Firing The Man
THANK YOU TO OUR 25,000+ LISTENERS! We are so thankful to be one of the TOP E-Commerce Podcasts delivering high-quality authentic content to you! Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA, Walmart WFS, and E-Commerce. Discover how you can create multiple income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love - whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world. Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures. During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned. This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from Ken and David you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
Firing The Man
Filling Underserved Shelf Space on Amazon with Jim Cockrum
Ready to scale your Amazon business?
Click here to book a strategy call.
https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon
What if the path to e-commerce success was simpler than most "gurus" make it out to be? In this eye-opening conversation with Jim Cockrum—pioneer in online entrepreneurship and founder of the Proven Amazon Course—we discover why most people are looking at Amazon selling all wrong.
Forget what you've heard about market saturation. With less than 20% of all retail happening online, we're still in the pioneer stage of e-commerce. The blue ocean is expanding daily, and Jim reveals his "low-low-high" approach that's helped thousands build sustainable businesses with minimal risk and investment.
The real opportunity? Finding "underserved shelf space" in Amazon's massive warehouse network. Jim explains why focusing on everyday products that shoppers need quickly—rather than chasing the lowest price—creates a powerful advantage even for beginners. Through fascinating examples (like how one seller outperformed 200 competitors while charging the highest price), you'll understand why speed and convenience often trump price for today's consumers.
Jim dismantles common myths about Amazon selling, clarifying how the platform's increasingly consistent policies make it easier than ever to stay in good standing. He provides practical guidance on sourcing products properly, understanding the economics of profitable reselling, and avoiding the costly mistakes that trip up new sellers.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Jim shares his unconventional belief that relationships—not tactics or strategies—are the true predictor of entrepreneurial success. By the end of our conversation, you'll see why Jim's approach has stood the test of time while countless "get rich quick" schemes have faded away.
Whether you're just starting your online business journey or looking to diversify your existing e-commerce operation, this conversation offers a refreshingly straightforward path to building freedom and financial stability in the digital age.
How to connect with Jim?
Website: https://jimcockrumcoaching.com/
Podcast: https://silentjim.com/podcast-home/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jimcockrum/
Facebook Group: SilentJim
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimcockrum
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jimcockrum/?hl=en
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2K55JmPu9WBAqmOtIaQAkf
Ready to scale your Amazon business? Click here to book a strategy call. https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Firing the man podcast, the podcast for entrepreneurs and business builders ready to grow beyond the hustle and into ownership that truly scales. I'm your host, and today's guest is someone who's been guiding people toward financial freedom long before e-commerce was a household term Jim Cockrum. Jim is a pioneer in online entrepreneurship, founder of the Proven Amazon course and host of the long-running Silent Sales Machine radio. For more than two decades, he's helped thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs create sustainable income streams through smart, proven strategies, without falling into the trap of chasing fads or burning out With expertise spanning Amazon, selling creative online marketing and building multiple streams of income.
Speaker 2:Jim's approach is all about creating businesses that serve your life, not the other way around. He teaches everyday people how to start lean, scale wisely and build assets that generate long-term results. In today's conversation, we'll explore how to stand out in the crowded e-commerce landscape, the timeless business principles that still work today, and why the path to freedom is often simpler and more attainable than most people think. Get ready this episode will shift how you see online business and what's possible for your future. Jim, very excited to have you. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:It's an honor to be here. Thanks for the invitation. I hope to deliver tremendous value to your listeners. Thanks for the introduction.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. To start things off, can you share with our audience a little bit about your background and your path in the entrepreneurship world?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, when I'm asked to do a little bio at the beginning of these podcast episodes and interviews and things, what I like to do instead is sprinkle in a little bit of reassurance for the listener that if they hang out, we're going to give them at least five, if not 10 or more actionable concepts that'll change their life, and I'm not going to hold anything back. That's what I've been doing for 20 years. So I've been married to my wife for over 30 years my college sweetheart. We've had five kids. Three of them have now had grandkids.
Speaker 3:I'm at that season of life where I'm just reaping the benefit of having done life a little differently, and it's a path that I now encourage boldly for others to explore. And that is we live in the greatest time in human history to launch businesses. The cost of trying new things and failing has never been lower. Take advantage of that. Be trying new things constantly. Better yet, be listening to people who know what they're talking about, who are leading large communities of people who are succeeding. Pay attention to what's working and try it, test it, go for it. There's never been a better time to go for it. Yeah, so that's my bio is.
