Alibaba To Amazon FBA - 2026 Product Sourcing & Shipping Masterclass (Pt. 2)

1. Welcome! Start Here: Hello and welcome to the product sourcing module of the course. My name is Allie Hobart. I'm Sumner's wife, and I manage all of the logistics side of our Amazon business. So I'll be joining Sumner in sharing with you all of our knowledge and tips regarding the entire process of sourcing high quality and inexpensive products through Ali Baba, as well as tips and resources that can save you lots of time and money. As you know, if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below. And without further ado, let's go ahead and get to the next video. 2. Product Sourcing For Amazon FBA Simplified: Welcome to the supplier and shipping module of the course. For me, when I was starting off, this whole idea of how do I produce products in China and then get them into Amazon, I feel like there are so many things that could go wrong. I feel like I could get scammed, right? It seemed like a very daunting process, and I've learned a lot from it. And really, for me, it was a lot easier and more simple than I thought it was and a lot less scary. So hopefully you realize the same and I'll just cover the general overview. But some specifics we're going to be covering is finding a supplier, okay? So we're going to find someone or a company that will produce our product inexpensively with high quality. And this is likely we're going to use Ali Baba is probably going to be your option. Ali Baba is the largest business to business platform. This is basically where American businesses that want to produce products like us, reach out to Chinese suppliers and I have all videos going into more depth about this, but Ali Baba is likely your best bet. But I also show you how to find suppliers in the United States as well, and we'll find basically find and kind of weed through a supplier to find the high quality inexpensive suppliers to produce our products. Then we enter in what I call the negotiation phase. So it's a lot less intimidating than you think, in my opinion, right? Basically, we just make sure that we both have the same understanding that this is the product that we'd like to produce with all the specifications, exactly how we'd like meeting our exact profitability and all of that, basically communicating and making sure that this is a good decision for both parties and making sure that everything is good to go. So once the negotiation process ends and we've chosen a supplier and we're excited to get going, we go ahead and start, we sign an agreement, pay a small amount upfront, and then we begin production. So the supplier will produce your units in a certain given period of time. We will inspect those units to make sure that everything is perfect, perfect up to our specifications before it's ready to ship, and then once we see that and everything's good to go, pay the remaining balance, and the items are then shipped and I have, again, all videos about this, items are shipped either by plane or by sea to the United States. They pass through customs and are taken to a specific Amazon FBA warehouse, which I will explain how you know which warehouse to send them to it'll be sent to the Amazon FBA warehouse. Everything will be properly packaged and printed and the products will be scanned and then available for sale on Amazon. Okay. So that's kind of how everything did very general overview, and we get into real detail, making everything simplified, concise. Make sure you don't where I want to make sure that you don't miss any step of the process, that everything is simple, everything makes sense and works together because like I said, I know it can be really intimidating for for us, the first time that we're in Amazon or selling on Amazon to produce a large amount of units in China, likely, and then send it into the United States or from wherever. It may seem very intimidating, afraid of scams, afraid something will go wrong. But I found that that is not the case. It's much more simple when I follow this step by step formula. So I hope that you do that. I hope you're excited because this is honestly really exciting to create something new, to create something that solves a need. So hopefully you're excited for this. I know I am. So let's go ahead and get into the nitty gritty. 3. China vs. Other Countries - Which Is Better For Sourcing Products?: Okay, so before we dive into Ali Baba, I wanted to talk to you guys about the pros and cons of sourcing from China versus other countries. So starting with the pros of sourcing from China, obviously, they are known for this. Most likely that's where you know the most for is that they're inexpensive. Now, it does not mean that all of inexpensive does not necessarily mean it's cheap. What I mean by inexpensive is that you can get the same exact product made in China or the same exact product, for example, made in the US for less money. So we have looked into other countries for a lot of our products right now, but China still beats even with the added cost of shipping. It's more it's still less expensive than other countries, especially the US and other countries in. So I also wanted to quickly touch about the quality because obviously, China, unfortunately has gotten the reputation of cheap, not quality kind of products. And the truth is, yes, they can create cheaper products, products that probably will not last that long, but they can also create good quality products. I mean, Nike and iPhones and so many other big companies, quality with quality products are made in China. So definitely one of the pros is that you can get pretty much whatever quality you want. If you want a really cheap product, you can get in China. If you want a higher quality product, you can get in China, and most likely even the higher quality products will be less expensive than other countries. Now, there are certain countries that are known for specific types of products. For example, India and Pakistan with some of their fabrics or rubber materials, certain places of the world might be a better source in place for specific product. But in general, China will most likely bet in price. And honestly, in variety too or quality, it actually can be because they invest so heavily into manufacturing and it's such a big part of their economy, so they have many, many options for that. Second pro is that they're extremely flexible. And when I talk about flexible, talking about several things. One, they're very flexible in terms of customization. As I said, we were looking into a US company for another product, another venture that wasn't necessarily Amazon. And it was honestly very difficult. It seems as from our experience, the US manufacturers, they do that and that alone. And for you to deviate from it, they need a very detailed drawings. You probably need to hire a product designer, and they probably do not want to deviate too much from what they're used to creating, but not with China. There has been so many of our products that not only they were willing to customize, even on the sample stages, we hadn't even placed the order yet, and they customize it for us. So we can improve a general product and make it more premium, make it to where it solves more problems. So not only have they been flexible into customizing things for us, so many things and things that we request, sometimes they even suggest customizations or improvements. And if you've heard about the Canton Fair, this is, I think it's a bi annually event that happens in China where all of these manufactured companies, they gather and they show their products, and they show some of their own invention sometimes I mean, they are so used to seeing what works and what's being ordered so much from their company that sometimes they develop new products, and if you have a good relationship with your supplier, sometimes they will give you those ideas as well and allow you to sell those as well. So they're flexible with customization. They're also flexible with order quantities. That is another thing that sometimes we're dealing with manufacturers in the US or in Europe, or even other countries in Asia. The minimum order quantity is a lot higher. So if you're just a beginner like we were, you probably just want to test the grounds and go slower when you started on Amazon, or even if you're in a less competitive market, which we usually that's what we go for, and that's what we advise all of our everyone we talk about Amazon to start with would be a less competitive niche, then you probably won't need to buy as many units. So they are very flexible with order quantity as well, which is a huge pro. And lastly, communication. So obviously, this looks like it should be on the C list. But when you compare China with other countries, for example, India or Pakistan, in our opinion, because I've communicated with these other suppliers, they're much easier to communicate with. They're very used to the apps or sending you emails and communicating this way. Obviously, it's not going to be the same as communicating in your own language or from someone in your own country. Obviously, there's the time zone difference, most likely, and all that that you have to take into consideration. But honestly, it hasn't been that bad, especially compared to other places that I've heard, for example, I've heard that Indian suppliers, in general, tend to call you a lot, call you all the time. Sometimes it's not productive. I mean, most of the time it's not productive. So, in general, I would actually put communication as a pro because they're used to we're going to show you guys later in the course like tips and tricks on how to communicate with them with photos, videos, and all that. And they're very open to that kind of communication. So I definitely put that on the pro. Now, talking about cons, the first one is that they are not liable for anything. For example, if you get sued in the US, if you're selling in the US, a product and there's something wrong with the product and the customer sues you. They're not liable. But if you had, for example, an American company, most likely they would be liable. So there are some certifications that you want to look for when looking for Chinese suppliers. But there has been instances instances where that certification is not real. So it's definitely a step that you need to vet, and we're going to talk about that when we're going through the Alibaba platform. But American suppliers, and I would assume European suppliers, even though I haven't dealt with them, we haven't dealt with them yet, I would assume they do have higher standards. They need a certain certification. There's higher pressure, I would say, of the government and all of these regulation agencies for them to comply by all of those regulations, but not necessarily China. And then the second con would be lead time. Now, this is possibly it will be longer, but it depends honestly. This could be true or not. But most of the time, it would be a longer lead time because you not only if you don't know what lead time is just to explain time is all the time that it takes from when you place the order and they start producing your order until the order is delivered to Amazon. So that takes into account not only production time, but also shipping time. So if you do want to keep your costs lower, you might want to ship, for example, via sea, and that can take a good while. It could take even a month or longer than a month, depending on the terms that you go for. So you do have to take this into consideration. We started as wanting the cheapest possible cost, and we realized later on in our Amazon journey that lead time is extremely important. So most likely, you would have a longer lead time than if you source from a country that is near you. And lastly, there is the language barrier. Obviously, sometimes it is a little bit frustrating, trying to communicate something and them not understanding or you not understanding them or the misunderstanding. But it does get easier. In the beginning, you might be a little bit frustrated and not really knowing how to overcome this. And there's also the time change. Sometimes, you have to be communicating with them. At the end of your day, you're tired, and it's just beginning their day, but you have to talk to them so they can get started on things. But it will get easier. You will get used to it and it's going to get going to get better. So, for us, personally, all of our products right now are being sourced in China. We did source a few products from Pakistan for a while, but we stopped with a supplier. It wasn't as it wasn't as easy as it is with Chinese suppliers, and they didn't want to do certain things, like the labeling, certain things that Chinese suppliers were more than willing to do for us. So for us, it's less headache, and it was less expensive as well to deal with Chinese suppliers. So with that being said, if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 4. Should You Hire A Sourcing Agent?: I also wanted to quickly touch on the subject, which is sourcing agents. And if you don't know what sourcing agent is, it's pretty much the middleman between you and the supplier. So if you are really scared about the whole process of sourcing from Alibaba, you know, this can be a good option for you. But I'm hoping that by the end of this course, you will no longer be you'll be very confident about whole process. I know when we started, we were very skeptical and afraid, honestly, of being scammed or doing something wrong. But I can promise you that it does get easier and more natural. It will come more naturally to you, all of the decision making or communication. But I did want to talk about sourcing agents and the pros and cons of hiring. So the first pro is that they will save you time. And a lot of times, depending on what you're responsible for within your company, you don't have enough time to talk to all of those suppliers. I know it can get pretty time consuming, especially as you extend your line of products, and if you have different suppliers for you to be communicating with all of them, it can be time consuming. And if you don't have that time, then this might actually be your only option would be to hire sourcing agent. Um, but in general, like I said, it does get easier, and we will tell you guys some tips and tricks, not only for communication, but your relationship with the supplier. So it doesn't have to be this dreaded thing that takes you that long, honestly. And then the other pro is that the sourcing agents will bring their knowledge, experience, and connections. So obviously, we're just you're just not learning about this. We also knew nothing about sourcing from Alibaba or even if it's not through Alibaba or sourcing at all, we didn't know anything about. Um, and the sourcing agent does have the experience. They know the niches. They know certain things that it takes a while for you to understand. Like maybe like in China, for example, they have the regions for certain types of products. So, for example, the majority of electronics in China are produced in the same zone or region or the majority fabrics or textiles are produced in another region. So this knowledge, for example, sometimes can make a difference can make a difference in a more competitive price or faster lead time. And most likely they're less likely to get scammed as well because they already know possibly all of the tricks, and they have their connections. A lot of times you want another package made in the same area that your product is is being made, so you can easily bundle or put those together, and they would have those connections. Even though I will say, most of our suppliers have been extremely helpful into with these connections, like finding freight forwarders for us or finding a good company that will do the packaging or the insert cards. So so far for us, we have had great experiences, but sourcing agents can bring that knowledge and those connections for you. And you might be able to get lower costs as well. But this might you know, we're going to see on the cons that it might not make a big difference for you, those better prices. But the last P that I want to talk about is that they will be able to facilitate certain logistic things, one of them being, for example, they can bundle your samples for shipment. So, especially in the early stages when you're testing suppliers, you want to order a sample from each, it could get a little bit could get expensive to separately ship each one of those because it can range $30-50 just to ship one small package. Um, but if you have a sourcing agent, you can send those to your asci agent, for example, in China. You can bundle all of that and then ship it to you for a lot lower cost. Um, so, yeah, so those are the pros. I'm sure there are other ones, too, but those in my opinion, are the biggest pros. And the biggest cons, though, are one dependency. So when you have a sourcing agent, you're completely dependent of them or their communication. Sometimes you completely lose the line of communication with your factory, with your supplier, and you're completely dependent on them if they have a personal issue, for example, you're a sourcing agent and they need they're taking vacation or they're sick, and you need to get a word with your supplier. It might be a lot more difficult. Some of them do not provide the contact for you. For you to have that relationship with the supplier. Not to mention, as we're going to talk about on the supplier tips, is that relationship is extremely important to suppliers. So they will be sending you merry Christmas wishes or happy holidays for certain holidays for you. And they do want that good relationship with us. So when you lose that, as I'm going to as I stated on the next con, which is type of priority. I honestly believe that when they lose that line of communication, you're not such a high priority for them because suppliers value talking to the decision maker and people who you can negotiate with. They do like negotiating. They like that communication. And when you have the sourcing agent, you break that. You you no longer have that. And that could be bad for you in terms of priority. If you need a rush and order or if you need a certain customization or something like that, they might not care so much to do. Et's put it that way. And then, lastly, it can become more expensive because of their markups. Obviously, sourcing agents need to earn their living by what they do. So you're either going to pay them by a commission of the order or your total order value, or it's an upfront fee or sometimes they have a different payment structure. But especially when you're paying them from a commission, what incentive do they have into lowering the costs for you? I mean, there is the incentive of maybe if they lower the cost, you place a higher order, but sometimes not. Sometimes if they get, for example, I don't know, 3% of the total order, um of the total order cost, then they have very little incentive to get the number lowers for you because they're going to earn less. So you do have their markups. It can be more expensive. And personally, we do not use sourcing agents, and that's what I would recommend. So for the remaining of the course, we're going to talk to you about your direct line of communication with supplier and how you should do that yourself. But I did want to touch on the topic because you do have the option if you want, if you don't have time and all that. So I hope you guys found this video helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below. Let's go ahead and get to the next video. 5. How To Find Quality, Trusted Suppliers (and Avoid The Frauds) FAST: Alright, alibaba.com. What is Alibaba? Ali Baba is like Amazon. But instead of searching for individual products for you to buy, you are searching for suppliers that will manufacture products in bulk for you. So, Alibaba has actually made this whole sourcing process so much easier, has reduced and gotten rid of so many barriers that I honestly cannot imagine sourcing and doing Amazon FBA without Alibaba. And I would probably be very skeptical and very afraid of the communication. But Alibaba has certain criteria that you can select that will give you the best suppliers that you can find for your products. And that's what I want to encourage you to do. A lot of people use Alibaba to find the best products or the cheapest products, but I want to encourage you to use Alibaba to find the best suppliers for your products, because as we talked about it before, suppliers are extremely flexible, especially in China, which is the majority of the suppliers that you find through Alibaba. It is a Chinese company, even though there is Alibaba, India and I think there's Ali Baba, Vietnam, and other countries. And you can find other suppliers from other countries within just alibaba.com as well. But as we talked about, suppliers can be extremely flexible and customize products for you. So I honestly wouldn't even say try to find the most similar product to where you're trying to sell, which used to be our strategy. I would say try to find the best suppliers that you possibly can within that niche. So I'm going to go ahead and show you guys all of the tips and tricks of using this platform. So First of all, you would go ahead and join Alba it is free. You can create a free account, you don't have to pay. You just go ahead and join and sign up with your email and all that. I will say that you might end up getting a few emails, you know, like marketing emails or all that. So be prepared for that. I don't know if you want to use a different email and just use your professional email for the communication with the supplier alone. Though it is useful sometimes getting some of those emails from Ali Baba. Like, sometimes Alibaba is hosting a promotion, like usually they do during September, and then you can ask your supplier about that promotion, all that. But do whatever you want, create an account, and then what you're going to do is you're going to come to the search box and look for a product. So, for example, we're going to use silicone, soap molds. Alright, next, you're going to go here on this drop down menu, and instead of products and before I do that, just for you to see, there are 8,310 results for soap modes. And the top ones will most likely be ads, people are suppliers that are paying for you to see their products. So it's not even necessarily the best product out there. Oh, this is the best rank. A lot of times, just like Amazon, they have their PPC and advertising strategy. So instead of products, we're going to look for suppliers. And from 8,310 results. Oh, I have to click Search. Okay, now we have 1,235 suppliers. So 1,235 options. Next, this is extremely important. Make sure you check this box, which is trade assurance. And what that means is that your payment if you pay through Ali Baba through the trade assurance program, your payment is safe, is protected. And a lot of times a lot of people from the Amazon community says, Do not pay via Ali Baba or only pay via PayPal. We currently only pay via trade assurance, and we've never had a product, problem. We we actually have had to use the trade assurance system to get some money back, and it was completely fine. And I've heard of many suppliers, sorry, many sellers that have taken advantage of this protection, and it has worked in their favor as well. So definitely check trade assurance and also check verified supplier. And the verified supplier means that whatever they say that they do, if they say they have 50 workers or if they say they have this certification or that they a third party company has gone to the factory, and they have verified that that information is true. So do not go into a partnership with a supplier if they do not have this verification or, or, I guess, do at your own risk, but we only source from suppliers that have the trade assurance and verified. All right. So now we're already down to 285 suppliers. So a lot less options, which is what we want. We want to find the best of the best. And so for that, let's go to this side menu here. And if you already know the market that you want to sell, and if you want a supplier that is used to that market, for example, North America or Europe, because they might be more familiar to the regulations and certifications and all that that's needed, you can go ahead and check these. So I'm going to go ahead and check North America and Europe, Western Europe. So, and you go ahead and click Confirm. And it's going to now 249 and we're going to keep going. Total revenue. This can be very deceiving, so I usually don't select any of the I usually don't go for any of these because I think this is only, like, the revenue that they make through Ali Baba, not like outside of Alibaba. So I usually don't select any of this. And then certifications, definitely. I select the ISO 9,001 I don't know if that's how you say it, but that's how I call it, which is the quality standards. Then I select the BSCI, which is the Business social compliance initiative, I believe, which is sort of like some standards and guidance that if they have the certification, you know that the factory abides by those guidance, and I always make sure I select that, as well as the ISO 14,001. I don't know if that's how you say it, which is the environmental standard. So I usually set those three and go ahead and click Confirm. If there's any other ones that you want to research or if you need it, you can go ahead and select those. I usually don't do anything here on research and development, and a number of employees, sometimes that can be good or not. If you want to process big orders, you most likely want to get a company that has more workers, more factory workers. Otherwise, you won't be able to get a faster lead time. Or sometimes if you need a smaller, a smaller MOQ, which is a minimum order quantity, and then you might want to go for a supplier that has less employees, they're usually more flexible and they can customize more of these things for you. But I usually don't select to right away anything here. So, right, so I've already selected and confirmed. Now we're left with 98 suppliers. We started with over 8,000 results of products, and now we have the best of the best. And now when I go through these, I usually want to get suppliers that have more experience. So this one, for example, 11 years of experience, at least 11 years within Ali Baba. Actually, this can also help you avoid any scams. One scam that has happened before is the fact that sometimes suppliers brand you to Ali Baba, you would go ahead and place your balance payment on all your balance payment, your deposit payment with them, and they would just shut their Ali Baba account. And when you see they have and usually that happens with suppliers that have been on Alibaba for a year. And I'm not saying that that is the case for everyone who's been on Alibaba for long not such a long time. I'm just saying that it is one of the scams that you might want to avoid just to be safe. You also want people with more experience, people who know the time of year or usually when you should be placing orders, sometimes they will help you make those decisions. And it's been so helpful for us, our suppliers, honestly, I'm very thankful because we have avoided a lot of headache, too, because of them, because of their advice. So before I open them, I will also say that you might want to look for remember, I talk to you guys about that usually a certain type of product, depending on the material, they're produced in just a region of China. You probably know that region by looking at the most common location within these options. So the first word of their company, it's usually the place where their company is located. So Shing Jing, and I'm probably mispronouncing this. But we see this one. Okay, we see Dongan, Dongan here, Dungan. Okay, so here we can see that that is most likely the area within China where silicone products are most likely produced, which usually means that you get a more competitive price or you know that you have more easily accessible sourcing materials. So because that region is very used to that type of product. So that's what I do. I usually go for those options. So, for example, this one, ten years, Dong one. So if you've already created your account, I'm using a brand new page here, so I'm not logged in. But if you've already created your account, I will go ahead and just favor this, and that's going to create you a short list of all of the suppliers that you have favored. But because I'm not logged in right now, I'm just going to open within a new tab this 12. And honestly, I would advise that you contact around ten to maybe 15 suppliers. That does not mean that you're going to be communicating, trying to decide 10-15 options. That means a lot of them will not reply, honestly. So but that means that you're testing all of the options to see what is your favorite supplier. In many terms, you're going to analyze many different aspects, not only the cost, but how well they reply to you and how quick they reply to you and all that. So all of that is very important. So I would encourage you to contact at least ten suppliers, but around ten to 15 suppliers is what we usually do. So just go through these and make sure you open some T one, 15 years and Dung Guan. And the location does not necessarily have to be have to be a deciding factor. You can open other ones. For example, this one that I saw in the beginning from Shing Jing, let's see, the top this one. Okay, so let's pretend I open ten to 15. You can go through these other tabs and take a look at their profile page. And sometimes they do have reviews just like Amazon. But what I also like to look in every single one of those is their other products because another thing that you need to be aware is that there are manufacturing companies, and there are trade companies. So trade companies usually have a more expensive cost or they require larger orders. Also, usually they have an extensive line of products, so they might produce silicone and I don't know, like silverware or electronics and all these different types of products. So they're more likely to be less of an expert into your specific products. So we usually definitely avoid trade companies. And the way one little trick that you can do is you can go to their products here. And see all of their selections. So they do