If you're new to Amazon, the thing I wouldn't do again is

I would not do a trademark. Listen up.

I had to get category approval to sell

my healthcare product in the UK Amazon platform. I

ended up getting banned. What I should have done and what I ultimately

ended up doing was using, I was Nicely

selling my product, everything was going well. One day, I just

start seeing this negative reviews. All the same

issue, $20,000 worth of stock went into the

bin. This next mistake would have easily have just crippled

anyone who's in this Amazon business. I'm Matthew Fraser,

and this is Amazon Ecom Secrets. I'll

be sharing with you the secrets that helped me go from millions in

debt to an eight-figure entrepreneur. If you're

ready to escape the nine-to-five and live life on your terms,

let me show you the way. Hey, guys. Welcome to Amazon Ecom

Secrets. My name is Matthew Fraser, and I am an Amazon

ecommerce seller who's done over $45 million in

sale. But guess what? without designing my

own product. That's right, $45 million globally

without designing my own product. But as amazing as

that sounds, and look, it is amazing, just a humble

guy down in Tweed Heads, it hasn't come easy.

And I'm gonna share with you today some of the top mistakes

that I've made in this six, seven year journey

of selling on Amazon and e-commerce around the globe. The

first one that comes to mind is this one here, and I've even

brought some props in today. Now, this one is my very first product.

You're probably thinking, Matt, what the fuck is that? Well,

it's not what you think. I know what you're thinking. It's not that. This

is a car chamois. And if I just pop this top

off here, very, very carefully, just inside there is the car chamois. And

you know what? I was pretty proud of this product, to be honest. I

designed this from scratch, having got

the plastic mold done in China. It was like $5,000 just to

do that. Came up with the branding myself, Patriot Auto

Products. There was so much that actually went into this

design, now that I think back. But guess what, guys? It

was a, it did not, it didn't work.

And I lost, you know, probably, you know, something

in the vicinity of 15 plus thousand dollars. And,

but the key thing I want to tell you though, is why did I lose all this money?

Why didn't I get this money back? It was because I just didn't

understand the marketplace. There was just

so much competition and so many bigger and

better brands in the car cleaning niche

that people just were like, yeah, no, we're just going to go with the

brand that we all know to work on my very special

vintage car, for example. Yeah. So that was the first one

that didn't work out. So, you know, when I did have this product in

the marketplace, I did actually, I was in a training program, but

the difference was unlike what I provide now to my clients, my

Private clients, my private clients, get one-on-one, day-to-day

mentoring and coaching. So, probably wouldn't have

made that mistake if they were with me. So

the second big mistake and this was

a fuck up because I

was setting up in the UK. So you can imagine I've now conquered

America. I was making a ton of cash and

now I'm going, I'm transferring now. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to get into the UK. Now

to get into the UK, you have to set up a UK company. So

I've gone through all that hassle and it's like thousands of dollars to set up.

Then I've set up my Amazon account. Now what I had to

do then was I had to get category approval to

sell my healthcare product in the

UK Amazon platform. Now, it's a little bit

tricky. You've got to get this approval. But I

didn't know at the time there was a particular method to

get it approved. So what ended up happening was I

ended up getting banned to sell in that category. Because

if you apply three times and you get rejected,

that's it. You can't then go back and reapply to get this

category ungating approval a fourth

time. And so that was it. I was out.

And so I was like, you go to all

this trouble of setting up the UK account, which is a pain, the

company. And of course, it wasn't just the UK company. I had to set up all the bank

accounts over there. So it was a real, real mission

to get this sorted out. And then at this final moment,

I've now been denied by Amazon for this particular category. I

was just like, oh, no, this cannot be happening. And

I think in hindsight, what I was doing was I was

trying to save some money. That's what I think I was doing at

the time. This is going back a few years ago now, because what

I should have done and what I ultimately ended up doing was

using a special experienced agent who

can get category approval done for you in a matter of seconds.

I think the cost of doing that is about $1,000. So

I would have been better off just biting the bullet, spending the

$1,000 and getting someone who's experienced at getting ungating sorted

and I wouldn't have had the hassle because then I had to go back and literally reapply

for a whole new UK

company and bank accounts and everything. It was a big, big disaster. Now,

the next mistake I made, and this is more of a just

not knowing what you don't know. And

I'd started out in 2018 and my goals,

I thought pretty big. My goal was really just to bring in some extra money into

the household to help pay some bills. And hey, it sounded good that

if I could bring in enough money to actually like

replace my day job or maybe save up to buy some

property, I thought that was gonna be awesome. I remember writing

down my goals of about $10,000 to

$30,000 a month. Initially, I wanted $10,000 a month in

revenue within like the first year. And then after that,

like year number three, I was hoping to get $30,000 to $50,000 a month. And

what I, the mistake that I made early on was

that I was just thinking way too small,

right? Way too small. Because what ultimately happened in

a pretty short amount of time was I was doing, I

sort of smashed through 10,000, smashed through 20,000. I'm

doing 50,000 US dollars a month. And this remember back then

was just Amazon USA. Because now I'm

in, like a lot of countries around the world. So this is just Amazon

USA. I smashed through $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month. And I'm like, wow, this is incredible. $100,000 a

