Robert
[00:00:06]
Hey eCommerce marketing podcast list. Now I wanted to let you know that we have created 16 eCommerce marketing videos for you. You can download these free videos by visiting eCommerce marketing podcast.com/videos are by texting the word videos to plus 1 4 8 0 4 1 8 1 4 1 11. This step by step video marketing tutorials will teach you how to drive more traffic to your eCommerce website. How to get more back links to your eCommerce website and how to optimize your website to get more paid customers. Get the videos right now by visiting eCommerce marketing podcast.com/videos or by texting videos to plus 1 4 8 0 4 1 8 1 4 1 1. Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Today’s guest is Scott Voker and he’s from the amazing seller.com. We are going to be talking about selling on Amazon. We’re going to be talking about how to market some products, how to even do research and finding products. Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Scott, how are you doing?

Scott
[00:01:18]
I’m doing really good. Thanks for having me Robert.

Robert
[00:01:20]
So if you could just give us a quick introduction about yourself, how you ended up selling on Amazon and what you [email protected].

Scott
[00:01:29]
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I won’t go back too far. I’m I’m a 43 year old man. I’m married, I’ve got a family, three children I’ve been married for 21 years, actually gonna be 22 here in a month. So pretty happy about that. But yeah, I’m just a, a regular guy that, you know, started when I was 18 years old, right. Outta high school, just going into my father’s business and learning about business in the contracting business that was, but then at that age, you know, really not having, you know, I didn’t go to college or anything like that. So I didn’t really have a ton of background in business, but I learned a lot by being in my father’s business. I also learned that I didn’t want to be in partnerships. And I also learned that I didn’t really want employees and that type of stuff, but it taught me a lot.

Scott
[00:02:10]
And from there, my wife and I, after I was working for my father for probably a good eight to 10 years, somewhere around there, I forget now it’s been so long. I was just getting kind of burned out. You know, I mean, I was working 60 plus hours a week and I wasn’t seeing, seeing my new daughter at the time. I only had one child at the time and we decided to go with a hobby that she had, which was photography. And we turned that into kind of fast forward here. We, we turned that into a business and after about 18 months of deciding to start that again, knowing nothing about photography, we ended up starting a little local business in our own photography studio, built that into a six figure business and a relatively quick time. And then from there about six, seven years later, decided to start teaching people online about photography and about how we started without really having any formal education.

Scott
[00:02:56]
And that really introduced me to the online space. And it’s always been, you know, part of me that’s always been entrepreneurial. I’ve always wanted to kind of find other revenue streams and stuff. And then that’s where Amazon really peaked my interest. I mean, I had other things that I had also dabbled in, but Amazon is the most recent one. And the one that I’ve really kind of drilled down into recently, but yeah, so I just started testing this whole Amazon thing. I, I was starting to hear how people were making some money at it, selling physical product, and then I gave it a shot. I figured, you know what, I’d give it maybe three, four months and I’d see what would happen. And long story short is in the first 90 days, I was able to generate about 40,000 in revenue. So it was, it was definitely proving the concept.

Scott
[00:03:34]
And from there, I just decided to, to go all in and, and focus on this. And, and then that brings us up to kind of the podcast. And I started that really to kind of help myself because I wanted to reach out to other people that were more successful than I was, and that were a little bit further along, be able to interview them, but then also, you know, share my experiences, share my journey with other people that might wanna get started. And that really morphed into this really, really amazing thing as we call it the amazing seller. So that’s where we are today.

Robert
[00:04:01]
Okay. Thanks for the overview and congratulations on the 22 years of marriage.

Scott
[00:04:07]
Thank you.

Robert
[00:04:08]
So are you still, are you and your wife partners in the business, or did you actually commit to not working with partners?

Scott
[00:04:16]
No. I mean, my, my wife is my partner in life and she’s also a partner in business always, you know, she’s always been a, a really a good partner in a sense that keeps me on track. She also is one of my biggest cheerleaders. So yeah, I don’t, I don’t even think if, if I didn’t have her, I don’t even know if I would’ve really continued to look into Amazon. She kind of gave me a nudge and said, Hey, if it’s looking like it’s peaking your interest, you’re probably onto something. So you might wanna give it a try. So, no, she definitely helps me out in the business and in, in any business that we do, she she’s always there to help. So yeah, definitely a big part of, of my success.

