Sales boosting strategies for Government

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today we've got one of the most knowledgeable people in the whole Amazon world back on the show toer he's going to give us his best tips on profitability automations and Amazon product launch how cool is that pretty cool I [Music] think you want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon to do that you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for maybe at the top of page one you can actually find that out in seconds by using helium 10's keyword research tool cerebro now that's just one of the many many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers for more information go to h10 domme SL cerebro h10 domme SLC b r o don't forget to use the serious sellers podcast discount coupon ssp1 hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by helium 10 I'm your host Bradley Sutton and this is the show that's completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and my guest and I are in opposite parts of the world I'm not in my studio as you guys can see I'm here in a hotel in Seattle had a offsite here um it's so about 9:00 p.m. over here where is it where you're at tomor right now I'm in K Thailand right now it's 11: a.m. here Thailand the next day you're living in the future already you're it's uh tomorrow over there it's been a while since we've caught up how is it first of all that you are in Thailand was this due to the you know uh the war that's going on were you able to to get out safely yeah yeah so since the war started on October 7th in Israel um a few days later I took my family and took the only flight available which was to Italy so we spent three weeks there my wife and my three kids and uh we didn't want to spend the winter in in Europe so we just decided to go to Thailand instead and uh you know this business allows us to do that um and they build the business in a way that they don't have a local office I don't have like employees coming to the office every day and uh very thankful for this business model I would say that allows me to do this how did you land on Thailand I mean your initial flight you didn't have many choices but then from there I'm assuming you could almost anywhere in the world how did you land in this middle of nowhere I've never you know I've heard of Bangkok you know never heard of where you're at yeah so again we didn't want to spend the winter in Europe so uh also the US for that part you know and tand is very cheap very affordable uh in terms of living here and we also spent our honeymoon me and my wife um um eight years ago so we knew about Thailand uh very well and it's a very friendly country especially with Israel we have a in Israel we have a lot of like Thai employees and a lot of Israelis come to Thailand my sister is just coming here in two days for her honeymoon so um yeah it's a it's a great country and uh it's lovely it's it's hot all all year long so it's uh it's very nice yeah I don't know if I could live there the food is too good um my my weight loss goals will never be met if if I would live in Thailand so anyways we're not here to talk about uh your world travels um you know it's been a uh want to say almost a year and a half or almost two years since we we've caught up um how are things going in your world as far as the the Amazon side of things yeah so Amazon is ups and downs as you know uh so we have multiple brands that we run in my own business and uh for the past 18 months I've been working closely with other sellers oneon-one that's something I've never done before um I only done that with aggregators and bigger Brands and companies but now I'm working with like seven eight figure sellers helping them mainly scale up to an exit or just to scale up their businesses and that has been very rewarding as well as challenging um and I think um from what I can see again it just depends on the brand but um a lot of brands are now struggling with all the obviously new fees and stuff but overall I will say that if you have good products and you have a good brand you'll do just fine I agree but let's talk about about that for a second now things are very fluid at Amazon you know so so we're going to talk about some things today that who knows oh a week later when this episode comes out maybe everything is completely changed cuz Amazon has backtracked but you know the first fees this year that a lot of Amazon sellers are starting or they haven't really seen yet but but they can see what's going to happen is the inbound placement fee so first of all how has that affected if any your the way that you handle your replenishment orders like were you using 3pls before were you shipping directly from factories to Amazon were you using Amazon Global Logistics what was your setup before and how has it changed now for the longest time my my thesis was that Amazon doesn't want to be a storage facility they're a Marketplace you know they don't want to sore your inventory for six months time you had longterm surge fees before so my thesis was always let's ship whatever we can directly into Amazon let's avoid using 3 PLS all together if possible um so we try to ship once a month from the factory to Amazon we still might produce for let's say three months time but we ship like one month at a time products into Amazon and then we store another two three months of stock at a 3pl just for like uh safety but that was our way of doing things for the longest time and it's still our way of doing things uh right now I don't think that's going to change and the whole point of Amazon is like you don't want to have like um you want to have just enough stock you don't want to be overstocked you don't want to be under stocked at the same time and obviously it's very difficult when you do b2c like business to customer type of business it's very difficult to predict inventory I talked to this uh big entrepreneur in Israel selling eyeglasses um one of the biggest brands in Israel and I asked him like I I told him I only have one question to you and he's like what's that I I was like