March 5, 2024; Wholesale Discussion & Q&A
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Join us for an engaging open discussion about Amazon wholesale, where experienced sellers share insights and strategies for navigating the wholesale landscape. Hear firsthand experiences and challenges faced by participants, from establishing supplier relationships to effective inventory management. This interactive session encourages brainstorming and Q&A, providing valuable knowledge for anyone looking to enhance their Amazon wholesale business. Whether you're new to wholesale or looking to refine your strategies, this session is perfect for you!
Introduction to the Session (00:00 - 04:30)
Open discussion on Amazon wholesale.
Q&A and brainstorming opportunity.
Participants introduce themselves and share their Amazon experiences.
Participant Experiences and Challenges (04:30 - 20:00)
Various participants share their backgrounds, including:
Abdul struggling to find distributors in Canada.
Nick's transition from RA to PL and his experiences.
Danny focusing on liquidation and diving into wholesale.
Common challenges discussed: finding Canadian wholesalers, competition, and product viability.
Approaching Wholesalers and Strategies (20:00 - 45:00)
Discussion on strategies for contacting distributors.
Importance of building rapport and being professional.
Tips for negotiating prices and securing accounts.
Finding and Validating Suppliers (45:00 - 60:00)
How to verify if a wholesaler is legitimate.
Importance of due diligence to confirm authenticity.
Recommendations for learning more about suppliers during trade shows.
Managing Inventory and Accounts (60:00 - 90:00)
Strategies on maintaining inventory levels and managing returns.
Insights on the impact of inventory management and prompt action against restricted products.
Advice on handling warranties and reimbursement processes for products sold through Amazon.
Closing Thoughts and Final Q&A (90:00 - 100:00)
Open forum for additional questions and concerns.
Importance of ongoing communication and relationship-building with suppliers.
Discussion on the benefits of professional representation when reaching out to distributors.
Detailed Summary:
The video features an open discussion about Amazon wholesale, intended for participants seeking guidance and sharing experiences related to the topic. The session begins with an introduction and a brief overview of the wholesale process.
A participant raises a concern about the challenges faced when finding distributors in Canada. Others contribute their experiences, with some selling solely on amazon.ca due to perceived lower competition. There is interest in exploring both Canadian and U.S. markets.
Participants share their backgrounds, ranging from beginners to those with more experience in selling on Amazon. A common struggle involves forming relationships with distributors, with various participants sharing their methods for contacting potential suppliers and the challenges in getting accepted.
Discussion ensues on the difficulties in accessing specific brands directly as many do not sell to Amazon sellers. The importance of networking and building relationships is emphasized, and participants are encouraged to share their experiences and ask questions, creating an interactive environment.
Vanities of opinions are shared regarding retail arbitrage versus wholesale and the pros and cons of entering these markets. Specific questions arise regarding finding viable products, dealing with competitor sales, and understanding the complexities of wholesaling in Canada.
Participants discuss strategies to overcome objections from distributors about selling to Amazon sellers, advocating for honesty in communication with potential suppliers. The conversation evolves into practical advice on tracking purchases, managing cash flow, and optimizing processes for inventory management.
The talk also touches upon the role of virtual assistants (VAs), with discussions about hiring, management, and the best practices for effective collaboration. The participants share their experiences with various tools and systems, highlighting the adjustment required when transitioning from retail arbitrage to wholesale.
Throughout the conversation, resource sharing is encouraged, including helpful guides on how to navigate the Amazon wholesaling landscape effectively. The atmosphere is supportive, with emphasis on learning from each other's experiences to enhance individual selling strategies.
In conclusion, the session fosters a sense of community, encouraging ongoing questions, sharing of knowledge, and support among Amazon sellers looking to improve their wholesale strategies.
(00:02) okay so then yeah for those that are just coming into this session um as I just mentioned kind of a little bit earlier this is going to be kind of an open discussion all around Amazon wholesale so there will be some topics that I will of course lead and um things that I'll discuss about kind of our own wholesale process but this is going to be more so an unstructured conversation where we can have the chance to basically do any open Q&A brainstorming uh and basically address anything that you want to address or have questions of
(00:32) all around Amazon wholesale so for those that don't can you hear me yeah I can hear you how's it going hey oh cool good um yeah I guess I got a question definitely so I was using your service a few months ago with the the lead list okay um an Amazon FBA seller um sort of took a break on the Retail Arbitrage um to focus on private label okay um I saw an email today about this wholesale discussion so I just I just joined um are we all Canadian sellers or is this a mixture of Canadian and European and American sellers I believe most of us
(01:07) are Canadian uh if there is like an occasional us seller in here like that is a possibility but I believe the vast majority of us are Canadian okay so I'm looking into the wholesale strategy as well so are most of us that are doing Wholesales it just within the amazon.ca site or are we um getting into the US market as well like uh wholesaling on the site and uh using the US uh fulfillment centers everybody here could certainly answer those questions for themselves uh but I do know that a lot of our members do sell in both uh Canada and the US for
(01:41) me specifically I actually only sell in Canada yeah for example for me I like to stick to Canada as well I'm still growing my Amazon business but um I just think Canada it's less competition in terms of wholesale especially and uh you know it's just easier to process any like return so on and so forth you don't have to deal with crossboard shipping you know so but us is definitely a possibility in the future for my business yeah definitely and then again to kind of embrace the spirit of a kind of an open Q&A if we just want to go
(02:16) around and just basically do some brief introduction with everybody and I would just like if if you're willing of course you don't have to just kind of introduce yourself kind of where you're at in your Amazon business and then you can also um if you have any specific questions you would like address today you can also ask those as well I will ensure that I record them and then we can address them as we go throughout the session so I'll just start at the top here so Abdul if you're present with us did you want to
(02:40) just give us a brief intro for yourself here hey Jordan yeah so have been selling onca and.com started onca I think almost three years back recently over the last couple of years I moved on to Doom so my major paino in wholesale is finding distributors in Canada I I I mean I just cannot get Google to work for me for some reason I mean I been shows get I mean when I find a distributor opening an account is not a problem but the the main thing is getting that distributor the right contact for me right now is the biggest
(03:17) challenge I have in Canada okay okay perfect and so what I'll do is when we go down this list I'm actually going to write down some of the questions or the pain points that everybody has and then when we get when we get kind of formally started then we'll start addressing all that but yeah that that's a that's that's actually like a great place to start off because I think a lot of people have those issues um Amazon FBA you already mentioned that you're just brand new here so do you want to give us a brief intro for
(03:41) yourself yeah sure my name is Nick um I've been selling on the amazon.ca site for the last couple years um I kind of found a nice niche product um they're established in the US but I've been able to take advantage of uh being one of the suppliers in Canada uh right now that sort of product line has has uh plateaued so I've been looking into private label um getting stuff from China to the US um attempted that uh last year but unfortunately I had one of my products uh seized by Customs um as well as I didn't know there's certain
(04:15) regulations that I had to figure out um so I'm kind of stuck between continuing with a different private label product or getting into wholesale um either in Canada or the US okay cool um and just to ensure that I mentioned this at the top of the conversation so obviously with PL it is I in my experience a lot harder to find um people who have gone through PL quite successfully in Canada it's not quite as common as like Arbitrage sellers wholesale sellers Etc we do have a couple PL sellers that are in this server um so if you ever need help you
(04:51) can certainly reach out to them uh one of them he's not present right now but his Discord username is DC his name is Richard he has built uh a couple multi7 fig PL brands on Amazon and then we also I know that we have Vinnie in here as well he has had prior experience with PL so of course if you ever have any questions specifically regarding PL you can certainly always ask them in here as well probably not in this session for PL specifically but in our chats or if we have uh additional live sessions Etc okay thank you definitely all righty
(05:22) and Danny how about yourself sweet so my name's Danny you can call me Dan I I don't really care um I'm 19 and I've been selling on Amazon Canada for a little bit over a year now so I started January 2023 um I mainly focus on liquidation products but I only buy brand new seals I don't really like open box so on so forth and I'm starting to dip my toes in wholesale as well as a little bit of private label here and there um I only sell on Amazon ca for now I tried Amazon us but it was just too much of a headache and one of the
(05:56) questions I have for this session is how do you go finding Canadian wholesalers who actually sell to Amazon sellers because I've only I've applied to around 50 and I've only got in one acceptance because everyone's like we don't sell to Amazon sellers so on and so forth okay perfect thanks Danny that's a great question so I'll write that down here perfect and uh dixa how about yourself do you want to give us a brief intro for yourself hi everyone um my name is Tia so I just started my Amazon uh Amazon Journey a few months back I started with
(06:37) um Wholesale in US market and um I started with my Canadian Corporation and started reaching out to few wholesalers and Distributors few brands also in US market but I was not able to open account with brand but um with some wholesalers and Distributors but um all the price list that I got and all the product hunting that I did I was not able to find my first profitable product yet so I thought maybe I should look into Canadian Market too and start with online Arbitrage and see if I can get some luck there perfect thanks XA all right and L
(07:22) Professor how about you hi guys uh my name is MK um I've been in the in this Amazon space actively for last 4 months I I I I launched my for I went in Retail Arbitrage and online Arbitrage model since November of last year I'm learning the ropes uh learning the game um got interested in learning about wholesale and like everyone finding uh having challenges in finding Distributors and supplier I'm in the same board as well so that's why I'm here glad to be in this conversation with this group thanks perfect thank you
(08:02) very much all righty and Gina how about you hi guys my name is Gina I have been selling on Amazon actually for about five years um sort of played around with it for the first couple of years and then I decided to get serious I didn't start Amazon until after I was retired so I'm certainly the oldest person in the group um I have had a couple of wholesale accounts but the biggest challenge is thaton has jumped on those products after I've probably been selling them for a year or so you know now they sell them for less than I can even buy them
(08:45) for so that's always a challenge and one of my concerns with wholesale is that I don't really want to do the crossb thing I would much rather find accounts in Canada and accounts in the United States with all all these new crossborder problems that are creeping up as far as daily amounts for crossing over the Border but I just am really concerned with Amazon creating all the issues that they have been about removing detail pages and taking listings down and jumping on listings and tanking listings as to buying in large quantities so I'd
(09:22) really like to hear some feedback from some of the other sellers on some of those issues excellent perfect thanks Gina welcome all righty and Jaden how about yourself sure uh hi everyone my name is Jaden Bas Toronto uh been selling on Amazon for close to pretty much two and a half years now at this point started with a bit of RA OA and in terms of wholesale I've been to a couple of trade shows uh opened up some accounts in some cases successfully however not necessarily found as profitable products or if I do not necessarily sustainable for a
(10:05) long period of time if you ask me um that being said I think with the wholesale I guess some of my concerns is you know to Gina's point is not necessarily about Amazon just you know getting on listings and maybe tanking it as one thing but uh you know what happens if I order 500 of one unit and you know maybe it's 2 3 months worth of inventory versus one month cuz I have to meet a minimum quantity of a wholesaler uh and then you know for some reason that product isn't viable right I mean there are obviously liquidation options
(10:36) but you know how best to mitigate cash flow and risk I guess in that case um and yeah I mean I guess the other thing may or may not be fully related to wholesaling is you know I've been reading about quite a bit of the new Amazon fees being implemented in the US side of things around low inventory you're having to split up your shipments to four different centers and how you know it's cost ing people an extra $200 per pallet to send in I'd be curious to know if that would impact you know whether you choose o versus wholesale or
(11:08) wice versa so yeah perfect those were some great questions thanks Jaden all righty and Jeff how about you hey guys I'm Jeff from uh Montreal I've been selling since I think since August but mostly got serious in December um most of what I do is oh a from OA and ra from Canada to the US uh I don't have really any experience in wholesale so um just trying to learn as much as possible with wholesale and and try to get started with that and hopefully do some Canada wholesale maybe some us wholesale or maybe some crossb
(11:46) wholesale perfect so Jeff for yourself yeah you haven't started wholesale at all as of yet just to be clear I have like one account but it's not really that profitable so no not really okay perfect thanks Jeff all righty and KB how about you if you're present or if you have a mic hi sorry I just joined uh what what do we what's the question that's okay so if you want to and of course you don't have to you don't have to if you don't want to but to just get a brief introduction for yourself kind of where you're at with Amazon and then also if
(12:23) you have any questions that you do want cover today you could ask them as well and we we'll write them down then we'll ensure that we address them throughout the session all right cool so yeah I I've been selling on Amazon since like Co started since 2020 so it's been like four years and I opened my fair share of accounts with Whalers so I kind of know what it's like but I'm just here to learn a little bit h a little bit some my what I already know maybe learn a few things and yeah perfect thanks KB all right thank you all righty and Manish
(12:59) how about you yeah hi good afternoon everyone I am Manish I've been selling on Amazon for a little bit over two years uh now and uh doing Wholesale in Canada and um looking to do more brand direct this here I swear you've been selling on Amazon for more than two years it's only been two years yeah I I feel like I've been talking to you for longer than that well you've been talking to me for a long time perfect thanks manage no problem all righty and Mike if you're present I know last time you didn't have a mic
(13:35) available to yourself but if you do today you certainly feel free to hop on the mic you know ha and give us an introduction to yourself if not that's completely okay if you want to to type it out as well that's completely fine okay so we'll assume either that you're not present or you don't have a mic available so that's fine and then Joe I do see you're typing in some questions there if you also wanted to give us an intro for yourself in the chat that'd be excellent if not that's completely okay all already and shanky
(14:07) how about yourself maybe not present that's already uh Sami are you there and present okay that's okay and just so uh everybody knows Joe is typing in the chat there he has mentions he's from Toronto he's been selling for over a year he's mostly OA and making strides towards implementing wholesale perfect thanks Joe all and Teresa how about yourself if you're present do you want to give us an intro for yourself hi everyone my name is Teresa um started with Amazon Canada last year late last year and then pause
(14:57) and struggling to get to momentum to start again so I don't have experience with wholesale so I'm just trying to learn as much as I can and maybe use this get together to you know push me again to continue what I started thanks thank you for having me perfect thanks Teresa all righty and last but not least Vinnie how about yourself hello everyone good good evening uh my name is Vinnie uh I'm based in Toronto um I basically I'm Amazon Seller a parttime mostly wholesale o and uh ra during Q4 uh I started my journey um in
(15:40) late 2020 with PL and there was lot of competition and lot back and forth then I trumbl around the Jordan and started reselling so it has been almost one and a half years and presently I'm closely working with Jordan on his This Server and I would say tell something new to learn building new network that is what going on at the moment 100% perfect thanks Vinnie all righty so yeah welcome everybody and I appreciate everybody sharing um but yeah we'll get started so I just wanted to start addressing some of the questions that
(16:19) have been coming in and that we had uh gathered from everybody at the top of the conversation so Abdul getting started with yourself because I think that's a good place to start uh Abdul mentioned that he's having problems finding distributors in Canada and again just in case you're just joining the conversation this is kind of be going to be like an open Q&A discussion so of course if you do have any questions if you want to butt in at any time certainly feel free so Abdu with yourself um do you currently have any
(16:43) active wholesale accounts yeah Jordan so I have got like four to five accounts like the active accounts from whom I purchase here in Canada but it's mostly for like crossb Arbitrage I I I have hardly found anything profitable for for Canada to Canada flips right now okay and so when you are searching for potential wholesalers distributors in Canada what's kind of your go-to method to search for those guys so for example if I'm if I want uh let's say for sari so I I would go on to Google and search Sarabi Wholesale Distributors uh near
(17:19) Toronto and um I haven't had much luck with it probably my search wordss are not right I'm not sure but some off for sure okay perfect and then so like say if you're looking for SV distributors near Toronto uh when you do find some of those lists how are you reaching out to those suppliers so I'm mostly reaching out to them saying that hey uh I'm Abdul from so and so company and um we are a wholesale we are a retailers we are online retailers based out of Toronto and looking for some of the products that you carry and we would be really
(17:56) interested in opening an account with you and probably if I if I know a couple of products that I want to buy from them I would give them a names of those products and yeah would would take up the conversation with them from there so I mean uh for me uh opening an account hasn't been honestly that much a problem I mean I guess my approval rate has been around like 50 60% which I believe is fine but the only problem is reaching out to the right people I mean I I only know a couple of wholesellers from whom I actively buy who are not mainstream
(18:26) but other than that I I I'm know other other wholes Sellers and Distributors are those probably everyone is buying from them so the prices are like either a break even or people are even selling at a loss okay for sure and so yeah like those are some great questions and some great concerns because so with finding distributors in Canada I'm actually going to share my screen because I'm more so a visual person so just give me a second I'm gonna get my screen shared [Music] here on to this guy I'm going to change the screen that I'm
(19:03) recording okay so if you want to view my screen you just have to click into my stream where it indicates that I'm live here and so when we are looking for wholesalers we have a couple different approaches when we are looking for new suppliers so yeah like one of the easiest ways to get started is kind of like you said just kind of Googling uh what kind of Distributors we have available um so if you are looking for specific Brands like you can certainly do that like say if we're looking for SRA v um but some of the some of the
(19:32) major big Brands like SRA or like say Mars Bars Etc a lot of those guys are going to be generally harder to find wholesale accounts for um some of them a lot of them are selling to companies like Walmart directly right and in general we probably most of the people in in here will not have the capacity to buy from Brands direct um big Brands like that anyway because if you uh contact someone like Mars or Proctor and Gamble they will tell you that you're able to open accounts with them but they have a minimum spend of like say
(20:06) $500,000 a year and they only send out full truckloads at a time right and so I would assume probably most people in here do not have that capacity so sometimes it's about adjusting your strategies so not saying that we can't open accounts with Sarah ve but I would always start with doing a Google search like you mentioned like sah V uh Sarah V distri and I wouldn't restrict yourself to just Toronto I would say Canada and I would also broaden your horizons to the US if you're willing to um because just because a distributor is
(20:39) not local to yourself does not mean that they're not viable a lot of distributors in Canada they will offer free shipping at certain thresholds um it is obviously nice if you have one that's local to you but I would never restrict yourself for that right so yeah like if we're looking for just Ser Ser distributor in Canada we may start having some issues like we see here we don't really see much come up for Google so in cases like this my personal goto if I want to try to sell SRA V is I would click into the actual
(21:10) website itself for sah probably svca and then I would try to contact the brand itself have you done that at all uh yeah I did that for one of the brands um yeah yeah that actually work yeah that's right but I mean U honestly at contacting stvi and and they just give me the list of retailers probably they I think I believe that they are directly selling to uh maybe retailers um they they don't have any wholesellers at at least in you Canada because they just gave me the whole list of London Drugs Shopper Drug M Walmart CH tiger
(21:46) and places like that to buy produ farm for sure and like companies like SV um I haven't contacted Ser myself so I can't tell you specifically what this brand but it may be more complicated to open up some wholesale accounts with Brands like this but I would always try just like you did about contacting the the brand directly I always prefer to try to get on the phone with the company versus sending an email sometimes we're not able to do that so of course if we do need to send a email first or as an initial contact that is always an option
(22:18) but I always like to try to follow up via phone if I can and if that information is available um cave is a company that is very large and again it's probably going to be a company that's a lot more difficult to open account with so instead of searching for like servy directly I would probably just say try more so searching for Distributors that are like say Health and Beauty distributors in Canada or beauty distributor Canada and you might surprise yourself and one of those cataloges that you take a peek in may
(22:45) end up actually having some cave products oh okay makes sense yeah so kind of broadening your horizons a little bit will probably give you better luck for that um but yeah like for anybody that is not famili familar with opening wholesale accounts what we do two of the primary methods is that we try to find Distributors suppliers directly contact them open accounts with them directly and then also try to contact Brands as well it is a bit of a different approach with each one but uh they are very similar so like with a
(23:16) distributor or supplier directly uh we would just say hey uh I see that you carry these products we're interested in opening an account with you to carry them in our store can you let me know what's required to open an account with you guys and get access to a catalog and then with a brand direct we can do something similar but I would also ask can you let me know what's required to open up a wholesale account with you guys or point me in the direction of some of your local Distributors and that has actually helped a ton and you'll be
(23:44) surprised because quite often the brands will give you a list of their approved Distributors that they have either in Canada as a whole or in your area and then another another thing I like to use as well is say uh say Cheryl from Sarah V gave me a list of their Distributors I will then contact the Distributors and I'll say hey Cheryl from s s v uh gave me your guys' contact information and this is who I am and I want to open up a wholesale account with you so just saying that just kind of mentally with a lot of suppliers kind of
(24:17) IND it gives them a a mental indication that you've been referred by Cheryl directly and that you actually know her and that can add a additional layer of professionalism and also get your foot in the door a little bit easier with the people that just kind of don't pick up those nuances right yeah that makes sense yeah yeah g yeah perfect I yeah I'll give it a shot thank you so much AR yeah of course and of course if you do have any additional follow-up questions that you want to answer for that or anything else you want to go over certainly feel
(24:49) free to ask sure thank you for sure Jordan um some of the things that uh Cory ganam talks about in regards to wholesale accounts deal directly with contacting Distributors and telling them that you're interested in XXX and X product and that you want to buy them even though you don't even know yet whether that distributor has it at a price that would be viable for you and he said it gets him great Rapport because he'll get quick action because right away they think well you're going to spend some money and they're going to
(25:27) send you all the information that you need and then you know maybe you have a negotiating spot at that point to do some negotiating on price but he seems to think that you know going in sort of saying not being blind about you know I'm interested in your products I'm interested in you know seravee moisturizing I'm interested in SRA face cream um can we you know can we get some information about those products and go from there so yeah that can be a effective strategy depending on the typee of distributor that you're dealing with so
(26:02) I think there's a lot of misconceptions when it comes to Distributors and Amazon sellers so like some people at the at the top of the conversation mention that they have problems open up wholesale accounts with distributors especially coming from the Amazon world there's a lot of denial that comes there so yes doing some due diligence for a place that you're contacting especially if you're going to be reaching out to them on the phone uh and doing some background research will certainly go a long way so like for example if we were
(26:29) say contacting a distributor like say cosmopro uh it probably be very hard for most people to open up an account with Cosmo Prof because you technically need a beauty license um but if you were to contact Cosmo Prof they are a multinational Beauty distributor right so it would probably do you well to have some experience or have some knowledge or learn some of the brands that they actually carry and so it actually sounds like you know what you're talking about and I'll tell this from experiences because cosal Prof is actually one of
(26:58) the first wholesale accounts I ever opened up um I had no business opening that account I shouldn't have got that account cuz I do not have a a hair stylist license but it was because how I had experience in that industry because uh my family my sister's a journeyman hair stylist and I had spent time around her and her business so I was able to kind of talk the talk and so I that was the very first wholesale I reached out to I reached out to Cosmo Prof I sent them an email and then on my lunch break from my job that I was