Robert
[00:04:47]
Okay. So now let’s get into Amazon. So how does somebody research and even choose their fast product and decide, okay, I want to sell this on Amazon. How can somebody get started on that whole process?

Scott
[00:05:00]
Well, there’s a few different ways you can get started. And there was one way that I was seeing that a lot of people were doing and they still do, and it’s called retail arbitrage. And it’s where you go into a big box store or even around your house. If you have stuff that, that you wanna get rid of, it’s kind of like eBay in a sense, but yet if you have stuff that’s still sealed, that’s even better. Cuz it says new. But with retail arbitrage, if you go into a local big box store, you know, Walmart Lowe’s staples, any of those, you can go ahead and see that they have clearance items. You know, they’re clearing, you know, off the shelves cuz they’re going into a new season or whatever. And they usually di deeply discount those. If you find them for 75% off, 80% off and then you can go and resell them on Amazon.

Scott
[00:05:38]
The problem with that, that I didn’t really like was, and I come from again the physical side and also see if the digital side, what really turned me off with that is having to go out and find more products all the time. So I had to go out there if I found 10, I’d sell ’em and then I’d have to sell another or go find another 10 and then sell them. So I didn’t really like that model. So that kind of turned me off. And I honestly, I started looking into that and then I kind of said, eh, I don’t think I wanna do that. But for a lot of people, they get started that way. And it’s a great way to get started without a lot of investment because you don’t have to spend a lot to get started, but we’re talking really now what really intrigued me was FBA, which is fulfilled by Amazon for anyone that’s listening that doesn’t know that’s really where Amazon does all the heavy lifting.

Scott
[00:06:18]
You take your product, you ship it in and then they’ll do the fulfillment for you. They’ll do the refunds. They’ll do, you know, like the customer support, all of that stuff. So that’s what really, really excited me about doing, you know, the Amazon thing. Okay. So from there, if you wanna just start, I would say retail arbitrage is a great way to kind of get your feet wet. Secondly, if you don’t wanna do retail arbitrage, you wanna go in the private labeling space. And that’s what I’m doing now is where you take your own product and brand it and then you manufacture it and now you don’t have to worry. You know, you don’t have to worry about finding more product because you’re, you’re the manufacturer. You can control that inventory. So one of the biggest things I always tell people when they’re getting started is you wanna look at a market, not just at a product.

Scott
[00:06:59]
So you wanna see what market are you serving and what products do they buy. And that’s really where you get started. Then from there, you can go into Amazon and just see what Amazon is putting in front of you. So for example, if you go to Amazon and you’re searching for a garlic press, let’s say, you’re gonna go there and it’s gonna give you related products around a garlic press and a garlic press would be in the, in the cooking niche. Right? So, so because of that, now I can go there and start getting all these ideas coming at me because Amazon is giving me suggestions. And if Amazon is giving me suggestions, that must mean that people are buying that because they have a lot of data from a lot of years. So does that make sense?

Robert
[00:07:35]
Yeah, so, but one quick question that came up for me is how did you transition from the retail arbitrage to manufacturing your own product? So do you first to get started, you do the retail arbitrage, but using those same products, do you just start to manufacture those same products yourself? Or do you end up developing a product that you think is going to fit a certain market?

Scott
[00:08:00]
Yeah, you can do that. What I like to do is I like to test with a product that’s already currently selling, so I’m not gonna try to reinvent the wheel. But one thing that you would do is if you see something that’s selling really well, all right, now what you can do is look at all of their negative reviews. They have negatives. A lot of ’em are gonna still have negative reviews. I mean, they might not have a ton, but if it’s, even if it’s a good product, you’re gonna have people that just complained about something, you know, like it was, it didn’t have a long enough handle. It didn’t have a long enough strap or it was slippery or whatever. Right? So once you hear these different feedback from, you know, the reviewers, you can then enhance your product and make it better to answer those problems. All right. And then when you do that, now you’ve taken a product that you already know is selling well, and then you just modified it and made it better. And now you’re gonna market that product, you know, in, in that same category.

