons more insight surrounding those topics. If you are getting into sales on Amazon, don’t reinvent the wheel. Listen to these Ask Scott episodes to ensure that you aren’t making mistakes you don’t have to make as you build your business on Amazon.

Should I choose a second product related to my first one that is in a very competitive niche?

A caller on this episode is doing well with her first private label product and is ready to add a second product within the same market. But the product that makes the most sense to add to her lineup is going to be difficult to sell simply because the market is very crowded and competitive. What should she do? Is it smart to even make the effort or would she be better off choosing another item to sell? Scott’s got some ideas about what she should do including what he suggests new sellers do to avoid this kind of issue if possible. You’re going to get some gems from this one, so be sure to listen.

There are lots of reports inside the Amazon seller dashboard. Which should I be using?

There are many ways to learn from your current and past sales and make adjustments to increase your private label product sales even more. One of the best ways is to get the hard facts on how your products have been performing. You can do that through many of the reports that Amazon provides in your seller dashboard. But where should you start and which reports are the most helpful? On this episode Scott shares the reports that he uses, how he uses them, and the results he’s seen from doing so consistently. You won’t want to miss this one because it will give you some trustworthy tools you can use to increase the sales of your products.

What’s the best way to understand air freight from China?

A TAS listener called in to ask a question on this episode of the podcast regarding having his products sent via Air Freight from China. He’s not sure what to do to make sure that he’s not personally tied up in the process too much or to ensure that he avoids entanglements when it comes to customs. Scott answers his question directly with some simple advice that will give this Amazon seller a direct route to the answers he needs. You can hear Scott’s advice on this episode of the podcast.

Are you new to private label sales? Get up and running within the next 10 days.

One of the ways that Scott has created to help newbies understand private label sales and learn how to find and launch their own products successfully is his free 10 day course that walks through the 5 steps involved in selling on Amazon. He doesn’t hold anything back, telling you everything you need to know to choose a good product, test it to ensure that it’s a quality item, make your first order, list it on Amazon, and optimize your listing and start promotions to get your sales going. You won’t believe the value Scott provides in this course, and you can find out how to get it on this episode of the podcast.

OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER

[0:03] Scott’s introduction to this episode of Ask Scott!
[4:35] QUESTION ONE: When choosing a second related product the numbers look incredibly competitive. Should I still go for it?
[12:58] QUESTION TWO: Can you comment on the analytics in Amazon that we can and should use?
[22:10] QUESTION THREE: I’m shipping air freight from China. What are the things I should look out for to make sure my items aren’t held up in customs?
[27:00] The value of understanding the reports and your sales numbers.
[27:50] How you can ask your own question.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

TRANSCRIPT TAS 217

TAS 217 : Ask Scott Session #64 – 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 217 and session number 64 of Ask Scott. This is where I answer your questions here on the podcast and…

[read more=”Read full transcript…” less=”Read less”]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…I do that by you submitting those voicemails that keep coming in. Keep them coming guys. You guys know this is like a highlight to my week. It’s where I get to listen to your questions in your own voice and I get to hang out with you and you guys have heard me talk about that. I like to think of us like in the same room together or may be having that cup of coffee. I was able to experience this by the way in Denver where we had our own private TAS breakthrough Live Event and I opened up the morning with a cup of coffee with about thirty other Amazon sellers TAS listeners.

It was amazing by the way and we had just an awesome, awesome time. If you guys were at that event then you guys know how awesome it was. If you weren’t and you want to register for an upcoming one when we decide to have it, which we haven’t done so or if you want to see some footage from that event, you can head over to theamazingseller.com/live and you can see all the details there. Again, we don’t have an official date right now. When I’m recording this episode at least we don’t, maybe in the future months when you are listening we will but right now we don’t. We are planning the next one and it was just an awesome time and this right here been able to do the Ask Scott sessions where we get to really hangout for a little while together just really awesome. You guys know that I just love, love doing this stuff.

Now the other thing that I wanted to remind you guys is that there are show notes and transcripts now available for all the episodes. If you want to download the show notes to these, the Ask Scott sessions or any of the other episodes in the past you can always do that by going to the episode. In this case it’s episode 217. That would be theamazingseller.com/217.

