product research. How could you go onto something and say, well, that's going to be crap. Let's say you went onto

Amazon USA. The average sales for the particular product you're looking at

was like $3,000. That would say to me, the way you're going

to minimise shipping, you're going to initially speak to

your supplier about how can you minimise the weight and

the dimensions of the product. So when you go to ship it, you've

already got an advantage. Trademarking. I'm going to tell you a top

secret that nobody is telling anyone about this. The issue with

trademarking is one, yes, there is a cost to it, but here's the hack. 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. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about how

much does it actually cost to start an Amazon business? And

this is probably a question that most beginners want to know about. I get this all

the time, and I had a client the other day. We sat down, and he said, Matthew,

really, how much is it going to cost me to launch a product and get this

Amazon business going? And I said,

well, look, let's step through the numbers and have a look, because every person is

different. I know in my case, when I first started, it

was in the vicinity. It was under $10,000 Australian. And

then on top of that, I pay for some stock. And so people say,

$10,000? That's a lot of money. Well, in this case, I don't think it was a lot

of money, because I was actually designing my own product. Some

people don't design their own product. And what does that mean? It

means they'll actually go to somewhere like Alibaba, which is

like a smorgasbord of products for that

manufacturer showcase. And if you go onto alibaba.com, you

can actually see how much a widget is

going to cost you, how much a yoga mat is going to cost you, or how much a chopping

board is going to cost. And it'll also give you not just the cost price per

unit, but also an MOQ, so a minimum order quantity. And

it just so turns out, as you can imagine, that the more

you order through these companies, the cheaper the per unit cost

is going to be. Now, if you buy something that's just straight off

their marketplace and you don't do any changes whatsoever, so you don't

change the color, you don't add some sort of a special feature, then

that's going to be the cost, which is display. But as soon as you

start altering things, new colors, new different formats of

products, then the factory is

probably going to have to go and do different tooling and put more time

and effort into designing that product for you. So therefore, the cost could increase

or the MOQ certainly could increase for you. So that's what I talk about.

It's on a case by case. I've also got a client right now who

has completely designed his product from scratch. It's

not like he's taking an existing chopping board, for example, and

altering it into something new beaut. This practice does

not exist. So he's got to invest a

lot more money into his product than perhaps some other people

who can just go to Alibaba and buy an off-the-shelf product.

And of course, the products range, don't they, all the way from

baby products, to clothing, to auto products, to

healthcare products. Everything down to, you can actually go

to Alibaba and buy literally screws. Yeah,

just little tiny screws and you might decide you want to be a screw and

nail expert and just sell those. Now as you can imagine, those

products are going to be like cents. as opposed to maybe

a healthcare product, it might cost you $100, $200 initial

cost price just to get one unit. So it varies for everybody. So

I sat down with my client and he had a budget in

mind. He really didn't want to spend really any more than certainly $10. And

so we started stepping through those numbers and what is the process. And

of course the first process is going to be doing some market research.

Market research in deciding what type of niche you

want to do. Now this can be quite

daunting for a lot of people because they don't know where to start. Obviously that's

why I get clients because I can step them

through those processes of where to find this information and make

their life certainly a lot easier where they can also save

money. I think actually something interesting just thinking about. is

the reason why people actually come to me is not only to get

my expertise and how to grow a business to, in my case, over $45 million

in sales scoured across the whole world, but also they

pay me so I can tell them how to actually

save money. It seems almost like a counterintuitive,

but you actually pay me so that you save money. I've got a client,

for example, and I know I digress here, but I think this is really, really important. Because

the client came to me after she had already placed

an order. So she'd done her own market research. She

decided that this particular product was going to be for her. And

her investment was going to be 30,000 Australian dollars. And

then she came to me. But by that stage, she'd already signed the contracts

with the manufacturer. She'd already paid an $8,000 deposit. And

after looking at the product selection, I was really worried. I

mean, really worried. This could be a $30,000 investment. And

that was just for the product. That didn't include the shipping, OK? it

could have been a fatal, fatal mistake. And

so my advice to her was actually walk away

from the $8,000. Try and get the $8,000 back from the manufacturer

because that's the deposit you've paid. And luckily in

her case, she's actually walked away from that product because

that's the best advice I could give her. If she had gone ahead and

spent $30,000, I actually sat down and worked out for her

how much it would cost to try and sell these products

because I believed that it was going to be extremely difficult to sell

these widgets to the mass audience. And it was actually going

to cost her in the vicinity by the time you added the product, the shipping,

duties, taxes, fulfillment, then

spending money on advertising, because in this particular case, she only wanted to

sell it through Shopify. She wasn't even going to sell it through Amazon. We're

talking, I hate even saying it, to

the tune of like $50,000. That is what

the minimum cost would have been to her, had everything played out.