(27:30) working at the time I went into the parking lot inside my vehicle and I had a phone call with the sales rep and we started having a conversation about the brands that they're carrying and he was he was just asking me oh what are you interested in I said oh I'm interested in this brand like say I'm interested in nioxin Old Plex you shouldn't sell those Brands by the way but I'm just using that for example and it just came off that I was from that industry without even me saying it and he was just more prone to be more open with me and
(27:57) because of that he didn't even ask me for any credentials and that was able just by talking to him like that was able to get me through that process and I was also able out of nowhere get a set discount from him just because he thought I had that industry knowledge so like back to your question Gina about going into it about asking for specific Brands I think that can be a good strategy uh but generally speaking when I contact Distributors specifically I do I approach it that I want to talk to them on the phone
(28:28) because I have a much better success rate when I get on the phone with them and I'm also coming to them with the expectation that I'm willing to spend money and that I do want access to their whole catalog but yes I am interested in specific Brands if I know what they're carrying um but I don't specifically approach most Distributors about like contacting them say hey I see you carry SRA I want to see what you have available for SV because realistically most of my suppliers I cont ATT them with the intention of selling a certain brand
(28:59) many of them I never end up selling that brand at all but I end up extracting a ton of other a ton of value from the other products that they provide but it's not a bad strategy so I hope I didn't go too much on a tangent does that kind of answer your question or do you have any follow-ups to that at all it's it's just another way of walking into a situation because I can't even imagine how many cont ta they get daily weekly monthly and if they think that people are just wasting their time and just want a product
(29:35) catalog you don't really enter in on their radar that you could be somebody that could create a commission check for them so that's the only reason I I said that if you're prepared doing this as with anything I think you're going to have better results that's yeah and that that's why one of the reasons why I like to try to get on the phone with Distributors and suppliers is because I don't think most sellers do and that kind of sets you apart and that also helps you kind of address any objections that they may have with actually selling
(30:05) to Amazon sellers versus like the everyday Amazon Seller they'll reach out to a brand via email send them a generic template and say Hey I want to open an account with you and then they'll get rejected from that supplier and then they'll just leave it like that and they'll never contact that supplier again there's initial ways around it um and no not every supplier that we contact is going to allow us to open an account and no not every account that we actually open is going to have a viable catalog but this is a a numbers game and
(30:33) the more people that we're contacting the more accounts that we're opening the more viability we're going to come across right and for suppliers in general from my experience um for us it's about 10% of the people that we contact end up actually open an account with us and then about 10% of those that we open account with actually end up having a viable catalog so realistically it's about 1% of the people that we talk to we actually end up buying from so that seems very discouraging uh but realistically if you
(31:07) are doing some followup and you're doing it quite consistently or you have like say vas doing initial followup for you or you just work into your everyday routine it doesn't take that long to find and contact a 100 different people and then do just do some initial followup here and there and one one distributor it will take a lot of upfront work work we are frontloading a lot of the work that we're doing when we're contacting Distributors but just one viable distributor can profit you tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month
(31:36) or not well a month but over like over the course of a year as well um so it may seem like it's not a good value on your time but it is as soon as you find those valuable Distributors and you're able to extract a lot of value from their catalog so Danny you mentioned about finding wholesalers who will sell to Amazon sellers and so a lot of that comes down to as well some of the things that we already addressed but then also being able to sidestep any objections that some suppliers have and again that comes down to why I personally like to follow
(32:15) up with Distributors on the phone so the way our process used to work is I used to contact uh Distributors by email I always felt that was easier it was quicker uh typically we would have a VA uh do some initial Outreach with them with some random template right and I'll bring over some templates that we have here and of course everybody can have these as well uh but these are some like generic templates that we would use so we'd have a a VA send a generic template to somebody and then we would hope that they get back to
(32:43) us um when we realized that we weren't getting a lot of follow-up from Distributors then we would send these emails and then we set a reminder for about one to two weeks later to actually give them a call if we had a number that was available that increased our open rate a lot more uh especially when we when we actually followed up and we had good conversations with people and then what really increased our overall rate for being able to open accounts was just getting on the phone with them initially and so like you don't necessarily have
(33:15) to do it that way but that is the way that we have found the most success and then I've also found that when you're able to do that you're able to talk to them have a real conversation with them they're able to that you are a professional you're not a tire kicker and you do actually want to spend some money with them which is the main concern when it comes to Distributors a lot of people online you'll see talk about um they say try to offer your distributors or suppliers some type of value or give them a value
(33:42) proposition uh personally I think that's [ __ ] when it comes to Distributors because realistically in my experience Distributors and suppliers or wholesalers it is generally a very transactional based relationship of course you can have good relationships with them there's nothing wrong with sending them chocolates you can have good conversations with them if they get to like you you'll probably have a better a better time better discounts better relationship overall but at the end of the day a distributor is a
(34:09) transactional relationship the more you spend with them generally speaking the more that they're going to like you uh value props come down to when you're kind of trying to work with Brands direct who are trying to build up their brand who are trying to get their catalog on Amazon who are trying to optimize their listings Etc generally speaking probably most Distributors don't care if you tell them that you're going to try and optimize their listings on Amazon because it's not their brand they're just trying to move product
(34:34) right uh as long as you're selling it and you're following their their rules and regulations they probably don't care how you're doing it uh we do have objections often and that is one of the most common objections is that we don't sell to Amazon sellers or people that sell on third party platforms so I always like and again this comes down to be getting them on the phone I always like to ask them so why why is that the case and then sometimes they stumble because they don't actually have an answer they say it as a generic
(35:05) response sometimes you don't get any real information out of it but sometimes they'll actually tell you why right and quite often if they tell you why it'll be because oh we've had so many people contact us get a catalog and then ghost us we've had people contact us get a catalog and then they only want to place an order for like three four or 500 bucks and our minimum order is $1,000 right um or we have Amazon sellers that contact us we have uh Maps minimum advertised pricings or we have brands that they can't sell but they try to get
(35:39) around that anyway and then they all of a sudden they drop the maps and they start pissing off the brands the brands find out who they are they're connected to us and then we get in [ __ ] because we have contracts with these companies that we're supposed to follow right so those are some of the main reasons like the main objections that a lot of those brands have if you actually have a conversation with them and then if you are willing to address those and tell them how you can be a better partnership with them versus a standard Amazon
(36:09) Seller and that you're coming with them and you actually want to spend money with them not always but if you if you do have that conversation with them a lot of them are more prone to give you a chance does that make sense yeah that definitely makes more sense I was thinking about doing like kind of objection handling so on and so forth in that in that sense as well um so usually for example if someone if you reach out to a wholesal or distributor over the phone and you do give them kind of that objection talk do you get further push back like
(36:47) how you give us go sorry Danny your mic's kind of cutting out a little bit it's like uh kind of just stuttery could could you repeat that said when you give them kind of that objection talk in terms of okay like we don't sell to Amazon sellers how do they usually respond or talk or react like can you give us kind of like a sample yeah so I I think probably in the future I'm going to record a call because I'll probably be the best example doing something that's live um but so like you will see people that say that they never
(37:19) tell their suppliers that their Amazon sellers I wholeheartedly disagree with that I'm always open and honest with my suppliers or my potential suppliers uh but I don't typically come into a conversation and say hey I'm Jordan I'm from this company we sell on Amazon let me get a catalog I always approach the conversation that I just want to talk to them get to know them and then potentially turn that into a business relationship right and I try to approach it like with anything else in my life where I'm trying to just one treat them
(37:48) like a human because chances are they deal with a lot of [ __ ] throughout the day and uh I'm just trying to Hope hopefully brighten their day have a professional conversation with them and potentially open an account but I almost always go into it into it without that expectation so my expectations are not crushed right and that helps you carry on a lot easier if you're able to do so so if we if we talk to say Cheryl from sah and I say hey uh I'm Jordan my company uh my my my Amazon compan is called velor so I say hey I'm
(38:23) Jordan I'm from velor we're we're located in Saskatoon um I would love a chance to car your products in our store okay so then Cheryl asks Okay cool so where do you guys sell do you have a brick and mortar and I say no we don't have a break and mortar but we are exclusively online and we do sell on a lot of third- party platforms as well oh okay so just to let you know we do not deal with Amazon sellers or we don't deal with anybody that sells on third party platforms okay not a problem uh I completely understand do you mind me
(38:50) asking why and then you'll get a couple things from Cheryl from Sarah ve uh quite often they will be be a little um a little taken because they're not used to people asking followup questions and a lot of time they won't really know what to respond with and then I just kind of let that silence sit there and let them answer it so that they can come to the conclusion as to why they think Amazon sellers are not good sellers um if they actually give you an answer and they say it was because of this reason say it's because we've had bad
(39:19) experiences with Amazon sellers in the past okay cool do you mind me asking uh kind of what experiences you had with Amazon sellers because I've been doing this and you can kind of FIB here but you can say I've been doing this for quite some time like say me and my team have 10 20 years experience or whatever and you know we've had really good relationships with our suppliers uh we're we're here we're willing to spend some money and this is a brand that we've kind of been thinking about and targeting for quite some time so I think
(39:44) that we could have some good potential if you're willing to give us a chance um and then it just comes down to kind of what back and forth you have with them and if you think about the potential objections that you're going to have from that supplier already having some responses already ready ready to go and answering them confidently that can get you very far so like what would be another objection that you have faced Danny uh just just the fact that it's Amazon Seller that's basically the main objection uh other than that they also
(40:16) say Amazon sellers I kind of talked to one they say Amazon sellers don't really have a like a lot of spend with them comparing to like brick and mortar um but you know that's those are the main push back I get yeah and that's completely that's completely valid so if they say yeah like uh Amazon sellers in general they don't spend enough money with us or they don't meet our minimum order quantities okay cool that's completely understandable and if you don't want to open account with me today I completely understand but I come and
(40:44) like this is kind of like the budget that we have per month and this is what we're willing to put towards your spend for the month depending of course on your catalog so if you would like and you don't have to you don't have to necessarily follow through like say if like we have probably the budget to open like like say a $10,000 PO with you guys you don't necessarily have to follow up with that but just hearing the uh the numbers intrigues a lot of suppliers and may open that chance up for you a little bit more but it's like
(41:11) okay cool like we've we've budgeted that we can probably do like an initial $10,000 PO with you guys assuming depending on what products you carry so like if you are concerned that we can't spend money with you um this is what we're willing to probably do so if you are willing to give us a catalog I can put together a PO and me and my team can have put together probably within the next week then we can actually see um how this is going to go I can put together what we're interested in for a PO and then you can let me know if you
(41:38) want to proceed right maybe my PO will be five grand maybe my PO will be 10 grand but um we can put that together you can see what we're interested in and then you can see what we're willing to spend see thank you so much Jordan Jordan can we assume that what Danny's talking about about is that they're saying no to uh we don't want any Amazon sellers but they don't have a presence on Amazon at this point in time and if that is the case would you entertain a conversation with them that says how would you like to let us um
(42:14) test a couple of your products to show you what we could do over the next couple of months and that almost potentially could lead to exclusivity down the road if things went swimmingly well definitely um but like when it comes to exclusivity so not saying that it can happen but we're less prone to get exclusive deals with Distributors versus if we are dealing with Brands directly right if we are talking to if we are talk to Brands direct that is something that we typically want to strive for that's obviously like that's
(42:48) like the the the best thing that could ever happen it's very hard to do and a lot of people push that oh you need brand exclusivity and they say that's the only way to do it it's actually very difficult to do and a lot of people do not do that but if we can come to that uh to that road that's obviously ideal so like Distributors specifically yeah when we're talking to them and we say they say that we don't have any presents on Amazon or we don't want any presence on Amazon yeah coming to them with saying oh like if you're willing to give
(43:16) us a test maybe we can add on x amount to your to your monthly spend right that is certainly a viable option but generally speaking with Distributors I probably would approach them with the expectation of exclusivity unless it's a conversation that they potentially mention because I in most cases it's probably not an option deal with a distributor direct it's going to be based on the Brand's approval of course yeah cool uh ask question yeah yeah no go ahead uh uh towards the discussion I want to share an experience so I re I
(43:58) reached out to couple of wholesalers and I was able to open some accounts one of the pushback that I got uh on one of the wholesaler who declined to open the account was because my address was a home address then I changed it to a UPS address uh and we still went back and forth it was all over phone and I was able to open an account with them in this in this method when I open three wholesale accounts and I went through their catalog almost 99% of their products were already on Amazon selling for Amazon so that so I like I was doing that type of
(44:40) sourcing and it and I when I Scout through their website and catalog I couldn't find a viable product then when I went back to keepa try to find which one is working and then using that reverse method to find for for example that SRA distributors near Toronto I even if I find SRA Distributors to that point like they don't want to work with Amazon sellers but most of the time I don't find those those products that I think is viable and I want to look for uh a wholesaler or distributor who wants to open who is carrying that brand I
(45:20) don't find find wholesaler that way and when I go when I find wholesaler for first and and try to go through their catalog I don't find M like almost a lot of product not viable at all or Amazon is already selling or some big retailer or or big Amazon seller is already selling can you share some comment or tips or anything on on that 100% so just like with say if we're doing OA sourcing uh when we're sourcing with wholesale it's very similar in that we are basically trying to weed through and get through as much junk as possible and
(45:59) yeah probably like 90 to 99% of the products that we're looking at at any given Wholesale catalog are not going to make sense it's up to us to extract the ones that do make sense right so I want to ask a follow-up question before we continue on here um what kind of expectations profit wise and Roi wise do you have when you're looking at wholesale products so because I I just started uh I was trying to find anything which is between three to $5 in profit per unit but even like I I wanted to work with like the ones that I opened wholesale
(46:33) account with I I tried to work with them and they have various level of uh uh purchase category I like so here's one with this wholesaler I went to their lowest uh purchase order category which was $1000 and I I scoured through their website but I couldn't find anything and then after a couple of uh weeks or so something that is like of course they're going to disable my account cuz I'm not buying from them so so and then yeah 2 five dollar per unit is what what what I try to aim for okay and so with this particular supplier with the different
(47:10) categories that they have I assume the different categories or different levels of discounts is that correct that's right uh and I I Tred to search in two ways I Tred to search this Distributors by riding exactly srai Distributors Missi Saga when I don't find it I go to keep a find the root category tree and I search like Beauty like you said Beauty and whatever Health products distributors and I find Brands but not the ones that I'm looking for or the ones that they're carrying it's already uh with some big big reseller on Amazon
(47:48) Okay cool so like the first thing and that's kind of why one of the reasons why I like to do more of a shotgun approach when it comes comes to finding Distributors whereas like instead of trying to find a distributor that carries a specific brand I like to find the distributor themselves and try to get access to their entire catalog because in general if you have a supplier that's carrying more than one brand say they carry a 100 different brands and their catalog is 10,000 products along long you're going to have
(48:12) a much higher hit rate chance versus somebody that just carries s right so that's why I try in general to find suppliers that carry a wide range of products and I try to get access to their entire catalog versus just saying hey I see you carry SRA I would like to get access to your SRA catalog realistically I want to get access to their entire catalog I want to see everything that they offer and see what we can make what we can make do with that right um on when you are looking through the catalog when you're sourcing
(48:43) it h what are you doing to source that catalog like how are you sourcing it so so visiting the catalog so I asked the once I am approved I asked the the sales guy that uh where is where can I see do you have a catalog in PDF or Excel or in any way form uh the ones that I have opened account with they they were in website so they said everything is in the website look through it and and I went Page by Page category by category and the ones that I'm talking about these are so so this one of one of this wholesaler he's on uh
(49:17) cleaning supplies industrial and scientific so he has all sorts of industrial and scientific brand all great Brands and if you when you look look at them in in keepa they they're selling really well but it's just I can't go get in because either Amazon is already there or a big reseller is there or or or or it doesn't work for me in terms of purchase order or something like that so yeah and like some of these companies like you're dealing with it may come down to what's making the big difference is your access to Capital and
(49:46) your ability to negotiate with that supplier right because so like we can never approach products and I think a lot of people do this is that they approach products when they're sourcing that oh this product is losing money because I I can Source at this price so that means all sellers have to buy it at this price right and so they'd assume that the seller is breaking even or losing money on this product that's not the case it can certainly happen but chances are that seller is actually just getting better pricing than what you are
(50:14) either from the same supplier they negotiate at a better rate or they have a different supplier that gives them better pricing right so a lot a lot to do with wholesale to make a lot of wholesale catalogs viable is the the ability to be able to do negotiation on your pricing because a lot of wholesale cataloges they will not make sense at their regular catalog price and it's up to us to negotiate a discount that is reasonable that will help it make sense and the easiest best way we're able to do that is if we come to a
(50:48) wholesaler with the expectation that we're willing to spend money with them the more money we're willing to spend the more that they are % willing to work with us and potentially negotiate discounts with us if we come to a supplier only willing to say spend $1,000 chances are most suppliers will probably not be willing to give you a discount or not a high discount for doing so if we come if we approach a supplier with the intention of my initial PO with them is going to be 10 20 30 $50,000 they see that and they're like
(51:18) oh I can probably do this with them every single month they're more willing to negotiate better discounts with yourself so yes when we first get started with wholesale it's going to be a lot more complicated and we're going we're going to have to find um a lot more I guess you call it Niche uh suppliers that have a better chance of making sense for us that's not to say that we can't negotiate discounts with a smaller budget but we're just going to be less successful being able to do so thanks thanks for your comment I I
(51:49) want to share a second story um this is uh for how I reached out to to uh to the brand itself I'll I'll I'll I'll I I'll tell which brand it was so this was anchor Hawkins I tried to reach out to their sales director in USA I wanted to get uh get approval for this I couldn't find any wholesaler or suppliers I was seeing can Canadian Tire was carrying these anchor Hawking products uh anyways I reached out to the director and Linkedin he reached out back to me and gave me their Distributors and wholesalers uh info the ones that have
(52:24) uh exclusivity I guess or uh contract with them in place in Canada I reached out to the distributor with the product that I was uh looking to buy the distributor says he never saw that product for this brand ever and I gave him the link of Canadian Tire that they're already selling it but have you ever come across something like that where the Distributors saying hey we have not seen this product for this brand but they are the one who are who has a license or or something like that to sell for the brand yeah I've seen
(52:53) that a couple times um and there could be a couple things that's going on either like they maybe they don't want to be truthful or there could be a disconnect from the distributor and the actual brand as well maybe they do carry some of their products but they're like smaller Niche products or maybe they used to carry them and they don't anymore and they haven't been removed off the brands distributor list that happens uh not everybody has proper systems in place but like say if that were to happen to you in that scenario
(53:20) where I contact distributor and I say hey uh I was told by anchor Hawking by you know Steve at Anor Hawking that you guys carry the products I would like a chance to open account with you guys and see what you guys have to offer they come back and they tell you well no we don't carry anchor Hawking okay I must have been mistaken not a problem um but this is who I am I am the seller uh I understand that you carry other household goods or housewares Etc would you be interested in potentially opening an account with myself because just
(53:46) because they don't carry anchor Hawking doesn't mean that they don't carry uh like other other products like Pyrex or something right or other products that will make sense makes sense thanks a lot so yeah I would still see to I would still try to see if there's an opportunity there um and again most of the time there will not be opportunity there but you never know until you try and the more you try and the more consistent you are the more you're going to find that you do end up finding viable opportunities but you're
(54:15) going to have a ton of rejection up front yeah yeah absolutely thanks for sure um Joe I just wanted to to address some of the questions that you had here since you've been asking a couple questions um what is the default or how do you protect yourself from purchasing counterfeit or stolen products so that is doing some due diligence Upfront for your suppliers so you want to ensure that you are vetting your suppliers and that you're not buying from Shady places and that has to do with you know uh doing some research on Google uh
(54:49) reaching out to your network if you have other people in your network like groups like this and just ask people if they're familiar with this distributor uh I would also highly recommend that you search their address on something more like Google Maps and ensure that they actually have a warehouse and that you actually see a warehouse and or like their actual signage on that warehouse um if it's local to you drive over there have a conversation with them um and then yeah like if you you can look up the websites on like places like trust
(55:15) pilot uh scam advisor Etc um but yeah just try and do everything that you can to ensure that the distributor is legit if you come across a website that looks like it's just kind of SL together or that looks like it's kind of shady um I would probably proceed with caution with those people um but yeah it's just about doing that kind of upfront due diligence as much as you can and then of course in general when you first open an account with a wholesale supplier I would always typically recommend that your initial
(55:44) purchases are done with credit card if possible because you are insured in the event that there is ever any fraudulent activities that happen you will find a lot of wholesale suppliers will only take you know uh payment via ETF or wire or E transfer right um I always unless I'm very confident with that supplier like they're a multinational supplier I always try to do my initial purchase with credit card so that if anything funny does happen if they screw around um I'm protected right um and then you ask what is the
(56:17) default logistic setup agreement with a supplier direct to Amazon or LTL to a prep Center so yeah like there are some distributors that will prep products and send them to Amazon your on your behalf again when you first start with a distributor even if they offer that service I wouldn't do that to begin with because one you want to ensure you're vetting them fully UPF front you want to ensure you're getting the products they're not they don't come too damaged they are legit Etc so I'd say you should always get them sent to yourself first
(56:46) if possible um if they do offer a service where they do prep and send to Amazon your behalf we would have to ensure that you you talk to the rep and ensure they understand Amazon's requirements you walk through the process of how it's going to be done as in if you're going to build a shipment if you're going to give them a child account access they're going to build it Etc and you need to ensure that they understand prep guidelines when it comes to Amazon um because I'm kind of a quality control freak generally speaking I would