Robert
[00:08:45]
Okay. And so that brings you to manufacturing. So how do you start manufacturing that product? And I know you, you work with like some people walk with manufacturers from China, but what’s the whole process about finding a manufacturer.

Scott
[00:09:01]
Yeah. Well, I mean the easiest way is to go to China. I mean, you know, you can go to Ali express Alibaba. Those are two of the main sites. And I always tell people you’re not going there necessarily to find the product you’re going there to find your manufacturer or your agent, cuz what you wanna do there is you really just wanna find a product that’s similar to what you’re looking for. And then start, start engaging in a conversation and, and creating that relationship with this agent because on the front end it looks like it’s just a big, giant website that you can deal with as far as sourcing products. But what it really is, is it’s all of these agents behind this website. And then when you go and you put a contact, you know, support ticket in kind of thing, then you’re contacting an agent and then you can start interacting with that agent. And then you can start building that rapport and then you can say to them, Hey, what else do you have? That’s not on Alibaba. Do you have something in your catalog that, can you send me a catalog? And then they can send that to you. And then you can get more ideas. And then from there, take those products and then go over to Amazon and see if any of those are selling. Okay. And then that’s really how you can tap into finding a manufacturer without really going after the one that everyone else has found.

Robert
[01:10:06]
Okay. And once you already have your product, so how do you start the selling process and selling on Amazon?

Scott
[01:10:13]
Yeah. Well the basic process is this and, and people need to understand that Amazon is based all off of sales. All right? Every it, you know, all they care about is sales, that’s it, right? Sales is gonna move the needle. And what I mean by that is, is if you have a product and you put it up there and you have no sales, you’re just gonna go to the bottom of the page or the, you know, the bottom of the barrel. Okay. You’re not gonna be found. So what you, what you wanna do right away is get sales. So one of the strategies that we use is we go ahead and we give away. And we usually figure this in to our budget. And our marketing plan is we wanna give away a hundred, maybe 150 units and we can give them away in exchange, you know, for not just a review, but just an exchange for them buying it.

Scott
[01:10:54]
So that way there, we can get a boost in our ranking. Okay. And what people need to understand is that Amazon is a search engine for buyers. We wanna rank in there just as though you would wanna rank a website or your e-commerce store on Google. It’s the same thing we wanna rank on page one for our keywords. Okay. And it could be garlic, press stainless, steel, garlic, press, whatever it is we wanna rank for those keywords, cuz that’s where you’re gonna get the most traffic. Right? So if you don’t get sales, you can’t rank. So here’s how it works. If you have, if you start getting sales through stainless steel, garlic press, you’re gonna start ranking for garlic, for the stainless steel garlic press. Okay. Now there’s a couple different things that, that I do. And the very first thing is I do a giveaway where I’ll give away my product, even at a hundred percent discount, I’ll give out these codes that they allow you to generate and Amazon’s okay with this.

Scott
[01:11:40]
And then you give ’em away to either a review group or people, you know, maybe you have an email list. And then from there they’re gonna buy through your, through your listing. And through that coupon code, it’s gonna trigger inside of Amazon’s algorithm that you’ve, you’re getting sales. All right. So that’s gonna help get you kind of noticed it’s gonna help you get on the scene. Now, the second part of that, what I do is I turn on Amazon paper click, they have their own paper, click, you know, platform inside of Amazon. And then you can show up on page one for your keywords. If you wanna bid enough, just like if you’re doing Google or if you’re doing Bing or any of those ads, you can rank on page one day one, if you wanna spend enough. And a lot of times it’s okay to even break even or lose money on that ad spend because all you’re trying to do is get sales through that keyword. So if you wanna rank for stainless steel, garlic, press start bidding on that keyword, start getting traffic to your listing from that keyword. And then once you start getting sales, you’re gonna start ranking for that keyword. Does that make sense?

Robert
[01:12:38]
Yeah. And what are some other methods of promoting your product in Amazon?

