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Solopreneur Profitably Selling £1m+ a year on Amazon UK with Retail Arbitrage & Private Label w/ Saj Gilani [PART 2]



About the guests

Saj Gilani

Kunle Campbell

Saj started selling on Amazon in 2011 with only £300 pounds and a 37.5% APR credit card. Fast-forward four years on and he's running a seven-figure Amazon business split between private label and retail arbitrage.



This is part two of my interview with Saj Gilani. As you recall, our first UK-based expert Amazon seller to the show, Saj started selling on Amazon in 2011 with only £300 pounds and a 37.5% APR credit card. Fast-forward four years on and he’s running a seven-figure Amazon business split between private label and retail arbitrage. He has also co-founded and is managing and consulting four other Amazon accounts for split-profits. He has a podcast and blog, Anybody Can Do It, and an academy where he trains and mentors students to sell on Amazon.

In the second half of this split-podcast, Saj talks about his approach to successfully creating a private label business. We also dive into some the tools and tactics that he employs on UK Amazon. We finish with learning more about the Amazon academy that Saj is building.The insights and advice Saj shares here are grounded in business fundamentals and hard-earned experience.

Saj’s personal story of building an Amazon business from zero and constantly adapting and evolving with a positive outlook on an ever-changing landscape is both fascinating and inspiring, and not to be missed!

 

Key Points in Amazon Seller Success

 

1: Branding Approach

Creating a Brand

So there’s two mindsets, you go in either thinking I’m going to sell anything and everything as a retailer. Or you can go in thinking, ‘I want to create a brand.’ And when you create a brand, initially your earnings and success might look small, but if that converts into a successful brand, then you get tenfold the earnings that used would have made instead of the short term gains.

If that converts into your global brand or a successful brand, then you get tenfold the earnings that you would have made instead of the short term gains.

So my strategy is to go in with a brand in mind and if you are doing this then you should probably go for something which you are either passionate about or you have at least worked in that field so you have a lot of knowledge about it. Otherwise sooner or later you get tired with it and lose momentum and they hear that voice, ‘Do I really want to get outside my comfort zone?’ That’s where most of the people fail.

Making Your Product Special

If entrepreneurship is inside you, you will find ways to differentiate your product or make it a little bit special somehow. If not then you are just following the crowd and sooner or later, you’ll find yourself complaining on some of the Facebook forums saying, ’10 people are selling my same products.’ Because it’s going to happen, even with my product, and these days everything is changing all the time and you can’t always be safe inside your comfort zone. But then if you are really passionate about it then you would find ways out of it and keep making your product special.

Business Agility: Have You Have It?

I think anyone getting into this business, it’s important first of all that you identify whether you have that entrepreneurship. Because it’s there’s nothing wrong if you don’t, some people are just better suited to work a 9 to 5 job. It’s just about identifying your own strengths. But if you are suited for business, you’ll know, because once you start you won’t resist change, you won’t get discouraged when something goes wrong or when competitors put you down in some other way, you try and fight out of those situations.

Transparent ballpoint pens, they came into picture and then they suddenly completely wiped out the business industry within six months time.

And if you’re an entrepreneur, you enjoy that change and you’ll start predicting these changes. If you have gone into product niches which normally interest you some of the way, you’ll find you will start learning the trends and you’ll find yourself in a comfortable spot where you will start predicting the changes. Now again business is a risk, so you’re not going to predict everything right, but that’s how the business game is.

2: Amazon Tools and Tactics

Prioritise Amazon PPC

I would prioritize Amazon PPC against anything else you can do. Again I have my own concepts, like other people say you know go on to the auto campaigns, then go on the manual campaigns. My way is the completely opposite, I teach my students to go the manual way and then go the auto way. But either way, Amazon PPC is the first thing that you should be targeting off. Facebook PPC and everything else is good. But everyone who clicks on Amazon is hopefully a potential buyer, at least they’re looking for the product. So I would personally say, whatever limited amount of money you have, spend on Amazon PPC as much as possible.

Growing Your Reviews Organically

I’m against these £1 pound giveaway reviews and stuff like that that, I personally don’t like that route.

  1. First of all, in terms of my conscience, there might be other businesses who have organically grown their businesses and you’re just completely disrupting them with fake reviews. Because even though we say, just to make these feedback sites seem legit, that we are looking out for your honest opinion, none of these one-pound reviewers are going to leave you a one star or two star review because they are part of that group.
  2. Now I always put myself in someone’s shoes who’s just starting and think as if they didn’t have money, and I’m not saying this is going to happen to everyone. I’ve seen this happen. Say you buy 500 units, that’s how much money you have. You gave away 200 units or 100 units to spike the sales. Suddenly say, you start getting 20 – 30 sales day. You’re going to think, wow, I’m making 20 – 30 sales: in 10 days I’m going to be out of stock. So what you going to do? You’re going to order another 500 or 1000. But then say for some reason it was a bad product. Your initial reviews are never going to say anything because they’ve ordered free, they probably didn’t even try it before leaving a review. And now the genuine customers who paid full price for your items, they could return your item within 15 – 20 days as well, right. Obviously, they are going to refund through FBA and they’re going to leave you bad reviews. And by that time, the ship would have already sailed because you already placed your order, and you could be out of the game even before you progressed.
  3. But this won’t happen for everyone, that’s why people still prefer these giveaway strategies and stuff like that. But the best alternative I would suggest instead is, give out to the top thousand reviewers that Amazon authorises them to leave contact details, give out 5 – 10 – 15 units, get their much more honest reviews in and then start your PPC and slowly, you know, grow slowly. I know you are so excited to start making 50 sales a day, but then if you have waited for so many years to start your business, why not just wait for another month or two and grow organically initially. Then if you wanted to give these reviewers and everything, that’s completely up to you.

These top thousand reviewers that Amazon authorises them to leave contact details, give out 5 – 10 – 15 units, get their reviews in and then start your PPC and grow slowly.

Amazon Tools for UK Marketplace

It’s only recently, like in the last 6 to 8 months, that tools like Feedback Genius and a lot of these Amazon software tools have come into the UK market. For years I kept on looking at the actual Amazon forums that they have where people would ask about third-party software’s but there was nothing, And so I used to manually send out 200 emails for review up til end of 2014 and even 2015. And I guess the only reason they started doing UK now is because a lot of US sellers have now gone international and they are selling in European marketplaces. But I mean to date there’s still a lot of tools that have not made it here to the UK.

But I’ve used Jungle Scout now a little bit sometimes in between just to even check the retail arbitrage items, like what kind of volume they are.  I personally found Jungle Scout quite accurate, so I think it’s one of the best tools I found.

I’m using Feedback Genius, which is still not the one that I want, but it is user-friendly. The problem with Feedback Genius is because the emails go out any random times, so it goes out say if you set it up three days after the order has been shipped, Amazon updates orders even in like midnight. So if Amazon updated the order that, the order has been dispatched at 2 AM, the email sequence is going to go out at 2 AM. Which is not good because when a customer wakes up, they just look at it and they forget about it because no one wants to sit down on their phone or computer and write a review for you early morning first thing before they are go in to work. So that’s the bad thing. I think Salesbacker is quite popular as well.

There’s another software, it’s from XSellco, it’s called High5. The interface was a little bit hard to use, so I didn’t have that much time to set up. But the reason why I wanted to actually try their High5 software was because they are a complete solution. So XSellco have repricing, they have email software, and other apps, everything a seller needs. And they are cross platform so you can pretty much maintain everything for all the market places from one account.

With inventory management software, what pretty much happens now with the PL item is I’ve got replenishment alerts in Amazon, and I mean I keep a track myself so I know when I need my items. But I used to have Linnworks, which is one of the leading ones in the UK that I can think of, especially if you are dispatching items yourself. Although the recommendation is to use FBA because otherwise if you are dispatching yourself, the chances are your sales are going to be half anyways.

