International Q & A Webinar Transcript

Transcription

1 Proven Amazon Course (PAC) Selling on Amazon Mentorship Series (SAMS) International Q & A Webinar Transcript Welcome everybody! We're so glad that you're here with us this afternoon. This is one of the last three of this wonderful SAMS mentorship series from Jim Cockrum and the folks at Proven Amazon Course. Today we are going to talk about selling internationally on Amazon. The slant we're taking on that discussion today is if you are the international party if you're from another country. Not within the US, but if you want to sell on Amazon dot com. Barrington McIntosh is a success story at both of those. He's not only selling on Amazon dot com, he's also selling on Amazon UK and Amazon France. He's here in the States with us today, but he lives and works from Jamaica. He has a great place to live. I can't wait to go back and visit Jamaica. Also, he's going to teach us how you can sell on Amazon from anywhere in the world. Welcome, Barrington! Thank you so much, Kat, for having me. Welcome to everyone on the forum. It's going to be really exciting. I'm looking forward to all your questions. Any way we can help, we're looking forward to that. Looking forward to a great show today. My name is Barrington McIntosh. I started on selling online about two and a half years ago. Got Jim's product. I've been listening to Jim's products for a long time: Silent Sales Machine coming all the way along. But Proven Amazon was one of the turning points in our business, myself and my wife. I'm married to a lovely lady, Sarah McIntosh. We have four kids. All of us live over in Jamaica. We live on the island. My catalyst to starting selling online was, I went to school in the US. When I was going back home, I thought to myself, What am I going to do? I wanted to do a business online. Because I just don't like the nine to five. I really don't like going to work every day, leaving my family, leaving the kids. I started to do a lot of buying a lot of things online. Buying something here, buying something there. Trying with the one here on ebay. Then I got Proven Amazon Course. That was really a game changer. It really helped us to be able to I resigned my job four or five months ago. I am now full time online, doing Amazon from home. Just trying to expand my business into multiple income streams. On the first slide, it talks about setting up an international business. The key to starting to do this is product research. Being international gives a great advantage, a wonderful advantage. That advantage is that you have unique products. In Jamaica, we have a lot of unique products. I think I can count on one hand how many persons are doing FBA from Jamaica. It's myself and maybe one or two other persons and we have a whole island full of products. We don't have a lot of competition. I really don't have a lot of competition. Once I find that product that I'm going to sell, I go on to ebay or Amazon and do product research. After completing the product research, we check for product compliance with FBA. If that product can be fulfilled, I will look, we will make our decision. That's a key: getting those products, looking at the selection and then checking for compliance on Amazon. Compliance meaning, whether we will be competitive with the prices that we can purchase for, plus shipping it to Amazon. Just getting all those compliance issues. Then, we set up the company in the foreign country as well as in the US. Now, for me, I opened a business in my local country to do purchasing. That's what I use for purchasing. Then to do all the registration with Amazon. Go to Amazon dot com, get your account set up. I know a lot of persons are having problems with the US account, but I think Amazon gave us a solution. It's called Payoneer. We also have to look at carriers. We use DHL to ship from Jamaica. We also use Amazon. There's an excellent 1

2 service called EMS. I'm going to introduce you guys to that. We think that is going to change the way that you send your shipments in. If it's for small shipments, EMS does an excellent job. It's EMS dot com. That sounds awesome. EMS dot com? Right. EMS dot com. It takes care of all your smaller shipments. If I'm doing larger shipments, I'll use DHL. But EMS is an express mail service. It's available in many countries. I'll see if I can get the link here, Kat, in a little bit and post it. I'll go grab that for you. You go ahead. Yes, if you can get that link. Just Google EMS. Express Mail Service world wide. That gives you the countries that they do it in. I think it's almost two hundred countries. But for small shipments, this takes your shipments directly into Amazon. So if you can advance that slide for me, Kat. Absolutely. It's EMS dot com. You were correct. I'm going to put the link in the chat room. As soon as I finish out...there we go! All right, I think we're on the Dos and Don'ts slide. I 'm going to put the link down here in the chat room, if you're looking for it. Yeah. Right. And then you can just search for your country and see if that's correct. Search for your country and see if EMS does shipping to Amazon from your country. I think it's about...they do a limit of twenty pounds from wherever they're shipping from. But the beauty with EMS is that you can ship directly from EMS to an Amazon center. If you're doing larger shipments, and you re using DHL or FedEx, you will need to have someone in the US to receive it for you with a Social Security number. They are going to have to be the importer on record, or you will need to have a US business. So to start out, do small shipments. Do your research, do smaller shipments. Once you get yourself set up on Amazon, do your research, do small shipments. It's important that you read about the import and export restrictions on the products that you re going to send. Another website that's excellent is FDA dot gov. FDA dot gov. I'll put that in for you too. That's for your US shipments. If you're sending in to the US, you want to make sure that you go to that website, look at the product that you're thinking about and do your research to ensure that your product can be received into the US with no restrictions on it. You also have to do your research on the duties on the product to make sure that, when it comes in, is it taxable? Is it non-taxable? You want to make sure you have all that set up. You don't want to be sending your product in and then it sits in customs because they have a large duty that you didn't read up on. You want to make sure that