#305 – How Two Sellers Have Scaled Up To $20,000,000 In Annual Sales

In today’s episode, we welcome back Helium 10 Elite sellers, Ankit Patel and Huy Nguyen to talk about updates on their businesses this 2021, all the lessons learned, and some new strategies that helped them crush it this year.

In episode 305 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Ankit, and Huy discuss:

• 02:00 – What’s New With Ankit and Huy?
• 03:30 – Entrepreneurs Going On Vacation
• 07:45 – Off-Amazon International Strategies From Huy
• 14:30 – Dealing With Returns Using eBay
• 16:00 – Using The Amazon Renewed Program For Returns
• 20:30 – How Did Their Businesses Perform In 2021?
• 27:00 – $15,000,000 In Amazon Gross Sales For 2021
• 30:15 – Search Find Buy Without “Search Find Buy”?
• 34:00 – More Tips And Strategies From Ankit And Huy
• 44:00 – Your Network Is Your Net Worth

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got two sellers back on the show who don’t have a course to sell, or a software to sell, or agency to promote anything like that. They’re just average Joes who have built their businesses up to now over 20 million of annual sales. How cool is that pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

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Huy:

It’s going really good. How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. It’s a good day to be in the Amazon space. When you just had like a couple weeks ago, the, you know, cyber weekend and black Friday, everybody’s all excited and people excited about sales. And, you know, we actually just got off one of our Helium 10 Elite calls and we’re hearing some crazy story from Elizabeth there, which I definitely have to get her back on the podcast to see how she did like 2, 3 million in a couple months. But anyway, that’s guy’s how I met Ankit and Huy actually they’re Helium 10 Elite members. And so we’ve met each other, you know, virtually and in person at events and things. And I brought them on last year for an episode. So if you guys want to get like their full backstory, we’re gonna talk a little bit about today, but we’re not gonna go into the details that we already covered last year.

Bradley Sutton:

So go back to episode 190 of the Serious Sellers Podcast guys, if you want to get Ankit and Huy’s full backstory. But basically, today, what I wanted to see is, you know, kinda like what’s new in your guys’ world and how your 2021 happens. Let me look at, I’m gonna check really, really quick. I gotta, I’m checking the transcript of the last episode. And I’m wondering if I put you guys on record with like a goal or something for this, I’m gonna be looking at that in the background. Yep. I see right here, it says I’d love to bring you guys back, and then I want to see how did you close out your 2021 or something? So we’re definitely gonna get into that. And we all know, Hey, you know, sometimes we’re up, sometimes we’re down that’s real life, you know we all gotta be prepared for it. And so first of let’s go with Huy, we were just talking about this in a Elite call. Where did you and your wife just come back from?

Huy:

We just came back from Tulum

Bradley Sutton:

Tulum. So were you guys like at an all-inclusive resort out there or something?

Huy:

We did do an all-inclusive resort. We were about 20 minutes away from Tulum actually and it’s was nice because this is like one of the first vacations that we took without the kids and so we did stay at adult-only all-inclusive. It was good. But we did go down to Tulum it was, you know, really nice. The reason why we didn’t stay in Tulum is a lot of the hotels down there. Don’t have air conditioning and so it’s quite hot. Yeah. So, you know, we choose comfort over that, but we still had an opportunity to go down Tulum and see everything only 20 minutes away. It’s perfect.

Bradley Sutton:

So did your income come to a screeching halt or did you have to request time off, paid time off from your boss week as an Amazon seller here?

Huy:

No, definitely not. I mean part of the thing, it just comes with the territory, right. This business runs 24/7, and my wife knows it as well as like when we go on vacation still get a couple hours of work in there. But you know, we have a good team behind us and everything was running smooth as usual. But yeah, that’s the beauty feel running internet business.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Absolutely. What about you and your family, Anita? You, you, you still just like grinding every day or have you guys actually taken time to enjoy being an entrepreneur and going on a little trip or anything lately?

Ankit:

Yes. Bradley. So yeah, this year, actually, we just came back from Mexico also.

Bradley Sutton:

Everybody’s going to Mexico. I like it. I didn’t even know that one. I didn’t even, I knew we went to Mexico. I didn’t even know that you did too. Cool.

