EP 37 - Steve Simonson - Steve Answers Live Questions from The Awesomer Army of Listeners

In today’s Internet revolution, the E-commerce industry is definitely the brightest star but many businesses encounter challenges along the way.

On this Awesomers Back Talk episode, Steve talks about major E-commerce issues and answers live questions from Awesomers tuned in to Facebook and Zoom broadcasts. Here are more valuable insights on today’s episode:

• How to deal with FBAforward going out of business.

• The great review purge of 2018.

• How to handle cross border selling and more.

So if you missed the live broadcast, don’t fret! Stay tuned and find out about newsworthy items that are happening as it relates to E-commerce and Amazon sellers.

Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey.

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00:1:15 (Steve introduces today’s back talk episode.)

Steve: This is Episode Number 37 of the Awesomers.com podcast series and all you have to do to find the relevant show notes and details is go to Awesomers.com/37, as always Awesomers.com/37. Now today we're doing another one of the live shows what we call back talk shows and this is where folks like you have submitted questions either in advance or you ask them live and we try to field those questions and we also discuss a little bit of news. So at the top of the show, I talk about some of the newsworthy items that are happening especially as it relates to E-commerce and Amazon sellers and how some of those issues may be affecting different entrepreneurs and Awesomers out there in the world that we live in.

Then we go on to answer some of the questions and deal with some of the ongoing issues that many entrepreneurs are facing especially again, E-commerce entrepreneurs that are focused on Amazon as a cornerstone business that Amazon Marketplace being so powerful yet just like anything this big there's little issues that need to be, you know, have the kinks worked out of it. And so as much as I really love and appreciate the opportunity to sell on Amazon and other marketplaces, but particularly Amazon because it's so large, I'm a big advocate for trying to get those little wrinkles ironed out and there are some pretty significant wrinkles and some blind spots honestly in Amazon's world that we want to help shine the light on a little bit and again, as always we'll keep the dolphin safe and get the bad fish out of the ecosystem right, save the Dolphins make sure that you know as they're sweeping the nets through and getting rid of all the criminals and all the bad guys out there trying to hack our accounts and steal our money and steal our listings and you know stuff, customers’ counterfeit stuff, Amazon has a full time job chasing these types of people and so we understand that sometimes dolphins get caught up in the nets we just want to try to prevent it to the greatest extent possible. So, I'm glad you're here today. I hope you enjoy the episode and if you want to be part of our future talk back or back talk as we like to call it episodes don't hesitate to get involved with our email list or follow us on Facebook and we'll share some of those upcoming times where we're doing future episodes just like this one.

All right. Welcome Awesomers. We're coming back for another live podcast episode. Today, we're going to do both a live broadcast on Facebook live that's right there and we're also doing a Zoom live over there and we will use the Zoom to make the actual episode, so you when you see this later or even just hear this on the podcast for Awesomers.com you will hear just the voice and that will be coming from the Zoom just in case you happen to see it at one place or the other.

So, I want to start with a little bit of news today. If you guys have questions, you can put it in the Facebook live or you can put it in the Zoom chat and I will get to those. I'm going to start with just a little bit of news just to make sure that everybody is kind of up-to-date on some of the things that are happening at least that caught my attention, there's always lots of things happening, but you never know what's going to catch your attention versus my attention, etc. So, first of all, for anybody who's used FBAforward or considered using FBAforward, it should not be a surprise at this stage that they've closed their doors. They've gone out of business and that's not good news for any of us. FBAforward was a shipping company. They provided freight forwarding type services, they provided a third party logistics center and they even provide a kind of FBA preparation type of services. And there's a lot of these types of companies and they vary in terms of size and their ability to conduct business and obviously carry on.

So, FBAforward closed down recently and now customers are having trouble getting their shipments and getting their inventory, so as one example, one customer reports, “Hey, I sent the money to FBAforward long ago and they haven't shipped my product yet.” In fact, the supplier is going, “Hey, where's the money? I'm ready to release this stuff.” And that's a big problem obviously. If you sent the money and had the product shipped and now you can't get your money back.

So, one of the big takeaways is to be sure that the resources you're using have the financial stability to get that business and this is - it's one of those things that people don't pay much attention to until they face the challenge itself and that challenge of course is the fact that the company went out of business and they don't have any you know money to conduct business.

Now, this in itself doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you just spent $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 for a shipment to be shipped and then they disappear with your money, you

are well in the business and the legal parlance if I'm not mistaken is screwed and glued. You are screwed and glued. So, you know, my heart goes out to those folks. I've been caught up in that kind of stuff before and again, part of the lesson is to make sure that you are extra careful and make sure that the resources you use have the financial resource to conduct business.

So, the other scenario that's being faced with FBAforward customers is there is inventory stuck inside their warehouse. And the good news is the folks there obviously they didn't want to go out of business, you know nobody did this on purpose. You know, there's some of the - I don't know some of the the internet trolls out there like hey, this is just another one of those get-rich-quick guys and you know they're just scamming people. I'm confident that these people were trying to do business the best way they could, that they were doing their very best and they just, they didn't have the liquidity to conduct and carry on business. That's bad news. It doesn't help anybody, but I don't think they did it in a nefarious way. And they have now decided to help customers get their stuff out of the FBAforward warehouse by referring people to a company called ShipCalm, ShipCalm, C-A-L-M, which is I find very interesting actually because the very idea that Calm is being brought to this particular situation seems appropriate. So, for those - anybody who's got stock in FBAforward and is trying to get that stock out and actionable, you can email ShipCalm by using this email address: [email protected] to start a resolution process.

I don't know how they're going to get it done. I'm not sure of the level of cooperation that's happening, but if FBAforward is out of business, you need your stock, the last thing you want to do is have them or the landlord seize that inventory and I should be very clear, the landlord has the right to seize inventory under certain bankruptcy laws. And so I want to make sure that everybody just gets in there as quick as they can and get that inventory out of there as quick as they can as well. This is a big, fat, hairy deal.

