In today's video, I'll be answering questions from my Q&A Facebook group. If you'd like to get your question answered in an upcoming video, click this link to join the group:

 

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Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. So, got a really special gift for you coming very, very soon. It's going to be a list of 15 smash hit private label products on a PDF. So if you're watching this video inside Ollie's e-commerce Q&A group, then it's going to appear in this group very, very soon and it's available for everybody in the group.

 

Now if you're watching this video outside of the group, there should be a link somewhere on this page whether it's below or above the video, where you can join the Facebook group and you can access this PDF.

 

Now these are going to be handpicked products that I've chosen, selected, validated, and some of them do up to 26,000 pounds per month in revenue and these are UK-based products. Very, very, very powerful stuff. So make sure you jump in the group to get them.

 

So today we've got some really, really good insightful questions. Some from current Amazon sellers, some from people who are less experienced. And I think it provides a great chance to expand your knowledge as you're growing your business.

 

Spotted a really good product related to my test batch product, but the product seller has patent on the design.

 

To kick things off, we've got a question from Carl Siddon. Now Carl's one of my clients and he says, hi Ollie, would welcome your views on this question please. I spotted a really good product today related to my test batch product- would make a good potential addition.

 

So Carl's got a product right now he's testing and he's seen something he could also sell in the same niche, but he says, but the product seller has a patent on the design. Does that mean just disregard and look at other options? Or is there a safe distance you can be away from the original but keeping the same basic concept and not run into copyright issues?

 

This is a great question and in fact patents are something to be very careful of as you're launching products on Amazon because you don't want to violate any of them. Could run into big problems.

 

First of all, obviously I'm not a patent lawyer. But I can definitely provide you with some guidelines as to what patents are, how they work, and ways that we can get around them.

 

The first thing to establish is to figure out what is the patient exactly for? Because you can patent one tiny mechanism within a design of a product. You can patent the overall design of the product, or parts of its function.. I mean, there's loads of different things you can patent, so I would look up the patent number. That it should be doable.

 

If you just Google the patent number, you'll pretty much find it pretty quickly and figure out what that patent is. If it's for the whole design, then you might have some issues. However, you could source a product that solves the same problem in a different way with a different design. That shouldn't violate the patent.

 

If it's just a mechanism, then look for a product that you could offer that has a different mechanism, but a similar design. That's what we want to do. Establish exactly what the patent is for and then just make sure when you launch your product, it's not violating that patent.

 

Now if this looks like it's going to be a really good opportunity, a really good financial opportunity, it might be worth booking a quick call with a patent lawyer just to help them look over this for you. Just to clear some of the confusion cause I know that this stuff can get a little bit confusing. You know, you could probably book a call, maybe an hour long call with a patent lawyer which costs you maybe a hundred pounds or something.

 

It depends again. Deal flow, right? Contact at least five lawyers, get quotes from them, see how good the company is. Pick one once you've got your five quotes and then book in the call. And you could probably get a really, really crystal clear answer to all of your questions before going ahead and investing in some of this stock.

 

So that's how you should approach any time you see a patent on the marketplace, that's how you should approach it. Great question, Carl.

 

I get one sale per day and can no longer get more.

 

David Kelly asks, I've got four private label products on Amazon. First of all, massive congratulations for getting those products launched. That's really cool. Sales have stalled when advertising. I get one sale per day and could no longer get more. I have increased the budget with no real results. What can I do?

 

This is a very frustrating situation to be in. You've launched products and at one point they were doing really, really well and the sales have declined a bit and now it's really hard to push them back up to where they were. So what we need to do to get your products to sell again is we need to diagnose the problem.

 

What is the problem? To do this, we need to look at your products and your business and we also need to look at the niches you're selling in and the other competing products to try and figure out exactly what's gone wrong that stopped people from buying these products.

 

I'm going to go through a couple of potential reasons your sales could have slowed down. We'll start with the easier ones, which are really easy to fix. And then we'll gradually move towards the more difficult problems. It could be a little bit more problematic to fix. However, there is still a solution. No matter what reason your products aren't selling.

 

The easiest, easiest, simplest reason your products might be selling and might not be selling is visibility. Visibility. In other words, can people see your products? If you're not spending much on pay-per-click advertising, if your product isn't well ranked in the search results, and your product isn't very visible- as in, there's not many customers visiting the page, that could be a very simple reason why your product isn't selling.