how do you manage inventory how do you predict inventory says you don't you just guess and you give your it your best guess and and that's pretty much it and uh I like that answer because I feel the same way when it comes to Amazon um but again we just did the best we can we try to avoid using 3pls AGL and AWD and the different programs Amazon is currently offering um I didn't use them myself we do have sales that used some of them and I will say it's like mixed results but over time what usually happens is they get burned by Amazon for some reason and they just go back to their fight forward to their own uh solution they had before and we'll just see how all these new fees play out because it's a bit I think premature to tell I think also a lot of sellers are trying to kind of raise a flag and tell Amazon look this is wrong you need to like reverse this so we'll see how this all plays out yeah I mean I I I was checking on my some of my shipments and since I have a warehouse at my house I've always just shipped from my warehouse and for me it wasn't too bad like yes the fees were more having to ship to four five locations and and maybe East Coast like I wasn't but I calculated out and then the the lower FBA fees didn't completely cancel out the new fees but it it it really you know made it where it wasn't that much of an increase now that being said the people who maybe ship full containers or LTL where they can't split it feasibly into four different locations you know maybe they're they're they're kind of uh hurt a little bit more and then of course we have coming also the low inventory fees which I know there's there's a lot of questions about but just like you said you know say like the crazy thing is if you start if you ship from China usually you get like one location still so I think that's the crazy part about it and if you ship from within the US you get like multiple locations yeah it's crazy right now yeah so Le let's see let's see how things go but you know it's not time to panic or oh my goodness Amazon is dead you know because there's no profit I mean these fees are affecting everybody you know so so if people have to raise prices everybody's going to raise your price it's not like there's or you know maybe I'm sure for a a few weeks there might be people using some kind of software to kind of game the system or something but but you know Amazon will will catch on to that and and block uh that kind of stuff but but you you talked about the importance of you know you've always talked about the importance of having a strong brand uh and and and you know really good product uh even more so you know that helps us get the what you call the was it six-star review experience and things like that what are some tactics that you're using nowadays that you feel like sets you apart where yeah you know you're not going to worry too much uh about you know a little fee here or there because you know you've got a strong brand Andor product uh we are now building a new brand so I can talk about that because that brand is going to be completely out in the open kind of like what you did with um the different products that you launched like the uh coffin shelf and a few other products so uh this uh brand is going to be completely out in the in the open so um the original idea was I have my annual Summit called Top Dog Summit uh we have the next one coming up in June in the Austrian elps and when I was gifting my uh guests you know at the event it was always like a power bank or a water bottle or different things like made in China we put our label on it and that's it and I thought about it and I was like well I claim to be one of the top people uh that know their way around e-commerce or Amazon then why would I give them something like this why not just give them one of my own products and then I thought about like let me just build a brand Under the same name Top Dog and uh serve digital entrepreneurs so Amazon SS to begin with but then like expand the scope for uh to be much wider than that uh and then we kind of started looking into what products we can launch and things like that and the first idea that uh we had a lot of ideas obviously but the first good idea that we had and that product has been developing for a year and a half now and it's almost done is a laptop sleeve so the you know that small bag that you put your laptop in and you can put it in your backpack or just carry it around so it's a laptop sleeve it's also a power bank a docking station and a laptop mat all in one so imagine you go to a coffee shop or you go to a conference you just take this with you the laptop is inside you take it out you can put the laptop on top of it and you can just work all day long you can connect it with a type-c port to your laptop and it has a built-in power bank you can connect another microphone or whatever it is that you need to get fully set up because it's a docking station as well it's a laptop mat so it doesn't get dirty in like a coffee shop or something so that has been developing for a long time uh and actually talked about in stage multiple times uh this year at different events and how we've kind of using the six-star experience for the specific product and I really I really feel like and again it Sals I'm working with we still have regular products we develop like it takes about three four months five months to kind of get from research until launch but we also have products that take much longer we just had a product launch for one of the members in my exit program those SS we help them scale to an exit that was just launched after a year and a half of development and that product is just going to it just it just kills it sells like 30 units a day with like two reviews right now the main image you can see the differentiating factor for that product and everything that we do is we really focus on the experience and I really believe that when you create an experience with a product it becomes giftable so just to give you maybe an idea about the laptop sleeve what we did is um the packaging is very unique it's an old idea of a