Make sure that you don't give up unnecessarily equity in

your business. There might be people out there who are trying to pry into

your business and take equity for something like building a website. Definitely

don't do that. A client of mine was offered to go into a

mastermind of other people who were already selling on Amazon.

I instructed her to start up an Amazon account

in USA. She said, my coach has said to open up a

USA account. And they looked at her in horror. Oh my God, why

would you start an Amazon account in USA? Clients will ask

their friends and family, what do you think of this product? And they'll also,

wow, it's amazing, you're so good. You won't be able

to test the product until you get it into the market. You might do a

Facebook poll, you might do an Instagram poll, you might do a friends and family

poll. But what I say to people though is, if it's friends and family, ask

them. 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, Matthew Fraser here. Welcome to today's podcast. And

in this podcast, I'd like to talk to you more about really things

that you want to avoid, the pitfalls when

you're starting out in your business. And as a seasoned seller

like myself now having been in this business for about eight years online

and actually in business in whole, probably 25 plus years. I've

got a lot of experience and a lot of insight into

the things that people struggle with, particularly in

their startups or their products when launching into places

like Amazon. So as

you know, I'm doing a mentorship program, and

I've been doing that for a number of months now, having transitioned into

this space, because I really saw a need where I could give back. I

could give back because of the experience that I have. And one of the things I hate seeing

is people who Who fail and

who can't get ahead? I want people to succeed

and so what I want to share with you today is some of those key lessons

Where where it will help you get through your journey? There's

two places When you're starting out brand new, there's really

two places that I see where are the optimal time for

quitting or failing. The first time is

going to be during the Amazon training program.

So nine times out of 10 people will buy an Amazon training

course. They go into it with good intentions. And

it's exactly the same process that I took. I started with an Amazon training program myself.

Um, but what happens is during that, that journey is it

becomes just complete overwhelmed, right? There's just so

much information and so many things that you've got to have to learn how to do

from not just setting up your. Amazon account.

And even in the Amazon account process, it can be really, really daunting because it's

like, what legal entity do I use? How do I set up all the international

bank accounts and, um, and all the, you know, the U S

government forms, what buttons do I press that in itself can be a minefield. And

then you move into the product selection and

it's like, where do I start with that? And so one

thing that I will say is that you need to break it down into bite sizes

so that you don't get overwhelmed on. I

was talking to a lady just recently, and she's been

in her training program for years and

years. And I said, well, what's taking so long? And it

was, look, I just didn't have the time. And basically

what she was saying is she didn't have the time because she

didn't know what steps to take for next. And that's why it's really important

to have the knowledge of what steps to take next, hence through a

mentor or a coach. But this is

her fundamental mistake when she actually went ahead. She

designed a product that was completely saturated

in the marketplace, right? So let's just say she came

up with yoga mat. And there, if you go to Amazon and

type in yoga mat, you will find there is like hundreds of pages of

yoga mats. And her great idea was

that it was like a unique color, okay?

And that unique color just turns out is not going to cut it.

in the Amazon marketplace. So automatically,

you're going to fail. Now, unfortunately, when

she came to me, she had already put through her first

order to the manufacturer. Now, we're talking an order in

the vicinity of $30,000. So keep that in

mind. That's your very first product. She's never launched anything

online ever, and she's just jumping straight into a

$30,000 product. And I said, oh,

once I actually had a look at it, the options I gave to her was this.

One, pull out now and lose your deposit of

$8,000. That ultimately would have been cheaper

because if she proceeds through option number two, which

she goes ahead, it would ultimately cost her in the vicinity of

$50,000. By the time you've paid for $30,000 worth of stock, then

you're talking shipping, Then it was she wanted to build

out a website as well, you got to hire someone to do that, and

the list goes on. So we're talking in the whole for $50,000 of

a product that really wasn't going to sell. Very,

very difficult to make the money back. Now, ultimately,

my client decided not to

proceed because I gave her the right advice. It was going to be cheaper to

forego the $8,000. In

that too, the lesson that she needs to learn, and

I would express this to you as well, is that you've got to have the

market validation, what I call the product market fit, and

that's making sure that when you come up with this amazing product,

or even if it's like a yoga mat and you're just slightly doing a differentiation, are

people going to buy that product? And

the way to go about this is through actual

testing. You won't be able to test the product until you get it into the market. But

there's some other things you can do around the edges. You might

do a Facebook poll. You might do an Instagram poll.