[00:02:03] Scott: It’s funny guys. Something kind of came to me. I’ve been doing a lot of Periscopes and I’ve been doing some Snapchatting and stuff like that and a lot of people, I just got a question the other day and I get this all the time, like, “Scott, do you ever not have energy? Are you ever like upset and mad?” The answer is, “Yeah. I am actually.” It’s not often. I’m pretty good about keeping a level head. I’ve grown up a lot since I was a kid, walk away. My father always taught me to like walk away. It takes more of a man to walk away than to deal with something or just getting upset in general. There’s days that you get upset with just people in general. People that just don’t treat other people well or that are… It’s upsetting sometimes if your kid is getting taken advantage of in school or whatever.

There’s times that you get upset. It’s normal but I do have a pretty good balance and I can talk myself out of it because I just believe in that. I’d rather have more positive energy than negative energy. If you guys are feeling that at all understand it is normal but you can reverse that and you need to surround yourself with more positive like-minded people. Again if you guys are hanging out with me on Periscope, you guys know what I am talking about. If you guys are not, I would invite you to go check out Periscope. You can go to periscope.tv/scottvoelker You can follow me there and I randomly jump on, it will be random. We are live. We can do a little bit of this but in more of a live fashion and I really enjoying doing that stuff.

Definitely go over to periscope.tv/scottvoelker and follow me over there and we can hangout. The one last thing I would like to remind anyone that is brand new, first of say thank you for showing up and thanks for hanging out with us and hopefully you get value from this podcast. If you do go ahead and share with people you think that would get value. What I would like to do is give you a resource or anyone that’s at the beginning stages that wants to get caught up as far as like figuring out like exactly this whole business model and what it takes to get a product to market on Amazon and start selling it, I created a free ten day course that you can sign up for.

[00:04:15] Scott: Totally free. Just head over to freeprivatelabelcourse.com I know, pretty unique name, freeprivatelabelcourse.com. There you’ll have all of the different steps that it takes to pick a product, to source a product, to do a pre-launch, to do a launch and then to promote the product. All of that stuff is there for you through that ten day course. Definitely go check that out. Alright guys, I’m ready. Are you guys ready? Let’s do this thing. Let’s go ahead listen to the first question of the day and I’ll go ahead and I’ll give you my first answer of the day. What do you say! Not bad kind of rhyme too. Let’s go ahead and do this.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:04:53] April: Hi Scott. This is April from Ohio. I have a quick question for you. I just launched my first product about six weeks ago and everything is going great. In fact I just ordered a second shipment of that product. My question is when looking forward, I want to know, when thinking about a second product I’m looking at items that are related to my first one obviously. However, the numbers look very competitive so I am not sure if I should go ahead with the second product that is related to my first product or if I should go with a second product that is unrelated but that has better numbers.

Like I said, a few things that I looked at that were related to my first product, they just look supper competitive, there is a lot of sellers in this space. Definitely the numbers look a lot different than they did from my first product so I’m hesitant to go in to something that would be within the same brand or product line because the numbers just don’t look great. Should I branch out or maybe just do a small test run with the related product to my first? Again, thanks everything you do. I love listening to the podcast and being in the Facebook group and you single handedly got me into this so thank you. Bye.

[00:06:17] Scott: Hey April from Ohio. Thank you so much for the question and thank you so much for being a listener. I really do appreciate it and I’m so glad that you are taking action and that you are moving forward and congratulations. I think all of us listening now should give April a round of applause. I hope you guys can hear that I’m clapping. Let’s give you a round of applause April because you are moving. You are moving forward and you’ve got some product that you are selling and that’s awesome. Now the question is, “Now what? I have got this first product. Do I launch another product that could be sold to that same customer?”

That’s really the big question or, “Should I now go outside of that and start a whole another product line or a product that I could serve to a different market in a sense because the competition on the other products that people are selling to the people that buy my first product,” that's kind of confusing how just I said that. You guys get what I mean though. That the competition is a little bit aggressive, so what do you do?