 

The first thing I would do is to get your product more visible. There's several ways you can do this. Number one, like you've done already, you can increase the PPC. Another thing you could do is drop the price of your product while increasing the PPC. What this will do is, this will get people to buy it because it's a bargain.

 

And yeah, you might break-even on some of these sales. You might make a bit of a loss, but we're not aiming to make a profit right now. We're aiming to get your products visible and back on page one. Then this should increase your rankings and it might kick start the process of getting your product to sell more often once more.

 

So if visibility is the only problem, then that will solve it. I would try that first anyway. See if it solves the problem and then it'd be super simple to get your products selling again. If you do that and it doesn't work, then the next thing to look at is your listing.

 

Have a think about it. When customers look through niches and they're trying to find a product to actually buy, all they have available to them is the listing.

That's it. I can't hold the product in their hand. They can't see it. They can't test it out. All they have is the listing.

 

So how good are your listings? How many reviews do you have? Could you get more? How good are your pictures? Are they super clear? Do they show everything about your product in a really crystal clear way? Do you have lots of different types of pictures? Pictures with a white background, lifestyle photos with the products being used, detailed product photos where there's little arrows and texts describing benefits of the product..

 

Packaging. If you have packaging, have you displayed that in one of your pictures to show how nicely it's presented? The better your pictures, the more eye-catching your listing will be. Gets you more clicks, and it will also get you more sales.

 

What about your bullets? Have you really used all the texts in every single bullet? Have you put a headline in the beginning of each bullet and capital letters to really draw people's attention? Have you figured out what people really care about with your product? The certain things people really, really want your product to do.

 

The way you find this out is by looking at other products and their reviews and finding out what customers are annoyed that the product didn't do. You know, I hate this product because it didn't do this. That's the desire. If your product does do that, you best put it on your listing.

 

What about your description? How in-depth have you gone with it? Have you just written a couple of lines, or have you really painted a picture in the customer's imagination of how the product is going to benefit them? Is there a call to action at the bottom of your description which says buy this now because it's going to benefit your life?

 

Have you put a really good solid guarantee on your listing? Maybe a lifetime guarantee. All of these things can make your listing better. So do all of those things. Combine that with the visibility stuff.

 

Once you've tried that and it doesn't work, then tweak the listing, try again, and see if that does it. Finally, if visibility isn't the issue, if your listing isn't the issue, then it could be an issue with the product itself. This is obviously the most annoying thing to try and fix because you've got the inventory already.

 

There are some very easy ways you can actually do this. Let's say you've got 500 units of your product in the warehouse and it's not selling very well and you try all this stuff and it still doesn't sell.

 

What you could do is pull back 50 units, get them shipped to your house, get a product- an additional product to bundle with these 50 products. So you're selling the main thing, plus a bundled thing on the listing, so they get a free thing. Then create a new listing. Send the stock into Amazon again as a bundle.

 

See if this makes your product more attractive. This is the easiest way to fix problems with your product not standing out on the marketplace. So I recommend you try all this stuff and let me know, does it fix the problem? Because by the time you've done all of that stuff, I guarantee if your niches have high demand and you pick the right products and they were selling one point very well, your sales should start to climb again. I hope that was helpful.

 

Challenges when it comes to reporting and accounting requirements without an external expert.

 

So we've got a question from Nuzrath. Apologies if I didn't pronounce your name properly. He says, living in the EU now and with Brexit happening, wondering what challenges we have to meet when it comes to reporting and accounting requirements without using an external expert- as this would generally lead to increased accounting costs, etc.

 

This is a great question. At the time of shooting this video, Brexit isn't done yet, so it's not finished. It's not finalized. There's no deal as of yet. We don't exactly know what the implications of it are going to be on your responsibilities as a business owner. We're not entirely sure what's going to happen yet.

 

Here's what I would do as things move forward. If you don't want to spend money on an external accounting service, then I would pay for the advice of someone who knows what they're talking about with European accounting. Just have a consultant and maybe pay for an hour of their time. 

 

Like I said to Carl earlier. Hire someone to speak to them and get their advice on exactly what you need to do with each marketplace and throughout your EU sales. Pay someone to learn what you need to do and then implement it yourself. This is how I would approach it.