book packaging I know those that are listening cannot really see it but uh it opens up like a book like this and then the product is going to come out from the middle of it so it's a very cool packaging that we worked a lot on and I'm very excited uh to show that to everyone and also we are giving a free dog keychain when you get the product again top dog is the name of the brand and that keychain is going to have an NFC chip inside NFC chip is the thing that you put your phone next to kind of when you pay it's the same technology so you put your phone next to it and it's going to have a pop up on your screen you click on that and you're going to see um the story of the brand which we help uh save dogs uh from getting killed and and finding a home for those dogs with a charity organization where are working with uh based in LA in the US so we are doing a lot of different things a lot of different elements around this product to kind of make it very unique and really make it giftable um and we believe that anyone that is kind of like either a digital Nomad or I honestly believe that now everyone is working from everywhere like I have my home office you have your home office but now you're in a hotel next week you're gonna be in Japan people are moving constantly around and they're not working for one place anymore and this is what this product is for it's not when you're at home to service your docking station it does something at your backpack at all times and you can just take it with you whenever you're on the go cool all right so it's it's a product that you would actually use you know unlike me who's selling coffin shelves which I would never use in my entire uh my entire life uh so I like it now what is what has been your go-to launch strategy for like you and your audience you know lately obviously you know years and years ago we used to talk you know about people doing search find buys or two-step URLs and then uh I feel like the the the industry kind of shifted all towards you know PPC you know when when those were like hey don't don't do that you know some some you know talk about Google ads and offsite traffic and sending Tik Tok I mean there's like any uh number of of launch strategies out there what has been for the last you know few months or year uh what you have been using along with your um Community we are leveraging the Vine Program a lot for the initial reviews so we do a few different things let's say we have four different colors coming in we might do like we we'll start at four different listings four separate listings register them all up for Vine Vine is actually a bit cheaper now it's like 200 bucks uh if you do more than I think it's like 10 or 15 units I don't remember um and so you pay 200 bucks uh for the all of the reviews and then what we do is we just put them under the same parent and that way we get like a 100 reviews when we initially launch the product there there also other workarounds around this like uh you can even split it further so let's say you have four different colors you can open eight different listings uh but then the four four of them are like 10 units that you bring in from that like specific color uh like a different F SKU just for 10 units and then you sign that up for vine and if that fails if that doesn't work what you can then do is you can just not merge it with the other variations so you can kind of split it out a bit more um you need to have like a bit different pictures and stuff but you can get away with it because you just give it away for Vine and and you run out of stock on that um and then you can just give away let's say 10 units in of giving away 30 units and that way you can just um you can safely Mo together and and get the reviews uh to be like five stars or four and a half when you when you really launch your product and if you want to do this strategy you can even close the main listing so let's say you have let's say you have the color yellow so you can have like three different yellow listings and then you can have like the main one being closed those three listings accumulate reviews then you open the main one and you merge those together and then you start your launch with some reviews already that's one thing on on like just getting reviews in terms of like so you need two things you need reviews and you need to get ranked that my next question yep so yeah I know so to rank um there are uh a few different things you want to do so PPC is something you want to start off the bat uh longtail keywords obviously you want to have high bids for you can have some short ta with low bids if you want to try that uh but start like very simple and I I think like with cerebro or whatever tool you want to use is very simple to just figure out what are the longtail keywords you should go for um and you start those with PPC we don't do any searchy buy or anything that but uh we do Leverage ugc sees a lot uh you can use different tools for that like join brands or whatever it is you want to use there are a bunch of them out there and we also uh leverage our email lists as well when we launch products so to our email list what we do and we collect emails with our inserts and we can talk about that as well but what we do with the email list we don't really use the email list on the day-to-day we only use it for launching products so we might email the email list and say hey we just launched this new product if you buy it right now and send me the order ID I'll send you another one free of charge or I'll send you this other product for free or whatever whatever it can be that is kind of like complimentary to what they just spot right let's say it's a supplement you can send them another one let's say it's a it's a laptop sleeve you can send them a mouse or something I don't know or another cord with with the product right something complimentary to that um and then when they saided your order ID then you can follow up and say I just shipped you whatever product and can you please leave us a review on Amazon right um so so that's uh an easy way like if you have an email list