Well first thing I would say to anyone listening right now that has not gotten to that point where you have that product launched yet or even in another brand however, wherever you are in the process you want to always think to yourself, “Are you going to be able to launch a product line to serve a market?” We don’t want to get to this place now to where we have done all the work to get up and running to sell that “one widget”. A widget like in a sense but now kind of start over again and find another market that we can serve products too. I’d rather do it where I know that there is four or five products that we can launch against that one product. This way here we can build up that product line and then once we get moving and we see that we are going to go outside of Amazon, we are going to build our sales channel, we are going to build our marketing outside of Amazon on our own platform then we can bring those products along with us and then we can lead people through the journey.

[00:08:21] Scott: If someone is a fisherman well, we want to say well, they need a pole, they need a tackle box, they need fishing gear as far as like maybe they need, I don’t know, a trolling motor. That would be expensive item. Maybe that’s something that they would want and need. It’s a little bit down the road. I would think I wouldn’t go that because it’s a motorized vehicle but, you guys get what I’m saying. You got the lures, you got the hooks, you’ve got maybe certain gloves, maybe certain sunglasses. I don’t know, whatever that market needs you got all these different products. The problem that you are saying April is that, your one product not as much competition, you are doing okay but now your next few products there’s going to be some pretty good competition there. Right? I think that’s what I am trying to say here.

My thought is this. I would do what you said in the latter part of your question is where I would probably test a product. I would maybe try to do it where you can again do enough to where you going to be able to give enough away to get the reviews going, to start getting the pay per click going, to start getting some sales going but then maybe you can also use your one product that’s currently selling and then run a promotion that’s going to show people that land on that product page and then it can point them over to your other product and may be give them a discount. For example, if you were going to, let’s just say that your first thing, let us say you sold a garlic press and then let us say that your second product would be let’s say a garlic press storage… A garlic bag that stores the garlic or whatever, I’m not even sure if that exists. I think it does. Then what you can do is inside of your one that you’re already selling you can have a promotion inside of there that Amazon allows you to set up and it would say like, “Get 25% off of your garlic storage system.”

Now people that are coming in, you already got the traffic coming into your listing, now you can entice them with that offer. Then from there what’s also going to start happening now is you are going to start showing up with the frequently bought together. Now that if you can get people to buy product one and two product together, when people buy your first product they are going to see it in their promotion but even if they don’t see it in their promotion inside of your listing they're going to also see down below when they're buying your product and it's going to say frequently bought together.

[00:10:32] Scott: When the ready to check out they're going to see that. Okay. There's ways that we can capitalize on that first product but we also have to think to ourselves like how much work are we willing to do.

If we were talking to go totally outside of Amazon and that's where we're headed for those of you that are brand new you're not headed there yet but eventually you're going to want to go there we want to say to ourselves, “If I get a customer to buy my first product, can I have them be interested in buying my second product by showing them through some content that I create whether it's if am selling a garlic press it might be recipes or a demonstration of how I’m doing this certain meal and then I am using this certain garlic press and I reference to it,” or whatever it is. Is there a sales funnel that I can build outside of Amazon that my products are going to align with. That's kind of like how I think and I know this isn't a direct answer April but I’m just trying to give you context. I’m trying to give you ideas of what you could do by not going away from that brand or that product line because I think that's how you can get the most traction.

Moving forward is to capitalize on other products that you're rolling out that can kind of cross promote. That doesn't mean that people aren't out there successfully selling ten or fifteen random different widgets. That's another model. If you want to be like you know like this one store that sells multiple different items to multiple different brands then go for it but just understand that you're not really building out a true brand that is going to be around that specific thing. Hopefully that makes sense, hopefully that helps but I would probably I think me personally I would probably say I would do a test with a small number at least enough that I knew I could get the traction going and to give it a good run.