Scott
[01:12:44]
Honestly, those are the two main ones. Tho those are the two main ones that you’re gonna wanna do. A lot of people start talking about driving outside traffic. I wouldn’t drive outside traffic until I’ve maximized my pay per click because paper click, you can, you can drill down for days and still not have all the keywords that you could potentially rank for. And the beautiful thing with Amazon is they, they give you a lot of the data. So if I run an auto campaign, they, they allow you to run an auto campaign, a manual campaign. I always start with an auto campaign and that allows Amazon to take your product and position it in front of different keywords that they think would make buyers or that would create buyers. So now what I do is after seven days that I’ve been running that, then I’ll pull that report and it’ll tell me what keywords that they’re targeting for me.

Scott
[01:13:27]
Then I can take those keywords and strip them out of those campaigns or that campaign. And then I can put ’em in my own manual campaign and then start bidding at like a phrase match instead of it being maybe a broad match. So those are just a couple of different things, but I see people a lot of times wanting to go outside of Amazon, like right away. And I don’t see it because the traffic is gonna convert a lot lower when you go outside of Amazon than if you’re in that platform. When people go to Amazon, they’re there to buy. If people are on Facebook or if they’re on Google, they’re not necessarily there to buy. They’re there doing something else. And you’re just kind of interrupting them. I, I would say you wanna do the launch process as far as the giveaway, that’s the very first thing.

Scott
[01:14:01]
Cause that’s gonna help you get reviews. If you don’t have reviews and your competition has 500 reviews, you’re not gonna convert that. Well, it’s the social proof, right? It’s like people trust what other people have said about a product. Okay. So if you don’t have reviews, it’s gonna be hard to convert. You can get all the people that come to your page, but if you don’t have those reviews, you’re not going to convert. So I always tell people, try to get your first set of 25 or 50 reviews before you really start pushing pay per click. Because then once you start pushing pay per click, even though you might get the traffic, you might not convert, but if you can convert and then get on page one and have some reviews you’re gonna convert even higher.

Robert
[01:14:37]
It’s really good that Amazon actually allows sellers to discount product, you know, 100%. Yep. And then now it’s good to help you drive the sales and, and get the reviews. So yeah,

Scott
[01:14:50]
I’ve done them. I I’ve done them Robert too, where I’ll give it away for a dollar or I’ll give it away for $2. You know, you can still do that. I just found that the free, the a hundred percent off definitely gets more people to take you up on that offer, but I’ve done both. Okay.

Robert
[01:15:02]
I’ve done both. And throughout your whole experience selling on, on Amazon, what’s, what’s your worst failure that you’ve had just on Amazon?

Scott
[01:15:13]
Well, on Amazon, I mean, I’ve had a few, to be honest with you and you know, it’s, it’s part of business I think, and everyone should realize that there’s no easy ticket, right? There’s always gonna be ups and downs. My second product, I think I missed the mark on, I didn’t understand the depth of the market as much as I should have. And I learned a lot about that. And what that basically means is that I found a product that I thought was gonna sell well, and it was selling well by maybe three different sellers, but the problem is after those first three, there wasn’t a lot of other sellers. There wasn’t a lot of other demand. So the first three were eaten up all of the demand for that product. So because of that, I needed to get in the first, second or third position in order to get a lot of sales.

Scott
[01:15:52]
So that was a failure, still a failure. It’s still, you know, doing a couple sales a day. So it’s not completely a failure. It’s just not what I set out to. And my, my strategy really is to get a product, to do 10 sales a day, really. And in about a $10 profit, that’s really what I look for in a good product. Now that doesn’t mean that if I can find something that’s easy to, you know, attach to my brand, that I, I won’t do it. If I can make a $7 profit, I would still do that. But I usually shoot for $10 profit on each product that I launched. But that that’s one of the, I would say, and I don’t really call it a failure cause I learned from it, right. I learned about depth of demand and all that stuff. The other one is I recently had my manufacturer and they they’ve been doing this for quite a while.

