#190 – These Strategies Have Helped Two Elite Sellers Generate Millions of Dollars on Amazon

Some of the best things about selling on Amazon are the different communities of sellers that support, encourage, and push each other. Most times, if there’s a problem that you’re puzzling over, there’s someone out there who’s gone through the same process and might have found an answer. 

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes two different e-commerce sellers who are both part of one of the leading Amazon groups. Huy and Ankit are both Amazon sellers and part of Helium 10’s Elite members group. They’re here today to offer tips on what their experience has been and how they each found their way to Amazon. 

They also talk about how meeting grounds such as Helium 10’s Elite group create fertile breeding grounds for innovative ideas, and a perfect place to get important feedback from the larger community of Amazon sellers. 

In episode 190 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Ankit, and Huy discuss:

• 03:00 – For Ankit, Entrepreneurship Came Early
• 05:05 – Huy – “Trying to Figure Out Something to Sell”
• 07:30 – Healthcare Workers Always Have Jobs
• 08:25 – A Rocky Start with a Fake Product   
• 10:55 – Multiple Marketplaces Offer Brand Protection
• 11:35 – If You Don’t Sell Your Own Products on eBay, Someone Else Will 
• 15:10 – Reselling Open-Box Amazon Returns on eBay
• 17:10 – Using Multiple Bundling Techniques on Amazon  
• 21:30 – Next-Level Products Equal Higher Profits  
• 22:45 – Selling Supplements on Amazon
• 27:05 – Huy – “Amazon Provides the Freedom to Spend More Time with Family”
• 28:15 – Taking Advantage of Helium 10’s Elite Program   
• 32:45 – In the Helium 10 Elite Group, Relationships are Key 
• 35:15 – Building Out a Loyal Community of Buyers   
• 36:45 – Text-Based Customer Service Gave Ankit an Advantage
• 39:15 – Getting a Head Start on Amazon in the United Arab Emirates
• 41:30 – Using Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform)

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today, we’ve got a couple of Amazon sellers who have sold millions of dollars on Amazon the last few years. I’m going to give some special strategies on things like selling supplements, how to offer products that have huge profit margins and even a cool strategy on how to use eBay to sell Amazon open box products. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers at any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got two serious sellers on the line here and now I have a seriously hard time pronouncing both of your names. So instead of me butchering it, I want to hear how you pronounce your names. Because I think I’m maybe doing it right, but go ahead and introduce yourself.

Huy: Hey guys, my name is Huy, and so obviously it’s very difficult if you just look up my name and it’s difficult to pronounce. So, I used to be in corporate marketing and the easiest way for people to pronounce my name was just, I just said, Hey, my name is Huy Nguyen (we win), so that’s a way for you guys to remember.

Bradley Sutton: I’ll never forget that again.

Huy: Obviously not spelled that way. And I know everybody pronounces my name differently, but in corporate marketing you just got to make it so that people can remember it.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. I love it. And the other gentlemen we have on the line. Go ahead.

Ankit: Hey guys. I’m Ankit Patel. People also pronounce my name sometime differently. 

Bradley Sutton: So Ankit and Huy like, you have a theme song, Huy. We can be like, all I do is win, win, win. So that would be like your theme song, I guess. Huh?

Huy: Yeah. We used to do a lot of presentations on stage. So, the guys just always just mess with me and put that song on. That was like the number one song.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. I love it. Now the way, the way we start off the shows is I like showing how diverse everybody’s background is, whether it’s where people grew up or their employment background. Everybody is completely different. We’ve had people who were dentists and doctors and models and chiropractors and people who just– are paratroopers. I mean, all kinds of different backgrounds. We’ve never had two that are exactly the same. So I love to first find out. Ankit, where were you born and raised?

Ankit: Yeah. Bradley, thank you. I was born and raised in India, and then I came to United States when I was 17 years old and I was in my 12th standard.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So, before you came to the States, when you were still in grade school or middle school, did you have a vision of like what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Ankit: When I was younger, actually, yes, I was always, every time I hang out with my friends, I had that entrepreneur bug in me, always making plans, like owning a factory and how we’re going to become a steel king and all kinds of things, because we’re always watched this videos and news. So, I was always wanted to sell stuff. My family had some business back in India, so I would always go to their factories and also through their office and whatever they’re selling. I always try to sell it on my own, even though when I was little and trying to make a few rupees out of it. And that was my entry back then.

Bradley Sutton: How about, how about you, Huy? Where were you born and raised?

Huy: I was actually born here, and I’ve grew up most of my life in Orange County and just kind of born and raised here. My parents were refugees from the Vietnam war. They came over here and in 1975 and I’ve been fortunate to live here in Orange County and grew up most of my life here.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. So, growing up here in Orange County, what were your ambitions like around the same age that Ankit was talking about, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Huy: Well, I think if there’s a lot of other immigrant or Asian sellers that are out there, they may understand this. It’s not necessarily about what my ambitions were, but it was really about what my parents’ ambitions were. Right. So I think that as mentioned that my parents are– they were refugees from the Vietnam war. They came over here with really nothing and at a severe disadvantage and they had a good life over there in Vietnam. And when they came over here, their life just kind of got offended. And both of them are doctors now and they made it and it’s one of those things where I think that, as immigrants, they always strive for the best and they want their children to be better than them. So they didn’t really have much choice of what I wanted to be when I was growing up. It was more about just study hard, you need to be a doctor, lawyer or some sort of professional. And that was pretty much it. But, for me growing up, I think my passion was, I liked to do a lot of different things. I think there’s just had the entrepreneurial spirit kind of as I was growing up. So yeah, man, I try to find ways to flip business cards, comic books, sell candy. I think that’s probably like, I hear a lot of that similarity with other sellers that have gone on these podcasts and other things. It was just more of that thing where trying to figure out some sort of something to sell, something to trade, or something to barter, right. Just to do something and kind of earn it. And that was one of those things. I think that my parents, as refugees and growing up in a new country, they had to go through a lot of struggle and strife and it just translated back to my work ethic. I ended up getting in a lot of trouble in high school and I felt bad. So I said, all right, well, I better do something to make my parents happy. So I did, I ended up going to college here. I went to college at UC Riverside. So not too far from Orange County.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. And then what was your major?

Huy: My major was business, but to be honest, it’s pretty general as I was going through college, I think that the college experience was more– I realized that I didn’t really learn too much actually going to class in college, but I learned a lot from the people around me and some of the professors that were there, not just like straight course material, but ultimately at the end of the day, just, I think, hearing other people’s experience and just learning how to deal with people in general, that was like probably the best part of college for me.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Now, Ankit, going back to you, you said you came here like senior year, so when you graduated high school, did you go to college yourself?

Ankit: Yes, Bradley. Actually I went to the community college, which is CLC. It’s stands for College in Lake County, but people always make fun of it and they say, Oh yeah, you ended the college of last chance.

Bradley Sutton: Where is that?

Ankit: I’m down here, I’m the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois, and that’s where I had the community college.

Bradley Sutton: And then did you end up getting a degree?

Ankit: Yes. I have associate degree actually. Just like how we say that as an immigrant parents, it’s not what you want to do. And the college, I actually did what my parents wanted me to go to healthcare because healthcare always has a job, right. Any other immigrant parents, because at that time, all those tech companies, Motorola and things, they were all getting a lay off. So, a lot of the family members got laid off. So I ended up becoming a MRI and x-ray technologist. I had went to college and I said, I need to make a $40,000 a year. And I actually make at least how much money I need to buy an apartment groceries, go to few movies, then have fun a little bit.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. So, how did you get into e-commerce?

Ankit: My cousin had a cell phone company there, so I was sitting at his place and he was selling and I, and he says, you should start a business. And I said, okay, let’s do this. So then I started whatever he was selling you going to market, but the cell phone cases and stuff. And then I started listing on eBay. I ended up getting a fake product. Some people find out it was fake and my eBay account gas jet off, and that’s what happened. And then I was under this shock and I’m like, okay, well, what’s next. I want to do business. So since I had that entrepreneurial bug, when I was young and I wanted to do it, so I didn’t quit. And then I started exploring Amazon. And from that rest is history.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Going back to Huy, what was your entry like what year and how did you get into e-commerce?

Huy: I think that from a e-commerce side, I think when I had my first taste was eBay, maybe 20 years ago. So, it’s been quite a wild ride where I think that when eBay first came out, um, it was you can buy anything on eBay. It was one of the only online shopping marketplaces that was out there where allowed private sellers a opportunity to put things up there. So, as I mentioned before, my parents wanted me to become a doctor. I obviously did not become a doctor. And I’ve had like 12 different career changes, I would say, in the past 20 years. And I was always looking to do something on my own, but coming out of college and not having a high paying job, you just kind of have to figure it out. Like I went from property management to real estate. And, that whole time I was just looking, I was, I guess I was the bigger consumer on eBay, just buying a bunch of stuff I didn’t need, but then I found opportunities there where you can buy things in the store and then do retail arbitrage and sell those things back on eBay. When Amazon first came about, that was just a huge opportunity that we saw eight years ago. It was a lot different than it is now. There was much less sellers. But the opportunity now on Amazon is just insane.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. How many marketplaces are you selling right now? And what I consider marketplaces, Amazon USA, Amazon, Canada, eBay, Amazon UK, et cetera.