(57:16) rather have it come to us ensure that we can assess the quality control insir it's done to our standards and send it out versus them do it the only time I ever have Distributors do that is if it's products that just require FN skes but again you can kind of work into your own processes of whatever works best for you like if you are having them like do like polybagging or bubble wrap or anything like that you want to ensure that they are doing it to your standard and that they do understand Amazon's actual guidelines because if they [ __ ]
(57:46) up and they do something wrong it's on you it's not on them if they put your account in Jeopardy it's on you right so it's up to you to be able to manage that and then follow up with Logistics question do you find yourself organizing shipping from supplier to your prep Center or Amazon so most suppliers at a certain threshold they will they will offer free freight uh but there are some that will organize it for you for a cost or you're required to organize it yourself so that is an important question when you do open an account
(58:17) with a wholesale supplier uh what is your Freight situation like do you offer free freight do we have to organize it ourselves Etc and and then you start organizing it from there and see what option works best for you and then I'll just answer the a couple additional questions that you have here then we'll open back up to the live Q&A here uh so Joe asks do you have a sales CRM to keep track of supplier Outreach Outsourcing into a VA at least for initial email or online application so what you see on my screen right here
(58:44) is a template that I built for the community a while back you can of course have access to this I'll put a link to this in the chat and this is just kind of a basic CRM that you can use with somebody like a like yourself with a VA Etc and this is just to keep track of who you've contacted if you followed up with them what stage in the application process you're with Etc right and these just have little color coordinations that you can use so like when you are um it should if you if this is a high priority this will turn the field red
(59:13) for you right uh you can indicate where you found the source so you know how you're finding your suppliers you can indicate what stage in the application process you are with them so like if you contacted them if you're communicating NE iation account setup Etc uh the certain things based on status like say open it'll turn the field correspondingly or one yeah if you win it it turns green if you put lost it turns red so it's just a nice visual indicator so I would recommend using something exactly like this to fill out
(59:45) this information and keep track of where you are in the contact or the account set up with a supplier even if you have like say a VA um that you want to just just build a list for you for you to contact or for you guys to contact later this is also a great option they can start filling in information for you and then he also asks uh what info do you include in your info websites that suppliers see when reaching out um I'm assuming that you're asking for like an actual professional website or like a landing page uh I used to have a landing
(1:00:16) page uh I don't anymore I don't find it's actually needed and in general suppliers tend tended to have more question s then uh I felt that the value was actually being provided because that would give them access to like a landing page and they say okay why see these things about your company but I don't see a store so like what do you guys do right um when we have the conversations about like well where do you guys sell what's your website Etc if it's a supplier that I'm actually interested in opening account with and I know that they are
(1:00:45) legit more often than not I'll just send them a link to my Amazon storefront and say after we already had that conversation I'm an Amazon Seller here's all the products that we carry okay so then just kind of going down the list here about um some initial questions that we had at the top of the conversation as well so Gina mentioned that uh she has some concerns about Amazon jumping on listings and issues with uh listings being removed like uh restrictions npn restrictions compliance stuff like that and so I assume that is
(1:01:21) a concern about going deep with products and so I've always approached wholesale and I've also approached Arbitrage the same way I've kind of when I did more Arbitrage I've kind of always approached it in kind of a wholesale manner where I am trying to do more volume but I'm also trying to limit my risk as much as possible and that's why I've always been a big proponent of only realistically carrying one month's worth of inventory at a time right so with these new fees that are coming up about like the low inventory fees
(1:01:54) we will have to adjust that slightly but I've always been a fan of really just stalking one month wor of inventory at a time because that ensures that we are relatively liquid and if anything does happen it really much so limits our risk so when I look at a listing and I analyze a listing we are still technically doing some initial test buys when we look at listing and say we determined that on this listing we can probably sell 24 units a month so then we will bring in 24 units send it in and then assess it after we get some sales
(1:02:23) data but then assuming that we're able to sell 24 units in a in a uh 30-day period we will then consistently stock that amount of units on the POS that we that we're buying and so that helps limit our risks in the event that Amazon does jump on a listing and starts to kill it um usually if that happens we will often get some type of warning where that they'll come in stock and then they'll go out of stock and we're able to sell out or we're able to liquidate at either a close to break even or maybe a slight loss um also like the nice thing with
(1:02:55) wholesale is again your inventory is relatively liquid so like say if Amazon does hop on a listing and it's just absolutely kills it where you're not profitable at all you still have Avenues with that inventory it may not be favorable but you can always call it back and you can sell at places like locally flea markets eBay Etc and that's a good way to liquidate some inventory as well and you should be willing to do that and that's realistically a part of the process that we have to deal with um because that's going to happen whether
(1:03:23) or not you have listings die whether or not you have returns that are sellable but not sellable back on Amazon Etc um as for like listings getting taken down um that obviously does happen but I think a lot of people blow it out of proportion more than it needs to be because the listings that are being taken down are almost always for a specific reason so most of the listings that are being taken down are because like say one that we had recently in I think it was the public chat there were some issues with with Polish Choice that
(1:03:55) was having like IP and counterfeit issues uh most of the brands that are being taken down are because like they're missing like npn numbers or D numbers so if you are buying products in Canada from reputable Distributors most of the time you don't need to worry about that to begin with right because if you do if you do have a product that requires to be registered in Canada and have an npn if you're buying it from a Canadian distributor chances are already has that if it doesn't have that on Amazon's back end and you do get
(1:04:23) restricted from that listing uh npn appeals are actually relatively easy to do assuming that your product actually has an npn on it and that's something that uh I can always walk you through if you ever um if you ever need to do that and I have a little blog post about how to do it as well so Gina I'm not sure does that answer your questions that you had there yeah I I think those are General concerns that a lot of people have too just because you know Amazon is changing daily weekly you know it's crazy lately
(1:04:54) um but are you suggesting then that you would try and do a test buy through your wholesaler or distributor for your first order and explain that to them as in you know that that will determine how you move forward yeah so like it's going to be dependent on your budget and again this is why I like to have open transparent conversations with my suppliers because if I come if I come to a supplier and say I only have access to $2,000 I'm willing to spend with them after like I have those Nal conversations we have a good flow when I
(1:05:28) get the catalog um I say okay hey this is what I like this is kind of our process these are how many units I buy this is what I'm willing to spend then that way it doesn't set any false expectations and they don't think that you're going to be dropping 20 grand with them right and there's like as long as you're meeting their minimum order quantity that shouldn't matter right um but yeah like with our with our suppliers we are typically looking at products that I want to be able to profit a minimum $50 per as per month those are
(1:05:56) products that I am specifically sourcing those are my minimum requirements versus having a minimum profit or or Roi requirement I've always found that works better for us um so when I'm looking at these products and say I look at product number one that this product sells 50 units per month it profits $2 per unit and there's one other seller on this product so that means that I'm going to be seller number two I can probably I can probably reasonably expect to sell 25 units of this product per month and I'm going to profit $2 per unit so that
(1:06:29) meets my minimum that meets my minimum requirement so I'm probably going to place this in my PO um and for our initial test buy we were not always like this like we would definitely when we had lower Capital we would buy less units to begin with but now our initial test buy is basically what we figure we can sell in a one month period but when we first started with uh wholesale suppliers and we had less Capital you know a lot of times we would buy 20 different SKS and we' buy six or 12 of each just because we didn't have
(1:07:01) access to as much capital and we wanted that we wanted to ensure that we had the data before we went deeper into it and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that yeah gotcha thank you I jump in about your comment about not having a minimum Roi yep so one thing I've noticed I guess depends on the category and what product you're selling is that with that thought um without first knowing the return rate um if the margin if they always too small then if you know if you're getting like 10% return rate and if you're Roi
(1:07:36) is say 10% or whatever you end up getting wiped out so it it depends so when I say that we don't have minimum profit Roi requirements like I'm still I'm not I'm probably not going to be buying items that profit or like have an Roi of like 5% right um but my main focus is to ensure that's going to profit me $50 per month if for example we look at an item like say that profits us I don't know $150 or a dollar and has a 10% Roi I'm going to be looking for products that are relatively price stable I'm going to ensure that I understand our costs so I
(1:08:09) understand what our production cost per unit is like I know how much our warehousing costs I know how how much my labor costs my utilities my supplies in a month Etc and then we can divide that by how many units we're putting through our warehouse per month so we know how much each unit is costing us to produce so I can understand and I can factor that into my fees that okay this has cost me this much I have that factored in uh I can see that this price on keepa is very stable right so I can see that this price only fluctuates like say 15
(1:08:37) cents and it's done so for the last three months so I'm very confident that history will repeat itself and it'll probably stay like this okay so generally speaking outside a Q4 we're probably not going to be losing money but we also ensure that we keep an eye on our inventory so that if the price does start dropping um and there's no indication that's going to recover we ensure that we are watching our inventory and or our repricers are set up so that we can clear out that inventory before we start losing money
(1:09:07) so our repricers are set up relatively aggressive to ensure that we are staying price competitive so that in the event that the price is coming down we're still able to sell those units and get out of them before we start losing money does that make sense yeah that makes sense in regards to pricing um I was referring to uh returns um cuz Amazon is a very generous return policy um oh gotcha I think it depends on on definitely on the product but um yeah get you get Returns the guy uses it it's smashed or broken or
(1:09:39) whatever um you just end up eating that so um that's something I do factor in um gotcha yes looking a product I'm buying 100% And that's that's a good point to bring up so what I'm talking about for most of the products that we're selling when it comes to like say a 10% a those would be items in the grocery or health and beauty category so those are items that can't technically be returned we will still get some returns from them but the return rate is extremely low but yeah if you're selling something like
(1:10:04) say in toys or Electronics you probably do not want to find products that only have a very low Roi 100% uh so Joe said do you have an online store that you share with suppliers does it have to be relevant to the supplier niche example tool a Shopify site by trying to open account with a Beauty Supplier no I don't and I know that's a method that some people use but again I think some of that comes back to not being fully open and honest with a lot of suppliers because if you're trying to like say just open up a
(1:10:38) a front Shopify store just to say that you're not an Amazon Seller that is part of like the process of not being super honest um I do know some people do that or they use other people's uh businesses that they know as like they say that this is their business to open up accounts with like say Pharmacy Etc I don't personally like to do that uh I prefer to have long-term relationships with my suppliers and part of that is being open and honest and transparent and that pre that prevents a lot of headaches that could potentially happen
(1:11:06) in the future uh somi says does Amazon Canada accept all seller invoices for wholesale technically speaking they should but they don't so if the invoice that you're getting from the the supplier just doesn't look like an invoice or they don't provide a proper invoice Amazon won't accept it uh generally speaking most invoices as long as it looks like a supplier invoice they should accept it but you can never guarantee that they will 100% of the time probably like 90 95% of the time assuming it looks like a proper invoice
(1:11:40) they should but it's never 100% guaranteed Mike said what about forming a group to purchase wholesale yeah 100% and like if you have some people in your network or even people like in here that you want to connect with that say um we all have interest in the toys category uh we are all relatively newer Sellers and say we all only have like say $1,000 budget each but you can pull together five people now our budget is five grand assuming that you can trust those people and pull an order together that's a great way to start with wholesale and
(1:12:14) increase your budget you just have to make those connections and of course you can do that in groups just like this uh Joe says what does that typically look like logistically yeah how does that look if like say one person's putting in the purchase order with the wholesaler like do we then buy inventory like how do we show the transaction I guess it's just a gas transaction at that point between one person to the other right so yeah like you would have to be relatively open because there is going to be a lack of chain of custody
(1:12:50) and a lack of documentation so there's of course going to be be a higher risk with that in the event you ever get asked for documentation uh the people that you are purchasing with whoever has the initial invoice you should be willing to share with the other like the rest of the group uh in the event that there's ever any questions about authenticity um or if you need to provide documentation like for reimbursement Etc but say if you need to provide documentation for reimbursement it's probably not going to have your
(1:13:17) information on it so you will probably have less of a chance of being reimbursed for those units so again that's kind of a a pro and con you have to weigh with doing that method there does come additional risks with doing so it can have Pros because you can pull your money together but it can have those additional cons as well and you have to be willing to take on those cons okay and so uh Nick Amazon FBA uh you had mentioned at the top of the conversation that you are kind of looking at getting into PL um so what
(1:13:53) kind of success have you had so far with wholesale uh I I dabbed into wholesale very little um before I selected uh po so really was just reaching out to a few suppliers um trying to get um what do you call the catalog list um I put very little effort into it maybe like a week's worth um before I just decided to go the pl route instead okay um but my P I I I didn't have a chance to actually fully test it because my shipment got seized by the American Customs right and then it also ended up that Amazon themselves started
(1:14:34) taking out that product category as well uh so kind of two uh two things that were against me so now I'm back to the drawing board and I'm just reevaluating whether I want to do a PL with a different product category or do I want to venture in and go into wholesale I think from my research the pl is maybe less predictable because you do have to spend money on the PPC and creating a new um a new listing um whereas PL you could sort of do the or sorry not PL H you could do the research more up front and have a bit more
(1:15:08) certainty but potentially lower margins and more competition so yeah I'm just kind of back to square one and seeing what I want to do for my next move for sure so do you mind me asking kind of why you decided that you were wanting to explore the pl route uh I think it was just a little bit easier to do upfront um I had more control over what product I wanted to pick um looking at the competition and sort of understanding the margins whereas with wholesale like you said like you know out of 100 contacts uh you
(1:15:39) might get 10 that you get the cat catalog from and then out of those 10 um another 10% would be viable so a 1% um I guess you'd say success rate so it kind of felt a bit more like searching for an needle and a hay stock so more upfront work but then I do understand that you know if you do end up doing the work upfront and you end up with you know a dozen products uh going on then it's just sort of reordering and things are smooth sailing so different trade-offs for sure I would also argue that uh private label kind of has some of those
(1:16:09) same qualities like the the quotequote work up front um but like in general realistically speaking private label is probably one of the hardest business models on Amazon but it can be one of the most profitable because if you build an actual brand you do have more exit potential to actually sell that brand but you also have to have realistic expectations that majority of the brands that are private label will probably not have exit potential right and chances are some of the private label brands that you do attempt to
(1:16:39) build will probably fail so there is more upfront cost with private label um it is I don't have private label experience I've never done it myself but I have talked to some people that are pretty heavy in the space and it is still definitely possible it is still definitely very profitable if you're able to do it successfully um but it is generally speaking more difficult and it sounds like you've already experienced some of those things where you have logistic issues um if you talk to Vinnie who's in the chat here he had previously
(1:17:10) started a private label brand and he had mentioned as well that he was having some success with it but then all of a sudden the manufacturer basically start selling the exact same product and they're able to sell it at a much lower price because they're the ones that are producing it right and then in those cases unless you're already established very well a lot of times those end up being a lot difficult a lot more difficult to proceed with right so it is still definitely a viable business model but I think it's a lot more difficult
(1:17:36) than what what a lot of people think corre yeah I agree with that um so my would say strategy but I'm open to trying both um I do have sort of my uh like my base of core products that I sell on Amazon on right now which is sort of set up and runs pretty smooth so it's just it's sort of plateaued in in its Market size in Canada so um it's good that it kind of runs itself and now that I've got Capital coming in every month um as well as some more freed up time so I've got the ability to actually try both now definitely and you
(1:18:10) mentioned that those brands that you just discussed that is a some you're purchasing from a wholesale supplier is that correct uh it's it's I think I found a really unique product so I guess I'm technically purching it purchasing it wholesale um but I don't really have like a official wholesale arrangement with this company um so they've established a pretty good brand in the US but there's really no um nobody filling that Gap within Canada so I'm sort of just taking advantage of this um while the're Going's good okay
(1:18:44) so you're just kind of buying it as a consumer then selling it on in the Canadian Market correct yeah okay cool cool so it's basically Arbitrage essentially it's yeah it's just an Arbitrage yeah okay cool um with that obviously I don't want you to share any details but do you mind ask do you mind me asking what category that product is in uh I could broadly say it's electronic Okay cool so yeah I just asked because there are obviously some restrictions when it comes to products especially that are being sold in the US
(1:19:12) and I just want to make sure that we're not going to have issues in the future so yeah like with with electronics there's not a ton of restrictions there are some with like radio communication equipment that you need certain certifications for but as far as I know outside of that I don't think there's a ton of additional restrictions that are Canada specific not that I've come across I've noticed that because there's the listing ends up being both on the US and Canada that especially in this Niche that I'm in it's having some issues the um the US
(1:19:49) regulations are taking these listings offline now so they have I guess additional rules that we don't have at the moment right so obviously yeah that would just be something that of course you want to watch to ensure that you don't get stuck of I'm trying to diversify out to either PL or wholesale or both definitely cool okay uh Joe asked uh what are some prep requirements or things to have ready when ordering from suppliers based in the US so it depends like are you asking about bringing products cross border and obviously if you're having
(1:20:26) them sent directly to the us it's going to be less logistical if you're having them sent to Canada you have to ask a few things you have to ask your supplier if they are able to ship the products direct to you and if they know the the the NAFTA documentation or kusma documentation I think it's called kusma now um if they're able to fill that information out for you and include or have shipping options that include duties with them uh you you can get some suppliers that will ship direct to you uh some of them they will not fill out
(1:20:56) that documentation you have to get it sent to a broker on the border which you can just like basically use ups for your first time uh they will get the documentation filled out for you they will charge you a small fee to do so and then you you're obviously responsible to pay the corresponding duties taxes Etc right or you have to utilize something like a crossborder service and so you'd have to factor in those fees right and if you look at our guides and resources in the server uh we have something called a a landing cost calculator uh
(1:21:27) let me just bring it up here so this isn't perfect and this is based on crossb pickups but you can basically make a copy of this and you can fill out some of the information in the white uh I think there was a video attached to the getbook article on how to utilize this and this will give you an estimate an estimation about uh how how much your units are actually going to cost after the additional fees so these are things that you just want to dig deep into before you you try to bring those products across border ideally your
(1:21:56) supplier will be be able to provide those options for you some do if they deal with a lot of Canadians but many don't okay so Jaden at the top of the conversation mentioned that um he has some concerns about going deep on listings uh kind of about overall risk management and kind of some concerns about factor in the additional Amazon Fe so about going deep on the listings uh I kind of mentioned earlier in the conversation when we're addressing some questions from Gina there about how I limit our risk just by kind of stalking
(1:22:35) 30 days worth of inventory at a time um of course as with any other business Amazon does have risk factors we can't get away from that it's not a risk free business basically any business that is going to be profitable in any sense has some form of risk to it uh but those are the things that we take into consideration to limit our risk and like I mentioned with the products that we are buying uh this is a relatively liquid business so even if we even if something happens to a listing assuming that we're not doing
(1:23:08) shitty things to get our account deactivated we still have access to the physical products so we can still get those products back and try to liquidate them somewhere else so it's obviously not ideal scenarios but we still have access to those assets right so as that we're not going crazy with our purchase numbers and trying to stock 180 days worth of inventory our risk is relatively limited but the kind of risk that you have personally is going to be dependent on your on your overall capital and cash flow because if you
(1:23:38) have all your cash flow tied up in one product even though that's only one month's worth of product that may not be a a good situation for yourself you you would probably want to diversify a lot more because yes there are issues that can happen on Amazon like listings getting taken down buy box dropping Amazon killing listings Etc so if you have access to lower Capital you probably want to either try to raise more Capital before you start going deeper into wholesale or just trying to get a more diverse selection of
(1:24:11) products and that goes with also Brands and specific categories as well so like say for example we want to sell SRA because we've talked about s in this ation we probably don't want to put our entire budget only into Ser even if it sells super well because we want to manage the potential risk that we have uh because if we look at the situations that are happening in the US right now uh all brands that are being sold by L'Oreal or that are manufactured by L'Oreal which includes Keels which I believe also includes cave are getting
(1:24:45) completely restricted to be able to sell and you cannot even request approval so if you have your entire capital tied up in SV and that happens in Canada then yeah we still have access to the product but our inventory is going to be tied up for a period of time until we're able to liquidate that so I would still be a bigger fan of diversifying the brands that we carry and also the categories that we carry for that reason does that make sense Jaden do you have any other questions regarding that I no that that makes sense right I
(1:25:19) think it's a matter of risk taking is you know the cut is a supplier saying hey you need to buy x amount maybe it's diversifying across multiple skews right or being transparent up front about hey you know I'm doing a test buy and then next month I'll do more if it works out right so yeah and I what I don't know I was been reading a lot about like the US fees and things like that which are coming about with you know storage and inventory or low inventory Etc um obviously as that may translate to car down the line um is that a concern for
(1:25:55) Arbitrage sellers is that a concern for wholesaler wholesaler when we're doing wholesale considering our margins are much lower like I mean there's risk in both ways right yeah and so to address the initial thing about risk management before we get into the fees is generally speaking I don't like to have more than about 10% of my Capital tied up in any single brand and that's just kind of personal risk management for myself right I will technically spend more with individual suppliers but I would still recommend
(1:26:25) that you diversify from just trying to have one supplier because if you only have one or two suppliers and that's where all your sales are coming from again you open yourself up to more risk because if that supplier goes under if they start selling products themselves if they decide to cut you off you are opening yourself to a lot of risk so you don't need a ton of wholesale suppliers to be viable in Canada but you should have more than just a couple and you should still always always be sourcing new products and you should still always
(1:26:55) be trying to add new potential suppliers into your catalog as you grow accordingly so that is a smart risk management uh when it comes to the additional Amazon fees so yeah there's a couple things that are happening right now so there are the like the inventory placement fees that as far as I can see I haven't seen it uh in any our shipments that we've done since beginning of March that is only in the US and basically what's happening is Amazon is basically requiring you to split your shipments and getting you to send your shipments
(1:27:29) more either directly to the warehouse where they're going to end up or more closely to the warehouses where they're going to end up instead of them getting it sent to All One warehouse and then them transfering it for you um and if you don't do that they charge you massive amounts of fees and if you do do that obviously it's just more logistical cost because instead of sending a th000 units to one Warehouse you have to send 1,000 units to four different warehouses and that cost more logistically right and so as far as I can see that is only