I don’t use repricing tools. But once again, I’m still a manual guy, because I mean, once I put a price, I know I’m going to sell. And unfortunately, there was a big incident that happened I think last Christmas. The repricing software repriced a lot of expensive items to a pound and then obviously the merchants lost money. So I’m a bit more cautious with anything connecting to Amazon and about repricing.

3: Anybody Can Do It – Academy

A Learning Portal

So it’s pretty much basic level, it teaches you everything from research, then pre-sampling stage, then sampling, ordering, and up to the post-launch stage. I’ve divided this into six stages and in each stage, a module has 10 – 15 lessons. The course will obviously keep updating itself, next month I’m going to put in some of my new insights. So the videos would keep updating as and when you want. So once someone start selling, what to do next? How they progress from just a start up to the next level?

Whatever I have learned I will try to bring in my flavour and teach them what I did. And then it’s up to the entrepreneur, seller, to kind of bring in their own flavour or twist. Otherwise they’re not going to be successful, if they just copy everything what I do, they are never going to be successful. Because all products are different. So they need to learn and obviously evolve themselves, but the learning portal provides everything they need to get started off. And then you have a Facebook group where obviously students can talk to each other and ask whatever questions they have.

Masterminding

So rather than a course, it’s more sort of a mastermind. Usually in the other courses what happens is like, the person who is teaching you doesn’t have much time to interact with you because it’s a big group or whatever. And so I’m a bit different. To be very honest, when you are joining any course or coaching service, whether it’s mine or anyone else’s, you are really paying to basically connect to the person who started it. Because a lot of it is about the conversation you can have with them and what you learn directly from them their experience that relates to your present situation. I wanted to basically help out 1 to 1 whoever needed my help, so people can actually contact me anytime they want. Like a student the other day, we spoke from midnight until almost 3AM and I was able to advise her on her present circumstances and next course of action.

 

Team Collaboration

What my students are now doing is trying something completely new. So they’re doing a group sourcing of one product. So everyone, even the ones who have already launched their products, they’re taking part as well if they wanted to. Everyone’s going to put in say £250, and all they did for a week they went and researched a few items they thought could be a good potential PL product. Then they came on a webinar where I observed, so they were talking, I was just listening, and they started discussing one product, and one person was going through ASINspector and Jungle Scout, seeing the demand and everything is and they started scrapping out some of the products. And now they’ve come down to two or three or four products from which they are going to select one which they’re going to group source.

And if eight people have gone through a course and then they’re now going after one product, they’ll probably make sure that becomes a success.

It’s just basically sometimes if they can’t take that first step, this would give them confidence to try out what they’ve learned in the course. And if eight people have gone through a course and then they’re now going after one product, they’ll probably make sure that becomes a success. Because if there’s any shortcomings in product, at least one of them will spot it, at least eight people can’t go wrong at the same time. And even if they don’t make any money, the main thing is now they would realize that how simple it is to go about, and they can now put that confidence and momentum back into their own product research as well.

Prospects

For US listeners, there’s quite a few study resources out there, so they can choose which one they want. Whereas with UK, there’s nothing coming from the UK experience. So I thought this academy would provide a good opportunity for anyone, because US sellers are now listing on the UK as well and that’s their second-best potential marketplace anyway after the US. And it would be a good, if I could get a good mix of US and UK students, because they can help each other, basically launch in each other’s respective countries, it just makes it easier when you have someone in your trusted group to ask advice from. And the plan later this year is to have something like a core service, so to make resources available, like accountant, product/package designer, and stuff like that, logo designer, you name it, whatever a private label seller needs. I want to make those resources available to the entire group so that they can all benefit from of it.

4: Parting Advice

Future Plans

I will keep enjoying releasing more private label products and hopefully make some money out of it as well.

3 Indispensable Tools

  1. Feedback Genius or High5 or Salesbacker depending on your preferred interface.
  2. Jungle Scout for product research
  3. And then any resources that help you stay in the loop with what’s happening with the industry that you are in.

Biggest Mistake

I get excited too early, I get too passionate and I release a lot of variations of the products too early. And I guess that’s my biggest feedback at the moment which I’m not going to repeat. So I want to grow slowly and organically as much as possible and make sure that customers remember the brand rather than the product that they bought.

One Piece of Advice

Stay focused, start studying about the niches and the trends. Small things can help you, like say for example, whether you should buy 10 or 50 is based on how your competitors are going to price and so you need to find out whether they can sit on stock without making losses and reducing prices. So you need to start studying your competitive environment whether it’s a PL or retail arbitrage items. And then start evolving and testing whether your decision that you made to buy 50 or 10 was right or wrong, and these lessons could then be applied for next year to help you scale up quite quickly. So you need to start understanding the entire business environment, including what people buy and when they buy.

Recommended Resources

Pat Flynn podcast.

John Lee Dumas podcast.

Who Moved My Cheese. It’s a small book, that gives you one small advice that: you shouldn’t resist change. But that completely changes your outlook in business and in your personal life as well.

The Everything Store by Brad Stone

 

Transcript

Kunle: What about… I know you’re not that much of the tools person but have you heard of platforms such as OriginalLeads.co.uk and Profit Sorcery? I’ve come across them on a number of forums. Are they any good, from experience, if you have tried them?

Saj: Unfortunately, with these kinds of stuff I am most sort of like an ‘oldie’ person. [laughs] I don’t resist change because that would have been the worst thing. And fortunately as I said, I have enough products that I can source myself that I know. I haven’t heard about Original Leads, so that’s something which I will probably share with my students as well, hopefully it helps them. Profit Sorcery, I know they started something just before Q4. They had some I think free trial where a couple of people who approach me they said they like it, some didn’t like it. But I guess it was kind of in its infancy. In fact, when I started this podcast, at that time I had a similar thing in my mind, maybe I could start a app where a very limited amount of registrants basically would get alerts from me about leads and stuff. But then again I thought they could probably do that themselves. And then if 10 people kind of go for the same kind of products, which they’re going to go for anyways…

Kunle: It’s a race to the bottom.

Saj:… and then someone with big pockets is obviously going to store more and then the others are never going to benefit. So I dropped that idea. But I guess it’s a good service. It is going to evolve, it’s going to take time if they had started, but obviously nothing is going to be perfect so I’m hoping that they have a service which at least some startups can use. But personally I’m more sort of a manual guy so I’ve never used anything like that.

Kunle: Yeah, I fully am on the same page with you with regards to just understanding the market. So everything, the calculations in your head and once you see a product, you know if it’s going to sell or not. Okay let’s move on to your private label strategy. You’ve done quite well with private label over the past two years and sky’s the limit. You’ve not even started to sell in the European marketplace or the US so it’s looking like it will 2 – 3 – maybe even 4 or 5X. Now with regards to your PL, you sell two products at the moment. Do you have any advice or frameworks for listeners looking to successfully get into private label? And I’m talking right from product research to sourcing suppliers, through to validating, without us going into too much detail. But the core things they should bear in mind up to actually promoting their products in the UK. Just top level stuff but, the most important stuff they should bear in mind.

Saj: Right. I mean I always, you know when I started this podcast as well I always said there’s two ways you can get into any kind of business. Not only like this online business. Even if it’s a brick-and-mortar or especially in the online ones, there’s two things when you go into business. You can have two mind sets. One is like, you want to go and sell anything and everything and just make money out of it. I was listening to one of the interviews that The Range store owner, like they buy, they’re more like pound-line kind of items, isn’t it. They sell expensive stuff but they sell anything and everything they guy can actually get his hands on. There is a YouTube video about that, that Peter Jones had interviewed him and a couple of other retailers like that.

Kunle: What’s the name of the store, sorry?

Saj: The Range.

Kunle: Okay, I haven’t heard of that.

