Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 0:18

So Happy Wednesday everybody. I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist with BWG connect, and we are a network and knowledge sharing group. So we stay on top of latest trends, challenges whatever is going on the digital landscape we want to know and talk about it, we will do at least 500 of these virtual events this year due to the increase in demand better understand everything in the digital space. And we will do at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to be in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email and we'd love to send you an invite these dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a specific discussion around certain digital topic and it's always a fantastic time. We spend the majority of our time talking to brands that's how we stay on top of latest trends would love to have a conversation with you can feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany Tiffany@BWGconnect.com And we can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know people want to know about. And it's also where we gain our resident experts such as GETIDA who is with us today. Anybody that we asked to come to use a collective team has come highly recommended from multiple brands within our network. So if you're ever needed any recommendations within the digital space, feel free to reach out we have a shortlist of the best of the best and we'd be happy to provide that information to you. Also, do note that we have a talent agency BWG Talent that we'd be happy to put you in contact with as well if you have any hiring needs. So with that a few housekeeping items we want this obviously it'd be fun, educational, conversational drop as many questions or comments you have in the chat bar that q&a. If you feel more comfortable, you can always email me at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com, we'll be sure to get to them. And this is a 45 minute session. So we will be wrapping up at the 45 minute mark. So with that, we're going to dive right in and start to learn how to reduce Amazon selling costs and boost profits. The team at GETIDA have been awesome friends, longtime supporters of the network, so I'm going to kick it over to you, Yoni. If you could introduce yourself, that'd be awesome. And then we can dive into the presentation.

Yoni Mazor 2:11

Thank you got to thank you so much. Thank you everybody for your time, I think I'm just gonna share the slides because that's a bit more information about myself a little bit. That's kind of related to the content. So let me share the screen might be a little lag as I share the screen. So let me know which one do you see? I see you. You see me and see you in a moment. You see the presentation screen?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 2:35