have silicone. They have kitchenware, just like I said, baby products and outdoor products. So you see here that they are most likely a trade company, and even if they're not, and you can tell you can see that maybe this supplier will not be as attentive to detail. They might not be as knowledgeable into what is required for that specific product, the silicone soap molds. So personally, I would not contact this supplier, and I would just close. And then you can go, for example, to the next one, look at products. Silicone, silicone stationary. Here you can see that it's most likely all silicone products, or at least the majority it is. And then another tip is that you can scroll down and look at specific aspects of this company, maybe some certifications that they have, and it's actually good that you look into those and even open these images and to later on test it and make sure it's legit. But also, you might want to look into some of their information and customize a message for them. A lot of people do that and suppliers, especially Chinese suppliers, highly value that kind of that kind of attention to the detail and interest that you express in their company and their country and all that. Personally, we usually use a RFQ or request for quote template and just adjust for that specific um specific supplier with the product, the product link, their names, and all that. That's usually what we do, and it's worked for us so far. So what you would do next is go here into search in the store and type in silicone, soap mold, the actual product that you're looking for. And then from here, you're within the store. You know the supplier is good. You can trust them. They're verified and all that. Now, I would look for the most similar product to what you're looking for. So if you want heart shaped or just the two, mold with just two little spaces or if you want with six, whatever is most similar to the product that you want to sell, then go ahead and click on it. And then from here, you will get a little bit more information specific to this product. Not only the estimated price, depending on the quantity, as well as the minimum order quantity, which would be 50. Though a lot of times, like I said, they are flexible. They can work with you with the minimum order quantity, and we're going to talk about that later on. But this is very helpful at least as an estimate. But I will tell you that do not get too attached to this price unless you want a very basic product, but that is not usually what. We advise were advised to go for quality premium, stand out, customize it, solve a need that it's not yet being solved by other sellers. So usually that price is going to change when you start customizing when you start adding a nicer package and all that. But it's still very useful to um to have that estimate, as well as lead time, you can kind of understand that 1-500, at least basic product, it's about seven days. So from here, what you would do next is go to contact Supplier, and that's what we're going to show you guys in the next video. We're going to go through our RFQ template and how to contact them what is important to ask, especially in this first contact. And I hope you found this video helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 6. USE THIS When Reaching Out To Suppliers!: Alright, so I'm logged in and now we're ready to contact our supplier. So you would go ahead and click on this button here, and then here's the supplier contact form. And this is actually a new interface. Alibaba obviously has been updating and always improving, hopefully improving their platform. But from here, you would see that, first of all, it automatically fills the quantity as the minimum order quantity. And what I like to do is I like to change this to maybe like 1,000. And even if you're not planning on ordering 1,000 units, it's in my opinion, when the supplier sees a contact form of someone interested in a lot of units, most likely they're more likely to give priority into replying as opposed to someone who only wants 50. So actually, do pay attention to that because sometimes you actually do want 1,000 units, and it automatically fills as 50, and the supplier doesn't reply to you right away or doesn't give you that much details because honestly, they're not that interest in a very little quantity, order quantities. So that's the first thing that I would do. Then they have all of these fields here that you can customize to be more specific about what you need, even though all of these, options are going to be in our template. So if you want to go ahead and choose one of these, go ahead and it's fine, especially if you know for effect that is what you want. If you want to customize it, you can leave it blank. It's not mandatory and just place the main message here. Now, talking about our template, we are going to give you guys this template, and all you have to do is edit whatever is in orange, you just put your specific details here. So let's go ahead and get through those. So we start with dear contact name. And the contact name you can find here, usually, it says right over here. So dear Chris. My name is Allie Hobart, for example, and I'm the purchasing manager for Hobart's products, for example, we usually we like to put purchasing manager as opposed to, like, CEO or owner or something like that, because that gives you a little bit more negotiation room. You know, you can say, Oh, you know, my boss, I would love to do this price, but my boss has to have this lead time or this cost or something like that. So as we talked about it before, they do like to talk to the decision maker. So you being a purchasing manager, you have the power to make decisions, but you can also leverage that you know, I can't really do it like that. My boss is the ultimate decision maker. And then we are an American consumer products company, and you can change that if you're not American. And we're interested in the following products or products listed on Alibaba. So add it that orange to say, we're interested in the silicone mold, silicone soap mold, listed on Alibaba, and then you can just copy that link that shows here. Just copy this link. Well, you probably have to open a new page again to actually grab the URL. So copy the URL, just so there is no confusion about which soap mold exactly it is. So place the product link here, and then our company is looking to add silicone soap modes to our line of products with the following requirements. Then here's just some ideas, but you pretty much list everything that you are looking for. So quality. Definitely say, you know, high resistant or durable. It's important that you even though it might seem obvious that you want a good quality product, definitely stress, especially certain aspects. Oh, I want something durable or thick or, you know, high quality, pink or purple, silicone soap molds, and then you can put the weight if you have, obviously, it's going to depend on your product. Just go through this list as well as other things that you might need to ask them for. So weight, size, if there is a custom logo and position, I would go ahead and say, with this logo image attached because as you can see here, you can attach files. So you can go ahead and already send them the logo. And if you don't have that information yet, then don't send it yet. You can always ask for them later, and then they'll give you if they'll tell you if they can include that in the same price or if it would be additional. And I'll talk about that very soon again. Just let me just finish the list, and I'll give you a little point of view, at least about. And also if you want a certain design or maybe I want this pattern or twisted, whatever it is that it makes sense for your product. As well as if you want to bundle with something else, you might want to bundle two different soap modes that the same supplier offers, or if you want to bundle with something else from a different supplier, ask if they're willing to do that, certifications, anything that will have contact, especially because some people use those molds for kitchen. So if anything that has contact with skin or if it has contact with something that you're going to consume, you most likely need FDA certification, and we're also going to talk about certification requirements soon in another video. But whatever certification that you should know, you should do your research, and you should know if you need certain certification for the marketplace that you're going to sell. So, for example, the US, then you can request it here as well, and any other addition details that you want to talk about your products. But I will say, moving on to the next one, which is packaging, This is our strategy. We usually go ahead and send them a template asking about everything. And later on, you can ask them, Oh, okay, what if I don't have this? What if you What if my package is different? What if I do the package with a different supplier, which they're used to? It's not necessarily offensive to them if you do something that they're not experts in. So if you do, like, a packaging or paper things with a different supplier, it's that big of a deal. Some people, however, and this is just a point of view, and it's an option. Some people might actually want to send them a very general inquiry, and then later on, go at different things because that way you can know how much you're actually charging for every single aspect of the product. So, let's say, you just ask for silicone, mold in purple. That's it. And then later on, you said, Oh, what if we want to add our logo over here in the position? Then they say, Oh, that's going to be $0.10 more per mold, as opposed to maybe if you ask all in one all in one, they might actually calculate a higher price for that specific service or customization. But for us, one, because we have already a lot of suppliers to deal with, also because we want to know from the get go how well the supplier communication willingness to work with you is, we prefer to already ask them everything upfront. And later on if we want to change something, they will tell us, Oh, that would okay, then if you don't want the package anymore, that would be $0.10 less or something like that. If you are curious to where every single thing costs. So anyway, just a parenthesis because you might want to choose a different strategy. But moving on to our template, next, we would ask about packaging. So we usually give them a little bit of detail, and it's very useful to use photos as well. So we want this type of packaging. We want a box or if you a just an op bag, a transparent bag with a head card, whatever it is, say image attach and attach the image to the message that's going to be extremely helpful and not just helpful but efficient. Sometimes you just ask, we want a nice package or a paper package, and they're like, paper package could be anything. And with them having a little bit more direction, they can give you a more accurate quote. And then product insert is very important, and it can be a great differentiation, differentiator. And actually, packaging as a whole, we found a lot of success into paying attention to our product packaging. If your competitors are paying attention to their product packaging, then it's a must for you. And hopefully, before you decide on this product, you are ordering your competitor's product so you can see the size, the weight, or if it's too thin, and you want thicker or if they have a really nice packaging or a gift ready package and all that. So you can either be on the same level to really compete or even better. So for us, we usually it will depend on your product. Some products require less attention to this, I would say, and some require more, but definitely do packaging. And then, lastly, ask them, is the packaging described above included in the product price in the final product price? You want to be very clear about this because sometimes they will say, Yes, we can do this packaging, and it's not really included in the cost that they gave you. They'll just tell you later. So then after you describe everything, you're going to say, considering your factory is able to supply the product as described above, please provide the information below. So we describe everything that we want or at least a lot of what we want. Then we're going to ask for costs and other information. So first, the sample. You can ask, please provide the following for DHL Express shipping. You definitely want a quick shipping for the sample, so you can move on and make your decision fast for the United States ZIP code, and then you can put your ZIP code. And then what is the total price, as well as how long it would take not only to produce but to deliver. So expected delivery time. And we will talk more about samples and when you should order them and what to expect and how to communicate with suppliers about samples soon. But just so you know, you definitely want to be ordering a sample, you don't want to be placing an order with a supplier, even if they check all of the boxes for you without actually seeing and touching the product. Next, you're going to ask them about price. So here you can edit how many units you want. But usually our strategy for quantities, definitely ask more than one quantity. Let's say you're set on ordering 1,000 units. Also ask them about maybe 503,000, something a lot more that maybe in the future, you might want to scale, as well as something a little bit less that you can see if at some point you need to just place a smaller order um, how much more it would cost for you to place a smaller order. So I definitely recommend you to ask about at least not at least, but I think three different quantities is very very useful for you to have that sense. So and I also like usually putting higher quantities, especially if it makes sense to what your order quantity it is. If you're planning, 750, maybe you can ask for 500, 751000 or 2000 to have that spectrum. And then next, you're going to ask about shipping. And it says on the template. What is the cost to ship the following quantities to the United States by DDP ZIP code. And then this is the LA Airport ZIP code. And we're going to talk about what DDP means, and this is a trade term, and don't worry. Don't get overwhelmed. We're going to talk about and explain what that means. But definitely ask DDP. And the ZIP code, it might not actually be most likely won't be that ZIP code later on, but they will not give you a quote without having at least an idea where it's going. And the LA Airport, the LA Port, it's usually where the products coming from China will most likely go to. So it's a safe zip code. Later on, after you place your order, you can give them and you create your shipping plane and you know where to ship your products. You can give them an updated address, and your cost might increase a little bit, but honestly, it should not be that much if it's within the same country. So go ahead and ask for the same quantity of units, how much that would cost because you need to know that before placing your order to know if you're going to be profitable or not. And then also production time. This is extremely important. As I said, in the other video, we used to always pretty much care about cost and the lowest cost possible. But lead time is extremely important. Imagine if you're running out of stock now and you're ready to place another order, but it's going to take another 30 days, 45 days to produce. You need to know that in advance the number of days for a small um, order or larger order for certain products, it might not vary that much because making 1,000 or 3,000 of a batch thing depending on the process might be the same thing, but it's very important to know. So ask about production time. And communication. Lastly, please provide your Wichat ID for further correspondence. You can also ask for their email address, whatever you prefer. But what is usually their preferred way of communication. Now, if you're in the US, Wichat has been banned from the US. Trump has banned as of, I believe, September of 2020. You can still get WCAt if you have a VPN and we're going to leave the VPN option that we use in the resources below. But if you have a VPN, you can select a different location for you to download the app and use it. That's what we use. That's what usually suppliers prefer. We know this. Now, after communicating with lots of suppliers, we know they prefer this. WhatsApp, a lot of people use WhatsApp, but WhatsApp for them is like we chat for us. It's banned in China, so they do need a VPN, so they might not be as quick to reply via Whatsapp. And you can also communicate via Skype or email. It's your decision. I usually don't like communicating via Alibaba. The Alibaba platform, as of right now, the communication is not great. It's not great for sending photos, which we communicate a lot with photos, you know, using the drawing, circulating, Oh, I need to change this and replying to specific comments, which these other messaging apps provide. So you can ask for their Withat ID, and then you say, attention, please do not respond to this message on Alibaba. Some of them might still do that. Please respond through our Wichat and then you put your Wichat username, Skype and you put your Skype ID, ID or email, email address. As I said, I prefer you might prefer email. It's a lot more professional and informal, and you have all of that communication saved, email threads, and all that. But personally, in terms of communication, highlighting things, I prefer these messaging apps, so I usually use What. And then finally, I would tell them, we plan to select the supply and complete our initial purchase within the next three weeks or whatever you prefer. We're currently communicating with two other factories. After our initial order, we will have repeat orders and hope to have a long term partnership and increased order quantities. So this last paragraph is very important because one, it tells them that you have a deadline, so don't take forever to reply. Two, it says that you are looking into other options. So yeah, if they wanted to give you a higher price, now they're at least going to think twice because you will be comparing those costs. And you also want to tell them that this is the initial order, that you know, it's a test order, so it might be a lower quantity. But you plan on, and this is key, a long term partnership. They love hearing this. They really value, like I said, the relationship, but also the motivate gives them the motivation of, like, Okay, maybe we wouldn't really pay attention to this. We usually bigger orders, but this is a test order. They want a long term partnership with increased order quantities. I mean, it's going to be a partnership. And that's what I encourage you guys to see this as the whole sourcing process and your relationship with your supplier does not need to be something that you're dreading or that is stressful or frustrating, which sometimes will be. And honestly, that's with pretty much all aspects of work is that sometimes it will be stressful and frustrating. But, um it's extremely important that you actually make this easier for you and value this partnership and show them that you care about their company, you know, growing and having profits and caring about their workers as much as you want them to care about your company and you having profits and you growing. It's going to be a mutual thing and mutual benefit if they give you, for example, good deals and customize things for you, so you have more success on your business and increase order quantities for them as well. So I definitely encourage you to not only see it that way but tell them that this is important. So and lastly, you say, we're looking forward to your response and then sign for your full name, purchasing manager, Hobart's products. I think that's what I said. So anyways, that is our Ali Baba RFQ, and you see that this template will actually help you get a sense of the communication with your supplier as well, because even though you're putting all of the information here, you still going to get messages from suppliers saying hello and then just waiting for you to say hello. And then, how many units do you want or things and asking one question at a time for things that you've already said on the template where other suppliers will give you like, you know, bullet points, very organized replies or not. You know, they might not reply to everything, or they might need some more information for certain things. And it's fair. I try to remember if I've ever had a supplier that reply to every single thing, very organized But in general, you will get a very quick sense of how well they respond, how much they paid attention to your questions, how quick they will reply. And that is also part of the selection of suppliers. So that's why I encourage you to reach out to ten or 15 suppliers, and then after you get the quotes, get your favorite supplier seem, what I mean is not just the quotes in terms of cost, but see the other terms as well, the lead time and the English, honestly, the communication and all that. I will encourage you to choose your favorite supplier, not necessarily your favorite cost or favorite quote. And with your top favored suppliers, talk to them. Ask them why. Why is this price higher, for example. Why can you not provide this or that? And always ask why, and that's going to be actually one of the tips that Sumner provides later in the course for you in the negotiation tips is sometimes you have no idea. You just assume that they gave you a quite because they're trying to scam you, where maybe they're the only ones actually quoting you for the quality that you want with the certification that you want, and you never know. So don't be afraid to ask why. And after you go through the process of elimination, you're probably going to end up with around maybe three suppliers, which is which are the suppliers that you would probably request a sample from in order to compare the quality, feel the product, feel the speed, and if they actually meant what they told and that's it starts to become very real, and then that's going to help you narrow down the ultimate supplier that you want to have the partnership with. So I hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions, be sure leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 7. Have A Back Up Plan: While you're in the process of selecting your favorite supplier or even later in the process, if you already have your supply, you've already ordered with them many times, I would still encourage you to keep the contact information of other suppliers that you've liked for the same product, meaning pretty much having a backup supplier. The reason why I say this, even though it is very important and we advise you to invest in the relationship with your supplier and wish for a long term relationship, there will be time, especially times of the year, depending on where it is. If it's, for example, doing Chinese New Year's or othter that maybe your main supplier cannot take more orders or if you've just ordered something and it's midway through the process, they cannot add anything else, and it will just take too long for them to do it after this current production is done. It is very advantageous to have another supplier who can create the same product for you, perhaps in a different part of the country or maybe in another country. But what I would encourage you to do is that after you selected your supplier and you've gone through the process of manufacturing and you have your finalized product, get one of those samples and send it to a new supplier and ask them to match that exactly, because obviously you don't want to have a backup supplier that will give you a different product, different quality, different way of packaging than your main supplier does, or than your other supplier does. So you have that inconsistent stock with you. So I would encourage you, though I actually haven't heard anyone talking about this option before to actually have that option because it can definitely come in handy, even if they're more expensive, maybe they're the second more expensive, but they have a shorter lead time. And so, usually, throughout the year, you are organized well enough with your inventory management to go with your main supplier and have a lower cost. But if you're in a hurry, if your sales spiked and you need something sooner, would assume you would be willing to pay a little bit more for shorter lead time. So it's just an idea. You can take it or not, the advice. But if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 8. Simple Hack To Communicate With ANY Supplier in ANY Language: In this video, I'm going to show you how to improve your supplier communication and negotiation process using images and potentially also video, but specifically images in this case. Images and video are pretty much universal. Everyone understands when they see visual images of particular things, in this case, of what parts of the product we want to change. Depending on your product, some will be more important than others, but this is very, very simple to do. What I'm using right now and what you see in front of you is a keynote presentation. If you're using Mac, I'd recommend using keynote then if you're using Microsoft or you have a PC, then you use PowerPoint. You can do this. I just did this literally in 5 minutes, really, really quick on my my keynote on my Mac. What you can do, if you need to call out certain aspects of a product of things you want to change, and maybe the supplier is having some trouble understanding or you believe they may have some trouble. This can always be just a great first step to really explain and show what you want to change or improve about your product, or it can be good for clarifying, et cetera's powerful, really simple, and it's free. What you do is get an image that is most similar to your product. And you want to search so you can search this on Google because again, you're not stealing anyone's copyright, you're just using this for example purposes. So you can go to Google and type in your product name and then followed by PNG. Okay? What does that mean? P&G? PNG images or something like this, right? So instead of having a background, the purple thing here doesn't have a background. This doesn't have a background. The the silicone soap molds here don't have a background. Those are not necessarily that they are, but when you search whatever your keyword product keyword is and then followed by P N G, those three letters, P and G, then you tend to find images that look a little bit cleaner. It just preference, you don't have to, but these images look a little bit cleaner. You'll do you'll find your product and then whatever similar things or things you want to change, you'll go ahead and you'll write what you want to change with arrows and then the image example. That's what I like to do. Really briefly, I totally made this up on the fly. I have no idea this is good or not, but we want to print logos on the bottom of cubes. Maybe I'd even says each cube, and we can just scroll that out of each cube, giving me a little bit of a hard time. There we go. Even extend that out to make it a little bit. Yeah, something like that. Print logo on bottom of each cube. Maybe you want to etch it in. Maybe to when someone's creating the soap, there's that custom, beautiful design or logo or whatever you want it to be. I just randomly chose this minimalist logo, which by the way, I really like this type of logo. Though it depends on the product. This is more for minimalist, modern type products. Maybe it wouldn't work for soap mold. Yeah, we just want to print this or etch this, we could say into the bottom of each soap mold, and I did my best to crop here, but obviously you can see this is not perfect and it doesn't need to be. Next, we want to change the color. We want it to be purple and we want this purple, not pink. We want the overall, we want it to be purple, not pink. Then the material or it could even be the silicone or whatever, must be FDA approved, overall, you could even say have multiple arrows or whatever, but pretty straightforward, write what you want to change, include some images, type the keywords into Google followed by PNG to find the best options. What you'll do is when you're communicating with suppliers, what you can do is you create this in a keynote or a PowerPoint slide, and then what you can do is take a screenshot. So just Google how to take a screenshot on your specific your MacBook or your PC or whatever you're using, learn how to take a screenshot, really simple. Take a screenshot of this and then send that to them. And if they still have questions, you can kind of edit it a little bit or make it look a little bit nicer or add some more things. Very, very straightforward, totally open ended. It's free to do, it's simple to do, and this will drastically improve your supplier communication process. Also, videos are another great thing. For example, let's say you order a sample, and there's a couple of things that aren't right. You can use images as well as have a video showing and while you're talking about it and pointing with your finger, it could be with your phone of what you want to change or it's different. Maybe you compare it with two products. Maybe you're showing video or images of packaging. So don't limit yourself to just text. There are a lot of different options, and by the way, you may think, Oh, this doesn't seem really professional. Trust me, they will definitely appreciate it. Anything that can reduce time for both parties, for the supplier and yourself is going to be a win win. It's going to be a benefit. So think about that. If incorporating images and videos, it's really easy, it's simple, and it's free. Hope this helps. Let's go ahead and get into the next video. 