your product...that the tax rate...what the taxes are going to be on your product. Shipping rates is key. This is what makes or breaks your business. You want to ensure that you compare the shipping rates. So that you know really quickly if you're going to make a profit on it. So once you do your research on Amazon, you find your product, you want to look at, how much it's going to cost me to send...if you're using EMS, how much it's going to cost to send twenty pounds of these items into Amazon? To see whether or not you're going to make or break even, or if you re going to make a real good profit on your item. Then you can use the FBA calculator to see what it's going to be on FBA, what fees Amazon is going to charge you and all of that. I think Kat speaks about this a lot. It's about Paralysis by Analysis. I mean, I was stuck in that mode for a long time. Just, Oh, I don t think it's going to work. The shipping is going to be too much. The key is, try doing a smaller shipment at first. Just start with a small shipment. First of all, look at the product you want to send in. Do your research, look at your shipping rates, your profit and loss margin. Once you make that decision, just start with a sample shipment. Maybe five pounds, maybe eight pounds. With something small that's not going to cost you too much and is not going to make or break you. Just start with that. Once you get it into Amazon, then you will know moving forward, to ramp it up. If it starts to sell well, then you know you need to ramp it up. You may now need to use DHL or use UPS. So this Paralysis by Analysis, don t let that deter you. You have to send in your first shipment. You have to get your feet wet. That is key. You have to make sure that you get your feet wet. 2

3 A lot of times, you'll hear family members, That's not going to work. This Internet thing is not going to work. I've heard that for maybe ten years or so. One person said, You just spending your money buying this new ebook and you're doing that? But listen, your goal is just...when it gets to that hard point and you feel like you want to stop, that is when your success is just around the corner. So keep pushing, keep going. You have a wonderful forum on MST. You can come in there and ask persons available, shoot your questions in there. Ask questions. That's how you get it done. Just ask questions. But the key is you have to take action. That is the key. If we could move to the next slide, Kat? Absolutely. Take action or die. There you go. That's it. N ow you get everything together. You re ready to ship. What do you need to check for? If you're sending in food items, you need to look at your relevant expiry dates. You have to ensure that the products you're sending to Amazon has long enough expiry dates, because you re not sure how fast that product is going to sell. So you want to ensure that you have a six month or one year expiry date out from the time that you're going to send in. So if you're going to buy a product and it's something that is in grocery, you want to ensure that it's fresh that you got one that's just manufactured. So you want to ensure that you have six months or twelve months out for your expiry date. So you got to check on that. Because once it gets there and it's expired, Amazon is going to toss it and you'll lose your money. Two months before expiry dates and they're going to throw it out. So you have to ensure that you are looking at your expiry dates. Again, you get the estimate of your shipping costs and then you can break it down. If you're sending twenty items in, you can break it down. Okay, I'm attaching it's going to cost fifty cents each item to be sent directly into Amazon. If you re shipping via the manufacturer or a third party, I guess that is when you get a little bigger. When you start to send in by the pallets, then you can go in and talk with your vendors and suppliers and say, Hey, I want you guys to start sending directly into Amazon for me. But that opens another can of worms. We'll have to talk about that later. The key is to try smaller test shipments first. Key. Try smaller shipments. Check all of your restrictions, make sure everything is fine. Test a small shipment. It's not going to cost you too much. Just do something small. Try it out. Then afterwards, you want to track your shipments. Sometimes your shipments get into...for EMS, the process is they send it from wherever, it goes into the US Postal Service. Once it goes into the US Postal Service, then it will get delivered into whatever Amazon fulfillment center that you have set up for. But the key is track your shipments, because it might get delayed in Miami or whatever. You want to track your shipment to ensure that your shipment is going to get there on time. So the next slide, Kat? Once Amazon receives your inventory, you want to ensure that if you sent in ten items, you want to ensure that all ten are received. Sometimes your items may be damaged in transit. That's when it is good to be using like a UPS, because UPS has insurance coverage. So if it gets damaged in transit, you get your money back. You check for the quality, then once you forward all your items to FBA with UPS, as I was saying before, the benefit of using UPS is that you will be reimbursed if your shipment is damaged. Follow-up daily. You want to ensure that, sending your shipments in, you want to keep a good follow up and ensure that all your inventory is received. Sometimes they start to receive and they receive five and you sent in seven or eight and the other three is hanging. If you have a problem, Seller Support is very extremely responsive. I've found that they are extremely responsive. You can send them a quick , Hey, I sent in a shipment and it's been checked in for four or five days and I've not seen any progress on it. Then somebody will get on your shipment. But you need to follow-up to ensure that all your shipment is received. If you sent in fifteen, you want to ensure that they received fifteen. In case of discrepancies, you may need to have your invoices on hand. You can always use that with Seller Help to make sure that all your cases are resolved in case of any discrepancies. If we could move to the next slide, Kat? Mm-hm. There we go. Finally. This is a quick synopsis. I really want to get to your questions. I want to see where everyone is at. You want to monitor your customer feedback and the quality of your inventory. I'm not sure what you guys are going to send in from wherever in the world, but if it's in the grocery, you want to monitor that for the expiry dates to ensure that you don't have a product sitting on the shelf and Amazon is going to toss it. You want to ensure that customer feedback is key. It is key. When I started to sell on Amazon and they said, List a lot of 3

