Amazon FBA Trends in 2018 with Danny MCmillan and Will Tjernlund

Mike : Episode 214 Global From Asia.

Mike : Okay everybody 214 shows in at Global From Asia thank you so much for tuning in today and I am here in Miami Florida, my kids are bouncing in the hotel room next to me. I think Maggie is a future podcaster. Definitely. I always try to stick a little bit of fun stuff in here. I’m here for our China Business Workshop happening in the next couple of days or so be over by the time you are listening. But we’re trying to do this offline events and get together some listeners and people on the audience and engage with them. So I’m excited for this. I’m preparing for a while. Of course the real reason I’m in Florida is family and couple of years my parents and my kids are hugging for the first time. That’s probably I do business globally, internationally in Asia is that crazy stuff my kids don’t speak much English and it’s kind of freaking my parents out, it’s so hard to explain on radio show. So let’s just move forward. This week’s show we have our 2 for 1 or 2 guests together the 3 of us in the mic Will Tjernlund and Danny Mcmillan and I and we’re talking about the future of Amazon in 2018 and e-commerce internationally. With some fun a bit and inputs on that and of course we’re also here to start sharing and promoting the Cross Border Summit 2018. The third Annual here at Global From Asia this April 20th and 21st. So just like this China Business Workshop one way to support the show is our offline events I know like Toby, he’s our listener our long time listener and he wants to make it out there. I know it’s a big ask to come up in China if you’re in America and the other things. But that’s one way you can meet us, meet me, meet some of this amazing guests on the show and we’re trying to make this interactive as possible too, Miles will be there, too. He’s so excited. Well we’ve always get the show notes of what we talked about at globalfromasia.com/episode214 and without further adieu let’s jump into the show.

Mike : Alright, thank you everybody for tuning in at Global From Asia podcast. This is gonna be a very engaging one. We have 2 amazing people that both on the show separately in the past. Danny Mcmillan and Will Tjernlund. Thanks guys for coming on.

Will : Yeah thanks for having us.

Mike : Sure, it’s a pleasure. Today we’re gonna be talking about Amazon FBA Trends and this new year 2018 and of course some of our top speakers at this upcoming Cross Border Summit in April 20 and 21. And for those that don’t know you guys maybe we’ll catch you up a little bit. Starting with Danny Mcmillan you’re in London right now and you’re a seller yourself for many years and I was thinking of you also had in the music business for quite sometime and you’re also doing a podcast and content at seller’s sessions, is that about right anyone?

Danny : Yeah basically that’s it. I’m in the music industry many, many years ago. I started selling on Amazon in 2015 and the host Seller’s Session.

Mike : Cool, and then Will Tjernlund another great seller and we’ve got to known each other over the years now  and seldom on the show, too. And you’re doing consulting, right.

Will : Yeah so I’m doing a couple of different things. I started selling on Amazon full time in 2013 from there went on start Go Consulting were we help run some manufacturers and some more price on Amazon. And my kind of pet side projects that I started on last couple of months is running a brand called Bad Boy that sells like kickboxing and MMA Equipment. So I’ve been selling on Amazon recently and kind of getting back in to the group instead of just the consulting side.

Mike : Nice. So it’s gonna keep us sharpen the game. I called it the Gladiators for being a seller in the arena here. So, today’s show I think we’re gonna have you guys jumping in where you can see and answer we’re gonna go through some items, I titled it the Amazon FBA Transfer 2018. We’re still early on in February and the show is scheduled in the next couple of weeks. So, we’re getting out right away. So at first I wanna start it seems like the outfit in the room is Amazon. I always talk in my show and to my friends I remember before Amazon was even a significant percent of my business was mostly eBay and web store sales back when I was starting in 04 and 05.But now it seems like what’s that the 80% is still the majorities revenue for most international e-commerce markets. Of course, there’s some others like China or Australia and others but it seems like can it still be the main source of income for revenue of sellers.

Danny : Will gonna go first.

Will : Yeah I think so. I still see Amazon as the main focus. We even been talking to companies that I worked with. Some of these are already in target in Walmart stores and also in different breaking more stores and still Amazon is majority of their focus. Every once in a while they ask us about different countries, different other marketplaces but majority of their sales, majority of focus everyone is still on Amazon. They still see it growing, the stock keeps going crazy and so all the hype kind of keeps building on itself. It’s a big snowball rolling on the hill.

