ECOMMERCE9 - ISSUE 1 | February Edition

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USING AMAZONS PPC PLATFORM TO BOOST YOUR AMAZON FBA SALES

ECOMMERCE ISSUE 1: FEBRUARY EDITION

AMAZON FBA

INTRODUCTION AND

CASH FLOW MANAGEMENT

HOW NOAH’S AMAZON FBA BUSINESS IS ON TRACK TO MAKE

$250K IN 2017

3 MONSTER TEESPRING

2016

CAMPAIGNS KILLING IT IN DAMIANS $4K+/M

DROP SHIPPING

JOURNEY

CONTENT

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PRODUCTIVITY TIP OF THE MONTH USING A TIMER

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HOW NOAH’S AMAZON FBA BUSINESS IS ON TRACK TO MAKE $250K IN 2017

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8 POWERFUL BUSINESS TIPS THAT HAVE MADE ME 6 FIGURES

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5 QUICK TIPS FOR BEGINNER FACEBOOK MARKETERS

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DAMIANS $4.000/M SHOPIFY DROP SHIPPING JOURNEY WITH FACEBOOK AND SHOPIFY

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15 RANDOM INSTAGRAM PAGES AND HOW MUCH THEY CHARGE FOR A SHOUTOUT - WE DID THE RESEARCH

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GETTING YOUR SHOPIFY STORE 100% READY TO SELL 5 SIMPLE SEO STEPS TO RANK YOUR PRODUCT PAGES HIGHER! NOAHS JOURNEY TO $10.000/M WITH AMAZON FBA USING AMAZONS PPC PLATFORM TO BOOST YOUR AMAZON FBA SALES

3 MONSTER TEESPRING CAMPAIGNS THAT KILLED IT IN 2016 HOW TO MAXIMIZE Q4 SALES FOR YOU FBA BUSNESS

CONTRIBUTORS

Layout Designer Hema Dhawan hemadhawan16@gmail.com

Layout Designer Yvonne Albers baterim@gmail.com

THANK YOU FOR DOWNLOADING ECOMMERCE9 3 months ago the idea popped into my head to bring together experienced people within the ecommerce community and produce content that’s up to date and practical, all in the form of a Free Monthly Digital Magazine.

After scouring the internet for hours and tirelessly gathering content, we have produced the first issue of what I hope to be the biggest and most valuable piece of collective ecommerce information delivered monthly to your inbox.

I don’t know what the future holds for ecommerce9 but me and my team will continue to give it our 100% attention.

If you would like to share a story, advertise, sponsor the magazine or give us a suggestion, etc, please get in contact at admin@ ecommerce9.com Other than that, I hope you enjoy the Magazine and most importantly, learn something you can implement to your business right away.

Regards,

Mateen Soudagar affengineer.com

Future Editions will be released in the second week of every month

This is a neat little hack I found somewhere online. I try and implement at least one thing I find online instead of reading ‘10 tips on bettering yourself’ and forgetting them all the next day.

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This small tip was easy to implement but it does something interesting to your mind.

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It’s basically just putting the timer on for how ever long you think it will take you to finish a certain task and trying to get the task done within that time.

It’s simple but allows me to get a tonne of work done everyday. Sometimes the simplest things are the best.

Right now, I’m writing this piece and am aiming to write about 500 words in 10 minutes. I’ve set the timer for 10 minutes and have mentally committed to try finish this task before the timer rings.

Can it be done? As long as I’m focussed and don’t alt tab to watch a quick youtube video or pick up my phone to respond to an email.

This is the beauty of the tip though. It switches your mind into overdrive and makes you insanely focused on finishing. Every time you think about picking up the phone or walking to the pantry to find some food or quickly switching on the tele and seeing what’s on or taking a quick look on your Facebook/ Instagram account, your mind will immediately knock the thought out of your head as it’s convinced that you simply don’t have the time to do it.

It’s the same mental rush I’d get during assignment submission at University. I’d have to submit an assignment at say 5pm. My body would be rushing to finish it by that time.

Everything else would come secondary. Eating, returning a phone call, anything that would lessen the chances of me submitting my assignment on time would be completely ignored and it’s only after 5pm, my mind would stabilise and I’d go do the things I needed to do.

You can start this anytime you want. Just turn on your timer every time you start

a task. Make an intention before you start to complete this specific task before the timer runs out. You can even set it to something small like 5 minutes. Make sure you’re specific with the goal you want to achieve so you can measure your success after.

Other tasks you can use it on can be, Spend 30 minutes writing a rough draft of a blog post 20 minutes to post a job on elance 15 minutes to clean your room You can use it for anything in your life. The main idea here is to trick your body to focus.

It doesn’t really matter if you finish the task or not, you’ll notice when you put the timer on, your mind just works faster and is more focused on what’s in front of it.

Growing up I was always hustling in one way or another. My family didn’t have a lot of money when I was young and as a result an allowance was not an option for me. I learned early on that if I wanted something, I would need to find a way to get it for myself.

My first business venture came when I was about 10 years old and I learned that the public golf course in my town would pay a penny per golf ball returned to the clubhouse. So a couple times a week, I would take a bucket and head up to the golf course to walk the perimeter of the driving range picking up balls.

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I found that I could earn about $3-5 per hour if I worked hard and at that age, it seemed like a small fortune to me.

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Throughout my childhood I always found ways to make a little bit of money on the side, but it wasn’t until the year 2000 that I realized there was opportunity on the internet. The Sony PlayStation 2 had just come out and with that came some significant buzz in the video game industry.

Because of the hype, the PS2 sold out everywhere, almost immediately. I was not in the market to buy one, but as an avid gamer I was intrigued by the hot new gaming system selling out in stores. While reading about the sellout online, I came across several PS2s listed on eBay, but these were not selling at retail price, they were consistently selling for 5x and 10x the MSRP. There was even a rumor of one that sold internationally on eBay

for $22K USD. The young capitalist in me was distraught knowing that I had missed the boat on this opportunity to make some significant and very easy money. So I told myself I would wait for the next big launch and seize the opportunity. In 2006, the PS3 launched and I was able to buy three of them on my new credit card. I listed them on eBay and quickly sold them for a sizable profit. I was hooked.

