The Amazon Strategist Show

From Amazon To Target: How To Get Your Products In Retail

• The Amazon Strategist Show • Season 3 • Episode 74

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Ever wondered how to get your products from Amazon into actual stores? Join us as John Cavendish sits down with Talor Ofer, the retail guru behind Retail Empire, for a no-nonsense chat about breaking into brick-and-mortar retail.

With 25 years of helping brands land on store shelves across America, Talor's sharing everything you need to know:
-How to actually talk to retail buyers (and get them excited about your products!)
-The inside scoop on pricing - so you don't leave money on the table
-Why sending the right samples can make or break your retail deals

Whether you're crushing it on Amazon and ready for more, or just curious about getting your products into stores, Talor's been there, done that, and he's spilling all the tea. No fluff, just real strategies that work.

Seriously, if you've ever thought "maybe my product should be in stores," you won't want to miss this. Talor's sharing the kind of insider knowledge that usually takes years to learn - and trust us, it's gold!
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Connect with Talor and Retail Empire
Website: https://retail-empire.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talor-ofer-876b4a113/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCVhA_pDLs03iD3PaQN7GFsw@UCgg3W3FBsgDydBwxCCVt0_w 
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Connect with John Cavendish
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jgcuk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejohncavendish
LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/thejohncavendish

Know More About Seller Candy
Website: https://www.sellercandy.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/SellerCandyPro
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellercandyamz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sellercandy/
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Speaker 1:

Welcome to a joint webinar between Seller Candy and Retail Empire. It's great to have Talor on the webinar and I follow your WhatsApp group. With Rapture Talor. I follow your WhatsApp group. I really like it. I like the stuff you share. So, yeah, really exciting to do this content together and also share some of the amazing stuff you share about getting into retail. Thank you, thank you for having me today. Appreciate that. Thank you for being here. So the way we're going to do this is a Q&A style format. I'm going to ask you questions and also ask you the questions that come up in the Q&A, but we've got some pre-prepared questions which we spent many hours going and creating.

Speaker 1:

Good, First can you tell us a bit about retail and what you define as retail?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely Just a quick brief about myself. So I've been working with retailers in the USA for the last 25 years or so. My focus is the US market. Again, retail, physical stores, retail in the States is huge. When I say huge, let's see some numbers. So every department store in the States has a bunch of stores. Some of them the smallest one, would have 2530 stores, which usually would be in one area, and then the biggest one, which we have just been talking with last week, dollar General they have 20,000 stores. Just imagine 20,000 stores.

Speaker 2:

It's always like that when we come to a conversation about Dollar General, when they are coming to the table because we are working with them quite a long time, we're like thinking guys, just order half a dozen per store, that's all we need from you. It's not a big deal, just six units. Take it, you know, by 20. Here you go 120 000 units. That's it. Just try it. You know. If it's good, it's good. If not, not, hey, but um, but yeah, but. So there are almost 30 000 department stores and you can understand that if one has 30 and another one has 5 000, 6 000, so on, it comes up to, as far as I remember, approximately more than 4 million physical stores in the States. Now, we're not talking about pills, we're not talking about therapies, dentists or stuff like that. We're talking about stores that are selling items. Okay, but it is including in that number. It is including grocery stores. Okay, it's very hard to define what's the number without the grocery store, but the good news is that even grocery stores in the States, as in other some of the countries, not selling anything but grocery, but indeed selling, you know, facial items, hba, beauty items, skincare, sometimes toys, small craft items and so on. So it is also a business. So, yeah, that's the size of the retail.

Speaker 2:

Now, looking at the US government websites, if you do look at it, you will find out that the entire online in the States is no more than 15%, including Amazon, the biggest, and then Walmart and all the other marketplaces, and there's also, you know, shopify, ebay and so on. 15%, that means it doesn't mean that 85% is the retail, but it does mean that 85% is the biggest market out there and what we call the missed opportunity. Now, it's a real missed opportunity, and why? Because majority of the online sellers are focusing on online, not realizing that there is a huge market out there for their products and again, we are staying in the states. We're not moving to anything else.

