One of the things that I highly recommend that you guys do, now I'm talking about just bookkeeping

in general, fortnightly P&Ls. I print out receipts and I

just put them into a file but the reason I do that is because don't get locked

into just Amazon. Amazon is simply just a platform that

could be an option for you in your online journey. Sometimes,

the manufacturer will come back to me wanting to renegotiate the

price. Well, here's some things that I would like. Ultimately, what happened with

the contract was nothing because the manufacturer wasn't willing

to look at a single thing that I proposed in

lieu of the fact that they could increase the price. The takeaway from

this is 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. Today, I'm going to tell you exactly

what I get up to in a single day. I come down to my office. This

is where I've set everything up. Yes, you would say

it's kind of like a man cave. I've got all my CD collection. Yes,

I'm a person from the 90s. Big

CD collection. I've got my records here. I've got my DJ turntable set

up. But I've also got right behind you is a big screen TV and

I've always got information, informative

things playing. Particularly on YouTube, I've got a select group of

channels that I'm constantly watching, mainly to

do with business and crypto slash

Bitcoin. That's the main things I'm focusing on right now. So you

can never know enough about Bitcoin. I'm

sort of a latecomer, I guess you would say, to

even Bitcoin. I only started buying Bitcoin in 2022. And

it's been a very, very steep learning curve, but I absolutely love it. And

so that would be my suggestion to you guys. If you're thinking about getting into,

let's say, an Amazon business, you want to be researching everything

you possibly can on Amazon, the platform. And

more importantly, I always say, don't get locked

into just Amazon. This platform is

called Amazon Ecom Secrets, this podcast. Amazon Ecom

Secrets, not just Amazon Secrets. The reason why it's

named that way is because I don't want you to be fixated purely on

Amazon. Amazon is simply just a platform, a pathway that

could be an option for you in your online

journey. It might not be, but it also might be. I've got a

client right now for example, we're launching his brand new product. We're

not even touching Amazon at this point. We're focusing purely on e-com.

So we're going to use Shopify platform, we're going to use Facebook

ads and Instagram ads, TikTok to drive traffic to his platform.

And it's because everyone's unique. Your situation will

be unique to this guy's situation. So maybe for you, Amazon

is the platform that you start on. For me, I

jump straight down to the office, as I said, I get my education fix

going, and straight away, pretty

much while I'm walking down to the office, I'm checking my

sales. That's the first thing I'm going to check. Now, you

may not know this, but Amazon has apps. They're the apps on

the phone here, so I click on the apps. multiple

channels across the world, so Amazon in USA, Canada, Australia,

for this particular company. And then I have a different company

set up in the UK, so I have a different set up over there. And

so for UK and Europe, it operates under a different legal

entity. So I'm going to check the sales and

I guess when I'm checking the sales, I'm really seeing just

very at a glance, you know, are the sales consistent? So for me, mostly

it's consistent. If it's not consistent, in

other words, let's say I open up one day and I'm doing half the amount of sales that

I'm normally waking up to, I know there's a problem, right?

And as you can appreciate, businesses don't come without

problems. There's always going to be some issues. So as an example, The

other day I woke up and I'd done half the amount of sales that I normally do. I'm

checking and I'm like, okay, I jump into straightaway, jump into

my inventory to check and see if the listing is actually even active. Because

sometimes Amazon may have shut down the listing, there may

be too many returns, you know, whatever it is, Amazon's just sort of put a

suppressing on your listing. That means no more sales, which means you've got to

take action to get things back going again. And, but

for me in this particular case, what had happened was there was a, what I call

a rogue seller. So someone who's jumped onto my listing,

who's now also trying to sell my exclusive product. Now

I know that they can't be selling the exact same product because

I have a very unique barcode, right? That gives me, nobody

else has that barcode. Now, how do they do that? Well, they

simply do something where they put, they

jump onto the listing and they're probably fulfilling it themselves. So they're not sending it

into Amazon, which is their kind of loophole of

jumping on the listing. So they're selling a similar product, but

it's not the product. And what Amazon provides for

me is the thing called a brand registry, which is where I

log my product, my barcode, my trademark, with

Amazon. So if somebody else jumps on my listing, I

can contact Amazon and say, hey, remove these people, then they're

doing the wrong thing. And 99 times out of 100, Amazon

will jump onto them and remove them within probably about 24 hours. But

the problem with that is the sales get reduced. So either they're selling

it at a cheaper price, so I'm not getting the sales, or

I lose the buy box or something like that. So that's generally what

I'm checking for. For the most part, things are

pretty good, right? I'm talking probably to 80 to 90% of the time,

things are good. Things are just going consistently. Now, the

other good things are, it might be like the sales might have spiked. And

of course, I'm not getting upset about if sales spike, and

that's usually the things that I've already done. Like perhaps I'm running a sale. Perhaps

I've got some other ads that are playing through social media, which

are in turn driving traffic now to my Amazon store

as well as a flow-on effect, what we call a halo effect.

