Proven Amazon Course (PAC) Selling on Amazon Mentorship Series (SAMS)

Transcription

1 Proven Amazon Course (PAC) Selling on Amazon Mentorship Series (SAMS) Perfecting Your Retail Timing Transcript Hi, everybody and thank you for coming here to the Selling on Amazon Mentorship Series or the SAMS series from the Proven Amazon Course creator, Jim Cockrum and his team. I'd like to welcome everyone to today's webinar with Steve Lindhorst of Multi Channel Surfer dot com. Today, Steve's going to be teaching us about perfecting your retail timing. Which in layman's terms, is when you buy what to get your maximum profit. Welcome to SAMS, Steve! And thanks for coming to teach us. Thanks, I'm glad to be here. Awesome. Well, I'll turn it over to you. I'm ready to learn. I've got my notes and my paper ready. Well, what we've basically done is, I think the way this all started was talking about the e-book that I did some time ago called, Retail Flipping. What it has to do with is learning when to buy things that we resell on Amazon or ebay and how that's really more important than what we buy and sell. That's kind of what we're going to talk about is just this. Let me see if I can make this thing go. All right. There we go. That's the term that I kind of came up with. You know, about flipping houses. People will buy them and then flip them, for a profit. That's kind of what we do with the merchandise that we buy. We may buy it on clearance or however we get it, we flip it for a profit. The idea then is to buy low and sell high, which sounds pretty elementary, but a lot of people don't seem to get that concept. They struggle with it. In a lot of cases, the idea of buying low and selling high, we get that, but there's no way to predict it. In our world, there's an advantage, because we can look at the buying cycles, the sales cycles. You may have heard of that. And they're predictable. We are pretty much guaranteed that our sales in December are going to increase. People will buy nearly anything around the Christmas holidays. And we know that right after the holidays, we'll be able to get merchandise for a much lower price and then refill the pipeline. Does that sound like something that you recognize, Kat? Absolutely. I was saying earlier that this is something that my mother learned from a long time ago. The white sales are in this month and the back-to-school sales are in this month, etc., etc. You just seemed to have turned it into a science. Well, yeah, maybe so. I don't specialize in any particular thing. I used to on ebay. I bought and sold posters, transformational posters and prints. I noticed that through the years that there were certain ups and downs. Especially during the summer, sales would slow down. People were busy and they didn't buy those kind of things. I could see a cycle in my own sales. So as I went forward and tried to sell different things, I noticed that, at least for buying, there were definite sales. I mean it's right out there. The advertisements that we see. Anyway, over the years, I noticed a lot of people saying, What should I sell? When I taught ebay University, that was the main question that people came up to me with, What should I sell? I came up with this, that what you sell really doesn't matter. And it's true, to an extent. If we focus on when, instead of what to sell, we think about when to buy, it will help us to make more money in the end. This sounds bad, but in fact, with our business, being an opportunist, it's something we need to do. We need to take advantage of every opportunity to purchase things when they're at a price that we can make a profit. We'll talk about margin in a little bit. Kat, just jump in here if you see something that you can relate to. I'd be glad to hear your comments on it, too.

2 I just think that an opportunist is a good word. It's got a bad reputation. Take advantage of opportunities is all it means. Yeah. Then the idea that right after the holidays, we'll be able to get merchandise at a much lower price. Well, that's true, but also this is what I thought was so interesting there's also things we'll look at in a little while there's sales out there that are very predictable. And they're just not flashy sales. I think one thing I mentioned in the book was and I think that book is free for those who have got this series. Yeah. It says it's included in the PAC. So go look, you guys. If you're a PAC member and you're listening to this webinar and you should be go check out Retail Flipping by Steve Lindhorst and save it's a twenty-seven dollar value! So go check it out. Yeah, and it's even more valuable if you use what's in it. Definitely! Anyway, the idea of the sale right after the holidays, I thought was interesting. You mentioned your mom knew about there's the white sale and the back to school sales and the holiday sales but after those sales, there's clearance sales. We'll talk a little more about that, but the thing that fascinated me was the sales cycles that you can find throughout the year for just loads of products. I think in the book I talk about humidifiers. That's not a very exciting product in general, but what I found was there's a fluctuation. Each year, each spring, there's clearance sales and also a demand for humidifiers. So I went in to Target and I found them walking around the edges. Have you ever heard of perimeter shopping? Yes, going around the edges. I went around the edges at Target and found them for seventy or ninety percent off. It was a real deep sale. So I bought a carload of them and they sold right away. These