#555 – Maximize Amazon Profits with the New Freedom Ticket

Join us on a journey through the world of e-commerce with the latest release of the revamped Freedom Ticket 4.0 course by Helium 10. This comprehensive training course, tailored for Amazon and Walmart sellers, brings forth the hard-earned wisdom of industry veterans. Listen in as Kevin King reveals the inspiration behind Freedom Ticket, designed to combat the misinformation spread by the infamous ‘Lambo gurus’ in the space. Our conversation unpacks the wealth of knowledge shared by our esteemed guests on subjects ranging from the nitty-gritty of Amazon patents to the essentials of e-commerce insurance, Amazon compliance, and the art of hiring and managing virtual assistants with Josh Hadley.

In this episode, we also underscore the critical importance of intellectual property for entrepreneurs carving their niche in the e-commerce landscape. Our dialogue with guest experts such as Chris McCabe provides actionable insights into maintaining a healthy Amazon account amidst a sea of policy changes. Learn about the intricacies of insurance requirements from Ashlin Hadden, the strategic timing for patent applications from Rich Goldstein, and the importance of understanding the legal frameworks that underpin successful online selling.

Our exploration continues with a practical guide to navigating the financial and regulatory aspects of running an Amazon business. Hear firsthand from experts about setting competitive employee salaries, the significance of meeting Amazon’s insurance mandates, and the proactive steps for securing trademarks and brand registry. We also tackle the dos and don’ts of insert cards and highlight the valuable resource that is Google Patents for those seeking product inspiration. Every bit of advice is aimed at empowering sellers to maintain profitability while adhering to Amazon’s evolving guidelines. So tune in for a masterclass in building and sustaining a thriving e-commerce business.

In episode 555 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kevin, Ashlin, Rich, Chris, and Josh discuss:

• 00:00 – The New Freedom Ticket 4.0
• 01:56 – False Promises of Lambo Gurus 
• 12:04 – Amazon’s Insurance Requirements for Sellers 
• 16:47 – Importance of Patents for Amazon Sellers 
• 21:12 – Importance of Trademarks for Amazon Sellers
• 21:31 – Staying Profitable on Amazon FBA
• 24:30 – Challenges With Abuse Suspensions and Reviews
• 29:01 – Hiring VAs and Managers for Amazon Businesses
• 35:18 – Determining VA Salaries Based on Skills
• 38:25 – Q&A With Our Guests

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’re introducing the newest version of the best training course for Amazon sellers out there, Freedom Ticket including. We’ve got some special guests who are going to give us some strategies that range from Amazon patents to compliance, to insurance, hiring VAs and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think you want to see the size of your niche or your market? Maybe how much sales overall is it generating? And, more importantly, how the size of your piece of that pie changes over time? Or maybe you want to know when there’s a new mover or shaker, an up and comer in your niche that you need to be on the lookout for. You can monitor these things and more with Market Tracker by Helium 10. Find out more information at h10.me/markettracker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today we’ve got a special episode, a little recap, of our reintroduction to Freedom Ticket 4.0, the premier course for Amazon sellers and Walmart sellers out there. And today we have some special guests like Chris McCabe and Josh Hadley, Ashlin Hadden, Rich Goldstein, who are going to give us strategies about what their topics in Freedom Ticket was. That can help Amazon sellers right now, including Kevin King with a little bit of a history lesson on the Freedom Ticket course. So, to find out what we can learn from them, let’s go ahead and hop into the workshop. And we have a special guest who’s just gonna be on here for a little bit Kevin King. All right, I know you’re only gonna be here for about five minutes, but for everybody out there, just can you give like a brief history of how the Freedom Ticket came about? And then now even people are asking in the chat like what’s different about the new Freedom Ticket 4.0?

Kevin King:

Yeah, sure. So the way the Freedom Ticket 4.0? Yeah, sure. So the way the Freedom Ticket came about originally is back in around late 2016. There were some courses out there and, as most of you know, we call them Lambo gurus. They’re doing stuff on YouTube or showing screenshots of look how you can make a million dollars I launched. Here’s my client, Johnny. Here’s a screenshot of $100,000 in his first two weeks of selling on Amazon. I can do this for you too, and I’m like you guys are so full of crap. I was gonna say another word, but there’s children watching. You’re so full of BS. Yeah, there we go. You know, Bradley Sutton, no, no.

Bradley Sutton:

Full of my initials there you go yes, full of your initials.