Speaker 3:I'm passionate about helping other people, like you just said, succeed using the internet creatively the greatest tool of communication and connection we've ever had and it's at our fingertips and it's free, and so many people aren't taking advantage of it. The opportunity has never been better than it is now to build the flexibility and the financial future that you've always thought was possible. It's possible, it's happening. I'm in a huge community of people who do it all day, every day, encouraging and supporting each other. So, yeah, let's get into some great content. Man, it's not about me today. It's about your listeners, making sure they understand that there's a lot of great ways to do really well online that are out there. There's a lot of great ways to do really well online that are out there.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. So let's start with the very beginning. So obviously, online sales is something that you're very passionate about. Do you remember when did you make your first online sale? Do you recall the product?
Speaker 3:The first significant sale that really that just caused an explosion of fireworks in my brain of the possibilities was when I had an old pair of Nike Air Jordans and I didn't like them. I'm a basketball player. I'd worn them a few times and I wasn't a big fan, but I put them in my closet, broke them out to sell them on eBay and a guy in Singapore paid me $700, $800 for these shoes that I'd bought for $ bucks on clearance. Now there were significantly more than that now, but that's not the point. The point is I had an international business in a couple of minutes. That had never been possible before. Sit down at your computer, type out a few you know, fill in a few forms Congratulations you have an international business. That's never in all of human history there's never been a time like that. Since about the mid-90s.
Speaker 3:The game of opportunity has changed dramatically, forever, and those of us who are just old enough to remember the way it used to be versus the way it is now, I think have more of an appreciation for how different it is. I think have a more of an appreciation for how different it is. Launching a business used to mean huge risk, years and years, without exaggeration of planning and spending and building and testing and business plans and lawyers and accountants, and and at the end of all of this ridiculously long journey, your odds of failure was still about the same as it is today About 80% of everybody who tries to build a business fails. But what's changed is you can try two or three things tomorrow if you want, and okay. So 80% of them fail, that's fine. 10, 20% of them that work and start to do something. Let's build on that.
Speaker 3:That wasn't possible before. It is now. So that's how I got started and as I started to realize the power of this tool of connection and communication and all the possibilities that come with it, we can't squander this time that we have that we're alive where this thing is. We're in the early pioneer stages of e-commerce. Let me just throw out a statistic, because some people are like oh no, it's saturated. E-commerce is huge. Let me just ask you, david, do you happen to know maybe you do because you're kind of in the space, but you may never have heard this number Of all of retail in the United States? Let's put it all in one big pie chart all retail spending. What percentage of that is online?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 3:I would venture to say it's under 50%, but trending upwards it's under 50. It's under 25. It's under 20. It's about 17, 18% right now. So, stated clearly less than 20%, far less than 20% of retail spending in the United States is e-commerce. People have the impression that it's already taken over. They see Amazon trucks everywhere. They think everybody's shopping online for everything. Nope, you're wrong. The game has barely started. We are in the early pioneer stage. If this was the settlement of the United States, we've just started sending wagons west. Right, the game hasn't even started yet. We're in the early stages because the projections this is US government data, Google it. Ask any AI, it'll tell you the projections are 20, 25, 30, 35 in our lifetimes. It's going to double in the next decade, plus. It's going to double in the next decade, plus. The game has only begun. So anyone who's out there, it's saturated. It's not like it used to be. Ignore those voices. The blue ocean is expanding rapidly, getting deeper, whiter, bluer, more welcoming every single day.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate that optimism.
Speaker 3:And, to be frank, we need more of that right now.
Speaker 2:I fully agree with you. I was talking to somebody last night about e-commerce and I said, if it's a baseball game, we're probably in the third inning and based. Call it optimism. I call it realistic, realistic, a realistic vantage point. I could pour some optimism on there, if you want. I'm just talking facts and data, which is a very optimistic outlook. It's the fastest growing economic sector in the United States. So for people that are new to e-commerce, or for our listeners that are thinking about starting an e-commerce business, I think there's a couple questions that they need to answer. One is what am I going to sell? Yep. And two, where am I going to sell it? Yep. And so let's start with the first what am I going to sell? Are there any? You know you talked about a large community of sellers that are supporting each other. Are there any product characteristics maybe it's price point, maybe it's size that you feel like there's very good opportunity in?
Speaker 3:Well, let me adjust your question just a little bit. So we ask what I think is a slightly better version of what you're asking right now. Okay, because our team set out about 12 years ago and we've been committed to finding what we call the low, low, high business model of e-commerce. Because there's a thousand ways that you can use the internet, right, I mean, you don't have to look far, go to Google and say I want to make money online and you're going to find it just scams and clowns and dark holes that you can fall down everywhere. Right, but we set out to say let's have the highest level of integrity, let's prove that we know what we're talking about by doing it ourself, first teaching it to a bunch of students, proving the concepts work, and then we're going to teach others and let's find the biggest blue ocean of opportunity that we can find, where others can come in and legitimately build and we can have a community around an unlimited platform of opportunity. Right, that's what we do.
