E326 - You need to understand the Amazon system and all that they offer to be successful in your sales | with Lesley Hensell

The One Big Tip Podcast with Jeff Mendelson

Leslie is the co-founder and co-owner of Riverbend Consulting. She solves problems for Amazon sellers and vendors, helping hundreds of third-party sellers get their Amazon accounts and ASINs back up and running after a suspension, deactivation, or block. Leslie leverages two decades as a small business consultant advising clients on profitability and operational performance. She’s aimed at improving both with practical and real-world solutions. She has been on Amazon for more than a decade and has seen a lot of trends on the platform. Leslie started out as a seller and then had friends and colleagues who were having problems with the platform, getting their accounts suspended and items were taken down and she started applying those old-school consulting skills to help them out.

Whether you're an established brand or you're someone brand new looking for a side hustle, the key is finding the right product, something you can sell where you don’t have competition on your listing, or beat the competition. Specialty products are the bomb on Amazon, and people that are successful have solved problems in their own lives. Lesley suggests looking for a business park with manufacturers in a town or city nearby. Many of them only sell to wholesalers or large retailers but they might not be online because they've never thought about it. Finding just a few of those small businesses in your area will give you unique products to sell online.

Recently Amazon has started adding accessibility to brand owners, allowing them to reach out to their customers and make special offers. For people who own a Shopify store, there's a new option where Amazon will fulfill the orders for your Shopify store. You ship all of the inventory to an Amazon fulfillment center with a checkout option that is for Prime on the Shopify store, called Buy With Prime, and in that case, you own the customer list and get the benefit of all the fulfillment and customer service being done by Amazon for you.

For a new product launch on Amazon, you have the option of doing paid ads and pay-per-click advertising. Ad campaigns on Amazon are their own animal and can be challenging. For organic listings, you can optimize your listing with great SEO as well as copywriting, headline writing for item descriptions, and great images. During that first launch period, you really need to have them all.

In this episode:

[01:56] Lesley has been selling for so long that she’s seen many trends on the platform.

• Started out helping friends whose accounts were suspended
• Using her consultant's success dealing with a giant like Amazon.

[05:03] Getting on Amazon for the first time, as an established brand or a side hustle.

• The big key is finding the right product.
• If you have Amazon-only offerings how to not hurt your channel?

[08:33] Living in a small town where there are several business parks and manufacturers to use.

• Putting their products online.
• Business, industrial and scientific categories can get a decent volume of sales.

[11:45] Being one of Amazon’s Millions of prime members.

• Opting for a one-time purchase or a subscription.
• Looking at choices on how often you want subscriptions delivered.

[15:07] How to get Amazon to default the radio button to subscribe and save.

• Not having to pay for the acquisition of customers.
• Testing all your products on Amazon to have repeat buyers.

[20:07] Lesley speaks about some of the software tools to use on Amazon.

• Putting keywords about certain products to pull up all competitive listings.
• Another tool to tell you how many searches of what people are looking for there are.