month. Oh my god. I'm like, I'm going to be rich. Then went through $200,000, $300,000, $500,000. I'm

not even joking, I got all the way up to close

to $800,000 a month in sales and I was just gobsmacked. And

it was around that time that I started branching out into Shopify

and then scaling the business across other marketplaces. So

you just don't want to underestimate the power of

the Amazon marketplace. It is a beast. So

make sure you think big. All right, this next mistake was

an absolute doozy and could have easily have

just crippled anyone who's in this Amazon business.

And what had happened, nicely selling my product, everything

was going well. And then one day, I just

start seeing this negative reviews, negative review,

next negative review, then multiple negative reviews. I'm thinking, oh my God, this

is not good. And they were all the same issue.

And it was the cracking of the plastic cap that

goes on top of the device. I was like, oh, shit.

What am I going to do now? So what I ended up having to

do was completely discard $20,000 worth

of stock, went into the bin. Now, that

alone, you're thinking, oh, shit, $20,000. For most

people, that would cripple you, right? And what's your first port

of call after that? It's going to be straight back to the manufacturer, right? How are you

going to get on the phone, say, you've just sent me stock that

is freaking ruined. And you're going to be pissed

off. Yeah, so I go back to the suppliers and look, all the stocks are

rubbish. It's cracking. And now, thankfully,

the manufacturer said, look, I will replace all those devices. Yeah,

all done. But that's not really the big, that's like good. But

the bigger problem is I've now got all these negative reviews

in the Amazon marketplace. So now I've gone from like a five star rating

down to, I think at the time was like a three star rating. right,

which is horrific because you rely on

reviews when you're selling a product in a place like Amazon. The more

reviews you have and the better reviews you have means

you're going to make way more sales. And

so it wasn't just the fact that I've now got these negative reviews which

are now going to slow down my sales velocity. But

it was also the fact that I had to discard $20,000 worth of stocks.

So all the stock's now gone. Now I've got to wait. And I think it

was like six to eight weeks I had to now wait for

the manufacturer to now send in more replacement Devices

that I could sell so I'm down for up to two months I've got these negative

reviews that are slowing ultimately end up slowing down my velocity So

it was all a great big what I want to call

a great big kerfuffle but I would

say don't let these types of issues wear you down

though because you know now that I've done over 45 million

in sales I can easily look back and During these beginning

teething issues and say well look, you know I'm really glad

I didn't quit because if I'd quit at the time because I was

just beginning, you know Getting all too stressful. Then you obviously you're not going to

see the growth in time know these Issues that happen

in your journey become little blips. You just got to stay

focused on the big goals. I Now, the

other thing that I made a big mistake on was I spent too much

money on my very first product. So I'm going to bring back in

the shammy and tell you why. Now, it

wasn't so much that I spent money on

stock or anything like that. I would say that was probably an issue, but

just little things that you probably won't know about and people probably don't even tell

you about. So if you're new to Amazon, listen up.

The thing I wouldn't do again is I would not do

a trademark. The trademark is Patriot Auto Products. This

trademark actually lasts for 10 years. Now it costs about

two to two and a half thousand US dollars to get a trademark in

the US. And being that

it was my first product and it really didn't work out, it was

just money that I really didn't need to invest in the product. I could have

just launched this product without actually doing a trademark and it would have been

completely fine. The other thing is when you're designing

your logos, there are companies that you can use to help you

with logos. One of those companies is 99designs. Go

and type into Google 99designs, it'll come up and you'll see the

types of things they do. One of the things is they can help design logos,

they can also come up with like your name, like Patriot

Auto Products, because sometimes you can get a lot of mental blocks on these

types of things, and you want to tap into people who can think of it yourself. That

said, this was some time ago, and

the fees back then were pretty up there. I think their

top rated package was about $1,500 US

dollars. Now, of course, me being all

very naive and very excited about my

car chamois, I had to have the best package. So I

spent the $1,500. Now I can tell you, don't

do that. It's just completely unnecessary. All

you need to do is get their very, very cheapest entry-level product,

which is probably around $200 or $300. It's going to give

you basically the same results at a much, much cheaper price.