(1:27:56) in the US as far as I can see most people are saying on average it's costing them about an additional 40 cents per unit right um so yeah if you are a US seller you do need to factor these things in it does look like there are some loopholes that can be manipulated right now to bypass these for now we don't know if those are going to get closed in the future but if you are a US seller and again I'm just assuming this I haven't tested it in the US but based on the things I've seen I believe it works is when you are making
(1:28:29) shipments and say they are being split to multiple different warehouses so you have a thousand units and they're getting split to four separate warehouses but you want all them to go to one Warehouse you can start playing with the numbers so instead of say putting in a thousand units that you're going to send to this Warehouse say you input that you're going to have 1,500 or 2,000 units and see if you have more units get get split to one Warehouse or two or to two warehouses and say you have say your first shipment is 250 250
(1:28:59) 250 250 so then you increase your shipment amount to 2,000 units and say now they go 500 500 500 500 so now we have we only want to send a th000 units but we're trying to manipulate the system so it's split it to four locations so cool we'll approve that shipment for 2,000 units then we will delete the two plans that we don't want for the 500 500 and now we're only sending to two warehouses and you can do that as well for as many as many numbers as you want to try to manipulate that to go to lesser warehouses even up to one
(1:29:32) so it obviously takes some additional work and there are softwares like 2D workflow that do that manipulation for you uh but you can do it manually just take some some figurine and some trying um as for whether or not I believe that's going to come to Canada it's always a possibility um things tend to happen in the US and and then come to the Canadian Market uh typically years later sometimes sooner but typically years later um I don't know if we'll have as big of impacts for that particular fee if it does come here because we are not
(1:30:05) as spread out and we have so fewer warehouses right so even if it does come here we probably won't see as big of impacts but we don't know until it happens as for the low inventory fee that is coming to Canada effective I think it's April 1st I want to say um that is something that's just going to it's going to impact everybody uh but it's going to require people if they don't want these additional fees to uh occur to properly manage their inventory right and instead of carrying one month worth of inventory to avoid this fee if
(1:30:41) you're going to continuously restock this inventory you probably want to consider carrying 45 50 to 60 days worth of inventory so yes that does open you up to some additional risk factors um but you should be able to build up to that while still still limiting your risk um prior to covid the kind of standard that most people would say is that you should work up to about three months worth of inventory right carry any at any given time and then when Co hit almost everybody kind of Switched their mentality to carry only a one Monch of
(1:31:13) inventory at a time uh because there was inventory restrictions it seemed like that's what Amazon was with their IPI and their inventory limits it seemed like that's what they're wanting everybody to do so now that these new fees are being incurred we're probably going to try to find a happy medium in between can you offer some insight into how to deal with these delayed delivery dates items send in and you know they may be there this week and have been arrived they checked in yet when I open count stock always sat on it'll show a
(1:31:59) delivery date that potentially could be in May and I know that some of those delivery dates change along the way because they move things to different warehouses and when they finally get where they want it they they change that but I have several items that literally are showing delivery dates 3 months away and then all of a sudden in one day a whole polum will sell when we get there yeah so unfortunately there's not a ton that we can do for that uh the things that you can do but you need to work towards is by default I have found
(1:32:34) that the more units you're sending overall in shipments the bigger shipments you're making the sooner your units are going to get received the more consistent that you're sending shipments out the sooner your shipments are going to get received and I have found that this is contested and there's some somebody that I respect quite heavily that canest this as well but I have found since starting to utilize 2D barcodes I have found that my receiving times have increased drastically um it is contested whether or not they actually do so and again
(1:33:07) somebody that respect would heavily specifically contest that fact but I have found that they made a big difference for us what's a 2d barcode so 2D barcode is something that Amazon introduced a couple years ago it's instead of having um like your standard Amazon FBA barcode it is a barcode that has more information embedded into it and the theory is from a lot of people that are really large sellers is that Amazon introduced these bar codes because they want to start gearing towards utilizing these barcodes because it's easier for
(1:33:41) them to receive and so in theory they should make more logistical sense and Amazon should favor them more uh I don't believe you can produce 2D barcodes directly in Seller Central yet you have to use third party software so like a software like 2D workflow or scam power or something like that um but we we we personally use a software called scam power which is kind of like our prep and pack software and it produces 2D barcodes for us instead of like the standard Amazon FBA barcode and since utilizing those I have found that one
(1:34:14) are receiving times are a lot quicker and then our inventory gets overall received in full a lot sooner is this on the shipping box or on each it's on it's on each box if you're doing SPD so you you still have your standard UPS label and then instead of having your Amazon FBA label that's replaced with a 2d bar code which is it's very similar it just has additional information embedded into it okay but it's not through Seller Central you're going through a third party app correct I don't believe yet I don't believe you
(1:34:45) can produce 2D bar codes directly in Celler Central yet Celler Central uh accepts them and you can turn on 2D bar codes in in solar central but I don't believe you can actually produce them inside of solar central yet I know Manish um if you're still here I know you have used you use scam power as well have you found that your receiving times have been improved since using 2D barcodes 100% um I actually recently switched over to sent I think it's not recently but maybe several months ago I began switching over to
(1:35:22) a e plus the plus the 2D uh content information and that I found has been even quicker than just just the TV yeah and so I've always came from the the mindset that the easier you make it for Amazon employees the more likely that your inventory is going to be received quicker the more difficult you make it for them chances are your inventory is going to get pushed to the the back of the trailer so like if you have it set that you want Amazon to label your units for you they offer that service for a fee but I have heard that generally
(1:35:59) speaking if that happens your units will get received a lot slower because you're making it harder for Amazon employees to receive your inventory um 2D barcodes in theory they tell the employees exactly what's in every box with ease and they should be able to receive your inventory a lot quicker that's the whole theory behind it thus making it easier for them giving them less barrier of Entry thus having them receive it sooner Nick I see I see you unmuting your mic there oh yeah I just wanted to see there were continue this
(1:36:38) conversation um I just wanted to ask something slightly off topic on this but still in regards to labeling yep um do you usually use a FN skew or do you use the UPC barcode um if that's allowed by Amazon always the FN SK if you're using the manufacturer barcode that is comingling your inventory which I am not a fan of because if you do that your inventory is getting pulled with other Sellers and when unit sell so like all like say there's 10 sellers that all commingle their inventory all your inventory just basically gets piled
(1:37:13) together and then whoever makes a sale those units are pulled off the shelf at random and that is considered your unit that is then sent to the customer right so there's some issues that can arise for that uh especially if there's items that are potentially have a high likelihood of counterfeit or have potential that the prep is incorrect Etc so like say if you sell I don't know Pokemon cards or toys that have high potential for counterfeit issues if Amazon pulls a potential counterfeit off the shelf and sends it to your listing
(1:37:45) but it's not actually your product you're then responsible for that or if it's a product that requires something type of prep and it's not prepped properly or it's not prepped to your standard and something happens with that unit you're then responsible for it even though you didn't prep it yourself if that makes sense yeah that makes sense um something I'd like to add this is anecdotal but when I have tried just the normal UPC code if it's allowed I have found that for some reason Amazon has a higher percentage of losing my inventory
(1:38:19) when they're checking it in um so I've had shipments where I'm putting my own FN skew over top um but I've had some units where I've just left the standard uh UPC code um and for whatever reason they're not checking in um the inventory with the UPC code and yeah like so I noticed that just with my shipments yeah and obviously like that's that's that's speculation and we see like a lot those things that happen with all different kinds of avenues with Amazon but it wouldn't surprise me if that CES issues just because the way
(1:38:52) Amazon systems are it's just if you don't follow their guidelines to a T and try to make it as uncomplicated as possible it seems like we just find random issues like that so I mean it wouldn't surprise me if it causes your units to be lost more or have a higher likelihood of being lost yeah and then they can't find it later on because it's not your own unique right I've had stff where they've lost my FN skew product and then it would just magically appear in my inventory two three months later because I guess they found it like on the floor
(1:39:21) or wherever yeah and if you have comingled inventory that's almost impossible to happen because they can't tie it to yourself correct yeah yeah um had a question Jordan regarding this what you still have on screen in terms of the listing calculator correct wrong is the taxes on that you have including the are you looking at 5% uh GST hsd cuz you're you're importing it as a reg business or are you including the 133% tax and assuming duties as well this is the tax I believe that is charged uh from New York which
(1:40:00) is 5% so the reason the reason why I included that into this calculation is because you probably cannot claim back the actual taxes that you're getting charged in the US so we actually include that as part of the cost of goods instead right but in addition to that isn't there the normal GST HST tax we pay on products we import to Canada for example and my understanding is if you have it registered under a business number if you are like if it's obviously not under any duties or tax exemptions you typically charge the 133% GST HST
(1:40:35) but if you have it registered as a business and imported as a business number you then end up paying only 5% correct I'm wrong so I'm not in a HST Province so I couldn't speak directly on HST but I know from myself where I am uh we can get PST exemption but we cannot get GST exemption so you'll still get charged the GST but that's still something that you can claim back so assuming that you're registered we wouldn't factor that into our cost of goods like we would like a New York tax oh yeah 100% you would you would get
(1:41:08) it back yeah need that do makes sense yeah and so like this this specific this specific calculator does not factor in duties so if if a product is going to be prone to get charge duties you'd want to ensure that you factor that in of course if your product is manufactured in the United States you have certain exemptions if it's manufactured overseas you're you're definitely going to be charge of Duties accordingly Jaden I'm not sure if you're trying to speak there it just sound like your mic was cutting out no that's fair enough uh I guess the
(1:41:49) other thing is with wholesalers have have you I mean there are some where you know you might buy a product couple of rounds they don't necessarily ask you if you're an Amazon reseller or not you just go on to their portal and sign up with things there are certain brands however that do limit you selling their products on Amazon and sometimes they tell you in advance and sometimes you're just restricted after a period of time right um do you recommend then going through another distributor and wholesaler and seeing if they'll sell you that product
(1:42:18) or typically you think it's a brand sort of discussion across the board across multiple Distributors at that point so it depends and like this is part of the reason why I like being open and transparent because like if a brand specifically restricts a distributor from selling to Amazon sellers chances are that distributor is under contract to do so right and if they sell to Amazon sellers and they actually know that they're selling to Amazon sellers they're at breach of contract and they are potentially risking their
(1:42:46) relationship with that distributor and potentially Financial um penalties as well right so you being open honest and transparent is helping you save your distributor's ass in the event that that happens um and I like to be open honest and transparent because if you talk to a distributor and they say yeah we're cool selling with Amazon sellers we have these 100 brands but these 10 you cannot sell on Amazon and this is why cool I don't try to bypass that because there's a reason why you cannot sell those on Amazon okay those brands have exclusive
(1:43:19) deals with uh certain uh resellers they sell themselves Etc and so if you try to bypass it where like you just don't straight up tell them or you try to make a new account or like whatever you you are opening yourself up to potential problems in the future and I know from experience because this has happened to me where one of my suppliers I never I never not told them I was not an Amazon Seller but they never asked so I never told right and I started selling these products uh these are this is one of my first suppliers started going
(1:43:57) relatively heavy into these products because I started selling started buying more and more and more and this was still relatively early on with me selling on Amazon and so it got to a point where one brand I had I think about 10 or $15,000 my cost worth of product and that was that was a lot cuz I was still relatively early on into Amazon I didn't start with a whole bunch of money starting with Amazon right um and then all a sudden one day get that lovely notification from Amazon saying that this brand is restricted and I do
(1:44:24) not even have the option to request approval it actually happened with two separate brands at very similar times and I had I was pretty deep in inventory at that time um and so later on I I found that if I would have talked to my supplier they would have told me because we had this conversation later on they would have told me that no you can't sell these specific products here's why so I would have avoided that entire headache to begin with so I still had the product I still had that asset but it took me like [ __ ] two years to
(1:44:56) liquidate it and that was just money that was tied up because it was just it was hard to sell so like I was still able to get my money back but it took a long time I would have preferred to be able to get rid of it on Amazon or not have to deal with it in the first place and I am when it comes to Amazon my mindset my business model has always been I am here for the long run um so I don't want to try to cut corners and you know make a a quick nickel or a quick dime however you say it I would rather be open honest
(1:45:32) transparent and have long-term relationships with people and build sustainable business practices instead of trying to just cut corners and just try to make a quick Buck 100% makes sense um depending on if other people have questions or not I mean something which I think you could share Jordan is a bit about you know scan unlimited or even tactical Arbitrage and exports if if that's something people are interested or don't know more information about but I mean you can leave that to us later as well but yeah yeah of course so like when we like this
(1:46:08) is my process to Source uh wholesale cataloges everybody's going to have their own process so obviously if you are just starting I believe wholeheartedly that you should complete manually Source your catalogs and you should build up that skill set to be able to do so it's going to take you a long time it's going to be very tedious but I think that's very important to do and so when I say manually Source catalog what I mean is you basically open up the catalog whether they website or their Excel file you go on to Amazon
(1:46:39) you search the brand and then you pull up any product that may look viable and then you see if it's in their catalog and see if it's profitable right so we come on to Amazon we would would search SRA I personally like to put brand names in quotations because in theory that's supposed to remove any products that do not have actually sery in the title so we see it reduced it from $3.
(1:47:06) 99 to 100 I personally like to do that but sometimes you're better off without and then I have DS Amazon quick view installed on my computer this is the extended version It's a onetime fee of like I think it's like 20 bucks and it gives you access to this information below the listing where it shows you if Amazon's on the listing how many FBA subers on the listing their lowest price the As and then uh I open up any product that looks like it could be viable so I would go through and I would literally open up every single product that looks
(1:47:36) like I may be interested in selling it and then I would pull this up cross reference the catalog try to search in this catalog so I would search uh I probably just copy and paste silic acid cleanser and see if we can find that in the catalog and see if it makes sense and then continue on to the next one and the next one and the next one until we get through as much as a catalog as we can where sales ranks look like they no longer make sense or until we no longer see listings from this specific brand so this is very a very tedious process but
(1:48:08) this is going to be how you find the most value out of a catalog and you're also going to be able to find more things like bundles multipacks Etc versus if you have a software like say scan unlimited where it's scraping the Amazon catalog for you it'll do it a lot quicker but it's going to miss a lot of those things that are either incorrect titles upcs bundles Etc so the way our process works is that we do a mixture of both because I'm trying to we're trying to get through the catalog as quickly as we can but
(1:48:42) also extract as much value as we can as well so if we have a CSV catalog or an Excel catalog available to us we will typically run that catalog through scan unlimited which scan unlimited is basically scraping the upcs comparing against Amazon and then producing results and telling you how profitable these items are okay it can go through like 10 20,000 products within a few minutes it's very quick and then you can sort it by profit dollar Roi Etc um we do that first we sort by the products that are the most profitable we
(1:49:17) start going through that catalog we're going to still have a ton of mismatches or a ton of non-viable products so you still have to filter through a lot of data we do that we start building our po based on that information and then we come back in after we're done looking through scan unlimited and manually search those brands that are interesting to us and see if we can find anything else see if we can find anything that the UPC scraper missed or if we can find any bundles or any multi packs so we do a kind of a hybrid I have find that I
(1:49:46) have found that is the most efficient for us in terms of time efficiency and productivity we probably still are missing some things versus being able to just completely manually uh Source a catalog but that makes it so that a catalog of say 20,000 products instead of taking us a week or two weeks to Source it takes us a day so I am sacrificing a bit of potential for the additional time but I wholeheartedly believe that when you first start it is very important to manually Source these catalogs and do so as thoroughly as you
(1:50:26) can um when it comes to something like say ta ta does have the functionality to Source wholesale websites so you can actually get a custom xass made which is basically like a custom scan for tactical Arbitrage where it can scan a website for you um even if it's hidden behind a password so like if you have a catalog that is only online based they don't have a CSV catalog uh you can get a custom X path built ta can scan that catalog for you just like it would any other retail site uh it does work but I have found that ta is just not that
(1:51:06) viable like you get a ton of junk and it seems like over time ta is becoming less and less viable as like three Colts took it over they're making changes it just doesn't seem like it works as well um I would personally rather manually Source those websites versus pay for Uh custom X pass and scan it in ta I don't find I don't find ta really saves us any time versus manual sourcing but you can do it if you want to can I just mention to everybody that if they don't have DSM as on quick for uh the extended version you have to have
(1:51:46) if you're Canadian otherwise this won't appear on your yes that's a great Point uh DS Amazon quick viiew is free for the US market but yes for Canada you need the extended version which is a one-time fee and it's like $20 us or something you only pay it once that's the only way it'll work in Canada you can search products like this like say if you use seller amp you can just do a brand search on seller amp I actually don't personally like doing this because I've actually found that searching the product on seller amp for
(1:52:19) some reason produces us different results in a different order versus brand searching them on Amazon that could be me and my own personal um biases and me being used to DS Amazon quick viw when sell ramp didn't exist so I that's kind of speculation but you can utilize this as well do you use helium 10 for anything I do not helium 10 is more so private label focused I haven't really found any viability for Arbitrage or wholesale I think there are some tools that like are geared towards those business models but I don't think they're really viable
(1:53:00) in any sense uh saw me asked in the chat what is the best way to calculate the profit for the wholesale using a profit calculator so opening a listing and using an onscreen profit calculator like seller amp uh a Insight rev seller Etc or using the Amazon Revenue calculator so you can literally search Seller Central Revenue calculator and that'll pull up a calculator directly in Seller Central where you can calculate your fees and profits or there's a free Chrome extension it's called Uh I think it's just called the FBA calculator
(1:53:35) Chrome extensions I believe I have it on here I just don't have it activated FBA calculator so yeah it's this one here this is a free calculator so you just have to click on it it opens up a screen like this and you're able to calculate your profits and um shout out to rev seller because for $99 us per year amount of information that comes up on page is amazing 100% And like realistically any onscreen calculator will work most of them do provide the same data just displayed different ways so whether it's rev seller asan it seller amp Etc I
(1:54:21) personally use seller amp I have previously used a insight and I've also used seller assistant uh I think those ones they actually they provide more condensed data in a nicer format but for our purposes sell ramp Works actually relatively well and sell ramp actually has additional benefits on being able to do some better storefront stocking if you do utilize that feature uh but any any calculator can get you sorted yeah on that note Jordan from a like a keepa product finder perspective or even like using our you know sto and stocking
(1:55:02) Bots is there any like parameters you can say okay this product maybe is a wholesale product based on the number of sellers or based on like I don't know pricing but I mean even if you do find if a seller is of wholesale working with a wholesaler vice versa I guess unless you're already working with another I guess the only best way is if you have a product you're selling and they're selling that same product you probably are like cool maybe this is also in my wholesalers Cate in catalog right but are there any other kind of ways to say
(1:55:33) okay if I'm trying to figure out how to get into wholesale maybe your the Nisha products I should look at in terms of number of sellers or Price Etc if there's any sort of filters like that I don't think so like I mean I suppose you could but realistically any product that exists if it's not a private label product it could have potential to be a wholesale product right so I mean a good place that a lot of people start when they are coming from the arbitr world is they will try to find products that they already sell via wholesale that's a
(1:56:02) great way to start you know say you sell this product SV I already sell this retail arbiture it's profitable chances are probably high if I can find it from a wholesaler distributor I can probably get it for cheaper so I'm going to try and find this product that's a great way to start I don't think there's any specific criteria that you would fill filter to define those products uh I just the way that I approach it is we either start searching for products on Amazon like say if we want to do a bit of different sourcing for potential
(1:56:32) wholesalers we'll come into the best sellers on Amazon we'll see what the bestselling products are and you can do this in keepo too like to keep a product finder oh it says I was throttled think I'm I bought hold on interesting best sellers apparently Amazon thinks the a bought at the moment uh but you can come into best sellers you can start looking at products like say that maybe Amazon is not on you can definitely compete against Amazon but maybe for the purposes of your sourcing you find products that Amazon's not on then you
(1:57:01) can start looking for uh those suppliers so whether that's Lysol SRA 3M Etc then you start googling uh 3M distributor Canada SV distributor Canada contact the brands directly that's one way that we do it I'm not I'm not looking for a specific criteria and the amount of sellers if I'm looking for a wholesale because my endgame is that even if I'm looking at SV as a wholesale as a a potential wholesale product the wholesale suppliers that I'm contacting I may never even buy SV from them that's fine I want access to their entire
(1:57:33) catalog with all the other products that they sell because chances are they will carry other brands that may make sense for me right even if I don't end up buying Ser my intention is to get CV from them but maybe I end up buying uh Kenra redkin naoy and whatever because they car those products as well makes sense and I guess a followup to that is what happens if like you're working with a wholesaler and you know the product you really like you buy test buy and then it goes out of stock what are some steps you have taken to be like
(1:58:10) hey let me know when it comes back in stock obviously some have monitors would say let me know send me an email when it's back in stock but is it primarily just building relationships with your suppers or is it is there a way to place an order ahead of time and you know it it'll ship whenever it does is there risk to that cuz maybe the price might change in the month uh like what are some steps have you seen to kind of be secure inventory your stock or even if you know it's s but they're not carrying a specific you know quantity size like
(1:58:40) 50 ml versus 200 have you found any opportunities where saying hey I know you saw this brand however I'm looking for this specific you you know sites and you look with the supply to get this right yeah so you had a couple great questions there so one about managing stock so the nice thing about wholesale is in general most of them depending on the supplier they do tend to be more stock conscious a lot of really good suppliers don't tend to go out of stock a lot of course it definitely does happen especially with really high in
(1:59:15) demand products so if there are items that regular go to stock at your suppliers yeah it's going to come down to whether or not they have a good notification system uh but preferably you have a good relationship with your sales rep that you can just say hey send me a text or an email when these come back in stock because a lot of online notification systems even with Distributors they don't always notify you right when they come in stock there's quite often a delay or sometimes you don't see them at all right so