that's an easy way to kind of uh get more reviews and get your product ranked at the same time um and in that email you can just give them the brand name and keyword but uh it's just safer to just give in a direct link to the product and you still get ranked on different keywords even if you just did in the economical URL that's that's more than enough to kind of get uh get going we do not leverage uh social Media or Tik Tok or anything like that for Our Brands uh right now we do have again sales that I'm working with that are doing a lot of Instagram and stuff I think it really depends on the brand that you have and how much you really invest in social media most Amazon Brands I will say are not very social media friendly and a lot of sales I think invest a lot of time effort resources into those different uh venues and it doesn't really pay off uh for the most part okay yeah very similar to to I mean I wasn't doing all of the vine but you know especially about the PPC and U you know was definitely something I've been using but you know something interesting this just came up maybe two three four weeks ago I've been launching a few test products on on the different accounts and um one of my strategies always was and this could be like a just a test you know Amazon is testing things all the time but it's got me a little bit worried because it coincided with am when when Amazon made the new coupon rules but one of my strategies was you know since I'm not doing find bu or using those websites uh I would mimic search fine bu but in an organic way by just lowering the price a lot on PBC using a sale price or using a coupon I I I uh always did a sale price so I I just picked you know what price would somebody see the product and even before those Vine reviews started coming in um they could see that hey this product is is something that I I never heard of but hey this price like I got to give it a try you know like maybe it's a $25 product but then they see a sale price of $9 I usually had like a strike through price because I would get at least one sale at uh at the $25 but then all of a sudden for these last two three products I launched first of all the strikethrough price didn't work even though I had a couple sales at the regular price and then at the time you know I started maybe let's say $9 and then it was great I started started getting momentum I raised the price to 11 12 14 15 but then before I got to my desired price which I think was like $24 um even though I had tons of of of of sales at at different prices I lost the buy box uh even though I was using sale price you know obviously back in the day if if you had a regular price and then you tried to raise it really high Amazon would make you lose a buy box but they never did that for a coupon or for for a sale price and then the second thing is I like I said I don't usually use coupons but then Amazon changed the rule right around the same time where they said hey for cou coupons you need to have a sales history which kind of like eliminates brand new products CU they don't have sales history so let's let's just play Devil's Advocate and say hey this wasn't just a test and you know 3 months from now this is the new normal for people like me who who need to ramp up that price until I get more reviews what would be the strategy I was thinking all right let me just have I know how many I want to you know quote unquote give away at the low price uh in PPC I send that amount in and then I have a separate skew that I I'll then join with that variation once it gets the reviews and and gets the uh keyword ranks and from day one that one has the regular price like would that be the way to go or what would be your your strategy in my situation yeah yeah I think that makes a lot of sense I also uh highly recommend starting at the lower price point like 20 25% under your Target price especially for Vine I don't know if you know this but Vine viers I think they have like an $800 budget per month or something like that so if you have a a more expensive product let's say 50 bucks and they think it's not worth it or it's like zero reviews or whatever they can a lot of the times Vine reviewers complain about the price and for you as a s it does make a lot of sense why did they complain about this they got it for free but they got it out of their monthly budget so um this is something you want to pay attention to and a lot of them actually comment like this is a great price you should get the product right and you raised the price since they reviewed or whatever so um so that's a that's a really important Point um to answer your question what we usually do is we start at the lower price point and use a coupon at the same time and just like slowly reducing the amount of the coupon and then removing it all together so if you start there I don't think you should have a problem on new products you will have a problem moving forward like we we ran a lot of like tests on let's say $5 discount and then $5 up with a $5 coupon so with all those different small tests you cannot you probably cannot run those anymore uh for most like Amazon will not let you do those tests anymore uh because you cannot play with the uh prices that much with the coupons and stuff like that now since the last time we talked uh I feel like Amazon itself has come up with a lot of cool data points that that can further enrich the way people prepare for launch or or just prepare or or or maintain a a season product like search for performance I think two years ago when we talked last it wasn't around and some aspects of product opportunity explore uh maybe some parts of of Amazon advertising you know like like uh top of uh you know top of search impression share and and things like that um any of these new Amazon things uh are you using for uh your Brands so we're not really using any of it for the dayto day we do use a lot of stuff for like product research and keyword research and but mainly for those things it just business as usual for the most part when running the business I will say PPC is something to stay like ahead of