# Amazon Product Research in 2022 with Kevin King

**Channel:** Zeeshan Jalil
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ297nhDkGo
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/IQ297nhDkGo

## Chapters

- 0:24 — Introducción y trayectoria de Kevin
- 2:43 — Cómo investigar productos rentables
- 13:26 — Sourcing, costos y márgenes reales
- 19:05 — Precio ideal y errores de principiantes
- 26:02 — Presupuestos, diferenciación y competencia
- 36:46 — Estrategias de lanzamiento y audiencia
- 43:55 — Análisis de competencia y casos difíciles
- 47:40 — Historia divertida del desastre sanitario
- 54:37 — Cierre y anécdotas finales

## Transcript

**[0:24]:** just a couple of seconds

**[0:40]:** all right hello and welcome everyone and thank you so much for joining us today and today we have a very special guest with us kevin king uh thank you so much for joining us today kevin and howard you're always welcome thank you glad to be here all right awesome so uh uh kevin uh we really don't need an introduction but still i would request you to tell a little bit about yourself how how you started or your amazon journey i'm howard's best student he taught me everything i know so uh

**[1:25]:** i've been doing this for uh more than 20 years on amazon i started selling on amazon in 2001. i've been uh selling e-commerce uh since before google existed so back in the 1990s i started selling by email and e-commerce right now i have uh four different amazon companies that i'm either a partner i own i have uh i do the billion dollar seller summit which is a big event one time virtual and one time in person for for large sellers uh i also use a company called product savants with steve simonson where we help big sellers find new products and uh and source them and then i also uh do training so for helium 10 i do the training called the freedom ticket which is a course for new people to teach them how to sell on amazon it's totally free if you have a heathen 10 membership it doesn't matter what kind of membership you have the cheapest one or the most expensive you can get it for free and then i do

**[2:20]:** their advanced training called helium 10 elites which is for the bigger sellers and some once a month training where we uh we bring on some guests i do some uh some things uh every month and then uh i speak at lots of events all over i was at howard's most recent event at the castle in paris i i speak at a lot of different events and so uh yeah i do a lot of stuff in the

**[2:43]:** amazon and e-commerce space all right awesome that's great so uh our today's topic like amazon product research so what would you like to add into this like how do you do the product research um well for me product research there's a lot of different ways you can do product research and the tools have gotten so good now uh i wish these tools existed six or seven years ago i would be a billionaire now if they existed six or seven years ago but the tools are so good you know at one point uh like four or five years ago that the tools were okay and the the big sellers to get the data that they needed to get the information they needed they had to go to like find people in china that were willing to share secrets that worked for amazon or something like that just to get this data but now these tools are

**[3:34]:** so good tools like signal lytics that the professor has and other like helium 10 that are so good if you know how to use these tools you can really find great opportunities i personally i use a custom tool that we developed in conjunction with helium 10 and in conjunction with a brandon young's data dive those are the three that i primarily use for product research i always start my product research with brand analytics you know some people will use a software like black box or maybe they look around their house or they're looking at other websites or on etsy or looking at that frequently brought together those are all good ways to get ideas there's lots of ways to get ideas but for me i want to know what's already selling on amazon because if something is not already selling maybe i have a good idea for a product yeah but nobody's selling it on

**[4:24]:** amazon i don't know if it's going to work maybe it will uh and maybe it won't but if i take the chance that it works then i i have to spend more money usually because you have to educate people more money on the ppc people don't know it are they even searching for this thing uh so that's where people sometimes will say they'll test a product they'll buy only 10 10 or 50 units or 100 to kind of get an idea to me that's a total waste of time uh and and not smart unless the product is brand new you know if i went to uh guatemala and i found some carpenter uh that was making some sort of special hammock that nobody is selling on amazon nobody's ever seen because this hammock looks like a i don't know like a cocoon or i don't know something crazy that there's nothing like it anywhere then

**[5:11]:** maybe i would buy a few to test it and see at the market but if there's already a market on amazon i don't think you need to buy a small amount to quote test it because if you do that all you're doing is showing all the other people that are using the tools this is working and they're just going to come and maybe be faster than you and get the product in and by the time you get yours out you have 100 competitors so i start with what's where the demand is and i use brand analytics so what we do is we if you're brand registered on amazon you can access brand analytics which is data directly from amazon it's not helium 10 or somebody else that's that's scraping it and making a an algorithm it's straight from amazon and it tells you the top keywords that everybody's searching for so we download that every

**[5:54]:** week right because you can do it every week or every month or every quarter uh and or you can look at it online we download that data and it tells us a lot of good information if you've never seen it tells you what's called sfr or search frequency rank so it'll tell you what's the most popular keyword on amazon right now it might be iphone case is number one number two might be i don't know hand sanitizer whatever it is i'll tell you one two three it ranks everything from one to about two million uh and the lower the the bigger the number the less the the popularity it is on amazon but it also tells you what are the three asins that everybody is clicking on so you know which of the three asians are for every one of those keywords that the most popular clicks but to me it's not what's the most

**[6:38]:** popular clicks because it's them what's the most popular conversion so it also tells you what are the three that are having the most popular the most conversions and to me that's where the real data is is because sometimes people do manipulations um it could be sellers that are doing add to carts or or some sort of manipulations to get all the clicks but to try to rank but it's the conversions that matter to me so i look for the three that are converting and i look at those three products and i say hmm what are these three products is there a way for me to compete and so i look at the re i i look at that keyword i pull it up in x-ray and then i look at x-ray at the results of that keyboard let's say it was iphone case for example i would never do an iphone case i don't recommend

