Increase or Decrease, That Is The Question: Pricing Strategies For Amazon Sellers with Paulina Masson

Thank you so much for choosing to listen to episode 264 – Global From Asia. We got some Asia background happening right now. I just like to add some of the real life feel. The interview will be nice and quiet don’t worry. We have Paulina Masson talking about pricing strategies for sellers specifically in the Amazon world.

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√ Cross Border Summit China

It’s been a fascinating conversation and thanks Paulina for sharing your insights and that extra little bonus for our sellers here and thank you again!

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Episode 264 of the Global From Asia podcast taking a walk in Bangkok and we’ll be talking about pricing. Welcome to the Global From Asia podcast where the daunting process of running an international business is broken down into straight-up actionable advice. And now, your host, Michael Michelini.

[00:00:27] Thank you so much for choosing to listen to episode 264 Global From Asia. We got some Asia background happening right now.  I don’t know, just like to add some of a real-life feel. Our interview will be nice and quiet. Don’t worry. It’s a good one with Paulina Masson talking about pricing strategies for sellers specifically in the Amazon world, but.

[00:00:57]Before we get into that amazing interview, just a couple of minutes. My chit chat. It’s summertime been, been a busiest summer for me, personally. There’s some updates. We’re really busy working hard on Cross Border Summit. 3 months away, getting some tickets sales. All right. Thank you everybody for taking part in supporting the show. Actually Paulina will be a speaker at, just we confirmed it after the interview so.

[00:01:26] If you like our interview with her today, you’ll be able to see her in Guangzhou in October 22nd and 23rd.  Man it’s really loud. I’ve been doing phone calls to all of them here and Bangkok is a loud place outside, at least downtown.  But what’s going on with everybody here and Alvin’s our editor. He’s also on the road.

[00:01:55] But well taking the BTS. I’m going to take you guys with me if I’m allowed gotta buy my ticket though.  Well, yeah, let’s just get in the interview and then I’ll do my blah blah blah. If you want to keep hearing this loud background noise on the train. I’ll talk about some of my own experiences.  I’ll mention in the interview too.

[00:02:13] But if you really want to hear more about my own pricing experiences, you can hop on over at the blah blah blah section after the interview. Let’s go into the show now. Will be much more quieter and calm with Paulina Masson Shopkeeper CEO/Founder talking about pricing psychology for sellers. Are you looking for Quality content for your online or e-commerce business looking for a reliable company that could make that stuff happen for you.

[00:02:43] Check out www.contentinvestments.com. It’s actually a lot of the team members behind what you’re listening to here or reading or transcribing or however, you’re consuming this content. If you are also watching our video version of this show. Whichever way you are it would be great if you’d also consider using the service behind it. contentinvestments.com was set up for requests of people that wanted to have a team to help them create more content consistently. We have monthly packages as well as just one time choices for all kinds of things from listings to writing blog posts, video editing and podcasts like this.

[00:03:23] So check it out today and would be great to have you. Bye. Bye. Thank you everybody for tuning into a Global From Asia podcast. We are doing these interviews under on the go. We have a great guest. She’s in Turkey now, and I’m in Bangkok, which makes it pretty international. Paulina Masson founder and CEO of Shopkeeper.

[00:03:45] Thank you for being here, Paulina. Hi, Mike, thanks for having me. Yes, my pleasure. We were just, we worked hard to get this to happen. That’s right. Our online teams are, are, my online team’s we’re growing and keep things rolling as smoothly as possible and excited for today’s topic and.

[00:04:11] Before we dive into the pricing strategies and psychology of pricing for Amazon or e-commerce or business in general. Do you want to maybe give us a little background about yourself today, Paulina? Sure. So, I’m one of those Amazon sellers that jumped on the bandwagon in the Gold Rush times. That’s 2014.

[00:04:32] So if you would look at Google Trends and you would put an Amazon FBA, so 2014 is when it started going really quickly up and then that’s when eBay started going down a little. Yeah. So I guess that’s what we call a gold rush and those were easy times, you know to start and launch the product so we had a lot of things that sellers don’t have today.

[00:04:53] So it was just good times to join them and that’s how I became an Amazon Seller and became slowly slowly developed my expertise and in this niche and because I am a developer by background, software developer. I just realized that I need the certain tool and then to do this unless I started automating my things a little bit for Amazon business and that’s how Shopkeeper was born there initial version of it. Eventually so many people started asking for it first my husband and my brother then the Facebook group that I was part of and we decided to hire a team and built it from scratch make it commercial product, which is very successful today. Exciting.