4 products and ensure that you always give good quality customer service. That is the lifeline of your business, customer feedback. Once you take care of that customer, you are guaranteed business on an ongoing basis. A quick illustration that I have for that, when I came to the US and I was in college, we came to class one day and the professor said, What is one thing that everyone is guaranteed in the United States? None of us could answer that question, Kat. I mean, none of us could answer that question. Guaranteed? There is nothing guaranteed! We had to go home and come back and the next day he said, Opportunity. Everyone is guaranteed opportunity. I'm telling you, it's the right place and the right time. Being an international seller is a wonderful place to be. Because it gives you a wide variety of inventory that you can send in to Amazon. Once you take care of your customers and your customer feedback goes you know, you're keeping it in the nineties, because a hundred is very hard to keep. If you're keeping it up in the nineties, you are guaranteed that you are going to be getting business. Unexpected charges. If you get your items in, you send them in from your country and then customs is going to slap some charges on there, Oh well, this one is taxable. You have to pay more. You have to prepare for all of those. Third one is to pay your suppliers. That is key. I have a very excellent relationship with my suppliers. I go in there, I'm letting them know, Hey, I 'm selling your product online. I'm not only selling your product, I am responsible for managing your brand. So I'm ensuring that if a customer is saying something negative about your brand, I am going to be there to protect your brand. That gives you that much more leverage. I started...i had to go into the supermarket to buy. That's how I started. I went into the supermarket to buy products. Then I got so many orders, that I had to go directly to the manufacturer. After doing that, Kat, I'm telling you, the manufacturer gave me an open line of credit! He's like, Listen, take what you need. Any amount of products that you need, you can come to our warehouse and get it. I make sure that whenever I get paid form Amazon, I go over and make sure they get their payments. They gave me their whole line of products. They said, Go ahead and sell everything online. Awesome! You are moving their business. So they are going to give you whatever you need to be successful. You are making money come into their coffers, so they're going to love you. So pay your suppliers on time. If they give you a fifteen day credit, pay them in seven if you can. Get them happy. Once you get them happy, you are guaranteed to be successful. Customers and suppliers, everybody's happy That's a good deal. That's it. I communicate with them all the time, sending s outgoing. One time we got a call myself and my wife we got a call from the CEO of the company. He called us in and said, Hey, what are you guys doing? You are selling more products than we are. And we are online. What are you doing? Do you want me to ship to your customers? I said, We can handle the shipping to our customers. We just want better rates. He said, Come in and sit down and let's talk. And we started from buying his products in the supermarket aisle. We were buying his products in the supermarket. Then we got so big that we had to go directly into him to start buying from the factory and buy by the pallets. So that's the key. You want to communicate and build that relationship with your supplier. That is key. Ensure that you will continue to have products going. Then look at products that you can add to the stream. Once you get your first shipment in and it starts to roll, then set it up, Okay, every week I'm going to send in this box. All you have to do is start finding new products. Find new products and put it on the wheel. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, just find new products and keep it going. File the relevant sale tax and tax report. Once you get to a certain amount of revenue, you're going to have to start doing your tax report. I'm not a tax guy, so I really can't give you the full financial information on that. My wife handles all of that and we hire somebody who knows how to do it. In terms of the taxes, once you get to a certain amount, don't let that deter you. You will start as what they call a hobby seller. Once you get to a certain amount of money, I think maybe fifty thousand or so, then you need to start filing the taxes. I'm not the tax guy on that, so I don't want to give the tax information, but make sure you keep all your records. So that once that is required, you have that. If you're international, from your country, you need to know what the requirements are. When you open a business, 4

5 you will have to know from your specific country what the requirements are. Over in Jamaica, we know what the requirements are, so we get set up with all the legal things there, to ensure that we are compliant with all our taxes. You gave the best advice already right there. What you said was go find someone and hire an expert. This is not some place to try to figure it out. Go find the people who can tell you what I need in your particular country. Good advice.. That's correct. That's correct. And six is to build your import/export line. Look for unique products. I was down by the craft market one day and I saw a very unique product. The lady called me. She said, Hey, are you going to buy this? I said, Right now... I had just started out, so I didn't have any money to buy. So I said, Let me just take a picture. So I took a picture and I listed it online. Within a week it was sold. Now I carry her whole line of products. This job is so unique. I tell people it's wonderful, because when you're looking at unique products, you re supporting your local economy, you're getting stuff out, getting US dollars in. It's an amazing business model. My advice to international sellers is, don't let Paralysis by Analysis cripple you. Start small. Open your Amazon account, get with Payoneer. I started a process with Payoneer it took two days and they approved me. Only thing they needed was my driver's license. Driver's license or maybe they need a national ID from your locality. And they support over two