Speaker 3:So what is that opportunity? It's not so much what am I going to sell, or it's not so much which price point, it's. Where is that opportunity? We call it the low, low, high opportunity. Low risk, low investment, low learning curve, highest odds of success. You could look at every business opportunity and put them somewhere on that scale. But what is the lowest risk, lowest investment required, lowest learning curve, highest odds of success, business model that we've been able to identify? Of the literal, literally hundreds. I've tried dozens and dozens myself. Again, most fail. But what is that? Low, low high. The low, low high is simply stated as possible. Filling the underserved shelf space, simply stated as possible. Filling the underserved shelf space in Amazon's massive 200 plus warehouse network with everyday, common, easily sourced items, helping meet the convenience needs of shoppers who aren't price sensitive. They are speed sensitive. That opportunity is massive. The risk to enter the game is negligible. The cost to get the tools you need we're talking, you know, a few hundred bucks. You're good to go. A few more hundred dollars for inventory. Welcome to the game. Let's go, Scale at your own pace. Right now.
Speaker 3:I'm fond of saying this is the cleanest way for me to kind of to sum up the opportunity in a single statement. And then we can go wherever you'd like to go, but right now, today, millions of shoppers will go to Amazon, which gets half of all transactions every day in the United States online. By the way, you add up the next 10 competitors and they don't add up to what Amazon does every day. Okay, so millions of shoppers are going to go to Amazon today and they're going to pay far less than they were willing to for product that will arrive later than they wish they could get it, and we've got overwhelming evidence that I could get into that demonstrates that. Right now, there are millions of easily sourced products being sold on Amazon that are understocked popular products that are understocked or completely unstocked currently in Amazon's massive warehouse network. That is the low, low, high business opportunity of our time and easily the lowest barrier to entry opportunity that's available to all of us in e-commerce. And that's what we teach, and we've got hundreds and hundreds of that's.
Speaker 3:My podcast is hundreds of interviews with students who are doing it At some cases, seven-figure businesses. In some cases, they started a few months ago and they're celebrating their first $10,000 a month, for example. That's what we do and it's reselling. It's Amazon reselling. That's the entry gate into hundreds of other opportunities, but it's the low, low, high. So is that okay that I kind of I tweaked your question a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely, and that was a better way to phrase my question. And so when you're talking about reselling, this would be in contrast to say, a private label brand, correct, exactly?
Speaker 3:Yeah, everything on Amazon is either a brand you own, if you sell it, or it's a brand someone else owns and you're selling it. Everything and the vast majority of the sellers and the transactions are people selling stuff that they don his invitation. I had a lunch with him and he said thank you for helping teach resellers how to fill our shelves better than we ever could ourselves. Right, amazon needs players in that role For the millions of transactions daily on 1.4 billion products in a catalog that's growing rapidly. It would take us 32 years to look at each of those products for one second each 32 years, and that catalog is growing rapidly, right? So Amazon can't do that themselves. They need resellers to do that. That's the game that we're getting better and better, and I believe we're leading the industry and informing people on how to play that game well with the lowest risk, lowest parity entry, highest odds of success. Business model.
Speaker 2:Very nice. I really like that and I want to dig deeper on that. So, amazon, I really let me back up here. You had mentioned that Amazon accounts for half of the transactions Approximately, and so that does seem like a logical place to start. Now Amazon has changed, and I have personally been selling on the platform for nine years and have seen a lot of trends that have come and gone, a lot of tricks or tactics that have come and gone, a lot of tricks or tactics that have come and gone, but there are some strategies that have withstood the test of time. And so if we talk about just a good Amazon business hygiene right, what does that look like? What is somebody who's totally on top of things, a tier one operator of Amazon of sorts?
Speaker 3:Well, let's talk about the reselling side, specifically because you own a brand and there's a different set of hygiene and ideas there. Let's talk on the reseller. I'm selling stuff that I'm not the brand owner. It's other people's brands, hundreds of thousands of brands that I'm eligible to sell. What's a good hygiene there? Well, the good news is I made a podcast episode not too long ago talking about this. I found five or six reasons why you're better off starting now, past six months or so, and going into the next year or so now, than, arguably, at any point in time. All the way back to COVID Because the question you just asked it's gotten easier to have good hygiene.