Ankit:

Yeah. I just came back from the Cancún last month and you know, since we are an e-commerce right, the Q4 is our big working time. Right. So we can’t really go around the Christmas time when everybody else are. So we had to pick like the school season, right. So, you know, whenever the best time to go, the pricing are good. Not a lot of people are there. So it was a lot of fun. And you know, last year even though when I go to vacation, I actually had to check my sales, make sure I answer the question for my team. This is the first time ever since I started, I actually did not have to do a single decision. I told my team, I’m going for one week. I’m gonna turn it off. You can call me directly. Don’t message me, call me if there is an urgent situation where it is kind of something you can’t do without my help. So that’s the only time. But yeah, so that was really good. It was a lot of fun. And now back to the Q4 grinding every day, and it’s crazy, which is good in either way.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now, speaking of grinding now, the last time I, I think I was on a video call with you, you know, months ago Ankit, or when you were at the office and by the way, guys, you know, I’m looking at Ankit right now, if you guys are listening to this in a podcast, you’re like bits bar talking about, but we also one week after we launched these episodes on the podcast, we now launched them on YouTube guys. So those of you watching this on YouTube, you can see what I’m talking about, but Ankit there in your office there. I remember, you know, last, last, last year you had just got moved into this office or warehouse, I should say. And then you had like a bed back there in the office. You were like pulling some all-nighters at work. Are, are things a little bit more like you’re not doing that kind of thing anymore or the bed is just moved to another off-camera or something.

Ankit:

So, yeah, the bed is when we used to bring my kids in, right when we first just came to office, because me and my wife, we both worked together. She handles all the returns and you know, we bring in the kid when they were off the school, so they would kind of take a nap. Right. So I had a bed in my office and you know, so yeah, the bed is at the other spot now. So, you know, because there’s a lot of recordings like today, I don’t want bed to be coming in the back. So that’s how.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So still yeah. I mean, I remember the days I used to have a warehouse 20 years ago when I was in the car parts business, and I literally had, one of the offices in the warehouse was a bedroom with two beds, had a crib in there because my daughter was a baby at the time and we had a TV there. We’d spend sometimes two days there at the office. That’s how it is. So yes, you can take vacations. Right. But at the same time, you, it’s not like it’s all laptop lifestyle you entrepreneurial life is sometimes.

Ankit:

Oh, it’s beautiful and hard. You gotta, you gotta work hard to get it beautiful right?

Bradley Sutton:

Absolutely. Now Huy one thing I don’t think we talked too much about in the last episode, but I wanted to kind of talk about that a little bit more. Today is some of your international strategy. When I say international, I’m not just talking about Amazon Germany, or Amazon UK, or Australia, but what is your off Amazon international strategy? Because you know, I’ve heard little bits here and there and it seems like you’ve got a somewhat unique strategy.

Huy:

Yeah. I think that there’s a tremendous opportunity outside of Amazon. Right. But then there’s also a tremendous opportunity in different markets. And I think that you know, the typical path for a lot of Amazon sellers is to just expand to different Amazon marketplaces. So you go to UK, you go to Germany, maybe go to Japan and some of these other markets provide a tremendous opportunity as well. So you know, we have been selling in Amazon, UK and in Germany, obviously, what breaks it when that happened, it did put some complications into the business. And then we’ve done like Amazon China when they actually went out to China before. But you know, there is a tremendous opportunity just depending on your products, we’re in the health and beauty space.

Huy:

So you know, we do have a lot of consumers that buy from us internationally and there’s a lot of interest in the Asian markets. We’re still looking at an opportunity to do more volume in China and it’s just been difficult. You know, we did have a issue a few years ago where we were selling there, a product was popular and we had somebody trademark pirate that ended up picking up one of our trademarks and held onto it, tried to register it, and tried to resell it back to us. So we’re still dealing with that issue now, but you know, the consumer marketplace in China and in South Korea, those are the areas that we’re looking at right now. There’s just a huge opportunity for us.

Bradley Sutton:

What are the main marketplaces there that you’re focusing on in those two countries?

Huy:

Well in China’s like Taobao and Tmall and things like that, right. It’s very similar to Amazon. Amazon went out there I would say that, you know, they kind of failed to capture the market, share. They were at like, you know, one to 2% market share where a Tmall and Taobao were over 90% in market share. It’s very difficult to penetrate. But over in South Korea, I believe that Amazon’s coming over there as well, but over in South Korea, there’s a lot of other things that we’re looking at, we’re looking at actually selling into retail. There’s a lot of pharmacies that are out in South Korea and the pharmacists in South Korea are different than pharmacists over here. A lot of the pharmacists in South Korea actually are almost looked at upon as almost like doctors.

Huy:

Like they can recommend products and you know, they really act as more a guide to the consumers. So there is an opportunity to go over there. We’re looking at some distribution partners to get us into places like Emart and other things, but Coupang is actually really big out there. They hold the majority of the share. They’re similar to Amazon and they actually went public this year in the US as a company, but this just exploring different opportunities out there and different channels as supposed to just Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s like, I know you do multiple things, but one of your main ones is like a supplement brand, isn’t it?

Huy:

Yeah. Correct.

Bradley Sutton:

So, is it because it’s supplements, or do you think that, like, let’s say there was a nonsupplement brand, you know, that I’m starting to do in Amazon? Like, would that also work in Korea and China because again, Korea and China there’s no Amazon, you know, so some people might not even be considering expansion there or is it just kind of like certain niches, like maybe beauty and, and food and supplements you think would work good in those two countries?