9. WARNING: Does Your Product Need Certifications? Here's How To Find Out...: So just a little bit more detail about how to figure out if your product needs certifications and requirements, at least what Amazon requires. They may not say everything that the country requires. You need to do that research yourself. But in terms of Amazon, you can follow this link here that we're also going to provide in the resources below, and that's going to take you here. And it's category product and listing restrictions. So hopefully you already went through this list and list of restricted products during your product research phase. But in terms of certifications, if you need any sort of standard or anything, even if the product is not restricted, you can come here. But winning down, the Amazon or Help page and the search box on the top here and also the Help page, they're going to be extremely resourceful for you. Just try to be as descriptive as possible. For example, if you're trying to create a wood product, just type in wood product restrictions or wood products certification standards and see what the results are. A lot of times it's from Amazon or other people already had that question. You can read that in the forum. But just to give you a a glance of what this page looks like. So you can scroll down and you can see there are some product compliance requirements, also in terms of the labeling or safety. For example, a lot of times, if it's food safety or if it's energy, like your fridge or fan or something like that, that has that special label. There are some requirements as well as requirements for the images. Just as a parenthesis, a lot of times for food, for example, not a lot of times, you have to put the nutrition fact as an image and you should definitely go through this list and take a look at the content, see, like the images and requirements. And then, for example, if you want to see something more specific, here's just a quick example. I went into restricted products, and you can see the breadcrumbs here. Restrictive products and then composite wood products as an example. So within the restricted products, let's say you don't really know if your product is restricted or not, I would say examples of permitted listings. So products containing regulated composite wood, sorry if I'm mispronouncing this that comply with EPA formaldehyde emission standards and labeling requirements. So there you go. You can sell wood products, but make sure you ask your supplier, does this comply with the EPA formaldehyde emissions? And can you show me a certification? And then, remember, when we're looking on the supplier profile, you could go down and look at their certifications as well. And for example, this one, it says that the certifications were verified by the SGS group, which is a pretty reputable company the SGS and worldwide. But you can go here. Sometimes you don't even have to ask them, but you can come here and look at the certifications and make sure, for example, that the company name matches the company name there and you can download or go through I can't really see exactly. Yeah, Dongan sorry, I can't pronounce this. But anyways, you can see that the company name here matches this company name. So that's a good sign. So anyways, that's just a little bit more information for you to make sure you're compliant, but you don't want to go through all of this process for at the end, you realize that the product does not comply with the marketplace standards or even go ahead and sell the product and have an issue and that's a whole legal problem. But not trying to scare you, just trying to prepare you. So make sure you go through that link that we're also providing below. And if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A section. So let's go ahead and get to the next video. 10. Requesting Certifications From Your Suppliers: Requesting certifications. If your product needs a certain certification or approval, for example, FDA approved, you want to make sure that you get the proper documentation and your supplier and your product will have the proper certifications to ensure that you don't get in any kind of trouble getting sued. Okay? So if you're planning on selling the United States and your product needs a certification of some kind or an approval that's one of the times I would actually really recommend partnering with an American supplier. The United States has very strict laws, and if you ask your supplier, hey, is this product FDA approved, they'll generally give you an honest answer because guess what? If they give you a dishonest answer, you sell the product, you get sued, they're also liable to get sued as well. Where in China, if you get sued, you know, they're in another country, totally different law. You can't take them and bring them into American courts. You know, they're not liable, okay? So just be aware of that and be careful of that. And again, that's why I recommend if you need a certification and you're selling the United States or in the European Union, then respectively, get your products sourced and your certifications there. And again, there's still room to be profitable and you still can't I'll show you how to find potentially find North American suppliers and the pros and cons, as well. But for now, let's talk about certifications, okay? So let's say you're dealing with a Chinese supplier and you want to make sure you have the proper certifications, number one, do your own research to make sure you get all the certifications you need. Then to make sure that the supplier has everything they need, you're going to ask them, do you have X certification? They're either going to say yes or no. If they say no, can't do business with them, obviously, right? If they say yes, then you ask them who issued what agency, what organization who issued the certification to you into your factory, your company. If they tell you who it was, at this point, they may say, Oh, yeah, actually, we don't have it, but we can get it. If they say, we can get it, ignore them. It doesn't matter. But if they say yes, then you say, all right, make sure that it was issued in the United States. If it wasn't could be totally made up. They just make up a company or there could be a company in China, for all we know that gives out false certification and it's like this whole scam, right? So if you need an American certification and it's certified in China, it means nothing. Even if it is truly certified, it means nothing. It needs to be certified in the area that you're going to be sell. So if they say, yes, it was certified by an American FDA, the FDA agency, I don't know, you know, FDA approved. So whatever the body is for that, you call that agency, the organization or the certification body, and you ask them, Hey, did you issue this to, you know, your supplier's name? And you can have the Ali Baba, and you can request, you know, contact information, the shipping address, and all that kind of stuff as well. And the professional, you know, all the information that they have to where you can give it to them and they can give you a yes or no. So in that case, again, vetting, completely vetting and making 100% sure they have a certification, it could be safe in that regard. But if it doesn't check every single one of these boxes and doesn't follow each of these steps, then I'd recommend staying away, choosing either a different product or looking to source in the United States or whatever area that you're selling in, okay? So again, I want to make sure you avoid any kind of potential scams. Make sure you do your due diligence in your research, okay? Um, again, anything that deals with, you know, anything that could be potentially dangerous, flammable, deals ingested or is put on the human body, those are some very good examples of things that we need certifications. So be sure to do your proper research beforehand and then make sure that your supplier and your product have the proper certifications to avoid any kind of problems and you should be set. Okay? So yeah, hopefully this is helpful. If you have any questions, let me know. And let's go ahead and get into the next video. 11. Painlessly Negotiate The BEST Price For Your Products: This lecture, I'm going to lay out some quick tips that are going to help you when negotiating with your supplier. This could be a supplier in China or really anywhere in the world. These same principles are in general going to apply, so let's go ahead and get into them now. Number one, relationships are key. This is especially true if you're working with the supplier or planning on partnering with the supplier in China. Me being from the United States, I know this us as Americans or at least citizens of the United States, tend to be very contractual based. We base performance and we deem if a business relationship is good or bad based on how the other party performs based on the contract that we have, the contract or the document that we have that binds us together. What I found personally and from interviews and from speaking with people, even one guy I know, in particular, who's lived in China for over a decade, right, himself, not being from China, but living in China, originally from Scotland, have really harped on the fact that the Chinese really prioritize relationships, okay? So, making sure that you're kind, you're polite, you're professional when communicating with suppliers, right, not just trying to get the lowest price possible, treating them like human beings, I've found, and it's really unfortunate that a lot of new sellers and a lot of other even Amazon tellers do not do, which is ridiculous. But anyway, relationships are very important. And keep that in mind to where a lot of times people are like, Oh, like, you know, we have a contract, so we're all good. Well, that's great. But again, for Americans, that's all that we need, but in Chinese terms, they want to be able to do business with people they like. And that's really true anywhere, when you think about it. Okay, so what does it really matter? Well, it matters for a lot of reasons. And one reason that I recently learned about that's very important is that there may be certain times of the year, for example, right after our quarter, right after, you know, after November, December, right Black Friday and Christmas rush in the United States, there are going to be a lot of businesses that are going place reorders in China, and guess what? If you constantly provide a better relationship, you order a decent amount, right? It's worth their time and business and all that. They may prioritize you over a lot of their other customers and you'll be able to start getting your products in faster than some of the other clients that your supplier has, okay? So think about, you know, they're not the only supplier that you could get. You're not the only client that they have or customer that right? So think about that and you ultimately want to become as big of a priority to them as possible because that can reduce lead times and they're more willing to customize. They may even reach out to you with new products and things that they don't tell their other clients about. Really, really cool stuff, really important to just keep in mind. That's, in my opinion, the most important. And again, that's true anywhere. Number two, quality overprice. Again, your goal is not to get the cheapest to produce the cheapest product possible. Your goal is to produce the highest quality product possible. Profitably. At the end of the day, all that matters is profit, I'd much rather have a product that has a 35% profit margin and a superior high quality product than a product that has a 40% profit margin and is not that great guess what? I'm not going in one case, I have a much higher likelihood of making a lot of good amount of money and good amount of profit. The other product, I may make actually zero are my profit margins 40% if it's a poor quality product, I may get a bunch of returns, get my account shut down and get a bunch of negative reviews, all that kind of stuff and actually not make any money or make a lot less. So you can actually make more money by your product costing more, right, because it's better quality. Because like I said before, especially with Chinese suppliers, when you ask and try to drive the price down as low as possible, they can likely do that. If you want to get your product produced for $0.75 depending what your product is, you can probably get it done. However, that just means they're going to use cheaper quality materials. You're not going to be a priority to them. You're definitely not building a good relationship with them. You're just kind enough to do business with them. But but yeah, quality is number one important. And then always focus on profit more than price. Although again, price is important. You want to kind of negotiate and work with them, and I'll get to that in a second. Number three, considering others. You want to be considerate of others. But what I mean by this is you want to let your supplier know that you are considering other options as well. Okay? And if you use my Ali Baba suppler which I give it's included in the course for all the students. This in the bottom section, you'll see that it has a statement that says something to the effect of, you know, we're ready to make a decision, and we just want to let you know, we are looking at other suppliers as well, right? And that kind of gives a sense of scarcity, right? And the reality is it's true. You're not lying. You are looking at other supplier, and it's good to kind of politely and professionally let them know that. In my experience, in my opinion, although it's completely up to you, number four, using images and video. So a lot of new sellers that I speak with talk about especially if they're from maybe not from the United States, from other countries in Europe or wherever they may be, mentioned the fear of they can speak English, but their English is a little bit broken, and the Chinese there are more English speakers in China than I think the rest of the world combined, or at least it's the United States. I forget what the statistic is, but there's a lot of English speaking Chinese, but mainly for the most part, their second language. So if your second language is English and you're communicating with someone whose second language is also English, you may have a fear of miscommunication. Well, that's where images and video come into play. So images and video transcend everything. It's something it's so simple yet it's so powerful, right? Just having an image of the product that you want, or maybe they send you a sample, you want to change something about it, having like a red arrow pointing to that thing with a little bit of text just really basic, really simple, or making a video where you have the sample and you're showing them or maybe you have the product that you want to produce. I have something here. So you have the product that you want to produce, right? And you want to say, Oh, we want the insight to maybe circle it in red and say, we want this material to be black or a different type of material or whatever or something like that. So a video or image really simple. It's really, really basic and easy to do can actually go a long way and transcend all the communication a lot of communication errors, okay? And again, a lot of people don't think about this, but the amount of time the faster that you can communicate with your supplier, the more money you can make, okay? So communication isn't just like, Oh, these are great tips, whatever. If you apply these rules, this can actually help you make more money and make money faster. So, it's not just about negotiating. It's about the ramifications of that. So yeah, images and video, very, very powerful. I'm starting to do that more and more. Uh second to last, always consider other factors. Price of the product isn't the only thing that matters, and it's not the only thing that you can negotiate. You can also negotiate things like lead time. So things like, is there any way that we could produce this in a faster period of time or we would like to produce it in a faster period of time. What are some ideas that you may have or could you please explain why it's taking maybe so long or takes this length of time? Maybe on your end, you can help give them some ideas for ways you could reduce the lead time, but that's something that could be negotiated and figured out as well, something good to talk about. Minimum or a quantity, so maybe for your first initial order, you just kind of want to test this Amazon thing. You want to see if this actually works. So what you might do, and that's not really the right way of thinking about it, but, you know, just to say that, you just want to test this product to see if this works, to see if it appeals to the market. So you might want to order a lower quantity than what is required, what the supplier says is required. Is there a minimum order quantity? You can say something like, you know, we'd like to order a smaller batch or smaller order for a test. And once we see that the product meets the demand of the market, that it's profitable and sells well, we'll order more from you in the future, okay? And keep that again, the long term relationship in mind. That's point number one. So yeah, you can negotiate minimum order quantity, packaging. Can you include packaging aspects of the packaging that the price can be reduced. Same thing with sickering so UPC codes, and other labels and sickering that you have, getting these negotiated either for free, getting them included or reduce the cost of that or whatever it may be. These are all factors you can negotiate, just things to keep in mind. And lastly, again, super important. And this is true, I think, anywhere in life, specifically when dealing with suppliers, ask why. They say, This is our lowest price. Always ask why. There was a time that I was looking into producing. I can tell you the product because I don't know if it's a great product or not now. If it is, go for it and use it. I'm not doing it. Doesn't go with my brand. But black, stainless steel silverware. That was originally going to be my first product, and I'm so glad I didn't go forward with it. I think with tariffs now and all that, with metals, it would be fairly very, very, very expensive to produce upfront, but it could be very profitable, as well. Basically, some suppliers were telling me that they could produce around my price point, and others said that they couldn't a few that said they couldn't of saying, Oh, they're trying to screw me over. They're trying to scam me. You know, what I did is I asked why, why is that the case? They explained and said, the quality of this material. This is literally the cheapest we can get our material. And they showed me this whole article, an American article talking about stainless steel, the whole all this process without going into too much detail, explaining why it was the way that it was, and it totally made sense. I realized the suppliers that were giving me a lower price for the product were significantly worse quality, and they weren't telling me that, right? I didn't know the difference between this type of stainless steel versus this type, right, in terms of how quickly it would wear, dishwasher safe, the coating, scratching off or not even having things like that, really, really important stuff. Asking why I found personally suppliers especially good suppliers are so willing to educate you on the product and the process. By the way, this is a total side note. Later on, if you're building out Facebook, Instagram, your YouTube channel, things like that, great website, some great content to have for your website is to show people the process. By asking why, you learn more about the process and you can even ask and say, Hey, you know, it's all up to you to do this. But would it be okay if you could send us a video of our products being tested or our products being produced or this aspect of it? You can use that as content to share with your audience and your customers, right? That could be really, really interesting because people are always interested in how it's produced, especially if you're you know, eco friendly. You're safer. You're producing it ethically, all these kind of things. People definitely want to see that and have that transparency. So that's just another side note. And you can find that out by asking why, ok? So very important and all these negotiation tips have helped me immensely and ultimately helped me generate more money faster, and I hope they do the same for you. So if you have questions, let me know, and let's go ahead and move into the next video. 12. Gain INSTANT Negotiation POWER With This Secret Hack!: Okay, so I wanted to make sure to share this heck with you guys because it is somewhat known within the Amazon community. But I also wanted to give you my opinion on how to use it and why sometimes it's not the best idea. So the heck is using the website called 16 80 eight.com. And what is this website? This website, it's kind of like Ali Baba, but for within China and within domestic companies within China. And that means that you can find a lot of times very similar products or the same products that you can find it on Ali Baba, but for much cheaper because they're trading within their same currency and they don't necessarily need to know English or have certain certifications. And that is exactly why I would say that use this hack with caution, as well as I wouldn't advise to necessarily go with a supplier that you find through this website because of the following reasons. So first of all, as I said, they don't necessarily need to know English. So the language barrier, unless we speak Chinese would be significant. Even if you try to use Google Translate, it is already a little bit difficult communicating with Chinese suppliers when they know English. Sometimes a lot of things already get a little bit confusing. If you're dependent on translation to actually communicate with these suppliers, then I guarantee it would be very stressful, and it could cost you a lot of money. So definitely don't always go for the cheapest option. And that is actually the next point is that you will most likely find cheaper prices on this website for the same product or so it seems like that. But a lot of times it's not the same product. The thickness is different. The quality is different. Doesn't have a certain certification. There are many, many reasons why the product here, even if the photo is the exact same, they can use the stock photo for their listing, but sometimes the product itself is not the same product. So be aware of that. Um, so when you use this heck, which I'm going to show how to do it next, just remember that and talk to your supplier. Be kind. Don't always go for the lowest price. As something already said on the other video, definitely prioritize quality over cost, especially if you already have a profit margin of 30% or more before advertising costs. So with that being said, I will show you this hack because we have used it before. It has helped us not only get at least slightly lower price, but also understand the differentiation of what our supplier was offering us and the quality and things that we actually ended up using on our listing to say, Hey, this one is higher quality because of this. It can withstand this heat or whatever it is. So without further ado, this is the 16 88 hack. What you're going to do is you can log into 16 88, and if you have Google Chrome, I believe you can translate some of it if you want. So this is like simplified English. You can see some some things are translated, and what you can do is actually open Google translator and input, for example, let me switch this silicone, soap mold. So after you do that, you can copy and paste it here. And then click the button. This is the first way that you can do this. And you can see there are certain things that are similar to what we were looking for before. Like, this is very similar. And what you can do is just open in a new tab. That's what I'm going to do the most similar things to your product. So this one, I'm just going to open a new tab. And the other way before we go to those results, the other way that you can do is actually really neat. You can go to Ali Baba and find the product most similar to what you're looking for and take a screenshot of that and then come to the camera icon here, and I already did that. I already took a screenshot. And then double click and it's going to upload. Maybe, let's try it again. You might have to try a couple of times. And there you go. It's going to find results that are very similar to that image. So you saw that it was kind of difficult to find the square and perhaps with six little units of the mold before just with the simplified English. And here you have lots of options with different prices, too. So, let's say, for example, we're going to do we're not going to go for the cheapest. Let's go for something in the middle like this one. We'll open a new tab, and what you can do is go to that tab, and you see it's varying the price based on the quantity. But even if you get the most expensive, let's get that number $9. Well, not $9. Nine and 60 YUN I think that's how you say, go ahead and copy. Then you can open the currency exchange here, the US dollar with the UN and then paste. And there you go. That same product or similar product, at least by photo, it would cost about $1.47. So you can use that number to actually compare with the quote that your supplier is giving you. Go ahead. You can screenshot this or send them the link and say, Hey, I found this at least very similar product or the same product for much cheaper from this other supplier. Can you match it, or can you get close to it, why is yours much more expensive than this cost? And they might tell you, Oh, they're not FDA approved. And for you to sell on the USA. You need the FDA certification, for example. So we actually cannot go with this, but you can still use it as a negotiation technique and ask them, you know, if the price is way too different, and the only difference is, you know, oh, the thickness. You can say, Okay, so match it and put it a little bit more for a different thickness, something like that. You know, it depends completely on your product and on the price difference. Nevertheless, I wanted to share this hack with you guys. Even though, as I said, be cautious of it. Definitely would not recommend actually going with a supplier from 16 88. But just use it as perhaps a tool for communication with your supplier that supplier that you already liked and like the quality, like the communication. So if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below. Let's go ahead and get to the next video. 13. How To Find QUALITY North American Suppliers (WITHOUT Using Thomasnet): What is the best way to find American suppliers if you want to produce and source your product from the United States? So I'll include the link to this website below, although that's the topic of this conversation, there's a site called Thomas Nat, and Thomas Net is sort of like the Ali Baba for American suppliers. However, it is not I say that loosely. It's a place that you can potentially find American suppliers, but I've actually used it again, for the product that I am currently in the process of kind of figuring out and producing and it just doesn't work that well, right? So I'm included a link to Thomas Net below, and you can kind of use it and see if it works well for you. But what I found to be best, and this is after speaking with seven and eight figure Amazon sellers who source products, and there are many that source products from the United States. And I asked them, What's the best way for me as maybe a newer seller to find American suppliers and reach out and contact them? And they said they all said the same thing, Google. Google them, okay? Not even Thomas Net. Google it. I'm like, Okay, great. So I started Google. And that's what I recommend you do as well. So you use Google. It's free, and that will be likely. And if there is anything changes, I'll let you know, the best way to contact and identify American suppliers, suppliers from the United States. Now, as I start Googling, I found a lot of more articles or things related, but I wasn't finding manufacturer websites. And a few that I did find, I started realizing American manufacturing websites are terrible in terms of search engine optimization. They're just terrible in terms of getting found. It's very difficult to find them. So I've come up with a way or actually, I've learned a way, sorry, to basically another Amazon seller shared this and I thought it was really great, so I'm going to share this with you as well. And basically, what you can do is type in keywords, for example, if we're looking for silicone soap molds, we would type in silicone soap molds into Google, followed by one of the following or could even be multiple of the following, but I recommend starting off with one of the following words in quotations. That's key. What this does, basically, when you put a word in quotations in the Google search engine, it forces Google to show you results that actually have the keyword, for example, manufacturer in the search results. You would simply type in silicone SOT mold followed by manufacturing parentheses, contact us parentheses, lead time pricing, and there could be more. You can think of more. These are just four main ones. Basically, we want to think what would definitely be on a manufacturer's website? Relating to, you know, your product, okay? Manufacturers, obviously one of them, or manufacturing or maybe supplier, contact us. Lead Time, you know, the pricing, their pricing page, right, things like that, especially, I think, these two up here are in lead time, right? This is very specifically for manufacturing. So this is definitely going to help you find American suppliers and kind of cut through and ultimately find them. Then what I recommend doing is you can send them emails if they have an email address, but just getting on the phone and giving them a call or if you prefer email, you can do that as well. They'll kind of recommend which way works best for you, but I just like to get on the phone. It's a little bit better and easier. So relatively simple, right? If you want to use Thomas Nt. I've included that below. But again, I found better success and results with this as I've personally been producing my own product. Use Google, type in your product keywords, followed by one of these terms in parentheses. Really straightforward. If you have any questions, let me know, and let's go ahead and get into the next video. 