hundred and fifty countries. That's amazing. If you put that link in there, I think it's Payoneer dot com. I think so. Let me go double check that on my monitor and I'll be right back with the correct link. I just want to make sure... Yeah. Payoneer dot com. Once you start with that, they support two hundred and fifty countries, so once you open the Amazon account then they will set you up with a Bank of America with a routing number and an account number. That's what Amazon needs for you to get started. I think that Payoneer is now an Amazon approved company. Because when I logged in to my Amazon Seller Central about last week, there was the ad, right in Seller Central! Do you want to be paid your Amazon revenue right away? Well, sign up for Payoneer. I was like, Whoa! This is nice. This is an obstacle a lot of persons are trying to overcome. Excellent. That's the link: Payoneer. Now what were you using before Payoneer? Because you had something else, then you figured out Payoneer. You had a different method before that? Right. It wasn't really a different method. When I came from here to go to school, I started a Bank of America account. So I still had that account. As an international student, that's how I got it set up. I was in the US as an international student and I got my Bank of America account with my Jamaican passport and everything. And I got it set up, so I used that account. I was just using that account to do my business. Okay. Then you logged in to Amazon one day and there was the advertisement for what we've been talking about on the boards, for Payoneer, right? Yep. Payoneer. So I know now they're Amazon approved. Or Amazon would not be showing that ad within Seller Central. Agreed. Agreed. That's awesome. So in a synopsis, this is the key. You want to do your research, just basically all the points that we went through. You want to do your research. You want to send a small test shipment. Once you do your research and you find a product and it's going to be potentially profitable, send in small test shipments. As I said, the first one with EMS. Up to twenty pounds, they'll send it directly to Amazon. If you re going over that, like larger shipments...the wonderful thing about EMS, they get your shipments to Amazon in three to five business days. Wow. 5

6 You don't get much better than that. No, not even in the US. Three to five business days! From Jamaica. So I send out a shipment on Monday and by Thursday afternoon, I get an from Amazon, We're receiving your shipment. And I'm like, Wow. Wow, wow. That is totally awesome. Because your shipment is there, it's competing. There are so many products that I have, you have to look at the products that are making you the most money. If you're sending in grocery items, if you re sending in toys, you look at what's more profitable and you ensure that they're always in stock. Stock is the key. Yeah. Ensure that they're always in stock. It's a good problem to have, to keep running out, but you need to make sure that you have products in stock. Especially for the last quarter, which is coming right up on us now. Yes, because if you're out of stock at a different time of year, there is a chance that they're going to come back and get it. If you re out of stock in Q4, you've pretty much lost the sale. You've lost the sale and you've lost a lot of money. They're going to find somebody else that has it, because they need it by Christmas or whatever holiday they're celebrating. That's right. All right. Really good synopsis and I know you've done really well. I don't want to jump...are you ready for questions now? Oh my goodness, look at me. There we go. I am ready. Whenever the questions are ready, you guys can start sending your questions. What we want to take from here is we want to...everybody that's on the board, I would love for you to next week send me an saying, Hey, my first shipment is on the way. That's the way to go. That would be great. I love the way you're encouraging folks to just do it. Don't let yourself talk yourself out of it. Don't let your mother talk you out of it. Don't let your sister and brother-in-law tell you, It's another one of those foolish things you're doing. Give it a try. Because Barrington did and look where he is now. I mean, that's pretty amazing. I was working persons would say, That's a great job! I was the IT director for a power plant. Pretty good job on the island. I was talking to Jim last year. Jim said, Barrington, I would love to be a fly on the wall when you're talking to your boss saying, 'Hey, it's too expensive for me to come here.' I was thinking about that conversation and I was thinking, I wonder when I am going to have that conversation. And by March this year, I had to have that same exact conversation! I had to go to my boss and say, It's too expensive for me to come here now. I remember that on your conversation with Jim and I thought, I love the way he put that. For those of you who didn't catch that, Jim was saying and this is what happened that Barry was making so much money working his other business that he couldn't afford to take time off from his Amazon business to work at the other business. It's amazing. When we actually had that conversation...and you know the funny thing is, my boss, he does his own thing online. And he said to me, after four months, he resigned himself! He's like, If Barrington can do it, I can do it, too! That's my boss! Oh, so that's the other person in Jamaica that you said you could count on one hand, a couple other people doing it. Yep. That's my boss. He's the general manager of the plant. He resigned as well. He started to do his own thing. He's like, What are you doing? You are serious about this Amazon thing, aren't you? I said, 6