Speaker 2:

I'm talking about talking about new infrastructure in Europe or wherever. I'm talking about something simple. Why is it simple? The way I see it is because the majority of the online sellers, especially Amazon sellers, already have everything that it needs in terms of chain supply in the USA to sell their products out of Amazon. So Amazon is obviously huge and great, but then we all know that you wake up in the morning and you're a little bit afraid of what's going to come up from Amazon side. Right, what's the new deal for today? What are the new requests? Why did they close my account, and so on. I'm not trying to scare anyone here. You all know these things are happening and you see them obviously more than me, because I'm not active at Amazon whatsoever. I'm just hearing from people.

Speaker 1:

I work with Literally our business. That's why we exist, solving those problems.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, solving those problems. So it's a good thing I brought it up, because a lot of my vendors that work with us they're telling me about it Stories that sometimes I'm like how could this happen? Like crazy stories, anyway. So, going back to retail, so this is the missed opportunity. Now I guess that around 50% to 55% of the entire US market is indeed physical stores. Okay, so now comes the big question Okay, okay, how does this apply to my brand selling on amazon?

Speaker 2:

I have my routine. I'm doing my 10, 100, 100 000 million dollar a month, whatever it is. What do I need that for? I mean, I'm happy with what I have. The way see it and I'm not alone in that is that when you create a brand, it's different if you're just manufacturing in China. So if you would ask me, what are you and I'm selling on Amazon, I would not say I'm an Amazon seller, I would say I'm a brand owner. There's a huge difference Because eventually, when you have a brand with website branding, packaging, you know language of your brand in terms of the colors and the visibility then the natural next step after sending online, showing some success with your products, is to go to other channels Most of the vendors are looking at, you know, facebook groups, tiktok, wherever it is, thinking that Walmart would be the next huge step.

Speaker 2:

Sorry, yeah, which is a huge step, but the way I see it, it's a small step, because selling on Walmart is again repeating what you did on Amazon, but it's not really spreading the word about your brand being, you know, a very well-known brand in the States. The way to become, to make your brand known in the market for real is by having your brand spread it in the country, and if you want to spread it in the country, you have to search the retailers that you can put your products on their shelf, which is the next part of our webinar today. But yeah, that was a long answer to a short question.

Speaker 1:

Well, I like it. I think it gives a lot of color and also, as you said, it shows the size of the opportunity, because I didn't know that. You know, basically, retail stores have what? If you say they're 50 of the other space outside, that's three times the size of amazon. That's true, and I love the idea of dollar general ordering six of my product yeah, every store for every store.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, maybe we can get into that and funding that. And what I would you know in my previous business if someone ordered 120,000 units, I don't know what I would do. So that's probably another challenge we can talk about. Yeah, it is, but first onto that, what does the market look like in retail, like if you want to start going into it, how does that work?

Speaker 2:

So I would first look. I would first divide the market into three type of retailers. The first type is lower. I would call it lower part is the off price. When I say off price, if you haven't been in the States or living there, you probably know TJ Maxx, rose Doors, burlington, homegoods companies that are selling off price. They're selling like if this hat, for instance, market price is, let's say, $19.99, they want to sell it for $9.99. We'll talk about how they do it, keeping their supplier happy and still able to sell the same very product for indeed $19.99 with other companies. But eventually, just to understand, these are the off-price companies. And then you have the medium class, which is Walmart, and perhaps you can put Target inside, it depends which category. But then you have all these general retailers like Michaels and Tractor Supply that are in an average level of pricing. It's also talking about, it's also indicating the audience that they have. Next you're going to have the premium retailers. Let's take, for instance, nordstrom, macy's, urban Outfitter, saks Fifth Avenue, barnes and Noble. All these companies.

Speaker 2:

If I had I could tell it. I could explain it better by an example. One of the brands I work with wanted to work with Macy's, said fine, but your products do not match anything on their shelf. She said I know, but I want to be on the marketplace because I know it's going to sell. The market Said fine, introduced her to the buyers. Back and forth, boom, forth, boom, she's in now. Before they went live in macy'scom, the buyer said that was a you know blanket how do you call it? Like the heavy blankets. I forgot to blanket.

