January 11, 2024; Hangout. General
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In this engaging discussion, aspiring Amazon sellers explore the challenges and opportunities of starting and scaling their businesses. One participant shares their journey from hesitance to confidence in selling on Amazon, while others discuss their experiences with sourcing, managing returns, and navigating the complexities of shipping and taxes. Guests delve into the nuances of credit card options, including leveraging cash back and point systems to maximize profits. Along the way, they exchange valuable insights on private label strategies, distributor relationships, and the importance of maintaining a strong network. It's a candid conversation filled with practical tips and personal anecdotes aimed at turning dreams of entrepreneurial success into reality.
Part 1: Personal Journey and Re-Evaluation (0:00 - 4:00)
The speaker reflects on their initial interest in starting an Amazon business in 2016.
Life events (family, work) delayed their plans but they express a desire to re-engage.
The importance of following through on entrepreneurial ambitions is discussed.
Part 2: 9 to 5 vs. Entrepreneurial Life (4:00 - 8:00)
A discussion on transitioning from a 9 to 5 job to self-employment and the challenges that come with it.
Some participants share their perspectives on the “rat race” and the appeal of working for oneself.
The trade-offs between full-time employment's stability and the stress of running a business are examined.
Part 3: Engagement with New Community (8:00 - 15:00)
An introduction from Chim Wendu, a new participant from Canada interested in the Amazon space.
Chim discusses wanting to learn and avoid beginner mistakes, seeking advice from experienced sellers.
The support and collaborative learning environment within the group is emphasized.
Part 4: Sharing Tips and Strategies (15:00 - 40:00)
Several participants share their experiences with sourcing, selling strategies, and using specific tools.
The importance of understanding Amazon's selling rules, listing management, and inventory tracking is highlighted.
Discussion on using different credit cards for business expenses, their benefits, and how to manage them effectively.
Part 5: Reflections on Growth and Future Plans (40:00 - 60:00)
Group members discuss the importance of diversifying sourcing strategies, utilizing wholesale and private label opportunities.
Conversations touch on the future of their businesses, potential for scaling, and reflections on past experiences.
Emphasis on building relationships with distributors and navigating the complexities of product regulations.
Detailed Summary:
The video primarily revolves around a group discussion involving several people who are contemplating starting or expanding their Amazon selling businesses. Here’s a detailed summary of the main points discussed:
Personal Journey and Experiences (2016 - Present):
One participant shares how he initially wanted to start selling on Amazon in 2016 but got sidetracked due to family and work commitments. He mentions that despite the long gap, he's considering starting again and acknowledges the unique opportunities that Amazon can provide, especially in escaping the traditional 9-to-5 job structure.
Getting Ungated:
The conversation shifts to the process of getting ungated on Amazon, where a participant explains that he had previously ordered products and was in the process of becoming ungated but got busy. One participant emphasizes that some people oversell the appeal of leaving their 9-to-5 jobs, highlighting that while working for oneself can be great, a traditional job can also have its benefits.
First-time Experiences and Questions in a Group:
Attendees introduce themselves and share their experiences with Amazon. There’s a focus on the importance of learning from mistakes and exchanging knowledge about potential pitfalls for beginners looking to establish themselves in the Amazon space.
Accountability and Community Learning:
The group emphasizes the importance of the community for learning and growth. They mention the regular sessions conducted within this group, serving as a platform for asking questions and sharing insights.
Product Sourcing and Sales Discussion:
There’s a discussion on selling strategies, where various platforms like eBay are mentioned in the context of reselling products. One participant, Chim Wendu, expresses enthusiasm about learning from others who have been involved in the business before him and brings up specific queries regarding starting a business in Canada.
Technical and Practical Insights:
Technical aspects of managing Amazon accounts including tools, software, and necessary practices are discussed. There’s insight into managing shipping, returns, and utilizing eBay for supplementary sales.
Return Management & Handling Issues:
The group dives into discussing logistics around handling returns, especially concerning items sent from the US to Canada. They discuss challenges with inventory management, including the need to keep track of products and their respective sales data.
Credit Cards and Financial Management:
Participants discuss the various credit cards they utilize for business purposes, talking about cashback rewards, points accumulation, and handling costs. They mention the importance of ensuring credit card strategies align with their purchasing habits, emphasizing effective financial management as a crucial part of running an Amazon business.
Private Label Experience:
Some participants show interest in private label opportunities, sharing their thoughts on getting ungated and managing inventories. There are discussions about the importance of building relationships with distributors and brands to facilitate private label products and the potential strategies around that.
Discussion about Learning from Others:
The group acknowledges the value of networking, exchanging ideas, and learning from more experienced sellers in the community. They highlight the potential benefits of working together to find good leads, sourcing strategies, and leveraging community knowledge to avoid common pitfalls.
Overall, the discussion is characterized by personal anecdotes, practical advice, and technical insights about navigating the complexities of selling on Amazon and leveraging community support for success. The participants seem focused on learning and improving their chances of success in the Amazon marketplace.
(00:00) initially I thought of starting in 2016 then got busy with family and life and now again after how many years I don't know 4 8 years looking to start again okay so when you were uh thinking about it in 2016 did you get too deep into it or you were just kind of looking into it back then yeah I just ordered a few products and was in the process of getting ungated but then got busy with the job and family so yeah it happens it happens it's uh I mean now is always a better opportunity and wait until tomorrow right that's right and I think
(00:34) with this with if you succeed in Amazon then at least you can get over the 9 to5 Rat Race otherwise you stuck in that race forever yeah and like I definitely get that but I think um what some people when they talk about you know getting out of the 9 to-5 and the rat race I think some people kind of blow it up a little bit too much CU yeah it's not always great having a 9 to-5 job and it certainly can be beneficial to work for yourself but some people like the 9o5 and obviously um if you are working for somebody else and not just having to do
(01:03) it yourself it's a lot less stressful right but yeah as as long as you're willing to take on the stress um to be able to do it full-time yourself and or hire employees then yeah it can certainly be a great thing to do uh but one thing that a lot of people say is oh you know I want to start Amazon I want to get out of my 9 to-5 because I want a lot more free time you can do that to a point I I I do 100% believe but I mean depending on what your goals are you might end up spending way more time working on your own business than what
(01:35) you were at a 9 to5 I know I certainly do hello everybody else few more people here yeah looks like we got a couple homers how's it going um good um I'm actually looking forward to this m it's my first time doing this so I know I've had asked a lot of questions so you Jan and I'm also Canada as well too so I just open like a business account right just I get started with this it's it's it's a sorry I don't mean to cut you off it's a little bit difficult to hear yourself um it sounds like there might be like some feedback or something
(02:18) in the background okay let me disconnect my ear this I guess um are are are you are you talking on a phone or a mic yes I'm doing on airpod can you hear me now oh that sound that's that sounds a lot better and yes I can hear you too okay great oh yeah so I was introducing myself my name is Chim wendu I'm Nigerian um I moved to Canada just like two years ago and I just I'm getting started with this as well too I've only just heard one or two things and have gone through the whole conversation in the Discord Channel however I'm looking
(03:00) to start like full time so I know I've been like in most in like in your personal DMS recently just like ask questions whether or not I'm making the right decision as well to getting started and I'm looking forward to this session as well to because um I would love to learn a lot from people who have been in this space right and also like learn from probably mistakes I think beginners like us should avoid just stting out so I am quite excited about this grp pretty much yeah definitely and thanks for this session actually J yeah
(03:31) 100% and that's exactly what this is for this is just to hang out um ask questions communicate with one another um so we do these sessions uh right now we do probably about once or twice a month I would like to do them more often it's just I have a really busy schedule but yeah we we have we tend to have really good conversations in here we learn a lot a lot of people ask good questions I learn stuff in here almost every session that we have and uh as I mentioned I'll also be recording it so if there's anything that you miss or you
(03:58) want to reference back to uh once the session is over um I will upload it to um a private YouTube video and then we'll all have access to it so you can review it any time and yeah like there's no set schedule that we have uh there's no set time that people are going to be on here for sometimes you know it's it's an hour sometimes it's multiple 3 4 hours long and there's no set agenda of what we're going to talk about we can basically talk about whatever anybody wants to really talk about all right thank you so much
(04:28) 100% so looks like we're getting quite a few more people in here how's it going Evan how's it going Jaden Manish recognize some faces here how's everybody doing today what's up Jordan how you been haven't talked to happy year you as well haven't talked to you for quite a while yep I was in Toronto for a few weeks got to spend some time with my family things have been good what about you just I took uh probably about three four days off around the holidays besides that same old just working away nice nice yeah group's been growing
(05:10) man it's good pardon me the group's been growing man it's good yeah we're getting a lot more faces in here we're getting a lot more resources I I'm really liking how everything's shaping up good yeah there's there's a lot of people asking a lot of really good questions and learning a lot so I hope people are learning and making money of course Jaden I see I see you finally scooped a PS portal the other day yeah second one uh I mean I've scooped some before as well and sold some uh just but the Best Buy ones the I
(05:43) I don't know if they have I think they have Best Buy auto bought checkouts right so it's pretty hard to sometimes get one because by the time you check out it it takes a while yeah like I find with Best Buy um sometimes the easiest way with them um well you have to be you have to be relatively quick but if you're yeah you to be signed in and all your information should be there but yeah yeah like with those ones I I find like when you click on them sometimes it tells you right away that they're out of stock but if you wait a second and then
(06:09) change to delivery instead of instore pickup sometimes the stock will show up exactly well you can make about 10 15% margin easy flipping those you list them on Marketplace you list them on Marketplace and you have like 20 people messaging you on a daily basis yeah I've I've listed a couple Marketplace get so many messages about people complaining that like the price is too high uh but I think so far I haven't gotten that many but I think I've sold like six or seven and all of them have been on eBay oh okay yeah and I think um it's
(06:44) been a little while since I've sold one but I want to say that the prices have been stable on eBay and they might have even increased PlayStation portal remote have any of you guys sold those Stanley tumblers yet I haven't sold any units yet I listed a couple of my units pre-sale but I haven't sold any yet okay you got them listed up on eBay and Marketplace yeah I got a lot of views on Facebook but I have zero views on eBay and it's been like almost 24 hours yeah that's not super common um I know like we had a conversation uh a little bit
(07:19) earlier about that but I would recommend that you do set a small amount for like your promoted ads right at the bottom of the eBay listing just do like 2% um are you okay yeah because like not at all so yeah if you revise your Lis on eBay and go all the way down at the bottom you have yeah you have an option for the promoted ads and what that is is um it's just if somebody clicks on your listing and checks out from that ad you just pay eBay the additional percent that you indicate and the lowest is 2% and it
(07:46) just basically gives you like a sponsored listing so you're kind of at the top um more consistently so it gives you more exposure more eyeballs Ser saying if someone like uh bid 3% then on ad it would uh overtake my 2% for an example yes so if some if somebody put 3% technically they would uh in in theory uh eBay should be displaying their ads more uh but you still will get more exposure even being at 2% a good idea right there perfect yeah and then I told you as well um your name is Tav right yeah Beauty um so I told you as
(08:20) well um I wanted to discuss about the cheaper eBay shipping so let me find it here before I forget so I do recommend that you do this um eBay extended it uh Evan posted about it uh a little while ago it was supposed to just be for a month but they've extended it until March 31st and basically what you do is you just have to uh click this link it uh goes into your eBay account and just gives you uh cheaper shipping options to the US and of course if you have more shipping options available and cheaper shipping options available you're
(08:52) probably more likely to be able to sell your items okay so I'm just going to tag you in it it'll be in the eBay chat so just give me a second here and yeah just directly through eBay you just have to activate it become part of the program and it just gives you cheaper shipping for um a couple a couple of the cheaper services for Canada Post on the on the con station of eBay um Jordan have you had any luck getting set up on marari I know you asked about it and it's in the list to to look into um I haven't I haven't dug any deeper into it
(09:40) yet I know that it is I know it is possible for Canadians but I think it's moreable if you're uh close to a border or close to a crossb service so like stallion Dyk Etc uh because you can ship uh packages that way yeah no I just have issues getting around VPN geolocation stuff that's all I've been struggling with and I've tried a few options like Fake GPS on my phone on know us VPN but nothing seems to work anyways what kind of like what kind of errors are you having it's just uh when you sign up I think you just need to be in the US and
(10:19) they just a really good anti-us sort of VPN stuff okay um yeah like so sometimes I know when vpns don't work I know sometimes like some proxies will um but yeah I'll make sure that when like I do have it on my list to look into I will make sure that I I will find a way and when I do I will let you know yeah no worries is anyone else here selling on marari that thus far or even Poshmark for that matter or is it pretty much eBay Facebook Marketplace stockx Amazon if anything I do have an account on Poshmark but I've never sold like we
(10:53) obviously have Poshmark Canada I have never listed anything on Poshmark yet because I've always just figured that Poshmark is is more so uh centered around clothing uh but yeah I mean more the more platforms I'm areer I'm also interested in getting started eventually on uh whatnot because that's been kind of blowing up over the last couple years so how's everybody else doing what's going on what's new did you see that uh did you see that uh thing I tagged you in there Tav yeah I'm doing that right now I'm just uh
(11:32) putting the in Beauty and yeah for your dimensions for that cup do you mind me asking what dimensions you used okay let me check um see because yeah like with that specifically um with eBay in my opinion you always obviously want to ensure that you're charging enough to have your Dimensions proper but you don't want to overdo it too much because then it's just going to overcharge for shipping and then like especially people in the US they're not going to see favorable shipping rates and you're probably not going to be able to sell it to them as
(12:06) likely sorry all right um we're shipping right now I'm pretty uh 31 by 10 by 15 okay let me I'm just going to double check to see what I for the package okay and what kind of weight did you put in there uh 630 Grand oh yeah you're your fine that should do 650 um uh like so where did you find your Dimensions I think it was Amazon or the main website right so yeah like you always want to do like a little bit extra just to give yourself a little bit of padding so I would actually say do 700 grams and then your actual Dimension
(12:44) should be fine because you you just don't want to make you just want to make sure you're not going to have to pay additional for shipping okay hey Jordan quick eBay question here for your eBay things are you making them yourself or you getting someone to make them for you like are you using a VA to make it for you for which story for your eBay listings uh no actually one of my uh employees here locally basically does all my eBay stuff for me my well why I say my employees my nephew so how does that work what's
(13:17) what's the process like so like I taking the pictures and everything yeah yeah so my nephew is basically my gopher I he does everything I need him to do like whether it's uh helping me do orders do uh prep and pack do ra runs whatever um but yeah he just uh takes the the photos um typically he'll do the listings when I'm at the warehouse with him because uh to do like the piggyback off the listings uh if you want to like do like the cell one like this I find for Canada it doesn't work unless you're logged into the app like you can't do it on a
(13:50) computer just erors out on you so I give him access to my phone he does all the drafts right away and then he takes all the pictures and then he's able to up upload all the uh listings on our computerss in the warehouse oh nice yeah and then we just store everything there just have like a uh a mini bin system with some shelves and some totes they're all labeled like for eBay like the problem with me is like you know I think there's definitely eBay and I was paying for that yeah yeah so are you you cut off their manage
(14:21) what was that yeah are are you paying for the eBay uh monthly store subscription or are you just listing it under like the normal account I do have an eBay store I don't think that really matters all that much like you get access to a couple additional tools that I honestly probably don't use and then you get like free shipping supplies or a credit towards shipping supplies every every quarter I believe it is I don't really think it's that necessary unless you're doing any kind of volume on eBay though yeah I had an eBay store when I
(14:50) was doing more like shoes and stuff but I honestly think I'm going to cancel it because I feel like it's waste of money because I never use it right like if if you're doing it a lot like I think you get a B bit of a discount on some fees uh but besides that like unless you're doing volume it's for most people if you're just casual I wouldn't say it's worth it yeah I agree I agree y y are you finding you're able to do more like flips on eBay versus obviously like on on Amazon or are you doing it more like locally like
(15:19) let's say some of the items in the group are you mainly trying to sell them on eBay it just depends on what it is so I'm more so interested into stuff that I can make really high margins on just because obviously eBay takes additional work and I have to if I'm doing it myself or I have to pay somebody um it does cost more per hour generally speaking so I want relatively High profit mergin um but yeah like if something is going to be worth it if I can like double my money I'm certainly open to doing it locally or on Facebook
(15:48) on Facebook uh I do deal with most of that myself um sometimes I'll have my nephew reply to messages just because there's too many people um but yeah like for example some local flips like there were some vacuums not the most recent ones but there was ones that were posted like last week or two weeks ago they were normally I think it was like three or $400 and we could get them for 60 bucks I should have bought more but I bought four of them and we just post them on Facebook because I knew that was just going to be a good local flip I
(16:14) sold them all in one day and I sold them all for uh I think it was uh a 100 bucks I sold them for 100 bucks each and they were actually $50 they $49.99 and so yeah so four of them in a day just locally and I mean you know maybe maybe those uh are claimed by the tax man maybe not you know yeah wait so you you paid 50 bucks each or you sold them for 50 bucks each no they were $49.
(16:40) 99 each and I sold them locally all in one day for 100 bucks a pop oh that's a good deal yeah and I think the regular retail price on Amazon was like three or 400 bucks and there was just a seller that messed up discounted it and also left there a coupon code on it right right nice and like they weren't anything fancy like they were just kind of like some generic Chinese vames right yeah right that's cool awesome thanks man yeah of course oh can you talk a little bit about um if you're doing like obviously eBay is more like merch and fulfilled essentially are
(17:11) you doing how are you getting shipping rates are you using Freight C or PayPal net parcel or using something different to ship uh shipments out via eBay yeah yeah yeah like let's say you're not doing shoes CU shoes are through eBay's like authentication program let's say you're doing anything but shoes right so non-authenticated items right so how are you Shing those the customer most stuff honestly I just try to keep things as simplistic as possible and we don't have a lot of services around here that we can use besides maybe like freightcom um
(17:41) I don't I don't have a stallion I don't have a Dyk anything like that so most stuff is just being sent directly through eBay shipping and eBay actually has generally pretty good rates nowadays because you can buy directly through them yeah like I've looked up I this is in the past like the last time I really used eBay I'd say more heavily than I'm using it now was like months ago like I would say even maybe eight months ago or something like that but when I when I looked at the rates they had a partnership with FedEx and the rates
(18:08) were higher using eBay's integrated shipping compared to let's say freightcom which I found was way cheaper are you finding that now like have you ever compared the prices between let's say eBay's you know eBay's integrated shipping option when you enter the same dimensions and weight versus PayPal net parcel versus freightcom I found like net parcel's High freightcom the lowest and eBay is kind of somewhere in between I've actually never compared so that's why I like having these conversations because I certainly will going forward but yeah
(18:38) like for for like those um those little people and syn Dolls I'm not sure if anybody else got those I sold a ton of those um most of them went to the states and those were I think they were like 40 by by like 15 by like 10 and there were like 600 650 gr uh to send those pretty much anywhere in the us it was like under 13 bucks cost oh that's great so I think that you're talking about eBay's like us shipping right yeah but you're not talking about like shipping from your Warehouse in Canada to a customer in Canada correct like
(19:12) most of those discounted rates for those uh for those guys specifically were discounted shipping through eBay to the US interesting so yeah like I haven't used that us shipping serviced yet within eBay but I think I think that's cheaper than anything you'd find on let's say like a third party aggre aggregator like Freight Com or net parcel but I think in terms of Canadian shipping you know Canadian shipping is ridiculous as it is um but I found that like if you use one of these aggregators to rat plus with freightcom you got free pickup so it's
(19:43) like if you what I normally do is if we have like a UPS you know Amazon pickup which is ready to go we'll do like the I if I do any Merchant filled which I don't do a lot of but if I have like some Merchant filled I buy it from freightcom and then that includes the free pick up so you're not paying the whatever three bucks but it's like now I just tax my UPS guy which is also great thing I don't know if probably go to through UPS guy too 100% yeah we have a couple regulars for sure um so how's the warehouse going
(20:13) with you and the new guy that you hired and the old guy that you had well the new guy's good the new guy's good he's been working well um he's able to I've been tracking his production and he's you know he's doing good I'm just trying to get to the point where like I don't need to be there at all um where like you know he did one shipment of like single skew single skew or sorry single sticker AC one AC in the shipment this is when I was when I was in trouble um and through like Scan Power and that worked out totally fine so I'm just
(20:44) trying to get it where like I'm creating the shipments or adding the items to the batch the PO and then he's able to follow the prep instructions and prep everything but he's paying attention to detail which is great and he's able to he's able to you know do the work he needs to do and then when there's no work for him to do let's say he finishes a shipment he then cleans up his prep area and then you know breaks down the cardboard and all that sort of stuff so he's been working out well I was going to ask you what's your like how do you
(21:09) figure out what kind of cardboard and then you know trash collection and all that sort of stuff that you have to do for your Warehouse you just email around and get a bunch of quotes So I just honestly contacted one company um what I think it was whatever you call it loras or whatever you call them um they luras their name yeah like it's l l o r a a s I call it Lor s terrible name yeah um I contacted one company they told me one price I was like okay cool come drop off a bin and yeah so we have uh garbage we have a garbage service
(21:41) like built into our warehouse and then we just had to get the recycling service and um I don't that's a fairly large bin we get it picked up every week and I want to say it costs us about 150 200 bucks a month for that service yeah when you say large bin you're talking like like a two yard bin I don't B I don't remember exactly what it is like it's basically the same size like if you ever like go back and like behind most like regular apartment buildings that's probably about that size and you get that picked up every week every week
(22:15) yes interesting yeah and then we have the option that we occasionally like we have to pay uh onetime fee to have additional pickups that we need we don't have we haven't had that that often but I think it's like 20 30 bucks if we need additional pickups well that's not so bad yeah I was getting quotes in December and then I was trying to get something together with all these guys want me to sign like a ridiculously long-term contract like they were saying the standard contract is like a fiveyear contract like no way I'm like man my
(22:44) leaks for this Warehouse is up in like November why would I sign a 5-year contract he's like typically our clients sign like fiveyear contracts but then if they move it's assumed that they'll go with you know we're going to continue to service your new location I'm like no thanks dude D I'm going to find I'm like I need something shortterm I'm like I'll find the lease until November but not for 5 years yeah no I didn't uh I don't have any set lease terms but I did have to I did have to greet a bunch of like that I was responsible for the bin
(23:11) so I'm like seriously like we're kind of in like not a great neighborhood so I'm like if somebody comes by and spray paints us or vandalizes the bin I'm going to be responsible they're like no like if if it gets like damaged if they set it on fire or something like I may have to pay for it but if they like they just paint on it and stuff they're like that's fine I'm like okay dude the dude I was talking to on the phone he's like the bin is like the bin cost them $4,000 I'm like really because an entire shipping container costs less than that
(23:36) so I don't know like why your bin costs so much money because it has a fancy paint job on it yeah it has L on in big bright pink letters yeah yeah so when you say that you're tracking production um like are you actually tracking how many units he can like physically prep and back per hour or what are you tracking so like I'm I'm keeping track of when he starts his work and then like it's just a log right it's just like a note on my um it's a note on Google keep that I've been using which is like kind of like docs but online
(24:12) it's like a note app yep um and so I'm you know I have a different let's say he works the week he only works Monday to Thursday but let's say he works like four hours a day on certain days or three hours or five hours or however many hours he works I keep track of when he starts like the time he start s the time he finishes and then how many units were produced and then what kind of prep I used to keep track of what kind of prep was required but it's kind of implicit that I know I know what kind of prep is required for you know if it's a
(24:40) single sticker single sticker you know um single single FN skew product versus a multi pack versus a variety pack versus you know like poly bagging non- polybagging all that sort of stuff right keeping track of like what I'm paying him and then what he's able to produce on average it's like it's quite good I feel like it's worked out to about 30 cents a unit Blended prep which is I would say like pretty decent but not amazing so like how many units per hour does that relate to um let me check and then like are you just
(25:16) tracking his uh his personal cost for preping pack or are you are you also tracking like your total cost that you're able to um your total cost for your Warehouse cost everything yeah that's something I want to work on more this year but I I right now I'm just figuring out what I pay him and what he's able to produce and then I divide his hourly rate by the units he's able to produce and get like a per unit cost essentially but no that's not that's not like um I think the Amazon lit guys call it like a production ceration that's
(25:48) right that's right production ceration so I was gonna go through and trying to figure out the math on all that sort of stuff like including like Warehouse overhead and you know insurance and trash collection and L ass's commission and all that you know what I mean like figure out what the total cost I would need it you know what the total cost is and then total number of units right so I think that's that's what I need to do that's not um but you know for this year I'm going to try to streamline it and make it more efficient but yeah I mean
(26:16) he's also started using Scan Power himself like I walked him through I to use it and then he did a shipment like kind of with a little bit of help so SC power does have like a track feature but honestly I don't think it's unless I set it up wrong I set him up as like a sub user on Scan Power so I have like the primary admin and then he's a sub user which I made him like his own email and so when he logs in and logs out it keeps track of production but I don't think it's super detailed it just keeps track of time I think unless they're missing
(26:47) something yeah I've never used uh Scan Power feature for that um when we were utilizing 2D workflow like it kind of worked similar but it it didn't really track time just tracked how many units were actually completed that day interesting mhm so I'm just looking at it now and it says View track time and let's say I go within a time frame let's say I go from just one second here so it shows like when he logged in and when he logged out so like for example he logged in at 1018 and then I told them when you finish the shipment
(27:23) you have to log out that's 10 that's 1124 but it doesn't show I don't really think it shows anything beyond that it just shows the time which is kind of useless like I would like to see what he produced you know what I mean 100% for sure I think they definitely have the capability to do that although honest like my Scan Power is logged in all the time I never really log out of it it's just like always saved on my computer and always logged in so yeah like it wouldn't surprise me like they should um if you do find out
(27:51) about that I'd be interested um I would I would like to hear about it because yeah like um we use uh time clock software so like we were utilizing Hub staff now we're using team logger so whenever anybody's at the warehouse they're clocking in Via team logger so I know what hours are actually working and then obviously you can look in scam power and you can see how many units were actually completed that day um like you can look in the actual physical shipments and you can look to see vers like if you were keeping track of it how
(28:17) many were done before how many done now what percentage of your shipments are completed Etc right yeah I'm looking at the screen right now this is honestly not really a lot of useful information like imagine like a calendar right so I'm seeing the calendar from the 1 until the 5th and then it shows like when he logged in when he logged out and then like a Time block so imagine like a calendar event and it shows red for me and green for him that's it so it's pretty useless um because I could have got that information without this software right
(28:47) but if if I mean I'm G I'm gonna email Paul or and call him yeah later I call them later he was saying there's a bunch of new features they've been trying to add to scam power like um you know like preset uh boxes for certain case packs with like dimensions and weight so you can just kind of like have you know let's say you're going to stick like a a 2d uh 2D box content label as well as a shipping label on a box it would already if you're prepping a certain item and it comes in cases of fix for example then
(29:20) once you input the dimensions and weight once you can kind of pull that and tie that to a certain aen so they know that whenever you have fa and you've packed it this way so it just saves time that'd be super nice and I've also asked them previously to have um preset box sizes where you can just like have like a drop down wherever you like choose like box one two three and the preset Dimensions just it's it's a small step but when you're doing so much it it can save a lot of time look like a lot of us are using like most guys I know are using
(29:49) U-Haul boxes you go like small medium large and that fits most of your stuff and then you reuse some of the cases or some of the boxes that your suppliers send you right so but for the most part if you're using small medium and large at least if you can have that in a drop down menu you know at least the default Dimensions if you cut it down it's a little different but I think for the most part that would save a lot of time as well 100% 100% yeah yep quick question uh for the seller amp how do you uh determine if a
(30:19) like a product is private Lael or not because I think in one of the videos you said even if there is only one seller it might not be a private labeled product so how do you distinguish that so a lot of that does come down to you uh having General like retail knowledge but then you can also if you're willing to spend a little bit more time analyzing an as it's just about like just doing some a little bit additional searching so yeah like in like when you look at videos for people uh for the US they always say you
(30:46) know avoid listings that have less than two sellers or three sellers because it might be private label sellers I would not recommend that in Canada because there's so many listings that we have here that just have one seller two sellers on them and they're not private label so you can just double check to see if the actual brand on Amazon matches the sell's name um that is on that listing so you have to look at their actual storefront um I would go a step further and I would say open up that seller storefront on Amazon so like
(31:16) click on their physical storefront and then change the url from amazon.ca amazon.com and then you can actually see the the person that's connected with that account depending on what they have Seller Central so you just pull up their storefront you click on their link you go in the URL you change doc.