Saj: Yeah, I didn’t know about that store until I went to one of the retail outlets and I saw their store. They’re more like WHSmith, so they sell a lot of different items. But they buy these private-label kind of items from China may be. So there’s two mindsets, you go in either thinking I’m going to sell anything and everything just like Will says, try out and then if it works it works. That’s what Will said on one of your interviews, with your episode as well, the interview that he did with you. But I went in with the episode, because that’s my mindset that you know, I want to create a brand. And how successfully I can do that, I don’t know, because not everyone succeeds in creating a global brand. But that was my mindset, that I would go in to create a brand. And when you create a brand, initially your earnings and the success might look a bit small, but if that converts into your global brand or a successful brand, then you get tenfold the earnings that you would have made instead of the short term gains. So my strategy is always going with the brand in mind, and when you go and think about creating a brand in your mind, then you should probably go for something which you are either passionate about or you have at least worked in that field so you have much knowledge about. Because if you don’t have either of those, then sooner or later you get a little bit more tired with it, and you lose that kind of momentum that’s needed. That’s where most of the people fail. Even if a lot of people are listening to your podcast and resources, they get excited, they start researching but then you know that voice, ‘Should I get outside my comfort zone?’ That usually only in one of these two cases, and it happens more successfully when you want to create a brand. And if you want to go out and do that thing, then initially I would say there’s nothing, so you have to research on your own so they would have to be based on your experience and your knowledge. Now, you have things like Jungles Scout and a lot of other resources you can rely on. So even if you don’t have knowledge about it, you could just be searching certain niches and certain products and you can still go out and do it. I personally still think that you should use these kinds of tools, but again if you have entrepreneurship inside you, you will find ways to differentiate your product or make it a little bit special somehow. If not then you are just following the crowd and sooner or later, you’ll find yourself complaining on some of the Facebook forums saying, ’10 people are selling my same products.’ And it’s going to happen, even with my product, it’s still happening with my product, I’m not saying it’s not going to happen if you haven’t done that. But then if you are really passionate about it then you would find ways out of it and you would have to keep waiting. Gone are those days I remember, even my dad was into businesses and at that time my dad used to manufacture ballpoint pens. If you remember the olden pens were like they had those click buttons on the tops so you would do that tick-tack, tick-tack. That’s how the pens used to work. And then you have the ink pens. At that time I remember, because a couple of my uncles they migrated to the United States and when they came back after a few years they told my dad, ‘Why don’t you come and join us in our businesses?’ And my dad said, ‘You know, I mean this business is the most comfortable business. I mean, who will stop buying a pen? So my business is never going to stop.’ And a few years later obviously, my mom fell ill because of cancer and all those things happened. So things went bad because of that but then suddenly, the Chinese automization came in these pens were transparent ballpoint pens, they came into picture and then they suddenly completely wiped out the business industry within six months time. And that’s when my mother was ill as well. And that was a good lesson that I actually saw in my dad’s life, you know he thought that, ‘Who is going to stop using pens? I mean how can my business stop?’ But things change. You couldn’t change unfortunately because of our situations which we had in our home, but I guess even if he didn’t have that situation, I would doubt that he would’ve changed because that’s like a traditional businessman or even like a normal human being, we don’t like to go outside of our comfort zone once we have something going on. Including me, like my product one minute was doing really good and I thought you know, that’s it, this is my added advantage. But what happens is after 6 -7 months when other people started copying my X-factor kind of stuff, obviously it did affect a little bit on the sales.

Kunle: You brought some really good points there. And one I picked up is, which is going to be a question, is do you think private-label businesses need to infuse a bit of agility? And if yes, how often should a try and…. you know in the startup world is something called disrupting yourself, so some companies like IBM will hire people who would look at their business and the like, ‘ Do you know what, we’re doing this in this wrong. An app can do this better, so we’re going to use this small team here to develop an app that will pretty much do what all these legacy app software are doing, so we disrupt ourselves. So you are your competition. And that gives you agility to compete against smaller players in the market. Not necessarily smaller players but new players with much more agility. My question is, this is a very long-winded question, do you think PL sellers should have agility in the business and what timelines do you think they should reassess the market and themselves, really, an think about either extending their brand or improving their brand?

Saj: Right. I mean I put it across in a different way. First of all as I said, everyone who gets into business has a certain motive. So as I said if someone is going into, like say for example someone who is doing retail arbitrage, they don’t really concern, basically, what they’re selling. They are concerned about increasing their income, whether it’s a part-time or whether it’s a full-time, whatever. So it depends on what was your intention, why you came into this business. And I’ll be very honest, I know some people say this is a lifestyle business, I don’t completely agree with that. I’d say even if you have automated it completely by having employees, by having VAs and stuff like that; say for example, a lot of people sometimes say that they can work only two hours and they can have this business, that’s fine. If some of them like to have it as a lifestyle business, there is nothing wrong with it. I personally, because I’m a bit more workaholic as well, I would think if I can get my existing business and take only two hours, why shouldn’t I work another 6 to 8 hours and get it 4X or 5X because that’s how much an average person works anyway, and in fact I should be working a little bit more because I’m not traveling to work, the time that gets wasted in traveling to and fro from work. So you should be using that time to work even more. So that again brings to you that how soon you should change, I think it’s because of the globalization and the trends, the market, everything changing so quick, and the worst part of online being is like if your product is not in front, like on the front page in a way or like a shop front then no one knows where your product is. So you need to kind of keep evolving and changing. And that was a little bit of my mistake in product one as well. Now say for example, if people were buying, say, plastic bags a lot so they have to pay for plastic bags and suddenly because the rules change and now you can’t use plastic bags, if I was a plastic bag seller and I fail to see that trend that people are now going to buy more recycled bags and materials so there’s no wastage, if I failed to check that then it’s my fault. And that’s why if you go into an niche which you are either passionate about or you have experience about, there are much chances that you would be familiar with the changes that surround that marketplace. Now let me give you an example. If you go today on any Facebook groups or any newspaper’s website or any other website, usually there’s going to be like lots of different ads, right. Like even if you go onto BBC website today, there’s going to be different ads. So there’s going to be the business section, even in business this going to be different sections. This going to be sports, is going to be movies. Most of the time you’ll see, you’ll go and not click everything that you see. You usually click more what interests you, so if you are die hard movie fans you will usually like to read about actors and what’s happening surrounding. If you’re a sports person, you usually first click on that, maybe you click on something else as well but you usually click on something first which interests you the most. Similarly if you have gone into product niches which normally interest you some of the way, you’ll find you will start learning the trends and the need to change it. Not only based on sales, because sales you know someday could be 50 and then the next day could be 10 for lots of reasons. But once you’ve gone into a business and a product which you love or you know that a bit more about, you’ll find yourself in a comfortable spot where you will start predicting the changes. Now again business is a risk, so you’re not going to predict everything right, but that’s how the business game is. And I guess not everyone is entrepreneurial. Like me, when I was working in PC World, it was outside London right. So I used to take C2C train which was once in a half an hour and for some reason I would always be late and I would 50% of the time miss the train. So the next train obviously would be after half an hour, so I never reached on time, but my mind just never said anything. Because once I was there, I would work really hard, and in most of the times I wouldn’t even take breaks you know, just like the managers, I would could you go have a bite in five minutes and quickly come back and not take my one hour break. So they never said anything to me, but it was not professional in the way. But when they needed me, I would be putting 200% work compared to other people, so they never said no. Now when I stopped in between, then I rejoined Currys, which is part of the same company, that manager knew me from the previous store. Now the new store was literally three or four minutes walk from my house and the first thing he joked with me, because he knew me very well from that store, he said so now there’s not going to be trains or anything because you’re going to be walking to the store, so I’m hoping that at this store you’re going to be on time. And believe me or not, I think I worked there for a year or something, I still didn’t make it 70 – 80% of the time. Not really that they, that maybe five minutes late, four minutes late, which is not professional, I’m guilty about that. But that’s the thing, I’m probably not born to work for someone else.