And that's why I said, walk away from that. Okay

and let's just start again because we can recover from 8, it's going to be really hard to

recover from 50. So that is a word of

warning and that's why you invest money in someone like myself

who can mentor you through these really challenging times

for people who are new to this game of online

business. So back to my client, how can we spend

under $10,000 in his case to launch a product. But the

first thing I said was go and do market research. What are the tools they're going to be?

Now, I'm going to share with you some of the tools that I said to my client.

One of them is going to be free tools, just like Google. You can

jump onto Google, and you can get a wealth of information. And

you want to be checking on there, I guess, the product

itself. How does it sit in the marketplace? You don't want to be

buying a product that is simply just not going to sell. So you

want to know that it's got some strong demand. And the other thing,

though, is there's other tools that you can use. And I use a tool

called Zonguru. There's other tools out there as well, such as Helium 10 and

others, where you can pay a very, very small

subscription fee. Some of these types of tools even have free

initial plans, so you can try before you buy. And these

tools are incredible. You can go onto your

Amazon Marketplace with the tool that overlays over

the top, And it will tell you the sales that

every single product is selling for. So let's just say that you've

decided that you want to sell yoga mats. You can go type

in yoga mats on the Amazon marketplace. All the yoga

mats will come up. You can press this feature button through

this third-party software. And

it will display for you all of the sales for all

of the different products, including the sales volume, the

review ratings. It'll also give you the averages. It'll tell

you whether that niche is even a good niche to sell in

based on a bunch of other key metrics. So that would be

the first place that I would start to gather information. Because

if the metrics aren't good there, and what would be not good metrics? How

could you go into something and say, well, that's going to be crap? Let's say

you went on to Amazon USA and the metrics were the

average sales for the particular product you're looking at was like $3,000. That

would say to me, there is no demand for that product. That

would be my initial inclination. But

let's say there's something different where it's a brand new product to market.

It's only new. And I'll give an example. A nut milk

maker, right? You can get these, they're like

blenders now. And they make nut milk, right? They

seem to be quite fashionable at the moment. They're sort

of penetrating the market. And if you start with something like that, you might

find that the sales are minimal on the

Amazon marketplace, but only because it's a new product to market. So

you'd have to do some additional research to figure out, hey, is

this going to be something where I'm new to market and the sales are going to grow? So talking about

tools to do with market research, there are a number of tools. But

let's talk about some free tools. Go to the marketplace itself. Now,

I'm going to tell you a bit of a hack. Once you've actually nailed down the

type of product you want, let's say you want to sell yoga mats.

I actually go and buy some competitor yoga

mats and have them delivered right to my house. Now, why would I do that?

I want to know exactly how they're built, what sort

of features come with the yoga mat, what sort of customer

support comes along with the yoga mat, like a product insert, what

are they saying in there, and I want to try and see if there's a if

there's a way for me to improve my product based on the

existing products. Another thing you can do without even buying the

product is go to the Amazon reviews of the particular

products in your niche, right? And start reading through all the reviews, especially

the negative reviews. What you might find is that there's

an opportunity. We might say, oh, look, I really like black yoga

mats, but I really wish it came in pink. There's your opportunity to

capitalize on that market. So let's just say that you've decided that you

want to do your own product in Amazon. And

it might even be an off-the-shelf product in Amazon, but you

want to put your own stamp on it. And by putting your own stamp on it,

you're going to want to put your own brand on it. You're going to brand that

product your own. And so what does that mean?

It means creating your own logo, your own word. You might

even go ahead and trademark that particular logo and

word so that it's unique to you. Now

in doing so, that's going to come at a cost, right?

But the cost could be

advantageous for you. But I'm going to tell you a

top secret that nobody is telling anyone about this, right?

Now, what you'll find is that the issue with trademarking is,

one, yes, there is a cost to it. And from memory, last

time I trademarked, it's about $2,500, $3,000 US. And

it could take you up to nine months to get that trademark fully

approved. But here's the hack. If

you go to particular websites and you type in trademarks for

sale or go to a company called flipper.com, that's

F-L-I-P-P-A, and hunt for trademarks

for sale, you could potentially pick

up a trademark for next to nothing. because

there's going to be people out there who have trademarked brands who

have just fallen out of love with their brand and now it's

just sitting there collecting dust. So you could potentially pay

for that IP and secure that brand. So you're going to fast track now

nine months. Now, why is that important? Because when you

go to Amazon, if you've got a trademark that you can put

into brand registry, which is like a secure Amazon

a secure Amazon site to protect your brand against

other people trying to steal your brand. But by

doing that, you get a whole bunch of extra services from

Amazon. For example, you can now use their A plus

content. Now that means that you can basically create essentially

like a sales page website within Amazon. You

can also take advantage of some of their special promotions including

getting Reviews, which is like through their Vine

program, so you can actually pay a small amount of money to have people

give you reviews because reviews on products equals

more sales, which equals money. The other thing is

you can also get videos now added to your listing. If you don't have

a trademark registered with Brand Registry, you cannot get

videos with your listing. Videos are

a really powerful tool to help you sell your product. So

along with getting a trademark, you want to think about getting branding

behind it, which means what is the color of the logo? Who is

your avatar? What type of message are you trying to sell through

your brand? Most people will go to

a company, for example, like 99designs. That is

a company that you can use that will help you select a

brand name, if you don't have one already, or a logo, or

if it's just a word, the font type of the logo.