So, if you've already spent money, it's going to be hard to recover the money, but try to recover your stock and do your very best to get the issues resolved as quick as you can. Whoever is there first is likely to get the most action. Whoever is there last is likely to get the raw end of the deal. So, let's be sure we pay close attention to that.

One other note that I found interesting is at Etsy you know they have a buyer review section just like Amazon, but they've just started to incorporate in the last couple of weeks buyer photos into the review process in a more comprehensive way. So, anybody who's got products on Amazon is familiar with this idea that you know a buyer can leave a review and they can insert videos or photographs and Etsy has had that functionality since probably about 2015 for the photos, but they're now incorporating those buyer photos in the review process in a more compelling way I would say and that not only are they doing that, one of the things I think is most interesting is Etsy has offered the ability for shop owners to remove unflattering or otherwise inappropriate

images that the buyers have submitted. So, that's kind of a really interesting level of control that is a big contrast to Amazon, right. Amazon for example doesn't have the this capability for the sell side, the seller to interfere or interface at all with reviews yet Etsy is allowing buyers to go ahead and upload the photo and then a seller can say you know what, that's not a great photo, I want that thing removed. And I just think that's a very interesting thing. It does show as a potential that you know maybe Amazon could give us some controls. There's some reviews, we've had buyers leave video reviews that were totally off-topic and just selling a competitor's product. I mean it was just nakedly against the rules and even when we reported it nothing happened. Amazon is a stickler when it comes to sellers interfering with reviews or getting involved with reviews.

00:10:28 (Steve talks about the great review purge of 2018.)

And that brings us to the great review purge of 2018, which continues the third wave of review deletions and the purge is happening and it feels extra visceral right now I believe. Right now, I think there is an inordinate amount of reviews being removed from ASINs right around the - you know, every category, I would see in any particular category. We've seen it across a broad range of products. And one of the challenges that we have right now is this idea is we don't know why they're purging these reviews. In many cases, the folks who are involved have - and by the way, I've had you know many of my ASINs, I haven't looked at every single one, but many of my active ASINs have had all the reviews completely deleted and we're not sure why. We haven't done any sort of incentivized reviews in one of the business I bought about a year ago, so I really don't know everything they did before and so I want to be sure that everybody kind of understands that this Amazon review purge is happening. We don't know all the particulars of how it's happening or how they're deciding what reviews to get rid of, but we do know that it seems to be in response to continued media pressure. If we look back in history, we can talk about the fact that back in 2012 Amazon had a big review purge that was based on the book category and it was some press that Amazon got that basically said hey, here's how authors are completely manipulating the Amazon review process. Now, most FBA sellers especially if you've come along in the the ASN world you probably weren't selling on Amazon back in 2012, but for those of us who were we remember this and the book review purge was definitely something. Hey, Brandon how are you buddy? It’s good to see you. The book reviewers were doing things that were you know against Terms of Service and definitely would be considered manipulative, at least according to allegations in the press, I think this was the New York Times. And so Amazon dug in and they kind of got rid of those and that was, you know, that was what it was at that time. That was way back in 2012. In 2016, we remember in response to another press story, which I again, credit to the New York Times, Amazon discontinued incentivized reviews. What it appears to me and several of those that are speculating is the fact that Amazon is now retroactively scanning all the ASINs and bumping out reviews that may have been incentivized, so even back before it was “outlawed” or against Amazon's rules when they allowed you to use giveaways to do incentivized reviews, they are now getting rid of those too. Now, it's not universal. We've seen some of it that still exist, but we have a sense that the way that they're rolling out this algorithm to go look for these bad reviews or these reviews that don't meet their criteria, and this is a moving target by the way, we think that they are rolling it out in certain ways that are conducive to their own ends. So, for example, if you have an ASIN with a high threshold of reviews perhaps as compared to reviews with other ASINs in that particular product category, Amazon may be scrutinizing that in a more serious way even if you know that's all legitimate reviews and I'd still truly believe that Amazon is getting a lot of false positives with their algorithm. I do think that there are Amazon reviews that were posted. They were legitimate. They were by a regular customer and they are still being removed and in some ways we think it's because Amazon is comparing your ASIN level compared to the other ASINs in the category. So, if you had a review percentage of let's say 10% and everybody else has an average of 2%, you're going to get potentially not just reviews deleted, but you are going to get potentially throttled as it compares and we've seen this throttling happening to us. It's so arbitrary because good marketers can get more reviews than bad marketers without breaking any rules by the way, and we just wish that Amazon would pay closer attention to this. So, this feels like that it's the major, the third major wave of this review smackdown that's happening so far in 2018 and I don't know if you guys are seeing it. Again, you're welcome to comment or post questions and we'll try to get to those particularly if you're

in the Zoom. The chat section in the Zoom is easier for me to respond to, by the way.

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Okay. So, again, we're back. Thanks everybody who's joining live. We're on the Awesomers.com Podcast and we are going to do just some, a little bit more news and then we're going to take some live questions and I've got a couple questions in the queue already as  well. So if you have questions, get them in the Facebook live chat or the Zoom chat and I'll get to them as quick as I can.

So, just to summarize again on the the annoying review purge that Amazon is doing, I don't know what you can do. There are ways you can file cases and you can you know try to get those reinstated. I would certainly encourage sellers if you are facing a you kno review smackdown, go ahead and take the time, make a case you know and make your case well, why you're being unfairly targeted for example.