I see the screen? Yes. Is that in presentation mode per se. But

Yoni Mazor 2:40

yeah, so I'm gonna put presentation one other. So we're good to go. Let's good. Yeah, we are perfect. All right, perfect. All right. So all right. So yeah, so this session is going to be really geared and targeted and focused on how to reduce Amazon selling costs and boost profit. So of course, if you are selling on Amazon, as a third party, Amazon seller, you know, this show is for you. And of course you're selling to Amazon one P, it's probably gonna be less of a show for you. But if you are a new selling one P anything about three P, that's fine. So I think this will be probably helpful for you to, to get some value out of it. The idea is really to highlight a few position points within Amazon and the platform to identify opportunities to really reduce costs and and get some recoveries. And by doing that, you know, boosting more profit and really increasing the bottom line. A little bit about myself, I'm the co founder and chief growth officer CTO of gotta have a slide here that talks a bit more about myself and, and how I kind of start to get to you to but before we get to it, I can just mention that, you know, consider what technology company our mission is, you know, every auditing and reimbursements. But it was kind of born from my experience as an eCommerce seller. So over a decade ago, I started selling online, I used to sell, you know, on the website, DTC direct to consumer but also on eBay. And then in 2013, I started to sell on Amazon and the business grew very quickly from zero to 20 million in annual revenue. And then we became a part of a larger group. And together as a group, we generated 100 million in revenue. And you GETIDA was born from that experience. And now with this slide, I'm gonna share with you a little bit about that, that initial birth of Gita because what happened was back in the day, we shipped there, we know when we started selling on Amazon, we sold FBM fulfilled by merchant and and then we kind of heard about FBA, there's a programme called FBA, where you can ship your products to Amazon fulfillment centers, and they can really manage all the fulfilment so so we, you know, back in 2013, we're, you know, Amazon was up and coming, so we didn't just send their products to this foreign alien called Amazon every week, you know, today, Amazon a big empire. So everybody takes it for granted. But for us, it wasn't the case. So we actually reached out to Amazon and asked them really what's your what's your policy, if anything happens with their inventory? What if it gets lost or damaged, destroyed, disappeared or Know what happens then. So then we kind of go dove into the terms of service and everything. And we learned that they have an FBI reimbursement policy, and every single unit is covered up to the value of $55,000. Okay. So we said, you know, they have the policy into writing, we investigate, it's all good. So we sent out a material. And our first payment was 116 units, which was about $10,000, it was a major amount for us back in the day, it was almost like our life savings. But we did that, because we had the reassurance in writing from Amazon that they'll take care of, of it, if anything happened. So the 160 units that we shipped in, and they only received 113 units. So three units were about worth about $600 for US retail value. And that's 6% of the shipment that we lost before the game even began before we sold anything. So but of course, we know about the policy, and we open a case about it, and the missing units from inbound, got investigated, and Amazon said, Yeah, we lost the unit, but they honor their policy, and they reimbursed us, they provision or they provide us with a financial reimbursement. And really, from that point on, we knew that there's legitimate, you know, organization that's respectful to its terms of service and policies. And we can really do this at scale. So needless to say, the second shipment was you know, double down and double down and double down until we really scaled the business to large degrees. And what happened was, we have so much data going on, we couldn't audit these transactions with spreadsheets, because there's too much data out there, spreadsheets were broken, we're breaking down. So that pushed us to do two things. First of all, was the critic Knology to audit a mass scale. The second thing was to create a team to constantly handle these issues, we created the solution for ourselves, right for our own reasons, in need. We told our friends from the industry that we have these capabilities, they told us help us we'll pay you. And that was the early Genesis in creation of the theatre back in 2015. So over the years, we grew to such a degree because the value proposition is performance based, it's really, really simple, meaning it's free to join the theatre, it's free to stay, we're performance based only if we get like reimbursements, only then we charge a fee. So over the years, it grew so much. So we just decided to cash out of a retail positions and all the profits we made. And we decided to invest in theta, but also our attention, motivation and creativity. And from that point on, we became the largest organization in the world dedicated to Amazon FBA, auditing and reimbursements. But that's a little bit of the background of our Amazon eCommerce experience at scale, they gave birth to do this solution. And now we're going to share with you some of the strategies and opportunities that it's available in the marketplace to reduce your costs and was profit. So hopefully you'll find it helpful. So let's let's begin. Alright, so before we go into the meat and potatoes, here's a few kind of marketplace announcements that I think might be useful for you guys. And of course, I do encourage you to put in the chat any questions that you have. I have also Lisa from a team that's here, she's gonna monitor the chat and provide answers. We're really doing this all for you to get the maximum impact. So feel free to interact. Alright, so here's the first kind of update from the marketplace. This is written in English, but this is Amazonian English, which means and he's kind of a translation and this is the way Amazon writes things. So I'll read it a little bit and then give you an idea what's going on. So um, as I was telling you if you send canceled or deleted shipments to Amazon, your FBA shipment may be rejected or your ability to send us additional shipments to FBA may be suspended the following actions lead to additional processing handling and rerouting which can delay the receipt of your inventory and availability for silly so here's the kind of the reasons the leading a shipping plan after you approve them former surrounding shipments or sending incomplete shipments such as shipments that are canceled or deleted status once again this was all in English but this is Amazon English the November translator for you. This is a signal that Amazon is sending to the sellers FBA sellers telling you listen if you send them to Amazon fulfillment centers a shipment you don't play around with it, because there's ways to play around with that. So let's say you're shipping 1000 units and Amazon tells you okay 300 units you shipped to Minnesota, borns you units you shipped to Connecticut, three units only you sent to Florida. So what happens with the seller some of the sellers they plan on this okay, let me ship the big shipment to all these places, but the three units to Florida, I'm not gonna I'm never going to ship it. I'm going to cancel it or delete it. And Amazon selling it No, don't do that. If it because you're playing around with underneath the server what's happening, it's it's playing around with the algorithm because Amazon wants to spread the inventory across the country. So they can have the one or two day Prime shipping for the consumers, which is really important for them because they're very customer centric. And now they're going to penalize you if you play with that. So this is a heads up its announcement if you ever played around with it, don't whatever Amazon tells you to do. You do you don't mess around with it. Whatever they tell you to ship out to you do it. No more games. This is the signal. This is the warning. I want to make sure you guys or your teams are educated about it. If they're not feel free to share it with them. I think it'll be important. So because you never want to let the train stop moving. You know you're sending an inventory. You don't want it to be stopped or blocked or especially if you utilize FBA. So this is kind of an update or announcement from the marketplace. But let's go to the next one. This is pretty cool. This is called news seller incentives. And there's a potential $50,000 in savings if you utilize it, so to keep it simple, once again, it's all in English, it's Amazon English, I'll make it short and sweet. If you are a seller on Amazon, or third party seller on Amazon, and you have your own brand, and you register that brand to brand registry, and you open a brand new account on Amazon, they're gonna reward you, they want new sellers to come in with all these brands, they're gonna reward you with a 5% bonus. Okay, so typically, when you sell on Amazon, the selling feels like 15%. So let's say you sold a million dollars, you know what, in your category of 15% 5%, you'll get back, because it gets capped at the first million that you sell. So you could potentially give back in credits. $50,000. Okay,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 10:47

A limit on that?

