MSU Extension Product Center

Well, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the webinar about selling consumer packaged goods on Amazon. I'm so excited to introduce Dean and Elise from This is Unicorn, and Dean is a CPG strategist who's been in the industry for over 30 years. My name is Kendra Wills, and I am from the MSU Product Center, I'll be your host today. I have a few slides to introduce you to the Product Center. Let's see if they'll move forward. 1 second here. I think we're going to advance that way. MSU is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer, Extension programs, and materials are open to all without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender, identity, religion, age, height, weight, disability, political belief, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, or veteran status. If you have any special needs, please type them into the chat and we'll try and accommodate you. Here's some instructions for webinar participation today. You can check your audio settings in the menu bar on the far left bottom corner of the screen in Zoom. If that's not working, you can call our help desk, and that phone number is 844-678-6200, and they can provide some technical support. We would like questions in the Q and A, and you can put them in there at any time. We're going to take questions at the end of the presentation. What is the MSU Product Center? We are a network of resources stationed all throughout the State of Michigan. We deliver services to support new food and beverage businesses, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneur endeavors. We support innovation and economic development related to food, natural resources, and bioeconomy. We have a list of services here. Many of you probably are familiar with the Product Center, but those of you who aren't. We work on product development, licensing and regulations. We help with marketing strategies, production issues. We have some commercial production spaces, which I'll outline here. Packaging and labeling, and even business basics more. We do one on one counseling with business owners interested in food and beverage businesses. We have a annual trade show and conference called Making it in Michigan. Usually, it's held at the Lansing Center, and we are working to plan a 2025 date, which we don't have a specific date to announce today, but hopefully that will be coming soon. Registration usually opens in January. So, look for that in January. And you can see a picture of our trade show from one of our past events. We usually have about 150 vendors and speaker panels based on co packing and distribution and retail. And one on one buyer supplier matchmaking happens at this event as well. Usually it will be held in the spring, April or May. We do have food processing and Innovation Center on campus. That is a USDA inspected and FDA registered processing facility that can be rented. We also run co packing and do some product development. Here's some pictures of our equipment. You can find more information on the equipment on the website for the Food Processing and Innovation Center, or if you have questions my e mail addresses at the end, I can connect you. Majority of people using our food processing center in Okemos, are stage two or beyond. They need larger volume production. Here are two examples. There was a farmer own product example. They developed a formulation. It was a retorted product, and they decided based on those test runs, they were going to invest in their own facility for production. Another example is a large consumer packaged goods company that needed to the concept and work on new packaging. They scaled their production at the food processing center in Okemos, and they ended up expanding to full production at their own facility. We are also connected to the Dairy Complex on campus at Michigan State, which also does co manufacturing, dairy product R&D and some education, like the Artist and cheese making course. We have another processing facility based in Muskegon called Farm Food Agriculture Research and Manufacturing Accelerator. It is lease space, so short term and long term lease options are available and value added products. We encourage you to register as a product center counselor for more information client for more information on that. And here's information about becoming a client. It's all through our website, which is listed here. You could use the QR code. There is $100 application fee, but it provides unlimited counseling hours for that $100, and then connection to our resources and our production facility. Check that out. You click on the become a client link on our website and complete the form to be connected to a counselor. So Let's meet our speakers today. Dean Sinclair is a consumer packaged, good strategist, executive life coach, who helps CPG entrepreneurs from start to exit and everything in between to win in today's marketplace. Before launching CPG Farms, Dean performed at multiple lead marketing and sales roles, like companies like Tops, Ana Heizer, Bush, Eagle Snacks, Bush Entertainment Meyer, Harper Collins Publishing, and Advanced Solutions. He's an expert at creating and capitalizing on CPG and food industry networks while helping his clients negotiate manage the journey of fund raising, DDC, Amazon, retail Omni Channel, food service, and other joint ventures and strategic components. Elis Jackson is the CEO of This is Unicorn, an Amazon Agency and co founder of Fern and Amazon Ads and workflow automation tool. Across, this is Unicorn and Fern, Elise supports and manages advertising and brand strategies for some of the world's most recognizable companies such as Hallmark and alongside disruptive brands like DDC brands, shake up cosmetics, Ocean bottle, and Fion, if I'm saying that correctly. Before entering the Amazon industry, at least worked with global giants like Loreal and Unilever, where she developed a deep understanding of commerce growth strategies. And her entrepreneurial journey began when she spotted untapped opportunities in the Amazon marketplaces for health and wellness products, launching her own brands in the US and European marketplaces, and she actually is based in London today, which is so exciting to connect with her on this webinar. So that is MQ to staff sharing, and Dean, if you want to take over here. Wonderful. Okay, I sure will. Can you hear me okay? I'm ready. Perfect. Great. Well, welcome, everyone. It's a privilege and honor to come and be part of the MSU network Webinar. And Kendra, thank you for the invite, and elise, thanks for joining with me today. So we just have a few slides that Lisa and I are going to take the participants through You know, we understand that when it comes to Amazon, based on who who's on the call today on the webinar today, that some of you maybe are