(31:36) com and that will uh show you um the information that they have in Seller Central so whether it's a company a uh an individual Etc and so if you like say if you pull up a product and say just for a broad example it's Clorox and you see um when you switch it to do this says like this is Clorox Corporation or whoever owns Clorox PNG whatever then you will know that that's the brand selling it um but you can also do like some searches on Google so like if you're unfamiliar with a brand you can search for the product on Google and if you see
(32:04) it in other major retailers sold by the retailers themselves not not like third party Marketplace sellers then you can start being a little bit more confident that it's not a private label product right and in terms of Ip alerts is seller M good enough because it shows like where it shows private labeling it also shows an IP alert sometimes or do you have an software for IP alert so with Canada specifically uh IP issues are not as common as what they are in the US they can and do certainly still happen in Canada but it's actually
(32:39) relatively rare um so for IP um IP issues like the the standard software that most people talk about is IP alert uh we have that I've paid for it I've used it I don't like it because it's a User submitted software and I I really like Chris Grant the guy who made the software he's super great he's very a good resource for our community um and he says like he vets everything uh that people submit to IP alert but like realistically if somebody really wanted to they could manipulate some data they could send them a fake screenshots about
(33:13) IP uh issues ETC and there's so many products that we sell that I've been selling for years that show up on IP alert that show up on sell ramp IP uh stuff and I've never had issues with them once I've never had an IP complaint there's no evidence that IP complaints actually happen the best way in my opinion to see if an item has potential IP issues is to look at that uh that third keeper graph or the second keeper graph uh where you have to open up the there's like a tab on Keo where you have to like click on like the bottom right
(33:45) hand corner that says view additional information uh you can then see how many sellers on a listing at any given time if you see the seller count just randomly drop off a cliff that is more of a good indication of an actual ual IP complaint happening in the past versus utilizing any software with IP alert I I don't even use it anymore we we turn it off and I personally completely ignore IP flags on samp we always look at that third keeper graph and if we just see random drops of sellers just completely cliff dive without the volume supporting
(34:17) it that would make us want to dig into that product a little bit more all right uh and last question and in terms of number of sales what do you usually see do you see seller RAM for estimated monthly sales or do you refer to keeper graphs always keeper um no sales estimator in Canada specifically I've ever found to be accurate whatsoever and even with Kea kipa just kind of gives you a a screenshot of the information that they can see it's not perfect it helps you make good educated guesses right uh because no Amazon
(34:53) doesn't actually give their information to anybody the only thing that they relaying to people is their sales rank um and uh software like Kea is just charting it over time and the way keepa works is Kea checks most products between about once every 1 to 15 minutes so sales rank can change multiple times in that time frame uh multiple units can sell on that time frame uh so just because keepo says like this item has 10 drops in the last month doesn't mean that it only sells 10 units per month typically speaking a sales rank drop
(35:30) generally speaking means a a sale has occurred uh but multiple sales can happen in that time frame so just because keepa says it sells 10 units per month generally speaking it would probably sell more um but there's additional nuances that go into that like if the item is a variation listing the keepa charts don't really apply because they're shared throughout all variations uh that kind of just applies like your standard one-of the-middle non-v variation listing okay I I know that's a lot of information and it can be pretty
(36:02) overwhelming if you're relatively new so if you need any additional clarification just let me know I know I think we'll just start looking so as I mentioned I just started in December so I'll start looking at stuff and then we'll let we'll ping you if I have any more questions yeah 100% And yeah if you ever come across anything you have questions always feel free to ask either myself or multiple other people in here are always willing to answer sure definitely um yeah just a question please yeah so okay yeah great um so um
(36:34) when starting out um some people advised that a other people have spoken to mention that it's good to start in the beauty and Healthcare and grocery department because I think also like to enter into for example it's Prett minimum when when when starting out with the cost in there compared to like buying like shoes or like electronic quite as wello my question now is in terms of like um sing so one resource that I think I saw in the group was like a list of leads that you do have for like different retailers that s in
(37:21) wholesale as well as in some discounted prices right so more like how do you like get like get deals that like cheaper to sell on Amazon and vice ver as well to so that you know that you're also at least making some goodi what would you recommend is a good Roi 20% or more than 20% so sorry I just want to make sure that I understand everything that you're asking um your mic does sound like a little bit choppy a little bit I know when we spoke a little bit earlier uh it did sound it was coming through a little
(37:55) bit better do you want to see if if you could make that happen like it did earlier at the top of the conversation just okay I want to make sure I I can understand everything that you're asking hello hey that that sounds better okay yes my question is as the beginner starting out um the advice pretty much from what I've heard is to starts from the grocery department to health care or beauty care because of the because of the costs needed to start compared to starting out with like electronic or machinaries and the likes right because
(38:30) of um the size is big as well as um for storage space in Amazon it may not be like the very best Pathway to start with so my question is for someone like me like I'm just acting as a beginner right what would you advice so like in terms of like um souring for example for this beauty product there was a sheet that I did see that had like a list of large retailers that sell like products right already you can also like see discounted prices so my question is how can you compare certain prices to ensure that you're at least getting a good Roi and
(39:09) also like what would you say it's a decent Roi to begin with right like how many percent would you would you say it's a good Roi and just starting out pretty much like what product would you personally advice to start with as beginner really so I'm a I'm a little bit biased because the way that I started with Amazon I still believe it's the best way but it's very slow and it's a very big grind is selling used books just because it allows you to learn Amazon so cheaply because Amazon it can be intimidating and tough to learn when
(39:42) you're brand new and doing something like books that you can basically get books for free uh they cost nothing you don't have to really worry about them getting damaged and the return is so high on books but they the caveat with that is they generally do sell very slow so um I do still like the book idea especially if you have limited capital or if you're just unsure uh but if you're not wanting to go to the book R which I 100% understand uh yeah starting with categories like even like some toys uh grocery Health and Beauty Sports and
(40:14) Outdoors some Automotive those are typically categories that are more quote unquote safe just because yes the the cost for most of the items does tend to be lower uh but also the return rate on on items like Grocery and health and beauty is a lot lower versus something like apparel is if you start selling shoes or close the return rate in general does t tend to be very high and if you are brand new and or if you have very limited Capital uh that can be a relatively big hit to yourself so it's going to all depend
(40:48) on uh what kind of knowledge you currently have how confident you are and what kind of capital you have right so like we do have have some sellers in here I see Fred I see you um Fred started off with a very large Capital uh and was able to go very very deep very quickly and start generating a very very high Revenue in a very short period of time most people don't have that option or can't do that or don't have that much confidence what they're doing and they need more time to learn and that's completely understandable I was the same
(41:21) way um so yeah sourcing some of those um safer products I believe are a better way to learn um a more safer way to learn rather um and when it comes to Roi and profit again that's going to be dependent on yourself your personal uh risk tolerance and how fast you want to turn over your capital in general for most newer sellers you typically want to try to stay with a a generally a higher profit and higher Roi just so you're getting more return on your money and then as you grow just by default typically speaking you tend to have uh
(41:59) Slimmer and Slimmer margins because you're doing more and more volume and that's just kind of how the game goes typically the more you sell the lower margins you're going to have um I know like a lot of people they say you know start off with like a minimum of $5 profit and like 30 or 40% Roi I think that's okay but I also think that limits you quite a bit uh you do leave a lot of money on the table especially for some high volume units so I would say you know just find a number that you think is a decent amount but don't have it set
(42:29) in stone like say if you set a a minimum number of like $3 don't disregard something just because it profits you 250 still consider it just as long as the volume supports it and it does look like it can sell uh I've had a philosophy for a very long time and I believe more and more people are starting to adopt this as well is I personally look instead of a set dollar amount or Roi on an item that I'm looking for I want to see how much over all that as is going to profit me per month so I've had a minimum of a profit
(43:01) per as in the Canadian Market is I want that item to be able to profit me $50 per month at a minimum um and I believe that has helped us open up our our expanded our mindset and expanded our catalog a lot more versus just having a set minimum uh profit dollar-wise or Roi wise and if you look at it that way like say you have a minimum profit of 50 bucks if you are able to start finding products uh that profit you $50 per you can see relatively quickly like you know 10 products if I can meet this requirement are going to profit me a Minimum $500
(43:34) per month uh you know 20 products are going to now profit me $1,000 per month obviously there's more Nuance that goes into that and not every item you're going to be able to replenish over and over but you can kind of start seeing some broader general math and how it's going to reflect on your bottom line if you look at it more that way oh I see okay that makes sense thanks yeah for sure Jordan before the call we were just going back and forth on the email so you mentioned in terms of HST uh so you were saying if you own a company then you are
(44:09) able to reimburse that HST amount is that what you were saying you don't necessarily have to own a company you just have to be registered for the corresponding taxes so like for example um are you in Ontario I'm assuming yes okay so if you're an Ontario and you're registered to collect and remit HST which you can do as a sole proprietor uh then that is then a expense that you can uh claim back you would then be responsible to collect and remit that tax by yourself I'm not sure if Amazon collects and remits HST because I'm in s
(44:43) saskat not Ontario but uh you're then responsible to collect it or Amazon's going to remit it to you and then you're responsible to remit that to the CRA and then you can claim back any taxes any HST that you pay on your inv ventory for resale so that ends up being a net zero cost and that opens up your margins quite a bit more all right so in terms of when I doing the when I'm doing the profit calculation if pretty much if I exclude the adding the 13% HST that should help with the profit Roi and the margin everything yeah obviously like if you're
(45:15) not registered for HST you probably want to include it in your cost because you're not going to be claiming it back uh but if you do decide that you're going to stick with Amazon I would one of the earliest things I would recommend once you determine that you're going to stick with it you're going to you know be in it for the long haul uh register for HST and start talking to an accountant figure out how to file that and claim that stuff back because that adds on a lot of additional margin to your bottom line
(45:47) yeah hey Jordan it's rzy how's it going good man so sorry how do you uh calculate the yep oh I didn't mean to cut it off it just sound it just sounded like you were cutting off you sound good now yeah so I want to ask you how do you calculate your the current dollar value of your inventory listed on Amazon do you guys use a software for that or is am does Amazon Seller have a report that can say how much inventory do you have in dollar value like for resale wise or cost wise uh classwise so the software that we use
(46:30) is connected to our bookkeeping software I use something called a2x I think it's very overpriced for what it does I think something similar like taxo mate can do similar stuff I think there's some other ones that exist uh but I I I don't have time so I've never tried anything else but uh I use a2x where we basically input our cost of goods in every item and it automatically calculates what our cost Goods is at any period of time a lot of people utilize stuff like seller board because seller board is good good
(46:55) for telling you what your cost of goods are I just don't know if it gives you a report um that tells you what your cost of goods was at any given time okay okay sounds good I'll look into it thank you yeah for sure do you utilize anything like solar board right now no no actually just uh just got done with the uh craziness of Q4 so I'm just uh have time now because it's slowing down a little bit this January and um just want to step back and see what happened yeah yeah definitely so like Q4 end up being pretty good for you because
(47:32) I know you mentioned that it was more than exceeding your expectations oh yeah we you know we started back in March right you know prob do not doing much right but when soon as October started you know it it uh it went you know through the roof so we're very happy about it but uh we now I'm trying to you know maybe um you know keep keep it up and uh hopefully we can uh keep it going uh all through q1 you know that's why I've been asking you about you know how can you um keep this up after Q4 um how do how does it carry over stuff like that
(48:20) so yeah like hopefully we can carry it over 100% And yeah like with Amazon honestly you get out of it what you put into it so as long as you are consistently sending an inventory and making good purchasing decisions good buys uh then realistically you should still continue to grow you will obviously probably see a decrease in overall sales come you know between this month and next month our January is always higher than December um but come like February or so you'll probably see those decreases but as long as you keep
(48:50) sending an inventory you should still keep growing because it's not just Q4 like you you can grow and you you can do massive sales throughout the entire year yeah no absolutely and um you know I I did probably sent uh I overstocked some of the inventory because um obviously it's our first year first Q4 and we really didn't know what to expect and so we probably overstocked a few skes but uh that's why I wanted to look into maybe um you know calculating how much dollar volum we have in our inventory just just want to get an idea
(49:30) of uh money is in there right now you know the easiest way for you to do that and probably the cheapest way is to do seller board just get like seller board I think it's I don't know $20 us per month or something it's super cheap um and it's to to calculate those expenses it's really good um sellerboard is a good tool I like a lot of people hear me on it a little bit just because I have mixed opinions about it because so many people try to use it for accounting purposes that's not what it's for uh but for what it's actually made for it is a
(49:58) good tool for what it is and it's very reasonably reasonably priced yeah I'm gonna look into it right now see if you know how we can reallocate some of uh because right now we don't know if we're going to restock some of this stuff right yep uh just because it is slowing down and hopefully um we can go through some of the inventory that we sent over um I am still you know in dispute with some of the shipments that we sent because we had a shipment from November 30th that is still um up in the air I don't know
(50:35) where they went but according to Amazon they haven't uh received it like it was helpful that you know you talked about how they weigh the boxes when it come through the warehouse and so that's been um I had a couple shipment that uh was reimbursed so that was great for us um but yeah we still waiting for that one shipment to to be reimbursed or maybe it you said it uh sometimes it just uh it just appears out been there right inventory shows up all the time I've had inventory just randomly show up uh out of nowhere that these are items that we
(51:20) haven't sold for two years and they showed back up in your inventory really yeah yeah okay most of the time like it's sorted before that but technically like if Amazon like say Amazon reimburses you for something and then they ever find it and put it back in your inventory they will take that reimbursement back from you oh I feel like I'm overreacting that it's been only been a month well like the standard process with Amazon I think it's 45 days um that they say before like everything's closed like after your shipment is closed that
(51:51) they have to basically reconcile everything after that you can start really submitting your reconciliation submitting your receipts your disputes Etc but yeah it can certainly be a pain to fight with Amazon for that stuff yeah what's funny is they uh they responded with hey we really we double checked and uh we really didn't receive it but for just for Goodwill we're got to reimburse so I one time gesture yeah the Goodwill all right so it's you know it's uh it's classic uh you know they won't admit to it but you know yeah it's
(52:32) all good got money back we've had the standard response where it says you know for like a onetime consideration well we'll give you this money it's like well I've had that one time consideration hundreds of times so yeah man but I'm happy so Bey but yeah like with that um like so if you do look into Cellar board um it C board can also be like a relatively decent tool to utilize to track um how many units you're actually selling on average per day um it's not the best but it gets you started and it helps you like kind of
(53:07) paint a better picture for how many units you should be restocking so when you start getting into Inventory management it's a it's a good intro into Inventory management because um like some people when they first start say they buy I don't know whatever 12 Clorox cleaners they send them in they sell them and they sell them within like two weeks and they're like oh my God I don't know how many I should buy so they repurchase 12 or they repurchase 20 or whatever uh when you start doing proper Inventory management and using a tool
(53:32) like seller board it gives you an actual average of how many units you're selling per day so it'll say you know on average you're selling two units per day so then you can easily calculate okay I want to stock 30 days worth of stock so you take two units times 30 I should stock 60 it becomes a lot more consistent that way to build up that kind of system um solar board does have some discrepancies and I find it gets more accurate the more data you have with SL board like it's not going to be super accurate on your first shipment you send in of a
(54:02) new as so you still want to be careful you still want to review your numbers but once you sell asens consistently it becomes a lot more accurate for inventory replenishment awesome I'll look into it um you know I have a bad habit of doing a few uh test buys you know before actually get going deeper into one SK so this will definitely help I don't think that's necessarily a bad habit like especially being at like a newer stage and or having limited Capital like that's being safe there's there's nothing wrong with that like we don't do
(54:41) nearly as quote unquote test buys as what we used to but we still do them because like not everything is super clear sometimes we'll come across like there's L that we came across today in the health and beauty category where it's like uh FBA sellers haven't been on this listing for like more than a year and has been dominated by Amazon uh it looks like it's consistently sells it looks like when other FBA sellers were on it uh they were regular get in the buy box um but it wasn't super clear data as to one why FBA sellers dropped
(55:08) off or two how many units were actually selling because we can't see Amazon stock so with listings like that we're still taking a risk and we're still um doing a smaller test buy just to kind of feel it out and limit the exposure that we have while still getting some solid data there's nothing wrong with that at all yeah you know I uh found it one of one product that uh it it actually went up in price um we're actually making money if we do buy them it is consistently selling but uh the last three months it only has been
(55:47) uh let's say at $35 for the past month and it was 29 uh the previous months and so with that I know I could sell it but then I can't go deep because you know the past six months has been uh selling really low and so except the last month like at the average price of $29 is it still profitable for you guys that will be very close to uh breaking even okay and it's it's just been increased to $35 over like the last month yeah okay and then so when it was at $29 which is almost your break even for um like you said quite a while was it
(56:34) stable at that price for like six months plus or was it like relatively volatile yeah it was it was it's stable okay and so when break even like is it exactly break even like including your prep fees and stuff and Shi to Amazon or is it like a little bit of profit what is it a little bit of profit maybe um let's say 10% to 15% Roi and what kind of dollar figure profit would that be will be a dollar okay and so like this is an item that you've been selling at $35 yeah consistently but then I've been restocking uh not going too deep just uh
(57:21) enough I know whenever I would stock it it would go out of stock a couple days after so I I'm still at that point where I don't want to go into too deep right because you know it might change in price I mean I mean people might hop on it again um I don't know yep so um like so how long like how many units were you signed in and how long did it take you to sell out of those units like by by the time so I'm sending in 20 units uh at a time okay and like by the time they're active versus when you're sold out how long did that
(58:05) take so it takes uh about three days get active and then it it gets sold in in two to three days okay so takes five days so you're selling probably on average close to 10 units per day when it's active yeah okay so that's solid um with that like so again that's going to be dependent on what your capital is right but like for us I often sell items that profit a dollar and have 10 or a little bit higher Roi that's kind of like our bread and butter because we can sell a lot of items at that volume assuming that it makes sense for us like
(58:44) I factor in things like my production cost for how much it's going to cost me to produce those units with Labor Warehouse cost Etc um but yeah like I sell a ton of stuff that profits only a dollar but we we move multiple hundred units of those per month um in my opinion um something like that assuming that it's very stable in price at that $29 and you still have some margin on it it's not that super high of a risk because history will probably repeat itself it will probably come back down to the price of what it was um once
(59:19) those sellers restock because history does tend to repeat itself on Amazon but it's still relatively safe assuming that the item is at that price very consistently it's very stable CU you still have room to get out of the item still uh still make a little bit of profit and not have to worry about losing money if it's volatile and like you do see lots of fluctuations in price and you do see it regularly dip to below where it's unprofitable I'd be more weary with it uh but if it is as it sounds what you're saying it's probably
(59:55) not as high of a risk as in what you think so how much would you restock if it was you so that you can't ask me that question because it's a different situation for everybody right because it's all depending on your your personal situation your access to Capital Etc uh like for me when we buy stuff like that and if it's exactly as it sounds what you're indicating and I was averaging 10 units per day and I have some consistent data indicating that my plan would be to stock up to one month's worth of inventory so 30 days so
(1:00:31) it may be a fluke just sending in 20 units and selling them you know 10 units per day so maybe you want to send in 40 50 60 units assuming you have the capital and the means for it uh but then once I did that then I'd probably stock 300 units the next shipment right that I haven't uh got over the hump yet of doing that uh the 30-day thing i' I've always been restocking on a weekly basis um I don't know why maybe I'm still playing it safe but I know it it will cost uh more money because of shipping to Amazon as
(1:01:14) opposed to shipping uh where 30 days worth of inventory um that way we'll we'll save more yeah and like it's it's completely fine starting off slower like there's no shame in it everybody does it different Paces whatever um like I say to most people I see people posting screenshots where they sell $10,000 in their first month my first month on Amazon I sold 950 bucks right everybody has different Paces um but like at a certain point you I would say you probably want to work your way up to stocking that much inventory um because once you do it and
(1:01:50) you see it and it sells consistently and you see things are not as scary as what they seem it becomes a lot easier obviously there's always still risk that happens with Amazon but with Amazon it's not as high of risk as what people think because like say if a listing gets removed um you still have the actual physical item right so depending on what it is you can probably still liquidate it to close to break even price like locally um maybe even lose a couple bucks but you can probably still get most of your money back it's still relatively liquid
(1:02:24) the only time you have concerns is if you're doing Shady stuff illegal stuff your account gets deactivated stuff like that yeah yeah yeah I I guess it's uh you know it's a getting comfortable with it uh and then you know getting that first experience of you know stocking one inventory uh restocking an inventory worth 30 days um yeah once I do that maybe I'll be more comfortable yeah and like obviously if you're selling an Amazon it's like your only source of income and um you know you don't have like a safety net or
(1:03:07) anything like that behind you yeah like 100% get trying to be a lot more careful because it's a lot more important there's a lot more on the line but if you have like another job or if you have a safety net or you just you've Diversified your uh inventory very well and maybe even over multiple platforms I think in those situations obviously it makes sense to take a little bit more risk okay I guess uh seller B seller board will help in that regard how how much inventory I'll be I'll need to send or what not yeah I look into that yeah
(1:03:43) cbard is super handy uh just keep in mind that again the first set of data that you get right when you send in a new as it might be a little bit skewed so like just because you send in 20 units and you sell sell those 20 units in 4 days doesn't always mean that's going to be your average so like you still may want to work your way up to it cuz like averag is you could have a fluke where like just like one person buys 10 units right so that's not obviously very good data uh but the more the more and more data you have in SL
(1:04:10) board the more sales you have come through the more accurate those numbers become and I will also let me WR write this down um to like calculate I'll make some like guides or v a video on how we calculate how much we're going to like replenish uh because I think that's really good data that I don't really see anybody really talk about yeah that would be great because uh that's where I am right now that's where the business is right now is um the only way to really scale this is for us to figure out how much uh inventory is going to
(1:04:50) sell in the next 30 days and if we figure that out uh we can scale this thing because really um it's uh it it it takes labor to ship uh inventory every week and you know we'll save a lot more um if we do do them in in a monthly basis 100% And like Amazon does have some built-in tools like their inventory management stuff where like you can look at the dashboard and it tells you right away of how many units you've sold in the last 30 days so like that's a good place to start but if you didn't have 30 days worth of
(1:05:27) inventory it's a little bit skewed but like at like a baseline you can just like uh copy an as go into your orders on Amazon paste it into your orders and then just like take a sample size of your your sales history like say like two two weeks and just like see like okay count count how many units you sold in a 14-day period and then take that number divide it by 14 and then you know your average per day you times that by 30 and that's 30 days wor of inventory right yeah yeah that's obviously a laborious but it's can definitely get
(1:06:02) you a good start all right thank you yeah of course so if somebody a new seller is starting and suppose they sell $200,000 in their first year so what sort of profit margin are we looking like 15% or more it's going to be depending on what kind of inventory you're buying uh but like and like I would assume that you're Pro primarily going to be doing online Arbitrage is that correct right so yeah like it wouldn't it it shouldn't be uncommon to have of a profit margin of like 15 to 20% or more just depending on what kind
(1:06:41) of value of items you're buying what kind of profit margins um items that you're focusing on right but as like your number increases your profit margins would decrease right in your case if you're doing say close to a million then your profit margins would start coming down a little generally speaking um unless you start to really do a lot more volume in the space that you have and better utilize the resources that you have so like obviously if I'm paying somebody labor and they're producing me 30 units per hour uh and I'm able to increase
(1:07:13) that to 60 units per hour that obviously increases my margin quite substantially and um if I'm able to pay them the same amount right right makes sense yeah uh and in terms of sales tax that we were discussing earlier so you said that if if you have a sales tax account HST account then you are able to reclaim that tax so I was thinking of doing that Arbitrage of like I have to pay 13% in Ontario instead I would hire a prep Center and pay whatever 8% or 5% in Alberta so in this case if anyways if I'm able to reclaim that sales tax then
(1:07:48) in the initial phases I I can pretty much do it myself rather than Outsourcing it to Preps Center and save that dollar $50 per unit right yeah so like um a big thing with the US videos that you see is a lot of us sellers say get a prep Center in a taxfree state so you save these taxes I'm not sure how the US tax system works uh I'm not sure if they can claim back sales tax I would imagine that you could um but if they can't that's probably why that they say it um but yeah if you're registered for taxes you can claim it back and then if
(1:08:21) you want to do the prep yourself and you're able to then yeah you can save those additional prep fees as well a lot of people still utilize a prep Center and are they're still registered for tax and they still claim back those taxes they just utilize the prep Center because they don't have the time or the means to be able to prep things themselves but but is off obviously you are paying a premium for that service like realistically maybe not at the beginning and it depends on what you value your time at and like what you're able to
(1:08:49) make per hour say at your 9 to-5 job you may not be able to make as much um value doing your prep when you first start but once you get a hang of it you put in some uh some processes in place you should be able to produce the units substantially cheaper than any prep Center yeah I think the other thing is also prep Center depending on how official they are if they're charging you an invoice with taxes you can claim that as for the input tax credit and then again it's against your cost of good Soul right any any cost you spend
(1:09:21) on on a prep Center somewhat is against the cost of good sold obviously deats into your profit margin but it's an expense which you can also claim back to a certain level right well it would just be it would just be another business expense and yeah for sure it would reduce your overall taxable income or your taxable profit but it's it is still that additional expense and it is still cutting into your overall profit margins if you look at it that way exactly that definitely ain't a it definitely ain't free not free