Kevin King:

You’re so full of BS. This was a launch. These were all giveaways that you just did and that’s why your sales figures are a hundred grand because you just went in the hole 20 grand. It’s not what you’re telling people and you just got to be frustrating. There’s all these people on Facebook, and so someone would post something, someone would ask a question, someone posts an answer and it’d be totally off base and totally wrong, whether it’s branding or how to launch a product or whatever. And you just got to be frustrating with all these people just basically, and people that were doing courses. They were leaving out all the stuff, including some of the biggest names in the space. Some that are still around today would show you a course that, look, I can sell it for $20, and I can buy it in China for $3. And look at these crazy margins, that’s an 80% profit margin. I’m like no, you’re leaving out all the fulfillment costs. They’re not telling the whole picture. So, I decided I want to do a course and I was going to do it. One of the reasons, too, is I was doing a fancy wedding in Cartagena, Colombia. I was getting married, and this wedding was the cost for getting out of hand. It’s like I got to do something. I need a little extra cash on the side, so why don’t I just do a course? And then I talked to Manny and Guillermo, who were the original founders of Helium 10. And they said well, we’re talking with Scott Volker. And I said Scott, why don’t we do it with you? And I said, all right, sure, it makes sense to me and we’ll just go in 50-50. We got the VAs, we got the team, we got the audience, you have the knowledge, you put together the course and we’ll put it out there. That’s a good deal, because if I was going to do affiliate marketing, I’d have to give away probably a 50% commission to affiliates to drive all the traffic to it. So, we put it out and we didn’t know what to price it at. Everybody else was like at $5,000. And we tried $1,497, and then we tried $9,997. And we got about 800, 900 people or so to do it. We shot it in August of 2017 in a Freedom Ticket 1.0. It was a hurricane that just hit the coast of Texas. I’m not on the coast I’m about three hours from the coast but this hurricane devastated part down by Corpus Christi and part of Texas and we got the residual effect in Austin. And so if you look at that course, the very first modules, like first 10 modules, there’s like four people because we put students there. So, we’re like, why don’t I teach? To make it different. So, it’s not just me on a Power Point presentation, I’m like in a classroom. So we have like four students asking questions and you notice one of those people disappeared and wasn’t there the rest of the course. It’s because one of the bridges that he had to cross to get from his house flooded during the storm. He couldn’t get back. You hear hail on the roof.

Kevin King:

The audio on that, the video quality, was just not very good, but the course did pretty well. Manny and Guillermo was like you know what? This is not up to Helium 10 standards. We need to reshoot this thing. So in 2019, plus, some things have changed in the space, so we need to update the course. So in 2019, I came out and we don’t ever know what Kevin’s going to say. Sometimes he might say something that he shouldn’t say or he needs a babysitter when he’s recording this course. So we’re going to do proper cameras, proper lighting, proper everything. Kevin, you fly out to Irvine, to Helium 10 course, spend a week out here shooting it and Bradley’s going to sit there with you the entire time. I was like, who’s this Bradley guy? He’s like, don’t worry, he’s going to. So Bradley was my babysitter on that first one, I got to do what I wanted. I outlined the entire course, I designed the modules, I wrote the whole thing, but battery’s there to make sure I didn’t cuss or make sure I didn’t say some derogatory remark or to make sure you know, whatever, he had his mission, and I think I did a pretty good job. You didn’t have to do much. We kept it up to date, as things would change from 2019, you know, 2020, some things changed. So we reshoot a few modules, but then every two years, basically, uh, pretty much every two, two and a half years, we reshoot the entire thing from scratch. So we don’t just like, okay, let’s go plug the holes or change this module, change that. That would be the easy way out. We completely redo it from scratch. So that’s what we’ve done on 4.0. So in February of this year, I flew out uh to uh out to Irvine and spent three days riding around with Bradley in this Japanese car he had imported from Japan. What was the name of that car?

Bradley Sutton:

Nissan Skyline with a right-hand drive. Little tiny thing, little tiny thing, two big guys trying to get into this thing.

Kevin King:

He’s sitting on the right-hand side. It’s this tiny car, it’s like six inches from the ground, and you can just imagine me and Bradley trying to get into something. You got to, like you know, maneuver your butt in a certain way to get into the seat. Then you’re like ducking and getting in this thing, and you know we’re driving around. We went to a Helium 10 party that PACVUE was doing not Helium 10 party, PACVUE deal that night, when I had all the people from all over the world for PACVUE in town, all the big executives and affiliate managers and everything, and then we so we reshot it, and so what we decided, though, is the last several modules have been pretty long, you know. There’s 50, some odd modules, and then plus gas modules, and so I was like you know what a lot of people we noticed not everybody finishes it. They start it, and then the life gets busy or they skip around. Like what if we made this where you could actually do this in a weekend and so that was the goal If you sat down and said, okay, this weekend I’m clearing my schedule, I’m going to knock out Freedom Ticket. That’s what we decided to do, so we changed it to where it’s 18 core modules. So, some of this material is the same as before, but nothing is scripted. So, it’s not like I’m looking at a teleprompter and I’m reading a script and someone’s writing this in advance a teleprompter and I’m reading a script and someone’s writing this in advance. That’s what a lot of people do. It’s strictly off the cuff. So everything is shot pretty much in one take, which is unusual. For most shooting I have some notes, like an outline, and I just start talking and we have a timer. This time we put up a timer so I knew where I was us and we had some other little shooting tricks that we did, but we condensed it into the core stuff. So instead of rambling about some things, we condensed in the core. So that’s the 18 modules that are from me, everything from the basic setup to the fundamentals. But then there’s experts that are know stuff way better than me. You know Rich Goldstein. He knows IP law. He can run circles around me and IP law or Gracie can run circles around me in influencer marketing. Or Ashlin knows everything about insurance. I have a pretty good grasp on all that stuff and know quite a bit and I could teach it. But why should I teach it when they’re the experts and other people that really know this. So, we decided we’ll supplement it with these people and let them come in and speak for 30 to 45 minutes and go deeper into the weeds. I might introduce it, but they’ll go deeper into the weeds for people that want to know more about that specific thing. So we put together an all-star group of people that are in it. So you have me and then you have this all-star group. That’s adding depth for those that want to go into more detail on certain things. So I think it’s really good and I don’t know if you talked about this yet, Bradley but one of the other things that we’re doing is we’re going to start doing monthly webinars totally for free for the Freedom Ticket. So every month, the Helium 10 announced a free webinar, even if you’re not in the Helium 10 software, even if you’re watching this and you don’t have Helium 10 software. That’s a mistake. You need to have Helium 10 so you can access Freedom Ticket. But there’s gonna be a monthly webinar and on that monthly webinar we’re going to bring on a guest and go deep into another topic, something that’s trending right now. Maybe the hot new thing is something on TikTok shop and tying that to Amazon or whatever it is. We’re going to. We’re going to go in. It’s going to be a totally free webinar and then that that’s module will get in. We’ll cut out me and we’ll take the person that’s on that webinar and we’ll put them into additional content. So be constantly refreshed and Bradley can talk more than he knows all the details more specific than I do but that’s the idea. We want to keep freedom ticket current, the best you know. It got voted in seller poll. You got voted the best course out there and especially for how much you pay for it, which is zero it’s actually I think it’s the most comprehensive and best course in the space. So you guys, hopefully this helps you. So if you’ve watched it before going through it again, you may have heard some of this. That’s true, you will have heard some of it. There is some new stuff, but it’s always good to have a refresher and if you’re watching this, I would recommend you put your VAs. Everybody that hits Helium 10 that gets a job here within has to watch the Freedom Ticket, and I’ve heard people that are selling $3 million a year on Amazon $4 million. They say I just kind of fell into this. And they end up watching the Freedom Ticket and they’re like holy cow, I was missing so much stuff and now I’m doing $5 million or $6 million. There’s some things I didn’t know and you’ll notice that Freedom Ticket if you haven’t done it, it’s not, this is step one, it’s two, three and 10 steps. Some people like that, but that’s not what we try to do. We try to give you the information so you can think on your own, think for yourself, and you have a full picture with no detail omitted, and then you can decide what’s best for you. Because if you do a 10 step process, that might be good for the person teaching it to you. They probably honestly didn’t even do it themselves, they just read it and copied it from somewhere. But you got to carve your own path in your own way and modify it. But if you have the foundational, key information, then you can. It’s kind of like learning a language. Once you know the vocabulary, you know the basics of the language, then you can write a beautiful novel and become the next William Shakespeare or whatever it may be. That’s what we’re trying to do with Freedom Ticket and so hopefully it helps a lot of you. Over 200,000 people have gone through it. The reach and the power of Helium 10 is undeniable, and you guys are lucky that you have access to all the tools that Helium 10 does and everything, and so I encourage you to take advantage of Freedom Ticket, take advantage of all the trainings that Bradley does, where he goes deep into how to actually use the tools, the meeting, the stuff that Carrie and Shivali and the rest of the team do. There’s nothing else better out there.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, if you haven’t gotten into the Freedom Ticket now, you know Kevin’s not trying to say, oh yeah, you’re going to have the same story as that other guy, but it just shows you what’s possible. You know, this isn’t just a course where like, hey, let me just learn how to set up seller central. There are high possibilities here. So, Kevin, thanks a lot for joining us and we’ll see you hopefully soon on another episode. Let’s go right into some of our guest speakers. So, what Kevin did he talked about it earlier. He brought on a lot of experts on certain subjects that maybe he wasn’t as much of an expert on. So, just, we’re going to do some rapid fire here with some of our guests. The first one we’re going to bring up is Ashlin, and I want to share where she is at in the Freedom Ticket 4.0. She is in Module 2. I don’t know where the numbers are here, but she’s in Module 2, Business Setup and Branding, and her lesson is the second one in Module 2, called e-commerce insurance. So, first of all, you know we’re talking about, you know, profitability and things like that, and somebody might think well, what in the world does insurance have to do with profitability? But Amazon made a change last year where, if you want to sell on Amazon, there’s something you got to do. What is that, Ashlin?