If I could see that I could start getting some momentum, then I might move forward with that as well and maybe do the same thing with the third product and the fourth product. Hopefully this has helped April. I know it was a long winded answer and I also just noticed that I’m talking kind of fast and that also makes me think of some people that I met in Miami or in Denver and they listen to the podcast and they are like, “Scott, I normally listen to podcasts like one and a half speed I can't do that with you man I can't do it.” I’m like, “Good. That means you get to listen to me in real time. This is me talking normal.” It's kind of crazy because I do move kind of fast. I walk fast too by the way. Let's go ahead and listen to the next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:13:00] SPEAKER: Hey Scott, just wanted to say thank you for everything you do with the podcast and the website and the workshops. The one question I had I don't think that I’ve seen an episode or anything that's touched on it but if there was any way possible to give some insight on some of the Amazon seller and business reports, maybe some of the business and seller reports that sellers should focus on or use if they are in the analytics to kind of measure the success of their business or if they're not successful at this point maybe some benchmarks that they could shoot for when looking at those reports. Thanks a lot and I look forward to getting my question answered.

[00:13:45] Scott: Okay. Well that's a great question and thank you so much for the kind words. I would call you out by name but again I can't because well you didn’t give me your name. Anyway, thank you for the question and I really appreciate the kind words and anyone else that's submitting a question on the Ask Scott show here, on the on these Ask Scot sessions, go ahead and leave your first name. I would love to call you up by first name. Again this is us sitting in the same room together. We just shook hands. “Hi my name is Scott and you are?” So let's go ahead and make sure that we do that from now on. Now let's talk about this.

This is actually a good topic. I’m not really too crazy about going in and just taking hours and looking at reports. There is some basic ones that I look at. I’m going to kind of give you those right now because there are they're important because we need to see exactly what's happening on the backend of our business inside of Amazon. The very first thing that you want to or that I look at is I go into the sales dashboard. Then what I’m going to look at, the main thing that I’m going to look at is the main screen there. We're going to see, you guys all have seen this. People post screen shots and all that stuff where you see seven sold today or yesterday thirty units or same day last week forty five units or whatever.

It kind of gives you. Then it also says same day last year how many units were sold, all of that. That's like the basic level, that's like everyone sees that data. Yeah, we look at that all the time. Now the next part of that and this is something that I look at because I have variations and I also have different categories that things are being sold in now. The other one that I look at is if I go to my sales dashboard, it's on the left hand side if you're on desktop obviously it's going to be on desktop. If you're looking at these reports you're going to be… Let’s just say that you're in the sales reports kind of dashboard, you look on the left hand side then you will see business reports. Then we'll see by date, by ASIN.

[00:15:47] Scott: I go where it says by ASIN. I scroll down a little bit and I go to detail page sales and traffic by child item. Then what I do is I click on that and then it'll give me a breakdown for the past thirty days and it will show me all the parent ASINs, all the child ASINs. It’ll give me the title and give me all that stuff. Then it tells me the sessions. The session is like how many times the page’s been views. It will give you the session, I can’t even say session, session percentage, it gives you page views, it gives you page views percentage, buy box percentage, units ordered, units sessions percentage, ordered product sales and then total order items. What I normally do is the very first thing I do in the morning usually around eleven o'clock because that's when the reports are updated usually Eastern time is I will go and I’ll select the from day to the day before.

If I do that I’ll go and I’ll just go to little calendar and then I’ll select the day before and then what that'll do is it'll give me just the day before stats. Then this will tell me how many sessions I’ve had but more importantly how many sales per ASIN or per child item that you've had. It also gives you the unit session percentage, I can't say session today for some reason. Unit session percentage, ordered product sales and then you'll see total order items. Units order that means how many were ordered but when you look at eleven total ordered… I’ve got eleven in front of me here because this one here there was twelve units ordered but there was eleven total order items.

That means, that let’s see, eleven people purchased one person bought two. Then it gives you the unit session percentage. Here’s the other useful thing with this report is that let's say for example I’m running a split test and let's say that I started it and I have to say the exact date that I started it. Let's just say that I want to see what it did in the past ten days. More importantly, I want to see how many sessions it's had because I’m going to base my split tests and stuff off of sessions.