And my tip to you, because I fell into this trap, I

got carried away with the whole thing. Because when you go into these websites, they've

got an entry-level program, and

then they've got this really, really expensive one. And I got suckered into

the expensive one. And I think maybe like over $1,000, $1,500 US

to get their U-Butte program to

help you design this amazing logo. But trust me.

just go with the cheapest option they have, which might be

in the vicinity of $200 or $300. And that

will be suffice for you to get started. So

remember that tip, don't go for the large one, save the money, go for

the cheapest option, because they always deliver good results either way you go.

So once we've been through the product research, we've got logos, we've

got trademarks, we've secured the actual product

itself, you're probably going to

want to get product samples. Now this is

where a high cost can come into play. So

we want to minimize this cost. And the reason why it

can become expensive is because the manufacturers over

in China will charge you, they're not

going to charge you a dollar per unit just to have a sample. What they tend

to do is they charge you a quite a large fee in the vicinity of maybe like

$100 to get that product shipped out to you in Australia. And

that's because they just don't want thousands of people ordering samples at

like a dollar each, even though perhaps you could buy that product for $1 to

$5 from them, but only based on a large order. So

if you're buying single units, you're going to have to pay. Now, how can you minimize that?

One is try and get as much information from

the supplier as possible, including photos,

videos, written descriptions. Perhaps

they even have that product that already exists in

Australia that perhaps you could go and buy in an Australian retail

store at maybe only cost $20 to buy retail, but

you can check the quality of their manufacturing. That

might be a good start. Now, if you've got, let's say,

20 different suppliers that you're talking to, you do not want to go

and get 20 different samples. You can imagine that cost

is going to add up. So that's why you want to try and streamline and

filter out all the bad suppliers, and it might even be not

even the photos of a product. It might be the fact that, hey,

this supplier doesn't even respond to my emails. Or they're responding

but they're not listening to my questions. They can't answer my questions. Delete

them. Get them off the list. So you're going to streamline the

suppliers that you're looking at for your yoga mats down

to maybe three. And then I would only,

at the very end, once you've got all the photos and you're happy

with the supplies, then I would go ahead and order

one or two samples from each supplier.

Now your question's gonna be, Matt, why would I get two samples for if I can just get one? Sometimes

it might be wise to get two samples

of the one product so you can compare the two. Just compare it

from a manufacturing point of view, one to the other, and see if they're consistent in

their manufacturing. But you only want to do that once you get to the end of

the line, you've filtered out the supplies and you know that

this is going to be a good supply that you could potentially work with. Moving on to the next phase

is going to be shipping. Now, shipping, it

can cost a freaking fortune these days.

And the way you're going to minimize shipping is

obviously if you're going to send it by air freight, air freight is going to

be way more expensive than sending it by sea, but

You're going to initially speak to your supplier about how can

you minimize the weight and the dimensions of

the product. So when you go to ship it, you've already got

an advantage. The other thing is it may be of

the way the product is palletized on your

pallets. There's going to be different dimensions. Ones

will be cheaper than the others. Maybe you want to do co-shipping

with other companies to minimize the footprint

within your shipping container. So you're not just taking up a whole shipping container

yourself, you're using up a part of another person's shipping container. That

might be another option for you. The other thing is shipping your

product directly to Australia first. Maybe Australia is

cheaper. Maybe you want to test the product first in Australia before you test

it in the U.S. because shipping to the U.S. again is more expensive. So,

that's some things that you can look at to minimize shipping cost, but

above all that, get multiple quotes. Do

not go with the very first quote that you get because you might

find that the companies are going to offer different shipping rates.