[00:05:33] That’s always the best way right to make something for your own, your own need. Um, your own dog food is I think what they say and then people are asking for for that as well. So so then so pricing I guess that’s that’s your your thing. Is that? Yeah. Is that so into in a gold rush days in the early days was that also something you were?

[00:05:59] Using to differentiate to seems like it’s it wasn’t is always been an important part you think. Well numbers. I’m a numbers girl, you know, so I really liked everything about the numbers and the shopkeeper app is all about the numbers. It’s a profit calculator. So I have a lot of knowledge about different fees and things that come into the pricing and because pricing strategy is so closely related, then it’s so numbers based.

[00:06:24] So I’ve always been personally curious about it and they used a lot of different strategies and split tested many things on my own seller account and then it became sort of an obsession of mine. I just started learning more and more and testing many different things and now I have a good feeling what works and what doesn’t and I’ve I’ve spoken on this topic in different conferences for Amazon sellers.

[00:06:48] So after I talk usually sellers approached me and asked me for feedback on their own strategies. Okay, that’s how I gained a lot of insight from different perspectives for different categories of products. So now I feel like I have the sense, you know, which price could work and which one wouldn’t so yeah, it’s my personal favorite topic great.

[00:07:06] Then then today will be a treat for for listeners and. so like we’ll we’ll talk about some ideas. I even have my own questions for my own use to ask you but I think is price everything in Amazon? I mean some people feel like they asked you like oh with the you know, of course, there’s factories or Chinese sellers.

[00:07:28] direct price or low price. I mean a lot of people think the lowest price should be the top results. I mean, of course there’s more to it than that, but what do you think is the importance of low price? I think price is a big driver and it’s a big decision factor for the buyer. Overall on Amazon you know, since Amazon launched, their, the motto was you know, we have the best prices and the biggest selection because of the part the best prices they attracted many of those bargain hunters that are sort of expecting the best price online to be on Amazon and because of that the prices on Amazon are.

[00:08:08] Not so much for the luxury buyer. But more for The Bargain Hunter if you look at the at a at the core of. There are more bargain hunters on Amazon. So it’s interesting that you are asking about low prices that important. Well overall. Like I said, it’s important to even the price is a factor is like the second most important on Amazon.

[00:08:28] The first is the image and then the second is the the price and that’s all the people look at first. Later, they look at the reviews, that social proof if they like the product. But the very first thing is the image and then the price together with that. So price is super super important in your strategy because even you can have the best bullet points the best something else, you know, if you don’t have good pricing strategy you may lose in that, you know, first search page of results.

[00:08:54] So it’s important, you know to really focus on it. All right. So what would you say is like a, is there terminology for like the lowest price? Premium or luxury is there some terminology that we or sellers should use more talking about our own product or looking at our competitors, is there? Yeah, actually it’s interesting that you ask. There are three different buckets of buyers.

[00:09:20] So and this is has been research has been done which I was very curious to read about. So this is not only for Amazon in general what type of buyers exist for e-commerce. So there is this type called Scrooge, like the Bargain Hunter, right. So that’s not necessarily the guy who has the least money.

[00:09:41] It’s very often the rich guy, you know, but those guys really like to get the cheapest they can get you know, if they will have all the plugins that compare the prices online and then they will just look for the big cheapest cheapest cheapest doesn’t matter anything else. So actually those guys are 24 percent online.

[00:10:01] That’s 24% of them over all that exists in all the buyers. And then there is this Luxury buyer, you know the buyer who doesn’t even think about the price when they buy it. Actually, I’m one of those and those are not necessarily the richest people either. You know, those are like just a Big Spenders who.

[00:10:19] Look if I’m thinking very long should I buy it? Should I not? It’s not the price that is tripping me up. I’m thinking will this be beneficial for me? How will I use it? You know, that’s what takes me a long time to decide but usually The Big Spenders don’t even look at the price tag. They just look if they like the benefit of the product.

[00:10:38] So there’s only a 15% of those and the rest in the middle are like Average Spenders 61% of them. So there’s this research been done. But on Amazon, it shifts a little bit more to The Bargain Hunter just because like I said Amazon positions itself as a place where you can buy the cheapest product.