Kunle: Your unemployable. [laughs]

Saj: Yeah. Which is good in a way because you know, for me, if you tell me that I need to work something on my product, I pretty much stay awake all night. And my students know, I mean I think the day before yesterday one of my students, she wanted to have a chat with me on Skype and she said just a few questions. And we actually kind of chatted for almost 2 1/2 hours and that was at 2 – 3am. So things that I like, I’ll probably do, but. It’s like work was something, you know once I go there I put in my 100% basically, but it was never that important for me to have reached. So I think anyone getting into this business, coming back to where I was going, it’s important first of all you identify whether you have that entrepreneurship. Because it’s not wrong. Some people are made to work from 9 to 5, not because they don’t have capabilities, because that needs more structure, discipline, because you’re working for someone else so you’ve got more responsibility, your actions affect other people’s business. But maybe sometimes you are better suited for that kind of business. But if you are suited for business, you’ll know, because once you start you won’t resist change, you wouldn’t basically get discouraged that something goes wrong or where competitors put you down in some other way, I mean just giving you an example of the top of my head, you try and fight out those situations, and if you’re an entrepreneur, you enjoy that change and you’ll start predicting these changes. For example, I already tested the product three, actually it’s kind of a product six in a way because three, four, five is already in the same niche. The sixth one is completely different but that products needs to be sold, kind of sells more in summer. I already bought a white label kind of non-branded version of that to selling Christmas, just to test how it goes. No reviews, on PPC, not probably making me much money. In fact some days I might have spent more on PPC then I made on profit. But it was a test that if you can sell in December, definitely a winner product in summer. And I’m already now, if you look at it, I don’t need a warehouse now because as soon as Q4 goes down, my retail arbitrage business, I try to minimize as much as possible, I mean 2014 I didn’t do it all but 2015 I did a little bit. So I’m trying to continue a little bit of regional arbitrage now, but I know I don’t need a warehouse now until Q4. But I’ve already gone and seen one and I’m already planning what’s going to happen in next six months so, end of the year.

Kunle: Gotcha, gotcha. That’s a lot, diversification and I think the real core point is, do you have it? If you have it, the agility is not something that you could just create, you need to have it. You need to have that entrepreneurial agility built into you. And there’s nothing wrong, absolutely nothing wrong in not being an entrepreneur. You could be a manager, a really effective manager, you could run a pretty good career. You could manage a really good career over your lifetime. But you really need to be entrepreneurial, really, if you’re going to be good at it.

Saj: Yeah. And I think it’s just about identifying your own strengths. There’s nothing wrong that you are an employee or whether you are a businessman. It’s just what suits you more and what you enjoy doing, basically. That’s what’s more important. Irrespective, yes, maybe one of them have more money potentially and stuff like that, but any wise businessman, I mean look at the big businesses, later on they become philanthropic and they realize that money is not everything. But sometimes businesses grow not just because of money, sometimes it’s the passion for the product, or sometimes it’s the passion to get your name out there. I mean in my case I’ll be very honest, money is the last thing. Again, it’s going to follow anyway if you’re successful, so it’s not that I don’t value money, because I’ve seen obviously bad times as well. It doesn’t really affect me at all now. Like a lot of people said that this business was too risky, when I started doing Amazon, you know just started doing this, ‘You’re leaving this job and you’re doing that that?’ I said the worst thing that can happen is like Amazon shuts me down and I go back and work in PC World again. The only thing I would have lost is I would have wasted that three – four years. But in retail they don’t promote you for another 10 years anyway. So I said the only thing I’m going to lose is a couple of thousand and I can go back and work in similar kind of job anytime I want. Even after 10 years I wouldn’t mind doing that. I guess I can go ahead and do a lot more businesses, even if there was no Amazon. But just to give you an example, a lot of people were scared, I mean I remember one of them used to work for, my mate used to work for Tesco. And I used to spot some deals and I used to tell him and he used to be about one half hours away from me, but used to come and stay with me when three days we had to go to college so he can travel. So used to come at those three days and stay with me and then go back another four days and worked there three days where he is to stay. And I should tell him, when you are there why don’t you just pick up retail arbitrage items? And he was a shelfer in Tesco, but he would never pick up a single item from there. And he himself admitted that when he’s on a shift, he finds loads and loads of resellers coming and picking those items. But he wouldn’t, somehow. And at that point, I didn’t understand, because I said why wouldn’t he want to make some money? But that’s what he likes, he wanted to spend 9 to 5 or whatever his time was, like Tesco shifts, night shifts as well sometimes, he would like shelving there just enjoying his time like that. He wasn’t probably an entrepreneur. And the only way he likes to be in business was like in investment business. So if I told him that, you know, do you want to invest in some product or shares or something like that, he would be all ears. So he was more sort of a passive business person. He didn’t like active business stuff, like buying stuff, selling stuff, marketing. He probably liked, I would say in easy words, monotonous jobs and I was the opposite, I wouldn’t like monotonous jobs.

Kunle: Gotcha, gotcha. Right. It’s quite interesting and a world with all entrepreneurs will not work.

Saj: Yes, there has to be customers, I mean we are customers in some cases, so. Good point.

Kunle: Okay, let’s move on to your promotional strategy and what you advise. You’ve mentioned earlier the fact that you work on Amazon PPC. What’s your promotion strategy? Outside of Amazon, some people would say, ‘I would never promote outside of Amazon, I’ll only promote within.’ What’s your perspective on driving traffic outside of Amazon? What’s your perspective on Amazon PPC? And is it a viable, in today’s Amazon strategy, is it a viable tactic to applied to your strategy if you are looking to grow sales or your seller rank on Amazon?

Saj: Yeah, I mean, personally yes. And I’ve been learning actually, a lot of trends, I’m not giving out the result, hopefully once I do a couple of podcast episodes, is I’ve been monitoring a lot of stuff. Because Amazon changes their algorithm on the backend a lot of times and you don’t know, because they don’t say anything publicly. But personally, yes, I would prioritize Amazon PPC against anything else you can do. It’s just something like how you should prioritize, just to give you an example, I bought my first house. Before that I didn’t even have a car and every time I went to the house, I remember one of the estate agent, basically it was a rainy day and we just looked at the property and I came back. And I had my house keys and I just had a habit of keeping keys in my hand, just like, when I’m thinking about something as well, so I just pulled out my key and he goes, ‘ Where’s your car?’ And I said I don’t have a car, I came in a bus. Then he looked in the eyes of the property owner and I could just see what they meant, like this guy was a time waster. Fortunately, I bought the same house though.

Kunle: Wow, so it was a good ‘in their face.’ [laughs]

Saj: [laughs] So, but you can see in their eyes because they thought you know, this guy hasn’t even got…. because usually you will see that when someone starts doing a little bit well, I mean again, sometimes you don’t need a car so that’s a completely different situations. But usually you see when someone starts earning a little bit and is a little bit better off moneywise, the first thing they will obviously buy is a car. I had set my priority. Because the days that I have seen, especially at those you my lunch was like digestive biscuits, I set my priority that car is not my priority. The reason being is because I’m working from home anyways. So I don’t really need a car as much as I need my house. And if you know Asian people, you know house is one of the main assets for them, that’s how we’ve grown up back home as well. So again, now this is off track but it brings back to the same thing, what the PPC can serve. I mean the limited amount of budget anyone has, I would say don’t waste your time, I mean I have a £5000 website which hardly makes any sales because Amazon PPC is something that is just like what other people has said on your podcasts or on forums, Facebook groups, that that’s where people are buying right now. There are some newbies who don’t even understand basically how much it costs them at their bottom line, so they are bidding really high and there spoiling it for other people as well, so those things are different. But I would say yes, Amazon PPC is the first thing that you should always think of. Again I have my own concepts in there which I teach, because like other people say you know go on to the auto campaigns, then go on the manual campaigns. My way is the completely opposite way. I basically teach my students to go the manual way and then go the auto way. So there are a lot of concepts but either way, Amazon PPC is the first thing that you should be targeting off. Facebook PPC and everything is good. Initially it was good, because I used to put links for my products on my existing page for people who have signed up, for my existing customers, but personally I’d seen that sometimes it just affects your conversion rate and your products are nowadays going down. I didn’t see this trend before. Because everyone who clicks on Facebook is not going to buy it. But everyone who clicks on Amazon is hopefully a potential buyer, at least they’re looking for the product. So I would personally say, whatever limited amount of money you have, spend on Amazon PPC as much as possible. The other things are, you can use them but those are the things, you know the 80/20 rule basically, they are the 20. I wouldn’t waste my time and resources on anything else apart from this now.