I don't know what Amazon's next move is, but I assume it's going to be more seller smackdowns certainly related to reviews. The general stance is that Amazon is not interested in reviews in general and we've seen products with thousands and thousands of reviews go back to zero. I do want to say there have been some allegations from sellers that say hey, Amazon is just doing this to enhance their own brands. They're doing this to allow their own brands to gain an advantage over the “marketplace sellers”. I guess it's literally marketplace sellers, I don't have to add the quotes. The point is these allegations are just speculation at this time my suggestion to you is if you really do have an example where your product went to zero in reviews, so Amazon took your product down to zero and their product went up for example in the rankings and we've seen this where they're positioning their own product against you know existing marketplace sellers, if you feel that they're unfairly giving their own brands an advantage, their own products even if it's a Whole Foods product, go ahead and send us, you know, state your case, send it to Awesomers.com/contact. You can go to that website and you know upload your case, include screenshots that you know help you demonstrate your point and we're going to investigate some of those claims and you know I don't think Amazon is doing this in a nefarious way. I don't think they're coordinated enough between departments to have you know this department over here that's responsible for selling their own private label stuff you know the new Amazon brands that they’re selling. There's over 100 Amazon brands for those keeping score at home. I don't think that department is coordinating with the review department. I honestly don't and maybe it's just me being an optimist or naive, but I don't think that Amazon is having a coordinated effort across departments to thwart marketplace sellers. I think they're independent operations. Now, the guys responsible to sell Amazon private label products believe it. They're in it to win it right, their metrics, their incentivized pay and so forth from Amazon, that's going to be focused on them making that product move, so any advantage they can get I'm sure they would take it, but I don't think Amazon will allow them to collude for example with the review department to say hey, let's take down a bunch of these old crappy reviews that we think are you know less than valuable. It doesn't make sense for Amazon to allow that sort of behavior. So, my point is if you really do believe this and you can make a case for it, we have an attorney looking into this stuff. I still don't think there's a good faith basis to bring this, but if you do state your case, go to Awesomers.com/contact and we’ll help kind of get a look into this and I'm not saying we're going to fund your case, but if we see this happening then we'll try to shine the light on it. So, again, if you're facing reviews being deleted, willy nilly and ad hoc, it's happening to a lot of people across a broad set of categories. I wish it wasn't happening, but it is happening, so we can only deal with it and react accordingly.

By the way, in a seemingly unrelated story, as of last Friday Netflix has discontinued their user reviews and wiped out 10 years worth of reviews, which I find fascinating and maybe this is - this big company is telling us that the user feedback and the user stuff is not as valuable as it once was. I don't know, but Amazon killing reviews is not helpful to anybody who's in the Amazon Marketplace business.

So welcome again everybody on Facebook live. Welcome if you're on the Zoom and I'm trying to keep track of both screens. Actually, I have three screens going and I'm thrilled to have any of you guys here. We are on the Awesomers.com Podcast today. This will be a back talk live episode that we’ll release in the upcoming weeks and all of you have the chance to participate by just entering a question here. And so I recommend if you do have a question that you want to get into the queue please enter that now and you can put it in the Facebook comments. I'll figure out how to read those if I can and then I'm also scanning for the Zoom questions as well.

00:21:25 (Steve talks about scammers in the E-commerce world.)

So one more piece of news and this is one of those things that I just dislike immensely and I left a or made a podcast episode earlier about watching out for scammers, well here's another scammer potential. So, the Federal Trade Commission has charged Jessie Conners Tieva - I'm not sure how to pronounce her name, who's one of the first season apprentice contestants way back in 2004 and her husband Matthew Tieva for running a large business opportunity scheme called Sellers Playbook. Now, it was back in the late July that the FTC filed charges against the couple and to me that this is just such a disgusting scenario because there's so many people out there talking about get-rich-quick schemes and all this other stuff and I don't like it because it's predatory behavior against entrepreneurs and I dislike predators who just prey on entrepreneurs and I want to warn people about this sort of thing.

So, this particular company was based in Minnesota and they made false and unsubstantiated claims, which is what the FTC calls it telling prospective customers you know how much money they could make in profit and they were selling something called the Sellers Playbook, which you know was all about becoming a Marketplace seller and so forth. Now, there's plenty of very reputable and very good training courses out there. I've seen a number of them and can recommend those, but you know there's so many more that are just pure predators and I want people to watch out for it. So, if you haven't heard about that, you can take a look and you can go search for it. The FTC has filed charges. They claim that they're legit. Obviously, they have their own side of the story, but the FTC has you know rarely filed charges when they don't have a lot of evidence. That said, they can make mistakes too. So, we'll see how that one goes.

So, that's just a little bit of news for you. This FBAforward situation, if you're caught up in it, remember email [email protected] to try to get your inventory out of that third-party warehouse. If you need third-party warehouses, don't hesitate to reach out to the team at Empowery.com. They can help you find some reputable sources that can help you out. And let's continue onto some questions now. All right. I'm going to switch gears and get some questions.

0:23:49 (Steve answers the first question from Facebook group.)

One of our first questions comes in and it's from Ina and she just asked this question a little bit earlier on the Facebook group and she says - perhaps this is related to the review question by the way. She says, “Is it best to stop follow-up emails altogether?” She points out that she currently sends out two per sale.

So, Amazon is really taking an aggressive posture on you sending review emails, but there's this dichotomy of Amazon behaviors that we can't quite reconcile. So on one hand they say hey, here's some services that will help you send out professional emails after the fact that they put into their ecosystem or at least show that these resources are available, many of which I like and would recommend and then on the other hand, they're like hey, you shouldn't be emailing your customers unless it's you know something really critical about your order. This implies that they don't want you to email asking for product reviews, feedback or other types of things like that. Whereas in other places they say it's okay to ask for feedback. So, this is one of those Amazon, I don't know, paradoxes that they tell you one thing, they do another. We don't know what the answer is. I would say that the general nature of the state of the union at Amazon is to be very careful with follow-up emails. Be very careful indeed. Two at this stage is probably on the risky side and it depends on what's in the content of those two emails in my opinion. I do want to take a break here to just say I could be wrong. This is all speculation. I don't know nothing about nothing, that's axiom zero, so feel free to ignore any of this. But my sense of it is that if you send out two emails, they better be highly highly relevant to that particular product order, so the more it could be related to the ASIN. So for example, maybe it's a how to set this up or some specific instructions that help somebody be more successful using that ASIN, that product that they purchased fine, but make it highly ASIN-related. And you can do that with some of the more sophisticated systems. The email follow-up sequence can be vector based on what the product that the customer ordered. It should also be relevant about the product’s imminent delivery or recent delivery. You want to make sure you know everything looks good. Those types of messages are going to be a little safer. If you say anything about a product review, I think you open yourself up to potential for trouble. Asking for feedback as of now is still okay and the more you do that through Amazon's email, the more I think you open yourself up to scrutiny from Amazon later. In my opinion and again this is just speculation, but Amazon anything in their system they're running algorithms of machine learning and artificial intelligence programs just to figure out what sellers are doing and then later they decide how well they like that. I know that sounds crazy, but it is my firm belief particularly as it relates to the reviews that Amazon is using a time machine and going back and saying look at these reviews from two, three, four years ago, all of them at the end they have this little thing that says they have this little thing that says you know I was provided a free product in exchange for a review. Now, it does say an unbiased review typically and it's supposed to be an unbiased review, but I think any review with those is highly susceptible to being deleted either already or in the future and I know I regularly have feedback from Amazon sellers who say oh no, I've been doing this for two years, three years, four years and I've never had a problem and that's cool. You know, I'm glad that you haven't had a problem, but that doesn't mean that other people won't have a problem. It doesn't mean that you might not have a problem in the future. And one of the most important things about Amazon in my view to remember is that you know there's so many departments that they can change rules between departments and category, so maybe something that works in cellphone category is not going to work in the beauty category for example. There are vast rule differences and even display differences and so on and so forth. So, just because something worked at one time, it doesn't mean it's going to work in the future and just because something works in one category it doesn't mean it's going to work in the future. I know that's not particularly great news, but that's the way it is.