little humidifiers. That got me thinking, nobody talks about this. Well, I love this because you're such a guy. You give it such scientific words. I love that! Seriously! I've been trying to tell people, How do you shop Target? Well, you know the end caps? Those things at the end? I kind of go around... Well, I'm going perimeter shopping! Now I have a word for it! Yay! I didn't invent that. There's already a word for it. There's a whole culture out there of Target perimeter shoppers. They talk about what they've found. And it's different from store to store. Target is an interesting subject. When I was writing the book on The Ultimate Guide to Savings by Store, we did a chapter on Target. There's an entire Target sub-culture. There must be a hundred blogs devoted to how to shop at Target. It's crazy! Yeah. You'll see in Retail Flipping there's a picture of one of the discount labels. There's information there that I never knew was there, like how much it's discounted and you can tell by the price if it's going to be discounted again and so on. So it's pretty interesting. The Target sub-culture. If there's a science to it, to me, it's predictable. We can predict some of the results. The thing to do though, just to kind of set this up, things that will determine our success in terms of profit predictability. That's really what I was looking for in this. When should you buy the things you sell? It's as simple as, I go to Goodwill and I buy books at Goodwill when there's a book sale. I don't go to Goodwill any other time to buy books. It's very simple. When should you sell for the most profit? That's the other thing. It all boils down to timing. It's the when question. Sometimes you may buy something and hold on to it for a while. I think we've all done that too. The main focus and again, this seems very elementary but I think we are focused on what to sell, rather than when to buy. So the margin is the difference between the cost and the selling price. If we have no margin, then we get no fun out of this.

3 If you're not making money, it's not fun. Absolutely. Question from the chat room about Target. I don't know if we have an answer. She wants to know why people are daily lining up and rushing to get into Target. I don't remember. I don't have an idea unless there's some kind of special sale. city? It depends on where she is. You might ask her where he or she is from. Is it a big town? A big She's in Colorado and she says that people line up and make a mad dash as soon as they open up. She's in the Denver area. One way to find out the answer to that would be to follow them. Follow the crowd! See where they go. But then the other thing is I know with me, my Target opens at eight o'clock and when I go in there at that time, I see a few of the staff still marking down items and stocking the clearance shelves. And there is a rule that I was told anyway, and this is in Retail Flipping too, there is a rule that for the first fifteen minutes after they open, the employees cannot get the clearance items, until fifteen after eight. Then they can get them for themselves. So they could also be competition. Wow. So possibly, in that local case especially, it could be a lot of re-sellers and they may have competition inside the store. I've seen it here. But I haven t seen lines. But I say follow them. And let us know. Yep. That's great. Awesome. So as far as the margin goes, I'm sure you've heard of this, use the three times rule. Everybody calls it different things. Is that something you've talked about before with any of your listeners? Absolutely. We teach this religiously. The problem we ran into is that we teach it so religiously that people are afraid to step outside that for certain, specific types of products. Please give us your version of it. Yes, everybody calls it something different and everybody has a different way of explaining it, so please give us your take on this. Okay. Well, the thing that makes this good is that I came up with this on my own, but I know that Chris Green came up with it on his own and a bunch of people have come up with it. So it's been, like, rediscovered several times. That to me means that it works. It's not just a fluke that I've done. So we'll do the rule, but then let's talk about the variations, too. I sell on Amazon. This works, I think, relatively well on ebay, too. I have this discussion around ebay. Like you, I'm a long timer. I've been around forever. People get frustrated and tell me that ebay fees are so much lower. But in my experience, Steve, the ebay fees plus the Paypal fees are pretty darn close to the Amazon fees. So I think it works. And you have to count them together. You don't separate one from the other. Before we get into that just to get off on a slight tangent Amazon does so much more for you with regard to collecting payment. If you use FBA, they do the shipping and the customer service for you. In that case, if you count your time as money, now you've got a real difference. Or, not a difference, but you have to count them the same. Anyway, to me they come out about the same. The way that I break this down is I figure a third is the cost. That's 33%. About a third is fees. It's not always exact. And then about a third profit. So for every hundred dollars I spend to buy product, I sell three hundred in product. So I have a hundred dollars in cost, a hundred dollars in fees and a hundred dollars in profit. So I get my original hundred back, plus a hundred in profit, so in fact I can double my money using this method. Does that make sense?