the game obviously and any new placement that comes in or any new ad type that comes in you want to be aware of and what I noticed is that uh sponsor Brands especially is something that you can really customize a lot uh with the like how you write your collection ad headline and what video you put up there and what video you have in your like uh in your video ads for specific keywords and one thing that we noticed that works really well is well two things I would say so if you think about a video ad right to begin with it's almost like a free click that you got because if someone is let's say typing in baby shower gift as an example and they scroll down and they see a video and it's a video of your product and you can see someone gifting it right you like a stock video in the middle of your video just to show like someone gifting it and if they click they are very likely to buy at that point right but if I would just Target uh sponsor products and Target like baby shower gift I would probably like never be able to get a um so video ads for those type of keywords that have like a very high search V and that can work really well and also for the longtail keywords that are very important for your product that can also work really well right like let's you say you type in baby bandana whatever baby bandana giraffe right whatever and then your video shows like a a baby with a band giraffe bandana right so that can work really well obviously you want to do specific videos for only keywords that make sense to your brand and not for everything and you can also do it for different keyword types right um so anyway that's something has been working really well and when we analyze a brand when we kind of take a new brand on one thing I can say is that 90 95% of the ad spend is on sponsor products and that that's I always tell n you make so much more money with your ads uh because they all only focus on spons products for the most part especially if they do it themselves and not hire an agency or even if they use a software a lot of times it's just like uh sponsor products but I would say that sponsor Brands and sponsor display should probably take up I would say at least 10% of your ad spent but probably should be around 15% of your ad spent so if you're not spending that much on those you can probably spend a bit more and make more money and I would also say those two usually convert better than sponsored products um an important point about sponsored display as well is that a lot of sellers tell me look it didn't work we stopped you using sponsor sponsor display which is fine it makes sense especially for a new product once your product is more established and you run sponsor display on other competitors or like new sales that came in you're going to convert a lot better right so I would I would tell them like test it again on your best selling products against like the lowest selling products out there um and it should work pretty well cool cool we're talking about you know Amazon tools and things well what about the the good old helium 10 one question I'm asking a lot of people this year is number one what's your favorite helium 10 tool I know for you used to be cerebro is it still that or function in helium 10 and then you know you actually have influenced helium 10 product road map in the past so if I were to give you keys to our product team what would you tell helium 10 hey this is what toer wants you guys uh to uh to make yeah so I think uh C is definitely number one on my list I think it's the it's the tool we still use uh all the time to do key research but for uh day-to-day stuff x-ray is the number one thing when we use like sales estimation we tried every other tool out there I think x-ray is is by far the most accurate tool that we've seen and I I can also say why I think other tools out there what I noticed that they're doing is they're kind of taking a snapshot of the current BSR so let's say the BSR is a th in home and kitchen they will say it sells this much per month and it doesn't matter what the history of that month is in helium 10 it shows you the average of the entire month uh and I think a lot of people think Helm 10 is skewed because let's say the prodct has been out of stock for two weeks or three weeks and now it's back in stock they will think oh it's like a th000 BSR doesn't make any sense it sells a lot more than that with a th000 BSR so I think that's like a misconception of understanding x-ray but I think it is a lot more accurate when you understand it actually takes the entire month into consideration U blackbox is another tool that we use all the time and I notice you keep adding more and more functionalities to it like more and more filters which I think is is great uh one of the things we do a lot when you do product research is we put a maximum in the number of variations let's say three variations or less because you don't want to find something with like 50 variations for a new product launch um so that's something we use a lot um yeah in terms of uh Future tools um yeah I think um what I'm really missing in this space right now when we kind of developed like internal tools for for our team and we might like put them out there for free or something something for other people to use as well but it's just like proper business practices and decision making I think with a lot of these tools let's say um cerebro or it doesn't matter even like x-ray whatever tool you have it doesn't tell you by looking at xray is this a good product or a bad product right should I go for this product or not so I think these type of bigger questions and helping decision-making is what is really needed from these tools and not just data data data coming out of it um especially for people that are not very like analytic I think people that are more creative it's very difficult for them to just understand how they can how they should be using these tools uh to make decisions and I think like at the end of the day it all kind of copy pasted to a spreadsheet to make a decision so I'm like let's build those spreadsheets into the