**[7:19]:** anybody ever do an iphone case but if it was an iphone case i would type an iphone case into the chrome browser on amazon i would hit the x-ray extension the little extension that pops up and gives you the estimates of all the sales or you could use jungle scout if that's your preferred tool there's other tools but i use i use cdm10 and then it'll show you all the sales and i sort it by sales not by dollars but by actual units sold from the highest to the lowest uh and then i take a look and how many reviews do they have you know if five or more of the top uh 10 have more than a thousand reviews it's going to be very difficult to compete if if uh i look at the review ratio the rate how fast are they getting reviews or are they losing reviews i look at how long

**[8:03]:** have they been selling on amazon if most of the people i've been selling on amazon for more than two years it's gonna be hard for you to compete there's there's a whole list of things that i look at there and and then if i see an opportunity um then i like it i really like products where the pricing is not the same on page one so if you look if you pull up iphone case and everybody's selling their iphone case for 10.99 and maybe one's eleven nine nine one's 999 but they're basically all the same price it's gonna be very difficult to compete uh because everybody's competing on the price and so unless you have really good sourcing and you can really compete on the price it's gonna be hard and for most sellers they don't have the budget to compete on price they get they get killed so i look for products where there's

**[8:46]:** a range of prices one's 1099 one's 19.99 one's 8.99 that tells me if there's a lot of price differences on the page one results on amazon that's a good thing for me that means okay now i can find an opportunity maybe i can sell for 14.99 because i make mine better or it has an extra feature or it has something i don't have to worry about always being the lowest price i can i can compete differently so that's important to me also back on brand analytics i look at the conversion rates so you remember i told you it gives you the three agents that have the most conversion rates and conversion rates means someone clicks it and they buy it so it's like it's like a percentage so it means if i search iphone case and it has a conversion rate of 10 percent that means one out of every 10 people that search for

**[9:30]:** iphone case bought that asid it tells you this in brandon licks for the top three i combine those three together and what i'd like to do is i like to look for the the total of those three together is either really high or or it's low so like below 35 percent or above 80 if it's above 80 it tells you one of two things it tells you that either there's maybe a patent on the product and whoever's selling that product is able to kick everybody else off because there's a patent or some sort of ip or it tells you that there's one guy that's just crushing it and maybe he needs some competition and maybe i can come in and i can steal some of his uh 80 and maybe take 30 percent of it or whatever or on the flip side if it's 35 or less when you add these three together that tells

**[10:16]:** me that's the top three guys have 35 percent of the sales and then that means 65 percent so 35 plus 65 100 so 65 percent is people on spot number four on down and so then i look at the competitive nature of it and if the competitive nature of it looks really good then i'm like i can take out the 60 even if i don't rank in the top if i can just get to spot number four i can take a significant portion of that 65 and so that's where i look for those types of opportunities and that tells me there's a window where i can come in if i can differentiate the product if i can sell it for a good price create a good listing and all the other good things that you have to do on amazon so those are some of the things that i look at and i even take

**[10:58]:** it further on helium 10 if you're an elite member on human intense only for the top tier people but there's a special tool where you can down you can import all the keywords that you found and it will tell you the estimated sales for every keyword i think however single linux has something similar but it will tell you like okay this keyword gets 6 000 sales per month not searches but sales but then what i do is i compare it to the searches so if it gets 6 000 sales per month and has 60 000 searches that's a 10 ratio so 10 when you compare the sales to the searches that means it's a 10 percent but maybe another product only gets uh 4 000 searches a month but it has 1000 sales from the 4 000 searches that's a 25 ratio that tells me that product that keyword might be a better keyword especially

**[11:46]:** if it's a lower volume search volume uh it it might be an easier keyword to rank on and go for so that i look for those kinds of things so when i start off my product i'm not going to try to get this big keyword i'm going to try to get the go for the lower keywords and work my way up to the big ones everybody always has big dollar signs in their eyes and they go after the big keywords that's not the way to do it unless you have a lot of money or a lot of patience one of the two so go after the small ones and work your way up and there's a tool called datadive that that's really good i think it's datadive.tools is the uh the address that brandon young a big seller that i've known for like four or five years he's created this tool that goes on top

**[12:24]:** of x-ray so when you run the x-ray you hit a little button on when you have his extension installed and it takes it to his tool and they analyze all the in about two minutes he analyzes all the competition he'll tell you how many people are good at amazon and how many people are not so i use that and if i if i'm doing an iphone case this for example i would never do an iphone case but if i was i would do the iphone case and i would pick the 10 best sellers i would run it through his tool and he's going to come back and see he's going to tell you seven of these 10 guys they don't they're not good at amazon they're missing a lot of keywords their listing is not good um he runs it through a big criteria two of them maybe are okay and one of them is

**[13:04]:** excellent but sometimes you do that it's like eight of them eight out of the ten are excellent and that means holy cow there's this this the competition here is gonna be really really tough so i don't use that to i don't use go after that that product so those i mean this is a big overview of of how i do it but it that's how i personally uh do it in the what we look for and

**[13:26]:** then then we have to source it so if we find a good opportunity based on the keywords i like to see that there's multiple keywords so that's called the root so if you have the root like if it's if it's hand sanitizer for example well the root word might be hand sanitizer or it might be just sanitizer but in this case hand sanitizer then you have hand size there's a gel hand sanitizer gallon hand sanitizer wipes all these different words often the more of those you have the better because then you can rank for for root words and those root words help you rank for the longer tail words so that's an important criteria in product selection too let's say we found a great all these we've gone through all this criteria and found an awesome product then what we do next is we have to source it so we go to the sourcing now