Speaker 1:

I used to start waiting blankets okay, so that was way better.

Speaker 2:

and she was msrping like retailing it for 199. The buyer goes back to her in one of the emails and I can't forget that saying listen, there's only one more brand with weighted blankets in our platform and they are selling for 349. So we cannot sell yours for 199. We have to take the price at least to 499, if not 299. They ended up increasing the price for the customer and by that, increasing the wholesale price given to the vendor, because there's like a method for them of how much percentage you're going to get from each and every product you sell. That was amazing and this could happen only with high-end retailers. This is how the market looks like now. Obviously there are special channels. I don't want to dig into it too much, but and you can see it on my website if you drop um, if you drop by uh, but there's a lot of other channels. But talking about, you know, traditional physical stores, these are the three levels now inside the three levels. Traditional physical stores, these are the three levels Now inside the three levels.

Speaker 2:

You, let's say, are selling weighted blankets, just like you mentioned. So you know that your category is bedding, but that's not the only category that you could fit. It could be also home, it could be also other keywords that are mentioned as categories and there are subcategories like linen, for instance. Okay, it's very important to know the categories and subcategories, but first the categories and then you know who's a good fit. If you define yourself as a bedding category brand, then you have no reason to apply to companies like the exporting goods or bus pro or academy sports, because these are outdoor companies and they sell outdoor. On the other hand, obviously if you're selling, you know lamps and gear and stuff like that hiking, uh, falls. Yes, you want to go to the outdoor companies but surprisingly, those so-called outdoor retailers are also selling a lot of other categories. So they would not sell perfumes, they would not sell those blankets, weight blankets but they will sell flip-flops and probably some electric items like earbuds and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

So again, you have to define. Why am I saying this? It's because you look at your brand and you want to know where is your market Inside the 29, almost 30,000 retailers, inside the 400 million stores? Where is the shelf that fits my product? And I can tell you that in most of the cases that we checked until today for every brand. We managed to fit at least 60% of the retailers and I can tell you that we did literally every category that you could think of besides food, even drinks we are still doing drinks, which is an exception for us, but anyway, any category you choose, you're going to have at least 60% match with those retailers. So that's good news because the market is huge.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean thanks for sharing. And if the market is that big, how do you choose where to start? And we'll talk about the process in a minute, I suppose. But how do you choose where to start when you've got 60% of all these tens of thousands of retailers, hundreds of thousands of retailers?

Speaker 2:

I'll do some. Let's talk practically. I'll do something very, very easy. I'll say I mean I mean bedding. How do I know who are the bedding retailers, the retailers that have bedding category? You don't want bedding retailers because if there are bedding specifically bedding retailers some good chances that they will sell their own produced products and then there's no way they're going to buy from you. You're looking at retailers that are selling various categories and those are the retailers which are most of them, most of them. Those are the retailers that would always look for vendors, even small ones like us, particularly small ones like us. That's what's happening in the last couple of years. So I would go to Wikipedia or chat GPT and ask that question. Now, if you ask GPT, I'm going to assure you that you're going to have to struggle a lot to get more than 20-40 retailers. There's a lot of reasons why it's happening with GPT, but I truly believe that the nature of retail is I mean, there are no many, if at all, agencies like us. We work with 450 retailers as of today and growing, and I don't think there are a lot of them. So you know what happened with GPT.

Speaker 2:

As more as people are asking questions, more information is going to have when you're sitting on the other side asking the same question to the next day, which doesn't happen in retail. So you're going to have to be a little bit more active in search on uh directories such as wikipedia. Wikipedia, yes, it's informational website, but it's also a directory. You can ask for a list of retailers in the states, per category, and get the list, um, so that's that's one thing to do. The second thing to do is to say, okay, let's say my product fits North Storm. What do I do next? So obviously you want to get in touch with them. So who are you going to get in touch with? So the next question. So the answer is very clear, very simple you want to talk with someone who is buying from vendors. So that means you want the buyer, but not only the buyer, because there's a lot of different terminology in how they define key people in retail.