(1:09:56) and yeah um I guess Jordan one of the things you I mean recently on the channel was cash out servers which he dropped I think earlier in the end of the month last year I've been on a one or two of them one being max out because of curious if anyone here has been a part of few of these cash out servers SL buying groups and I mean primarily it's for people who are looking to you know churn and burn credit cards in my opinion and get a lot of points in a quick match without you know having to deal with the hassle of buying and selling I mean
(1:10:28) realistically making 1 2% cash back or 3% or whatever in terms of points or accon or whatever I'm curious how many other folks here are playing that game in any shape of form so yeah like a lot of those do revolve around that to gain welcome bonuses points Etc but a lot of those ones as well like depending on what kind of deals are going on a lot of those uh Services they do offer offer commissions on products so like y you can earn you know yeah about three bucks 10 bucks it's usually 1% of the product depends
(1:11:02) on the prodct right some are ,000 MacBooks some are you know $50 $300 items right give or take right and it's funny um DC who just joined the chat not too long ago Richard me and him were just having a conversation and he was talking about something like that do you mind me talking about that Richard if you're present maybe not here hey sir can you guys hear me yeah yeah oh yeah yeah no by all means man go ahead yeah so Richard was just mentioning uh he was considering doing like a buying group in Canada specifically like for him to expand
(1:11:42) Arbitrage operations to be able to Source more units overall so you know get a group of buyers they're able to buy units for him they're able to earn credit card points Etc so yeah like he had a similar idea of the Casual servic that we see but specifically for Amazon yeah I think it would be a really great way to um really scale operations without adding more uh much money or or M Power yeah I think I mean it makes sense but I guess Prim if you have the capital for it then that makes sense right because typically majority of the
(1:12:18) Amazon sellers here use their credit cards as a way to fund their Capital to a certain level considering you have your great period of x amount of days in AMX hoping you get reimbursed within you know those 50 days right yeah I think you know having a buying group I'm sure there are a few people like myself who are very much eager to collect all those points and travel with it yeah so uh you'll when I get it going you'll be the first one I reach out to then but yeah I can definitely see like at certain scales which some people in
(1:12:50) our communities are at certain levels some things like buying groups can make a lot of sense because it helps you get around order limits it can free up your personal time for buying Etc yeah and and another another cool thing about it is it's kind of like you have Arbitrage but it's kind of like a wholesale because you can buy almost as much units as you want kind of like you know wholesale or if you're doing private label of course right and um yeah and I think from what I've seen anyway I think Arbitrage has a bit of a
(1:13:29) higher margin than a wholesale from from what I seen I don't know if that's how everybody sees it but but uh yeah so there's that and if you're a if you're able to order the same way you are with wholesale then um it really gives you a one up on you know people that are limited to five units and then they got to go Source their next lead and three units there and then another lead and six units there you know what I'm saying that yeah especially like during like the you know Black Friday to you know the whole Q4 time already November
(1:14:04) December um you know sales are high there's mad sales everywhere and like this past um uh Black Friday uh not even black pretty much Black Friday all the way till the end of the year I was seeing some like pretty insane leads that had like incredible profit margins and they were selling like uh you know thousands thousands a month uh you know similar to that Crayola thing that uh that that um we posted about in the group uh similar products to that there where you know we're buying for like I don't know what it was like 2530 and
(1:14:40) we're making like 25 on it and it sells like as soon as it comes in right so uh but a lot of times throughout the year I find that you know those products um they're always limited to like you know five or whatever it is right so you're not able to kind of like take advantage of those opportunities uh the same way you would if you had like a buying group and you know you could very easily get like you know 100 units of it instead of the five limit and really scale your your um operations uh that way is anyone else any part of any of
(1:15:19) the other buying groups which you posted I I am Act if one one two of them I'm curious if anyone else has had experiences with them any not so good experiences to share so um I go ahead sorry oh sorry like I I just like the ones that I've posted I've ensured that I've vetted very extensively I've talked I've talked to the owners I have utilized a couple myself not a ton but just to ensure that they were legit uh so the ones that I have posted I am very confident that they are legit uh there's more on my list but I just haven't personally
(1:15:55) vetted them yet so I haven't posted them yet yeah Richard what were you gonna say oh uh no I was just gonna say that um I I'm not part of the buying groups uh but I I have a couple friends in the US that uh are run like the US ones uh well just kind of like for their own operations and um yeah I I I saw like ins and outs a little bit of those but uh yeah that's about it yeah there's there's where there's only I think realistically from what I've also investigated I've only found outside of what Jordan posted I did some
(1:16:37) research I mean max out deal seems to be one of them and then in Canada there's primarily one to be honest which I've seen fairly active not found too many more in Canada to be completely honest but yeah I mean we're talking it's it's also a volume game at the end of the day like cuz you're making a dollar or two commission maybe on each item two or three and you know you need to be spending in the thousands if to really make it fun but I guess it each for their own in terms of where you are with your credit card spend and
(1:17:08) things like that right I mean I haven't I haven't uh spoken to my accountant too much about how how exactly to uh process all of the other fun stuff that comes with it but we'll see but yeah like it just depends on um like a lot of people that join buying groups they do it casually you know earn a couple bucks here and there earn their points Etc but there are some that go super deep into it and earn a lot of money it's a little bit different than a buying group but the guy that we have in in the server uh Eric uh the spice who
(1:17:39) does the the ticket reselling stuff he's he's a full-time ticket reseller and he has a buying group for purchasing tickets uh for for shows and so uh in his group uh you're he calls out show goes at certain times and then he gets you to cart those tickets and then when uh if you have them carted for the ones that he wants uh he actually gives you a virtual credit card so you can purchase those under under him so you don't have to pay for it yourself and then he gives people commissions for that right and I've seen people post screenshots for
(1:18:11) one show you know earn a couple thousand dollars worth of commission uh just from doing that because they have you know multiple machines proxies uh all kinds of browsers go in and they're buying you know hundreds of tickets um so yeah it just depends on what kind of scale you wanted to do yep you want to make money there's ways to be making it 100% it's going to be a bit creative and smot about it I'd be curious if uh there's also a a a Marketplace for just points or you know transferring points it is a bit more trickier but you know
(1:18:47) people sometimes rack up card points aop plan points or ax points and you never know there are some people who are going to pay for that even I've seen that whole world of of things too I imagine there probably is I think with some of that kind of stuff like you mentioned is probably a little bit more tricky because it's probably against a lot of uh companies terms uh to transfer them to other people depending on what they are yeah yeah I think yeah Aeroplan doesn't really allow it Mar Bono does actually like 100,000 points so I've learned that
(1:19:20) you can like transfer your ax points obviously to Mar and then from there you can transfer to someone completely versus you know trying to make an airline booking or reservation on someone else's name and doing all that other stuff cuz who knows what can happen when you show up at the airport hotel you know at any point someone could choose to cancel their reservation right um so I think you know transferring points there are a few systems that allow it one of which being Mar bone wayse so I mean hey it's it's
(1:19:50) all about how much you're willing to spend right cost per point at the end of the day for sure I'd be I'd be curious to know Jordan are you in like the millions of ax points at this point do do you ever use it to pay off your card in terms of cash or is it are you have you been able to redeem anyit for travel I I'd be curious to have know if what some cool cool experiences people have been able to redeem using it if any I do have a few million AMX points yes but I've actually never I've never used my AMX points for anything I've been
(1:20:23) collecting them since I've had an MX I haven't taken a vacation uh the goal is which I've been told to a lot of people is to do I want to do some traveling this year I said that last year but I definitely want to do it this year you gotta use your aex points that I use them I I got a ton of uh AMX points too um from my other companies but you got to use them man they're they're like um I so this past uh uh Mar no February or March I took my whole family to uh Asia for like six weeks uh we all flew in like business class and
(1:20:57) all the hotels were pretty much all paid for with the points uh all the flights were paid by the points and we hit up a bunch of destinations and it was a really great time and this weekend I'm actually uh I used Bond points to um to uh I booked the Planet Hollywood in in Canon Beauty yeah yeah I flew to sorry go ahead John oh I didn't mean to cut you off um but yeah like I'm I'm definitely planning on doing it I just I haven't taken a vacation for a long time uh but this year's a year yeah I use my points some of them I
(1:21:36) fly I usually there and when you looking to book Jordan there's there are a couple of cool Aeroplan tools which allow you to search for stuff as well which I have access to I'll definitely send you links some if if anyone's interested in Booking Aeroplan seats and getting your best point redemptions or even some hotels uh uh I can send you some few links to a few resources it's mainly seats.
(1:21:59) Arrow but yeah I mean I flew to I FW I've been I been to Vancouver I was in uh Dominican Republic you pay a bit of cash sometimes if you really don't want to spend all the points it's a good mix but yeah you get some good deals I I was I I flew business class from Toronto to Vancouver for like I think 20,000 points which is realistically spending like 20K on your credit card which is like a month some of us in terms of spend so basically you could get a business class flight every month with the amount you spend depending how much you do I I could get
(1:22:32) many of those every month exactly I think I think Jordan can probably not have a house for a month and just live in hotels and and airplanes if you don't want to do yeah but yeah I would definitely be interested in uh seeing those resources that you have Jaden Manish what's up were you trying to speak there Manish travel what what's that yeah if you guys looked into like the prince of travels group yep oh yeah yeah and that's the other thing too if anyone's uh like if you're buying into us I was able to a get my US bank account set up
(1:23:22) while obviously like CIBC or whatever but then I was able to actually get a ax set up in the US using a US crossb account and not using the global transfer process using another one called Nova credit so now I have American base credit card as well not tied to my Canadian history which is kind of interesting because then I can buy stuff in USD and they have cool and different rewards with the usax yeah a lot of the US cards have way more benefits than what we have yeah I'm I'm looking into getting a I think they call it an iton right which
(1:23:56) is a independent tax identification number haven't gotten that yet because that allows you to open up a few more cards but we'll see right I just joined like 10 minutes ago did I miss anything important in the call I'm not too sure if you did we are having it recorded and we will post it later so yeah uh Fred Evan are you guys here are you just in here by mic or by listening yeah I'm here how's it going Fred good than you good good we've never actually spoken before how's it going good I am currently prepping of course of course so you and
(1:24:43) your wife yep beautiful and how was your guys at Q4 uh pretty good uh we did the about the same as November and December but right now we went on a 3 we vacation during December so uh the numbers does don't look like what I want so we're working over time to bring back those numbers up yep yep and so you're still primarily Arbitrage all Arbitrage is that correct yes I'm still busting your ass I got maybe one W cell account but uh it's like one sent with my uh s okay cool and you mentioned that you're just starting to expanding into the
(1:25:28) US yes I uh sent my first shipment before going to vacation and right now we're uh I'm trying to focus on the US because uh there's more volume and from what I saw uh some of the clearance that we got here uh they got 50 60% Roi so uh it's it's better than uh what I normally find in Canada for sure for sure so like are you like you're still working a full-time job right yes so how much time are you spending every day sourcing and prepping I would say that uh prepping I don't really do much I got an employee and my wife's work on
(1:26:19) it so uh we ship about uh 700 the item per day um and uh for sourcing maybe four hours a day busted but at the same time it's it's it gets easier it's it's it's a skill that you build and afterwards uh it takes you less time to find stuff 100% I'm a big believer in that I was uh I've been um secretly trying to chase you your your Revenue uh Fred I think we started about the same time and um I thought I was going pretty pretty fast but then when I see your progress I was like wow you're you're pretty damn hard to catch up to what's your secret how
(1:27:09) how are you how are you uh sourcing so fast because I know you just said you had a you know full-time job and everything so how how what's your secret to sourcing I don't really have a secret uh I use a software from some of my sourcing that's called uh sellers spy I think uh Jordan has a an equivalent in the uh Money Team uh Discord uh which is uh I can put about 40 sellers uh and it tells me on Discord sorry every time uh someone replenish an asense or add a new asense to their uh their list yeah yeah so we have the our seller
(1:27:57) watch bought and I've actually talked to Fred about the sell spy that he uses because I was interested in it and yeah it sounds like their software does something very similar to us um ours right now only tracks um new asens that seller stock uh but I'm actually actively working on implementing a feature to track uh replenishments as well and then Fred mentioned that uh with sell SP you're able to download uh like csvs or Excel documents yeah to to sort through the information and I'm working on getting that implemented into
(1:28:28) seller watch as well well perfect because uh I would say that it's the best part of the The Tool uh because even if I miss the uh actual warning uh if the seller doesn't hide his stock count uh by putting a Max limit I can see in his inventory what sells and what does not sell so I focus on uh the stuff that actually sells for him so yeah like if if you don't actively use the Celler watch bot that we have in here it does work very similarly I would definitely encourage everybody use it on biased as our own tool that it's our own inell tool but uh
(1:29:12) I use that and my team uses that quite heavily and I'm with the Starwatch that we utilize for our sourcing I'm basically able to replace an entire VA just from having those notifications assuming that you're sourcing uh quality stor on on average I'm curious with the solo watch tool Jordan would you recommend I mean you can obviously go for people who have thousands of reviews and are Niche products but I assume the way to go about kind of choosing the person is a you sell similar products as you you have access to it you know where
(1:29:45) they're sourcing from so you can easily reverse Source it and then the other item of it is I guess just tracking you know what they sell and then from there I mean the main thing is just making sure you're able to buy it at a similar cost price or hope you can remain competitive right at that sell price yeah so you should definitely do some leg work up front and find the sellers that are you you probably want to focus sellers that are selling Arbitrage products and once you do some like reverse sourcing some storefront
(1:30:15) stocking ET uh those sellers are relatively easy to identify and then you probably want to through those storefronts and find storefronts that you're able to get a lot of good results from just initially sourcing and then those are the those are the storefronts that you should add into seller watch because chances are if there are uh sourcing quality items items that you can find yourself items that you identified are also Arbitrage items chances are the new items that they stock are probably also going to meet
(1:30:43) that criteria and you'll have a much higher hit rate doing that on a I also have the requirement that uh that seller must have at least 100 AC because under that um they they don't have the volume that I'm looking for makes sense yeah that that's a good way to look understand how often they're also replenishing and finding new products and searching for new stuff because if it's just someone who's selling 20 items and the probability of them bringing in net new products is a whole another pronunciation of itself
(1:31:19) right I'd be curious though like I mean there's as one person doing it there's only so many sellers you can keep a track of but then again I mean they're not replenishing or adding new products on a daily basis right so I guess you know you start off you could start off strong and if it's too much or overwhelmed you start cutting out things that don't make sense anymore or vice versa well you get a list you get a list of notifications and I mean you can go through them basically any like in whatever amount of time you would like
(1:31:47) right like so it's not like you have to get the notifications and say you get 100 today you have to look all through the them all today you definitely have time to look through them right yeah yeah some someone time sensitive because uh the item might be on special true but um honestly I don't really look at the uh the the notifications I mostly look at the uh excels uh because it filters for me what sells and what does not sell because the guy might uh add some product and they don't sell for a month I'm not interested in that I just go
(1:32:25) look at the you got the inventory count and the Asin and the date so you see every day his inventory count so if you see that he sells uh 30 unit in a month then uh I'm looking at that product and seeing if I can find it uh for cheaper than uh what it costs uh the profit so do you find for the that's your primary way of sourcing is utilizing that tool yes but right now I'm mostly focusing on replenishing the uh what I already have I think I have 1,00 acents on my uh seller account so I have to uh filter out what's good and what's
(1:33:13) not and uh put alerts I'm trying to find a software that uh would work uh correctly because I've tried some of them but they don't work as I would want to uh monitor the uh the price change on some websites so like monitor like for when items go on sale and whatnot discount a discount or uh back in stock or uh so we're actually introducing that to an extent with the the sites that we monitor um so like it's going to be relatively limited for private monitors because like we basically right now we have access to private monitors for the
(1:33:56) stores that are new monitors support and you you can just basically direct message the bot and then do it privately where it can monitor for restock and it can monitor for price changes uh but for for personal stuff inside the server like for you to uh private messages bot it's going to be limited to begin with to just ensure that's not abused for public monitors it's not going to be uh limited but I'm assuming you probably don't want to share your data for your publicly with everybody else uh yeah but for private stuff uh there was one that
(1:34:26) I had let me just find it here uh was it the Chinese extension no like that one that's kind of like resource heavy like that does it like in your own personal browser so if you do want to monitor a lot of stuff like it's going to bog down your computer there's one that's a cloud service uh what the hell was it called let me find it here it was one like this.
(1:34:55) I used that one but uh wasn't working well I'll find one here I don't have experience with it but I've heard it works well uh the only issue is with those ones which it depends on how big of an issue it is for you um a lot of those tools they don't constantly monitor the items they'll check them once every hour or a couple times a day they won't check yeah yeah normally I put in once every 4 hour or once every 12 hour it's not really a time sensitive thing it's more of a I need to know when it's back uh in stock right so let let me find this tool here I'm I'm gonna
(1:35:33) while you do that Jordan Fred I'm curious with the volumes you mentioned what uh what encourages you to keep your prep in house and then B do you consider seeing this obviously you know being obviously great income as well do you ever see your of progressing it into something more than it is currently and what what would be that line where you say okay I'm all in or there's no need to choose I guess uh well right now there's no really need to choose because uh we're vired someone to do the prep it's uh I don't want to say it's monkey work but
(1:36:13) it's uh not that complicated but um my wife's work on the uh on the on the packing uh I don't want to use a prep Center because uh for example she was today alone she packed 500 items if you put that at five days a week at $1 each uh you're looking at uh about $120,000 in prep fees oh she she prefers to uh she she she wasn't seeing her value in the Enterprise at the beginning but right now uh when we did those numbers uh she changed her mind sign me up if someone said I'll pay you $120,000 a year to package products
(1:37:04) yeah that's that's pretty much it uh it's really just for me it makes sense to uh yeah to do it that you what would you what would you consider I mean you're obviously scaling at a level I assume you're happy at uh do you do you see yourself uh accelerating it in any shape or form or are you happy with the progress you make and would there be a point where you're like okay I'm I'm going to you know to Jordan's points you create efficiencies you let other people start to manage and build processes out and your hands off and you're just you
(1:37:41) know sipping Margaritas on the beach potentially and and letting someone else run it or I me H honestly uh in the past uh uh I've I've sold uh video games uh on Steam which is a PC platform uh I've done pretty well uh I could have I could have not worked for 10 years if I wanted to but uh after six months I went crazy doing nothing so for me retirement is not uh not retirement but doing nothing is not uh I'm not looking for that uh makes sense so I want to grow Amazon as much as possible uh but I'm always worried about
(1:38:33) the Amazon closing my account that's my biggest fear uh I think it happens way more in the US than in Canada but uh still got to be uh backing myself up so uh for now or goal is to pay off her house uh I believe we'll be able to do it in one to two years uh and after that uh we'll uh maybe invest in some other Venture makes sense oh it's good to know why people get into Amazon and how they scale and it it sounds motivational in in my opinion right to others around us it's it's a great story to hear thanks for sharing it's a pleasure
(1:39:22) Fred I found the tool I was talking about I'm not sure if this is one that you mentioned but the one that I've heard that works well apparently I have I don't experience with it it's called distill IO yeah that's what I was using and it doesn't work that well no because uh it it monitors uh for example a part of the website but when it doesn't load uh after T dries it puts it as inactive and uh you got to go back inside of the software uh pretty much every day to figure out why it wasn't working ah gotcha yeah that's a pain in the ass um
(1:40:06) but so if you want something that like that's like private um I could connect you with the developers that we have that do our restock monitors so you can basically have that in your own server and so like they have a list of websites that they do so you can't just do any website you want but you can ALS you can also ask them to add more it doesn't cost you anything else and you can basically set up your own server and then they monitor for restock and they're actually really good and it's not they don't check every every couple
(1:40:33) hours they check like basically every few seconds and you'll get notified of restocks within a few seconds of them restocking okay yeah if you can uh send me their info uh I'll be uh I'll be interested definitely and so like yeah if you look under like our restock monitor list like all of those websites that you see are ones that um they actively offer right now and then there's more but they're more so uh us websites okay uh I have a question for you Jordan what's up I have some uh unfulfillable inventory that that's been sitting at
(1:41:10) Amazon warehouses or uh more than a 100 days and they they they don't send it back I don't know what to do I've contacted them but uh they say yeah it's taking longer than the traditional 90 some days that they normally operate in but uh I I got to wait unfortunately when it's in inventory like you're unfulfillable inventory and you have like it's basically grayed out where you're not able to remove it on like I haven't found anything that works you just have to wait as much as it's as shitty as it is it's just one of the shitty parts of
(1:41:51) Amazon like I've had some on occasions I've had stuff sitting in unfulfillable inventory for over a year it doesn't happen that often but it can happen and we can't do all about it okay uh but the what I did is I did a removal order I think it was for 100 units they ship out five but the rest still sitting there oh that's interesting so that's a little bit different so if they've actually if you've submitted the removal order and they haven't been remed that's a little bit different cuz like there's uh when they're in unfulfillable inventory uh
(1:42:25) sometimes they sit in there and you can't physically remove them they say that it hasn't been processed yet yeah yeah it's in TR yeah I know I got I got some of those too so have you like tried to track down those units via your inventory Ledger at all like are they still at the warehouse where can you see that is it on Amazon website yeah so on sou Central let me pull up on my other screen here you like they never used to have this it's still kind of new their inventory Ledger um but I find it works quite well
(1:42:56) it's supposed to like basically track your inventory through the entire process as soon as it's received at the Fulfillment centers so we go to uh reports fulfillment and then under inventory Ledger yeah the inventory ledger so okay you should be able to paste your uh your as or FN skew in there and you should you should be able to start tracking down where those units currently are so at least like you know that they're still at the Amazon warehouse if they've been sent if they've been shipped already it should indicate in the
(1:43:30) inventory Ledger that they've dispatched from the Fulfillment center and then you can use that as leverage to submit a claim with Amazon if you haven't received them if they've been quote unquote lost in shipping no they're not lost uh I contacted the support and they said that the they're in the picking up process and so you removed them over 100 days ago yep yeah that's a little bit ridiculous I I can tell the ace and I don't mind it's it was the the the the Packy chips uh that they they they removed from the market oh the recall uh
(1:44:06) yeah yeah so I wanted to get a refund for those but uh I need them physically to request a refund so I'm still waiting for more than a 100 days yeah with scenarios like that like honestly like as as it is I don't think there's a whole lot that we can do um at a certain level of seller which I'm I'm not even at uh you have to be really high you get your own Amazon representative but short of having one of those I don't think there's a whole lot that we can do uh I do have another question uh it's still about uh the unfulfill bles yep
(1:44:43) they they they it's the same thing uh they they claim that the item are damaged uh and I request uh a removal order they they're they're taking their sweet time just they were not damag when i s them send them in so is there a way to claim uh Amazon that they damage the items so what kind of damage did it say on the items did it say distributor damage did it say um Warehouse damage customer damage uh uh remove let me see uh no it says defective ah yes so yeah like you can't do anything until you get them back but
(1:45:41) when you physically get them back if they are damaged take pictures of the item Inside the Box take a picture of the little slip that comes with it that has uh the removal information on it and then yes submit that submit that to Amazon it will probably be a fight but you should be able to get them reimbursed chances are high though that they will probably be fine and you can probably send them right back okay yeah I received some uh that were apparently some Legos that were apparently damaged but they they were just fine yeah so
(1:46:11) like Amazon does that for multiple multitude of reasons so like usually what happens is like their orders that a customer orders then they get sent back and not the same box that Amazon sent them in and then Amazon will automatically just classify those as defective or customer damag uh okay if they were sent directly to the warehouse for some reason either their Bots or employee just figure that something's wrong with them so they put it like that and 99% of the time there's absolutely nothing wrong with them
(1:46:41) okay uh yeah I think it was the two questions that I had uh they're they're pain in the ass when you grow but uh I guess you got deal with it it's all growing pains my man yeah y hey just to quickly chime in here so if you do recall your inventory and um you have the removal order slip you can get a um you can get a refund or a reimbursement for the removal order cost as well if there's nothing wrong with the item you can just say you know after we've received it at the warehouse there's been inspection um and then you
(1:47:17) can get a reimbursement what's the what's the average removal cost for an item it it's like a few bucks yeah it's a few bucks it's a few bucks it's not very okay then I think I don't think it's worth our time yeah it's probably not but if it's like you know a large removal order like I had you know removal order of you know hundreds of units and they charge you per unit right that ends up being a lot more because they ended up sending it on like a truck or whatever and then skid so it's like that in that situation it makes sense
(1:47:49) but if it's you know a standard removal that maybe might be just a couple bucks but it's like you know for the Packy chips for example that's like a a recall issue I don't know if you're going to be able to get a um reimbursement on the removal fees for that but in certain situations like if they've messed up then you can get a you can get a reimbursement on the on the removal order fees yeah I have a funny story uh I I once removed 40 items from the Amazon warehouse and they sent the pallet to my residential
(1:48:21) address so the the truck driver arrived and uh he was looking for a a business with a dock so it wasn't funny and so it didn't have a liftgate no yeah yeah they just assume because they're getting pallets or whatever that's coming to a business right y yeah Evan how's it going are you present with us yeah I'm here how's everything going on your end um with h selling on Amazon or yeah um it's um pretty lukewarm has been since I've started um I think this is my probably my second or third year now and I haven't really progressed much so have
(1:49:17) I seem like you've been kind of like digging into books and stuff recently how's how's that been going so far um I'm just in the research phase right now I haven't actually done any sourcing um I'm researching uh thrift stores in my area and unfortunately there's not a lot of them at least within a you know a 105 minute drive I'd probably have to drive at least half an hour or an hour or more because you know I am in a rural area um but uh we do have a couple of local thrift stores though I think the majority of the the books in those
(1:49:49) thrift stores are uh fiction rather than non-fiction and uh um I don't really want to scan fiction because the the majority of works of fiction unless they're you know box sets or special editions or other books of um of that description um are not worthwhile financially so for sure uh so have you uh gone to those S throws and taken a peek at what they have yet uh yeah yeah so I went to one of them a while ago and um did a little bit of scanning there I found um a couple of books that I had sent in with one shipment um but they're still sitting
