Certified Amazon experts Jeff and Jenna of Turnkey Product Management teaches you how to market on Amazon faster with the definitive building blocks of a high-converting online store on the world’s biggest e-commerce platform. They apply these basic principles in their own Amazon production management company, where they help clients from a range of different industries with widely diverse product categories sell over $1,000,000 in total a month. Jeff and Jen give you the lowdown on why selling on Amazon is worth the time and effort, and reveal concrete fundamental solutions on how you can extend your reach by maximizing the e-commerce platform’s many useful features to prime potential clients with spending power to buy from your very own Amazon store.
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I’m Jenna Lieber from TurnKey.
I’m Jeff Lieber from TurnKey Product Management.
We just wanted to go through a little bit of a presentation of what we do and who we are. We’re going to just start a little bit of a presentation for you now.
If you were going to sell on Amazon, hopefully you can walk away with some tips for how to get launched on Amazon yourself or how to grow your sales. Hopefully, this will be helpful for everybody.
Our presentation is going to be like the first step of Amazon and what it takes. First, I wanted to start out by explaining what TurnKey is and what we do. We are an Amazon consulting company. Another way to look at it is as your Amazon sales partner. What that looks like is we’re there from start to finish. We’ll set up your Amazon account, we’ll put together the listing, we’ll help you pick out the right images, create the sales copy, everything like that. Once you’re set up, we’ll come up with review strategies. How are we going to get reviews? What’s the best way to get reviews? We also come up with sales strategies, running promo codes, lightning deals, and things like that. We also specialize in Amazon Pay Per Click. Amazon Pay Per Click is a little different than Facebook Ads or Google Ads. Basically, what we do is we go in there frequently and we’ll optimize those ads and turn off those unprofitable keywords, boost up those profitable keywords, and then come up with new ideas like targeting competitors or running head search ads. There’s a lot that we do for Amazon Ads that we also would help you with.
We also help you put together a customer service system, what that looks like with Amazon, and things like that to help you build up what you should be doing. We also help with any business automation you might need when you have Amazon coming on with your business. Lastly, we do one-on-one coaching. A lot of our clients like to know, “How do I set up a promo code? How do I create a shipment?” We’ll help you do those things. Just in case, for some reason, we can’t be there when you need the promo code or when you do need to create your first shipment, we’ll help you out with that. That’s what we are and what we do. We have a large range of clients across a ton of different categories. With all of our clients, we’re doing over $1 million a month on Amazon alone. That’s pretty much TurnKey and what we do. Jeff’s going to take it away from here.
Right now, we’re talking about a couple of our biggest success stories and then we’ll dive into some helpful content. First, we’ll try to show you some examples of what’s possible on Amazon. These are two of our top performing clients where they were okay with us sharing their sales numbers. You can see here in the past 30 days for the top client, they’re on top, sold almost $417,000 selling over 18,000 units in the past month. For the client below that, that’s a different brand in the beverage niche, and they sold over $360,000 on Amazon alone in the past 30 days. We’re going to quickly run through why should you be selling on Amazon? Probably, a lot of you already are on Amazon so I’m just going to fly through this, but if you’re not on Amazon, we’ll cover why you should strongly consider it.
Online Store: Amazon is the largest online store in the entire world.
Reason number one, most people know Amazon is the largest online store in the entire world. ECommerce is just continually chipping away and taking a larger piece of the pie of total retail sales. It used to be all brick and mortar and retail. Amazon and other online sites are taking over and Amazon is by far the largest. They already have that huge pool of traffic of buyers looking for products like yours. If you’re not on there, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Reason number two, Amazon has the equation for success. They just grow like crazy every single year, every single quarter. It just keeps breaking through the ceiling from their Amazon Prime membership and their customer reviews. They have your credit card on file. If you’re an Amazon member, they have a great search algorithm to put the best products in front of the members. With having over 90 million Amazon Prime members, a lot of people that are Prime Members will only shop on Amazon. They pay for a Prime membership and so when they have to go buy anything, kitchen stuff, coffee stuff, or physical products, anything of that nature, they’re going to only shop on Amazon. If you’re not there, they are going to choose somebody else.