**[14:06]:** in most cases we start in china sometimes we go to pakistan sometimes latin america sometimes the u.s it depends but most times it starts in china and we go and we try to find the factory and then once we find a factory that can do the product the way we want we get the pricing and then we have to look at a lot of people stop there that okay i can i live on alibaba and this product this product is four dollars and i can sell it for fifteen dollars okay i'm good there's eleven dollars profit there no there's not i see this mistake over and over with people that don't do the math if you're not good at math and you're trying to sell on amazon don't sell on amazon or partner with somebody that's good good at math it's so critical to know your math and know your numbers because that product is

**[14:49]:** four dollars in china from the factory one you may have a is it exports or is it fob you could have an extra cost depending on there just to get it to the ship or to the airplane and then you have duties and taxes if you're bringing into the u.s you might have 25 percent trump it's called the nickname is trump tariff this is a the tariff that the president our ex-president put on china for every almost everything coming in some medical things and some things don't qualify but and then you have a duty so it might add as much as zero percent as much as fifty percent to that four dollar price so maybe your price is really six dollars and then you have the shipping cost and you then you have uh duties i mean uh import fees and that four dollar product might turn into a nine dollar product by the time

**[15:30]:** it gets to the amazon warehouse when you pay all the shipping you gotta know all that stuff and then you're trying to sell it for 14.99 you're never going to make any money because amazon's going to take 15 of that 14.99 so they're going to take uh 2.25 cents yeah that's right and then they're gonna also take a fulfillment fee depending on how much they weigh so but and then maybe you gotta do ppc so at the end of the day you're not making any money maybe that maybe you're making a little bit of amazon's depositing some money to your account and you're like ah i got some money coming in but when you do the math and you figure everything out you're not you're not making any money uh and that's a very common problem that people have and and then the other thing i look at is you need two and a half

**[16:11]:** time in my you need at least two and a half times your initial product cost to to launch a product so if you're starting in this and you're in pakistan you you've been able to get a thousand us dollars together to launch on amazon that's all the money that you have uh and you're going to start to try to launch a product you need to find a product that you divide that by two and a half so that's gonna be four hundred dollars because 400 times two and a half is a thousand so you need to find something that you could get to amazon into the amazon warehouse for 400 if you spend more than that you're gonna your chances of success are extremely low because what's going to happen let's say that you succeed let's say your product is a big hit and it starts to sell well then you're going to need to

**[16:55]:** order more and you're not going to have the money if you spent 800 dollars of your thousand dollars to get your product into amazon you don't have any money for ppc you don't have any money maybe for the software if you're using a software tool you don't have any money to launch it or to do some influencer things or whatever you might need to do but let's say you don't need to do any of that you don't need to do any pc you just put it on amazon you think people will find it because it's so good and so niche you still need to place an order with the factory to get the next one coming that's going to take the factory is going to take a month maybe more 45 days then it's got to come on an airplane or a ship so it's some more time so it might be anywhere from two

**[17:30]:** months to four months before you get more in so if you only order you sell through those first ones really fast you're going to be out of stock on amazon for a month two months three months and which means when you come back into stock you're basically starting over again because amazon is all about what have you done for me lately you lose the honeymoon period i mean there's ways to reset that but that you lose the honeymoon period you lose everything and so you're just shooting yourself in the foot and that's why a lot of people give up like this amazon thing doesn't work it's because they're doing it all wrong and they don't think it all the way through with all the math all the numbers so the reason for the two and a half so four hundred dollars if you only have a thousand dollars to start with get your product for

**[18:08]:** 400 bucks landed that means if you're buying a thousand of these it has to be a really cheap product or if you're buying 100 has to be you know no more than four dollars that's not the factory price the factory price might be two dollars but all the shipping everything because amazon's not gonna pay you right away they're gonna hold your money in most cases for two two to four weeks because there's a there's a they have to ship it out there's a they don't it doesn't go into your account until ten days at least seven to ten days until after the customers got it just to make sure they don't return it and then it goes into your account balance to be able to withdraw so there's a cycle there you're not gonna have the money to pay the factory so that's why you need that extra six hundred dollars there if you're successful

**[18:47]:** to pay the factory so that's things things like that people don't think about um and that's what hurts them and that's why a lot of people fail um i could talk about this for a long time but that's to give you 15 minutes not anybody asking a question so that's that's the job

**[19:05]:** yeah that's that's uh that's ton of information however you would like to add something here uh sorry i was on mute so um what um kind of uh price range of a product or selling price would you recommend the audience here well for me personally i don't do anything less than twenty dollars because it's not worth my time for me i'm a different you know i'm experienced we have money we have resources so for me anything that has to sell for less than twenty dollars i usually don't i'm not gonna say i never don't touch it but it's rare that i touch anything less than twenty dollars and i i need to i personally want products that i can make a profit of at least ten thousand dollars a month on uh so if i can't make ten thousand dollars a month on the product it's not worth my time but for a lot of

**[19:49]:** the audience here that would be life-changing for them so so the price point that you're looking at but it depends on your budget it all depends on the budget so like if you only have a thousand dollars and like i just said you can only spend 400 in your product and you're only going to buy a hundred units that means you could it's it's say it takes 90 days uh for your product to get made to get shipped and you're selling that means you can only sell three a day so if you don't if you're selling three units a day if you sell more than that you're gonna run out of stock before you have more come in because you don't have enough money so you need to find something that has low volume and start there you can work your way up you know you can add more products later or work your way

**[20:27]:** up but if it's selling three units a day um and you know at 400 dollars that's that basically is a um about a two dollar two dollar fifty cents cost at the factory at the my maximum and so what i'd like to see is i like to see at least a 5x so to answer the question so if if this you gotta look at the numbers so i can't just say well i like products that are 15 or less it depends on your how much money you have so if you only have a thousand dollars like in this example so only 400 is going to go to your product maybe you're going to have some shipping cost of 100 200 so that means your product cost needs to be a maximum of two dollars at the at the factory and then you're getting a hundred of them once you add the shipping cost in the