Okay, so somebody also asked if it's yes, I'm definitely at a at an angle there. That's hard to watch. How about that? So, the final thing I want to say is particularly as it relates to the follow-up sequence is if you're doing a follow-up sequence make sure it is highly highly relevant that's the last little bit there.

0:28:56 (Steve answers another question about Amazon giveaway.)

Okay, so another person asked, Mahish asked, “Has anyone used Amazon's giveaway promotions? Are they worth it?” So, this is something that is still working. Amazon has their giveaways and although they're ratcheting down some of the usages of it, I still think Amazon giveaways are viable method to help generate awareness and get some bestseller ranking. When you do a giveaway especially if you do them in a particular way, they can be effective for you and I do in fact think they could be worth it. So, I think that's a very good question. If you guys haven't already used Amazon giveaways, I highly recommend that you take a look at it and the way that you do it and the way you set it up is very - it could be done in different ways, let me say it this way. And when you do it in different ways, it's important that you do it carefully. And when you think about doing an Amazon giveaway, your mission is to you know generate brand awareness, you know maybe give away some products, but ultimately is to drive a little bit of ranking with your product ideally. That ranking comes from the immediate sales boost that you get from that giveaway, but it doesn't last long and so you really have to think about how you're going to do some other things marketing-wise, maybe doing some Facebook marketing to drive people in to buy your product to help that product rank. As always, you know, your main mission is to get on the page one of the A9 algorithm and you do that by getting it to rank up and there are so many things that are important to getting that product onto page one and they include relevancy right, is the product relevant. They include you know bestseller ranking. They include you know probably conversion rate and general interest. There's a number of signals that again we speculate about Amazon doesn't publish what it's about, what they speculated about, what makes these things go. So that's a fair question.

I did want to give a shout out to Clint. He posted his experience of getting onto brand registry in only 109 days and this is something that we've talked about before and I want to just again give a special shout out to Clint and remind people that when you use other countries to get that trademark process faster, sometimes you can get into brand register quicker than waiting for the U.S. Patent and Trade Office to get back to you. The USPTO is I don't know, famously slow, what can I tell you and it just takes an awful long time to get things done there. Whereas you can go to other countries that are within a select group for Amazon and they will use that faster trademark registry to put you on brand registry 2.0. And of course, that is a very important point if you're going to have reasonable brand protections is to get that brand registry. I will say that there are some important things that are coming up with brand registry that will be enhancements. I can't go into all the details. There's some things that are happening that they've shared with me, but I'm not allowed to share with you, but I just will say it's going to be better and if you're not already going down the process of getting trademarks and getting brand registered, you're making a big mistake. If you really want to control your brand - now again, this doesn't apply to retail arbitrage, you can't control somebody else's brand, but if it's your brand, you should get on brand registry and you should get a trademark so that you can do everything that you can to protect that. We have a lot of examples of hijackers going in and editing listings and we're not just saying they change a photo or they change a description or bullet point. They change your brand name right. We have one example. A very good friend of mine, he hasn't agreed to be named, so I'm not going to name him here, but he's had a hijacker go in and they're selling through Vendor Central and they've literally changed the brand name on the product, so when he makes a complaint and he says hey, Amazon this product has been edited. They're like show me your brand page, so he shows them his brand page and they say no, no, that's not the right brand, see the brand name is different. So, it's like this spinning you know whack-a-mole routine and and it's a lot like Keystone Cops I have to say. Now, I want to give Amazon credit. They're trying to do the right thing. You know, most often they have processes that are meant to help the good guys, but the bad guys figure out how to manipulate those processes and then they get into the the business and they just start whacking and whacking and whacking the good seller. So, to Amazon I would say please try to get less dolphins in your net and get rid of the bad fish without killing us dolphins. We’re the good guys. And if you haven't as a seller taken the initiative to get a trademark going, consider using another country to accelerate it. By the way, if you do file in the U.S. and I most often will file in the US, there is a way to petition for an emergency or urgent request to speed up the process. And a hijacker by the way is a legitimate reason to consider that urgency and so I do know of similar brand registry stories including in the U.S. in less than the you know 6, 9, 12 months process. So, if you're selling, get a trademark. Whichever way you prefer to get it the fastest I think is fine. I do recommend - now again, I have no affiliate relationship here, krinternetlaw.com, that's krinternetlaw.com, that's Karl Kronenberger’s firm and his team Jenny and the whole outfit, they're really smart, they're great people and they understand you know the U.S. trademark process. I always use attorneys to do trademarks. One, I'm too lazy to do it myself, but really the most important reason is the method that you document in your trademark registration, the exact words that you use and how you apply for the specific class is more complex than people realize. And if you're going to register particularly in the United States, I recommend you get it right and it's not that expensive and it's you know relatively painless for you. You have to answer questions for the attorney and you have to kind of defend the process and the concept especially if you're filing with the urgency, but man oh man, they're far better at it than I am and I suspect they're far better at it than most of the average sellers out there as well.

