Hello to everyone.
I have over two years of experience with PPC, but now I would like to get into Amazon FBA. I would sell from China to USA.
I am learning a lot these days and I am stuck at a few things, where I hope to get help from the comunity:
1. Trademark for private label - I understood that you can not have a private label anymore if you do not have a trademark for it? Is that true?
If yes, whats the alternative? I would like to start with one product, wich is custom manufactured in China.
2. How do you guys test different products?
I am using jungle scout to search for my products and it seems like a great tool that gets the job done, but the problem is that I see high risk
if I start just with one product (200 pieces for start).
What is your strategy? Do you start with few products that you do not private label (lets say around 20 pieces per product) and after you start selling, you pick a winner and then hit the private label strategy?
I am also available on Skype: deanzuna
I would appreciate it if you guys could help out.
Cheers!
I would definitely get a trademark, as this is part of the application process with Amazon if you want brand registration.
We've gone through it and now have our brand registered. From there we'll register it at Amazon.
I am not sure of you need to get our brand registered in every marketplace where Amazon is active, it's something I am figuring out. But we are planning to register the brand in the main marketplaces anyway to protect the brand off Amazon as well. So UK, Germany and France.
We do want our brand to be protected when we launch our own sites for these products.
As for junglescout, I would say it's pretty accurate, so it's a good start.
We have used it for branded products we resell at the moment and it has worked well.
Not sure what you perceive as high risk when selling one product? Not getting any sales and keeping stock there? Price competition?
The point of junglescout is to find out what sells well and find a way to improve on that offering so people start buying yours.
This improvement can be:
- lower price
- better features
- better pictures
- more compelling sales copy
- bigger advertisement budget or better ad management
Hope this helps
Thanks a lot for your info!
The problem I now get is the one that should be the easyest.... I can not open a seller Account because I am from Bosnia, wich is not supported by Amazon...
I have tried to rent a US Mailbox Adress, I got a US tel number and I have used Payoneer.
Amazon asked me for a utility bill wich I do not have, because I only rent the Adress, not the place and after that they did not accept my Payoneer CC.
Do you know a way around this mess?
This will be hard for me to overcome, because most countries can sell via Amazon.
Do you have any friends or family in the US that can help you out?
I know nothing about how to open a seller account from your country - so sorry to hear about your woes and I'll try to ask around for you to see if anyone has any ideas.
But I do have a tip on how to do some initial testing to test the market: Basically photoshop images of your product (that you're planning to private label, to include your logo and whatever other modifications), rent an FB account and launch a test campaign to see how many conversions you get, what the ROI is etc., and go from there.
Obviously the "customers" aren't going to actually receive the goods. Be sure to refund their money (if you're charging money upfront) along with an apologetic email.
Just don't associate the test with your company's name or FB account in any way if you don't want your company/store's reputation to be negatively affected. In spite of a refund and apology, some people may still report your ad.
Amy
1. Trademarks are NOT necessary to START selling on Amazon, but it's highly recommended to do it as soon as possible.
Brand Registry saves you a lot of headaches and opens up some cool options. You can register trademarks in other jurisdictions that are a little faster than the US, such as the UK and use that for Brand Registry to speed up the process.
2. It can be better to diversify your products at first to see what works, just like testing offers. BUT, a decent amount of the first round of inventory is spent "building the listing" - which means used for reviews, initial sales velocity, and other promotions. Without a lot of reviews, your advertising cost per conversion will be very high. It's good to get to 20-30 at least as fast as possible. Amazon Early Reviewer program can help you get the first five. Find a way to significantly add value with your private label instead of just copy from Alibaba. If you have no competitive advantage Amazon can eat you alive. Most people see what's working and create their own product after that research.
3. Amazon can be strict with opening accounts. Are you opening it as a company or as an individual? @symba3
Vortex is an absolute killer at marketing, but I would say that FB is probably not the traffic source I would use to test products for Amazon specifically. Example: If your product is a can opener, no one is going to click on that and buy from a Facebook ad, you're competing with too much other stuff that grabs attention and it's too boring. Amazon is great for those kinds of boring, utility products that perform poorly with
Facebook is great for things like kickstarter products - innovative but hard to search for - but Amazon is more like a search engine and so products that are very innovative, where the buyer doesn't know to look for it, don't do well on Amazon.
It's probably too late to answer the original question, but, since I have some direct experience of selling on Amazon, I'll add my 2 cents anyways for those who will read this thread later.
You only need to trademark to join a brand registry program. It gets you the following benefits:
- Limited brand protection. Private label sellers struggle a lot from hijackers that attach to your listing and sell crap products cheaper winning the buy box (buy box determines which seller gets a sale on a particular listing). As the result you lose sales and often get bad reviews. Brand registry gives you a bit more power over hijackers, but it still does not solve your problem completely.
- Unlock advance product listing capabilities. With brand registry you can add what they call Enhanced Brand Content which means you can add images and formatting to your product description. That usually bumps your listing conversion.
- Access to additional marketing opportunities. Those change consistently, but you usually get some sort of a marketing carrot. At some point brand we joined Amazon Exclusives program which provided free Lightning Deals. That was a huge boost to our sales. LDs worked really well for about a year and then we started getting crappy results. Moreover, Amazon started being very glitchy about that. Since Amazon exclusives costed us 5% in additional fees, we left the program.
As for testing products, here is the formula that we used and produced successful results for us:
1. Pick small and light weight products that you can ship by air without paying much. Usually smaller plastic / silicone products worked best
2. Get a 100 units test order and send it to Amazon
3. Optimize product listing. We do only white hat stuff, so this part is a bit harder for us. The main thing is to be able to get initial reviews. There is a lot of grey / BH ways to archive that. If you go white hat, your best bet is to sell the product at a lower price / do giveaways and then follow up asking for a review. Having an email list helps a lot.
4. Launch PPC ads to your product listing
5. If it starts selling well, you keep improving the listing and order more units
6. The key in this strategy and Amazon in general is to be able to sell for at least 10x of the purchase price. For example, if you sell your product for $15, your max purchase price should be less than $1.5. A good example is silicone wedding rings. We were buying them for 10 cents / pc and combining into a 5-pack set (COGS = $0.5). Shipping was also dirt cheap (something like 0.2 per set). We were selling those sets for $15. So, in this example launching an initial test of 100 units costed us (0.5 + 0.2) x 100 = $70. These rings were a huge success for us back in 2015.