Mike : Yup, seems unstoppable.

Danny : Yeah I mean I think it’s that big the bite selling on Amazon and it’s like okay then you got come off Amazon and go down on all these different channels. Now if you look at recent data I think it was Casey Gus from Viral Launch they’ve got thousands of customers basically that worked with them. And he said he can’t think of any of the customers that he works with. Even at once doing an over 10 million a year. I’ve managed to shift that talent of revenue off an Amazon. Because a lot of people say that it gets suspended like, I bet enough of them, I’m gonna build this channel off of them and all this time, all this resources but never seen to get any way near and left with revenue is generated on Amazon. So it’s impossible but I think in this day and age I think if you’re gonna sell on Amazon you want a product that’s consumable. So you can order on a regular basis so you’re not keep paying for that first sell everytime in terms of requisition cost. Ideally it’s not on Amazon and it’s cheaper than Amazon and you’ve already built a mold around it. And I think that’s one of protective way I’m not saying it’s impossible but I think most people would say that 80% or so their revenue if not more is on Amazon and the other 20% made up across 10 or 15 platform. That’s not everyone. But I think if you some down a thousand people same questions you probably get close to that.

Will : One think to keep in mind is that if you do wanna capitalized on those other marketplaces out there that you got wanna be niche specific and marketplace specific so you might notice there’s a gap in the market for charcoal grills on Walmart.com or you might notice that there’s not enough silicone baking sheets on jet.com or wish.com is really missing more on expensive items. And so you find a very specific niche and the very specific marketplace were you can really exploit it and you can actually get a decent amount of sales as no one has gotten there yet. But for the most part, yeah I think Amazon just trying to as the majority of traffic, the most trusted niche that quick as to convert your customer into actual sales.

Mike : Yeah I think probably our listeners are agreeing, nodding their heads here. But at the same time Amazon seems to know this, too. So they don’t seem to really, they’ve been getting much, I think stricter what you say on sellers. It seems very clear they’re tightening up. I think years ago they’re really trying to get more sellers on the platform. I guess they feel like that they have enough now and it’s just gonna probably harder for a sellers getting or the owner.

Will : Yeah I just talked to 2 sellers in this last week who are both just launching their first product and both are having a little bit more trouble getting to a process, getting everything kind of set up because Amazon is making them jump through so many more hopes and so I think  Amazon realized now we have enough SKU’s. We have enough silicone baking sheets silicone glove. We have enough whatever yoga mat. It’ll be best if we have 40 over mats to choose from instead of 4,000. And so I think they’re just gonna make it stricter and stricter and I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard in the future that Amazon will gonna significantly increase the monthly fee to be a member. Were if they started charging a thousand dollars a month to be a pro-seller it will kick ton of people out of the market and majority of people who are selling quality product, quality price wouldn’t be really affected would come go along on the daily business and so some like that’s not a bearable increase but kind of like a static increase on the fees would something that I would see coming down kind of with that kind of hype line in their future.

Danny : I definitely agree with that. Those that say that compliance makes a big things as well. You know we tend to gate in the trend of having a trademark brand rich 2.0. I think there’s a much in built grounded so they are trying to retain only the top end sellers with high level quality of products if that makes sense. ‘Coz you’re saying that more and more regulations that coming in to play and squeeze this, on say the people with the smaller amount of cash flow to work with. So, mostly it moves people outside of the game but it pertains to people that obviously established themselves as a business. If you think the cold rush a few years ago people would call it. The big one even getting inspection and they run stuff straight from factory to Amazon with no care involved. So obviously a lot of that changed now and I thinkt the compliance since start really step up. And I agree with Will with the phase as well. There’s one thing I done agree with this new service which works out 42 grand a year to kick your own seller’s support rep. I mean you’ve got to be mad to take that on. So that’s the story for nowadays. So, have your own account manager but I think there’s another point to take in consideration here is with the platform to grow is you get more and more relevant through PPC and the fact that more and more people are going off to the same few positions and see that’s having not gonna fit of people to play in the game in terms of the cost per click and it’s writing in a lot of categories.