I knew I had to reinvest, so I used the money from my PS3 sales to create my first eCommerce business on eBay. I went online and was able to find some incredible deals with no purchase limits. I decided on a unique type of baseball cap which I knew would sell on eBay. It fit my product criteria perfectly: lightweight, low price, high margins, low competition and high demand. Using all of my PS3 sales profits and nearly my entire credit card limit of $3,000 USD (I was 19 years old at the time) I was able to buy nearly 800 units for $5,000. At the time, this seemed like a massive amount of money to me, so I was definitely feeling some nerves and pressure to sell. But, I trusted my research and instincts and the hats started selling like crazy. I ended up selling all of them in less than four months and suddenly had more money than I knew what to do with.

I continued with my online arbitrage business on eBay for a couple of years but never found a product as profitable as the hats. Pretty soon the housing market crashed and with

risk averse? This was a huge blow, but I that came the great recession of 2008. learned something very important. When eBay became a wasteland and nothing ordering a product that can be damaged seemed to be selling. Simultaneously, in shipment, come to an agreement with my education began taking up more of the supplier on how the units will be my time and I decided to take a break from eCommerce. After finishing school, shipped and what happens if the arrive damaged, prior to placing the order.

I did what many young people do and moved to a city to get a job. Soon after Fortunately, my next attempt was better. moving to Denver, Colorado, I landed I found another product while browsing a job in insurance claims with a major on Alibaba. Again, all of the numbers domestic carrier. After about two years looked good, however this time the of working in my desk job, I was eating product was lighter, smaller, and virtually lunch and browsing the iTunes podcast impossible to damage in transit. It was library. In the business section I found also in the apparel category, which I am Scott Volker’s podcast called The familiar with. I received the order, listed Amazing Seller. It’s all about Amazon the product on Amazon, got some good FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) and it looked interesting given my background reviews, and turned on Amazon pay-perclick advertising. in eCommerce. So, I downloaded the first few episodes and listened to them that afternoon while finishing my In less than a month, I was selling workday. By the time I left the office I 10-15 units per day. In two months, I was borderline obsessed. I spent the rest was up to 20-30 a day. By the third of the week tearing through all of Scott’s month, I had surpassed my income podcasts at 1.5 speed, I just wanted to from working 40 hours a week at my know everything about the business. corporate job. By the fourth month, I quit my job and began focusing fullAfter a few months of researching time on eCommerce. It happens that and learning everything I could about fast on Amazon.

FBA, I was ready to order a product.

For my first product, I found a stainless I’ve since added more products steel lunch box that seemed to be on Amazon and expanded to other the perfect fit. The price was low (low marketplaces such as eBay, Etsy, and barrier to entry due to my high level my own shopify store. My success has of risk aversion), there was plenty of come quickly on Amazon FBA and I demand on Amazon, yet the market believe this is a result of an intense focus wasn’t over-saturated, everything looked on product research and building a solid good. So I threw down about $500 and understanding of the business model. ordered 100 units. While I waited for the In 2017, I’m aiming to grow my annual units to arrive, I built a solid listing on revenue to $250K while maintaining my Amazon, optimized my keywords and goal of 55-60% margins. For my brand on search terms, and researched Amazon Amazon, I plan to increase the variants in FBA barcode labeling practices (more my current product lines, as well as add complicated than you’d think). By the an entirely new product line with several time the lunch boxes arrived, I was variants. ready to go. But there was one problem.

Nearly every unit arrived damaged. My The Amazon FBA business model allows supplier had stacked 100 metal lunch sellers to grow and scale their businesses boxes and wrapped them a few times in very quickly and easily because Amazon thick bubble wrap. No box, no airbags, does all of the heavy lifting. They bring just bubble wrap. They were scuffed millions customers to the seller while and dented, one even had a hole in also handling all of the order fulfillment it. After going back and forth with the and returns. Because of this partnership, supplier, it was eventually determined a seller can essentially focus solely on that they were not responsible for the finding and sourcing truly profitable damage. So, my first attempt resulted products to be able to find huge levels of in a $500 loss. Did I mention I’m very success with Amazon FBA.

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Knowledge means nothing until you can break it down into actionable steps.

The main contributor to people success is not just knowing how to do a certain something but the shift in mindset from novice entrepreneur to one that can bring in a healthy full-time income. I’m going to list 8 things here that will give you the right mindset going forward. They’re the realities of business and although everything is an open paying field, they’re 8 things many entrepreneurs have come to agree with over time.

BUSINESS ISN’T EASY Most of you guys are looking forward to the days you can put in a few hours a week and make a decent part time income. It’s fine to think like that but that comes later. At the start you have to be ready for the grind. You have to be ready to spend more than just an hour a week to get your business off the ground. Why? Because you’re still learning the process. Once that process is figured out to the point you’re making money, then you can relax and cut down on unnecessary tasks and outsource to a team.

You have to be ready for this. Think of it as a a big hurdle everyone has to overcome at the start. This hurdle is filled with learning curves that can only be learned by doing the work. You can read a tonne of books but the only way you’ll cement this learning into your head is to do the work.

BREAKING THROUGH TAKES TIME This is related to the point above. Don’t expect to be making money within a few days. Again, it takes some time to find that sweet spot and you have to be patient throughout the process.

Overtime I’ve come to realise that anything that is of value takes time to achieve. It takes months, sometimes years to build a house, get fit, lose weight, stick to a healthy eating routine, to play chess competitively, learn how to dance, etc.

My mind would want to learn a tonne of new things all the time. From learning how to play the guitar to boxing to hip hop dancing, it would continuously jump around. I’d spend a week doing one thing then switch to something else. A year would go by and I would have made 0 progress towards my overall yearly goals.

It took me 4 years to get my degree and in my naivety I would think it would take me a few weeks to start earning money in the business world. Business isn’t just a side thing that’s easy to do. There’s an art to it that can only be figured out in due time. Whatever you do, stick with it till for at least 3 months. If you’re doing something consistently for 3 months, you should be in a much better position to ask yourself whether it’s worth your time to continue or to make a change. As long as you’re learning a lot, you’re on the right path. The moment you reflect back a week and feel like you haven’t learnt anything, that’s where you need to change your business schedule.

Everyone will get there in time, but the moment you quit or change to something else, you’ve killed your chances and will need to reset.

CONSISTENCY IS KEY Make things easy for yourself.

It always seems doable while listing down how you’re going to go about achieving your goals but is often a tougher road then anticipated.

Instead of telling yourself you’ll work 4 hours on your business after your full-time work hours, make it only 20 minutes at the start. Building a routine should be your biggest goal at the start.

Getting into the habit of freshening up after work and getting into business mode takes time to get used to but once you start doing it, you’ll easily work more than 20 minutes. Having that initial goal of 20 minutes will at least make you feel satisfied and is more sustainable than making it hard at the start.