Reason number three, it’s great to put ads in front of people on social media and on different websites for your products and that can be great and a lot of our clients do that as well. The difference with Amazon is people are there on Amazon because they want to buy something right now. They have that buyer’s intent versus on social media. If you put an ad in front of them for your product, they’re not on there looking for your product. They’re just relaxing, or having fun, or sharing photos, catching up with friends. Amazon is such a great place to advertise and to list your products for sale.
Reason number four, you can literally take over the world with Amazon. Amazon is now expanding into nearly every continent and so many countries. Also, it’s very easy to switch over from just Amazon.com in the US. You can basically copy those same product pages and all the content that you already have and you just easily duplicate it to Europe or Canada or Japan. They just launched in Australia. It is coming up the pipeline. It has a scalability factor to it and it’s there for the taking. However, Amazon.com is the best place to start because the US market is so much bigger than all the others. Definitely start there if you’re just starting now.
Reason number five, in my opinion, for almost every company out there that sells physical products and has a brand, I don’t recommend that Amazon should be your only sales channel. We just strongly believe and have seen the success from our clients that it should be an additional sales channel for you. Almost all of our clients, they also sell on Shopify or on their own website or they also sell on Walmart or Walmart.com, listing on social media and Facebook, trying to get it into retail like Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and stores like that. Those are all great and that’s going to increase the sellable value of your company. It’s going to increase the probability of your success by having multiple sales channels so that you’re not reliant on just one. If you only do Facebook Ads to Shopify and that’s your whole business, if Facebook changes their ads or all of a sudden competition floods in on Facebook, you’re running a risky business with only one sales channel so it’s good to diversify. It’s very hard to manage all of them, so definitely try to take one at a time or hire experts or companies that can help assist with certain sales channels to help you grow a very sound and well-rounded business. That’s all you need. Jenna, you’re up.
I’m going to go through the first step, what our TurnKey team does when we get a client. We’ll go through what we’re looking for when we’re doing a competitor analysis or what we see when we’re looking at a client and what we’re about to take on. We’re just going to go through that so you can see what we do.
Before you invest in paid per click ads, before you take the time to get reviews from past customers, before you send traffic from Facebook Ads or Google Ads, the most crucial part is perfecting your listing because you want to set a good face. You want this to look the best way possible before you send any traffic to your listing. That’s where we always start, where our team always starts. What we examine first is how is this appearing to customers? First of all, to meet Amazon’s requirements, your main image has to be a white background image. They will take down your listing if you do not have a white background image. Another thing is you want to come off professional. You don’t want to look like someone that is selling this out of their garage or something like that. You want to make this look like this is a class product, this is the top-notch product, and that’s what this conveys when it has a white flat background. That gives you a visual of the starting point, the main image. You want to perfect that main image and put your best foot forward with it.
[Tweet “Hire experts or companies that can help assist with sales channels to help you grow a very sound and well-rounded business.”]
Here are our main image tips. One thing that is incredibly cool that not a lot of people do is include the packaging in your main image. For example, we know that we’re buying a water bottle because we need water, but you want to see the packaging. You want to see what am I actually buying? What is it going to look like when it gets to my doorstep? That’s why we always try to get our clients to have packaging included in the main image. This completely meets Amazon’s policies because it has the all-white background. That’s something to keep in mind when you’re starting out with a product and you’re thinking about images. You only want to invest in images a handful of times so you want to do it right the first time. It’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re doing images with all white background.
Another thing, you want it to be large. Nutella, for example. That’s a smaller product but you don’t want it to be small. You want to make sure that you’re checking that your images are big on a computer or on mobile. You want to make sure they’re coming off as large, even if it isn’t a large product, because they need to see the details. They want to see the logo. They want to see 200 calories. They want to all this stuff. That’s important to customers to get that visual. A trick that we do is we just crop it so that it is a little bit closer and a little bit more honed in on the important things.