Okay, so for the live audience who is apparently watching me sideways. My apologies. I tried to switch it and then the camera told me to rotate my camera, so my apologies. It will be right-side up on the replay for the podcast. So, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back on the Awesomers.com Podcast.

That's how fast the break is everybody. It's an amazing editing there. So, when you do get to watch this later and hear this later on the Awesomers Podcast, so first it goes live on audio. You can go to iTunes Stitcher. I don't know where people find podcasts. I just use my iPhone, but wherever your favorite podcast place is, if it's not there, let us know. Go to Awesomers.com/contact and let us know if we haven't found your favorite podcast platform. We want to be on there. We want to make it easier for you. So, that's the audio version that drops first and then later we drop video versions and we'll put those in various places that you'll find later.

So again, I want to just give a shout out to Clint for sharing his experience going through the UK and it's a nice way to accelerate it if you can't get it done. I do want to remind people that if you're going to file for trademarks, there is an urgent methodology that you can use and if you're getting beaten down by hijackers, that is a very good example of urgent.

0:37:05 (Steve answers the question, “What’s the best way to report fake reviews to Amazon?”)

Okay, so we had another - okay, so George asked recently, “What's the best way to report or alert Amazon to someone getting clearly fake reviews and my gosh, I honestly - we've tried to report some of the reviews that we see competitors have and we've never seem to be effective. There is a process with each individual review you can report it and make it, mark it as suspicious or whatever. I've never seen anything that was what I would call viable or reliable as a methodology to report these fake reviews. I do find it maddening and I wonder if you guys agree, let me know if you agree that our reviews are being deleted wholesale like it's a going-out-of-business sale on reviews and they're selling them to somebody and they appear to be selling them to guys who were launching new products. These appear to be Chinese sellers and they're launching new products and within days, two days, three days they have 700 reviews and yet my reviews have throttles on them or otherwise being completely destroyed. So,

I find that to be maddening. Let me know if you agree. Definitely it's something that's a you know extraordinary to me. So, George to answer your question, I don't know the best way to you know kind of share if somebody is getting a fake review benefit because everything we've tried to do has not worked. Bear with me just a moment. I did not want to talk this much today apparently.

So, I'm just back from a cruise everybody and this is my first day back but I'm always anxious to hang out with entrepreneurs and I love sellers and so today we'll answer some of your questions. If you have live questions, get them in now. If you do not have live questions, I'm just going to keep going into some that were already submitted.

So, a newer seller asks, “Hey, I want to change my account from individual to a professional,” and my advice is just go to Seller Central and make those changes and if you can't figure it out just file a case. You know, as a new person you should use the seller support as often as you can and get introduced to the majesty that is inconsistent answers. But those types of questions are best for seller support and anybody who's a new - or you should always use the Seller Central as your primary method of looking for information in my opinion and anything you can't find there that's when you come and you jump on to the Facebook groups and ask Advance Sellers

0:39:45 (Steve tackles cross border selling.)

So, Betty I think - I don’t know how to pronounce this, but she asked, she says she's based in Germany and she's curious if any other international members particularly in Germany are selling it to the United States or internationally in general. And I would just tell you, there's a lot of sellers who sell across border. This cross-border trade is happening more and more and Amazon is one of the big reasons why. Amazon and marketplaces like Amazon, New Egg, Rakuten, the list goes on and on, they've helped cross-border trade because they made the acquisition of the customer so much easier and there are lots of ways that you can be in - you know one particular location selling to other locations. The complications of course start coming in when you start talking about VAT compliance or the concept of sales tax compliance and these other types of things. So, there are a series of complications that go along with that, but generally those happen after you reach certain sales thresholds. My best advice on this is probably to do a test and you know do a relatively small test. If you need some registrations to do that test then it’s probably worth it to do those registrations, but if you're going to sell across borders, be sure that you understand how to get the product into the country like the import rules and restrictions particularly as it relates to VAT, GST or other types of tax collection or even just tax reporting. So, for example, to import in the United States you're generally going to need an EIN number. This is an employer identification number also called a TIN number, taxpayer identification number. It's the same number by the way. And any international seller can go on to the IRS website and get a taxpayer ID number very quickly. It literally wouldn't take more than than 10 minutes of information. Now, that simplicity is you know just the beginning of your life

with the IRS, so make sure that you understand when you bring in stuff, they're trying to make sure that they they collect customs and make you the importer of record and things like that. So, without that you generally not going to be able to import. Excuse me for swipe in there. Without your ability to import into the country then you're dead in the water right then you have to ship stuff in from outside of the country. What you can do it’s just not - it's not as good as shipping through for example an FBA Center. So, if you have product in stock in FBA, you're always going to have a better customer experience, you're going to be higher ranked than the algorithm, all those types of things are going to be better for you. And I would highly recommend if you're

going to sell on Amazon be an FBA Center. If you're going to sell in you know a foreign country whether it's you know the US is foreign to you or if you are selling into Germany for example from you know a different place, you are the foreign seller selling in, make sure that you know how to get the product imported. Without the ability to clear customs and pay appropriate taxes, do these tariffs, VATs, whatever it is then you're dead in the water. If you want to test, now one method people are testing right now is they're doing cross border trade and they're shipping directly say from China wherever it is in the world and the Empowery team just helped a couple of prospective members and members line up some really powerful ePacket resources. And so this is one method that people do is they set up a website. They put in you know, 5, 10, I don't know, 1,000 products, 10,000 products even and they put those in a Shopify site or similar E-commerce site, WooCommerce can work with the WordPress platform, and they put all these products on the site. They put in the shopping cart and then they allow the customer to just buy it and it'll ship directly from China. And the way this works is the ePacket will you know get packed and shipped from China and then mailed directly to the customer in whatever country they're in and generally I think ePacket works in 30 or 40 countries roughly with relatively predictable delivery service and it's also quite inexpensive. In many cases, it's cheaper for you to mail a package from China via ePacket than it is to come in from the United States just domestically, so