Speaker 2:

So you're going to have category manager and I'm telling you here things that took me a lot of time to learn and understand. I was struggling, but I'm giving it like as a present to the seller, can the audience? So, category manager, buyers, buyer assistant, svp remember that that term svp and then, most important, gmm, which is the general merchandise manager. This is the person who is on top of all the buyers and if you get to that person, good chances that they will direct you to the right buyer, because you're probably going to end up, in the beginning at least, finding a contact which is not exactly in your category, which is fine. Let's say, I want to sell those blankets to nostril. I don't need to get this the the sleepwear or or bedding buyer right away. If I can't, I can get health and beauty buyer and ask that lady hey, janice, can you help me with getting the right buyer? Look at my brand here. It's a cool one.

Speaker 2:

Obviously, like any other thing in sales world, you're going to have to repeat that action a couple of times until you get answers and you're going to have to pull the strings. Now you have to understand something as well Retail is a long, heavy process. There are no magics in retail it's not like Amazon. You put the product, it's either falling down or it's coming through the roof. It doesn't happen in retail. But when it does happen in retail, the numbers are absolutely insane, and you can understand that with what I mentioned earlier. So these are things to keep in mind.

Speaker 2:

Now, once you found the buyer, and you're going to ask me okay, so where do I find the buyer? You can find them on LinkedIn. You can get, like you know, paid directories. I used to pay thousands and thousands of dollars until I understood how to do it properly, but allow me to tell you that in my journey, I was living in China, producing for retailers, and then I created my own brand and I wanted to start away and I only had Walmart and Costco, which was huge. We started to work together, I started to ship goods and then I said why don't I make it bigger? I have the manufacturer, he's happy to finance the goods. Let's get more business right. I have no problem doing large. Wait a second, how do you find wind powers?

Speaker 2:

So back in 2004 or 5, 6, there was no GPT, there was no directories, nothing, literally nothing. So I had to pull the strings and talk with a lot of people over the phone to get my hands on the right contacts. I mean, I did so. Eventually, after a couple of years, I ended up working with 60 department stores, which was, for me, huge, and I thought like, okay, I'm working with everyone in the States, that's it, there's no more of it, nowhere to go, which was false. Obviously, today we work with 450 and we're still far from the entire market.

Speaker 2:

The way we jumped from 60 to 450 was 100% using mainly LinkedIn. We started manually and then we moved into a lot of SaaS platforms we're using, but manually as well. So LinkedIn and directories. So directories is something that you can find in the internet if you're lucky, or you can pay for it and get the right one, if you're lucky. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And then comes the even bigger question Okay, I got the right contact. Hold on one second Before I apply to this person, because this person, this buyer I'm going to talk with, is probably having a budget of a couple of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't want to put myself in a position where they're going to look at my message, email, whatever it is, and say next I don't want to be there. I have only one chance to capture their attention in the first round, because later in the second, third, fourth, it's going to be harder because they have the first impression in their mind. So how am I going to do it? To make them look at my brand and say you know what?

Speaker 2:

This is interesting. Yes, I've seen wooden puzzles before. I've seen flash toys. I've seen wooden puzzles before. I've seen flash toys before. I've seen whatever den engines before, but this one is interesting. I want to read more. How do you make that happen? It's going to take me about six, seven hours to explain, but I'll try to push it into three, four minutes. I love it.

Speaker 1:

Carry on going Not six, seven hours, but, yeah, as much detail as possible, because I would also love to know that I think everyone listening should be making a lot of notes.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate that if they do, and even if they don't. So the first thing you want to think about is how to define your brand. Now, if I'm selling this head and and my name is boss, then I want to use that name because everybody knows that name. But if the head's name is Taylor, my head I don't want to use that name because the buyer in front of me doesn't know who's Taylor. They don't know what I'm talking about, right? So I'm wasting a word.