Kunle: And you have a very detailed private label course. ABCDIT.com, AnybodyCanDoIt.com/privatelabelcourse. I’ll link to it in the show notes, so if anybody wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of building and managing Amazon ads. Okay, so what about reviews? What’s your take on reviews? I know you mentioned something like, earlier where you talked about the fact that your product one had over 1000 reviews and that was an attraction as compared to even other big brands that had this similar product. So what’s your advice on reviews? Do we aggressively get reviews, or should it be organic?

Saj: Actually I’m completely against these giveaway reviews and stuff like that. Again, I know, people are not going to love, and even being a coach, because I’m coaching people now, it’s a easier way for coach to basically get their students being more successful. Because if I tell you that, you know give out 100 – 200 units, get those reviews in, obviously you’re going to see a sudden spike in sales because of what we had heard in lots of other resources. And then if you go that route, obviously you’re going to be more happy, look, like Saj taught me that and now I’m making so much sales. But I personally don’t like that route. First of all conscience-wise as well, because there might be other businesses who have organically grown their businesses with that by selling so much and going at that stage, you’re just completely disrupting with fake reviews. Because even though we say just to make these sites and this form legit, that you know we are looking out for your honest opinion, you know 99% none of these one-pound reviewers are going to leave you, I mean forget about four-star, but they’re not even going to leave you a one star or two star review because they are part of that group. And usually they had three items, no one’s going to say no to that just for any reason, even if their name doesn’t show up. But no one gives one star or two star reviews. I’m not complaining against them, people can follow that strategy because this is something, for UK platforms it hardly happens, it’s only happening now once all these information came out from the US groups and stuff like that. Because it never existed, I mean we only relied on people searching for product and then we asked for reviews. The problem, I see this for some of the newbies as well, and I’ve seen this is, I’ll give you one example. Say you have a budget of getting 500 units, that’s how much money you have. Because remember, some people who joined this big courses, especially that’s how this the giveaway strategy started, basically went into this business with 5,000 or whatever money they paid for their course. If they have that much money to put in the course, that means they already had a successful business or they were like six – seven figure employees who had a lot of money to burn, so they could sell those kinds of items which they could lose 5 -10 thousand initially and then even if nothing happened they would just say you know, that was a great attempt but nothing happened, that’s fine. But I always put myself in someone’s shoes who’s starting just like me. I mean people say they start from zero, I started with minus, because when I can here I borrowed money even to study. And I was told back home that you could work and then just take care of your studying expenses and you can earn a little bit what you are doing here as well. When I came here it was a completely different situation, I couldn’t even work more than 20 hours, which didn’t even cover up my expenses here. So I always put everyone in my shoes and think, if they didn’t have money. Now this is what happens, now this won’t happen for everyone, that’s why people still prefer this giveaway strategies and stuff like that. Now say for example you buy 500 units, that’s how much money you have. You gave away 200 units or 100 units to spike the sales. Suddenly say, you start getting 20 – 30 sales. Now what’s going to happen if in a weeks time, you’re going to think, wow, I’m making 20 – 30 sales: in 10 days I’m going to be out of stock. So what you going to do? Even if you have money, you’re going to order another 500 or 1000. Say for some bad reason, say it was a bad product, initial reviews are never going to say anything to because they’ve ordered free, they probably didn’t even try before leaving a review. Now the genuine customers who started paying full price and buying your items, they could return your item within 15 – 20 days as well, right. And by that time, the ship would have already sailed because you already placed a couple of other orders just to keep everything in demand. And sometimes you would be just out of the game even before you progressed, because your products are bad. If you don’t refund, obviously they are going to either refund through FBA, they’re going to leave you bad reviews. Now these kind of things could happen, I’m not saying it’s going to happen for everyone. But the other thing I said was just your conscience as well, because when you start doing fake reviews, then your competitors see suddenly they’re making 100 sales and now they’re down to 10, they are either going to start a price war or they’re going to start similar stuff. Best thing I would suggest is, give out to the top thousand reviewers that, I’ve always said initially as well, these top thousand reviewers that Amazon authorizes them to leave contact details, give out 5 – 10 – 15 units, get their reviews in and then start your PPC and slowly, you know, grow slowly. I know it’s quite exciting to start making 50 sales a day, but then if you have waited for so many years to start your business, why not just wait for the month or two and grow organically initially. Then if you wanted to do, you know, give these reviews and everything, that’s completely up to you. But that’s my personal take, I mean, just give out 5 or 10 to these top thousand reviewers because they’re going to most probably, I’m not saying 100% they’re going to give you honest opinion, the chances are they are, if you choose the right ones, because they share the interest on their profile page. And they’ll write things what a normal free 1 pound reviewer is not going to write, first of all. Because they will inspect the products, if you choose the correct top thousand reviewers, because they tell you in their profile what they love to review. They’ll write product details what others wouldn’t notice, basically, what they have to write. And the other thing is you get and honest feedback as well, sometimes, I’m not saying that happens all the time. The chances are that these reviewers are going to give you a bit more honest opinion than others. So if something is wrong, you would not have found before you place your second order.

Kunle: That’s a really good answer. And I like the fact that the route you suggested, you know that listeners should use, are all within Amazons recommended guidelines. So the top 1000 reviewers are recommended by Amazon and PPC, you know Amazon wants you to use their PPC platform. So really really good stuff there, I’ve taken notes. Okay what about tools? I know you said you are an old-school kind of guy, but do you have any tools you would put your hand up and recommend?

Saj: Right. So as I said, initially I was old-school. Personally, as I said, the mind would always ask you to stay in your comfort zone. So I still tried to battle that and I want to learn new tools, because that’s what I learn you know, even learning how to blog or create a podcast. I mean I sat down whole night listening to Pat Flynn videos, that’s how I did my podcast as well. So I’m still trying to learn and use any tools that’s available. The problem was, and if you have been UK seller you know that there was nothing that existed for UK. I mean to date there’s nothing like Tax Jar, there’s nothing like Inventory Lab or you know like inventory management there are certain software’s, but there’s nothing like you can download your accounting softwares which you can do pretty much automated in US market. I mean think about things like email software. There was not a single email sequence software. I mean I used to do 200 sales a day; every evening between 5 and 7, I used to manually send out 200 emails for reviews. And that’s up to almost end of 2014 and even 2015. It’s only recently I think when Feedback Genius and a lot of these… if you see last 6 to 8 months that’s when all these softwares have come into the market. And especially they realize that they have the potential for UK market. And I guess the only reason they started doing UK as well, because a lot of US sellers have now gone international and they are selling in European marketplaces.

Kunle: So they are actually following US sellers rather than actually looking for markets aggressively.

Saj: Yeah, so I mean there was nothing. For years I kept on looking at the Amazon forums, the actual Amazon forums that they have. People would ask about third-party software’s but there was nothing, I mean even Feedback Genius kept on saying for months that they’re going to release a UK version and finally they only released it, it’s only been the last 6 to 8 months when I’ve seen these movements.I mean even Jungle Scout, if you see, that is a very good tool, initially came for only US. Surprisingly, Greg did the UK version, otherwise I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was no UK version.

Kunle: And are you finding tools like Jungle Scout pretty accurate, from a UK standpoint, on product research?