Mike : Got it. Yeah I like it though, it’s true just getting more options with paid ads and you can be more focus in specifics. So there’s maybe some positive to this.

Danny : Indeed.

Will : I think one more quick positive, too is that Amazon just forcing this other marketplaces to step their game up. And so I’ve had like 3 or 4 calls in the last couple of weeks with customer service reps and managers over at eBay. And they’re going way out of their way and make sure that they kind of roll out the red carpet for me, make my life as easy as possible, help me upload a couple of thousand SKU’s, all that kind of stuff. And, you’ve been tell that they wouldn’t probably be doing all the stuff going above and beyond if I wasn’t doing so well in Amazon and if Amazon wasn’t such a big competitor there. So there’s saying you wanna seize this pie, what can we do to attract sellers and so if you’re selling a certain volume, you still marketplace that actually made go out of their way to kind of like cut fees and do things that they normally won’t do for other people. So that’s one thing to think about when you think about other marketplaces.

Mike : Alright, thanks guys and yeah Will you’re talking about some new sellers launching products and I’ve talked other sellers and consultants and experts and it seems like with the launch it seems like everything is getting restricted and discouraged and black or gray, anyway. But I think what sellers are saying that, you just got basically there’s so many regulations and rules now. You kind of gotta break the rules or ban the rules a little bit to stick out especially with the launch when, how do you guys feeling?

Danny : Well, I mean the product launch thing has been over and over in the Facebook. Just to break few things out here, you got gray, you got black, and then you got compliance, you got TRS but is it in TOS is it gray, is it technical over. It’s breaking down, right. You can do discount codes which you can determine the discount. So, if you wanna give some 90 cent you can. There’s no law against you running Facebook ads unless you stop making false claims which some people might do. One of the things that you got to look at is that there’s a storefront URL that pay per use to help with ranking. Now that can be considered manipulation. But Amazon is left that part open. It put to it everyday. All the launch, not all but a lot of launch companies use the same method as well. Now, this launch companies is still here. So at this moment in time, there’s a lot of talking this is gray ads, this is black ad. Let me give you an example were I have many conversations for people maybe they got suspended or they got worried, this is black ad, this is gray ad, etc. So far it’s gonna break you down. If you run in ads and that would 90% like Facebook ads, there were times just saying people was send to the landing page and they’re using Amazon logo in the image that they used in best seller page and then using 5 stars. That’s against the rules. And then also putting in their false claims. Now the other thing I’m saying people would do, an Amazon sign up to this fannels is the people asking for review and at the same time they got a review kind of setup as well. So what happens is you get across pollination stories that are being told and saying a lot got suspended for this reason and then when you really start to dig then you realized that what they’re doing is, they’re doing discounts, they’re asking for reviews, they’re using the logos and stuff that they shouldn’t, not being provided outside of the program is the official Amazon logo. They’re using best seller badge when they don’t have it. They’re using 5 stars when they don’t have 5 stars. All of these things start to come into place. So where were at the moment is Amazon is always gonna be changing and update in a row. One day they might shot the loop up in terms of using simply external traffic and using storefront URL or using promo discount code with limiting to 50 or 60% off and then to introduce new features. But that extent at the moment there’s no law against Facebook ads, there’s no stipulation of law against the storefront URL because I would deprive my services to use it and there’s no limitation on whether these are group codes or singular codes over. I can tell you for sure that a lot of this suspension companies I talked to, when they talked about suspension for Facebook ads, it’s normally for more review manipulation.

Mike : Makes sense.

Will : Yeah  I think Danny’s story is kind of a story as all this time in the Amazon community as were people get suspended for some thing say they did nothing wrong. They start asking more and more questions and you kind of get to the root of the problem quickly. And so I always tell people as long as you’re not doing anything maliciously or like misleading the customer for your gain then you’re more times on that. You’re in the clear with Amazon. So as long as you don’t try to lie with your customer or try to trick them, you’re in the good. So if you try to put like a badge on your t-shirt that says no badges, your badge says a 100% cotton and t-shirts are 100% cotton. You’re not really hurting the customer, you’re not really doing anything malicious to the customer Amazon doesn’t really care, they’re probably not gonna suspend you for even though it’s against the terms of service to put badges in your photos.