**[21:09]:** taxes your unit cost is four dollars each you order a hundred products for four hundred dollars once including all the fees i i want to see you sell that for at least 19.95 five times that price uh the worst case is three and a half worst case and some it's three and a half now if you get into really expensive products you're selling something that costs five hundred dollars you don't have to buy it for like a hundred you know that you can work with you have better different margins but when you're selling anything under a hundred dollars retail price you need between a three and a half and five x minimum multiple one of my products we sell it's a calendar it's a wall count you hang on the wall we make them in korea and they print them in korea for us it's cheaper than print them in the us my landed cost

**[21:52]:** which means the cost to make them the cost to put them on the boat to cost all the duties everything is a dollar sixty so it's a dollar sixty for that and we sell it for twenty dollars nineteen ninety five so you can see that's way more than even a five times markup that that product is super profitable so someone comes in and starts um spending more money on ppc than me or they start uh selling theirs for 14.95 and they're killing me because everybody wants theirs because it's cheaper i can lower mine to 14.95 no problem i still have a lot of margin to make a profit if if and so if i need to spend more on my ppc no problem i have the margin uh so that's that's very important because if you're successful people are going to try to copy you and they're going to try to come in on your

**[22:36]:** coattails and if you're using a tool like black box on amazon or some of the other tools out there that spit out product ideas you have to remember there's thousands of other people seeing those same things so when you see something that looks good by the time you if time you get it to the market maybe a 100 other people also saw the same thing you did using tools or whatever and so you got to be ready for that um so that's why you need those good margins some mistakes i used to see students in the freedom ticket they said i just can't make any money at this i'm like well how much are you selling your product for 11.99 so what's your what's your cost from the factory uh it's like five dollars so i have a six dollars profit no you don't um what's your amazon fees what's your shipping fees which and

**[23:20]:** by the time it's end of the day they're not making anything the others money coming into their accounts because amazon has taken 11.99 minus their 15 minus the fulfillment key so they're paying them six dollars or something for every one of them so there's money coming into their account so they think they're making money but by the time they pay the factory and the shipping and everything uh they're not making any money uh they don't have any money left over at the end of the day to put into their pocket and so that that's that's difficult and you need another thing is for new people is to remember that maybe your first order is not going to be profitable so if you're thinking oh my gosh i need to put some i need to buy some food or i need to pay but for my family's rent or something in three months i'm going to

**[23:58]:** sell something on amazon and take some money it's probably not going to happen maybe sometimes you hit the lottery and you win uh and it happens but it's rare it usually takes six months to a year uh sometimes longer but six months to a year before you can start taking some profits because if you're successful you're gonna have to take the profits and you're gonna have to buy more inventory so maybe you bought 100 the first time you're about a cool account i was selling three a day but i could sell six of these a day uh you know it's getting good reviews everything's going well so i need to place an order now for 800 from the factory instead of four hundred dollars you're that's gonna come out your profits you're not gonna be if you start putting that in your pocket you're not gonna be able to grow your business and to make

**[24:39]:** actually start making real money and make it making good money so you have to keep that in mind too so don't think this is a overnight get rich save your life thing it takes some time and sometimes you lose you know sometimes you do a product and it just doesn't work but that doesn't mean amazon doesn't work i see a lot of people they try one product like i lost a thousand dollars uh what's uh forget this i'm gonna go sell on shopify or what's the next course i saw on facebook that i can take that's gonna make me money no amazon works if you do it right and you have patience and you know and you and you know your numbers so if you if you do it the first time and you don't succeed consider that like going to school you're going to learn a lot you're going to learn all the mistakes

**[25:20]:** you made and you're going to learn that okay let me let me regroup here and let me try again i've seen people that lost on their first two products and they are so disappointed they lost like ten thousand dollars and it's like there's my life savings i borrowed some money from my mom you know i don't know how i'm going to pay her back you know my wife is really sad with me she's like get a real job quit doing this it's crazy stuff and then on the third product they learned on each of the two the third product boom they did everything right they fixed all their mistakes and now you know the guy just sold his business for three million dollars so i mean so um you know this is like a 21 year old guy uh so um it you it can be done so um stay with it and and and

**[26:02]:** learn but and try to minimize your mistakes uh it can be painful sometimes it can hurt uh but it's a it's a great opportunity um i i remember um i remember there uh for any of the helium 10 um members you can actually subscribe for the freedom ticket right it's free like you said kevin yeah there is a tool i think he's teaching about like launching and how much you need to uh uh allocate for launches and everything like that correct i teach that yeah so so that's a really good thing to budget how much you uh you have into it uh zeeshan i wanted to ask you uh in pakistan what is the normal um launch how much people are using to like initiate the first launch like do they have like a ten thousand dollar like uh set aside for the long for for new product launches or or what is the norm

**[26:58]:** in pakistan yeah so here in pakistan uh mostly people start with the 15 thousand to twenty thousand in the us uh and like ten thousand to twelve thousand for the uk and germany and uh for rest of the markets which are much smaller like the canada the mexico the uae or the ksa they start with like five thousand dollars so this is the minimum they are doing here but for the us mainly they know it's a capital intensive market so they come up with at least fifty thousand fifteen thousand dollars that's good that's good that's good uh i think i i talked to kevin last time i said hey kevin what do you uh think is a good amount set aside for doing amazon uh launching and then i think kevin says like 25 000 or something that is that what you said no it depends on depends on the product yeah no 25 000

**[27:58]:** uh maybe maybe more than that but it depends on the product and competitive nature and what it takes to get to the top of page one on anything so on a fifteen thousand dollar budget uh you should be doing a product that's uh you should be spending about six seven thousand dollars uh probably about about six hours yeah six thousand dollars actually that's two and a half six thousand dollars on your initial inventory i depends on the product cost on that it depends on how much how many you got to give away or promote or how many guys sell to get into those top positions as would be determine the launch cost it's a product cost plus plus the any if you're paying a service or you're paying influencers or whatever whatever that cost would be but it can be it can be significant depending on the competition and some products it may be nothing

**[28:46]:** because there's just no no competition or it's a deep there's a lot of deep keywords but for a product for if you're six thousand dollars on your product i would expect to spend probably at least half of that or more on the launch uh six thousand and fifty percent of that or more on the launch so six thousand plus three thousand minimum on on the launch yeah if you're selling iphone cases or hand sanitizer or something crazy it's going to be a heck of a heck of a lot more than that so mostly the mistake people are doing over here is that they are selecting the product with the very low price like the five or six dollar price range this is the major mistake i have seen in pakistan people are doing and the another thing is they calculate the profit stability uh in terms of percentage like the six dollar uh the 25

**[29:42]:** plus 25 percent of cx dollar is like nothing they just ignored the percentage profit percentage in terms of dollars so that is the biggest mistake people are doing here and the second biggest mistake they are doing here is like they do not differentiate the product they just sell the they just copy paste copy paste it just uh they uh the source the same product and just launch it so this one is the second biggest mistake people are doing here in pakistan those are big mistakes uh you have you you have to differentiate you have you have to indicate it's not just put a free pdf with it you get you gotta you know what i look for is if on page one everybody's selling a round one the product will say a round thing i look for the square one you know something that when you're looking on the page oh your eye stops that

**[30:35]:** one's different you know take your product if you're if you're thinking about doing something and and take a screenshot of page one and results of the keywords that you're going after and take your product or photoshop it in there like on the second or third line and then go to something like pikfoo or you can ask your friends even if you don't want to spend money on pickfood and say which which ones of these catches your eye first and second and third if your product is not in one of the first first second or third that it catches their eye you need to change what you're doing because you're not going to succeed yeah i i agree um you know like amazon raises price every every so often like two times a year three times a year so with that kind of margin being like you're looking at percentage it's not going to work right

**[31:22]:** so you need to make sure that uh you have something like a higher uh maybe profit as well as the dollar amount profit right so yeah dollar amount profit is more important than the actual percentage um so like you said like the six dollars and 25 percent that's a dollar 25 cents profit you have no margin there what if you need to spend 50 cents on ppc all of a sudden because all the com your product is not differentiated it's the same as everybody else and you're just out bidding each other on ppc you have no no place to work but if you had a margin of ten dollars and maybe your competition uh you have margin ten dollars and if it costs you 50 cents or even a dollar more ppc okay it comes out your profits a little bit but you're still fine you're still going to be okay and that's a big

**[32:06]:** mistake a lot of a lot of people make to me i always say the money on amazon is not made in the selling it's made in the sourcing it's made in the source so if you know people that just go to alibaba and just accept the price they get off of alibaba maybe they do maybe they do a little bit of negotiation huge mistake huge mistake another thing i look at is how many sellers are from china and this is not anything against chinese people it's just uh i look at you know tools like helium 10 will tell you this how many how many of the sellers on page one are from china there's other extensions you can put in to chrome browser that put little flags but if more than 50 percent of the sellers are chinese based that are on page one i usually don't launch that product because those guys have a

**[32:47]:** competitive advantage over me maybe it's the factory i always ask my factories do you sell on amazon if they say yes we sell some of this i say i'm sorry i'm not going to work with you um so if if so but if over 50 of the sellers are based in china that are selling on the keyword you're going to have a tough time unless you completely differentiate unless you can make it like you know made in the usa because people will like it because it's made in usa or it's made in europe or whatever and so there's a reason that people will buy it over something made in china that would be the only time i might consider that but those guys have a huge they're local they speak the language they negotiate hard they're hustlers they compete hard they're super competitive so to me that's a that's a big warning sign um and

**[33:34]:** so you got to be careful with that so i always say the money is made in the sourcing not in the selling so you've got to find like i know howard has good access to a really good sourcing person i don't know if he shares that here or not but she's really really good i mean the people that do stuff with him but you you gotta you gotta get that price right because if you're buying your iphone case for a dollar and your competition is having to spend a dollar seventy five instantly you have an advantage for you know so you you gotta you gotta and sometimes you can have an advantage maybe if you're selling like you said you know they're just selling the same thing as everybody else you can have an advantage in the way you package it so look at the sizing maybe everybody else is sizing it 10 inches by

**[34:16]:** 5 inches by 2 inches but if you you look at the numbers on amazon like look if i make this 9.75 inches the box by 5 inches by 2 inches it goes from a large standard size to a standard size or something like that it knocks the category down so that fulfillment fees are now two dollars less you instantly just made money that's done in the sourcing and where you figure out how can we get this package smaller how can we maybe the product can we take it apart you know it comes assembled but is there a way to take it apart and put it into a smaller box or get it lighter or something so that you can even save money on the amazon fees uh where your competition is not doing that they're not thinking to do that they're just taking the product directly from the factory as it is so there's lots

**[34:57]:** of ways you can do that that's what i mean the money is made in the sourcing and a lot of people uh kind of overlook that yeah um if anyone needs uh sourcing um you can contact us and we can uh see what we can do uh but uh you it's true because in china a lot of the people uh the factory and the buyers i mean the buyers or which is the sellers right for amazon sellers they actually like go and talk to them and drink with them and socialize with them with the same language you know so there's like this really uh and you're and they see them often so it's hard to say no when trying to get negotiating a better price so that's that's why um it's they usually get like 20 30 cheaper than what normal people usually get when if they're like uh you know from like the us