Saj: Yes. Personally I do, yes. And that’s the only reason I became an affiliate for that as well. And I thought, pretty much, because I typed my own item and it was quite close, in fact I’m just tracking one of my student’s item and it’s pretty much close as well. Initially I tried the ASINspector as well, which people say it’s improved a lot, unfortunately I haven’t tried. As I said, the problem is, like Jungle Scout and all these software’s you use when you’re trying to find items to sell, I already have 10 items in my mind which I don’t have time to release it. So it doesn’t really help me. But I’ve used Jungle Scout now a little bit sometimes in between just to even check the retail arbitrage items, like what kind of volume they are. So I think it’s one of the best tools I found. And then you have lots of these email tools which do the similar thing. I’m using Feedback Genius, which is still not the one that I want. The problem with Feedback Genius is because the emails go out any random times, so it goes out say if you set it up three days after the order has been shipped, Amazon updates orders even in like midnight. So if Amazon updated the order that, the order has been dispatched at 2 AM, the email sequence are going to go out at 2 AM. Which is not good because when a customer wakes up, they just look at it and they forget about it because no one wants to sit down on their phone or computer and write a review for you early morning first thing before they are go in to work. So that’s the bad thing. There’s another software which I couldn’t, unfortunately, try [00:39:30.12 inaudible] but they say that they have the options where certain times the email can go out, it’s from XSellco, it’s called High5. But the interface was a little bit hard to use, so I didn’t have that much time to set up. Whereas Feedback Genius obviously is tried and tested, so they made it a bit more user-friendly to use so that’s what I’ve set it up right now. I’m not completely happy, but then you know, I think there is Salesbacker, there’s a lot of other software’s. I guess people should just, you know sellers should just try what they are comfortable with and then use the one. So I would definitely say yes, have something like Jungle Scout so it helps you, even if you have certain products in mind, it just gives you a quick glance of what’s happening. I find it pretty much accurate, it’s never going to be 100%. I mean Greg and you know, all the ASINspectors and all the other people, I mean whoever owns similar software, they have said it’s never going to be 100%. But I personally found Jungle Scout quite accurate, which was surprising, I mean I didn’t expect it to be that accurate.

Kunle: Wow, okay, okay. So we’re going to take your word on that. So the second email was High5 you said?

Saj: Yeah. There is High5, then there’s Feedback Genius, I guess a lot of other podcast listeners are using Salesbacker as well. I mean email software’s are pretty much common, it’s just like an inventory management software, so I guess it’s just the ease of the interface, whatever. Like when I use Android phones, I can’t get used to it. Again, that’s my insight, because I always use if I have to use, I don’t… just when you look at it, even though it does the same thing, but you just don’t want to get out of your comfort zone even for a day and look at that phone and start using Android. So it’s pretty much like that. Look at the softwares, find the interface which is much more user-friendly for your use and that’s it. Go for it.

Kunle: Okay, brilliant, brilliant. What about any inventory management or analytics report? Do you use anything or?

Saj: No. I mean I used to have inventory management software, Linnworks. That’s one of the best ones if you are especially dispatching items yourself. But again, you know what pretty much happens with the PL item, it’s like I’ve got replenishment alerts in Amazon. And I mean I keep a track myself because I don’t have employees anyway, so I know when I need my items. But Linnworks is one of the leading ones in the UK that I can think of. Especially if you are dispatching items yourself. But again, at this point, the recommendation is to use FBA because otherwise if you are dispatching yourself, the chances are your sales are going to be half anyways.

Kunle: True, true, true. What about repricing and price tracking? Do you use anything that?

Saj: I don’t, because once I put a price, I mean I know I’m going to sell. But once again, I’m still the manual guy, I’m hoping I can put more time in learning anything extra that I can. Unfortunately, repricing, there was a big incident that happened I think last Christmas. The repricing software repriced a lot of expensive items to a pound and then obviously the merchants lost money. So I’m a bit more cautious with anything connecting to Amazon. In fact, for months I didn’t even connect these email softwares. Because you know, they connect through your… and after this repricing incident, Amazon put an alert saying that even when you are connecting these email softwares, basically you are giving it complete access to someone else. Now I know all these big companies are not going to do anything bad to your account, but it just brings back old memories like what happened with eBay, you know like you get blocked for silly reasons, so I didn’t want to use it but hopefully after a time, you know there’s no way I’m going to manually email 200-300 people a day for years. So I’m a bit cautious about repricing but you know the XSellco company that I’m saying, the reason why I wanted to actually try their High5 software, because they are a complete solutions. So they have five different products. So they have repricing, they have email software, and they have lots of other apps to activate, it’s called XSellco.

Kunle: Okay.

Saj: I’ll leave you a link so you can put in the show notes, but they have everything out what a seller needs and they have for all the platforms so you can pretty much maintain everything for all the market places from one account.

Kunle: Okay, well, we’ll definitely check them out, XSellco out. Okay, all this is really, really, good stuff, Saj. It’s really, really good stuff. Okay, let’s talk about your academy and your podcast. So 2016, people who are listening up till now, if they’ve listened up till now their loving what they’re hearing because we’re… this is going to be split into two episodes for sure. So they will most likely, very most likely, be interested in learning more about you and your podcast, your following, your courses and your academy. Could you shed some more light on the Anybody Can Do It website and the courses you offer, and the coaching services you offer, please?

Saj: Right. So as I said you know, initially I started it just because of the people who actually approached me at the start of the course. So it’s pretty much basic level, it teaches you everything from research and up to the post-launch stage. Initially what I did was like for the first batch, I think I had about eight students, what I did was even though there’s like, I’ve divided this into six stages and in each stage, a module has like 10 – 15 lessons, depending on the module. So research and then presampling stage, then sampling, ordering, all those kind of stages they have video lessons inside. It’s like a learning portal kind of the website so you go in and you can read. And then you have a Facebook group where obviously students can talk to each other and then, whatever questions they have. Usually in the other courses what happens is like, you can follow the course and everything but then obviously the person who is teaching you doesn’t have much time to interact with you. And I’m a bit different, I wanted to basically help out 1 to 1 whoever needed my help, so they can actually contact me anytime they want. The course will obviously keep updating itself. Unfortunately I haven’t got much time after I created the first course, but hopefully next month I’m going to put in some of my new insights. So the videos would keep updating as and when you want. So once someone start selling, what to do next? How they progress from just a start up to the next level? Whatever I have learned I will try to bring in my flavour and teach them, basically what I did. And then it’s up to the entrepreneur, seller, to kind of bring in their own flavour or twist. Otherwise they’re not going to be successful, if they just copy everything what I do, they are never going to be successful. Because all products are different. To give you an example, say car manufacturing company, it’s never going to give out a new car completely free of cost to new buyers. But say when I ordered something from Ocado, like grocery, they send me a 200g pack of a light butter because it was a new brand and they can afford to give you out. So the marketing strategies are completely different for every product. So they need to learn and obviously evolve themselves, but the learning portal provides everything they need to get started off. To be very honest, there’s lots of information out there anyway for free, of course. When you are joining any course or coaching service, whether it’s mine or anyone else, you are really actually paying to basically connect to the person who started it. Because it’s like the conversation you can have with them, like you know my student I said the other day, we spoke from 12 – 11 at night until almost 3. And then she said she is now feeling charged up, she doesn’t even want to go to sleep, she’s going to research now because she hasn’t ordered her samples, and she said because you know obviously, it’s going to be Chinese New Year holiday so from next week everybody’s going to be on holiday and so I’ll start ordering the samples later on. I said no, you shouldn’t do that. You have seven days, why not order the samples now so they can send you the samples and you have enough time when they are on their Chinese holidays. When they come back, you’ll be ready with your feedback whether you’ll… And then she said, you know I’m just going to start contacting right now and I’m going to probably stay up all night deal with this period. So that’s what you’re paying for, to be honest, to learn from the experience. So it’s more, rather than a course, it’s more sort of a mastermind where I’m learning a lot stuff as well. Because as I said, as a human being the worst thing that happens is everyone wants to stay in their comfort zone. Personally, you wouldn’t believe, even when I came across these Facebook groups and podcasts, which is when I decided to start my own podcast, this is only about 6 to 8 months ago, I can’t even remember the date. But til that date, I didn’t even have my picture on my Facebook. Because I don’t use Facebook and Twitter at all. I was caught in that middle age you know where the grown-ups think it’s a waste of time. And I’m still young, but it’s like the proper youth, you know the college youth, thought like this is the mosy happening thing, and you don’t want to learn… I mean you think, what am I going to forward every day? I mean, this person forwarded me a joke and then I forwarded and then someone else forwarded. So I was never using it but then starting this Academy and then getting involved with a lot of like-minded people encouraged me more to go out and learn more. Because I had to go out and see how to create the podcast, how to create the blog, even though it’s one of the worst [laughs]. So it helps, this helps, so even being with newbie students, it helps me because they would be thinking something else completely then what I’m thinking, and I’m going to be learn from them as well. You might find it hard to believe but I actually picked up a couple of retail arbitrage strategies from one of my students because he does a lot of retail arbitrage. And while just talking casually every day, we talk with each other about some products as well, you know in open, and I picked up a couple of new strategies where I could kind of… There’s a new strategy that I’m trying to actually apply now and this kind of sparked based on that. I’m trying to see if I can combine retail arbitrage with private label, in a way.