(1:50:31) there like probably 180 days later so um I might just end up having them uh disposed of or return to me because I mean I read a lot I have about um a personal collection of about five between five and 6,000 bucks so I might just end up having return to me so that I can read it myself you might even if you're willing to let go of them you might be able to find some good inventory in Your Personal Collection I I could yeah but a lot of the the books that I have are scholarly editions and are heavily annotated by um
(1:51:05) renowned scholars in their field so I don't think I would part with those I wouldn't be able to sell them on Amazon anyway um probably yeah because of the uh the kinds of annotations that are in them but I there are I have scanned just for for practice I downloaded the uh scoutly app and was configuring the triggers the other day um and did some scanning in of the the books in my basement just to ensure that the the app was working as it should and I think it there's it shows uh some promise but um of course I'll actually have to do the
(1:51:37) scanning to see to see what's out there for sure yeah like so I know some places you might end up being quite surprised like it might look like it's not super viable at all and then just one day you might go in there and you might be able to find a ton of profit yeah I mean a lot of places they're very unassuming um but at the same time I think what I've come down to because I don't have a tremendous amount of time right now um on account of working a um a full-time job like for I've watched various YouTube U videos
(1:52:08) for example and um several of the the YouTubers um the ones who've been um successful at at selling books have all said that when they started they were sourcing for you know two and three hours a day and in certain thrip Source I just cannot commit to that at all um I would probably only be able to do it maybe a few hours a week at that so it would it's going to I think end up being a painfully slow process much like anything else I've undertaken um but uh there's which is why I thought maybe that what would make
(1:52:43) more sense for raising capital is to have um a multi-pronged approach so um sourcing books could be one component of that approach another component of that approach could be also using um a service like restricted inventory um in the states I've corresponded with them for uh for a while now and they are receptive to receiving fitments from Canada I I live within about an hour drive of a stallion Express drop off location so I can get really cheap shipping on um a large volume of DVDs and CDs and uh textbooks which I
(1:53:20) wouldn't be able to sell on Amazon anyway or the majority of them I wouldn't be able to sell anyway um and I can send them there so that's another potential Revenue source for um for raising Capital um and then of course um the server too with some of the the product leads for for eBay that I found I have um I've sold there was one lead I think you had shared a while ago um for some action figures uh I think it was the reverse flash action figure I sold all three of those eventually um but the other leads that I bought um
(1:53:52) specifically the Instinct theme little ties uh figurines and um can't remember what else it was that I got but they're still sitting so I'm probably just going to end up returning them I also got that um uh Spider-Man um two themed what I thought was Psy but it's actually not a PS5 it's a a collector set and it confused a lot of people on Facebook so I just ended up returning it fair enough those uh how like you listed those in the little people instant collector dolls on eBay and they haven't been selling no not at
(1:54:29) all and I made sure my prices were competitive right so I kept check I checked whenever I refreshed the listings once a week as per um the uh advice you had provided in the eBay guide that you prepared I um would also check the comps just to make sure that my pricing was uh was still consistent because you know Supply fluctuates and of course eBay like any other Marketplace if you have a preponderance of a certain item then generally speaking the prices are will start to diminish the same is true in Amazon um
(1:55:01) so I insured as I was just as I was refreshing my listings that I would adjust my pricing too within a certain amount of course because I don't want to be losing money or breaking even I would like to make at least a little bit of profit but no I haven't really been selling much of the stuff that I I had sourced that was shared in the server yeah the Instinct stuff is interesting if you don't mind whenever you have time could you uh just send me a link to your listing if you if i' just like to take a peek at it um if you don't mind sharing
(1:55:30) because yeah like I've boughten quite a few of those I think um I've I don't know probably like around 30 or so and I've sold them all really yeah and like I'm I'm checking now and like it looks like the prices right now are still decently consistent like 80 bucks plus and it does still look like they're selling multiple unit units per day and the sell through rate is still solid like from what I see right now there's 132 sold results and there's only 44 active oh that's strange yeah for whatever reason for me it's not selling
(1:56:03) I thought maybe the issue was um my IM the image or the the product photos I had taken but I think they were all right I think for one of the the photos that was a little bit too dark so what I ended up doing was just lifting one of the stock photos by Amazon but I screenshotted it so it wouldn't have any the metadata on it um and could be flagged by ver right so um but uh yeah it's just sitting here I'm just looking at trying to find the listing for you now so I can share like I share it in the the the chat window you'll be able
(1:56:34) to see it right uh yeah it should be able to just depends uh just let me know what chat you shared and I can take a peek okay one second here okay so I had shared it in I'm not sure what this I guess it's the the messenger underneath the the voice chat tab okay okay I see it perfect yeah sorry for everybody that was talking in this chat I actually haven't looked at it until now so I apologize if yeah I had a little bit of trouble I had a little bit of trouble connecting before so what seemed to resolve the is cuz I thought maybe it
(1:57:20) was just my computer and all my uh sound was activated I actually end up switching browsers I switched from chrome to Firefox and it worked so good to know yeah okay so yeah like you definitely are price competitive I see like your shipping is solid you have positive feedback and you've been like relisting this every single week like you mentioned yeah yeah I've had the product now for let me just pull up my uh Amazon stats here it will be in my orders um wasn't too long ago that I got it um yeah so on the 10th of December so
(1:58:01) about a month ago okay let's see here so yeah that's interesting um I don't see any reason why yours would not sell because you are very competitive yeah and I thought thought maybe the issue is with was with the promoted listings too so I just I increased increased it by a percentage point and uh doesn't seem to make any difference I know at a certain point on eBay when you use promoted listings it just it doesn't really um it doesn't really help you that much so I I think I've kind of met the threshold for that
(1:58:42) this particular listing in that respect right yeah yeah it hasn't been selling and uh there was I'm trying to think of what else I got here um that wasn't selling the other the Spider-Man 2 um collectors uh Edition that I bought didn't sell either because a lot of uh people on eBay and Facebook Marketplace were convinced it was a PS5 and I mean to be honest I thought it was a PS5 to but it wasn't so it's um what do they call it it was like a collector's edition figurine um a voucher for a SP a limited edition Spider-Man 2 a digital
(1:59:19) video game and then a field box display case but it wasn't actually a PS5 right right with that guy did you just list that guy locally or did you try putting that guy up on eBay as well I did both yeah and I made sure I was price competitive I refreshed my listings I even changed out some of the pictures a few times I thought maybe it was an issue with the with the pictures I'm also having the same issue actually the the lack of sales with the um seal gravity cars the Air Hogs um I bought 12 of those and uh listed them and again
(1:59:49) like I the pictures seem okay to me and uh I'm making sure that I'm price competitive I even I even decreased the the value of the listing by $10 um I'm still making a little bit of money but not as much as I would have and they're still fitting they're not selling either okay so um if you don't mind Evan um either later tonight or tomorrow uh because I just want to ensure that I address it uh preferably tomorrow could you just send me a a message about these specific guys I I want to dig deeper into them and just look just look at a
(2:00:25) few things and see if there's anything else I can recommend um because like especially with the AirHog and the the insync stuff I realistically don't see any reason why you shouldn't be selling those because they are actually really decently high volume and uh like I I haven't looked at the AirHog one but the insn one I don't see any reason right now why you wouldn't sell it but I just want a chance that they deeper into it just in case there's something that I'm missing okay um yeah I'll share the um the one for airhogs in the same chat
(2:01:00) window for sure I just sent I just sent it now for sure so yeah if you can just send me a I have it written down here um but sometimes my days are a little bit hectic so if you don't mind just sending me a private message tomorrow and then once I have some time I will sit down and I'll take a look at that guy for you okay yeah those are the um I think those were the only two on eBay asides from beside the um or aside from the the collector's edition Spiderman uh thing that I sent back and I got a refund for
(2:01:29) that too actually um I tried uh I entered some of the uh sweep Stakes as well that that sweep sweep Stakes tab that you had put up yep um there was actually something I wanted to bring to your attention about it so in One Sweep Stakes um I can't remember what it was now I had to you had to validate that you were the age of the majority for your Province and um one of the ways in which you had to do that was by um in entering your credit card number or something like that just to prove age a majority I've done that for other sweep
(2:02:02) sakes too and I've never had any problems outside the server and it actually um actually ended up with some um fraudulent charges on my credit card oh yeah so that's not good so yes I definitely if that stuff happens I definitely want to be made aware cuz like that stuff um a lot of the stuff that's coming in basically through Bots they are coming in through websites that from what I've seen are reputable but if stuff that is coming through that is not reputable I definitely want to know so I can address it yeah so just to give you an example
(2:02:34) the one one that came through was from um at least on my credit card statement it's saying WD gd.com and when I went to that it was I mean you can tell it's a facade when you're looking at the the actual site so I actually had end up canceling my credit card and getting a new one reissued so okay I'm definitely sorry about that um but if you no and I mean that's yeah that's not your fault but it's just something I wanted to bring to your attention I was what I've been trying to do and I haven't messaged you before because I'm trying to reconstruct
(2:03:04) through my browser history exactly which sweep Stakes it was because it's not really help for me help helpful for me to not give more information about that so you can at least track it down and see what the um exactly what provider bought is the problem but just haven't been able to do it through um my browser history I don't know if they're using a mirror site or something like that yeah like if by chance like uh if you know uh an idea of what what post it was or what day it was that it was uh posted any information would certainly help um
(2:03:36) because I want to make sure that if there's any any of that happening that we want to remove that immediately yeah okay like I said I'll try to reconstruct it if I can um and uh I wanted to you know just uh making aware of it now um but I've been looking into it the me for some reason I just can't seem to reconstruct it through my browser history 100% yeah if you could give me any information I would certainly appreciate that okay um but yeah other than that I had I mean I noticed um some higher on Amazon specifically I noticed um higher than
(2:04:11) usual sales for Q4 but that's pretty typical my inventory is pretty low right now but um and um obviously I don't have enough capital for consistent um sales through OA so I'm trying to see if I can pivot to to use books and um other sources of of for raising Capital too but um I should probably try to get a shipment out sooner rather than later especially with the admin to this new low inventory fee that nobody can understand so right definitely but yeah like um the reason why I mentioned for yourself like we discussed previously
(2:04:48) about use books just because like when I started I didn't have a ton of capital either and that's exactly how I started and it is definitely slower for sales but is in my opinion one of the best ways to maximize the capital that you're able to gain because you can literally buy a book for a dollar and a lot of them you're able to for 30 40 50 up to like 100 plus dollars right yeah yeah and I have looked at um even uh with some books online I tried to use eflip but I can't really get the hang of it and I sent I sent their
(2:05:18) customer Service uh um an email and asked them if the software could be used for um Amazon Canada because a lot of the searches I can had conducted through the free trial were returning results specifically for amazon.com so I thought maybe that some of the settings and one of the accounts needed to be reconfigured specifically for the Canadian Marketplace but um I I haven't received a response for them so I sent another message and I still haven't received a response so I don't know whether it's even being monitored any
(2:05:48) any more or um it's just been sold off and it's just left there free floating I'm not sure um but uh I think in my case I probably just have to Source in P in person as much as I I don't particularly enjoy doing that in part because of the I have to do it on the you know the busiest days of the week which are typically weekends and uh um because I don't have a lot of those kinds of venues in my area right for sure yeah yeah so when you were uh when you were um sourcing Used Books uh to raise Capital um how much time did you spend sourcing because
(2:06:29) I know at the time you had a a full-time job yeah so like I basically when I started I definitely caught a bug and I was trying to spend as much time as I physically could sourcing um obviously doing any amount of time is better than doing nothing like moving slow is definitely better than not moving at all um but like so when I first started I just you know on the weekend I would spend a couple hours uh hitting thrift stores learning the system sending it in and just basically getting a proof of concept because we didn't really have
(2:07:01) any Canadian resources at that time and I was basically trying to learn everything from more or less Breezy resells on YouTube and I made a ton of mistakes because I didn't apply it to the Canadian Market I didn't really know a whole lot about anything um so it was slow moving um but it was a proof of concept and so just a couple hours probably per week and then once I knew the concept was working then I started going deeper and deeper and spending way more time and like on my lunch breaks I would go hit up through the stores if I
(2:07:31) could I would be actively looking on uh Facebook and kig I got pretty deep into like used video games and video game systems because they tend to have relatively hard high margins as well but they obviously have the additional caveat where um you have to test and clean everything so it takes more time but the margins were very high so I started doing that a lot and then at a certain point I basically spent all my free time all my weing hours sourcing books video games and learning as much as I could so many many hours per
(2:08:02) day yeah yeah that's kind of what I'm struggling with too because I don't it's it's it's hard because I don't have a lot of time um so but I guess I'll have to see if I can find some more although it's going to be hard um did you did you find that uh you had to go to certain thrift store State a few times say one month apart to see what the inventory was like before you were able to develop a sourcing route yeah so like when I first started I wasn't like specifically trying to implement any systems I was just doing it just to see
(2:08:37) what worked uh once I started get more heavily into it um I definitely started noticing some thrift stores were a lot better than others uh I started keeping track of how many books I actually ended up accepting from an individual thrift store so like if I went if I went to my local Valley Village and I I kept track on scoutly where you can reset your stats on how many books you scanned and then then I would just keep track of how many books I actually kept and so I just keep track of that in a just a mini spreadsheet and then I would analyze
(2:09:05) that later to see which thrift stores I should be spending most of my time at and I found real realistically two uh they both ended up being Valley Village locations locally which ended up being like honey pots one specifically kind of like in a more like a Richie uh area of the city and basically every time I went there I could go back there almost every single day I would find at least something if I waited a week I would find a ton of stuff and at that time I was doing like a lot of textbooks and i' I would always get really good amount of
(2:09:35) profit-wise textbooks from there almost every single time I hit it and then as I mentioned like I started doing uh advertisements on Facebook and kiji for free Book pickup uh that was always hit or miss but you could get a I did get a lot of free inventory from that but also had to sort throw a lot of junk because people just give you everything that they had and you just bring it home you scan it keep anything that's any bit profitable and then basically recycle the rest yeah I think in my area the and I could I could be wrong but uh it's not
(2:10:06) particularly affluent but I I'm in I'm inclined to think that um there's been an abundance of books in a lot of households so I might have more luck with that with that kind of approach in in tandem with uh sourcing at what th stores I can I can Source um than just say limiting myself to to to thrift stores yeah and like um I really like the model that re resells had I remember years later uh when he talked about in his videos just attempting to be like a thrift army knife um yeah trying to be like just have knowledge in different
(2:10:43) platforms different categories different things so just when you if you're trying to buy anything anything whether it's online Arbitrage going to a thrift store selling books whatever um if you gain some knowledge in all those categories basically any type of sourcing that you do or if you decide to go thrifting uh your chances of finding stuff and finding profit it just becomes so much higher oh yeah yeah it stands stands to reason the more the more avenues that you pursue for for inventory and this is true irrespective of the kind of
(2:11:11) inventory that you're attempting to Source the more likely it is that you'll find inventory that's that's profitable right as opposed to limiting yourself to a single Source or even a couple of sources um but did you find that um when you were when you were scanning in the Thrift in the thrift stores or in any other venues for that matter um were you looking up non-b barcode books or were you just limiting your stuff to books with barcodes so when I first started I was trying to look up almost everything but then eventually I wanted to do more
(2:11:44) volume try to get through more books more quickly so then eventually I moved to just basically all barcodes so if it didn't have a barcode unless it looked super interesting to me I would probably disregard it okay yeah because that's what I'm thinking in order to achieve a high degree of volume especially with books it's kind of something you you have to do especially if you have a very limited time right right um and did you use like a listing software like turbo Lister and and a repricer or when you had enough
(2:12:13) inventory so when I did it uh almost off the Hop because I tried listing through Amazon originally and it just it deterred me uh listing through their their platform which was vastly different than what it is today um I started using scan Lister immediately uh but I imagine um like scan Lister it was like a one time a onetime fee of a higher amount that you could own it for life uh but using turbo list or something like that would work just as well uh especially if you're doing like so many different SKS and like so much
(2:12:45) volume it probably make more sense if you're just listing like 1020 I mean just do it in Seller Central doesn't really matter but if you're doing like a couple hundred listing software it'll definitely pay for it um when it came when it came to repricer there was um what was it called uh it was like called reprice reprice it or something it was like a really cheap repricer was like $10 a month um I I that was the first one that I used it really sucks they when we check and repice your inventory like every hour or something um I don't think
(2:13:15) it's that needed for books um it just depends on really what kind of volume you have honestly if you repice your books just look at your inventory like even once or a couple times a week it's probably fine yeah that's kind of what I figure too I obviously what I I want to avoid and in raising capital is any un unnecessary costs um so and I mean of course you have to be as a rule I think it's it's healthy to be suspicious of um you know the Fanfare that various kinds of software enjoy among you YouTubers 100% um and a lot of them are not very
(2:13:51) useful for us as Canadians anyway um but yeah I was I did just watch just today actually um one of uh rezy reel's uh tutorials on selling used books this one I think was from about six years ago or so and uh one tip that never even had occurred to me um although was uh I think quite um quite ingenious was when you're sing especially if you're sourcing at the same um thrift stores um you bring with you um a UV pen and have a a UV light on your keychain yep and mark the books that you've scanned so that when you go back into the store you
(2:14:33) can just Shine the Light on the books see which ones you scanned and which ones are new that was fantastic yep you just have make sure you're not you don't get caught doing that because some people might look at you weird yeah well yeah what are you doing marking my books yeah well the good thing is though you're not actually defacing the books because it's it's it's not yeah exactly you can only see it if you shine the light on it otherwise it's invisible right for sure you can do that and you can also like um consolidate books to like a
(2:15:05) different shelf so yes yeah take and leave Open Spaces yeah yeah yeah then you know where the new ones go yeah exactly because I mean I know as with being an employee all these years you're going to choose the path of resistance so in that particular Cas you're going to put the books where there's open space as opposed to moving the books around and putting them in between or whatever else right other books um did you find though that um like how much um Capital did you think you had to uh accumulate before you
(2:15:34) transition to um sourcing for OA and do you think the same amount of capital would be viable in 2024 so like when I first started I didn't really try to think that deep into it I was more so just of the of the mindset of just do it and just go and just just just try it and just keep going with what works Without Really Trying to dig that deep into it so like obviously at a certain point you obviously want to ensure that you have taxes sorted books uh get systems in place Etc but I wasn't concerned about any of that when I first started like I
(2:16:10) wasn't concerned about getting accountant I was just worried about just trying this out and then if it works just keep just keep doing more of that right and so like how I trans transition from books into Arbitrage is um again watching those videos getting hints about like oh just like scan some stuff in your house that could be retail products and see if they're viable on Amazon and then just started looking at some products at stores when I was there and just kind of like just slowly organically got into it just scanning
(2:16:38) some grocery items here and there nothing too too serious and then started looking at some uh some items some OA items and just slowly doing that started looking at like Costco buying a few items here and there and then just slowly sending in more and more and more while still doing the books because the books was still working and it was still gaining me capital I never really thought about like how much money I need to start doing this I just tried it a little by little by little and that helped me learn that helped me limit my
(2:17:08) risk because I wasn't going too deep and also it helped me grow my Capital over time as well and like even when I started with I started with books and I moved into use video games and then some small Arbitrage products like some small grocery items uh primarily from places like Costco Wholesale Club uh Walmart and just slowly expanded from there um but yeah like books started working so I started slowly going deeper into books and then I found video games that started working so then I started buying more consoles more uh like rock band
(2:17:39) guitars Guitar Hero guitars went pretty heavy on those because they were super profitable and then just slowly started transitioning to the Arbitrage stuff um I don't really think I don't really think you need any set Capital obviously the more you have the faster you'll be able to expand us to mean you're making good purchasing decisions but I don't think you need any set amount okay yeah well I'm just thinking about having enough um or raising enough Capital to be to have higher payouts that um would enable me to uh purchase
(2:18:12) capital and sort and feed the beast so to speak because right now with what limited capital I have um the payouts that I've been receiving from what SC sales I've had on Amazon isn't really enough to purchase um a uh an amount of inventory sufficient for uh well what I would consider sufficient for a shipment of you know say 30 units or more as a small seller right yeah true uh but like you can also again if you start expanding your horizons into like books or other things you'll probably be able to find more
(2:18:46) units on top of Arbitrage to be able to fill up those boxes a little bit more and honestly like especially like to build momentum it's not going to maximize your shipping costs but it may be more beneficial assuming that your margins can account for it to just send in more consistent smaller shipments just to get just to build that habit and just do it consistently and just say I just want to send a box per week and then increase that over time it's just like growing that skill set in that muscle memory to just consistently do it
(2:19:14) the consistency is like the biggest thing in this business no matter what business model that you're doing yeah I mean um I had contemplated that approach as well but the the trouble was that because of the how small the shipments were it um or how small my payouts have been from from Amazon what from what few sales I've had um is that the they didn't justify sending in additional inventory because as you know with Amazon through it agreement with UPS the generally speaking the um the the more units you send in or the the the heavier the
(2:19:49) shipments are um the the greater the discount on shipping so with what limited shipments I was going to send in um it consumed most of the profit right for sure so like in that case you might just have to supplement it with you know additional like if you if you can cop like free books or uh cheaper inventory or cheap use Electronics or something like that and that can probably help scale that a little bit a little bit easier uhhuh so I'm thinking well for I was also looking at DVDs and CDs and video games but I'm hesitant especially
(2:20:24) the um a lower volume seller um to send in those types of items because they tend to well now more so I think than in years previous attract a lot of um counterfeit product complaints so I think it's probably probably more would be ill advised to do that or would be better to send it through um a service like say restricted inventory I don't know of any Canadian Coral to that I don't think there is one um and have the have them bear the risk rather than have bear the risk myself on my own selling account assuming I can even sell those products
(2:21:02) and the majority of them I probably couldn't so so like a lot of that stuff um in my experience DVDs CDs Etc they never sold super great on Amazon Canada they definitely do better on the us not saying that they can't but I have tried my hand at some of those and never found them super beneficial uh some video games yes like even like PS2 games Xbox 360 games original Xbox Etc just depending on the titles they can have a very high premium and have decent volume um I obviously the risk is always there but I think the risk is relatively
(2:21:38) limited when you're selling them as used and like honestly like I sold quite a lot of video game stuff in my time and I never once had a complaint about stuff being inauthentic you have to ensure that you're able to look at it and if it's obviously a fake don't send it um and you know test it make sure it works but assuming all that then your risk should be pretty limited okay the risk is always still there but I don't think it's something assuming that you do your own due diligence that you really have to worry
(2:22:10) about and I always tell this story because um not too long probably like six months or so after I started selling on Amazon uh my dad also started selling on Amazon and for the lack of better words my dad is not uh very uh uh he's very technology illiterate and he is older doesn't really know how to use computers he just saw that I was doing this and thought it was interesting so he basically followed what I did and I showed him how to like scan for books and then he started getting into video games whatever he
(2:22:40) knows nothing about video games but he saw that was profitable and the one time he bought a a lot of video games you know PlayStation controllers Games Etc and some of the controllers you can sell separately and they're quite profitable and one of the ones I sent in was a Sony controller uh Sony PlayStation original controller I believe it was a PS1 controller and the day it hit the warehouse his account got suspended and I was like well why did it get suspended he's like well they told me it was a fake product I was like well is it fake
(2:23:09) he's like he's like no like I I know it's legit and he was swarming down that it's it's it's a legit product it's not inauthentic and then uh we finally were able to remove it from Amazon and get it sent back and as soon as I seen it in the poly bag that he had it in I was like that's a third party controller he was trying to sell as a Sony controller and an employee obviously an employee obviously seen that it was very obviously not a Sony branded controller um but even with that like it was an honest mistake I was I was able to help
(2:23:36) him write a plan of action and he was able to get his account reinstated and I mean that he only got deactivated because of his own his a fault of his own he didn't pay attention he didn't know what he was actually doing when it came to that well yeah I mean you don't know what you don't know right right hey Jordan I don't want to sound dumb here but like I tried like a couple years ago selling on Amazon haven't done it before but uh for Branded items or not like that selling anything like certain branded items they just won't let you
(2:24:04) sell it how's that work so what do you mean how does it work you want to clarify I was trying to sell type in like Crow Hines yep I tried selling that type of product and it just wouldn't let me list it because the brand remember what exactly said I remember I couldn't use Amazon to sell or like most of the stuff but I'm seeing people other sellers sell that right so just want to clarify uh so you don't have any real experience with Amazon correct at all okay beautiful uh perfectly fine and that's a great way
(2:24:34) for you to be here and learn about all this because I think a lot of us that are in the server come from Amazon so it's probably a great Avenue for you to learn uh but the way Amazon works is especially when you have a new account a lot of items are called what what they call gated so they basically don't give you access to a large part of their category when you are a brand new seller because essentially they just don't trust you and they want you to sell items that are lower risk to build up that trust to ensure you're going to
(2:25:02) send them to ensure that you're going to uh be sending authentic products um and so on and so forth and as you build more credibility with Amazon they get more trust you start to be uh come what's called Auto unated for more categories more Brands Etc um but you can FastTrack that by getting invoices from Distributors uh and you can submit those to Amazon to get ungated early so like if you have an actual Wholesale Distributor you can get an invoice from them like say if you want to sell um Lego you can do that for Lego and then
