Shownotes
Experience can come in many different ways. You can get it yourself (sometimes the hard way) or you can hire experience to help you get on track. That’s what Brian Freifelder has done and states it is the real reason his business is doing so well. “Iron sharpens Iron” as it is said, maybe you need to get some help?
Mentioned:
Scott Margolius-eComSellerTools
Anna Hill- Accounting we will go
RA Sourcing Secrets- Brian and Elizabeth’s sourcing group
Chance to win the one extra ticket for the sold out 2018 Resonate conference in Atlanta Georgia. May 15th & 16th 2018- text RESONATE to 44222 (you are responsible for your own airfare, lodging and transportation)
Sponsors
Gaye’s Million Dollar Arbitrage List
Transcript: (note- this is a new tool I am trying out so it is not perfect- it does seem to be getting better)
Stephen: [00:00] Hey just wanted to offer you a chance to get to the resonate conference that’s sold out that’s coming up in May. It’s May fifteenth and sixteenth in Atlanta. I bought an extra ticket and I’m going to give it away to someone who subscribes to my newsletter. Yes, you’re going to have to subscribe. You can text the word resonate to [inaudible] the word resonate to four, four to two to. It’s going to ask you for your email and that’s what it’s going to take to get entered into the drawing. It’s one ticket. I paid for it personally. Um, you get to hang out with me. Is Monday the 14th and includes a cocktail party in, includes lunch both on Tuesday and Wednesday. And an includes an incredible dinner Tuesday night. And I just can’t wait because I think it’s one of the best conferences. What I would want you to described it last year because bunch of people ask me, hey, what was it like, very technical and the attendees were younger.
Stephen: [00:53] Now I’m an old dude and compared to that they were definitely younger, but they were so technical. Uh, one of the guys I was talking to is selling on 16 different channels, the details and the intimacy because you’re so close to the speakers, you get to talk to them, you get to ask and go deeper and it’s just really, really a valuable conference put on by seller labs. Yes, they’re one of my sponsors of the show, but I bought the ticket so you know, to be fair it is sold out. They didn’t give it to me, but I want to help them because I think it helps you. And so for me to get a chance to see Ezra firestone speak, I’ve not seen him speak personally face to face. I’m dying. Bret Bartlett a. When you see James Thompson, I’m from prosper show, Peter Kerns. I’m. They’ve got this expert coming in who’s doing a talking about instagram and she is talking about instagram influencers and how to use them for your products.
Stephen: [01:48] I mean this is really, really intense stuff. It’s, it’s held in an amazing place. This was a new venue in Atlanta. So you’re responsible for your own hotel, your own flight, your own transportation to the event. But the ticket itself is paid for. I paid for it because I’d like to hang out with you. So if you’re interested in it, all you have to do is text resonate to [inaudible] and it’ll ask you for your email. That’s the cost and you’re gonna get subscribed to my newsletter, which I think is a valuable newsletter. But then again, maybe I’m biased, but if you want to come and hang out with me in Atlanta, it’s going to be in May, coming up quick. So I’ll probably choose the, uh, the person pretty quickly. So any questions, just send me a note. And Steven and e-commerce, momentum [inaudible] steven and e-commerce momentum.com.
Speaker 2: [02:33] Welcome to the e-commerce guys will focus on the people, the products, and the process of e-commerce selling today. Here’s your host, Steven Peterson.
Stephen: [02:47] Welcome back to the e-commerce momentum podcast. This is episode 200 and eighty nine. Bryan fry, felter. Yes. Brian is back. Now you’ve got to go all the way back. Way, way, way, way back to episode number 13. To hear Brian’s story. And if you’ve not heard Brian’s story, please go listen to that first, stop this now go back and listen to it because I want to help you understand the kind of person we’re dealing with. This is a true, um, pull yourself up by the bootstraps hostler. Put your head down. Do the work determined person who is going to win, who was taught early to win, really taught early and really has learned how to win and went through some challenges and he talks about them. And back then he had the. I use this phrase, it’s my praise, is a scarlet letter you know, around his neck and you’ll understand what I’m talking about when you go listen to that, but my God, what a difference.