You might do a friends and family poll. But what I say to people, though, is if

it's friends and family, ask them for the money. Go

to them and say, well I'm doing pre-orders on this product, you

give me the $50 today and you will be first in line to

get my XYZ product. And that will tell you

if someone is willing to hand over their money. Because I've seen

this so many times where clients will

ask their friends and family What do

you think of this product? And I can guarantee you, nobody wants to

be the bearer of bad news. Everyone wants to talk it up. And so you'll

go to them and say, look, I've invented this amazing product. I've made this

amazing yoga mat. And I'm selling

it for $50. What do you think? And they'll all say, wow, it's

amazing. You're so good. Wow, this is such a great

journey you're on. And you're going to change your life. And what an incredible

product. And that's when I say to them, well, go back to those

very same people and ask for the money. Now, you

find that they don't want to hand over the money, that's going to be your first red flag,

right? Because if it was so amazing and they really wanted to support you

and your business, your new business to success, they would

hand over the cash. So that is the first thing. The

other thing you can do, let's say you've been through that process and you're

thinking, okay, they kind of like it, but you don't really

know until you take it to the proper market. So this

comes down to MOQs, right? What is MOQ? Minimum

Order Quantity. Some people get into this business

and they get railroaded by the manufacturer. So this is what happens. You've

come up with your unique yoga mat. You haven't

tested it in the marketplace yet, but you talk

to the manufacturer and they say, in order to

do this particular yoga mat, you're going to need to buy 10,000 units

as a minimum. And we'll give it to you for, you know, let's say $4 each.

Now, the problem is that you haven't tested it.

So all of a sudden, if you go ahead with that, you're going to have 10,000 units

in the marketplace, of which you now need to store somewhere, and

storage costs money, and you don't even know if it's going to

sell. Because what you're taught in a

lot of these Amazon training programs is to get

the price down as much as possible. And

that sometimes is not in your favor, right? So the

Chinese, for example, manufacturer might be thinking that you

want to get the price down because probably by this time you've negotiated down

to $4. and you're not willing to go any

higher. But here's the trick. Go back to the

manufacturer and say, look, I don't want to get 10,000 units. I'm testing the

market. I want, let's say, even 100 units.

Well, the manufacturer is going to say, I can't do 100 units. But

he's only saying, this is the loss in translation part, He's

only saying, I can't do 100 units if I'm going to charge

you $4, OK? But you'll say,

well, what price is for 100? How much per unit?

Now, he might say, well, it's $10 per unit, right?

So he can do it, but he's just going to charge you a higher price. In

the beginning, your goal is not to make money. Your

goal is to test the product in the marketplace. And

even if you have to pay $10 a unit, and even if you break even,

and even if you kind of don't really break even and you come out at a

loss, at least you know whether that product was going to be a fit.

in the marketplace. So let's say, let's walk this out practically.

You've bought your 100 units, you've paid $10 a unit, it's now

cost you $1,000 only plus shipping. You put them into the

marketplace, you do all your amazing pitches and you optimize

the listing, And then you wait and see, do people want

to buy this product for whatever the price point is, $30 or

$50? If they do, you now know you're onto a

winning product. You can now go back to your manufacturer and

then start talking how much for 1,000 units, how much for

5,000 units. And that's going to be based on what you're comfortable with moving

forward within that marketplace. So that is how. You can

validate your product without going completely bankrupt.