4 It makes perfect sense and I agree totally with you that it's very interesting that people discover this on their own. You discovered, as you say, based on your selling. Chris Green discovered it. I discovered it kind of from Chris. Even before that, I was trying to estimate thirty percent for the fees. And it's not exact, but it's a great way to think of things and it's easy to measure and it's a protection for newcomers. Because newbies don't figure that out real well. Maybe we should just call it a rule of thumb, because there are so many ways to break this rule. For example, if you buy a book for a dollar and the book only sells for four or five dollars, with the fees, you're not going to make 33% on it. It's not really profitable. But if it sells for ten or more dollars, then you can make a profit. With some low priced items, it doesn't work. But for an average retail like we're talking, it works real well. Exactly. If you keep especially if you're brand new if you keep this rule in mind and keep to it as much as possible and also keep a bottom threshold: Do not sell below at least ten dollars. I encourage higher, but at least ten dollars. Then you're pretty safe and you'll actually be making money, not just think that you're making money. With that ten dollar limit, I find myself just sneaking things into my packages. Well, I only paid a dollar for it. I might make a dollar or two and I'm already sending this box in anyway. So why not throw it in there? For those things, I'll sell a little bit lower. But in general, I try to stay up over ten for sure. I had a person call me, or one time and said, I'm trying to follow this three times rule. I've got an item that doesn't really fit the rule, but I can make fifty dollars profit on it. It was a three hundred dollar item, or something like that and he was able to make fifty dollars. I said, Then do it! I mean, if you can make fifty dollars on one item, do it! That's exactly what problem we've run into: teaching the three times rule so heavily that people are afraid to go outside of it. There are legitimate reasons to go outside of it. There are legitimate reasons to break the rule. There are exceptions. Question from Honey, Is that the lowest FBA price, or just the lowest price for the item? I think she's asking about the bottom line pricing, where we were talking about the ten dollar thing. I usually go with the lowest price on Amazon. I know you can break it out, FBA versus non-fba. But that's just my thing. I do use Scanpower, so I look at the prices that include shipping, so that's usually the price I'm going with. I try to do it in my favor. I assume that I'm dealing with non-prime members. So that way, it just builds in a little extra buffer over time. Sometimes the FBA price I don't think it's competitive. It's a little too aggressive. I come from ebay I assume everybody's trying to nickel and dime the market. Okay. Honey has clarified her question. Thank you, Honey. She's saying should it be 33% below the lowest overall price, or the lowest FBA price? She's asking about keeping your costs down. So if you're looking at something that sells for a hundred dollars, you should be looking at paying thirty-three dollars, correct? Yes. But when I look at the overall price, I do include shipping. So I guess...how do we say that? A third of what it sells for including shipping. Yes. So if it sells for ninety dollars and nine dollars shipping, that's ninety-nine dollars. You don't want to pay more than thirty-three. That's me. Okay. And when you were talking about throwing dollar items in your packages, that confused some of them. They're asking are you shipping packages to your customers? But I think what Steve is saying is he's packaging for FBA and so he might go ahead and throw in a lower priced item that, on its own, he wouldn't send in to FBA. But since he's sending this big box anyway, he might as well send in this lower priced item. Did I get that right?

5 about that. Exactly. All of my Amazon sales are through FBA. I should have said that earlier. I didn't think That's all right. You're like me. When I talk about throwing things in, when I'm shipping my orders on ebay, I throw in a freebie. I think that's what they thought you were talking about. I knew what you meant. I like doing that too, but in this case, I was talking about the shipment that goes to FBA. Just as an example, I can have a whole box of toys going to Amazon. I've got a bunch of these stretchy book covers that I got from Walmart for five cents a piece. I remember those. I mean really, they were practically free. And they sell for six or seven dollars. Well, I make profit on them. They don't weigh anything. I don't make much, but I always throw a handful in and re-stock my inventory when I send a box in. Can I ask a question about that? With FBA, I've run into problems with my lightweight, ten dollar items getting listed as an Add-On item. So you don't have that problem with the book covers? about that. Yeah. I have. Are they Add-On? I think they are. I've had other things listed as Add-On. I don't think there's anything you can do Well, the only thing you can do is pull them back and bundle them and re-list them under a new UPC. That's the only answer I have. My question is, have you ever had anything sell after it was declared an Add- On? That's a good question. I haven t had anybody I haven t found anybody that has said yes. I sell these ponytail hats. They weigh about six ounces. They were selling for $9.99. About half of them got declared Add-On. The other half, no. No rhyme or reason which one. I sell different colors. The ones that got declared Add-On, not one has sold. So I'm on a quest to find someone who has actually sold an Add-On item, and I haven't found anyone. I have to do some research on my own sales and see if I can find an answer. I would love to know that. Carole wants to know what an Add-On product is. This is a new program or something that Amazon has created that...i don't even know how to explain it. Lightweight, low-cost items can be declared Add-On : A-D-D-O-N like you're adding on to your order. You cannot purchase them with your Prime account and get free shipping. You have to order twenty-five dollars worth of stuff and then you can order an Add-On item. Although, can you, if you're buying something on Prime, can't you add them on? I don't know. You can't just order the Add-On item for Prime. And if you're not a Prime member, you have to order the twenty-five dollars, then the Add-On item. If you're a Prime member, can you order something for ten dollars and then the Add-On item? I don't know. I guess I should try that. Go shopping. Oh my goodness! I'll grin and bear it. I have to do this. All right. So we kind of got that down. Now let's talk about where we'll find some of these things. This is always fun, because it sort of leads to...i don't know, it kind of gets that Treasure Hunt thing going in people.