Another cool thing is make it a lifestyle image if possible if this applies to your product. For example, if we were to just see this brush laying on a flat white surface, we might not even know what it is. Since they’re able to show that this is what we use it for, this is what we do, it definitely conveys the message a lot better to the customer. If this applies to you, I would definitely take advantage of it. Maybe a food product, it wouldn’t make sense, but a product like a brush, it makes total sense. You want to see how this brush would work on your dog. It makes good sense to try to do this.
Lastly, when you’re setting up that main image when you’re first starting out, we always recommend that we all double check on mobile, because what if it can look awesome on your desktop, but then on mobile it’s too small or people can’t read the text? We always do a mobile check and this goes for everything. This goes for the title, the bullet points, and things like that. Sometimes they can’t see. This is a good example, these speakers probably aren’t that big, but on mobile, they look pretty large. You know the product you’re getting, customers can see what they’re looking at. That’s definitely something we always tell people to do is check it on mobile. Make sure it’s looking top notch on mobile because close to 60% or maybe even 70% of Amazon customers are buying mobile. They’re not buying on their desktop. They’re buying on their phone or on their tablets. That frame looks different than what it looks like on desktop when you’re setting it up. It’s something to keep in mind definitely down the road. Jeff, do you want to take it away and explain this sales copy magic and why this is better than that?
When you’re writing sales copy, Amazon gives you a certain amount of real estate space to put your sales copy. This is the most important space for communicating the benefits of your product. We have five really well-done bullet points. We also have five very short and incomplete sentences. It’s not using the space that Amazon gives you. If you look at Amazon, you’ll see this a lot and this is one of the easiest things to fix that can boost your conversion rate.
Take advantage of having that short, punchy, all-cap sentence to communicate what is the benefit of your product. Don’t just say, “We sell a horse hair brush.” That doesn’t mean anything to people. Explain why that works, “An original glide-through brush.” Letting them know what that benefit is, “The best at removing knots and tangles.” They’re communicating what’s the benefit of their product is. If a customer has that pain point and that’s what they’re on there to solve because their dog has knots in their hair or whatever, then that’s going to speak to them and they’re going to resonate and be like, “This must solve my problem.” Take advantage of the space. I believe, Jenna, you have 250 characters per bullet point, is that right?
It depends on the category. That is something that is important. Certain categories, you only get 100 characters, but other categories you can get 200. As we’re setting up our listings, our team, that’s something we look at before we even create the sales copy because you want to know what you’re working with. One thing I wanted to go over, just mention the why. Why would people buy your product? Here are some little tricks to finding the why. You want to think, “Why should this customer buy your product?” Think about it. Why would they want this? Use that as your caps or punchline. Another thing to think about is how will this product help them? Why did you create this product? I’m sure a lot of you, the reason you created the product was to solve a problem that you had. Think about it like that. How is this going to solve their problem? What makes your product different? A lot of our clients, the reason that we’re drawn to them is because they might have a product that other people are making but there’s something a little different with their product. Use that as your punchline. That little difference is definitely important.
What are your customers saying? A lot of the time, what we’ll do is we’ll go through the customer reviews if they already have some and see what customers are saying. Some people, if it’s a dog brush, they’ll say, “The tangles, they’re gone now.” They’re like “All these brushes used to break when I would brush my dog’s hair.” That’s a good example of going through your reviews and seeing what your customers are saying about your product. It will be incredibly helpful. You can also learn a little bit about your product and see what people are using it for.
How did this product benefit past customers? You can even go as far as asking your Facebook followers or emailing past customers like, “Tell me a little bit about your experience. What did you like? What did you not like? What problem did this solve?” Your customers are using your product probably daily, probably more than you are. It’s something to consider when you’re thinking about your why and what you need to include with that. Jeff, go ahead and tell them a little bit about the title and how we put that together.
Online Store: Going through your reviews, you can learn a little bit about your product and see what people are using it for.