And remember, the first scenario was 10,000 units. You could have spent

$40,000 on units, and maybe they didn't

work out. You would have lost all your money. So the other thing to think about when

going into the market is profit margins. Now,

it's not just profit margin, it's actually also how much you

should sell a particular product for. I made this very

same mistake. I made the MOQ mistake, and I

also made the profit margin mistake, and that is that my

product and this we're talking about the chamois if you want to know more about the chamois go all the way back

to uh the very first episode where i'd go a little bit deeper in the chamois but

the chamois was costing me about a dollar fifty and

i was able to sell that for about fifteen ten

to fifteen dollars okay now the problem was i

was thinking wow dollar fifty how cheap is that i could just buy a

bazillion of these and look at all the margin between dollar fifty and fifteen dollars

but what i didn't take into account was the

uh the complete the Amazon fees, and

the biggest one I didn't take into account was how much money I was

gonna need to spend on advertising. Because although the product's

actually in Amazon, you still need eyeballs on

your product. And I can tell you when you're in the car chamois

niche, you're not gonna, on day one, you're not gonna be on the first

page. So you're not gonna type in car chamois and you're gonna be just like smack bang

ready for people to buy. You're gonna be pages and pages behind.

So the only way for you to get to the front page at

that point is by paying for advertising and advertising costs

money. And you can imagine if you've got after Amazon

fees, let's say about $10, you've only now got about $8.50, let's

say $8 of actual gross profit

to spend now on advertising. And I can tell you what, when

someone's pressing the button on your ad in Amazon, it

could be anywhere from up to like $2 or $3 a click. So

you can imagine like in three clicks, all your money is gone and

you might even make a sale, but you're now negative. Okay. So

that's why you've got to think about this profit margin. Now I would suggest, here's

the trick. make sure that you've got at least, I

like to have cost of goods times by

at least three. So if you're buying it for $10 landed,

I wanna be selling it for at least $30. And I also

wanna have a product in the market that's at least $30 retail,

okay? Because as you can imagine, if I exaggerate this out a little bit,

let's say you're selling a product for $100, But it's

only costing you $35 minus some

fees. You're probably going to have about $50 to spend on

pay-per-click, right? So even if they click three

times and it's now $9, in the first scenario, we lost all

our money. In this scenario, we've got way more fat in

the product, and we've now got some profit margin. left

over, which means money in your pocket, which means you can continue on making more

sales rather than going backwards. So guys, let's dive a little bit deeper into

a particular scenario that has just come across my desk

recently. And it was a client of mine who's new to the

e-commerce space, right? But he's a great inventor and he

has this amazing product. And you know what? Over my many,

many years of being in this space, I have I've been privy

to hundreds and hundreds of products, right? There's

so many products that I've actually seen, I can't even remember them all. And there's so

many inventors that I've met that I can't remember all of them too. But

there's one thing that stands out with all inventors is that

they're good at inventing a product,

but sometimes they're not good at product market fit. What

does that mean? It means they're great at their own idea and

thinking it's amazing, but they don't take the next step of

testing it out in the marketplace. Generally speaking, they'll

ask their family and friends, which give them a big thumbs up and you should proceed with

it. but they don't actually test it in the market and will someone buy

it? Now, there's a particular story that

comes to mind just, as I said, just the other day. And

the gentleman rang me up and he said, Matthew, I've got a gentleman who's willing

to give me a, he's willing to

do a service in return for some

equity in the business. Okay. And the person who

was willing to do the service was actually

a website designer. Okay. So the gentleman receives

an email from the website designer and says, Hey Jimmy, I'm

willing to do a free website for you, but I want 10% of your business.

Now, keep in mind, this business hasn't launched yet, right?

So there's no sales. It's just the idea at the moment. But

the website designer thinks it's a good idea and is

kind of on the train of thinking there's going to be a lot of money here. So

I'll do my service for free if you give me 10% equity.