Yoni Mazor 10:48

No, that's the beauty of it, there's kind of no time limit. They started, they announced it last year, but it's still available, and also includes us. So just to keep in mind, if you are right now selling an Amazon, us and you are planning to launch new brands, make sure to utilize this opportunity open a brand new account with brand registry, okay, and you get a new incentive. Also, if you are planning to expand, so let's say you already sell on Amazon US, but you want to expand it to the UK or to Germany, that's where that's where you can apply for that as well, you're gonna get that $50,000 per marketplace. Okay. And also, if you're already selling in Europe, if you're watching this from Europe, I don't think so I saw everybody here was pretty much American, and you want to open the new account in the United States same thing. So this is an opportunity to save $50,000 up to $50,000 of fees if utilizing this opportunity. So that's kind of one, one thing I wanted to bring to your attention. And this is where it becomes even cooler, or even more robust on their offerings. So this is called Brand referral bonus program. So once again, you have your own brand. Yeah, brand registry on Amazon, you can visit you can just search us on Amazon's platform, it's called Brand referral bonus program. Okay, look, you know, you find it, you opt into it. And what's gonna happen is Amazon is gonna give you a special link, a URL link, that if you use that link, to drive traffic from outside of Amazon, into Amazon, they're gonna give you a 10% bonus, no cap. In other words, if you're really good at driving traffic into Amazon listings and Amazon's platform, like an affiliate, like it used to, you know, they everybody knows the Amazon affiliate program, but the affiliate program gives you 2% or 3%. It's cute. This is where they're saying I'm saying to the brands we sell on Amazon directly, we want you directly to get your own brown referral bonus, and URL, drive traffic from outside Amazon into Amazon. And the traffic that converts and generate sales will give you 10% Because you know, the brands already have a lot of power there they have, you know, they generate content, utilize social media. So instead of sending to DTC to your own, like direct to consumer website, Amazon just telling, you know, send it to us, we're gonna reward you with the 10% bonus, which is with no cap. So let's say you drive traffic, a million dollars worth of traffic, that's 100 grand back in your pocket, you do $10 million, who would have generated sales from that traffic from that URL $1 million back to your pocket. So imagine like the first one, you you generate a million dollars in revenue, and you stack up this 10%. And you also stack up this 5% Essentially, it's no fees, right $150,000 will be back to you, or come back to you in office. This is how you reduce your costs and boost your profit easily. Because this is all signals from Amazon telling you the third party Amazon seller, we want you to stick with us wants you to grow with us since traffic our way launched new brands new accounts, and increased our catalog and enhanced and increased our customer experience because they want to be the largest catalog on Earth and missing that. So this is how they kind of put out the signal that you know in these incentives for you guys to consider. So hopefully now that you know about it, if you haven't utilized it, I encourage you strongly to opt in and utilize it and save a tremendous amount of money and really boost your profit. So any questions?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 13:45

email campaigns, TikTok

Yoni Mazor 13:47

Yes, correct. Great. You have a database Yeah, you have email there's Yeah, hit them up. So you know, here's here's our new product launch. Here's our product is whatever it is, email or TikTok, whatever. It's all good. He's driving the traffic in Amazon is able to analyse that, see the conversion, the generate revenue, and boom, you get that money back.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 14:07

Awesome. Yeah. Cool. All right.

Yoni Mazor 14:09

So now, we touched on these announcements that are immediate, immediate opportunities to to reduce costs and increase profit. Now I want to kind of do a quick overview of the AP auditing and reimbursements component of things. So once again, this is this is for the third party Amazon sellers who utilize Amazon's fulfillment centers. And here's kind of this is a quick overview. This you know, this is the simplified, let's put it this way or entry level, because I don't want to overwhelm the crowd here. So let's go one by one to so let me back step. When you send your product into Amazon, you get your inventory, all these issues can happen and Amazon gives you time limits or expiration dates, since the incidents happen to basically open a case and reconcile it and potentially get reimbursement for that. Okay, so when when we're dealing with FBA inbound shipments into Amazon when you're sending Your inventory into Amazon. In the United States, you have nine months to audit and reconcile the shipments. If you're selling an Amazon, EU or UK you got six months only less time, okay? If any of your units inside Amazon's fulfillment centers once again, Amazon receives it, okay? I mean some issues happened okay, but once the units aren't inside Amazon's fulfillment centers, that's when the units all of a sudden tend to get lost or damaged inside also between the warehouses sometimes Amazon might ship the product from Kentucky to California, California to Nevada, this you know, units get lost or damaged from the fulfillment centers to the consumers, when the orders come in, units get lost or damaged from the consumers back to Amazon with all the refunds returns, units get lost and damaged or have customer refund issues. But also if you remove your inventory of Amazon fulfillment centers, units can get lost damaged all these issues. So all these logistical friction points, Amazon provides a window of look back window of up to 18 months. Okay, so this is kind of the rules of the game. And for when a dimension overcharges of fees, you got three months or 90 days, it's limited. So what's this one of dimensions overcharges fees, let me explain, then you know, you have a product, this is your product, it's a phone cover, it's six inches, six ounces, and Amazon stores it in the bin, once the order comes in from the marketplace, and they need to fulfill it, they're going to pick it from the bin, they're going to package it in a box, and they're going to ship it out. And they're going to charge a fee for that a fulfillment fee or pick and pack fee. And the fee is based on the weight and dimension of the product. So the larger and heavier Amazon thinks your product is the more than they're going to charge you fees, but incorrectly, so you can audit for that, discover that and then do two things. First of all, fix it. So going forward to stop overcharging you super to protect your margins. And then of course, get the recovery of the reimbursement for the past 90 days for the overcharges. Okay, this is a high level overview, a quick overview of the name of the game here. And let's march forward unless we have any questions, thoughts, ideas so far? Definite?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 16:59

Wow. No, I just having used to sell furniture on Amazon that really resonates like category that's very high risk and