[00:17:58] Scott: Now if you're using this to do the split test you definitely want to be looking at sessions. Here's what I would do. I would go in and I would say, okay, let me go back ten days let's say and then I’ll select that day range. Then from there I’ll look at sessions and I’ll say, okay, cool I had five hundred sessions. What was my unit session percentage. It was let's say it was, I don't know, thirteen percent. Okay cool. Now I’m going to go back ten days before that time so let's just say I go back twenty days but I’m going to also cap it at only ten days between that one day. This is getting kind of confusing but you want to set two different times but to get the same amount of sessions.

This way here when you're looking at your test you're able to see that you started the test on one day and then you tracked how many sessions that went past but then before that you want to see how many sessions are up to a certain amount of sessions so you can track the actual percentage of conversions. Sounded really confusing but it's really not. That's what you want to use this report for, at least I do. Now, there is a new tool and I’ve talked about this, just started talking about it. It's called Splitly and it's a really awesome tool because you can set up these split tests to actually do exactly what I just said so you don't have to think about it. It'll show you a test that's been running and I’ll be splitting between two different altering back and forth between the two.

Again that’s Splitly. I do have an affiliate link that you can go through, you'll get an extra little bonus there by going through that plus you will buy me a cup of coffee what you guys know I enjoy. You can find out more information about that product by heading over to theamazingseller.com/splittest all one word, so theamazingseller.com/splittest.

[00:19:59] Scott: Check that out, really awesome tool but you can do it manually. This is what I’ve been doing as well and it works but it's just a little more time consuming. Anyway that's the one reporting area that I always go into every single day. There's other ones you can go to detailed page sales traffic, detailed page sales traffic by parent item and all that stuff. I usually again just go for detailed page sales and traffic by child item. That's what I do. Then the other report that I go under is if you go under reports, you just hover over top that you'll see a drop down menu and then from there I go to advertising reports. Then under advertising reports I can see what I’ve spent per day so I can look and say, “For the past,” I think let’s just see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight days it will show you what you've spent, you can change that if you want to but from here what I look at is I go at the very top.

At the very top you are going to see performance over time, performance by SKU, performance by placement, search term report, estimated page one, other ASIN report, campaign performance report. I look at search term report, I’ll click on that and then I will run and I will request the report and it usually takes about five minutes to get back. Then that's going to give you all of the data from all of your campaigns inside of your Amazon pay per click and your sponsored ads. Then I go through and I really dive into those reports to see the keywords that people are actually searching for that are bringing in sales. All right. Those are the really the two main ones that I look at. Obviously if you're going to talk about like inventory you can go into your inventory, see where that is.

You'll also see if there's any alerts at in the very front end of your dashboard if you have any low inventory but really report wise that's the two areas that I look at the most. I know that was a long winded answer again but I wanted to take everyone through those two things as far as reporting goes. That's me personally. Again there is other people that probably go a lot deeper. Those are the two things that I look at on a regular basis or a pretty regular basis. Let's go ahead and listen to one more question and I’ll give you my answer

[00:22:10] Steven: Hey Scott, this is Steven from Atlanta Georgia. Like all the other TASers out there I just want to say thanks so much for all the time and energy you put in making this podcast reality. Thank you so much for that. My question is regarding the import process from China after I’ve selected a manufacturer, I have a product. I know you mention a lot that you like to use DHL air shipping and I believe you mentioned they handle all the logistics for you. My question is if I’m shipping through UPS or Fedex or another one of the shipping companies besides DHL but it is through air freight, will they handle the custom clearance for me, will my suppliers freight forwarder handle that? My question is how hands on does that have to be for me and what would you recommend as the best path forward for selecting one of the shipping companies and making sure that I’m not going to get held up with customs or anything like that. Thanks so much and I’m looking forward to hearing your answer.

[00:23:09] Scott: Hey Stephen, thank you so much for the question. Assuming that we're going a by air, now you said something that was a little bit different and maybe some people don't understand this. If you're going air freight like if you're doing like not air Express, that's a little different. A lot of times with air freight, I haven't done this I just heard that what you're doing is you're having the goods delivered to the airport in a sense and then you're going to have a freight forwarder pick that up or someone and then from their ship into Amazon or bring it to your warehouse location wherever that may be. We need to be clear on that. If you're using Air Express for the most part everything is going to be done for you right from door to door. You wouldn’t have to worry about that stuff.