Mike : Danny have any last part for this launcher?

Danny : No, I just think of what you gotta be careful of this is that there’s the truth, there’s what Amazon knows and then it’s the Facebook truth. And so, Facebook can be an eco chamber were people are hearing certain things and then they repeat what they heard like a lady wants this stuff, storefront URL and this ranking services are not working anymore. And then you wonder why, then they’ll say well I tried on this niche product I’m not naming it but this try it on a product and then they tried to get moving another product 3 months later. But what they done handy they give away (blurred) they need to give away. What was the discount codes. Did they make sure that their URL (blurred). They missed so the bits in between. Does it make sense. It’s not until you start to dig in and you go okay, will that make sense because you decide did not to do 90% off. You couldn’t distribute that many codes because you decided the 30 to save money. By saving money people didn’t find the valuable therefore it didn’t distribute enough code to do the ranking. Therefore it take you longer to rank over that period of time. So and I think well what people do is that they might have a budget in mind to give away certain amount of units. And when it doesn’t stick then they blame the ranking for not sticking even though they got there to position whatever they did on page 1. The problem is with the ranking thing, you can get somewhere there to page 1 with the right amount available using the right amount of promo etceteras. People done over and over again. But what you can guarantee is that the Amazon community of buyers (blurred) get the page 1 and it doesn’t (blurred). And so that could be done to your price, it could be done to your images, it could be people done like the product are some different variables. But I think it’s very easy to say that alright that doesn’t work, that’s against TOS. But you need to understand the 4 picture before that kind of comments can be conclusive.

Mike : Yeah this is really, you guys are great in getting into details. It’s important and I’ve supposed we still got to put up with there, right. I mean we’re out of conference the Cross Border Matchmaker in October and Will will also there. I don’t know if you remember this part but one of the sellers Jerry Gan, he’s the current owner of Amazon Tracker and he’s got one of the biggest Amazon seller companies probably around the world. He was a panel and someone asked him if it’s worth having a shopify or a shopping cart or he said no. He kind of shock the room because there was a lot of back and forth with that question. But he says he’s all in Amazon.

Will : Especially the scale he’s at. Say, out of this make up a number I have no idea how much he does in sales. But say he’s doing a hundred million dollars in sales. Well, that shop 5 stores have to do like 15, 20 million dollars in revenue for to be worth his time. And so if he lock the shopify store and hire all these people and train all this people and it does 2 million dollars on revenue in the first year. It’s almost considered a failure and it’s like well that’s just stop doing that and just focus on Amazon for here and now. So, it’s interesting depending on where you are on your business, and how your business set up. What marketplace can make sense to different people for different reasons.

Mike : True. Especially people asked me about Chinese sellers and I think maybe any seller but scale is always the most important to get as big as fast as possible. So they always kind of say Westerner or international sellers always wanted diversify and get all complicated. I think Jerry’s another, well another Chinese sellers would just say they’re focusing on revenue and the volume.

Danny : Yeah I mean I’m imaging he’s not selling everything go for 1 seller central account and that maybe they got a number of different businesses with different brands, they run to different name they don’t know. I mean it seems that, like they’re not putting all these eggs in 1 basket but if he’s one of the biggest sellers on Amazon maybe no sense that we don’t know with diversifying risk.

Mike : That is true. Maybe we’ll let listeners think if he has responsible accounts or not.

Danny : I’m not saying it should but, it’s not against the, you can apply for it as secondary account as long as it separate brand and if you do with paper work right and you do it all in the right manner there are ways of doing it. Well you’ve done it and you separate brands of your sold brand.

Will : Yeah I got different Amazon account and also I signed in, in our office between different employees, the 6 of us. And, the different companies we manage, we make time in and out of different Amazon accounts on each computer each day. And so if Amazon is really touchy about that, we were been slayed million times over.