Yoni Mazor 17:07

pain. Yeah, imagine that you're the furniture unit that you send in instead of Amazon charging you $5 per unit to fulfill it, they have incorrect data, that thing is larger and heavier. They're charging you $15 So they're financially overcharging you $10 Every time you sold the unit, we sold 1000 units. That's $10,000 Easy. It's yeah, it constantly happens. Yeah, as you scale as you do more volume becomes more of an issue. Okay, so now, I really want to teach you how to on the NBA measurements. You know, I'm giving you the intro and ability to actually do yourself. So after we finish this, feel free to do yourself and this is money in the bag. If you do this, this might look familiar for you never heard of this or did this. This is money time. So hopefully this will this will be helpful. You just visit amazon seller central, you go click on inventory, click on Manage if ambition means, okay, and then you scroll down and the ambition is log. And you look for this kind of area here where it tells you units expected versus Units received. Okay, and you keep scrolling down until you see something like this boom needs attention what happened, units expected to under 16 Units received zero, the status of the shipment is closed. So basically the whole shipment got lost, you got delivered. But none of the the units got, you know received, so it got lost. So what do you do, you click here on this blue area is going to allow you to enter into the shipment information. And in the shipment information, you see that as product name information, but you see the units expected to 16 discrepancy minus 216, you have a drop down menu, what you want to do is click on Research missing units. That's the first step. And then the second step or even the third step will be that Amazon might request from you some additional documentation so they can investigate on these missing units. One type of documentation is a pod proof of delivery. And the second tab might be a P O P proof of purchase. Okay, so let's kind of dive into that for a moment. So pod proof of delivery, is that pretty much if you use outside carriers that are not Amazon partner carrier, they're gonna ask you for this. In other words, if you buy the logistics, to send it to Amazon from Seller Central, you don't have to worry about this, they will never ask you for this because they have the tracking information. But if you use outside carriers, you work with the carriers outside of Amazon's platform and use them and they ship it your inventory into Amazon, they're gonna tell you give me a proof of delivery, what's a proof of delivery just to keep it simple. It's a stamped bol bill of lading to build a building that has a stamp that got delivered to Amazon, because I'm going to tell you, Oh, you want me to investigate these 200 missing 16 units. Show me that God delivered you. So send that document okay, God delivered, they're going to look into this right? If you want to really go more into the details of the policy, you can scan this and it will take you into Amazon's platform to read more. So on our end, we see that we know we have 10s of 1000s of users worldwide. I would say 70 to 80% of them. Never get requested pod is preferred deliveries because he was Amazon 100 carrier, and the other ones that don't use it, they get requested and they take care of it. So now you know what it is and what you can do about it. The second type of document is PRP proof of purchase. So here you have two options. First option for person for a proof of purchase is an invoice that's like the immediate Tezpur. Right? You know, how do you how do you show that you own this product if you send an invoice, but just you guys know, if you are once again, a brand owner, it's your own brand, and you have brand registry, okay, you don't have to send an invoice, you don't have to disclose your suppliers to Amazon. Instead of that, you can just give them a packing slip. a packing slip a slip and wall document says there's our company information, there's shipping information, there's units to ship, when you sign off on it, that's a packing slip, and you're eligible to send them that document instead of an invoice

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 20:54

and registry, you do not have to send anything about your manufacturers your factory, right? Nothing.

Yoni Mazor 21:00

All right, yeah, because this is the actual policy and running here. But you know, if you read through it, it's like kind of confusing, I'm trying to simplify it, let's read it just to see like how scrambled it is. We talked about scrambled eggs and the roads of St. Paul, Minnesota, because the Amazon scrambles things. Proof of image ownership, it's a proof of or proof of inventory ownership will help identify any potential discrepancies that may have occurred some example of acceptable acceptable documents or an invoice from a supplier received from another seller or signed packing slip if you are the manufacturer. Other words for manufacturers a private label seller or brand owner would brand registry, that's kind of the filtering behind this. So you know, you say I own one brand, like, for example, Apple, right Apple iPhone. They don't manufacture their own device. But they're the brand but for all intensive purposes families out there, the manufacturer, they're the brand, they're in the manufacturer. So instead, they can just you know, because, you know, they outsource manufacturing, but it really they they are the they're on the manufacturer for in Amazon's eyes. So that's where it becomes a little unclear. But it we're here to clear it up for the sacred purpose of reconciling MBS Shimon and the acceptable proof of purchase document. And of course, it's telling you what kind of permission needs to be in document and stuff like that.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 22:16

Okay, so as here,

Yoni Mazor 22:18

yeah, so here, I want to take the opportunity to kind of do a quick demo onto a platform, so shows you because it's free to join our platform. And you're gonna get free access to visibility's free data, if you want. So I just want to take a quick tour into our dashboard. So the Welcome to the platform dashboard. As you can see, as you log in, we'll give you a kind of an overview of, you know, all the stuff that we're doing with the account. Right now this account, we're looking into $35,000 worth of discrepancies. And you have all the case IDs that were that are being managed in the status of each case, this one got reimbursed, and this one is pending. And you can always go back in time and see how much money was recovered. That's all good. But I want to turn your attention to this module here called inbound shipments, which where you can just always, once again, it's free to join the platform and the system and use it technology here and this page, inbound shipments, it will give you a dashboard that will focus immediately on each shipment. So everything I showed you so far in Seller Central, you got to go into the shipment and find the issue. And when all this documentation we had did all the work for our system does it for you. So enough to spend all that time, you just log in, and we'll show you all the humans that have an issue and the value of each human. So you can always prioritize the value of the shipment from top to bottom. So you work from the money all the way to the ones with less money, right. And also here on the bottom, it shows you a consolidation of all the data right away, free boom saves you all this time and energy. Right. So you see the all the chips together in this account are worth $26,000 in potential recoveries and reimbursements. That's pretty, it's pretty, it's money, you know, it's not like, you cannot ignore that. And you see here it gives you right away the proof of purchase request. So 122, Sherman's you know proof of purchase, which is the packing slip, right? If you're brand new to for your private label, brand, registry seller, but if you're just a reseller with no boundaries, you're gonna have to provide an invoice. So you just click this boom, you can go to work, it shows you all the shipments and documentation if you just go to work, and 360 shipments need proof of delivery. Okay, so right away, get the visibility, you can go to work and have to spend all this time within Amazon's platform. And it's free to get all this data, you just sign up to get here, it's free, and boom, you get access to this great. Now in addition to that, what we did, we created some further innovation, we actually have a patent on this innovation I'll show you in a minute. So you know for proof of purchase for packing slip if one agenda or packing slip, right because you're a private label seller with a brand registry, you can just log into Dockmaster it's a packing slip tool, just when we click here and he logs into it. And within a quick agenda, it's the packing slips you have to go back in 122 shipments. So imagine 122 PDF files, documents, you're gonna have to take care of and source or get right and consolidate. Instead of that in our system. You can just generate it with a few clicks. Right so you click it and opens up all the shipments. Keep me logged in on Refresh. We'll also have our chat. It's a live chat Money for seven. So our friend here, I think her name is Erin.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 25:03

I mean, this is an API, the Amazon store. 

Yoni Mazor 25:06

Yeah, we're software provider. So we have access to API when authorized solution provider by Amazon. So we're available on amazon app store. And as you see, as you log in, it shows you the shipments from top to bottom. With expiration dates, we want to also protect the expression that you never miss out. Remember how we in the beginning, we discussed how you have a timeframe allowed. So it's all prioritized from top to bottom, and you can just log in. And all this information of the shaman will be right here. If you just click Create packing slip, and you're done. It's all consolidated, we have a patent on this. So it's innovative technology that we have. So that's kind of one option. So one option is that you generate the document, the packing slips yourself one by one, that's one option. Because the thing is that, you know, if you ever need to edit the quantities, you could do it, you know, let's say you didn't ship 1000 units only, which is you know, 100, so you can edit it. But if you don't really ever have to edit because if things are really accurate, we do have enough another feature free of charge is it's called a dock Master Pro, you can one second here, you can just click on here on the top, it says opt in now, and dock Master Pro, if you opt into this, we're going to generate those documents for you. That says you have additional time and labor. And of course, we'll also also be able to open the cases on your behalf and manage all the back and forth with Amazon to get you the recovery. And we only charge you a fee if we're successful. Once we get all that data or the labor savings, all that stuff, it's free. And only if we're successful and get your recovery only then you pay us a fee. If you'd like us to deal with that if you don't, it's fine, you can still use the technology and the visibility to take care of it with your own team not a problem at all. We're just here to help kind of maximize the impact. So yeah, that's Dark Master Pro,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 26:41

I always found that was half the battle was my team didn't have the bandwidth to

Yoni Mazor 26:45

private school as you scale, it just becomes a bigger and bigger and bigger issue. That's what kind of give birth to get you to the skill component of it. And today, we're just creating a new innovations and modules to ease the pain as much as possible to make it turnkey, so you never miss out on the opportunity because the clock is ticking. You know things expire. And if you don't recover it, you lose all this cash flow. Now, I do want to mention something very interesting and nice about FBA reimbursements because our mission is to really make sure that FBA sellers get the maximum FBA reimbursements that they're eligible to receive. Because if you don't, you lose two things, the first thing you lose is your investment, the money invested into the inventory. But the second thing you lose is your profit. And why? Because when Amazon pays you a reimbursement, they're paying you the retail value, not the cost value. So if your product or your sourcing, it costs you $2, but you are planning to sell on Amazon or the platform for $25, they're gonna pay $25 to recoup that $2 plus that $23 in profit. So good theta, we're trying to shift the double negative into a double positive, where you get your money back and turn into a nice profit. This is the world we live in. This is an issue we live in. And that's our commitment here. So that's kind of the environment that we're in any thoughts ideas?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 27:57

That's the actual payback.

Yoni Mazor 27:59

Yeah, in addition to that, I do want to mention that the discrepancy rate on FBA on an annual level can easily range between one to 3%. From Revenue. If you do a million a year, there's 10 to $30,000, you have to look out for you're doing 10 million, that's 100 to 300,000, if you're doing 100 million is one to 3 million, so on and on, it goes, it never gets easier, it just becomes more more complex over time, Amazon constantly adds more requirements, more additional permission here and there. So it's something to think about. Let's

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 28:27

see where they don't pay it full retail, or they're paying partial.

Yoni Mazor 28:31

Yeah, there's a case where if you're launching a new product, and you never sold it on Amazon, and then no have on the dataset, any proof they sold them that price, and their systems not gonna recognize they're gonna give you a default value based on the category, each category has a minimum value of a product. I think, for example, if you are in the Watch category, they give you $25. So you Your watch is worth $100 retail. And it's brand new, we never sold it before he shipped it to Diego last didn't have any indicators that it's worth $100 By default, the system will go to the category of watches minimum $25. But if you see that, you can say hey, you only give me $25 Max for the cost present example, on the cost level, an actual cost is $40 or $50, whatever, you send them an invoice, they'll give you the delta so at least you don't lose your cost. There's an opportunity there. But as you start selling it on the platform for $100 the system recognizes it's really legit $100 Because you can play a game you can say, hey, this is a $2 item, I want to sell it on eBay for $1,000. You hope that they miss one unit boom, you make a lot of money. So they have their own kind of calibration systems in place in order to kind of try to do the right thing. And of course there's an issue reach out, they'll take care of you. 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 29:41

How many orders would you say an average you have to give before that algorithm recognizes it's

Yoni Mazor 29:45

a real No, I think a few are just a few orders, just you know, just even want at least at least one of the system that the consumers are buying that product for that value. I think one should be enough because what happens over time is that they try to calculate the average value of the product in the past 18 months. When you're selling it because it constantly adjusts, you make it harder and make it lower. So, over time, within 18 months, we're gonna blend it into a certain average. But as you start selling, that's all the average they have, what's that retail price that was sold? That's what you're gonna get

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 30:13

the items that you move through reviewer programs like buying qualify for that, what is it? Sorry, if you do a buying review program? And let's say I send out 25 items. I haven't sold one to an average consumer, we lose it, could they take the vine sales?

Yoni Mazor 30:32

I don't know. That's a good one. I never I never experienced that kind of granular issue is a good question. I don't have an immediate answer. But it's good. It's actually interesting. If there's no money value, if I was to generate their system, I would say until there's no money transfer from a consumer to you. It might be all fluff. You know why and this is that influencers. It's uh, you know, it's not the Vita game yet, so to speak. If I was them, the logic dictates, but it could be that maybe, maybe not. But this is French is typically the it's all locked down, and it's good to go. Okay, now I want to kind of shift gears and move forward into into the next kind of thing that I want to educate you about. This is where it becomes a bit more complex, call it advanced, because right now we covered the reconcile risk reconciliation FBA shipments. Right now we're going to any units that got lost or damaged in the past 18 months. So you just visit amazon seller central you, you can just scan this will take you to where this page is. And it kind of gives you the logic here and the explanation of the reports and data sets that you need in order to do the audit. They have a recent update lately, you see kind of three reports to download them in order to the reconcile. But they actually consolidate these two reports inventory, report and manage FBA inventory reports got consolidated, pretty recently. So now after the consult to a new report called inventory ledger. So to make it short and sweet, you visit amazon seller central reports fulfillment, on the left side, you see that inventory levels there, you download the past 18 months, all the transactions in the past 18 months in the report. And when you open the file, you're gonna look for a last transaction and a damaged transaction. Okay. And as you do it, you just copy the transaction you have, you just scan, this will take you to the tool, Amazon has a tool, so you can go one by one, and use this reconciliation tool to audit and reconcile these loss and damage units in the past 18 months. So pretty tedious is kind of a copy paste activity. Once again, if you never heard of this, never done this, it means there's money for you to recover. And if you don't want to hear about it ever again, you're here. But now if you want to get the money, but you don't wanna hear about again, that's fine. There's solutions out there that help with this, and happens to be that get to one of them. So if you ever want to help, we'll do it for you. Not a problem at all. But to make a chart from the report, any unit that got lost, sorry, got damaged, we entered the transaction ID the idea Amazon call it or trade your copy, paste it and you click Next. If it's eligible for a case, I will tell you if not, it will tell you it's not but if it is, it's eligible for a case, open that funnel for you. And Amazon records I want to give you a reimbursement that's on the damage unit. On the bottom, you need to enter the FN SKU fulfillment network SKU, okay, it's called from SKU, you copy paste essence, FN SKU, and Amazon is going to reconcile for you, if eligible, you'll be able to open a case and get the reimbursement if you're not the system will tell you. Okay, you have 18 months look back, you want to download the report. Once again, I'm gonna go back this report called inventory ledger and you take the past 18 months all the transactions, you open the file, you know, any, any units that got damaged entered the transaction ID to see what's going on. And then even if they got lost in order to reconcile it, you enter the FN SKU. Okay, this is kind of where things become a bit more sophisticated, but hopefully you guys be able to manage that. If you need help, we're always here for you. Okay, some quick don't do it and don't lose when you open in managing and reconciling FDA reimbursements in cases, you know, assign a responsible team member for I'd be auditing don't have like, you know, hodgepodge of people coming in and doing it not doing it having a chance to have a really a responsible team member that exclusively is the ultimate point of context that they're really trend you can do if on this recording or not. But make sure they're trained they know what to do how to do so they can really engage with this properly. So you get all the refunds are you eligible to receive so you can really maximize your profit and of course reconcile discrepancies on time every time never miss out it's your money. Really. 