One more note on top of what Jenna said, another step that we do at TurnKey and you can do this yourself, is also to go study your competitors’ reviews and go study your competitors’ product pages because they’ve done the homework as well. You can find out what are they doing well, what are they not doing well, what are their pain points in their customers’ reviews. You can incorporate that into your product as well as into your sales copy and your images. That’s helpful for us.
Speaking to the title, that’s the one that’s going to show up in the search results. The title is absolutely critical. That’s probably the first thing that the customer is going to read when they’re scanning through. It’s a tough balancing act because there are a couple of things you want to accomplish. One, you want to mention what your product features are here and you also will have a character limit. It might be 250 characters in your category. If you try to put 250 and then Amazon says it won’t upload because it’s a 150 for your category, then that’s what you have to work with. Make sure that you maximize your character count.
The other thing is that the title is the best place to put your most important high-volume search for keywords. Not to get too technical, but like Amazon’s search algorithm, it’s like Google SEO. Amazon looks to your title, what keywords are in your title, and then they’re going to give that the most weight as far as their algorithm and try to rank you for those keywords. Put dog, cat, brush, pet, and all those different variations of keywords, you want to stack them into your title. At the same time, you want to balance it and not go too crazy where it’s not even readable or it’s not even legible. It’s always good to run it by just a friend or a couple friends and say, “How does this look? Does this read well to you?” Sometimes you can get lost in the details, trying to get too many keywords stuffed in there. It’s a balancing act. Hopefully, that’s helpful.
I wanted to go over exactly what Jeff said and give you examples of a similar product. These are the same exact product, but which one would you buy? They’re almost in price, so price shouldn’t matter, but they clearly aren’t pointing anything out here. I know that it’s “My Magic Mud Activated Charcoal Toothpaste,” that’s all I know. I don’t know why I should buy this or what the key features are. Here’s a good example of someone using every single character that they are given, putting in very good keywords. Here’s an example, “Holly White Activated Charcoal and Organic Coconut Oil Teeth Whitening Toothpaste. Made in the USA, natural whitener, vegan, fluoride free, sulfate free, zero peroxides for sensitive teeth, safe for kids, mint.” Assuming they mean mint flavor. That’s probably the only part that I’m questioning here. It covers a lot of things. The fact that it’s organic, that matters to some people. The fact that it’s made in the USA, that matters to a lot of people. Natural whitener so it’s not bad for you, that’s a good sign. The fact that it’s vegan, fluoride free, sulfate free, these are important when you’re looking for toothpaste. That’s very important to a lot of people. These are two different examples showing a basic title where you’re not putting much thought into it, not putting all that keyword research into there. You can almost guarantee that the bottom toothpaste is most likely showing up more often than this My Magic Mud Toothpaste.
You can obviously tell looking at this. This is a more expensive product by $0.49. It’s still more expensive, technically, but this has 1,400 reviews versus 200 reviews. Clearly more people are buying this. A lot of that probably started with the fact that they could find it easier. You can’t find this if you were to look up sulfate free, this would show up over this because they have it in their title. The most important part for the keywords is that it’s in the title. That’s definitely something to keep in mind, something that’s incredibly important. You also want to make sure it’s readable. I would say the bottom one is relatively readable. They can definitely work on that, but they’re getting a lot of things accomplished in that title. Jeff is going to talk about perfecting the image blocks and we’re going to go a little bit in detail with that.
On Amazon, the image blocks, what we’re talking about there is when you click on a product that you select out of the search results, you go to the product page. In upper left, you’re obviously going to see the main image, and then typically, you’ll see about nine total image slots. You might notice that some companies will only have one image because that’s all that Amazon technically requires, and there are no other images supplied. Those companies that are doing that, they’re missing out on so much because your competition is going to use that space. Use all nine image blocks and put info-graphics. If you’re selling anything with nutrition labels, put the calorie count and all that good stuff. It’s critical that you use all of the space as well.
[Tweet “The title is the best place to put your most important high-volume search for keywords.”]