Huy:

Yeah. I don’t know too much about the other industries, but the reason why ours works well in that is that there is a demand for US-made products. So a lot of people do wanna purchase products that are made in the US and sometimes shipped from the US cuz believe it or not in China, they also worry about buying products in China that could be counterfeit. They don’t know if it’s directly from the US brand. And so a lot of the people that we’ve talked to and, you know, just in our research they want us to keep the US labels. You know, of course, we’re gonna have to do some labeling to comply with regulations over there, but people do demand consumer goods that are from the US. And it’s kind of interesting cuz also in the US, we sometimes we demand you know, products from other countries and I think it’s just that scarcity, it’s the, you know, we don’t have it and we want it and something’s trending.

Huy:

But yeah, so that provides a good opportunity for us, but the challenges that it provides going internationally for a supplements brand is that you have to comply with regulations. There’s different regulations in every area. So it’s not as easy as just you know shipping your product over there. Whereas I think in other categories there provides a big opportunity because you’re not dealing with regulated ingredients and things like that. And you could probably just use like use an Amazon Global Selling Program where you can actually send product out there without making any logistical changes to your packaging. There’s an opportunity there

Bradley Sutton:

Are you having to set up corporations or business entities or have boots on the ground in those countries to be able to sell there? Or can you do it strictly as an American person?

Huy:

Yeah. So some of the countries that you do and the Amazon will help you, like, for instance, if you want to go to Amazon China they do have services that will help you get into those markets, help you get regulations, help you find importer on record. But in like China and Korea, we also have to go through exclusive distributors or not exclusive distributors. There’s a lot of exclusive distributors out there that tell you that needed to go through them. But you know, going through these distributors helps you not only just bring your products in, but they provide other services to do like product registration, trademark registration, and other things, just, you know, working with the regulatory industries over there. I think it’s you know, it’s quite helpful just you know, if you want to go over there setting up something from scratch in the new country, it’s very difficult. But if you have a product that easily translates over there, you could take a look at these opportunities.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, I mean, that helps with competition. It’s not easy. It’s not like, oh, anybody in the entire world can become an Amazon seller in 15 minutes. It actually takes a process. So that like right off that, you know, eliminates 90% of the competition who’s too lazy or maybe doesn’t have the means to set that up. So I like that as a strategy let’s go back to Ankit before he goes to his old bed and takes a nap here on us. But Ankit last time and we was talking about this as well, but you talked about your strategy about like selling your returns on eBay and things are how’s eBay still working. Like, are you, do you have separate listings? Like one for like brand new never been opened. And then one for like maybe stuff that are like lightly either used or messed up boxes or what’s your strategy like, and how has 2021 been for you for eBay?

Ankit:

So, yeah, you know, our sales has grew almost 200% over year. So that also comes with 200% returns over year. When that happens, that, I mean, you know, understand my wife is handling the returns right now. You know, we just move to warehouse. I haven’t hired my single employee yet, which I better should, but eBay, because I have started this five, four years ago, I would say the listing has grown a lot. So I have a separate listing for open box. I would just say, open box off item X, Y, Z. Then I would give them at least $40 off, you know, because you understand like my item is over a hundred bucks. So when people see the price tag that Hey returned within 30 days, right open box for 40 bucks off, they would like jump on it.

Ankit:

People would buy for their whole families or whatever they need. Right. and it’s been doing really well. And actually, the new strategy is I decided it that as a backup, there’s a program called Amazon renewed and they’ve reached out to us and said, Hey, you guys get a lot of returns. What about you guys sell your, you know items as a renewed on Amazon. So that is for my backup. And what happens is if you participate it in this renewed, it will show up right under your bullet points, say, Hey, buy this item for $40, cheaper as a renewed item. And Amazon has certain guarantees. So if you have a lot of returns that you don’t know how to get rid of, renewed program is definitely a way to go. Because if you have a good sales coming to your main listing, a lot of people would actually love to save that you know, whatever amount that you’re giving off. And they don’t care if it’s brand new or shrink wrap, you know what I mean? There set items. as long as it’s working.

Ankit:

That’s what I do at Best Buy. Like I never buy anything brand new at Best Buy. I always go for those ones where it’s an open box or something, I got some shrink wrap and I get to save like 40%. I’m cheap like that.

Ankit:

I just bought anchors doorbell. Right. and I was renewed. I save like 40 bucks each. I bought like two, one for my front warehouse, one for back and my gate. I’m like, Hey, it’s perfect. So, Hey, there we go.