So as this gentleman's mentor, he

rang me and said, look, Matthew, this is the scenario. What do you think? And

I said, well, first of all, what does your gut tell you? I like to work

on gut. And he said, well, I don't really think it's going to

work because I don't really want to have someone else. I don't want

to have a partner. Okay. And I want to be responsible for somebody else.

I said, yes. And the other thing that you should be thinking about,

I said to him was the fact that There are so

many website designers out there. It's not like this guy

was unique to his market, right?

And by giving up 10%, let's just say that

in the future, this guy's business was gonna be worth $5 million. That

means you're ultimately going to end up paying this guy 10%, which

will be $500,000. So you might have saved maybe $10,000 in

the beginning by not having him do a website, But

at a sale in the future with a valuation of 5 million, you're

now going to have to pay this website guy $500,000. Would you

be totally crazy? Now, the thing to think about

also in this scenario is that the owner of the product didn't

need the money. So he didn't have to

get this website designer to do it for free. He was happy to pay the website

designer and simply finish the transaction. So ultimately, that

was the advice I gave to him. So it really was

like a saving for him of potentially $500,000 by

just making a phone call to me and running through those scenarios. And

for him, I think... I know for a fact that

it was things that he hadn't even considered. And he did say to

me, Matt, if I hadn't have spoken to you, I actually probably

would have gone ahead with that deal. And I think that would have been a big mistake. Warning,

warning. This is for all business owners. Make

sure that you don't give up unnecessarily equity in your

business. There might be people out there who are trying to pry into

your business and take equity for something like building a

website. Definitely don't do that. The website cost

is only $10,000 but ultimately you could be giving away millions

of dollars on a potential sale in the future. Big, big

mistake. One of the other big issues I come across all the time is

mindset. And what do I mean by that? I mean self-belief

limiting mindset, right? And I'll just tell you a story. I

was at a summit recently and I walked through this summit and

you know, I'm basically one of the biggest sellers in the room. So people

are coming to me, you know, giving me their story and

I ask them their story. And quite often I say, you know, where are

you up to in your Amazon journey? And surprisingly, there

was just a lot of people in this room that had been in

like an Amazon training program for like years and years and

years. I'm talking like five years who hadn't even launched yet. And

it got me thinking about Why haven't they launched by now? Because when

I launched, it took me one year from when I started the program to

when I actually launched my very first product. So one whole year,

which I thought at the time was actually really slow. But

now I'm meeting all these people who are taking like half a

decade to even think about launching a product. And

there was one story that really stood out. And I was talking

to her about what I do for my clients. And I said, what

I do is I get them to start their Amazon account straight

away, meaning we get the ID checks done, we

get the account details put in, all validated and

ready to go. And you know what she said to me? Oh no,

I wouldn't do that because you don't even have a product to sell

yet and it's costing you like $30 a month. And

I looked at her and I thought, oh my God, that's the reason. She's

putting a ceiling on moving forward with her product

ideas because she doesn't want to spend $30 a

month. And by not spending the $30 a month,

you can't have the Amazon account. If you can't have the Amazon account, you can't send

your first product in. So that is a big mistake and

something you do not want to get into. You do not want to surround yourself

with other people who are also thinking the same thing. Because I also see

that too. It's getting into like a mastermind with other

people in the room. Here's the next story. Client of

mine was offered to go into a mastermind of other people

who were already selling on Amazon. Now, at face value, you

think, this is brilliant. I'm new. These people are already selling

on Amazon, so I'm going to get so much value here. But here was

the problem. The person going into the mastermind was

my client and I had requested, I instructed her

to start up an Amazon account in USA. And

so you're going to say to me, why USA as opposed to Australia if

you're living in Australia? And it's because USA seems

like the Mount Everest. If you're living in Australia, the easy

path is, oh, I'm just going to start up an Amazon account in

Australia for starters. But what happens ultimately is

you never then get to where the big money is, which is in USA.