Speaker 3:I call it the policy and the enforcement bubbles. Most people just assume policy and enforcement go together. Not true with Amazon. Until recently, policy was over here, this gray drifting bubble, and enforcement was over here, this gray drifting bubble. And enforcement was over here, this gray drifting, confusing bubble, and sometimes they would bump into each other and overlap and make sense, and most of the time they were two completely separate worlds. In many, many regards.
Speaker 3:Amazon's been working really hard to bring those into one circle. Here's our policies, here's our consistent enforcement of those policies, here's the clarity on those policies. So now it's a lot harder to say well, I saw a bunch of other people getting away with it, so I did it too, and now we're all in trouble. You're not seeing as much of that. You're seeing a lot less of that because the policies haven't really changed a whole lot. They've gotten a little clearer and the enforcement has gotten more consistent. So hygiene has become far easier now than it used to be. And I could I mean I could brainstorm off 12, 15 examples. I'm not going to go into it but there's so many ways where Amazon has gotten so much clearer on what their policy is and they've gotten so much more consistent on enforcing it. So now you kind of have an advantage. You're not. You're not risking getting punished retroactively for something you did a year and a half ago on a product you shouldn't have been selling, an ace in the hop on. Amazon has been known to do that to sellers. That's never going to happen to you.
Speaker 3:If you get good education and training and you're taught where the guardrails are, which have never been higher and clearly more clearly marked, taught where the guardrails are, which have never been higher and clearly more clearly marked, you're good to go right. You do need to now. You can still absolutely make serious mistakes. You need to know the rules. You need what you really need as a good mentor or instruction to make sure that you stay in the guardrails, cause there's a lot of garbage content out there stuffed on YouTube. You know well, just go buy a pallet from wherever and throw it on there and, you know, make a bunch of money.
Speaker 3:No, you're violating so many, so many policies. You're hopping on bad ASINs. You're selling inventory that can't be. There's no chain of authorized custody of that inventory. You got to know these things. You got to source from an authorized retailer or website. Right, you got to know what a good receipt is versus a bad receipt, a good invoice versus a bad invoice. You need to know these things. They're not complicated, but you need to know. But if you know, the guardrails are there and clearly marked and you're going to do great. So hygiene involves making sure you're following the rules and you understand them, and that's never been easier. That's the short answer.
Speaker 2:Okay, no, that's really helpful. And what you're saying about the policy and enforcement, those two concentric circles coming closer together I have witnessed that certainly, and I look at you know five years ago was kind of the wild wild west, where those circles were not concentric, they were at opposite sides of the page sometimes and it left sellers sometimes in a tough spot, with the best of intentions but with the red flag on their account. And so one thing I talk a lot about private label on here because that's what I have experience with, but we haven't had a ton of reseller guests on, and so I'd like to go a little bit deeper here.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Where are you sourcing product? Is this typically domestic sourcing? Is this? Are you starting on Alibaba? What does that look like?
Speaker 3:I love it. No, never Alibaba. We've got a list of the most common mistakes that newbies make when they get into the reselling arena, and one of them is sourcing anything from outside the United States. Don't do it. You're crazy, you're blowing up your future. You're destroying the possibilities of having a viable business on Amazon. Don't do it. Don't import anything. It's not necessary. Where are we sourcing? Every major retail in the United States, every authorized website, distributors, wholesalers as long as the brand you are selling recognizes the source you are buying from as part of their authorized channel, you're 100% good to go 100% of the time, as long as you keep your receipt or invoice, with no exceptions.
Speaker 3:Where the confusion comes in is where people buy very authentic looking, very authentic looking product from a liquidator in a pallet. You know, billy Bob's pallets are us down the street. A cousin opened up this thing and he's buying liquidations and returns and he's putting them on pallets and selling them to sellers and like surely this is good product. I mean, look at it, it's in a. It's still in the shrink wrap. It looks great, it's perfect. I'm going to send that in. I've got my invoice right here. Amazon said I need an invoice, right, okay. So I got my invoice.
Speaker 3:No, you've violated policy, because what Amazon's going to do if someone accuses your product of being inauthentic is they're going to call the brand and they're going to say to the brand that you just sold and they're going to say to the brand that you just sold hey brand. We got a seller here who bought some inventory from they look at the invoice Billy Bob's Palette Palace, are they part of your authorized channel? And the brand is going to go Billy Bob, what? No, they're not part of our authorized channel. And Amazon is going to come back to you with very bad news, say hey, seller, sorry, you can't prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that your product is 100% authentic. Therefore, we have to assume the possibility that it's counterfeit, which means you're selling, you're breaking our counterfeit policy, like no, no, I didn't order from Alibaba, I didn't order from China. Hey, this is legitimate inventory. That doesn't matter, you can't prove it. It's that simple. Ask the brand, the magic three words that protect you from ever violating Amazon's authentic product policies.