Huy: Yeah. So, we’re selling on Amazon US or amazon.com. We’re selling in the UK Germany. We’re also– we dabbled in Amazon, China when that was still around, but that was a pretty epic fail for Amazon in general. And in addition to Amazon, we’re also selling on Walmart and now we’re also selling on eBay. We’ve taken a look at eBay not because we wanted to sell there necessarily, but it was more for brand protection. A lot of people take our product. And as I mentioned, everyone was selling on eBay. And so we do sell them the health supplements and beauty category. So there’s– it’s a very competitive category. That’s obviously very popular. And there’s a lot of competitors, but one of the things that’s really important in marketing health supplements is– so that you don’t get in trouble as a brand. And also for you to protect your brand is, you know, you can’t make certain health claims and you need to control your marketing. So, there are a lot of people that just list stuff on eBay. They take our products, they’ll do arbitrage from Amazon to eBay or Walmart to eBay. And when we saw some of the prices that they were selling our products at and we’re like, that’s just amazing. And you look at the sales history of what has been sold and what it’s sold for, it’s just insane. It was a lot higher than what we normally sell our products on these other marketplaces, but it was just a different customer set that was on eBay. And also like I mentioned, the brand protection is huge. And that’s you want to make sure that people are saying the right things about your product and the people that are reselling your product are also doing your product justice. So it doesn’t look– because the thing with Amazon is you’ve got a certain template of what your product page can look like. And you can kind of control that, but with eBay and some of these other marketplaces where they just allow multiple people to have individual listings, the eBay templates are looking pretty crappy. So, that’s one of those things where there was really a brand protection play. We thought about it for a long time and said, Hey, there’s a lot of people selling these products with the harm because we’re getting a lot of sales from that because they’re just buying it full price from Amazon Arbitraging. I said, I’m not going to knock anybody’s hustle for that. But I think that, as we’re trying to become a better business and control our brand, we looked at eBay.

Bradley Sutton: I can speak to that because if you don’t sell your own products on eBay, I guarantee somebody else will. And you might think, Oh, this is weird. Why is my $30 product– why is somebody listing it for $60 on eBay? That must be something weird, nobody’s going to buy it. And then you look and like, wait a minute, people are buying it. So like, if you just list at the same price and you can do even an even better. So, out of all those marketplaces, you said, I mean, I know we’re still in the– not even the middle yet of Q4 here. What is, what do you think you’re going to end up with for 2020 sales across all platforms?

Huy: That’s a good question. That really, I think that we’ll probably end up in the mid seven figure range. And I say that because it depends on how much product that we have available that we can push there’s– with COVID our sales have gone up just like a lot of other Amazon sellers, especially in the health category as well, but at the same time, because we also source our own ingredients and we have different manufacturing partners for different products. That’s been the challenging part is ultimately we’re trying to be build a better product, but at the end of the day, it’s just we rely on so many different partners to actually do that. So, I would say around there.

Bradley Sutton: So, when you say mid seven figures, four to 6 million around there?

Huy: Yeah. Around there.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Thank you. Ankit, let’s go back to you now. How many marketplaces are you selling on now?

Ankit: Yeah, Bradley. So, we are selling on multiple marketplaces. Amazon USA is our main one. And Canada, I started selling last year to marketplaces, UK and Germany was our big one, but because of the bad issues, I shut them down for temporarily and I will start them again. I got all the really good reviews. People love that product in the UK, and those are their toughest people to convince because I had that California cancer warning on my packaging that I made for USA. I didn’t realize it. People are sensitive. So, some people wrote a negative review about it. I’m not even using this product, it cause cancer. So, that was an epic fail right before I start, I failed. But other people loved it, so I will start it again. Now I just launch Walmart is our next. We’ve been approved on Walmart for the last year and a half. So, we’ve been on Walmart. eBay is also a big one big success for me on eBay was selling an open box items, but because eBay’s mainly known for people to buy open and use products at a lower price. So they have that customer group of people who always looking for a deal. And what we did is we significantly lower the price because on Amazon, our return is significant. Our return monthly goes to somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 since I’m in electronics category. So, I mean, what are you going to do with that 30, $40,000 return? Right?

Bradley Sutton: I like that. This is something I don’t think any of our guests have really talked about before. And now we have two guests on at the same time who both independently said the same thing and how it can be beneficial for Amazon sellers to be selling their private label products also on eBay. So, sellers out there, take heat of this. This might be something that you might be missing out on, and I can definitely attest to the eBay model as well. Now, Ankit for you, all of your products across all the platforms, what do you think– I know it’s early again, rough estimate. What are you going to end up with as far as gross sales for this year?