**[35:45]:** or or not and the same thing with the logistics as well they have a really good really good connections with uh logistics and suppliers yeah they have a big advantage major advantage so it's hard to compete against that so that's why i when i'm sourcing products i steer away from that if that's the dominant factor um z sean can you look into the the note see if there anyone has questions so we can kind of he's got one yeah yeah he says on average to reach 10 000 us dollars how much do you spend and how much time do you take to reach that music do you mean ten thousand dollars for profit sales or profit profit he means profit um that i can't answer that question with a nice little answer because it depends on the product you're selling how competitive the niche is i could make ten thousand dollars in in two days

**[36:40]:** on some products on amazon others take months

**[36:46]:** that's a difficult question to give you a very nice answer on because there's a lot of factors what's the selling price what's the margin what's the competition what the reviews like uh how much money did you have to launch it are you slow launching it fast launching it there's a lot of variables in that okay

**[37:07]:** um so do you prefer a launch of five variations at once at a low price or do you instead prefer one single product in a mid mid price range more than twenty dollars i would go with a single product i don't like to do a lot of variations at the beginning and sometimes i might do if you have clothing you are something that's a size you might have to do some sizes but if you're doing something that's colors i might do one or two colors but you don't really know what colors i mean you can use the tools like km10 to get an idea of what colors are selling best but you really don't know so and i'd rather what if the product doesn't work i don't want to have five extra products uh so i usually launch with one maybe two and if it works then i'll start adding to it uh having any

**[37:50]:** additional variations but i usually don't launch unless it makes sense you know like clothing would make sense or like a few other things would make sense but most things don't make sense to do variations when you launch

**[38:08]:** so the ranking strategy that i'm using now um it's getting much more difficult you know used to be the big ranking strategy was most recently up until last year was search find buy where you basically you do it yourself through manychat or facebook or you have a company that helps you with the ranking and you they they have a list of people that go buy the product at full price and then you reimburse them the entire money plus you pay the company a little bit of fee there's still some companies that do that it hasn't gone away but it's it's much less than it used to be and it's amazon's really cracking down on that so you have to be extremely careful if you do that they call rebates some some people call them rebates uh some call people call them sfb or search find buy i think that's gonna continue to get less and

**[38:54]:** less and less um you need an audience to launch on amazon is what you really need at an audience you need an audience of passionate people so in the past people would say go build an audience on facebook go and you know before you launch your products and spend three months or six months you know if you're selling a dog product start posting dog pictures on facebook and get people to follow you and to come into your group and and do that kind of thing that's great maybe you'll get a thousand people that follow you or a thousand people in your group but those aren't buyers you have to remember psychology here those aren't buyers maybe 10 of them or 20 of them are going to buy your product but that's not enough to launch a business that uh those are people that are like dogs that doesn't mean they like your product you need

**[39:33]:** people that will actually spend money on your item so that means either going out to other people that already have that that spend money uh are partnering with influencers but what i'm working on now and something i'll be talking about it's uh the billion dollar seller summit and also heating 10 has a big event in september in the us i know most of you can't come to that uh but uh they're doing a big event but i'm i'm doing stuff with nfts uh so we're we're doing uh building communities with uh with in the crypto world uh around nfts uh that also relate to products so we have an audience of people that spend money on the mft so i know they spend money and they're passionate about the subject that we're that we're uh we're building the audience around and then i can easily leverage that into launching products on amazon by because when

**[40:18]:** they buy the nfts there's some gaming sys some gamification to it and they get points and rewards and they can redeem those for products on amazon and then they can come and uh buy the product on amazon which helps launch it and creates this whole cycle and then people that buy the product on amazon they see it in the insert about this nft and like what is this i never heard of this i don't know they go to the website and it gets them into the game into the system so it's it's really new it's it's advanced so it's not something that the average person can use but that that type of thing is where this is going to get to in the next couple years um we're one of the first to do it uh we'll be doing it this fall um but i'll be talking about those two events um we're in the

**[40:58]:** planning we're in the final planning stages right now of everything but that's what it's going to take it's going to become harder um to launch and so the opportunities still though were on the not on the popular products you know amazon has gotten so big there's so many people searching there you can do good money on things that you don't need to spend a lot to launch on like for my calendars for example that i do every year that's seasonal so from about november until january is when people buy them because they buy calendars for the next year usually christmas presents or something at the end of the year they're getting ready for the next year those those particular products i don't have to do any launch i don't i do zero ppc i do uh i have a customer base of about quite a few people then i go to about 100 of them

**[41:43]:** i said would you just go buy it i don't give them rebates i don't give them any extra bonus i just say you can buy it from me directly from my shopify site for 19.95 plus a shipping charge of 20 buck of 10 more dollars so 30 or why not just go buy it on amazon for 19.95 use this link uh you know i give them that i give them the the canonical url and they go and they buy it and that's usually enough to get it to go and i start early enough because it's seasonal the big sales come in the middle of november until the first part of january so i i get that in stock in like august and so i started selling in august so in august to get to the top of page one for the keywords i only need like one cell a day because nobody's searching for it

**[42:27]:** in august so if i can just get one cell a day at the top of keywords and then when people start searching more in september and more in october and more in november i just kind of it's like riding a wave in the ocean you just kind of ride that wave as it goes up uh and so that's that's how we launched that particular product other products um without the nft stuff we're doing a lot of heavy ppc we lower the price and so i know if my price is 19.95 i like i might make my price 4.99 and then i run a lot of ppc uh and because the the reason for that is everybody if everybody else is 19 and 95 cents you and they have 100 reviews or a thousand reviews and here you are at 19.99 and you have one review or no reviews or just a few they don't trust