Bradley Sutton:

By the way, guys, I love seeing these people who make millions and millions of dollars on Amazon, like getting all happy about saving 40 bucks guys. It’s a mindset, you know. This is a mindset for entrepreneurs, which is why the people succeed like Ankit and Huy here is like, you don’t just like, Hey, I made my first a hundred bucks on Amazon. I’m going Rolex, Valencia, I got life from now on. Nah, guys, that’s, that’s not their grander. I love it. And keep literally guys again, you can’t see this on the video. He had a big smile on his face, so proud of himself that he saved 40 bucks on his used doorbell. And I’m super happy too, that I saved money on whatever used thing I bought from Best Buy. But anyway, I wanna dive into that. I don’t think we’ve talked about that on the podcast. Walk us through the process, like, is this renewed or refreshed or whatever you had said, like, is this an invitation, only thing, can anybody do this? Do you have to have the product come back to you first? And then you sent like, like, walk me through this whole, the whole thing of how you set that up.

Ankit:

So Amazon renewed I don’t know if it’s invitation-only, but they have been reaching out to us. Right? Every time some new manager comes in, they always reach out to us. I get, I think they look at the data or which account is selling a lot and which account has an opportunity with a lot of returns. So they’ve been reaching out to us. So the requirements for that is you have to have like a Amazon renewed requirements, like certain type of stickers, and you gotta have either same packaging or, or a separate brown packaging that you have to create separately that clearly states that it’s a renewed item. Right. And you gotta follow this. It’s very easy. They usually say that in their email I can look it up if we need to, but I have a lot of email to go look for it.

Ankit:

But yeah. And then once you gotta send them the first photographs, once you get the right person, like six side of photographs, provide them with certain, just pretty basic information that they ask for. Once they approve you what I actually ask them, like, Hey, can I create a separate account for that? Because I don’t want people to buying a renewed product and my product reviews to go down. Right. So they said, yeah, you can have a completely new ASIN for that. Right. So when people click on renewed item, it will be completely new ASIN.

Ankit:

So your reviews Are not tied with your brand new items. So that’s the first benefit. You can have a separate account for that. So your feedback seller feedback is also not affected with your, the brand new items. Right? So, yeah, I mean, that was a good benefit. The only thing is my, you know, wife just can’t keep up with the minor returns that we’re getting. So I don’t have a lot of inventory to send back into the Amazon renewed and we’re able to do it with our own website and eBay. So, you know, we get a lot of open box purchases from our website now understand the benefit. That’s why, I mean, I didn’t do it on Amazon, but understand the benefit that we’re getting with our website is that we don’t have to pay that 10% commission. So we are actually making that $10 profit even on our renewed, when people buy it from our website when people buy it from eBay or Amazon, we gotta pay that commission. And we’re pretty much not making anything right.

Ankit:

And understand our Shopify is growing. We have thousands of emails. So people love to buy that, you know, once they buy a new one, they know it’s good. They trust our brand, they trust our customer care. And then they will say, Hey, you know what, I’m saving 40 bucks. I’m just gonna buy a second renewed item because I need it. Right. So, yeah, that’s the benefit of it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Now, going back to Huy here you know, for a lot of people, 2021 was just absolutely amazing other people, like it was terrible because of the shipping from China and, you know, inventory issues and prices, you know, skyrocketing and stuff. Other people kind of in the middle, you know, same old, same old. What, what about you? We’re almost at the end of 2021 here. How, how would you classify your 2021?

Huy:

Yeah, I think for 2021, it was interesting because in 2020, you know, we were doing quite well. 2021 you know, I would say that we didn’t hit our revenue goals that we would’ve liked to set forth. And you know, specifically for Amazon, I think our Amazon business took a little bit of a hit and we’re still doing well on Amazon. We’re doing well in the categories. But I will say that, you know, we did have a few issues. A lot of it had to do with inventory and inventory limits that were put on. So that provided some challenges as well. So as a supplement brand, you know, a lot of our products are actually on subscribe and save. So when we do reporting and do analysis on our end you know, close to 40% of our sales are through subscribe and save.

Huy:

So if our products are not you know, coming in time, it presents challenges beacause those sales don’t exist you know, or people are waiting for it longer. So we did deal with some challenges early on with inventory issues like in, but we figured it out. I mean we were able to, you know, send in more frequent shipments. You know, there’s only so many things that you can control and we’ve always had like seller filled option on our product. So we’ve been able to, you know, handle that, but you know, unfortunately, just some logistical challenges. We weren’t able to have the inventory that we’d like in Amazon. So I would say that, there were days that we were outta stock for prime, which kind of hurts as well.

Huy:

And then the other thing is I think that you know, there’s a lot of national brand, the supplement space is quite crowded and quite competitive, like not just from Amazon only sellers, but from a lot of sellers that are outside. If you look at Amazon’s revenue overall, you know, their revenue’s gone up. A lot of people are focusing more on this channel and especially national brands that are out there. They’re recognizing that you know, Amazon channel’s probably doing much better than some of their other channels. So there’s you know, like in terms of Amazon advertising paper click you know, the cost for advertising had gone up. So you know, really getting outbid on some keywords, but you know, it sounds like a lot of excuses and you know, it is, there’s a lot of things, but I think also our focus has been for the past few years is to bring our brand and build more awareness outside of Amazon, build other sales channels and go into retail.