Now with that all being said, if you're going through a different company like UPS or FedEx I'm pretty sure it's very similar to DHL where they're going to handle most of that for you. My advice to anyone would be to hope on the phone with UPS tell them exactly what you're doing or Fedex or whoever, tell them exactly what you're doing and you want to make sure that everything is kind of outlined for you to understand through that process. They have people that are dedicated just for handling international shipping you know customs all that stuff. The other thing that you want to probably do is you want to ask your supplier, what is the unique code that they're shipping this under.

There are certain codes that they ship product under that will go through customs and it'll let them know the type of product that it is. When that is established you're also going to have a little bit more info as far as like what customs could cost you. They won't come out and tell you exactly what customs are going to cost you but they'll give you an idea of what the percentage could be and then from there you're going to pay customs once it gets through.

[00:25:17] Scott: Honestly I would reach out with a customs broker in a sense through like DHL or UPS or FedEx or any of those and I would try to have them handle everything. They have divisions that are dedicated just for this here in itself. Again if you wanted to use like flex port or one of them, Flex port is even on a waiting list now and I’m not even sure if you can use them but any other freight forwarding company they can handle all that stuff for you as well and take you through the entire process. I just say that in the beginning when you're going by air, usually if you go by Express it's going to streamline the process a little bit more especially while we are first starting and then from there we can we can start to kind of go outside of that and start thinking about, okay, how can we cut costs with the shipping and once you get through the process you're going to learn that.

I would definitely get on the phone with UPS, FedEx, DHL any of those and let them know your situation, let them know the product and then also ask your supplier to give you more information about the product and how they label it as far as what the item is because that could make a huge difference on your customs. Definitely do that because you'll give that code to FedEx or UPS or DHL and then they'll be able to say, “Okay, that code it's this percentage for customs generally.” That's what I would do. I would get on the phone and I would talk to someone. I don't think there's an exact answer that I can give you other than I’d have to get on the phone and actually reach out to these people and talk through it a little bit. Hopefully that's helped you and good luck.

Guys that is pretty much going to wrap it up I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into that, the reporting thing that's why I spent a lot more time on that. Usually these episodes are under thirty minutes. If this goes over a little bit I apologize but yeah I just wanted to dive into that because I think reporting it's necessary because we need to understand where our business is and especially when we're doing split testing you're going to want to know how to do that whether you use a software tool like Splitly or if you do it manually you still need to understand where those reports are and how to use them and what they do.

[00:27:35] Scott: There's a lot more that you can do inside of the reporting but you don't necessarily have to but those are the more important things that I look at on a regular basis. You definitely want to check that out. Alright guys well this has been fun, this has been awesome as usual and if you guys want to leave your own question or have your own question answered here on an upcoming session of Ask Scott just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask. Make sure you leave your first name please and then I can call you up by first name and hey we can have that cup of coffee together. Did want to remind anyone that is brand new to the show if you wanted to get caught up really, really fast actually in ten days or less you can head over to freeprivatelabelcourse.com, I’ve created a ten day email course there where I walk you through in video on exactly what it takes to get started selling on Amazon and how to get your first product picked, selected, sourced, all of that good stuff and I’ll take you through that process and give you the overview of exactly what you need to do and what you need to understand about this business.

Again that's freeprivatelabelcourse.com. Go check that out. Let me know what you think. If you have any questions or any of that good stuff. Then the last thing is the show notes. If you guys want to check out the show notes or the transcripts to this episode head over to theamazingseller.com/217. All right guys, this has been awesome as usual. I want to thank you guys again for listening and for reaching out and leaving comments and just being awesome. I just want to say thank. I know you guys have a lot of choices out there to listen to people as far as podcast and I really do appreciate you guys spending time each and every week to come back and listen here. Once again thank you. You are awesome.

That’s it guys. That’s going to wrap it up. Once again remember, I’m here for you, I believe in you, I’m rooting for you, but you have to, you have to… Come on say it with me, say it loud, you know it’s coming, “Take Action.” Have an awesome amazing day. I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]
Click Here to Download Transcript <<

[/read]

[divider]