- Okay welcome everyone, so we've got some new faces
and some people who have been here many times
which is great to see.
I've done it last on Monday night, I did the same in Sydney,
last night in Adelaide 'cause I was trying to get some
perspective what percentage of sales
everybody's been getting eBay compared to Amazon.
So we're traditionally seeing normally around 15-30%
for their professional sellers and that's why I say
over 1000, 'cause I was kind of looking for people
who were professional sellers, okay.
We'll ask the same question tomorrow night in Brisbane
and I get some kind of balance.
Okay, so anyway for those who haven't been to one of these
events before, we're all about these four values.
Sharing, networking, learning and community.
So we're all here, we're all doing the same thing.
Selling online and we're all here
to share our ideas and help each other.
Our vision, our purpose like it says on here
is to help more and more people to learn to live
the internet lifestyle which has being out to work
from home or your favorite coffee shop or wherever
using the technology that we're all blessed to have today.
We no longer have to get an office or work five days a week
and get two days off, though whoever set those rules,
I don't know what they were thinking
but we don't have to do that anymore.
So if you are a full time eBay or Amazon seller
and anyone asks you any questions tonight,
please take a little bit of time to help them out.
'Cause everyone was a beginner at one time
and we do have quite a lot
of full time sellers here tonight.
A show of hands, who here is full time at the moment?
Okay.
You guys must be getting close down there, eh?
(crowd laughter)
Ha ha, you should be full time.
All right so tonight we are about beginners,
but please anyone who's already selling,
please take a little bit of time to help others.
So what's coming up, we do a whole lot of events
so tonight we can't cover all these topics because obviously
no one would be going home tonight if we try to cover
all of these topics, so tonight we're going to try to stay
on track which is all about FBA for beginners.
We'll take as many questions as we'll possibly can.
If we start running out of time, I'll have to cull
the questions but while we're in time,
we'll take as many questions as I can.
Okay so as it says here this is your group,
and we are all here to help each other.
So if anyone else who's also selling
and they've got any feedback that they can give
to the group, feel free to share anything
that you guys want to share as well.
We're all here under the same umbrella.
Now all the links and all these slides are available
for everyone for free to download
so you don't have to write everything down.
There's a link here and also put the link up at the end
of the presentation tonight so you can download
all the slides and all the links I'm going to give you.
If I use any words tonight
that you don't understand please tell me.
I've been doing this now, selling online for over 20 years
and you do tend to use words that people don't know
or have a clue what you're talking about.
So if I do use any words please tell me and just stop me.
So don't be scared of putting your hand up and asking.
So who am I.
I'm an eBay/Amazon seller.
I've been importing for just over 30 years.
Selling online for just over 20 years.
I went full time with this basically out of desperation
because I was separated from my ex-wife, I had two kids
and I didn't want to get another job and I needed more money.
So I started out of desperation and started at Sydney
and got a first warehouse at Sydney and then these days,
we don't live in Sydney anymore, we live on a farm
four hours north of Sydney and we have no staff
and no inventory on the property at all.
Everything's run totally virtual.
We have our VA's or our virtual assistants all overseas
and the majority of our FBAs work from their homes.
So that's how we run the whole shebang these days.
All right so tonight's all about how to sell on FBA.
So tonight we're going to cover what is FBA,
what to sell on Amazon FBA, where to source products,
how to source products, how to get started
from the beginning, optimization.
I'm not even going to touch on optimization tonight
because it is a beginner and I don't want everyone's eyes
to glass over if I start going
into to much of the optimization stuff
but I'm going to give you enough to be dangerous.
Also the tools and automation because the whole idea of this
is to build a business that works without you
and a lot of people forget this and they get started selling
online and they just do everything themselves
and they hit a glass ceiling 'cause they can't go any higher
because they've run out of hours.
And the whole idea is you learn a task,
and then you outsource.
And you spend 10% of your profits on virtual assistants
which you can get for $1 per hour
and I'll give you a lot of links tonight so you can know
exactly where to get them for $1 an hour.
So if you can do a task, you can record your screen
and you can outsource it.
And more.
Okay, so what is Amazon?
Amazon for those who aren't aware, it continually grows
and grows and grows and grows.
And this is about how many Amazon Prime households,
and I'm going to talk about what Amazon Prime is tonight
'cause it's a very vital part of Amazon.
So Amazon though is a source of abundant traffic.
So you can list items on Amazon just like eBay
and it's a source of a whole lot of eyeballs
who can see your products.
So some people will say yeah, but Amazon and eBay,
it's expensive to sell on.
Well look at the amount of people who can look
at your products and buy them.
That's what you're paying for as oppose to putting it
in some small newspaper which has got
a fraction of the audience.
Put it on Amazon and people all over the planet
can see your products.
Amazon's growth as you can see
just keeps going up and up every year.
There's a familiar face, hi there.
Last data I've got from Amazon is this.
US of course up here, Australia here.
Now this is getting a bit old so we're probably somewhere
up here but I haven't got anymore latest data from that.
So I'm going to be showing you a lot of slides tonight.
Some of them from Australia and quite a few from the US.
'Cause that's the best data I've got.
All right so Amazon though is only new to Australia.
Back in 2016, Amazon first came out here as doing a part
and I did the roadshow with them in 2016, was anyone here
for that before Amazon opened when we did the roadshow?
A couple of people here, okay.
So that was the first time Amazon came to Australia,
we did the roadshow around Australia.
That was actually done here as one of the events.
Okay so that was 2016.
In 2017, Amazon opened it's doors in the first warehouse
which is in Dandenong and Victoria of course
and the second one's opened now in Millbank in Sydney.
So what is Amazon FBA?
FBA of course stands for fulfillment by Amazon.