Huy:

And really you know, this year we focus a lot on building a stronger operation, you know, better team, more specialized people. We focus a lot more on brand building. We, you know, focus a lot more on influencer marketing. So I think that from an operational side we did or from the side of brand building and some of the goals that we had set forth there, I think we crushed it. I mean, we had just a really good amount of progress on some of these other areas, but in terms of Amazon revenue, I’ll say were flat we’re a little bit down from last year. So we were hoping that grow significantly more, but you know, completely honest.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I remember you was like kind of low to mid-seven figures, right. Is what you were doing now. Let’s just say, you know, we always say hindsight is 2020 and some things are unavoidable, you know, some negative things. But if you were to think back to this year out of any of the negative things or the things that may be slowed your growth in hindsight, or in retrospect, is there something you would’ve done differently? Like a strategy, like you talked about the warehousing like you know, maybe it was at the beginning, you guys didn’t know what to do and you got out of stock, but then you thought about it in retrospect, like, oh, dang it. I wish I would’ve done this, but just something that you think might help somebody else, like, you know right now the limitations aren’t as much or aren’t as crazy as it was like, you know, last year or the beginning of this year, but who knows what could happen? You know, like we have Delta variants, we’ve got Omicron, we’re gonna have like gamma and all the sorority viruses soon, you know, you never know what, what could happen. We could have inventory restrictions, a lot of the stuff that happened this year, it could happen again. So yeah, anything we can learn from some of your negatives?

Huy:

I think that would probably have what some of the biggest impacts on our business logistically was dealing with the issue. I mean, we have two 3PLs that we actually use. So it’s not that we didn’t have the stock. But I would say that for people that are importing products from China, all of our products are actually made in the US and our manufacturers are here. So it wasn’t too much of an issue in terms of supply chain. However, I think that there are a lot of people that bring products in and we’re expecting to go directly into, you know, obviously, we knew that solution doesn’t necessarily work anymore. If you’re gonna bring in more products, you need to have a solution like a 3PL or something like that, where you can store products, FBA prep, and also merchant fulfill.

Huy:

I think that you know, like in the beginning of 2020, we were going quite aggressive on marketing. So we sent in a lot of products into Amazon and then we had, you know, like three, four months’ worth of turn-in products. And so like that obviously messed with our utilization rate, which was never really an issue before because we could just send in as many products as we wanted into FBA. But I think that just paying attention to utilization you know, that’s something that is an area that sellers need to focus on. Now we send in, you know, we have been for the past few months sending in less frequent shipment or more frequent shipments in less quantity utilization rate has been going really well. And Amazon, you know, rewards you for that, I guess with allowing you to send in more products. So we don’t run into those issues as much, but I will still say that they do persist because, you know, if we have a good sales you know when your product goes into Amazon FBA, they also put into transfer into all their other warehouses, distribute it across the US. So that takes time as well. It’s not just when they receive it. So yeah, I mean, I’d just say people just pay attention to your logistics, have a backup plan. And that’s probably the key area that I can say broadly for other sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, Ankit, you mentioned a few minutes ago, you’re like, Hey, your, your sales were up 200,000, so or 200%. Yeah. 200,000 is that’s like a slow day for me. But I was looking at the last year’s podcast. And you were saying you’re about, you know, like seven, your projected was about, you know, 7 million or so. So does that mean your, your projected sales this year is about like 15 million?

Ankit:

Correct, yeah. We’re gonna surpass that goal.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. So what’s the general breakdown. I don’t need exact breakdown, but like how much of that is Amazon? How much is Shopify other channels? You know?

Ankit:

So yeah, Amazon is I mean, I don’t even know what is exactly the Shopify, so I can tell you the numbers and Shopify, I didn’t do any kind of marketing on Shopify from January to almost September. And all the sales only come in on Shopify for people who already know our brand. Right. Okay. So from September, we started working with the agency who’s gonna take you know, totally do kind of really deep dive and take our stores. So on Shopify last year, it was close to $370,000 this year, right now, year to date looking at it today is I would say it’s about roughly $425,000 today. Okay. I’m looking at right now live. So by the end of December, I’m hoping to get $500,000, which is half a million dollars doing just on your website. I think that is a very proud moment if I would’ve done it.

Bradley Sutton:

And that’s just basically from brand recognition, not advertising like you said, right?

Ankit:

Yeah, you’re right. So this is just on Shopify and the best part is, you know when you send an email to, when you have a customer list over 30,000 people, man, that each email can bring you $10,000 worth of revenue. Right. And you don’t even realize it, whether it’s a Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, okay. Of days the holidays, the Christmas, you know, we have Black Friday sale, Cyber Monday sale, the Extend date sale. Then we have Holiday sales starting, right, the last chance. All kind of strategies you put in Shopify, like, you know, you gotta understand, like, even though Shopify is no way close to that 15 million mark on Amazon, but it’s half a million mark. And that comes with 30,000 plus email addresses.That’s your own customers. So now this is how I look at it. Like this is the most important thing.