Speaker 3:And yet there seems to be so much confusion on this. But it's not confusing at all. Every brand on every shelf and every Walmart store in the United States is authorized inventory. Walmart is authorized to sell every brand it sells. If you take a Walmart receipt as proof to Amazon and say, yep, I bought it from Walmart I look Walmart up the road here or walmartcom I bought it from Walmart itself on Walmartcom. I didn't buy it from a third party seller on Walmartcom because I don't know the chain of custody for that product. But I do know the chain of custody if Walmart is selling it itself.
Speaker 3:Here's the invoice, here's the receipt 100% safe, 100% of the time, zero exceptions. With thousands of students in our community doing this for 14 years, I'm aware of zero exceptions to what I just said. I also know many, many cases where people think that they were within policy and they weren't. And the point where their argument falls apart is when we say well, did you ask the brand if that website or retailer or wholesaler even there's a lot of fake wholesalers out there just because someone says they're a wholesaler, they've all gone out of business now. But I was waving a big red flag and shouting with a bullhorn about the guys that were saying we buy in bulk for Amazon sellers. Nope, time out If the invoice says Billy Bob's bulk purchases and that's where you bought your stuff.
Speaker 3:They are not an authorized distributor, wholesaler, retailer or website for Amazon products. Therefore, you can't prove that you're not selling counterfeit. Therefore, amazon's going to boot you people screaming in the Reddit forums and on Amazon's discussion forums. I had an invoice. It's legitimate inventory. Did you buy it from an authorized source that's recognized by the brand? That's the question. Not was it authentic product. Did you buy it from a source that is authorized by the brand? If not, you might as well have bought it from China and bought, you know, cases of Nikes for a dollar each. You might as well have done that, because Amazon can't prove that that's not what you did, so they have to assume that that might've been what you did. Therefore, you violate their counterfeit policies or authorized inventory policies. Does that help clear it up?
Speaker 2:It's really not a complicated thing, but people make it out to be this huge, confusing thing working with. Is a clean conscience, is a comfortable pillow, right If you're following the rules. Should your account get red flagged, you've got nothing to worry about, and so I think understanding the rules and then playing within those rules is the best way to build a long-term sustainable business. And so now on as a reseller, is PPC, pay-per-click advertising. Is that a component of Not really.
Speaker 3:Man, that sounds nice, no what we do is we run nickel ads just to give our you know, when we have the buy box. We get a little more exposure that way and it's it's money worth spending. You know, spend two or 300 bucks a month to get an extra eight to $10,000 in sales, yeah, all right, it's worth doing. But yeah, paid ads. I mean you set up, you know, nickel ads or 7 cents or whatever on your entire catalog and add all your new ASINs into it constantly. That's really as bad as complicated as it gets being a reseller and using paid ads. Amazon does the heavy lifting, because where the skill is is in finding the underserved shelf space. Remember that term from my description earlier. So you're hopping on products that it's already selling. Really well, there could already be 5, 10, 15.
Speaker 3:One ASIN that one of our sellers hopped on had 200 sellers already on it and he sold 2,400 units in just a few days over the course of about three weeks. Actually, 2,400 units in three weeks with 200 sellers already on it, and that's not the best part. He was the highest priced seller and that sounds crazy. Until you understand the rest of the story, you want to take a stab at how he pulled that off? Do you have any idea? But you don't have a clue.
Speaker 3:As a private label guy, you probably have no clue how that happened and it sounds like I'm making it up, but this is a guy that my son hangs out with. My son was actually in his wedding about a month and a half ago. This is a guy I know very well. We attend church with him. He's a student who hopped into our community, took what we teach seriously, ran with it. So with 200 other sellers it was a lower priced product. Almost all of them were merchant fulfilled sellers on that product, meaning they're shipping it from their own garage. How long does it take you to get a product if it's a merchant fulfilled product Typically?
Speaker 2:Probably three to five days, three to five.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly how long does it take you to get a product? If you live in a reasonable sized city and you've got a warehouse near you that has that product on the shelf, how long does it take you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one, maybe two days.