Some sellers are eligible to add video to the bottom of the image block. You’ve probably seen that before where there’s a little play button. If you have that ability, usually you have to qualify for it by going through a number of steps and getting into a certain sales level. Hopefully, we’ll get to that one day. If you haven’t launched on Amazon yet, you can reach out to us and we can help because we have a contact at Amazon that can help set up the account basically tagged as a managed account and gets you extra benefits like adding a video to your product listing which most sellers don’t have that. Hopefully, that was helpful and Jenna is going to go a little bit more detail.
Jeff talked about the main image but it can’t hurt to go over it one more second. Like I said, that white background is there as you can see, but also, they have that packaging. It shows the full picture of what they’re getting. Maybe someone wants to give this as a gift. Now, they have more of an example of what they’re going to be getting. Here are a few images that are very important. These are things that not all sellers are doing. If you do it, you’re special. You are taking that extra step that other sellers are not. For example, if you’re looking at this for your dog, one of these images shows this holds two cups of food. Now you know does my dog eat two cups of food or do they eat more? Will this fit what I need? It also shows the size. Is this size doable for my kitchen or wherever I’m putting this? Does this fit where I’m going to be putting this? That’s important. These features are crucial and these are things that maybe you didn’t have room to put these in the sales copy, but you have an image that shows it.
Another cool thing that I liked from this listing was these non-skid rubber feet. My dog, for example, he’s pushing the bowl all around the kitchen. This would be incredibly helpful if it had rubber feet on the bottom, and that’s what they’re showing. They’re showing a key feature here that maybe not all dog bowls have. That’s definitely important. It’s a good place to point out key features and why people should buy your product. Actually, this is my favorite part of images. This is where companies can put their stamp on it and where they can show what they’re all about. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen dog bowls like these. I’ve actually never seen this before, but when I was preparing for this presentation, I was looking at this and I was like, “Why is this bowl the way it is?” They actually had an infographic to explain it to me. The reason that this bowl has all these little valleys and everything like that is it prevents dogs from choking because it slows down their eating because they have to track it. I thought that was incredibly cool, but it made it even better that they explained it. It’s a food safety material. It prevents food spillage and sliding. It prevents bloat and canine obesity. Not sure if your dog suffers from bloating, but this would be helpful. It’s also dishwasher safe. For a lot of people that’s important. You wonder, “Why do I need this?” They just explained it to you in an image.
The other thing I liked that they took it the next step was this image over here explaining the differences between their dog bowl and common dog bowls. They’re not saying a specific competitor because you’re not allowed to do that, just FYI, but saying other common bowls. They’re saying other common bowls; your dog can eat fast and they’re easy to get fat or get sick. With their bowl, it slows down the rapid eating, it makes them eat slower, and then that makes them healthier. These are honestly fantastic examples and a great way to show the features, show your why, things like that. Especially if you have a different product, this stuff’s important because some people might be like, “I don’t get it.” Explain it to them. Use infographic. It’s important. This is the fun part. Coming up with things like that makes it more fun.
Just a little bit of a refresher of what we went through to talk about what our team does. The first step is we perfect that main image. We get that sales copy magic going, finding why customers buy it, finding out the key benefits. We talked about taking advantage of that title, making sure they’re full of keywords, making sure that character limit is completely reached, making sure all the important information is put into the title. We then talked about perfecting that image block, hopefully taking advantage of video if you’re one of the lucky few that gets chosen, and then making sure you’re taking advantage of infographics, making sure you’re using lifestyle images, things like that. Show your product being used. That’s what we went over today. Jeff’s going to talk about what’s next.
Basically, if you’re already on Amazon, I would go through this presentation. Those are the building blocks that we just covered. It’s the blocking and tackling of success on Amazon. You’ve got to have those pieces in place because that will give you a high converting page. Hopefully, your conversion rate will be 15% or 20% of visitors will just buy. If your conversion rate is like 3% or 4%, then you don’t want to drive thousands of dollars of traffic to it and be spending a ton of time doing that. You need to fix your conversion rate first. What we went over today is just some of the quick tips to help get your conversion rate higher.