Ashlin:

Yeah. So, Amazon has kind of always had it in the background where you’re supposed to have insurance, but they really haven’t been policing it until the last year or so. So there’s been some big claims that came out and Amazon is saying, hey, I’m tired of taking responsibility for you guys putting crappy products on our platform, and now they’re pushing back. So now they’re saying if you sell $10,000 or more in a month, then you’re going to have to provide them this certificate of insurance. And really all this certificate of insurance is a fancy way of proving that you have insurance. They’re wanting everyone to have it, but they’re only policing it at that $10,000 mark. And what they’re wanting you to have is general liability and product liability. So that’s going to be what you do or say as a business, or what your products do to harm someone else. So general liability is going to say like, hey, I sell this lipstick and I said that this lipstick is going to make my lips sexy and plump and it doesn’t, and I sue you for false advertisement. That’s general liability. Product liability is going to be I put this on my lips and I started to break false advertisement. That’s general liability. Product liability is going to be I put this on my lips and I started to break up, break out and I have big old duck lips and I sue you for product liability. So that’s what Amazon wants you to have now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Now one question that some people have do I need to be an LLC? Or hey, I registered for Amazon under my personal name. Am I, or, as an individual, am I still able to get this insurance that Amazon needs?

Ashlin:

Yeah, great question. You can be a sole proprietor, meaning that you open this account under your own personal name, or you can be an LLC. I, of course, I highly recommend it at any time. But if you’re a sole proprietor, using your EIN and your social security number, and you get sued, they can come after all of your personal assets. They can come after your house, your car, your 401ks, everything. So, I highly recommend always setting up an LLC and bridging that gap between your personal assets and your business assets. But if you are selling a dollar under your personal EIN, your personal social security number, then you need to get this policy, no matter what Amazon says, because your personal assets now are at risk.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Excellent. And one last question that is common and obviously there’s no one size fits all. The answer is going to be different if you’re some 9-figure big, humongous brand as opposed to a brand-new seller. But let’s just say I’m under a million dollars a year of sales or maybe I’m a newer seller, you know, maybe I’ve only got a couple of products and I am. I did hit that $10,000 a month threshold, what is, like the most basic kind of policy going to cost me.

Ashlin:

Yeah, it depends. If you’re a private label seller, you’re just reselling. We have newbies coming in that are just reselling, that are about $600 a year, all the way up to people who are selling PPE in the $30,000 a year mark, but brand-new sellers who aren’t selling super high-risk items. You know you’re looking at the $600 to $800 range, just to start out with.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, perfect, perfect, all right.  

Ashlin:

Sometimes you can pay it monthly. So, there’s no reason not to get it.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I mean again it’s if this is not one of those, oh yeah, like it’s a nice to have. No, this is a need to have, guys, if you hit that $10,000 mark, you know you could get shut down by Amazon if you don’t provide proof.

Ashlin:

And we’ve seen people get suspended already, so I mean, they’re not messing around now.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, all right. So, Ashlin, go ahead and hang out if you will. But for anybody who has to drop and you want to reach out to Ashlin outside of this call, go to hub.helium10.com it’s our Seller Solutions Hub and just start typing in Ashlin Hadden and you’ll see her page in our hub and you can contact her right here. But, of course, make sure to check out her module in Freedom Ticket. Let’s bring on another expert, Rich Goldstein. Are you in the house today? There’s Rich, all right. So, guys, Rich is, he’s been on the podcast before and if you guys want to know what module his is here in Freedom Ticket, he’s also in module two under business setup and branding and he’s the fourth module in there, or the fourth lesson, I should say intellectual property law or e-commerce, and that’s where his module is at. But, in a nutshell, you know like this might not be one of those kind of like super sexy things of the Amazon world, like AI based image generation or something like that, but just like what we were talking about with Ashlin, like patent is an important thing when it comes to Amazon sellers. Why is that?