Ankit: I’m hoping same like Huy, as he said, we’re at the same ballpark, I’m going to be middle-eight figure. So, I would say six or 7 million.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. We, I’m not sure if you’re going to live up to your name and you might not win the contest here. Let’s talk some more strategy. So, we got some strategy ready. Hey, eBay, that’s something new. Maybe our listeners haven’t considered, but you mentioned before that your product is a high price item. So first of all, how many SKUs are you selling? Like how many different products?

Ankit: Yeah, so that’s also interesting because I mainly have three main SKU and two off on my best seller. And one of them is kind of, I’m just selling it out, but those products, they requires a lot of accessories, right? So then I’m also selling the complimenting SKU so that those– and now Amazon started virtual bundles. So I just got those accessories in stock. And I’m selling those virtual bundles, I’m in the process of creating it because lot of people buy a lot of accessories and other product that compliments each other. So, those other complimenting products are roughly about 13 or 14. And then I have created those single accessories into a bundle accessories. Right. So if you say on a single accessory, for example, for 10 bucks and you make $3 out of it, but if you bundle those five accessories and sell it for $20, instead of $50, now you’re actually making eight or $9 because you sell it bundle.

Bradley Sutton: You’re using both the real physical bundling technique where you package it together and you’re using the virtual bundle technique, you’re saying?

Ankit: Yeah. So on Amazon, I will, I’m just in the process of doing today the virtual bundles, because they just got in stock today on Amazon. But we also have Shopify site that I have been pressing a lot harder, bringing a lot of traffic. So we’re grossing really well on our Shopify store too. So, we get, we sell a lot of bundle. I even sell like warranties too. So I created a warranty and that people are buying warranty for my electronics product, because Amazon says, they’ll buy a warranty for three-year from all state. Oh, I say, well, why don’t we have warranty? So, I have warranties. I have bundles because I sell a warranty for 20 bucks, but then in return I give customers a $40 coupon code for a future upgrade after six months. So, let’s say I launch next product after six months and the customer can come back and say, Hey, I bought the warranty. So, not only they have extra year of warranty, but now I have a better iPhone 13, for example, from 12, 13, they can get $40 off or their $20 warranty. So, guess what? I will have my customers coming back, even after $40 off, I still will be making money there. I don’t have to go and sell it. The customer will be getting a good deal. So it’s like a win-win. And I’m also making 20 bucks right now, which I don’t, it’s not a physical product at all. Right. So, I have that digital product kind of thing. And my product is good, so I don’t have to replace that. And even if I do, my supplier will go in and fix it anyways, I just had to send it back to China. They’ll fix it, coming back to USA and I can sell it back on eBay as refurbished. And now on Amazon, they reached out to us and they want us to open another Amazon account where we, I think it’s called, I don’t know Amazon– I’m on brain fart, I don’t know, let’s call Amazon open box or Amazon repackage, something. And those are really fast, you can go to the electronics category and they’ll have is, Hey, buy this item cheaper as an open box, like right under your buy box or somewhere.

Bradley Sutton: You talked about these little accessories you have, but your main product, your money generating product, what’s the retail price on it?

Ankit: The retail price on it, it’s a hundred bucks.

Bradley Sutton: A hundred bucks. And what’s your cost?

Ankit: The cost for that, it comes out to 55 bucks or 50 bucks.

Bradley Sutton: So, did you start off with that product? Was that like your first product? Because that’s a pretty, that would have been a pretty hefty investment if that?

Ankit: Yeah, no, God, no, I start, I sell so many other products. I was in kitchen. The kitchen was the easiest. This people say don’t sell spatulas, but I guess I sold spatulas and I got a great success from it. I invested heavily on my designing the photograph and how my listing. It was so good. So I sold a kitchen utensils sets before. So, I have another brand in another Amazon account. And people actually reach out to me for buying that brand. But apparently I wasn’t smart enough to sell it at that time. And now I’m not focusing there, so I’m not able to sell it. But I was selling kitchen utensils. I was selling scoopers and stuff. And I actually designed that one of the scooper myself, there is a trigger and stuff. And I reached out to the manufacturer in China and they made it, apparently I sold 15,000 of them. And then after all the other sellers just copied my pictures, have it everything I did. And I’m like, okay, well now there is nothing left on this. Let’s move on. But that was the start, that 15,000 scooper, it was costing me $2.25 cents, Amazon fees, five bucks. I was selling at 20 12.99, making me find out a profit for eight. So if you say, you know, 20, 25, 30 a day, you’re making three, four, $5,000 in side. I was working on MRI job at the time and my salary was lower then. So, I made a goal that say, once I make the three times my MRI salary, I will go ahead and quit my job two years ago, I was able to do that.

