November 27, 2023; Hangout. General Processes, Starting Capital, Keepa & More
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Join a lively discussion among seasoned resellers as they share insights on navigating the world of Amazon selling. This engaging video features members chatting about their experiences, from investing thousands in Lego sets to balancing full-time jobs with reselling. Watch as they delve into topics like sourcing strategies, the pros and cons of private label versus retail arbitrage, and the challenges of managing inventory. Learn how to effectively use tools like Keepa for analyzing product performance and discover practical tips for maximizing profits. Perfect for both new and experienced sellers looking to take their Amazon business to the next level!
Video Breakdown into Key Parts
Part 1: Introduction and Overview ([00:00 - 04:00]) Discussion on recent LEGO purchases: One member shares about spending $3.5K, anticipating more purchases around Boxing Day. Casual interaction between participants; a general Q&A setting is established. New and relatively inexperienced members are encouraged to ask questions.
Part 2: Experiences with Amazon Reselling ([04:01 - 20:00]) Vinnie shares insights on managing a full-time job while reselling on Amazon, discussing a mix of Amazon and eBay. Challenges with private label businesses are discussed; Vinnie explains difficulties in stocking due to competitive pricing from China. Discussion on the contrast between private labeling and reselling; Vinnie mentions preferring reselling due to lower time commitment.
Part 3: Sourcing and Selling Strategies ([20:01 - 35:00]) Janine addresses struggles with new members trying to adapt sourcing methods to the Canadian market. Conversations about using tools like Keepa for analyzing product viability. E-commerce veterans share tips on manual sourcing and the importance of checking sales rank and seller history via Keepa.
Part 4: Tools and Resources for Reselling ([35:01 - 55:00]) Introduction of various tools: seller watch bot for monitoring storefronts, stock track for competitive pricing, and warehouse inventory strategies. Importance of analyzing competitor listings and pricing dynamics to make informed purchasing decisions. Mention of Discord servers for community resources and support.
Part 5: Closing Thoughts and Future Sessions ([55:01 - 1:15:00]) Discussion on managing sales expectations and leveraging small volumes for significant growth. Plans for future sessions to enhance learning in reselling practices. Closing remarks and encouragement from the host regarding participation and resource utilization in the community.
Detailed Summary:
In this video, a group of Amazon and eBay sellers engage in a casual discussion, sharing experiences and insights about their journeys in online selling, specifically focusing on various strategies, challenges, and successes.
The conversation begins with a light-hearted exchange about holiday shopping, especially related to Lego sets, followed by a general Q&A session for newer members in the server who may have questions about selling on Amazon and eBay.
One seller, Vinnie, shares how he manages being a full-time IT guy while also running an Amazon business, crediting his wife for assisting him with tasks. He mentions challenges with his private label products, specifically how competition from other sellers has led to a surplus of unsold inventory. He notes the importance of understanding market trends and pricing strategies, realizing that reselling is proving to be a more manageable and profitable avenue for him.
The group discusses the difficulties and intricacies of product sourcing, specifically how to balance the time invested in sourcing against the potential return on investment. Vinnie explains his initial venture into private labeling and how he faced stiff competition, leading him to pivot towards reselling instead.
The conversation shifts to Jaden, who shares his positive experience with Amazon reselling, but notes the challenges with timing and restock notifications. Evan, a newcomer to the group, expresses frustrations with finding time to act on leads due to his full-time job. He mentions using the Amazon seller app for manual sourcing and discusses how he plans to scale his operation for better results.
A significant aspect of the conversation centers around utilizing tools like Keepa, a tracking tool for sales rank, and data tabs for determining the viability of products. They emphasize the importance of being able to source products effectively through both Amazon and local retailers, including using resources like Stock Track to monitor price drops across various retailers.
The members discuss the significance of balancing their sourcing strategies between eBay and Amazon while also looking for profitable items. They advise exploring both platforms for potential sales opportunities, especially with items that may sell well on one site while also being available for resale on the other.
The discussion then transitions to questions about shipping methods and strategies for selling on eBay. Members share insights on how to structure shipping costs effectively to encourage sales without alienating potential customers.
Towards the end, the conversation wraps up by discussing the importance of continuous learning and adaptability in the ever-changing online selling landscape. The group emphasizes the need for new sellers to have patience as they develop their strategies and begin to see results from their efforts.
Overall, this video serves as an informative and supportive discussion among sellers, providing a wealth of knowledge on sourcing products, managing inventories, and overcoming common challenges within the world of online reselling.
(00:01) [Music] yesterday today weon did you end up spending like 10K on Lego sets yet not 10K around 3 and a half K nice but I'm hoping that we might get more as we get into like um Boxing Day right for [Music] sure hey Janine how's it going good how are you guys doing good good good just listening to you guys just got on here right now so no problem we're just kind of uh this isn't any set call it's kind of just like a hangout General Q&A uh there's been a couple people in the server that are relatively new that wanted to ask some questions so figured
(01:03) this would be a good opportunity oh I think that's perfect thank you for your time as always for sure you think they're GNA be heading in here in a bit or what it'd be interesting to see where yeah I know it's interesting to see where they're going you know with their questions or how new they are or just being in the new group or just in general right so for sure and I mean hopefully oh that's interesting let's see here so anything new with you guys [Music] Denny I was just hunting Legos now last couple of days
(01:55) yes you're still uh working fulltime there Vinnie yes I just finished my work and then you pinged me the Barcelona Lego so I just able to buy um uh hold on what does this look like it looks like Jaden posted something about potentially free gift cards $151 card MX 15 off start so Vinnie how do you manage having a full-time job and then doing um Amazon on top of that are you into eBay as well I'm sorry I'm not too familiar with with um what you do okay so I work for bank and um I'm it guy so I work from home so I have two
(02:54) computers two monitors oh nice whatever time I have just I I just uh do leads and then most of the time 80% time I work on my full-time work 925 and then my wife helps me for Amazon business too so that's how it goes oh nice good for you that's that's fantastic do you ever find it kind of hard balancing everything or uh not much so I'm not going that much deep into Amazon business so I would say per month I just buy like 10K and that's it not beyond that I don't go well that's that's a reasonable amount though how long have you been in
(03:40) doing Amazon then um around one year uh before that I had my private label oh I see okay so you're a you're pretty familiar with the Amazon do you do eBay as well then uh yeah sort of not too much are you still doing your private label there Vinnie uh yeah man my private label stuck now so basically what I did was I sent my whole inventory in us right and I'm using this NAFTA like selling in Canada and us uh the problem is the initially when I like it's one year back that time the the product whatever I had was it was trending is a
(04:25) auto device and then what I did was I manufactured that in China and then the first month was really good I sold like 140 uh unit in one month and then I did all these advertisement brand register I I am registered brand in Amazon and then I did trademark everything and then I was greedy and then I order 1K a quantity from China and then what happened is within month or so like there were like uh 15 Sellers from Chinese manufacturer they are selling the same product for lesser than the manufacturing price so my unit is are
(05:08) stuck so I have like 600 units they stuck in us so I can't if I sell on same price then I'll been loss I'm not even breaking one so that's the problem right with the grinds right and so like were you buying from a place like uh like Alibaba or something like that no I have basically a manufacturer in China so I'm direct manufacturing from them and then sending directly to us uh vs okay okay so because it's um because you have that problem with the manufacturers kind of selling directly on Amazon so like you're probably not
(05:49) going to be continuing with your private label brand then yes so that is how I'm Trumble on this one right reselling so I was initially started with with the private label that's what the only thing I knew before so I just gone through all these courses and other stuff and then found this product and then I realized whatever the time and effort I spend is not worth right I spent like around 15K USD uh probably I'm I got like 5K back 10K still there in inventory and all the advertisement creating um images all
(06:31) this stuff right so right so do you think that you'll do you think that is something that you'll try again maybe with a different product or a different manufacturer or something I was thinking so uh but I feel reselling is lot better right the accountability less and then you will not have lot of things to like catch up right so you will be having different SQ and stuff right so I feel it's better for me with the full-time job uh the reselling is a lot better than private level you need to spend a lot of time
(07:03) with private level right for sure for sure I think in general like um private label obviously it's more difficult um but it can be a model that is more viable longer term because you can actually build a brand and exit out of it um reselling is always going to be there it's always going to be profitable um but you're not you're not building your own brand specifically I agree but if I in future if I plan to do fulltime probably private label is better option I guess because you can spend right amount of whatever right so knowledge time I
(07:42) already know what is right and what is wrong right but uh only thing is the problem is getting that IP right so if I go to Manufacturing in China so it will end up with the same thing so only best way would be probably manufacturing us or Canada that would protect these things right that is what I was thinking but it will be costlier right same time for sure I know a lot of YouTubers uh who sells their uh brand like brand for millions of dollars right I don't know how they do that but it would be oh it takes a lot to build it up and and you
(08:23) have to ensure that you protect your brand and you don't have the manufacturers coming on and trying to screw you yeah it's not that easy I guess it's need lot use oh def lot of stuff but this is what we are doing is easiest part right right but have you been like uh tried doing PL before or any thoughts about it I haven't personally done any private label um when I first before I first started selling on Amazon that was kind of like my initial thought that I was going to try before I even knew um individuals cuz sell things on Amazon I
(08:58) was like oh yeah like I can get stuff from places like AliExpress and sell it and like this was years and years ago um so I think maybe one day I might venture into it um but it doesn't really hold too much interest for myself right now okay makes sense yeah hello Jaden how's it going hey it's all right it's going good were that those gift cards that you post said were you able to get some of those yourself yeah yeah I got like I saw it earli in the afternoon and morning and then I tried it myself this evening and it work so
(09:38) basically I just I just tried it now and it wouldn't let me so did you do uh did you do like 15.01 yeah yeah and and use amazon.com yes and with AMX card right yes and then the yes um let me it could be like it is potential like I don't no I don't have a business account in the US let's see if this works here it didn't have to be a business account it could be a personal Amazon account it's just going on amazon.
(10:11) com right so uh which what stores did you try Starbucks Subway something else yeah I tried starbox and I tried Navy I tried about half an hour to 45 minutes ago and it worked so yeah I was just trying it now and I didn't uh it was not working for me said that the code was no longer valid so I'm going to try it again yeah make sure you choose like you you chose 15.
(10:35) 01 cuz often you choose $15 flat and then it didn't work for me either um and then you need to make sure the payment is a an AM AMX card yeah so I got 151 right now on a Starbucks e gift card delivering to myself continue and the code is AMX 15 off right and caps yeah so let's see if this guy works here MX5 off yeah it says that is not valid unfortunately damn it but I appreciate you posting that that's really sweet and that's cool that you got some free gift cards no worries hey Evan how's it going it's thanks how are you good good so how are you enjoying the server
(11:35) so far uh it's great um I don't under I can't pretend to comprehend it in its entirey at least not yet um but um based on what I've seen so far it seems to be tremendously helpful I think the issue for me um uh partly is the is the timing of when leads are shared and restocks are shared so because by the time that I get to them um you know on account mainly of working um all day the items are sold out before I have the chance to purchase them for sure yeah that that can definitely be tough especially if you're at a job all
(12:10) day where you don't have access to to to purchase them or through Discord or whatnot um there are definitely things that are posted throughout the entire day uh but there are certainly a lot of things that are very um time sensitive for sure yeah definitely but yeah so um yeah I believe you are one the newer members that we have um and like I said to Janine and Vinnie here earlier this is kind of just a informal hangout uh question answer session that we can have whether you want to an uh ask specific questions about reselling the server if
(12:43) you just want to chat I'm completely open to everything okay yeah so what is your personal experience with Amazon reselling all that kind of stuff um it's pretty it's it's actually been pretty frustrating um not only because of um Amazon Seller Central which is just garbage um like that well Seller Support I mean specifically but um you know mainly because just trying to get somebody who's who speaks um who can understand what you're saying is is very difficult yep yes it is yeah and um I'm it's just really hard
(13:25) for me to to find products I uh within the last year or so I registered for the um Chris grants OA challenge which largely is for American sellers but the many the many of the principles and specifically sour sourcing methods that he discusses in that um 14-day Workshop um are transferable to Canada but uh suppose what I'm struggling with is um adapting them to our Marketplace which is obviously in in many ways substantially different from that United States um so for so for example one that comes to mind is use of uh keep a
(14:07) product finder to find products which understand is um um is a any resellers um regardless of regardless of marketplace a fruitful source of product leads but I'm just not entirely sure how I would adapt that uh particular sourcing method to the Canadian Market so that it's the most fruitful for sure for sure so and yeah like Chris Grant he obviously does have very good um education he is actually one of the few people in our space that I would consider very legit there's not that many in our space unfortunately there's
(14:43) a lot of people that are out there just trying to just take people's money um I've heard good things about the uh the OA challenge um specifically for Canadians um but for yourself so like how long have you been selling on Amazon for and have you had any success previously doing any other sourcing methods or uh learning anything on your own at all um so I've been reselling on Amazon specifically for for about a year or so now um like I'm I tend to approach anything in life systematically probably because of my my academic background and
(15:15) the skills that it's conferred upon me um so what I was had been looking for for the longest time is a a kind of a course or series of courses that I could um follow that would enable me to a set of methods that I could um that uh I could apply uh sequentially or master and then apply sequentially that could coales into something um that would yield a a u a higher rate of return for an Amazon business as right now my payouts are pretty meager they're 100 bucks here 50 bucks there and it's been like that for over the past year or so
(15:54) um as for sourcing methods the one with which I'm the most familiar um it's probably the default sourcing method sellers when they start and that's a manual sourcing method and mainly I would just um instead of using seller amp or all those other um kinds of software which I don't use because I just don't have the capital for them right now um uh I use the Amazon seller app which I think is is underrated it's it's pretty good um or at least it has been for me and I would scan images or product images on retailers websites
(16:29) in the attempt to see any price discrepancies um of course the the yield of that been pretty minimal but I've some found some products for that way I was pleasantly surprised um that some of the smaller retailers um in Canada are especially fruitful sources of um of products um and and some of those uh retailers uh like Giant Tiger for example um have a really good onine storefront now and they have uh I think raketen has managed to secure um it's up to 2% cash back with uh with giant tiger definitely definitely and
(17:07) so okay that's good to hear and so with yourself like do you mind me asking like and like you don't have to give me exact obviously but like kind of range of how many active asens you have and then how much you're actively spending on inventory per month and how many new asens you're finding per per week or per month um well it's not a I don't as I said have a lot of capital so I've just been sending in shipments periodically and hoping that the the yield on those shipments would be substantial enough to send in shipments more regularly so it
(17:39) would be maybe like a few hundred dollars here and and a couple hundred dollars there um a huge part of the problem though to um is is gaining the momentum because of price tanking so um I I I'm sort of in a transition phase now to Amazon so rather than focusing on um choosing fewer asens with a higher profit yield I'm shifting my um focus to choosing or uh in to attempting to find more asens with a lower profit per unit at a high but that sell at a higher volume for sure for sure and make on Amazon so and what kind of minimums are
(18:22) you looking for in regards to profit and Roi um well Roi I don't really I'm not really going by it's more so uh say two two $3 something like that it just it really depends on the product itself so if it's in um you know a a category in which there are um a lot of units for for sale um then the profit per unit can be can be lower depending on what the sales rank is of the item that you choose but if it's a smaller category um overall then I would want if I'm listing asens and from that product category the minimum profit to be a
(19:00) little bit higher right for sure and um I would assume that you're prepping yourself you're not utilizing a prep Center correct no no I I don't think I would ever use a prep Center frankly I I I think I'm just a bit too territorial for that that that's fair uh there's a lot of people have mixed opinions about prep centers uh we don't personally use one uh but like we build out systems to have like employees and warehouses and whatnot um but I think prep centers can be viable for some people especially at like a certain a certain level I think
(19:30) once you surpass a certain level it makes sense to bring it back in house though um so with that then do you mind me asking like total Capital wise um do you mind me asking like how much do you have available for you to reasonbly spend on inventory every month obviously without leveraging debt or anything that you're not comfortable with um I would say anywhere from say 250 to $500 it's not not a lot as I said I'm pretty new to this right and I like to do um I like to research something thoroughly before I before I undertake it even if I feel
(20:03) as if I'm I I have uh I'm competent in it I don't want to take too many risks so I'd rather do research first so if I'm sourcing product for example I find to be a series of promising asens I will examine them very closely before I commit any of my Capital to them precisely because I only have so so much to work with whereas if I had say you know tens of thousands of dollars at my disposal a month I would probably be a little bit more Cavalier about what I was choosing for sure and like those are all good points to have um and I think
(20:37) that kind of like can frame exactly what kind of Direction you want to go and uh how quickly you can do it because like it's obviously no secret that um with when you have more limited Capital um obviously your growth is going to be stunted and that's fine that's exactly how I started uh but I think you need a way to be able to try to earn more Capital more quickly so you can keep reinvesting it into the business if you're wanting to grow at a decent speed um so like with myself when I started back in 2018 um I started with
(21:08) about $11,000 total so a little bit more than you had access to but I spent I think like $300 on a desktop PC and then I primarily sold used books uh because used books of course you can get for next to nothing many times you can get them for free it's a super big grind um it can be a real pain in the ass you're going to be going through a lot of crap per se um but they are extremely profitable and us like utilizing that was able um to help me grow my Capital quite substantially I always say that selling used books uh the only thing
(21:43) that's more profitable or that would be on par I would probably be selling drugs [Laughter] so yeah see the problem with I mean uh see I have a couple issues with books for one thing I there aren't too many places nearby me because I'm in a roote area where I cons Source them and to be to be honest like anything like Retail Arbitrage I I absolutely hate so from do something from a computer I'm not about you know to even even thrifting I'm not about to go into a store and and uh clear the shelf and and scan everything and look for comps and
(22:20) whatever I'm just not inclined to do that at all so I would rather do what I can through and this is why online Arbitrage was particularly appealing to me I know generally speaking for away in comparison to say you know sourcing sourcing books or um you know items from a thrift store you need a a higher Capital but what I was thinking is um trying to increase the capital I have by um selling uh more on eBay and using whatever payouts I receive from eBay or investing a portion of them in more inventory but also investing the
(22:56) difference into the Amazon inventory to build the capital that way so that I have more that I'm I'm dealing with 100% And like that could definitely be a good way too um it's just a matter of finding um regularly profitable products that you're able to to Source on eBay um with your Capital to obviously earn that profit to flip it back into Amazon for sure that's this is that's Theon why this Discord was so appealing to me because uh based on what I've seen so far um as I'm scanning say the the restock channels um from various
(23:27) retail and of course the the channels that are specifically DED dedicated to eBay and even the ones dedicated to Amazon there is often at least a few products there at any at any given time on those those channels that have good resale potential on eBay so 100% And like a lot of stuff in here like obviously not everything is going to be uh super cheap there are a lot of items that are relatively expensive like we have the upcoming uh Pokemon release that uh through Tiffany that those guys are gonna be a couple thousands of
(23:56) dollars but they have a lot of resell potential but that's more Capital intense uh but we also have a lot of opportunities in here for things that are relatively cheap that you can flip locally or back on Amazon or Ebay uh like the thing I sent out that Vinnie tried getting it was just a bing set it was normally 100 bucks and it was on for seven um it may be a little bit different for yourself but if you're in a larger City getting something like that um a lot of those items can be flipped relatively easily locally um and
(24:23) give really really good profit margins um all also I'm not sure how you feel about it because everybody has mixed opinions about it uh we do have a category um under the important section for listing errors um yes everybody does has a different uh opinion about utilizing that and I 100% get it um but those are listing erors that we Source directly from Amazon and if you do follow the directions that are there you can get those items for free um it just depends on how you feel about getting those items from Amazon um and some of
(24:56) those are relatively high value like perfumes colog and a lot of those can be resold on places like locally like Facebook or on eBay and help uh increase your Capital obviously you can't abuse it you going do like one or two of those per month but that can also be used towards additional inventory if you're comfortable with doing so oh yeah I have no compunction about exploiting Amazon so it yeah like the way I look at it is like just um we're ensuring that they are transparent in what they're doing and I don't specifically buy anything
(25:30) from Amazon and just say hey this is incorrect refund me let me keep the item I just say hey this item uh was incorrect on your listing I want to return it and if you buy it in the category of grower Health and Beauty they do not return those items so by default they just tell you to keep them yeah yeah that was that was uh certainly one an approach I was considering as well um but I think um with what limited capital I have I can still make Amazon work but the the difficulty for for me or has been for me at least
(26:03) since I've decided to Pivot um higher yield but um lower profit per unit products is uh finding something that sells at such velocity to be able to raise that much uh greater Capital definitely and you're definitely going to have those problems when you have um more limited Capital uh with the place that you're located do you mind me asking like what kind of population is in your city or town uh probably like 10,000 it's very small okay so like you're not somebody that has like a local Walmart no no the closest Walmart to me
(26:39) would probably be about a 45 minute drive Okay cool so like yeah like that does limit opportunities for specifically uh retail flips because like you mentioned you don't want to do Retail Arbitrage and I 100% get that uh but in general like if you're looking at stuff for Amazon um the harder something is to obtain and the more pain in the ass it is to prep generally it'll be more viable longer term so it may not sound too appealing but I always like the idea of telling people you know check out places like um if you have like a Wholesale
(27:11) Club local or like a Costco and find items that you either need to bundle together or split up because a lot of those items end up being very profitable very long term because people they just for some reason they don't find them or they don't want to put in the effort about splitting up the units or bundling them together or if it's if it's like a glass item or very heavy item a lot of people just don't want to deal with those well yeah I mean as far as like um asending bundles are concerned I have no problem doing that it's just for me
(27:40) because my time is so limited something more online based is makes more sense for me um I wouldn't have any issue for example if um I had you know tens of thousands of dollars of capital and didn't have to work a a regular full-time job about um doing a little bit of retail Arbitrage like my main sticking point with Retail Arbitrage is not so much going into the stores and doing the scanning I don't mind the scanning at all in fact it's therapeutic for me it's being around lots of people I don't like being in
(28:10) crowds um so it's uh it make more sense for me to be able to to do that Retail Arbitrage when um there are a fewer people around generally speaking that tends to be when most other people including me right now are working right for sure so that reason ra um would work I mean and I'm also not averse to uh at least right now doing hybrid Arbitrage like finding stuff online and picking it up in person because there are a number of products from some of the uh from some of the stores that I Source online they don't uh they won't ship the products to
(28:45) you directly but you can pick them up in the store so I've been doing that for for some of the products um as well and um I do some manual manual sourcing online as well for you know Shoppers Drug M and um in Walmart especially in the the clearance sections of those particular sites and I found a few things that um can flip uh there and that are also um are available in the store as well as online of course the the issue with um any online retail or most online retailers especially um Walmart and Shoppers drugmart um
(29:16) especially the latter rather than the former is purchasing limits and of course when you find something um online that that is in the store you can basically just um ma out your purchase limit online and then um if I know for example which store I can find that product in then I'll go to that store and I'll buy additional quantities if of course the research supports buying such large quantities for sure for sure um in regards to that like obviously it's a little bit different when you're picking them up online um but like for Walmart
(29:47) and Shoppers specifically because they do uh they are kind of a pain with their purchasing limits um if you do order them to be shipped to yourself assuming you can meet your free shipping thresholds uh I have found no problem ordering um multiple orders back to back with either of those retailers so like for example with Walmart they have a Max order quantity of 10 uh we regularly buy stuff like multiple orders up to like multiple hundreds of units assuming that they have it in stock and they almost always ship it unless they don't have
(30:12) stock for those guys and so so do you find when you if you're ordering if you place multiple um orders with Walmart um that uh none of the orders um are cancelled um do you wait for example till the say one of the order ships before you place another order or do you place these multiple orders simultaneously we always do it simultaneously directly back to back and like I said we've done it very often um we're kind of transitioning a little bit out of OA um but we have done OA quite heavily in the past couple years and
(30:44) it's very common that we would order multiple hundreds of units like that and I never found them to be canceled unless they didn't physically have the stock and we do it immediately one after another okay yeah yeah yeah so I I I wasn't I wasn't too sure about that myself I know some some retailers um will um and perhaps maybe this is true more more so true of the the boutique retailers like Lego for example um that if you if you place multiple orders that they'll they'll cancel one of those orders if you've already maxed out the
(31:13) purchasing limits on um what particular item that you want to order more than your your maximum allowable yeah like Lego is definitely known for that um they do have their their limits per household and it's very hard to get around with Lego um I find most Canadian retailers they are generally reseller friendly uh like the one that kind of sticks out that may not be is like well um they they have historically done well for a lot of people um people are able to order decent quantities from well uh but some people just like myself
(31:47) included they just cancel our orders every time we order any kind of volume and also um one that's based in the US that a lot of people order from iherb they've been cracking down on resellers a lot recently too but in general most retailers are quite um understanding and reseller friendly I find that most most of the time if your orders get cancelled it's more so because the retailer is concerned about potential fraud happening and they if you just call them and let them know like hey this is me um sometimes they might just want like a
(32:18) picture of your ID or something um usually they're prone to letting those orders go through then yes I had the issue with iherb um and my work the the workr I had um for it was actually to to wait until the previous order had shipped um before I placed the the next order which admittedly is a a a slower approach and of course there's the risk of product selling out before you can place you know a subsequent order or multiple subsequent orders but in this particular case it had worked so definitely and so you mentioned that you're using the
(32:50) seller app um are do you have keepa I do have keepa yeah okay and that's that's that's part of the Reon why yeah absolutely that's a necessity so um part of the reason I had joined the Discord to is to to learn the other source of meth inting and I know my my capital is limited but as I said there's a kind of side strategy I think that can be um a uh a compromise for me on say doing Retail Arbitrage or thrifting or something like that which is using is selling both on eBay and Amazon but using the bulk of my payouts from eBay
(33:25) to you know to fund uh to provide myself with more Capital to make the larger purchases um to gain momentum in my Amazon business because I enjoy both platforms and they they both have their merits and their demerits um but I have no problem one to finance the other so definitely and like especially with um eBay specifically um you will find that we do find a lot of items that we can purchase on somewhere like Amazon and sell on eBay and with those kinds of flips um again they might be a little bit more Capital intensive but they are
(33:56) are next to no risk with Amazon because you can get them list them uh on eBay and then if they're not able to sell you are able to send them back to Amazon within their return window right now their return window is beautiful because you have fre returns until the end of January uh normally it's like 30 to 45 days and a lot of the time if you find a in demand enough item you're able to get it sell it relatively quickly um and if not able to return it within the 30 days no problem it's kind of a bit of a more
(34:24) of a a of a runaround um but sometimes when we have more Li to Capital we do have to do uh go through some hoops like that yeah and I I don't mind doing the extra work as long as it's online based I mean I just can't see myself right now just you know driving from store to store to store it's just it's just not something that I enjoy doing at least not right now I mean I think it would be a different story if I wasn't working full-time and I can go to the stores during the days when everybody else is working um but uh right now that would
(34:53) be probably a better um approach um for me um especially with as you're saying with Amazon's generous return policy actually one one thing I did want to ask however is that if you use um Amazon for uh to to purchase items to then resell on eBay Amazon um just recently I think it was within the past year um has now um in some cases started charging for returns so if I were to return something that wasn't uh that wasn't selling within the return window or the return window for that particular item was soon approaching and of course I don't want
(35:31) to lose my money um exactly what reason what I choose to avoid having to to to spend any money on postage uh costs to return the item to Amazon so as with everything when it comes to returns um it's something that you don't want to abuse for Amazon because if you're just buying a bunch of stuff and you're only returning it you're not making regular purchases in between You're Never Keeping anything um that's going to flag your account with Amazon and they're eventually going to shut down your buyer account um if you like I buy a lot of
(36:02) stuff like all my personal stuff I basically buy on Amazon um and we we'll regularly buy things like the Funko flips that I post where you can uh order like 12 18 24 funkos uh keep the chases send all everything else back or like the listing errors Etc I'm not concerned because we're only doing it like a couple times per month um but when you are returning it to Amazon just choose options like it um it doesn't there's an option that says it doesn't it doesn't meet your systems needs or something was wrong with the order or something that
(36:32) is not specifically your fault like say um there's options on there that you no longer need or uh you found a better price elsewhere don't choose those options choose options that are like more that would seem like it would be Amazon's fault they do ask for a description for most of those things when you return them you honestly can put in a blank space or a single letter and it still lets the return go through okay yeah um but um I do want to share a couple things with you I'm not sure if you've looked through our guides and
(37:03) resources at all um have yes beautiful um have you had a chance to look at the retailer database that we have the retailer database um what channels are though specifically I will find it and I will send it to you directly here so um we've been selling myself on Amazon for quite a long time I've had my leads list business for quite a long long time and in that time we' built out a database of Canadian retailers for OA um and I share this this full database with this group here um I'll send you the link directly to it
(37:38) uh right now on that list it has I think close to 900 different retailers so there's no shortage of retailers that we can Source uh in Canada um so if you do if you're ever struggling to find a place to find products these are all places that we have previously found viable products from and we have vetted to the best of ability to indicate that they are legit okay so with these with these retailers when you Source from them do you are you primarily using like manual methods of sourcing or so we use um basically any method you can think of so
(38:12) I have a decent size VA team uh right now I have 10 vas and I've trained them all personally to an extent like I've developed um programs that I put them through to train them how to Source in Canada um but they all come based off my personal trainings um but we use any method you can think of so manual sourcing the retailers the uh we do a lot of storefront stocking through something like cell ramp which I do believe is a very viable method it's I think it's talked about um at nauseum in in a sense with a lot of like the uh the
(38:45) YouTubers and it can be a source of a lot of price tanking but I believe if you do it intelligently uh it can be very viable um we do use a lot of software so so we do use tactical Arbitrage uh a program called arborus which is for the US uh we use those less and less nowadays uh we use keep a product finder basically anything you can think of yeah I suppose I suppose the the methods right now are the the ones that are um uh well Manual of course and then of course with uh keep a product finder as well in storefront stocking the ones
(39:20) that you know require the least uh investment of uh of capital and then of course as I I gain more and more c um throughout the course of uh reselling then I can look at these these other options I mean there are so many other options available but I'm I'm hesitant to embrace a lot of them because many of them you you just don't you don't need um like uh like I mean I have some experience with Cellar amp and I did I did enjoy uh using it but um tactical Arbitrage um was was all right but there were more false positives than there
(39:52) were positives yep so yeah so I wasn't too pleased with that and I mean just because something is difficult it's no disincentive for me to learn it I I will absolutely learn it if it's difficult um but I just found that based on what limited learning um I had I had uh done for with that software is the the were not quite what I had hoped um especially for what is a really expensive software yes so you like with anything um any type of sourcing method that you do um you're not you're not going to find any specific course or any specific person
(40:29) to uh tell you something that just makes things click automatically like just overall um everything all the sourcing methods they do take real time and they are they do take real skill to develop um I'm a fan of learning kind of um focusing in on one individual method one or two uh spend a serious amount of time doing that like I would say like a 100 plus hours actively sourcing before trying to learn something else um all the other methods every method can be viable every method can be extremely viable um but you also have to learn how
(41:05) to do it something like tactical Arbitrage it has a very steep learning curve and yes if you uh just run scans um you're going to get say like a thousand results from a scan from like Walmart you're probably only going to pull out like 10 to maybe 15 products total out of all those results so you have to learn how to effectively filter through them um but yeah like no individual method is required uh you can make any method work for you extremely well it just depends on how deep you go into it how how much you learn it and
(41:34) then I think just adding on the additional methods and having knowledge of how to do the additional sourcing methods just kind of makes you more kind of like a Swiss army knife because you are going to come um across some days where like say you you want to spend like four hours just focused sourcing and say you're just doing manual sourcing and just for the life of you you're you're trying to Source stuff just not finding anything not finding anything that's going to happen that happens to all of us if you do have some
(41:58) of those other methods in your back pocket that you've learned over time um it's a lot easier to to transition and to find viable leads in a short shorter period of time yeah yeah I think the probably the most the most practical methods for me right now practical in the sense that they require um comparatively the a lesser in investment of time and are probably um more akin to the skill set I've already cultivated um aside from manual sourcing would be um storefront stocking and um using the keep a product finder um and then and then you know
(42:36) once I of course Master those methods and have more Capital then I can look at other options because I completely agree you want to master uh methods and approaches um one at a time and then um because if you try to um try to learn them all simult simultaneously then of course that's tends to be tends to to lead only to confusion rather than uh to Clarity 100% and it gets super overwhelming and um I find like if you narrow your focus down you're able to be more productive or as if you're trying to like uh disperse
(43:09) your focus through multiple different things just like building a business um if you're building one business versus trying to build five at once chances are when you're just building that one it's going to do a lot better if you're trying to build five right yeah yeah it's and it's a difficult it's a difficult approach uh to take probably because I'm so um acclimated to to dispersing my focus um usually in um information and intensive Enterprises right right and so when you're looking for products um when you
(43:40) mention about you're looking for volume um for especially like lower tier products for like lower profit wise what kind of volume are you hoping to get out of a product or how much profit are you hoping to make out of an individual as per month um I think it would be reasonable I mean you had mentioned in I think it was one of the in the reselling guides um that um for your your business and correct me if I'm wrong um that you you'd like an asent to have uh to earn at least $50 profit per month I think that's reasonable um I mean I'm not
(44:12) looking to to become some you know multi-million dollar Amazon Amazon seller because I just don't um generally uh care about money that uh to that degree so it something that would uh you know uh would earn me say you know 10 eventually as I scale the business 10 to $15,000 a month I would be happy with that for sure so like is your ultimate goal with Amazon um to just have additional money for yourself pay off debts replace your job uh probably well I think ultimately it's it's to replace uh replace the job
(44:50) but um I don't want to invest uh I don't want to Place U my existing job with only one source of income so for me Amazon would be one source of income eBay would be another source of income and more than likely um I would I would start an an additional business to probably a freelance business like um I have a um have a background in textual editing specifically proof reading and copy editing so I probably would have a freelance editing business as well okay cool um so yeah and like to get to10 to 15,000 profit is super doable and it's
(45:32) super doable in Canada um obviously it does take the capital to get there and it will certainly take time to to build that up and to get more confident with your purchases and be able to go deeper and more units Etc um but it's certainly possible um we we have many people in here and our free community that you know scale to that level within few months but they have access to massive capital and they have they fre freaking me for saying but they have massive buls for doing so cuz some of them they scale too
(46:04) quickly um yeah and I have no problem waiting to scale to that point in fact I would I would much rather scale slowly than quickly because um I find and this may very well apply to other people as well is that generally speaking the slower my Pace the more that I learn something um so and so if if I'm constantly searching for for means of Expediting things I I tend to avoid you know something that's integral to the entire process so I would rather um I would rather adopt a slow pace as a matter of course definitely I think
(46:38) that's a good way to look at it um but there's also um in my opinion having a good balance with that because like you mentioned before um you like to analyze listings and there's nothing wrong with that especially while you're learning um but if you are analyzing individual listings um like say it takes you I don't know 5 10 minutes or more to look at an individual listing and you are wanting to to do some intensive sourcing um that's obviously going to cut down on the amount of products you can look through and realistically our job is to
(47:08) get through all the [ __ ] as quickly as possible so we can find the winners so um I've I've said this before I've said this to Janine who's in the the call today um I I personally believe that you should be able to work up to uh over time of course but you should be able to work up to to being able to analyze a listing and make a purchasing decision within about a minute or so um obviously it's going to take time to get there and you have to build up the confidence to to do so but I think that's a good bench
(47:36) Benchmark to get to if you are wanting to do some serious sourcing to find those new Asin see in Jordan I always remember everything you say and instead of bothering you I will go back into the into the YouTubes and the the guides and the resources and everything and what I've been finding lately with myself is that I'll go through keep a charts and I'm second guessing myself where I know darn well that they're good but then I'll go back in and look and I know this is my problem right I realize that but I don't want to bug her up
(48:13) because of so much tanking so on and so forth or at this time of year with uh sales going on there seems to be all of a sudden like I was a four sellers that one I I believe I text you and I was like woohoo I went through how many of them in a day sent a back a bunch back in not like overboard what I felt comfortable with then all of a sudden there's six other people and one person's got 294 and I'm like what in the world is going on here so and then reading the keepa charts even though I've gone through that again I'm finding it difficult
(48:53) sometimes because of all the different drops so I believe I believe I recall um saying that some people put limits on it so on and so forth so it just shows like a a sharp drop or everything's in FC transfer so on and so forth and this is where I'm having a hard time because I could have gotten into five different asens I think about a week and a half two weeks ago and I just sat there and went are you doing the right thing are you doing the right thing so some of that is going to come down to um being able to analyze the
(49:32) listing and trust your gut from prior experience and obviously with any business you're going to have to eventually uh take take on some risk like obviously this business has risk just like any other business has um it's our it's our job to try to mitigate it as as much as possible but like for example if you're looking at a listing like say it has I don't know a $3 profit margin and it's been very steady for a very long time time it's it's from a not super common retailer like I say it's not from it's not from Walmart um and
(50:02) it's not currently on sale um yeah I would say if the volume looks like it can support what you want it to do based on the competitive sellers total sellers is irrelevant it's it's only the competitive sellers that matters um yeah buy some senden and just make sure you're watching your pricing and if it does start decreasing lower your price accordingly just to move your units and like if you do it and you're diligent about it it should be very rare that you lose money on an as assuming that you're making viable purchasing decisions
(50:36) because you should be able to be price competitive and sell those units out before it becomes unprofitable and if you're able to do that at scale and bring that across many more asens you're going to have a better chance of finding the ones that are more longer term winners that you're able to replenish multiple times over yeah cuz I think for the most part A lot of people are actually looking for replans so it's difficult when you look at certain how many asens you have because sometimes you're just in and out
(51:07) you see what I mean so it would be great to say okay I've got 500 asens and whatever but they're not all replans all the time so it's hard to judge um cuz even myself like eventually I want to be able to you know make enough money so I'm I'm comfortable stuff and I've got the capital it's finding the high volume stuff um you know which I've been coming across a few of them which is good but I've gotten into a few other things as well where everything looked good and it was like what the flip and how did they
(51:42) find it that cheap and you just got to get out for sure but also like with OA um I don't believe and I think I mentioned to this to yourself Janine before I don't believe you should approach it with the intention of spefic specifically looking for replans and like you see some people that tell you um like some YouTubers influencers whatever they're always like oh source replans sorry but that's [ __ ] because you don't know if something is going to be a replin it just happens right um and with OA in general um it is
(52:14) a relatively um Rocky Market um in general price tanking it does happen across the board it's more common than something like say per se hold sale or something that has a higher barrier of Entry um so with AA you do realistically always have to be sourcing always have to be sourcing new asens you will build a small catalog over time for items that you can replenish over and over or you can replenish every time that retailer has sales for that item um but you need to also pad your inventory with items that may be just opportunity buys like
(52:48) maybe they're just profitable right now they'll be profitable for the the month worth of inventory I sent in but after that they're not going to be profitable yeah you can never get emotionally attached to a as never never get married never get married to a product ever I never get married anyway but and okay so you're you be you said you're phasing out of OA and you were predominantly OA and wholesale were you not yeah so at the start of this year we were probably about 80% OA and about 20% % wholesale um we were about flipped
(53:28) that we were about 80% wholesale um when Co first hit and the inventory restrictions hit when that happened I made a decision I don't know if it was the right decision but we basically transitioned more so to OA at that time because I just wanted to be able to get products quicker and get them into Amazon because we had very limited inventory space and we we didn't even realistically do a ton of OA we were doing like a lot of RA uh so we can get products and G set out basically same day um but yeah I've been see that's
(53:55) what I like but I don't like going into stores it drives me nuts and and that's fine like I'm I'm the same way I don't like being around a ton of people like my form of RA is we would go into stores like say like Costco Wholesale Club Etc or I would send one of my employees into there and we just take pictures of things that look interesting then we come home research them and determine whether or not we want to buy them that's not the most efficient way to do it but that's kind of how we did it so I didn't have to spend hours in the
(54:21) store okay so now what about even going like not doing OA but okay we're we're just going to use Walmart wholesale for an example right what about going on the internet trying to find something but going into the store is that still call considered ra or what do you call cuz I cannot scan like I want to smack people out like and I don't like screaming children so like I I personally view like it's going to be kind of very hybrid but like me personally if in my opinion if you're picking up from the store I would technically considered it
(54:59) ra um but it's kind of a hybrid if you're if you're researching it online and then just going to pick it up in the store yeah cuz I look to see what the stock is so on and so forth and just like today like I thought oh well I got nothing to send in much this week waiting for my orders to come in I went out and I was like I price matched I did this and that the other thing I knew who had stock of what I come home and went oh flip I got lots prepping to do but that was okay but it only took me an hour so I don't mind that like going
(55:31) into the store the stores but researching it and making sure whatever took me another how much time but it's better than waiting for something for you know 2 weeks to come in and then by the time it gets in then everything's other people are on it cuz they figured it out but realistically most items if you're doing proper research and you're looking at the history while well enough um most items they shouldn't only have a lifespan of 2 weeks obviously it will it's bound to happen um but realistically most of them
(56:04) shouldn't like if all the products that you're looking at if you order it you get it and by the time you get sent off to Amazon within like say a twoe period if it's already at the point where it's unprofitable that might be an issue with your sourcing methods or your research okay okay and sometimes it unfortunately I got to say that sometimes it just happens it's like all of a sudden people just figured out it was a good thing and it's like what in the flip how did you guys figure this out and it's bound to
(56:34) happen but it shouldn't be consistent yeah oh yes of course I understand and so for the whole sale though I mean how feasible is that for most people in reality or newbies like selling wholesale well going into more wholesale so like I don't think it's something that if you are brand new and you're not confident with Amazon I don't think you should go into wholesale right away um because there are more inherent risks for doing so um and you generally you don't you're not required to have a super high Capital because like a lot of
(57:14) wholesalers have relatively low minimum order quantities but in general if you want to make it viable you do need higher capital and like most the time I would say like don't even start wholesale until you have like at least five grand that you can spend mhm but like once you have product research done properly it can be very viable and like you don't necessarily need to be incorporated to open wholesale accounts like a lot of wholesalers open up accounts with soulle props and you don't need to be ordering tens of thousands of
(57:42) dollars like a lot of wholesale minimum order quantities of like 500 bucks um yeah but if you want better pricing you're going to have to be willing to spend more money of course of course cuz I watched uh your wholesale YouTube again and so then I started trying to look for more you know people and or companies and stuff like that I think what and this is whatever it happens but that company that you know that I had that was the best money I made last year and they decided to start doing FBA on Amazon and they just
(58:21) completely screwed me I was like I'm out I'm out so now I got to find someone else with the same products and go haha well that's always a possibility but that's why I like being open and transparent with my wholesalers because I have those conversations beforehand and like majority of the wholesalers that I deal with like they specifically say like they have no interest in selling on Amazon themselves and it's for this reason and those are typically the wholesalers that I gravitate towards like if I'm trying if I'm going to be
(58:50) competing with my wholesaler if they're sourcing the products considerably cheaper than I can get it considering I'm buying it from them that's probably not a good move see and when initially when I contacted them they were just doing fbm and then because I was I was only spending like a a grand a week from from them solely yeah about 1,000 bucks a week from them solely and I think that they kind of clued in and then all of a sudden next thing you know they're were doing FBA and I was like come on guys right but you also like you you can't
(59:28) blame them I mean it's I understand I understand it's just unfortunate so I think that kind of that kind of put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth but is what it is right right but not all wholesalers like that like a lot of companies they have no interest in selling on Amazon themselves they're strictly B2B companies right yeah um so those are typically the ones that we focus um but like it's it it can always happen like you can't you can't guarantee it like with anything there's always some forms of risk with wholesale though you
(1:00:01) have a bit of a higher risk per se because you don't really have the same return opportunities as a lot of retailers um some wholesalers will restock products but it's usually with a fee and typically speaking you want to avoid sending stuff back to your uh wholesalers because it'll more than likely damage your relationship because that's not the kind of business that they're in um yeah so you want to ensure that you're able to make viable purchasing decisions yeah and for the most part with them there was a couple
(1:00:30) of items that someone else if regardless someone else come along and put it on there but I know for a fact that they actually wholesale too and uh and uh just completely demolished me and I didn't I got the product didn't even send it to Amazon and went I'm going to keep it you know what I mean I got rid of it thank goodness but um but yeah like um like to to to be honest like spending $1,000 a week or so like that's a good amount but when you look at it for the aspect coming from the wholesaler side that's very that's very small um yeah
(1:01:13) depending on what kind of wholesaler they are what kind of volume they that they do like a lot of our wholesalers um when we first open an account like our initial purchase order our first purchase with our wholesaler is like 20 to 30 ,000 right so and like I would consider ourselves like not even that big like there's definitely guys that do a lot more than that yeah see and I complet like I completely understand that it was just an extra you know how much from them that they weren't expecting from someone that just come along you know what I
(1:01:43) mean that was just like okay whatever and just ordered whatever and um you know it was feasible for the time that was the best money I made and um unfortunately you know it's on to the next now right for sure uh in your terms of saying I'm my apologies in your terms of saying like wholesalers so we're talking about Distributors suppliers so on and so forth right there's a difference in term because generally you don't get to go straight to the brand or the source right yeah like um buying from the brand directly via like wholesale or getting
(1:02:23) wholesale pricing is certainly POS possible um a lot of Brands if you look at the website they have opportunities where you can open up or you can submit wholesale applications to them directly but in general uh wholesale would be buying from wholesalers or Distributors and in and in general not always but typically speaking you get better pricing from a wholesaler or Distributor versus if you were to buy from a brand directly just because of the economy of scale the distributor probably buys truckloads of those products so they
(1:02:52) they get a better price they pass those savings on to you versus if you're just buying you know like say just even like half a pallet or something from a from a brand directly chances are they're not going to give you as good of pricing okay thank you for clarifying that because I just noticed that just recently as well yeah and like you like I would never discount trying to start a wholesale account with a brand if the opportunity is there because you never know what uh what may come of it but I would also like say just for example I
(1:03:20) don't know if you're looking at uh Earth Mama products you can probably open up account directly with Earth LMA uh I don't think that they're super reseller friendly on Amazon but uh you can open up account with them uh but also try to look for some of their wholesalers as well and just compare pricing chances are you'll probably find Distributors that have better pricing so when you're looking it up do you look at wholesalers or distributors or should I can go back through the video again I'm not sure what the best way of Googling that
(1:03:48) situation is I know it's in your video though you can do both like there's no step method of doing it but Google's a great place to start just just like if you want to look for a specific brand um like say you come across a brand that looks like it may be viable on Amazon like Earth Mama for example I would just look up Earth Mama the the brand directly I would send out one of those templates that we have in our resources to the brand directly um and then I'd also see on the website if they have a link that um lists their Distributors
(1:04:15) which a lot of brands do yeah or you can look up like Earth M Distributors Canada or Earth M Earth M Distributors Alberta or health and beauty distributors or health and beauty Distributors Alberta um you can do all those methods and just start contacting people okay I don't know I don't know if I missed the first part but mama is not not Amazon friendly yeah yeah I believe I mentioned that but yeah I was sure that they're not super friendly with uh distributor wise there's a few other companies I wish I could say but I sell them so I'm
(1:04:50) not going to say but they aren't either so the the fibs that I've told just to get some products is actually pretty funny and that's always a method I don't personally prefer to do that because I believe the more transparent you are um the less likelihood you're going to have problems or headaches down the road I actually um contacted someone else that carries the product but I had gone to the main brand which I told the FIB to but they still sent up my order today and then I contacted another company and I tried to be transparent with her and
(1:05:31) she said no we have an agreement with that company that we do not allow Amazon sellers but she continued to tell me how to just order it fair enough I was like so if I just happen to order it from you I said do you have limits and she goes no and she said what's the item number and she looked it up and she go no there's only three in stock right now but this is how you check and see I was like I guess I mean part of it part of me is like cool like I have multiple e-commerce platforms say you have your own website as well how do how are they
(1:06:12) I mean they can obviously if they find out from your storefront but in theory like how do they know your distribution split right it's not hard to find um who you are as an Amazon Seller I've pointed out in some of my videos before um it's very easy to find what who is connected to what Amazon account unless you go through extreme lengths to hide it yeah the only question is how much stock you know you could say like yeah I sell on Amazon but that's like 5% of my stock majority goes through my own retail website and they don't have stats on
(1:06:40) what you actually sell on your ril website right never thought that but it's also very possible that somebody like a lot of Brands if they are very serious about it um they will monitor the as that are on Amazon under under their brand and then will'll regularly look up sellers right and so like for example uh one wholesaler that a lot of people here probably have heard about if you don't you it's it's it's a I think it's a good base start wholesaler to start with in Canada Purity Life okay Purity Life is a wholesaler in Canada that sells Health
(1:07:11) and Beauty grocery items Etc they're very easy to work with um they you don't you don't have to be a uh Incorporated open account with them you can be sold prop you fill out an application with them online you basically get approved automatically um it's it's relatively hard to find profits with them but if you do Source it properly especially when they run sales it can be very viable but for example with Purity Life they share their sales directly with the brands so uh if you order 12 of a unit from a brand um if that brand monitors
(1:07:46) their what's happening with their Ecom they will know that you have purchased that many units from Purity Life and if they monitor their as on Amazon and they find your storefront connected to you and they see that you ordered 12 units and they see that you stocked 12 units on Amazon it's it's relatively easy to put that together right so like um there's definitely you can do things to um sidestep restrictions like that um telling small white lies Etc I've just personally found the more transparent we are with
(1:08:25) our relationships with our Distributors the more viable long-term and more profitable our relationships have been yeah even retail stores when I was in there today they were like what are you doing with this stuff and I was like I told them and they're like oh that's cool you know what I mean and it's like is it your full-time job and I said well during the winter yeah right and even when I sold books um you would would occasionally find people that just have a stick up their ass when you tell them what you're doing and for
(1:08:57) some reason like uh a lady at a local Canadian Tire when we used to pick stuff up there she would always uh intentionally cancel and our our orders and only give us like four units per order and she just had to stick up her ass like thinking that it's like her business and she just wouldn't let ever order anything but nobody else cared it wasn't their policy um but that's very few and far between like we didn't have that issue very much but when I was selling books I was always open with people and I went to a thrift store once
(1:09:24) and they asked me like why are you buying so many books and I told them and it was the people that ran that thrift store and I ended up starting a bulk deal with the owners of that thrift store um and I was just able to buy their excess books by the pound I paid 10 cents a pound I got a lot of junk from it and I but I was helping them with their problem I was getting books extremely cheap and I profited way more uh from that relationship and from doing that um versus if I didn't if I wasn't honest with them yeah first I was always worried about
(1:09:58) telling people and for the most part I don't care now the only thing I don't like is walking around as I mentioned like when I tried doing the scanning of items and retail stores and I swear people were looking at me like I was stealing stuff and it was like no they couldn't figure out what I was doing and because I live in a small smaller center and it was just like okay well dreadlock some chick walking around with her phone scanning stuff and I'm like no I just can't handle this and the screaming kids as I mentioned so
(1:10:36) definitely yeah the Hudl right um but yeah like uh we we've definitely gotten the same thing like I used to buy quite a bit of volume from Costco like we still do from time to time just because we're able to get pallets at a time but like when we used to walk in the store with like those Buller carts there were two of us and they would just be stacked full of stuff and people would give you some really weird looks and make some really weird comments yeah yeah um but for yourself there Evan um I want to come back to what we were
(1:11:06) talking about um oh I should I wrote this down I was there was something specifically I wanted to ask I just lost I just had it um slipped my mind we'll come back to it uh talking about too much at once that's okay um I do have one question and maybe maybe the uh your response or or my question or a combination of both could uh help you remember but um uh so for a a wouldbe reseller or somebody who's you know interested in um in reselling but specifically um onl Arbitrage and hybrid Arbitrage what recommendations would you have for them
(1:11:54) so that's a good question and that's relatively a broad question um but in general so I have never been a huge prop proponent of most courses that are available because I think in general most people that are in our space that offer courses are for the lack of better words full of [ __ ] there are some ones that are good like uh Chris Grant there are some ones that I would probably pay for but I've never paid for a course myself but trying to dive into it and do as much research as possible is obviously where I would start even with
(1:12:26) some of the American content that is out there um I know it's not all relevant to us but you can still learn a lot of the fundamentals and a lot of the basics from a lot of Americans and a lot of the ones that I recommend would be like people like reezy resells uh watch me Amazon Amazon lit Chris Grant um there's one uh their channel is called superhero sellers if you're selling if you're utilizing tactical Arbitrage that is a guy named Chris Anderson that's it's more so specifically for ta um the side hustle Network they talk
(1:12:58) a lot about Amazon and also eBay those are that's really good content and then trying to just kind of adapt that to the Canadian Market um but also that's doing like a lot of research that's analyzing a lot of stuff but also try not to get analysis paralysis which a lot of sellers do so like you mentioned earlier when you are analyzing listings for a long period of time I think that can really stunt your opportunity um I do I do think being able to research products properly is very good and I do believe you should develop that
(1:13:30) skill but once you do develop that skill and get comfortable with it I think taking action is more important because if you are analyzing a product for multiple minutes or hours or days that does certainly limit your opportunity a lot and it also makes it so that you're not able to Source a lot of products very efficiently yeah so when I when I said that I that um I analyze a listen closely I'm just doing that right now because I haven't yet mastered the skill so I didn't I didn't intend to to um adopt that same approach with every
(1:14:03) product that I encounter but it's just because there's a lot of data points that you need to analyze in making a making a decision rate so I want to master the the whole process of analysis or each of the components of of that that process before I'm able to you know enact them in what seems like and uh effortlessly definitely and and yeah like there's certainly nothing wrong with that but my recommendation would be try to develop those skills like that's one of like the main fundamentals that we have to develop as sellers try to
(1:14:33) develop that specific skill as quickly as possible and I think a lot of that comes down to being like actually as as scary as it can be actually taking action because you can see certain data points um you can analyze listings all you want all day but without actually getting the real data for you sending in the products and getting that data yourself you you don't always really know because just because keepa shows you one thing or you see so many drops or seller stock movement Etc doesn't always give you the full big picture and
(1:15:04) being able to actually send those units in and get that data yourself is what's going to probably teach you the most um but I did remember what I was going to say to yourself um the thing I would also recommend that you do extensively or that you try to master um relatively in the short term is doing what I would call The Rabbit Hole method for sourcing which I believe uh Chris Grant talks about quite extensively as well he calls like rabbit trailing whatever um but when you find one viable product or you find one viable
(1:15:36) storefront or you find um one retailer that has one viable sale happening go down those rabbit holes because personally with my VA team that is where we are able to find the most products and you'll probably come across a lot of retailers you've never thought of before you'll probably come across a lot of products that are more stable for longer periods of time and that are more profitable so like just for example if you come across uh we're using the brand Earth mama earlier for example you find one product that's viable from Earth
(1:16:04) Mama do a reverse search on Amazon look up Earth Mama the brand in total and start pulling up every single listing um and comparing it against the retailer that you're sourcing at or search uh Earth Mama for other retailers to see if you can find it cheaper elsewhere or on sale Etc things of that nature yeah so it's basically like a form of inception but for Amazon yes and you can go down um consistent rabbit holes over and over again because um like again if you find like a viable product um say like this product looks
(1:16:35) super super solid or I've been selling this product personally we can then look at the current sellers on that product or the historical sellers on that product for keepa we can pull up their storefronts and we start going down those rabbit holes via storefront stocking and then we can keep going down Rabbit Hole by rabbit hole and once you become proficient with that method um and being able to like see the bigger picture and be able to Source efficiently uh you'll find that you you'll be able to find a lot more
(1:17:00) products a lot more quickly yeah I mean the main barrier for me I think right now is I said is capital so um and part of the reason of course I had had joined this this particular group um was to uh find leads on products that I can resell on eBay to raise the capital for Amazon and the other part too was that I had um I had subscribed to one of your lead list as I had mentioned to you when I and I was um really happy with a lot of the products that I found I just couldn't continue with the list because I just don't have
(1:17:31) the capital right now right um and many of the products did um really well um and I did some some of the uh rabbit trailing as it's called on those products as well but mainly with um the retailers themselves and with the brands not so much through Amazon itself with the listings that were on Amazon that is definitely and yeah but like with that as well um even though you have limited capital I would still recommend assuming that your time allows for it I would try to a lot you know an hour or so per day or just x amount of time per
(1:18:07) weekend and try to actively Source even if you don't have the capital to buy those products right now but start building like your own product list of potential products um because that will that will help you develop those skills obviously and then when you do gain the capital over time then you'll start having a list where you can just come to your own personal database where you can you don't have to spend a lot of time sourcing you can basically look at that maybe do some additional rabbit ho holding off of that and you'll probably
(1:18:30) be able to pull out a lot of viable products in a very short period of time because you've already done the work yeah and that's actually what I ended up doing when I was a subscriber to your uh to your leads list I started building a database of products not only of um the ones that I had uh the ones that were presented on those lead lists leads list but also ones that I had found uh myself and I just keep adding to that list so that eventually I have a database of thousands of products uh to draw from which will of course make the job of
(1:18:57) sourcing that much easier when I am in fact able to raise uh the capital the one thing I've been another thing I've been struggling with too is um knowing how many units of a product uh to purchase um I know as an on any Amazon Marketplace you have the the best uh the the best sellers Rank and then that that will vary from product category to product category and so what's um say 100,000 for example in home and kitchen which is a a pretty good rank is a terrible rank in grocery so um when I use keep a product finder for example
(1:19:31) and you have to input um as a parameter uh say the a best seller's rank in the attempt to find products I'm never really sure um of what range to select um Chris Grant gives some examples and um when he does a tutorial and keep a product finder in the um Thea challenge but I'm kind of having trouble adapting that particular approach for the Canadian Marketplace because of course the the number of asence we have in the Canadian Marketplace is much smaller than that of the us so you can't really um adopt the same parameters or ranges
(1:20:05) that that he adopts in that tutorial so are you wondering exactly about what filters you should be applying to keep a product finder or when you find those products how many you should be purchasing uh both Okay cool so when you look at keepa when like say for example you come across a brand new product to yourself um it's iable to you it looks solid um how what are you using or how are you making your decisions on how many you should purchase or how are you guesstimating that so I also um I also subscribe to the um the monthly uh what
(1:20:39) was it I forget what the term is now for it um the the list that you send out every month with this oh the sales rank charts yes sorry so I I subscribe to those sales rank charts and um so when I'm using keep a product finder and I'm still you know learning learning how to use it there's an there's an awful lot of uh filters in in that that uh I have still yet to um to understand the meaning of um but I will use uh the best sellers ranks or ranges in those sales charts uh to try to find products so um for example if they're um let me just P
(1:21:18) one up here for reference yeah so if I'm looking for something and say the beauty and personal character category which is a a category I like to sell in besides Grocery and gmy food um then if I'll look at say what the number is for the top 0.5% and then I'll start with say a bestseller rank of one to 21,000 or whatever it is and then I'll conduct a search that way to see if there are any products that um appear within those those search parameters so I'll use in other words the sales chain sales rank charts or the figures on the sales rank
(1:21:51) charts as a kind of gauge to to find those products okay cool and then when you're actually making the purchasing decisions like are you familiar with the the data tab or like the the FBA seller stock inside of keepa vaguely yeah okay so if it's cool with everybody I would actually like to share my screen and we can go over some stuff because I think um doing a lot of this live might be more beneficial uh so just give me a second I'll share my screen here that's really a great idea Jordan I find like with me personally
(1:22:23) like I'm a very visual learner and sometimes it's just easier to look at stuff um head on uh let me get all set up here okay cool so let me know if everybody can see my screen you will you will probably have to click on my name my my name says live and then you'll like there's like a little stream thing that will pop up that you can probably go into and view from there yes I see it now beautiful okay so I'm just using this product because this is a product that I believe was shared in one of the Lee channels here recently um but when you talk about
(1:23:00) sales rank um sales rank is a good initial filter to use when we're wanting to filter through a lot of the junk so we have less junk to look at uh but besides that I don't think sales rank is really relevant um because sales rank is not static it always changes and so like for example something that was a sales rank of 50,000 um say in like the toys Cate which in Canada would probably not be very good if it just made a sale say 15 minutes ago it could be a current sales rank of 2,000 because it just made a sale so it's a 2000's bestselling
(1:23:33) product at that at that very time and then within a couple hours or a day it'll probably be back up to like 20 30 50,000 if it doesn't make more consistent sales so I only like to utilize sales rank as the initial filter to find products uh besides that though we don't use it to make any purchasing decisions uh when we're making P purchasing decisions for an item uh we always come down to uh keepo of course and um if you're familiar with Chris Grant's training uh he's a big propon proponent of saying that uh sales rank
(1:24:07) drops do not equal sales and that's very true um sales rank drops when we see a a big drop like when we see one of these large drops that we see here that is most likely a sale that is occurring but that doesn't give you the full picture because Kea only realistically tracks every product about every 15 minutes or so um for products that are not as popular uh they don't track them as often or sometimes not not at all and um also in that 15-minute period or whatever uh period that their system refreshes or whenever somebody else
(1:24:40) looks at the product and refreshes that product on keepa end multiple sales can occur in that time so just because you see six drops in a month doesn't mean that product only sells six chances are it probably sells more in general um so when we're looking and determining um how many of an item we want to buy I would of course look at the current FBA Sellers and the current FBA sellers that are within the buy box range the I very rarely look at fbm Sellers because in general um fbm sellers are kind of irrelevant for us to compare against uh
(1:25:13) we can't really gauge sales for fbm Sellers as well as we can for FBA sellers um and in general if the buy box is an FBA seller we wouldn't really consider fbm sellers or competition anyway and I would look at how many FBA sellers there are currently within the buy box price um if they are outside of the buy box price like more than like 3 4% above the buy box they are pretty much irrelevant because if they're not price competitive chances are they're probably not getting the buy box and they wouldn't be considered competition
(1:25:44) anyway okay so in this particular scenario this may not be a super good example because Amazon's on this listing um but what what I always like to do is I always like to look at the year-long history first just so I can get a feel for how the item is looking overall the overall price stability um and if we see FBA sellers Amazon Etc and then when I'm making my purchasing decision I kind of uh zoom into the last three months or even the last one month and I really want to see price stability over the last at least one month period um or at
(1:26:15) least profitable at that price before I consider purchasing that item so for this particular item uh it looks like it has consistently over the last month sold for about $1 12986 so about $130 uh recently it has dipped with Amazon uh which isn't surprising considering they probably had this on Black Friday sales and then we can see recently it has recovered and one thing with Amazon is almost like with anything else um history does tend to repeat itself so just because you see something that um say normally sells for $20 but right now
(1:26:51) it's selling selling for $40 um chances are that is probably probably a very temporarily uh inflated price increase uh chances are it'll probably come back down to the regular price unless something else has changed like the buy cost the supply Etc right so I'm kind of looking at the overall average selling price so I look at this and I say probably on average I can probably sell this for about $130 and that would that would be what I personally vet this product at so I know my buy cost is $77.
(1:27:22) 99 uh my sale price is going to be about 130 then I determine how many I'm going to be purchasing if this meets my criteria and I want to buy this item I would then come into the data Tab and if I'm going too quickly at all please let me know interrupt me feel free and I'm also recording this so if you do want to reference this later we can reference it later too um but I come into Data offers and then I always filter by Prime and buy historical offers and this kind of gives you a general overview of how how many units
(1:27:52) are selling via FBA um it's not perfect as with everything with Amazon because um there are sellers that can put um uh selling limits or buying limits on their inventory so when that happens you don't actually see inventory movement even when they sell an item like say they put a Max buy quantity on their items of five assuming that they have more than five in stock whenever an item sells keepa will not be able to see that and you will not see any movement in their their stock account um Amazon is not always super
(1:28:25) reliable either with the stock counts because they don't specifically share that data with keepa um quite transparently all the time so it's not always super easy to tell with Amazon um so I would I wouldn't specifically look at Amazon's stock count I would look at other uh other FBA Sellers and so in this case the reason why I posted this one is because it's not super common that other FBA sellers are in the buy box it's not common not other FB sellers are price competitive with Amazon whatsoever but it does look like when
(1:28:56) they were price competitive with with Amazon they did get the buy box and they were moving units so I want to kind of zoom out and look at the past history to kind of see what I feel we could sell based on that data that we have so I'll extend the offers tab I will typically extend it to the last 180 or 365 days just so I can see more history and I will see uh if there's any information on when the seller stocked when they loed out if I can gauge how many units I should be buying based on that information that I see
(1:29:26) there so we can see like with this seller here they were priced at $88.99 so they were never pric competitive so they never really sold their units which is not surprising um with this seller here this seller was price competitive we can see that when they first stocked they were 15555 then they dropped their price uh to be price competitive and when they actually dropped their price they actually it appears that they sold their unit units so they went from three units to no units in a short period of time once they actually um became more price
(1:29:58) competitive and you can look at exact dates and you can kind of compare if you want to get very specific into it uh but I can see here once they actually became price competitive it does look like they were able to sell their units and they were able to sell them relatively quickly so in this case I'd probably gauge of how quickly they were able to sell their units when they were price competitive so they started being price competitive around uh say around January 20th or so and from January 20th they went from three units to
(1:30:29) February 14th they sold out so they sold about three units in about a 30-day period so with that information that I see there assuming that we're price competitive we can probably estimate to sell at least three units chances are if we stock more we'll probably be able to sell more so does that make sense it's kind of like a broad high level overview of that um I'd probably have to review it a number of times for it to make sense oh that's okay I'll pull up another example that might be better because if like
(1:31:04) Amazon's not on it just give me a second here yeah Jordan maybe another one um as you said that Amazon is it on is not on that where you can see multiple you see what I mean multiple buyers like going up and down or just showing the restocking or not yeah definitely and so um I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with um variations and whatnot but um when we look at Kea uh Kea does tell us a lot of good information but when it comes to an item that has variations so we see an item like this that has multiple different um
(1:31:42) different sizes or different colors we can no longer trust the sales rank drops we see on Kea because Kea shares the same graphs of the same sales ranks across all variations even if the graphs look different across all variations the sales rank will likely be identical or very similar so we can't trust sales rank drops on variations whatsoever and that's when it becomes very important that we have to dig deeper into the product so with this one let's take a look at what's going on with this guy here so so for some reason it looks like this
(1:32:24) product when we had I posted this earlier in November our buy cost was $98 our sell price was 185 at that time it was profitable it was profiting $24 per unit I'm not sure why it's not showing it's profitable now somebody may have messed with the dimensions or the fees let me just see here that would be something I would have to look into a little bit deeper but that should be profitable um but if we were looking at this item here so first thing I tell myself is okay it's a variation so I know I can't trust the
(1:33:00) sales rank drops that I see on the listing whatsoever and then I obviously want to make sure that that's profitable so in this in this case like just say for example that this item is profitable it's going to make us $24 and 25% Roi which it did when this was posted originally in November so this is potentially a very solid product it does have a super good sales rank um so that should through through your filters if you're searching for things via like keep product finder or through tactical Arbitrage Etc and then for this one it does look
(1:33:30) like Amazon's on this one as well but not as much and they're not typically in the buy box let's take a look at this guy so I don't always um a lot of people they avoid listings with Amazon when they're on it I don't do that and once you become relatively comfortable selling on Amazon I would recommend that you do the same you just want to ensure that the listings that you're selling um that you are able to sell yourself and that Amazon actively shares the buy box and we can do a few things that will discuss to determine if they are going
(1:34:01) to share the buy box so we'll look at the data tab we look at offers I'll sort by Prime historical offers and in this case we have some used items so I'm going to remove the used items because we're not comparing against used right and so we can see that there are multiple different Amazon sellers on this listing um there's Amazon of course we would kind of want to disregard their stock counts because we can't always go based off of that but we can get data from some of the other Amazon sellers that are on here so we can see that for this
(1:34:30) guy here it looks like he had originally stocked six he had likely these either went through a transfer or more than likely because it's um the so far uh far spaced apart it is a very high likelihood that he had sold those units from October 20th to October 29th and then he restocked a bit and then he's been selling a few units uh it looks like with this seller here they only stocked one unit and it's very common that if you only stock one unit that you probably will not be winning the buy box if somebody else has multiple units just
(1:35:02) because your items are not really that close to the customer because we can see that once this guy stocked more units then he went out of stock and that's actually relatively common to see we see that all the time with our listings if we're down to like say one unit and we're always in the buy box um but we normally have 20 30 40 50 plus units we can see that even though we're price competitive our sales just basically go go down to nothing and then as soon as we stock more units we start making sales again because our our units are
(1:35:32) more likely closer to more customers and that shipping speed does determine if we're going to be winning the buy box so it's very common that if you only have one unit in stock that you're probably not going to always expect to make sales relatively quickly so yeah like it looks like this guy has been selling them relatively consistently it looks like what when this person uh stocked some units they did sell them relatively consistently like it looked like they sold those three units out within a couple days um this seller here it's hard to
(1:36:01) determine what they're doing because it looks like they do randomly stock some more units here and there but then they kind of go out of stock right away so I may not factor that into my C my personal calculations just because it's hard to tell what's going on with them it looks like this guy once he stocked two units he sold out relatively quickly and then if we want to kind of confirm our data as well we can come down to the review section and we can see how many reviews are actually happening with this particular variation so I come all the
(1:36:28) way down to the bottom of the Canada section so we see that there's a section for Canada and we see that there's a section for other countries we only want to look at the reviews for Canada specifically so I click see more reviews and then we should have an option to just look at reviews for this variation so yeah we're just looking at reviews for this variation right now so defaulted to this variation and then I want to sort by most recent they changed the this review section here recently so I'm not too familiar with this let me see if I can
(1:36:58) sort this still they're always changing stuff on us we used to sort this by most recent I need to sign in to filter reviews one sec I'm just going to bring this over here to sign in be just a second here okay cool I'm signed into an account so now I can filter so I will click all formats I'll filter to just the variation that we're looking at so by default when we click this it'll just show you the one variation that you're looking at and then instead of sorting by top reviews I'll click sort by most recent then you can get an idea of how
(1:37:40) many reviews this item is getting and in general uh generally speaking an item will get about a 1% review rate so that means that for every 100 units that an item sells typically you would expect to get about one review that's kind of like a Roose a loose Rule and there's obviously exceptions to the rule like if you see a product with just one review that may be a fluke but generally speaking if you see an item that has consistent reviews like one or two every single month you can get a really good indication of how
(1:38:09) many units that item is actually selling so we can see that this has a review in November 2023 another one November October October October October September August so it is very likely that this item is probably selling you know probably between like 100 to like maybe like 4 to 500 units per month total we don't know for sure until we have sales data but I'd say on the low end it's probably selling at least 100 units per month probably more so I'll come back to this guy and we'll do some further analysis so now I just want to make sure
(1:38:42) that Amazon is actively sharing the buy box so you can do that by looking at the data Tab and looking at buybox uh buybox statistics that's a quick and simple way to do it and you can look at any individual range on how much percentage individual sellers are getting to buy box so we can see over the last 30 days Amazon had the buy box 40% of time this person had 32% of time so on and so forth over the last 90 it changes over the last 180 it changes Etc or you can simply run your mouse over a section and you can see who's in the buy block at
(1:39:14) any given time so it does look like as long as you are price competitive with Amazon Amazon does appear to actively sell uh share the buy box and it does appear that they do actively sell this item at a higher price than the active buy box is currently so for this particular item assuming I had the capital and assuming it made sense for me profit wise um if you have lower Capital you may not want to focus this un because it is more expensive but say you had the capital I'd probably send in a small test buy um this is kind of more
(1:39:43) limited because it's probably on sale but if you had the capital I'd say you know you'd probably be relatively safe sending in 6 to 12 units just because of how stable the price is and assuming that this does profit you $24 which it's supposed to we have a healthy margin to to go down in price before we break even our break even price should be $155 based on the previous lead that I shared earlier this month so we have a lot of room to to drop to break even uh I do see that this item does sell quite consistently I
(1:40:14) would be relatively confident that it would sell assuming we're price competitive and if we if the price does start to dip or we not making as many sales as we expected we're able to drop this price you know up to $30 before we break even so in that in my opinion that is an item that could uh bring in some decent profits for us so if the buy box depends in essence the demand and the need of the demographics you're in I'm just complicating things aren't I no you can't really determine in essence how many you should buy like did I just
(1:40:53) like completely screw this up or what so like are you talking about like what I mentioned about like only having one unit in stock and not selling it well no just you said that the buy box depends on potentially where your units sell or where they're needed is that correct or no so the way Amazon systems work is when you send your items to a fulfillment center their algorithms automatically pick up where they want those items to go based on where their previous highest customer demand is and where their estimated highest customer
(1:41:25) demand is going to be right so but they also have um things in their algorithm we don't know exactly how they work because obviously they don't share it with people um but they obviously want units dispersed throughout the country so like yeah maybe they sell more of these products to people that are Ontario cubec but maybe occasionally somebody in Saskatchewan or Alberta buys this so they probably still want to allocate a couple units to like Alberta or sukatan where we don't have we don't have um fulfillment centers here but
(1:41:49) probably like Alberta Manitoba Etc so by default um if you just have more units available your units are going to be more evenly dispersed throughout the country and chances are more of your units are probably going to be concentrated in the areas that are more close to customers that are going to be buying them in higher volume so you're just going to be more likely to get the buy box and make sales because your items are closer to the customer they are they're going to have a faster delivery date for that customer so
(1:42:15) Amazon automatically puts you in the buy box because everything else is equal and understood so when we come across the FC transfers that we always get upset about there's a reason for it there's more likelihood that it's wanted in that area more likely that you'll get the buy box then for sure and like when we see examples like this um one of some of these sellers it looks like they stock one unit uh consistently like it is possible that they have a buying quantity quantity limit on their inventory but it's also very possible
(1:42:47) that um they only have one unit in stock or two units in stock and they're just just not selling because maybe their units are placed in Alberta and most people are buying these are in Ontario right cuz some of their units got allocated to Alberta whereas if we send in 6 12 units chances are most of our units were probably get sent to the higher densely populated places that people are buying these like Ontario Quebec and then maybe one or two of our units will go somewhere like Alberta just in case somebody buys it
(1:43:14) there but yeah when we look at this buy box here um say this item had a buy box and it wasn't suppressed if I looked at this buy box and um I would probably see a different seller in this buy box than if you looked at it yourself based on your location unless we were very close to one another because obviously Amazon does favor price and price is a very important factor but I find in Canada especially they do tend to favor um delivery times a lot more so any questions so far this wasn't again a super good example because
(1:43:50) Amazon's on this listing but I'm hoping I'm going to pull up one that Amazon is not on we're kind of just doing this live okay cool let's look at this next guy then so with this guy uh this might be a good example we will see uh but when we look at this one here this does have a a really decent sales rank in for some reason it's in grocery and gbet it should be in it should be in toys but regardless it does have a decent sales rank in grocery category but when we first look at this item it doesn't look that that intriguing like it doesn't
(1:44:25) look like we have tons of sales drops happening like when we looked at the last product right so you may be inclined to say that this item maybe doesn't sell a whole lot we can see on the statistics down here on keepa they estimate that it sells 12 per month and this is a relatively new item so that's also a good indication uh but let's STI a little bit deeper on this guy so we can see that there's currently one active seller on this listing let's see if we can find Historical so yeah when we look at historical sales this kind of does tell
(1:44:58) us a bit of a wider picture so we do have one active seller on this listing that looks like they have sold a couple units in the last little bit uh but previously this seller that was on this listing they sold quite a few more units so they originally stocked their units starting October 22nd and then they were basically sold out by uh November 12th November 14th so from the October 22nd they were at 48 units to November 14th they were at three units so they sold 45 units in that period and how long of a period is that that's October 22nd to
(1:45:31) November 14th that is 7 14 21 about 20 23 24 days so they sold about 45 units in say 20 24 days so if we go 45 divided by 24 45 units sold in 24 days they were selling on average 1.875 units per day so in theory if everything else is equal they should be able to sell about 56 units of this item per month assuming that the demand stays the same uh and people are demanding at the price that you're selling it at so for this particular item I would look at this and I'd say okay cool um it does look like it was selling um it was
(1:46:20) the price did fluctuate quite a bit um we did see some sales happening at like $37 32 price increase Etc but it's not unreasonable to say that this item will sell at $39 um we do have a healthy Break Even point we can drop this by $10 before we break even if we're able to Source this for 1748 so even if I sell this at say $35 I'm still making a decent profit that's not amazing but it's still relatively good uh I have one competitive seller chances are I'll probably come on this listing and I'll want to match his price so I'll probably
(1:46:53) be matching that price and from what my initial analysis was is I can probably sell this listing in total probably about 56 units per month so let's just say we be a little bit more conservative just in case say we estimate that this is probably going to sell about 40 units per month there's one other active seller on this listing if I have the capital that I can support it um and I'm confident with the data that I see I would say okay cool maybe I want to buy 12 to 24 of this because I'll be about a one month's worth of inventory send it
(1:47:23) in see how it does so is this where looking solely for keepa charts that are consistently up and down up and down so on and so forth you have to dig further into these other opportunities that could potentially you just sell a couple of month and make if that's what you're uh what qualifies for what you want for Roi whatever your um needs for a product per month so sometimes I think these things you can't just look at the up and down up and down all the time no and like I I would never I would I would never discount listings
(1:48:08) that look like this so like a a lot of sellers will look at this and they'll say oh that doesn't move I'm not going to look at it I'll continue on to the next one till they find products that look like that instap pot where it just looks like constant sales happening there's nothing wrong with having products are like that but especially in Canada you're not going to find a ton of products that look like that instapod you're going to find a lot more products that look like this um we do definitely have items in Canada that do sell decent
(1:48:33) amount of volume but they are more few and far between versus what they are in the US it is more common in Canada that you'll find a lot of listings that sell 10 20 30 40 50 units per month so it's not a ton but if you go wide in Canada you can add a lot of those as to your catalog and they can be relatively profitable for you long term they may not profit you thousands of dollars per as but maybe they profit you 50 100 200 bucks a month you start adding on 10 20 30 a 100 of those asens in total and that can add up to a nice profit at the
(1:49:06) end of the month this is honestly very very good insight and it takes the blinders off because a lot of people are myself included are constantly looking for asens that are up and down up and down right you know what and something like this would be viable if you were able to you know not discounted for sure I'm going to pull up another example for something too because in Canada it happens in the us too but um for us we have a lot of products specifically in the grocery and health and beauty categories that I call
(1:49:42) suppressed sales rank items right so they're items that have no sales rank whatsoever for whatever reason we don't know why but Amazon either glitched or they just decided that they do they no longer want to report the sales rank for that item so when we look at it it looks like a completely blank keeper chart that looks like it's not selling whatsoever and a lot of those items if you ignore them right away You're going to miss a lot of opportunity because a lot of those items still actively sell and a lot of those items sell a lot and
(1:50:09) a lot of sellers especially new sellers avoid those listings so they do tend to be profitable longer term for that reason cuz in general not always but in general it's usually the newer sellers are more prone to price tanking so I'm going to find one of those listings that has a suppressed sales rank just give me a second bo bo boom let's find this guy here suppress sales rank so this is one that was in like a leads list from like a long time ago so it's should be fine it's like almost like a year ago um and
(1:50:53) we'll see if it still sells today I'm just going to take a look at my screen here so yeah like with this assuming like with this item that we're looking at right now with this Bluey item assuming I can regularly sell this at $35 per month and say no other sellers come on this listing and I can personally sell 20 units per month eight times 20 I could potentially profit like $160 per month off this listing realistically um with the price fluctuations that we see will probably on average more so sell this item for
(1:51:25) like around $35 so it'll probably be profit about profit us about 450 per month but even at 450 times say we sell 20 units ourselves that's $90 profit per month this may not be an item that you're going to be able to replenish over and over because it was a sale but you can regularly find items like this that are available at regular retail price okay so with this guy so yeah I think this might be a good example here okay so I'm going pull this guy over okay so this is an item uh this is a prime item that is in those categories
(1:52:04) that um we regularly see suppressed sales rank listings so it's in grocery um so if you ever see an item that is in grocery or health and beauty and you see no sales rank don't discount it right away um because when we look at this item like from what we can see right now it looks like it does nothing like there's no sales rank drops no s uh no BSR so as far as we can see it doesn't sell anything right but if we dig a little bit deeper into it we look at the data tab we look at Prime include historical offers we can see that's not
(1:52:33) the case and we can see that there's more so like the consistent staircases of people um like they're kind of going down more steadily instead of just like random Cliffs that just drop out of nowhere so this is an item that is actively selling uh but if you just discount it immediately because of the sales rank you would not have known that and this does look like this sells on a semi-consistent basis it looks like um there are some FBA sellers right now it's not super profitable if we were able to Source it
(1:53:02) for 279 but it just depends on the volume that we're able to sell personally we only have one competitive seller on this listing right now so any questions comments about any of that stuff so far don't be shy um but yeah like with uh yourself Evan um like I mentioned I am recording this so if you do want to reference back to it I will get it as a unlisted video on our YouTube channel that you can reference back to at any time and then also um on our my public YouTube channel I do have a video in here somewhere um
(1:53:42) that discusses how I make these decisions on how many we should be buying for new SKS and I basically uh discussed what we just discussed right here it's uh how many items should I purchase for new SKS Amazon FBA Canada and I basically go over the process I just talked about right now and this is a process that I've been using for a long time and that we use every day in our business yeah okay it's it's um of information especially for somebody struggles to read graphs 100% and that's why like it's good to have these
(1:54:12) references where you can come back to because yes it is um if you're not familiar with all this stuff it's going to be super overwhelming but it's important that you look at this information break it down and analyze it and um start to understand it because this is the information that's going to help you um grow and obviously be a profitable long-term Amazon Seller so yeah like I know I discussed a lot right here so do you have any questions about anything I discussed at all or anybody else for that matter I probably do but they're just
(1:54:49) not not occurring to me right now well if you ever do you can always feel free to ask and I'll always answer them so yeah like that's how we basically determine how many units of an item that we're supposed to buy or that we should buy so like with this item here um I don't discount an item just because it only profits as a buck um like I said I mentioned like what Evan mentioned like what Janine mentioned we typically most the as that we Source if we're going to Source it to begin with or if we're going to restock it I want
(1:55:24) it to profit at us about $50 uh per as per month at a minimum many of them um profit us more that's kind of my minimum requirement and that's probably a lot lower than like a lot of um us Amazon sellers tell you that you should be sourcing but again I kind of adjust that for our Market because our Market has a lot less volume right and I try to be more reasonable and doing so uh I I open up a lot more opportuni I'm able to find a lot more asence and we're able to be a lot more consistently profitable so just
(1:55:54) because something Prof only profits us a buck I'm not going to discounted immediately because in my profit calculations as well if you look at the profit calculator and this is something that's like nice about having like an onscreen calculator like sell amp because if you're using like say um Amazon's revenue calculator uh you can certainly include all these things in the revenue calculator it just takes a little bit more time but it's certainly still viable or if you use like the free FBA calculator Chrome extension you can use
(1:56:20) that too but in our fees uh we automatically include inbound shipping at uh 30 cents per pound to send to fulfillment centers in Canada and we also include a prep fee of 50 cents per unit so that ensures that I cover costs like labels box space uh labor cost uh all those types of things so when I'm looking at this item I know most likely this is going to be my net profit after all my expenses this is not going to be gross profit this is going to be net and so when I look at this item say we see that there's one competitive uh
(1:56:56) Amazon Seller on this right now it looks like this probably sells about 40 units per month so if I come into this listing right now nobody else does I could probably sell about 20 so if I go if I can sell 20 units per month times 111 times 111 I can probably profit about $22 per month off this as so this will probably be one that's not super interesting to me I probably will pass on this one but if I found something that was similar to the that could profit us closer to like say 4550 then I'd probably be more
(1:57:23) interested or if we can Source this for less and make that make sense yeah I I think the the picture that's starting to emerge for me here at least in in my case between selling on eBay and uh Amazon it's is that it's almost as if um you know for someone like me who's in who's inclined to uh to to Source a product primarily um online and then of course to to resell it online that it would make the most sense to try to increase my Capital first by selling uh um items with a you know higher or lower uh buy cost but a
(1:58:10) greater return on investment per unit on eBay and then use that that uh higher Capital to purchase more units on Amazon for a lower profit per unit but a greater profit overall yes I would agree I would 100% agree and also maybe even supplementing that with some higher return items on Amazon as well right right for sure um but yeah like I would personally recommend um trying to get as much Capital as possible um because that's going to be your biggest Factor on determining how fast you're able to grow and you
(1:58:45) mentioned like you are in a smaller center but if you are able to Source stuff like you don't like to go to stores and stuff but like say if you are able to store stuff like locally on like Facebook Marketplace or Kijiji um such as like some of the things that we post about like some of the the thrift or bolo finds or inore finds like say used VCRs or CRT TVs um some of those things can be huge returns you can spend like $10 on an item and get back like a hundred plus dollars in profit um just depends on how comfortable you are with
(1:59:14) those types of things and if you're able to find them locally which you probably could um though doing stuff like that can certainly help you raise your capital a lot quicker I think probably the most convenient option for me you know given where I am and my time constraints would probably be to um spend more of my Capital higher tiet items on Amazon and other retailers and uh then just try to sell those on eBay for sure for sure but yeah like no matter no matter what you do um trying to maximize or trying to gain as
(1:59:51) much Capital as possible uh would be my primary concern it's just going to be on the only limiting factor is how quickly you're able to spend that money that you have and then get it back for um for your profit wise for your sales that you're making so yeah like obviously if you have higher Roi return Investments if you're able to Source things in here like say you look at some listing errors grab a couple of those items a couple times per month and get like a 100 bucks or 200 bucks put that into the business
(2:00:19) um and try to Source items that consistently and maybe you can buy it for $50 and sell it for a couple hundred I think that would be a great Focus for yourself they may not move as quickly but it help you um increase your Capital probably probably the best in the short term and then I'm earning additional Capital to buy um more units to sell or on Amazon do the product research for Amazon and start building that database of leads so that when I am in the position to buy more SKS and and more units of H skew for for resale on Amazon I have to a
(2:00:58) robust list and draw 100% And yeah I would never personally stop sourcing for yourself on Amazon like if that's your ultimate goal what you want to do obviously you guys may ensure that's that you have interest in it that you want to do it but yeah I would still consistently recommend a lotting time you know an hour per day or a couple hours per week or whatever you have time for to consistently source that because then that will be fruitful for you once you're able to to tap into those leads what is your opinion Amazon versus
(2:01:30) eBay they are very different marketplaces so I have different opinions of both of them what do you want to know specifically well I've found I've got a bunch of items that or a few that I've listed I have not I've been more consumed in Amazon that I have to get rid of because I had to do removal orders as I've mentioned before from Amazon um but even sourcing stuff there's a few items I found and I've looked and I'm like 80 units sold what the flip I should buy a few more I sell them on Amazon as well I'm unsure if I should order a few more and
(2:02:14) sell on eBay too like and I've gone through this sold the completed items so on and so forth and I'm like this bugger sold 87 this month if the volume supports it and it can be profitable I don't see why not but like in general they are very different marketplaces you can probably find some some things that cross over where you can be profitable on both Amazon and on eBay but in general eBay would be more so for things like are one-offs Collectibles hype items um used items a lot of used electronics um close
(2:02:49) stuff like that like there are things that sell more consistently on eBay but it's not as common as it is on Amazon okay and that's what because Amazon gener obviously generally tends to have the volume but a few different items that I sell on Amazon this one particular store but also they've had reviews and stuff um has sold certain amounts and I'm like really even if I made an to Grand these certain items I'd be fine with it but they're not Collectibles and stuff right so I'm just trying to distinguish you know the
(2:03:29) capital is there but I'm trying to distinguish whether or not I should buy a few extra and tempt them or do you know what I mean like it's a whole new a whole new thing if you actively sell them on Amazon I don't see the harm in that because if you do list them on eBay and you're unable to sell them on eBay you can still sell them on Amazon yeah that's that's a good point that's a really good point yeah so whenever isource leads I always look uh for for Amazon specifically or for eBay I always look uh toggle between the two
(2:04:11) marketplaces to see if the one product I've sourced explicitly for Amazon I also pass resale potential on eBay and vice versa and actually I find more often than not um that that is the case um but of course how many of the the units of the particular product sale per month will vary from from product to product for sure and like I'm not sure if you knew about this but there's this eBay button on keepo that you can click and it'll title search the item for you on eBay um but like for this specific item here like this is like a regular
(2:04:43) consumable item so with stuff like this like this is like kind of our bread and butter for the stuff that we sell on Amazon I sell a ton of consumable stuff ton of grocery ton of Health and Beauty because they're just very consistent they sell over and over again um they are prone some items to price tanking but not a ton they don't always they're not always the most profitable but they usually sell very high volumes that's what I personally like with something like this um specifically you're probably not going to find this selling
(2:05:10) on eBay just because it's readily available locally uh typically items like this you wouldn't see sell on eBay unless they're selling for regular market price or if they're just really hard to Source like when we had the Sriracha shortage a couple months ago you could sell that stuff readily on Amazon or on eBay but that shorter just kind of over now guess we should start selling bags of sugar if you can find them they're not that hard to find a Costco and places like Wholesale Club are consistently selling them it's just the
(2:05:41) fact that they're too damn heavy but yeah like something like that like Roger sugar for example that's probably a prime item that probably does sell for premium right now on Amazon just because they are technically harder to find um and if you follow markets like that you can obviously make some money off that but yeah like this one looks like has no FBA sellers on it right now you can probably find some items that you can separate sugar packs for most definitely those are probably going to be um more viable longer term just
(2:06:15) because they are harder to do that would certainly probably be iable uh let's look at this guy so looks like this is an item that we had sourced previously but yeah if you're able to find this item a 4kg bag still for $5.99 it is probably relatively profitable and this will probably stay profitable on Amazon for quite some time even when they are more readily available but the regular market price might be closer to 25 26 bucks which may not be profitable but yeah it looks like this item sells quite consist consistently
(2:06:49) quite well so if you are able to Source it that's probably something that would be viable for you in the short term at least depending on what price you can get it for I suppose it looks like it normally sells for about 27 bucks so yeah it's not super profitable let's see if we can find it anywhere one second Rogers sugar for kg Canada Wholesale Club depos it for $5.
(2:07:20) 99 if you're close to a Costco Business Center they may have it for cheaper probably get at Costco in store for cheaper uh let's see if I can just find a postal code that has a business center here canadi Tire work for me huh not available but chances are you can probably find this in store at a Costco Business Center or maybe even a Costco location for probably the same price if not a little bit cheaper than a Wholesale Club so you can probably Source it for like say $4.
(2:08:15) 99 or so and that might be that might be a viable item is there any way to do a more definitive Google search of of stuff and just in your like in your video you put a certain whatever get rid of this not and the other thing like so you don't get us and then you put Canada um I'm just wondering because I found an item today I came across it by chance and when I Googled it it did not show up anywhere other than a few different stores but I happened to be in one today and I walked by it and I went are you flipping kidding me I was going
(2:08:58) to have to drive to the city to get this and grabbed a bunch so there's going to be a a large subset of stores like especially like Costco and some other stores where they're just their stock isn't readily available online so when you are able to find those items in store those will probably be items that will be more viable for you long term just because they have that additional barrier right um if you're searching Costco specifically like there's websites I've talked about previously like Coco West or coco East you can use
(2:09:27) they're not perfect because again they do miss some things and not every Costco store has the exact same stuff but it can give you a good base um but yeah like there's always going to be stores that you're going to miss um for me personally if I'm searching for something I typically look at the first page or two of Google I try to ensure it doesn't have as much as as little fluff in the title as possible and sometimes like we'll search like 4 kgs sometimes I'll take out the 4 kgs and just try to find it elsewhere because maybe they
(2:09:54) have the the imperial system um or whatever us system that they use in their title versus the the metric system so sometimes that could be viable as well but I personally don't like to spend a lot of time on any individual product so I typically just quickly look through the first page or two and then I carry on to the next one but yeah like if you are able to find those items that are in store that you can't find online chances are those will probably be more viable for you for a longer term period let's try 4,000
(2:10:34) gr yeah I don't get anything off of that either but yeah like say if you're title searching something off of uh Amazon this has like a bunch of granulated fine baking sugar Etc I would search this and then I would remove everything else because if you're trying to get very specific with your keywords you're probably going to miss some results in your searches not always but some websites don't don't um have super great SEO versus other ones and some websites you just can't find on Google at all like brick creation for
(2:11:11) example so yeah um any questions comments concerns I did have a question about what is this eBay shipping what do you mean well on the money group there was something about eBay shipping or choose to do eBay shipping instead of um like how they how they currently have heavily discounted shipping is that is that the one I believe that was it because I switched a couple of things to the eBay shipping but I didn't quite what is the difference in why or is it just a temporary thing it's just from what I can see it's just a temporary
(2:12:07) thing like they currently are offering discounted rates through Canada Post and you just have to enable it on your eBay account um so then your buyer obviously gets um opportunity to get Discounter rates specifically sing to the US in the case of eBay um Jordan do you find in general that uh customers are more willing to pay uh for shipping for um you know items like uh television and electronics or bulkier items than for items that say uh that are more lightweight such as um t-shirts and um smaller beauty products and the reason I
(2:12:52) asked is that it's been my experience um with selling on eBay and I've sold on eBay for a while albeit at uh relatively low volume that um whenever I use calculated uh shipping or select calculated uh shipping from my shipping templates as opposed to say a flat rate which would be based on um Rate rates that I Garner from uh a service like St Express that the majority of um the emails I receive or messages I receive from customers um will say that they'd like to buy the items um but when calculated shipping uh applies to them
(2:13:32) um they what they ask me for is a discount because the shipping is too high for sure and we live in a world where Amazon has definitely change that for everybody right because everybody's used to buying things on Amazon and getting free 2-day shipping so with eBay I don't think it's as taboo to have shipping uh on there or calculated shipping I think the regular eBay customer is still more so used to that more prone to that um but yeah like if you are able to add on shipping in and factoring into your cost if you are able
(2:14:04) to do that and get like a flat rate shipping cost um you are probably going to sell that item through more even like so like for example if you have an item that's $25 and your shipping is 10 you're probably going to sell that item more if you price it for $35 versus having $25 charge and $10 shipping it's just kind of how like the lizard human brain works they think that they're getting a better deal because they don't have to pay for shipping but in general in my experience um I don't find that I'm unable to sell items just because I
(2:14:37) charge calculating shipping like I do sell a lot of bulkier items like you mentioned like Electronics VCRs zv players CRT TVs I've sold um like the giant 12T SC skeletons from uh Home Depot on eBay and I charge shipping for that and it's pretty astronomical and I don't find that it really impacts my sales I probably could sell them a little bit quicker if I was able to incorporate that in my price but I just don't think it's super viable to do uh in Canada especially like for myself I don't have stallion or Chit Chats or
(2:15:08) anything close to me that can offer me better shipping rates yeah I mean I think I uh I'm about an hour hours away from uh styling Express drop in ghost station so I'm I'm hesitant to even offer the flat rate shipping for unless of course the the item is uh at such a high uh ticket price that when you factor in the cost of transportation and the the flat rate of shipping it still offer me to um to charge the flat rate right because it's for something like a you know a small toy or a t-shirt it's just a waste of
(2:15:44) money for me to drive from where I am to Hamilton and which is about hours drive right for sure and like um for me for eBay that's kind of why like I have the I I don't do a ton on eBay like we do a decent amount like we sell like multiple thousands of dollars per month on eBay but like it's not like a big p portion of her business um I more so do it because like I enjoy it as like a profitable Hobby and like going treasure hunting and stuff but in general for me for items if I even want to consider selling them on eBay they are typically
(2:16:14) much higher profit like usually if an item doesn't even profit me like 20 bucks I probably won't even consider selling on eBay just because the additional time it takes um but yeah like that's always a factor to include is your shipping costs and how much your General market is going to be like if you have us sellers that are all selling the same t-shirt that you are and they're offering it for 10 bucks plus free shipping and you're you're charging 10 bucks plus shipping you're going to be less prone to sell it uh that's just
(2:16:42) the nature of the beast but this is something that I discussed um in the last call that we have that I don't believe you a part of I'm going to share this picture in the general chat I've been talking to a service I I want to ensure I vet it properly before I introduce it to anybody I obviously want to make sure it's legit but there's a service that offers basically flat rate shipping via UPS um it's not amazing rates but it gives you an idea of how you can get flat rate shipping based on the weight and this would be available anywhere in
(2:17:13) Canada so this may be an option if I'm able to vet it properly and get it in the server uh we might have some better options for eBay and at least with this you'll know exactly what you're going to pay um depending on the weight class I just shared in the general chat there we ALS okay so the the service then will be the the rates will be based not on the dimensions of the package but Solly on the weight is that what you're saying correct they have uh specific weight or specific Dimension constraint let me just see what it says here the
(2:17:45) only constraint that they have is that that you have a max weight of 150 lb per shipment and the Box can no be no longer than 108 in long so 274 CM that's the only constraint that they have for Dimensions okay that makes sense as a business model because they're they're using the the dimensions of the box as a parameter for for um a weight ratio right and we also do have options like through Canada Post if you ever stop by a Canada Post we they do have those flat shipping boxes um if you do have items that are able to fit in there and that
(2:18:21) may be a little bit bulkier um those could always be viable options as well uh I think they they can do up to 5 kgs and they have different sizes and they have a set amount per size so some of those would certainly be viable for some items assuming that they're profitable um and probably more so on the higher end of that weight Spectrum okay um I had a question specifically about the um the server so so um generally speaking under the uh the channels drops uh and reminders I'm just scrolling through them here and
(2:18:58) uh uh important and the restock monitors and of course the the channels uh dedicated to eBay itself the items that are listed in there generally for resale um on eBay broadly a lot of them yes just because like that's a lot of the the leads or hype drops or limited drops that we have they are more so focused towards eBay um just because like Collectibles and limited drops and stuff they're just not a huge Market on Amazon but yes a lot of those are focused for eBay or locally for sure okay fig has mentioned sure yeah
(2:19:37) the the restock monitors themselves not necessarily for eBay because the restock monitors actually find um more helpful um for OA sellers especially if you come across an item that um is reg regly sold out you can just set a restock monitor anybody can do one you just have to request it through a support channel uh we can set a restock monitor for you and then it just notifies us when it actually restocks so a lot of that stuff in the restock channels itself uh some of it is for eBay but a lot of it is also viable to sell on Amazon as well
(2:20:05) you just have to keep in mind that obviously the restock monitors they're public they don't just uh inform you specifically so you just have to Ure that you're okay with that of course okay is and the same is uh true in the case of the scraper monitors or are they slightly different so yeah like the restock monitors um we have a a big list there there's like some like 50 odd stores so that means that we can um actively monitor for restock for all those sites and our restock monitors um we go through a developer that we have
(2:20:36) in the server uh very well tuned and pretty much all the items we get notified within a few seconds of them being restocked they are very solid monitors uh the scraper monitors what those do is those actively uh scrape websites for specific keywords or for sales so if you look at any one of those scraper monitors and look at the pinned channels so at the top of the screen there's a little pin you can look at the Pinn channels and it'll tell you in each individual Channel um what key words we're looking for so like for example if
(2:21:09) you look at like the Amazon CA new channel you look at the pin messages the keywords that we have monitoring for that are Amazon exclus Ive Blaster box discount five night at Freddy Lego bundle limited edition Pokemon pre-order so those ones they're just monitoring those websites for new items based on those keywords we also have some websites where it just uh it informs us for every every item that's stocked so specifically like Shopify websites like Taylor Swift website it informs that channel whenever a new product is listed
(2:21:39) on that website uh regardless of what it is so we can do keywords or we can do all products okay yeah so like some of those as well like if you look at um Costco for example uh one of the one of the keywords for Costco uh is off the reason why we specifically chose off is because we found that that is the best keyword to find discounts on Costco so typically if you look at those items uh those are typically items that are actually on sale and so it's just basically picking up new items that are on sale on Costco
(2:22:26) and then yeah um also I'm not sure if you're aware because again we do have a ton in This Server um but you mentioned you are Amazon Seller specifically there Evan um and you have done some storefront stocking uh we do have a bot in the server that is our own inhouse spot called seller watch uh you can utilize that if you do find some storefronts that have been viable for yourself to Source uh so basically what it is is it opens up your own individual private thread and then you're able to um add in your keepa API key which it
(2:22:57) kind of walks through in the steps on how it works on how to do that it sounds a lot more complicated than it is um and then you're able to add uh seller storefronts into your personal thread uh right now you can add about 14 to 20 different storefronts uh without having issues and what it does is it actively monitors those storefronts for you and then it pings that channel when it detects that that storefront stocks new products so like say if you find a storefront that's been very viable to for yourself you it's kind of clear that
(2:23:26) they're OA sellers uh what that bot will do is it'll tell you whenever they stock new products because chances are they are they are vetting those products already themselves and you can just look through there you know every day every couple days and you can probably find a good handful of new products to Source yourself okay another technique i' had been using although it's more um more manual is to uh uh to access shoer Dart and their online storefronts and to start first with the clearance section and scan through the items there but
(2:24:01) then once you do guess what you could call a baseline scan is return to those online store for you know every few days or a week or and then just focus specifically that you haven't scanned 100% definitely and if you don't know about the website one website I'd recommend that you check out is a website called stock track.
(2:24:23) car are you familiar with that website uh yeah I did see it in um I think one of the videos I had watched yeah so like that one specifically for like that method that you just mentioned um they track price drops on a wide variety of websites every single day so then you can just see like the new price drops for today or just for yesterday so like they have Walmart they have Shoppers Etc and so you can look at the right hand side where it says says I I'm on my I'm on my screen right now if you can still see it it uh sorts it by how much percentage is the discount and
(2:24:54) these are just items that were priced dropped today so this is a good way to to uh to source that as well then you don't um you're then you're probably limiting the amount of products that you look through multiple times right yeah so is that a is that a subscription based website Jordan or is it free completely free you only have to sign up for an account great okay so that'll that'll cut down sourcing time quite a bit then yeah because then yeah then you you rarely ever have to worry about look at the same product
(2:25:27) twice yeah okay that's great because I was I was getting kind of tired of manually scanning like 46 variations of lipstick so for sure and so yeah this will probably help you because you can look at today yesterday weekly Etc and then you can sort it by total price drop um like the amount or the total discount Etc and yeah like I find like this um if you spend some time with this website it can be super handy and it tells you right away if um Shoppers has stock online as well or other websites excellent okay yeah so that and
(2:26:00) that covers um like all major retailers like Sho Walmart Sephora others those places not everyone it's just ones that this person that does this website has access to their API and like it's developing it over time so we see over here has Walmart can tires Staples Best Buy Source Shoppers Home Depot Ona Princess Auto Toys R Us the ones at the bottom sport check atmosphere lows those are ones I believe that they are working on but they don't currently have access to but like a lot a lot of the big Heavy Hitters okay so yeah more than likely
(2:26:29) they'll probably just expand their catalog over time then yeah like this is a website um when they first started quite a few years ago like they just had Walmart and they've expanded quite quite well it just depends I believe on what uh retailers offer access to their API that's great to know yeah yeah it's a super it's a super nice resource I tell a lot of people about this and I think a lot of people sleep on this website way too much do you find in in your experience like that this particular website stock
(2:26:57) track is um good for both um finding leads for resale and on uh Amazon and eBay or more so one than the other both a lot of the leads if I I I don't indicate that they're coming from a specific channel in or server like from one of Le providers chances are relatively High I probably found it in here yeah but yeah this is a super Solid Source and um I don't remember exactly the time we used to have it um down pat um because it's I believe it only refreshes once per day as far as I'm aware or used to I want to say before
(2:27:36) was at like 5 or six o'cl uh Central Standard time so if you get it down pat and you want to Source like specifically rate when it's indicates what um what the price drops are you probably want to uh sort your time out that way um I'm not sure if that's still the case but yeah like we used to just actively come on here at like whatever it was 5 six o'clock local time and that's when we start sourcing because that's when we see all the deals come in okay that's good to know yeah cool so yeah um right away we'll
(2:28:08) probably be wrapping up shortly here I have to have a meeting with some of my vas here in about a half hour but I still have some time so does anybody have any additional questions or want to know anything else or just talk about anything yeah I'm sure I'll have more questions I just I need to to let the session ruminate for sure for sure I tend to talk about a lot and go on some tangents so I know it can be a lot to take in at once uh BTC do you go by Kevin or do you go by Virgil I don't believe you've ever actually spoken if you're
(2:28:52) here might not be present I I go by Kevin okay how's it going pretty good how are you good good I don't believe we've spoken before I believe you've attended some of the sessions but I don't believe uh we've actually spoken at all no no I'm usually just uh hanging out and listening while sing right on so uh how have you been finding uh the server so far because you've been part of it for quite a while now I see uh no no no it's been pretty good um Amazon has definitely taken off since I've joined um eBay Hit or Miss depending
(2:29:36) on um which drops I sort of score on but but Amazon has been doing well with all the tips and guides and everything you've given so that's good beautiful uh how long have you been selling on Amazon for about two years now okay cool and you you work full-time as an accountant is that correct yeah that's correct cool uh do you mind do you mind me asking uh what kind of volume you're doing on Amazon at the moment um volume not too sure how many units but um just going to surpass my first um 5K month I think this month so
(2:30:24) beautiful pretty good yeah excellent and so what have you found has um kind of helped you uh in increase your sales and knowledge overall uh the most um a lot of the tracking helps um and then basically just tips and tricks from keep a product finder sourcing and um and then basically storefronts stocking off of like the restock monitors and all that and finding some good storefronts from there Beauty have you uh utilized the solar watch bot at all um I I did I did but like it was a couple months ago and then it broke down
(2:31:14) for a bit and then so basically I just have like a spreadsheet I keep track of a profitable storefronts that I that I stock yep and so I just go off that really I don't use the I don't use the um the bot no fair enough fair enough um if you're ever interested because yeah like we did go through a a phase um where like we're just getting it developed and stuff it did definitely crash sometimes over this last little bit um it I don't think it's crashed for quite a a while um in my opinion it is a very good way
(2:31:50) to Source like I actually find a lot of stuff from doing it so I do recommend trying it out if you have the time to to to to try it out I think it's actually really cool I'm I'm very biased because it's our own bot but I think it's very viable but no that's good to hear um is the idea to just earn some extra income with Amazon to supplement your uh your job are you looking to replace your job sorry I'm just walking my dog here but um no it's um for for now yeah to gain some extra income um like I got a pretty
(2:32:32) good gig so it's it'll be tough to replace um the monthly salary well unless I'm doing like some crazy volume in the near future but um no it's basically moving into wholesale eventually but I mean always do pretty good for me right now and like I just had a kid so then it's like I don't really have to leave home kind of thing so can spend more time with with the baby and that right on yeah it's good to hear um but yeah like it's if it's ever something that you want to do it's certainly not impossible to replace your income but if
(2:33:14) if that's what you're wanted but I know a lot of people that want to do it for some side House of money or some debt payments or some trips or whatever and that's cool too oh yeah for sure but um no like yeah you know what if I if I did have more time I could definitely deal it pretty quickly I feel now that I'm getting a better hang of it but um yeah I guess time is really the most the biggest histry definitely I think that's probably with most people you have to be able to balance it with your regular work and your personal life
(2:33:50) so especially with a especially with a new kid yeah well like okay so the the main issue before was that you know I would be sourcing for hours wouldn't really find anything and then you kind of get discouraged yep if you do that for like a week and a bit or whatever but I think in the last session I think it was me or whatever and um he mentioned how yeah it took him like what two weeks or close to a month to find his first product and then it just started snowballing from there so 100% yeah so so that was pretty cool because then I
(2:34:32) just like okay well let me just plug away at this for two weeks and then see what happens and it's true it really is yeah it's not just you you don't just have a problem yeah yeah so I feel like if I if I had just been sourcing for like two weeks straight or something like that then oh man the growth been crazy definitely and yeah like with anything it's a skill that you developed and with anything with Amazon it definitely snowballs in all aspects So like um sourcing it and then also like your sales so like a lot of people like they
(2:35:07) they get discouraged because it's like oh I'm only selling you know x amount of money per month it's not growing as quickly as I would I want to and all basically what mostly experienced people tell you is just keep sourcing keep sending stuff in just keep doing it just don't worry about that just keep doing it and all a sudden you see it you just it just starts growing it starts growing it starts growing starts growing and all a sudden you're like oh Jesus like I need I need to equip my job I'm selling too much yeah so so like how long how long
(2:35:32) have you been selling so I've been selling since uh November 2018 I started doing research on a station from my insurance financial advisor position in October I took took a vacation from work it was just a station and I spent about 40 50 hours that week um finding YouTube videos listening to podcasts learning how to sell on Amazon uh and then I started with selling used books so I found a um a guy on YouTube named rezy resells I'm like oh cool like he's he's he's not charging money to tell you how to do it he seems solid books like you
(2:36:09) don't have to spend a lot of money so I was like Kate I'll take what I learned from there go to Thrift Store start buying books not realizing that um Amazon us and Amazon Canada are completely different when it comes to sales ranks so I'm buying like everything that's like a million sales rank I'm like that should be good that's what he says is going to be solid and then realizing that they're not selling so had to like slowly adjust from there and then just slowly transitioned while I was working over time to selling used
(2:36:36) video games ra OA I got into wholesale relatively quickly um I'd probably say like within my first probably like five six months I started like opening wholesale accounts and then um then basically Co popped off my sales shop astronomically and I was like I can't keep working this job like I need to quit and just see see how far I can take this it wasn't I'm like I'm not super profitable right now I think I can make enough if I need to feed myself I'll I'll be cool um I don't have a t like I don't have any dependence I have a place that I pay for
(2:37:12) like it's I don't have a ton of bills so I'm like I'm just going to risk it and I'm very happy that I did no no that's that's cool so so it took well I guess back then it was a bit different right because I I just want I was just wondering like how long did it really take to sort of just click and for it to sort of be like a muscle memory for you so it was a bit different for me because um we like as time goes on we get more and more resources as sellers regard regardless but like then like there was certainly resources for
(2:37:48) sellers like some some YouTube channels but there was like no resources for Canadians uh but I was also just selling books so I was just basically buying books based off sales rank I wasn't like trying to like dig deep into how many they were selling it's basically if I had a good sales rank it was profitable I was buying it regardless um same when I got into video games that's basically the same the same thing I was doing it wasn't until like probably like a year year and a half in where I finally realized oh you can like
(2:38:15) go into this offers tab you can actually get a better feel for what's actually selling which I find like a lot of people don't discuss at all and like a lot of Canadians specifically don't know you can do and that's when things really started clicking like things made sense before that like I found profitable ra products like relatively quickly I was just scanning [ __ ] in my fridge um but when it really started clicking and growing is probably like a year in when I was like okay like this makes more sense I I can make more viable decisions
(2:38:43) I'm not just buying blindly no and and that was one of the big things I took from this session was okay so you know how you showed that Bluey item and it was like if you just look at the keeper graph um it's fairly new product you're not really sure if it does any kind of volume yep but then yeah looking at the data Tab and then seeing okay there was that one seller that was selling like 20 in a month so it's like well if I just looked at the keep a graph it I would have totally disqualified that product but then if I
(2:39:24) look in the data tab it's it's actually pretty viable yeah 100% And yeah like I've I've know about this for like quite a long time like for some reason I'm not sure like a lot of people don't like I've talked to very experienced Amazon sellers that had no idea about the data tab I'm like oh Jesus like how how have you guys been doing this um but but like realistically like it's only for buying your initial products once you actually have your own sales data like that's that's real data and you know how much
(2:39:53) you actually are going to sell and you can make real decisions off of that this is just to make your first initial guesstimates um but yeah like it just always baffled me when people didn't know that were very experienced about how to do that and I'm like well how were you making decisions before like I don't know we just looked at an item that it looked like it was solid so I bought six or 12 and just seeing how it did so like doing this it just helps you limit your risk more right got it so it's it's really
(2:40:25) about managing how well it sells once it's in there keeping track of it and then using that real data to make your decisions moving forward yeah because if we send an item in like say I don't know we bought 20 of this and we sent it in and we sold all 20 of those within a twoe period we can then actually ccate how many we can realistically sell assuming the seller count doesn't change so then it's like okay cool if we have the same sellers on here we sold 20 in two weeks then we can easily calculate okay we're going to sell uh 40 in 30
(2:40:59) days and we typically want to work up to stocking in 30 days worth of inventory so cool we're going to buy 30 we're going to send them in and we can probably continuously do that assuming we can still source that product for that price got it okay no no no yeah that was my biggest takeway from the session so and um so what percentage of your catalog would you say you sort of find based on that similar sort of keep graph I would say probably majority of my catalog looks similar to stuff like this or is completely suppressed I'd
(2:41:37) probably say like probably like 70 80% um we do have some items that um I one item comes comes to mind that is a suppressed item I've been selling it forever it's one of like my first R items I found um I'm still selling it today um I'm now the only person that is able to sell it um other people they can't get ungated for it just some things that worked out well um and it's a completely suppressed sales gra or sales rank chart if you look at it you would completely disregard it you would have no idea how much it sells unless
(2:42:11) you dug into the data tab um we have other items that definitely sell hundreds of units per month that look like they sell 100 units per month but most of our graphs look just something like this look looks like he got disconnected yeah cool so yeah I'll be wrapping up right away here uh Evan Teresa Teresa you've been quiet today anything else you wanted to discuss before you wrap up at all uh no thanks Jordan it's it's been very informative and uh I look forward to additional sessions perfect Teresa how about yourself I'm
(2:42:49) good I just like Poli and whatever I can thank you perfect yeah like I hope everybody learned something from from this today like that's the whole point of doing this um yeah and I hope you found some value in it but yeah we typically do sessions like this um I try at a minimum once a month um depending on schedule like right now it's Q4 it's kind of crazy so um that's probably like what we're going to meet um but I typically would like to try to do it like once every couple weeks um or if not once a week that would be ideally
(2:43:21) what we get to it just depending on schedule and what we can all sort out great thanks again Jordan yeah for sure and I appreciate everybody attending so yeah I will wrap it up um as I mentioned I did get the session recorded assuming nothing screws up and then I will probably get it uploaded tonight and then I will share it with everybody uh and you'll be able to review it however you need so yeah I hope you both have yourselves a good night and a good rest of your week you too Jordan thanks take care thank you bye bye bye
(2:44:05) bye