 

In fact, how I would approach it is, I would pay someone for their advice and then I would also pay someone to implement as well. The reason why I don't want to be spending valuable hours during my day bookkeeping and accounting- I'd rather outsource that, spend my time marketing, growing the business.

 

So my advice to you would be to make your business more profitable so you can pay to outsource bookkeeping and accounting because it's very time consuming. It's probably not the best use of your time, so if you can hire someone to give you advice and then implement it yourself- because this stuff's only going to get more complicated and it's important too, to understand your responsibilities moving forward.

 

It's a great question. I think a lot of people were thinking about that. If they're selling in the EU.

 

Should I focus on a brand within a niche or can I have a brand which serves a few niches?

 

Michael asks, should I focus on brand within a niche or can I have a brand which serves a few niches? This is a great question, actually. In fact, quite a few people had this question, especially since launching a brand is becoming more and more important with selling on Amazon.

 

Here's the thing. A brand is a combination of you and your message as a seller and the group of people that you serve. Put those two things together and you've got your brand.

 

For example, let's say you launched the brand for dog lovers. You and your message could be saying, we provide ethical toys which benefit the health of dogs. That could be your brand message. The group of people you serve are people who have dogs.

 

Put those two together and that's your brand. This brand could cover several niches. It could cover the dog toys niche, it could cover the dog health niche, the dog training niche. All of these niches are separate products and separate niches on the Amazon marketplace, but they gel together within the same brand because they still represent you and your message.

 

You should focus on growing the brand based off that philosophy and then see which products fit into that. You and your message could be, we serve 40 year old men and we help them look better. And obviously the group of people you serve, 40 year old men. Put those together. There's countless niches you could have. You could have shaving products. You could have after-shave, you could have moisturizers, you could have all of those niches fit within the brand.

 

Think of it from that angle and it should hopefully answer your question. Good question, Michael.

 

How to launch in 2020?

 

Veru says, how do you launch in 2020? Should you use PPC, giveaway services, early bird reviews, or should you combine them all? Great question, Veru.

 

First of all, if you haven't done so already, look at the announcement post in the top of the group. That pinned post- there's a PDF called the marketing tri force, which is a training that I used to sell, I'm giving it to you for free. As a thank you for being in the group, it walks you through my method for launching.

 

You're absolutely right. Use all three of those things. Pay-per-click advertising, giveaways, and get reviews as well. Also make sure your listing is very, very, very well optimized. These three things are the foundation for launching a product on Amazon. There's two other things which I would recommend though.

 

Number one is make sure you have an amazing product before you start thinking about launching and stuff. 'Cause all of that stuff- giveaways, PPC, everything else will mean nothing if you don't have a great product. Because at the end of the day, people have to want to buy the thing you're selling.

 

You have to do something different, you have to add value. So that's the thing to focus on first. And additionally, if you can, I would also send out side traffic to your Amazon listing as well.

 

Now this is something that's not going to happen instantly. It's going to take a while for you to build maybe an email list or an external audience of people who follow your brand, who can jump on your products for maybe a discount when you launch it.

 

But the more external traffic you can send to your product as you launch, the more of an edge you're going to have over all of your competition. So that's something you can throw in the mix and start building up.

 

  Now you can do things like content marketing, advertising, email list building to build this sort of external traffic. That can actually really serve you as an asset because then in the future you could even start selling products off your own website as well as Amazon to your audience. And then you have a base of customers which you control, which is really, really powerful.

 

Those are a few thoughts for 2020. Definitely grab my marketing tri force PDF if you haven't done so already.

 

All right guys, thank you so much for watching this video and thank you for your fantastic questions. I'm aware by the way that there's loads and loads and loads of questions from you guys who have joined and we've got an influx of members who are almost at a hundred today, which is great.

 

I will be getting round to your questions. By the way, there's a lot of people who asked the same questions as each other, right? It's very common questions. If it's one of those, I'm going to tag you in a post in the group with some resources which answer the question better than I could in a video. Therefore you'll get the answer you need and you can move forward.

 

Thank you so much for watching this video. If you're watching this video outside of Ollie's e-commerce Q&A group, click the link that should be above or below this video. You can join the group, you can get your questions answered as well, and just make sure you answer the questions in the box that appears after your request to join. And then I'll approve your request to join the group.

 

Alright, thanks so much for watching this video and we'll speak very soon.