domestic first class is going to be a lot more than ePacket from China most of the time, which is crazy in many ways, but you know use it if you can I suppose. So, when you think about cross-border trade think about it from the perspective of am I going to have product in you know the country, that's obviously the best customer experience or am I going to ship it from outside the country and I'll give you an example. In Europe, when we were testing some of our products, we just went to Amazon in Germany and Italy and France and UK and so forth, Spain even and we just put up the SKU and then we shipped it from the United States just by a regular mail. It was expensive. It’s a relatively expensive item, but we got a sense of does anybody care, can we get this to rank you know, how is it going to perform and once we hit a certain sales level we stopped mailing it and then put the product into their - that particular company didn't have a European division at the time so we had to start a European company and then once you're inside of Europe, once you land it inside of Europe, you can basically ship it around relatively easy, you don't have to clear customs, but you still then have to consider what are the VAT ramifications within each country. And I could tell you that the war on you know small sellers will continue to rage on because all these countries think that you know we're kind of the the problem. Somehow we're subverting taxes or whatever and the reality is if they would just make it easy on us we’ll be fine to get involved with whatever the tax scheme is, but they they make it so complex that it's it's very very difficult. So, I do want to recommend that people you know test it, tread lightly and be sure that you know the rules. I generally will hire an accounting firm that's a specialty in a particular region or zone or it can handle a large series of zones. For example, often we’ll hire a an accountancy firm in the UK that can handle all of Europe or an accountancy firm in North America that can handle you know Canada, the US and

Mexico and in some cases we've hired you know big five firms that can handle the global scene, but man oh man they're billing rates are insane. So, generally the more you can find a specialist in the area, the better off you'll be. Again, Empowery has a bunch of really great help in this particular category at least for keeping track of the books not necessarily the VAT advice upfront, but I would highly recommend people checking that out.

Okay, so one of the other questions is that somebody said they don't know - like their reviews have been deleted, but they don't know what to do about it. And I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I’m going to dive in just a little bit more and recommend to people if you're not already cataloging your Amazon product reviews, catalog them. For goodness sake, catalog them before they're all deleted and then that gives you the chance to go back with a you know a bit of evidence and say hey, here's all my reviews, here's the the URL they came from and that allows you to you know fight back and go you know why was this review deleted, why was that review deleted and that's, you know that's a recommendation I would give anybody. Make sure you catalog those. There's a number of methods to do that and Parsimony is working on a method as well to help you guys do that as well. So, I want to let you know that that is something that is very very important.

Let's see here, I had a couple other questions. I'm just scanning, kind of answered that. We've already covered that. For those who are not using the headline search, I want to just make a special mention about this. So, it used to be that you had to go through AMS to get your access to the the top of search basically and to get that headline search, you know that banner essentially, you can now access that through Amazon sponsored products and this is a really powerful ad mechanism. It's something that I recommend people try out. It can be very very effective especially to drive clicks and therefore awareness, so if you haven't tried that already, I would definitely recommend you do the headline search stuff and I think there's a requirement that you have to have three items to do a particular type and if you need to do that then you know you can set up aces with multiple SKUs or there's other ways to kind of get around that little requirement if you only have one item, but hopefully you have more than one item so.

Okay, so I'm going to do one last scan. I'm going to do last call for questions everybody because we're running long here and I know that my Facebook is still sideways, but we're calling that a feature not a bug today and as I said earlier when you see this - when you hear it live you won't know which direction I'm standing, vertical or horizontal and even in the future when we release the video version of this it will be from the Zoom feed, which is right side up everybody. Won't that be exciting.

All right, so last call for questions while I scan for just one or two more that I had lined up here.

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0:50:03 (Steve gives advice on how to minimize FBA storage fees.)

Okay. One of the questions came in is how does somebody minimize or otherwise manage their FBA storage fees. So first of all, many of you if you've been managing your inventory, well you should see the new Amazon indicator that shows your score essentially. I forgot the exact name for it, but it's the Amazon inventory index or whatever that shows how well you're managing your inventory and the higher turns you have, the more ability you have to put product in. So for example, we got an email on one of our accounts the other day and it said, “Hey, good news for Q4 you have no limits right, which is really great because that gives us the opportunity to put in lots of products during the peak selling season. What's the downside of putting in lots of products in this peak selling season? That you pay storage on them right and so FBA storage fees are really expensive and they need to be managed very very carefully and so when you think about the the cubic foot, the amount of space that you're taking in the Amazon warehouse you're going to be paying for every cubic foot. So, you're number one bit of advice that I would give you is to take only what's going to sell over the course of that month and this requires you to do some guesswork in forecasting and so forth and you know, your worst case is you end up running out of stock and then it takes a little longer to get back in stock, but put about a month’s worth of inventory. You can do a little bit more around the holidays anticipating the surge and one of the challenges with this strategy is that yes, that makes more sense economically and the best of us will always use just-in-time inventory by the way. You know, this idea that Amazon has

suddenly come up with this new idea of where you have to land your inventory in one place or stage it as we call it, that's a staging warehouse and then put in shipments from time to time. This is not new to Amazon. This has been happening in logistics and inventory management since the dawn of time honestly. It is an age-old mechanism to make sure that you're using the most efficient inventory movement possible as FBA sellers especially if you're less experienced we get kind of a general - I don't know, we got accustomed to the simplicity of just sending it in without really having to think too much and then when it's like oh, now we have to pay for this stuff in oppressive way you know this oppression began recently maybe six months ago where they said, “Hey, good news we're going to start assessing long-term storage fees every month now.” And that's a nightmare right because it's like all right I'll suck up - in the old days you could say I'll suck up the twelve-month hit and then I'm good for some more time, maybe six months or 12 months depending on the timeframe and now it's like no, no every month, everyday that goes by you're assessing greater fees. So, I really really would encourage people to to pay as close attention and deploy, if you don't have your own warehouse deploy a third-party warehouse to be that staging warehouse ideally that warehouse can also send out individual orders for you so you can sell them to other channels as well. If that's not part of your mission, that's okay, but in any event a staging warehouse will make financial sense the more inventory turns you have and the more inventory you have involved. That cubic space at Amazon - this is one area, you know that Amazon got a lot of guff for introducing that inventory index, but I say this is one of the good things that they've done. We should only want efficiency in that kind of area and I think the more efficiency that comes, the better off we’ll all be in terms of business. I know it may sound counterintuitive to say they're charging us more or they're making us jump more hurdles, but really if you can be good at inventory and you can understand how to move your product from you know the manufacturer’s origin all the way through to the customer in the most efficient ways that's when you're going to find the profit and maximize your opportunity. There's a lot of slop in the gears so to speak when you just do it the easy way and just send it directly into FBA and then just hope and pray that it sells over time.