So make sure you think about the money when you're going to these first

products. One of the other mistakes I

made in my journey was not focusing on

the main prize. Ultimately, what ended up

happening was the product that has done over $45 million

in sales is really just like one brand and a couple of

variations of that product in the healthcare niche. But during

the beginning phases, I was really looking for other things. What else can I do?

What else can I sell? And I remember coming across this affiliate

marketing program, and I thought, Brilliant. That

is exactly what I need to do. Affiliate marketing, because

in affiliate marketing, all I have to do, it's so easy.

I don't have to like design a product like this car chamois, you

know, which took, that actually took me one whole year to get that

to market, right? So this doesn't happen overnight. And so you

don't have to worry about that. I'm just thinking, okay, all I have

to do is just promote other people's products. Simple,

right? I'm gonna do that. And so I did this

full training program and I had coaching with

some guy in America and I thought everything was going great. And

then the very first time I experiment with

this affiliate marketing, I put up this link

to the product that I was selling and I put it

into Facebook, just on my personal Facebook page. I thought,

oh brilliant, let's just give this a go. Just pasted it in and

guess what? I hate to say it. My

Facebook account got banned, got like shut down. Yeah,

like a strike or something. I was like, what the fuck? What's going on here? I

thought this was supposed to be simple. I'm just like posting up these links in

like on Facebook. And I just had no idea because

one, I mean, who actually reads the terms and services of

Facebook? I've never read it. Right. And it actually says

in there that you can't post up affiliate links. Now,

they didn't tell me that, though, in the bloody training program that

I had paid all this money to do. Because if they'd told me that

from the get-go, and that would have been like a big one, right, to tell your

students, hey, you're going to do this affiliate marketing program. First

thing is, don't put these links into Facebook or

Instagram, whatever. That would have been the first thing you'd tell your students, right? No,

they didn't say that. It's like, oh, just put these affiliate links up everywhere. And

it was just a great big disaster. So I then had to go through all this trouble of

trying to get my a Facebook account live again. Now, and

it was really because I was just, I was not focusing

on the main game. I had a product in Amazon that

was already selling and it was doing quite well, but I was just still,

oh no, there's got to be something else I can do. No, no, no, no. I

should have just... just left off affiliate marketing and

just completely focused all my time and attention on

the product. Now, strangely enough, what ended up happening is

I have actually gone into affiliate marketing, but I'm

not the affiliate marketer. What I do now is I hire other

people who are affiliate marketers to help promote my product, right?

But I don't tell them, don't go to Facebook because these guys are

seasoned professional affiliate marketers. And

what they'll do is they will generally have like a huge database of

like emails or they'll have their own website where they offer particular

discounts on certain products and therefore when they make a sale they get a commission on

it and that's generally how it works. You'll

also find a lot of affiliate marketers are very, very good at

doing content for ads in Facebook,

right? So you can have, there's ways around these things, right?

You don't put an affiliate link directly into Facebook, but if you put

a link that goes to a particular page, like a middle page. a

landing page which then goes to the affiliate link, you can

get away with things like that. But now what I do is just focus on

using the professionals to promote my product when it comes to

affiliate marketing. Now the next thing that I've made a huge mistake on

was my kitchen knife product. Now this was

after I'd sort of tried and tested the chamois, it

didn't really work out and I was in I

was in the Canton Fair, doing my thing, walking down the

aisles. And the problem is, I was still new, so

I didn't know what I was doing. And I remember being there,

and my wife came with me. And if you haven't been to the Canton Fair, it's

absolutely ginormous. I mean, imagine, I

think the number is about 40 football fields or

something like that, something crazy. And it's just row after row

after row of manufacturers, generally

from China, just they're displaying their wares, okay? Now,

and it's not even over like a day, it's like over weeks, because there's

so many things. And there's actually even like different segments. So

one segment for like, it might go for like two weeks would be like kitchen

and clothing. And then the next fortnight after that, they'll pull all

those people out and they'll put new people in like, which like medical and

something else, right? And so we went on one particular fortnight

or one section. And we're walking down the aisles. I'm

literally just looking at them. I really had no idea what I wanted

to do. I was a bit lost, but I was looking for inspiration there. And

walking down, up and down the aisles, and you're just picking up just random stuff,

like glasses. Oh, maybe we should sell glasses. And eventually,

I came to the kitchen knife section. And

I just had this epiphany, like, oh, kitchen knives. Everyone

needs a kitchen knife. And when I say kitchen knife, I mean like a chef knife. I

thought brilliant, that's what I'm gonna sell. And I could change it

and change the handle and do this and do that. And I start talking with

these knife manufacturers and get photos

with them. And it was a great time. And ultimately

I thought, yeah, that's what I'm gonna do. And then I went back home and I start designing this

kitchen knife packaging, which like transformed.