pre revenue. You haven't launched on Amazon yet. Some of you may already be on Amazon and are just looking to see if what you're doing maybe is the right approach. And others, maybe you're an Amazon expert yourself and you're just curious. But whatever your journey is and wherever you are in the growth and scaling of your business, hopefully this will be helpful. My first slides is, I'm going to just do a baseline sort of foundational overview of, you know, what are some best practices to begin building an Amazon sales channel? And so I have a few slides, and then I'm going to turn it over to Elise, and she's going to go a little deeper into some tactical approaches to really maximize your holiday selling season. So here we go. First step, with the many start up CPG and even emerging CPG brands that I work with, you know, really step one is to have a strategy in a plan, and why this might be a rhetorical statement. It's really critical that you step back and have a plan. Amazon, as many of you know, second largest search engines in the world, one of the largest businesses in the world, and you really need to approach them like a major sales channel or retail customer, like a Walmart or like a target. Amazon has one goal and that is to make money. And they don't care about you. They don't care about your brand. They don't care about you as a business owner. They don't care about if you even make money. And I know you like to think they do, and they'll use the word partnership a lot. But the fact of the matter is Amazon is literally every day, thousands and thousands of people are writing algorithms and program development to figure out how to take more of your money as an advertiser and get more profit out of the millions of products they sell. So you need to really step in to working with Amazon with a strategy and open eyes that You need to be fighting for yourself. You need to be fighting for your own brand as you step into this. And if you step into this giant machine called Amazon without having a plan, a lot of times it'll cost you a lot of time and money. And the first step of that is to ask yourself, am I going to manage the Amazon business myself internally? Or am I going to delegate it to maybe a contracted expert? Elis, going a little bit later about what her company offers, but Alisa's agency, they specialize in deploying strategies and helping you really understand the over 100 different advertising programs that Amazon offers. Some are conducive for CPG, some are not. So budget and time and location of where this helps going to be, you need to work through that. You also need to ask yourself, how you're going to measure success on this channel. You could sell $1,000,000 a month on Amazon. But if you're only making 1% profit margin on your product, that's not a viable scalable business. You really need to understand, what are the margins and what is the profit margins that I need to succeed in for this to be a channel that I can really grow and become profitable in. What are those KPIs, the key performance indicators that you're going to use to say, yes, this is worth my time and my money to grow this portion of my business. And then finally, how are you going to position your company and your brand? There's huge branding opportunities on Amazon, just with the search engine optimization itself. But how are you going to position your product against other competitors? The second step is, there are many brands listed on Amazon, that they throw up their listings before they're ready. And one of the main thing you need to do is do some research, and three facets of that. You need to understand the category you're competing. If you're selling a dry granola in a bag, you need to look at the top 20 sellers, and are they snack pack? Are they larger pack? How are they case packed? What are they offering? What's their skew line? What are the flavors? What are the top selling flavors? You need to really understand the category that you're going to be competing against. The next thing is to review your competitor's website. The reason why I say that is because it's critical for you to understand, how is my competitor pushing potential customers to purchase on Amazon? Some product, some brands. They don't even advertise that they're on Amazon because they don't make much money in Amazon, and they'd rather go direct. But if they do if they do offer on Amazon, how are they advertising that on their own website? What's the strategy behind what they're doing? Then the third is order some products. You should pick three or four competitors that you're going to be competing against day in and day out? Order the products, see what the customer journey is. How is the packaging? When it comes to your doorstep or your office, and you open the pack. Is the product damage? Is it sed out? Is it within code? What is the customer experience that your competitors are pushing out there, and how can you do it better? The next step is save some time and money on really doing some behind the scenes, advertising and content development. And there are basically three aspects of this is, you know, every image you throw up on Amazon, it really needs to be best practice. More and more of the clients that we work with are sort of leaning away from product photography, and they're moving more into the area of just doing graphic packaging because it looks better online, it's cleaner. You don't have to worry about, you know, particular lighting. If you have a good graphic designer, you can put that light on the package. And it just makes it easier to read online if they expand the picture. So make sure your photos and your packaging is best practice. And the next is the copy. What's your listing going to say? Are you really choosing the best words as you describe as you describe your product that are going to be the best practice for SEO? You want people searching for gluten free or non GMO. You know, any certifications you have, you need to really make sure you're highlighting that. And that it really compares to the other best competitors. And that's the whole thing about the research. I mean, you can look at how enterprise, multi billion dollar granola companies are selling millions on Amazon and look and see what they're doing. A lot of times they aren't always the best, but you can see what they're doing and see if you can find a way to even have a better listing that could get to get you better search. And then the third thing is really figure out what your pricing strategy is going to be. This is usually a long discussion. You need to think through what your pricing is, if you're going direct, if you're currently on shelf, whether it's farmers markets or you're in a few retailers. What does that look like? And how is that going to affect or cannibalize what you're doing on Amazon? So it's