So, one last note, somebody asked me about bots this past week and I definitely, I love the idea of using bots and I've seen some incredible bot flows. One of the bot flows that is highly effective for you guys is to send out one-time used coupons. Now, I do want to put a little asterisk. Amazon seems less and less interested in one-time use coupons. They see that as a potential way the sellers are manipulating things. Amazon's perspective is hey, if you're going to give that coupon, give it to everybody on Amazon. You know, you shouldn't just be giving it to one person. So, they're starting to scrutinize promotions in a very particular way and I would just say to you to be careful about that, but when you use chatbots, sending out one-time use coupons is a really effective way and for those using mini chat you have to do kind of a zapier and a you know kind of a connection. You pay for each step and so forth not that they’re expensive, but if you want simplicity, I would definitely go and try to find the seller chat bot guys. They do have a mini chat integration where it'll do all your time use coupon stuff for you automatically or you can just use that as your chat bot and kill two birds with one stone, so a lot of opportunity there. That's something I really love and full disclosure I'm a silent little partner in that so you know I do have an extra grind in that particular case.

Okay, so if anybody has any questions I haven't seen them come in so you guys are mostly just listening today, which is okay with me. The other questions have come in I'm just getting to, let's see.

0:55:58 (Steve answers one final series of questions.)

One final series of questions that I've seen is everybody is always trying to get warehouses in California and I think that's fine, but just know that if you have a warehouse in California your chance of - plus particularly if it's not an Amazon warehouse, so I think that when we talk about the sales tax debate and you can go to Awesomers.com/3, I believe that's the episode I had with Paul Rafelson and we talked about sales tax and the complexity of it and I'm just going to touch on it here, but if you're selling on the Amazon Marketplace and you're using FBA, it's less likely that you have Nexus. Now, I know there's plenty of guys who tell you if you have a Nexus I listen to attorneys who know what they're talking about instead of guys who are selling sales tax software who have an axe to grind. So, if you haven't already go listen Awesomers.com/3 to listen to Paul Rafelson. If you're getting beaten down by a state, by the way, contact him directly. No affiliate, anything like that. Contact his law firm directly and maybe he can help you out.

Yes. I'm trying to turn the camera Tyler. I really do appreciate the feedback. I'm sorry I'm sideways for all you guys. I look great on this camera and I mean great, very handsome,

suave, debonair, all of those things, but I know I'm sideways on you guys’ view. I apologize. When I try to turn the camera, Facebook tells me rotate your camera, so I don't know what to tell you. My apologies on that. We will get the right one uploaded.

So, the point I bring this up is if you're an FBA warehouse, that's one level of scrutiny about Nexus. If you have your own third-party warehouse, that's another level of scrutiny for Nexus and if you have the warehouse in California as a third party logistics  center, I think you increase your potential to have Nexus in California and California is one of the most owners and oh, I have so many words I want to use here, but I want to try to keep it clean. California is aggressive. Their collection techniques are mafia-like. Their collectors are not qualified. They can't give you the legal basis on which you should pay your taxes. They just say fill out this form. Once you fill out the form, you're kind of automatically admitting yourself into the system, which you should not do in my opinion and blah, blah, blah. So, I'm not going to go down the sales tax rabbit hole except to say if you focus on California having your warehouses there you're going to bring on that scrutiny and potentially bring on that Nexus whether you want it or not even for a marketplace business and beware of unintended consequences, that's another axiom.

Last word, I know I said I was going to do this on the last one, but I've been getting a lot of questions about people you know trying to sell their business and things like that, there is a ton of opportunity to sell an Amazon business, but I would recommend getting your books in order, making sure you have processes, making sure you have systems, getting yourself prepared and there are lots of methods to do that and getting on a path to getting that done over the course of time is important that you do it. Maybe you don't want to sell now what you want to sell in two years, why not get on the path now and I would highly recommend reaching out to the team at Empowery, they have a couple resources to help you. If you're a big business, they've got an investment banking firm that can help you and if they've got a little business, they've got a kind of a Main Street brokerage firm that can help you as well and those getting on the right path to position your business to capture that equity is still one of my big important missions in life.

As you guys know, I love entrepreneurs. I think the world is better because of entrepreneurs just like you and I hope you guys are doing everything you can out there to you know make your business successful and also helping you know the people around you be successful. You know, I definitely believe in pay it forward.

So, we're going to wrap for today. I hope I’ve answered your questions. I know all the people who submitted questions beforehand. I got into those in more depth and Ted again, I appreciate your answer or asking the live question and I think it was Taylor's - well I can't scroll back, apologies. Maybe I can. There’s Cesar. Hi Cesar. Oh, Tyler, hi Tyler, you asked the question of what size companies they can help. So, there are lots of companies designed to help everything from less than container load, which is what I see a lot of FBA sellers are doing. They're not doing full containers, doing less in containers, which is great that's you know relatively inexpensive certainly compared to air and most of these companies will help do LCL, FCL, that's full container load or air and just a reminder for everybody, there's lots of different kinds of air. Just because you say you're shipping air it doesn't mean you're paying one set rate. There's the Ramina[unsure] Air Freight. There's the - you know UPS has a whole division called UPS Supply Chain and that is a totally separate division from their general air freight and when we get air freight quotes from UPS Supply Chain, they're way less than UPS Air, I mean like 50% less, 60% less and one of the reasons is that it goes on a space available basis. So, there's just so many ways of doing this and I just want to remind everybody you know especially if you’ve only been doing it you know a year, two years, three years, four years, I know the guys doing it four or five years are like hey, I've been around, you know I’ve been doing this four or five years, this is my 30th year in business and over 20 years online. I've been around the block. I got a lot of smart people around me who are far smarter than me and they've been around the block a couple times too. Experience really does have value in this business and I hope each of you are gaining experience.