So she was going into this mastermind. She said, my

coach or mentor, being me, has said to open up

a USA account. And they looked at her in horror. Oh my

god, I wouldn't be opening. Why would you start an Amazon account in USA?

Wouldn't you start in Australia? And this just goes

back to, again, the self-limiting belief.

They were all thinking that the Amazon USA platform

was just way too hard. And therefore, they just didn't take

the steps to go there. But that's where the money is. And that's where you

should go to. There's an old saying right now in the Amazon space,

which is that if you can't make it in Amazon or you can't make

it in a business, then you fail and you go and teach. And

this was one of the things when I started thinking about my mentoring program

that, I want to be that person who's not just mentoring people,

but I'm actually in this in the trenches as

well. Like currently right now, I still sell on Amazon across

multiple platforms, across multiple countries, plus Shopify

in multiple countries, including Japan, which is which

is certainly like that is literally Mount Everest getting into Japan. But I

want to do that because I want to still be able to know what's going on on a day to day

basis while also providing value and experience

to my clients. And so one of

the things you want to be careful of when you're looking for a mentor

of your own is, do they have the receipts? Because

there's a lot of people in the internet world,

like social media, and they can simply put in their bio, I

do $1 billion in sales. But

it actually doesn't mean shit, because if you go into their their

social media, if they're driving a Kia, there's

something that doesn't add up, right? Because if they're doing a billion dollars

in sales, you're going to think they're probably going to have a Lamborghini or two. And

I'm not saying that material possessions matter. I'm

just saying that there's got to be some joining

the dots and things that kind of make sense in your mind. So

that's why you need to look a bit deeper into some of these mentors and

coaches. You certainly want to be getting coached and mentored

by someone who's in the position that you want to be in, who

has already paved the journey already. Because I know that

when I was getting, and I've spent myself over six figures easily

in my time, not just from Amazon, but also in cryptocurrency, in

Facebook ads, in consulting. A

whole range of things, yeah? Buying businesses online and

I've gained experience from different mentors and coaches along the

way and it's kind of built up my foundation of knowledge over

time because not only have I learned that but I've also implemented a lot of

that as well and got real life experience from

that. I look

back to my very first mentoring program and

I thought, how could I structure my mentoring to

be even better than what I had experienced? And

so one of the things I do now, which I know people need, is

24-7 access. Now, you're going to say,

holy shit, how do you provide 24-7 access? Well,

I just do. I let clients contact

me. any day of the week at any time because

what I want to see from them is success and I don't want

them to get stuck on anything which then holds

them back. So let's just say you're that person and you're going

through an Amazon training program and you get stuck.

It might be how to set up your Amazon account. It might be which product

to find. It comes down to a lot surprising, well not surprisingly,

is a lot of mindset. People doubting themselves, this is the right thing

for me and I can obviously talk from experience because I've gone from

being like in negative a million dollars in the hole right

to now doing over 40 million dollars on online and

over 100 million dollars in sales, business sales total. And

so I have structured the course that way so

that it adds real value. There was no one else in the marketplace

that was also providing that type of level of access

and who's also at the level of achievement that

I've been able to get to myself. So

that's why I've joined that sort of program together.

because I can deliver so much value to people and I'm seeing the results right

now. There are people who have joined who just never thought they would even launch a

product and we're now launching products. There's people that have joined with

my program who have already got existing products, who

didn't know how to take them to market, who didn't know how to scale them and

now we're going through those exact steps of what are they, which markets

do I start in because sometimes Look, not even sometimes. It's

always overwhelming when you don't know. And so that's the

level of expertise that I provide to people. And you know what? I

absolutely love it. I thrive on it. So guys, thank

you so much for joining me for this podcast episode. It's

been a real pleasure. I hope you've got a lot of value out of that. If you do want

to reach out to me for mentoring, please click on one of the links around this

podcast and I'll be happy to talk to you, fill in the application form and see if you're a

right fit. And thank you for joining me. I'll see you next time. 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