Now, something that does come up is do manufacturers alter

the quotated price? price of the goods on

their invoices in order for you to save on taxes going

into a particular country, that might come up for you. But I

would be very, very weary about that, because it could just take

one slip up. Next thing you know, you've got a black mark

against your name. You're going to be under a lot of scrutiny now from customs

on the importation country. And

you just really don't want that. So I think Don't try and

sidestep the legalities, particularly when it comes to

customs and taxes, because it really could backfire on

you. Okay, the next step is going to be listing. You've

now shipped your product all the way into the country, your destination country,

could be Australia, could be UK, could be Canada, could be USA. Most

clients that I deal with are going to either be Australia or USA. USA

being the biggest marketplace for Amazon in the world and Australia being,

well, we live in Australia, there could be some other opportunities that

you might see in Australia. So when it comes to listing,

there's a couple of things that you want to think about. One is going to

be your images. The images are

absolutely imperative when it comes to listing. And

why is that? It's because the customer can't

pick up the product. They're not going into the store and picking up and touching your

product and sort of reading the labels and things like this. So

that's why your images have to display the product in

the best possible light. So don't skimp on

photography or the amount of money that you're going to spend on

someone helping you with doing images. What's so incredible right

now is you've got AI. Now, if you don't know how to use

AI tools to help with doing these images, you can outsource

that to someone on like Fiverr. Now, I've got a client right

now, for example, where they didn't want to spend the

money. And I said, look, the images you've done, they're crap. We're

going to have to go back now and we're going to optimize those images.

And I showed him exactly the person and the way to actually

find that person through Fiverr. Because the other thing I

want to do, I guess, as a mentor, is I don't want to just

give the people the fish. I also want to show

them how to fish. Because the idea is I share all my knowledge

with people so that they can go off and become an

amazing Amazon e-comm seller themselves. I just don't want

to hold all the information in my head. I want to give

you the tools. And so by giving my client the tools, he

was able to go and optimize his images and literally went from

zero sales one day and then straight away, as soon as

the images had changed, started making sales. That's how paramount

the images are. As far as cost, it

was cheap as chips. I'm talking like $50 is all

it took to use someone on Fiverr because these guys,

you know, they're based in countries like Pakistan or India. So you can

get exceptional value for money. And these guys who are in India

and Pakistan, et cetera, they're bloody smart. These

are very, very smart people. They know how to use these tools like

the back of the hand. So definitely take advantage of

these people. Okay, so once you've launched your product, you're

gonna wanna start playing around with some other features within Amazon. One

of them is going to be PPC, that is pay-per-click, which

is just advertising within the Amazon marketplace. Now,

that is something that you can easily blow out and

waste a lot of money. So my advice to you is, Go

and do some research. Don't just start straight away, right? Find out

how to best optimize your PPC, especially in the

beginning, where you can save money. For example, don't

start off spending hundreds of dollars a day on

PPC because you could blow out your $10,000 within a

very, very short amount of time. Start off really low, like maybe $5 a

day or $10 a day, and learn how to use PPC. I

tell you what, there's so much opportunity within just the advertising space. If

you became an expert in PPC, you

probably wouldn't even have to sell on Amazon ever again. I'm just

kidding aside. You would definitely want to sell on Amazon but you would be a valued person

with some valuable knowledge and PPC is so instrumental

in getting sales. So once you've now made all your sales, things

have started off, they're going well, you want to think about customer experience.

Now what I do is I actually outsource my customer service.

I use a company called Zon Support. They are exceptional.

And so if you really want to tap into another company who can look

after that, definitely look at Zon Support. Cost-wise, I

think the plans are going to vary from person to person. I

think for me, it's about a few

hundred dollars a month, maybe even less, let's say $200 to

$300 a month for their service. And so what they're going to do is basically look

after responding to customers. Let's say

there's a customer sends back a faulty item, they can send out a

new one. They kind of just take all the day-to-day operations of

customer service off my plate and let me focus on the

bigger picture, like getting better products and optimizing my listing and

making more profit. All right guys, so as we come to a conclusion with this episode, let's

just go through those numbers again. Now for the product

market research, we allocate say probably $50. Then

we go on to branding, I would allocate probably

$300 there, plus depending on, and fingers crossed, you

can actually buy an existing trademark. Let's say you could pick one up for

$500, an abandoned and disused trademark that

you could tap into. So $500 there, plus then we're

talking listing optimization, let's say approximately

$50 to $100, let's say $100 for that. Then

we're talking customer support. That is something

that you probably don't even have to do. That is probably something further down the

track. I've added it in there anyway in case you want to outsource that.

And let's allocate that to say $300 for the

first month. Okay, so let's add in some customer support there.

I would allocate about $300 for the first month for that. Now keep

in mind with customer support, you could actually do that yourself. you

don't really need to outsource that. But let's just say you did. So

now with all those costs considered, it's about $1,750. Now

on top of that, you're going to factor in your shipping and

also the product cost itself. Now that, of

course, is going to vary from person to person. And of course, not

just the product itself, but then how much of that product that

you ultimately sell. So at $1,750, we're actually under

the $2,000 that I had initially kind of thought about,

and well under the $10,000 odd dollars

that I spent. So that information I've just given you has really probably saved

you like $8,000. Thank you. You are welcome for

that. So guys, thank you so much for joining me in this episode. Really

hope you've enjoyed it. And of course, reach out to me if you've got any further questions. Look

forward to seeing you in the next one. 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