Speaker 2:

Look at what I'm telling you here. I'm literally counting words. What I do want to do is say hats and say that it's branded. How am I going to do that? How am I going to explain that this is not just another five euro hat that you can find in the market, but it's the one for 25 that everybody wants? That's the million-dollar question. But I can tell you that you can use GPT to give you ideas, but eventually the best copywriting would be from your head and not from GPT, although it sounds non-2024 type of statement.

Speaker 2:

So if you're saying luxury heads, for instance, and you're talking with DJ Maxx buyer, you're losing them because they are not looking for luxury, they buy off price. And if you're saying best price or talking about quality or anything like that. You're losing any kind of buyer. And here's a great tip Do never mention anything about manufacturing, about pricing and about quality. They are assuming that you have great quality, otherwise you would not even try to attempt trying to talk with a huge buyer like them If you don't have the quality needed. What are you talking about? I mean, I'm not a quality control manager, I'm a buyer. I want to see something ready, fixed, 100% good, that once it's sold nobody's going to come back to the store saying, hey, there are some threads here going out. No, so if you're talking about quality, you make the opposite impression. You make me suspect that something is not really. Plus, you don't want to talk about manufacturing, even if you are a manufacturer, and I am working with manufacturers. Why? Because eventually they don't buy from overseas. 99% of the buyers do not buy overseas, they buy locally in the States, from a US warehouse.

Speaker 2:

And the way you present your brand. You can say a lot of things, but you don't want to. You want to say a little bit and drive them to ask more. This is the CTA of retail. I know CTA doesn't not really matching the situation, but it is call to action. You want them to ask you can I see catalog and pricing? You don't want to tell them hey, I have catalog and price. The only thing that you could offer them is samples. Why? Because the nature of retail is as follows Approach the buyer they ignore you. You approach them again and again. They respond to you asking for samples. Without samples, nothing is going to happen. Approach them again and again. They respond to you asking for samples. Without samples, nothing is going to happen.

Speaker 2:

I remember in 2002, something like that I came to China and I was like, wow, there's so many stuff here. And then a guy I worked with in Spain told me you have this, can you find that? And I found everything he said. I said okay, bring me the data. He said man, what are you talking about? I need to see it. I said, okay, I'll send you a picture by email. He said, no, no, I need to see it. I didn't understand the business.

Speaker 2:

And then I went to my partner telling him about this call. He told me are you kidding me? Forget it, let me handle that. And he was putting three, four pieces from every product in different colors and variations, with catalogs physical ones inside. He told me let's ship it whatever it costs, I don't care, $5,000, $10,000, $20,000. I don't care, I want to ship it overnight to them. I want them to get it, be excited, feel the product and then they want to order. And that's exactly what happened. Samples were the only way for us to get orders, especially back in those days. Nobody had catalogs and stuff like we have today. But anyway, samples is something that they really want to see, and fast. Now down the road there's going to be a lot of communication from the buyers.

Speaker 2:

Here's another interesting point that I've been seeing a lot in retail Buyers like to talk about concepts. Yes, they are forced to talk about pricing and about, you know, structure, like shipping point, delivery point, delivery date, all these things, but they are forced for that. What they are interested in is the concept. They like talking about the color of the thread and how they can change, probably the packaging, or maybe to make a co-branding and stuff like artist stuff and branding and so on. Why do they like? It is to my opinion. I don't have any proof for that, but to my opinion is because the nature of how they are being employed Now a buyer is getting in most of the retailers they're getting bonuses at the end of the year per what their products, under their responsibility, were selling. So if they brought half a million hats and only 10,000 were sold, there's no bonus. But if they sold the entire 450, almost 500 of them of 100,000, they're going to get a fat bonus. And for doing that they know that the branding and the language and the cars, this is what sells.

Speaker 2:

It's not the price. Even in TJ Maxx you can see three, four, five dollar Nike shirts. And Nike, by the way, produces specifically four tg max for this division. Not sure if you're aware of that and I've been there like when was it Before COVID? I was visiting TJ in New York, like a basement or something, and there were five, four $3 t-shirts in there and I didn't even bought one and I thought I'm going to buy the entire rack, not even one. The outfit is bad, the colors are not good, the logos are I don't know, it's just, it wasn't bad. Colors are not good. The law goes out. I don't know, it's just, it wasn't that I preferred buying two, three of them only in a you know, in a full price at night store because of how they look like, but that's just my opinion anyway no, I like it to summarize where you've been so far, because you're a fountain of information.