**[43:11]:** you but if your price is so ridiculously low and your listing is really good they're like what the heck i'll take a chance for five dollars you know i could always return to amazon throw it away if it doesn't work so i have a really low price it's just all they just can't say no but do i spend a lot of money on that heck yeah i mean i'm losing money on every one of those i sell because it's below my cost i had to pay amazon their fees i'm spending a tremendous amount on on amazon ads at the same time i'm doing vine reviews so everything goes into the buying program to try to get a bunch of reviews there so to get those first initial reviews i like to get up to 20 or more before you can really start wrapping things up um so that's that's kind of how i launch stuff

**[43:55]:** right now all right so uh howard i believe this question is for you

**[44:09]:** um well if you contact us we can probably uh connect you to one of our uh sorcerer and they'll go out there to the factories or uh to the to see how they can negotiate better prices it's really hard for people to uh just go online and never seen that the the factory or the sales rep and try to get the best price there's so that we're on the ground in china being able to help you uh on your behalf to negotiate prices mainly and making sure that qc and logistics side is uh that you're getting the best price for everything all right yeah competing products do matter uh one new product selection absolutely competition you have to analyze the competition how good are they at amazon and how good are they means how good is their listing how good is their photos are they missing a lot of keywords that's like tools like degad

**[45:06]:** they'll tell you they'll tell you these these top competitors uh yeah they'll give you a percent this guy is on all the keywords that are relevant for your product they'll say this guy is ranking on page one for 32 percent of them this guy is ranking on page one for 95 of them and so that that tells you how good they are listing how good they are on amazon absolutely you have to look at competing products not only what the product is and how it looks and the price the quality and the reviews but also how good is the seller because that's your competition as seller so this is the big question it says uh i won't go into products that has more than 50 chinese sellers currently they're working on a product with some really good stats the main brand is doing over 500 000 in monthly revenue congratulations all the other sellers are

**[45:59]:** new with less than 100 reviews and they're they're doing good revenue too so we can do such products we do a bit design change and file our own design pattern and we can achieve 40 gross parts project uh gross margins with uh competitive prices um yeah i i don't know i'd have to take a look at that but i don't know what your question is um maybe you're saying that uh you're doing well despite there being a lot of chinese sellers is that what maybe that's what you're saying uh abraham uh i'm not i'm not sure what your what your question is on that okay ibrahim if you can just elaborate a bit again so we can take that question again yeah i got the idea of the situation but what's the question i think it's trying to prove that uh that 50 chinese sellers are still able to uh you know products like those

**[46:51]:** can still be able to get into niche the niche but i mean yes you could there's always a percentage of probability but you still that's a little harder right you want to see if there's like less of a competition in order to get into it for a higher success rate yeah i'm not saying it can't be done um but but it's it's very difficult for most people if you're first like you are not maybe you are one of the first ones and now there's a bunch of chinese sellers that come after you that's different if there's already chinese sellers selling there and a bunch of them when you started that that won't make it much harder but if you're one of the very first ones and now there's a bunch of chinese sellers that are basically copying you like you said they all have under 100 reviews that i'm not too worried about you have

**[47:35]:** a big head start

**[47:40]:** what would be the minimum profit and dollar value that should be considered for products to launch i can't answer that there's not there's not one answer for that that's like saying which girl is the prettiest you know everybody's going to have a different answer of which girl is the prettiest in the room there's so many variables in that i can't i can't tell you that

**[48:01]:** is it possible let's do a live demo on screen how you decide your marketing budget after seeing a good product i can't do that today i only have about uh uh six more minutes or so here so yeah maybe another time we could do that all right perfect so guys uh like so the last uh thing from my side uh let's wrap up so i would like to ask uh we are doing this for every every of our session the what is the fun fact happened to you from amazon what is the funniest thing happened to you in your career from amazon really yes okay so and to in 2020 uh we decided to launch some hand sanitizers you know the code came and everybody was doing hand sanitizers and i was like i'm not going to do hand sanitizers that's like doing iphone cases it's like crazy you know or hoverboards or something crazy

**[48:54]:** everybody's going to be doing it but my partners it's three partners they said we have the money kevin you know how to do the amazon we have the money don't worry i'm like okay uh you know you could lose all this money because it's gonna be very competitive they're like don't worry let's do it like okay if we're gonna do it we're gonna do it right we're gonna do proper branding we're going to do proper everything we're not just going to find some bottle and say hand sanitizer with a cross and stick it out there on amazon we're going to like create costumes for the characters you know have a brand you know with a costume and do all this crazy stuff and real branding we had a jingle like we wrote a radio advertising song and everything talking about washing their hands and we did everything right we launched the product on amazon and

**[49:38]:** was crushing it and this was then uh we launched it in june of 2020 so two years ago we're selling forty to fifty thousand dollars a day of just one sku it was going crazy well amazon at that time was freaking out about all the people selling hand sanitizers so if you had the word hand sanitizer in your listing they would uh you know sometimes turn it off and we'd be in the middle of a launch we were even using howard's company uh one time to help us with some of the launching and right in the middle of it boom the listing is dog pictures uh you know it's like we just wasted all this money uh getting ranking and spending money and uh that happened to us like nine times but we even had someone at amazon we were authorized at amazon we were in the covet store we we we had i had