6 Yeah. In order to find things with low prices and hopefully high margin, we want to look for sales and discounts. Again, we want to remember that the sales cycles are predictable. And if the sales cycles are predictable, that means that we can predict when we're going to get things at a low price. Then that means that our profits will be more predictable. Not exactly to the penny, but generally, we can figure this out. So places we might look are clearance sales. We're thinking seasonal inventory clearance like after Christmas sales, back to school sales. By the end of August, most people are ready for school, so now you're going to start seeing clearance sales on back to school stuff. After Christmas, then you'll start to see clearance sales on Christmas stock that's left over. So that's a real big thing there. That's where literally, I give away a calendar that says, Now you should start looking for this kind of item, because this month, here's what happens. And so on. So, clearance sales. Another one is scratch and dent. If you've got time for a quick story, when I worked for ebay, we did a trade show for the Independent Hardware Association of Wisconsin. Wow. Yeah. So we went to Wisconsin and did this trade show. One of the hardware store owners said, We would like nothing better than if people would come in and help us get rid of our damaged merchandise. Because, he said, we have to turn our inventory over twice a year in Wisconsin. We have our summertime merchandise and our wintertime merchandise. In this case, they're the main...i think it was Ace or somebody like that they didn't take the stuff back. So they had to get rid of it in order to make room for the summer merchandise, or winter, when it turned over. So if they would have a snow-blower with a broken handle or a dent or a scratch, they had to figure out a way to get rid of it. They couldn't send it back before summer, because otherwise it's taking up valuable space where they could sell two lawnmowers in that space. Otherwise, this thing is going to sit around. So there's a potential there. Either wait for the clearance sales, or talk to the managers of some of these stores. Especially in the Eastern part of the country, where they see a lot of turn-over. We don't see a l ot of snow-blowers in California. Yes, thank goodness. Another thing that I learned here: When the Rite-Aid drugstores remodeled, they built a new store. It was just across the parking lot from the old store. So I saw all this stuff going on and I asked the manager about it. They had incredible clearance sales going on, because they didn't want to move this stuff from one store to the next. Maybe there's rules about it, but I got tons of items from that drugstore that they didn't move to the new store. They just cleared it out of the old store. They even sold the shelves. I mean, they sold everything. So that's another place where you can just keep your eyes open. I always suggest, you know, don't wait for labels to appear on things, go ask! Talk to the staff. That will help you plan a lot of things. Anything you want to add to that? No. I love the idea of just asking. Oh my goodness. That's a big deal. That's a huge deal. Just be polite, be there. You know how they see us in the stores. Especially if we're using a scanner, checking prices. They see us in the stores, they wonder what we're doing. I always just tell them the truth. And I've had people come up to me and go, Hey, in case you didn't notice it, there's a whole shelf of this or that over there. It helps to get them on your side. You're there to help them. Their goal is to sell stuff and you want to buy stuff. It's a marriage made in Heaven. In fact, there's a store here and I tell the story in Retail Flipping I'm not trying to be funny, but

7 I sold condoms that I found at the store. It was a store where they sell damaged goods. I think they call it a salvage grocery store. And the boxes had been damaged a little bit. Not opened. Maybe crushed a little bit. They just had been on the shelf a long time and they started to get old. But they were not expired. That was important. I could get these for two dollars a pack. And they were selling on Amazon for twelve dollars a pack and higher. Sometimes twenty dollars, depending on, there's different styles and so on. Brands. Mm-hm. So, you know, I'd roll up to the check-out counter with a shopping cart full of these things. And it was just funny. It was a little awkward at times, but you know. I remember this one girl saying...she didn't say anything. She was just checking them all out. I mean, it was a shopping cart full. I just said, These aren't all for me. And made her even more embarrassed! She started grinning and said, I just thought they were Christmas presents. Well, you haven't heard my condom story. I used to source at my local Publix, which is a grocery store. I always checked their clearance kiosk. One