Ankit:

Next time you launch a product. I mean, you can just tell the customer about your product, without having them pre-order on your Shopify store because you know, Amazon terms of service is changing. No more searching, buy. I mean, I don’t do that anyways because I’m a biggest fan of creating a beautiful product that I want people understanding line for. Right? Like Steve Jobs does in the back. But you know, when you send an email without any kind of URL, two-step or whatever, you just tell them about your product. It’s live on Amazon. It’s a hundred dollars off today. Go buy it. You get one week, you’re gonna get so many sales, right. Just from it’s gonna instantly grow your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

So you’re making the customer figure out how to find your product. So they’re gonna like enter your brand name, maybe enter some keyword.

Ankit:

Correct. Even though if they search for X, Y, Z garlic press, that’s fine. You know, I don’t care if they search with a branded, because what that does, you instantly have a sales on Amazon with finding you don’t where to tell them, go search, find, buy. So say, Hey, we on Amazon, here’s this what it looks like. And that this is what the price is. It’s gonna be, you have one week to buy it as part of our VIP customers. You go and buy,

Bradley Sutton:

You know what I call that. I call that search, find, buy without search, find, buy, because you’re telling them to go search, find, and buy your product. But you’re not doing it. The traditional “search, find, buy”.

Ankit:

Correct. No URL, nothing, just a photo that you can’t even click on, you know? Yeah. Don’t even take them to your site.

Bradley Sutton:

And maybe if they email you and say, oh, I couldn’t find it. Then you can just give them a direct link or something.

Ankit:

But I’m sure people knows how to search on Amazon, right? On Google people go to, you know, people don’t realize this, like Google is the search bar that’s worth billions of dollars for information. Amazon has a search bar that worth billions of dollars, trillion-dollar company for products. Right. So people know the one thing that people know on Amazon is how to search. Right? so if you don’t give them link, they will search for it because without that they can go browse their categories.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Yep. I like it. Now, we’re gonna talk about both of your guys strategies for the last, you know, 10 minutes of this episode, but apart from your strategies that I’m sure, you know, helped increase your sales. Would you say that when a lot of those humongous brands on Amazon this year got locked out of Amazon because of review abuse and all the other shady things they were doing, did you see any direct correlation to increase in your, because some of those were your competitors, right?

Ankit:

Oh yeah. Oh boy. Oh, I am so glad that no search, find, buy, and no this shady stuff I did, you know, and that’s why I’m here today. And when that happened, your sales are instantly doubled. Cause now you don’t have to spend enough on marketing, right. That you used to, I used to compete against crazy. I, I always had to come up with different strategies on how you can present your brand differently while doing the Whitehat things. So you can still win it. Like that was the biggest challenge. Like how can you sell your product more and top seller in your category without doing a blackhat? Think about it for a second. There’s no a way you could do it unless your product is differentiated, unless your product is good, that people love it. You know? Like, so that’s why I had to pull overnighters here trying to figure it out what do I need to do differently.

Ankit:

So people fall in love with my product, not just buy it and be happy with it. Yeah. Right. And that is, what’s the secret sauce for my success. And now when those competitors are gone, boy, there is no one stopping and me becoming number one. I mean, it’s the proudest moment of my life. You know, I’ve been telling everybody and Amazon, I look at these guys are doing complete Blackhat. Right. They do search, find, buy, and a hundred percent rebate only after five-star review with photo and video. I’m like how you compete against it. There is no way, no way. Yeah. You know, and I mean, this is what Amazon, a nine algorithm is no secret. Right. It’s basically a fi flywheel. So yeah. I mean, I was the happiest person when that happened. I mean, I, I, I would hate to see anything bad happen to anyone, but I think they were.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s somebody cheating, you know, getting fake reviews and stuff. You can say there’s a little bit of part of you. That’s kind of happy to see them kind of get their karma guess sometimes. All right. Now, now the last part of this episode I want go back and forth just on like some 30-second tips or you can never, Ank can never keep a, anything in 30 seconds. So I might have to give him a minute, a minute for him. But before we get into your personal strategies, I wanna start with, what’s your favorite maybe Elite strategy, you know, again, being Helium 10 Elite members, you come to the workshop sometimes in person. You know, we did recently we have the monthly ones. We have these, you know, coaching calls with Kevin in, and we have the one that we did today where it’s just a round table with just other Elite members. So what would you say Huy first what’s maybe one, like your most favorite thing that you learned from one of these Elite workshops or webinars this year. Okay. Can you think back to one? Well,

Huy:

I’ll just start really quick. All the things that you mentioned. I think it’s just the access, right. To all the other Elite members in there. And so whenever we have an issue or something like that, I’m trying to figure out, like, I feel comfortable. I can reach out to Ankit, you know, I met Ankit through there as well. I can reach out to anybody that’s in there and all the people that have actually met through Helium 10. The relationship is very valuable. I would say that, like, you know, maybe some of the things that you know, I learned that we’re really valuable this year we’re just bringing in some of the influencer experts that people came in and talked about influencer marketing. We’ve been doing this and we have actually the other business that we have is completely built off of influencer marketing. That’s direct to consumer. But it’s just nice to actually get access to people coming in who are experts in that field so that you can test your strategies, learn more things. And, you know, even though we’ve been doing it for a long time, you know, there’s always so much to learn and I learned something new every single time.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. All right. Why don’t you start us off with your first tip of the day, just, you know, the Huy special doesn’t have to be from a leader or anything else, but I think some of that I think last year, when we were doing this back and forth, that was where some of this eBay strategy came from, like the returns and stuff. So like what’s something you haven’t, you didn’t say last year.

Huy:

Yeah. I think that my first tip and it’s something that we’re looking at as well, but I think that, you know, we really need to pay attention to the trend of live selling. So live selling is something that’s huge outside of the US, like in China and these other markets, they have people that are live selling and it’s not just the sellers that actually live selling. I know that Amazon, Amazon live has you know creators on there as well. But over in these other markets, they’re doing live selling with influencers and that’s, you know, they’re showing the product, there’s so many different opportunities that you can do right there with live selling. I do think that you know if we’re starting to see this trend come here, but then you is a big opportunity here for people to capitalize on that and put together necessary resources to do live selling before it becomes too late. And then you’re kind of priced out of it or you’re doing something that is low quality when you’re trying to do it yourself when in reality. May need something else to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

Alight. That’s a good one. All right. Let’s go back to Ankit now, like, first of all, what’s like something you learned from being an Elite member this year, and then what’s your first strategy or tip for us.

Ankit:

So I missed a lot of the I didn’t come to the conference, but then, my favorite elite strategy is what you mentioned about Canonical URL strategy, right? Like, you know what is the new way to launch the product? You know, it’s like using the canonical URL with the keywords that doesn’t have a lot of search use those and then start off that. So, and, and now you could change your canonical URL. It is the best strategy I heard. I mean, I had no idea right. Being an eight-figure seller until I heard it from Bradley said, I had no idea. So you learn new things every day and even one smallest thing can make your failed product turn into gold mining again. Right? Sure. So I have one product that I launched last year, which I was very confident I was gonna be successful, but obviously, I’m not. So that’s is the strategy actually I’m going to apply. So Canonical URL is very, very, gonna be the next one.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what’s one of your own strategies that you’ve done in the last year. And again, but for both of you guys, these strategies don’t have to be just about Amazon or Walmart. They could be about lifestyle. It could be about crypto, NFT. Like anything that you think e-commerce professional would find interesting. We’ll stay with you first Ankit

Ankit:

So couple things the two, my favorite strategies of the year is number one is influencer marketing. Now you gotta somehow figure out a way how to get the top guys. I mean not the medium guys, how you can convince the top guy to know that you are not just an Amazon seller, right? And for that you’ve gotta come up with a very creative ideas and come up with that. So we have been doubling down. I have trained all my team and created SOPs about how to do an influencer marketing and now on YouTube and on mainly our YouTube, we have in many of the top influencers have, you know, purchased our product and made a videos. And not only that but the blog site, because of that. And also because of the Amazon sellers and being top, a lot of the blog sites will actually reach out to you, right?

Ankit:

They’ll say, Hey, we picked your product as a number one, would you like to use our logo? Right. So that is one thing. And then you, and another thing that a lot of people don’t know is an interesting thing, is like, I don’t keep anything 30 seconds. So sorry about that in advance, but this is very important. Now you can work with, this is really good. One. you can actually pay this, some of the blog sites as a commission, Hey, 5% or 7%, like they would actually write about your product, like top 10 best. And they also have an algorithm like Amazon flywheel effect, right? Like they would rank the products based on what brings them the most revenue to them based on their affiliate commission. Right? So that is their algorithm, the most click and most commission earned. However, if you somehow change that, your number said, Hey, you know what?

Ankit:

I’m gonna pay you 10% commission. And now, you know, Amazon right now, doesn’t pay more than three to 5% commission. If your product is, let’s say a hundred dollars on Amazon. And if you offer them, Hey, you know what? Amazon already paid you 3%, that’s yours, but I’m gonna you another 7% to 10% commission. Now that’s extra 10 bucks per unit for them on top of what Amazon. Now they’re gonna add that to their algorithm. And now instantly your product is number one recommended product on the blogs. So if you have the product that a lot of people go on research before purchasing it on Amazon or on your website or whatever, if you, you build your brand that way, like this is golden nugget right there.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you find these bloggers and, and stuff? Well,

Ankit:

You have to basically go on Google and just say, let’s say you’re selling garlic press, right? And you say the best garlic press to buy in 2021, or be creative right best garlic press to buy best garlic press TikTok, best garlic press YouTube, a garlic press Amazon, and figured out who writes about garlic presses. And then you reach out to these site owners who write the blogs. Usually, under the blogs, there are people’s name. And there is a way to get in contact with them. You could reach out to these people and say, Hey, you know, we’re the brand owners, this, this, the product we have, whatever, and you gotta be creative. I’m just giving you just a general thing, right? Like if you present yourself, they would take you up on that. And they would bring your product. Number one, even on the blog site.