(2:25:36) you can get ungated with Lego and Amazon does that because they figure that you're actually buying from a reputable distributor and that builds more trust you're able to utilize some retail receipts that look like resources or sorry that look like invoices um and you can use those to get ungated so like we have I have a blog post and we heavily talk about using Amazon itself to buy stuff on Amazon from Amazon directly and use their invoice to get ungated it works it shouldn't but it does because Amazon's invoices they look like
(2:26:07) distributor invoices and Amazon just accepts their own invoices to get ungated in almost anything okay what do you mean by lower risk as saying Lego but some of the parts I was trying to sell are like 40 30 bucks so sorry could you clarify like um yeah some parts I was trying to sell was like 30 40 bucks like what do you mean by like lower risk item because some Lego was more than that so no I'm saying like Risk to the customer not like cost so like toys for example those would be considered high-risk items okay
(2:26:42) not part yeah because you're you're sending those items you're sending those items to children they're vulnerable people yeah they're they're high risk CH okay yeah and so like off The Hop like when I first started selling on Amazon and Canada we could we could send in uh we were Auto ungated with groceries when we first started now as far as I'm aware with new sellers you can't sell groceries off the Hop and it makes sense because it's a higher risk it's a consumable item yeah you should probably have to go through some hoops
(2:27:09) in order to be able to send people physical items are going to be eating right yeah that makes yeah so yeah like they they Amazon is one of the harder platforms to sell on but it also comes with some of the highest rewards um it's very it's a lot easier to scale on Amazon once you learn the systems versus a lot of other platforms because you can get things so automated but you have to jump through a lot more hoops and they do make it more complicated intentionally do you do uh do you let Amazon do all the work like FBA or do
(2:27:40) you do fbn I do exclusively FBA um I'm I have mixed opinions about fbm um I've always come from the mindset of I like to value my time as much as possible and leverage other people as much as possible which is why I've hired employees early on it's why I have a decent sized team now um but yeah because of that reason we we do exclusively FBA but fbm can be viable in Canada as long as you have proper shipping services that you can utilize Andor um have very high profit margin items how's it like the the Returns on
(2:28:13) Amazon like does that mess you up a little bit like customer returns yeah not really um obviously it is a part of the business um it's something that you have to factor in uh but most of the stuff that we personally sell is consumable items so Health and Beauty grocery Etc okay yeah and so those those return rates and those categories are extremely low because on Amazon you can't actually return them uh they don't allow you to return them there's obviously ways people can get get around that um but it's very hard for them to
(2:28:43) be returned and they're consumable items that don't have a high return rate to begin with if you want to focus on something like apparel or shoes to start off with which I wouldn't recommend those have much higher return rates in General on Amazon yeah um I wouldn't recommend digging deeper into those until you are more experienced okay it's like what you're saying you recommend like books to start off or something like that I'm biased I that's the way I personally like to recommend to people because it's such low risk and
(2:29:16) you have very little investment and the mar the returns are very very high like you can't really get as high Returns on anything besides drugs with the amount of return you can get on books because you can get so much profit uh there's just a caveat that they just sell a lot slower than other items so some books will take you multiple months to sell but you can literally turn up $1 into $100 but it takes a long time so what if per se like know we had more than a little bit of budget what would you recommend that so so I would
(2:29:47) still recommend not necessarily books but I would still recommend just lower risk um OA and ra stuff so depending on what kind of budget you have and depending what kind of research you have and what kind of knowledge you have I wouldn't recommend going Balls to the walls off the beginning because you will make mistakes and it can cost you if you don't pay attention like some people do uh but just yeah look at OA ra stuff look for the categories that you are enged in uh so you'll probably be looking at like home uh like HomeGoods
(2:30:18) Sports and Outdoors Automotive you might be able to find some prods and like some health and beauty items but not a lot some grocery items not a lot um and then I would try to get ungated in toys grocery Health and Beauty as soon as possible is there like a thing I can read that what I have access to gated wise so you'd have to you'd have to open up a Seller Central account and then you can just look up the individual asens um we can't there's no list that exists that says that what you can can't sell because every count is technically
(2:30:49) different okay yeah Robert how's it going I see that you joined us hey what's up guys how's it going Jordan how are you good good how are your holidays and new year's it's been fine with the family and stuff um had some big returns by the end of last year around like uh 30 31 31st of December but yeah it's been great uh all the Distributors were closed so had the time to relax a little bit um and now we're back uh in business beautiful and it's still still yourself in just one VA yeah so one VA fulltime and I have
(2:31:41) another one that's uh like part-time helping me for uh wholesale uh like uh like scanning uh cataloges or scanning like websites uh with me but yeah so far a small team not like yours but uh with your employees they've been working out well for you to be honest yeah um I've been spoiling them a little bit because um I wouldn't be there if uh I didn't have them so uh um so far so good um I'm thinking in 2024 maybe give them more responsibilities so I can be uh so I can focus on more important tasks yep um trying to open more accounts um trying
(2:32:32) to get like a little less riskier in my spending because I was going like uh balls deep with my credit cards they were crying so right now I'm keeping a little bit of a cushion to just to make sure that uh if something happens with my account uh I can still eat tomorrow yeah uh yeah I had like a little heart attack with the associate account so it's been back in business Robert was concerned he was going to get shut down because of an Amazon associate mishap yeah so long story short uh I opened a asso account like I think a
(2:33:17) year ago and I didn't like read a lot of it I didn't put a lot of um attention in the term of service for this program and basically this program is you get like a small uh percentage um of the sales that uh um from the links that you give to people if they buy from your link get a small percentage and so basically you are not allowed to to send to your friends or family which I was doing uh and they caught me for some reason I don't know how they did it but they CAU me and they shut down my account I I tried actually what happened is they
(2:34:01) sent me a warning and I I wasn't sure exactly what was the the reason because I've been doing that for almost a year now and um like randomly my sister uh she opened like a Tik Tok and I was like oh you know what uh you can if you want you can put my my link tree there and we never know maybe people are going to click it or or I don't know and a week later uh they sent like they sent me this warning and I told I was like oh maybe this is the reason um so after that I I closed everything I told them okay I closed it
(2:34:38) and then they just permanently they said okay we're closing your account and I was like okay uh and but they gave me the reason they told me that I was sending to friends and family so I sit down like a morning and I wrote like a plan of action for like 4 hours and I didn't think a lot of it much of it but it worked I don't know how but knock on wood I'm I'm I'm still here but good story is it had no impact to your seller account yeah I choked honestly I told you I figured it wouldn't yeah but you know me I'm a
(2:35:14) little bit paranoid when it comes to account health and uh and like shaking Amazon I don't want any trouble with them so yeah Def and how about you how was your holiday it was good I think it took like three four days off which is kind of rare so got to chill out recharge for a little bit and yeah it's it's been solid it's been super busy for us and yeah some days I want to pull my hero but it's been good yeah Y and the team nothing major like still doing well the team still uh working as you are wishing to for for them to work yeah so like
(2:35:56) well like specifically like my VA team uh we were up to 10 vas total um since then like I have cut down quite a few uh just because like we've been heavily tracking production uring everybody is holding their own weight Etc like I think I've sent you some numbers recently what some people are doing um so I was able to basically cut down from a team of 10 to a team of six at some point and do more than what we were doing with a team of 10 for like lead production wise um so just kind of like fine-tuning the team and only keeping
(2:36:30) the ones that actually have their head in it and their heart in it and actually want to be part of the team yeah exactly uh I've onboarded this past starting this past Monday we onboarded two new people so I let go of one so we were at six so we went to five now we're at 7 um so yeah like we we're getting we're still fine tuning Our systems ensuring everybody is we only have employees that actually want to be here uh it's just it takes quite a while to weed out the people especially when you're hiring so many
(2:37:01) people at a time yeah 100% I mean you you don't know if the person is going to work hard unless you take a risk and hire them because like the guy in the interview versus the guy working with you is not like two different person so 100% you have to test out and like just recently like one of the recent Pas that I let go uh she was actually with us since I believe it was like last February or March um and she was super solid when she first started she like just just blew through products uh first month super high disqualification rate like
(2:37:38) 70% disqual 70% disqualification rate for her leads but she produced a ton of stuff her first month and and then when she started getting some feedback that went down massively and she still was doing super well and then just like over these last couple of months she just kind of just been uh slipping away and like we've been trying to like ask her you know what's been going on is there anything personal that's happening exactly is your heart notot just in it whatever and just no matter what we tried just always saying you know
(2:38:04) nothing's wrong everything's fine I want this job Etc yeah and just was not improving so I just uh the start of this month unfortunately had to let her go yeah I mean at the end of the day you need them to show results and you gave her time so yeah it happens yeah 100% it was like it was like a six-month process of like before like noticing like performance issues before she ended up getting fired yeah and you have like a pretty good like process to uh train people so I'm guessing maybe yeah she has like a personal uh problem issue I don't know
(2:38:43) yeah like I would think so like like again I don't think it's training because like I said she was able to produce a ton she knows how to do it um I just don't think that when she was at work she was focused you know actually uh the person the VA that's working for me part-time is uh Bjorn one of of the that working with yeah okay because initially I really wanted him to be with me but Mike Mike got ahead first cuz I wasn't I was traveling I was coming back from uh uh um I think Japan right and you actually sent me the message to hire him when I
(2:39:22) was boarding the plane so once I got back like 24 hours later he said oh Mike already hired me I was like but I but I kept like he he told me that he was still interested and I kept like saying you know the doors are open whenever you want you can come work with me um so yeah one time he just sent me a message message he said uh by the way are you still interested uh for my work uh and I told him yes I of course asked Mike if there was no issue about that and so right now he's I believe he's working full-time with Mike and
(2:39:59) part-time with me okay sweet and so how has Bjorn been how long has he been with you um it's a good question I think couple of months like maybe I would say three months two months three months months how has he been for you so far in complete transparency and honesty so personally like like uh me and him like the contact like the text and everything he's a very sweet guy uh really like formal professional and everything uh and the leads that he's uh giving me are honestly very good I'm not buying everything that he's he's he's giving me
(2:40:39) but um I mean so far I know he had like some um issues with one of your employees but so far in terms of uh personality I didn't have any like um issue about that uh maybe I can sense sometime he's not working the 20 hours um but beside that he's been like solid with his sourcing to be honest okay good so yeah like he specifically um buttheads was my VA manager um so I never had any issues with bjor which is why I I tried to find him in another position when we knew we were going to let him go cuz I always thought he was solid um but yeah like I
(2:41:23) I think what it was is I believe like so Bjorn he has post-secondary education he's a man I believe even though he says not I believe he had issues reporting to a woman who didn't necessarily have post-secondary education he never mentioned it but I believe just kind of in the back of his mind I'm pretty sure like he just didn't respect her Authority he was always fine with me but yeah when he couldn't work with her then that obviously became an issue right but I always thought he was very solid yeah I mean I haven't um connected
(2:41:59) him with my other V which which is a woman so maybe maybe there's going to be like a problem there but for so far it's been like I've been only uh working like me and him uh in in a different um cat and he's been he's been fine so far honestly I don't think he has any I don't think he has any problem working with anybody else I think I think he just had a problem even though he says not and we Tred to address it I just think he had a problem uh reporting to a woman that wasn't as educated as him and that was younger than
(2:42:33) him that's that that's just what I sensed yeah that's interesting maybe it's in the I mean maybe it's in their culture or something because I remember um um I remember uh I was um I had like a interview with my VA which which she is a woman and she's she was like maybe three or four years he is three or four years older than me and I told her my age and she was a little bit like like I I would say a little bit more than shocked so I was like okay come she was she was very like um she put a lot of uh uh come how do we say it um
(2:43:15) uh like importance about telling me okay you're a baby you're small and everything so okay yeah I mean okay if you if you say so so I don't know I think maybe I think like their culture is still like relatively what you call I guess traditional and like I think like most of like people in Authority when it comes to like the Philippines traditionally like are older people yeah exactly they have like a big respect for elders stuff like that exactly like uh not hugely different here in Canada yeah yeah yeah it's true
(2:43:50) like um I I don't understand uh their language to Galu or anything uh but they regularly my whole team is all from the Philippines they'll regularly communicate in their language and when we're just talking like in chats um my VA manager is a woman and no matter any of my employees who are like most of them I believe are older than her um but they always refer to her as uh it sounds like they're saying mom I think it's like I don't know if it's ma'am or Mom but it's just it's supposed to be like a form of respect because like they're
(2:44:21) like they're she's her their boss right yeah so I just I would just find it interesting yeah may you know bjn he's he always said sir Hey sir how are you sir and I told him many times I'm like you can't you can't call me by my name you know said no no it's fine I'm gonna call you sir okay yeah as you wish yeah I get that all the time with all the new employees I say don't call me that about I'm not that old yeah exactly it's fun yeah yeah so beside that this year I would like I think to try to diversify a little bit uh but I'm not really sure
(2:44:59) what I want to do I have like maybe an opportunity right now with a private label um uh and also maybe try myself with um I don't know I think I told you about you know uh creating my own website and drop shipping from Distributors yep but that's that's to be we're GNA check if we're GNA do that so if you are interested in private label and I hope he doesn't have a problem with me saying but Richard who was in the chat earlier his name is DC he is he's Mike's brother okay um and he has uh three different private legel Brands and two uh all
(2:45:44) three three of them do seven figures one of them close to eight figures per year in Canada Canada and the US Jesus Christ okay and when did he start uh he's been doing Amazon since I think he mentioned 2016 so he started right off the bat with uh private label he started with private label now he's getting into Arbitrage yes yeah I mean it's something I'm really like I have no um I'm not educ at in that I mean I have to check some videos how to create a listing how to get like A+ content how to register a brand and everything I I really have no
(2:46:24) information about that I don't know yeah I never did it yeah Richard I think he would be a very good resource and he mentioned he'd be cool talking about it so I I hope he's okay with me mentioning it but uh yeah like I think he he could definitely help out if you're interested in private label oh that's sweet um if I have some bumps or or obstacles I'm I'm sure I'm going to try to to ask him some questions 100% And yeah like I I spent a good hour so talking to him not too long ago and he's he's a really solid
(2:46:57) guy yeah I mean with I just spoke with Mike and he's really really kind like sometimes I had some questions for for him and he he seems very intelligent uh and he knows his stuff so 100% pretty sure his brother is the same definitely yeah yeah I had to ask him because he was mentioning about uh Mike specifically starting like a private little round with poly bags so then I randomly asked him I was like how do you know Mike and then he's like oh I'm his brother like okay damn yeah yeah small world so yeah yeah so when is the when is the trip
(2:47:38) soon quit asking me soon soon yeah did you between the uh Thailand or Japan uh maybe just do both if I I'll try to get away for long enough that hopefully I can just do both yeah that would be the that would be the best uh yeah but in our travel deal monitors the other day I seen that there was a deal for a flight uh out of Saskatoon to Hawaii direct flight round trip for like 350 bucks I was like oh that's super tempting Jesus for uh for when uh it was there was multiple options there was some in March April and I think some in
(2:48:23) May let's do a a uh money group meet up there I wouldn't mind that at all but oh there's a caveat that everybody has to travel with their points yeah I I bought into I don't know how many people have this but I bought into a time share I can't believe I'm I'm saying this but they exist still Jaden but long story short it's it's it's it's more points based but I have access to all properties across us and and a few other places including Hawaii Vegas so yeah if anyone ever is looking for one can look some things up that's
(2:49:09) good if it's beneficial but I've always seen people say never buy the time share never get oh no I I didn't no when I when the the people trying to buy sell it to me originally from the property was charging me like $35 $40,000 I bought it off the resale market for like thousand bucks it's it's it's prepaying your vacation on a yearly basis so yeah you have to commit UPF front I'm like okay cool but I'm like I I did the math somewhat aligns I'm like for th000 bucks $1,200 for a seven night stay in in US you don't really get anything for less
(2:49:42) than 150 200 bucks a night these days days so yeah fair enough just make sure you utilize it and get your value out of it exactly there's a couple people in here that haven't been chatty at all Jeff Liam how's it going are you guys with us hey Jordan how's it going good you not too shabby how is uh your how was your Q4 it's uh actually the best uh well my first Q4 and my best month ever in December I think I posted in the other channel I did uh basically 40K us so I think that's over 50k Canadian so kind of hit my first Milestone so pretty
(2:50:31) happy with that beautiful and so you're primarily focusing on the US market right yeah I do like it's basically 100% Canada to us right now um and now I'm looking to expand basically because I want to get to 100K next and and I think I might have to start changing it up like adding some different Avenues maybe doing us to us or US to Canada or Canada or just Canada to Canada yep not exactly sure where I'm going to go next um still analyzing that beautiful and so when did you start selling on Amazon Jeff I think
(2:51:04) it was in July was my first sale nice nice yeah beautiful and so so far you're getting you're catching the bug and it's it's going good for you yeah I sort of like started slow I mean for the first few months I was hesitant I wasn't sure I was kind of afraid Amazon would shut me down or I don't know I thought I wasn't going to get paid out or it just it didn't seem like it didn't seem like it was going to work I was paranoid but then um December came around I just went all in and it it definitely paid off so so yeah now I'm
(2:51:35) going to go definitely all in now this year um so all the capital that I have saved up I maxed out all my credit lines I opened up a bunch of credit lines like I I went kind of crazy and um I mean it paid off so I'm happy that I did it but at the beginning my girlfriend was definitely a bit worried for sure so just to check you have all those paid off now yeah yeah okay beautiful actually I'm still waiting on one more payout but pretty much all paid out yeah beautiful yeah like I think it comes like at basically everybody unless
(2:52:06) you have access to un limited Capital there's going to be that point where it becomes very scary and you're unsure and you need to start leveraging money you don't have um I know like not even that long ago Robert and I had that conversation and he was himself about paying off his credit card and I had to assure him it was fine but uh I think everybody at some point um at a certain scale you're going to experience that yeah eventually Capital becomes like your uh your number one like con what is it constraint so 100% yeah
(2:52:37) you're gonna you're gonna have to do that at some point but I know it's good to at the beginning like use your own Capital just to so you get confident in it um and and you're sure that the products you're getting are working and then when it's time to replenish or something like that then you can go all in cuz you have your proof of concept there um so getting the the lineup credit is not too scary definitely yeah once you actually understand have experience and know what you're doing for sure um so sorry go ahead I didn't mean
(2:53:06) to cut you off I I I had a question actually that I wanted to ask you um now my fiscal end of year is in July so I have to start looking for accountants and bookkeepers cuz now it's just basically all like stored in a folder on my computer um I'm wondering like what's a a reasonable price I should be paying for like a bookkeeper and an accountant like on a monthly basis because I'm seeing some price ranges that are pretty wide like I'm seeing stuff from 500 a month to a th000 a month to 2,000 a month and I I just don't know like and I
(2:53:39) don't know if I should be going for like an e-commerce specific account or does it even matter so like with bookkeeper don't get a CPA to do your bookkeeping for you you're going to be overpaying if you do that uh CPA all offer bookkeeping services but they charge out the ask for it um it depends with bookkeeping like you realistically you can find somebody and we do have people in here that have utilized places like uh virtual assistant like you can find even virtual assistant like from online jobs. pH that
(2:54:09) do bookkeeping I think that could be a viable route but you need to understand the process and how to do it yourself just so you can ensure that you review their work I think you should do that even if you just have a regular local bookkeeper the only time I'd be confident not digging that deep into it is if you had an actual accountant that you trusted doing it but you're going to overpay them for that um but like say if you get like just a regular local bookkeeper that has experienced bookkeeping but that doesn't have any
(2:54:36) specific certifications you're probably going to end up paying anywhere from about 20 to like 60 plus dollars per hour and so that's going to be dependent on how many transactions you have um obviously if you're doing Arbitrage you have a lot more transactions than just you know somebody doing private label transactions um do you understand the bookkeeping process yourself to begin with not really especially because it's um a lot of crossborder stuff right so it's it seems a bit more complicated off the bat for the bookkeeping itself it
(2:55:07) shouldn't be because like realistically when it comes down to it um all you're doing is just confirming your bank state against your basically your receipts and your record of payment and then applying that to the right account it doesn't actually matter what account you put everything in the CRA doesn't care about that that's just for your records and then you're just indicating that you've paid tax on this so you can claim that back so like realistically you can put all your expenses into one account if you want to it's just not beneficial for
(2:55:34) yourself just because you're not going to be able to track your expenses that well um so like once you actually understand the process and if you use a software like QuickBooks it's not that hard it's just tedious you it just takes a little bit to understand um but yeah like you could probably realistically find bookkeepers that aren't quote unquote super they don't have like any certifications but know how to do it for probably like 20 bucks an hour it's just I believe you should understand the process so you can
(2:56:04) review it just to ensure there's no mistakes okay I found one girl that quoted me at 40 bucks an hour but she had quite extensive uh experience so it sounds like actually a pretty reasonable price and that could be especially if she's more efficient right um so like even to do like a year of transactions it shouldn't take a unreasonable amount of time uh I I wouldn't recommend doing this but when I first started I basically did an entire years worth of transaction reconciliation not too long before I had to file taxes and this is not like me
(2:56:40) having a lot of bookkeeping experience and I mean it took me I don't know probably 40 hours total I I wasn't I wasn't doing a ton of volume back then but it just kind of gives you like a reference point right yeah um yeah I feel like I'm getting to that point now because uh I mean it's coming up I mean it's maybe in six months from now so it's a little bit further out but I'm starting to get to the point where I'm doing you know like 2,000 transactions a month so I feel like it's going to start adding up a lot so like
(2:57:14) do you already have um bookkeeping software like set up like QuickBooks or anything no I don't have anything okay so I I I would recommend you doing that sooner rather than later because like with QuickBooks you're going to have to connect your bank accounts and your statements and your bank transactions will import automatically uh but depending on what bank you're with um QuickBooks is only probably going to pull back like 6 months worth of transactions they might go further depending on what bank you're with but
(2:57:42) the other ones you might have to manually upload um okay it shouldn't be that bad uh what bank are you with right now RBC okay RBC is going to be the worst I know because I'm with RBC uh they they don't give you a proper format to upload into QuickBooks for your bank statements um but when you do that let me know and I can uh send you a a software that I use that can convert your bank statements to CSV that you can upload into QuickBooks oh okay nice okay cool um I'll save you ton of time um I've had to do it many times um but
(2:58:19) then once you do I would get those uploaded because you don't want to pay a bookkeeper probably get those uploaded because that's going to be kind of time intensive and you're going to have to have access to your accounts and stuff anyway which you probably don't want to give them access to uh and then yeah I would recommend starting to do it now because it's probably going to take you a little while if you're doing that many transactions per month um when it comes to actual accounting like your year end filings are you a sold prop or are you
(2:58:43) Incorporated Incorporated okay so obviously when you're Incorporated it's going to cost you a little bit more to have your filings done um but uh you should be able to find an accountant that just charges you your filing fees that when they actually file for you for your uh probably your qst uh your actual Corporation filings and your personal filings you probably don't need an accountant that's going to charge you every month uh most good accountants in my opinion they will just charge you the fees to file it and then you can ask
(2:59:10) them advice whenever you want throughout the year and it doesn't cost you anything thing um but for reference for my accountant per corporation that I have it includes my Corporation filings uh my GST filings my PST filings and my personal income tax for that one set it cost me about uh I think it's about $2,300 that doesn't that doesn't that doesn't include any bookkeeping yeah I mean that's not too bad if it's over the whole year that's it's worth it yeah and like so when I wasn't Incorporated it did cost considerably less but that's also when I
(2:59:48) when I get it done that's doing like whatever uh the full p&l financials report which you may not you may or may not need uh you probably don't need it unless you're sourcing like uh bank loans or trying to get uh business credit so if you if you don't need a financial report it'll probably cost a little bit less is your account local to your Province or like local to your area yes and so yeah you asked about having an e-commerce specific accountant I I don't think you necessarily need somebody that has experience with Amazon specifically
(3:00:20) um accounting at the end of the day is accounting no matter how you look at it if you are selling in the US you obviously want accountant that's familiar with crossborder um accounting they don't I wouldn't assume they need to know us tax law because like we have our tax agreements you only have to like fill like an additional form or so so they just need to have you know some exposure to the US which any account that's worth or sold should have um but yeah I have a local guy um I found him through a friend referral and
(3:00:49) he's super solid okay yeah I'm wondering if I should get like a local account just because I don't know if Quebec is like Quebec tends to be special with a lot of things so I don't know if I should like just get a Quebec accountant on top of it just to to make sure I don't like break any Quebec laws yeah I know there's quite a few accountants that will not uh they service the rest of Canada but they won't service cuc yeah to one I I have one that I've been with uh for seven years so if you want just send me a
(3:01:22) message and I'll uh I'll send you his info okay I'm definitely interested does he do bookkeeping too or is it just accounting both okay yeah awesome I'll check it out thanks I do want to ask him uh Robert who was talking about Mike earlier uh Mike Chong he's in our uh public server uh super solid guy I had conversations with him before uh he's based out out of Alberta he indicated that his accountant has like an AI software that basically reconciles all his books for him and they don't they have to do very limited bookkeeping I do
(3:02:00) want to look into that more because I think if it's able to do it and do it accurately that can be a huge time save and money save and he's a large enough seller that I imagine that um it's being done correctly and that sounds interesting do you know if he's doing crossborder or is it just Canada he's doing crossb oh okay yes but from my understanding when I had the conversation with him he indicated that his accountant utilizes uh Discord he uploads his receipts to some capacity into Discord somehow and then his AI bot
(3:02:38) whatever basically reconciles everything within a couple hours which I thought was thought was kind of insane welcome to 2024 or in the future yeah I was like I don't know if I trust that to be done completely like efficiently but he says it works good so yeah so I have a question also on um just your general thoughts on what I should do next sort of like right now I'm doing a lot of Canada to us I feel like I've sort of maxed it out I can maybe do a little bit more but I don't think I can get to 100K a month just
(3:03:11) doing uh Canada to us I'm not sure what I should do next like you think I should do Canada do you think I should do us to us do you have any opinions on that why do you think you maxed it out it's a good question uh basically I don't know it's just a hunch that I have I've done a lot of sourcing and I found like a lot of good replans and and now like I've just I've having a lot of trouble finding new new stuff I I can I can definitely tell you for sure that there's still a lot of stuff you haven't explored and there's