Scott
[01:16:31]
They’ve been packaging, a bundle for me. Well, recently that bundle was missing a piece. And because of that, I was getting a lot of refunds and because of the refunds, Amazon suspended that listing. So now I’m out of commission until I get that fixed and there was a whole, I can’t really get into it, but there was a whole bunch of different things that I had to do and kind of work around to get my listing back live again. And then it really did take my ranking and bring it down. So my sales had had slowed because of that. So I’m, I’m still working to get that back as we speak, but that was something that I learned a lesson I need to have those inspected better than I’ve had them inspected before, especially when you’re doing something with multiple pieces. So that’s, those are a couple, I would say,

Robert
[01:17:09]
Okay, thanks, cut for being on the podcast and just sharing and giving us a quick overview on just the, the vast world of selling on Amazon. If people wanted to reach you, how can they get you?

Scott
[01:17:23]
They can just reach out to the blog, which is the amazing seller.com. And there’s just about 190 episodes there. Now the podcast, there’s a hundred and probably almost 200 posts there. And we’ve got a lot of great resources. I also do a live workshop. Generally. I do it once a week, but you can register for an upcoming free workshop where I walk you through the five phases we spend about an hour and a half to two hours on that workshop. And that could be, you can [email protected] slash workshop. And you can register there for an upcoming. One of that, that would be the two best places to get ahold of me.

Robert
[01:17:58]
Any final thoughts?

Scott
[01:17:59]
Final thoughts is get started. A lot of people, what they do is they, they really start analyzing and on and trying to think if this is gonna work and if it doesn’t work, what happens and okay, now I gotta do this, but then I know in three weeks from now, I’m gonna have to do this. Don’t think about all that stuff, simplify it. You know, I’ve got people right now. I’ve interviewed on my own podcast. That started really small. I got one guy that took a Craigslist listing of another guy that was, he was taking a bunch of product that he had created. And he was basically selling it out because he didn’t want it anymore. It was like, I don’t know. It was like a thousand of something. So he went ahead and he bought him for 65 bucks, long story short. He turned that into a little package, a little bundle and he’s he made $1,100 profit on that.

Scott
[01:18:43]
Right? So because of that, now he took that 1100 and he reinvested it into his first private label product. So just start a lot of people, they think to themselves, they gotta have a certain amount of money or they gotta have a certain amount of knowledge. Just start if maybe it’s retail, arbitrage start selling college books from college kids that wanna trade their books in and they, they wanna get money quick. There’s a lot of different ways you can do it. But my big thing is always take action. You gotta do something or you won’t get any results. That’s it

Robert
[01:19:10]
Well said. And now final question. Last question. What is the one thing an eCommerce business can do right now to, to grow, get traffic or get sales?

Scott
[01:19:21]
Well, if we’re talking about Amazon, it’s going to be really honing in on your reviews and your sales, because that drives everything. E-commerce side of things. I’m just starting to enter into that world where we’re gonna start building some outside funnels and some email lists and stuff like that. But I would say as soon as you can, as soon as you can start building an email list of your customers or of prospect, that right there will be the ticket for you in the future to do whatever you want with. If you build, if you have an e-commerce store right now, and you’re not selling on Amazon, that’s your first step, because you should be capitalizing on that traffic inside of there. And the other thing is, is if you already have an email list that you’ve built, or if you haven’t gotten one yet, and you’re you’re, you have an e-commerce store and you’re getting sales, you should be collecting those and you should do them like immediately. But what you can do with that now is you can have your own internal email list. And if you have a new product you’re gonna launch, you can give away 25 or 50 codes to your email list to help you promote it on Amazon and to boost that, you know, the, the algorithm there. So the very first thing I would say for anybody outside of Amazon is, and even on Amazon is start building that customer list.

Robert
[02:20:24]
Thanks for being on the podcast. Scott,

Scott
[02:20:26]
I appreciate Robert. Thanks for having me. And hopefully everyone got some value and yeah, like I said, if anybody wants to get in, touch me, just head over to the amazing seller.com.

Robert
[02:20:36]
Thank you for listening to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Join the eCommerce marketing podcast, Facebook group to learn, connect, collaborate, and grow with other eCommerce marketers@ecommercepodcastdotcomslashfbwww.ecommercemarketingpodcast.com slash FB. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for eCommerce marketing podcast. And please leave a rating and a review. Thank you for listening to you next time.