Stephen: [03:43] Two and a half years of putting your head down and doing the work, what it can do for your business, paying attention to the important things, being willing to invest when you’ve probably money was probably tight. We didn’t even get to that, but he took some leaps of faith, took some advice from really smart people, took some help and has really ran with it. And it’s paid off and he’s just such a great guy and he’s so real and so genuine, and it just so cool to see him. So successful. So well deserved. Let’s get into the podcast. Right. Welcome back to the e-commerce momentum podcast. Very excited about today’s guest because it’s been a long time. It’s been a very long time since we’ve gotten a chance to talk on here. We’ve talked socially many different times over the years, but it’s been two and a half years just about Brian Freifeld. Welcome Brian Number, team. Dude. Think about that.
Speaker 3: [04:41] And yonder. Yes, it’d be, uh, one of the first ones. And I kind of delayed it at the time.
Stephen: [04:47] You did? Yeah. You, uh, you, you may be chase you a little bit. Um, let’s go right there immediately. You know, go back to episode number 13. This is the episode number. And Brian was. Brian had a scarlet letter around his neck, is that, that’s not an unfair description, right? Two and a half years ago, if your account was suspended, you were looked down upon like, oh my God, he must be terrible business opera. He must’ve done everything wrong when quite frankly, you know, in our discussion we talked about so many people I’ve interviewed had been suspended and it’s generally not because of things they’ve done wrong. It’s because things changed and outside of your control and your account got swept up in it, right? Is that fair?
Speaker 3: [05:33] Summer of 2015, I think there were some changes that Amazon, uh, just some changes with seller performance and I’m starting to hear some people are getting suspended here and there. I got caught up in July, which I got lucky because I was able to get back on relatively quickly, but there were people getting suspended in August of 2015. They were taken like a month, if not longer than that to back on. Um, it was a crazy time period for anyone selling on Amazon.
Stephen: [06:01] You credit a Scott Margolis with a lot of help and I want to applaud sky. He’s a great guy. He’s helped a lot of people, but you credit him with really helping you make some adjustments in your business. Can you give us some specifics on things that you’ve changed, um, that, you know, we might all say, of course you can’t do that, but back then, you knoww, w Brian were talking a little in the pre show. Both of us have been around for, I’ve been 2011. I started selling Fba. You’re gotta be darn close to that or before that. Right? And the rule, we used to buy everything and send it all in. That was it. I mean, we’ve all heard Chris Green said he used to buy tools and never even bagged them. He would just send them it. That’s the way it was. And when they scale, they had to put rules in place to help them manage their growth. Right. That’s reasonable and fair. Unfortunately, when you have inventory sitting in there and you have processes in place, you’ve never adjusted them. You just don’t keep up with the. You’re just feeding the machine, feed the beast as everybody says, well guess what? You know those rules didn’t apply. Now there’s a rule in that applies. You’re magically supposed to follow it. It’s like, that’s not as easy as you think. Fair. So Scott helped you get some of the straight and narrow, um, get, get some things back online. Talk about that. Will you?
Speaker 3: [07:17] One of the first times I ever talked with Scott, he pretty much gave me an idea. He showed me some different reports on Amazon and pretty much said, hey, you need to be on top of these. Uh, it’s important that, you know, if you want to keep your health in good shape that you know what’s going on with your returns, an order defect rate. Um, and I mean he pointed out, uh, at one point when I was stickered now I’m coming right now. I might be going back to stickered at some point, but uh, he pretty much pointed out how I can add a flyer in there and kind of intercept customers from reaching out to Amazon. And he just gave me a lot of different pointers at the time, which really helped. I guess kind of, um, I guess clear up, you know, some, some of the business.
Speaker 3: [08:02] Um, I have different, uh, I have um, things in place now that kind of, uh, like for instance when I have a return, I’ll reach out to the buyer if it’s effective or not as described. And I’ll say to them, hey, you know, I’m really sorry for the issue. I just wanted to check in with you and see what was wrong with it. And um, by knowing this, it kind of gives me the opportunity to prevent me from selling too many of this item before, you know, I potentially get a performance notification or get suspended for it.
Stephen: [08:32] So let me, let’s break that down a little bit more. So if you’re selling, I don’t know, I’m kool-aid bad example, but it’s kool-aid and the customer gets it and they message you and say you message them and say, Hey, what’s up with that kool-aid? And they come back to you and say it was hard as a brick man, there was, you know, whatever, something was wrong with it or whatever. If you have two of that same kool-aid sitting there, even if it’s in date, you run a risk of every one of those people and then they will shut your account down, write all you need is four or five of those and you will get your account shut down. Right? So there’s an example of food. Now you don’t sell food, but it’s just, that’s, that’s a perfect example of being proactive instead of kind of turning your head away and saying, well, I pay Amazon to do the customer service. Right?