[00:10:56] So not necessarily you have as many luxury buyers on Amazon either. So now when you’re putting your strategy, you usually will fall into one of these buckets whether you will Target like if you want to be the cheapest you will Target those Scrooges and you’ll fight for the for the price with the other tip guys and that’s like the toughest bucket to be and but you can still make money there and probably.

[00:11:18] The everybody’s favorite needs to be started at those luxury buyer, you know because you can put whatever price and they will still buy it if the product is good, but just like I said, there are not so many of them on Amazon. If 16 percent overall exist, probably a little bit less on Amazon overall. So in terms of profit and the volume how many sales you can make and profit you can make probably the best bucket to be in is that middle where people are not so affected by the price, but they still.

[00:11:48] are looking for good deal and good quality product. That middle is probably the best place to start with but if you see that nobody is offering the the super cheap product or nobody is offering the luxury item. Then you could go there and then you’ll have less people to share with that little profit. So it all depends on on the other competitors.

[00:12:09] What are they doing? So it’s always important when you are deciding a pricing strategy to look at all these other guys. And see what they’re doing and that’s how you would base your pricing strategy. Okay, this is good. I think some listeners know. We, we sell some, we have like a public case of coffee products we could talk about but we’re kind of in the middle too we try to follow the middle the middle strategy of quality and price.

[00:12:34] So another point we had talked about in preparing for the interviews the 95 cents 97, 99. Is that you know, what’s your in and some people just do like 5.00 some do 4.97 obviously just a few cents or even 4.99. I know that’s something interesting for for people and you must have some insights on that.

[00:13:00] I love to hear. That’s right. This is very interesting psychological effect that happens. You know, how we we see this 99,99 everywhere and like I was thinking before like what’s even the reason for it? Well why everybody’s doing 99 seems such a complex number, you know $29.99. Well, a long time ago I discovered that the answer is very simple if you compare $29.99 and $30, you know, that one is 20-something.

[00:13:24] This one’s 30 something that’s huge difference. That’s very significant. So that’s all the basic difference. But now what happens with the 99 that we became conditioned to feel that 99 is some sort of bargain. It’s some sort of good deal and unfortunately very often good bargain means lower quality item if it’s super cheap good bargain means probably lower quality.

[00:13:48] So that’s w here you can play a little bit if you are targeting those luxury buyers, you know, The Big Spenders you could round your prices to have like $45.00 instead of $44.99. And, and then they will feel like mmm something’s little bit different. Maybe not such a good bargain. Then must be a little bit luxury item, right?

[00:14:06] Yeah. This is one cent, makes the whole difference because it’s different. We are not used to seeing the round numbers like that so you can play on that a little bit and there are little bit more strategies. Do you want to hear a few more? Like these are great. This is really great. Yeah, please so, you know how this nine nine nine everywhere and so on so because of a nine we started to believe.

[00:14:28] With this part of our brain in the back here. I forgot what it’s called, but that’s the one which is driving for you when you don’t even think about it. So that nine nine nine became put it into that part of the brain that you don’t even think about it. 9 equals good deal. So now I tested them my prices and I had a lot of wiggle space.

[00:14:46] I was targeting the luxury buyer. Most people were doing 18.99 and I was doing $34 for the same item because I was targeting those big spenders. I decided hmmm they don’t care much about the price. Let me change it to 39, you know, because nine in our brain is like a better deal. Yeah, actually 39 started selling so much more, you know, that that’s number of sessions increased even though there was five dollar difference in the profit and in total.

[00:15:14] I was only making maybe $11 on that item. So $5 was significant that you know, and that would be the other bracket with the average Spenders as well. Actually, 34 sells much worse than 39 just because there is a nine in it and in the end I realized that there are other charm numbers. They call them charm numbers.

[00:15:35] Sure Walmart is doing 9.95 always with the five in there. Yeah, like all internet marketers are using seven at the end. I think seven. Yeah. 67 so those numbers 5 7 and 9 are the most common charm numbers like end numbers and if you use those in your price digits instead of using 34 36 use 35 and 37 and that will help you sell more and get more sessions just because of that.

[00:16:03] Like I said part of the brain which thinks automatically about it. So avoid those even numbers 4 6 and 8 and always just go look at your listings and switch the prices up to be 35. You know, 37 39 that will totally help your number of sessions and there’s many different tricks and things with that but this is the most interesting bit for me that if you just switch up the digits that you use you can gain a lot.