Bradley Sutton: So basically, did you have this goal that you wanted to do a higher price product? And so you’re just like, Hey, let me build up some capital here using these other methods so I can afford that kind of thing. Or did that just opportunity come independently and later?

Ankit: Yeah. So, it was a step-by-step success for me. Right? You do one thing. It gives you confidence when you become successful, then you fail again. Then you work hard, then you get more success. So, retail are two kitchen gadgets, kitchen gadgets, too. I also sold some, electronics products, laser light. Right. So, those were expensive too. So success after success, small bins that gives you more confidence to go to the next level products.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Interesting. All right. Now let’s switch back to Huy. Now, something different about you that I didn’t know about is your main category you said is supplements?

Huy: That’s correct.

Bradley Sutton: So, how long ago did you start that? Like how many years ago?

Huy: We started off there actually. And so, the brand that we’re currently in right now is the brand that we started with. We have a lot of passion around health in general and nutrition. And we felt that supplements was a really interesting category because it was very high demand, but also we found out very quickly that it was very highly competitive and there’s a really low barrier to entry for people to jump in there. So, ultimately at the end of the day, we said, Hey, we will do want to stick with this supplement category because we feel that we want to build a strong brand, a strong business. And so what do we need to do to be better? And we decided that we’re not going to focus on being a loss leader, like the majority of the supplement companies that are out there, they’ll go out and hire a contract manufacturer, take off the shelf, packaging and brought materials and things like that. And just create a supplement for a couple bucks and then go out and list it. And then, as everybody’s selling the exact same formula and the exact same supplement, the price starts to come down and down and down. And so not just kind of a race to the bottom. So, what we focused on is building a supplement product that is high quality, is tested on every batch that we produce. And we focus on education is really educating the customers who are trying to purchase our products. And we’re not creating generic supplements. We’re creating supplements that are specific for certain niches. So, we do build out custom avatars. We understand our customers and we’ve been selling on Amazon for eight years. We really understand kind of what our customers and our existing customers are looking for. And we try to build products that are high quality effective and meet the needs of those specific customers. So, we’re not really trying to compete with the masses, even though sometimes we end up in those categories, but we’re just trying to build a better product, higher price. And it’s not higher price because we’re just trying to make additional profit, but it is higher price because of the patent ingredients that we use and the different, the way that we market and all those different costs that actually come into it.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. We’re going to kind of close, like the last 10 minutes or so with just like, not as like, something we haven’t done, like non-stop strategy session, but before we get into that, a couple of questions for both of you, I’ll stick with you for a little bit. We’ve had a lot of women on the podcast who are also mothers and talk about that experience, but I feel like we haven’t really talked about being a daddy-preneur. How old are your kids, Huy?

Huy: Yeah, so I’ve got two daughters and my youngest one is seven. My oldest one is nine.

Bradley Sutton: And you’ve always worked at home for most of their lives?

Huy: No, that’s not necessarily true. As I’ve had like multiple, kind of like careers as I was discovering what I wanted to be when I grow up. I used to work in corporate marketing. So, I used to work for a fortune 100 company. And I was one of the marketing directors there. I was constantly traveling, flying all over the place, my wife and I wanted to have kids. And my wife’s a teacher, so she already knew what she was going to do for the rest of her life and knew how much money she was going to make when she retired. But for me, I was just still trying to figure out what I wanted to do. So, because of all the traveling, I do enjoy spending time with my kids. And I didn’t– my life started to shift and change because I was traveling so much, so I did want to be home and travel less. So, I started to move to different startups and smaller companies in order to allow more flexible time with the kids. And Amazon provides that opportunity for me to do that now.

Bradley Sutton: That’s good that you had both, so like contrast it, you don’t have to go too into detail, but like, is it night and day? You feel like you’re a better father or it’s better to be with what you’re doing now, as opposed to that traveling gig you had.

Huy: Yeah. I mean, so I think the contrast is that like, I’m a people person. I love meeting people. I love networking and I attend all of the Helium 10 kind of events, right. Because I enjoy that aspect of face to face. So, that’s what I do miss. And I miss the sales aspect of doing that, but the freedom that we have to work from home or work from wherever and spend time with the kids, it’s not like, I’ve always been more family oriented just because my parents are very close and try to keep all of our family together and spend a lot of time with that. So they’ve instilled those values in me. And so I’ve always kind of had that, but at the same time, as you growing up, you always, you’re trying to strive for better, get that promotion and make more money, buy a house and try to hit those milestones. But at the end of the day, I realized that having the freedom to do whatever you want to do and work wherever you want to work is ultimately what I want. And I think a lot of people are experiencing that right now with working from home. They’re realizing that they may work just as much or more from their jobs in the office, but they have the flexibility and freedom to actually see their family and do these certain things. So, when people are realizing what it takes to be an entrepreneur now.