Once you get the page looking great and ready to convert customers, I wish it was that easy and then all of a sudden, your sales will just skyrocket to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, now you’ve got to go onto the next steps. Just as a high level, you’ve got to get customer reviews. Think about it from your own personal shopping perspective. If you’re going to buy a product that has 254.5-star reviews or what if your product only has three reviews and it’s three stars, no one’s going to buy your product. How do you get reviews? Just as a heads up, you may already know, but Amazon about November of 2016, they changed their customer review policy so that they no longer allow incentivized reviews. It used to be very easy to get five-star reviews, you can basically just bribe people to do it. Now, it’s hard. It’s actually a good thing because it weeds out all of the people that are gaming the system and just paying their way to the top. You’ve got to earn the reviews. There are a lot of strategies that we use that can help get those reviews. That’s one of the most important things and it’s very difficult to do. Get reviews and then once you get your reviews up, maybe you get to 10, 25 reviews, then you can start playing with getting some traffic, whether it’s coming from your email list, social media, or Facebook Ads or something of that nature, or one of our favorite strategies is using Amazon Advertising.
Amazon has its own advertising platform, just like how Facebook has their advertising platform. Google has theirs. Amazon has theirs. It’s an incredibly profitable place to advertise. There are a lot to it with setting up keywords and different sort of campaign groups and tracking it and optimizing it and all of that. Make sure that you at least attempt that and put some money into it just to see how it goes. Once you get those building blocks, the next step is traffic. That’s how you’re going to get momentum and get that snowball effect where if you’re doing all these things every single month and it’s growing and growing, then eventually, hopefully it will get to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month or depending on your niche, whatever that would be.
Online Store: Amazon Advertising is an incredibly profitable place to advertise.
If you have any more questions, anything that we talked about, if it wasn’t clear or whatever, feel free to reach out. You can go to our website TurnKeyProductManagement.com or you can email us. We listed our personal emails there for the company. Feel free to shoot us any questions that you have. We would be happy to help. That’s all we’ve got. We’re going to open it up to some questions.
It looks like we have a few questions. Jeff, what do you feel is the most important piece to selling a product on Amazon?
What we talked about today is making sure you at least have the building blocks first. Without those building blocks and a beautiful page and using all the images and the reviews and sales copy, you’re not going to be successful. Making sure you have the basics down first before doing the fancier stuff is probably the best way to get started.
How long do you think it takes for a product to grow on Amazon? What is your personal opinion on that?
Honestly, it can be crazy how fast it can happen. We started with one of our clients. That was your client, Jenna. They started at $20,000 a month. They needed help. They were overwhelmed and they were facing all these issues and so they called us and brought us in to help. Our team helped them out and we’re still helping them today. It went from $20,000 a month to over $200,000 a month within 80 or 90 days. Our best month was over $300,000 a month.
Yes, the best month was over $300,000. It can definitely take off. We just started working with a client. We put the building blocks together actually. I want to say they went from selling 1,000 a day up to 5,000 a day. This has happened over fourteen days, already five times the amount they are already selling. It does depend on the client. That’s the challenge of it. That’s what’s exciting about it. It definitely varies from category to category as well.
What is the biggest challenge with setting up a listing? The biggest challenge with setting up the listing is the competitor analysis part. That’s where you start. You go and see what are your competitors doing, why are they successful, and how can we beat them. That’s a cool challenge and you can see how we can beat them in the sense of, “Maybe we should offer an eBook or maybe we should have this promotion that they don’t have.” It’s a cool challenge where you’re thinking, “How can we beat this competitor?”
The next question, how long can it take for listing to be fully set up? It can vary. It depends on the assets you have. Do you have those images ready that Jeff and I were discussing? Do you have that plain white background? Do you have those lifestyle images? Do you have infographics? It does depend on the assets you already have. That’s important going into it. If you are to give us a call, it depends on the assets, but I’d say a month. I feel comfortable saying it’ll take a month to get the listing up, get the sales copy up, get inventory in if it’s not already in. Jeff, out of all of the steps it takes to get a listing ready, which do you think is the most important piece?
