Chapter 15: Amazon Global Seller Success Story and Other Developments

14/6/2018

2018 has been a busy and exciting year!

Many new things are happening and business is growing.

Here are some of the updates:

Amazon finally published their Global Seller Success Story featuring my wife and I.
Sales both on and off Amazon are growing. This includes sales from our own website, multiple marketplaces, and physical stores. Learning and applying the strategies from the newly released Proven Audience Formula course to grow a Facebook Messenger subscriber list is one of the factors for this growth.
Went on my first trip to source in Yiwu, China!
Reducing costs: Just made my first supplier payment using World First.

1. Amazon Global Seller Success Story

At the end of 2017, Amazon's Global Selling Team asked me about recording a video interview for their Amazon Global Seller Success Story series. This is the first ever Amazon Seller Success Story featuring a seller from Singapore!

The video was shot at Amazon's regional HQ in Jan 2018, and was just published on 11 June.

Watch it below to understand why I think selling on Amazon is so compelling.

Note: One of the questions in the script was how I learnt to sell on Amazon. My answer would have been the Proven Amazon Course and the free MySilentTeam Facebook group, but that wasn't appropriate, so those details had to be left out in this official Amazon video.

How to sell on Amazon from anywhere in the world: Global Seller Success Story

2. Increase in Sales Both On and Off Amazon

Business is growing to unprecedented levels.

This includes increasing sales on existing channels as well as expanding in to multiple new income streams.

On Amazon

1. Amazon sales has increased about 80% year-on-year every month in 2018 compared to 2017. This is due to a few factors including:

Better keyword optimization using more accurate tools, particularly the Magnet Keyword Research and Cerebro Reverse ASIN tools that are both part of the Helium 10 suite of tools and learning how to use keywords more effectively from Viral Launch's podcast episode about Amazon Search Optimization.
Improvements to my Amazon PPC strategy. This includes using the same keywords that I target in my listings (from previous point) in manual exact/phrase match campaigns and bidding 20% more than the top of the bid range.
Improving product images. I previously had mostly simple product photographs. But recently I started using the Amazing Freedom Magic Image Service to create new images for 4 of my listings, and I have been very pleased with the results.
New listings

As a result of the above, several of my listings have doubled in sales.

2. Consulting for Other Companies.

I currently consult for 2 companies. I actively manage the Amazon account for 1 and am on retainer to help the digital marketing team with their Amazon sales for the other.
Using Viral Launch Market Intelligence together Helium 10 Cerebro and Magnet, I have managed to double overall sales for the first company.
The second company has been selling on Amazon for 1 year. We started the first month by focusing on improving 1 of their existing listings. Using Helium 10 Cerebro, we uncovered several of the top selling competing listings' best keyword search terms. We then used Helium 10''s Keyword Tracker tool to track the search results ranking of the best relevant search terms for the client's listing. By simply tweaking the title to include 2 or 3 of these search terms, we tripled sales for the listing! This was mainly because we moved from rank position 19 to 4 by including a keyword that has about 3,000 monthly exact search volume according to both Helium 10 and Viral Launch.

Off Amazon

Local Training Classes: As a result of this blog and my online sellers Facebook group, Numerous people in Singapore have asked me to conduct training over the past few years. I finally acceded to the overwhelming number of requests and started doing small groups of 15 people at a time this year. You can find out more about my class on this page: Amazon Seller Singapore Training.
Adding Sales Channels: I finally took the time to reopen my eBay account and cross listed 10 of my Amazon listings on eBay using Joelister, a 3rd party app that syncs your Amazon listings (images, titles, description, etc.), inventory levels and automatically triggers Amazon FBA to fulfil orders received on eBay.
Scaling the Business: We recently hired 3 part-timers and 1 full-time intern. The part-timers handle packaging of products and merchandising (restocking at some of our physical retail locations). Delegating these tasks frees up about 1-2 days a week for my wife and I to focus on working on instead of in our business. This allows us to focus on business development including developing new products, social media marketing to grow and engage with our audience, and exploring new markets such as China. We hired 1 Chinese scholar studying in Singapore to translate our content in preparation for selling online in China, and a full-time intern who works with my wife on marketing for Singapore and preparing for a product launch in China.
Overall Sales Growth: Our own websites sales have been increasing consistently this year. A large part of this is due to growing a Facebook Messenger subscriber base. Using a combination of simple Facebook posts, Ads, Messenger and a chatbot, we have been able to grow a highly engaged customer base. It's the same relatively simple and cost-effective strategy that my friend Brett Bartlett has used to rank multiple product listings to number 1 , 2 and top 10 bestseller on Amazon, which is totally crazy! Brett explains it in his Proven Audience Formula (PAF) course which was just released at a launch price of only $29.99 (that's a ridiculously low price for such excellent content). We have been able to increase sales on demand using PAF strategies. Previously when we had a new product or a promotion and sent email marketing to our email subscribers, a fantastic result would be 20% opening the email 5-10% clickthrough and 1-2% conversions (orders). Now with PAF, we get over 80% open rates, 50% clickthroughs and 10-20% conversions!

3. Sourcing Trip to Yiwu, China

Went to Yiwu, China in April. It was a very fruitful trip and I have already made an initial order for 8 products, with several more to come.

I'll write more about my trip, the observations, lessons, whether it's worth visiting and how to maximize your trip in a separate post.

4. Reducing Costs - World First Supplier Payment

This is a feature that has been requested for years. I remember talking to World First's Asia director and Singapore ecommerce manager about it 1 or 2 years ago.

It's now in beta-testing and I just made my first payment to a supplier today.

The cost savings is realised because I do not have to transfer my Amazon USD payout back to SGD and then incur a 2nd forex loss when I make a payment to my supplier from SGD to USD.

How the process works is:

Amazon pays out in USD to my World First USD account.
I pay my supplier in USD from my World First USD balance.

Therefore there is no forex fee incurred for transferring from USD to SGD and then SGD to USD. The only fee is a onetime fee that World First charges when I make a payment to my supplier. My fee is 1% of the amount transferred. Talk to you account manager about your rate.

It's free to open a World First account and you will have an account manager assigned to you even if you have not transferred a single cent.

You can find out more about World First in my World First review.

1 Comment

Eric Gichira

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