Mike : Make sense. So we’re bringing up in China of course 1 big 1 in China’s Alibaba and I know even Will’s talked in previous podcast another station, even buying off Taobao, people want some AliExpress. I think probably top is the e-commerce comes in the world of Amazon and Alibaba when a lot of people don’t know always different parts of Alibaba but you know more than just the B2B directory. So I feel like there’s, they’re coming closer and closer on each other’s turfs. Not sure even Will in your podcast on the show, you’re talking about the dragon boat and Amazon’s doing shipping direct now from China. So I feel like this 2 guys are getting closer and closer.

Will : Oh yeah for sure and then, they’re gonna sit there and probably steal the idea from each other so Amazon for sure has seen the success of like Alipay and will be wanting to get in to that kind of market soon and vice versa. Alibaba’s gonna be seeing stuff that Amazon is doing where they got that stores where they have no checkout line or anything that Alibaba is probably opening their own version of 711. They are sitting there and it’s like they’re kind of almost working together at this point where they can see it how one  get some in one marketplace and they’re kind of have each other’s ideas one selling product at a much higher price, one company’s doing less retail price but high volume and so they kind of almost kind of work together and work separately at the same time. It’s very interesting. It’s kind of like the relationship between Lift and Uber. If you look into that and like Uber owns 20% of DD, DD owns 20% of Lift. All those companies seem like they’re competitors with their all kind of own each other and they all kind of work together, it’s kind of bizarre, they’re both kind of work make the future going in one direction. So, (blurred) see them as a competitor but like as a head to head direct competitor, I don’t know if that’s gonna be anytime soon.

Mike : Yeah that’s true I mean it’s a long waste to bridge these 2 markets. I’m not sure if Danny’s I mean, I know Will follows this a lot with Taobao and everything.

Will : I think Will’s well on top on that one. I’m not gonna much put in on that.

Mike : That’s fine. So I appreciate you guys time and it’s been already really spark our line of interests and we’re getting towards the end. I think 1 of the last main questions that we talked about is third party seller’s in the future, I think these marketplaces, they’re always kind of like push ball between the 2. They always need sellers, right. I mean some people are always afraid of it or there’s you know people think it’s just big brands only now or Amazon’s basics or.

Will : I think there’s always gonna be a room for sellers. There’s especially always gonna be room for innovative sellers ‘coz the team like innovative sellers are always kind of dare in the niche before anyone else and it’s gonna take a while for some of these big multinational corporations or even Amazon’s basics themselves to get into certain markets and so you can see kind of like innovative person could be in there right away for the new DJI Drone case and be flooding the market with bunch of different types of cases with different logos and patterns on them way before any big corporation could make all those decisions and stuffs. So there’s always gonna be a room for like the scrappy third party seller. There always gonna be around there. It’s just gonna be, you have to be more create and kind of have a better idea of sourcing from this point forward and having boots on the ground like Mike does in China is kind of a huge advantage if they’re trying to launch products and they’re gonna kind of quickly jump on trends.

Danny : Yeah I think what always happens is, as the platforms make sure as well. When we got into it there was less compliance scheme and red tape etc. But you know they see Amazon has ground and what top some of these issues that have to deal with because obviously they have to keep of bad people of the platforms as well as looking after good people. But sometimes with Amazon the way they operate as suspension policies they shoot first and ask questions later. You can get caught up in that but I think they won’t set. When they alter on these regulations they all making it better for the sellers that are already on the platform, is that make sense. So I don’t think it’s, there’s a complete shut up on the new sellers. But can you start with 500 dollars like you used to be able to 1 point, not really if you wanted to replace your income. I think what’s happening now is the platform’s got more sophisticated. You have to put a bit more money into it. But see it’s a positive as well ‘coz if you’re trying to compete on the platform you don’t have compete with this large pole in an area that you’re in. If you could reduce that pole that’s not gonna benefit you if 1 needs competition at the end of the day. But if you’re willing to jump for somebody’s hopes and complete the paperwork and play the games as slight be high level it’s not gonna benefit you long term and it’s also way forces you to do it. Makes you think about the kind of products that you do so. Because you can’t get away with the products that some people use to sell before. You need to make sure that you got high quality of products in order to survive. And that’s not a bad thing.