So I see you constantly you know, as sellers as I always say, like this way, you know, selling on Amazon is like being in a battlefield in a war zone and just constantly bullets flying at you, you know, sourcing launching marketing, advertising, customer support, logistics, so many things you have to do during this war zone or in the war zone. You don't want to stop everything's hey, let's look back. Let's see what happened the past 18 months because very, very difficult over time as soon as you scale but you miss out. So don't miss out, have somebody responsible and it will be accountable for this exercise and reply to open cases. stead of opening new cases. Okay, if you open a case and Amazon's kind of not answering you and this and that, I don't open until like five more cases on the same issue. Just go back to their case and reply. And you know, if you need, you can, you can, you can call it in on the same case that somebody has to get somebody on the phone to get progress. And stay professional, don't take it to heart, don't take it personal. This is business. You know, some people will get emotional, it's worth 100 $100,000 $10,000. going out of business, it's not it's fine. You can sell that in a nice professional ways. Stay professional. Okay, don't don't do it. Right. So don't open a case with Amazon prematurely. You know, the shipment is still in transit, having God delivered to Amazon, you know, it's only shifted, and two days later, you want to say it was the shipment? Where's the units? It's missing? No, it's not. It's prematurely. So don't don't do that. All right. And don't be pushy with Amazon Seller Support. Be very respectful. Don't open a cage for the same issue twice. And don't try to game the system. Stay honest. We've seen over the years, we're doing this for eight years. Some sellers, you know, say oh, let me constantly ship less. So I tell Amazon, I ship 1000 units, and only really ship 999 or 998. There's always kind of few minutes missing on my side, because I am going to reconcile, they're going to pay me a reimbursement and my work a few times. But after a few times, Amazon will see that there's inconsistency with with your your operations. And that might kind of strike you. So don't try to say the game the system stay on stay professional. And you'll have long term Cisco success with reconciling all these transactions. A quick quick note about Amazon, US versus Amazon EU. You know, we see that the total level of refunds are pretty much the same. There's a few key differences that we're gonna we can touch that we saw, we saw this earlier on the shipment side you have six months to reconcile in Europe, you have nine months in the United States be attentive to metric or imperial systems. When auditing FBA fees. As I said the fees are based on winning dimensions. So make sure you know few. The winning dimensions are based on you know other centimeters or inches or grams or ounces. Okay, now it might cause a confusion on the first place. So the system is really overcharging you. So be attentive to that. That's a key difference that it's important to remember moving forward to a case study. Okay, this is a $5 million case study of a seller, we have this blue area, the beautiful blue area, which means shows you all the money that's coming in from Amazon to your account. But unfortunately, all the red area, which means money coming out of your account with all these fees. So if you look with an untrained eyes, your FBA fees is very slim, not much of an impact, but Amazon's fees is very chunky. So I'm here to teach you an education let you know that inside this Amazon thick Amazon fees area, there's actually a lot of FBA fees hiding. And let's let's do the breakdown, you see that all these Amazon fees are about 77,000 from the 77,040 $3,000 are in FBA fees. And these fees are fulfilment fees, the pick and pack fees when Amazon picks up from the band, they package in a box and ship it out. Right? They would equate it to about almost 20% from the revenue. And that's a lot. Right. So let’s do a quick summary here you see that? You know, the fulfillment fees or the pick and pack fees are almost 20% the rest of the visa are like point 2% Don't forget it, I got Amazon selling fees, which is 15% for this specific case study. And you see that 35% Of all the sellers revenue on Amazon fees which are burning through the margin. And this case on an annual basis is one point 75 million in fees. Now I don't want to depress anybody, this is the FBA universe. Or I'm gonna I'm taking you to the the opportunity to optimize your FBA universe. There's also the PPC universal the advertising universe where sellers constantly try to optimize the advertising, you know, improve the keyword, reduce the bidding, increase the bidding all that stuff. We're not dealing with this now. It's very popular content out there, right because it's growing it's kind of more paid to play over time with advertising. I'm taking it to the other side of FBA. Okay, so now that we now that we know that you know, FBA fees, take a massive toll on your revenue right? Here's a simple strategy to consider. Right? I just minimize your packet smaller or lighter, smarter on your on your product side, right so because Amazon fees are based on the winning dimensions, everything individually packaged product. So we'll take a quick example here if you're selling you're selling a soccer ball or a football if you're in England, I there's two options for you can send it in inflated so maybe on the dimension side it can be 30 40 inches, and because of that Amazon will put you in a tier of pricing of fees that will charge you let's say $10. But if you do something very simple, just deflated from the air and you send it in now it's only taking 10 inches, and because of that you get priced at a lower fulfillment tier, they might only charge you instead of $10 you might charge only $3. So this way, you'll be able to save $7 per unit every time you sell unit. You sell 10,000 units at $70,000 in savings because you optimize your product to Amazon's fee structures. Okay, same thing. Another example you know pair jeans you have two options to ship it in. All rolled out so on the Dimensional weight is humongous. It looks like a size of a refrigerator. It's like 7080 inches or you Roll it up, you put into a shrink wrap or some sort of, you know, Ziploc and it's as small as it can be on the winning dimension side, and then you're gonna save a lot a lot of fees. So if any of you so I see this over here that you know, if you any of you've seen are selling to brick and mortar, when you sell to brick and mortar, actually, packaging has to be kind of large and bulky. Because you're fighting on the shelf, you're gonna elbow out, you want to really elbow out your competitor, right, that's when you go see the potato chips are full of air, right, because they're nice and shiny. And packaging is part of the selling process. Because of all this information, low fat, low sodium, that's how you communicate to the consumer, it's shiny, you want to hold it as a consumer, put in the carton shop and buy it. When selling on the online especially on Amazon, you don't need all that your listing is your shelf over there, you communicate with the consumer and you convert them. And once you do, when they get the product already sold, you'd have to resell with a big shiny, heavy packaging. So stay nimble, and save you a lot on FBA fees, tremendous amount, because we saw the way that it takes. But also, I will save you all this money logistically to to source the product, let's say you're sourcing from China, the smaller the units get, the lighter they get, the more you gonna save and those layers as well. So keep that in mind. So hopefully, so also try to do an audit on your fees right now. And the tears, weight and dimension tears and Amazon has to find the borderline, you can only you can reduce your packaging with 50 half an inch, and it puts you in a lower price here with fees, do it. In other words, it wherever you're borderline cut, optimised and save a tremendous amount of fees, which, you know, was just gonna go right into your profit line, you know, bottom line profit. So hopefully that's helpful.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 41:34