Speaker 3:As quickly as 20 minutes in some cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right, looking for this very popular product that's flying off the shelves from, like you know, 20,000 sales a month or something just like ridiculously popular 200 people selling it. They're all fighting for the precious buy box at this low price point. He hopped on as the highest price as one of only a few sellers with FBA inventory. Amazon received that inventory, spread it out to their underserved shelf space and their massive warehouse network and suddenly shoppers had an option Wait three to five days and get it for $8 or $9, or pay $17 now. Or pay $17 and get it now, like 20 minutes from now or later today, right?
Speaker 3:A whole lot of people said you know what, just like DoorDash, I'd rather eat now than save $8 and eat tomorrow. Or I'd rather eat now and have someone deliver it versus get in the car, go to a restaurant, wait 45 minutes, right, the convenience and speed people are willing to pay for it. That's the underserved shelf space and there are millions of ASINs where that's true. That's what we teach people how to recognize and capitalize on. So, even if there's a whole bunch of other people already selling the product, even if there's a whole bunch of people fighting over the buy box, we don't get obsessed over buy box. We teach people to completely ignore the buy box and I could get into why if you want to, but I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, here's why you ignore the buy box. I don't care what software you're using, what tool you're using. Try this yourself. Change your zip code as a shopper, as a customer on Amazon and watch how that buy box is wildly different on virtually all products. Pretend you're shopping in LA it's $20 there, say Mason. Now. Shop from Miami it's $24 there. That's the buy box. Now shop in Chicago it's $27 in Chicago. That's the buy box. Now. Shop in Chicago. It's $27 in Chicago.
Speaker 3:Right now, for the same product, the buy box is different in multiple zip codes. Why is that? Because Amazon is suggesting the product that they think you might be most interested in as the shopper, based on where you live and what's in the warehouse nearest you, and the speed and the price is factored in. Now sometimes you'll see one seller dominating the buy box across the entire United States, but it's not frequent. Typically it's multiple sellers.
Speaker 3:So when people say I got to find something that's priced profitably in the buy box, you're leaving out so much data. You're saying, hey, whatever tool you happen to be using at the time, whatever random zip code it chose to look at for the buy box, you're going to base all your inventory purchase decisions on that one random zip code for that one random point in time. No, that's ridiculous. You want to look at how underserved is that product, how widely distributed is that buy box across multiple zip codes? And that sounds like it may be complicated. It's not. I can look at any ASIN for about 20 seconds max and tell you if I want to hop on that thing or not, and I can teach other people to do it too.
Speaker 2:Okay, that makes sense. What you're talking about is the zip code and the distribution across all of the different warehouses. And so I would next like to dive into the economics of a sale, and I have an exercise that I do when I'm launching a product. I call it fail on paper, and this has come from a bunch of product launches that were nice products but there just wasn't profit margin there. At the end of the day, there was not enough meat on the bone to make money on it, and so what I do is I will look at my landed costs, which is my unit cost to the supplier plus shipping, whatever it takes to get it into Amazon warehouses, and I'll multiply that by four.
Speaker 2:And when I'm looking at the average sale prices of competitors, if I'm in that neighborhood now, I'll make money on it. So if I have a land, it costs $10. If I can sell it for 40, I'll be in the money. And this again is on the private label side of things. Right, 15% of my revenue is going to ads on a healthy account, and so when you're looking at okay, here's an opportunity, I need to go see if I can source the product. Are there any rules of thumb that?
Speaker 3:you're using. I don't have that ad expense. Two to three X is what I'd look at. Here's my landed cost, which is basically, you know, no-transcript. And they're not winning the price wars. They're finding underserved shelf space, to be clear. But we have a 2 to 3x multiplier, or you have a 4x. We have a 2 to 3x. I'm paying $10 for it.
Speaker 3:It better be selling for at least $25 or so bucks for it. It better be selling for at least 25 bucks or so as a general rule for me to get too excited, because by the time Amazon keeps their fees and you know all the other things that go into it. You got weight as a factor, et cetera. Right, there's no flat, hard rules, but you know if, if I can buy it for 10 and I think I'm going to sell it for 12, yeah, there's, there's nothing there, dude, right?
Speaker 3:Um, which is where a lot of people get frustrated early on is they'll go to their local Walmart store. I use Walmart as an example because actually you could build a great business just sourcing retail arbitrage from the Walmart closest to your house and never setting foot in another retail store. You could put $100,000 in the bank net profit just sourcing from your local Walmart. I'm 100% convinced of that. We see it all the time. Right, but people will get frustrated early on because they'll go to Walmart and they'll pick up a bag of marshmallows and like, okay, this is selling for $4. What's it selling for on Amazon Selling for $4 there too? Oh, there's nothing there, and they'll move on. They get frustrated. Nothing there and they'll move on. They get frustrated. They think the game is finding the right products. The game isn't finding the right products. The game is finding the underserved shelf space. If that bag of marshmallows is selling 3000 times a month and sure someone has the buy box right now for $4. Maybe it's Amazon, but Amazon's running out constantly. You can look at a keep a graph and see like Amazon doesn't have that thing in stock, but maybe, you know, five or 10 days out of the month they're running out.