(1:59:43) ideally you would have that relationship with your uh with your sales rep say hey these are the products I want let me know when you get get back in stock uh some suppliers definitely do offer back order potential uh it depends on your supplier uh you would want to know what their terms are for the back order so whether or not you are 100% committing to this they charge you up front they charge you when it gets in um if you're able to cancel it Etc so you want to know these things and you want to also know a time frame of how long it's going
(2:00:15) to take your products to get there so if you have a supplier that does offer back order potential and they regularly stock products and they're like yeah we're going to we we can back order this right now we already have it on order it's expected to be here in two weeks cool I have no problem backing that assuming that the keeper chart looks good we don't see major fluctuations Etc if they don't know how long it's going to take um or if or if they're like you know it's special order it's going to take a six months to get it i' probably be less
(2:00:44) prone to place those back orders unless I have the option where I'm able to cancel it and they don't charge me up front right that's about limiting risk and U managing cash flow some will only charge you after they get it and they ships some they will not um they will not hold you that you have to purchase it but some once you place a back order you are responsible for that right some suppliers you're able to return things but I always like to try to avoid that it's not going to be good for your supplier relationship if you are
(2:01:18) regularly R turning items um it just puts a bad taste in a lot of their mels because I mean you're taking away their commission it's a pain in the ass for them it indicates you don't know what you're doing so typically in most cases I like to try to avoid ever returning products uh whenever possible and most places will also charge you restocking fee for doing so Wholesale Distributors Etc um I believe you had another question I I think I lost it was the last question that you had Jaden I'm trying to remember it myself
(2:01:50) um let me think about it for sure yeah it was about the products like if it's c for example years a 47 mL bottle but you know fundamentally a 50 ml bottle of this right or a 562 as you can see on the chart here clearly that's not available in the market maybe the distributor or the brand itself has stopped producing that but like how many times have you had occurrences where your distributor has been able to go back to the market cre and the supplier say hey I'm looking for this specific skew very often and yes that's a good
(2:02:24) point and I appreciate you bringing that up so that is a additional part of our sourcing so if we do find a product that is simply not available in their catalog if we see other similar products like say we see they don't have the foaming facial cleanser but they have the silic acid cleanser that's the same size and it makes sense at that price chances are the foaming fac facial cleanser will probably be a similar price right it'll fluctuate because it's a different product but it all be similar so yeah we will put that on RPO as a potential
(2:02:52) special order and we will ask them okay uh can you get this product and if so what can you get it at or we'll say this is the product that we want this is what we're willing to pay this is like our Max price that we're willing to pay and if you can get it for this price this this is the max amount of units that we're willing to buy for you from you at this time but yeah you can definitely get a lot of additional products that a lot of people don't have access to by asking and by special ordering stuff and a suppliers
(2:03:19) they are more than willing to special order stuff that they do not have in their regular catalog cool makes sense and with wholesalers have you typically seen like uh industry standard in terms of discounting like if it's typically if you're buying you know $10,000 worth of a single product obviously you know that's on a larger scale you typically see a 5 to 8% reduction and off the wholesale price I know it depends on brand to brand but what as a as a person what do you typically should be asking for expecting obviously whatever makes
(2:04:00) Financial sense uh from a profit calculator but have you seen anything industry averages in terms of how much lower things can go I wouldn't say there's a set average because it is dependent on the category the business their profit margins Etc and how like obviously your spend uh but most places are willing to give typically reasonably speaking between anywhere from about a five to about a 15 to 20% discount depending on the category right so that's another thing I want to address is that a lot of people think
(2:04:35) that when they buy from Brands directly they're going to get better pricing okay that can sometimes happen but that's actually rarely the case most of the time when you buy from a distributor you're going to get get better pricing versus buying from the brand directly and here's the reason why that makes sense is because it's like the econom is a scale right a distributor is buying truckloads of products from these from these brands at a time whereas with yourself you're probably buying a couple boxes maybe a couple pallets right and
(2:05:05) so the distributor is getting massive savings because they're buying way more volume and they're passing those savings on to you the customer right that is obviously not always the case and there are certainly exceptions to the rule but generally speaking you will get better pricing buying from Distributor versus the brand direct um when it comes to discounts obviously Money Talks um but like say even if you have a like a small dis a small budget small amount of capital it still wouldn't hurt to start asking and getting familiar with the
(2:05:37) process and getting used to being rejected I would still try to ask for discounts uh but the way that I do it is I like to make initial purchase orders show the people what I'm willing to purchase and then say this is what I want to purchase but this is the amount of discount I need in order to purchase that I personally like doing that because it shows that we're serious we're went through the catalog we're willing to purchase x amount of products um and it gives me more leverage right so I can confid say I'll give somebody a
(2:06:06) 20 30 $40,000 Po and say these are all the products that we're interested in but in order to purchase these I need a 15% discount from you right I have found much more success doing that versus just asking for a discount up front uh but I encourage you to try both so even when you first get a catalog you can ask them up front okay cool I like the catalog uh are you guys open to any discounts what kind of discounts can you offer you will get rejected so you need to get used to that and there are some suppliers even
(2:06:41) if you come to them with mass amounts of money they simply will not provide you discounts either at all or until they actually build a steady relationship with you I have had some suppliers that I spent a decent amount of money with but until I've actually been buying from them for like a year consistently they won't even negotiate a discount with me and then after I've been with them for a year okay let's talk about discounts cool you've been buying consistently from us we give you 6% cool that's better than nothing it's not ideal but I
(2:07:11) mean that this is that specific business and the margins that they have right yep exactly and I think that that forther opens up the topic to even just payment methods right if you're paying by credit card typically they pay a 2 and a half or 3% processing fee sometimes if you say hey I'll do a direct deposit or bank transfer they're willing to offer you a 2 3% discount or then that opens it up even to net payments terms right net 30 nexit as you grow business with your boths those are favorable terms can in the long run help
(2:07:43) you scale your business right CU example in the Enterprise World in addition to just pment terms and things like that something we look at is a rebate model where I say hey okay don't give me an upfront discount but if I spend $10,000 with you this month give me a 1% rebate as a credit which I then use as a gift card at your store for my next purchase right and I guess those are things which you know sometimes people are more incentivized to do because you're just buying more from them or driving more business within each other yeah 100% And
(2:08:15) yeah so most Distributors they will offer savings if you choose to not pay via credit card if you choose other payment methods just because they don't incur those fees and there's also a lot of Distributors wholesalers that actually don't take credit cards at all because their margins are so thin that they their business can't support those additional fees from credit cards right so you have to factor that in there's obviously a bunch of wholesalers that will um but a lot of them will also charge you additional amounts for using
(2:08:41) that credit card um in terms of net terms yeah those are great things to utilize um and it can and it has helped us build our capital a ton by leveraging somebody else's money uh that is that does kind of get a little bit more advanced when you get more deep into wholesale and you do have to really be on top of your finances and ensure that you understand the terms when you have to pay them and sure you pay your bills but being able to leverage somebody else's money especially if you have net 30 up to net net 60 which is like a a
(2:09:12) unicorn if you can get those uh those can be massive ways to help build your catalog and uh build your cash flow 100% uh dixa asks how much miscellaneous cost should we add while calculating the profit for shipping and prep does it differ as per pack size so I know that you yourself are brand new so with yourself it's going to be different versus somebody that is established right with yourself you don't have any actual data to calculate real averages so you probably just want to over estimate a bit and then once you
(2:09:50) actually have some real data about how much your average shipment costs you how much your miscellaneous fees are Etc then you can more fine-tune it when you are first starting it's going to be dependent on how much volume you're doing but if you are prepping and packing yourself uh assuming that you're sending relatively small shipments I would say factor in about 50 cents to a dollar per pound for shipping to FBA and then just factor in like say an additional 50 cents per unit for miscellaneous fees like prep which would
(2:10:23) include your labels poly bags box space your labor Etc it's not going to be a perfect calculation but it will ensure that you are going to be not looking at unprofitable items uh by mistake once you do have those fees more tuned in then you'd want to adjust them accordingly to what your actual fees are and then of course like if you are sending an oversized unit like if you're sending like a Brother printer um that's going to cost you more per pound to ship versus like a small standard size item like this facial cleanser right so if
(2:11:01) you are sending oversized units you do want to factor an additional fees for shipping to to Amazon and then yeah so we see I see there's a couple uh people typing in the chat here for questions and of course if anybody else has any questions certainly feel free to hop on the mic and ask so I think this is depends on the product but certain manufacturers might have a whatever like a 90-day guarantee or they might advertise a a one-year warranty um sometimes I get like a random customer emailing me you know whatever 10 months later there's issue
(2:11:41) with the product how how do you handle warranty um CL claims as a wholesaler I think as like an RA technically you're not an authorized seller so it's kind of in a gray area so I just usually just refund the customer but with regards to host if you're buying it off the distributor do you just refer them to the distributor for whatnot for the a warranty claim so yeah that's going to be a case-by case basis so typically speaking if there are products that have a implied warranty um if you are buying it OA or ra technically you are breaking
(2:12:16) terms because you not aler that warranty yourself and if the manufacturer states that their warranty does not extend from you reselling a product you are technically in violation of that listing right and that's how a lot of Brands controller listing whereas you are offering products where it indicates in the listing that it offers a one-year warranty but you you can't actually offer that warranty as buying it as an OA ra product right um with buying it wholesale it's going to be dependent on the the manufacturer's terms most of the
(2:12:47) time they say assuming that you're an authorized seller you can just refer them directly to to the manufacturer there are some that say that you take the product back you refund them you send it to the manufacturer then they refund you so it's just going to be dependent on their individual terms for warranty but yeah that's obviously something that you want to consider more heavily especially if you're in categories like say small appliances Electronics Etc if you're in more so consumable Goods that's not something
(2:13:15) that you have to be as concerned about right uh so I guess just in regards to ra what's your uh like your personal policy like if somebody complains about a warranty and I guess technically you can't provide it do you just refund the customer just to not cause any problems of it affecting your account it depends on the circumstance so like if it doesn't indicate that there's an implied warranty on the actual listing and they are outside of the return policy of Amazon typically I would refer them either to the manufacturer directly to
(2:13:47) Amazon or I would Mark the case as no response needed because once it's outside of the return policy I'm not responsible for it right and a lot of products like say if you open up like a brand new uh remote control or a brand new uh Appliance most of them nowadays say don't contct the the vendor contact us directly so then they can deal with the manufacturer directly um it's not ideal in terms of Customer because some customers if there are warranty issues and they're not able to get it obviously they might get
(2:14:18) shafted um but if it's outside of my my responsibility I'm not going to refund them okay if it's within like the return policy and like there's potential where claims may be opened up I would be more inclined to typically I would want the item back depending on the value even if you have to pay for the return unit if it's cheap yeah it's probably just better just to refund them but if it's outside those windows I typically either refer them to the manufacturer for Amazon or I just Market as no response needed uh dixa asks how much profit
(2:14:56) should I consider that's going to be completely dependent on your own personal circumstances how much Capital you have available Etc um typically speaking the more Capital you have available the less margins or less profit generally speaking you can and should consider if you are more on a tight budget you probably want to consider higher profit units Andor units that just sell more volume in general uh I can't say exactly what you should personally consider uh but I do think that when you do set arbitrary numbers for yourself I don't
(2:15:32) think that's necessarily beneficial like a lot of people will say I will only sell products that's profit $5 and that give me a 30% Roi I don't think that's a great mindset to have because if I look at a product it's like okay cool this is going to profit me five bucks a unit but I can only sell four units a month that's one going to profit me 20 bucks versus this other item I can profit $2 for but I can sell 200 units of this per month I would much rather sell that one that's going to profit me $2 at$ 200 and
(2:16:02) profit $400 for the month versus 20 right so I don't always necessarily think setting random arbitrary numbers are that healthy for your business of course you want to ensure you're profitable you want to ensure you are having healthy cash flow but I think arbitrary numbers are not a great approach to to this business and I think further to that Jordan the the shift from like even online Arbitrage or Retail Arbitrage to wholesale like obviously you need Capital primarily but I think the fundamentally you need to also
(2:16:40) understand the volume game that hey you could be making a dollar profit or your margin is 10% versus your typical 2025 and the reason you have these lower margins is because you're selling volume so you're making a dollar profit on each product but typically in the wholesale model you you are in a higher volume business alluding to you're selling 100 200 units of that product making you a $200 profit a month right which I think fun times sellers need to understand that each model has it slight differences and you can't keep the same
(2:17:12) criteria across the board 100% And yeah like generally speaking again it's not it's not a set rule but generally speaking when you do sell wholesale you are going to be having Slimmer margins and as the more volume you do pretty much at almost any business model the more volume you do the less lower margins you're going to have that's just the nature of the Beast right um but yeah so that's also why at scale it's important to understand your costs right that's why we keep track on how many units we pump through every single month
(2:17:47) what all of our costs are so we know how much it costs us to produce every single unit so that we're able to assess products correctly because like say if we look at seller amp uh on our profit calculator we have some set fees built into the calculations right so we have a inbound shipping fee built into here of 30 cents per pound we have a standard prep fee built in here of 50 cents per unit right it is often that we'll come across a product that is a lower profit unit say we profit us a dollar uh but it's like say 100% Roi but it's a dollar
(2:18:24) it's dollar profit but we can sell multiple hundreds per month and then we analyze it a bit more okay this item is actually not going to cost us 50 cents for prep fee because my staff that say an average prep staff I pay $115 an hour for uh they can prep say 100 units of this per hour right no poly bag is involved so I can make a better assessment what my actual prep fee is going to be and that also adds on more margin onto my actual profit right because if they can prep 100 units per hour that is what if they do 60 units
(2:18:58) per hour at $15 I think that's 25 cents a unit 15 divided by 60 so yeah if they do 60 that is05 cents per unit for labor if we do 15 divided by 100 15 divided 100 that's 15 cents per unit in labor costs for that fee right then we'd factor in a couple cents for the FN skew we'd factor in depending on the size of it a couple cents uh for box space and then we can make better buying decisions that way that's why it's just really important to understand your actual costs at scale this isn't something you have to go super deep in
(2:19:34) when you are relatively new but at scale it's very important are you printing your FN SKS with a laser printer uh thermal printer so those does that come in like I use the 8 and half by 11 there's like 30 stickers on on a sheet um on the laser printer yep is the thermal printer is it a same size sheet or they is it coming out like in a row of uh comes out labels comes out in rolls and you just print the amount of uh labels you actually need so you're not wasting any on any sheets okay yeah so we use thermal printers for both our FN skes and our
(2:20:17) also our box labels uh but yeah like Laser Printers especially like just getting started getting into the business with 30 UPS those worked absolutely fine we use those for a long time um but like again as you scale it makes more sense um overall because you don't have the cost of toner uh you're not wasting label sheets they print quicker um to start using thermal label thermal printers at a certain at a certain point right it's obviously not necessary especially off the Hop but eventually it's something that you should consider when you do
(2:20:51) start scaling uh somi says what if sending to Amazon direct from supplier what are the charges I'm assuming like sending from the supplier directly to Amazon is that what you're asking and then you would have to discuss that with your supplier if they're going to build that cost into your actual cost if they're going to charge you additional fees to do so that's something that you have to discuss and negotiate with your supplier um Ronald says I'm trying to get into wholesale but do not know how to get my business license my business is already
(2:21:27) registered which site should I go on so it depends on what you're asking so are you asking for a local municipality business license like for your city are you asking to get registered for GST HST uh in a business number are you asking to get Incorporated those are three three very different things so it depends on what you're asking for so some wholesalers will actually request a physical business license and that is just something that you fill out with your local M municipality so like say your city you literally just fill
(2:22:00) out an application with your city you tell them what kind of business you have you pay their fee of 50 100 bucks Etc per year and then they send you a business license okay that's one thing uh to get registered for GST HST uh PST Etc you contact your local um tax Authority so like if it's HST I you can probably uh register directly through CRA if you have PST um I have to register through um s whatever it's called Saskatchewan Revenue Service or whatever it's called um and then for your incorporation if you want to get
(2:22:37) Incorporated that is very different uh that you have to register through your local incorporation uh Authority so if you are incorporating federally I believe there is a federal place you can do it through if you are incorporating provincially you're going to have different um authorities based on which place you have to register through and you can just look up something like if you're Ontario or Quebec you can just look up Ontario incorporation and you can fill out the application and do it yourself you just have to understand that when
(2:23:07) you are Incorporated you're then a company and you do have different tax obligations and you have to file as Corporation plus yourself personally um it's not always required to be incorporated to sell wholesale but if that's what you're doing you just have to understand that there are differences so yeah anybody else have any other questions at all relating just Amazon or Wholesale in general I've been talking a whole lot uh hi Jordan I do have one question so uh when I was contacting Distributors and wholesalers so I um in the US market
(2:23:53) I came across so many wholesalers it's hard to know which wholesalers are authentic and even then I looked on Google like you said um and see if they have a physical um warehouse but even then how we are going to know if Amazon is going to accept their invoice or if they are direct um authentic distributors of that brand so generally speaking if you do your due diligence and you can indicate that they are an actual distributor their invoice should always suffice when it comes to something like authenticity complaints or if you need
(2:24:34) to get reimbursed the only question will come into play is whether or not their invoice will be accepted for ungating purposes okay um most generally speaking invoices are accepted but you just can never guarantee it so that's why like if you can get ungated via other methods like say Amazon first be before buying those product from a distributor may be more beneficial to you and may limit the Financial Risk that you have um as for whether or not you can prove if they are authorized Distributors there is only so much that
(2:25:12) we can do like you can contact you can contact the brand directly and ask them if the brand tells you yes then you then you know right you know 100% they're they're authorized Distributors besides that like we can only do everything that we can do in our power to find out like uh searching on Google seeing if they have a warehouse if they're local go and visit them Etc having conversations with them checking their website uh you want to do all that as much as you can if you ever have a bad if you ever have a bad
(2:25:40) feeling I would say pass pass on them there's a lot more opportunities um my only main concern is that you don't want to be selling products that are inauthentic that are counterfeit or that are stolen because those are things that will 100% impact your account uh and if you are busted selling potentially stolen products you will probably never get your account back yeah yeah I guess I didn't know before that I can get ungated first and then um sell any distributor's product if they are legit I thought I have to
(2:26:17) get their invoice to get ungated if I'm buying from them and selling their products so I am going to try to ungate first and then um sending their products yeah and that would probably be more safe especially when you're first starting um if you're buying from a distributor like say a multinational distributor like Cosmo or like say Cisco foods or Gordon Food Service I can almost guarantee you that those will always work cuz they're multinational Distributors um but you can't always say with 100% certainty okay okay thank you for
(2:26:56) sure um I'm just going to take a quick break I'm just going to get a quick drink so I will be back in about five minutes and then we can continue answer any other questions that anybody has and then do some initial wrapup Etc so I will be right [Music] back all right sorry about that I have
(2:29:07) returned so yeah if anybody has any other additional questions whether it's wholesale directly related Amazon related reselling certainly feel free to ask so Joe asks when deciding on a quantity to purchase from A supplier do you aim for a 30-day Supply or other time frame right now we specifically aim for 30 days worth of inventory even with our initial purchase uh we are starting to adjust that because of the new low inventory fee that's coming into play and we will be focusing probably closer to 60 days soon but yeah like there's no shame when
(2:29:45) you first start about like having a lower test buy and like that's how we used to do it always like we' buy 6 12 units or something even if we expected that we may sell more just to like limit our risk but yeah we specifically shoot for 30 days even with a initial test test purchase because we're analyzing the data and we're making good gu estimations that we should be able to sell this amount of units in the next 30 days hey Jordan what's up can you can you quickly walk through your process from sell ramp export for
(2:30:24) for a product that you've come across to then import into uh scan power to list it uh yeah I can let me just pull up a blank order tracker here one second I don't want to show you you want to do it call later schol that I should be able to do it on here I just don't want to show you all my purchases uh this should work so this is kind of like a standard order tracker that I've made that we actively use all the time in our business the one that I use right now has a few additional features like we can export to a
(2:31:00) purchase order directly in the sheet uh but we have separate sections for OA ra and wholesale right so we our sheets on seller amp here we have a bunch of different sheets so for all of our sourcing vas for our leads list and then for our order tracker right so if I'm going to if I'm going to be buying this wholesale I click the wholesale button I I Ure my link or my notes are in here so like I can't export on this one but I ensure my link my buy cost my any notes that I have are in here and then I export I exported to wholesale so this
(2:31:34) has a script so it automatically goes to the very top and then every single minute the script runs and then it automatically organizes the supplier by supplier so like it'll automat put it under the corresponding heading name right if the heading doesn't exist it'll make a new one for you so like if we export something in here from London Drugs it'll automatically put it here if we export something if we export something here from Amazon it'll make a new heading and put it under Amazon that's just for us to keep it sorted
(2:32:03) Etc right and then uh we use this to keep track of our orders our receiving inventory Etc and then we also have a a PO that we obviously build for the supplier uh but we put it in here we all the information that we see here is exported automatically from seller amp or from Amazon uh the only thing that we input is the quantity ordered and then how many we received and then we put the date received when we receive it so like say if we ordered 100 units we would put that we ordered it today which would be March 5th and then we put that we
(2:32:39) received zero and so that turns red and then when we receive it we put the day that we receive so say we receive it March 10th we receive all 100 that turns green and then we indicate when it's received in the warehouse and we're ready to add it to a shipment we click off ready to ship that turns that field yellow and it automatically exports it to our scam power import list so this should load here and yeah it has a data right here so then from here all we have to do is when we're ready to build a shipment we just highlight everything that we
(2:33:13) want to add into our buy list in scam power hit extensions Scan Power import and then we can export from the buy list into a new batch that's pretty SI that's pretty smart and does that create the merchant skew on its own or do you does it create the merchant skew um with a template so yeah in Scan Power or does it create it with with the Excel sheet I'll I'll show you so like when we export something we have a formula in here automatically so this is our formula I'll put this over over here say I buy this from Amazon so
(2:33:49) my source URL is Amazon so I put amazon.ca it automatically put it automatically puts a supplier here for me right and then we input our cost so like say it's five bucks we're going to sell it for 20 our profit is going to be $5 and a 20% Roi so before we export it to our ready to ship section we would indicate whether this is a replenishable item if we have if this is an item that we are replanning or if this is a new SK okay if it's a new skew we check that guy off that turns red just for a visual indicator and then in the Scan Power