Many times when getting into something new whether it was a new sport or a new diet, I’d do everything 100% at the start. I started to realise that those who have mastered these routines did so over time. They didn’t just wake up one day and implement everything perfectly. They slowly added things and let their body adjust. Sure, it took a few weeks or months extra but it was a great way to cement it down.

Business is the same. Consistency is key and if you’re the sprinter type to get right into things like me and go as hard as you can, you’ll most likely burn yourself out and give up soon after.

Take your time and make sure you’re moving forward everyday. Make it 20 minutes a day for the first week, then add in another 20 minute session the next. Keep going till you find your sweet spot. You can even put a break day there in the middle on Wednesday. Whatever you do, keep it easy and consistent and let your body ease into it.

MONITOR YOUR PROGRESS What doesn’t get measured doesn’t improve. Something I learned during my working career.

My role was to monitor projects and make sure we’re finishing them on time and under budget.

The guys on site who would construct our pipeline projects would just be concerned about getting the work done. None of them really cared about the budget or timeline, for them, as long as the work is being done, it was fine. Don’t be like them. Don’t spend all your time and energy on things without knowing if your progressing or hitting your goals. Our goal isn’t just to have a part time business but it’s to make money.

Don’t be so caught up on things that you forget to monitor your costs, revenues, profits, time spent on business related activities, etc. I’ve had a financial spreadsheet since the very first day I started internet marketing 2 years ago. Looking back at this spreadsheet I can monitor trends and relate them to certain factors during my business. I can figure out what personal life situations contributed to what business results. There were many times I’d feel I was doing great but I’d look at that week on my spreadsheet and notice I wasn’t making as much as I thought.

Your mind is great at deceiving you but numbers don’t lie.

MOTIVATION COMES AND GOES – IT’S NORMAL There will always be a phase during your business when you run out of steam and will feel like this idea is going no where. Everyone gets this and it’s completely normal. The ones that push through it and can continue till the motivation comes back are the ones that make it to the other side. Most people will slowly stop working on their projects as they’re not as motivated as when they started and in time it will just become another shelved idea. Make it a point to finish

the whole process. Whether you’ve chosen to write a book or make a blog, go through with the whole process till you’ve finished. If you don’t get the results you desire, at the very least you’ve learned a lot and can take those learnings to your next business venture.

There have been many times where I’ve just lost interest in what I was doing but have been able to switch myself to robot mode and push through till I finish. Sometimes, I’ll be successful with the business idea I’m working on and motivation that comes from that success will be enough to get me going again. Many times it won’t bring me the results I wanted but I would have learned a lot about the idea and would have learned skills I can implement in the next idea.

SPEND TIME DOING IMPORTANT THINGS It’s easy to get caught up doing things in business that may seem important but really aren’t. I know people that have read a tonne of books but have very limited real business experience.

Maybe they read books because it gives their mind a satisfactory yet somewhat artificial sense of progress.

Whatever it is, it’s a road block. At the end of the day, no matter how you see it, making money comes down to one thing. Someone has to pull out their hard earned money to pay for something they seem to be valuable. One way or another you have to get comfortable with selling. Whether it’s online or offline, you have to be comfortable learning how to get someone to believe your product or service is valuable.

Instead of reading another book, watch some YouTube tutorials on how to make a website and start building one. Go down your street and letter drop pamphlets marketing your new business. It’s even better if you can call them or door knock. Again, you will have to get comfortable doing these things at some point. The sooner the better. If you can get yourself to do these then you’re already ahead of the majority of dreamer entrepreneurs.

DON’T WASTE MONEY ON MINOR DETAILS AT THE START I had a friend that spent $500 on a logo design for his business idea. Did he go ahead with his business idea? Nope. It never eventuated. All he had was a logo and a plan in his head.

I find this being a trend with a lot of people that want to start with business. They spend too much time doing things that don’t really matter. Thinking of a business name, getting their logo made, paying someone a fortune to build a website or an app, spending $5,000 on inventory, etc. Don’t spend time or money doing all these things right now, they’re important but not right now. Right now you need to prove to yourself that this business has life. Just because it make sense in your head doesn’t mean it makes sense in the real world. Only the real world can tell you whether your idea has value or not. Get out there and make some sales.

Go to reddit.com, find your subforum and pitch your idea there asking if anyone would be interested in such a service or idea. Don’t worry, no ones going to steal your idea. Try make a sale before you even buy your inventory. Again, you need to prove to yourself this business idea has life. Don’t ask your relatives or close friends. They mean well but sometimes leave you deluded in optimism. Ask people you don’t know. Cold call, door knock, post on forums online, whatever you need to see if there’s interest or not.

Build a small website with a landing page explaining your service or idea. See if anyone gives you their email address or makes a purchase. This is referred to as validation in the business world and it’s very important.

COMPETITION IS A GOOD THING For a long while my mind would come up with ideas and then quickly shut them down when I realise the idea is ‘already taken’. Some guy in some other country would have a half-baked website built around the idea and I would feel like there’s no point continuing with mine as there’s ‘already one out there’.

This is the wrong mentality. If there’s a healthy thriving business providing a particular service, then it’s a healthy business model that’s been already proven for you. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be trying to provide a similar but better service!

If there’s a local lawn mower that everyone knows then obviously a lawn mowing business is a great idea in your neighbourhood. Try jump in and get a piece of the pie!

It’s the reason why all the food places in shopping centres are grouped in the same place.

Everyone that enters that space is hungry and can be convinced to eat anywhere with the right type of marketing. At the end of the day this is what it comes down to.

FaceBook came from the success of Myspace. Yahoo came from the success of Google. Apple came from the success of Microsoft. All these companies were unique in their own right but can you imagine if Steve Jobs convinced himself not to release iPhones because the mobile phone industries were already dominated by Samsung, Sony and Nokia?

Bottom line, Competition is a good thing!

JUST GO FOR IT! At the end of the day no amount of reading can earn you money. You’ll never feel 100% ready to launch your business. There will always be something to fine-tune or perfect.

Products and services that seem to be ‘perfected’ now have come to become that way by going back and forth with customer criticism. The first iPhone had a tonne of issues. Now, 15 years later, they’re amazing pieces of technology.

Don’t wait till you’re 100% ready and your product is perfect. That will never happen. There is always something you can improve on.

The important thing here is to just jump in and have fun!

Start doing things, start making mistakes, start learning and it will only be a matter of time till you see the success you desire.

All the best!