Rich:

Yeah, patents and trademarks. Really, it’s for two major reasons. Number one is having IP, having patents, having trademarks, gives you tools against people that will try to rip you off. On Amazon when you list a product and it does, well, there will be other people that want to jump on the bandwagon. Your ability to slow them down through various means, including by having the rights to the product, having the rights to the design, having the rights to the branding, so that they can’t confuse your customers into buying their product instead of yours that’s effective at preventing such competition. So that’s reason number one is that it’s an effective tool, especially as your brand grows, to slow down the competition. But the other reason is you’re growing your brand and maybe exit seems really far away. The notion of selling your brand to another company seems really far away. But it pays to start with the end in mind, and having your IP set will vastly increase the value that you get someday when someone buys your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So, one of the themes for today, and I think the whole year for Amazon sellers always, is profitability, right, and how do we stay profitable? Well, if you’ve got a patent on your product where now, all of a sudden, you’re not having to compete with 15 exact replicas, you know, and it’s your price war to the bottom, obviously that’s going to affect your profitability. Now, something that’s a little bit off the beat and tracking. Maybe this is a little bit of the sexy side of patents, but you’ve talked before about how patents, doing patent searches, can actually be a form of product research and finding a product to sell on Amazon. How in the world is that possible?

Rich:

Yeah, absolutely it’s true, because the way that the patent system works, once a patent expires, it’s fair game for anyone to use it. So, a utility patent lasts for 20 years, and a design patent lasts for 15. But once that patent expires, anyone can make that product and, at the same time, keep in mind that a lot of people have an idea for a product, they get it patented, but they never do the research, they never learn about the process enough to actually get that product launched, and so there are a lot of great ideas that have been patented that are just in the patent archives and they’ve never actually been put on the market. There are some lousy ideas, but there are also some great ideas, and so if you know how and you search the patent record for expired patents, you can find ideas for really great potential products.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, absolutely. Now you talk about some of these things in your, in your Freedom Ticket module. What are some other topics that you cover that are important for Amazon sellers, new or experienced, that they need to know about?

Rich:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we’re talking about is international protection and into to a large extent, I followed Kevin’s lead in terms of what Kevin talked about and then I hit upon the areas that he talked about and went into further detail. So, one of those areas is international protection. Another area is how you deal with enforcement on Amazon. So, if you get accused of infringing IP or if you find other people infringing your IP, what do you do about that? Again, we talk about trademarks, and the trademarks are very important. Trademarks are for your branding and on Amazon, trademarks are a path toward brand registry, which has benefits to a seller. You need to have a registered trademark to get into the brand registry program. So, that’s some of the things we talk about. We talk about timing, like things you need to be aware of. For example, there’s a one-year rule after which you are prohibited from getting a patent if you haven’t already applied. These are things that new sellers encounter. These are even things that advanced sellers encounter when they don’t know about it, and so I just want to make sure that you all know the things that you ought to know about IP to help you on your seller journey. And just again, it pays to start with the end in mind. Again, it pays to start with the end in mind. And so, even though some of this might be advanced in the sense that you’re not going to spend all your money on patents and trademarks in the beginning and I don’t want you to but you should know the principles so that you do the right things in the beginning and then you allow it to expand as your seller journey continues and as your business expands.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, make sure to check out his module and Freedom Ticket. You can also contact him through hub.helium10.com and then you start typing in Goldstein Patent Law. All of his contact information will come up there. All right, our next guest instructor who came on is going to be Chris McCabe. Let me show you, guys, where you can see his module. He’s actually at towards the end of module eight in Freedom Ticket, under the subheading Compliance and Risk Management, and his lesson is entitled Keeping Your Seller Account in Good Standing. So, make sure to bookmark that if you haven’t watched that part yet in Freedom Ticket. So let’s go ahead and bring Chris on. And again, we’re talking. We’re talking about, hey, what strategies Amazon sellers need to have to stay profitable. Well, obviously, one of the ways that you can be not profitable is if you get your account shut down because you’re doing things that are against Amazon terms of service or you upset them. So that is one of the key aspects of staying profitable on Amazon. So what are a couple of things 2024, going back to 2023, that you see sellers doing? That is getting them into time out with Amazon getting them in trouble, Chris.