14. Keep This In Mind When Ordering Product Samples...: So here are some things to keep in mind when ordering product samples. So first of all, product samples are extremely important, not only during the selection of your suppliers phase for you to decide which one has the best quality and all that, but throughout the whole manufacturing process as well, and I'm going to talk about this very soon. But just certain things for you to keep in mind is that the sample might actually cost you a lot more than a single product will cost you. Let's say you're trying to source something that it's $3 per unit. But one sample, they might actually charge you 35 or $50. Usually, the average range is 35-100. That is for a few reasons. One is because they need to they're not mass producing. So obviously, they're only producing one thing for you customize. It's very time consuming, so there's that. Also, there's the shipping cost, obviously, for them to ship just one unit via Air Express, it will be more expensive. And sometimes, if you're asking for something customized, then they will probably need to create a mold. So that is very expensive and sometimes they will ask you to cover those costs. And what a little tip is, and what I always do is I tell them that I'm willing to pay for the sample. And I will say some suppliers do not even charge you for the sample. I ask you to pay for shipping, which is more than fair, in my opinion. But if they do charge you for the sample, what is fair is that I always ask them to refund that amount when you place the final order. So because we mentioned in the RF, they know we're probably comparing samples with other suppliers, and don't want to just give you something free if they're taking the time to put in their work and all that, which is fair. But then you tell them if I go with you, if I place the order with you, once I place the order, will you refund the cost that you're charging me? And a lot of times they will do more times than not. That's what's happened to us. And you should also ask them to ship via DDP air shipping via DHL. That's going to be the fastest one. You don't want to ship this via C. For example, you don't want to drag on this process very long and you want it fast and you want to safe. And it's probably going to be a small package, too, so it's less likely to get lost. So just go ahead and order DHL air express shipment. And a lot of times it's $30-50. That's what it will cost. And most of the time, as I said, they will ask you to cover those costs, which is more than fair. And how you should pay them is only pay either via paypal or trade assurance. Sometimes they can create just a very small order on Alibaba just to cover the sample costs, and then you can pay via trade assurance or pay via PayPal. Do not pay in any other way because you're not covered. You're not covered. There's no protection. There's no guarantee that they'll actually ship you the product. So only pay via those two methods. And also consider ordering multiple samples. And that's going to play into account later on, too, as I'm going to mention throughout the different phases. But even as the first sample, you might want to test their consistency. If you have a logo, for example, on your product, and for one product, it's right in the middle, but then the other one is misplaced. It's not really in the center. You want to test for their consistency because you're going to be ordering for them to mass produce that product. So you want to make sure they can be consistent with their production of that product. So consider ordering multiple from the same supplier, as well as as we already talked about, ordering from multiple suppliers in the beginning phases to compare and make that decision. Also, you can when you receive your samples, test it, test it as all of the details as much as you can, test it for durability, test how it works if there is a zipper, for example, or if it smells or if it rips very easily. Most likely, the suppliers will give you the best sample that they have, something that they paid attention to detail so that you may place the order with them. But it's still important to test everything, you know, like, leave it out in the sun. It depends on your product, obviously. But keep that in mind, to test it and make sure it's durable. And then also consider using those samples to ask friends and family, which you should have, if you purchase your competitor's products, for example, ask friends that do not know, for example, which product is yours and which product is the competitor, which one they would buy or what are their opinions or what would they do differently? We did that, and it was very helpful and it helped us customize and improve our products, things that because we're so involved in the process, sometimes we overlook the most obvious things, too. So it's very helpful to ask for friends and family and to have their input as well. And then, lastly, that's what I wanted to stress is that you should order a sample for every phase of your production or at least keep that in mind in general. So you ordered the first sample before you even chose the supplier, you like it. Then when you place an order with them, ask them to send you a pre production sample. That sample should have everything like it would be ready to go to Amazon. So it should have the package ready, all of the labels. You want to see that they can do everything that you expect them to do for the whole order. So the first sample, the second sample is right before production or as soon as it starts, especially if you made any changes between the first and the second. So the second sample. And then, lastly, consider ordering a sample. Ask them to pull one of the products that you ordered from the big order, let's say, a 1,000 units, and ask them to ship one of those as well. And what it needs to happen you want it to happen is that the pre production sample and the post production sample, I guess, that's how you call it, those two need a match. You need to make sure that they can produce one single product with the same consistency and with all the details correctly for when they produce a whole batch of products. So you would end up most likely and ideally with those three samples, and you go ahead and use your second sample, the one that is pre production, and already use those for photos. Consider actually for that pre production sample to order three. I would say that's the ideal number, or you can order more. One for you for you to keep as that test order for you to compare at the end. The other one for you to send to an inspection company that's going to be inspecting the products at the end, and they will be doing the same thing that you want to do is they're going to be looking at that sample that you gave them, as well as a several of the products of the bulk order. Sorry, there was a lot of words. But yeah, so they're going to be doing that comparison as well. You know that that single sample that you received is correct that you approved, it has the right colors. It has the right labels. So send one of those to the inspection and lastly, send the third one of the pre production sample to your photographer. If you're hiring one. So consider ordering those three, and it doesn't necessarily mean, for example, that one sample cost you $50. It doesn't mean that you would need to pay 150 because if they need to create a mold, they create just one mold and produce three or it's just one shipment for all three of the samples. So it doesn't mean that it's going to be incredibly expensive. But I hope this was helpful if it was confusing, if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 15. Know EXACTLY How Many Units To Order For Your First Shipment: How many products should you purchase for your first order? This is a question I get all the time and it's very, very important. I'm going to cover two different strategies and you can decide what is best for you. Before we can determine or calculate how many units to order, we'll need to understand lead time. Lead time is essentially the amount of time it takes from when you hit the purchase button, like, Hey, supplier, I want to place another order until the time it becomes available on Amazon. Okay? This is something very important to keep in mind. Think about. If you're selling products, let's say you have I'm just making this up, 1,000 units. You have a 1,000 units, you bought it in January or let's say March 1, bought on March 1, and at the end of March, near the end of March, you see that you only have a few left. You only have, let's say, 30 left in inventory, you're running lower and lower and lower, then you're like, Oh, now I'm going to reorder, but think about it. It takes time to produce your product, time to ship, and then time for Amazon to scan. If you order and you have only a little bit of inventory left, guess what? While your product is being produced, you're going to run out of inventory. Your products being shipped, you're still out of inventory. It arrives at Amazon takes time to scan and you're still out of inventory. What's going to happen is, and I talked more about this in ranking videos. But your sales rank in Amazon's algorithm is going to say, Oh, this seller, you know, runs out of stock, it doesn't properly plan, and it kind of hurts your ranking a little bit. Now, you can absolutely recover when your products come back in. Let's say your sales rank, right, because your sales rank starts creeping up in terms of, you know, let's say you were number 100 and these st going down to number 200, 300, 400, 500, six and lower and lower and lower every day or every couple of days, that you're out of stock, okay? So that's something to consider and avoid. I'm going to kind of talk a little bit more about that in a second. But just keep that in mind. So that's a lot of sellers do. They order their first product, they sell out, and then they're like, Oh, I need to reorder and oh, my gosh, it takes a while for it to get in. And my listing, I have to re rank and do all the things again, right? So it takes more money and time than if they just would have ordered a larger quantity to begin with, okay? So I'll talk about that. But I'll also talk about another strategy, so stay tuned. I is important. So basically, we have three different sections, okay main sections. This is kind of oversimplifying, but main sections. Your production begins. Hey, supplier, X, I would like 1,000 units. Production begins. Let's say it takes 30 days. It could take less, it could take more time. This is just an example. It takes 30 days. Then the products are done. We completed, they're all packaged, everything's ready to go. They've been inspected. All of that takes 30 days. And then, Okay, great. The products are ready and they get shipped by air from air to when they arrive at Amazon, that takes ten days, again, for this example, ten days. And there's still anywhere 2-5 days for the products to be scanned. So we're going to be a little bit pessimistic and say five days for the items to be scanned and become available for sale, that's a total of 45 days in this scenario, think about it. If you order 45 days worth of inventory, that means that the day that you start selling on Amazon, you have to place another order. Does that make sense? So if you order 45 days, that means you have enough inventory for 45 days, okay? So think about it. I you have 45 days worth of inventory. If you reorder the same day that you start selling, that means that by the end of the month or by the end of the period of 1,000 units, you run through 45 days. At the 45th day, your inventory is in and it's been scanned in Amazon ready to go, right? If you order, let's say you have 45 days worth of inventory, you order two weeks later, that means you're going to be out of stock for two weeks. If you place your order within one, you start selling and then one week later at the day you start selling, you place another order, that means you'll likely be out of stock for one week. See how that makes sense? If you have questions about this, let me know because I know it can be confusing for some people, myself included. So yeah, this is lead time. How long it takes from when you start producing your product to when it actually shows up and it's available for sale on Amazon. Something very, very important to keep in mind, okay? And once we know what our lead time is, we can calculate our initial test order. And here's where we have the two schools of thought. So one, your lead time, which we calculated was 45, plus safety stock is going to be your initial order. Safety stock is basically how long? This is my definition of it specifically for Amazon sellers. This is my definition, which is more relevant to you. Safety stock is basically how long it's basically MVT. It's a minimal viable test. What's the least amount of time it would take for you to really understand if your product is a success or not, I think 15 days is pretty low. I would like to see usually around three weeks or three weeks is a little bit better, so that's about 20, 21 days. So I like to see it more closer to 20 days, but 15 is a good amount of time, especially it's a good amount of time on the lower end use basically, think about this, okay? 45 days. That's how long it takes for our lead time, okay? So if we just order 45, that means we place our initial order. It goes into Amazon starts selling. The day that it starts selling, we have to reorder, okay? When we order 45 plus 15, that means so we place our order, okay? And that means we have 15 days before we need to reorder. So that's 15 days of testing to see if our product is viable. I personally prefer 20 days to test the viability of a product. That for me is a little bit better. 15 days though could be enough time. It depends on how competitive product is, how many products you order and all that. But 15 days could be good, but again, I'd recommend more towards 20. But let's just go with this assumption. That would be 60. We would need to order 60 days worth of inventory for our initial order based on this assumption. This means we order 60 days worth of inventory. We aren't going to go out of stock, least for our couple we're not going out of stock, and we never want to go out of stock. We always want to make sure we're reordering um, to ensure that we never go out of stock, okay? So that's how that works and that's why. Because running out of stock can be sorry, it could be detrimental, but not necessarily detrimental. It's not a positive thing. You don't want to run out of stock. It's not in general. If you run out of stock for one or two weeks, for example, there's actually a time it was so terrible. There's a few things that happened that were just stupid on my part in terms of planning, but I ran out of stock twice. So one was in one month and ran out again in the second month. And I originally had a, I was out of stock for about a week. So when I was out of stock for a week, my sales rank went up, which isn't good, right up up up up up up up, you know, down, I guess, you know, it kept dropping, I should say. I got worse. My sales rank got worse, while I was out of stock because that's not a good thing. Then when I got back in stock, I began to go back up, which is a good thing, right? So I ultimately got back to the same place, right? So let's say I was ranked number 100. While I was out of stock, I went to 200, 300, 400. B, you know, and so on, for a week. When I got back in stock and started ranking again, I got back to the same place that I was. So if you're out of stock for one to two weeks, especially, you know, one week not something too much to worry about. That's why as well, if you only, let's say you order 45 days, which is your lead time plus the 15 days, but instead of placing a reorder at the 15 day mark, you reorder at the 20 or 21 day mark, that means assuming your lead time is the same, that you're going to be out of stock for a week. And you know, I'm not recommending that, but you should be okay within reason, okay? So that's something to keep in mind. If you're out of stock for one or two weeks, especially if it's your first order, that may be something that you're okay with doing, but if you have the funds, you've done your research, there's no reason for you not to know if you have the funds, no reason to order more and I would definitely order if this is your lead time, I would definitely order at least 20 if not more, up to maybe 30, right, for this. So 75, I believe, right? Yeah. So you know, 75 days worth of inventory. Now, Sumner, how do we calculate how many days worth of inventory? Here's all you do. It's really simple. Go to Amazon, type in your main keywords and use viral launch and helium ten to look at the top 50%. Top 50%. So organized by revenue on the first page and make sure you're only looking at products that are specifically related to you. So go ahead and don't even look at if you're selling, taco holders, and you see a silicone baking mat show up, don't include that. That's a totally different product, or you see maybe some other kind of holder, I don't know, like a pot holder. That's completely unrelated. Don't include those products. Just look at the top 50% of sellers on for your main keywords and look at vir launch and Helimt and take the average of each seller in terms of sales. So look at how many sales each sellers making every month. Take the average of all of those from viral launch and helium ten. So if you have, let's say you're analyzing, 15 sellers from viral launch, 15 from helium ten, you're going to take all those values, add them together and divide that by 30, total. And that's the average that's basically what the average top seller is selling per day when you divide it by well, that's per month, and then you divide that by 30, right? So you take the average average monthly sales, divide that by 30, that's the average daily sales. Okay? So then you get your average daily sales. So for example, if, let's say the average monthly sales are 300. 300 sales per month divided by 30 days is ten. So that's ten sales a day. So that's ten sales a day multiplied in this case, by 60, that's 600 products that you need to order for your initial test order or more or if it's 75 days times ten, that's 750 products you want to order for your initial test order, okay? So that's one strategy. And that's a strategy of not going out of stock. And again, it's really simple to calculate. If you guys need more information on how to identify, you know, the sales velocity, you know, the daily sales or the monthly sales, let me know. But again, it's pretty straightforward. Use the viral launch and helium ten Crum extension. Look at the top sellers. How many are they selling a day, average it out, see what the average is of the top 50% of sellers. And that's an estimate for you because you want to be a top seller, and that's likely what you are going to sell. That's the best way to estimate in my opinion. So yeah, that's number one. Number two, this is the last part, I promise. So it's the last part. Something you can consider doing is just placing enough just a task. You may be saying, Sumner, I don't have a lot of money, and guess what nobody does. And again, I have video showing you how to generate more or get startup capital for your business, okay? But let's say you're really tight on money, you really don't want to spend a lot of money. You're not confident, although you should be confident, but let's say you're not for whatever reason, you don't want to spend money. Um, what you can do is place just a very minimal order, meaning just enough products, and you know you're going to stock out. You know you're going to stock out, you know that's going to hurt the algorithm, and that it'll take some more money and time for you to rerank for your new products. But maybe we're like, Sommer, I just want to know that Amazon works, that this is going to be successful, and I don't care if I run out of stock. I don't care if the product ends up not working out. As long as I see that Amazon works as a platform, and that's your mindset, what I'd recommend doing is ordering one month's worth of supply, okay, knowing that you're going to go out of stock. I don't recommend but if you want to do a minimal viable test, the minimum amount that I would recommend is a months worth of supply. Okay? So that's enough for you to really rank. So there's some inventory you'll need in order to rank. That's basically to get seen by potential customers. And then you need to basically see, once you rank and once you sell product to rank, then you need to see is this working out organically? Am I selling products passively and organically? And if you follow the steps, you definitely should, okay? You definitely should see that. And basically a month is enough time, in my opinion, for most products to rank. And then also to see organic sales. It's basically the minimum viable test. It's the minimum test to order. So I would recommend ordering a month, so that could be instead of 60 units or 75, if you're really tight on money, if you really I don't want to spend the money, although I recommend that was there's always ways. If you want it, there's always ways to get it a month, it would be the minimum. And really the best would be around more 75 days. 30 days is very, very low. Don't recommend it, but you could do it successfully, just to see that there's success. And then once it runs out, then place another order, and basically have to redo the ranking process and all of that. But again, you can still do it and still be successful. So keep in mind that if your first product, you run out of stock for a month you can still be successful with that same product. It hurts the algorithm. It's a little bit harder to re rank, but it's absolutely still possible and you can do it, right? It's your choice. You can choose between one of the two options. 30 days is low, 75 is the higher end. Now you know how to calculate and why. The key takeaway is if you really don't have the funds, what I'd recommend doing is A, looking at two types of products, A, products that sell less per month. If you see products, my favorite types of products and these are really everyone's favorite types of products in terms of sellers are products that are relatively small and light that have high markups. Again, I know someone who's selling a product. His product costs for shipping and product is $20. He's selling it for $150. That's pretty great. If you take that on a smaller scale, let's say you source something for five bucks or even two bucks and you sell it for 25 or 35 bucks. That's an ideal product. Those are harder to define. But if you're really worried about money, then you need to make sure that you're putting in more effort and work into the product research process. It's just going to be there's less options for you in the product research process. But I recommend looking at lighter products. And I'd also recommend looking at products that generate less monthly sales. So higher profit products. So maybe you sell fewer per month, but they have higher margin to whether they're still generate at least 1,000 or $2,000 a month in profit for you. That's what I'd recommend doing. Okay? So small and light, high margin products. And then, of course, regardless of what you do, low competition, really focus on the low competition. Cause then, by the way, you know, 60 days worth of inventory for a product that doesn't sell, you know, as many units per day versus something that's a lot more competitive, right, is going to be totally different. You could end up spending, you you know, let's just make this up $5,000 in total cost for the first product versus $15,000 in total cost for the second product. And, in both cases, you'd be ordering 60 days worth of product, okay? So hopefully I made that clear. I know it was a little bit kind of scattered brain. It is a little bit difficult to kind of convey. And if you guys have any questions, of course, I'm more than happy to help. Hopefully this helps, though, and let's go ahead and get into the next video. 16. Don't Lose Track Of Your Inventory: Now that you know where your lead time is and how to figure out how many orders you should order for your initial test order, I wanted to share with you guys this inventory management spreadsheet that we use, and we want to share with you. And this document will also be available in the resources below. And we use this to make sure we do not run out of stock. Not only that, but to plan how many units are already on Amazon, if you have a different warehouse, as well. As if you create a new order. And we also use it to plan our next orders in terms of total cost and keep track of how many sales per day and everything. So I'm just going to quickly go through this spreadsheet with you, as well as give you an alternative if you have scaled your business, if you have multiple warehouses and several sales channels or different marketplaces, it does start to get more complicated to keep track of inventory as you expand. So I'm going to give you an alternative at the end of this video. So to start, first, we list all of our products, and I like to separate them by color, knowing for suppliers. So for the first supplier, it could be variation or not, but this is the first color, the second one, the third one. Then you will input your product cost and your shipping cost. And this is just to estimate the order the total cost for each order. But it's not necessarily to keep up with inventory. But then here you're going to list, what is the stock currently on Amazon? And you can always add here underneath this title, the date that you have input those numbers. So Amazon stock December 28, 2020, for example. Here you can input any stock that the way that we use is either already in the USA in a warehouse somewhere that we can easily ship it to Amazon from there, or it's already on its way. It's already paid for, and it's going to arrive at Amazon soon. And the third column is the inventory ordered. So I use this. A lot of times I use this to plan. So, Oh, what what if I order 200, then I go down and see the rest of the results, and you see what I mean by that. But this is the inventory ordered, or you can use it quickly just to plan if I order this much or this much, how long until I'd have to order again. And then here I put expected delivery. So anytime that I've ordered inventory, this is the expected delivery time, so it can help me with that planning. Next, we put the sales per day. And this can vary a lot. We usually use the software called fetcher to get the sales per day, but we're currently transitioning to the software called selix.com, and I'll also leave those links in the resources below. But they will help you your profitable, with your profit accounting as well as understanding your sales per day. So you want to know your sales speed. So that's where you input. You get, for example, 30 days, and you divide many cells how many cells you had through those 30 days, and you divide by 30, and then you input it here. And this will definitely change through fourth quarter and specific seasons of the year. Then here it's just for planning purposes of how many days worth of inventory you want to purchase. So I don't want to worry about this for the next 30 days, or I want to order three months worth of inventory, so you go ahead and put 90 days, and it's going to tell you how many units to order based on sales per day. So that's why it's important, as well, for you to plan. And then here it's going to we add also the inspection cost. But, for example, if you order both of these together from the same supplier, then you only need to pay for one inspection. So at the end, you can subtract $200 or however much your inspection costs. Adding the inspection cost, it will give you the total cost of order based on here, product cost, shipping cost, and how many units you want to order, it's going to give it to you. So it's a very quick way to plan with your cash flow as well as inventory. So that's why we like to keep it together, this ordering amount as well as inventory, how many units you have on inventory. But you can get rid of these if you don't want if you want to know just how many units you have or not, you can get rid of these columns. And then they'll tell you the total inventory. It's going to sum up all of these, the Amazon stock, how much you have in a warehouse, how much you ordered. And then sorry, from this total inventory here, then it's going to tell you, Okay, this is how many days worth of inventory you have, based on the total inventory divided by sales per day, then you have 94 days of inventory, so that's good. That means that if your lead time is X, so we've already talked about figuring out lead time, but I will say you might want to add an extra at least five days, especially lately on how long Amazon has been taking, honestly, to check in and scan the products after they're delivered. I think it's safe to add at least another five days. And then here it says, when to reorder. So I would only have to reorder in 59 days for this specific product. But for this one, it would be 13 days. In 13 days, if I don't reorder, I will most likely run out of stock if I keep up the same sales per day. If it goes higher, no it immediately goes down that number. So, for example, if I start selling nine products per day, then I need to reorder in two days. So usually you don't want to get you don't want to let that number get very small because in our opinion, it's better to have a little bit extra inventory, even if you have to pay for storage than to not have enough because that means you have to relaunch a product. Going out of stock is really bad for ranking, even though Amazon has not made it easy, especially this with the re scanning and the inventory limits. But this is just in our opinion, very useful spreadsheet that we're using every week, sometimes. For certain weeks, especially in busy times of year, I use it every day just to make sure there's nothing else to reorder. And then I also use these last two columns here for the reorder date when just so I know sometimes, oh, it's only 33 days apart, but then you want to know the exact date. Okay, by March or by the end of February, I need to have reordered. So it's good to have the date here as well, as well as any other notes that you want to add. Ask your supplier to split the shipment, something like that. That's usually how we use this last column four. And then, lastly, as I said, I want to talk to you guys about this software. It's called So stoked. We're so stocked. I don't know how to say it, but I think it's so stoked. And to be honest, I have not used it yet. I have just heard about it because this year, we have expanded to new marketplaces. So our inventory pool in the US is a different number than our inventory pool in Europe, as well as our warehouse right now that we have our third party logistic company. So this software was highly recommended in several Facebook groups of experts that we follow. And I will be testing it soon and then hopefully coming back and telling you guys how well I like it. But just so you know, it's called let me go ahead and show you the URL, yeah, it's called sosok.com, and as I've heard, it's great for forecasting. It's great for you to create these groups. You can organize everything by supplier, or you can organize everything by warehouse or marketplace. So I've heard it's very, very useful. If you have used it, make sure to let all the students know. And if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below. And with that being said, let's go ahead and get to the next video. 17. How Your Products Get From China ALL THE WAY To Amazon's Warehouse (Explained): I know the shipping process, especially when shipping products from China to Amazon, may seem a little bit overwhelming or a little bit scary at first for new sellers. So I just wanted to kind of outline the overview of the entire shipping process. There are a few kind of moving parts, but I'm going to show you in other videos, kind of how this all works together and how to make sure there are no issues whatsoever, getting your initial test order from Amazon, ultimately to Amazon's warehouse, and then ultimately into the hands of hungry customers. So let's start here. So it's honestly pretty straightforward, and this is an overview, okay? So there are some steps within this, but this is generally the framework that you want to focus on. So first, production. Your product is being produced by your supplier, and that takes however long. Once production ends, this is either while your products are being produced, actually, I'd recommend, while your products are produced, you use an inspection company to make sure that the products are meeting certain requirements. This could be right after production. But before anything gets shipped, you hire an inspection company. An inspection company is something you definitely want to invest in. They're very, very important. I have videos on this specifically. An inspection company will ultimately make sure that all the goods, all the products are up to specifications. If there are any potential issues or any specific products that they find that have issues, they will write a detailed report and let you know exactly what the problems are if there are, right? This definitely helps you in so many different ways, I mean, just imagine if you ordered products and had no idea if there were any problems, they show up, they get delivered to customers. Customers write negative reviews, they return the items, you potentially if something's really wrong, depending on the product, it goes bad, it could shut down your account. This is just a way to completely avoid all of that and inspection companies are relatively easy to use. It's not a huge long process. I'll show you exactly how I do it and very important. You products are produced or manufactured, then they are inspected by a company to make sure everything's good to go. Once you get the clear, everything's good to go. Then your products will be sent from the warehouse to your freight forwarder or your freight forwarder will pick them up from the warehouse. Unless you have a relatively small order, you will not be using your supplier for shipments. Although in some cases, you will be, again, if you have a smaller order for a decent sized order, and I talk more about this when you should use a freight forwarder and why. Um, you'll be using a freight forwarder. This could either be your freight forwarder or it could just be your supplier here. But for a lot of us, ultimately, as we scale our business, we're going to be using a freight forwarder, which is really great for a lot of reasons. So products are inspected, you know, production ends, they're inspected. They're good to go. Freight forwarder either picks them up or the supplier sends them to the freight forwarder either way. They end up at the freight forwarder. The freight forwarder then handles all of the logistics. Either we ship by sea, or by air, we ship either by sea or by air. The freight four handles everything until it gets to Amazon, I handles everything. It's on its way, ships either by air or by sea, and then it arrives either in an airport or a sea port. Depending and then obviously, the US government will decide if they want to do an inspection of your product. Whether that goes through an Xray or it's a manual inspection. Obviously, manual inspections can take quite some time where Xray inspections can take just a couple of days or, you know, not very, very long. Again, it depends on your product. If you have a more dangerous or hazardous product, this is more likely that it'll be checked and inspected by customs, okay? And otherwise, you know, it'll be pretty quick arriving and running through customs. And ultimately, from the port here, it will ultimately be delivered to Amazon's warehouse. Once it arrives, it just needs three to five days for your product to get scanned and become available online, they need to get scanned in inventory, for them to become available online, and that is basically the entire process, right from hitting the go, starting the order with your supplier all the way to, um, your products being available on Amazon and then obviously from there, Amazon ships and deals with all the returns and everything. Again, it may seem scary. That's why freight forwarders and inspection companies are huge. R not that much more of an investment, and they just help immensely and in my view, are a necessity. So that's the shipping overview. Let's go ahead and actually get into the nitty gritty of this process and show you how simple it really is. 18. IMPORTANT: Miss This And Potentially Lose THOUSANDS: Today we're going to be talking about inspection services for Amazon sellers, how to hire inspection services, who we recommend, what to expect, tips, everything you should know. So first, who do we recommend? We definitely recommend top win inspection. And there's actually a lot of really good inspection companies out there, very comparable to Topwin, and we've tested other companies as well. But we keep coming back to top Win. They are very, obviously very reliable, but they also offer services across all of these different countries, and they are constantly expanding. They also offer all different types of inspections and other services, lab testing, specific inspections for Amazon FBA, and their price is very competitive, as well. And as a matter of fact, you can get a discount code by using code Hobart 25, and you're going to get $25 off your inspection. And as I said, their price is very competitive. A lot of us use Ali Baba, and we can see on the order that Ali Baba offers inspection services for what it looks like very inexpensive, like $48. But we have tested that service before. And even though it was a good service, when we actually got the type of inspection that we're going to talk about soon, the price was very comparable to top win, which is around $200 per inspection. But it obviously depends. So I'm going to leave their link in the description below, but you can also go to top win inspection.com. And now let's talk about the types of inspections. Topwin performs all kinds of inspections and other companies as well. This video is not just about top win. They are just the company that we recommend. But I did get this graph from their website, all these different types of inspections. There is factory audits to see the conditions of the factory, if they are truthful to what they say when you hire them. Let's say they say they have 50 employees, but they only have three. You know, all these kind of things that they start checking if all of the certifications that they say that they have, if they really have. So there's all these types of factory audits. They have lab testings and all. But today we're going to focus on product inspection services. Specifically, as you can see here, three types of inspection services IPI, DPI, and PSI. So IPI stands for initial production inspection, and that usually happens right at the beginning of the production of your product when less than 20% of the products have been produced. And the reason why you would want to do that inspection is because you can catch any mistakes or anything that you might want to change right at the beginning. You can check to see if they have sourced the correct materials, if they're using the correct shapes or if the logo is placed correctly. There are definitely advantages of doing the initial production inspection. There's also the DPI during production inspection, and that usually happens when your supplier has produced 20-60% of your products. And the reason why is because there's still time for any corrective action. You can see more of the process. For example, if they've already started to package some of the products, you can see how it's going and change anything if something is not up to your standards. And lastly, there is the PSI pre shipment inspection. When at least 80% of your products are ready and packaged. That way, you can see not only the state of your product, but also the packaging requirements if they have done the shipping labels, the shipping marks, everything that would be ready to go to Amazon. So what I would recommend is that you at least get your PSI pre shipment inspection for every single order. Trust me, we've heard of cases where people went through a few inspections with their suppliers and then just trusted, they're going to continue to uphold the quality. And then the quality really, really lowered and they suffer consequences from that. So we always account for pre shipping shipment inspection for every single one of our orders. But I would also recommend that if this is your first order of your supplier that you considered adding at least one of the other inspections, the initial production inspection or during production inspection. So you can really be on top of the whole process in every single detail of the production of this brand new product. You either haven't done before or you at least have not done with that supplier before. So I can't stress that enough, highly, highly recommend that you hire inspection services and at least the pre shipment inspection. So there are no surprises, and a lot of people, too, think that they might just do the inspection themselves. For example, produce everything and then ship to your home for example, in the US to inspect. But then what happens if you find problems with the inspection? It's going to cost you a lot more to ship it back to your supplier for them to fix it. That is, if they do accept the shipment back, if the order hasn't been completed yet, and all that. So highly, highly recommend. And now let's go through a couple of inspection tips before I show you the whole process of hiring Topwin and what you are expected to fill out and what you can do to make this process as smooth as possible. So first, make sure your supplier agrees to a third party inspection. The way that we do that is we actually talk to our supplier. We have them sign a purchase order agreement. And we stress this before we even close any deals with them, that we reserve the right to have a third party inspection. Because if you do not mention this before, it can get really stressful down the road. They might not be willing to do that, and then you already pay them part of the fee, and you don't really know if you should trust them or not, even if they send you photos and videos of their own. So definitely make sure they agree. And then along those lines, also discuss with them the course of action if the inspection fails. So top win, when they schedule the inspection with your supplier, they will tell them that if inspection fails, they are responsible for the inspection fees. But a lot of them just sign something or just say that they agree or they don't even notice that that has been said in the email, and then once the inspection fails, they are saying, No, we're not going to pay. So make sure that is very well discussed and agreed upon, and that's actually good for you to talk to them about before you even start production because they are going to put even more effort to produce a very high quality product for you. So make sure you talk to them and make it very clear before you even pay them anything. Also, you're going to see that at least Top Win, but also the other inspect companies that we've used before, they will send you a product specification sheet for you to complete where you can put as many details as you want about your product before they go and inspect the whole production, the whole mass production. So I definitely recommend that you fill out and put as much detail as you can this product inspection sheet, and we're going to go through that very soon. Also, very, very, very helpful is send an approved sample to the inspection company. You should always get a final sample, including the whole package, labels, everything right before you start producing your products. And you should get at least three, and that is one of our tips. One of them is for you to keep the other one is for you to maybe use it for photos, and the third one is for you to send to the inspection company. So they have something that they can compare to when they're inspecting the production. And you might be thinking, why? Like the sample is coming from the same supplier? Like, what difference does it make if I send them one of their samples to what they're going to see later on but one of the reasons why we recommend inspection services is because when you're mass producing something, the quality of every single unit can easily lower. And there's definitely details there might be missed. For example, if you're making, like, a T shirt, they might be sending you a wonderful sample with threads coming off or no stains or anything. But when they're producing 1,000 of them, a lot of them might actually have some defects or the color might be a little bit off, or the logo might be misplaced. So it's absolutely useful to send to the inspection company not only an approved sample, but also as many photos and videos as you can. And as we're going to show you very soon, not just photos and videos of your products, but also any product inserts, labels, everything that you can. Another tip is that you should definitely schedule in advance. Even though we really like top win and they have very nice to us in terms of being able to schedule inspections within short notice. A couple of times has happened that they have been completely booked, and we had to wait a week or at least a few days until they could actually have an available agent to go. So as soon as you talk to your supplier and ask, Okay, when will the order be completed? If they say June 1, then you're going to say, Okay, I'm going to go ahead and schedule the third party inspection. So not only you can guarantee that day that you're going to have the inspection done and you're not wasting any time, but also puts a little bit of pressure on your supplier to actually uphold their word and not have any delays. So I would highly recommend that you schedule inspection in advance. Alright, so now let's see how you would go about booking your inspection. You can go to top win inspection.com, as we mentioned before, and then on the inspection tab, just click and you can easily book an inspection here. So here you can fill out all of the information, your own information and the suppliers information so they can get in contact with them to actually book the inspection. And as I said, if you do go with Topwin, make sure you come here and put the promo code Hobart 25, and you're going to get $25 off and then hit Submit. And then Topwin is going to get in contact with you and send you a product specifications form. And this is what it's going to look like. So here's where you would add as much detail as possible about your product, about your product packaging, about possible issues that that product might have or issues that customers have complained about in the past or that you've noticed in the past, so you can make your money's worth because inspection agent will do a very thorough job even if you don't add this. But if you put anything here, any detail for example, let's say your product has had a weird smell in the past. And if you put it here, they're going to make sure they're going to inspect the product for smell. Just add anything that you might be worried about here. And then you save this and send them replying to the email that they sent you along with all of the photos and videos, and then they're going to be booking the inspection. They're going to go there, be sure you confirm with your supplier that they're there. And then after the inspection happens, it usually takes about two days, maybe three at the most, I don't think it's ever taken more than three days after the inspection for them to send us an inspection report and actually the results. And here's a little sample of what it would look like. So they will send you a report of several sheets, but I'm just going to show you guys a few of them here with the overall result. And I will say that 98% of the time, the results are pending because usually there's just something that the agent want to make sure you're aware before they just approve it completely. So most of the time it's going to be pending, and they're going to say over and over, refer to remark number one, number two, number three, and I'll show you. So it might be a little bit confusing, but this is just going to be the general information, the quantity that they have inspected, the photo that they took the day of inspection of the product or products and the sample sizes. So, for example, for us, we had 1,800 sets of a product, and they have inspected 125 so if you keep going to the next pages, they're also going to be very descriptive about what is the defect that they may have encountered. Sometimes it's a minor stain or sometimes the product just wasn't really packaged, how you would expect. And then they will tell you here if it's major or minor the total of the defects found and the result. And here, it has passed because it's been under the maximum allowed. And if you want to tell them that the maximum allowed is actually three or five, you can tell them too, you are just using their standard numbers that they usually do for the majority of their inspections. And we usually with their standards because honestly, no mass productions are perfect. And as I said, 98% of the time, they come back as spending and just go through the whole report. And what I would recommend is that you take screenshots of any issues that you found, especially if they're not too big or if not many of them have been found. And what we do is that we get back to our supplier and these need to be corrected. Make sure you correct them, make sure you document the correction and show it back to us, the products all fixed so that you don't have to pay for ring inspection. So I would say that nine out of ten times, this is how we would go about solving any issues that the inspection agent might have found. But we have had it happen to us where the inspection has failed before, where there has been way too many issues for us to just trust that they're going to show everything have been fixed. So we just tell them that they are going to have to reinspect and pay for the inspection fees. But it's completely up to you. You might want to negotiate with them, too, that if re inspection is needed, you might split the fee or anything that you prefer. Just make sure you're very clear in your communication with the supplier. And that's it. This is what you should expect when hiring inspection services for your Amazon business. 19. Which Shipping Option You Should Choose: In this video, we're going to talk about types of shipping. And this can seem all the terminology can seem very overwhelming in the beginning and confusing. But hopefully, this is going to clarify everything for you and then make it very easy. And I'll also tell you exactly what we do. So if you don't even want to bother understanding everything, you can just go for it for at least our advice that what you should do. So let's start with the trade terms. What does that mean? So trade terms is the division of responsibility in terms of the shipment. So when a supplier gives you a quote, let's say they say, Hey, this product is going to cost you $3 FOB. This is the FOB price, and you're like, I have no idea what that means. So what is included in that price? Now we're going to talk about every single term that they might tell you for you to understand. So the EXW or X works, that means that 100% of the responsibility of shipment is yours. So the price will not include the shipment from your product, your suppliers factory all the way to Amazon to Amazon's warehouse. So if they give you a cost and say, This is it's $3 EXW, know that that includes nothing regarding shipment. If they tell you that it's FOB, free on board, that means that the responsibility is split, 50% your responsibility and 50% theirs. That means that after production, after they pack everything, they are responsible for taking your goods to the nearest port. That could be a seaport or an airport. And from there, you're responsible, meaning you would have to hire someone, hire an agent, hire a freight forwarder, to get from the port all the way to Amazon's warehouse. So that cost, whatever they give you, cost FOB does not include any shipment from the port to Amazon's warehouse. Next, we have DDU which is delivery duties unpaid and DAP, duties at place. With both of these situations, you would have, what I would say 10% of the responsibility. That means that the supplier included in that price, the delivery of your goods all the way to Amazon's warehouse. But the customs duties and all of the tariffs, any fees that you have to pay when you import the goods at customs, they are not paid. They're not included in the price. And I would highly advise you against especially the duties at place because delivery duties unpaid means that when your goods are in customs, when they arrive at customs, they will be inspected, and they were going to give you a bill. Okay, this is how much you need to pay. So that's going to delay the process, but still it's still at customs. And you can pay and you can send the money there. You can pay there, or your freight forwarder can let you know, Hey, this is the total. You pay your freight forwarder, and they pay the customs agent. That's still okay if you want to go that way. But for duties at place, do not do that if you're shipping to Amazon warehouse, because that means that once the goods get delivered, then the carrier is going to charge the person who received the goods the total fees. And Amazon does not accept that. They will now receive your cartons, your boxes, if you buy the shipment under those conditions. And then, lastly, this is the safest, honestly, the go to the stress free option, which is the DDP, delivery duties paid. That means that you have zero responsibility. You pay your supplier or your freight forwarder, and we're going to talk about freight forwarders later. But you pay them you pay the cost for them to take your goods all the way from the factory to Amazon's warehouse, including the fees and tariffs they might charge you. Um, at customs. So you don't have to worry about anything. Everything's included in the price. A lot of people prefer the DDU because they don't want to they want to make sure that the supplier or the freight forwarder are not overcharging you. Obviously, they're estimating as close as they can, but they're experts, and it's usually really good estimations on the total and giving you the price. So they don't have the risk to maybe owe too much money if they have to cover something. So a lot of people go for the DDU, but for us, we always ship DDP. It's the safest, and there's no delays, and you can be worry. Next, I want to talk to you guys about the types of shipping comparing air shipment and sea shipping. So for both air shipping and sea shipping, and I'm going to move myself out of the way here. For both of those options, you have two options. So for air, for example, you have the Air Express or air Standard. That's usually how your supplier is going to name it. They're going to say air standard. And the difference is in between obviously cost and speed. So Air Express, it's usually around three to five days, and it's usually with a carrier like DHL or FedEx or UPS Express, and they can everything is included. If I'm not mistaken, it's always DDP. That always means it's DDP when you go with those companies. And it's very fast, three to five days to be delivered. For Air standard, it can vary 7-15 days. And what happens is usually with Airtndard the supplier has their own freight forwarder. And again, these can work for both supplier and freight forwarder. But let's assume you're going with your supplier, and they have their own shipping arrangements. So your supplier is going to give your products to their freight forwarder, the shipping company, and the shipping company has a departure date. They're going to wait for several goods and and boxes to arrive so they can fill that airplane in order to leave. So that plays into that range because 7-15 days, so that plays into it because sometimes it takes a few days, especially if you're the first boxes to arrive and also time at custom. So sometimes your products might be stopped and inspected at custom, so that's why that plays into the range. And with C shipping is similar. There's the C express, and they might not say express, but it is a faster, faster shipment and the C standard. So we have had products that the sea shipping time is 18-25 days. So you see 18 that's very close to even 15 days of air and significantly cheaper. And we've had also quotes for C standard, which is usually 25-35 days. So quite a while, there's also, I would say, more risk, obviously, because the goods are longer. They are on the boat for a long time. If there's an accident, there's way too much time for an accident to happen. So yeah, so the cost might also vary. I honestly don't know when you can some freight forwarders offer the faster option and don't even offer that. Whenever we ship with our freight forwarder, when it's not through our supplier, then it's usually a much faster sea shipping. You know, they have their clients, they're giving the attention and priority, and it's much faster, even when it's sea shipping. But usually, if you're going through your supplier, it's going to take longer around a but it is a lot more inexpensive, a lot cheaper when you compare, especially when you compare Sea shipping to Air Express. After COVID, prices have completely spiked. There have been certain products that almost doubled for Air Express because they have a lot more limited quantities of planes that they can fly especially from China into the US. So keep that in mind. And what is our strategy? What do we do? We for our first order, we always ship air. We can also mix it, which is what we especially do for following orders. We split our shipments into the first batch that goes much faster and gets to Amazon very quick by air. Either Air Express or Air Standard, depends on our inventory volume. And then the other batch that is C shipping. And that's actually an amazing strategy because you not only save money, you're not only saving money with shipping part of your order via sea, a lot cheaper this way, but also you're saving money from storage. If you shipped everything via air, let's say you're shipping 1,000 units, you're going to be paying storage for those units that are not sold during that time. So the best strategy and it has worked well overall for us because it is also a gamble. You might actually sell your products that you shipped via air very quickly, and your other batch is still on its way. In the sea somewhere. So it is kind of a gamble, but as you sell more in Amazon, as you understand more of your inventory and sales volume, you can be more calculated about those quantities and how to split your shipment. But for us, it's worked really well. We save money. We save money on shipping quotes and also storage overall. And I hope this will help to you as well. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 20. Do You REALLY Need A Freight Forwarder?: So by now, you probably heard this term quite a few times, which is freight forwarders. What are freight forwarders, and do you need them. So freight forwarders would actually help you with the shipment of your product all the way from China to Amazon's warehouse or wherever you are sourcing from to wherever you want them to go. A lot of times they will help with packing. They will help with obviously the transportation itself, whether it's sea or air. They will help through the customs process, which is very important, someone who actually have the documentation and be able to pay the fees for you or send you how much how much it costs for you to pay the import duties. And they will also help taking it to the final destination, obviously. So when do we recommend you actually use a freight forwarder? So anytime that the total weight of your shipment is over 250 kilograms, this is just a rule of thumb. It's not every single case. But that's when we would recommend you to consider hiring a freight forwarder. Not only you still have two options. You can still hire freight forwarder or you can use your suppliers freight forwarders because a lot of times they do have the company that they partner with. But if it is a smaller shipment, because freight forwarders will charge a fixed fee for their service on top of everything else, you know, the actual cost of transportation, because they would have this fixed fee. If your order is very small, when you want to divide that fee all by those products, it might really increase the cost per unit to ship. But the bigger you order, the less that fee that fixed fee, it doesn't matter how big your shipment is. So the bigger you order, the less it will cost per unit to have the freight forward, do it for you. And in general, they do have a much less expensive quote, and you do need those services in terms of overseeing the customs and all that. When you have an order that is equal or lower to 250 kilograms, what we usually do is we just ship them via the more known carriers like DHL, FedEx, UPS. Those usually cover all of the expenses in terms of DDP, though should you should always confirm with your supplier or whoever's making those arrangements. So if it's you hiring the service yourself, they usually include all of the fees, as well as they take care of all of the customs process and anything to go through the country that you're trying to import those to. And when you do hire a freight forwarder yourself, you want to pay attention on those trade terms that we talked about. If you hire your freight forwarder to ship everything DDP, which is what we would suggest, then make sure that your cost that you're paying your supplier for the product is XWkss EXW because that divides the responsibility perfectly. You are only paying your supply and to produce a product and package them, and you're paying your freight forwarder to pick them up from your suppliers factory all the way to Amazon's warehouse or their warehouse, whatever you choose. So just pay attention to those costs. You don't want to overpay, for example, pay for your supplier in the FOB terms to where the cost includes them taking the cargo to the nearest port or, for example, your freight forwarders warehouse within China. And then double pay by hiring your freight forward in the DDP terms. So just pay attention to that. I think that's one thing that we actually overlooked in our first shipment with our freight forwarder, and we almost paid it twice, but then they helped us realize and make sure that we were doing this correctly. So here's the company that we use. We use WorldCraft Logistics Company. As I mentioned in the previous video, they are three PL, and they also offer the freight services. We've used them with air services, with Sea, and we've had no issues with them. They're extremely through. And one thing that you notice is you need to have a bond to be able to import cargo into a country. So you could use I could use, for example, my freight forwarders bond, and they will charge you a little fee for it, or you could buy your own your annual bond, and they can help you with that process. They have helped us. If you in their case, if you use them three times or more throughout the year, it's definitely worth it to buy that annual bond with them. But if not, they're going to assist with everything that you need. So that's one of the things. They also offer a very quick inspection upon arrival of their products to their warehouse, and they also ship products from their warehouse, their warehouse to Amazon's warehouses. So this is who we go with. I'm not that this would be the best option for you. This is just who we have selected based on our needs, the needs of our business, how many orders we have, the amount and size of our orders. But just so you know you have that in reference, I'm also leaving the link for them in the description below. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 21. Bonds, Duties & Tariffs DEMYSTIFIED: When shipping products to the United States, there are some things you need to keep in mind. There's an old saying that goes, there's only two things that are guaranteed in life, death and taxes. The top three are different types of taxes. I just want to keep this in mind. In general, it is much, much, much more profitable to source products from outside of the United States, even with the taxes associated with that, than to ship and produce your products within the United States. In general. Again, there are certain circumstances that this isn't true, but in general, especially for a lot of Amazon sellers, this is absolutely the case. I just want to keep that in mind. They may seem, oh, my gosh, all these taxes, all these expenses, all this right? But you have to think about it over the long term and also think about your investment. Again, I believe that Amazon FBA in terms of invest in terms of building a private label product based business, in terms of investment amount is significantly better than real estate in terms of cash flow and ultimate, total ROI. Same thing with the stock market. That's just my perspective. So, it may seem like a lot, but you have to think about this in the grand scheme of things, for me, it's been absolutely worth it. So let's go ahead and get into it now. Uh, bonds. All right. There's these things called bonds, not stocks and bonds, but related to shipping. And bonds whenever you hear this term relating to shipping, this is the right to ship goods to the United States. So it's, you know, the right to ship goods from outside the US into the United States. And there are either annual bonds that you can purchase or monthly bonds. If you're using a freight forwarder, they will actually ask you and kind of walk you through a little bit and kind of guide you. At least my freight forwarder did, and that's why I recommend World Craft logistics because they've done a phenomenal job. I they've taught me a lot, too, by the way, and have really helped me through the process. And that's actually where I learned a lot of this information from. So bonds are the right to ship against the United States. You can either get an annual, I believe, or monthly, obviously different price points there and the freight forwarder will walk you through that. Duties. So duties are the actual tax, and they're tax based on the type of good, okay? What you can do, this is very important, guys. What you can do is you can ask your supplier for your duties code, ask them, I would like my duties code so I can calculate my duties tax, right? So different certain products have a 0% duty on them, others have 25%. What that means is, you'll pay anywhere 0-25% of the cost of producing those items. So let's say it cost, I'm just making this up. Let's just say it costs you $2,000, right? 25% of $2,000 is 500. Okay? So that's obviously very, very high. Your duties would be $500, in that case, if it's 0%, you pay $0, right? So it depends on the type of good, and there's an online can just look up maybe on good to link to this as well. There's a calculator. You can just look up duties tax calculator. You basically enter in your product code into the calculator, hit Enter, and it will tell you what your duties percentage is, yeah the percentage is the percent of the amount of money you spent on producing product from your supplier, okay? So that's duties. Tariffs. These are really fun, of course, you would see this through the United States. Tariffs are an additional tax on top of duties. So this is basically a double duty or it's a tax on top of that. And depending on when you're watching this video, it changes and especially recently it's been changing relatively frequently. So you can kind of look at, you know, what the tariff rate is at the particular time you're watching this video because again, it will definitely change, either increase or decrease, right? So you can kind of look into that as well. It's readily available on Google. And then customs, okay? Customs This isn't a door. This isn't a tax. It's not another a this is just something to keep in mind that if you are sourcing more flammable or dangerous products from outside of the United States, you're more likely to get checked and inspected by customs. If you're familiar with Elon Musk, Elon Musk was shipping flame throwers around the world. I think you might have been importing. I forget where he's getting them produced, but he labeled on the crates, not a flame thrower to try to get through customs. So yeah, flame throwers, you know, knives, ingestibs, right, like vitamins and supplements, flammables, batteries. These are all more likely to go through custom to get inspected by customs. And they can either be inspected via an Xray, which is relatively quick. It's not super long. I think it's a couple days, I want to say, to go through Xray. And there's also physical inspection where a human being, I don't know if they use canines or whatever, it's kind of the US government wants to keep this a little bit ambiguous, but it'll take you up to, you know, two to three weeks by a human being actually inspecting products, okay? So there's something to keep in there's one time that my product was inspected. I think it was a few days that it was held up at Customs, something to keep in mind when shipping product. But many times your product will go through customs without any issues. It won't get held up for two or three weeks getting inspected, but just something to keep in mind that obviously all products coming into the United States will be not that every single product is opened and inspected, but the goods will be inspected and it is potential that you could have a manual inspection. So just to keep that in mind, one way to avoid getting this manual inspection is to be honest and completely fill out all the information required. Again, if you're using a freight forwarder, they will provide lots of information, they'll ask you about the bonds. They'll ask you some information and calculate duties and tariffs and all that. They'll give you will give you some insight on customs and just things to maybe watch out for. So that's another reason I love using freight forwarders. They're so helpful. But yeah, pretty straightforward. If you have any questions, let me know and let's go ahead and get into the next video. 22. Keep This In Mind When Shipping To Other Countries: I wanted to make this quick video just as a reminder that if you're planning on shipping products from China or wherever you're sourcing them from to Canada or other countries, make sure you do your research into what is needed, what is required for you to import those shipments. If, for example, Canada, which is very common for people to start expanding to Canada or start in Canada, it will depend if you're Canadian citizen or not to where if you need to register your business in Canada or not in order to receive those shipments into the country, as well as all of the other countries that unfortunately, we cannot cover all of them here because every single one not only has its own requirements or specific things, but that is constantly changing. So we have explained everything that you need to do, especially considering the USA market. But if you're planning on shipping to any other country, including Canada that in so many things are very similar to the US and you're not Canadian you definitely need to do your research and be sure that you have all of the requirements to fulfill that importation. And a lot of times, a freight forwarder can help you with that. So that is another perk of hiring a freight forwarder. You can ask if there's anything that you need, if you need a certain registration number. So just a friendly reminder to do your research and make sure you're complying with all of the necessary requirements. So if you guys have any questions or anything that you want to share with the other students, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 23. Product ID Terms Simplified!: Another quick video to just clarify, hopefully, something that confuses a lot of sellers, which is bar codes and the product ID terms. So when you hear GTIN UPC or EAN, they're talking about these numbers that you will purchase. You need to purchase, like the government or someone owns these numbers. Honestly, I'm not sure who owns them, but you need to purchase this code as an ID for your unique product. So what these um, word stand for is GTIN is global trade item number, UPC, I believe it's Universal product code, and EAN is European article number. And it can vary the number of characters as well. I believe UPC is 12 digits. EAN is 13. Can purchase them from Europe or the US or GTIN with a lot more digits. The main important thing for you to know is that this should be a unique number for your products. If you're a private label seller, that means that no one should be able to find that exact product anywhere else. Either you put your logo on it, you made a different package. It's a different color, you customized it. Then ideally, that is a very unique product. So you need a unique identification number. So that's why you need to purchase this. Now, this is the let's say global and universal ID number for a product. You don't necessarily need to show this number on your product. You're going to need this number to create your listing. When you're creating your listing and it asks you for your product ID, you would put the digits and then product ID type you would put if it's UPC, EAN, and all that. You're going to need this number only for this stage if you're selling on Amazon FBA. Next, once you create your listing, Amazon is going to give you a unique ID as well. This is called ASN, and the ASN is pretty much the Amazon ID number. This is how you're going to easily locate your product on catalogs. You can easily see what an ASN number is of any specific product. For example, on Amazon, it would be these I don't know if you can see. Let me make sure. Ah, there you go. It usually starts with the letter B, sometimes it doesn't is fine, but it's these numbers the combination of letters and numbers over here. And you're also going to be able to see that in your seller centre account. Right underneath the title on the manage inventory page. And then lastly, the F&SQ or FNSKU. I don't know how most people say what's the correct term. But F&SQ it's also an Amazon label that you absolutely need to have. And it's a combination of the barcode. So Amazon can scan your product when it arrives at Amazon's warehouse. So absolutely important when it arrives, and every time it gets sold as well, they need to scan it for inventory management with the number right underneath the number that Amazon sometimes that can be your ASN, sometimes it's not it's a unique Amazon number. Underneath, it's the title, and right here it says, My Amazon product description, but it's the title. Then in the specification, usually it's the beginning of the title and the very end. So if it's a variation, it's going to show at the end the color. And then underneath, it's the condition, which most likely is going to be new. So this is the label that you're going to print or get the file and send to your supplier so that they may sticker on the product. You might want to print on the package if you have a box package, but honestly, in my opinion, it's a lot easier to just make them as stickers, especially because later on, if you want to change your title, every once in a while it's good to update this label, if you change your title or color name or something like and then it's easy you just send the new file to your supplier, and then you print the new one and sticker on your product. So this is it. When we talk about UPC, especially UPC and F&SQ, people can get very confused thinking that this is what you send to your supplier, but it's not. Especially specifically if you're selling on Amazon FBA. Now, if you're creating a product package to sell on, I don't know, Walmart or I don't know, Target or another place or a grocery store, then you would need the bar code on the package so it can be scanned for all of the sales. But Hopefully, this is no longer confusing. I hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 24. UPC Codes - Do You Need One?: Okay, so I already explained what UPC bar codes are, but how do you go about purchasing them? And what are valid UPCs? So, according to Amazon, they verify the authenticity of each UPC code against the GS one database. So what they say is that they recommend obtaining your UPCs directly from a GS one database because if not, it says here, if your UPC is found invalid, your product will be removed. You may lose your selling privileges, your account can get shut down and all that. So you definitely want to take this seriously. However, a lot of other Amazon sellers have had experiences with buying much less expensive options, but I'm going to show you guys all of this right now. So the GS one website that Amazon recommends is this one. But as you can see, when you scroll down, this is the this is the fee. So it is a little bit expensive for each bar code, as well as the renewal fee that you need to have every single year. Now, here's a little tip. You actually don't need to buy your GS one code from Amazon from the GS one US. You can buy from GS one UK, and those are cheaper options. So it's still against the GS one database. Even if you're going to sell on Amazon US, you can buy your bar code from the GS one UK, and as you can see, it is less expensive option. And what I was mentioning before is that some sellers, they do risk buying their codes from websites like nationwide, barcode or barcode Mania and all that. And I want to make it very clear you may get really bad consequences for it. As I mentioned, you may get your account shut down and all that. But a lot of sellers do that without any consequences as of right now. And you can see the price is significantly lower. Like, $12 for just one barcode, and when you buy it for, um, in bulk, it gets less and less expensive. So a lot of people do use this website to get your UPC code. But the best option if you do not have the money and if you do not want to risk and you're selling private label options is actually getting GTINEemption. And I'm going to leave this link in the resources below, but you can find it through your seller center account, and it shows who is eligible to request GTINEemption. That means that you do not need to buy a UPC barcode. You do not need to buy a number, and you can create your listing with just Amazon is going to give you an ASN. So you're going to have a product ID, but it's only going to be the ASN. And you can do that if you're planning, especially if you're planning to only sell on Amazon. And there are eligibilities here that you can go through and read. But if you're one of them that indicate that you're eligible is if you're selling private label products. So if it's your own product and you're only selling on Amazon, there's really no need for universal code. So that's why they grant DTINEemption, and you can apply this link over here, and you have to apply first for each category that you want to sell in. So you find a category here, then you put your brand name and you apply for it. And second, you have to do this before you even create your list. And once you're approved and you're creating your listing, when you select when you input your brand name on the brand field of your list, listing creation, you might get an error, which is okay. It's now coming that's the way that Amazon's verifying all of the information. You might get an error saying that you cannot that brand is not registered. So you cannot create it with that brand. So what you need to do is contact Amazon Seller Support, unfortunately, that's their protocol now. You have to contact them. You have to send them photos of your product to request that GTINEemp for you to use your brand name as well. Even if you're not brand registered, you send photos with your brand name on the product. And later on, we're going to talk about types of labels, and one of them is all the labels that you need to put on your product. So you might actually put your brand name just on the label. You don't need necessarily to have your brand on the product itself, like printed or carved or whatever it is. So you can actually use one of your samples that you got from your supplier with that label, that shipping pre shipment sample that we already talked about. And you get it from your supplier, and you use those to take photos, to send it to Amazon Seller support so they can completely approve you. And this is a lot less headache. You're not getting you're not running the risk of getting your account shut down for purchasing cheap and invalid barcodes, and you don't have to spend a fortune. So that's what I would advise. Some people do run into certain issues when they're applying for GTIN. Be patient. Amazon. This is a somewhat new program from Amazon, and I believe they're going to keep improving it, as well. So if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 25. Understanding How GTIN Exemption Works: So today, we're going to be talking about how to apply for GTI in exemption. But before I show you guys the whole step by step process, I want to talk to you guys about the pros and cons of applying for GTI in exemption. I know I already mentioned what it is a little bit in the video before this one, but I wanted to really hone in and talk to you guys about the pros and cons so you know what you're getting into and actually decide for yourself if you want to apply for the exemption or not. Okay, so let's start with the pros. The biggest and probably only benefit of applying for GTI in exemption is that you get to save money. Now, I'm not saying this is anything small because bar codes, as you probably know, are pretty expensive. If you go to the GS one website, which is what Amazon recommends, it's about $250 per code plus $50 renewal fee every year. So that can easily add up. And at least this is for the US website, the GS one US website. And there is a hack that we've already mentioned here before that you can go to the GS one UK website, and it is cheaper. But it's still quite expensive, especially if you're launching a lot of products at once, or if you're just testing out products, which is not usually what we do. We usually go all in in one product and develop as much as we can work on the brand. But a lot of Amazon sellers just want to test out lots of products at once. So having to buy all of these bar codes can get quite expensive. So apply for GTI and exemption can definitely be a benefit to save money. But now let's talk about the cons. The first con is that you are limited. The sales channels that you use are limited because some sales channels actually require you to have a UPC code associated with it. One of those examples is Walmart, Walmart Marketplace. If you want to sell Walmart in the US, you have to have a UPC code associated with every single one of your products that you list. So having the GTINEemption and not having to buy the bar code is good if you're selling mainly on Amazon. And I mean, you can still sell on other sales channels like Etsy, for example, and you're not obligated to have a UPC, at least as of right now, but for other sales channels, you have to have it. So just know that you might be saving money right now if you're selling only on Amazon or a few other sales channels, but you're limited. The other con is that if your brand ever changes, as I'm going to show you guys, when you apply for GTI and exemption, you have to choose the exact name of your brand, and if your brand ever changes, you are going to have to create a complete new listing on Amazon. They won't just simply change you can just go on the back end of the listing and then change the brand name to your new brand. So just keep this in mind, this is not a big problem if you're already brand registered. That was our case. We actually did apply for GTI and exemption, and we were already brand registered, so we haven't had any problems with that because we haven't had to change our brand. And then the last con is that it's possible that you might get some Bc difficulties or some issues. And this is not like an official thing. It's just from personal experience. As I said, when we apply for GTI and exemption, we actually had separate listings at the time, and when we try to make them into variation family, it was very, very, very difficult especially because I think the existing parent ASN was already associated with other listings that had UPC codes, and trying to merge the new ones that did not have was extremely difficult. But at the end, we were able to solve it took a lot of headache and a lot of calls to Seller Centro. I just want you guys to be aware of all of these cons and all of these limitations. But obviously, the benefit of saving money is a big one, and we know that's why we have applied before for GTI and exemption, and you might be interested, as well. So with that being said, I'm going to show you guys exactly the step by step process now. And starts by going to this link right here, which I'm also going to leave it below. Once you click on that link, you'll be taken to this page, which talks about everything about GTI and exemption, what product categories are required to have UPC numbers and which ones you actually can apply for GTI and exemption. And just in general, I believe the majority of you guys are actually going to be private label sellers. And for almost every single category, if you are selling a private label product, you are able to request GTI and exemption. But you can go here and download the list of brands that require GTI and you're going to be able to see if you're selling one of those brands, which usually it's for people who are doing retail arbitrage or if you're already selling a product that already exists and it's a well known brand, or even if it's not that well known, you have to download this list to see if you actually can apply for GTI and exemption, being in that category or having that brand or not. So once you review that, you can also go to this link right here, which I already have open, and it's going to show you exactly by category if you need to if it requires a UPC or if you can request GTIN. So here, for example, baby products, the major brands do require UPC code, just like we talked about, but exemption may be requested for private label brands. So that's what I was saying. If you're selling a private label product, almost every single category, you able to apply for GTINEemption. So back at that first link, you're going to be able to scroll down here. It's going to show you the exact step by step process of applying for GTIN. And before we actually go ahead and start applying for GTINEemption, be aware that you must have these requirements right here before you apply. So you need your product name and a minimum of two or a maximum of nine product images showing all sides of your product. And it needs to have the brand on the product or packaging. Also, if you're applying for GTI and exemption, your packaging cannot have any barcode, any UPC barcode showing. Also, the brand needs to be on the product itself or on the package like engraved on it, printed. A lot of people have asked if they can use just a label, like a sticker label. And I actually did hear of a lot of people who have been approved just with a label on the product packaging, but they have gone to lengths to make that label very professional looking. So having the brand name very well printed, maybe some design on that sticker and really well placed on the product packaging as well. And they have been able to use that as the brand of the product that it is required when you are applying for GTI and exemption because as you're going to see, you need to have a brand associated with that product when you're listing, or you're going to have another option. And I'm going to show you guys what the other option is. So you can just go here and click on this link, apply for GTINEemption. Alright, once you're here, just go ahead and select the product category that you want to sell in. So, for example, I'm going to go ahead and choose home and garden. After you select your product category, you're going to choose your brand and the brand that you want to associate with your product. If you do not have a brand, as it says over here, you can just list generic, but you have to It is case sensitive, so be sure you you put the G as uppercase letter, and then everything else lowercase. So you can do generic or you can do your own brand. And you can apply for GTI exemption for several brands and for several categories, up to ten. So you can always click here if you want more product categories, you can add more here and you can add more brands as well. So let's say you're going to you also have a brand. I'm going to go ahead and choose like Hobart products, for example. And then you can click here and check eligibility. Okay, as you can see, you automatically approved for the generic brand, and I'm going to show you guys how to add a product next for Hoberts products, because that brand is not registered yet. If I went ahead and had selected the brand that I already was brand registered for that we have here, then I wouldn't have had this issue. I would have been automatically approved, as well. But since this is a new brand that maybe it's your case, you do not have a registered brand yet, then you're going to see here that this requires brand approval. So all you need to do is contact seller support and mention that you got the error code 5665. And along with that case that you're going to create, you need to spell out the brand that you're trying to get approved for. So Hobart products. Again, it's case sensitive. So if you have the uppercase H and uppercase P, you have to spell out the exact same and also, as we mentioned before, you need to have the photos of all of the sides of your product. The brand does not need to be on all of the sides of your product. It can be on just one of the sides of the product or packaging, but they still want to see all of the sides of your product in the images as well. And lastly, do not take screenshots or um send them any manipulated photos. They want real photos you can even have like your hand holding the product itself. You can take it with your phone. It does not need to be a fancy photo. They just wanted to make sure it wasn't manipulated at all. So you can just go ahead and do that if you want to list it for Hobart products. But since we've been approved for generic, this is how you would go about adding a product now with GTI exemption, go ahead and click Add a product. And now you just have to follow all of the same steps of adding your products that we've shown here before. But I'm going to go ahead and show you guys everything. So let's say I'm adding a product not sold on Amazon, which would be a private label product. Go ahead and click on Alright, I had to move myself out of the way because the sun was starting to catch up. But once you're in this page, all you have to do is actually find the category that you applied for in your exemption. And for us was Home and Garden or home and kitchen. I think it would be here. So go ahead and select that category and go down the path until you find the exact unique category that you want to list your product in. So, let's say, for example, that we want to sell in home decor, and we want to sell clocks. And let's see what else? Let's see, we want to do alarm clocks. So select category. So once you get here, you're going to see that you are not required to put a product ID number. It would be highlighted in red and have the asterisk here if you were required. But since we apply for GTI and exemption, you see that this is no problem, but you do have to have the product name brand and manufacturer. So let's just say we want to do modern digital Let's just say this is our title for now. Then for brand, what you're going to have to do is this, as you saw, we were approved for the generic brand. So you're going to have to add the word generic here. So it needs to be K sensitive, so it needs to have the capital G. So once you do that, in this case, for this product category, it is asking for a manufacturer. Honestly, in our experience, we just put anything. Unless you know the manufacturer, we can just put like Hobart products. And then you just have to fill in the offer here with, let's say, we're going to do ten, 1999, and then condition new. And all you have to do now is submit, save and finish, and your product is going to be created. And you didn't have to spend a lot of money to buy your bar code for this product. And for the other case, as we already mentioned, if you have to prove your brand, you need to contact Teller Support, mention the error code, send them all of the required photos, and that's it. You're ready to go. This is the Amazon GTINEemption process. And I hope you found this helpful. And let's go ahead and get to the next video. 26. Shipping Labels You MUST Have (Biggest Mistake New Importers Make): In this video, we're going to talk all about types of labels. And this can be very confusing throughout the process of selling your product on Amazon because these terms a lot of times are used in a slightly different way and in different meanings as well. So it can get confusing, but hopefully this video will clarify everything in all of the labels that you need or should, in our opinion, have so the first one is the FNSKU label that we've already talked about. If you're selling on Amazon FBA, you need to go to your manage inventory page and download the print item labels, and that is the FNSKU. And we're going to show you this specifically on our tutorial when we're creating the shipping plans. But we're going to show you exactly where to go, know that you need, as you know, as we already showed before, the FNSKU label. Each product by each product, each unit that you sell needs to have that label. And what do I mean by unit? If you're selling just one water bottle, for example, and it's $10, that water bottle, whatever packaging it is, needs to have a label. If you're selling a set of ten water bottles and it's whatever, $50 for one set, that set needs to be packaged together and have one label. Okay, so that is what I call by unit. Next, you need to have the country of origin on the product itself, as well as the box, which we're going to talk about soon. But this is a national requirement. I think it's an international requirement, but definitely for the United States, you need to show, for example, made in China on your product. Now, when I say on your product, it could be on a label, like a sticker that you put on your product packaging, but it needs to be visible and it needs to be there. So what we do, I'm going to show it very soon, but we actually combine this requirement with two others. The next one is the suffocation label. So you need a warning. Whenever your package is if your package is a bag, a lot of times a lot of packages are those transparent bags. And if that bag when flat, if that opening measures more than equal or more than 12.7 centimeters, you need that suffocation warning. Now, some bags already come with that warning printed on the bag, but you might not want that. It might honestly not look very professional. It looks very industrialized. Now that premium, in my opinion. So there are other ways that you can fulfill that requirement, and the next label would be the brand. And what we do is actually we combine the country of origin, the suffocation label and the brand. You're not required to have your brand name on the product, okay? But it can be very useful if you're applying for DTINEemption, as we talked about, because they will ask for photos, and there should be your brand name on the product. So that could be on the label on a sticker. So what we do is this. We usually have a label like this with our product name, then the warning, and then made in China. If it's made in China. If it's made somewhere else, then have it the other country. But that's how we fulfill it. And another tip is, if you have a fabric, a fabric product or something that requires a washing label, you can implement in that same label as well. And you can copy this design. It's not honestly very unique design, but you can be very creative as well to make a beautiful label if you want for your package. Next, we have the shipping mark, and a lot of people ignore this or don't even know that there are requirements for this. But the shipping mark or carton label, some people call it carton label, but I don't usually call it shipping mark, and usually that's where the industry understands looks a little bit like this. There's certain information that one you're required to have on the box itself. So let's say there are 100 units within that box. So there's certain information that you and there's certain information that would be very helpful for you to have, especially if you're working with a third party logistic company, a warehouse, or if you're storing things yourself in order to keep track of your inventory. So I actually got this from our freight forwarder. This is how we structure our shipping mark. Which is our company name, then what is that product? So, like I said, it's like red shoes. And next, how many units are inside that carton. Those three are not required. What you're required to have is the weight, the dimensions, and the country of origin, as you see it next. So you need the total weight of that box, and you're going to need that weight, also, to create a shipping plan for Amazon. You also need the dimensions of that box printed on the box. And you need the country of origin. And you can ignore that last part, the product ID. You can put your product ID. You can put your ASN if you want. But that last part with the barcode is specific to the freight forward that we use, so you can ignore that. But the number one reason why products are stopped at customs to get inspected or why it takes so long at Customs is because they don't have the country of origin on the box. So this is extremely important. Make sure your supplier has this, and it is in our purchase agreement as well. We make sure, but always make sure the inspection company also inspects for that. And one thing that it's valid to know is that it does not need to be printed on the box necessarily. It could be printed on a paper and then stickered on the box. Preferably on two sides of the box, two opposite sides of the box to make it easy. But that's not a requirement. But lastly, the less label last type of label is the shipping label. And the shipping label is what you're going to get when you create your shipping plan. So after you create your shipping plan and you put the cart and weight and dimensions and all that, then you're going to confirm your shipment, and you're going to be able to download that shipping label. That is specifically for Amazon warehouse check in. So the staff when they receive your boxes, they can scan that, and they can check in and know that this is your product, this is for your account. And and keep track of all of those shipments, all of the shipping plans and cartons that have arrived. So those are the six type of labels that you need. And I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions at all, we're going to show the step by step, as I said, of the F&SQ as well as the shipping labels. Next. But if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 27. Getting Your FNSKU Labels From Amazon: In this video, I'm going to show you how to download the item labels, the FNSKU labels that you need to send to your supplier so they can attach to every single one of your products, as we already talked about this requirement. So from your seller Centre account, hover over inventory and then click on Manage Inventory. From here, we're assuming that your listing is still under the fulfilled by merchant category. So if your listing is already fulfilled by Amazon, you can skip the next few steps. But if it's not, I still want to show you guys how to make sure you change it to fulfilled by Amazon if that's the fulfillment of your choice. So just click on the little arrow that looks similar to this. Next to the Edit button, I'm covering it. But click on that little arrow and then click on change fulfilled by Amazon. From here, you can select either an Amazon barcode or manufacturer barcode. Actually, you can only select that if you have used the UPC code or a GTIN code. If you went for the GTINEemption, you can only have Amazon barcode selected. To be honest, it hasn't really played any difference to us. Select a manufacturer barcode or Amazon barcode but you can always change it back. So select one of those and then click on Convert only. Next, you're going to have to fill the dangerous goods information. So just click on that link. And then from here, make sure to read it and select if it's yes or no, but most of the time, and if you follow our advice, it would be no and then click on Submit. And finally, just click on Save and Continue. And that's going to convert your product. It might take a few minutes, maybe about 15 minutes to convert your product from fulfill my merchant to fulfilled by Amazon. And then once that's completed, you can go back to the manage inventory page and click once again in the little arrow next to the Edit button and then select print item labels. From here, you can input however many labels you want to print and send it to your supplier, and just click the button Print item labels. Then you're going to be able to download a PDF file that you can email it to your supplier and they are used to. They know how to print it and attach it to your products. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 28. Make Sure You're All Packed Up: Alright, now that you know about all of the different types of labels, it's important to always check for Amazon's packing requirements. So here's the link, and I'm going to leave those in the resources below as well that you can copy. And it looks like this. Amazon show tells you about all of the packaging and prep requirements, and that's going to be product specific or category specific. So I can't cover every single one of them here. So make sure to click on this link and go through everything. And two very common questions that we get on our Facebook is that can I combine all of the FNSKU label, the warning label and the country of origins all in one label, and I would advise you not to. Some people do, and it's fine. But there are certain requirements, as you can see, of the size of the font, the text, as well as the spacing around the text, the white spacing around the text. And so I would advise you not to mess with that design or the proportions or anything. Just download the file as it comes from Amazon and send it to your supplier because you don't want to run the risk of your labels not being up to standard, and then Amazon having to relabel them and you having to pay a fee for every single unit that they relabel. Another common question is that if your product already has that UPC code printed on it, do you need an F&SKU label? So the answer is yes, not only you would need an F&SKU label, but you need to cover the existing UPC code with that label. No other bar code should be showing that is not that doesn't have anything to do with Amazon. We do have the box bar codes and outside of the box. But Amazon wants efficiency for when they're scanning in your products or when you get in order and you have no delays. So you need to make sure the labels, the preps, the packaging is all up to standards. This link is going to tell you what is the max weight that each carton can have or max dimensions. So be sure to read through everything to make sure you're not overpay or you're not having headaches, having to redo things. And I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 29. EFFORTLESSLY Create Your Amazon Shipping Plan (Step-by-Step): This lecture, I'm going to show you how to create your Amazon shipping plan. Basically, you need to let Amazon know that you're planning on shipping products into one of their warehouses. Amazon is going to tell you which warehouse is best to send your products into. You're also going to be able to create shipping labels to put on your products as well. You want to make sure you do all of that and I'll cover that step by step by step in this video. First, what you want to do is log into your Amazon Seller Central account. Next, go ahead and head over to manage inventory. Once you are there, find the product that you want to create a shipping plan for, which I've already done here. Click on these two up and down arrows here. What we're going to do is click on send slash Replenish Inventory because we're going to be sending inventory into Amazon's warehouse. All right. And then once you click on that link, what you want to do first is go down here to ship from. So we're going to click on this ship from another address, so go ahead and click on that. Okay. You're likely not going to have any of this information here. I'll probably luring it out anyway. Sensitive information. I'm going to scroll down and show you what to do. Here, you're going to enter in the ship from Address. This is where the products are shipping from. Really straightforward. Honestly, this whole process is straightforward. There's just a couple of specific parts I want to point out. This is one of them. So you'll enter in your suppliers shipping information here. Now, what some sellers have done successfully, is they'll enter in an address in California, specifically near the Los Angeles area, and you may be thinking, why would they do that? Well, the reason for that is that they get a higher likelihood of getting their products sent to an Amazon warehouse in LA. So most products that are shipped to Amazon, at least for a lot of new sellers are going to come from China, okay? So most products shipped from China go through the LAX or go through the port in LA, right in Los Angeles, California. So from there, right, if you get the product that you're sending, so you get it into through customs, right, your products are right there. If you can get them to LA's or Amazon's LA warehouse or one of their warehouses, that's really quick to get your products in and get them scanned, right? If they need to get shipped across the US, let's say to New York or Florida or somewhere else, right? That's still significant journey that the products need to travel before they even start getting scanned in. So this is a way to kind of a hack to kind of reduce your lead time to get your products up and running on Amazon as soon as possible. That is up to you if you would like to do that. But technically, what you are supposed to do is what Amazon asks of you and that is your suppliers ship from address. You can go ahead and fill that out. I've gone ahead and done that already, so I'll go back up to the top where we were. All right. Once you fill that out, just make sure that you create a new shipping plan checked, which it should be. And then here for packing type, again, if you're ever stuck on a question or things slightly change for you for whatever reason, you can go ahead and find these little like what is this links that'll really help you out as well. Just to kind of keep that in mind, always look for those little links. But here, we're going to go ahead and choose case packed products unless individual products are if you within one carton, one of those big boxes that I talked about before, you have multiple different types of products, and let's say, an orange T shirt, a blue T shirt, a red T shirt, all different kinds of colored T shirts, that would be individual products. But case packed, which is most likely going to be the case for you, is the same product. Let's say a red T shirt, they're all red t shirts or in this case, maybe blue T shirts all blue T shirts in every single case. Something else I want to mid I just want to let you know as well. This is very, very important to make sure you keep this in mind. So remember I talked about little boxes and big boxes. Little boxes just the box or the bag that your product goes in. The big boxes are what your products go into. It's called a carton sometimes or a case, right? So in that big box, you want to make sure that you have in all those big boxes that you send to Amazon, all of your cartons, your cases, that they have an equal number of products in each. Okay? So for example, let's say shipping two cartons of products into Amazon's warehouse and one of them has 49, the other has 50. That's a problem. You want to make sure that either both have 49 products in them or both have 50 products, you just want to make sure that when you are ordering product from your supplier, you may need to order a few more or a few less of the product to make sure you have an even number of products per big box, per case per carton. You just want to make sure that there's an equal number in each to prevent any issues. I just want to make that very clear. If you have questions about it, let me know, but it should be pretty straightforward. Once you do that, click on Case PAC products. Click on Continue to shipping plan. All right. So we're going to enter in the units per case and the number of cases, okay? So let's just say we have 50 products per big box, and we're going to have two big boxes. Okay? So we're ordering, and this is, again, totally hypothetical. This would probably be really low, but we're ordering 100 products. 50 of them are going in one box, 50 are going in another box or one case and the other in another case. Really straightforward. So yeah, go ahead and enter that in there and then click Continue. All right. And then here, we have the section of who preps, okay? So you either have the option of Amazon, prepping or merchant. Now, what does that mean? Who's prepping? What are they prepping? So what prepping is specifically in regards to your shipping label. You could have Amazon do it for you, but it's going to be very expensive. A lot or I should say, a lot more expensive than you just doing it yourself or having your supplier do it for you. So in every case, I would recommend, merchant, it's up to you, but that's what I do. That's what most other sellers do. It's not really that much effort and it's a lot cheaper, so I don't see why not. Go ahead and click that and hit Continue. Here, I've already shown you how to print your labels or specifically your FNSQ. So at this stage, you can just go ahead and hit Continue. All right. From here, we are going to make sure we're going to name our shipping plan, which I'd recommend that you do. Right here, I'm going to go ahead and delete this and I'm going to put um example shipping plan. But you can put in your product name and the date that you made it. This will be really important to do to make sure you keep track of everything and organize, otherwise it can get very messy. Just make sure you name this properly, name it. Again, it's not important. It's just for you internally. So you name it whatever you like just to keep track of things. Go ahead and hit approve and continue. Once you get to this stage, you'll see that Amazon has generated a shipment ID for you and go ahead and verify that the information is correct here and click on Work on shipment. You'll scroll down to get to this section here. And 99% of the time, your shipping method will be small parcel delivery. If you are palletizing, if you're using palettes, you may select this one here. If you have no idea what I'm talking about. If you're not using palettes, then you're likely going to select small parcel delivery. For shipping carrier, we're going to use, in this case, if you see the one you're using, if it's DHL or FedEx or whatever it may be, you can go ahead and enter that in. But a lot of times, it'll be other, so I'll go ahead and hit or enter in other and scroll down. All right, shipment packing. Is everything going to be in one box or we're going to have multiple boxes. Remember how we showed that we had two boxes. We had 100 units, 50 in each box. We have two boxes, so it's going to be multiple boxes. And this threw me off. This is why I'm going through this step by step. I remember Amazon used the terminology case. Remember I have small box big box, big box is where all the products go into. Um, so they used to call the big box term case. Now they're calling it box. So it can be a little bit confusing. That's why I'm trying to walk you through. But when they say here, multiple boxes, that's multiple cartons, multiple cases, multiple big boxes, not individual product boxes, if that makes sense. All right. So we're going to go ahead and use the web form. That's the easiest. All right. Scroll down here, and then for shipment quantity, y we have 100 units per box. We have 50 per box, number of boxes, remember two boxes. All consistent, make sure that's the same information that you had before. And then you'll go ahead and enter in your box weight in pounds and then box dimensions in inches. What a lot of people do is your supplier will give you your box weight, possibly in kilograms and the dimensions in centimeters, the metric system. You just want to make sure follow directions. Your box weight is in pounds. Box dimensions is in inches. So make sure you convert correctly and enter in the information here. Want to call that out. And then we can go ahead and click on Confirm if everything looks good. So we click Confirm. Once we do that, this grade out area kind of right here will open up. You'll be able to edit and actually do stuff with it. So once you hit Confirm, you'll be able to print, although that's really just download. So you can print your shipping labels. So go ahead and download your shipping label. And you can send those to your supplier to affix to every carton that you have, right? And then you're good to go. That's pretty much it. So yeah, not super fun, but I just want to call a couple things out. If you have any questions about this, definitely let me know and I'll help you as best as I can. But hopefully this was helpful. And let's go ahead and get into the next video. 30. New & Improved Way To Create Your Shipping Plan: Amazon has recently changed their shipping plan creation interface. So I wanted to make sure to create this video to give you guys the most up to date process. However, the step by step process that something just showed in the last video, that is still how it works. That is still the workflow in a few occasions, for example, if you're creating a shipping plan within Europe, or you for now, can still choose to go back to the old version of shipping plan, so you can use the step by step that you learned previously. I do think that Amazon is going to completely switch to this new interface once people get more used to it. So let's go ahead and get to it. So from your Seller Central homepage, go ahead and hover over inventory and click call Manage Inventory. From here, click on the arrow next to the Edit button of the product that you want to send to Amazon and select sndhRplenIsh Inventory. From here, you should be able to select this link for the ship from address. And if this is the first time that you create any shipping plan, it will require you to put the address from scratch. So you can just click on this option add contact. And if you're using your supplier's address, if you're shipping from China straight to Amazon's warehouse, be sure to ask them for the city, province, and district because Amazon requires those three fields, not only city and provinces. Sometimes they don't give you all of those three details. So make sure you ask them about that, so then you can successfully save that address to your contact. Or if you already have different addresses, you can just click on Select, like I'm showing here. And if it's in the future, if you're just coming back to this page, be sure to see if the ship from address is the one that you want because Amazon automatically selects one, and usually it's the last one that you use. So if you need to change it, be sure to click on the link and change it to the correct one. Also, before we move forward, a lot of people also ask if they should use another address for the ship from option in order to get a warehouse closer to the port of entry. So a lot of people try to do a warehouse in California because most shipments from China usually go to the LA port, and you can try. A lot of people have tried this before. We have tried this before, but I will say that Amazon is getting more and more picky about where they send their products. It's not necessarily the closest to that address. But if you want to go ahead and try, the only risk is that the ship from address, obviously, that's where they would send the items back to if there's any issues with the shipment. So if you just pick a random address within California, for example, if you're not working with the TPM, you're working with a three PL, then absolutely use the warehouse' address for the ship from address. But if you're not, if you're just speaking random address, you do run that risk. So anyways, moving forward, you're going to go ahead and create a new packing template. So click on that, and then here you're going to input all of the details about that packing template. You can name it, how I like to name my packing templates. It's just the name of the product and how many units are within that box. I find it the easiest to keep track of the different packing templates if you end up creating multiples is, for example, water bottle blue 50. Or if it doesn't really matter the variation. If they're always going to be packed as 50, you could have water bottle 50. Then you can easily know from the drop down menu that I'm going to show you soon which template that is in the configuration of the boxes. Then you would keep going and put how many units per box, or you would put 50 in this example. Then the box dimensions as well as the box weight and make sure you do the conversion because your supplier will most likely give this to you in centimeters and kilograms. So be sure to change that and then input here in inches and pounds. And then for prep, usually if you don't need Amazon to do anything, any special bubbling or anything like that, which is in most cases, you just select the drop down menu and put no prep needed. And lastly, who labels the unit. So who put the F&SKU labels in each product? And I would encourage you to do it yourself or have your supplier to do it. In both cases, you would select By seller. Amazon does not care who labels. As long as it's not them, you would select seller, and then you would make the arrangements and then click Save. From here, you would now have access to this drop down menu where you could where you could see your new packing template, as well as se the option of creating a new one if you want. And once you create several, if you do have several different chipping arrangements for that product, you would see them all listed there. You can also click on View and Edit, and if you need to adjust something the weight or dimensions or anything like that. And then here you're going to put the number of boxes that you want to send within that configuration. So how many boxes of 50 units each do you want to send? So, for example, you put two it will give you the total just to confirm. Then you click Confirm. If you cannot send that many units, if you have an inventory limit, Amazon will give you the arrow, and then you would have to click modify and lower the number of boxes. And then once you confirm that it's all good to go, you'll be able to click on Confirm and continue. From here, you're going to click Select the shipping date. You do have to select it. It doesn't have to be exactly perfect, but try to find a day that you think your supplier will be shipping this around. And here you would select the shipping mode if you're shipping loose boxes or if it's going to be in a palette. In most cases, it's the small parcel delivery. And then you will see that Amazon is going to give you the destination warehouse or warehouses, the addresses that you need to ship your products to, and how many boxes of each. In this case, it was only two boxes, so it did one each, but it would give you the details if it's more boxes as well. And a lot of people try to avoid this and they try to delete the plan and recreate it. But I actually would encourage you to see this as a good thing. You never know the quote that you might get to splat your shipment buy might actually not be that much higher. We've had instances where there were no price differences, no increase or decrease in price, and it actually can be a good thing because that is what Amazon will do once they receive your shipment. If you got just one warehouse, Amazon will receive your products, and from there, they will start distributing across the country, across the different fulfillment centers, so it's easier and faster for them to fulfill orders across the country. If you actually go ahead and you have split shipments yourself, you might actually get your products kin in and available on amazon.com much faster. So either way, grab the address details and send it to your supplier to get the updated quote because sometimes it's not the same as the one that you asked them previously. And then here you're going to select Amazon Partner Carrier. You can select oh, sorry, non Amazon Partner carrier. What carrier is going to be shipping your product? And if you don't know, you can just select other. If you know, it might be helpful to put DHL or FedEx and select that. And then finally, you're going to accept charges and confirm shipping. So usually it's $0. If you haven't asked for any labeling from Amazon or prep if there was no prep needed, then it's usually going to be $0. Unless you're shipping from an address within that same country. So if you have an address within the US, let's say you're shipping from your home or if you're shipping from a TPL within that same country, then Amazon is going to offer you an option to purchase the carrier label through Amazon. They have partnership partnerships with the post office, and you actually get discounted prices. So I would highly encourage you to take advantage of that, and they will show the total here and you can accept or not accept. It would show the option here. You can still not accept if you don't want to go with their prices and do your own way, or if they have that option available, it would show here, and then you can accept charges and confirm shipping. And then finally, you can actually after you're done with that, you will be able to rename your shipments, and you just have to click on this little link, and then this box will pop up. And I highly encourage you to rename your shipments because Amazon gives you a standard combination of letters and numbers, ID. But as you create more and more shipments, it can get kind of confused to try to find one if you need to. And this can make you very much organized. And what I like to do is I like to put where it's coming from. So if it's coming from our three PL, I would put WCL on the World Craft logistics, then the product name. And if there is a variation, for example, water bottles, blue, and then the shipping number. And if I'm splitting, I would put, for example, 1.1 and the next 11.2. Either if it's split by Amazon like this case, or if I'm sending from that same order, I'm sending it partially via air and partially via C. I usually do that 1.1 for air and 1.2 for C. And then you can go ahead and click Save. And then finally, you can print your labels and then send those labels to your supplier. You just have to click on the print button over here for each one. So if you have more than one warehouse, then make sure to print for both. And you will be able to see your file and download it as a PDF and send it to your supplier so they can attach it to the cartons. So if you have any questions, I hope this wasn't confusing. And if you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below. And let's go ahead and get to the next video. 31. IMPORTANT: Protect Yourself When Paying Suppliers!: So you've chosen your supplier and you have approved the sample. Now, before you send them any money and before you start production, what we do and what we're advising you to do is to create this purchase order agreement and send it to your supplier for signing. It is structured as a contract, but it's not legal binding, meaning that if something does not follow what you both have agreed in this document, you cannot use it as a legal contract to sue them. Like, they're in China. It's like, different it's especially, I mean, at least if they're Chinese. It's a different sort of legal system, so it's not really legal binding. However, it has several pros, and one of them, actually, our supplier has actually upheld their agreement, you're going to see in one of the sections we talk about production time, and if it goes way over it, they agreed to give you a discounted price. So one of our suppliers we unfortunately have had to use it, but they completely agreed to honor their word and what they said, and they did give us a discount at the end after all the delay. And another reason why we like to use this document is because first of all, everything about your order is going to be laid out here. So this is a great document to refer to if either one of the parties, you or them do forget or cannot find a certain piece of information through your messaging or email everything is going to be laid out here. This is a great way to actually get information to give to inspection company with all of the details. It's organized. If there's any confusion, if you made lots of changes throughout before, you know, like from when you create the first sample until before you start producing, if you made way too many changes, this is a great way to summarize and make it very clear what the production is all of the details of the production. However, I will say that some suppliers might take it as a little bit offensive, let's say, because even though in the US, it's very not only normal, but it's almost necessary to always have contract we're very contractor based, and it's not offensive at all. It's very straightforward. In China, they are very relationship based, like, as we talked about, and it could seem like you're giving this to them because you don't really trust them. But what we usually do is when we talk to them, we say that we're American company, and this is a company policy, and that's why we need to so far, none of them have had any issues. And as a matter of fact, sometimes they go through the agreement, they catch certain things that we've missed or want to make sure, Oh, you wrote that it's 100 sets. But remember, you said that you actually needed to be 120 for reason X, and you forgot. So this is a great way also to be very clear with them about all of the details, as I already said before. So before I go through the agreement, let me just remind you that not only this document, but all of the documents that we mentioned throughout the course, they're all available in the Facebook group, so be sure to join the group. I'm going to leave the link in the resources below. And it's filled with amazing resources, documents like this, there's the whole community where people are sharing questions and experiences. You might find good support there, as well if you have questions, if you are going through a certain stage of the process that we might not have referred to it here. So, okay, let's start. In the beginning, it just starts stating that your company name. So, for example, Hobart's Products, known as First Party, agrees to enter into this purchasing contract with your supplier company name, known as second party. This is just to establish that anytime throughout the document that you say first party, that means you or second party, that means them. And then the first section is all about production. And here's where you're going to put all of the details about your goods, the specific product, for example, all of the dimensions, the colors, how many sets. If you're bundling, put it here all the pieces that are going inside the bundle. If you want if you want it to be arranged in a certain way, put the order, that arrangement here, all of the details that you can and can think of, I would put here colors. I think I already said that. But anyways, everything so you can refer this too. And it's also a great way to later on just grab this section of your agreement and send it to the inspection company. So they have all of the information, even though they will send you a form for you to fill out. So it's a great way to refer very quickly to all of the details. So put here all the details, all the things about labels as well. And then here says the first party, you agree to the cost of X amount of dollars, and you can even say if you want, that means y for example, $2 per set times 200 sets, and that is the total. So the next section says that if production time exceeds the agreed upon time, and then you put how many days they told you it was going to take them to complete. The first party requires advance notice of at least three days and respond appropriately. And it says later that if it goes beyond three days, they agree to enforce a 5% discount and you can change that number as well. Just like the other document, the RFQ, just go ahead and change all of the orange colored text, as well as anything else that you want to change if you want to add more information or remove, if you don't if you want to take off this whole section about the delays all up to you. This is just a resource to help you. And then it also says that there are any flaws discovered during production, the second party, your supplier agrees to remedy, fix all the flaws and all of that. The next section is about inspection, and it's very important for you to state that you reserve the right to have a third party inspection. Do this before production even starts for two reasons. One, because I honestly think that they will put more effort to pay attention to every single detail of your production if they know that someone else will be inspecting. They're not just going to be, Hey, it's ready, give us the rest of the money and we can chip. If they know someone else might be inspecting, they're going to take extra care when they're producing. And also because I highly recommend we highly recommend and we talk about this in the course as well for you to definitely have a third party inspection company every single time, but especially in your first order before you ship your goods to the United States or wherever you're shipping to. But also, here, you see that you also request them to send you photos and videos of the products being produced, as well as when they're ready and all of the cartons and carton labels and everything. And that is important to one, it's an additional step of the inspection, and you might actually catch something in time to do any changes or anything like that. And two, these are actually very useful for social media content. You we have used it on our TikTok account, on our Instagram, you know, the behind the scenes production, and people really like that, too. So, we also request them to send those photos and videos of the production. And then the next section is all about shipping. And it starts by saying that the second party agrees to deliver items too, and then you put the Amazon address here. If you haven't yet, um if you still don't have the Amazon address, you haven't yet created your shipping plan, then you can just put address to be determined within the country X, within the United States. And then you talk about the second party agrees to provide the first party with tracking information. So anytime that you ship anything, you always want tracking information. Do not go with any shipping arrangements where they will not provide you that. So always agree to provide shipping information, and then if it is DDP, the second parties agrees to cover all of the fees and duties associated with the shipping because it's DDP meaning that all of the duties are paid already. And it says how many cases via air freight. If you're splitting your shipment, you can put another bullet point saying how many cases are going via air, how many cases are going via sea and all of the details here. And then after that, you asked them to confirm that they will be printing the shipping mark or case labeling according to the list below. And then you can structure this as the way that you want. We already talked about shipping labels, the way that we do it with the company name, product name. But at least these last three options, those are required, as we already talked about. The next section is all about keeping all of your product information confidential, not only confidential, not only not share with other clients, but also not use your own photos or videos, which has happened before. A lot of people have said that their supplier started using the photos that created and paid for on Amazon on their listing on Alibaba. So with this, you're making sure and asking them to agree to not do that with Alibaba or any other website, as well as keep your whole everything design and ideas or patents, anything confidential from anyone, only within the company. And then the last section is about the payment. So you just going to say here, how the payment's going to be structured. And this is very important. What we usually do is we send them 30% upfront. That is the deposit, and they're very used to this. I don't I've only had one supplier that requested that we sent 50%, and that is because the material was significantly more expensive than usual. So they do need to make that purchase upfront in order to start production. So they asked us to do 50%, but never do more than 50% and definitely do not pay everything upfront. So 30% of the total amount of the production, um, along with 30% of shipment or not, you can decide with your supplier if you want to do shipping later. Sometimes we do only 30% of production, and we figure out shipment with them after when we're paying the deposit, so it's all up to you. We'll be paid via trade assurance, Alibaba trade assurance or PayPal. Which is absolutely the only two methods that I would suggest you do. Now, when you're paying via trade assurance, let me just go to our slide to show you. This is what it looks like, and you have a few options. Within trade assurance, the checkout, you can pay via credit card, via wire transfer, Western Union, and all that, and your payment can still be protected because what you're doing is actually you're sending payment to Ali Baba, and Alibaba will withhold that payment from the supplier until it's confirmed that the order is okay, and then they're paying them so you can pay there are several different methods of payment that you can use, but make sure it's all within trade assurance. We have used credit card, we have used wire transfer, and it's all worked completely well for us. Do not send them a wire transfer if it's not through Alibab but you have zero protection. You can also use PayPal. PayPal does have about, I believe, around 4% fee. That you have to pay when you're paying for a service in order for you to be protected. And when you pay via credit card with trade insurance as well, there is a small fee as well, not a small fee, a percentage fee as well as the trade insurance. So everything has a processing fee. You just have to see what works best for you. We've used credit card a lot because we travel a lot and we use our miles credit card. So we get cash back. We get miles. So for us, it has been worth it despite the fees. It's been better than sending them via wire transfer or PayPal. You're going to stay here, the method that you're going to be paying them, and you can put the subtotal, and then the remaining 70% of the balance, and you can stay here what that 70% is will also be paid via Ali Baba after production and finished after production is finished, and you are also responsible for all of the processing fees required. And then we usually add their company name as well as their address. And then the last section are the approval. So this agreement is entered into on date, put the date, your company name, your supplier company. And here's where you would be signing and dating, and then scan and send it to them. And then finally, what I would suggest is that you ask them to send it back to you, read and agree with it and send it back to you with a stamp, the red stamp. And the reason why is because only the manager has access to the stamp. So the person, the representative that you were speaking with, if he just wants to move forward, and he might not be held responsible for this and he just wants to go ahead and move forward without much responsibility, he cannot give that stamp. He would just sign. So ask for the red stamp, and then you should be good to go. As I said, this has worked really well for us, and you can access it through our Facebook group and the Unit section, and all of the resources and more. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 32. Let Amazon Help You With Other Sales Channels Order Fulfillment: When you have products that are fulfilled by Amazon, you can actually take advantage of Amazon's fulfillment program and their services to complete orders that you sell on different sales channels. For example, if you have your own website or Shopify website, if you have expanded those same products to Etsy or Ebay or other sales channel, and you're selling within that same marketplace, for example, the US, then you can actually use Amazon's fulfillment to Amazon's program and logistics to fulfill that order within Amazon itself. And I'm going to show you how to do it. So from your seller Centre account, go ahead and hover over inventory and click on Manage Inventory. From there, click on the little arrow next to the Edit button of the product you want to fulfill and click on Create Fulfillment Order. From there, you're going to have all of these fields that you need to complete, which is all of the customers address and information of the order that you've received. So, for example, let's say you received an order from Etsy for this product, and Etsy is going to give you all of the details, the customer name and address and all that. So you can just input everything here. The name, address, postal code, the phone number is optional. And then you already have your product here, but if you want a different product or add products, you can use this search bar. And it's also going to tell you how many you have in inventory. Let's say the person bought two, you don't have to create two fulfillment orders. You can fulfill two items at the same time by just changing this number. And then finally, you can choose an order ID of your choosing. Or if you leave blank, Amazon is going to generate one for. But what we do, what I like to do is that I like to get the order number from that sales channel. So, for example, the ETS, Order ID number 0145, then I put under Order ID, I put EtS 0145 because I can easily go back to my orders later. Make sure I can easily find it just by searching for EtS because I know what marketplace it came from or what sales channel it came from, and the order number. So that's what I like to do. If the person has had a congratulation message or a gift message, you can also add it here, the packing slip comments. Unfortunately, Amazon does not do any additional gift wrapping or anything, but you can add a message in the little paper that will come with the order. And then once you fill this out, Amazon's going to fill out the prices depending on the shipping speed and the estimated delivery date as well. So usually you have the standard, the expedited, and sometimes you also get the priority option, and it will give you the different prices, and you just have to click on Place Order. With whatever option that you have selected, you are agreeing to pay that price to Amazon. And you just click on Place Order, and that's it. Amazon is going to charge you that amount from, you know, from your payments or your next payment reports. Or if you're negative, it's going to charge your credit card on file. And there you have it, you don't even need a T PL or you don't need to ship it yourself if you want to start expanding to other markets within the same marketplace. Now, you cannot do this if it's an international order. Unless I believe if you have a media product like books or DVD, something like that, I'm not completely certain. But if most products as of right now, you cannot use this program internationally. But you can within the same country that you try to fulfill, and it's an amazing opportunity because it can save you a lot of time, a lot of money. A lot of times these T PLs will charge you a fixed fee, and you only have scarce orders. So this is definitely useful. And lastly, you can actually automate this process by clicking here to Learn More, and you can actually integrate this multichannel fulfillment program with your other sales channels depending on what it is. So you can just click on that link to learn more. And I hope you found this helpful, and let's go ahead and get to the next video. 33. Do You Need A 3PL?: This video, I want to talk to you guys about third party logistic companies or three PLs. And what are they and should you consider them? In our opinion, this is extremely important to consider, especially as you start scaling your business. Why? Because Amazon Fulfillment, Amazon FBA, fulfilled by Amazon, can only go so far for you. Not only can only go so far, it might be more costly, and they definitely will not prioritize you thousands if not millions of sellers that they have, you don't have this guarantee. When you are working with TPL, you can have that partnership. Sometimes they will customize things for you. They can offer services that you might need, such as storage or fulfillment. Taking that order, for example, especially if you have other sales channels like your own website, taking their from the customer, from the warehouse, trade to the customer and making that fulfillment, the shipment. A lot of times they offer control of inspection or customization or how or packing and prepping or freight forwarding. So there can be a lot of advantages of working with a TPL, as opposed to Amazon or along with Amazon, as you scale your business. So when we talk about Th PLs, I like to consider four factors when choosing your TPL, because there's not just one TPL that is perfect for all businesses. I absolutely varies on how many orders you get per month, the size of your business, how many sales channels you have, if you're shipping internationally and all that. So the first point is cost. And when I talk about cost, obviously, it's very important. But I'm talking about everything related to the services that you want. So storage, for example, compare the storage of the same amount of units during that same time of year because it does vary at least with Amazon. During the same time of year for the same amount of storage with a three PL and with Amazon. And you might actually see that most likely it will be significantly cheaper, especially during fourth quarter. During the last quarter of the year, because of the holidays, Amazon storage fees are so high that sometimes even when you sell even more, some sellers are not even profitable because it depends on how much storage you have. Not to mention, in 2020, Amazon announced that they were going to be limiting storage depending on your IPI score, which is inventory performance index number. And in 2020, the threshold was 500 score. So anyone who had below 500 could only send so many units to Amazon. Sometimes it was very small and definitely when kind of crazy. And during the holidays, a lot of people getting out of stock, us included. And because of that, they are reducing the threshold to 450 points for 2021. But still, if you have lower than 450, you will experience limits for your inventory. So because of that, it is very important that you consider storage on other three PLs. You might not only save money, but it can help you with the whole logistics. For example, if you might save money with storage, but you also might save money with product sourcing because if you're only shipping from your supplier to Amazon only, then you can only order so many units because most likely your supplier might not keep the remaining of the units for you. So that results in a higher cost for your item with with the other option, you can actually order a bigger order, paying less per unit, ship whatever you can or want straight to Amazon. The remaining you would ship to a three PL and within the United States or whatever country you were trying to sell it in. And when your inventory is getting lower on Amazon, just quickly ship it from your three PL to Amazon, and it will get there much faster for cheaper than if it was Air Express from China, as well. And you would have them ready there. We wouldn't have to start producing it all over again and run the risk of going out of stock. So this is one of the benefits, and you want to consider the cost of that storage as well as cost of fulfillment. So when you talk about fulfillment, sometimes a lot of TPL and they will charge you a fixed fee. So like, 1-200 orders per month, this is the cost. And 200-500 is another cost. Sometimes this is how they charge, and it might not be worth it for you if you don't have as many orders per month, or sometimes it's per order, like $1 per order, $2, I don't know. It depends. So you definitely want to take that into account into your profit calculator. Well, to make sure that you're still profitable, you still have a good margin. And also consider the costs of several other services that you might be interested in if it's freight, freight forwarding or if it's packing and prepping, let's say your supplier cannot do that and they cannot label your products or put them how Amazon wants them to be packaged, then you could ship it to your TRPO, and then from there, they prep it and ship it to Amazon. So consider cost. Second, consider location. And this could be this, honestly, depending on the size of your company or your needs, this might not be as important, but it's also a good thing to consider. So if you're only selling on Amazon FBA, it might not be as important because Amazon will not usually, they're not as consistent of giving you the destination warehouse, Sorry. They're usually not as consists of giving you the same destination warehouse every time. So one time you create a shipping plan and your destination warehouse might be in California, another time in North Carolina, another time in Texas. So sometimes you think, Oh, I'm going to get a warehouse, a Tri PL in California, so I'm really close to the warehouse. Sometimes that's not the case. You should definitely take it into consideration, especially if you start seeing a pattern that all of your shipping plans, for example, are going to North Carolina. Maybe you get TPL on the East Coast or California. And I will say that sometimes when you do create a shipping plan, if it's not a really busy time of year or if your product is not a special product like dangerous Good or a small and Light enrolled in the Small and Light program, Amazon, I do think that most of the time they try to get a warehouse that's close by. So most of the shipments, if you are sourcing from China, they do come through the LA port. So a lot of people go for warehouses in California because it would be very fast not only to go from the port when it's delivered from your supplier to the warehouse, but also, like I said, a lot of times, Amazon will give you a California destination warehouse, so it will be very close as well. But also, if you live in the United States, so if you live in whatever country you're trying to fulfill your orders, if you live there and you want to be nearby, if you store some things at your own place or if you want to have that close relationship with the three PL, you might also want to find a location near you, if you want to maybe save some money on that. So locations definitely something that it's important to consider. The third factor is speed. Not only their processing speed, because so how long does it take for when they receive an order to actually ship out their order? When they receive their order for that package to leave the warehouse. Even if you're not fulfilling just one, you know, individual orders, even if it's okay, I'm running out of stuff of Amazon. I need a new carton to be shipped ASAP. How long does that take? 24 hours a week. So you definitely want to be asking them that. Not to mention certain warehouses, they do qualify for merchant fulfilled merchant fulfillment prime program. They guarantee the speed that Amazon requires for you to apply for the merchant fulfilled prime. And it does take a while for you to be able to be eligible to apply. But if you don't want to deal with Amazon's FBA fulfillment by Amazon, um, issues or, you know, if you want to control the returns or if it's really expensive for Amazon to fulfill that, if you have an oversized item, for example, you might want to consider fulfilled by merchant and consider a warehouse that can do the prime fulfillment. They can guarantee the speed that Amazon requires for you to be prime because that will absolutely impact your sales. And then last but not least, consider the other services that they provide. Even if you don't want it now, you might want to use the other services later. For example, if it's a warehouse that also offers inspection, even if you're always going for the inspection company in China, sometimes you hear something happen during the shipping and you want to have that the possibility of someone inspecting it again to see if everything's okay if something happened during shipment, and they can do that for you. Or one thing that we wanted to consider when we were looking for our warehouses was returns. So when people returns, and Amazon deems that product unfulfillable, that you need to remove that product. And a lot of times those products are not damaged. Sometimes the buyer just selected that something was wrong with the product because they didn't want to pay for the return or whatever reason, and the product is not even touched sometimes. So a lot of T PLs will also offer to inspect those small packages and see and see test it and see if it's broken or not broken and repackaged for you to join your stock of sellable products. So definitely consider this. A lot of them will also offer free forwarding services, which is what we do. We partner with a warehouse that also offers this, and they are our free forwarders, which we're going to talk about in the next video. But before we go, I just wanted to share with you guys this link, which is from the ecommerce optimizer. Website, and they have gathered this list of T PLs all over the country and abroad of companies that you can click here. You can get the link. It does say which services they offer, but I would encourage you to to double check this, to see if they really do offer this or if maybe they're no longer offering or if they added a new program. So maybe look at what's most important for you. Let's say, prep and chip or fulfillment is most important for you. And then you contact these warehouses and see what else that they offer. And I will say that there are two parts to this table, and a lot of people miss this second part. But there you go. Here's this gray table that I want to share with you guys, obviously, giving the credit to Ecommerce Optimizer, which is who gathers this amazing list for us, and you might want more than 13 PL. You might want one for storage and one for fulfillment. It might depend on the cost and all that. So have this at hand, and hopefully this was helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to leave those in the Q&A below, and let's go ahead and get to the next video.