- Mateen Affengineer.com

5 Quick Tips

FOR BEGINNER FACEBOOK MARKETERS I’ve spent over 150k on FaceBook launched over 2,000 Teespring campaigns. I thought I’d quickly list 10 beginner FaceBook tips for anyone that wants to start advertising with the platform.

FACEBOOK PAGE REACH Most People don’t know this but not ALL their Page fans are friends are reached when they make a Page/Profile post.

For example, If I were to post something out to my 15k Fan Facebook Page, only a small amount of those people will actually see it. In my experience it is less than 10% Facebook does this so people don’t get flooded with newsfeed posts from ALL their friends and ALL the pages their connected to.

Some people are connected to 100s of pages if not 1000’s so you can imagine how spammy it would become if everyones Posts would reach all their fans/friends.

They also do it to get marketers to spend more money on their platform. Surprise surprise. The conclusion of all this is to not rely on your FaceBook pages to drive traffic. Don’t be under the false assumption of thinking you have 5,000 fans who will ALL see your FaceBook posts. Only email lists seem to still have the capability of delivering to all participants.

FaceBook is good to advertise and spend money on but growing a FaceBook page to drive traffic is definitely not as effective as it used to be.

HOW FACEBOOK INTEREST TARGETING WORKS FaceBook allows you to select people who are connected to certain ‘interests’ to target to. For example, if people have liked the page, ‘I love dogs’, then you’ll probably be targeting these people when selecting ‘dogs’ as an interest.

Now, if you select multiple interest. Example, ‘planes, cars, trucks, boats, then your ads will reach people connected to all of these interests.

When I first started with FaceBook Marketing, I used to think my ads would reach people intersecting with these interest. I used to think I was targeting people connected to Planes and Cars and Trucks and boats. Not ‘or’. There’s a big difference in both of these.

If I want to target people who like Michael Jackson and drive a Mercedes, I will need to use their ‘also include’ function.

Definitely something to know when using the platform.

AUDIENCE INSIGHTS IS A MUST USE TOOL Audience Insights tool is heavily under-utilised. It’s a tool that uncovers the depths of FaceBooks data and makes it available to any FaceBook marketer that wants to know.

You can gain data on the age/geo location/gender ranges of any interest you want. Extremely powerful when doing some basic demographic research. Best of all, it’s free!

Simply go to audience insights, type the interest and go through the tabs to learn about their behaviours and FaceBook connections. Eg, if I type in chihuahuas, I’ll get insight into what other FaceBook pages they’re connected to.

HAVE A CLEAR IMAGE/MESSAGE TESTING WITH AN ADEQUATE TEST BUDGET Almost EVERY Facebook marketer I get contacting me, will have spent a few bucks on their campaign, and will be asking for sdvice on what to do.

A few bucks is not enough to learn anything about your Campaign behaviour. People spend $1,000s to test a simple CPA product, how do you think you’ll learn anything after spending $5?

In this industry you’re trading cash for data.

There’s no other way to go about it. The more you want to learn about your demographic, the more you’ll have to spend. The more you know about your demographic, the more success you’ll have with our campaign. I would suggest spending at least $20-$30 before you evalute the data you get back.

I know this is a bit much for some people but this is business. In business you HAVE to spend real money to make real money. It’s just the way it works.

FaceBook is a visual platform. To catch someones attention when they scroll down their newsfeed, you need to be able to visually capture them for that split second and stop them from continuing to scroll.

This is where the Ad Image comes into play. Most, if not all of my Facebook advertsare really just page boosts of my page updates. I’ll have some short text and a big image like the below it.

Note - This is NOT my campaign It’s big and straight to the point.

Not too many things going on. A simple picture of the merchandise for sale with a text at the bottom to tell you where to buy it from. $10 Off to create a slight urgency and a red border to get peoples initial attention.

I’ve seen ads with way too much detail and customers just don’t know what’s being advertised. Save the text for when they go to your destination. The only purpose of your FaceBook Ads is to get them to click to your lander so keep it simple.

DAMIANS $4K+/M DROP

SHIPPING JOURNEY

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It all started when I got sick of school, sick of my job, sick of other people telling me what to do.

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I searched Google for ways to make money online and stumbled upon something that was foreign to me at the time: drop shipping.

I’ve heard the term before, but it never really clicked for me. This time I wouldn’t give up.

Looking back now I laugh at myself for not understanding it right away.

Find a product online and buy it, but send it to your customer’s address. That’s it. The rest of it, the website, the advertising, is all found easily on blogs and YouTube channels.

Once it clicked for me, once I realized how simple [read: not easy] everything was, I dug right in. I Bought a Shopify plan, bought a simple two-word domain name (didn’t spend a lot of time here), used a free theme and messed around with it until I felt comfortable looking at my site. Next, I learned about Facebook advertising. I started to really see how it could work at this point. Create an ad for a product and show it to people who would be interested in it.

Those are the two MOST important concepts to understand to make sales: product + audience = sales. I found out about Aliexpress (the Chinese version of Amazon basically, AKA baby Alibaba) and went to work finding products.

I knew I would make a ton of money, all I needed was to find a cheap product and sell it with a huge mark up and I’d be a millionaire right? Well, the first product I tried out was a pair of socks with little dog faces on them.

They were about $0.80 for the pair and I was going to sell them as a FREE, just pay shipping product where the price was zero for a pair but shipping was $9.95. I would make about $9 per sale. Pretty sweet deal I thought to myself. So I made an ad for the socks, which consisted of dragging and dropping the image from the Aliexpress page to Facebook

Page Posts where I was creating the ad.

Wrote a short little message like Love dogs and socks? Get these cute socks with dogs on them for FREE, just pay shipping!

Literally that’s how simple everything was.

Baby steps. So the ad was set up, the product was set up on my site, and I let the ad run.

I distinctly remember it being 6:30AM on a Sunday morning when I let the ad run. I was going to work at 8AM - 4PM, so I would get to see some results during my break around noon time. I was so excited going into my car for break and seeing how things were going. I tried going onto Facebook Business Manager on my phone and it just wouldn’t load. I thought it was either my connection or Facebook just didn’t let me go on through my phone. So I waited until after work to look at the results and tried going on to FB Business Manager at home on my laptop.

Whenever I tried logging on it said that my account was disabled for suspicious activity.

My first ad campaign and my account gets disabled for crying out loud! My heart sank and stayed there for a few days. I contacted FB through the message where it said my account was disabled and through their help center or whatever it’s called. I didn’t know what else to do, after basically bitching about it for a couple days I remembered that this was the time I wouldn’t give up.