Bradley Sutton: Totally agree. Totally agree. And then last question for you before we go back to Ankit is, you’re a Helium 10 Elite member. How have you been benefited from being a Helium 10 Elite?

Huy: The benefits are vast, right? So, I think that when Manny first started Helium 10, I gave the product the trial and I said, all right, this is awesome. I really appreciate what the Helium 10 guys are doing. They’re building out a bunch of tools. They’re not just focusing on one area. And that’s something that we truly appreciate. The difference between what Helium 10 does and what other companies out there that are doing is they’re trying to build a community that allows people to interact with each other. And also bring in great speakers and, like the speakers and the different people that come in to provide the trainings. I can hear those people in other places, but to see those people face to face or interact with them and other Helium 10 members on a personal level is just massive. I’ve built tremendous amount of relationships with that. If I have a question that I need to ask, instead of me posting it in the Helium 10 members or the Amazon High Rollers Facebook group and get a bunch of random answers, I can hit up Ankit, or I can hit up Karyn, or anybody on the Helium 10 staff or any of the speakers that we’ve built a relationship with in the past and get a solid and trustworthy opinion. Not always am I going to follow that, but I think it’s just invaluable that access that you have.

Bradley Sutton: Alright. Cool. Cool. Ankit, going back to you. Do you have kids at home?

Ankit: Yes, sir. I have two girls also. Six and two and a half.

Bradley Sutton: Oh, okay. That’s cool. Now how about– same question for you, tackle just briefly about being a dad and being able to work from home and, you know, Hey, uh, I’m not going to say this is a hundred percent the best thing in the world for everybody it’s different for everybody. So, I’m just wondering how your experience has been, would you say that’s positive or are there drawbacks?

Ankit: Yeah, this is super interesting. It is positive and there’s a drawback because the reason I wanted to do this e-commerce and build my own business so I can quit my nine to five job. But then I was able to do that by working super hard. So, I invested those time to able to quit the job, but then after I quit the job, I got busy building the team and the office abroad and hiring people, launching the product, getting success. So, then I got busy also. So yes, I do love working from home where I can see my kids grow up along with me. I can see them coming in the office and running out and not the best thing all the time when you’re busy, but I do love seeing see them growing away, better if I used to go to my job, I just wake up, get my breakfast, they’re probably– they’re sleeping. Since I was a radiology tech, I’m always on call, so I didn’t get my weekends off. So, they might be attending family functions where I will be working. So it was hard, but so working from home and doing this Amazon business, and now I even call it an e-commerce brand. Now it’s definitely got its park, but then you go, the one negative is I’m having a hard time balancing. Because I’m always thinking Amazon, like back in the day, even I was, even when I go out with the friends, I’m always thinking of Amazon and they’re like, Oh my God, you can’t even have a good burger without thinking of Amazon?

Bradley Sutton: That would be a good opportunity. This napkin holder right here in this restaurant. Hmm. Let me just look it up on Helium 10 real quick.

Ankit: Exactly. So I go shopping on Walmart for, with my wife and I always scanning stuff. I’m like, Oh my God, I got to stop. So, if you can balance it so he could spend more time with the kids where you just don’t go for, okay. Keep doing more and more and more all the time. It’s really good. You got to step back and relax and celebrate the small wins. And as you know, that other wins will come.

Bradley Sutton: Oh yeah, it’s funny. And they’re like, now, especially now that– I normally don’t work at home. Obviously. I only do that because of COVID now. And then my kids are talking about, Hey, you haven’t talked about Cerebro today, but I’m pretty loud. And so they can just hear me throughout. So, now they know all about Amazon because they’re just bombarded with it all day long in the house. But the other question I had told Huy was like, what about you? How has being a Helium 10 Elite member benefited you?