critical to think through your pricing strategy. And really a pro tip is, you really just need to really plan when you launch to be at a higher price point. Not only for margin protection, but it's a lot easier to tell your consumers, you're going to lower a price than raise a price. If you come in high, you can start to get some learning about what pricing strategies work and where you fit in to the overall category. The fourth and final step that we encourage our clients to do is here again, to take the time before you ever throw up your first listing and really make sure that you understand how you set up what we call the back in, how you set up your account. Is all your information correct? It's critical. I mean, you don not want to miss a digit on your baking information or how they're going to wire funds and things like that. If you are a food or beverage company, your branding and trademark information, and there's some legal copy that you'll have to upload as well, and be assured Amazon has everything in place. They will not be liable for anything that happens with your product through the selling process. If you stale out, if someone gets sick from consuming your product, it's all going to be on you. And Amazon will take no accountability for themselves for anything wrong that happens on your platform on Amazon, and you really need to be prepared to understand all of the legal ease and all of the banking and all the information. I'll say this before I throw it over to lease. If you do not have your brand trademarked and you do not have a registered brand, you cannot sell on Amazon if you're food in bed. You just can't. They want proof that you own your brand, the trademark is yours, the brand is yours, and that's also just really good protection for you so that people cannot resell your product unlawfully. There's still a lot of unlawful things that go on on Amazon because people know how to circumvent the system. But it's really important here again, if you're not an expert to even contract with an expert that can walk you through these steps, and it really protects you in the future as you begin to sell on Amazon. Finally, as you if you are not on Amazon, but even if you're on Amazon and maybe you've been going at it for a few months, Amazon without a doubt, it is a marathon, not a sprint. The best thing to do when you launch on Amazon is to very slowly test and validate different types of advertising tactics and strategies. If you come across any contractor or agency that says, you need to come out of the gate spending ten $20,000 on Ad fees. I would run very fast the other way because you need the time to populate, and it takes time for these listings to be become aware. Yes, it's pay to play. Your products are going to be seen more by the more you spend on the platform, but you need to take we recommend the first 30 to 120 days to really understand what you're going to do before you put more fuel into your machine and pay for those precious advertising dollars. So that's sort of an overview on how to launch. And I'm going to turn it over to Elis who is going to take you a little bit more in the detail as you prepare for the selling season. What are some things you can do to maximize your business on Amazon? So Elise, I'm going to turn over to you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Perfect. Thank you so much, Dean. It's a pleasure to meet you all. Thanks for having me today. Yeah, as Dean mentioned, I'm going to go a bit more into some of the tactical details. So if you are already selling an Amazon, this should be very useful for you. But if you're thinking about selling an Amazon, wanting to step a toe kind of into the water, it'll give you some ideas of what's possible, what leaders you can play with with the Amazon platform in order to kind of grow your sales and really kind of And yeah, grow sales effectively on the platform. So I'm going to go through five key areas to make sure that your brand is ready for selling this holiday season. So this month, but November and December, are key months, of course, across the year. So the first element is stock inventory is fulfillment. So ensuring prime fulfillment, and that's often fulfillment by Amazon is really, really important. And that's not only that you're set up and sorted with the fulfill FVA network, but actually, you have stock available in Amazon's warehouses. What's really key is Amazon have cut off dates to ensure that their stock is available and ready ahead of key dates such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, et cetera. So I've put some key dates down there on the slides. We've fall Bastills days coming up next week, which is very exciting. But really importantly, towards the end of October, October 19, that's the actual cutoff date for you to get stock and inventory into Amazon's warehouse so that it can be guaranteed to be available for consumers ahead of Black Friday or Cyber Monday. If you put stock into the warehouse Amazon's warehouse after that date, won't be able to guarantee that it's ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So keeping yourself aware and ahead of the game when it comes down to Amazon's dates and those deadlines is really, really important. Of course, we're talking about food and beverages here as well. So whilst we always recommend forecasting effectively to ensure that you have enough stock for any uplift over the holiday season, which, of course, there will be. Also make sure you're forecasting that replenishment against your perishable date as well, and you're not going to have too much stock in Amazon so that that goes sale, et cetera. So getting that balance between those two is really, really important. Okay. Moving on to the next. As Dean already mentioned and just to build upon. It's so important to have exceptional content on Amazon. Consumers are finding your brand for the first time, and they want to learn about your products and what's going to do for them, what the benefits, what the features are. And so what you want to make sure is that you've got brilliant, SEO friendly, so it's got the right keywords in, but also that it can convert those consumers that are actually visiting and seeing your product detail pages. So that's across not only your copy images, and exactly as Dean said, it's really important across F&B to have graphic images as well. They just can look a little bit nicer in the search results. But also video is really, really important. It's very engaging in Amazon and is really clear for consumers. There's also possibilities to add in more significant visual branded content such as A plus content. And if you have availability to do premium A plus content, that's really valuable too. The example that I'm showing on the slides here is of that premium A plus content where you've got video, you've