So from the 3rd day in I started sending 10 messages a day to FB about my account and kept sending them my ID. After exactly a week from the time my account got disabled I noticed it got reenabled and everything was fine. So I looked into my account and found out that the card I added to my Ads account was a few numbers off from what the number was on my actual card.

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Wow. Anyway, I launched that product again and let it run for 3 days at $5/day. No sales, $15 down after 3 days. Found another product and tried that, same thing.

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Did this for about 10-15 products until I finally got a sale.

Since then I’ve made sales with dozens of different products and made close to $20K in revenue and $3-4K net profit in about 4 months.

Margins were so small with the free plus shipping method. I would buy the product for $3 and sell it for $9.95. However I would pay like $4-5 to get one sale, I ended up making $1-2 per sale, bummer.

This is right about the time I found Mateen and his Affengineer.com Blog. I saw that he was showing examples of him making sales without any special deal. Decided I would give it a try, found a product that cost about $5 and I sold it for $12 + $5 shipping.

Still cost me about $4-5 to get a sale. Now I was making about $7 net profit per sale, which was awesome for me. Since then I’ve made sales with dozens of different products and made close to $20K in revenue and $3-4K net profit in about 4 months.

I’ve gone through countless obstacles throughout these couple of months, waking up

to a different problem every day. It’s given me a kind of calmness to be able to get through almost anything without getting too worked up. Being on the forum at Ecomuniverse with a bunch of like-minded people who understand and have been through what I’m going through and help me out really lets me focus and keep on going.

I know what to do at this point, launch products and outsource. I just need to do it, remember it’s not easy, but it is simple. Best advice from me to anyone starting out is to just dive right now, don’t worry about stupid things that don’t matter like domain name, website design, ad copy, etc., etc. Just keep creating ads and launching them to specific audiences until you got a steady stream of sales and then start outsourcing at UpWork.com, Onlinejobs.ph, or something similar. I’m still a newbie with drop shipping and ecommerce, and am excited to get deeper into it, namely outsourcing. Especially customer service, boy do I hate customer service haha, I must be a bad person. Go out there and find those gold products, or else other people will!

CHARGE FOR A SHOUTOUT Instagram is still mostly an unchartered territory.

Plenty of brands have grown to multimillion dollar levels contacting influencers and getting them to post shoutouts of their product. I’ve done this myself and been able to make a good amount of sales with just one shoutout.

So how much do these shoutouts cost?

I’ve contacted about 15 random accounts with variant sizes and got their shoutout rates for you’s.

Here they are on the next page.

ACCOUNT

PAGE SIZE

SHOUTOUT POST COST DURATION

Bateman.official

43.3K

$25.00

24HOURS

DragonBallSuper

190K

$40.00

24 HOURS

DBSuper

90K

$30.00

24 HOURS

Pokesphere

140K

$30.00

24 HOURS

Official_anime_offical

382K

$10.00

24 HOURS

official_anime_official

382K

$20.00

48 HOURS

carlifestyle

3.7M

$50.00

24 HOURS

AnimalAddicts

2.3M

$250.00

24 HOURS

AnimalAddicts

2.3M

$200.00

12 HOURS

Puppysketch

1.3M

$165.00

24 HOURS

Puppysketch

1.3M

$125.00

12 HOURS

Babyanmipage

736K

$90.00

24 HOURS

Babyanmipage

736K

$65.00

12 HOURS

DiscoverGlobe

1.3M

$125.00

24 HOURS

Livetoexplore

1.1M

$125.00

24 HOURS

TheGlobeWander

2.1M

$250.00

24 HOURS

Worldofartists

2M

$60.00

12 HOURS

worldofartists

2M

$80.00

24 HOURS

harrtpottercast

1.6M

$120.00

24 HOURS

theperksofbeingaweasley

540K

$110.00

24 HOURS

Drop Shipping via FaceBook and Shopify is becoming a huge trend.

For people that seem to want to get into this, they often get stuck trying to perfect their store before they start testing products. That’s fine, but isn’t a major part of the game.

I’ve sold 10s of thousands worth of products with a store that doesn’t look good at all but has all the necessary aspects required to start making sales and scaling.

Here’s a quick and dirty checklist for those that are just starting. Once you have the below set up, start testing products and never ask yourself if it’s because your store looks good enough or if your ad copy needs some work. 99% of sales come from people being mega excited after seeing a picture of your product on FaceBook, clicking through to your ad and checking out on your store.

SHOPIFY THEME

 My theme is pretty basic. It’s a free theme that anyone get download and start using.  The thing about themes is that they don’t really matter.  Most people visit your product pages not your home page.  Think about that for a second.  Most product pages are almost exactly the same. A few pictures on the side, some text about the product on the other side and an add to cart button.  So why spend so much time selecting a theme?  As long as the home page has a nice logo, (could be just some simple text made with cooltext.com), some products and some categories, it’s fine.  Don’t spend too much time trying to find the perfect theme. The guys making big money don’t bother with this.

SHOPIFY PAGES

The main Shopify Pages you need are the folllowing, Home Categories Shipping Policy Privacy Policy About Contact – You can use the contact template for this Tracking – You can use the aftership app for this Make sure you’re very clear with your shipping so the customer knows it’s going to take some time to arrive.

The last thing you want is to make good sales then get a tonne of disputes on your Stripe/ Paypal account that will lead to them shutting you down.

SHIPPING SETTINGS

Shipping is a little annoying at the start to set up.

It’s not as easy as just setting your shipping price for each product.

You will need to set your shipping prices by weight for domestic and international customers.

For example, 0.5kg product = $5.95 shipping 1kg Products = $9.95 shipping Then you’ll need to put these weights for each product.

Why do shopify do this? I have no idea but you’ll just have to work with it.

PAYMENT PROCESSORS The best practice is to have both a credit card processor and Paypal.

You’d be surprised how many people still use the good old fashioned credit card number as opposed to Paypal.

In fact, 70%+ of my orders come from credit cards!

Make sure you have a credit card processor set up, for me I use Stripe and so do most other people.

Stripe and Credit Card and you’re good to go!

SETTING YOUR STORE TO U.S CURRENCY Ideally you want to be auto translating your stores currency based on visitor location but to keep this a simple guide, change your store currency to U.S. Again, Shopify make this more complicated than it needs to be.

Seems like you need to disable their current default payment processor which is set to ‘Shopify Payments’.

Once you disable this you can set your currency to anything that you want.

These are some quick tips to get started. Once you’ve done the above you can pretty much start adding products and start launching campaigns!