Ankit: Oh yeah. So I have been an elite member ever since it was offered. It provides me the immense value. I don’t have to go look courses after courses and to stay ahead of the game, working with Kevin King, the guests that he brings in, the hacks that he gives, I mean, it’s just worth a thousands of dollars than you actually pay for it. So the value it gives me is it keeps me ahead and all these advanced strategy I can apply it before anybody else can. The biggest part and success for me with elite is exactly as what we say it again, making this great relationships with everyone, right. And you know what kind of entrepreneurs are they, it gives you that confidence inside that, you know what, if they can do it, I can do it. And if you have any questions or concerns that ever you held back, you can simply message them. And Hey, how do you handle your shipping channel or ship PL, or how do you launch a product, or something new, anything, and everybody’s willing to help. And recently, I appreciate you guys doing that networking call every two weeks along between those Helium elite members that has been to me is tremendous amount of knowledge. And it just gives me a lot more confidence, which is more important for me to gain that. Having a lot of money and selling good product is one thing. But if you don’t have confidence, you can’t be successful faster.

Bradley Sutton: Yep. I agree. Agree. All right, now we’re going to do something guys I’ve never done before. And I actually just decided to do it while we were on the show, especially when we was talking about his name, about winning, we’re going to you guys, if you listen to podcasts and those who listen out there, we do something at the end where the guest does just one, what we call the TST, which is a TST, 30-second tip, right? Some like advanced, not this doesn’t have to be advanced. It could be basic, but just some really cool strategy that somebody thinks is unique. That’s helped them in their business that a listener could really do. So what we’re going to do is we’re not just going to have one, we’re going to do it like as long as we can go here, we don’t have too much time left here, but we’re going to do a TST challenge.

Bradley Sutton: All right. So we’re going to start with Huy, and you’re going to have like 30 seconds and if it’s really good, I might give you like some more time here to give like a TST about anything out there. And then Ankit, you’re going to do one and then each round I’m going to pick a winner. Let’s see. I wish I had the audience able to pick winners. I don’t like picking the winner, but what we’ll see, maybe it’ll be all tie. So, Huy, whenever you’re a chance or whenever you’re ready, what is your first TST?

Huy: Sure. So I think that for us, we don’t do a tremendous amount of hacks. I think ultimately at the end of the day, focus on building a better business. So, that means a business that’s not just focused on Amazon, a business that can capitalize on the other marketplaces and moving to where your customers are, just building customer equity. And that’s not always in terms of just sales, but you want to build out a community loyalty and ultimately provide the best customer service that you can. I think that’s one area that people lack or don’t think about is they think that just let Amazon handle the customer service, but you need to be extremely proactive. Go out there, respond to every review, respond to every feedback, follow up with your customers and provide outstanding customer service. And then you’ll see more reviews because of that.

Bradley Sutton: Alright, so following up on every feedback, following up on reviews, that’s your strategy. And it doesn’t have to be like hacks guys. It could be one of it could have been, but we already talked about it was, Hey, list your items on eBay. So, don’t just think in the hack standpoint, that was a good one. All right. Ankit, we’re turning it over to you. What’s your first TST?

Ankit: Okay. So, this is a cool one guys that really brought me over a huge success. And I don’t know a lot of people aren’t doing it. Since I was an MRI tech, I didn’t have a customer care. I was everything. I was one man team back then. So I’m like, okay, well, my electronic panic. And there are a lot of people who actually don’t know how to use it, even though you spell it out really plain simple. So, those people need help. So, the 90% of the customers, I don’t have to take care of it because they’re smart. Anybody use it and they probably won’t write the review. But the important part for me on my success is that taking care of those 10% customer who you feel like, Oh man, I’m going to slap all those 10% of them. So how do you take care of those 10% who’s going to be angry and easy to write negative review. So I come up with like, you know what? We can provide a good customer care. So instead of having them email me, I use the text message service. I got a Google voice, which is free. And I use that number in my insert kind of says, Hey, you know what? You can email us for customer care. But if you want a faster answer, simply text us and we will reply to you faster. So, those 10% of people, because they are lazy and they don’t want to read the manual, they use it, they’ll text it. And while I was working, because I do MRI, I actually have 30 minute break every patient because once the patient going into the MRI, you are really on 30 minutes doing nothing. So, I can go on my phone and answer those text message. I mean, it’s not all the time, but they just come in once in a while. But you reply to those people on Google ways text message, like you would like have a number one, eight or seven, whatever. And you just say, okay, just go ahead and do this. And they’ll be like, Oh my goodness, nobody on Amazon ever provided a service like that. And then at the time, it’s like, do you have any other questions or you wedded it up a little bit and then they’re super happy. And they’re more willing to give you five star review when you ask for it, because you just blow them out of their chair by providing the tech support. It’s like a personal.

Bradley Sutton: Alright. For this round, I’m going to have to call it a tie. I like Ankit your hack. Not really. See, I just said, we’re not going to do hacks. And I call it a hack. I liked your tip, but you went way over time. So, you got penalty on that. So, I’m going to call that round a tie, but that’s pretty cool. All right. Huy, back to you, what’s your comeback?