tools and then they don't need to do that anymore anyway that that's what I think tools should be doing instead of just showing me data also profits right is a good example of like okay these are my profits for the past week what are now like they went down from last week what do I do right or my market share ran down from last week what do I do so um I think that that's really missing right now awesome awesome all right speaking of speaking of profits um you know we talked earlier about you know new fees and and also you know of course PPC sometimes it seems certain keywords keep getting more expensive so of course the the easy thing to do would be just oh yeah let me just make up for this by raising the price and of course that that's an option but I would think that most sellers before they go that route they they want to make sure they have they have squeezed all the juice out of little things that they could be doing here or there to help the profitability anything that you're advising you know your your students about hey you know here's a way to save money or have you have you audited this or or have you you know checked that you know in order to to really squeeze a little bit more profit without having to just go directly to lowering or to raising their prices yeah I think raising the prices is a is a nice to say thing but it usually doesn't doesn't work the way you want it to because you don't have the context of your 10 top compar say hey let's always the price by $5 and like yeah Dominate and if and if you are doing that you'll get in trouble with the FTC and Amazon anyway so you can do that right um unless you have like direct contacts in China to all your competitors so yeah I don't think I don't think that that's the case so uh let me ask you uh Bradley like in your coffin shelf what are your current terms with your supplier I just a standard I I pay uh 30 % before I make it and then the rest of it I pay when they ship okay so you can probably get much better terms and I would say that when you're tight on cash flow that's what you want to do you want to get like better and better terms over time so you can probably tell them look I'm going to pay you 30% UPF front and 70% after it arrives to Amazon or you can do it in different ways right um what I'm doing with the sales I'm helping especially to an exit is the entire goal is to increase profits right we don't care about cash flow anymore as long as we have cash in the bank like we don't really try to improve terms so let's say your Cent terms are 3070 right with your supplier and usually the sales are working with is much better than that let's say it's 3070 what I would tell your suppliers hey um we got some extra cash and we want to help you out this is a partnership we want to pay you more up front we want to pay 7030 or we want to pay 100% up front right this is only something it will do with a supper you already know and familiar with and ask for a discount in return and always they will give you like discount of 5 10 15% discount um for your inventory always like we've tried that so many times it always always works because they need the cash as well you know they like cash flow as well and if a customer came to you and said hey I want to buy 12 units from you this year but I'm gonna buy all of them right now can you give me a discount you'll do that right you'll give them like 10% off or whatever like you don't really care but for them it's very significant right so for the seller getting like uh and we saved a lot of money for the sells that we work with so we've done that that way and we've also done it in a way where we say okay we sell 1,000 units a month it's 12,000 units a year we tell the um supplier look we want to work with you in 2024 2025 we want to pay for the entire year up front let me tell you uh let me pay you 10% up front for the entire year and give me a discount and every time you start production we pay another 20% when you ship it we pay 70% whatever right whatever the terms were before is okay as well but because you pay them so much money up front they see you're serious about working with them they like it a lot and if you can visit your factory and do it that way that's even better right because you meet the owner but even if you just talk to the sales rep and ask like you you kind of a lot of sellers what they do is they just ask for discounts that usually doesn't work you know like the sell the The Sur is gonna say I cannot do that but when you treat like a partnership and you say look I want to pay you more money up front they will be a lot more eager to give you a discount at that point imagine again you get 12,000 units a year you save $1 per unit that's like 12K in your pocket a year and when you put a multiple on that when you sell like a 3 four 5x multiple that's a lot of money right that you just made from not doing anything besides talking to your supplier in one email um and the other thing I tell sellers is they tell me look but I'm tight on cash right I don't have enough cash so I'm like so get funding if you get funding the funding that you're going to get the interest you're going to pay is probably going to be less than the discount you're gonna make so let's say it's you get 5% interest rate even if you get 10% interest rate so it's the same right you get a 10% interest rate 10% discount but when you sell your business you still get the multiple on the profit and the loan is just an addback to your business you just cover the loan as soon as you get paid so it's always good doing like uh when you try to increase profits talk to your supplier offer them to pay them upfront if you don't have cash get funding and that that works like a charm every single time um one last thing I wanted to ask uh you know before we get into your tip of the week is you know I know shali was just with you in the uh European seller conference and she said the only thing I I I she said about your your your presentation was you talked a lot about like Automation and things but she didn't really go into uh into detail so what what were you talking