Chris:

Yeah, and it could be account level too, not just ASIN level. A lot of restricted products violations and warnings for even just one ASIN in 2024, those are turning into account-wide suspensions much more commonly than they were last year, or compliance suspensions for adding any unsubstantiated claims, any violation language, to a detail page, to back-end keywords. That’s always been a thing. But instead of slapping your wrist or striking down an individual ASIN, they’re tending to send a warning where they just mentioned one ASIN, but then if you appeal it not to their satisfaction, they come back with we gave you a chance to appeal it, we told you to dispute it if we were wrong in warning you or slapping your wrist and you did not appeal it to our satisfaction. And then they initiate a review of the whole account and sometimes suspend the entire account, even if it’s just that one ASIN. So that’s new, newish at least. The other thing is reviews. Abuse suspensions are back, and they weren’t such a big thing most of 2023, I want to say maybe towards the end of the year, but in Q1, they came back in a big way. So, we’re seeing that quite a bit. Inserts and packaging I know you and I have talked about that quite a bit, both recently and over the years. The inserts and packaging I’m still seeing some wild stuff. It’s really easy for a competitor to buy from you Amazon won’t punish a competitor for a valid abuse report about you and it’s easy for them to just take a screenshot of the insert. And the inserts are still all over the map. I don’t know who’s making these or why they’re still showing up in packaging. Maybe it’s just the pressures of the inflationary economy. People are trying to grasp at straws, but those are not the straws to grasp at, because a lot of the reviews of these suspensions are difficult to remedy and unfortunately, we’re hearing from a lot of brand owners that are re-offenders. They’ve suspended for that before, which makes it like 10 times worse than the appeals process. So, if you’re re-offending and you’ve got those inserts sitting in your packaging, you should probably do some removal orders and pull that stuff out. As soon as I finish my sentence.

Bradley Sutton:

So, these are things that hey, guys, don’t do, right. Don’t be putting inserts in your in your packages and telling people to go here’s a coupon to go buy this the next order off of Amazon. Or hey, I’ll give you a gift certificate If you leave me a five-star review. I mean, you think that’s a thing of past, the thing of the past, but there are still crazy Amazon sellers doing those things, and sure, some people get away with it. But, guys, it is not worth the risk to your account. Now, those are things we should avoid. What are some maybe proactive things to protect ourselves, as opposed to something just a negative thing that we need to avoid, right?

Chris:

I mean in your listing creation, listing review process, factor in a compliance review. And if it’s not an in-house employee, if it’s an agency you use, make sure they’ve got a compliance arm. If it’s a company, third-party service, make sure they’ve got a compliance arm. But make sure whoever is optimizing listings and again, I understand some people might have sales down or fees are up. There are a lot of financial challenges going on out there and competition’s always fierce. But whenever you’re listing or amending a listing, before you go live with those changes, make sure somebody with expert eyes looks at that listing to make sure you’re not reaching beyond policy or violating policies to try to get that listing or product to stand out. Because, like Bradley was saying a minute ago, if the entire listing comes down, then you’re not making any money. When you’re suspended, not only that, you’re threatening the entire health of the account and it also risks that somebody’s going to start poking around at other listings you have that they haven’t flagged yet. I mean they’re using automation. Some AI is factored into it, but it’s still not an exact science inside Amazon. I mean down the road, they might have a really easy way of checking all your listings in one go and figuring out if a violation they found on one ASIN is present on other second listings, third listings. They might just look at one ASIN because your competitor reported you for that one. But imagine in the future, maybe six to nine months down the road, maybe 16 months down the road, they’re going to have a way to figure out if you’re 100% TS compliant on all listings very quickly. Ultimately, they review the account for suspension because they’re thinking of suspending it if they find violations. And it’s easier and quicker for them to just take a quick look, find violations, suspend the account, versus sending you messaging on each individual ASIN, sending you a policy warning each individual time. That’s time consuming. They have to set reminders; they have to go back and look at you again. It’s better for them to get it all in one investigation. Typically, that culminates with at least a threat of an account suspension where you have to submit an appeal.

Bradley Sutton:

Just one quick thing before we go to our last speaker today is if you want to get more information directly from Chris or meet me as well. We’re going to be at an event in New York in a couple of weeks, so just make sure to, for more information, go to H10.me/velocity. You can ask Chris all the questions you want in person, and myself too, I’ll be speaking at this event. If you want to reach out directly to Chris or maybe you’re out of the country, you definitely can’t go to New York for that event. You also can find reach out to Chris from our hub. Go to hub.helium10.com type in e-commerce Chris, e-commerce Chris, no spaces and you’ll find out how to reach him. Let’s go to our last guest of the day, and it is Josh, Josh Hadley, and let me show you, guys, where you can find his module. I’ve already heard from a lot of people that they really found this informative. This is one of the newer ones we have had in Freedom Ticket. We’ve had Chris in previous Freedom Tickets, we’ve had Rich. This is a brand-new topic in Freedom Ticket 4.0. And it’s in the module nine, under continuous learning and adaptation. His lesson is entitled Finding and Hiring VAs and Managers for your Business. All right, so this is something that definitely has to do with what we’re talking about, and being able to scale your business, being able to stay profitable. Amazon sellers get to a point, guys, where it’s like I can’t do everything myself. The beauty about Amazon is you can start an Amazon business by yourself. You can probably scale up to a few products and some decent sales by yourself, but whether you have a day job or not, you’re going to reach that point where your growth is going to be stunted if you don’t get help. Now, it’s a very subjective question, but, josh, like what? How does somebody know if they’ve reached that point where, hey, I need to get help with my business?