time they had a bunch of condoms. I scanned them, they were selling really good. They had like five or ten boxes. The other side had pregnancy tests. You know, the ovulation kit thing. So I bought those. I'm checking out and I could just see the lady, Okay, she's got condoms and pregnancy tests. If you want to get pregnant, she can help you. If you don't want to, she can help with that, too. Very confusing for the cashier. Anyway, my point for telling the story is, I would come in and every time these condoms came in, I would just clean off the shelves. I'd scan which ones and I'd just take them all. I said, Does the manager ever get kind of upset about this? Because they price them and put them on the shelves. She said, No, he loves it. He's glad somebody is buying them all. He's making money and I'm making money. So he was glad. My secondary product was the cream that's for nursing mothers. Oh wow. Yeah. That stuff also sells like crazy. Yes it does. People think we're being silly and we're enjoying ourselves, which is good. You should enjoy yourselves where you work. But honestly, folks, things that are a little bit embarrassing to buy at the store. You know the joke, You know your man loves you when he'll buy you a box of pads? There's all kinds of jokes like that. Those kinds of things that are a little bit embarrassing to buy at the store sell really well on Amazon. People would much rather have them delivered to their house in a plain brown box with the Amazon smile on it than to walk into the store and buy them. So don't overlook those unmentionable products. Yeah. I've sold Depends. I've sold enemas. All kinds of things. Yep. I do real well with Depends, by the way. Yeah. And they're expensive. Yes they are. And a lot of times, it's older people that want them delivered to their house. Subscribe and Save. Amazon does the Subscribe and Save with those, too. Exactly. They do it with condoms, too. Just an FYI. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. It's true, though. But now they don't carry them anymore and I had to find something else.

8 All right. So the point of that story was to get plugged in. Get familiar with your local stores. Here with TJ Maxx and with Target and with...what else do we have here? Ross, out in California. They have markdown schedules. I talked to a lady and asked her, When do you do the clearance? She said, For this store, it's every Tuesday. At Target, they have specific sections each day. I put that in the Retail Flipping book, but in fact, it is different for different Targets. They don't necessarily do toys, you know, every Wednesday, in every Target store. But they do do it by departments. So you can look every week or so and see where the staff members are with their carts, marking them down. But again, one thing I say is, talk to the staff. Ask them when to expect a sale. They don't care. Absolutely. They're not trying to keep you from buying things, they want you to buy things. And I love the open-ended question, What's the best you can do? Oh yeah! Oh... Because if I've got a shopping cart full of something, whether it's Walmart or wherever, you can bet you I'm going to go to the not the store manager, necessarily but the area, that department manager, If I take all of these, what's the best you can do? It doesn't take but five minutes to ask. And I've never gotten less than ten percent. Exactly. And they're not going to do it by item, generally. They're going to give you your whole cart off, ten percent. Yep. So yeah. Definitely ask. There was one other thing. Oh yeah, the worst they can say is no. You ve already got it in your cart. We used to joke on FBA Radio, They're not going to eat you. They re just going to say no. They're not a monster, nothing to be afraid about. They can't do anything to you. The other thing about being plugged in Of course, that's being plugged in socially, I guess, in a way but being plugged in with your equipment is important, too. You know the little scanners we talk about. Scanpower, there's a monthly fee for that. And that's just part of doing business. I remember a long time ago, when I lived way out in the country and we didn't get high speed Internet. We wound up getting the satellite Internet. That made a world of difference with the speed of listing and being able to do my work. I considered it I talked with my wife about it we kind of considered it a power tool. It's the difference between using a hand drill or a power drill. You can get the job done with writing things down and going home and looking them up, but it takes forever. It's just so efficient. The power tools will help you make money. Put some of that money back into your business and get the tools that you need. Yep. Don't skimp on your tools. You might even think of some...what's that? Don't skimp on your tools. Men are much better at this than women generally, because they know if they're going to get tools, they're going to get good solid tools. Having the right tool for the right job. Women tend to make do with whatever they've got. Don't do that. Get the best tool for the job. Carole wants to know the difference between Profit Bandit and Scanpower. Profit Bandit is simply a scanning app. That's all it does. It does every thing you need it to do to scan. But that's all it does. It doesn't manage your inventory or help you list on Amazon. It's just a scanning tool. Scanpower is a bundled product, if you will. They have Scanpower, the scanning app. Then they have a tool that helps you list and ship your items into inventory. Carole wants to know a list of tools, or tools for the newbie

9 starting out. Here's something else, Carole, that Karen and I talked about this morning. There are tons of tools and Steve is absolutely right, don't skimp and spend the money that is going to make you money. On the other hand, you do not need as a newbie, to go out and subscribe to all of these services and all of these tools, just because everybody else has them. Add tools as they make you money. The other difference between Profit Bandit and Scanpower is Profit Bandit is a fifteen dollar, one-time charge. No monthly fee. It's actually a new tool, so I'm not sure if Steve has actually looked at it. Scanpower is an ongoing, either forty or sixty dollars a month, depending on what package you have. So start out with the free Amazon price checking app. Or step up to Profit Bandit for fifteen dollars. Add Scanpower when it makes sense for your business and you need something beyond just this scanning app. Or add Seller Engine, or one of the others. And I think Scanpower does a thirty day free trial, right? Actually, I believe there's a sixty day free trial for PAC members. Only for PAC members, if you use the link in the Proven Amazon Course. I gave them my spiel. What's your take on tools and when a newbie should add them and all that kind of thing, Steve? Well, you know I'm in this avoid-the-shiny-thing syndrome. I'm one of the guys I guess I'm more like a woman in that way. I just make do. I reluctantly buy new tools. If it's working for me, I'm happy with it. So in a sense, sometimes that's a bad thing. Especially if you're in a position like I am, where you teach other people. I don't try everything. Scanpower was the first one that I really tried. I know Chris. I subscribe to it. It answers every question for me, so I don't look any further. To me it's like, they can't get better than that. It does everything I need it to. It prints the labels for the FBA items. It's just great. I looked into the other ones, but as you said, it isn't a full package. It doesn't answer the problems that I have. So to me, Scanpower is just... And that's not a paid promotional announcement. It's just totally...i'm not getting paid here. No affiliate here! That's the thing. I've been really big on making sure that people know about all the options. Again, I think you're with me. Don't hurt your business by not getting the tools, but don't go out there and get everything before you get started. No definitely. Another thing, I used my phone as a scanner for a year or two. Chris is like, Get one of those little Bluetooth scanners. I just put it off and put it off. I think it's over two hundred dollars for one of those things. Two fifty. Yep. So I'm like, Nah, I'll get one when it's worth it. Well, when I got it finally, I was able to go so much faster. It's just so much easier. I attribute those to the microwave phenomenon. I'm old enough and I'm showing my age to remember when microwaves were new. Everybody went, I don't need that. What do I need that for? Of course, the early adapters were like, Gotta have it! Gotta have it! But most of us were like, I don't need that. Now, can you imagine living in a house or apartment without a microwave? Unimaginable! Yeah. So it's very much like that. Then there's things like for the desktop, there's a thing that is like what they use at a cash register that looks like a little gun. I got one of those, too. That's another thing, I used to type in and I did a lot of books I would type in the ISBN. Oh, ouch. I could do it pretty quick. Still, it's so much faster to just shoot it with a gun. It goes so much faster. That was like seventy bucks. I was reluctant to spend that. But I did it and I've never looked back. So definitely get the things you need. You don't have to get the very best. Don't keep changing once you get things. That's another thing. I don't have fancy printers or computers or anything. Just get things that work. Don't get the cheapest, but don't get the best. Er, don't get the most expensive. Get the best quality for your money. Get the power tools. All right, that's pretty much it as far as buying. I just put this in there too, because I felt that was a pretty important part of flipping. We've got to be able to sell, too.

10 So I researched some things just as some examples, just to show you how you can find demand. I like Google Insights for search. You can see exactly what I did here. I searched backpack and I searched worldwide. Since Look at this graph. You can see that each fall, right around August or September, you see what happens for backpacks. Right? You see a peak. Those are sales. That's activity and sales. When should you sell backpacks? Probably right around back to school area, around that time. Then look at the secondary little blip there, though. Right near Christmas time each year, there's another bump for backpacks. So that's the kind of predictable nature of sales. We can look that up for nearly anything and say, When is the best time for me to sell this? Should I hold on to this or should I sell it right away? I found that the prices well, you can see here, as the demand goes up, then obviously the supply is going to go down and the prices are going to go up. That's just an example. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. No, I love that! I am a big fan of getting stuff out there when you get it and not holding on to it too long. But there's both sides of it. It's like Christmas items. Christmas items will sell year around, but they will sell better and for higher prices closer to Christmas. So it's your choice. It's your business. You need to choose for your business, but knowing where those are, and when it would be, would be awesome. I think I even give an example of that with Christmas ornaments. I got a bunch of really good Hallmark Christmas ornaments marked way down after I don't know, I think it was 2011 Christmas. One of the drug stores had them and they're collectibles, you know? They were marked way down. So I bought them and I listed them right away. Even though, obviously, Christmas was just over. They sold really well throughout the year, because people aren't buying them to hang on their Christmas tree. They're buying them as collectors. They're buying them for that reason. They look all year long. That's their hobby. I've got right now a consignment. A lady who just closed out a toy store. Wow. Maybe I didn't tell you this story, but this is a good one. Anyway, she closed out this toy store and she moved here from a couple hundred miles away. And they brought all of the toys with them. She put up wire racks in her garage. And she put all the toys on the wire racks and she said, I'm just going to put them on Craigslist and get what I can for them. Well, I found it when she first put the ad up. I called her and said, What if I took all those toys and sold them for you, so you don't have to deal with strangers. You don't have to do the constant, Let's go to the garage and let them pick through the toys and dicker with everybody and all of that. So she said yeah. So I took them and I've got all these toys on consignment. I would say September would be the best time to sell these, but she needs to move them now. We're still getting good prices. Great prices. Incredible prices for some of these toys. You don't have to wait for peak time to sell stuff. I think that knowledge is power, Steve. You can decide for your business. I need the cashflow now. So I'll take what I can get now. Or, I want to maximize my margin and my profit so I'll store these things at FBA or at my house or at a storage unit and send them in when I know I'll get peak prices. It's a decision, but you need to have the information to make the decision. Yeah. Like I say, so far, it's been done really well. Partly because she closed the toy store, I think a couple of years ago. So some of these things have been sitting up there on the shelf for a while and they're out of production. So things that were selling for six or seven dollars in her store are selling for twenty dollars now. Yes! So I mean it was just a really good find. That's another argument. I'm just a little off-topic right now, but we discussed this on my show repricing. People tend to think that repricing is just a race to the bottom. But whether you should sell for six or

11 twenty, that's where a repricer would help you. It would watch that and it would adjust that price upward for you. That's a perfect example. I'll have to remember that. This is just one way Google Insights for search this is just one way to do the research. There are some other ones. I can't think of, what is the Amazon site? Camel camel...? has Amazon. people. Camelcamelcamel. I've actually got news. I am so excited I get to tell you this. Terapeak now Really? Wow! Terapeak does Amazon! I can't believe I got to... Okay, I've got to introduce you to the Terapeak Oh, I used to know them. I remember when they started. I had a free account for years. All of the people that used to work there that I knew, they're all gone. It's really crazy. They just lost a bunch of people. But they now have Amazon Terapeak. But the site that you're thinking of, I believe, is camelcamelcamel. In any case, they show the Amazon sales history for different items. I think it's them. And there's some other ones. I can't think of them off the top of my head. Those types of sites are really helpful for getting these types of trends. Let's say you look at Amazon and backpacks are just in the tank. None of them are selling. The rankings are terrible, or whatever. Well, maybe we need to wait until August or September, or maybe we need to wait until just before Christmas. Then you can see that obviously the interest in them rises and the sales should be better again. into it too much. Absolutely. You're right. I talk about auto-pricers in Retail Flipping. I didn't have enough time today to go Yeah, that's probably a whole webinar. That's a pretty big important part of your...that's one of those sales tools that I would highly recommend. There's several out there. But I just found one that works that I like and I stick with it. I don't research too many of them. It would be bad to get competing auto-pricers and have one raise the price and one lower the price, one raise the price, one lower the price on the same item. You know, maybe we could make them fight with each other through the day. All right, so that's pretty much it. All right. Carole's got a little bit off-topic question for you. Do you sell on consignment? She's got an opportunity to sell some books on consignment. Do you do consignment? You talked about the lady with the toys. And how do you set that up? What's your minimum percentage? Those kind of questions. I generally set it up so that I earn...well, I use the three time rule. I figure that I want to split it with the customer. So they pay the fees and they get a third and I get a third. So that's basically, in a rough way, how I do it. I get about thirty-five percent. I use my own boxes. That's not a real big deal, but for my time I do thirty-five percent. That's worked good for me. I might get a raised eyebrow, but then they go ahead and do it. Any higher than that, and I think it would scare them off. Okay. Just throwing it out there, I do mostly consignment on ebay and I do fifty percent. I guess I want to scare them off. Because I really don't have time. In some cases, that's really good. The way I look at it, it's free inventory and I'm actually earning the same amount. Because I don't pay anything for it. They're paying the fees so I'm still coming out with a third of it.