got carousel opportunities, and so you can see it the great way to showcase your brand and showcase your product. And also a brand store is really important, like a mini website within Amazon. And so you want to be making sure that's up to date with your products, and you can include seasonal content on those across the holiday period. So including things like ribbons, making sure consumers know that a product is potentially giftable, including like gift hampers to types of products. That works really well across a lot of our clients in the food and beverage space. It works really, really well on Amazon. Now, content can be very resource heavy. It can be quite a challenge to get exceptional content across your whole catalog, if you have a large catalog. So we always recommend, especially when you're doing seasonal content and changing that content, if you do have a large catalog, focus making those changes on your top 20%. We typically see the 80 20 rule that 80% of your sales are probably going to the top 20% of your catalog. So actually, if you focus your resources on that top 20%, you should be able to maximize your sales, and then you'll have a bit of a halo effect across the rest of the catalog as well. That number two. Number three, coming to reviews. So, of course, on Amazon, that social proof is really, really important across your products. I'm sure when you're buying, you're looking at what consumers are saying about a product in order to decide whether you're going to purchase it yourself. So if your products are new to the platform, do run vine. It's a program that is set up by Amazon and enables you to get reviews on products that have less than 30 reviews, and it enables you to get up to 30 reviews across your products. And so gives each product a really good head start, good customer reviews to begin with. We also recommend that you answer questions on your product detail page to help consumers so that you're giving as much information about the product as possible. You can also, if you have received a negative review about the product, but it's not actually about the product, it's maybe about the fulfillment experience or something like that. You can actually request Amazon reviews. So it's always useful before the holiday season to do a review of all of your products. A, if there are any products with less than 30 reviews, run ne across them to maximize the number, but also then remove any reviews that are negative and are not product specific. However, the very important thing is that you always stay within Amazon's terms of service when it comes to reviews. You cannot solicit fake reviews or reviews that are overly positive, or you cannot ask consumers for only positive reviews. They have to be honest realistic reviews of your product. And the worst thing would be if you had any reviews that were questionable and Amazon was doing a review ahead of Black Friday or Cyber Monday, for example, it will be the worst thing if your product was taken down right before that key sales period. So always make sure you're staying within on the right side of Amazon's terms of service, and you're not risk risking your products, especially during those key marquee days on the platform. So moving on to the next slide, as we've already talked about with Dean, is implementing a strong ad strategy across your products. So ensuring that you have a great strategy across Amazon Search, so that there's three types of campaigns you can run within Amazon Search, sponsor products, sponsor brands, and sponsors display, and also to Dean's Point with regards to brand registry. Absolutely, it's a requirement for your brands as food and beverage brands. But it's also hugely advantageous to you to get more control over your brand. But also you get access to additional ad features such as sponsored brand, sponsor display. You just can't do any of that stuff if you don't have brand registry in place. So it's really really important to have that trademarking so you get access to that. And exactly as Dan said as well, that planning up front is so so important. Firstly, making sure you're budgeting effectively for the Q four season. So creating a budget for the whole Q four season, ensuring that budget has clear prioritization based on when you're running promotions across products based on your top sellers, and that forecasted growth potential, but also making sure you're isolting and saving budget for seasonal seasonal events, so you've got enough to play with on Black Friday, for example. Then with regards to targeting, so you're going to be targeting a whole host of keywords. So as well as targeting your longer tail keywords, also make sure you're targeting seed keywords, really to identify kind of discovery to discover kind of new search terms that a consumer might be using on the platform. During the holiday season, there may be a wide range of keywords and search terms used. And so it's useful to have those seed keywords in at, you know, broad and phrase match so that you're capturing a wider audience where possible. We also recommend, you know, on a regular basis, reviewing those search results, adding those converting keywords into your campaign, so you can target them effectively, as well as targeting shoppers who viewed your products already, but perhaps didn't purchase. You can target those through sponsor display campaigns marketing campaigns through sponsor display. And again, when traffic is just much higher through Black Friday and, holiday season, where consumers might be discovering more and more products, it's really important to do that remarketing, so you're really capturing every consumer that you can. Of course, then there's also the optimization, and this should be happening on a regular basis, as usual, but it's really important to do it more often, I would say, throughout the holiday season. So, for example, checking your repeat purchase intervals, making sure that you're kind of keeping up to date with that. Also refreshing your headlines and creatives, refresh that with seasonal content. Anything to make sure you're standing out against your consumers is really valuable, and of course, defending your brand through branded strategies. Your com bestors might might try to target your brand with their products. So you want to be defending the brand space around your products, so you're really kind of owning your space for your products and consumers. When they find you, they only purchase yourselves. And then finally, it's what's really important during those seasonal events, like the full Prime Day Black Friday L side Monday that I've already mentioned, it's really important to have a very grimul the strategy. So regular budget monitoring and increasing those budgets where you can because you've already isolated that budget for those seasonal periods. And then as