Josh:

Well, I think it comes in much earlier than people assume. The nice part about Amazon, though, I would argue that most business owners can scale to a 7-figure business on their own, with maybe the help of an assistant or two. But here’s the critical component, is that I believe most of us entrepreneurs have much bigger ambitions, and even scaling up to seven figures like how do you know what tasks you need to give to those assistants to help you out? And here’s one of the most important things that I continue to reiterate time and time again when people ask me this question is this you, as the business owner, need to be focused on revenue generating activities period. Okay, so that means you need to look at everything else that’s going on in the business and I share this in the course, but it’s conducting a two-week time study. That’s where all of this begins, and what you need to do is identify hey, how much time are you spending going back and forth with your manufacturer or coordinating the logistics of getting your product into Amazon? While all of those things are important and you wanna save costs on your fulfillment, that is all true, but what you really need to focus on is that really going to drive revenue in the business, you should already assume that you have a logistics plan that’s getting you into Amazon. You need to be thinking of what’s my next product idea that I’m going to be launching. What product am I running Cerebro on today and evaluating these keywords? Or I need to be focused on my PPC to drive more traffic to my listing so I can generate more sales. So sales beget sales and that’s the only thing I would caution people is don’t get caught in the thick of thin things, because running an Amazon business is no small feat, but too often people get caught up doing a lot of the minutia and administrative tasks and that’s what stunts their growth.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, just on a side note, you know you have hired countless individuals to work for your Amazon business and I remember you telling me something unique is that you know a lot of people that they like to find somebody who has a lot of experience on Amazon or who knows about Amazon. But you particularly make a concerted effort to hire people who are completely new to Amazon because you want them to like not come with bad habits and things. And didn’t you say you actually use like Freedom Ticket and some other education to like train, to train your new employees?

Josh:

Yes, it is. That’s week one of onboarding is watching Freedom Tickets. So now they get to watch me this time.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s what I was saying for the first time. Now this is your first time in Freedom Ticket. They’re gonna be like wait a minute, there’s boss right there. Now speaking of your, your module. Why do you think this is an important topic and what are some unique things that maybe people haven’t thought about? When filtering candidates, for example, for hiring VA, you know, maybe somebody is like, oh yeah, let me just, you know, gather some resumes and look, see you know what looks best. But you go a lot deeper than just resume browsing as far as what people should be looking at when looking for VAs to hire for their Amazon business.

Josh:

Yeah, Bradley, this is a great question. So, this has been something that I have spent literally the last seven years trying to figure out, and let me just say this as a CEO of a business if one of your superpowers can be the fact that you know how to spot and identify a really good talent, then guess what? You are off to the races, because most successful CEOs will tell you this, I hire smart people and I let them run the business. Okay, I don’t plead to say that I’ve got all of that firing on all cylinders right now, but I know that that is why I am adamantly focused. I am always refining this process and so, Bradley, this all started from me hearing from some other course back in 2017. And somebody was like you need to go to oDesk at the time it was called the old Upwork and go hire a cheap Filipino for like two or $3 an hour. It will save you so much time and money. So, sure enough, I go on there and I had hundreds of applicants and I’m like what do I do now? I jump on Zoom interviews with these people and that’s what my thought process was, and oh my goodness, how much time I wasted. Half of them couldn’t even speak English. Half of them had bad internet connections, so I just wasted my time, and so, from all of those mistakes or obstacles, challenges, I kind of refined it into a seven-step process where it’s not just hiring a VA. Let me get that. Let’s lay that out. First and foremost, I talk about how to hire management level staff in your business, and, yes, they could be doing administrative tasks, but every single one of my team members, they come with management level experience, and so they’re able to make significant impacts in the business, not just doing exactly what I tell them to do and only that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, all right, awesome, awesome. Let’s go with our first question for our last speaker here, Josh. Tristan says how much should we be paying employees for basic accounting tasks, like maybe you bring somebody on to just handle the accounting side of your business? What kind of uh you know salary range we’re talking about here?