7 Yeah. I love it when they call it This Amazon thing. It's like, This Internet thing... Can you really make any money? I get that question from my family, Can you really make money with this Internet thing? Well this Internet thing is the new economy, so figure that part out. Okay, I'm going to walk through my own questions when we get there. Here's a question from Liorr about the VAT on Amazon EU. How do you figure out the VAT if you're selling in the UK? Or are you selling there as a nonregistered seller? I guess he heard me talking about you expanding from selling on Amazon dot com to selling on the Amazon dot UK program and he's wondering how you are handling the Value Added Tax program, or VAT in the UK? The products that we are selling on Amazon That is an excellent question, by the way the products that we are selling on Amazon are zero rated. So we registered for the VAT with Her Majesty's Royal Tax and Collections. I'm going to try to find that website. We went there and we read up my wife did all the reading, because she's the accountant. She is the lady that crunches all the numbers. So she did all the reading. We read up on Her Majesty's Royal site and we registered for the VAT number and we got approved. They sent us an to say, Hey, this is your VAT number, so whenever you need to file... Even if it's zero taxes, you still have to file it. So you put zero. And they gave us all the information. So we went to that website and registered for VAT and our products were zero rated. And we used our local address in Jamaica. That's how we did it. You say, zero rated, and I'm thinking, translate that to a US...for me to understand. It's like we have some items that are not taxed. So zero rated is the same thing, right? There's no tax, or no VAT on those items? That's it. No tax. And I'm assuming that's a lot of food items, correct? Right. Correct. Keep sending the questions in, because if you don't send them in, I'm going to bury him with my questions and you all will never get yours asked. You'd better put yours in there. Good questions from Justin, Have you found that Amazon is less likely to begin competing with you if you're sourcing from companies outside the US? Great question, Justin! Excellent question. Excellent question. The funny thing about that, Kat. They actually tried. This is where having excellent relationships come in. We were moving a product so well that Amazon contacted our supplier in Jamaica. Do you know what happened? Because we had such an excellent relationship with our supplier, our supplier called us and said, Some guy from Amazon is contacting us wanting us to move the product. Do you want us to take this order? I was like, Whoa! So they called you up and said, Do we want to do this, Barrington? We trust you, we don't know these other people. Tell us what to do. That's it. They're like, We're not too sure about this Internet thing. We want to concentrate on making the best product possible. So you go ahead and take care of that. But once it's outside of the US, unless it's really, really, really moving I mean like you re in a sales rank of one to ten - the chances of Amazon trying to compete with you are way less. But they will. If a product is doing very well, they will try to compete with you. That's a guarantee. That is why keeping good relationship with your suppliers is key. It's really, really key. Awesome. So what have we learned from that little story? Number one, the relationship with your supplier is key. And number two, Amazon will try, whether your product is inside or outside the US. This is another reason you know we talk about multiple streams of income that's why you don't want to have one product. You don't want to build your business around one product. One of the hardest lessons I learned in business, Barrington, was when I was real excited about finding this product and I thought I would sell this one product forever. What I found was, whether it's Amazon or somebody else, eventually you will have competition. Or there will be a problem with that product. So keep expanding our product line, while expecting, eventually, to lose a product here and there. Would you say that's fair? 7

8 That's fair. That is correct. That is what we did. We started with one product on Amazon dot com. And after the Christmas season,. We saw four or five more sellers on FBA. On that product! We said, What are we going to do? We took that same product, brought it over to Amazon dot co dot UK and we're the only ones over there. And we're getting the same price on Amazon dot co dot UK, but only it's in pounds, so it's way more! Yep. I've heard that also and I've seen that. We did a web presentation at the SCOE conference in Seattle where Ioan from Seller Engine was showing side by side comparisons of products that were selling on Amazon dot com and Amazon dot UK. And the same product was getting so much more money with so much less competition, because the other side's catalogue is so much smaller than the Amazon dot com catalogue. Stuart was asking if they were going to get the PowerPoint slides. Absolutely, I've already created the pdf. So all I'm going to do is render this video and send that and the pdf to our little web guy. Hopefully within twenty-four to forty-eight hours it will be up on the SAMS page. You'll get a notice on the SAMS page when it changes. Keep them coming, guys. Like I said, I've got plenty of my own. I love you discussing your strategy of finding products in your local store. What did you do, buy five or ten of them using the EMS process, under twenty pounds, just to try it out? That is a start. That's it. That's the start. You go into your local store and there is a little product. There's a Jamaica product. Jamaica, mon! I say, Okay, it has a UPC. Let me take it back and go do some research. Did the research, see where I can come out maybe ten, fifteen dollars in profit. Okay, let me try four of these. Use EMS, send out to Amazon. Then you wait. Then the product starts to do very well. My wife found one product that was not even on Amazon. She listed it herself. Now, that's one of her top sellers. And we are the only ones who sell it. So go to your local supermarkets, look for something unique. Persons travel to your country. They may be over in Jamaica and they see something that, Oh, I really love this spice. Or, I really love this tea. And they're back in the US and they can't find it. It brings something back. So now they go on Amazon. Wow, it's here! Oh, I can buy it. Perfect. I am the supplier. I'll take care of you. I'll send anything that you need. That's how you got to do it. Just go there, find some products that are unique to your country products that are popular from your country and you be the one to supply them. That's the key. Awesome. We are such a global society. I know that phrase is over-used, but it is absolutely over-used because it's true. We have people who move from Jamaica to the US, or from the UK to Jamaica. And they miss their home products. Like Barrington said, I go visit Jamaica and I find a favorite product. Maybe I lived in Jamaica and I have all my favorite products I've had all my life and suddenly I move to the US or to France and I can't get my products anymore. I'm going to pay more money to get those products and I'm going to find them hopefully on Amazon dot com. So