Want step by step video tutorials on the whole set up and profiting process for FaceBook + Shopify Drop Shipping? Check out the free training centre at ecomuniverse.com.

5

24

Simple SEO Steps to Rank Your Product Pages Higher!

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) secret to success is being able to analyze, research and optimize your site. Understanding the implications of these SEO findings can help you make the right decisions in improving your website and search ranking. Failing to implement SEO simply guarantees your website won’t rank on Google for any of the coveted keywords.

Don’t Trust Me, Trust the Statistics On average, websites that rank on the first page of Google have a click-through rate

(CTR) of 71.33%. This statistic alone showcases the impact and importance of SEO for an e-commerce website.

Furthermore, the number 1 ranked position on the first page of a search result, receives an average of 31.24 clicks, while number 2 drops to 14.04 clicks. Makes you want to be number 1, right?

The following guide is designed so you can implement SEO directly onto your own e-commerce website today. So let’s get you started on winning that SEO battle.

1. Start with an SEO Audit

Conduct a thorough SEO audit on your website, but mainly focus on your Product Page. Generally, this has the most mistakes found yet it’s so crucial to your website’s performance. It’s good to get an idea of where your site currently stands so you can make the necessary steps to improve it. You can use Neil Patel’s free SEO analyzer - it’s simple and easy to understand. Just enter your website’s URL and it will do the following:

the opportunity to write irresistible product descriptions that Google will favor and at the same time entice your customers to buy.

4. Link Social Media on Your Product Pages

 Crawl your links  State your top keywords  Check page load speeds  Give you page level SEO recommendations

The amount and quality of social media signals is picked up by Google and helps in improving your page authority and relevance.

This will help increase your rankings on Google and increase your backlinks. Social media is the easiest way to kickstart backlinks to your site. Add social sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest) to your product pages so your customers can share information with their followers.

2. Understanding Keyword Research

5. Write Irresistible Metadata

Keyword research is key in driving quality traffic to your website. By placing the appropriate keywords on your product pages, you captivate highly qualified customers who are genuinely interested what you offer, which can result in huge sale numbers. You can use a tool like Google Keyword Planner, for Keyword research. It’s important to look at these 3 aspects when deciding on your most valuable keywords: 1. Relevancy 2. Search Volume and 3. Ranking Difficulty Long-tail keywords are highly targeted search phrases that contain 3 or more words.

By focusing on long-tail keywords you’re attracting customers who know exactly what they’re looking to purchase and are ready to buy. Keep the long-tail keywords highly relevant to your products while still having high exact-match search volume and low difficulty ranking compared to your competition.

3. Create One-of-a-kind Product Descriptions

You don’t want search engines to view your product pages with duplicate content. You can avoid this by NOT using the manufacturer’s product description. Google penalizes websites that have duplicate content by not ranking the product pages. However, Google does reward unique content. Take

Meta titles and meta descriptions are highly important in winning the SEO battle! It is the first thing a potential customer will see on a search result, so make it magnetic, catchy and entice them to click. For meta titles, add your main long tail keyword, make the title attention grabbing and aim for around 55 characters. With meta descriptions, include 1-2 keywords, aim for 155 characters and draw your customers in with a persuasive call-toaction (CTA).

Bonus Tip: Include Customer Reviews!

Product pages with customer reviews convert 58% more visitors. Need I say more?

Remember! SEO is an ongoing strategy that will keep you on your toes. You need to frequently test your site for errors, use the right keywords and monitor Google’s algorithm updates. Keep updated with SEO best practices and truly make your content unique so your customers have a great shopping experience. Search engines and users will reward you for it.

By: Ashley Elliott at RISE Digital Marketing Contact Section Don’t Have Time to Implement SEO? Contact us today, with SEO Packages from $400!

Matthew Metcalfe | Business Director RISE Digital Marketing Phone: +61475509579 Email: matthew@risedigitalmarketing.com

27

“

Hi everyone, Matt Foote here. I am making $15,000 in revenue a month on Amazon.com selling my Private Label brand. The most important thing to my company is cash flow, and I thought I would discuss that with you along with some general Amazon know-how for this first issue. Hope you enjoy.

”

It seems a lot of people want to join this sexy private label business importing from China, slapping their logo on a product, sending it off to Amazon, and getting rich from the internet. Sounds easy, right? It really is easy to sell thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise on Amazon every month; the hard part is making a reasonable profit on your products. Simply put, the low hanging fruit of generic products with minimal investment has been saturated.

If you want to make real money, run a real business. Adding value for the customer takes work but it’s the reason businesses succeed in this marketplace. Creating a better listing leads to more customers. That means better product, better pictures, better copy, and more reviews. You need to create a rock star brand that fits in a specific niche, and deliver quality products. Differentiate yourself.

I’m huge on applying the lean startup method to my product launches, that being said, the startup cost for each product isn’t cheap. Shipping samples to you from multiple manufacturers, $150+. Making an innovation to the product to make new molds, $150+. A first order of 500 to 1000 units may well cost a few grand between manufacture, shipping, and tariffs. There will be a real investment when it comes to quality marketing of your new product: copy $250, listing pictures $250+, box design $250+, and all of this is okay. These are the barriers of entry. This investment is your competitive advantage against those who don’t treat their business like a real business. At this point you should have already calculated all of your expenses, and figured out that your breakeven price is far below your preferred retail price. I’m all about minimizing risk.

Supposing you’ve made it this far. Your product is in Amazon’s warehouses, you’ve done the product launch giveaway, and sales are coming through. First off, congrats, you’re a real Amazon seller! Now you can’t let your product run out of inventory, Amazon’s algorithms don’t like it, so another order will have to be placed. You will also want to be broadening your product line to create depth for your brand in the niche. This is

28 where capital starts becoming a wall to your expansion.

Hopefully I can shed some light on some tactics that helped me grow. When I started I had enough capital saved up from my full time job for the first order. I definitely would advise not to be putting yourself into any kind of debt for your first order when you are learning the ropes of the business.

Further, don’t put in anything you’re not willing to lose. Businesses fail after all. Banks won’t offer business loans until you hit the one-year mark, proving yourself as a new business. Amazon.com will actually start offering you loans once you hit the one-year mark on your seller account. The amount offered fluctuates with the amount of sales you do. So where do you go for capital once you’ve started?

I turned to long 0% APR period credit cards. With introductory 0% APR for 12 to 21 months on three cards I was able to secure the credit necessary to make the reorder, and the deposit for a 20’ container of new product. There is certainly a risk in credit card debt. The burden is to take a calculated risk on the revenue that you will be bringing in with the inventory you are purchasing. It is a necessity to understand the timelines from the beginning of your 0% APR period to your manufacturing, shipping, and retail when the capital comes back into your bank account. For instance, based on the sales velocity of the market, I found that I would do at minimum three reorders before the debt needed to be paid off. Calculating my cash flow cycle allowed me to not be afraid to pull the trigger on debt.

There are other options like working to build capital, withdrawing from savings, borrowing from family, seeking out investors, or taking a personal loan. I’m currently filling out an SBA loan application. All are fine options. There are no one size fits all answers to the financing problem. It takes time to find the right solution for your situation. What’s important is weighing your options carefully, and planning your moves far in advance so

there are no surprises.

What really matters are your risk tolerance to debt and how you balance between cash flow and revenue. You’re balancing between will sell out and can’t replenish in time with will be stuck with inventory you can’t move. To mitigate the risk of selling out I’ve had cartons shipped air express before the full order was completed to ensure I would have product in stock. For the latter, there are plenty of other platforms to develop relationships with – eBay, Groupon, Jet, etc. And who knows, they may turn into another revenue stream.

Amazon makes distribution payments every two weeks directly into your bank account. For my business, every dollar is being reinvested into more inventory. There may come a time to withdraw some of the profits for living expenses but I don’t want to hurt the potential of the business as I create my product line.

At the end of the day do your due diligence. There is an incredible amount of free information when it comes to selling on Amazon. There are plenty of Facebook groups: Amazon Intermediate (mine), The Amazing Seller, FBA Master Group, and Amazon FBA High Rollers. There’s a great community on Reddit, www.reddit. com/r/FulfillmentByAmazon. I gained a lot from listening to podcasts on http:// theamazingseller.com/ and http://www. ampmpodcast.com/. I wish you the best!

USING AMAZON

29

PPC PLATFORM TO

BOOST

YOUR AMAZON SALES “

BY SAM PAGE

PPC is one of the best ways to scale sales for a product. Unlike Adwords and Google, Amazon Marketing Services does affect organic rankings. The more sales and reviews you can generate for a keyword, the better you’ll rank for that keyword in organic searches. This is one of the HUGE benefits of having a scaled up PPC campaign.

”

You simply pay for as much traffic as you want and if you have an optimized product, the sales come in. Amazon’s PPC platform Amazon Marketing Services, is still relatively new and the CPC’s (Cost Per Click) are still cheap. Pair low CPC’s with a high converting webpage, you’re off to the races.

30 ​ mazon is already a site where people are there to purchase. More often than not, the A research phase of the buying process is done elsewhere. This lends itself to a higher conversion rate than a website. Like Adwords, its imperative that you properly track your cost per conversions but Amazon does a great job of providing that information using their formula for ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) which is simply Advertising Spend / Sales.

Unlike Adwords and Google, Amazon Marketing Services does affect organic rankings. The more sales and reviews you can generate for a keyword, the better you’ll rank for that keyword in organic searches. This is one of the HUGE benefits of having a scaled up PPC campaign.

The boost of sales affects your Best Seller’s Rank and you’ll see tons of benefits by having that increased, particularly organic sales.

When setting up a PPC campaign in Amazon, I like to run two full campaigns. One campaign is an automated and another is manual. Automated campaigns are PPC campaigns in which Amazon decides which queries are relevant to the product and will display your ad accordingly. The manual campaigns are more traditional where you choose with keywords you bid on and try to earn the top spot for said keyword. Running two campaigns is a good way to see what Amazon thinks is relevant to your product. You can pull a report showing the keywords your ad was displayed for and apply those keywords to your manual campaign.

If you find your Amazon ads aren’t generating very many sales but you’re spending lots of money, its probably a conversion optimization issue. This is very common and something even highly optimized products should address. Everyone wants a better conversion rate. For Amazon specifically there are several things you can do bump up that conversion rate: - Images; critically important to conversions and branding, make sure you invest in high quality images - Your product title should be carefully crafted and informative. It should include keywords and brand.

31 - Bullet points are a big factor in conversions. Make sure your bullet points have targeted ad copy.

- Product description should have optimized ad copy and be informative. DON’T have too much copy that you risk losing customer engagement.

- Pricing is hugely important. Amazon is full of bargain hunters.

- Reviews are one of the biggest factors in conversions. Make sure you have informative, positive reviews and several of them. Negative reviews aren’t always bad but be sure to mitigate them as best as possible.

Armed with this information, you should be well on your way to getting new sales through Amazon’s PPC platform, Amazon Marketing Services. If you’re a Vendor Central seller, you can explore A+ content and Headline Ads as well. Keep refining keywords and testing your conversion rates and you’ll be #1 in your category!

Sam is the founder of Amazon SEO Experts and is the Senior Digital Marketing Manager at HiBoostUSA.com. He enjoys learning about digital marketing and exploring possibilities in ecommerce. You can follow him on Twitter @tippingpointseo. http://www.amazonseoexperts.com/

Boosting Sales

32

Think Teespring is saturated? Think again.

First off if Teespring somehow dodged your radar, I’ll explain how it works and why it became the catalyst to 100’s of custom platforms being created around the world and even Amazon launching their ‘Merch By Amazon’ line.

Teespring has 2 main components to it.

Design and Marketing: This is done by us, the affiliates and /or designers.

Fulfilment and Customer Service: This is handled by Teespring.

We come up with a design, put it on a shirt using their system and market the product page they generate for us. When sales are made, they will wait for the ‘date of the campaign’ to end, create and fulfil all ordered custom merchandise to your customers and pay you out your total profit.

Pretty cool right?

Custom Merchandise became so big because FaceBook just happened to be the perfect advertising platform for custom merchandise. Made a shirt for car lovers that live in Ohio and just had a baby? You can target these exact people on FaceBook!

The detailed targeting made available on FaceBook saw everyday people like you and me make a fortune almost over night.

That being said, it’s been almost 4 years since the boom of Teespring and many people have moved on to different businesses thinking Teespring is saturated yet my research continuously finds monster campaigns like the below that mint money.

Here are are a few Campaigns doing that did extremely well in 2016 and how I’d go about targeting them. None of these are mine, just ones I’ve found on the internet while researching.

33

This was created a few months ago on October 17th. I’ve seen this phrase quite a lot of times but the niche is so big that a fresh new design might get some people that didn’t buy the old design to buy this one.