I don't actually run ads on my business directly to Amazon.

I run ads in social media directly to

my Shopify store. But what happens is people

see the ad, they may even come to the Shopify store, and for whatever

reason, they don't buy. In America, particularly,

they love Amazon. So they might actually jump over to Amazon, type in the brand

name of the product, and then they'll buy it there because they trust Amazon.

They probably have an account there. They probably get free shipping. And also, they

trust the platform because if they don't like the product for whatever reason,

they can send it back. So that's another way

how I pick up sales. So guys, once I've done that, I'm

then going to jump into boring stuff like

emails. I'm terrible with emails because I

just start going through the emails and deleting all the ones. I'm like, I don't have

time for that. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. What I should be doing is

actually unsubscribing from these emails, but

I just don't get around to it. So I go through, I get rid

of all the trash that I'm like, I don't have time for that. Then

I'm going to go to the ones that are absolutely important. What's

interesting, I guess, when you get to my position with

Amazon, is you kind of think that you shouldn't

be doing any more work anymore, and it turns out that you still

have to do work. I was just talking to one of my fitness

coaches the other day, John, from chief

exercise officer, CXO. And he was saying, maybe

you should outsource some of that work. And yeah, I could. I probably

could outsource a lot of paperwork. Like, I've got things here, like on

here is, you know, this is where I keep, you know, as an example, my

invoices, right? So I'm still paying a lot of the invoices. Now,

a lot of them are automated, so electricity bills and things like that. But

stuff that's specifically related to the business, I

like to pay it myself. So inventory, just

as an example, this one here is a strata bill

for one of the commercial buildings I own. I just like to

do it because I then get to see the cash flow and

stay on top of what's happening. I'm probably a bit reluctant

to pass over a lot of that to somebody else because then

I lose touch with what's happening. And

there's a big rule in business which is, don't

lose money if you can, right? And don't lose capital. And

I think one way to potentially lose capital is

if you entrust other people with your money, okay? So

in the mornings, I'm going to, I guess, highlight what needs to

be paid. And I'm actually pretty old

school, to be honest. For the most part, this

is what I write down. I keep this on

my desk. I'm writing down the date, the

day, and literally like a list of things, must do this, get this done, get

this done, get this done. I will say though that a

lot of my time is actually not related to

Amazon because the great thing about an Amazon-based

business is once it's set up, and this is to Shopify as

well, but once it's set up, it's pretty much on

an autopilot. It's set it up, which takes

a lot of time. But once that's done, it's in

maintenance mode, making sure that the stock's there, responding

to customers. But I outsource that to somebody else, so somebody else is looking

after the customers. Sometimes they might email me

about a particular question, but that's fine. And

I have a lot of communication with my accountant and my bookkeeper. So

that's, they're sort of keeping track of things. And one of the things that I

highly recommend that you guys do, now I'm talking about just bookkeeping in general, is

I found that a lot of people don't do bookkeeping properly. Now,

you could do it in line with the BAS, right, which is generally

monthly, most people do quarterly BAS, so your business activity

statements. I go one step further. Not only do

I do, obviously, the quarterly BASes, but I'm

doing fortnightly P&Ls. So I'm,

again, I'm old school. I print out

receipts and I just put them into a file. But the reason I do that

is because in my P&L, I've got it sectioned out into different

territories. So Australia, USA, Canada, UK.

And I want to know for that particular column, the income

versus the expenses. So I want to know what each territory and

how it's performing. You know, is it running at a loss or is it making

a profit? And that's how I'm able to keep it all under essentially

one legal entity in Australia. As I said before, I've got a different legal entity

in the UK and Europe. But that

gives me more control and I

guess just a quick visual, because I keep it on my desk and I just look

at the numbers. Bookkeeper

is key, accountant is key because what you're going to find is

that you're going to start building up also all sorts of different legal entities.