Speaker 3:It's such a popular product they can't keep it on the shelf. You don't have to sell it for four bucks, you can sell it for 16. So it's not the product, it's the underserved shelf space that you're looking for. It's the ASINs that aren't being served adequately by Amazon and the other sellers who are trying to serve 1.4 billion ASINs and a whole bunch of them are over-served. You don't want to do that, but a whole bunch of them are also under-served. That's where the opportunity is. So it's not the product, it's is it adequately stocked?
Speaker 3:And then when you do the math there, you know if I can buy this product for four bucks, I better be able to sell it for you know, 12 or so, before I get too excited, maybe I'll sell it for more than that. So the ROIs that we see, you know 40% is kind of a minimum. We see a lot of 100% ROI. You see a lot of, you know, at scale. Let's say someone has a multiple seven figure reselling business, their net margins could creep down into the 10 to 12%. On the low end, you see a lot of the newer people who are doing all the work themselves with 30, 35% net margins on the reselling business, and it just opens up the possibility.
Speaker 3:Then the way we teach it is until you can resell, don't try to private label. There's just too many moving parts. Let's get you some confidence, let's get you familiar with the platform. Let's maybe find, explore some gaps and find some brands like wow, there's not enough products in this category. I think there's some opportunity here, or maybe even build an exclusive relationship with one of those brands.
Speaker 3:Introduce a new product into their catalog. Build an exclusive relationship with one of those brands. Introduce a new product into their catalog. They've already got the moving parts to do that. Could I rebrand white label one of your products and I think with the right keywords we could kill it. They've already got the trademark, they've already got the legal stuff lined up. They've already got the suppliers. Just hop on their brand, borrow it, take a cut as a consultant right on their brand. We see that kind of creative relationships spring out of being an effective reseller. Where you're not there on an island on your own trying to launch a brand and figure out all the moving pieces. You've got some marketplace credibility and momentum already built up. So we love reselling as that low, low, high introduction into e-commerce and Amazon selling.
Speaker 2:Outstanding, outstanding. Jim, I think I could sit here all day and ask you questions about this. This has been a really, really helpful interview. Before we get to the fire round, I do want to talk about your course and the community that you've built. Can you share a little bit about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think if people want to hear more information along these lines. We're very proud of a couple of things. One is, to my knowledge, we're the longest running e-commerce coaching organization in the world. We've been doing e-commerce coaching for coming up on 24 years with the same coaching director under my name, thousands of students. So we're easy to Google, we're easy to do your research.
Speaker 3:Here's what I'll say, rather than here's how to find me. You know silentgymcom. It's on the screen. It's a little fuzzy. I probably should have cleaned my lens. I don't know if you see that or not, but silentgymcom. Go there.
Speaker 3:But here's what I want you to look for Before you invest in any opportunity of any kind in e-commerce or otherwise. Find a community of people who are doing it and doing it successfully. So here's the litmus test I give everyone when they're doing research about business opportunities online. I say go to the person who is at the head of the organization, send them a message, send them an email, send the leaders of that community, send whoever's trying to sell you a course a message and say the message is simple. It says hey, where can I go to hang out with others who are doing this already successfully? I want to spend some time with them. I want to get to know them. I want to hear the realities of this business. I want to hear the pain points. Where do they struggle? I want to see some success stories. I don't just want to see little testimonials on a website. I want to meet those people. I'm going to interact, I'm going to Facebook message them. Most. I would say when I say most, I'm not exaggerating 95% of the time you're not going to get an answer that you like to that question. Well, not until you join. Our community is about as good as it's going to get for most of them. For us completely free Facebook group, 100% transparency. All of our coaching students and all the people who just found us yesterday, all mixed into one big happy group. Multiple seven-figure sellers, people who just started last week all in one big happy Facebook group. Complete transparency, talking about it all day, every day. The pain points, the struggles, the triumphs, the challenges, everything that's what we offer. Silentgymcom is where you can go join that Facebook group.
Speaker 3:Listen to a few of our thousand thousand plus podcast episodes, most of which are interviews with our successful students. The course is the Proven Amazon course. About a hundred of us have contributed to that content library. $39 a month gets you our entire content library.
