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For this series of podcast episodes I interviewed Alex Leal, a very experienced ecommerce seller who specializes in selling on different platforms including a very big Latin online marketplace.
To watch the video recording of the interview, please visit our website.
My name is Aleksejs Leal. I’ve been selling over 7 years different marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Mercado Libre for 2 years of experience and I also have a Fulfillment Center which basically fulfills for all my Amazon stores. I also have few private labels, some supplements, some other categories.
– Let’s talk about tips for sellers who would like to start selling health supplements on Amazon. Maybe somebody would like to launch their own brand and they’re thinking that then going also sell their product on Amazon. Any tip that you can share about it?
– The tip I would give for the people let’s say Private Label, in the Private Label sector for the supplements. To be successful on Amazon first of all, you need to also have your audience outside the house. If you are just launch product and just be a 100% on Amazon you not going be successful. You need to have social media presence, you need to have your own website, you need to have your email list, all that before you basically launch on Amazon for the supplements. Because it’s very very competitive category. Now other tip is if you doing that and you don’t have all the component at least get the product that is unique because if you going be just any protein, there’s so many brands and so many brands with so much money that it just going to a beat you and you’re not going be successful. You need to have something unique that you can advertise let’s say any special keyword, ingredient that you can add onto your product that can be very different from everybody else if you want to compete in that category. So that would be my advice for anybody who want to start Private Label. If it’s a wholesale make sure you have a good contract with the brand that you going work with because there’s a lot of work also believe you or not and if you have exclusivity and you working on and ranking the brand and if you don’t have a solid contract the brand can just start selling to other people and a lot of people going to jump into your listing and they just piggybacked all the work you’ve done. I’m talking about based on my experience because it was a brand that I was wholesaling, I did a lot of work on ranking the products. All the work that being done like an optimizing the listing, the pay for click, some external traffic products really well by we didn’t had a written contract. It was based on verbal contract. And they start wholesaling outside the Amazon as well and there’s a lot of people start jumping to my listings, technically my listings because I’m the one who created them but it wasn’t my brand. They start jumping to the listing, basically a lot of people’s to piggybacking all the work I was doing I was paying pay per click they were not, you know, there’s a lot of money that was spending on my own and then when I start saying to the brand, why you doing this, you need to control who you sell, they basically didn’t care and I told them if you’re not going to control that all the sales going drop. They didn’t want to listen to me they basically were thinking about today and anything for a long run and what happened to them from the hundred thousand I was selling on a monthly basis on their brand. That was done by our team. They went down to like $10,000 a month.
And again, I’m not working with them anymore. I still have some inventory because I was purchasing the inventor up from 3 to 4 months inventory supply, so because you know how when you rank the product you want to make sure that you have inventory so I bought the inventory of front all that time and you don’t they did that. So, my advice is having a really good contract. Right now, I’m getting to another similar brand, similar project and I prepare my contract like never before. It’s going to be a really detailed.
You may find Alex on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and also at Wizards of Amazon facebook group