you've got a built in audience for a lot of these products. Yep. That s correct. Okay. So you've set up your Amazon account and we've already talked about Payoneer - we've solved that pretty well. What about the issue that people keep saying that Amazon requires you to have a US address? How does someone living in Jamaica or France or the UK or Pakistan how do they get a US address to use and why do they need it? I think for Payoneer that's a very good question for Payoneer, they give you a US address. Awesome! They give you a US address. But if not, there are a lot of services that they have it's like a freight forwarding service. What they do is they give you like, a Miami address and you can buy online, ship all your products to that Miami address and they forward it to you. I actually have one of those. It's called Mailpac. Yes. What they do is, they give you a US address and you go ahead and set that up as your address. All your products are sent there and these guys, in turn, will bring your products in to the island. Or wherever. They do all the countries in the world. They do all the Latin America, Asia, they do a lot of countries all over the world. But they give you a US address. And from that, you can use that as your US address for Amazon. Because that's where 8

9 you get all your mail, your items that you shop online for. That's another way that you can go around that. Awesome. So if you haven't started up your Amazon account or your Payoneer account, you can get both problems solved in one. Right. If you have a different payment solution, there are other options for getting your address. Again, I have to reiterate, this is a global society. I went to the IRCE conference in Chicago just a few months back and they had one aisle for shipping solutions two aisles, actually. One aisle was packing supplies and such. That's another story. But the other aisle was all of these companies coming up specifically targeted to different countries or different regions around the world. Several of them, Barrington, were targeted to Latin America. They were for US merchants to get their merchandise to Latin America, safely, quickly and insured. I'm sure it works in reverse. Ways for Latin American countries to get their items to the US. This is a burgeoning industry. We as a global society are demanding these solutions and they're coming up. There may be three solutions or one solution we can find for you now. There will be more next month, or the month after that. So keep coming back to MST. We'll find them for you and we'll post about them. Eric. Good comment from Eric. There's more research I can do of course, but so far I haven t found any products that are unique to Canada that are not already available, in some cases cheaper, in US markets. I'll get back on it and dig deeper. That's the way to go, Eric. That may be not the exact way to go for you. There may be other things. I always encourage people to look around their local area, like Barrington is telling you. Don't give up, because people say, I'm trying to sell books on Amazon and I'm not finding anything. Well, you have to scan, in my opinion, at least fifty books to find one that's worth something. If you re just going in blind to a grocery store or a department store, I will tell my people, you're going to look at scanning a hundred items before you find something. Now those may seem like high numbers and that's what they are, but you're eliminating competition. Because a lot of people, they won't do that. That's too much work. So just keep going, Eric. That's right. Barrington, anything that you want to say to Eric, too? Yeah. I would just echo what Kat had to say. Just keep trying. Maybe think about what the tourist would purchase when they come to Canada. Maybe it's some Niagara Falls memorabilia. Or just think about something unique to Canada. As we said, you just have to keep going out there and think about it from that aspect. Think about what a tourist would purchase when they come to Canada. Maybe they came on a trip to Canada and they forgot to get a souvenir when they're back in the US. When they get back to the airport, Oh, I forgot to pick up this coffee mug for my mom. But it's on Amazon and they could do it Next Day. That's another aspect that you could take it from. Or also, if you have friends who are Canadians who have moved to the US, or Canadians who have moved abroad to another country, find out what they're missing. What do they miss from home? That would give you some good ideas too. Yep. I hope that will help you. So I've got my Payoneer to get my money,. I've got my US address, I've set up my Amazon account, I went out to my local store here in...i'm going to live in Jamaica too, because I like that...jamaica. I put it in a box and I take it down to the EMS people and they send it off. Do I label my stuff just like you do as an Amazon dot com seller? Same process with FBA, I go through the shipment feedback and put those little stickers on it? Is it the same for you as it is for a US seller? That is the same process, yes. Exact same process as doing it from the US. What happens is, EMS gets your shipment from wherever, those two hundred fifty countries in the world, they get it from your location into the USPS system. I think everything comes into Miami. They drop it into the USPS system and it takes off. So if it's going to Phoenix, if it's going to Virginia, if it's going to Philadelphia, any one of the FCs, the Amazon FCs, it comes through the USPS system. I just go through the regular process. I go in and create a shipment, do the labels. If I'm doing a larger shipment, I'll probably have Amazon label it for me. But if I'm doing a smaller shipment like ten, fifteen items, I'll just go ahead and print those labels and stick them on there. If it requires polybags or anything, I'll ensure that everything is taken care of from here. But once it gets into Amazon, everything is received just the same as sending it from Florida, or just the same as sending it from New York. 9