we get through to the end of the holiday season, actually making sure you're monitoring those shipping windows, because, of course, with prime shipping, we have same day next day shipping. That's great. But as soon as that shipping window has passed, and that product is not going to arrive ahead of Christmas, for example, Then consumers are going to stop purchasing. There's no point in spending money on that, when you could pause that and reduce that at expense. Keeping that kind of oversight and monitoring across your shipping windows, especially in the week before before December 25, is really, really important. And also, I would say across the board, it's very important to have a very granular strategy separating out your products into different ad groups and different campaigns, gives you a lot more control over your bids and budgets. So for example, if you have items that are perishable and you want to increase the sell through of those, if you have a granular strategy for your advertising, you can then isolate and say, Okay, I'm going to put more budget towards this specific product, for example, push that sell through. Excuse me. Just 1 second I'm just going to grab a glass of water. I'm going to tick in my throat. Just to let everybody know. The Q&As open. If you have any questions, feel free to type them in. We'll take your questions at the end. So Dean and Elise will be here for questions. Feel free to load that up if you would like. Perfect. Thank you. I'm so strike for the tick on my throat just there. Anyway, moving on to finally on to promotions. And of course, as we all know, a great promotional period across the holiday season. So there are tons of spaces where you can really include promotions in your catalog. And on Amazon, there's many different types of promotions you can run. There's lightning deals, there's best deals, there's top deals. What we would typically recommend is if you are not able to run promotions across every part of your catalog, we'd recommend to focus promotions on the door openers of your catalog. So those hero products, where consumers will purchase, they'll purchase again. And then from those products, you can then focus on remarketing tactics to then bring customers into the rest the rest of your catalog. But I've included in here some examples of what types of promotions you could include at different stages of the holiday season. So for example, of Cross Brac Friday, cyber Monday, top deals, lightning deals as I've mentioned, but also prime exclusive discounts. There are a new batch of promotions that Amazon is releasing, which are very exciting. And they allow you to isolate different parts of your consumer base and give them specific promotions, specifically tailored to that segment of your consumer base. So for example, that could be consumers that have purchased Mb six months ago, but haven't purchased in the last six months. You can actually target a promotion specifically at those consumers or through marketing techniques. If a consumer has added your product to the cart, but hasn't actually purchased, you can target a specific promotion to those. So having those prime exclusive and brand tailed promotions is really important throughout the holiday season. I've just included in screenshot there. That's just an example of a promotional calendar, that it's important to have across a few it's an example from one of our clients, but it's important to have a really clear plan of your promotional calendar. So you not only know when those promotions are going to be running, but you can make sure that your ad strategy is aligned with that and you're pushing those products through ads at the same time as having potentially discounts available on them. Those are the main key areas. I've also included on the next slide, a ready made kind of action plan for you, I won't go through the detail of this, but this is really a roadmap through the next three months to ensure that you have, your objectives correctly, what the objective is for each month, as well as what actions you might you might be taking. For example, making sure you've got stock in or making sure you've got your promotional calendar set up and all your promotion set up. And then I would say the really important thing, the holiday season this year is very, very important. But as you move through December, It's really important to start thinking about the plan for next year. Taking those learnings, having that retrospective of what happened on your account and for your products over October, November and December and learning what you can do to improve on that for the following year. So making sure you're planning ahead for next year is a really key activity to be doing in December and through to the beginning of next year. I hope that's helpful. Sorry for sort of tickling my throat halfway through, but I'm happy to answer any questions you have as well. It's great. A Lise, thank you so much. And folks, I know we've went through a lot of stuff really fast. But, you know, that's the purpose we wanted to do a survey sort of fly over. I know that Kendra is going to make this presentation available to the network. And like we said, you can throw a question in the chat, and we'd be happy to ask some questions. Well, maybe people are thinking about a question for a minute, Kendra. I wanted to throw out to Elise. Elise. Could you just explain to the team, and I apologize if people on the call already know this, but what is the difference between A plus content in a brand page or store? Yeah, great question, Dean. So A plus content is visible on your product detail page. And so it typically is information that's more specific and tailored to the product itself. It's a very visual kind of product description, I would say, Whereas your brand page, your brand store, consumers can click through to it from your product detail page. And if it's useful, I can share exact examples of this afterwards. But a brand store is much more like your overall website. It'll talk much more about your brand, your value, Production, for example, how your products come to life, your history, and then you can also highlight your products within that page as well. Great. Wonderful. We do have a few questions. I did want to just let everybody know. This is being recorded, so you will all receive a copy of the recording and of the slides in PDF version. Thanks to Dean and Elise for that. We had a quick question about trademarking, and I'm happy to announce thanks to Dean's connections. We have a free webinar coming up in November to go over the trademarking process and costs involved and what that looks like. So look for an e mail. I will send out the registration link to that free webinar. I believe it's November 6 is the date for that webinar. But that one will also be recorded if you're not able to