Kunle: Wow, okay.

Saj: So… but it’s a long strategy, it’s hard to bring up, but if it works, it works. But at least it sparked a new idea. It’s very interesting, one of the needs students who came in, he was an ex-Amazon seller for a long time. I mean he was trading around the same time, 2011, and then he got booted off because of a small error and he made. He shouldn’t have made, I told a friend that he shouldn’t have done that, but he did something and Amazon booted him off. He’s now back on, he asked Amazon permission and they let him be on Amazon now. And suddenly just a couple weeks ago he said that there are a couple of students who have already launch their products successfully, like one of my students he is now doing 15 sales. No giveaways, nothing, I think he did only three or four top reviewer’s free samples. And he is now consistently via PPC doing 15 sales a day on an average. The issue is his products are a little bit bigger size and he has to sea ship it and now the situation is that he’s going to probably run out of stock, that’s how good he’s progressing. So he never thought that he was going to do more than five sales to start off with, but he’s doing about 15 to 20 sales and he has to turn PPC off so that you doesn’t make sales now, that’s how…

Kunle: Not bad, that’s good problem to have. So I kind of like the advantages they get. First it’s a mastermind with like-minded individuals. So do you guys meet up on a regular basis to brainstorm and share your ideas and soundboard your challenges and successes with each other in the academy?

Saj: Right. There’s two things, and I mean I don’t lie this to anyone. First of all, because it’s a limited amount of people not like a buzzing Facebook group. Because some of them have just recently launched their product, so most of them launched in December. Some of them are waiting, so the new student who came in, he gave just an idea that if he could have this mindset where they start with the products they want to release, what they’re now doing is trying something completely new. So they’re doing a group sourcing the full one product. So what’s going to happen is that this a people, even the ones who have already launched their products, they’re taking part as well if they wanted to sell some are taking, some are not, depends on the time frame may have. So everyone’s going to put in say £250, and all they did for a week they went and researched a few items they thought could be a good potential PL product. Then they came on a webinar where I was just a spectator, so they were talking, I was just listening, I wasn’t even on the video, I was just on audio. And they started discussing one product, and one person was going through ASINspector and Jungle Scout, seeing the demand and everything is and they started scrapping out some of the products. And now they’ve come down to two or three or four products from which they are going to select one. And they’re going to group source that one product. Now you might think there’s not much potential in that. It’s just basically sometimes you, as I said you can’t take that first step, so this would give them confidence. It’s if they can list this now, we haven’t even decided who’s going to list it and stuff like that, but the list them, they try to promote it based on what they’ve learned in the course. And once it’s promoted, they’ll share the earnings what they get out of that. But they going to use mainly at shared earnings to again probably launch another product if they want. And the main thing is not the money that they’re going to make out of that product. If eight people have gone through a course and then they’re now going after one product, they’ll probably make sure that becomes a success. Because if there’s any shortcomings in product, at least one of them would spot it, at least eight people can’t go wrong at the same time.

Kunle: Exactly.

Saj: And even if they don’t make any money, the main thing is now they would realize that how simple was that, and they can now put that confidence and momentum back into their own product research as well.

Kunle: Yeah, that is a fantastic strategy, just all coming together and collaborating, cooperating to one goal. And a lot of people would have… it’s like a team, they working as a team and they’re sharing their successes and risks together. So it’s really, really interesting. When do you open the doors again for the academy or the course?

Saj: Right. Actually it’s currently open, because some people wanted to join in. So as I was saying initially what I did was, even though the lessons were there, what we recorded, the first batch basically I teach them on live webinar. So I did six Hangouts, each Hangout was about 3 to 4 hours. And each Hangout I took over the entire module, so all six modules were taught. So you have the individual lessons, but you have one big chunk of each module as well. So they can get double, you know, when you listen a couple of times you pick up things which you have missed out. So that’s already there and then every two weeks we do a Q&A webinar Hangout. So we talked for 2 to 3 hours, if anyone has any questions, if I want to share anything that I share. And it’s going to keep evolving, as I said, the main reason I started this was just so that we could form more sort of where people can, and I wouldn’t say it’s biased but, but I wanted something to do this especially for UK groups as well. Because for US students or listeners, there’s quite a few resources out there, so they can choose which one they want to follow. Whereas with UK, there’s nothing coming from the UK experience so I thought this would give a chance for anyone. In fact, because US sellers are now listing on the UK as well and that’s their second-best potential marketplace anyway after the US. So I thought it would be good, if I could get a good mix of US and UK students, they can help each other, basically, launch. So say for an example, I have certain US students, obviously they are still start up. But say six months later one of my UK students wants to launch in the US, they can just ask the US person to speak to their accountant and see what they need to register. It just makes it easier because you have a class factor in helping each other. Same with the US students can get help from us if they want to basically register for VAT and stuff like that. Now I’m not saying that those information are not available but it just makes it easier when you have someone in your trusted group. And the plan later on, I mean I don’t know how it spans out, is basically I want to have something like a core service. So I want to have say like a designer who basically, if anyone needs to basically get their packaging done we have one designer who does take care of everyone’s packaging and stuff like that. So basically the way it helps is you find one good one who obviously gives you better results so you get better prices plus you get benefit of basically buying everything or sourcing anything as a group. Same goes with sea freight and stuff like that as well. So that’s what my 2016 plan is, that I want to make resources available, like accountant, product/package designer, and stuff like that, logo designer, you name it, whatever a private label seller needs. I want to make those resources available to the entire group so that they can get a benefit out of it.

Kunle: And they’ll be so much value, that value add. And the co-oporation, yes, it’s really key. I mean I will do business with anybody my friend or trusted colleague recommends, so yes I would love to see that. Okay Saj, we have come to the very end of the show and I typically ends the show with a lightning round or what I call the evergreen questions I ask every other person.

Saj: All right.

Kunle: So are you ready? The format is that I asked you a question and if you could just answer with a sentence or two max.

Saj: Right.

Kunle: Okay, all right. What are your future plans?

Saj: I will keep enjoying releasing more private label products and hopefully make some money out of it as well.

Kunle: Brilliant. This probably doesn’t apply to you, but how do you hire people?

Saj: I haven’t yet but a couple of my students are actually using VAs so I’m hoping to have some kind of VAs or people who can help me with a little bit of retail arbitrage. And probably, earlier I guess listening to other successful sellers on, one on your podcast as well and some of the other resources, the earlier you learn to to get other people on board to help you with the business, obviously your business can grow. So I’m hoping that I can learn that skill now.

Kunle: Brilliant. What are your three indispensable tools for managing your business?

Saj: Again tools-wise I would say the email software which I mentioned earlier, Jungle Scout. And pretty much stay in the loop with what’s happening with the industry that you are, so any resources you can pick up, basically. You know as I said, whatever niche you are interested in, that would help you to manage your Amazon business quite well.

Kunle: Okay. What has been your best mistake today? By that I mean a set-back that’s giving you the biggest feedback.