(2:34:23) import list it makes a new msq for us automatically based on the supplier Das buy cost- random uh random placeholder number and and and I could adjust that equation to have it be supplier code and then product code cost and then plan is purchased yeah you can adjust however you want for sure that's just how we do it awesome all right cool thanks man for sure and then yeah if we have it marked off as a replan and not a new skew then it does not make an McQ for us and so you're not importing this into scan power under the import section um
(2:35:02) you're you're exporting it directly through some sort of sheet method so yeah we're exporting it via their their extension that they offer like they offer a extension to export it directly from Google Sheets so that link that that link that I sent you a little while ago it shows you how to install that extension and then this ex this Imports it directly to scam power's by list and then you can then uh transfer that buy list over to a new batch so it's it's a couple clicks to get it sorted awesome yeah all right cool
(2:35:34) thanks man for sure uh does the Canadian Amazon Market have enough viable products to justify large quantity orders yes um but like there's a caveat to that so like if you are primarily a US seller you're probably going to have eventually a good chunk of products where you're going to be able to sell hundreds to thousands of units a month right those products do exist in Canada but they are few and far between and generally speaking a better strategy in Canada is to go more wide than it is to go deep so you're probably
(2:36:14) going to have a larger overall catalog of total unique as and you're going to be carrying less uh less units per asent right there are certainly units that will sell hundreds to thousands of units per month but those are a lot less common like they are in the US you're going to have a lot more products in Canada that you're going to sell 12 24 36 per month uh Lazarus asks uh what's your strategy for the low inventory feed to avoid it so we're still analyzing some stuff like that article I previously shared from Marketplace prep that really
(2:36:52) goes into detail about the low inventory fee I'm still analyzing some stuff from that article that's from somebody that I very much so respect if somebody if nobody knows about it I shared it in the public chat but Marketplace prep this is run by a guy named James McConnell out of the US he is a large seller and operates a large prep Center uh he is very ENT and he does really in-depth analysis of things like this so he has a whole article about the low inventory value fee and how he believes that these are going to be applied based on his
(2:37:25) math uh but basically we're just going to consistently try to stock we're going to be stocking up to 60 days and then we're going to be manager inventory to hopefully have a stock hitting the warehouse by the time our inventory is at 30 days so I can't say for sure like how our system is going to work because we have to make some adjustments but that's going to be our game plan and we're going to iron out a few things along the way Nick what's up yeah so you offer the ra service the daily lead list are there any services
(2:38:07) you offer for wholesale I do not no uh I think like a wholesale service might be difficult I know like there's people that sell like vetted or they say vetted list of like wholesale suppliers but they're not they just find wholesale suppliers I don't think there would be like much viability for like a wholesale service okay second question I I'll look through this more thoroughly on my on my free time but this is my first day in this Discord group could you sort of explain what sort of how this works I see a lot of different
(2:38:39) products or uh Brands and like an auto notification comes out up about pricing so um what's this all about yeah so I'll pull it up here um on this screen just so we can see um there there's a lot in this server and I know I 100% know it's overwhelming oh this isn't the right website hold on this I can't multitask um I know it's overwhelming but my goal is to try to provide as much value to somebody as possible and then you can personally decide what sections you want to focus on uh but the server is most of us come from an Amazon
(2:39:16) background that's what most of us do but this isn't just Amazon specific it's focused around like every Avenue of reselling in e-commerce that you can think of and I just try to provide as much value and resources for the ability to make money in whatever Avenue you want to pursue okay so when you are getting started I would recommend that you come into the server guide this does break down every single section which what every single section offers um it is an order of the actual channels so it is relatively easy to to navigate
(2:39:51) but there's a lot here cuz there's a lot in the server um if you don't like to do that there is a video you can click on it's a video walkthrough that I did recently and it's about 45 minutes long that explains what every single Channel and category is and what it offers but basically like we offer information about hype and limited drops basically every single weekday so anything that is basically coming up that is potentially profitable whether that's Amazon eBay other marketplaces we'll be providing information for that uh we provide
(2:40:23) information for Price errors and listing errors uh we provide information for Amazon so like we provide Amazon leads we have Amazon Bots that actively scrape for potential Amazon to Amazon flips we have Bots that you can use that automatically storefront stock other sellers for you uh we we have Auto checkout providers so like if there's a drop that's happening that is going to be very hard to get these guys run bots on your behalf that they can check out so you don't have to run a bot so like you know how like a lot of sneaker heads use
(2:40:58) Bots to check out items they can do that for sneakers for limited drops etc those are like items that are like next to impossible to get manually so they they can run bots on your behalf there's Cash Out opportunities there's deal monitors like deal monitors are just actively monitoring websites for deals like price drops on Amazon or Lego Etc or scraping websites for food deals coupons things like that uh there's a whole section about eBay uh additional flips Investments other places we get information from regarding video game releases sneakers
(2:41:34) Etc all kinds of stuff so I'm it's a it's a lot but I'm basically trying to cover almost anything that you can imagine to be profitable online and then you can focus on what categories are important to you okay cool yeah I think the I'll go through this intro guide and the video um yeah when I first like I said I I got an email today about a wholesale chat so I signed up for this but it looks like it's a lot more than just like a networking Discord group yeah and that's certainly what we want to utilize it for
(2:42:05) as well so to build good relationships and network with people we already have some potential things coming up in the pipeline where people want to build like their own uh cash out service for people in the server where you can basically buy items on their behalf for them to sell ra OA Etc and they pay you commissions for doing that uh we can build relationships like if people want to do bulk wholesale buys uh we do have potential like we do have a liquidator in here that does offer liquidation deals uh so we can have that potential
(2:42:35) as well all kinds of stuff right and then we have like restock monitors so you can monitor like 80 different websites and be notified within seconds of items being restocked which is super a super nice tool to have for OA ra Etc but yeah all kinds of stuff oh thanks for sure I try to not overwhelm people with what we what we offer but it's hard not to um Joe says do you find yourself oh sorry go ahead yeah tell me about it Jordan yeah yeah like it's it's a mix of wanting to try to provide people as much as I can
(2:43:21) but also try not to overwhelm them so I try to provide like information on like how stuff works in each Channel like there's how it works sections but I know it's still a lot I get it uh Joe says do you find yourself having to build up volume on a listing yourself is Scan Power for those operating their own prep centers um so like what do you mean about buildup uh volume on a listing like do you mean like slowly build up the amount of stock that you're carrying uh if so we used to do that more now we're basically coming in with one month
(2:43:54) at a time at a time no build up the amount of sales so like the longer the longer you're on a listing the more sales you're getting is that specifically what you're asking or like trying to rank products better rank products so sometimes it depends on the product most of the time when that happens it's because there's products that we are basically like the only sellers of that we've stocked out of for x amount of time and then we're trying to bring it back um there are some occasions where like we'll find listings
(2:44:33) that look like they used to be viable they haven't had FBA sellers on them forever or the FBA sellers are asking way too much versus what the market is and if we see those potentials sometimes we will we'll try to either bring it back down to the market price run some PPC on it Etc to bring it back uh but most of our business model is finding existing products that already sell and us becoming a part of that it's very rare that I personally try to bring back listings uh edit listings Etc like that is certainly a business model you can
(2:45:04) certainly do that uh optimize listings to make them sell better I just personally have enough opportunity just trying to find other products at this point and scam power for operating their own prep Center no uh scam power does offer things for people that do operate prep centers but you can utilize it just as a regular Amazon Seller I personally use it as a regular Amazon Seller too it's not the the greatest user interface like if you use something like 2D workflow 2D workflow looks nicer it's easier to navigate I
(2:45:39) have used it I used it before scam power but scam power uh it offers more than 2D workflow and and is cheaper it's just a little bit harder to navigate at first but once you get the hang of it it's pretty easy uh how do you prove or validate to a sales rep for a supplier that you are worth doing business with so that is a lot of that comes down to your professionalism your knowledge and how much you're willing to spend right some sales reps just because you have a good conversation with them they'll love you and they don't really
(2:46:15) care what you order uh other times it's just you have to be bringing you have to be willing to bring money to the table or you have to be um you have to sound knowledgeable in that specific space for them to even consider opening account with you like I mentioned at the top of the conversation there was no reason I should have been able to open an account with cosm broth the only reason why I did is because I had that conversation with the guy he I think he mentally got the inclination just by the way I was
(2:46:42) talking that I came from the beauty industry so ask any additional questions and then what's the ballpark spend range to mention that is dependent on you right so it's going to be dependent on your budget sometimes you don't need to bring it up at all quite often we don't bring it up until we do the initial po so like I'll say we just want access to the catalog they think we're actually professionals we know what we're doing we're not Tire kickers and then when they see the initial po then they see what we're willing to spend uh sometimes
(2:47:14) they want to upfront what you're willing to spend that's going to be dependent on your budget I wouldn't try to [ __ ] that because if you only have $1,000 to spend and you're telling them you're willing to spend 10K a month that's going to probably give them a bad taste in their mouth uh also asked what are some good Canadian trade shows to attend I am actually not a good reference point for that because I haven't really attended many trade shows uh Manish may be a better better resource for Canadian trade shows I know he's attended some in
(2:47:47) the US I'm not sure if he's attended any in Canada do you want to share it all Manish I would us here in Canada um I mean I hav much out of it but then again I could just me not fallowing up on it one of it is chfa which is more natural fruits and supplements and Health Products and that stuff um and the other one is um praders far uh which is Whalers s groceries um sort of great show I can share those links if anyone's interested and so most of them happen in Toronto as well as either in Halifax or Montreal or
(2:48:38) when yeah I Shar oh sorry I just mentioned I just shared in the chat some that I am familiar with so like yeah Jaden mentioned Traders Forum chfa then there's also like the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers those are really the only ones I'm familiar with Manish do you have any other ones yeah there's chfa there's one in Toronto there's one in Vancouver the Toronto one is uh is I think later in this in thef then the Vancouver one is in April so it's coming up uh last month there's grocery Innovations it's a
(2:49:12) pretty decent one uh that been dra as well and then um some suppliers like some suppliers host their own private trade shows um which which they would also invite you to so if you have good suppliers they would certain suppliers um especially the larger suppliers they have their own inhouse trade shows where you can meet the Reps and you know they they bring in all the different companies that they work with um and a lot of times you can work out some sort of promo pricing on certain um in the states I'm going to
(2:49:42) afd in Las Vegas this Sunday um there's Expo West in the states which is also in California which is shortly after ASC um but those are the ones there's Expo East which is somewhere Central in the states I don't remember where but yeah there's a bunch of trade shows just if I were you had look at look up your local Convention Center and see if there's anything happening there your Convention Center Conference Center only have a calendar and you can look into that and see what they have off yeah and to add on what Manish
(2:50:19) mentioned about uh local shows I think that's relatively untapped for a lot of people because if you look up the kind of shows or conferences that are happening locally you may surprise yourself about what's being offered uh just in your local city and I wouldn't also limit yourself because there could be shows in categories you never even thought about selling in but I would definitely recommend that you go check those out assuming that your time allows for it because you never know what potential Could Happen yeah and just just touch on that
(2:50:45) a little bit um just exactly as he mentioned it people don't really look into what they have in their own area like I just went to a local a local conference here maybe about a month ago and I met this guy who works with this export program where he can help export can products in the stakes and I got uh became a part of that sort of um EC program so I can now get access to funding to help export products of States so there's lots of opportunities depending on what kind of conferences and trade shows you guys go to
(2:51:21) beauty and yeah like I do know that there's quite a few people or at least a good handful of people that are attending ASD this weekend uh Manish if you haven't met Robert before uh he will be there this weekend as well oh no way I'm gonna send a message we and are gonna go grab a beer that's awesome yeah him and cryptogon or Rahul are both going to be there are they are they flying out together I'm not sure I don't believe so do you know when Robert's flying out I do not you have to ask him I'm gonna set him yeah him and I
(2:51:59) been talking for a while like years and and haven't met in person which is hilarious but yeah I'm gonna hopefully meet him um next week I be curious right I mean obviously not giving away the keys to the kingdom here it's hey did you find Value yet know as well as not necessar saying hey give me your template as to what you did but it's like you know some I know there are a few people who also go about how do you prepare for a trade show world of the best steps to to like work for it right and I'm sure we can definitely learn
(2:52:29) from each other I see a lot of the US guys talking about how you have a list at once figure out the suppliers how you tackle it cuz from what I've understood ASD is so large like good luck trying to make it from one end to the other end of the hall even just talking to suppliers and you're going to waste sometimes time talking to people who may not be as relevant as you should right so there a whole bunch of strategies against going after those ra shows if you ask me right I mean I would think one of the qualifying questions would be okay do
(2:52:56) you sell within us do you export to Canada for example what's that process like or you know are you Amazon friendly if that's something even question you would ask them right I'd be curious to build something out like that so Manish with you going to ASD are you doing the trade show walkthrough with Amazon lit NOP I'm not ah I was gonna say if you were then you could share some tips that they share no I'm not um i' I've heard it's great um yeah they offer a trade show walkthrough which I hear is great I've already been to a handful of trade shows
(2:53:31) so I don't definitely think I would need to go to the trade show walk through been to um a handful last yearing plan my trade show rounds this year as well but you know prior to trade show you want to research who's going to be they who you want to talk to um like show normally on their website publish their um exhibition list and so you look through the exhibitor list and you know just re research each brand like research each company right and see which companies offer brands that you'd like to carry and then when you get the trade
(2:54:05) show map when you get there use a pen and paper and try to make a point to talk to a person at that company but you know I would suggest I would suggest you dress comfortably and look presentable um you know that depends on each person and that's going to change person to person but you know you want to be comfortable during your time at the trade show probably comfortable pair of shoes because you're going to be on your feet pretty much all day um lots of water breath mints things like this um yeah and just you know have a
(2:54:40) conversation with a person right just be an open social person and that's pretty much it it's it's it's really just a matter of developing the relationship with the person but obviously you're not going to be able to completely do that in a span of a five minute conversation you just want to get their contact information so then you can eventually follow up once the trade show is done like your job at the trade show is to get the contact information and develop some type of rapport with the person but when you reach out to them they can you
(2:55:11) hopefully remember who you were and you know some information about your conversation so then they can recall back on that so they kind of would be able to distinguish you from a whole what are your thoughts on bringing business cards to trade shows always bring business cards to trade shows yeah and so you can get a business card made for like what like 20 bucks or something I think I got like 500 made for like 30 bucks at a shop here in town and they've they've proven um for helpful yeah and like with that like I
(2:55:46) can't give great experience for trade show walkthroughs because I haven't really personally done a lot myself but I know just like from coming from the mindset of a distributor is yeah make sure you have that rapport with them talk to them treat them like people uh but also don't just hand your business card to somebody and walk away have that conversation first and then give them your then give more contact information if you just say here's my card and then just leave chances are that card is probably going to go in the trash
(2:56:15) yeah and the most important thing is not the trade show the most important thing is after the trade show because after a trade show you're going to have a little pouch with you or like normally at Trade Show entrance to give you like a what do you call those things like a like a pouch thing you know what I mean which has like all the information the trade show in like a little information packet type thing and so they're going to give you that little pouch and normally you throw your all your cards in there all
(2:56:39) your contact information there the most important part after the trade show is to follow up with all these people that you were talking with right because if you don't follow up with them there's no point of really attending the trade check like the goal at the end of the day is to open up the account and the only way to do that is to follow up with all the contacts that you made out the trade show and it takes time right if you meet you know if you go to a trade show that has 100 different companies there you might only want to talk to 20
(2:57:09) and to you know to call all 20 companies might take you a couple hours right you can at least you know do your initial email to the company and then once you have that uh email back and forth with whoever or whomever you were speaking with um you can then give them a call that's I would suggest have you have you thought of the approach of trying to reach out to some of these companies obviously you can find the contact information ahead of time and then say hey I'll be seeing you at ASD and try scheduling a meeting if like you can't I
(2:57:41) mean obviously they should be also available I mean I've seen some people also go with the methodology be like oh yeah I go in there and place X number of orders and POS and I'm like how do you make those buying decisions on the spots yeah if it's a liquidation or something maybe but you know I guess even some people just go in there and are just renewing their relationship and saying hey good to see you again and you know thanks for the business we've done so far and here's my here's what's next right or what's new so yeah like in in
(2:58:09) so a this is my first time attending ASD but in terms of some of the other trade shows that I've been too like um it's a lot a lot of times you want to meet the people like a lot of times you've been you know if it's a company that you've already been purchasing from for quite some time you've been talking to some of these people for you know quite some time and you've never met them in person so a lot of times it's just putting a you know making a connection between the person you're talking to on email or on
(2:58:33) the phone and then taking that person's hand at a trade show right so you just want trying to connect more with the actual person and you know offer to take him out to lunch or a drink or coffee or what have you it doesn't really matter um and then what was your other question I don't remember the other question I think about placing orders on the trade show order yeah yeah normally I don't place an order at the trade show like trade show hey so like I don't know a lot of distribution companies that are at trade
(2:59:04) show they say we have this order you know it's only available today or for a week or whatever it's typically available for the month of the trade show like for every trade show that I've been to they normally offer the promos for for the month it's it's normally not like a onee thing unless it's something like liquidation but I've never done liquidation I don't plan on doing liquidation um because it could get kind of you know sketchy depending on the Liquidator you're you're approaching but you know the the the trade shows that
(2:59:33) I've attended normally are are a lot of uh there are a lot of Distributors there and they're all authorized Distributors not just like black market kind of situation um navigating ASD I haven't been to AFC before but I'm essentially going to avoid you know liquidations close outs all that sort of stuff and and look for look for replenishable like you know vendors that would be able to consistently supply products not just like a oneoff of situation I'm not sure if I answered all your questions yeah that makes sense D
(3:00:07) wrong Manish like obviously if you want to sell some of this stuff in Canada are you going to look at hey can they ship to Canada directly or do you have that figured out as an option plan B being okay I would have to you know get it shipped to whatever place in us and then crossb it yourself for example would that be like a de it it depends like some Brands like at ASD it's going to be I imagine a lot of American brands but there are also you know Canadian brands that attend ASD um and that being said some of the American brands at these
(3:00:42) trade shows are looking for a way to get their products into Canada and if you can help facilitate that um that process and have the conversation with them if you understand the way to import products and Logistics and all that sort of stuff then you could definitely be of significant value to some of these companies like one of the one of the Distributors that I recently started buying from a um they have this brand um in which I want to purchase this brand from you know no longer from the distributor essentially
(3:01:18) um if I can cut them out I will and uh I would probably get much better pricing going to the brand directly because I just had a conversation with a person at the brand today they said they're going to be at some of the trade shows that I'll be attending so um but they won't be at ASD um but anyways there's what was your question sorry I don't remember oh yeah the logistics um or like if they're in Canada or whatever yeah like a lot of these Brands they might be American it's not it's not necessarily I would like for them to be able to ship
(3:01:48) to Canada if they meet some sort of FFA allowance but if I don't I'm I'm more than open to work out what the cost would be to bring that product into Canada myself because some of these Brands like if they're American brands they want to expand into Canada as long as they can produce the the product in English and French packaging which a lot of them can um and they're not in the Canadian Market or they have the they have the ability to be able to produce that English and French pack they're not selling the C could be an
(3:02:17) opportunity makes sense and do you CEO owner or do you approach them as just a buyer as part of your organization or company what what was that do you approach them as like oh I'm the CEO or owner or or do you approach it as yeah the buying agent for my company like obviously yeah yeah like my my company cards just say owner on it I've never written CEO on it I found like CEO is kind of a show offy kind of term I don't know um I've never threat CEO on a card but I just write owner on all my cards and that's you know they ask me like I'm
(3:02:58) in charge of making the decisions for the company because I am but yeah like to add on to what Manish is mentioning um and like what Jaden asked is when you are when there are opportunities to purchase products directly at a a trade show and I know from listening to people before like obviously there's always those opportunities um that's obviously something that you don't need to go into the trade show expecting but if you have the capital and the means to vet the products while you are there then of course you can always look into those
(3:03:28) opportunities but you just have to be willing to vet those products and make viable purchasing decisions when you're there um also with finding vendors I should like you should also make sure that before you are buying from them that you are able to vet them because it's not the responsibility of the conference to vet whether or not A supplier is legit a lot of vendors they just have to pay a fee to have like their Booth right so you still want to ensure that you are vetting suppliers even if they are at a quote unquote
(3:03:58) reputable trade show to ensure that you are dealing with reputable suppliers and then Joe asked uh could you suggest a niche or category suitable for those new to wholesale example avoiding Health Canada if you're buying from Canadian suppliers that's not realistically that big of a concern because any products that need to be regulated by Health Canada if they are being sold by reputable Canadian suppliers they will already be registered right so like honestly like any category that fits your budget and that you are able to
(3:04:38) regularly Source I don't think unless you're bringing them across border you're bring BR them across border you probably want to tread more lightly with things like grocery Health and Beauty Etc but realistically any categories can be fine and then Joe asks I'm curious to learn about what your public profile is to show to supplier reps like do you have a website LinkedIn custom domain email so Manish can answer that for his business cards but like for myself when I talk to reps i h I do have custom domain emails cuz like that's something
(3:05:10) that's very easy to get cost you a couple bucks a month and you should get because it does actually show you are professional uh but besides that I just have my personal contact information that I provide to people yeah my company cards just have my company name uh logo my phone number my email website that's pretty much it um if you're looking to make a website um it's quite inexpensive like I made mine in 48 hours it's not amazing it's pretty simple it's essentially just a landing page which kind of talks about
(3:05:47) what you what the company does and services that are offered and how we can help grow your brand um nothing too complicated yeah and you can realistically build a website like even drag and drop stuff like Squarespace or Wix or WordPress right there's card there's company called card c a rrd uh card.