(3:03:47) still always new stuff even Canada to us specific so like obviously like my VA team and myself we've sourced quite extensively Canada to us and there's always new stuff that you can definitely find that's still high margin good margin um there's always there's millions of new products being listed on Amazon every month so there's always going to be new stuff okay yeah so maybe I should continue focusing on on what I do already and just try to expand it I would say like at a minimum don't stop what you're doing if that's your main
(3:04:21) primary revenue Source um either try to expand it or do that in addition to if you want to do Canada to Canada or us to us I don't think either one or any option is a bad option if you want to expand different Horizons but I would just say don't stop doing what you're doing for Canada to us if it's already working okay yeah maybe I'll have to go to the VA route then and get a get someone to source for me fulltime that could definitely help if you need access to more products it just depends on what what bottleneck you're
(3:04:52) having at the moment yeah right now it's it's products that's the bottleneck yeah and then yeah so as long as you're able to uh relay your processes to them how you want it because you probably probably won't find somebody that is Versed and doing Canada to us sourcing as long as you're able to re relay whatever um whatever sourcing methods you have to them properly then that would probably be your best your best uh short-term investment sounds good when uh so you're you're actively working a full-time job correct yeah
(3:05:31) okay so right now with yourself how many hours per week are you actively sourcing um I'd say about maybe 10 okay and so are you 100% uh utilizing prep centers for all your prep no I'm doing the prep myself with my girlfriend okay and how many hours per week are you prepping I'd say maybe another 10 okay and so like do you feel like you're capped out right now for time it feels pretty close to it yeah um I could always do a little bit more but I'm eventually I feel like I'm going to burn out basically working two full-time
(3:06:09) jobs for sure for sure so then yeah um when you look at it that way um I would say look at whatever things are you eating up most of your time uh and try to Outsource those the easiest tasks first so like in my opinion prep is the easiest thing to Outsource first e either locally or to a prep Center I always prefer locally other people have um different opinions but I prefer own in-house QA but like if you want to if you're if you guys' relationship at school with it completely relay that to your girlfriend or hire somebody else to
(3:06:43) do with your girlfriend or just hire somebody else to do it themselves that might be the best way to uh free up some of your time in the short term and then work on uh hiring somebody and training somebody to do that additional sourcing for you yeah that sounds good actually my girlfriend uh says that she likes doing it so maybe I'll do like Fred and and and get her uh on that while I work on sourcing right as long as she's cool with that everybody has different uh relationships and she like you can't leave me
(3:07:11) here but yeah that' probably be the if you're in Montreal we could do a dinner I'll I'll let you meet my wife and uh if you bring your girlfriend she'll teach she'll teach her some uh some tricks some tricks yep I think Robert is local to you guys as well so have a big meet up yeah i' i' I've met Robert once we went for dinner Beauty pretty cool guy I don't know I've heard mixed opinions about Robert I'm just kidding uh but um yeah we can we can meet we can uh set up a meeting uh whenever you guys want I'm ready I don't
(3:08:07) have a girlfriend but I can try to find one before uh La I seen you just rejoined us and I apologize I didn't see your questions earlier in the chat but now that you're here I do want to address them uh I wasn't able to hear you if you're talking um do can you let me know if you're able to hear me right now and I can address the questions that you had whether either Voice or by chat here if you're present yeah I can hear him yeah I can hear him I cannot hold on could you try speaking yeah can you hear me cool I can
(3:08:48) hear you now sorry about that oh no no worries at all yeah uh first off I just want to thank you you know you're uh since last October I think you're the one that kind of jump start my Amazon again so yeah um a quick question here how did you keep track of your inventory for example your your replants um because I have a trouble right now so is there a way do that you're just trying to like keep track of your orders or what you should be replenishing what should I be replenishing okay so we personally utilize a software called so
(3:09:24) stocked I don't think that's a good option for most people and I think it's overpriced for what it is it's stupid expensive uh but uh a good entry way to get started with uh inventory replenishment would be utilizing seller centrals in uh inbuilt tools for inventory management and preferably utilizing seller board seller board isn't my absolute favorite for inventory replenishment but I think it's a pretty okay tool that you can get started with um even utilizing so stock I don't think so stock is missing a lot of stuff and
(3:09:58) it's not optimized for OA and wholesale sellers it's made for private label stuff and there's so much on it that I want to change I just don't think there's something that's like super optimized for what we need to do at scale but I think seller board is a a very it can get you very far and it's very cheap okay sounds good I have one more question yep that's okay um what are the best credit cards to use right now I'm just using One credit card um I'd like to maybe get a few more just to get uh just to have more money come in more stuff to buy I
(3:10:37) mean so what do you utilize them what do you uh utilize the most so like do you primar shop at regular retailers big box stores Canadian Tire do are you looking for cash back for points what kind of things are you looking for I'm looking for cash back and points right now I have an nbna about about 30 Grand in spending in there but you know I'd like to get others if that's if that's possible uh what do you recommend are you uh Soul prop or are you Incorporated uh so prop right now but who knows maybe this year depending how
(3:11:11) it's going I might go corporate okay so like just for pure value wise I would say one of the best cards you can get overall is probably the AMX simply cash preferred um so like it's just a very good General card um because it has uh it had I believe it I don't believe it has any caps on cash back might need a double check but I believe on grocery store purchases which you obviously you can utilize for OA ra um I believe I want to say the cash back is 4% um it has it has some different limits for like gas and stuff and then
(3:11:45) like General cash back is 2% which is pretty okay um the Cobalt card I've heard good things about I don't know exactly what the benefits are of the Cobalt card I haven't looked that deep into it I can tell you what it is it's five time the points on uh groceries and restaurants so if you buy a lot of groceries stuff or OA from grocery storees that could work yeah go um if you do ever Source Canadian Tire it's basically a requirement you should have a Canadian Tire MasterCard no annual fee and their base cash back is 4% Canadian
(3:12:24) TIR money and it regularly goes up to like 16 plus perc on their promos so it's absolutely ridiculous if you value Canadian Tire money which you can use to buy more inventory or just personal gifts or uh treats whatever um and then from there like we don't have a ton of super valuable cards I'd say in Canada but like from there like if you need like um if you need more Capital then you'd want to start looking at charge cards like the American Express gold or platinum card they have okay benefits like their their
(3:12:56) point their point rewards are not huge where they shine as they um their charge cards so they don't have a hard limit on how much you can spend there is a limit that's there but it rapidly increases as you spend more money and keep paying it off okay sounds good and I mean the ax ones they they might not give you great cash back for dollar spin they give you good sign B sign up bonuses per se the other thing with ax at least with me is I signed up probably January or February last year and uh I've opened up three or
(3:13:32) four credit cards with them since I've only had maybe this is just my luck but I've had just one hard credit check on my original card and ever since I've been an existing customer every time open a new one weirdly enough they never put a credit card check in for me and I have a mix of charge cards as well as credit cards with them so yeah yeah and like I found like as long as you have decent credit um and you start building a history with AMX they're probably one of the easiest lenders to get higher limits with um but
(3:14:05) on the flip on the flips side I've heard a lot that if you ever like if you're ever late with payments with MX or um just like don't whatever you're not you don't do good business with them they can be pretty restrictive and they can start like limiting your limits really quickly and Prett pretty drastically okay well thank you very much I got no more questions yeah thanks again for all help for sure so I have a question for Jordan what's up uh AMX gave me a account representative yep they never replied to me
(3:14:43) oh uh they sent me an email like they were they were my new account rep that I could take uh like a meeting with them but the girl never replied I sent her five emails I don't know if you have an account they don't they don't work in cubec Fred that's the issue okay yeah they don't they don't like your cuckers so I don't know just weird I have got one but I've never actually communicated with them so I probably couldn't give you good advice for that but that's very unlike MX because they're usually super customer oriented
(3:15:21) and like very high customer service I'm wondering maybe if she got fired or let go and that email doesn't exist yeah maybe yeah but uh I don't know I have a a platinum card and they limited my card to uh ,600 they limited your CS to 2,600 yep I charged uh 16 Grand on the first on the first month I fed it off and afterwards uh it stopped working at 201600 and since then uh I think I've charged over $50,000 to the card but the limit it's is still 2,600 and so like has it business business platinum or personal yes
(3:16:04) business Platinum so has it been like that since you got it or did it used to did it used to be higher well the first month I charged 16 Grand like I told you but after that uh been 2,600 the like the cap after that did you try to call to increase the limit well they told me they needed some documents I sent theend the documents but they uh I received some uh like mail like they needed more time to uh take a decision but uh after three months I never called them back so might be my fault too that's very interesting so I've I have a friend that
(3:16:52) had sold on Amazon for a period of time who did get some AMX cards I believe he got the gold card and his credit wasn't amazing um but he had like a personal MX card uh he only had like a couple thousand limit and then he got the gold card because he wanted access more capital and they limited him to I think it was like I think it was like a thousand or $2,000 to begin with and he had the same issue like they just wouldn't increase it um he never proceeded with anything to try to increase it uh but my experience with
(3:17:24) that like I have a business platinum as well I've never had like any hard limits set on myself ever like I've never had a transaction climent we we've burned through that thing yeah same same to me but I have I I swear by the way I had one distributor he messed up the invoice and he tried to charge four thou $400,000 on the card and it went through I mean they it they didn't block it because they said that my limit was reached they block it because they thought it was a fraudulent transaction but but I mean yeah me too I never had
(3:17:59) any issue with the limit with ax so maybe there's it's there's a bug or something try to call them ask what's the issue because you're paying $800 a year for a $2,000 limit it's crazy I don't know it was my first argument when I called them yeah I definitely yeah I'm looking I mean have the have the AMX gold business no no I mean they don't give you a preset spend limit so what happens when you go to your like card account and you you say check spending power does it allow you to do that and yeah you want me to check if it
(3:18:41) works no there's a thing which allows you to do check right oh I'll try it where is it yeah when you check your when you whatever quote unquote check your spending power that's supposed to realistically tell you how much they would approve in your one transaction right where is it on the app just start go I know I've seen it but uh yeah I know I just saw oh I got it it's in statement so let's say I'll put $4,000 no no it say it's approved I don't understand so so now you can check it I think three times a day so I'll try like 10
(3:19:48) 10,000 I'll try 10,000 One Last Time nope not approved yeah that's something I would definitely try to get sorted with AMX because if you can only get a couple Grand and you're spending that much per year that's kind of stupid yeah $2,000 payment every day for uh for a whole month yeah that's that's a little ridiculous because they're like they're supposed to be considered a premium card have good customer service gave you access to more Capital so to be limited like that like it's it's kind of sounding like kind of
(3:20:26) like a douche Hy toyy but you expect that because you're paying that money right yeah I'll try to call them tomorrow and let you guys know yeah for sure I think I had the same issu with but with my bus is gold um so I think the first month opening I I charged like 15 16 Grand on it and then uh immediately got flaged by uh by AMX and then um I believe I called them but uh on the rap just told me to um I think you can check um americanexpress.
(3:21:02) com doent Center so where um you can upload all of the I believe um uh income statement or um some of the docum they asked you for and then just keep following up with them for a couple weeks then U you know it's eventually got resolved for for my for myself so I'm not sure that would help okay I'll call them and uh let's see what they request of me again just that uh last time it was complicated so I had other things to do than to follow up with them yeah I me yeah try to tell them that you you have a business and uh all of the
(3:21:42) transaction would be um you know for inventory buying from suppliers and then I remember the r asked me like random questions like who's your suppliers and I just I just told her to like take a look at my statements and then give them some names of the suppliers that you buying from then um they definitely take some notes then um eventually got resoled okay yeah kind of kind of a pain in the ass we don't even be spending time doing stuff like that but for me it's I want to use that because it would be easier just to charge everything to one
(3:22:21) card instead of having seven cards yeah for sure uh there's another card that I would recommend if you buy uh if you buy uh electronics there's one card that has three times the point on uh at Staples Best Buy The Source uh everything that is supposed to be business related it's the uh the blue card The Edge uh business Edge yeah yeah yeah so like I don't know I I got the I have the business Edge do you have one of those Fred yeah yeah maybe they limited me because I have four MX cards I don't know yeah that I mean possibly I have I
(3:23:09) have three I've never had that experience so okay yeah like with the business Edge it's it's more of a traditional card so you have a a hard limit and you know set yeah yeah yeah but still for the points it's three times the points uh really any Electronics The Edge card I think also has a decent amount for restaurants and eating out I don't think it's as good as the CET card but when I originally got the edge I bought it I got it basically to to eat out and go to restaurants and stuff yeah yeah are you still using the uh regular
(3:23:48) cash back from RBC the Master Card for the business RBC one yes so it's a it's a free credit card it's not the paid one uh let me check which one I have here hold on they gave me one uh the $10,000 limit in uh when I called in last time they they asked me if I wanted one the it's RBC MasterCard cash back but I think it's only 1% on everything yeah that's yeah that's what I have but I'm I was wondering if it was more I mean it's more value if you get like the the the one that gives you points with Avon no I think the points
(3:24:35) are like uh it's one point for dollar and the points were worth uh 67 cents I think think except if you go for flights you might have a little bit more but uh yeah I thought even for the flights you're not able to um to switch the points to uh uh Air Canada that's that was a no no you're not able to you have to reserve through their system so I was like let's let's continue with the the free one but I mean I know that P that some personal credit cards give you more uh bonuses than business is so I'm like yeah 1%
(3:25:14) it's not a lot so yeah like with that with that like the RBC business cash back card I have one of those for each of my corporations uh and we we basically just use that for places that don't take AMX um I think I'm pretty sure it has a hard cash back limit per year I think it's like I think it caps as like 600 bucks per year of cash back that you can get okay are you serious I think so let me check I have was oh my God I I have a spreadsheet of all my credit cards that have all my on it hold on let me pull it up here must have
(3:25:47) busted through that limit uh robt so I just lo I just lost like a couple of hundred or thousand bucks of cashback I think because last time I called him I I told them because you have to call them to get the cash back on your statement right and I pretty much spent more than like $600 uh worth of cash back but they told me you have 600 but I didn't know why so now I know so yeah it looks like it caps out at 650 so that one that one has a hard limit whereas like if you get a a personal RBC cashback MasterCard the
(3:26:23) personal one I'm pretty sure that one has no cap but again it has to be personal it's not under a business and um that's the card I used to use when I was a soul prop just like the RBC personal regular cash back no annual fee um I never got flagged for it but you could potentially to get flagged and get it revoked if they think you're using it for business interesting okay so have I have a card with d I'm charging like $80,000 a month on it and they on person are you paying before you get your statement just so that you don't affect your carer
(3:26:59) score no well I I'm my limit's like 35,000 but I'm paying uh you always have like statement of $30,000 no well I have a statement of 30,000 but I've spent like 80 and I've paid 70 on it something like that yeah maybe that's why they don't care I mean I don't know how it affects the credit score I the other day Jordan was telling me you have to know your your credit your credit score but I wasn't able to find it unfortunately and I still don't know how what what is happening why they are not able to identify me which one which one are you using
(3:27:48) borrow Credit Karma or through your bank the one that you gave me Jordan I don't remember that would probably be Credit Credit Karma um if you have a personal RPC account you can also if you go online not on not on the app there's an option on one of the side menus where you can check your credit score through RBC and it should be I I think it should be identical to what you would see on Credit Karma but you can only check at once per month and does it get affected if I oh no but is it I think it's TransUnion it's not a
(3:28:24) correct yeah if you want you gota go through borell I believe what's the difference I'm sorry I don't know about this there's there's two Credit Bur in Canada they have slightly different ratings and the way they rate even um so it's stupid and certain Banks pull from certain certain specific uh credit rating agencies sometimes they can pull from both sometimes they can pull just from one yeah so it's stupid but there's two different places that your credit stuff gets reported to and that lenders utilize for different things so like
(3:29:00) some mortgage lenders will pull from eifax some will pull from TransUnion right and your score will differ from Transunion and Equifax and different things will report to the different credit bureaus like um I have uh like my mortgage is only only shows up on Equifax it doesn't show up on TransUnion for some reason they just don't report to both credit bureaus and my TransUnion score is drastically different than my Equifax score so it's important to know them both because depending on what you're doing uh one of them will impact your
(3:29:33) ability to borrow money yeah and the biggest thing I think is it's also a matter of credit utilization so fundamentally it depends on how many credit cards you have opened sequentially and how many you have opened versus closed so the ratio of that as well as utilization so if you have charge cards for that matter some of the ax ones which don't have a limit show up very differently on your credit credit score because they don't have a credit limit to it it then doesn't affect your utilization but you know Fred's example paying off $70,000 a
(3:30:08) month before spending another 80 depending on when they exactly report to the bureaus it might show his utilization is only 10 or 20% of his overall planed utilization across 10 different CS right so that's kind of how it works yeah and it only matters what your balance is when your statement is actually reported so like your your utilization isn't impacted if you pay off that balance before your statement is issued so if your statement is on the 15th and you have it paid off and it's processed through your through your
(3:30:38) credit card company before your statement date that is not counted towards your utilization yeah I'm trying to do that with one of my personal card that I'm using for um foreign uh like transactions um yeah but the the the Platinum I'm just come going ham on it I don't know if it's going to affect like from what from what uh uh jayen Jay saying yeah not affect my utilization it won't it shows up on your credit report as a revolving account so like it looks the same as like a a phone bill so it does it doesn't impact it's a
(3:31:16) business Platinum you have right yeah I have a business Platinum but like on the card there's my name on it and the business name but I think that you can call them and and like register it under like legit under your business but you had I had to do it like initially from my understanding I think ax is one of them which which have to have some personal relation correct me from wrong Jordan feel like that one who irrelevant of whether it's a business not well unless it's a cooperation that's separate I think they if as long as you're they'll
(3:31:54) Associated to you but it'll be a credit of alling uh card as you said Jordan yeah like I'm not 100% sure if you can completely separate it like my card is in my business name my name is also on my card but uh my business Platinum card also shows up on my personal credit report um I don't think you can separate it because I think they want you to be a assigned garor I mean maybe at some point you can but I'm not sure I I've read somewhere that you need to do a certain amount of tails per year and they would remove you as
(3:32:34) a uh a grer on the card but don't quote me on that you would have to uh to search I heard something um I don't know if we have to hit like a certain amount of spending but I heard something about like you can fully register the card under your business but you have to call another department I know other banking banking institutions allow that like RBC or a few others I just don't know about ax specifically ax is a tricky one I think other institutions yes yeah like both of my RBC business cards uh through my two
(3:33:10) separate corporations they're not on my personal account at all they're just strictly through the business yeah to get and you were talking a bit about foreign transactions are you using a Canadian card to run foreign transactions with no no foreign transaction fee cuz make sure you if you're looking to sign up for a new card there are very few cards that all for no foreign transaction fee ax for that matter has a foreign transaction fee on all that cards so that's something to be aware of yeah I'm using the HSBC
(3:33:46) MasterCard World Elite I really love this card but unfortunately since October because they're transitioning like RBC B them they're not offering this card anymore I don't know if they're going to still keep it for older clients but so far I extremely like this card because every time I go um I mean every time I go on vacation as well I use it without needing to uh withdraw a lot of money in cash so that's are you Primary in the US or other places so uh for for Amazon you mean for the inventory for both I mean when you
(3:34:26) want to use a card cuz I was in the same boat where I was paying foreign transaction fees hence I got a usax um so that would be a next option I mean I I like mostly it's for Amazon the inventory I pay with my with this card which is like a Canadian card um US USD invoices but I mean when I went like on vacation um I used it as well like uh outside of America and it was fine I didn't got like any extra foreign fees and also the points the cash back is pretty epic because it's a card uh that gives you more points if you um
(3:35:08) book like travel stuff like a ticket a plane ticket or a hotel or stuff like that so I'm I'm praying that they they keep the card yeah I know scosa Bank have have one or two no transaction ones uh like foreign ones I think they Scotia Bank has a American Express one which is a bit confusing it's not by American Express but by Scotia but yeah so are you are you using uh for now do you have one that has no foreign fees beside like I have I have access to yeah my us American Express card which is America us-based so that's in USD the
(3:35:55) account so any time I want to transfer funds and pay it off I I have a cross banking account with like how you have with RBC and CBC so I use the bank exchange rate between CIBC transfer into my USD account then pay off my credit card in USD and and the U that that USD us ax cards don't have any foreign transaction fees at least the ones I know of a few of them so you could be buying in the Middle East or wherever else and there's no foreign fees and the the US AMX cards have a have like more travel credits and all this fun stuff
(3:36:32) like I have the Hilton one which gives me uh I think like X number of points and one night free state every year for sure plus like travel credits and all this other cool stuff so and you're located in Canada you live in Canada yeah how did you get um a credit card that is based in the US because I heard it's really tough it was a it was an interesting process uh yeah there are some online online to there are some online uh things to do it as well I I jump through some hoops cuz you can apply through an iton i I managed to
(3:37:11) create a I managed to call CIBC and make them change my primary address of my account to a US mailing address I use one of my crossborder shipping addresses as the mailing address I had to get ax on the phone with CIBC confirm my address in us uh I had a ax card sent to that mailing forwarding address and then they weren't able to receive it and forward it cuz most male forwarders don't allow it and then after they sent me the original one I asked for a replacement one to be sent to Canada so yeah just to understand so you with CIBC
(3:37:51) you had a bank account a crossb bank account based in the USA yeah it's a USD bank account and with that USD bank account place in the US not in Canada exactly it's USB us it's the IBC USA even RBC I'm pretty sure has that option where you can get AER to do that with I heard it was not too I think it's free to have one in the US y I did everything it's like I've been back and forth with the guy for a week and at the end of the process the guy told me okay so final thing I just need your certificate of incorporation
(3:38:28) of your business which was incorporated in Quebec and it was written in French uh so oh mine mine is personal yeah so maybe it is is a bit different for corporations to set up a a business bank account in the US using Corporation so mine's a personal I use it on my personal name to open an account in the US with CC us I don't know if even if with personal it's going to work because um Revenue um is it Revenue yeah Revenue kebec doesn't translate in English if your business account like if you're you live in Quebec yeah and so the guy like
(3:39:12) that was posing my account he said that I really need to get the document from um directly from the government and they weren't accepting like a official translator translation from so I was little bit stuck so what I did uh I I just open a wise account you know transfer Wise Wise transfer but I don't know if if but I don't have an address so I don't know if it's going to work if I want to try to to get like a a yeah you'll have to you'll have to give an Us address and ask your bank to tie your us account to
(3:39:47) that address and then there's a way where ax when you submit your application online for ax they'll ask you for an address you give it and then it'll not approve you on the spot you'll have to call in to the AMX call center and verify and they'll say oh you need to tell us who your bank account is with and they will call your bank and put you on a three-way call where you validate your information and they confirm that okay your your residential information is X or Y it's a bit complicated in my opinion I'm GNA try again I'm going to
(3:40:20) try this time with yeah just just message me and if if I can walk you through some of the steps I mean at least from a personal personal credit card perspective so yeah thanks a lot and do you know if you're do you remember if you're paying any fees to get this account open in the US or the I don't pay anything for my US banking account but I do pay a fee for my ax card yeah ax did they increase it uh increase the price as well in the US like they did in Canada I they they did I think but I I don't have the Platinum I have I'm I
(3:40:56) have the Hilton card which is like the higher end one too so I'm paying like I think it's it's like what's it called 5.99 USD for the year no 550 a year but it gives me it gives me a bunch of stuff which I use so it like gives me status at Hilton and stuff so when I travel or stay at the hotels I get all the credits and all that stuff so it pays for itself I don't care for that's good I I think like with the Platinum you can't uh get like into lounges that are in America which is a little bummer because if you want to travel to the
(3:41:35) States you can't use your card oh with your with your Canadian Platinum you can with the American Platinum no I was I was in the Centurion Lounge last week and like in the US if you have a platinum you don't get access but if you have a Canadian Platinum you get access for you plus a guest but if you want to go International no for international flights because I believe even the Canadian one you can't because I tried last time there is no there is no ax Centurian Lounge in Canada no they have them in other countries but you do get
(3:42:09) access with MX you get priority pass which you can you can uh you just need to call them and they'll uh create a priority pass account for you and with that you get access to all the other lounges which are like the whatever ones available in the Canadian uh airports yeah I got it uh I got it actually after after my trip I didn't know that I had to to call them that was fun yeah but yeah [Music] when uh you get everything set up you'll have to write us all some guides Jaden on how to get us credit cards 100% yeah for sure that that plus
(3:42:52) the it stuff which is the next one I'm trying to I'm trying to get a Chase one which basically gives me Aeroplan status coming soon but we'll see Jayden's GNA become a full-time credit card Turner yeah I'm at I'm at my what fifth ax in a matter of one year so yeah working the system oh yeah I mean I'm I'm like oh I'm going to run out of Canadian ax cards so now I have to hit the US ones hope you're maxing out those welcome bonuses oh yeah I need to now hit those sadly ones too but I'm like 30k spend for 10,000 points I'm like I'm not going
(3:43:35) to I have to hit those two but that's when youze those cash out servers yeah uh Thomas are you here you haven't uh spoken since you've been kicking around maybe maybe not hey Jordan I have a questions for um sourcing from us to ca um yeah so basically say if you want to if you're to buy products um inventory from uh us uh us websites um can you use a Canadian credit card cuz uh cuz obviously the shipping to address will be um a crossw service address right and then for the building address can you like basically put in your
(3:44:28) Canadian address uh based off your credit card or I'm just going to drink if you can use like a Canadian credit card for for say us inventory it depends on the website some of them you can some of them you can't so like if you Source from uh Amazon obviously it's no problem um if you Source I think Walmart taret I want to say Walmart you need a US actual billing address but like it's it's relatively simple um most credit cards you should be able to contact them and add on a secondary billing address and you can just utilize
(3:45:01) your crossb service or your the US address that you're using and then they just basically add it on as a secondary address so that it goes through when you sub transactions online with those addresses okay that's interesting cuz like you can say you call the um credit card um customer service and then just tell them or you can just add the U crossb address yep you mean yep okay so I've done that success I've done that successfully with both RBC and MX and I've done it with them just over their online chat I didn't have to call