You’ve got to have all the building blocks. There’s not one that you’ve got to have, but you’ve got to have them all. You at least want a good main image. It’s worth investing a few $100 or $500 into a white background photo shoot with someone that has a professional camera because if you’re just taking it on your bed sheet or something like that with your iPhone, it’s going to be tough to sell a product to your competitors who may have invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into their photos. That’s what I would say unless you have a different opinion.
[Tweet “The biggest challenge with setting up the listing is the competitor analysis part.”]
That main image is incredibly important, the title too. If the title isn’t top notch, they’re not even going to click, in my opinion. It’s definitely the main image and then the title is next. This question also would fit you, Jeff. You mentioned that multiple sales channels are important. Why is that, and do the multiple sales channels influence your success on Amazon?
Yes. I started on Amazon over four and a half years ago. It was a pet products company. I sold that company a little while back. In going through that process of selling that company, I just know from experience in talking with business brokers and buyers who wanted to buy, it’s always good. It increases the multiple that you can get on your business. It also reduces your risk in business. If you just think about it, if 100% of your sales are on Amazon, you’re a one-trick pony. You’re a one-legged stool that might fall down anytime. However, if you at least have saved 10% of your sales on your Shopify store and 90% on Amazon, that’s a much safer business than the 100% example. Ideally, you can have whatever, and 70% Amazon and 30% Shopify. Ideally, it would probably be more 25% Amazon, 25% Shopify, 25% retail. There’s no perfect formula. It depends on your niche and where your customers are and where it’s good the sell. It’s going to reduce the risk of your business going out of business or failing. If one channel falls or struggles, you have other ones that can pick up the slack.
Is TurnKey able to help if I want to sell internationally? Definitely. This is something we’re definitely experiencing with a lot of our clients. A lot of them want to go up into Canada. We definitely think Canada is a good one. Canada is cool because you have to have an English listing and you also have to have a French listing which a lot of sellers don’t take that extra step to create the French listing. It’s something to take advantage of. Some other international avenues that are incredibly profitable would probably be UK and Germany. A lot of people say Germany is one of the best markets in the Europe section. Definitely, we would help any client that wanted to take that step. That’s something we are open to. What clients does TurnKey usually work with? Jeff, what do you think? What’s your ideal client?
We have a couple of different offerings that TurnKey. If you want the full service, you have a full dedicated team at our agency that’s working every day and week basically managing your whole sales channel. The most ideal and successful clients we’ve had are brands that are already doing well and have great products already and they’re doing at least $500,000 a year before joining with us, and hopefully that’s on Shopify or on Amazon or wherever, a brand that has a good product line. Ideally, they’re actually doing multiple channels because they’re a growing business and they have an advertising budget because they understand that in order to grow, you can’t just always rely on free organic traffic. You can’t grow it to millions of dollars without spending a penny. Not everyone understands that, and that’s okay. You can do it whichever way you want. The most successful clients we’ve seen understand that and understand in investing in the business and investing for growth.
If you’re not there and you can’t afford TurnKey, or you have the team or you have the people in-house and you want to learn it yourself how to do Amazon, that’s great. I would highly recommend that too. It’s going to be quite a learning curve. We help companies with that as well where we don’t do the full done-for-you. We can do a done-with-you where we hand you over all the trainings, the videos, the templates, the strategies, the launch list, and all the steps that you need to do in checklist so that your team can take it over and you take it in and train your team to do it. You can also have the support of Jenna or myself or our other managers as well for an hour or a couple hours a month, checking in and helping strategize and seeing how things are going in and providing support and training. That’s a few. If you’re not quite at that level yet, we still are happy to help. Maybe one day, you will be to that level. Hopefully, that’s helpful.
What product categories has TurnKey worked with in the past? We are across the spectrum. Like Jeff’s said, he started with the pet products. We work with sunglasses, stereos, grooming products, beverages, supplements, sports equipment. We’re all across the spectrum. There isn’t anything we’re not interested in. We love food products. That’s always awesome because you have repeat customers. We’re willing to try any category. We believe any category can be successful on Amazon if you play your cards right. We’re always willing to try out different categories, different clients, everything like that. Last question, in your experience, what products are the most successful?