Josh:

Yeah, so it. It depends on where you’re hiring this person from, first and foremost. Right. But the nice part about this question is I honestly let my, the candidates, kind of self-select their own salary, so to speak, because to be honest with you, I’m not going to force feed a low salary to somebody that may be the right fit. Maybe I’m willing to pay a couple grand a month for the right person, but maybe they’re only asking for $500. So my favorite way to do this is in your hiring application. You can do this on Upwork. My favorite way to do this is in your hiring application. You can do this on Upwork, onlinejobs.ph, etc. In there, one of the questions they have to answer is what is your desired hourly rate? And then that gives me a good perspective to be like. Sometimes I’ve had people from even the Philippines that have been like $50 an hour and I’m like interesting, I’ll look at your resume, but man, you’ve got to be absolutely incredible. And I haven’t seen that direct correlation with higher salaries, higher performance. I’m a big believer of find the right person first and then figure out the salary component later on.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent, excellent. One for Ashlin. This is from Raul. Is Amazon insurance requirements specific to sellers making 10K a month overall, or is it applicable when sales for a particular product exceed 10K?

Ashlin:

No, so it’s for your entire account. So if you have two accounts, so you set up, you got approved for two accounts and you’ve got two separate EINs, you have two separate entities, then you have to have insurance for each one of those entities. So it is for your total account, not per product.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. Another question this one is going to be for Rich. Do I have to wait to trademark for the Amazon brand registry for six months, or do I submit my trademark application to Amazon for brand approval?

Rich:

First of all, you don’t wait for brand registry to apply for the trademark. You apply for the trademark first. But I think what you’re wondering is once you apply, do you need to be registered in order to get brand registry? Once you apply, you can go into your seller account and ask for brand registry and there’s a process where they’ll send a code to your attorney that you then put back in your seller account and will generally give you brand registry even before the trademark gets registered.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Thank you very much for that, Rich. This is from Ari to Chris. What about insert cards with? To write that essay, to register for a chance to win a gift card, to collect email addresses? But they’re not specifically mentioned, leaving a review, how would we raise it? And we can’t offer an extended warranty.

Chris:

Don’t do raffles, don’t do contests, don’t do give cards, don’t do giveaways. Anything that could potentially net a positive review, whether or not you ask for it, can result in a takedown, and if you’ve been caught before, you definitely don’t want to try it. Somebody wrote in the questions should we not use inserts at all? I mean, really you can, as long as you follow the policies. The problem is people are still coloring outside the lines. As long as you follow the policies, the problem is people are still coloring outside the lines. So I mean very clean, very objective, you know, not too creative on the insert, and you can still. You can still ask for reviews. You can’t give things away or create contests or create additional benefits that don’t apply to other orders, other buyers of yours. That’s the incentive, of course. Course right, if one person’s getting something somebody else can’t, that’s what you can’t do. So it’s kind of like well, it doesn’t matter how you do that, if there’s any tipping of the scales you could be in trouble.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay back to Rich, this is from Laura.  You mentioned we can look at expired trademarks for product ideas. Where can we look for that?

Rich:

Okay, so actually, what I refer to as expired patents, trademarks are for branding. You want to be very careful around using someone’s trademark, because if someone continues using a trademark, they can keep that forever. Like it would be absurd if anyone could sell products called Coca-Cola simply because the trademark expired, right so? But with regard to expired patents, you can look on Google patents, which is patents P-A-T-E-N-T-S dot Google dot com, and you’ll want to limit the date, and it’s helpful to know a few things about it, to know a few things about it. But I would say, if you limit the date to granted 25 years ago, then, or documents that were more than 25 years old, then you’ll probably be safe.

Bradley Sutton:

You’ll be, you know, very low risk, awesome. Oh, one more for Ashlin. Here is the this is from Alexa Is every time I say that now my Alexa is going off here. Is the insurance required for US citizens only I’m in Germany. Should I get the insurance? So, I’m assuming she means selling, or? Well, first of all, do foreign sellers selling in us have to get insurance? And what about foreign marketplaces, like somebody selling amazon Germany? Do they have that requirement?

Ashlin

So Amazon.com right now is the only one that’s requiring the insurance. Of course you should get it, no matter where you’re at. But if you are a foreign seller selling on the dotcom platform and you hit that $10,000 mark, that’s where you have to have the insurance. Most of the insurance carriers will not allow you to have a foreign entity, so you are having to set up a US EIN in order to get US insurance. So just know that there’s a little step that we have to kind of go through in order to get you the US insurance.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right. One last thing Somebody mentioned I didn’t give the contact information for Josh. So, Josh, how can people find you out there? Somebody mentioned I didn’t give the contact information for Josh. So, Josh, how can people find you out there?

Josh:

Yep, so you can find me at [email protected]. That’s Ecomm with two M’s, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, everybody, thank you guest for joining us. Make sure to check out their Freedom Ticket modules. Thank you everybody who joined us Chris, Josh, Kevin, Rich, Ashton thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for lending your knowledge to the Freedom Ticket and we’ll see you guys later.

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, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast. 

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast 

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. 
• 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.
• 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. 
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.