(3:06:11) co it's another good one for you know you can I would suggest if you're going to reach out to a wholesaler use a professional email because everyone can have a hot mail or Gmail or whatever and it just doesn't look professional if you if you reach out to them from you know your email um which is like a personal email essentially a lot of times they will look up your website like I've had multiple suppliers look up the website because they they they see the email that you're emailing from and they normally ask is this also your website and then yeah
(3:06:44) and is your which carries retail product like a e-commerce St front or are you just saying you're a brand managing company that Imports product and specializes in Canada etc etc yeah I don't put any products on my website um it's just a very general landing page website um I know some people are of the mindset that they make like a Shopify website and put like fake products on there products they sell on Amazon do any of that [ __ ] just have a website that kind of explains what the company does and what I do and all that
(3:07:19) but it's not there are no products on there yeah and like I mentioned kind of closer to the top of the conversation I used to have a website I don't anymore I haven't personally found it to be that big of a benefit when contacting suppliers um so if a supplier does ask me for my actual website if I know I'm actually going to do business with them and they look viable I would more often just provide them a link to my Amazon storefront yeah and I don't know if my mic is still on yep um some of these trade shows will ask you um if you're in
(3:08:00) the industry in order to prove that like sometimes like CHF chfa will ask you grocery Innovations will ask you and you know they've approved me but they've rejected a friend of mine who you know you only had like a handful of grocery products like five or something like I that might not cut it right or you might have to you know provide them with some kind of invoice to prove that you're in the industry and you know purchasing five or six units of a product might not necessarily consider they might not consider you a an Independent Grocer if
(3:08:31) you only have an invoice that shows six units or you know any other proof that you're you're actively involved in the industry right because chfa I'm pretty sure he free um from what I remember and chfa is a great one uh grocery Innovations I think I paid for it but it was also pretty good but anyways point being is that you know a lot of these trade shows will require some type of proof that you're in the industry because if you don't provide the proof you'll be considered general public and you got to pay way more right like the
(3:08:59) difference between the cost of being a independent retailer let's say it's like 50 bucks versus just a general public might be like $200 or something a lot more right yeah for Ste like you could register online and it's a bit daunting at first so like for me example I took the risk of going in person cuz I was like cool it take me 20 minutes and I did have to go there and I'm like here's my website use my business card and like you an current supplier who's one of your like main sponsors of the show and you invoice
(3:09:29) from them where I've bought like2 $3,000 worth of product before right so like those are some to kind of get through that door um but yeah I mean and even like with some of these like ASD or even like chfa if you're smart about it like I'm not saying you obviously would love to go to the show and meet these people you can still go through the online directory and there's still a lot of information out there so if you like still want to do the online work and try reaching out that way you you still will get some
(3:09:59) sort of content or knowledge that you could potentially leverage you know right so if you know if it's a distributor that's harder to oh yeah you can go ahead Jordan oh I didn't mean no I didn't mean to cut you off going to say if it's a distributor that's harder it's if it's a distributor that's harder to work with and one that says no Ecom if you have you know let's say if you've had a conversation with the rep and they kind of understand what you do and they understand that you're a professional at what you do when you
(3:10:26) have you know a warehouse or a space or use a prep Center what have you um and you've you know you've made a point made it a point to differentiate yourself from the crowd um from your typical typical eCommerce person um that goes a long way in opening up that account cuz because you have that direct relationship with you know the right person like for example chfa because I went to the one in April I reached out to the rapid she's like you don't you don't need to register you've already been approved for pre-registration I'll
(3:10:52) send you your information like you s me my information like months ago or the one in Vancouver and I went to the dra one like last year so I I no longer need to register for that show I think ever again I also want I also wanted to share so like in regards to websites on my screen right now this is the website for Amazon lit okay so Amazon lit for those who don't know like they are relatively large Amazon sellers in the US I think they do like something like $60 million us Revenue per year this is their website right now it looks pretty nice
(3:11:26) right it's pretty straightforward if you want some type of reference but also if you look in like the wayb back machine to show what the website used to look like so like in 2020 2021 this is what the website looked like it wasn't nice it didn't have a whole lot in it right so it's like you don't have to overthink things like this if you do want a website if you do want one just put one together like they are large Amazon sellers and they have just a very generic website there are also programs for small businesses uh if you want to like work
(3:11:58) with someone to create a website like if you really are struggling with it yeah yeah like in most cases I don't think it's really necessary like if you it doesn't have to be fancy if you want one just literally a landing page indicating what you what you do and you can literally just use Wix Squarespace WordPress you can drag and drop stuff it's really easy or you can pay somebody on Fiverr to do it for you and then if you do on a website it'll run you like 20 bucks a month uh Joe said what systems should you have in place that are unique to
(3:12:38) wholesale versus OA so it really depends like real istically the same systems you put in place for OA um are going to be very similar systems that you can also utilize for wholesale it's just like the more you scale the more kind of systems and uh organization you're going to need in order to break through certain Plateau so like you should have a way to track your purchases versus what you bought versus what you received you should have some type of system in place that you're able to utilize to replenish your inventory whether you're you're
(3:13:10) whether you're utilizing seller board whether you're utilizing Amazon's uh inventory system uh whether you're utilizing something like so stocked right um I don't think there's any specific system that you need to put in place I think everybody builds their own systems around their own workflows and their own processes over time you should realistically no matter what you're doing you should keep tabs and keep track on your production like kind of we mentioned in the the general chat a couple days ago so that's
(3:13:43) tracking like if you do your own in-house prep or you hire somebody to do your prep tracking uh how many units they're able to produce per hour based on what kind of prep they are what kind of prep they're doing um keep track of your personal time what you're keeping what you're actually spending your personal time doing while you're working on your business uh how much revenue you're able to produce per hour when you're making purchasing decisions um keep tabs make sure that your bookwork is in order make sure that you have a
(3:14:13) good handle and grasp on your finances these are things that like not everybody when they first start are going to have but these are things that you need to do over time and realistically everybody's going to do it at their own pace obviously things like your financials book workk etc those are going to be more beneficial the earlier that you do it but some people wait honestly years before they get those in order which you shouldn't but some people do but for like systems like from trans from like OA to wholesale we've had very
(3:14:40) similar systems in place basic basically the entire time we've just improved enhanced our systems as as we've went and as as we scaled cool so any other questions comments concerns about anything from anyone Fred I see you're here how's your q1 going so far if you're present hey hey sorry uh I'm prepping of course you are as always um it's going well uh I've done about you want to know the profit I've made or just in general how's it going like how are your numbers looking compared to the last uh 4 it's well uh in December I went on
(3:15:47) vacation so uh uh January was a bit slower than usual because I went on vacation for like 3 weeks uh but uh it picked back up in uh February uh and the margin are improving uh I HED two vas uh to uh find some uh us and Canadian leads and uh it's going well uh making about 35% margin right now uh not margin uh return on return on investment okay I was goingon to say that's a really high margin yeah nice and so when did you first hire when did you hire your first VA uh three weeks ago okay and Fred did you onlinejobs.ph and use any of the content
(3:16:49) J created this no own stuff actually it's a guy that contacted me on Twitter uh he said that he wanted to give me a free trial of his Services he already worked for uh some us Sellers and I told him that I wasn't selling in the US but if you could uh uh find me some leads for a week uh from U for Canada to us then uh I would consider iring him and uh I think he found about 100 leads in a week so uh I kept on going and uh right now he's he's going for about uh still 100 leads a day uh not a day a week that that would be too too good to
(3:17:46) be true uh 100 leads uh a week um and uh they're averaging uh 30 to uh 100% for lead and is he working for you full-time or yes okay I actually I actually pay him uh a $100 US per week yes and do you have a contract with him like I'm curious because you know he reached out to you saying hey here's my leads I'm curious like how do you know he's not doing that to anyone else and ensuring he's not sharing the same leads anywhere else uh how you tracking like his work effort and stuff like that if any well I I try what he does in the
(3:18:32) sheet I don't actually know if it shares with anybody else but at the same time even if he did uh I I still believe that it's about execution it's not about uh only the information that you get so for example someone with the less Capital couldn't buy as much as me um so doesn't really matter even if you shared it and those those other the person would not maybe take the same uh the same decision as I do on the quantities that I buy so I I don't know honestly I don't have time to think about that so yeah like Jaden if you are
(3:19:25) concerned about like hiring a VA and like tracking whether or not they're sharing stuff with somebody else I mean honestly like a contract you can have VA signed contracts but those they're irrelevant good luck trying to good luck trying to enforce a contract with somebody overseas and chances are they know that so if somebody really wants to [ __ ] around realistically they will uh most vas that you actually hire though um realistically especially if you're sourcing them yourself they're people that just want a job and provide a
(3:19:56) living for themselves and their family uh there are things obviously that you can do to ensure that they're not screwing around if that's what you want to do and like we have things in place where we have our va's clock in and it actually tracks their activity level it takes screenshots while they're working we don't do that to invade privacy but there's ever if there is ever any questions about what is going on we can review that information and find things out right and so like uh we used to use a software called hubstaff now we use a
(3:20:27) software called team logger they just clock in while they're working um we have had a couple instances because we pay our employees by the hour they are working full-time we don't pay them a salary um there have been uh some instances where somebody has been specifically stealing time where like clocks in puts like a rock on his keyboard and then just goes away and doesn't work and clocks in for 18 hours straight and is 100% active right and so like those are those are obvious and we can see that they're just trying to not
(3:20:57) work and get paid for it so in those instances like we see that they're not producing anything they're clocked in all a sudden we we check their their screenshots they're not actually working it's the same screen for 16 hours straight so then we know that those people need to be fired and honestly for me uh it's about uh the result it's not about the number of hours if he can get me 100 leads per week for a $100 I don't mind even if he works 16 hours a week as long as they're sustainable and purchasable that's all that matters yeah
(3:21:36) yeah and I think that's a mindset that a lot of people would benefit having and I've had that mindset for a long time like I've talked to many of my VA employees and like I would say I don't really care if you work 40 hours a week if you're able to produce as much as you were right if you want to work 20 hours a week and still produce as much as you were doing 40 I'd pay you for the the entire 40 That's cool because they're still giving you that value why why should they have to continuously clock in and work those 40 hours if they're
(3:22:02) able to produce twice as much as somebody else's V that are reaching out at the moment um I had someone get in touch with me weeks ago and interestingly enough I had been involved with another course out of the us and one of the things they had was an actual test that you could get your VA to complete surprisingly her resume was beautiful and looked fantastic but when I sent her the test he was unable to do it because she didn't have the experience that I thought she did based in her resume so I kind of dodged a bullet with that and I
(3:22:49) was pretty happy because this is the second time I've had somebody reach out to me and the first time was a disaster so you know it's um it's just the luck of the draw and and just a a story that happened recently that I just wanted to share with you yeah for sure and like with any avenues like there's always going to be people that are just trying to uh get by on somebody right uh but even with tests like even to a certain point some people can pass through tests whatever you information you want them to provide and
(3:23:21) they still might not end up being viable employees that's that's OB that's obviously like a another filter that you can do like doing like an interview a test things like that a trial run those are all good things to help avoid that but even with all those you could still end up having shitty employees oh absolutely totally agree with that but made she made it look like she was like very good at sourcing yet she just was useless as far as trying to do some OA simple calculations so surprise right yep Jordan uh when you interview these
(3:24:00) guys right like are you expecting them to subscribe keeper or Sal I don't think of those guys will have that right no like you're you're asking somebody overseas that literally makes next to nothing you should be providing them with all the tools that they need right like I like we provide them every single tool that they need keepa seller amp if we have them use tactical Arbitrage anything else you shouldn't really expect them to be bringing that with them especially when you're paying them next to nothing and
(3:24:32) you should realistically already have those tools anyway oh no I mean I mean Gina's point right if you if you contact these guys like and if we provide them a test most likely they will not have a tool to do a sourcing right correct so yeah like if they need access to something I I would give them access like there's very limited things that somebody can do if you give them access to like cell ramp and keepa there's not much that somebody can do and you can just change your password if they don't have access to
(3:25:00) those tools the exactly um the the test was very specific and had a bunch of screenshots in it that showed uh keep charts and statistics and all kinds of information so um this case yeah they should have been able to do it so you're saying and generally I'm sure Jordan the same as most of the rest of us your va's access to your um tools most likely via Fass or whatever you're using so that they just have the tools without the without having to have the software pass passwords right with rvas we actually just have a a spreadsheet
(3:25:46) with the relevant information that's assigned to them and then yeah like if if they have access to seller amp keepa Etc we just make note of that and then if we do have to terminate them then we just change those corresponding passwords either before or right after yeah yeah are you concerned at all about giving them your seller ramp um credentials because like I I emailed Sol an maybe about a week ago and they said that there's no such thing as a subuser account on their program it's just like you have to you have to give them access
(3:26:20) to your main account and then depending on the type of subscription you have um you can get x amount of people to be able to use that same account at the same time the only thing that I'm concerned about is that when I log into my solar ramp account I could see the last um the last four characters of my of my credit card that's the only thing I'm really concerned about yeah I mean that's not really that's that's never been a concern for me because what are they going to do with four digits right that's also true yeah say the history of
(3:26:49) your scan products yeah and and again like that's that's has to be like a a risk that you're willing to take like somebody if they want to look through your cell amp history of everything that been looked up I mean so be it I mean if they really want to go through that effort I mean whatever that's that's on them yeah you actor but majority of them should be good and I mean that's business right you got to trust them as simple as that Jordan you also mentioned there was like a Facebook group or something you would
(3:27:21) recommend which has some of these sources uh because correct me wrong with online. jobs or pH you have to like create a listing pay for it things like that go through the whole process right yeah yeah so like onlinejobs.ph is probably one of the best places to find a VA if you're specifically hiring but yes you do have to register and pay for it to make a listing uh when you do expect to get like literally a couple hundred applications within a day or two so you do need to do things to be able to filter out those applications the
(3:27:50) thing that I do the most is somewhere in the middle of the job description I'll just indicate uh put this word in your title and I'll just say I love oranges or something like that so that uh when they send me a an a message if it doesn't say I love oranges in the in the actual subject I know they didn't read it so I don't even pay attention to that application you need something like that to be able to fill throughout uh people when you have that many applications um there are a couple of Facebook groups that you can find good vas in I have
(3:28:18) found some good vas in um but you also have to be mindful that some of these vas uh they are the ones that I got that were trying to steal time clock in and not actually to any production so like there's some give and take right uh you can get that with onlinejobs.ph as well you can get that anywhere but uh there are some Facebook groups I will find them and I will share them in the chat but if anybody is interested eventually I will be putting together like an entire guide on like how to effectively hire a VA with our processes
(3:28:51) on how we do it that will be in the future we have that uh scheduled in our working on channel that is one of the guides that we're going to work on uh but if you look at our gitbook which you can access through our guides and resources Channel under support uh we have a category under resources virtual assistance we do have a couple resources in here right now so we do have a standard recruitment form this is what we personally use that I send to vas when they're interested in getting a job with us so you can make a
(3:29:20) copy of this I get it via Google form and just allows me to one keep their information on file and then I just see some relevant information so like it does ask for things like a resume I don't even care about a rume I never even look at them I just put it there just to ensure that they're like an actual real person right uh and like their Facebook profile I don't care about that I just want to know that they're actually a real person and then it does ask some basic questions about their prior job and then some uh basic
(3:29:48) Amazon Knowledge Questions right and this is just for me to gauge that if they have a an base level understanding of Amazon it's not to put them through any extensive test it's just to ensure that they have a base level knowledge of Amazon so that's what we do I just ensure that they answer these very much so to the answer I'm expecting or very close and then if everything if everything else looks good and and they indicate that they have a decent system and a decent internet connection that's why I asked for a screenshot of their
(3:30:16) speed test for their internet connection then we would proceed with uh interviews and additional tests um we also have our VA Source where would I find that uh one second I will find it here I will send you the link and I will put it in the chat thank you so it's in our guides and resources channel so we have a category called support and resources it's near the top of the channel list we put a bunch of stuff in here uh but everything goes to what's called our getbook so this is where we have everything cataloged from the calls that we have
(3:30:53) they're all cataloged in here to all the resources that we have to all the guides that we have Etc they're all cataloged in here accordingly so there's a bunch of guides on like how to do different things on Amazon eBay ticket guides sports betting Etc I'll find the exact post here uh and of course everybody in here is able to access this even if you are on a free trial uh where is the post I'll just send the link to you that'll be better uh I will put this in the voice chat and then I will DM it to Gina thank you because if you can't find it
(3:31:43) how the hell am I supposed to find it Well I I can find it I just don't know where I put the exact post linking to this but yeah it's there it's there somewhere with you come on and then yeah like there's also a VA sourcing spreadsheet it's like this is the exact same template that we use for VAs and just for us to keep track of their actual production so like there's a video on here exactly how it works but you can open this guy up and this is what we Ed to have our vas export their products into right so we set up we set
(3:32:15) it up via seller amp which you can do with any other calculator they export their products into here and then this is where we give them feedback qualify the leads disqualify them and then it also gives us stats so it tells us their active stats for this month this week last month Etc and gives us access to all their stats overall and a bunch of other stuff and you can filter the products accordingly there's a whole video about it it's a pretty handy tool that's awesome yeah and so this is something that like
(3:32:48) this is like a crucial part of us managing a VA team and ensure that we track their production over time if I didn't utilize something like this it would be very hard to track that many employees and ensure that they're improving over time as well well especially if you're planning on giving them bonuses along the way you have to know what they're doing right exactly and yeah like this just gives us access to ensure that we are able to give them feedback immediately because we put feedback directly in the notes
(3:33:20) and then we can also qualify or disqualify the products just with a simple check box right so like if we accept the product we can just check it off we can just check this guy off and it'll turn green if we disqualify it we can uh disqualify it then it'll turn color accordingly and then it shows the employee read away why it was disqualified if it was out of stock if we previously used it if it's a mismatch Etc H yeah some amazing systems in place there yeah we've been doing this for we've been doing this a while and it's
(3:33:51) definitely taking us a while to to build up these systems but yeah and we're always upgrading and uh improving our systems but this is kind of what we have right now for VAs and I imagine in a year's time it will probably look quite different as well um mentioned uh he asked Fred if his VA is also doing purchasing as well and why are you doing your own prep um no the VA is not doing any purchase I'm the one doing the decisions um and why am I doing my own prep to save money because uh I'm a cheap ass and I don't want to pay a dollar per unit to
(3:34:42) uh put a label on my uh items so I think Fred's situation is a little bit unique to most people just because like the volume that he does and as far as I as far as I know Fred it's you and your wife that do prep exclusively is that correct yes okay so and like we've had these conversations in here I've had these conversations and [ __ ] on people on Twitter all kinds of stuff um but I think people very much so overrate prep centers so there is a time and place for prep centers but at a certain scale it doesn't make sense um
(3:35:19) for Fred I'm not sure why he hasn't hired somebody and pay him an hourly wage versus dude it himself uh because I would understand that over you you using a prep Center what else do I have to do well I mean that's fair if you have the time that's completely fair I mean I got my kid but uh he sleeves at eight so and that's completely fair but like the way that I look at it is I say if I was just starting over again um when you're just starting if you have very limited cash flow realistically you probably have the time
(3:35:57) to be able to do prep right and that would also help your bottom line and ensure that you're able to reinvest more money into your business more quickly um once you start scaling a little bit and like say you're working a full-time job and you do not want to manage employees then yeah YES Prep centers probably make sense or if you just want hands off 100% you just have to be able to factor in and live with those costs but then at a certain scale it almost never makes Financial sense using a prep Center versus hiring
(3:36:25) employees and getting a warehouse it's going to be dependent on your cost and where you are but like if you either if you hire somebody locally to come into your house like say a nephew a friend's kid Etc you can pay somebody $15 an hour and you're going to be able to produce those units much cheaper versus a prep Center at least 50% cheaper chances are probably even more right so if at scale like say you're doing multiple tens of thousands of units per month like many of us are you're going to be leaving thousands to tens of thousands