[00:16:29]Yeah. I liked it and I learned about charm number. That’s a great that’s a great one and. And you know going back to the cheaper price, you know, like you said, I think Amazon or Jeff Bezos says I think it’s three criteria to cheapest, the fastest and the best service something like this is their goal.

[00:16:47] So does that mean like, like I see some competitors coming new competitors coming out and they had they’re launching their product. They’re dropping under they’re selling at cost or even losing money and it freaks it, I think sellers there is you know, it’s scary right? You’re like do I change my price?

[00:17:06] Are you looking you know, I guess of course you got to look at your, you mention it on the interview little bit to you. You, are you looking at your competitors? I guess you’re looking at your own data. You know how much paranoid should be about like, especially new competitors coming in and and drop in the market.

[00:17:23]I know it’s scary when there’s so many like right now is about 5 million third-party sellers on Amazon, you know, there’s so many other guys in the same bucket and it gets more worse and worse and worse for this Amazon. But in reality those who are playing for the very cheap price, they’re also playing it on the quality, you know, when they go to Chinese manufacturer, they usually tell them okay, let’s not use stainless steel, let’s use this regular metal which rust right away, and then they get lower review.

[00:17:53] So it’s like lower quality goes with lower price, you know, and I think if you if you continue having very high reviews like minimum 4.5 Stars, you know, if you are there and your product is high-quality and he has three and a half stars with his like ten dollars, you know, you definitely still have an edge, you know, because like I said not so many people are affected by price.

[00:18:14]Even sometimes you would put two prices next to each other when when I’m choosing. Okay, I’m a big spender. Maybe I’m bad example, but I think in general people when they see like $10 item 12 and 18. They think I’ll buy 12, 10 is probably the low quality, you know, like they discard the lowest one just automatically so you still have space for for competition man.

[00:18:36] Okay, plus you brought up this interesting thing that you said. Do you have to look at other people on your page? You know those sellers that I mentioned that come to me after the conference after I gave a talk on the pricing and they show me their phone and they say Paulina like, what should I do?

[00:18:52] First thing I always do I look at all of their competitors on the first page and see what they’re doing. And that’s how I always recommend base on your initial pricing strategy. Don’t forget you can’t just look at like one snapshot of you know, if he’s doing 18.99. I’ll do 17 know you can’t just look at that snapshot of the day.

[00:19:11] You have to open something like Jungle Scout and look at like historical average of his price. You know, maybe it’s a problem when he’s running maybe low on inventory. Maybe you know, he has every price or all these things can affect his price. We have to look at the average historic average of the price and that’s how you base your decision.

[00:19:29] Keep in mind, some of the people could be even out of stock and not show up on your listing. I’ve heard sellers that they create this product. They launched they come to and then. Suddenly, there are other strong seller’s with 5,000 reviews. You know, they were just out of stock when they were looking at Market.

[00:19:46] So, you kno w, when you are deciding on the product Niche, you know, keep checking every two weeks, you know, what’s happening in that in that category may be seasonal maybe something so it’s very very important to always look. Plus you’ll see all the players how they are distributed who started getting the luxury guys who’s doing the bargains and who’s in the middle?

[00:20:07] And then like I discovered that my Niche that there was nobody doing the luxury buyer, you know, so I went to my Chinese manufacturer and I told them okay, let’s upgrade this item now to be stainless steel instead of as regular metal and then you know, let’s add a box in the Velvet bag and now I can charge $10 more just because it looks completely different benefits are different.

[00:20:28] So, you know always look at what exists first before you even start thinking about it. Yes, that’s really great. The frequency I think are how you know, I’m talking about paranoid people. Well, I’m sure your software also can help. Is this but some people are you checking every day every five minutes you refreshing your page? Are you you know, what is some daily workflow or how how often should we look at price?

[00:20:59]Actually, Amazon, if you look at the Amazon listings themselves, like what they run, you know Amazon Amazon listings. Actually, they change Price like every 10 minutes or something like this very very good sense. Take just have so much data to work from but us as sellers, we don’t have that much data to work from you know, it’s very hard to manually keep checking every day and repricers are not really looking at any other listings, which is most important factor in my opinion. They’re only looking at your buy box.

[00:21:28] I feel like the only guy there, you know, you can’t even use your prices. And if you do split testing of any kind split testing only works on high volume products, you know, because you don’t have enough statistical significance, if you only sell five units a week, you know, you have to have enough volume to check it.