make that. So first question, what's the best strategy for a company with just a few products? I'll jump in and then I'm going to let a lease fill the gaps, and I'll so covering my mistakes. So I think if you just have a couple of skews. Here again, I'm going back to the first slides. That's okay. You can build a business. One, potentially good thing about just having a couple of products. It will give you a chance to learn and understand what it's like to do business on the platform, and you can really focus on those two product lines. But here again, strategically, understand what's currently going on with your competitors on the website, the best you can before you launch. And you might want to think about given the category and Is there a certain time in the year that's best for you to launch? But I would think about the timing, know the category in your competition, and then set a plan of getting everything set and locked and loaded before you push the published and go live button? Yeah, absolutely. I can build on that as well from Dean. Yeah, if you only have a couple of products, that actually that's great. You can actually focus all your resources on those products, you know? I was talking before if you have large catalogs, it can be quite challenging to get content across all of those. If you just have a couple of skews, then focus your resources on those elements. Would say as well from a strategic perspective, there are so many opportunities and features and tools that are available to you on the Amazon platform. It actually can be quite hard to navigate those. So I would always bring it back to those foundational elements, which are really some of the elements that Dean and I have both covered. Making sure you've got that fulfillment set up correctly. You've got great reviews, you've got great content. You've got an ad strategy, and go from there, you know, start small, test and learn, validate some of those assumptions, start more with your ad budget, and learn from there. But make sure you're covering those foundational bases before you start trying to run with advanced strategies. Thank you so much. So here's another question. Today is my first day activated on Amazon. Somebody says Pa pa congratation. Would you recommend, and I'm going to spell this V EEQ if FBM? I need FBM because it's a chocolate product and melts easily, is what she said. V EEQ, I think. I don't know. Want to go. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that I know what V She's asking if she needs the VE Q. Maybe it is She spelled it Q, but I think V I don't know if VCO personally, but I believe it may be a third party warehouse that does sell a fulfillment. So, yeah, I understand this with Chocolate and multiple inventory. And yes, Amazon has restrictions with their warehouses with multiple inventory. So yes, if Vico gives the opportunity to have prime fulfillment through that third party warehouse, then yes, I would recommend partnering with a warehouse such as that because you want to get the advantages of prime fulfillment, even if you can't necessarily use FBA and Amazon's warehouses all the time. So yeah, there are certain dates where multiple multiple inventory comes in and has to be removed from the warehouses. So I do understand. Question. It comes in in September and has to be usually out by May if it's meltable. And so they don't sell meltable inventory through the summer months. And because of a majority of the warehouse space, they don't have refrigerated. If you are a meltable or refrigerated or frozen product, most of the time, you're going to have to do FBM. And there are a number Of a lot of options for warehouse. One is ship Bob, and there's others. But here again, you know, that would be something that a company like mine or a leases that we would help you do the research? What's the most cost effective way to do that? And then also work out work out a pricing in PNL model of, k, if I'm going to use a third party ship for my chocolate goods, does it make sense to use it for the whole year? Or does it make sense to just use it when I can do FBA, So these are questions. So really excited you know that you've launched. It's going to be really interesting to see if you use this warehouse, what they charge, and if you can still be profitable by using that third party warehouse for chocolate. But if you are a chocolate or meltable product, you really need to think through how you can do it because it can be disruptive because you can do FBA for, like, you know, four or five months a year, but then they're like, Okay, get it out of our warehouses because we're not going to be responsible if it melts in the hands of the consumer, no pun intended. But to that as well, which I think is valuable to know, is there is a lot of flexibility within Amazon. So exactly as Dan says, you can put your product in Amazon for that period where they'll take the multiple inventory and then use another warehouse for another part of the year. So it doesn't have to be a kind of an all or nothing using a separate warehouse. And certainly for chocolate and the high demand that we see across, you know, the Q four season being very giftable, it could be very advantageous to use Amazon. What you look with the PNL, of course. No, great, great point, at least. Hey, we have a couple of other questions related to the cost of selling on Amazon. How does Amazon do it? Do they tack on costs or if somebody's just starting out, do they take a percentage of sales or how does that work? Yeah, here again, I'll take the lead here and let a lease fill the crack. So this is back to my first slide of understanding what your budget is. Yeah, they will take and charge you in multiple ways. Here again, this is where Amazon, a lot of times operates like a retailer. If you sell $10,000 of goods at a Myer store or a Kroger store and you participate in their promotions, you might sell $10,000 in a month at a Myer store and you're like, Hey, I just made $10,000. But then when you get their PO or their invoice, if you will, it'll be $10,000 minus this promotion, minus this shipping cost, minus this sale buyback. At the end of the day, now you're at $5,000. You're like, Hey, how come they took all my money? It's the same modality with Amazon. They even if you sell $10,000 in one month, they will subtract your ad fees, coupon fees, and other fees. And if you end up utilizing an agency like ase or you contract with another expert, you're going to want to fold that into your budgeting as well because most companies like A Lise, there's either a retainer plus a percentage of sales if they help you grow your business, which can be a really great model because you're getting somebody on your business who can manage it And this is why I like Alisa's company is that she also they have what we call skin in the game. So if