10 Awesome. Okay, so it is the same process once we get the product and get it moved in there. Now, I want to encourage folks, too because I have some of my coaching students that are in Hawaii and they're like, I'm just going to give up, because it's too expensive to ship stuff from here. Well, I'm guessing that if they're complaining about the Hawaii shipping rates, that the shipping rates from Jamaica are rather high. Or from the UK to the US. So that's one more thing. Number one, you have to take that into consideration when you're doing your research, Barrington, as you pointed out. That's part of your cost. That's one more hurdle that sellers will not deal with. So you are eliminating competition. Every time you find a hurdle in your business and you stop and you go ahead and go over that hurdle and keep working, you have left more and more of your competition behind. So when you run up against something like that, don't say, Okay, I can't do this, and throw up your hands. Say, Okay, I'm going to make the extra effort to overcome this hurdle and leave my competition behind. Do you want to talk a little bit about shipping costs and such? Yeah. I think that suggestion that you gave a while ago, Kat, that is an excellent suggestion. Before I started this, had I heard that, I would have paid you big money just to know that. Because you re eliminating the competition. A lot of persons are going to be, Oh no, it's too hard. I'm done. But when you move past those hurdles, it starts to get easier. I'm the only one doing this. That's when you're going to reap the rewards. You have to work hard. You have to put in the work. A lot of people say, Oh, you're not doing a real job. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of leg work to get everything set up, but the rewards make you really really feel like you're accomplishing something. Yeah, I'm getting paid for what I'm doing. So definitely, you want to weed out all those persons who are going to start and say, Ah, shipping is too much. Shipping costs are too high. I'm not even going to bother with it. You have to look for solutions. That's where we started out. You know, I went to the Post Office and in Jamaica, the EMS service is very under-utilized. When we went in there and I said, How quickly can you get my shipment to the US? And they said, Yeah, we can get it there in three to five business days. I was like, What? The other option is four weeks. Four weeks! I said, What's the cost? So I got the cost from the shipping line, went back home and I said, Okay, Sarah, this is what we have. I gave her the numbers and she said, Oh yeah. This will work. Let's roll with this. Because at that point, she knows, we're paying X amount for it. It's going to cost us this much to get it to Amazon. And this is what we're going to get back. Okay, we're going to make a good profit on this, maybe twenty-five percent. Let's go. We did a test shipment. That product started to roll, that's one product on the line. Let's find another product. Repeat the process. I think Chris Green used to use the phrase, Lazy scanners, lazy sellers. Every time you're doing something they're not willing to do, you're leaving competition in the dust. You're moving forward. Knowing your costs, that's important. Again, we're recording this in August of Barrington has found this fantastic resource called EMS. EMS dot post is the website. They serve about two hundred...it goes from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. That's the list of countries. A lot of countries. Yep, covers everybody. But I will bet if we come back and revisit this subject in August of 2014, there will be a whole list of companies doing that. So keep your eyes and ears open. Always be watching for a new way of doing it. Again, every time you overcome an obstacle and do something that other people aren't willing to do, you're going to be one of the front runners. And guess who makes the most money? It's the people who find the products first. What I see happening with FBA now, Barrington, is two years ago when I discovered FBA and started working on it, there were very few people doing it and everybody was complaining about how hard it was and all the things we didn't know and the services we didn't have. As we've gone on and FBA has gotten older, it's gotten more and more mainstream. There are thousands of people coming on every day. They have services and helps and coaching. There must be thousands of coaches out there now to help them. So that's where the majority of people are. They're getting on to Amazon dot com, they're selling, they're learning. But there's still all this opportunity out there that has not been touched. That's international selling, your own products, all kinds of stuff that nobody will do. You, by selling from the international side and bringing these products on to Amazon, you're in the front runner space. And you're going to make the most money in exchange for the most effort. That's it. That's key. One good point again - with EMS, it doesn't even get stuck in customs. Because it's such a small shipment, it goes right through customs. Whenever you have a bigger shipment coming in of the same thing, FDA is going to hold on to that. They have to check and make sure...it takes a longer time. But with the smaller shipments, it goes right through customs. No headache. EMS takes you right there. Boom, boom, 10

11 boom. You're out of customs, done. Okay, that's a great point. I know that people shipping from outside the US into, or from out of the US into the UK or whatever all countries have their own customs and stuff like that. So that's how you avoid that. What about when you're shipping in a pallet of something? Do you ship by the pallet, or do you break everything down into the small twenty pound boxes for EMS? No. I ship larger shipments. We have to do pallets on larger shipments. Those go through DHL. Okay. And DHL handles the customs, so that when they arrive...? okay. DHL handles the customs and they charge us...i think they charge us twenty dollars. But that's That's fine. They charge us twenty dollars to take care of all the you know, they go to file the prior notice and everything for FDA. They will take care of all the paperwork. They just give us a call. Hey Barrington, you owe us twenty dollars. We took care of all your paperwork. I love that. So you're paying a shipping service in some cases, EMS. In other cases, DHL. There are other options coming on board daily. And you re paying them so the products get to the Amazon warehouse and they don't have to do anything. It's just processed the way a normal any other product coming from Florida or wherever would be processed. Is that correct? That's correct. That's correct. For shipments that we send to the UK, we use the EMS service. What they do is partner with the major carrier in wherever. So if we're sending shipments to the UK, they use Parcelforce. So they get the product from us in Jamaica, take it to the UK, drop it off to Parcelforce and then Parcelforce will just take it straight into