Saj: I think the biggest mistake I did was I get excited too early. That’s what I was telling my students as well. I think I get too passionate. I think even now as I said, I’m sitting in my work office at the back of the house, even though I have an option that this can be a lifestyle business but the mistake that I made was… because if you had hear my podcast episodes you’ll hear I use more the strategy where I release a lot of variations of the products, so sometimes I get too excited too early. And I guess that’s my biggest feedback at the moment which I’m not going to repeat. So I want to grow slowly and organically as much as possible and make sure that customers remember the brand rather than the product that they bought.

Kunle: Good stuff. Okay. But one piece of advice can you give Amazon e-tailers keen to growing their businesses or their sales by 2X or 3X?

Saj: I guess I would say stay focused, start studying about the niches and the trends. Like I was speaking to the student that I had, and she said every time she looks at the retail arbitrage items… like I’ll give you an example of retail arb basically, and she said that she finds that either Amazon selling or someone else’s selling. And then I just gave her a piece of advice, ‘Did you check how many they have in stock with the 999 method and stuff like that?’

Kunle: What’s the 999 method, sorry?

Saj: Oh, 999 method is basically when you, say for example you went and found that someone else was selling the vacuums cleaner that you sold. You add to basket and then before checking out, you added the basket and then you do 999 to see how many they have in stock.

Kunle: Okay, that makes sense.

Saj: So Amazon would update the basket, basically, saying that they only have 20 to purchase. So things like that, you need to start learning and knowing your competitors. Now as I said, I do retail arbitrage in certain sectors, now I do toys as well, certain other products as well. I know most of the time what my core competitors are the what their capacity is. So I keep a trend, even if there’s a stock that are not buying at the moment which was on offer due to any XYZ reason. But I see that if they bought that item, how many today buy this time? Not something to be exact that they’re going to buy the next item exactly the same quantity, but it gives me a little bit idea what’s the capacity of my competitor on those retail arbitrage items. So those small things can help you, like say for example, whether you should buy 10 or 50 is based on how your competitors are going to price and whether they can sit on that without making losses and reducing prices. Because they’ve got their own money and maybe you’re buying them on your credit card which you need to clear at the end of the month, otherwise your interest would take away the profits that you’re going to make on that. So those kinds of things, I know it’s not a one sentence answer, but you need to start studying your competitive environment whether it’s a PL or retail arbitrage items. And then start evolving and testing whether your decision that you made to buy 50 or 10 was right or wrong. So learn those, so whatever you’ve learned for this Christmas period, apply them for the next year. Maybe it’s a different product that you’re buying, but you’ll see that the trend that you followed and you learned would help you to scale up quite quickly.

Kunle: Brilliant. Thank you. Would you still say, this January’s sales are quite a good time for retail…oh well, January’s over would you say that January sales our good time for retail arbitrage, for RA, people to get into RA?

Saj: Yes, it’s quite hard, I mean personally for some of the products that I stored unfortunately, a lot of part-time sellers were there so it’s still not doing that bad I think, my total sales are, just on the UK platform, has been about 130K, including PL, so it’s still not that bad. I personally think, given the way the Amazon platform is progressing, I think no one. It just depends on, like say for an example, you know that the toys are selling a lot in Christmas period, right. Now if you are a business person and you just think because you sold a lot of toys in December I’m still going to do a lot RA of toys in January, then you’re not learning business trends. Because you need to know the next few months what people are going to buy. So the Valentine gifts in February, when the summer starts going to buy a certain type products, they might not spend the same amount on the toys but they might spend similar amounts other products. So you need to start understanding the entire business environment. What people buy, when they buy. Because what they buy in January, you don’t buy in December. What they find December, they don’t buy in June because the sun is out there and they probably buy a completely different products.

Kunle: Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, right. If you could choose a single book on resource that has made the highest impact on how you view building a business and growth in general, which would it be?

Saj: Right, again, that’s going to be a really bad answer for your listeners, because I’m not really someone who read a lot of books, although I’m now start reading a lot of books and resources. I still prefer to listen to podcasts and stuff like that so I’m sure most of the listeners know the famous ones for Amazon. I would say don’t just stop yourself to Amazon because then again that’s just speaking about the actual Amazon marketplace. You need to start listening to a lot of other stuff. I mean I listen to Pat Flynn, I tried to listen to some of John Loomers?[01:03:51.12 inaudible] But there’s one book which was one of the smallest book, actually the worst book someone can recommend as a reader, was Who Moved My Cheese? That was a book which is probably only about 30 – 40 odd pages, I had a book or something like that with that. But that said the same thing that everyone resists change, which is when you start losing the momentum. I would definitely recommend. It’s a small book, probably gives you one small advice that you shouldn’t resist change, but that completely changes your outlook in business and in your personal life as well.

Kunle: That was my first business book, it was given to me by a very good friend I remember years ago. Well over 15 years ago.

Saj: So unfortunately that’s the only book I can remember I’ve read, apart from that, I mean recently I did read the Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ The Everything Store e-book. I guess you should start reading anything, if you are interested in business and entrepreneurship, you start reading a little bit of that but unfortunately at this stage’s that’s the only two I can recommend of.

Kunle: Brilliant, brilliant it’s been an absolute, absolute pleasure having you on the show, Saj. Thank you for sharing your insight, your deep insights in Amazon selling in the UK. In the insides and outsides, the insides of your business with our listeners. A lot of people listening up till now will be very much appreciative of you coming on to the show and sharing so, so much. And just the energy that you bring into the show. Thank you, Saj.
Saj: It’s always a pleasure. I mean I could go on and on. Unfortunately it’s a podcast. But yeah if anybody wants to get in touch, if you have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to answer.

Kunle: Okay, what is the best way our listeners can actually get in touch? Where do you hang out? What’s the easiest way to get in touch with you, from your perspective obviously?

Saj: If they sign-up for the Facebook group, and from there even if they want to leave me… I mean I get more PMs everyday then they actually post on my Facebook group. Which is surprising because it’s just like everyone wants to keep secret, because sometimes they think… everyone’s back to ask questions and I have to keep telling my students, ‘ Don’t PM me. Actually ask me in the Facebook group unless it’s something related to your product. Because then other people can benefit from the same question. But I understand sometimes when anyone wants to connect, they prefer…. so they can add me on the Facebook when they can join the Facebook group for the podcast as well. Either way I’m more than happy. You’ll find me answering sometimes 5 AM in the morning as well, so don’t be surprised.

Kunle: Yeah, I remember, the first time I reached out to you. I think I sent you a message late evening and you responded in the early morning hours like 1 or 2 o’clock.

Saj: I used to do podcast episodes late night as well. Unfortunately I just lost away, and you know being a podcaster, you know, even if you’ve done 10 episodes, it’s just like every time you do it like anything and you need to have that warm up around before you could start talking some how. And its surprising, English is not my first language so it’s slightly bit difficult to get started, but hopefully I should be will coming out with some goods.

Kunle: The end of the day it’s the content that really matters, what you’re delivering, and the message is solid so keep on doing what you’re doing. Much more encouragement, I enjoyed every show, every episode of your podcast. I’m going to link up to it from the shownotes. And you know guys, join the Facebook group, and going to also link up to the Anybody Can Do It Facebook group from the show notes also. I’m going to split this into two, in half, because it’s well over two hours now. Okay so for those of you listening, thank you for sticking to the very end of today show and hope you found Sajs insights, his tips this strategy on selling on Amazon UK helpful, inspiring, and actionable. The key thing guys is to take action, so just listening is not going to cut. But actually taking action from what he said, even if it’s just one thing, taking that action is what’s most important. To download the show notes, I’m going to make sure that the show notes are available when you listen to this episode, we’re working out all our timelines now and, we’re well ahead of now of time which is really really good, so you will read the transcripts when you listen to this. Just head over to 2XeCommerce.com. And for updates and tips on growing your store, be sure to sign up to our email alerts on 2XeCommerce.com. And until the next show, do have a good one everybody. Cheers.

About the host:

Kunle Campbell

An ecommerce advisor to ambitious, agile online retailers and funded ecommerce startups seeking exponentially sales growth through scalable customer acquisition, retention, conversion optimisation, product/market fit optimisation and customer referrals.

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