they're going to manage your Amazon business, they get a percentage of the sales, but then she has an incentive to work for you. There are a lot of Amazon agencies and contractors. They just want to charge you a large number to manage your account. And it's just like a huge administrative retainer fee. Always look for a Amazon expert that you're going to pay them based on the sales they're going to help you get because then they have ownership, and then that really gives them incentive to know your brand, to know you as an owner, and a founder and really have your back and work for you and not Amazon. Appreciate that. And we're going to make sure everybody gets Dean and Elise's contact information if you want to contact them and follow up about their consulting services after this. I'm not sure if we're going to actually get to all these questions. We have about, you know, 15 years. Yeah. Yeah I jumped into it but I Elis. I know it can be very complex if you're using multiple advertising platforms, but did I state that right? I mean, they'll take you pay for Amazon advertising. You have a couple of options on how you pay for the Amazon fees, correct? Yeah, that's correct. So typically, Amazon will charge a fee, a referral fee for every product that you sell on the platform. It's essentially a thank you to Amazon for the privilege of using their platform. So that's important to take account for. Then there's also stock and imagery management. If you're using their fulfillment programs such as FBA. There is fees with regards to that. That's based on weight and dimensions of the product, and also how long you're storing it in their warehouse. What I would say is that Amazon's FBA fees are typically very, very competitive in comparison to other warehouses, especially when you take account of Amazon handling, potential returns, a little bit of customer service in there as well. And then finally, yes, it's important to isolate and make sure you have budget for advertising. And to begin with, you might be investing a little bit more in the advertising to build up traction. But as your product becomes more established, as you build up reviews, then you should be able to lower that kind of percentage investment within your advertising. Still squeezing out more profitability for your products, you know. We do have, and I'm very happy to share this with everyone. We have a sort of a margin calculator for Amazon to help with understanding those referral fees so that you can have a good kind of picture and understanding of what that looks like before you're get into the game, you know, so feel free to ask Dean or myself, anything around those kind of fees would be, if you'd like to. Wonderful. Thank you. That will answer a couple of people's questions about margins and pricing. So related to the advertising, one, maybe we can share this. Someone was asking for an example of an A plus brand page. If you knew that off the top of your head or we could provide a link in the follow up. And the other one was saying, do you have connections or recommendations about companies to do the graphics and videos for your Amazon page? Yes. So I'm sorry, what the first part of that question? An example of an A plus. Okay. Right. We can definitely embed that and I know we're getting tight on time and I could share a screen. I don't know if Elise had one pulled up that she could share, but I could pull one up real quick. But I'll pull up. We can send you an example. But yeah, here again, Elis is a strategic partner. Her agency is someone that can help you so to nut. So she has people in her wheelhouse, in her network that can help you with graphics and design, and she can walk you all the way through that. Sometimes, We have other people. They sort of specialize in digital ads, and we can do that. So I have within my network multiple people that could help you, but I know that Elisa's agency can do that as well. And so really as a CPG coach, that's what I do is I bring my clients options. And I have a lot of people. I have not only Elise and Elise knows this, but I have other people that have similar skill sets. But a lot of times, if if you're going to hire someone like Elise and her team. I mean, a couple of things, not only do they need the expertise, you need to see if they're people that you feel you can trust and work with, because they're going to be working on your business day in and day out, and you need to trust them. And so I stand behind every single vendor or supplier that I recommend to the brands I work with, and Elise is one of them. So, yes, we can help you on that, and we can point you to a number of options. If you'd like me to, I've got a couple of examples pulled up. I my screen. I can do that. Let me just pull this up here. So, this is an example of this is Trol Hunter. This is one of our clients, and you can see their products in here. We've got title, bullet points, all the images and video across the left hand side. Um, if you scroll down in here, you can see this element, which is from the brand. This is the brand story. And then you have this very visual product descriptions. This is an example of premium A plus content, where we've got video coming through here really showcasing the products as well. So that's a plus content. Now to move through and show you the brand store, if I just scroll up here, if you click on visit the Truffle Hunter store, this is one of the ways consumers can reach a brand store. Another way might be through sponsored brand advertising or through off Amazon advertising. You can late them directly to your store. Then you can see the full store in here as well. And so you can see here that this is much more about the brand in general, about the manufacturing process, about what the values are for the brand, as well as then highlighting through the shop the different products within the range. Hope that's helpful. Yeah, this is a perfect example. Thank you, Elis, because this is a perfect example of a beautiful store within a store on Amazon. And all of these images in the video, it's all searchable content. The more robust content you have on your brand store like this, the higher chance of people finding you in the search. But I believe, Alisa's team, this is a perfect example of how they can execute and help you have this type of brand identity on Amazon? And this is a beautiful store. As you can see, they not only have multiple skews with this brand, but they have gift packs and other things. And the thing is, is when in the selling season, you can change these images out pretty well. And Elise, if I was going to change images to sort of redesign this for the fall selling season, how much time do you need to do to maybe add some images, some videos and some new skews? Yes, we're actually in the planning for this at the moment for raffle hunters. So