For targeting I would the use input the below filters on FaceBook  Women  Engaged No need to play with the interests due to the above filters targeting the right audience.

Targeting fot this campaign would have been relatively simple but to maximise revenue you would need to play around with certain filters once the campaign is doing good. You should be split testing different age groups, (usually in 10 year intervals) and different engagement time frames.

It would be smart to split test those that are ‘just engaged’ with those that have been engaged for 6 months or 1 year+, (You can do this on FB).

34 Second Campaign, (I’ve seen a tonne of these!)

These are the type of Campaigns that can make you a lot of money. Why? Because they are mega expandable. You can sell these for all 12 months in the top 5 western countries AND probably another 10-15 non english speaking countries if you were to translate it.

That’s a lot of tees sold.

Judging by those engagement numbers, that’s a good 1,000+ units sold. Multiply that by $15, (average profit margin), and you have $15k in payouts. Multiply that by 12 and you have... a lot of money!

Notice how simple the design is? Sometimes a simple quote that touches the right spot is enough to sell in the 1,000s.

Targeting is relativel simple for this one too.  Men  Born in...

Turns out you can select a ‘Born in ‘month’’ interest for every month!

I would split test different shirts but it seems the ones where the birthdays are coming up seem to do the best. Again, you can select this in FaceBook. Isn’t FaceBook Great?

Next Campaign, I keep telling people to not just think about tees when it comes to Teespring.

This next campaign got really creative and made a lot of money doing it.

Kids Tees,

35 Again, an idea that is mega expandable.

You can do this for, Mothers Uncles Dads Aunties Grandpas Sisters Brothers Mimi’s Nana’s Obviously you can’t target kids on FaceBook so you need to target the person this design is talking about. The Mother, Uncle, Aunt, etc. So for this particular ‘crazy dad’ tee, you’d target Men and put the below in the interests filter.

These are the campaigns I hunt for. If you can get a few of these going you can take a year off! I find campaigns like this all the time when researching so for those that think they missed the Teespring band wagon, think again. You’ve missed the early days when it was real easy to make money. Now, you have to get creative, think outside the box and ultimately, be a real entrepreneur if you want to make it. Also, don’t let the word ‘Teespring’ limit your campaigns to just tees. Nowadays you can make custom clocks, canvases, shoes, mugs, pants, you name it!

There is a tonne of areas to explore so be innovative and start testing!

36

A lot of people love the holiday season.

Decorating the tree, opening presents, spending time with family, it’s all great. But there’s a group of people who love the holiday season even more… Amazon Merchants. Sure, presents are great, but 2x, 3x, even 4x average sales on Amazon, now that’s something to get excited about.

Q4 on Amazon is absolutely massive. Let’s consider a few statistics, Amazon has well over 300 million unique customers. In 2015, these customers spent over 107 BILLION dollars on Amazon.

Amazon is far and away the largest eCommerce website in the world and Q4 is when everyone pulls out their credit cards and starts spending.

Now that we understand the scale of Amazon’s reach, let’s talk about how we are going to cash in. In my experience, Q4 starts a bit slow and then ramps up very quickly. If you have been selling on Amazon for a few months or more, there is really no excuse not to be ready for Q4. So, let’s go through a month by month outline.

October. Q4 is here, time to make some money! First, pump the brakes, October is more about preparation than sales. October is the time to check inventory at the FBA warehouses and restock if necessary. With so many sellers prepping for Q4, your FBA shipments will take longer than usual to be checked in, so when you send extra product, send it early. You should also be optimizing your listing if you haven’t already. I’m not going to go into detail on every optimization strategy, but keep in mind that your photos, title, and bullet points are huge factors in converting shoppers into buyers. If nothing else, make sure these three things are flawless.

November. Okay, I know I said fine tune in October, but really fine tune in November. If you’ve been putting off an edit to a photo, do it now. If you haven’t reviewed your PPC reports in awhile, do that now and update your campaigns accordingly. Towards the end of the month traffic and sales will start picking up quickly and you need to be ready. Don’t leave any money on the table. Speaking of PPC, bid prices begin to get more competitive in November and will stay that way through

37 Christmas. Of course no seller wants to pay more per click, but this is a cost of doing business and you have to do it. There is a massive spike in traffic late in Q4 and you need to be visible. Raise your bid price well above the recommendation. Remember, you are likely going to be paying much less than your bid price unless you are in an extremely competitive niche. But regardless, you need to be visible in Q4, and trust me the increased ad spend will be worth it. Your ad spend now through the end of the year will go increase dramatically, but that’s alright because your ACoS should be where you want it by now. By the last week in November you should expect at least 1.5x average sales.

December. Expect a sizable spike in sales

by December 1st. A lot of people start doing casual holiday shopping in November, but they get more serious about it in December.

You should have plenty of stock of all of your items and be out bidding everyone for PPC. Although you should expect to see 2x-4x sales at this point, there’s not a whole lot to do. You prepared for this, now it’s time to sit back and watch the Amazon ATM pump out the cash. Sales should steadily increase until about 3 days before Christmas and then drop off sharply over the Christmas holiday. Sales will then likely return to near normal levels a day or two after Christmas. Although Amazon handles most of the work, you should expect an increase in customer service emails simply due to the increased volume of sales. I highly recommend using the Amazon Seller app on your phone so you can respond to customers as quickly as possible. This will likely ensure you receive excellent seller feedback. Also, with the increase in sales, you should see an increase in product reviews. Amazon sellers know how challenging it can be to get product reviews, so take advantage of this. Make sure you have a highly converting email follow up sequence in place to solicit product reviews. If you do this

properly, you can put your product in a good position to rank and sell well in the upcoming year.

Keep in mind the 2x to 4x sales spike is an estimate. I base this off of my own products, some of which are more seasonal/giftable than others. If you sell auto parts, don’t expect to see a major spike in sales in Q4. Not many people ask for a new radiator for Christmas, so just be happy that you have consistent year round sales and keep doing what you’re doing. However, if you have a relatively lowcost item that can be used by anyone, think male/female, young/old, expect a significant spike. A lot of this should be common sense and you probably know which SKUs are going to be giftable and which are not. If your product is highly giftable, plan for 4x, if it is less giftable, plan for at least 2x. It’s better to have the extra stock on hand just in case sales exceed your expectations.

Q4 on Amazon is exciting, but it can also be a bit overwhelming, especially if you’re new to the business. However, if you’re proactive and you come up with a plan, you can expect a major cash infusion for your business in Q4.

Well, that’s it!

What do you think?

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Keep winning Mateen Soudagar