[00:21:45] There are other things affecting split testing like seasonality or PPC demand and Supply. They’re so hard to test it and change the prices. I think once you discovered what brings you good volume. Like in the beginning you may change but later I wouldn’t recommend changing it up too much except things like coupons coupons expire, you know every 90 days so you should go back and check and enable them.

[00:22:12] There’s just one button click to re-enable all your coupons and oh and check what other competitors are doing. Maybe, you know once a week if it’s really high volume product you could check once a day but you know, if you have 10,000 items it gets hard. So I would just focus on your best sellers but changing the prices really.

[00:22:31] Risky business if the facts is one of the strong factors that affects algorithm 89 algorithm on Amazon. Yeah. So if you change it up, it takes algorithms some time to get used to it right now see on our higher volume coming and there are more CTR more and as soon as you change the price it becomes like a new test cycle for the algorithm.

[00:22:51] So you have to give it enough time to actually react, you know, and what if it reacts badly, it pushes you down, you know, so then you have to quickly go back. So it’s very very risky. So in the beginning when you’re setting a price is just decide your strategy very well, you know over a span of time check what the situation is and just play like that if it’s super super competitive market and you are really worried about the price and you are very tight on the margins fighting with the other guys.

[00:23:23] What I would recommend doing is, let’s say you are like second or third or fourth result. I would exactly copy the best seller or the Amazon Choice tag. Let’s say he’s doing $29.99 and 5% off. Well, I wouldn’t say twenty nine and ten and ten percent off. No, I wouldn’t even build one dollar. I just do $29.99 five percent of exact same match what he’s doing. Why I do that because when people are skimming now suddenly the prices are matching exactly and the price becomes a little bit irrelevant at that point.

[00:23:53] They are now choosing which one they like better, right? So now you suddenly become if you have at least five reviews that works so. You know in all their choosing by which one they like better. So it’s very often, you know, don’t make them think this guy’s One dollar cheaper, but he has less reviews.

[00:24:11] Don’t even put them there yet. No, the buyers just put exact match price and coupon exact amount and then you’ll be on a different bucket of consideration. So it’s a nice strategy to use. Sometimes we feel really really struggling. I like that. One specific question popped in my mind is, the psychology I think between the $10 right like one of our items that 19.95.

[00:24:36] I don’t know if my five is right or not, but it seems so hard or scary to go to 20.95 or 20.99, you know because you’re going from you know night $20 to $30. So do you know that’s the tricky ones, at least in my opinion. We’re considering increasing in our price. But then you’re going to go into the $20 range rather than a teen teen dollar range, you know like that feels like. What’s the profit.

[00:25:01] Margin? What’s the profit margin on that item? Like, do you know? Like yeah percentages. It’s about about $10. We’re paying, so it’d be about 12, about double, 50% margin. Yeah. Okay, 40% margin is usually the top all like the most private labels  they have 40% margin and that’s a good guideline when you’re setting your price like where to look you where your ceiling is.

[00:25:31] It’s a good guideline to think that 40% is the maximum. You can charge if you charge hundred percent margin, then it’s probably going to be out of the normal price, you know, and that gets this extra. Hmm. There is one thing though like 19.95. I wouldn’t never change the 20 or 21 because it will be already not 19, but 20 something.

[00:25:52] Yeah exactly. Decision, I don’t know, you know, like you have to go and check with your wife now at this point to spend that much money or not. Like there’s this little bit of decision struggle at that. But if you would have asked me right now if your price is $22 or 23, should I change it to more? I would say yes, because in your you have $25 free shipping threshold, right?

[00:26:19] And if you are just below it, that means that the person has to pay for shipping like five to fifty let’s say right and in that case if you’re paying 5.50, then you end up being like 27 in total and that is more than you would pay when you have free shipping $25, right? So I will totally recommend if you have any products right now that are just below the free shipping free shipping threshold.

[00:26:43] Then you can just increase the price to be just a little bit above you know, and that would definitely mm. That’s great. That’s great. That’s great. So let’s we’re talk,I I think holidays got to be Q4. We’re still got some time before fourth quarter, but I think that’s where most sellers including us make your money.