we will typically change up some of the images that are in the store at the moment with that seasonal content. And then we'll also focus on typically across their giftable range. So for example, the packs we'll then start putting images that are, you know, they have kind of, you know, gifting elements to them, you know. So in terms of time, I mean, my team, we do we create all that content. And so we'll always put together kind of, you know, a cost effective but resource effective plan across a range to make sure we're focusing on what's really going to move the needle the most. The brand because there's no point to do across everything, it's better to focus on kind of those top sellers for the brand. Okay, great. Yeah. So a question about if Net FBA, which promos would you recommend for a new product? L, do you want to start? Or should I start? Okay. So for a new product. So typically to begin with, Amazon have deals such as lightning deals, best deals, and top deals. But for those, you typically have to show strong volumes before Amazon is going to offer those deals to you. It can feel like a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. That's where a partner, such as myself or Dean can be very useful. We have a partnership with Amazon. So we can actually get access to deals, even if you don't have that volume through our partner manager, if you're interested, talk to us about that. But other things that you can do to try and build some of that volume that are available to you, even in the early stages are coupons and some of those exclusive prime exclusive deals. So looking at all the deal options that you have and putting together a strategy to build volume so then you can get access to those larger deals is really really valuable. We typically may recommend for a brand new products becoming established. Maybe we might run a promotion for, every Saturday for a month, for example, you know, and then we'll look at the results and typically see a Halo effect coming into the following month, for example. So it's important to have that strategy and not just go Willy Nilly on promotions, but you've got a really clear plan in place for those. Appreciate that. Thank you so much. So this is just a very quick three question survey about the webdar, and you're going to get connected to se and Dan via e mail with a recording link. You're going to get a copy of the slides. So much great information. While we're giving people a minute to do this three question thing, price range to hire you both. Dean, this was the last question. What should people expect? I mean, people are small working on a budget. They're just nervous about Absolutely, do they have enough budget to even talk to you both? Absolutely. Well, so I've been launching food and beverage brands for over 25 years, and many of them have started. I have launched two companies on my own as well, and I've exited those and been consulting startups for a long time. I'm not trying to skirt the issue, but I really sit and have a conversation with the owners and founders and what the needs are. And I know, my monthly retainers can be, you know, $2000-10 thousand a month to be depending on what the needs are. Because of my association with MSU and some other incubators around the state, I have a passion to help young entrepreneurs not only survive but thrive in today's CPG market. So I am a lot of times I just take it case by case. I need to see that we're going to get along well as a client and coach, and I need to believe in your food and your mission and what you're doing. And so it just starts with a conversation. I rarely just do hourly consulting, but I am doing some of that through organizations like MSU. And Kendra, maybe we can talk offline. If one of the things that we're talking with MSU is that maybe there's three or four brands that could use some one on one coaching, and I make myself available Kendra and her team if it makes sense. So that's how I work, and it's usually a monthly retainer. I rarely like to work with brands for under six months, and here's why. I need time to understand the brand, the category, what you're trying to achieve. And most of my clients, I have a simple goal is to get them to their first million dollar in sales profitably. So that's the goal. So I'll turn it over to Elise and she can maybe talk a little bit about her structure real quick because I know we only got 3 minutes. Yeah, of course. I mean, very similar to Dean. I mean, that's why we're here today. We just really want to help and see brands thrive. That's what's important for me. And especially at Dean said at the beginning, Amazon can be a challenging platform. And so I always want to see brands kind of cut through that noise, cut through, crack the code of Amazon, and really thrive on the platform. So for us, yeah, our retainers kind of start. We typically do a retainer plus a percentage of revenue, so we do have that skin in the game, but it really depends on the number of products, and also we'll always work to understand actually what resources you have internally. As young businesses a young start up, we know there's a lot you can actually do, and you might have get value from us from a consulting perspective or just from doing some of the advertising, for example. Well, always, as Dean says, it'll start from that conversation to understand what you can do and then really where we can make the biggest difference and then tailoring kind of something to suit. And yeah, there's no question that's kind of too small. If it's something that we feel that actually, we can't do ourselves, it will be better if you could do on your side. Then we've got loads of resources and blog content, knowledge content that we can share to help you on your journey, and then maybe we pick up in a few months time. But if we can help you from the start and really build that growth on Amazon, as I say with our skin in the game too, then we'd be very happy to do that. Let's have a conversation and see what we get to. Wonderful. Great way to end the Webinar today. Thank you all so much for joining. Thank you, Dean and Elise. Wonderful information. So relevant for the month that we're in, and that's so adorable. What do you call it in London? No Prime Days, Best Deal Days? Is that what they call? Yeah. Best Best Deal days we have. I kind of like that. Better. Time days. Yeah. This is just a really quick, my contact information, my e mail, but you'll all be hearing from me and you will get Alice Dean's information as well in your e mail. Once the recording has been closed captioned, which I would say probably tomorrow, you'll be receiving an e mail from us about that. Thanks so much. Have a great afternoon, everybody. I'm going to end the webinar now. Thank you. Take care, everybody. Bye. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.