Mike : Alright you guys, this is great. I think I mean stay motivated if you’re listening a lot of, there’s still room for I think generally newbies. You gotta be like innovative just like any market or any business you know the earlier you get the better normally. But there’s still chances. So, don’t get too discouraged listeners. And so now let’s talk about some fun stuff, we’ve been planning this almost for quite sometime now and we’re having a Cross Border Summit, our third annual and we have both of you guys coming to share and it’s a 2 day whole day conference 20th and 21st and we work out bonus half day VIP Mastermind session in the afternoon before on the 19th that some of the speakers which you 2 and also Anthony Lee and Brian Johnson will be helping out with. So Danny do you wanna catch some people on that?

Danny : Yes so basically we got the idea from ‘coz me and Will, we got our own agency and so we got Anthony as well, and so we tend to do quite a lot of speaking work around the world. And one things we say which was quite well is that the Mastermind thing which is almost like speed day when you got multiple tables. So a lot of people want to get involved with masterminds but don’t always have the budget to pay big bucks for this very large ones that may cost you 25 grand of bits and stuff. So what we’re trying to do is we try to put knowledge in the hands of people without all the, all the fluffy if you like around it. ‘Coz basically you can go into the room, you can have multiple people to the table and you wrote type of those table. At the end of the day, people want to come and get solid information and get a questions answered. And it’s an affordable way of doing this without maybe pain for an independent mastermind. It’s like you can come into to the event and you can network into all these different things but you can also attend the half day mastermind where you can get a lot of of the information you would do on a 2 day mastermind or if you want to one on a desert island. You know some people would do in a places like Bali. So for me, it’s about getting the right information to the hands of the sellers of all different sizes so is this, no one has been excluded.

Mike : Very good. If we both here guys first time at this  Summit, some really excited to have you and I think this Mastermind were adding with you guys this year is special because but still we continue what we’re trying to do is, we don’t want to be the biggest conference like as far as quantity of people but we actually like the whole affordability as well, ability to also get to know the speakers, get to know the other attendees and really get to make some relationships with each other. So I’m excited for that anybody listening we’d love to talk to you about it. Talk to me we have it at crossbordersummit.com/2018 for 2018 with the full details and that’s it for that part. A little plug for this show and supports what we’re doing here at Global From Asia and then everybody else. So Danny how can people find you. Is your Seller Session is the best place?

Danny : Yeah they can reach me at sellersessions.com if they wanna drop me an email and ask any questions it’s danny@sellersessions.com.

Mike : Very cool. And Will what is the best place for people try to find you online.

Will : Our best place to find me is just email me my name williamtjerlund@gmail.com I’m all those social medias, too. Whether Facebook, all that stuff. So yeah reach out to me if you have any questions, if you have any questions about the Cross Border Matchmaking Summit or Shenzhen like that let me know.

Mike : Awesome. Thanks guys for coming on and sharing. It’s gonna be an exciting year 2018.

Danny : Good day. Thank you.

Will : Thanks for having us.

Mike : Thanks so much Danny and Will for coming for coming on again. Both have been amazing guest in previous episodes here at Global From Asia. You know I don’t what’s next I’ll be in America to be very honest with you. It’s a family really the reason and I don’t know let’s see what happens but it’s been difficult couple of years since the last time I was here. I think it’s been even longer. Just next time to be prank. I mean I guess why I started this Global From Asia  that’s why I moved there and never thought that’d been 10 years but still think of be here another 10 years. Some of us are gonna live there for the rest of your life like are you gonna live where you are for the rest of your life. I think it takes some courage to move outside of your hometown and your home country and I respect anybody that’s able to do that and longer. It is challenging I’m just gonna say goodbye to my parents and things like that. That’s the hardest part. I wish there was teleporting where’s gonna get that invented for faster planes or something but. Anyways, I will be with you guys next week  still be on the road in America and try to connect with some listeners and business people and promoting this Cross Border Summit coming up April 20th and 21st crossbordersummit.com/2018. And I’m gonna go take a little swim in the pool with the kids, I think destress a little bit. Thanks again for listening, thanks again for your support and telling your friends leave a reviews. Saying how much this helps you. I met actually some people that I watched the video blogs and then he wrote me some amazing feedback he says it gives him the courage to come out from China getting the courage to do business online and things like that. And that just totally makes me feel amazing. Hope that helps new guys out and I hope we can work together in the future in the business relationship. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye bye.