Okay, so now I'm having to turn my head to read the question. Tyler asks maybe address this, but how concerned should we be about the tariffs that we're going on right now? So first question Tyler, you're not the only one worried about tariffs I'm sure. In a recent Awesomers.com podcast episode I talked about China and some of the tariff or issues in more detail, but I'm just going to share just the brief overview for those watching live or perhaps listen to the playback. So, tariffs and trade wars in general go in cycles. These cycles happen on a regular basis and if this is your first cycle then it's like panic inducing and you're like holy crap, what does this mean, what's going to happen, but it's it's not as bad as people think. First of all, tariffs if they apply to you, they apply to your competition most likely who is also likely sourcing from China. Tariffs are not limited to China by the way. There are tariffs impacting you know Europe and Canada and Mexico and so forth. This is a positioning by the United States of saying hey, we're trying to negotiate a better trade deal, so we're going to you know put these roadblocks up and then the other guys are responding in kind and saying fine, we'll just put on tariffs too. You know, nobody wins, but I can tell you that I think China is more susceptible to tariffs going away sooner and the reason is the stock market in China is already down 18% this year. There's a lot of panic in China about it even though they won't admit that. That would you know cause them to lose face. There's a lot of uncertainty even if you don't want to call it panic, there's a lot of uncertainty in China and many industrial, big industrial companies are moving stuff to Vietnam and Malaysia and Cambodia and other places just to hedge against tariffs, so big industries will move faster because the impact is worse and faster to be felt. Walmart just last week recommended to some of their beauty suppliers that sell shampoo and things like that, lotion to move out of China to eliminate some of the tariffs and this is part of the battle. If your product is easily sourced in Vietnam or Malaysia or Thailand or South Korea, then you should consider some of those alternative sources as just a backup plan. I'll give you one example. The 10% tariffs that were announced maybe about a month, six weeks ago perhaps that it said hey, we're going to do $200 billion worth of imports and they're going to have a 10% tariff. Now that got almost all of my items and we looked at it, we’re like ahh, 10% you know happens everybody. It’s not the end of the world and we also know that China will discount some of this, so they - China is going to react to some of this by offering you discounts, and by the way if you haven't gone to China in the last year to get a discount, you're missing a 10 or 12% currency shift. All right, listen up on that. If you haven't got pricing renewed in the last year from your supplier, the currency has changed to you know to the US dollar favor by over 10%, that's 10% they can give you right off the bat. So, we are getting even in advance of these tariffs going into effect suppliers giving pricing concessions not just for currency but also for the anticipated tariffs. We think the Chinese government is going to support those exports, which is only going to lead to the next round of tariff tit-for-tat battle. So, my answer to you Tyler, which has turned into a long answer, my apologies, don't be that concerned about it. Think about sourcing elsewhere just as a matter of you know if the world comes to an end kind of thing, but don't be in a panic about it. If you're interested in learning more, one of the Awesomers.com episodes was about China and you go take a listen to that. I apologize I don't remember the number. Spencer, if you remember the number and you're listening you could post that in the live comments.

So, thanks, everybody. We've gone on about an hour now. I hope this is instructive. I again apologize that I'm sideways for those listening to Facebook or watching Facebook. We're going to do these from time to time. I hope you guys engage. I hope you ask questions and I hope you find most of all value in these. And by the way, I hope you check out the Awesomers.com Podcast. Why not go take a listen. Listen to episode 1 so you can hear the vision, mission and values and heck you can leave us a review. We're not opposed to that. Believe it or not, reviews really do help and thank you Spencer. Awesomers.com/9 for the China episode recently recorded. Our reviews really do help rank on iTunes and you know so we could we could definitely use your support there and so far there hasn't been a review purge on iTunes, so you know here's hoping. Thanks again, everybody. We'll be back right after this.

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Well, I hope you got some value out of today's episode. Anytime we do a back talk either kind of some technical issues because we're doing live interactions with people and in this case, we also broadcast live on Facebook to get a little bit more interaction and a little bit more kind of engagement. So, we're going to do more of these and in fact we'll probably add some fun like adding some game shows that everybody can kind of log in and participate in. It's going to be a really fun time and I hope that you're here for another backtalk live episode and by the way you know come prepared to these episodes, bring questions up. In fact, you can bring answers and say hey, you know I had a situation. I'd like to share it Steve and we'll get you on there and you know sometimes if you're shy you can just submit the things in writing via the chat window or email or whatever the case may be, but if you say no, this is complex and I would love to you know get on camera or get on the mic, we're happy to you know get you along for this ride. You know, this is not a single man operation over here. This is a big team operating this podcast and ultimately we're here to serve the community. You know, I love entrepreneurs and I just love people who are trying to break the paradigms of normal and become awesomer and I'm glad you were here for this awesomer journey. Now don't forget, this was episode number 37 of the Awesomers.com Podcast series and to find the show notes all you have to do is go to Awesomers.com/37.

Well we've done it again everybody. We have another episode of the Awesomers podcast ready for the world. Thank you for joining us and we hope that you've enjoyed our program today. Now is a good time to take a moment to subscribe, like and share this podcast. Heck, you can even leave a review if you wanted. Awesomers around you will appreciate your help. It's only with your participation and sharing that we'll be able to achieve our goals. Our success is literally in your hands. Thank you again for joining us. We are at your service. Find out more about me, Steve Simonson, our guest, team and all the other Awesomers involved at Awesomers.com. Thank you again.