And we're in the final few minutes here if you can believe it. But the interesting comment question here. So Amazon is famous for giving reimbursements for lost inventory, and then finding the inventory and charging the vendor back. So in that situation, what does GETIDA do?

Yoni Mazor 41:51

Yeah, we're just refund you. Simple question. If Amazon ever reverts back the reimbursement they find it in the reverse it we receive, we just refund back, no problem. Once again, we performance base or the performance, you got provided reimbursement we charge a fee if that ever gets reversed. You get it back not upon?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 42:10

How is there a timeframe for how long they can actually do that?

Yoni Mazor 42:14

No. And it might happen a year later, but we refund you. We're always attentive to that. So no problem we're performance based. And that promise is always guaranteed.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 42:23

And is that something that the seller would monitor manually? Or

Yoni Mazor 42:26

is there's no way you'll sit in the system, you're sitting with the billing system over time, you see that maybe recovered $1,000, and you're supposed to trade you know, that's all your your your rate is 25%, we're supposed to charge you $250, you see that we haven't charged anything because another refund of $1,000 worth got reverse for example. So you see it with the ongoing balance and we've been credited. And of course, if there's nothing that we recovered, nothing for us to charge you, then we just give you a refund on your credit card.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 42:53

Awesome. We have two minutes left, oh my goodness, sum it up in two minutes, because I know you guys have a ton of awesome information to set people up for success. 

Yoni Mazor 43:02

Yeah, so a few easy things here. Just some more knickknacks we've prepared prepared a free ebook for you with more information and Profit and Loss template, you could just visit GETIDA.com/ebook to be able to access it. Here's more additional refunds we look into today focus is on five, six of them, there's more things we look into. So any of these issues do not look familiar misery leaving money behind. And if you there's more about us we're in 500 or 5000. We want the American Business Awards, and all that good stuff, we have two podcast shows you can always tune into. This is the kind of the difference between the US and other options on the marketplace. And then what I really want to get on here is this one actually, because we did prepare a special offer for the BWG network that I mentioned earlier, it's free to join GETIDA and it's free to stay there's no subscription or anything you can cancel at any time. But in addition to that we were prepared $1,000 offer. So the first $1,000 will get you get you and remember reimbursements are free, we're not gonna charge you a penny after $1,000. If you want to leave, you can leave if you want to stay you can stay use a GETIDA.com/BWG or just scan this QR barcode to claim the offer. Yeah, so this is a nutshell. Hopefully this was you know, a good opportunity for you guys to identify opportunities to reduce costs, save money, you know, get reimbursements and boost the profit bottom line. Tiffany, go ahead.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 44:24

And are they able to get a copy of the presentation if they'd like?

Yoni Mazor 44:28

There we go. So yeah, so the few slides that we kind of skim through, feel free to look into them and my information actually is here as well. Yeah, if you have questions, thoughts, ideas you want to connect, feel free to reach out there's my direct email and then you can scan this you will get further information on myself. You'll see you get access to our YouTube channel, our social media handles so you can really track and monitor we constantly share content about all this kind of world and stuff. 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 44:53

You guys have a wealth of information so greatly appreciate it. Yoni thank you so much for all the contents we definitely encourage follow up Conversations with Yoni and team at GETIDA that we'd love to have a conversation with you as well. That's how we get the topic ideas for our future events. So with that we are at time we're at a wrap. So Yoni, thank you so much. Thank you all for attending today. Hope to see you at another events and have fun in Cancun and safe travels back home Yoni.

Yoni Mazor 45:17

Thank you so much, everybody.