In other words you send your product to Amazon
and they hold it, they warehouse it for you
and then they can ship it for you, it gets sold.
So basically if you own this you can send it out yourself
which is called FBM.
Fulfillment by merchant.
In other words it sells and you put it in the post
or the courier and send it out.
With FBA you send it to an Amazon warehouse,
they warehouse it and when it sells they pick it,
pack it and ship it.
Is everyone clear on that?
It's a pretty easy program.
Do we have anyone from Amazon here tonight
that's willing to put their hands up and own up.
(crowd chuckling)
We got one person, okay awesome.
Can I ask what part of Amazon?
- [Low Man's Voice] What do you mean?
- Which part of Amazon do you work for?
- [Low Man's Voice] Oh, work for Amazon, I don't.
- Oh, okay.
Does anyone here work for Amazon?
'Cause you know you're going to get swamped
at the end of this if you put your hand up.
Anyways, okay.
So Amazon's going to send your products, they ship your orders.
So why have an Amazon FBA business?
There's a whole multitude of why have an Amazon business,
so let's get started.
It's your own business of course,
it's your rules, it's your business.
Create a passive income which means items sell 365,
24 hours a day, all year round
and money continually flows in.
It's a passive income.
They warehouse your inventory so you no longer have
to have your own warehouse.
Now in saying this, you can also do the same thing for eBay,
for the eBay sellers in here.
But I can really do that as well with eBay
because you can have a fulfillment house.
But they warehouse your inventory for you.
When we started we had to.
Our house got filled up with inventory.
Our spare rooms got filled up, our attic got filled up,
our garage was filled up, even bought an old 40 cubic meter
pantech truck which had just under a million kilometers.
Parked that in our back driveway, filled that up
and then we eventually bit the bullet and got a warehouse.
So these days that's old fashioned,
you don't have to do that anymore.
You don't require an office anymore 'cause it's all virtual.
Amazon does all the reporting,
they do all the wrapping and the shipping.
No shipping products because Amazon does it all for you.
You don't drive to the post office.
Anyone who's done that knows that's a real pain
in the backside to continually drive
to the post office every day.
But even though once you're spending $45 a day
with Australia Post, you can get them
to come pick up from your house.
No negotiating rights with courier companies
'cause of course Amazon's got great rates
with courier companies already.
They look after your customer support
which is different than eBay.
So any customer inquiries,
Amazon looks after them including returns.
You can work from anywhere.
The coffee shop, your house, a tent, a cruise ship,
it doesn't matter.
Anywhere you got internet which is pretty much
worldwide now with cellphones.
Work your own hours, work your own days.
Yeah, you simply choose what days work like you know,
Wednesday for instance is my day I fly my model planes
and that's my flying day, is Wednesday.
So you don't have to work the day so you can pick your kids
up from school, you can do all that kind of stuff.
You can over 90% outsource it.
You can get everything, listing, research,
all that kind of stuff can be done fully automated.
Diversification which I'm going to talk about later tonight.
so you don't have to have all your eggs in one basket.
You've already got a bricks and mortar store,
you can also sell on Amazon, you can also sell on eBay
but I'll get more into all those different
diversification aspects later tonight.
You can also with Amazon FBA fulfill website orders.
So you send some of your goods to an Amazon warehouse
and when an order comes in,
you log into Amazon Seller Central and you get Amazon
to pick, pack and ship direct to your customers
for your own website sales.
All right, done that.
And of course you can sell all the same products
on all platforms so if you import a product like this,
you can sell it on eBay, Amazon, and your own website.
Now you can't ship your eBay sales with Amazon.
In the spring seller release, eBay specifically said
do not ship orders for eBay buyers from Amazon.
Is everyone clear on that?
Any questions so far?
It's all quiet so far.
Yes?
- [Woman's Voice] I'm just trying to get my head around
the territories, for example we import product from America,
and they have an Amazon store that they don't sell
into Australia and then we can set up an Amazon store
in Australia but where can we sell, just to Australia?
- No, you can sell worldwide.
- [Woman's Voice] That into America, (mumbles) buy it?
- Yes you certainly can, totally.
You can do it with FBA or FBM.
- [Soft Woman's Voice] Isn't the shipping
more expensive from here?
- Yeah it is, shipping from Australia is expensive.
But people pay it, for a long time before Amazon
was in Australia, we were shipping from Australia.
- [Woman's Voice] I think in America they've protected
their store though, somehow,
like (crosstalk) sellers on there?
- [Man's Voice] I think it would depend
on what the agreement on the contract
or the agreement on your product would be.
- Yeah, okay, is there an agreement
or a contract on that product?
- [Woman's Voice] I have a good contract
with Amazon America if we wanted to do the same thing
with Amazon Australia, how hard is that?
- That means yeah, you're going to have to check
on the contract for that product if there is.
I was assuming this was just a Chinese product
which is being sold in America.
Now if this is an American product than yeah,
you'll have to check on that.
Thanks again.
Lincoln's an accountant so he's more trained
than any of us so.
(laughter)
Okay, so our job as eBay and Amazon sellers is simply
to find what the market wants and fulfill that market needs.
Also it says here identify and fulfill market needs.
Now the difference between a small online seller
and a large one, this is so basic but so many people
really don't get their head around it.
Is a big business has just got more proven products
like the way if anyone's read my last book,
I know I talk about this all the time but each leaf
is a product and each product sells over
and over and over 'cause we're into the new products
and because they're are new products they sell over
and over and over again.
So the more products you have the more revenue you make.
So many people here would have hobby-sized businesses.
If you put all those hobby-sized businesses together
you've now got quite a large business,
probably a full time business and a lot further beyond.
And the difference between a hobby business
and a professional business is that a professional business
makes more than the old wage.
Another way to look at it is that many streams make a river.