[00:27:05] So. You know, is there a there’s obviously some I could be a topic in itself a podcast course, but I think that’s when you should increase. I mean, I think generally that’s when you make your money, right? So is that when you’re increasing your price normally in fourth quarter? Or is there some thought process or psychology or you drop in price the others price and watched it is. Things like that because everybody stocks up a lot on inventory and very often sellers who have overstocked the waiting for the season to come and hope it, hope just gonna sell it when Christmas comes.

[00:27:38] But you know and there’s a lot of people who overstocked and then with Christmas season gets half into it and they see it’s not selling that much and in January, we’ll be stocked with huge storage fees. And in December of the storage fees are super super high, you know, yeah. In reality, they are dropping the prices a bit.

[00:27:57] You would think that the increasing because demand is higher but because everyone has talked so much and it’s so expensive to stock it, you know, and in December actually many sellers are dropping the price to get more velocity more sales and More Everything. I don’t know in general. I usually just leaving my prices as is because I don’t want to affect the algorithm.

[00:28:18] Like I said because once I know which price works I leave it and then all the other guys get rebooted by Amazon reefing, Frederico. I’m going strong on the same way, you know, and then it gets more sales more sales. Yeah, it’s very hard to do that but you should keep in mind your cost. So, you know, maybe your margin now you said this 50% you know, but if you’re playing with the price on some of the products you may have only ten percent margin. Keep in mind that that could be eaten up by storage costs which are so much higher in the three months of the seasonal of the Christmas.

[00:28:55] Yeah, especially in United States and Japan. There are like very very very high and I don’t know if that could eat up all of your margin, you know, you have to consider that as well, you know, and that could be the trigger when you could increase your price. So always look at many other factors as well.

[00:29:13] But yeah for some listeners are made for you. We we didn’t sell like our main product coffee pot last year. I did it made it through Christmas out selling out but it takes three months or so to restock from ship, you know manufacturing shipping at least three or four months. So it’s just dangerous.

[00:29:30] You don’t want to run out of stock. So we increased our price see I’m talking $20. Now, we jacked up to $35 and still sold out in January. It was consumed like we couldn’t slow down even we increase the $35 now it’s at 20. We couldn’t stop the sales. Like it just kept coming and January, it was gift, I feel it was gift cards, but then we ran out of stock and it was like a month out of stock.

[00:29:56] So, you know, It’s just I think also maybe seller should think about running out of stock. Right but we couldn’t even slow down sales to turn off PPC and we increase to 35 and still sold out was it was crazy in January. So but then yeah, this has been a fascinating conversation. There’s is there something I’m missing about this.

[00:30:19] I mean that we should add to towards now getting towards the end of the kind of the meat of the, the conversation is. I guess I could mention the bundling that is important to do bundling when it makes sense. Okay. So, you know how the bundling if you bundle instead of one product you connect two of them together with Scotch tape, and then you label it that becomes a bundle right?

[00:30:41] And you actually make more profit per unit when you do that, even if you lower your price by a dollar or something the reason this happens is because when you add another unit FBA fee doesn’t double up. Referral fee does double up but FBA fee just slightly increases and that’s what all your savings come from that and I’m so if you have two or three units bundled up.

[00:31:04] Your profit per unit sold, it could be much much bigger than you just selling single items. But not every item is suitable for bundling. So I would suggest start with the singles run it for like one year and then look at your Seller Central Business reports and check you know, how many orders came in and how many average units they bought and if something is over 2.1 or you know, then is a good item for bundling and I would bundle those especially for upcoming Christmas season.

[00:31:32] And things like that. Great. That’s great Paulina. Thanks for adding that and let’s talk a little bit about what you’re working on. You’ve mentioned it towards the beginning but the software shopkeeper. Can you give us some insights how it how it can help us with this pricing game? Yeah, so actually shopkeeper is a profit calculator.

[00:31:52] There are 72 different fees on Amazon, fees and charges. So usually if you when I was a seller it was so hard for me to go and pull all of these 25 different Excel reports and you download them. Then you pivot tables then. Oh, you know so much work. Yeah. Yeah. I created an App for myself to catch all of them automatically any time of the day I would log in I would know how much profit I am making.

[00:32:15] And it has this little extra neat feature, you know, how all new new people who are new sellers. They like to go to Stats and keep refreshing Seller Central, how many more I sold? How many more I sold? And they go every 5 minutes keep refreshing. The fix that is shopkeeper has a “ka-ching” sound that it makes on every new cell.