I've shown that on some of the previous episodes. So if you wanna go and

have a look, you probably find that somewhere in my previous videos. And

it was this, I thought it was actually pretty awesome, like it

was this transforming package that

went from a package into a display, that's what it was, package into a display where

you can have your knife just sitting there beautifully on your bench

and Guys, what ended up happening, I

spent in the vicinity of $50,000 on

samples, and product design, and research,

and just logos, trademarks.

I went all down that path. I just spoke before about trademarks and

spending too much money. So I spent a whole bunch more money, $50,000. And unlike

the car chamois, which I did launch into market, I

didn't even launch the knife. I didn't even

get there, right? So it was just, and I've

still got it sitting at home on my shelf as

a reminder of just the things that just

never worked out. And it's $50,000, I'm just looking

up at my shelf, $50,000 just tied up there that

just never, never went to market. Behind

the scenes, the reason why it didn't go to market was because my

other product, which is the healthcare product, was just going gangbusters. I

just, you know what, I'm just going to put this one aside and it's

going to just have to go to the graveyard of

product ideas. Now, the

very last mistake. Now, actually,

no, I'm going to say that again. I don't want to say it's my very last mistake.

I say it's the one I've written down last mistake. But I'm sure there's so many

mistakes that I've made. But I've come to eight. Eight because,

ultimately, eight is a lucky number. Now, this one is

a distribution deal that I did. And so, during

my journey, I have signed up distribution deals

for certain products, okay? Now, the great thing about that is that's exactly

something that I teach in my mentoring programs, which

is how to source and do deals on

products that exist in the marketplace where you don't

have to even design a product. I mean, are

you listening to that? You don't even have to design a product. Yeah.

Most people in Amazon training will get you to go and find a

product. You have to go to Alibaba, do all this research, try and

get the prices, et cetera, et cetera. And then you've got

to come up with the logos and, and, and the trademarks and all

that stuff. Imagine if you just pretend that

this car show me was amazing for one second. and it wasn't on

Amazon. Imagine if you just found that, it's got the barcode, it's got the trademark logo,

the package is already done and you can just grab this and just put it into Amazon

and start selling it. That's exactly what I did with

a healthcare product already done, not on Amazon

and just put that into the Amazon USA marketplace and

it just started selling. I'm talking like instantly started

selling and I started making bank immediately. And then

just over time, it just kept growing and growing and growing until I

said before, you know, $800,000 a month in just USA was

nuts. And so that's exactly the formula

that I now teach to my clients, particularly

my private clients where I take their hand and do step by

step. This is where to find them, this is the deals, here's the contracts, right?

I show them where these products are and there are products freaking

everywhere. Literally, only this morning, I

was flicking through Instagram and I came across

another product, right? Not on Amazon and the guys invented

it right here in Australia. This is a product that's ripe for

you or me finding, doing a deal with him

and sending it to Amazon, okay? So this is the type of thing I talk about. But

let me tell you about one of the mistakes that I made. Now, I did this

distribution deal, this is early on, but the way I structured

it though, I said, let's do a profit share.

But this particular product, there was just not enough

money in it because of some of the things that I now teach you not

to do in these deals. Because not every product is a winner, right? Even if

it's not on Amazon, you can't just go after any product. This particular product was

a very, very low Retail price it

was under $20. We steer away from those now, right?

But I can only tell you that now because I've got the experience of having

the values for you, right? So we would not go into that and

because in this deal The

deal structure was that we would split the profit but

ultimately there was no profit in it because the purchase price was under $20 and

by the time you took in our fees and shipping etc

there was just no money in it. So ultimately I didn't make any

money in the deal. If I was to do a deal like that again,

I would say that I would get paid a flat rate

fee or a percentage of the turnover of sales, right?

Turnover of the retail price potentially rather

than the profit split. Yeah, and that way,

ultimately, I get paid all the time regardless.

Okay guys, so I hope you've enjoyed me telling you all about my mistakes when

it comes to selling on Amazon and e-commerce and the deals that I've done

that, you know, I say were mistakes, but

I want to preface by saying if it wasn't for all these mistakes

and failures, I never would have learned anything. So I'm not saying

it's bad to have mistakes. I certainly just wanted to share with you

some of the things that you can learn from my mistakes. And of course, if

you wanna learn more about not making these types of mistakes, you

can join me in my community. Find the link down

below, click on it, and I look forward to seeing you there. Now, if you've really enjoyed

this episode, please leave, it'd be great if you could leave a five-star review

in Apple Podcast or Spotify. And until next

time, look forward to seeing you then, take care. Thanks

for tuning into Amazon Ecom Secrets. If you

enjoyed this episode, the best way to show your support is

to give a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and

make sure to subscribe on YouTube so you don't miss an episode.

You can also find more at I'm Matthew Fraser

on all social media platforms. Thanks so much. Take