Ankit:

And then you only pay them commission based on the sales. So they can tell you that, Hey, we drive hundred sales from our block site to Amazon. This is what Amazon affiliate paid us, this many units. So this is what, and you just pay them. Now that’s a free, and you only pay them if the sale happens, you know, and lot of people won’t even click their link, right. They will actually go and search your brand X, Y, Z, garlic, press and buy it. So that’s just a free advertising, free money that you don’t even have to pay. And if you have to pay certain money, I mean, you’re not actually losing anything. You’re already making $30 profit. You’re not paying 10 bucks. Right. So that’s just an extra strategy over 30 seconds.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Now, now we Ankit just gave two. So we’ll give you one more chance here. Since you only gave one the last time Ankit’s just attention hog over here, but that’s fine. We’ll give Huy a chance here. Do you have another strategy for us about anything that would be interesting, an e-commerce professional?

Huy:

Yeah, I think you know probably going back to the influencer and even on the affiliate side, and there’s just a tremendous opportunity to get content that is not directly from your brand. I mean, that’s obviously nothing new, but one of the strategies for collecting content, especially video reviews rather than just asking for video reviews from, you know, people that purchase your products or anything like that you can use a tool similar to video ask that allows you to ask questions almost like you’re interviewing them through a video or through a mobile phone. So you can ask them a question. You can shoot a video of yourself, asking them a question and they’ll respond. And then what you can do is actually stitch all that together and then create a nice video for yourself that you know, it’s good for your brand. So imagine being able to not necessarily direct people to say certain things, but, you know, you can guide the conversation so that it’s efficient and a nice review testimonial for you. So that’s something that and I think people probably don’t know about. So I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton:

So how do you do that? Like, is there like a service or?

Huy:

Yeah, so you familiar with the company called Typeform. So they also have a product called video ask. So just go to video ask, and you can watch the demo from there, but you can do video surveys from your mobile phone, you set up the survey, you can ask the questions in a video and then they can respond in a video and then press next and it saves a video and moves on to the next question. So it’s a good way to survey your audience, but it’s also a good way to get video testimonials.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. I like, alright, cool. We always learn something new when you guys are on here. So thank you again for coming on here. It’s good. It’s cool. The timing, I think last time we had you around October, so we want, you know, Q4 was just getting started, but now you guys are here in December. And so we’re able to see kinda like a year in your view. So probably the next time you guys will be on, will be maybe 2023 January or something. And, and let’s see how your guys 2022 was, hopefully, we’ll be completely outta this pandemic and out of these inventory restrictions and all these other crazy things that are happening, but it, it’s great to see people like you. One thing that we don’t have in this episode guys is, you know, at the end of episode, sometimes I’ll be like, Hey, if people wanna, you know, reach out to you, you know, how can they find you?

Bradley Sutton:

Because a lot of these people have agencies and, and, you know, courses and things, which is, there’s nothing wrong with that. Absolutely. You know, like I love having influencers and people in the industry, but  Ankit and Huy here, I guess what, they’re just, so what we call, like the Average Joes these are just regular guys, like you men and women out there who are, who are getting started on Amazon. You know, I believe Ankit was in the medical industry before. And now, you know, doing 15 million and still saving 40 bucks on his refurbished doorbell. So, guys, these are just regular people. This is, you know, we, we don’t wanna try and say, here you get started on Amazon, anybody, everybody’s gonna go make you know, five to 15 million a year on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

No, but this just shows you that you don’t need special education. You don’t need a you know, some kind of prerequisite in order to crush it on Amazon. Like these two gentlemen have done here. And, and now they, they know each other personally, you guys have you met in person? Did you guys the prosper show by chance, or that was the first time you met in person, right? So guys, you know, like both of them mentioned it, you know, it’s, and it’s not just about being in a Helium 10 Elite, there’s tons of masterminds and tons of Facebook groups and stuff out there. Your net worth is your, your network sometimes. So-net with other sellers here, we got Ankit and Huy who are becoming friends for like the last two years. They’ve only met once and they hit each other up and ask each other questions, build your network guys with other like-minded people like you. And hopefully your e-commerce world’s skyrocket for you. So again, Ankit and Huy thank you so much, and we’ll definitely be reaching out in 2022 or 2023.

Huy:

Sounds good. Thanks, Bradley. See you Ankit.

Ankit:

Yes. See you guys. Thanks, Bradley.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
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