Speaker 1:

Um, so we've been through what's retail. We've been through what's retail. We've been through how you can start approaching these people, where you can get the lists from what you need to say when you outreach, don't just chat, gpt, the whole thing, perfect, different types of buyers, where to find contacts. So maybe you can talk a little bit about from the point of view of an Amazon seller. So there is Amazon seller that's been selling for two years. They're doing 100,000 a month. Where do I start Right?

Speaker 2:

See, one of the important points to talk about is the pricing, because you're selling your products $19.99. Okay, let's say, for example, this is the MSRP Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price. It's the retail price, suggested retail price. It's the retail price. Now, if macy's gonna show it in their shelf for 29, nobody's gonna buy it because people will notice that they can get it on amazon for $19.99. But if they're going to show it for $15, they're going to screw your listing on amazon because, hey, it's cheaper than on amazon, let's it here. Let's even buy it and sell it on Amazon, whatever all these things that's happening. So you have to think about being aligned. That's number one. Buyers are very aware of that, by the way. Second thing how do you do pricing for retail? So retail is based on bulk quantities and everything, and there's the price that you see on shelf $19.99. And then there's the hidden that you see on shelf 1999. And then there's the hidden price which is between you and the buyer, and that's the wholesale price, a price you give them so they can buy bulk for you and make their profit. Normally it's going to be 45 to 50 percent of the retail price. So if 1999 is your price, they're going to buy it somewhere between 950, 990, perhaps even 10. It depends for the retailer.

Speaker 2:

Some of the retailers, pricing information can be found on google. It's as simple as that. Google can tell you that imu imu is initial markup. What's the markup they do? How much percentage are they doing on top of the product? Now people would ask how does it happen that google knows such a thing? Is because most of them are public companies and, being so, their staff are sharing in interviews what's the business model they're doing, how they do their pricing structure of a much they pay per square foot in the store, if it's East Coast, west Coast and so on. That's why it's visible information. But in general, if you want to make it easier and not just dig into links and everything, you can make it easier by understanding that most of the you remember we said off-price, medium and high-end. So the high-end are definitely going to pay you between 40% to 50% of the MSRP, the LUT price, the medium one would pay you probably 40% to 45%, while the off-price, like TJ and others, they're going to pay you 25%, maxing in 30%, which comes in our example of of 20 bucks. You're talking about six to seven dollar per piece. But yes, you're going to get 10, 000, 20, 000, 50 000 pieces, just to give you.

Speaker 2:

Uh, if I can share my screen, I could show you how a retail order looks like so you can understand. So, as you can see here, I don't want to expose too much details, but anyway, it's from August and shipping is supposed to be, as we speak, 500, then 1,000 units, 1,700 and so on. This order, if you summarize all of them together, they're going to come up to 15,000 pieces. Not a huge order, but still. That's why they allow themselves, when they do test orders like that, to ask for 25 or maximum 30%. But if you look at Rite Aid, which is I just prepared that before we speak, I just received that purchase order yesterday. They are not. As you can see, it's shipping to October.

Speaker 2:

Rite Aid, with 1,200 stores, there are three purchase orders like this, so they are buying less quantities. You see 10, 7, 18, blah, blah, blah. This one is specifically $10,000, not a huge order. And then if you look at the other one, I guess it's the same or a little bit smaller. It's bigger, actually $28,000. And the third one. So these three orders, which are eventually, for one vendor, coming up to $40,000, $50,000, are not as huge as TJ Maxx in quantities, but they are paying approximately 40-something percent of the retail price. And these are things. So you're going to have to look at your landed cost what you guys are calling COG, cost of goods, right, we call it LDP. It's the same landed slice.