That fits in with what type of clients does TurnKey usually work with? It’s those clients that are willing to do go the extra step. That means using some Facebook ads for Amazon or willing to do that 1% that maybe someone else does. For example, Canada, you can do an English listing or a French listing. That’s how you’re successful is if you do that step that maybe not all Amazon sellers are doing. That’s what sets products apart from others is are you a part of that 1% of sellers that is doing that extra step?
We forgot to touch on this as well, it’s important to know what your niche on Amazon is and what the sales potential in your niche is. Almost any product can be sold on Amazon, but there’s metrics and software and tools out there that can help you very quickly find out what is the top twenty sellers in your niche. What are their sales and their revenues per month on Amazon? We have that data and we could we provide that just as a freebie thing. We’d be happy to do that if you guys didn’t know how big your niche was. Why that’s helpful? Let’s say that you’re selling paper clips, for example. Let’s just say we looked at it on Amazon and we put it through our tools and then found out that the number one seller of paperclips on Amazon is selling only $15,000 per month and the number two seller is only selling $2,000 a month. That’s literally the first step that you should look at before you invest time and money into Amazon. If you’re a paperclip seller, I would not waste my time in that niche if those are the figures in the niche because you know that that ceiling. Even if you work your butt off and whatever and do the strategies to get to the number one paperclip seller, your ceiling is $15,000 per month in gross sales; that’s not profit. I would not waste your time and it wouldn’t be worth our time either, and we let companies know that if it’s not a good fit.
Online Store: It’s important to know what your niche on Amazon is and what the sales potential in your niche is.
On the other hand, if you’re in a niche like supplements or sporting goods, stuff like that, where if the number one guy is doing $700,000 a month, number two guy’s doing $600,000 a month, number three guy’s doing $400,000 a month, then that just shows very clearly and very quickly how much potential there is. That’s a niche that is worth investing into and looking at launching on Amazon because the potential is there. What’s beautiful about that is oftentimes you can be the number-twenty seller in your category but if it’s a big niche like that, you can still be making $100,000 a month on Amazon. That’s awesome. That’s great. You don’t need to be number one to make money if you’re in the right niche. If you’re not sure and don’t have the tools, feel free to send us an email. Tell us what your niche is and we’ll just run it for you and tell you what your niche and competitors are doing.
We’re all good and we do appreciate you checking out our presentation here.
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About Jenna Lieber
Jenna Lieber, Account Manager, graduated from California Baptist University and received her BS in Marketing. While in college Jenna played collegiate softball for the Lancers. Prior to joining TurnKey, Jenna interned for a very important mouse at The Happiest Place on Earth, and now she loves helping clients make the most of their listings on Amazon. Jenna’s favorite part about TurnKey is taking on the challenges that come with e-commerce. Her goal is to provide excellent customer service to her clients while helping them meet their goals. When Jenna isn’t roaming Amazon or chatting with our awesome clients, you can find her on the softball field or in the nearest Nike store.
About Jeff Lieber
I’m Jeff Lieber, founder of TurnKey Product Management. I am from San Diego and attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for college. After graduation, I moved to San Francisco to work for a healthcare auditing company, where I worked for over 4 years. Towards the end of my time at that company, I wanted to start my own business and knew Amazon would be the perfect place to start. I started with 1 dog product, grew it to over 20 products in the dog and baby space, and ended up selling those brands for six-figures to a buyer in the USA.
After several years of selling my own products on Amazon, I have learned so much about making the most of your product listings to maximize profits. Over the past two years, I was approached to help other companies to make the most of their listings as well. And that brings me to today. I want to help YOU get your product on Amazon, so you can start reaping the profits that can be found on that powerful sales channel. This work is my passion and I can’t wait to work with you!
Oh, and check out this video of when I won an Amazon marketing competition. I won 1st place out of 3,000 successful Amazon sellers, for my top tip for marketing your Amazon products.
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