about and and how are you suggesting to to sellers that they should be implementing uh automations into their business yeah uh first of all like the EV prog was amazing Augustus with a great show and I was there last year as well so um my talk was mainly about how to run a proper business if you want to remove yourself from it and I think when you think about the Amazon business in general you have really four options you can either um sell the business automate a business transfer to your kids or go bankrupt right these are these are probably your four options and the last two are probably not viable options so sell the business or automate now let's say you want to sell the business you're probably going to start another business later on right it doesn't matter if it's Amazon or something else and that business let's say you have $10 million in the bank you probably want to be you probably want it to be more automated so you don't want to do PPC yourself you don't want to support yourself I don't want to do anything yourself anymore so what I tell s is learn to automate your business now right learn how I take weeks off of the year I'm going to go next month with my family for two weeks to Hong Kong to Disneyland and a whole bunch of places uh not open my laptop once right and when I went to Prague the same thing so learn how to run the business in a way that you can remove yourself from it because if the sell comes it comes if it doesn't it doesn't but it doesn't really matter right because you know how to run a proper business so to have have that in place you need to go from an employee in your business a person who is just doing everything on their own to a manager in your business so a person who has a few employees you need to manage to a CEO who has a few managers managing a few employees underneath and that was mainly my talk in how to get from like an employee to a CEO position and my autopilot business model which was also covered in my book uh right the Amazon wave in a lot more detail but I give like certain rules for the CEO for the manager they need to kind of think about and transition from each one and and I think we all agree that being a CEO of a business is not something anyone can learn how to do unless they're actually doing it right you cannot get a degree on being a good CEO and you graduate and then you can be a CEO it doesn't work like that and you can see CEOs transferring from like a company to a company to a company in different Industries completely but they know how to manage a business right they know how business needs to run and I think that's what Amazon sales need really to try and strive for and what I really enjoyed seeing the in PR compared to last year is and I kind of see that all over the place right now is that the level of sellers coming to events is higher than before uh it looks like uh the entire industry is maturing it looks like I've talked a lot of ss they already know everything there is to know about Amazon so when I came in and talked about something a bit different something more business related I think it was very refreshing for them because on Amazon they kind of like up to date on anything maybe they get like a small tidbit here and there but overall I think that was uh that was a big uh reveal for them and I think a lot of them are just hustling and kind of working 247 in their business but towards what like what's what's the end goal right and they're not working towards that end goal anymore and when I started this business I wanted to be I wanted to have Financial Freedom when have time with my family and then and if you don't get that then what's the point right right why run this business to begin with and you can hustle for a year or two I'm not saying you shouldn't and that's what I did as well but at some point you need to run towards something and one more thing guys toer is actually recorded for the New Freedom ticket that has just come out or is just coming out depending on when you're listening or watching this but New Freedom ticket 4.0 make sure to check out to's module about the Amazon algorithm and all of the insights he gives on that all right now before we get into your last tip uh of the week how can people find you on the interwebs out there you know your course Community um how can they uh find you your your book is it still available etc etc yeah so my book right Amazon wave is on Amazon obviously audiable as well uh anywhere that you buy your books from you can probably find it um in terms of finding me you can go to join topdog docomo is Jo ntpd do.com um we do a lot of different things you can also find our Summit there if you want more details on that um yeah and you can also find me on Facebook LinkedIn um if you just want to message me I'm always happy to talk to Sellers and help them out now now now it's time for your 30 or 60 seconds strategy or tip what what I will say is that one thing that we saw like a a small increase you know anything kind of adds a bit and I wanted to maybe it's something not a lot of people are doing but uh B2B sales is something that um can get you like extra cash right um so one of the things you can do is you can do quantity discounts for B2B sales like if you go to uh Sal Central and you go to your inventory you can see uh quantity discounts for business so you can just uh you need to set up like a B2 account first and then you can do that but you basically do quantity discounts for like two if they buy two units they get let's say 3% off if they buy five they get 5% off if they buy 10 they get 10% what whatever you want just don't do quantity discounts for one unit if you do it for one that actually hurts your coupons and Deals and things like that so you want to avoid doing it for single units yeah but the previous tis were better than this one so hey they're all good all equally good well thank you uh for taking time out of your day there in beautiful Thailand to to come on to this call uh our audience always loves and looks forward to your episodes and and hopefully that we'll see each other in in person soon