Speaker 2:

And then you would say, okay, if I'm buying it for $4, $5 landed and I'm selling it for $8, $9, that's good, no problem. But what if I buy it for $8,000, $9,000, that's good, no problem. But what if I buy it for $6 and TJ want to buy it for $630, $650? Oh, if it's TJ, I would say yes, because TJ could bring you a 1 million pieces order to the table in no time.

Speaker 2:

But if that would be the case with a company like I don't know, william Sonoma, high-end retailer, you don't want to make a dollar on a product, or half dollar or even a couple of them. You want to make a good chunk of dollars on every product because their quantities are not huge. Talking about hundreds or thousands, no more. You're not going to see 20,000, 30,000 pieces orders from companies like William Sonoma. But William Sonoma, for instance, they are a company with 17 retailers under them, including West Elam and Poultry Barn and others. So if you combine all together, yes, you're going to see 20, 30,000. So it depends how you look at the edge of your business, will Barron.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. So I guess, going from the seller example again, you're doing 100k a month. You've found your retailer, you've contacted some buyers when they start doing these different orders and how do most of your sellers that are Amazon sellers deal with logistics, like I guess a lot of them aren't holding a lot of inventory in the US to start with, like excess inventory.

Speaker 2:

They do not expect you to hold inventory for an unknown order. That's why we have two types of purchase orders, Even with DJ Maxx, that are working quantities. You're going to have a couple of hundreds as first step, as first order. They're going to ask you how much you have, what's your inventory level looks like? And then you're going to say I have whatever level looks like. And then you're going to say I have whatever 600 pieces each. They're going to say, okay, let's start with 400. And obviously you don't have 600, you have 800.

Speaker 2:

So why are you saying six if you have four? Because we want to leave some quantity to make sure that you have that quantity for your Amazon business right. Next, you're going to want to look at the second type of photos, which is the bulk one, saying, okay, you don't have that quantity here, so we're going to give you a lead time which is not immediate like the test order. It's going to be 90 days, 120 days, 60 days, whatever it is, because we know that you need they don't say it, but they understand it you need to produce and ship, receive it in your warehouse, warehouse in the states, and then ship from your warehouse to their warehouse. No, they do not receive overseas orders right into the warehouse because of the tax issues, uh involved inside. It's just a big headache for them and we can understand that nice, cool.

Speaker 1:

So you've ordered in, you've got this initial bulk order. What about cash flow when it gets to that point as well then?

Speaker 2:

If you have the cash flow, it's good. If you don't have the cash flow, there are two types of solutions that I know. One of them is communication with your vendor, trying to get better terms from them. Explain to the guys we've been selling on Amazon. Everything's good, you've seen what's happening. Now we're talking about the big game. We need your support. You need to give us some credit. Second option, which is the more likely option to happen, is going to a factor.

Speaker 2:

There are companies called factor in the States that are financial, not banks, private companies financing bulk orders for between one and a half percent up to four percent from your profit. Um, and then the good point about those companies and you can google a company like that they name. Their name is rosenthal and wasn't out in the in new york. Now I'm talking about rosenthal Freight. It's a different company. The good advantage that they bring to the table is that they know what you've been through, so they are capable of putting the deposit and the balance to your Chinese manufacturer and get it financed until it's landed at Macy's Warehouse and you've been waiting for whatever 20, 30 days to get paid. They know the process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, awesome, yeah, I mean, I've heard about those as well. So what services do you provide? Like how do you help people with this process?

Speaker 2:

We basically connect online vendors with buyers in scale. That's what we do. We have a dedicated program, which is the main thing that I'm doing. Again, as I mentioned, you can work with 450 retailers growing every day. It might be even 500. By now, I don't know, I just got used to seeing 450 in the last couple of months, but anyway. And then we also introduced to special channels which we didn't talk about today's for another podcast, but TV segments, media companies, local importers, marketplaces like callscom, office, depotcom and so on, Subscription boxes, a lot of things. But the main core of the business is physical chain stores and, yeah, that's the service that we're giving. That's what we do, and it's going to become a SaaS service because we're building a SaaS platform. It's been like ever with this journey of SaaS, but at some point it's going to happen. It's going to be a platform login, credentials and everything, same way that you get any service in these days.