(3:45:33) them gotcha yep gotcha yeah and then for uh for any purchases say um am onario right and then the crosswaters address that I'm going to use um probably going to be in New York so I believe the S the sale tax there would to be about 7% say anything I buy from um the US will be charged um an additional 7% right then I I guess we wouldn't be able to claim that back correct so I so that would to the C good Robert shared some information which I can send you the link um there are quite a few websites that you can actually get tax exemption
(3:46:13) for even as Canadians Robert found a good form that you can do that so it's not going to work with everywhere but like I believe Robert said he had success with that with Walmart and Amazon is that correct Robert yeah I do recall that I have also downloaded the uh I believe the form that we need to fill in right and then just send it to uh Walmart yeah so far it worked with Walmart um I I didn't try with Amazon but I'm pretty sure it's going to work because on the form it says that it's for um businesses that are in in any
(3:46:49) province in Canada so right and I called I also called them I don't know what's the name the the tax Bureau in the states and they confirmed me that it's a doc it's a legit document that we can use as um business owners uh in Canada so it should work as well with Amazon and even not with what not would not sorry not just with Walmart and Amazon but you can try it out with any other businesses if you see that they are charging taxes yeah I'm assuming Jordan you have that crossborder calculator right which charges you the duties fees
(3:47:26) all that other fun stuff which is something you need to account for yeah so uh just to touch on what uh Robert said so that that would probably be the the best way to go first um so most big box places will probably do it for you like Home Depot Walmarts Etc uh you may have problems with Target just because Target is known to not be reseller friendly but yeah I actually tried with Target and the only way to have tax exemption with them sorry to cut you off Jordan that's okay but the only way this they told me is if we are a
(3:47:59) non-profitable organization or a government government organization so it doesn't work with Target yeah right we're opening a church exactly but then yeah like if you have transactions that you can't get exemption I can't tell you for sure if this is the right way as far as I know as a Canadian business I don't believe we can claim it back like regular taxes like we was like GST HST Etc right uh for us we include it as part of our cost of goods so like we still it's still a business expense but we're not just
(3:48:38) purely claiming it back um okay s but yeah like what I just sorry I just wanted to touch on what Jaden mentioned about the calculator that we have for the cross border fees so like if you haven't seen it I can send you the link it doesn't calculate duties for you so like duties may still be applicable but it does help you get a realistic idea of what your total fees are going to be with your crossboard fees and whatnot hello y sounds good man um sorry I thought I got disconnected for a second y yeah so sorry Liam did you have
(3:49:24) another question yeah no um I just wanted to know um to see because um I'm just kind of thinking about um expanding the inventory to um like sourcing from the US I just kind of want to know whether I should include the sale tax um into the cost of good Souls right and then um yeah just kind of want to get the accurate cost um then before I pull the trigger so yeah like if you are buying from a place where you cannot get it Exempted then I would yes right and also I believe with um I I never tried bring stuff from the US um
(3:50:03) I've sent a lot of stuff uh crosswaters to the US but I never tried to bring it back here but I believe uh styling Express they have uh if you sign up for a business account uh you can get discount on or I I believe that the rap told me like if you register for a business account then you can bring stuff uh here to Canada like for like technically unlimited amount like bu a pallet um without any problem uh obviously you you would probably have to pay any applicable Duty in tax but but uh yeah that's what I've
(3:50:42) heard from like as far as I know I don't think like when you're when you're sending from Canada to the US you have like that $800 limit per day right but like that that's to help avoid duties you can send however much you want if you do like formal entries into the US you just have to again pay the applicable duties right and so I believe I believe it works the same for the US and Canada we just don't have that exemption of like the $800 per day as far as I'm aware right yeah I'm not sure because I I was even asking the guys like are you sure
(3:51:15) like you can see you can pretty much just send unlimited amount from USD Canada and the guy was like yeah yeah like I'm not even I never tried just keep in mind when you are bringing stuff from the US and Canada like say you're bringing in like um I don't know aspirin migraine medication pills supplements Etc um if you're not importing them as a business technically you can only bring in like so many months of like personal Supply I don't remember exactly what the threshold is uh with those types of things you only bring like personal
(3:51:47) Supply amounts if you have a business account with one of those services like a crossb service then that you shouldn't have those limitations unless it's like a an over-the-counter medication which you might well I guess that what he meant up for supplements and that personal use stuff yeah for sure but yeah like if you there I think there's a huge Market um a lot of opportunity for us to Canada there are if you look for specific sellers that do that there are a good handful of sellers on Amazon Canada that you can tell do
(3:52:23) that um but it's it's not nearly as common as Canada to us from what I've seen and there's a lot of very very profitable items uh that are that are us specific um one more thing that you just need to be wary of is chances are if they are us specific items they probably will not have French packaging on them and technically it's required by law to have bilingual packaging in Canada you'll probably you will probably be fine until somebody from cubec orders it and complains to Amazon about it um but if that happens you can technically
(3:52:58) print out your own label with the translation on it and still send it yeah so I I've heard that um many many times so yeah just maybe just like just don't go too deep on any products right maybe test of waters and maybe go by you know a few units at a time like just in case Amazon shut down the Le thing then you can you know you know take some losss and move on without too much damage to the Rees usually like again unless it's like if if it's an item that needs to be registered with health Canada like say it's a supplement
(3:53:34) yes I would be more wary with those but like say if it's like a regular homegood um I wouldn't like obviously it's always a possibility that the listing will get shut down but chances are if you have a complaint against you where it's missing bilingual packaging the listing probably will not be shut down it's just you will have to relabel the products with the French packaging or with the the bilingual packaging do you have to send new pictures on the listing like to add new pictures thought maybe Amazon asked you to like upload
(3:54:05) upload the photos on the listing not like just committed to them right is it correct most likely so like for a period of time um there were some products that I've seen um that you can you can clearly tell like the distributor did exactly that to be able to sell them in Canada uh they just the the the actual label the product underneath was just um English uh English label and then you can tell like over top they printed a thermal label with the uh with the Bal packaging and I've seen those pictures on some Amazon
(3:54:41) listings right like if you don't create um originally create the listing then you wouldn't be able to add or edit um any photos on it right you still can so that's so oh that that's a myth like unless it's like a brand registered product you can it's it's it's not that uh Amazon always allows you but you can and I find that you have more success being able to edit the pictures if they're specifically asking for a change like for example if if they're asking um in Canada for pictures of an item that requires an npn number or a din number
(3:55:16) and they're they're requesting that the pictures be uploaded with that you have much more likelihood that they'll approve those the updated pictures with that information on it even if you even if you didn't make the listing yourself okay so you have to um so you have to basically um attach the image to the case first right and then ask them to upload it to to the listing or you have to do it yourself no you actually go into the listing itself and you uh you like you basically you're requesting an edit you upload a photo and then you
(3:55:47) submit it it doesn't automatically get approved but uh it gets submitted for approval gotcha gotcha yeah cuz I I've had a few listing taken down in the past and um because of the the language so um but I didn't know about um you know you can add photos to the listing yep 100% awesome yeah with stuff like that um especially if you have any any value of inventory if it sells a decent amount I would always attempt to try to fix it if it's something that doesn't sell or you don't have any inventory left you don't plan
(3:56:22) replenishing it then whatever I wouldn't waste the time yeah for sure for sure yeah so uh I think we'll probably be wrapping up relatively shortly here uh before we do anybody else have anything else that they want to discuss everyone's quiet now can you hear me y yeah quick question do you have any suggestions for Canadian credit cards that aren't MX cards because obviously you know MX isn't accepted everywhere right now I'm using like the CIBC Costco master card for non MX purchases um there seem to be some people that know a lot more about credit
(3:57:15) cards than I do so totally open to suggestions for anyone's um input on Canadian credit cards that would be good where MX isn't accepted besides like if you're sourcing Canadian Tire Canadian tet cards I don't have great recommendations for regular credit cards so I'd also be interested if anybody else does cuz like regular credit cards I haven't found besides like AMX I haven't found anything too fantastic I know a website but it's in French I don't know if you can translate it I think you can it's called the mopia
(3:58:06) docomo if you want to check it but so far I think we have the same credit cards me and you I'm using the business plat and uh the Master Card of um RBC but I can send you the link if you would like yeah some the link it if I don't understand that I'm just going to hop on a call with you and maybe you can Google I checked you can change the you can change the language to English I think this it's funny I think it's a French um French people that uh immigrated to Quebec and they open this website and it's very popular here
(3:58:44) interesting so that's why it's uh by default in French what's your RBC card the the normal one the the cash back the 1% but now that Jordan uh informed me that it's capped at $600 I may I may check misopedia to see if I can find another credit card I think the cost one is like it's 1% on everything but they also when I called CIBC they said they have a business CIBC Costco MasterCard which is very similar to the personal one but it's just easier to differentiate your purchases from your company versus your personal so I think I might get that but
(3:59:27) 1% is not a lot like 1% the personal one is I think like the first 5,000 or something it's like 0.5% and then it goes to 1% on everything or it was like that when it was with um whoever the last provider is I don't remember the name uh Capital One so I do have the I have the Costco CIBC World MasterCard if that's the same one that you have um no I don't have that one okay wait you have a you have a CO you have a Costco one what do you mean yeah it's called it's called the Costco CIBC World Mass card it's like a black one okay Costco CIBC I
(4:00:03) don't know if mine say World on it though one cost I got that one a while ago like think because like we still have sourced quite heavily from Costco I was like well this is going to be good like for cash back at Costco so I was like Mak sense so I got it and then after I got it I realized that in store at Costco you only get 1% back I was like what the is this yeah you get 1% and like online you get 2% online on costco.
(4:00:29) ca you get 2% okay I'm just looking at the website um it's a CIBC Costco Master Card I don't see where it says world the paid card at Costco free one free one the one that I have the one that I have is also free uh let me see if I can find it here hold on okay this thing says I just went to costco.ca CIBC dcco dmard there's two of them there's a personal one and there's a business one they're both no annual fee they're both 3% cash back on restaurants and gas 2% on for the personal one it's 2% on other gas and costco.ca for the business one it's 2%
(4:01:09) on other gas costco.ca and Costco business center.com yeah but I'm looking for a better one because I mean for a no annual fee it's not bad but it's also not the best no yeah I know there's the Rogers World Elite one but it's Rogers uh I know that if you uh buy stuff in USD you get 3% back and everything else and no no effect fee uh I don't think there is an FX on that one I haven't used it myself but I I that's something you would check out I think um the other ones are like very staggered like scoia bank has a few but
(4:02:09) it's like 4% on grocery stores only or and then 2% on everything else and up to $500 is all these like staggered sort of stuff I was looking at one and it was um it was kind of similar like the one you mentioned where it's like it was like a Bank of Montreal card because I do my my company's uh my company's banking through the Bank of Montreal and so there's like some random cards that were offering for companies but it wasn't that good it was like tiered and you only get like you know certain just like you mentioned like you know in certain
(4:02:42) categories you get certain higher spend and it's only for like the first six months and you like work at the math and like you're only getting like $200 in cash back it seemed pretty bad so I'm just trying to find a good card where you can you know like the AMX cards where a lot of people run their spend through if there's a good card you can run spend through that you know you wouldn't um for for companies that don't accept MX yeah I haven't found one that's any bit amazing cuz like most of the ones that have increased cash back
(4:03:12) percentages are like grocery store and like your main box stores like Walmart Costco Etc they're not considered grocery stores you have to go to like Wholesale Club Superstore to be considered grocery store right right but even then like you can find I'm sure you can find a car that has like decent you know if you do a lot of like ra or whatever there's I'm sure there's cards that are good for grocery like even that simply preferred cash back is really it's personal card but for grocery I think that's the best
(4:03:36) I don't think you're going to beat 4% not that I've seen yeah I don't think so in general no right I think that's definitely worth it for the whatever $120 annual fee although I was thinking about canceling that card too because I called them I'm like look I'm not using this card enough you got an offer for me and they're like yeah we'll give you like 20 bucks I'm like yeah I don't know yeah but for my for my business Platinum I called him like I'm GNA cancel you guys jack a refuse like go we give you 25,000 points if you stay and I
(4:04:05) still paid the I paid $4.99 annual fee for this year again and I got two 25 I think it was 20 or 25,000 points so you know in cash value that's like what like 200 if it's 20 if 20,000 it's like 200 bucks if it's 25 it's 250 bucks although I never redeem it for cash value but you know right definitely yep yeah if you do find a if you do find a better card let me know and maybe I if you actually refer me you'll actually get paid this time yeah exactly hey exactly so stupid that that happened they're like yeah you need to
(4:04:41) wait I'm like dude I waited it's been a year I'm like you know what forget about it I'm not enough time to go chase this uh this rabbit you know yeah yep what do you have for your what do you have for your cards you have you have the well obviously the business Platinum one and the you mentioned one more or you have the prer I have a mortgage Board of cards I have a spreadsheet to keep track of my so I I'll read them off to you now under uh personal cards I have the Amazon MBNA rewards MasterCard the MX simply cash preferred the Costco CIBC
(4:05:17) Master Card RBC cashback Master Card RBC Rewards plus Visa RBC signature rewards visa and under business I have the business Edge the business Platinum the regular Canadian Tire MasterCard the Canadian Tire World Elite Master Card and then two RBC business cashback Master cards so you walk with the three wallets when you go out oh no I don't carry M subcribers With Me George castanza with all his receipts and wallets yeah no no if I carried all that my wallet would pull down my pants do you think the edge card is good I have a
(4:05:56) business Edge but I wasn't spending a lot and I think it was office and two other categories I don't remember so yeah it gives you increased amounts for I have it on my spreadsheet uh three points for every dollar spent office supplies Electronics rides gas food and drinks so I originally got it for food and drinks because I didn't look at the Cobalt so I was like oh that looks good and I'll just use that for like all my eating out quote unquote business expenses and then I found the Cobalt gives you more but I don't need another
(4:06:22) credit card I I think the Cobalt is the best for if you're eating out a lot on like entertainment and whatever I think the Cobalt's the best one in terms of its points multiplier right I probably should get that but I really don't need any more cards what do you what do you use the MBNA Amazon one for I have that one but I canceled it I don't I got it because I think at one point many many years ago they said oh if you get this card you get a free $20 on Amazon so I was like all right I've never used it in my life that's funny it's I think it
(4:06:54) gives you more uh money back if you buy stuff from Amazon like I but I I never I've never used it I think it's some sort of cash back but it's it wasn't amazing when I signed up for they like we'll give you 50 bucks off your Amazon purchase then it will give you like for the first six months will give you like a higher percentage cash back on Amazon but it wasn't anything amazing yeah like Accord I'd have to check but according to what I have in my spreadsheet it says it gives you 2.
(4:07:20) 5% back on eligible amazon.ca purchases does that include business. Amazon as well I guess it still gets you know it still gets flagged as amazon.ca with the order number at the end yeah I'm not 100% sure probably we Jordan what's up do you know um if we open a business account with Amazon uh and we try to do like Amazon to Amazon flip uh if we subscribe to the prime program is it still illegal to sell this stuff on Amazon yeah so like if you if you use prime shipping it's still against terms of service yes so even if we're buying from a business
(4:08:02) account yes so if you want to do that and use prime you'd have to use like a disconnected account like not connected in your name I wouldn't personally risk it though no no I'm not going to risk it but it seems like um I mean it's a business account so logically you're using it to buy it for your business so it's pretty weird that they're offering Prime for businesses business accounts but you're not allowed to use it to sell stuff on their platform yeah but they I mean it does make sense that they make it against
(4:08:34) terms of service though because uh realistically like like when you're using prime shipping like they're spending a lot of money on that so like they don't want people to abuse that to resell back on their platform yeah I think I think they're thinking that when you have the prime shipping on your B2B account they're they're presuming that you're going to use it like it's going to be used up within your company not for you to resell the products on Amazon when they're not stock or whatever yeah that's that's that's what I think as
(4:09:04) well but yeah like I do have a a business Amazon account I it's pretty handy because you can get a lot of quantity discounts on products you didn't get before or they just have discounts that regular accounts don't have yeah that's that's that's pretty do you have Prime on your business account as well I do not yeah same I have I have a business account which is not tied to my Amazon selling account but even then I don't do a2a flips of it but yeah I have it's also handy to have one if you if you live in like a PST GST Province where
(4:09:39) they have both you can get PST exempt so you would not pay the PST or not have to claim it back at the end it's just you know a little bit less accounting to deal with which is great and maintain a little bit more cash flow yeah exactly yep but yeah um I've also noticed though that from time to time if you look at stuff on an Amazon business account uh it doesn't happen very often but sometimes you're actually not able to purchase some deals on the business account you have to be on a personal account yeah or you have to have Prime
(4:10:10) yeah that too yes sir do we want to uh start comparing credit limits with everybody I me I mean I'm sure you got invited already for the black ax card no no I haven't got I haven't got that no how what is the requirement do you know uh like it's it's like Invitation Only and like I've seen some sources say you have to spend 250 Grand a year some they said you have to spend like upwards of like a million dollars a year but I think I don't know I don't know what the actual requirement is I don't think they really make it public yeah yeah I think
(4:10:52) it's also dependent on the categories you spend in like for that invitation only card they want you to spend on areas like you know luxury clothing and luxury travel and all that sort of right because they know that it's like non- returnable type stuff is my understanding yeah more like experience and lifestyle spaning I have to start investing in Gucci I guess exactly very quality investment yeah exactly starts flipping uh sneakers and and Chanel bags and L yeah exactly uh Robert are you still buying from that uh that
(4:11:35) one supplier that we've talked about in the past uh the one for which one the the beauty or the the the local people that you talk to uh so um I I so they they offered me another thing like another um uh brand that they want me wanted me to buy which was pretty come pretty interesed interesting for me but the the only thing is um I didn't really like the way that he was dealing with me I it seems like cuz they are already doing like a good business with Costco and I feel like they they were too pushy with me and you know I I Tred to um secure my
(4:12:22) account I don't want to buy from U like anything like like everything I mean so I was asking him like you know um I know that you're legit because you're selling from Costco but I need the trail of your invoice voices cuz you know I want to make sure that you're buying them legit and stuff and it seems like I was insulting him by asking him that you know and so we went to eat uh I think like two months ago uh and I was just telling him about my concern about that and he yeah I felt like he was he was taking it like I was insulting him and I
(4:13:02) think it's like the basic stuff that you should ask someone when you're dealing like when you're doing business is to make sure that the starf are legit and I'm pretty sure they are CU as I said they're dealing with Costco but since then I mean he didn't uh I I tried to poke him like one week ago he didn't respond back so I'm like you know what I think um like everything is meant to be so I mean maybe I skipped the bullet there yeah like I could like depending on like the culture people and like where they grew up I could definitely
(4:13:37) see some people getting offended from that like especially they're like old business people but like typically speaking you would only see people get offended from stuff like that as if they're trying to hide something exactly and I mean again the guy is like a seller so he just wanted to to like close the deal with me and everything um but then again like I want to secure my business I don't want to buy something I'm not sure of it so right maybe maybe he's G maybe right now he's on vacation that's why he's not
(4:14:10) answering me back but we'll see we'll see if he can provide me like good invoices I might go with him but for now uh just want to make sure that everything is correct before doing business with him yeah for sure and that's completely Fair better to be safe than sorry 100% I learned that recently yeah um how much were you spending with him uh a month on average so I uh I just did like um I just did like a one shot deal back then uh it was like from from stuff that they bought for Costco but they couldn't sell
(4:14:48) back because I don't know for X reason like Costco or like type of Amazon like they see something they cancel the order so you're they're stuck with the the the the stuff so I did like only one deal with them so far like it was like a 20K it was 20K invoice I did with them but since then the next contract that I wanted to do with them was like um a recurent because they were not going to buy sell me uh old stuff they were going to like buy the stuff from a distributor who was buying from the brand and I mean
(4:15:24) selling me the products every month or every two months uh so yeah so far I didn't spend a lot of money with them but I know that um there's some kind of opportunity with them because they've been in a game for aot long time and they know like they have a lot of contacts and they're they're capable of getting like good brands like we I mean Dior I don't know what we were said earlier Gucci maybe they're able to to get them I don't know if it sells well on Amazon but I mean the the the thing with them is they want me to place orders um it it
(4:15:59) was the only contract that they wanted me to place like a like uh like a small order let's say like 15,000 the other one they want me they wanted me to place like uh 5K units which which was like maybe like 100k 200k orders which is like too too risky for me right um but yeah let's let's see how it goes let's see how it goes in the future definitely and like with that I would just just say just always have caution because yes if they sell like with Costco or two Costco whatever uh obviously they're going to
(4:16:33) be legitimate but not saying that some of those people might try to pass off illegitimate to other people that are not c yeah that's so true man that's so true come there was I mean there was something else that they wanted to sell me that which was like um uh like in their inventory they weren't able to sell or something happened with Costco they told me you know what take them they're new uh and I just talked with them you know it's it's it was only talking no pictures at all it it you sell them like take them sell them and
(4:17:07) we can do Consignment stock we don't care they're brand new and then when I went to uh to to dine with them um they actually uh told me to come back at their place a second time just so I can pick up the stuff they wanted me to sell on Amazon and then when I went there I was like I I looked at the boxes there was like some some like scratches on the box uh some of them were open the manual was like a little bit um like folded it wasn't like it it wasn't looking new and then I told him like you know come I don't mind like it's thank you for for
(4:17:50) giving me the opportunity to take them as a consignment but I can't sell that as brand new come and it's it was like a um luxury brand nobody's GNA buy uh buy premium price for something that looks new but it's not really new you know and since then I was lucky this guy is not telling me like the full story every time he talks to me yeah you know for sure so that's why I was like here come that's why I didn't I didn't like his um his Vibe let's say yeah and yeah when you get uh feelings like that sometimes it's better to trust your instincts yeah
(4:18:30) exact but yeah like I'm not sure if uh we talked about it but I know I heard at some point that there was a period of time when Costco got some Rolex watches in did we did we talk about this uh I I did I did I tell you that uh no I'm just saying that I I know Costco got Rel because it was them from what I heard it was them by the way okay like they I don't know if it's maybe it's another story but from what I I understand from what I heard from them from from their accountant so they had a um distributor of Rolex um and they
(4:19:11) started to sell to Costco and eventually you know Rolex has like a serial number on them so they track down uh the the seller and they track them down uh Rolex track these guys down and they almost lost their um their permit I don't know what like the reselling uh permit but I don't know if I don't know if it was that story you wanted to tell but no from it might have been I just remember hearing something like that that Costco got Rolexes at some point it it might have been you that was telling me um and then yeah like Rolex is very
(4:19:52) uh selective and protective of their brand especially like for the gr Market stuff so like Costco I it it probably was from you but I heard that they got them not from Rolex from somebody else they were legit Rolex watches but they didn't get them with rolex's blessing and so they got into with that and I'm pretty sure I heard that Rolex was attempting to sue Costco at some point oh wow yeah like I mean they do some kind some sketchy things like that like at the end of the day the the the watches that they were selling to Costco
(4:20:27) they were legit I can't give them that they were legit everything was fine but they're playing between like legal and ille I mean not legal and illegal but but they they they're pushing their the boundaries as much as they can you know when they're doing business so I mean I guess it's the it's it's the thing to do to you have to take risks to grow but I'm not prepared I'm not prepar now to take this kind of risk with them because Amazon is not Costco Amazon is not going to tell you okay let's hop on the call and figure it out you know
(4:21:02) right right and like a brand like Rolex or one of the probably one of the richest brands in the world as far as we know they're privates they don't really know and they could probably try to cause a lot of yeah this as well yeah yeah so I'm like okay you know what I'm still a small fish I just want to to uh to make things right right now and maybe in the future we're going to see I I remember when I went like when I refused like the the you know the the got me to their place and I said okay you know what I can't I can't take that like if you want
(4:21:41) I can take it but I won't sell them again they took it as an insult obviously and when I went like to take my stuff and like get out of there the guy told me he was because I and like on the other hand it was like it was weird I felt like I felt like bad for them because I don't know I I felt bad because I didn't took them so I said yeah I'm sorry look um you have to understand my side as well I can't take them and he said but you know we can we can go on Amazon ourselves as well I was like yeah go ahead if you want I don't
(4:22:19) care man try to try to go on Amazon it's not the same thing as Costco it's it's another game to be honest so anyways I'm renting out on them but sounds like he was like almost trying to threaten you yeah exactly so I didn't like it so yeah we'll see we'll see yeah and how about you did you get any um any like great opportunities recently uh nothing crazy I don't think it's just kind of been relatively standard I haven't come across anything outrageous it's more yeah doing your stuff uh with like more uh with I I
(4:23:00) think you're more busy with like this year last year you're more busy with uh Discord and the the community I'm guessing earlier in the year yeah um when I started the Discord server uh I certainly spent a lot of time with it for sure um but yeah like our Amazon business is still still uh going really steady but um like I said I've been transitioning into wholesale a whole lot more and that helps a lot for time wise uh just for time allocation yeah um we have opened up a few new accounts over the last couple months but not many it's
(4:23:41) more so just been trying to extract as much value as we can out of our existing accounts because we've had some existing accounts let me pull up my thing here we've had some existing accounts that we've had accounts with forever and we've just like basically never ordered from them um right now on my list we have just over 40 open wholesale accounts and we probably only regularly order from 10 and then like most the other ones like like some of them like a couple of them we scatter orders here and there so like
(4:24:10) we have so much more potential that we just haven't extracted from these guys yet that's awesome yeah that's yeah that's great I mean it's better to have like more opportunity like more options than then no options you know 100% but like I not not 2023 I think 2021 or 2022 I don't remember but we went like kind of on like a bender like trying to like open up a ton of new accounts um but I think we just got access to too many too quickly and then we just never utilize them which isn't cool cuz like I've definitely had to like repair some
(4:24:43) relationships with people to get access to them again yeah yeah yeah yeah I remember you told me you can be careful don't open too much yeah from coming from experience yeah um so yeah I we've definitely lost some and I have to repair some relationships um but yeah like there was so much value in some of these cataloges that we just weren't utilizing at all yeah totally yeah um are you opening accounts based on um products that you're already finding and you just reverse Source the distributor or you're just like like opening like accounts with