[00:32:34] So it keeps refreshing and checking for you every few minutes. You can leave it in the other Tab while you’re working in something else and it makes “ka-ching” and the tab changes to your sales. You know, if one of you have like a nine to five job and you have one screen open, you can still have a tab change and see that you’re making sales while you’re working with so.

[00:32:54] So little things like that, but in general is managing by exception type of tool where you see the problems first. So it helps you to see I’m overspending here. I’m doing this wrong. Okay, and then you go and attack those first. So that’s the key feature and you know, how. Exciting okay and then how can how can people find more about the software and and why and how to find you guys online?

[00:33:19] So if you go to shopkeeper.com, let me give you a guess a little surprised that I prepared. Okay, so normally our free trial is 14 days, right and many promotions that other apps run online. They usually give like 30 days or like 60 days free trial when they do bonuses. But today I would like to give you a special special deal.

[00:33:43] It’s going to be 180 days free trial. Six months free trial of shopkeepers. Anyone who’s listening. Especially useful to those new sellers who are just starting up because at that point you can’t really afford any tools yet. Okay to claim that go to shopkeeper.com and you’ll see a little chat bubble in the corner, you know the regular.

[00:34:04] Chat bubble like all the apps have just open it up and type in STINGRAY180, you know the fish the stingray which I like. Oh sting ray. All capital letters STINGRAY180 and that will automatically upgrade you to the six months free trial. Nice. Thank you for that. Thank you. Yeah, Christmas in July.

[00:34:28] We were in July now, it’s awesome. Actually July is the month when I’m starting to order my Christmas stock. It’s true for sellers. Yeah, it’s really is for us. Yeah, well, it’s been a fascinating conversation Paulina and thanks for sharing your insights and that extra little bonus for us sellers here and thank you again.

[00:34:49] Mike, thanks for having me again. Are you looking to make payments with making lots of payments into Thailand lately. Immigration here is very very much liking money coming into Thailand. I guess every government likes money coming in and not going out, but that’s why it’s great to have cross border payments services like goremit.hk, one of our long-term sponsors here at Global From Asia and we really appreciate them.

[00:35:17] We use them ourselves to pay our amazing team Alvin editing this and others. We simply need to get their bank account information. They do not need to create an account at go remit and they will just receive money into their bank in their local currency whether it’s in the Philippines, Vietnam, China or other parts in Asia, goremit.

[00:35:35] HK is a great source for low costs especially for smaller payments and multiple places around Asia from your Hong Kong Bank. Check them out today and tell them GFA sent you, thank you. All right. Thank you, Paulina. So for those that remember from my intro I was supposed to take the Subway or to BTS or wherever to thing is called and I didn’t have change and so what happened was.

[00:36:06] They, there was a huge line and machines broken and it’s 41 bahts and had to have coins so I didn’t have enough coins and then I jumped into a taxi, which just pick me up. I’m literally walking on my laptop connected to my microphone. As I jump in and guy doesn’t speak any English. Well, why should he doesn’t have to and I’m trying to show them on a map.

[00:36:29] You can’t read the Google Map. So he goes off a side road. I’m trying to almost a straight goes off a side road and then then stop somewhere and finds this Bellboy to help us and I’m trying to record this, you know, and so he, I think Bellboy finally helps him say where I’m going in Thai and then the guy doesn’t want to drive. Their driver doesn’t want to go so he says get out get out and I’m acting like I don’t know what he’s saying just you know, trying to set up my laptop to do this recording so I just keep going and I’m waiting for another grab actually.

[00:37:09] I’m still at this roll I it’s the end of the show. You already got the good the good stuff from Paulina. So if you just want to keep listening, It’s 6180 is a license plate. They’re just so much traffic in Bangkok. I had to cancel a meeting yesterday because we both were just too far away and it would have take an hour to meet. It’s in traffic.

[00:37:30] It’s just a crazy place here this traffic 6180.  So I said I would share about, I would share about my pricing. So like I said in the interview. You know, we’ve been playing around with this Moka pot and it did really well in fourth quarter and it’s definitely a good Christmas gift. I recommend anybody listening that wants to get a good Christmas gift this moka.

[00:37:55] pot will be a good one, from Sisitano. So the price just didn’t seem to even matter. I said like in the interview we jacked up like $35 and it just kept selling same exact item we have now for $20, so we just didn’t want to sell it out. We didn’t want to sell out. Where is this car? Where is this car?