Speaker 1:

I love it, and so if anyone's interested in exploring whether their product and how does someone evaluate whether their products are good fit for retail, so, yeah, it's very hard to evaluate and say this is indeed going to work in retail or not.

Speaker 2:

I truly believe that if it's not a catastrophe product, then the only real way to discover that is by starting the journey. And if you would ask me what defines the success rate of the vendors you work with, I would say something surprising that I've noticed that those the more the vendor believe in their brand, the more potential they have to get them on the shelf. Not related with the product, not related with the branding, with nothing. It's just who's the company, person, people, who's behind it, and you do.

Speaker 1:

They believe and push it the way it needs to be pushed. Obviously, you need branding.

Speaker 2:

you need a website and everything. You cannot send a sample in poly back to a retailer because they're like what is this, unless it's a shirt?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Just like it is with general business just whoever has the most consistency and belief that it's going to work, they tend to be successful eventually. All right, cool. So if someone does want to work with you or just see if they're a good fit for you to help, what's the best way to do that?

Speaker 2:

They can always fill out a very short, quick form, which I think I sent an issue, I can share it to everyone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they can fill a form. Then we look at it, getting back to them to book a call with us to make sure that we are aligned and talk further, or they can drop an email as well. And, yeah, on my website you can find everything that you need If you want to work with us or get in touch with us, if you want to see the blog, if you want to get, just hear some, some information from our newsletter everything is there.

Speaker 1:

We know we've had you on the podcast before you've done this webinar. I mean, I truly believe that if anyone wants to go into retail, they should, you know, reach out and see if you're a good fit, because we all do so much and you know, we start making money, things start going well and then we're like what next? And I think working with experts and working with people who know what they do is the number one shortcut to actually scale a business without going insane and without having to learn something from zero. You know, learning from zero, as you said, 20 years, right, and I'm sure you're still learning Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

Every day.

Speaker 1:

Like all of us. Yeah, we're not learning. We're dying, or maybe we're still dying.

Speaker 2:

I don't know Slowly, slowly and safely.

Speaker 1:

Slowly, comfortably yeah. Right, so we have time for some questions, if anyone has any in the Q&A, what would be a reasonable charge slash percentage for your service? I think that's a question.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a question. There's a button on my website called SalesTube. This is our service. You're going to see all the details inside. Basically, we work on a monthly subscription plus percentage from dealers. But we are flexible in percentage because, if you remember, I mentioned the pricing earlier. So if you're price, if you're looking at an order with DJ Max, we cannot charge you for like seven, ten, eight percent of commission. But if you work with companies like Macy's, yes, we can. Once you have an order from the off price retailers, it's going to come up to um, probably four or five percent. It depends per order. But uh, yeah, these are the numbers and I will. I will even share the exact link if, if you want, you can visit that page and like see all the information there.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Yeah, I'll share that link as well. So, um, yeah, all I would say is don't let a percentage or fee hold you back because, like anything else, you can do the numbers after you've talked to someone and figure out if it's profitable, and don't sign up with anyone who's not profitable as a supplier.

Speaker 2:

Right. I mean I was asked about it a couple of times. Obviously, I've been asked a lot, but let me put it that way If I have a brand and I want to break through retail and I'm going to calculate briefly what's going to cost me to bring employees to buy database, to purchase knowledge, all of this, you're going to end up with quite a nice amount of dollars that you're going to put on the table with people that not necessarily would exactly know what they're doing. Okay, Because it's very unique what we're doing and I'm aware of that. So by what? As of today, the nature of our business today, before we launched the platform I mentioned earlier, it's like hiring sales team, but a very professional one.

Speaker 1:

And if anyone else has had a sales team before, you know how painful it is to hire somebody who's good yeah.

Speaker 2:

Everyone's a salesman.

Speaker 1:

Nobody, the people. Someone that can actually generate leads and convert them for you is worth your weight in gold. Thanks, talal, and thank you everyone else who joined. So see you soon. Thank weight in gold.

Speaker 2:

Thanks a lot, and thank you everyone else who joined, so see you soon. Thank you, John.

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John Cavendish

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