(3:36:55) of dollars of profit to a prep Center versus being on your bottom line yes you don't need the hassle of having employees Etc but if you're in my opinion if you're wanting to build a long-term sustainable business that is almost a necessary step and eventually you will want to at a certain scale everybody has different goals and opinions but at a certain scale if you do want to break certain plateaus and ensure you're still profitable you're probably going to have to come to a point where you're going to have to hire
(3:37:27) your own employees right uh you can definitely scale with a prep Center but again at a certain point you're going to be leaving a ton of profit on the table and if this is something that you're just doing part time or you just want for travel money or you just want some extra extra dollars in the bank no problem using prep Center absolutely especially if you want more hands off you want to not manage employees definitely but if you're wanting to build a business to a certain point then that's where it really makes a
(3:37:59) difference and I seen like Fred recently um somebody on Twitter mentioned something about nobody who's selling millions of dollars a year is prepping out of their house and and Fred said well I am and I was like yeah like I was like not everybody needs a warehouse people can prep out prep in in their house and there's different scales to everything like there's people that literally sell millions of dollars of books a year there's people that literally sell millions of dollars of use video games a year there's different
(3:38:28) scales and different levels to this and you can do it out of your house if you want to and I'm curious Fred not not to cry but like I'm assuming you may live in a house which has a garage or some sort of nature versus example I could perhaps live in a condo or or a room which has two flights of stairs before I even get to my main floor and like there's not enough space for me to prep my stuff without it being in my living room right you make it work Jaden if you got it you make it work it's all I get that two of s might
(3:39:03) be uh a bit of a pain but uh the I've prepped before uh I think for four months I've prepped in on my kitchen table because my garage was full of [ __ ] old stuff that uh I I was just letting Rod away in my garage for no reason so we had to clean it up and set up like a uh desks and uh tables to do the the prep but uh we were so overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that we re we were receiving that we never took the time to uh actually do it uh so you can definitely do it even if you don't have a garage oh yeah and
(3:39:51) once you to the printers and invest into a process and you you get it down to it and you like doing it Go and that's that I don't mind doing it also it's not all about like having all the supplies immediately like when we first started like I started in my top for condo I I wheeled [ __ ] up the stairs buying it ra and then I graduated and I moved into my my mom's living room because she lived in a house it was more accessible and then we got a warehouse right and over time like we just slowly bought things over time so like in my
(3:40:27) condo I had one folding plastic table that was about it and then like standard like 30 up labels a laser printer some poly bags Etc graduating to my mom's uh living room we end end up getting I think it was like four or six plastic folding tables packed her living room uh ended up eventually getting like standing mats because we're standing on these floors for 10 12 hours at a time and killing our back and it's like slowly upgraded right moving into the warehouse and all of a sudden uh we still had a laser printer to begin with
(3:40:56) and then started getting uh thermal printers and then upgrading those thermal printers and getting steel tables and ones that come up to our our belly so we're not bending over stuff like that and you just make the the upgrades and progress over time right so Jordan I'm just looking at the left panel in on my screen which has you know all of the information I don't see anything there that tells me that there is the guide section someplace I should be looking I see your message so I see the link but I'm not sure where to go
(3:41:36) and find it if I had if you hadn't shared it with me so so do you see my screen on Discord right now or are you able to get into my screen I see your screen yes okay so you want to click into the server of course first so you click into this guy right here with a little animated uh spinny icon and then we see all of our channels in here okay oh so not on my okay gotcha yeah so all all the orbs on the on the left hand side are either the servers that you're in or the direct messages that you get and then when you click
(3:42:11) into the server then you see all of our channels and so under the if you open up the support and resources category we have a guides and resources section and anything anytime we post things they're they're posted in this channel okay yeah it's just like I said it's it's me intact you know we don't always go together right I yeah but I think anybody can get overwhelmed in uh in the server when there's much going on so don't blame you thank you for your started to create a separate Discord server just for myself and then I copy paste I share
(3:42:50) links from this Discord to the other just so I can reference and bookmark fair enough that works oh yeah uh Vinnie you were going to hop on the mic what's up um back to VA topic so how you pay them like do you create invoice or you just salary them like what is the process you follow so when we had our accounting session with carmel she made a good point that technically speaking uh subcontractors are supposed to be sending you invoices right I've never actually done that I've only uh had them clock in Via our clockin software and
(3:43:29) then I pay them on a bi-weekly basis and I pay them via Paypal right so I can't say if I'll have problems with the CRA if I ever get audited for not having those invoices I haven't and and probably best practice is to get invoices from your vas and then pay them and like you just invoice them for how many hours times whatever you pay them per hour or their their salary and then just pay them accordingly via like PayPal wise Etc okay so oh so at the end of the tax return it's like VA expenses right that is what you uh do the tax return right
(3:44:04) for for bookkeeping honestly it doesn't really matter what account you put it into the only thing that matters is that you have some that are credits some that are debits right you separating into different accounts is just for your own reference it doesn't matter to the CRA if you put it in this account this account this account for us for uh VA salaries we just put it under a chart of account for subcontractors that's it but you can put it under any account that you want it can just be a regular expense um how you separate them is just
(3:44:36) for your own individual reference and processes yeah and and it is the business expense except you're just not going to get GST or HST against it to claim as an input tax credit that's about it right so they just wouldn't charge you and you wouldn't factor that into your accounting software but how you pay do you directly to the foreign exchange and send send the money to them or you just send Canadian so I pay my vas in US Dollars and uh I advise them whether or not they do it or not to open up Bank local bank
(3:45:10) accounts in US currency that ends up being so that they have the least amount of exchange rates as possible uh so I just I pay them in US Dollars and then whether they receive it in USD or PHP is up to them how do you pay your employees in Canada like the people that work and do prep rate are are they contractors or are they um are they employees on payroll so my two employees one that's part-time one that's a casual they are considered contractors my full-time employee my nephew my gopher he is on regular payroll
(3:45:53) goer my goer oh god well yeah I mean basically whatever I need him to do he has to go and run and do it right absolutely and like that's like I like as as as bad as it sounds um that has been really helpful for me because to to a sense I've been able to exploit my nephew because I can get him to do things that most other employees wouldn't do like go from doing uh orders with us Inventory management to doing prep and pack to going to thrift stores with me to picking up ra purchases to whatever right like it's a lot that most
(3:46:35) regular employees probably wouldn't do he's getting taking on our lot of responsibilities but I'm giving him value in return right I'm obviously paying him well and he's learning things from me as we go yeah do do you see any advantages like pros and cons or paying your employees contractors because the the two guys that work for me right now they're both contractors they just pay them by you transfer every two weeks why I have the one guy who works more parttime the other guy's a lot more casual than the first guy but um you
(3:47:08) know they're both they both contractors or subcontractors which e rank for them to the amount and then they handle their own taxes all that do do you think they're pros and cons to I think we've had this conversation before a little bit realistically like from the employer perspective I don't really see that many cons from hiring somebody as a contractor um the only con is like potentially long-term viability and retention because if you hire somebody as a contractor you don't have to deal with the paperwork about like uh
(3:47:37) remitting their taxes EI workers comp all that [ __ ] right um right but like for long-term retention and employee happiness that may impact that if they are like oh I have to remit all these taxes myself or or that kind of stuff right right yeah so yeah like it just depends on what stage you're in like there's no shame when you're first starting hiring employees just Outsourcing Etc to hire somebody's contractors like when I first hired my nephew who when I first hired him full-time I hired him as a contractor too cuz I didn't know if he
(3:48:17) was going to work out and I didn't want to deal with payroll and stuff but eventually it's like okay he's been working with me for a year he probably wants a regular paycheck and actually try not to do tax evasion and stuff so right right right so because yeah when he went he he's relatively young he's I think he's 21 22 last year he wanted to go buy a car or it was last year or the year before as when he was still a he was he was still a contractor and he's like well they want my t4s like for financing I was like well you don't have a [ __ ]
(3:48:54) T4 so I just have to bring him like a an like a record of employment I have a question for you Jordan what's up how do you manage your cash flow for uh for employees pay you take out a certain amount uh every time Amazon spays you I'll do Planet so I reevaluate my cash flow at the start of every week so I have a spreadsheet uh eventually when I have it all ironed out I will share it with the group but I basically keep track on what we have in our accounts what we have available for credit between our credit cards lines of credit
(3:49:35) Etc uh what we have as pending balance in amaz Amazon and then what we have expected payouts for that week okay so typically on Sunday or Monday I will look through this uh the spread sheeet and I start doing some calculations on what our cash flow and our spend is going to look like for that week so it tracks uh if I have any obligations like Warehouse rent uh what my employees wages are for that week if we have payroll uh what I need to pay myself those types of things and then I have a a buffer amount that I always keep to
(3:50:08) ensure that we are able to cover our bills uh it wasn't always a very big buffer but now it's about 3 months worth of expenses that I never spend it's just to ensure that I can pay everybody and then basically besides that we're basically trying to take as much available funds as we have and try to maximize our spend as as high as we feel comfortable okay uh you uh I'm I'm in a phase right now that I'm trying to repay all the debts that I got MH uh I don't I don't really want to grow that much uh have you had a phase like
(3:50:51) that I've tried to limit it but yes I have 100% And I have went through phases where I scared the sh I scared the [ __ ] out of myself with how much debt we had okay I I think like I'm I'm not crazy like I think at a certain point if you don't have the actual Capital yourself it's almost necessary whether you're utilizing loans LS of credit credit cards Etc um because you you need to be able to leverage more money in order to grow right y uh with most of the debt that you have is it like credit cards lens credit loans what is
(3:51:26) it uh most of it is on credit card uh but I got uh 100k with the BDC uh the only thing that worries me if uh well I have money but if they would close me I would essentially have a debt of uh let's say $200,000 I would I wouldn't need to uh to repay to those creditors so that's what I that's what I want to avoid and uh actually repay those loans before uh just as a a way to drisk myself of course and yeah I've definitely like maybe maybe TMI but there have been phases where it's like I've had so much debt and just sitting there thinking
(3:52:17) about it it's like I definitely make myself throw up at a point right uh but that that was like a very much so a a growing phase and it was very stressful and I think almost anybody at certain scale is going to go through that um with your like your independent debt like I would assume you're Incorporated Fred sorry uh yeah I'm Incorporated but um the problem is uh there's I'm a personal grer on those uh on those loans right so yeah like that's that's like that's the thing so like if anybody else is here when you are scaling that two
(3:53:03) things can happen uh when you are scaling especially when you're utilizing a lot of capital ideally you would be incorporated and ideally best case scenario you would not be a personal guarantor on those loans that's not always possible because like if you if you are a personal guarantor that means that you're personally responsible even if your corporation fails right uh that typically happens when you are like a relatively new Corporation have limited credit for that Corporation Etc or getting a large loan that is not the
(3:53:34) most ideal situation but it will probably happen in a lot of cases um yeah like with your concerns about being shut down on Amazon I think we've had this conversation before um I think people that have those concerns they are valid but I don't think it's as much of a risk as what people think it is extremely rare that people get deactivated for things outside of their control for any extended period of time right the only time in recent history that we've seen that is the whole section three stuff that happened in the
(3:54:09) us more so in the US um but most people got their accounts back in under a week and I don't think they their funds were ever restricted I think their selling abilities were restricted uh Jaden do you want to just mute yourself you keep cutting in there thank you um so like there are scenarios where people have been deactivated and people say it's for nothing that they've done but I would bet that probably 90 plus% of the people that say I got got deactivated I didn't do anything are not telling the whole truth right and if you actually dug into
(3:54:44) it they were probably potentially selling stolen goods counterfeit items trying to manipulate Amazon systems like review Systems fake invoices Etc it is extremely rare that somebody will ever get deactivated for not doing something that is actually outside of terms of service and just making simple mistakes is not outside of terms of service so like with where your account is so like in the in the public chat last night that guy Maddie was mentioning that his account was deactivated because he got an IP and a counterfeit claim okay that
(3:55:16) doesn't surprise me because his account is still new and he hasn't sold that much worth of volume whereas with your account Fred you have sold enough that you have better metrics that even having probably multiple IP complaints and counterfeit claims will probably not shut you down it'll take really yeah it'll take it'll take more because you have better metrics and Amazon is more lenient with you because you already have a proven history okay uh I received uh I think three weeks ago I received a complaint like that I had too many
(3:55:52) products that were uh I was not supposed to sell uh I just want to uh tell everyone to not keep product you're not selling as activated in your account as a list you want to delete all the listing that you can if you're not selling them because apparently it uh it means that you intent to sell that product yeah you can get like restricted product notifications for inventory you haven't stocked for months for sure if you still have it active in your inventory or or that you haven't NE that you have never sold right so uh keep uh
(3:56:39) almost the minimum strict product that you can inside of your uh your product list or your inventory list that I didn't know and I had the 1500 listings and uh they wanted to uh shut me down oh God because you got too many restricted product violations yes yeah yeah but i s plan of action and they they understood but now I know yeah like so like with us we review our inventory once every about 3 months or so and if we see inventory that we haven't stocked for multiple months and we have no indication that we are going
(3:57:21) to restock it then those listings get removed we typically wait a good couple months just in case inventory is lost get returned Etc but yeah every couple months it's good to do an audit of your inventory and delete those extra listings J if you close and delete them would you lose like your your Merchant skew to a certain level or I assume that will still show on the reports you need for tax or whatever other purposes right from tracking cost of good or whatever doesn't matter at that point so yeah all those items are
(3:57:50) still tracked via like your inventory Ledger your reports if you upload it in solell board Etc places like that they will still still show up even if you delete them out of your inventory regarding account restriction so Rec uh like I think couple months back I registered for geta for reimbursement uh service right uh so I'm lately I'm getting lot of reimbursement through that services so is it something uh I need to worry or is it fine like it's coming through there I think API or something right like you're concerned
(3:58:30) about using a reimbursement service about having like their account linked to yours yeah yeah no I mean they are reimbursing so so many lost item and the stuff so it is like I think they have they are getting through the reimbursement process but it has been so many so I'm a bit worried like if they are requesting too many uh request to Amazon it might affect my account or is it fine no I highly doubt you'll have any issues with that like there's no specific limitation for how many cases and stuff you can make like at a certain
(3:59:07) point if you're trying to uh keep hounding Amazon if they denied you on the same case they may say like they may give you warnings like Stop opening this case but for multiple reimbursements no you shouldn't have any concern for that okay talking about sorry when we're talking about closing listings um versus deleting listings I generally will close a listing so that if I get a return or I come back something stranded then I can just relist it and then if nothing happens after I'll just delete the listing so what's
(3:59:47) your so yeah like we if you have no intention of selling an item again like it's obviously it' probably be good practice to close it just like so there's no potential issues but we audit our inventory once every three months or so and all the inventory that we haven't stocked for multiple months and we have no intention of restocking it in the near future we physically delete those out of our catalog for the reasons like Fred mentioned so we do wait a couple month we do wait a couple months in case there are lost inventory returns Etc um
(4:00:19) but then we delete them and there are still some cases where like inventory will be lost and this magically found six months later and then it's stranded and we have to have it removed but it's it's not that common and we just deal with it and we just get them removed and relisted accordingly okay y yeah I see some other faces in here that are just starting to come into the conversation kind of at the end of it Liam wobby how's it going also on that note isn't that that Health Assurance thing you can sign up if you have like an HR or certain level
(4:01:01) I don't know if like anyone even actually qualifies for that and if that means anything I don't know if Fred that could apply for you well like I think almost everybody now gets access to get called from an account Health representative I I don't know if you have to be at a certain point or like a certain account Health rating but like most people have the option to be called so that if you do have concerns about your account um being suspended or issues happening you can actually talk to somebody and like that's an initiative that Amazon took
(4:01:30) not that long ago where they're supposed to actively try to be more communicative with you in the event there issues before you actually end end up getting deactivated oh yeah it's that account help Assurance so it ask you to provide a valid uh emergency number and then to maintain an ahr of 250 Plus for 6 months or something of that nature I don't know if that really is being cacked or not but yeah yeah but yeah like one one like obviously like Amazon like there's still a lot of [ __ ] we have to deal with with Amazon but them actually
(4:02:04) implementing things like that is a good sign for sellers for one because it actually shows that they're not just trying to randomly deactivate people for no reason um there's still a lot of [ __ ] we have to deal with but at least that's a good indication that it's looking more faible exactly I mean when I get product while wirly restricted products I just I'm like okay cool I deleted the listing or remove the listing and it supposedly says no impact on my account help but I'm sure once they start adding up it it
(4:02:34) can affect you yeah restricted products don't have a huge impact on your account Health but if you have a lot to Peri your time then they certainly will for sure and like it's just like with any other anybody's account um a brand new account if they get a counterfeit claim they are going to be deactivated immediately not suspended but deactivated a account that's established like say my account or Fred's account will probably need multiple many of them back to back before we actually get deactivated in the case of a counterfeit claim like
(4:03:11) say you have a receipt from winners a home sense or a liquidator you think that's sufficient enough or they're probably going to screw you over uh winners and home sense yes if the UPC is listed on the actual receipt um a liquidator it's going to depend like that's hard to prove chain a custody so like thankfully like counterfeit authenticity issues are not super common on Amazon but when they do happen you want proper documentation and yeah like Liquidators can be an issue um the guy Jason in the server from max deals that we have um he has
(4:03:46) indicated and like I've seen their invoices that their invoices have worked for authenticity purposes um but that's not to say that will work with every Liquidator but yeah like retail receipts always work for authentication assuming that you can actually indicate on the receipt that it's from it's actually that product if you have like a receipt from Dollarama that they scan a Dollarama tag it doesn't have a UPC on the bill and it just says book or something like that that will probably not work for authenticity so yeah we'll probably be
(4:04:31) wrapping up shortly here uh before we call her a knight anything else anybody want to cover before we do it's been uh been a good session we've been at it for just over four hours so really good thank you for all you do Jordan 100% I appreciate everybody wanting to listen to what I have to say and appreciate what we do thanks Jordan well we always listen to what you say Jordan come on I I never know like I I'm just here talking about what we do so I don't know if people find Value in it so it's always interesting when they do we'll do
(4:05:28) a tedex talk and we'll we'll put you on a stage with all those like like $100 for for for per seat sit down and just draw there we go no no thank you you should try for PM PM Ru we can vote for you for for what Vinnie you can stand for PM we can vote for you oh yeah totally bring all bring all we badly need you bring all my Amazon experience to to the uh to political Spectrum it couldn't be any worse than what's going on no I have too much [ __ ] on my plate I don't need to deal with that the all the entire country I hear you how many hours a week
(4:06:13) do you work Jordan on a average on average probably like 80 to 100 wow clearly you don't have a life outside of this I'm confused wait minus the ones you sleep what no like I I work a lot like that's I find joy in it so that's what I do so yeah and I I have goals and things that I want to achieve and I know like the the effort and time that needs to be put into it in order to achieve it so that's what we do well it's clearly evident the effort and the time and the growth that you put into it so it's much appreciated I appreciate that and yeah
(4:06:58) I've watched you quite a few years now and from where you were to where you are is quite incredible well thank you appreciate that and yeah like I believe you were part of some of the initial Facebook communities that I was a part of when I first started and we've communicated for quite some time so yep we're still talking to one another so that's a good sign I guess I guess that means that I'm not that much of an [Laughter] [ __ ] so some people that I've voice my opinion to would disagree I would assume I've been banned out of a lot of
(4:07:41) groups and people don't like my opinion when I call them on their [ __ ] but it is what it is we both know that there's lot [ __ ] to call people on in this Amazon world you know yeah uh before we finish off uh somi just had a question for USA wholesale can I buy same brand or I can buy other brands with same invoice as a first order I'm not 100% sure what you're meaning so me do you want to clarify like you can you can use the same invoice to get ungated in both Canada and the US and assuming that the listings follow local regulations and
(4:08:25) are listed on Amazon or you're able to list them you can list on both marketplaces as well but like there are certain regulations especially like versus the US to Canada that you really have to follow and like a lot of listings can can get restricted like Health and Beauty items grocery items uh technically legally all items sold in Canada are required to have both English and French packaging which items you get from the US probably don't have so those are just things that you have to keep in mind okay cool so I think we will wrap
(4:09:03) it up there so I appreciate everybody coming out and spending the time with us I hope everybody found some value in the session and then uh yeah we will continue to be providing resources in here as usual and likely either probably later this month or next month we'll be scheduling additional calls so if you ever have anything specific that you want covered or you want more in-depth sessions about let us know and then that will be what we can focus on going forward