(4:25:24) Distributors that look big but you don't really know the potential that the products they are giving a little bit of both but like I said right now like we're not actively targeting a whole lot of new accounts we're kind of just trying to see what we have for our current value but when we are going through and trying to find new accounts we do do a lot of existing products that we already sell um say we sell brand whatever Clorox um I will actively contact Clorox and see if they have other Distributors because chances
(4:25:55) are they sell other products besides Clorox and we might be able to get better deals for the same products we might be able to leverage them against one another um and then also uh We've actively looked for products like best sellers on Amazon and then try to find those Distributors um yep all kinds of methods yeah that's uh I I find it so exciting it's like every time you open an account it's like uh I don't know it's it's like Christmas you're opening a a GI a gift you don't know what's gonna you're gonna find yeah it's always
(4:26:28) a surprise yeah and sometimes sometimes it might let you down but sometimes it may be very very viable exactly so yeah some Distributors I was like okay it's too it was a little bit too easy to open the account pretty sure there's nothing there and then you're surprised oh okay and other I'm like it's like the FB FBI they're asking me for this that uh all my social number security number and everything and you open the account the price are yep um have you opened up like do you have existing accounts with um
(4:27:06) basically competing Distributors yet um that's a good question I not um maybe some like I mean distributors in the grocery category but I but not not really not really so I would when whenever you have time obviously like don't make it a huge priority like say just like some of your bestselling products that you buy wholesale um try to find another distributor that exists uh that is potential competition uh and just open up a catalog with them and just see if they carry the same product so like say for example you sell Clorox one from
(4:27:47) this company you find another company that sells Clorox uh I I've had had some success not always but some where I open up account with a company number two and then I open up um when I first start uh I get their I get their catalog I don't ask for any discounts off the Hop but then I look through their see what's viable and I just assume that we're going to get a discount I put together the PO that's like my favorite method yeah I'll put together that PO I'll say cool uh this is what we need to make this make sense and you know we'll have
(4:28:17) a PO of 20 30 $50,000 depending on the distributor so it's actually like we're serious we're going to spend money um and I'll say cool I'm getting this product Clorox from uh company a for $5 when I'm actually getting from them from Seven can you uh can you price match or beat their price and I've gotten products cheaper from another distributor just by trying to leverage them off one another and that's so smart and even if you so even if the other distributor is not giving you the price you said like you you're saying you're buying from
(4:28:50) them at $5 you're you're still trying like you're still trying um to do like a bluff or no you you get the you get the price from one distributor which is lower than the second and you try to ask them to match it or so I've done both you just have to be careful because uh I had had Distributors where I just tell them they should have Blu and then they ask for the invoice uh previous invoice to conf to confirm the pricing oh and then I just kind of like just ignore the request and just try to continue on uh but there's Beena there's been
(4:29:25) occasions where you do that and they don't even ask for the pricing they like yeah we can do that just because they see the size the initial po there like yeah that's not a problem that's smart yeah and there's there's a problem that like I've been carrying for a very very long time that I did that with and yeah I beat the uh the original the original suppliers price by like 20% just from saying that and I think you told me uh there's actually one distributor you you were working with uh where finally you went
(4:29:57) directly with the brand like the brand contacted you maybe yeah uh that wasn't that long ago yeah I remember so how like I mean the distributor uh was like he got no at the end oh kind of yeah but like that that's actually relatively common uh depending on what agreements that uh Distributors have with their brands like some Brands require Distributors to share the information the people that are buying their products because they want to know who their customers are what kind of volumes they're doing sometimes they want to monitor their
(4:30:29) products online so yeah like when this company called me um I didn't recognize the number whatsoever so I don't nor nor answer calls from people that I don't recognize um and then I looked up the number while they were call me I'm like oh like that's this brand I'm like okay so I answered it and then they started ask me questions about like oh like uh she was like very nice um she was saying oh like I see like you've ordered uh these products from this distributor I'm like yeah and she's like um like I see like you've ordered like a decent amount
(4:30:59) I'm like well I think so I have to look back it's been like a I think it was been like a month at that time before like we restocked um I was like okay yeah like we ordered this amount um they're like oh I just want to know like how like the product's going for you I'm like yeah like I don't know I don't use it I would just sell it and then uh she's like oh like do you have like a store I'm like just be honest like we sell on Amazon and she's like oh like that that's really cool and uh she's like if you want we can sell
(4:31:27) you these products directly like she she like this wasn't our attention of this call but she's like if you want we can sell you the products uh these products directly and I think it would end up being like five five 10% cheaper than than from the distributor that's crazy for something that was already profitable yeah getting a a five 5 10% on top of that is it's like literally uh free money 100% And like that's not usually the case like usually the brands direct typically end up charging more and I don't like we weren't even
(4:31:57) ordering like huge volumes like it was an okay amount but it wasn't massive so like I didn't think it weren't any additional discounts but yeah and I was kind of at first cuz I didn't know that if they were in Canada but they were and free freight so I was like cool that Mak sense that's awesome and honestly sometimes um the personal like the relationship that you build with people or just like even if if it was the first time you spoke with her if the person sees that like you're I don't know good person or
(4:32:29) it clicks between you um sometimes they give you like a special uh special uh like special things yeah so it's it was it was great it was a good opportunity for you yeah and you never know where those types of things will lead like maybe this person um maybe she's a sales rep for this company maybe a couple years later she'll end up working for another company be like hey maybe you're interested in this just because she remembered me right exactly yeah I had some sales rep that went to other companies but I'm still like keeping
(4:33:00) contact with them just you know you never know you know and at the end of the day it's been so long that you're speaking with them that I know I mean you become some somehow like some kind of friend you know a friendship yeah so and yeah there was another case um it wasn't specifically relationship wise but I was buying it was like almost like the opposite I was buying from a brand directly out of the US and then uh a distributor in Canada started carrying their product and obviously the brand had shared information to this
(4:33:32) distributor and a lady from this distributor just randomly contacted me like hey just see like you carry this product we're just opening up a branch in Saskatoon just wondering like if you want to like uh potentially um open up an account with us I'm like yeah like this is a a kind of company you typically can't open account with without certain licenses so I was like yeah I want to open an account oh my God man that that's the best I have actually one company I'm trying to so hard to get an account with them but
(4:34:03) they are going through a distributor and this distributor like you said I need a license to buy from them but I know from from uh what the Sal the sales rep from the brand they are some like I I feel like they're interested but the logistic right now of how they um they move their stuff it's like pretty impossible for me to to get it so yeah sometimes um when you open this kind of account honestly it's like pretty much game over for the competition you have no competition 100% yeah and yeah those ones those ones
(4:34:45) will be profitable for a very long time yeah it's true Y and yeah recently I mean recently last the last year I've been super transparent with my calls when I tried to C call companies I just say I mean I sell on Amazon I mean I sell on Amazon I would like to place like x amount of orders per month the only thing I'm like less transparent is I I say that I have like two warehouses which are my prep centers but it's like it's 100% a lie right it's a white lie exactly so yeah it's it's it's nice and honestly the the thing um that we have I believe
(4:35:31) the advantage we have in Canada is a lot of compan companes in the states uh they really like to have someone here that can um um like even if they're selling in in the states uh some companies like um to have like a Canadian based person here to sell their stuff so there's opportunity there as well 100% yeah yeah but with uh the company that I was talking about that I bought uh products from the US they had there was a couple places in Canada that had sold their products retail uh nothing on Amazon um I talked to the dude uh he was
(4:36:15) completely cool products being sold on Amazon um I was trying to like sound like a big shot back then I was like oh like we sell multiple platforms like Amazon eBay Walmart Etc we only sold Amazon and he's like we we refuse to have our product sold on Walmart just because it looks like it devalues our product but we we'll let you sell it on Amazon um I was trying to get like brand exclusivity with them um like I was like you know like I can like carry your catalog I was not prepared to do that at the time but I was trying to talk a big
(4:36:45) game it seem to sell well um but like we want like exclusivity and we want to like get like a brand registered and try to get like either like transparency bar codes or like get these guys kicked off the listing because like they're killing the price whatever um I tried it but nothing ever came of that but I ended up getting a distributor out of that um and yeah like the brand was profitable for a decent amount of time but it had uh died within a couple months so because uh too many people jumping on the listing yeah
(4:37:15) 100% yeah I mean the the the end goal is obviously to get exclusivity but it's it's pretty it's like a almost unicorn but it happens it happens uh I mean the thing is um the more you try the more you going the more chance the more lucky I mean the more chance you're going to get lucky does does can we say that yeah yeah you can't you can't earn those opportunities unless you actually try right exact so it's fun it's fun I mean initially I remember I was like my first first first call with a sales rep I didn't know
(4:37:56) what to say I I was almost like trembling on the phone I was like my God this this poor this lady come she's dealing with like beginner of the beginners I don't know what I'm saying but but then again like you have to start somewhere yep uh the very first account I opened the very first sales rep I talked to I opened when I was still working my job I scheduled a phone call with the dude when I was on my lunch break so s it sitting in my vehicle in the parking lot and and talking to him like yeah like this is
(4:38:31) what we do full-time we sell online etc etc and it went way smoother than I thought and I negotiated a discount right away I don't know if I negotiated or he just gave it to me I I I like to say that I negotiated but I think he just actually gave it to me and I still have that account today and we still over from them yeah that's great honestly I think it's practically the same story I was like launch break at my work I received a call I didn't know like uh initially I didn't know who called me so I didn't know that I didn't know what was like a
(4:39:02) sales rep to be honest initially and then um yeah the person I remember again like yeah what are you doing and at the time I didn't want to say that I I remember people was say were saying like don't say Amazon don't say Amazon it's not a good thing and the lady told me she said uh be transparent with me are you selling on Amazon and I was like yeah I'm yeah I'm saying but but at the end of the day like you said it it was beneficial for me because um she knew the game and she actually sent me like a spreadsheet and
(4:39:41) she said look these Brands you cannot sell because you're going to get shut down and stuff like that so yeah at the end of the day it's always it's almost always uh good to tell the truth about which platform where are you selling it'll be more beneficial in the long run for sure yeah no actually I lied with that distributor I I don't I don't think I said that I sold on Amazon but I don't think he asked right because I I I ended up having a problem with a brand I think I've told the story before where I end up getting stuck with some products and
(4:40:15) I wouldn't have if I told them and yeah I remember yeah so that was a distributor that I didn't tell but if I did they were cool with it and they would have told me not to buy those products and I wouldn't have got stuck with them yeah yeah yeah yeah but I still have that account today so he didn't ask so I didn't say I mean yeah it's the best I mean it's the best uh situation when he doesn't ask and he has good pricing but then again you run into these kind of issues you never know yeah and like if we would have like I you
(4:40:46) don't have to open up the conversation like hey I'm an Amazon Seller give me a catalog but if I would just in the conversation like hey like just like you know like we saw on this platform um do I need to know anything about your brands that would have been so much better and I I would have not got stuck with product that I couldn't afford to get stuck with at the time 100% I did a small I mean I don't know if I can call it a mistake but I tried to contact um a comp I mean I contact I contacted a company that was selling in
(4:41:18) the state and I wanted to sell their products in Canada but the ick there was it was like uh a topical product and you know topical Products that come from States what happened with health Canada y i i mean I knew the risks but I still wanted to try it and I obviously got the but I mean you I mean the the lesson there is you have to you learn from your mistake and that's what happened also on your end you learned and move on you know yeah you just hopefully you try to make them as cheaply as possible yeah exactly yeah when when you
(4:41:59) SCE product from um um say a US Distributors like uh do you still um use the crosswater service or or you have to work on some sort of uh like Customs or you have the brand or Distributors send uh send the stuff directly to you uh in Canada so I have three kind of uh distributors in us I have some that I deal with um where I just send the stuff to uh you know crossb pickups uh it's easier for me like if it's like a small quantity or uh yeah if it's a small cor I just ship it there because they ship directly to
(4:42:39) my warehouse I have another kind of distribute like another way I do uh the shipping um is I uh directly from the distributor in the states I ship them directly to my prep Center without um using crossb pickups but I'm using a instead a broker uh to do the duties for me so what I do is I buy the label uh from freightcom uh I I sent it to the the distributor they put it on the on the pallet and it ships directly to the prep Center usually I do that for like a larger quantity and I have one distributor which I was able to um to
(4:43:22) negotiate with him where they labeled the products for me and I shipped directly to Amazon in Canada that that's pretty rare that's awesome that's pretty that's pretty crazy yeah yeah so to add on to that I also I've I don't have that many distributors in the US I uh right now I only have one active I've had I think three or four total but we did previously have a distributor in the US not now but they did offer shipping directly to us from the US uh they always shipped via UPS um Freight was included after a certain amount it
(4:43:58) wasn't that high of a threshold and they were familiar with shipping to Canada so at that time it wasn't usma like C usma it was I want to say it was NAFTA the North American Free Trade Agreement they fill all those documents for us and shipped it off uh it did have to go through a broker at the border but we were just able to utilize uh UPS uh very minimal fees and we're able to get them so there's that option too if the distributor knows what they're doing um they don't always um have those Avenues or know how to do it to ship it to
(4:44:32) Canada right so so I guess uh it's all come down to the quantity then like if like Robert said if uh if it's just small quantity then we better use just the the crossbow service right for for the you know just better service and quicker and if we um say import like a large amount of inventory then um we probably should uh might have to use a broker service or like you like Jordan have like a distributor who familiar with all of the logistics and stuff cross prod then that's even better right you I mean the best would be they pay
(4:45:09) for you for the shipping but for me I it never happen you you'll probably have to utilize a broker in some capacity like if you're like basically if it's considered more than personal use it'll probably have to come through a broker in some capacity if it's being shipped business the the thing that is great with the crossb pickup is like I mean if you're going to send like one or two boxes or they they also receive pallets I mean you can send anything to them they're going to receive it but the thing that is good with them is that uh
(4:45:44) usually um like shipping in the states is not too expensive so usually they ship it for free there and then from there to Canada sometimes it's like cheaper than shipping directly the the boxes from the warehouse to the to the prep Center so sometimes you just have to like uh to uh check how much it costs for on freightcom and you know approximately how much if you already use uh crossb pickups approximately come check how much it will cost you and and compare both of both prices but yeah how you guys handle returns like I'm struggling to get
(4:46:27) returns in us so most of my returns like disposes is there any better we for me the returns in the states um I just for now there are losses even for me like I have private label like my the returns ratio is very high like 8% so my all margins eaten up with returns in us I believe the the thing in the state you can liquidate products for the returns some there's some Liquidators they I don't know if you saw that um once it get return to Amazon you have a third option which is liquidation yeah I think liquidation is
(4:47:12) I think it's uh my brand has to be eligible I don't think it is eligible at so those Liquidator only look for certain brand I guess so I tried that option but uh well there is the option directly on Amazon to liquidate your inventory in the US okay I I don't think I I think I tried but maybe it is disabled I as I remember so presently what I do is for my reselling anything return return like more than $30 $40 I just send it to my friends pleas uh that is a one way at least he can utilize and he can uh list them in eBay otherwise it is anything
(4:47:52) below $5 $10 it just I just dispose so a lot of things eat up right so one is crossborder double shipping and then these things so I have to be very care careful with uh sending anything into States I think there's some uh this uh prep centers that accept returns for you in the states so they can check the condition of the product and list it back like send it back to Amazon because like I mean not most of the time but I think like 20% of the time the returns are like uh they're resellable so yeah actually I I spoke to T Express
(4:48:30) so basically how it works is um they will get back whatever sent through Stylin to us right so they they can get back those return product but I should be having import license so that is what they were asking so my business should have import license and then once I provide them license number they can take those back that is what they suggested but I think the getting input license is has like guess but you mean like bring them back to Canada yeah if if he sent through Stalin Express they can get back those product to uh Canada
(4:49:06) to my address my business address but I think what Robert was saying is you can send units to a US prep Center and then they can reinspect the products and if they're still eligible to be sold back on Amazon they can send them back to Amazon for you oh okay okay they stay in the US and they never come back to Canada because there are there are prep centers that will do that and then there's also some Amazon prep centers that will do that and then in addition they offer eBay listing services so they can list it on
(4:49:33) eBay for you if it's like say it can't be sent back to Amazon they can list on eBay for you and then send it off when it's actually sold okay that looks great options yeah uh if you can send me the link if you have anything then probably I can explore there I wish I had honestly I'm I'm actually looking to uh um to to find like a uh prep Center in the states that that does that and also come uh also um for us to us flips but I didn't check for now so okay I know that this prep Center so I when I was exploring selling
(4:50:11) in the US these are the people that I talk to so I'm not sure if you've ever heard of them they do have like YouTube social media whatever they're called um the side hustle Network they operate they operate a prep Center called Network prep they have a prep Center in Oregon and they have a prep Center in Texas so I'll I I can send you the link so um I do know that they offer eBay services so like they can list products for you on eBay and uh store them and ship them when they when they're sold I'm not sure if they will
(4:50:47) accept returns from Amazon and reinspect them for you but I imagine that they will they do seem like very agreeable people and like that you can work with um when I was exploring selling in the US I talked to them talked about their systems Etc they sounded very very system oriented and they seem like they really had their together um but like they would also ask for some limited access into your Sol Central account which some prep Centers do some some don't but they would actually make the shipments for you uh you can send
(4:51:19) stuff to their warehouse they would store it for you and then give you a set uh shipping day if you wanted so like if you just want to send stuff to their warehouse and then only have your stuff sent out on Wednesday so you can kind of like um congregate or or whatever get a bunch of all together at once so they sent it all together at once they gave you that option as well and they just seem very very in tune with what they were doing and very knowledgeable okay that's great um because um do you know do you know actually if they have a
(4:51:52) minimum with them uh I'm not sure uh let me look so they may have introduced it I know at some point they introduced a I think they introduced like a a an onboarding fee like to sign up with them but like they regularly I regularly get emails from them saying like their onboarding fee is waved U I'm not sure if they have a minimum uh yeah cuz I I actually tried like one month or two uh a prep Center that was called prep works I don't know if you heard about them I believe so yeah they they weren't doing uh um
(4:52:34) the they were trying they said that maybe they going to do the returns but they they weren't doing it when I was working with them but the thing is like you said they had like a minimum fee per month and I remember I I think I sent like maximum maybe like a 100 unit or or 200 units and then I stopped um sending stuff but they kept charging me a $100 USD every month like for like two three months I was like what the hell is I I noticed like after two months so gotta be care yeah yeah you you definitely want to clear that out
(4:53:11) before you um start doing stuff with people like that um yeah but yeah like I'm just looking like it uh it looks like they have different requirements for the different warehouses and different prices but like it looks like they say that you need an inventory lab subscription so like they'll do the shipments for you it says minimum of 300 units per month which you can probably negotiate with them um but 300 units per month probably shouldn't be that bad um $250 signup fee but you can probably get that waved uh
(4:53:41) and then it just say one year minimum selling experience so that's probably fine they look uh they look smiley yeah like when I talked to them like I said they seem like they have their together perfect I'm going to try them because I think maybe I have an opportunity with a company in the state but I mean honestly dealing with Distributors is like uh you have to call them every week or every month so they can they can remember you and process your request it's I think with this company it's been like three or four
(4:54:16) months I've been trying to contact them and every time it seems like they're too busy it's crazy like a prep Center or a distributor a distributor I mean a dist a distributor that is located in the state but they told me like he said I got him like I I spoke with the guy that that uh can create my account but not a lot like maybe one or two times and from what I understood from him is that um he has a lot of work but he doesn't want to uh he they are already on Amazon but he doesn't want to deal with them anymore so I was like
(4:54:54) okay I didn't tell him yet but I was like okay maybe it's a good opportunity for me to like ask them you know I'm already saying in Canada I can do it in this as well so I'm partnering with the prep Center maybe you can sell me the stuff and I can send them there so I don't know we're gonna see yeah for sure let's 100% uh Vinnie uh I'm not sure because I know I don't believe you were in the call earlier I know that you do some PL I'm not sure how much deeper you're getting into it but I just mentioned that one of the guys that we
(4:55:33) we have in our server uh his name is DC uh he is a relatively large private label seller uh he mentioned to me that he does he has a couple different brands that do seven figures another brand that does almost eight figures uh per year uh Canada and the US so if you are wanting to discuss stuff about private label he may be a good resource for you yeah I coincidently I was talking to him like earlier so yeah he he spoke to me I think he has some other ideas too like like leads and stuff so that time he's explain me here yeah good to know that
(4:56:09) there are other people doing P yeah yeah it's not super common around these parts so actually I was uh phasing on my whatever the current brand right the product so it is not selling much and lot of Chinese sellers are dumping the prices so I'm not even able to sell at my lending price right it is less than my lending price so I just have to liquidate that I'm also meanwhile thinking to come up with some new brand or product so I'm I'm talking to a lot of people jayen and other guys so probably I talk to this guy too
(4:56:46) something which is generic brand or maybe I can add product uh like based on Seasons dynamically so those kind of brands are and we know that the life the life cycle of any product rescue is like probably 4 months and after that all these people like Chinese sellers come in and dump the prices right it's better to have some kind of product which is like only 4 month uh with the life cycle and probably we can add new uh product within the same brand so that kind of brand I'm thinking like just initial thought process uh so let's see how
(4:57:24) where it will we will end up so so talking to different people so probably I'll talk to you sometime are you brand registered by by the way yeah I'm the presently my brand is brand register and I have trademark in US and Canada how hard is it to U get that uh it's not that hard in us if you want to do a trademark like for example uh if if you are listed in us and if if someone try to hop in your listing and if you complaint Amazon so first thing they will check whether you are uh brand register and you have trademark in US
(4:58:03) and uh to Brand register in uh um Amazon it doesn't matter like is even if you if you take uh a trademark from uh Canada US India any like there are six uh countries uh you trademark in those countries uh Amazon can brand register but IP complete is specific to Country for example someone hop in in us so they will ask us trademark if you don't have us trademark then they can't do anything they can probably just uh send a email to them uh that is the only thing like until unless you have trademark in us the same way in Canada like if in
(4:58:42) Canadian listing if someone just hop in into your listing uh you should have the registered trademark okay interesting it's easy like in us it's like $250 like Canada is $250 is cheap and in us if you want to tradem Mark you need uh attorney like you have to hire attorney uh so basically they will charge like $400 plus $ 250 that is like 550 USD in us and if you want to do very cheap like you just want to register you you can just hire someone from India it it like $100 yeah I have to check that I mean it's like U A Whole New World uh
(4:59:30) the private lab yeah it's a it's a different world but uh there a lot of protection for brand registration in Amazon from Amazon right so basically if you do really well probably they will take over your business and they will try to sell themselves right you don't have to do any advertisement PPC anything so you lose lot of money yeah they will B like so I think they have some kind of criteria if you if you are selling thousand uh quantities per uh month consistently for one or two quarter they'll probably uh connect with you and
(5:00:07) they will ask for the some kind of pricing pricing uh stuff and then uh they will be selling your product you just have to send the product and they have some kind of limit so 1,000 inventory you have to send every month and then basically you don't have to do PPC they'll just Amazon you selling so there are more lot opportunity to like exit business and sometime if you do really well Amazon probably help you to sell the products yeah honestly this is something I would like to check this year but we're going to see not
(5:00:47) sure but uh yeah overall it's a tough route though brand and products it's not easy like it's like proper business right you will be competing with like, million people yeah do you have by the way um a different account for your private labor label or you're selling on the same account no same account I can have as many brand as like I can have multiple brand Under same account it will be registered differently yeah I mean I don't really see the reason beside having the name of your store the same as the brand but I mean I know
(5:01:25) Amazon accept I think to create another account if you have a reason to do so but personally I don't want to take any risk I mean you know you don't know what can what Amazon can like the algorithm can trigger with the multiple account policy so um yeah I mean if I'm going to do a private label I think I'm going to do it with my main account I'm not going to try to open another one I think so but I seen yeah I seen lot of people what they do like uh especially for private label you need lot of initial fund right like at least 50k something
(5:02:00) so most of people do the partnership like it's easier to do a get into a business with multiple partners is easier so that way you can have different account yeah but but still I I'm still skeptical about uh what Amon can trigger on you I think most people when they separate the accounts they they're doing with the attention because eventually usually the idea with the private label brand is You're Going to exit sell it eventually so just to have all that that separate into its own account criteria Etc I mean it's obviously not required
(5:02:37) but I believe that's what most people when they separate out that's why they do it yeah I mean it's smart to do that but what if you can SE start selling it on your account and then if you're going to exit it you just I mean you just create a new account and sell it to the guy I don't know if it works no no basically like I most of those private level like people who are like influencer YouTuber right they always do these new account with partnership with different people so I think that criteria will create
(5:03:11) different uh I don't know if uh account structure that is how they create different people at different uh partnership and different companies right so most of them will have in cooperation on Cooperative right and they will have all the tax return everything they will be setting up so the like as Jordan suggested there go goal is to exit right somewhere so they have to keep everything in place I think the right way is obviously to to open like a new account with the new brand but we'll see we'll see there's no set way you can real
(5:03:49) realistically do whatever you want but yeah yeah however Jordan Jordan you are also planning to do PL right so last time when we discussed you said probably you are I was saying probably down the line but not anytime soon I don't have the time for it right now uh ask it what no I I would say like ask a VA to do it yeah no I want to make sure if I'm that invest invest that much money I want to make sure that we're able to do it proper 100% 100% but I have to sign off um I do have to do a few things and get to bed sure so I hope
(5:04:33) you all have a good night thank you for coming out it's been it's been a good talk yeah take care man sleep well take care guys