Huy: Okay. My come back. Since we both talked about the customer servicing kind of going, providing extra care and protecting your brand. mentioned eBay before, but I didn’t mention wish. So, wishes a new marketplace or for a lot of people. And a lot of sellers are not thinking about this right now, but Wish is actually the third largest marketplace in terms of traffic right now. And if you go out there and take a look at who’s selling your product, you’ll just be amazed at how many people are selling your product and the prices. So I think that– have a look at Wish, build a strategy, and get on Wish. And also if you’re selling on Walmart and you’re using deliver for fulfillment services deliver has a direct integration into Wish right now, so that you can use your existing inventory from deliver and just set up and fulfill automatically to Wish.

Bradley Sutton: Ooh, I never heard about that before. Ankit, that’s going to be a tough one to beat. I don’t know. What do you got for us?

Ankit: Yes, that’s true. That was definitely a good strategy. My strategy on this is I keep the seminaries. I launched on Amazon AE. So, I had an account manager who helped me set it up. He helped me get deal of the day for free, which get me 25, 30 sales. And I was instantly ranked for almost all the main keywords on page one keywords on my category. I’m on page one. Now I’m getting two or three sales a day. And it’s helping me grow on AE before it gets popular. So then it will, I don’t have to spend a lot of PPC money. So, hopefully within it’s a long-term investment, but after two, three, four or six months, when AE gets a little bit hotter, you will be on the top listing and get more reviews and you’ll be able to make some kind of good, healthy income from AE rather than just focusing on Amazon US and Canada, which is my best selling places.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. I like that. AE. I don’t think a lot of people have talked about the opportunity there. We had somebody on here who was just starting on that marketplace. So, that’s a good one. Try and get the account manager, sometimes we get those emails say, Hey, we’d like to you to expand your, your marketplaces. So, basically it’s like, Hey, take them up on that offer and see what we can go with. I like it. All right. Ah, I’m going to have to go with Huy on this round because that was pretty cool about the deliver and Wish. Let’s go back to Huy before for the final round. All right. What’s your last TST of the day?

Huy: So I think a lot of people are out there are using chat bots, using many chat to do rebate campaigns and which is great. But I think that one of the things that people are not focused on necessarily is always trying to acquire new customers. So, many chat does have a feature that’s in there that allows you to send messages back out, like sponsored messages that you paid for to go back out. And so take a look at that and see how much of that actually costs. And it may be less than the cost to acquire new customers. If you’re trying to launch new products that are out there and people have already gone through your funnel before, they’re more likely to actually repurchase again, through your funnel. If you reached back out to them and you don’t have to pay Facebook or find new customers.

Bradley Sutton: I like it. I like it. All right. Ankit, keep final round. Go ahead.

Ankit: I would say I’m a– DSP is making a big impact for me for retargeting because I be spent a lot of PPC and not outside traffic people who view your Amazon listing. But because Amazon didn’t used to share their data before you can retarget those people. So, they might forget about you, or they might end up buying something else. But I have been using Amazon DSP and that allows me to actually re-target the people based on viewed my listing or my product display pages. And that’s actually working out really great because I’m able to rebuild those customer by retargeting them. And the ROI is very, very, very good, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. So, those retargeting money invested in DSP is very well spent and you will actually know a positive ROI.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. I like it. I like it. All right. I’m going to have to give a slight, slight edge to Ankit on there. So, it’s basically a tie because we tied the first round. Huy won the second round, and then Ankit won the third round. So, you guys are pretty evenly matched both in sales and in strategies and as dads and elite members. And as an entrepreneurs wanted to be an entrepreneur when you’re a kid that got a lot of similarities, Asian parents. I mean, this is a– I didn’t plan it that way, but Hey it kind of turned out pretty cool, but despite the similarities, there’s also a lot of differences, but the cool thing is that we all ended up kind of in the same space. And that’s the main message I think of this podcast is that no matter how you were raised or what your initial ambitions were or what your parents wanted for you, Amazon is really for everybody, like anybody can make money on here. It doesn’t require a specific training or a specific upbringing, and we all can end up here in the same place and have massive success as you two have had. So, I’d love to bring you guys back next year to see, Hey, how did you close out 2020? And then let’s see if you’re able to even scale up from 2021. So, hopefully we’ll start having in person meetups again, for Helium 10 here with the Elite. So I can see you guys, but until then, wish you guys the best. And thanks for coming on the show.

Huy: Thanks so much, Bradley. Nice speaking with you too, Ankit.

Ankit: Yeah. Thank you guys. It was really nice speaking with you both.