Speaker 3:And the last thing I'll say on that I don't want to talk all day about it, but we have a philosophy of just-in-time education instead of just-in-case education. Just-in-case is what we all grew up with, going through grade school and high school and college. I'm going to teach you how to. The example I always use is dissect an isosceles triangle, just in case you decide to build bridges someday, like, okay, all right, that's great. I'm not anti-math, but that's one philosophy of educating is let's just fill your head with a whole bunch of random stuff, just in case you need it someday. Cool, get on Jeopardy and hope you win some money with that model.
Speaker 3:What I'm fond of is here's where I'm at right now. Here's where I'm trying to go. What are the baby steps in between? Here's what you need right now, just in time. What do we need now to make the next few steps? That's what we give you. That's what that library is, so it's something for everyone. But you don't absorb the whole thing before you start. You absorb a little, you take action, take the next few steps, a few more doors open. You get what you need to go through the next doors that make the most sense for you. So it's a just-in-case learning platform, or, excuse me, a just-in-time learning platform. Provenamazoncoursecom is our flagship. Like I said, $39 a month. We're getting ready to jack the price up at some point because it's ridiculously low. It's not taken as seriously as it should be.
Speaker 2:But all of our free stuff and that course at silentgymcom Outstanding and we'll post links to all of that in the show notes. Sure, thank you, jim. We've got four questions. We ask everybody at the end of the episode.
Speaker 3:We call it the fire round. Are you ready? It says let's do the readies, I'll be. I'm going to get a little sip of water, let's go.
Speaker 2:All right, what is your favorite book?
Speaker 3:Outside of the Bible itself, which has twice as much to say about money and business as it does love and prayer combined. So entrepreneurs are crazy to ignore it. There's a book called business secrets from the bible by rabbi daniel lapin. Now, he's a jewish, I'm a christian. You know he's orthodox jewish rabbi. We're great buddies so I've become friends with them over the years. This guy advises people like Dave Ramsey. He's advised presidents. Now that I've said his name, you're going to hear his name around. He's a really cool dude. But his book that breaks down business principles and I know you asked rapid fire, but I want to sell the book a little bit. It's unlike anything you've ever read. It's not common sense, it's not be honest. Right, it's strategies for making more money based on biblical principles. Powerful book. It'll change your life.
Speaker 2:I like that. I'm going to add that to my reading list. What are your hobbies?
Speaker 3:needle walker, so I played last night. Yeah, I'm in my mid fifties and I get up and down the court with 20 somethings. Man, I just think I love the game and, yeah, that's probably my strongest hobby.
Speaker 2:Very nice. What is one thing you do not miss about working for the man? The alarm clock Agree.
Speaker 3:Haven't had an alarm clock in over two decades and do not miss it. And you know certain occasions you have to have. When I'm speaking at an event, I have to be up by 9 am to present or whatever. Like hey, I better set the alarm. But no, I don't miss it.
Speaker 3:Very nice and last question what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started? Great question. I was asked that on a radio interview I think it's out of Phoenix, which I don't do many of those but they just called me and said hey, I want to talk to you, and I've given the same answer every time it's come up since and it's a surprising answer. I doubt you've ever heard this from anyone else, but I think it's spot on man. It's relationships, relationships. People who intentionally focus on expanding the network of relationships tend to succeed, people who don't tend to fail. That's it To the point where I could pinpoint your odds of success.
Speaker 3:If I just say what's your plan to expand your network of relationships in your niche, you're like, well, I don't really have a plan. Like you don't have a plan, then, dude, I don't care what kind of training, teaching strategy, if you're not expanding your network of relationships constantly, you're going to fail. If you are expanding your network of relationships constantly and you're a little incompetent, you're not quite playing by the right rules. You're skipping some corners here and there. You're not quite playing by the right rules. You're skipping some corners here and there. You're not very motivated. You are so far ahead of everyone else because the relationship network is going to be such a great support for you. The people who know, like and trust you. Relationships, man, that's, that is the path forward, no matter what the strategy is.
Speaker 2:I like it. I like it and I have asked this question 284 times and I have not heard that answer.
Speaker 3:but I do think that's an outstanding answer answer and be there for you. How big is that list? I don't care what names are on it. How big is that list? By the time you're in your midlife? It should be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of names, and if it's five or six names, your odds of success are abysmal in any arena.
Speaker 2:I like it. I like it. Well, this has been an outstanding interview, jim, thank you so much for your time today and to our listeners, I will post links to Jim's website, his podcast, his Facebook group and definitely go check those out. And, jim, thank you so much. We'll talk to you later. Thank you, dave, it was a pleasure.