But anyway, that's another whole section. So

make sure you've got those people in place. Hey guys, I just want to break away from

the episode for just one moment and let you know that I've just launched the Amazon

Launchpad Mini Course. Now, this is designed for people who want to get started on

Amazon really, really fast. But guess what? I can get you launched your

first product on Amazon with just five hours. You just have to

click on the link below, join my community, and the course is absolutely free.

All right, thanks guys, and back to the episode. So guys, there is

a business management element to Amazon, but like I said,

once it's set up, it's in kind of autopilot and you're in maintenance mode. The

great thing about it, although I'm sitting here at my desk and I'm pointing

out my invoices and I'm in touch with the bookkeeper and doing emails, I

can step up from here and walk away at any

time. Sometimes I have to remind myself of

what it's like in what I call the matrix world, the

nine to five matrix world, which is you'd be at a desk and

you're like, Oh, I need to go to the toilet. Oh, I have to check out.

I have to press a button or I've got to report to the manager or something crazy thing

like that. I don't have to do any of that stuff. The luxuries that I've got

is once I've been down here in the morning, I then go to the So

I'm going to the gym three times a week, I've got a personal trainer there, I've got an appointment, I

meet that appointment. I then get home and I

take my girls into school. Most parents don't

get to do that. So I'm in a very, very fortunate position

to be able to spend that morning time with the girls. And

we go down there and I spend time with them at the school. I've got a 10 year

old and a five year old. And then after that,

I then go and get my favorite coffee and then I chill there for

a little bit. And then if I'm feeling up to it, I might drop into my showroom

and I might look at my cars and I don't know, polish them

or something. That's pretty much the morning. I get back to the house and I do my

list of tasks. Now, just to give you an idea, this is

one just from like yesterday. So I'm in touch with my insurance

broker because I've got insurance not just to do with my Amazon business.

And just so you know, you can get insurance on

your Amazon based business. And in fact, Amazon requires you

to have some level of insurance. So just as a side note, and it's actually not

that hard to get, but you have to have the right insurance broker. If

you need to get the right insurance broker, reach out to me. I'm happy to share

her details with you. I'm then in touch with my bookkeeper. I've

then got a YouTube video. Now as a

side project, I've also got my WRX Cult YouTube

channel. Now, I just do that for the fun of it because I love WRXs,

but it's another thing to do. It piles on more work.

So I was busy editing that

video with an editor who's based over in India somewhere.

Oh yeah, another scheduled meeting with another company where I'm looking to take their

product, a digital product, global. Then helping clients

help with their, for example, this today was their frequently asked questions. So

I'm sort of reviewing a lot of their work and giving my perspective on

the things that I've done in my business. And I guess I get to

help those businesses because I've already done them. So

I can help fast track, you know, FAQs, privacy

statements, and all that kind of stuff. Then it was further

into some other platforms, like

the New Zealand platform, for example, that we're having some issues with. So

it's dealing with that. And then another call with a client. One

of the other tasks I had the other day was actually analyzing product

selections from a client. And so what I do with

my clients, I say, look, Go away. Here's some frameworks

to work with to go and source existing products. That's

my shortcut method, right? Rather than going and finding your

very own product in China somewhere and putting a brand on it and trying

to come up with some differentiation point, imagine if you could find an existing product

that you could take to market and help scale globally because that's what I do.

In this particular case, my client had gone through a whole bunch of

magazines, which is another little trick. And

he came up with one particular brand, which I know you guys know, which is Okubra. And

it turns out Okubra is not on Amazon. So

that was just something that we had to analyze. Is there an opportunity to

take the Okubra hat to the USA and put it on Amazon? Or

is it not? And after analyzing it, we

actually decided that one, it wasn't on

Amazon, and I think for a reason. I don't think Akubra actually wants to have their

product on Amazon. And why would they not want to do that? In

my opinion, I think the Akubra hat is something that's

better utilized or sold through boutique

physical stores. Because you guys

may not know this, but Amazon return rate can be bad. It

can really affect businesses. Now with hats, can

you imagine you're sending out these very, very expensive hats

to people and They just don't fit for whatever

reason, right? You're going to end up with returns and then I don't know what

the Akubra brand does with hats that have been on someone else's head.

Is there a health issue or something? I don't know. But that could pose as

a huge problem for the Akubra brand and it's probably something

that I would not do. Now, is there a possibility of

partnering with Akubra for Amazon? Yes, there is.