Amazon. Excellent. Excellent. Anybody got more questions for Barrington? I know we've covered the main issues that I constantly hear on the boards: How do I get a US address? How do I get a bank account? Lots of things like that. I see someone's raising their hand. If you would like to type a question in the question box, I'd love to type it out. There's a question box and a chat box. I can hear you from either place, if you want to type your question there. We've covered those two, we've covered shipping. There's always different options for shipping in your country. Google is your friend. Because there are, as Barrington said, new companies coming on daily to do that. So use Google to find that. Maybe we could, in the My Silent Team, start some specific forums for different parts of the world to share ideas. That actually has been some of the best places I've seen people sharing feedback, Barrington, is on the MST forum. People sharing, Here's how I got it. I'm in France and I was able to use this shipping company. People are even sharing the names of the people they hire, the customs brokers. Right. The customs brokers. That's correct. There's even people sharing that. Again, don't let all of this customs and that and da, da, da lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Don't let it stop you. Get your US address. Get your bank account. Open your account. Find one or two products that your research proves are worth sending in. I always think that for you it's even more important. Because making a mistake and paying for all that shipping on a part that's not going to sell, that's going to hurt. That is why research is key. Research, research, research is key. Before we started to sell on Amazon dot co dot UK, I had that same mentality. Oh, I don't know if we're going to be accepted. When I tried to list the product over there you know, I opened the account with the regulars, so that I don't have to pay that monthly professional fee. Just to start out. Just to test out the waters. Right. We wanted to sell in a category and we got a response from Amazon UK that said, That category 11

12 is gated. So you cannot sell in that category. So I mean, a lot of persons would give up right there. They'd be like, Oh man, they turned us down. I just sent another to Seller Central, What do we need to do to get approved? Well, are you selling anywhere else? I said, Yeah, you know. Okay, send us your link. So I sent them our link to Amazon dot com and she's like, Okay, we approve you. You are now approved to sell in this category. All we did, we asked questions. We just asked questions and continued to follow up. You don't take the first no, that you're not going to do it. When you tell me no first and I know I'm going to do it, that is motivation for me. I'm like, Okay, I know I'm going to sell in there. Let's see what we need to do. My wife just got approved for Amazon dot CA. We're listing on Amazon dot CA as well. It's just, you know what you want and you have to go out there and get it. Take action. Take action. I know I've met people, Oh I've been following Jim for twenty years. Oh, that's awesome. What do you do? Oh, I still teach right now, but I'm going to get going soon. So you know, you have to take action. Nobody can do that for you. The information is there. Good question from Justin, What kind of percentage of markup are you looking for? Great question, Justin, because here in the US, we teach people that it needs to be three times. You need to be able to sell it for three times what you buy it for. If you pay ten, it should sell for thirty. If you pay a hundred, it should sell for three hundred. What kind of markup do you use with your extra expenses of shipping, et cetera. What do you use? I still use that formula of three times. I still use the three times formula and I take into consideration the shipping cost. Because that's the key, coming in from international. You have to look at what is it going to cost me to get it there, landing cost? You look at customs, you look at duties, whatever you have to pay. I still work with that formula, three times. So I mean, if I'm making twenty-five, thirty percent, I'm fine. Awesome. So it's three times if you're scanning an item, looking for something to sell. Making sure you can make at least three times. Taking into account the shipping, what that says to me is it has to be three times, but if it's heavier or a larger product, that's going to cost me more to ship, it's got to be on the high end of the range, like thirty-two or thirty three. If it's a smaller item, I might be able to buy for ten, sell for twenty-eight, twenty-seven, that kind of thing. Is that what you mean by including the shipping into that figure? I'm sorry, Kat? When you say it's three times, but you also consider the shipping, I was thinking, if I'm buying a ten dollar item that is a larger item or heavier item, and it's going to cost me more to ship it, I'm going to want it to sell at the high end of that. Like, instead of just selling for thirty, I'm going to want tit o sell for thirty-two or thirty-three or thirty-four to cover that extra shipping. That's correct. Versus if I'm spending ten dollars on some little tiny lightweight item, I might be able to say, Okay, it sells for twenty-eight. But it's so tiny, that will work. Is that what you meant by figuring the shipping there? Right, right. That's correct. You want to make sure that you're not losing at the end of the day. You want to do your research to ensure that, even with shipping, you're still coming out at this profit margin. That's good for me. That's correct. Awesome. You have to make sure for EMS, they only take shipments up to twenty pounds. So anything bigger than that, you have to go DHL, UPS, FedEx. You have to go, maybe shipping by the boat. So you have to make sure that whatever you get in there has enough products and is going to make you enough profit. Absolutely. So like I said, looking for what shipping options are available in your country would be a major factor to figure out as you're starting down that route. Like you said, you found EMS and then you went back and told your accountant, Okay, here's the kind of rates we're going to get, so here's what we need to figure on any product that we're going to get. I would say that is a big thing to go look for. Right. Find out who in your country does shipping and what their rates are. As I said, EMS pretty much covers a lot of countries and that's a good starting point. When you start to get a whole lot more sales, then 12