The Downside Of Being An Amazon Seller

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The downside of being an Amazon seller with Paul Harvey.
Danny is a big fan of shooting videos and passing repetitive tasks to the VA.
Danny hates ‘sourcing’ and so has built tools to speed it up in-house – down to 8 minutes to validate the product fast.
Going onto Alibaba and hitting up 30 factories is not Danny’s favourite thing
Paul was spending upto 60% on admin tasks when he started out.
If you contact 20 suppliers you have to keep track of where you are with each of the m in the process
When it comes to contacting all the factories it does tune people off quite a lot

Shipping Logistics as a Downside of being an Amazon Seller

Another area Danny hates is shipping logistics
It’s such an old school industry
Danny doesn’t go anywhere else as it’s so much hard work – likes to keep it simple and has a good relationship with his shipper
Paul is not big on penny pinching with Freight Forwarders – his knows the processes and they just get it done, no hassle or paperwork hassle
Happy to pay extra for peace of mind and avoid this downside of being an Amazon Seller
Cheaper option usually means a poor service
Shipping to UK with VAT and customs is a whole mine field
Danny had a UK shipping agent to speak to a Japanese shipper to avoid ‘tourist pricing’
Optimise with port nearest to your prep centre
Who is handling which relationships

This admin stuff winds Danny up and can be a major downside of being an Amazon Seller
Reconciliation, UK VAT, Euro VAT, etc
Danny titles it – PAYING AWAY THE PAIN
Take monthly revenue on Amazon / 40hr work week
Figure out 160 hours / month
Divide your Amazon revenue by / 160 hours / month
That’s your hourly rate – spend 4 hrs in admin on this and it’s costing you
Spend time on the business not in the business

Paul uses LOOM as a screen recording software that’s free, similar to Jing and has a chrome extension
Paul is doing screen recordings and just hits record and send once he’s done
Danny loves audio recording too
Danny uses ‘screencastify’ for his recordings
Emails are just working on ‘process’
Our jobs as entrepreneurs are to put the deals in place and make it happen
‘Manager’ and then there are people who have the vision – if you’re managing your business it can’t grow

Paul gets people who ask him for support
He send them to an existing video on-line but they are too lazy to watch the video and still send an email with loads of words in it…..which Paul then won’t respond back to
Watching hundreds of webinars over the years makes you wary of watching ‘another’ video unless it’s going to provide value
Is there a service where people will watch a video / webinar for you and just give you a one-pager of the highlights?

Outsourcing as much as possible and quickly as possible will help you grow your business
If you have to sit-down and do accounts for 3 days and it’s a hassle then you lose momentum
You lose your creative energy and you’ve not got as much passion for pushing on with that launch, or raising that cashflow
It’s a real damage to your business
People say ‘I did so much today’ but how much of that was ‘grunt-work’ (stuff a 12yr old could do) and not growing the business

When Danny has a new VA come on-board he shoots a video (3 min long) of him completing the tasks and send this to his VA
THis is in effect Danny walking through the ‘standard operating procedure’ for his VA
He then asks the VA to watch the video and write up the ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ with screen grabs for their task themselves
This lets him assess if they’ve understood the task from the video and embed it into their long-term memory
And if the VA doesn’t work out or moves on then he has a set of instructions available
The VA should be ready to replace themselves with someone else with their documents and processes