But it wouldn't be a case where you would buy the product from them to then on

sale on Amazon. I would only look to do it if

I could be an Amazon manager, which

means that you're just going to get paid a salary basically

to monitor, manage, keep in stock,

manage customers, the inventory of

the brand of Acubra on Amazon platform. That could be an opportunity, but

that would probably be the only way that I would even look to do it. But

then that said too, I wouldn't even do that. Yeah, because I'm not in the

management business. I want to actually get a brand on Amazon, help grow

that business. I don't want to be capped by the salary. I

want to build it and ideally scale it

across the world. And that's what I do for brands right now. I've been

selling products for years and years now and sometimes the

manufacturer will come back to me wanting to renegotiate the

price. Now, I'm all for the manufacturer making money.

I'm not out to screw the manufacturer because I rely on the manufacturer. to

make money too, because if they're not making money, then they could close, and they

then can't on-sell the product to me, which therefore I can't take it global. Everything

in a negotiation is a to and fro, right? So they've come to me and

said, hey, we need to renegotiate the price. I say, yep, absolutely.

Well, here's some things that I would like. It was like new territories. It

was, I think, contribution to marketing. It was pretty

basic stuff, to be honest. And I put down everything that

I want, right? And if you're going to think, In

the perfect world scenario, here's all the things that I would want. Now, of

course, I'm not expecting everything to be accepted. So

when I went back to the manufacturer with my proposal, they

hit the roof. They lost it. Eventually, we

got onto a phone call. We sort of nutted things out. And

ultimately, what happened with the contract was nothing. Nothing

changed. Because the manufacturer wasn't willing

to look at a single thing that I proposed in

lieu of the fact that they could increase the price. I was happy to increase the

price, but I just needed some positive things on my

end too, right? I needed to be a win-win. And ultimately, it

wasn't a win-win, and so the contract has stayed exactly as

is, and the pricing hasn't changed at all. The takeaway from this is

make sure you speak to someone like myself to get

a perspective on how the contract should be put together from the

get-go. So that's what I do now. I

help people put the contracts together knowing what I know now,

right, about how I would structure the contract to put yourself

in the best position possible for the future. because

I can tell you just one little stroke of a pen and you

could fuck it all up. So then guys, once I've wrapped up

all that, I usually have some time to

focus on building the business. One thing I'm always focused on is

how I can increase my wealth, protect the wealth,

and maybe go

into acquisitions of other businesses. That's something that I'm always thinking about. But

on top of all that, the thing that I'm constantly thinking about

is how I can best serve my clients. It

just plays on my mind all day. What are they doing now? Can they do this?

Can they do this? And so we fortunately get to stay in

touch with my one-on-one clients. through WhatsApp.

And we can just shoot each other messages through the day. When it comes to the evenings,

that's when I usually book in my one-on-one calls. One of my clients, he's

doing this incredible product, which is, it

helps in the waste management business, all right? It's a waste management

solution. And he's designed it himself. And so one

of the things he's just sent me is these pictures right here. And

I was having a conversation with him last night about how

we can improve the hero image of the product. And these

ones look really, really good. However,

I think I'm gonna go back to him and get a couple of things changed.

Hey, Abby, how you doing? Hey, tell me,

I just got those images that you sent through. There

was only one little thing that I thought would make it a little bit

better. I think that first one that you sent through to me. Yeah,

the one on the angle. I also wanted to have the bags

on the angle as well. Yeah, remember

how I said have the side of the bag so you can see the roll so

you can see the roll of the of the bags Yep.

Yeah, cuz it was front on the only way, you know, it's a bag

a bag of a roller bags is

because it says Bin liners, but we don't actually

know it's a roll. We sort of assume it is We know it

is because we've seen we know what it is. You know, I mean I'll

Yeah, and I think that's going to be

really, really great to have as our hero image for the

Amazon listing and also as well for the Shopify store. I

Okay, well you send me back what you produce so I'll just triple check it

and then make sure we're on the same page and then we'll go from there. But anyway, looking good, mate.

No worries. Thanks, mate. Thanks, Abi. Bye. And that's what it takes. This

is what I'm doing every single day, talking to clients about how to improve their

business, their product, and take things to the next level.

Just simple things like that. And sometimes it's good just to have somebody

else look over the simple things where we can just fine tune

it. And that fine-tuning will ultimately end up in

more sales and more profit. All right, guys, so that's pretty much it. That wraps it

up for this episode. I hope you've enjoyed having a little bit of a sneak peek

behind the scenes of what it's like being an Amazon e-com seller.

And as you can see, it's not so bad, right?

It certainly beats having to be a slave in

the nine-to-five matrix. I hope you can break it. All right, 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