[00:38:17] Some lady come on some Mercedes.

[00:38:25] but anyway.  That’s been one and then I noticed the same thing with with other businesses, I worked in. I don’t know if anybody actually knows but one of my first startups I work with 2003 was still in New York City, it’s a mobile app, a mobile checkbook and we increase the price from 2.95 for this Nokia or Blackberry app back in j2me days.

[00:38:47] Have anybody knows what I’m talking about? We took it to the 6.95 US each download instead of like 2.95 and sales went up. And also what happened we noticed was we also noticed because it was more sales up, the marketplace was handango. Also increased the the revenues we were like one of the top-selling apps in that Marketplace.

[00:39:11] So it was it was good on both sides and sorry, I’m gonna I don’t know might, Alvin might edit this out, but I’m going to check my my grab app. Where is this guy?

[00:39:25] Should do video like literally on the side of the road in Bangkok. I guess he’s still on the way taking a corner. It’s like this is just insane here. Seriously, serious traffic in Bangkok.  But so that was another one about pricing and then back in my bar products days.  We also noticed similar, I mean Andrew my partner and the day, back in days.

[00:39:52] He also said without the 95-99 just having round numbers would work on premium products. So when the price is so expensive it does look kind of stupid like if its like 19 $1,995.95. So sometimes we just say straight up two thousand dollars and it would it would kind of work. Is this guy coming? I see him?

[00:40:14] Here’s my driver might be a little bit quieter for you guys on the next story. I’m going to get in here. Why not? I know Lorenzo likes this stuff.  He’s pulling.  Hello.

[00:40:32] Recording a podcast. Okay close the door.

[00:40:41] All right. So we’re on the way actually to see a logistics company. Met them at the Rise Conference and they they’re looking for some help with getting more factories in Thailand on online, which is pretty cool. Right pretty good company logistics company won’t say the name yet because see how this meeting goes, but.

[00:41:08] Back to pricing back to price or a nice. This is a nice car. This is great. Yeah.  But back to the bartender kit, so we will sell some expensive furniture or beer pong tables and stuff like that and we noticed when we just stopped using the 99 97-95 it would actually do better because like Paulina said in the interview.

[00:41:31] It’s um, it’s better to luxury or high priced items to stop the gimmicks or the mindset because it just looks cheaper I think in my mind if I’m looking at luxury product just having around zeros and nice and clean without even a decimal place just a straight-up number without point zero zero or .95 it just looks more quality.

[00:41:54] We’re doing a k turn here major intersection. So awesome.  and.

[00:42:04] I wonder how many you guys are based in Bangkok. It’s pretty place, pretty nice place, but it’s a less some other of the other of the insights of pricing but it is true and I’ve had some people say Mike, how are you competing with Chinese sellers selling the same products and this it is scary. I’ll be honest with the Moka pot.

[00:42:25] There’s people come in and really low price. I guess they’re just trying to get traction because it doesn’t look like anybody’s making money with Amazon fees and the price and the product has to cost something right but that’s the strategy of a lot of these guys, so. It is a it is nerve-wracking and I think once you find that right sweet spot in price, you could could really leverage that for the long term.

[00:42:51] So we’re stuck at the $20 range right now Phil Phil. I know there’s recommended us to increase it. I do appreciate that. It’s just my own thinking is this little bit scared to go from 20 to 21 or 22. I guess if we’re going up, I got a $25 for this product get that free shipping for US or other other ideas 25 my sound round.

[00:43:16] Maybe go 25.0 0.01 just look kind of crazy to people. But thank you. I hope you guys enjoyed this and yeah, Paulina was an amazing amazing guests and we’re really lucky to have her come into the Cross Border Summit too. She has some suppliers in Guangzhou as well. She said that she can meet. So if you guys want to meet her and little old me and and others, that would be pretty awesome talk pricing, talk shop.

[00:43:42] Got a really good group of people. So thank you so much for sharing. And listening. I’m sharing and Paulina for sharing we will always have the transcript all this blah blah blahs also in this transcript heavy section, but we will keep on rolling and I will probably do next week show in Manila.

[00:44:03] We’ll keep these show to show right now. Thank you so much for for listening and thank you everybody for your input. Bye bye. To get more info about running an international business. Please visit our website at www.globalfromasia.com. That’s www.globalfromasia.com. Also be sure to subscribe to our iTunes feed.

[00:44:29] Thanks for tuning in.