12 Okay, Steve and I are doing the same thing then. Because I do fifty percent before fees and you're doing thirty-five percent after fees. That's going to be about the same on ebay. I think you're right. That' what I do with the library too. I've talked about that. Friends of the library consignment. Well, do you have a bottom line? Because what I ran into when I was doing a little too much consignment was that the low priced items were really a pain. It really wasn't worthwhile splitting the profit, plus all the bookkeeping that I had to do. So do you have a way of weeding that out? With FBA, I'm really not that concerned about it. If it takes anything extra to create listings for people like with the toy lady there's a couple things that aren't in the Amazon catalogue right now and I'm not going to...just the nature of it there's too many potential problems. So I started a pile of things for me to just give back to her. And she's totally fine with that. She's like, If it doesn't work or whatever, just give it back. So that's what I did. If it's too low...in fact, she's got some toys that are off-brand. I just don't take them. I don't even put them in my cart. I scan them at her house and I just leave them there. Not worth it. Not worth the time. The other question in the chat room is what re-pricer do you use or that you recommend? I like Repriceit dot com. Part of the reason I went with them is at least in the earlier days of repricing they were one of the first that would re-price FBA items. That was sort of like a different category from your standard Amazon items. They were able to do that, so I went with them. Prices are good. Again, I'm not an affiliate. I'm only going by my own experience. And my sales, my profits really started going up once I started using them. Obviously I could stay competitive. It only takes a few cents for competitors to sort of push you down in the rankings. So if you can kind of keep up or down with them, to a degree. All of the settings are customizable so you don't lose money. But I like them. For those of you who use Scanpower, I was using the Scanpower re-pricer. They do have a repricer in their system. It's not very robust. At least it wasn't. I know they just came out with a new version. I just got the newsletter yesterday, You're going to be switching to the upgrade, over to a new version of Scanpower, Mister Steve. So it might have a more robust re-pricer. But the one that I was using didn't have a lot of options. When I switched from using that re-pricer to the one that I use now, which is part of the Seller Engine that I use, it comes with a re-pricer. In fact, the major reason I went with Seller Engine was because of their re-pricer my sales and profits went up, just like you're talking about when you started using Repriceit. So the Seller Engine basically, it helps you list, it has the label printer and all of that and it has the re-pricer in there with it. That really improved my bottom line. It helped me maximize my profit. Yeah, that's good. What sold me on re-pricers was when and I still talk about this example, because it was such a drastic one when Sarah Palin came out of nowhere on the political scene no one knew much about her. There was one old biography that was written and everybody was scrambling to find something about her. So that book, if you had that book, it was sitting there at four dollars one day and it was up in the hundreds the next day. Yes, yes! So unless you had a re-pricer, that wouldn't have happened. Same thing with these toys that I'm selling. If I had just put them at the retail price, I would have put $6.97 on some of them. But the re-pricer saw the competition's prices on some of them and what was going on and it priced them closer to twenty dollars and they sold. So you know, it obviously makes them money. That's an excellent example, the Sarah Palin book. Many others like that, when somebody not only gets famous like she did immediately, but also when they pass away. Yeah, exactly.

13 Okay, I think that's all the questions. Any last minute advice for the group? Well, I hope they will download the book. Take a look at it and I hope it will help. It's what I do every day and I think it's what you do too. Sometimes writing it down helps us think about what we're doing. Well, they're saying thank you in the chat room, too. They want to thank you for allowing them to have that book as part of the Proven Amazon Course. They really appreciate it. Well, I really enjoy it. If you guys have not been introduced to Steve before, you're really missing out. He has a fantastic newsletter. I believe they would go to Multi Channel Surfer to sign up for the newsletter. Is that correct? Yep. MultiChannelSurfer dot com. Okay, great. I think that's about it. Hopefully aweber is working so the sign up will be there. If it doesn't, don't forget and come back later. The newsletter is definitely worth it. The newest book, we'll have to talk about that sometime. They think - Alan says you deserve a gold star for the webinar. Oh thanks! I love gold stars. Gilberto, I do not have the link to the book. But if you log in to the Proven Amazon Course and look under Resources, you should find it there. Carole, thank you for the reminder. Steve and I will be having another webinar on Thursday. That will be at one o'clock Eastern also, correct? Yeah. One o'clock Eastern, which is twelve Central time. We'll see all you guys again on Thursday. Thank you all. Excellent webinar, says Honey. Thank you all very much. We'll see you again on Thursday. Thank you, Steve. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.