**[50:19]:** a guy at amazon that's the seller support but like one of the top guys i had this home cell phone and i could call them as they do that our product just went down again he's like ah and he would he would escalate it up you know i have to deal with seller support that's how we were tight he's like you guys are doing this right you're like the model company that we want selling on amazon but still the algorithm just kept knocking us down knocking us down just because we had the word sanitizer and we're like can't you just flip a switch that says we're approved we've gone through this so many times they said no there's no switch on amazon that does that unfortunately so after we sold about uh two million dollars worth of uh stuff in about three months and then we we got we got a little bit eyes big

**[51:02]:** eyes like shoot man we could sell a lot more so we placed some big orders and we switched it from china to vietnam and so we could save on taxes and different things and not say it's made in china because people are freaking out we have this big order coming in and then amazon shuts everything down again in like november of 2020. at that point we couldn't get it back we were down for a couple weeks and when we tried to relaunch it's just we lost all the momentum all the honeymoon period everything was just it just became a disaster so we just said the heck with it you know what we're just going to liquidate this stuff out sell it for 10 cents for every dollar that we we spend on just get rid of it wash your hands and move on to the next project we've got to lose some money we couldn't liquidate it nobody would no one would buy it we're like you know it cost us a dollar to make it we'll give it to

**[51:47]:** you for 10 cents just come get it like no we don't want it there's so much of this everywhere we have all enough so we ended up having to give it away so at the end of the day we had 460 pallets of this stuff sitting in a warehouse in washington state and we put an ad out in the local newspaper and this korean church a big church of all these korean people i guess passed the word around and they came to the warehouse one day like on saturday everybody with their cars and their suvs you know their trunk open their back doors and they're just throwing the stuff in their car just filling it in there we just gave it away for free we're like thank god we're finished with this it's done uh we lost a million dollars between all the partners uh you know i ended up losing about a hundred and

**[52:28]:** something i had to put a little bit of money in even though they said they put all the money some some money came from my pocket too we lost about a million dollars on this whole project because we had to give away all this inventory that we paid for so uh that happened in uh early 2021 about uh in february this year i was doing my billion dollar seller summits online a virtual one and there's a price for the winner howard knows this we give a cash prize he does at his events too whoever's the best speaker and i like to show the money on the screen you know i like to like uh show look all right here's five thousand dollars somebody uh is going to win this money look boom boom boom boom it's it's real it's it's right here so i had to go to the bank to get the money my

**[53:10]:** local bank here in austin i live three and a half hours playing right away from where the warehouse was in washington where we gave all the stuff away i'm in the bank i'm touching money and like i better just clean my hands i don't know that money's maybe dirties who's touched this i reach up to the counter at the bank you know i'm waiting for the person to give me the money and to clean my hands and like wait a second that bottle looks familiar i turn it around our bottle and it's the newest version the ones that we gave away for free uh you know to get liquidated and then i started i was like that's mine the bank teller guy's like what are you talking about that's like that's my company's like yeah yeah right dude yeah of course yeah i was like no that's that's ours and i started looking around the

**[53:52]:** bank and the bank has different you know different windows and every single window has our hand sanitizer and then i look behind me all the officers sitting there that make the loans and everything they have it on their desk i'm like holy cow someone took this free stuff that we've lost our shirts on and then turned around and sold it to this bank you know 2 000 miles away and here it is in my local bank what's the odds of that happening and i'm taking the money from the account that we lost all the money from so i was like i almost want to tell them hey you owe me some money for this stuff but that's so that's probably the most interesting story it was a big like knife to the heart

**[54:37]:** all right okay so i think time is up and uh like uh thank you so much kevin for joining us today and uh giving us your valuable time and uh how would you would you like to uh have some closing notes here uh i just just for the fun of it you know like the first time i met kevin was like 2018 uh one of my my first mastermind in u.s i think it was in las vegas and we were and then all sudden he was saying that there's rats in the in the mansion you know because i i hold my mastermind in mansions back in the days now the castles right but uh and then he says what i spend a lot of money on this place and this is this rat and then he's like playing around and it's like oh look at the cookie there's a wrap part of the cookie so

**[55:26]:** you know and then i say okay and then all of a sudden um and then fast forwarded to like 2020 or um johnny 19 or something that he's like he we went to one of his his mastermind right a billion dollar seller summit and then all sudden uh he put me into a ghost room a room that uh there's ghosts known to have ghosts in there and people died in there i'm like good thing that i had my friend david the chinese uh uh seller uh he took i that that room that he has actually is 7 10 which is my birthday right so he gave me his room and how he took my room and then um he got uh he got scared when uh there's all these weird stuff happening in this room so it was like kind of like pretty well he's kevin is a funny guy hey even today i don't

**[56:21]:** think he admit that he did that on purpose but i have a feeling it is planned right kevin yeah that was pure coincidence that a hotel someone didn't get murdered in that room it's it's on a ghost tour so they actually leave the tourist around ghost tours and that's one of the rooms they show them and so the howard was supposed to have that room and then he traded with uh uh his friends who's also from china doesn't speak very good english and one night he was in the room and we're all sitting in the lobby of the hotel and we see him running down the stairs like freaking out going to the desk and almost like you gotta change my room you gotta change my room and we we got up to see what the problem was to try to help him he's like i just saw a ghost the ghost just came uh

**[57:04]:** they were talking to me but uh thank god uh that they don't understand chinese they don't speak chinese because i don't know what they were saying and they were saying so he was freaked out it was funny that was funny thank you for coming on kevin yeah no problem take care and uh uh good luck in your amazon district venture keep at it it's a good business to be in if you do it right and uh have some patience and uh the best of success to everybody and their families all right thank you thank you guys for joining us today and uh this session has a ton of information so i will request you all of you to share to to let other people know as well uh so other people can learn from it and uh correct their mistakes thank you thank you howard thank you take care bye bye