Speaker 3: [09:20] Exactly.
Stephen: [09:21] Well, do you pay them to do the customer service to you? Is that something that you’ve realized now that that’s not really true
Speaker 3: [09:29] to customer service, uh, or you’re saying, do I pay Amazon?
Stephen: [09:33] I mean, because in some ways that was one of the big attraction, right? Because the negative with Ebay is you get a million customer questions, right? That’s what they do. Hey, can you measure that shirt from this to this or can you do this and that. What we’re used to is the attraction for Amazon was that they handle the customer service because they were Amazon customers. Not your customers, so technically they handled it right. And so that was nice, right. They, especially when they were not as big as they are, they would handle the customer service now, now they get back to you when it comes to you. But, but did you make that mistake?
Speaker 3: [10:05] It’s hard to put a value on Amazon, handling our customer service, um, because I’m selling on Ebay at this point and I can’t stand getting the five to 10 messages per day where, yeah, they’re asking like a, you know, I know this is a size small, but can you measure it for me or can you measure from the one end to the other? Um, so with Amazon, especially with items that I guess, you know, aren’t delivered to the right address or it didn’t make it on time. Um, it’s definitely nice to not have to deal with that.
Stephen: [10:35] He does and you know, we don’t know how many of those we get, but it’s gotta be voluminous, right? Because think about you as a buyer, you’re probably inquiring and wondering, Hey, you know, where’s this and that kind of thing. So it, you know, add that to the number of customers you have multiplied by that and you see how big it is. So yeah. So, so yeah, could you imagine the staff that you’d have to have, um, I just saw this as a side note, so we just got hit with a foot of snow in our area. Will you, you didn’t get as much as we did. Brian’s over towards Philadelphia. I’m a middle of the state. We’ve got about a foot this time and uh, one of the companies is going to outsource 270 jobs to a call center in Tampa and somewhere else because they had so many snow problems and their business, cause they’re a nationwide company so they’re going to outsource those jobs because it’s affected them. They had so many people call off and shut down because the roads get shut down so much that they’re going to outsource those jobs. And so I think about running a customer service operation to that size. And can you imagine what, how you know, how difficult that must be,
Speaker 3: [11:42] especially if you’re in a, in the north and you have things preventing you from being able to work. It probably doesn’t make sense.
Stephen: [11:51] Let’s use another example. You and I are in a group with, um, Dan went worth and how many times has he gotten feet of snow up in Boston, right? What did they do in their business? Right. It just affects their business. Well, imagine if you had to have a customer service team in their handling these questions about shipping and all that kind of. Josh. So again, I’m with you. We don’t put enough value on what Amazon does for us. However, that doesn’t. Where I was going with the comment was it doesn’t allow you to walk away with wash your hands of it, I guess. Fair.
Speaker 3: [12:22] Yeah. I mean there are situations where, um, you know, maybe the person got a pair of shoes or a shirt where there’s something wrong with it. You really can’t expect Amazon to answer those questions. I mean, that’s really for you to figure out what happened and fix it for the customer
Stephen: [12:36] so it’s not a hundred percent and I think that’s the mistake where people make and that’s what I was going with it. So I think people just say, oh, I pay Amazon to handle that. Well, no, that’s not true. You, you pay them to handle the delivery issues and stuff like that, but the rest of it really is on you. Um, and do you have a process to deal with that now? You didn’t have a process back then and those would use credit, those changes, these, you know, subtle but real changes with the growth of your business too because there’s a cost. But would you say it’s the real reason you’ve had growth?
Speaker 3: [13:10] I had a totally different business back then when you were less interested me in 2015. I was still doing media at the time. I was doing clothing shoes, which is what I sell primarily now I’m back then though a few of the items or at least one of the items in my suspension was for missing parts, was part of the description of what was wrong and every now and then I would sell a DVD or video game where the disc wasn’t in the case and um, it just kinda happened here and there, um, you know, you sell enough of these items and every now and then a disk is in there. Um, so that was mentioned as part of the suspension at the time. What I wanted to do was try to prevent any issues that I decided to stop selling used items at that, at that point. Um, I kind of felt like I may not have been suspended if it weren’t for the used items. Um, so I pretty much just completely took over my use cds, dvds, video games, and moved them over to E-bay and said, you know what, I’m just going to new to new new items at this point.
Stephen: [14:17] That’s the difference for Your Business,
Speaker 3: [14:21] I think. I think, uh, I eliminated a lot of issues moving those items out,
Stephen: