#454 – 153 Knockoffs & 1 Shutdown: The True Cost of Selling on Amazon with Chris Keef
Can your Amazon brand survive the onslaught of 153 knockoffs? Hear from Chris Keef, our expert guest, as he unravels the harrowing tale of an Amazon seller who faced this exact nightmare and navigated the turbulent waters of account suspension despite a fortress of patents and trademarks. Chris brings a wealth of knowledge from his dual experiences in the corporate and e-commerce worlds, offering listeners a roadmap for maintaining a competitive edge through robust intellectual property strategies and unique product offerings.”
In a world where unauthorized sellers and ‘hijackers’ lurk around every corner of online marketplaces, protecting your Amazon listing becomes a high-stakes game. We dive into the systemic issues within online marketplaces, shedding light on the stark contrast between e-commerce and traditional retail environments. Through gripping case studies, Chris and Kevin expose how low barriers to entry often lead to shortcuts and unethical practices, and how sellers can strategically plan and fortify their defenses with tools like Amazon’s brand registry and the Apex program.
Discover strategic approaches for combating false advertising and counterfeit threats while learning how to leverage brand protection services like AMZ Watchdog. Not only do we emphasize the importance of resilience and assertiveness in safeguarding your brand, but we also explore innovative strategies for thriving in the e-commerce landscape. From creating a digital moat around your products to utilizing emerging platforms like TikTok for brand growth, this episode is packed with insights to empower you against unfair practices and position your brand for success.
In episode 454 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Chris discuss:
- 00:00 – Protecting Your Amazon Listing Strategies
- 00:04 – Rising Competition in Online Sales
- 06:42 – Concerns About Data Security
- 13:32 – Navigating IP Protection in Global E-Commerce
- 16:54 – Intellectual Property Rights Across Borders
- 18:55 – Combatting False Advertising in E-Commerce
- 20:11 – Retail vs E-Commerce Growth Differences
- 30:12 – Strategic Approaches to IP Protection
- 40:32 – Negotiating for Release of Product
- 41:33 – Navigating Brand Protection in E-Commerce
- 45:11 – Navigating E-Commerce Challenges and Innovations
- 47:15 – Competitive Strategies in Global Business
- 52:48 – Utilizing TikTok for Brand Success
- 53:59 – Protecting Brands in E-Commerce
- 59:13 – Supporting Amazon Sellers Through AMZ Watchdog
- 1:00:40 – Kevin’s Words of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 454 of the AM/PM podcast. My guest this week is Chris Keef. That’s right, we’re going to be talking about protecting your listing on Amazon. What’s happening with that? You’re getting knocked off, with other sellers, especially from China, coming on. He’s got an example of a story of someone that had 153 different knockoffs come onto their product, despite them having a patent and a trademark and everything on their item, and then they ended up having their account shut down. So, it’s crazy stuff, but we’re going to talk about some strategies and some ways to actually combat that and actually protect yourself on Amazon. Enjoy this episode of the AM/PM Podcast. Chris Keef finally got you on the AM/PM podcast. I think we’ve known each other for I don’t know a decade or more, maybe. How are you doing, man?
Chris:
Doing well, appreciate it. Yeah, the space is funny. You tend to orbit around people and we’ve sort of like bumped into each other a few times. You’ve spoken at a couple of our events when I was doing some live stuff and I’ve known about you for a long time, so it’s great to finally connect in more of a real kind of professional setting, as opposed to dinners here and there and events like that.
Kevin King:
Yeah, it is. I mean, you’ve been doing this e-coms thing and selling for a long time, right, I mean you-
Chris:
Yeah, real quick my background. I consider myself a recovering corporate guy, so I wasn’t. You’re an entrepreneur, I think. Knowing a little bit about your background and your story, I think you were kind of a grade school hustling and selling stuff, right at least from your story. So I had a bit of an entrepreneurial mind but didn’t have the kind of the family that would just sort of saw that risk-taking. So, a job was kind of my deal. I put myself through college, went to UNH. I painted homes, loved it, very entrepreneurial, made some good money. But it was still my gray hair shows I’m getting a little bit older. It was kind of a thing of get the job, work at that job for 30, 40 years, get your gold watch. That still was kind of the zeitgeist, which is pretty funny. So, I ended up with a psych degree of all things. Didn’t do that. But I got in the business with my background of painting houses. So I was in business for years. I actually had a pretty meteoric rise. I spent a lot of time in semiconductor and ancillary equipment around that. So that put me in China, Singapore, Taiwan, southeast Asia. So, I got a good sense of what was going on with supply chain kind of culturally, what the differences were, and I saw the growth of manufacturing going to China and I saw that entire shift happening right before my eyes.
Chris:
So, my meteoric rise was sales guy and then sales manager and then I was a director of sales and I was tapped to be the vice president of sales and I won’t go into the whole, corporates not bad. But I saw that wasn’t the path for me late. I was like 40 years old and I said, okay, that’s not for me. So, I ended up just going into e-commerce and it since about 2010ish or so. I just jumped ship, burned the ships and I went out on my own and a lot of people thought I was insane, cause I looked at my W2 the other day. In modern dollars, my salary was about 260K and I had a company car and expensive and like who, why would you give that up to do to sell on Amazon? But I saw the opportunity and I knew that. I knew that things were shifting to e-commerce. So, I moved into e-commerce building my own sites. Amazon wasn’t too big and then, like many people, there’s the How to Sell Online training course. Actually the amazing selling machine that was like many, many, many people bought into that. Here I am, so I haven’t really looked back. So, I’ve been at the e-commerce game and Amazon for a good long time. I’ve seen great stuff. I’ve seen some sketchy stuff. You mentioned Black Hat things and, yeah, I’d love to talk more about kind of what we’re doing right now and trying to help level the playing field for a number of sellers in the space.
Kevin King:
Now, are you still selling at all or have you moved on? So, you’re still managing Amazon and e-commerce accounts?
Chris:
Great question. I started initially with PL so doing private label stuff, and then I moved into training and kind of the business opportunity and that was more of the wholesale model of selling. That’s what you mentioned, Todd is what Todd and I were doing. I had a training course on how to work with distributors and online brands and sell on Amazon doing the wholesale model. I think that’s still viable, but I don’t think that’s quite. Margins have shrunk significantly. Amazon fees, as we know, have increased dramatically. I think that’s a harder business model not impossible, but harder. We still do private label. We still run our own brands. A lot of time what we do nowadays is we try to partner with brands, people that have maybe a patent or have some intellectual property, that they’ve got a little bit of a digital moat. They’ve got something that’s more of a competitive advantage. I think it’s a little bit harder nowadays for that ubiquitous, you know feather on a string cat toy. I think those days might be over. It’s hard to compete in that space, right? So you need something that’s a little bit more unique.
Chris:
So we still sell products. We still do private label products. We have some partnerships with brands. We’re doing just shy of 10 million bucks or so on our own stuff. But we also have partnerships where we work with brands, where we run their Amazon sales forum and we do a lot of work on actual IP enforcement, whether it’s trademark protection, copyright and also trying to help with people that might be cheating a little bit. And that’s kind of the part where things like false advertising and things that I’m seeing from Chinese sellers that just aren’t, they don’t set well with me and I don’t think they’re, they’re right. We, um, we help fix that.
Kevin King:
So, do you have a legal background or are you partnered up with, uh, someone with a legal?
Chris:
That’s a great question. I have to be very clear and say I’m not a lawyer, don’t play one on TV, I don’t ever want to be a lawyer. No offense to lawyers, but we are not lawyers at all. That’s a very specific subset of knowledge, right, being that, having that legal background and doing things the right way. We come at it from the Amazon side of the house. What I’ve found is, as good as lawyers are, they’re like that can’t possibly. They see some things happening and they’re like there’s no way that’s happening. Amazon wouldn’t allow that to happen right. And we’re like it is happening. Here’s what’s going on, here are the specifics, here are the sellers and things like that. So, we are not lawyers. We do not take the legal route ourself. We partner with a legal team that is exceptional. They’re aggressive in what they do. They follow all the rules as they need to because they don’t want to lose their law license. But I say that because you mentioned it. There’s just everybody wants that angle and they want that edge and what we’re seeing is you probably remember going back eight, nine years.
Chris:
I mean, there were situations where people were getting information from Amazon, people from inside the walls of Amazon employees, right, I think the case was. They flew them down to Costa Rica or something, and they’re basically like hey, give us some info, help us with this account, get rid of these reviews like some really nefarious, really high-level stuff. Because when you’re talking the millions of dollars that are made on Amazon, it’s amazing, I get that. So we’re not lawyers, but what we see, is what we started to see is these, these brands would come to us and say, man, let me give you a specific example. Um, someone came to us with a product, uh, that did everything right. She has a patent on it, it’s a, the product is easy outlet, she has a patent on the product, she has trademarks, copyrights, she’s done everything correct. Five years in development. It’s a fantastic product. That’s just nothing like it in the marketplace. She launches it on Amazon. Finally, five years, you know, I don’t know the total amount, but it’s in the six figures to get this thing launched. She launches and, Kevin, wouldn’t you believe it? Some influencer sees it, picks it up and says this thing’s really cool, sells out her inventory, a couple thousand units, like virtually instantaneously.
Chris:
That’s the power of, of TikTok, right, and it just blows up good for her, like, oh, what am I going to do now. It’s amazing what happened next. Her account had been up less than 60 days. That product was going less than 60 days. Within two weeks her account is shut down, just disappears off the map through some very, very strange set of circumstances and she has a hundred plus competitors selling knockoffs of that product that are really poor quality. Her product is dead in the water before it even gets started. That’s the kind of thing that can’t, to me that can’t stand. I mean, you’ve got someone that did the great American dream right, you’ve done everything properly, you’ve done everything right, you’ve gone through all the steps to do all the things you’re supposed to do. And then you’re kind of kicked in the teeth saying that’s cool and I know you did everything right, but competition’s hard, business is hard, man, what are you going to do? So, what we did is she came to us and said can you help me here? Like I, this is, this is brutal what’s happening. And we said I, you remember early Amazon, there was a life cycle to a product which I understand. You sold the product and invariably Chinese sellers would kind of grab ahold of it and then it would kind of water down the price. They were direct from the manufacturers and it was hard to make the margin. So, you had what was it? You’d have sometimes six months to a year and a half on that product.
Kevin King:
Yeah, 18 months usually is the end of it yeah.
Chris:
18 months. So, I never sat well with me because I’m like God, like making a product, and only like the clock, like you could say, go and the clock’s ticking. What if you’ve got a patent? And what if you’ve got copyrights and trademarks? You’d like to say, hey, look, I want to sort of like imagine Apple going well, we’re going to, you know, send something out there. We’re only got 18 months out of it. No, you need some life to that because you’re putting so much time and effort into it. So, she came to us and said, hey, can I get some help here? So, what the legal team does and again this is from the legal stand point to say what could we do from a patent side of the house? What can we do from copyright? So, images are being just full on stolen. You can’t, I mean, that’s an easy one. You can’t do that. That’s just that’s. Someone creates those images, that is their property. You can’t steal that. So that’s one, one direction to go, and so they help with that part of it. The bigger part, Kevin, is, that shocked me was when the law firm bought those products and had a look at them and said okay, let’s analyze this in depth. Are they infringing on a patent? Are they infringing where are there possible issues here? Here’s the part that scared the hell out of me, each of those products 153, and then initial sweep, 153 knockoffs-
Kevin King:
153 different vendors?
Chris:
Different vendors. 153 in a matter of a month from launching this product. Every one of those products was highly unsafe. None of them were grounded. They’re sold as such. They’ve got a 110 volt US three prong outlet and it’s a not grounded product. So, it’s an outlet extender is what it is. And it’s that crazy problem where you’ve got an outlet behind your let’s call it a nightstand, or maybe behind your bed. You’re like how am I to reach down and put? It’s one of those things you go. Why didn’t I think of that? And it’s a cool little extending outlet that is. It’s tested; it is ETL approved. You have to go through all these rigorous you know standards to get the thing tested and safe, and yet you’ve got sellers going. I’m just going to ship whatever cause you can’t find me. I’m in China, I’m not going to get sued. I don’t give a rip, or that’s probably being a bit unkind. They’re probably selling the thing without you know being malicious about it. But at the end of the day, you can’t sell unsafe products. So that was an unsafe product and that lawsuit is as we’re recording this. It’s ongoing right now and there’s going to be a pretty amazing result of that, where those get taken down because you can’t sell unsafe products. And it’s a tough one. You know, this Amazon kind of throws their hands up.
Kevin King:
Well, it’s like whack-a-mole a lot of times too. I mean, you might get all 153 down, but I guarantee there’s going to be 40 more come up right after that.
Chris:
Yeah, and it’s a big problem.
Kevin King:
Yeah, we just had a person on I do another podcast called the Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar, and it’s not about Amazon. But we had a woman come on, Mary Harcourt, and she developed this light. She was doing eyelashes for women and all the lighting that was designed had shadows and so they need to see these fine hairs, and so she developed this arc light that actually lit the thing up and now it’s turned out. It’s really great for tattoo artists and it’s really great for all this stuff. She patented it, put it up on Amazon and immediately she had you know, it’s a $500 light. She had people selling it for 70 knockoffs for $79 that are pieces of junk. She said she bought them and they’re pieces of junk and she’s constantly fighting it right now and she’s taken down about 38 of them so far. Well, it’s a constant battle and she just had to build that into her margin for legal fees and then what she decided to do is actually knock herself off. So she’s like, well, if everybody else is going to actually mine’s $499, I’ll create one in the same price range, that’s better quality, with the goal of, when you buy that, I’ll let you trade that in and upsell you to my good one and say, hey, so that’s what she’s doing to actually counter that.
Kevin King:
But it’s been a problem and people always use the word hijackers. There’s a hijacker on my list. That’s a common word you see in the forums and sometimes people don’t have any protection and they have just gone to Alibaba and stuck their logo on something and they really don’t have any protection and there’s not much you can do. But if you go to the point of developing something, like you said, for five years and spending the money for IP, making sure it’s purely safe, it’s total BS that someone can come in and do what they’re doing and, like you said, Amazon just throws up their hands and they don’t care. I think the number one step maybe this will happen now, this tariff stuff that’s been going on the last several months is anybody that sells in the US, just like TikTok does. You have to be a US citizen or you have to have a US representative or an idea or a partner in the US so that you can be sued, so that you can be stopped and stop this, but Amazon doesn’t. They’re still actively courting Chinese sellers and Chinese factories.
Kevin King:
And now I just had someone on talking about sourcing on the AM/PM podcast. I think it was last week’s episode. When you guys are listening to this that was talking about now it’s a huge thing and Amazon’s pushing it factory direct, not only just with Hall, but actually to Amazon, and a lot of these factories are now cutting out the middleman and just going direct. It’s called Manufacture Direct, MDS or something like that. There’s a terminology for it. So, what can be done about this? It’s not just that, like you said, the cheating is rampant. I mean, with not doing the proper certifications and the things are dangerous with cheating on the tariffs, you know, not putting in a different category and underpaying and putting, but it’s just, it’s crazy. What’s happening?
Chris:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I, it’s a complex issue and I want I do want to be very clear. I don’t want to have there a lot of times there’s pitchforks and, uh, torches right, the villagers of you, you know an anti-China sentiment. That is not it at all. I mean, I’ve taken, I’ve been to China a number of times and I, I, I love the country and when you, you travel a lot in the world, when you-
Kevin King:
I’ve been to China many times too. I mean China’s, more sophisticated and better, and the big cities of China, way above, way ahead of the United States.
Chris:
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin King:
And it’s a good people and you know, China’s really good they’re not. I just read a book recently; I think it’s called One Step China or something. They’re talking about the six pillars of Chinese manufacturing and one of those. They’re saying that they’re not great at innovating but they’re great at second generation innovation, so they’re not known. You know what’s that Apple thing says? Designed in Cupertino or made in China, designed in Cupertino or something that’s kind of they’re very, very good at taking something that already exists and then fine-tuning it or improving it a little bit or figuring out how to make it cheaper or better or whatever. And that’s the problem we have is we’ll someone like your client there will innovate, and then they’ll just blindly knock it off and don’t, and then completely don’t care and there’s not much you can do. I mean, she had IP. I guess I’m assuming, just in the United States, that she had IP in China as well.
Chris:
There’s the rub, right. Yeah, there, she had it in the United States and I want to make sure again. I’m not a lawyer, so the language I want to make sure it’s right, and if I’m wrong don’t hold me to it. But with copyrights, in the US it’s first to use and then in China it’s first to file. So, you’ve got this weird phenomena where I believe I’ve got to check this one. I believe Apple still pays technically for something on one of their copier trademarks, because if you file at first file a name, they then can kind of block your shipments coming from China. Like, well, we have a trademark on that. You’re like, but that’s my product, yeah, I know, but I filed it first in China, you didn’t. I mean, it’s not much you’re going to do about that. So, you kind of. So, you asked the question what do you do? You have to get the kind of proverbial ducks in a row and make sure you’re paying attention to that stuff. But stateside to your point, it’s complex. I don’t want to be anti-China at all and you explained it perfectly. The US tends to be a lot of innovators. Innovation, the zero to one right. Go from nothing, the concept of an idea to get that thing launched. China isn’t great at that part. They do some. They’re really, really good at saying, hey, EV, electric vehicles, that’s cool, I’m going to make this thing super badass. Now that’s credit where credit is due. They’re exceptionally good at that.
Chris:
The challenge with Amazon, I believe, Kevin, is the barrier to entry to get into the space is so low and the dollars are so big. The incentive is there to cheat and cut corners. So, I’m all for taking a patent and poor Kate, I don’t want her product with Easy Outlet. I don’t want anyone to say, oh, I’m going to try to hack this and try to get around it on the patent. You could do that, but fair play is fair play. Good, red-blooded capitalists again want to make money. If you find a new way to do that idea, awesome. But that’s not what typically happens, right? What typically happens is I’m just going to go until I get caught. I’m just going to rip it off fully. I’m going to steal the images and if Amazon says you got to change your images, only then will I change them. Or I’m just going to do this stuff and I know I can’t get sued. I’m going to send them as not even doesn’t even have a ground wire, I don’t give a rip because it’s going to take a while for someone to figure that out and most of the time, they don’t figure it out. Or it’s too expensive, because a lot of the times I’ve gone to lawyers and asked that question. It’s expensive. It’s $25, $50, $100,000 a clip. You’re a startup with a new product. You don’t have that bandwidth of those dollars to do that, so you’re kind of dead in the water.
Chris:
So what do we do? I think we have to be hypervigilant about this stuff and you have to get ahead of it with an understanding that I’m going to do all the right stuff to lock down my copyright and trademarks. There’s, there’s inexpensive ways to do that. You can file those things. Make sure you say this is my stuff, got a digital stamp on it, put it in a drive folder saying these are my original images. If someone does rip them off, okay, you’ve now got a stance to say this is the, you know, clear. The metadata in this is when I launched it and I first took the images. Or they were first created their mind, or they were first created. They’re mine. Try to do IP, secure IP whenever you can from a designer or utility patent or enforce this stuff. I mean, I’ll give you another example of someone in this space that drives me crazy. There’s a very large company came to us that was this is a unicorn, I think you’ll like this one. They were doing, depending on the year, 30 to $50 million a year in brick-and-mortar retail. On Amazon, they were doing sub $300,000 a year. I haven’t heard that in a long time. That’s just a couple of years ago. It’s almost always flip-flop right Huge in the e-commerce because low barrier to entry, easier to get in there, and then people move into retail. He was opposite.
Kevin King:
It’s because in retail you actually have to show certifications, you have to have to go through a whole process to get into Walmart or get into any of the. They don’t take that chance. I mean, you get in, you got to prove it.
Chris:
Yeah, and why are there not? I don’t want to be unkind, but you know, on Amazon, the random letters kind of jammed together that become a brand. That’s why you don’t see those on shelves. Sure, products are manufactured in China when you go to target and you go to Walmart and you go to Costco, but they’re not like your bleak X, whatever brand you’re like. What the hell does that even say? Because-
Kevin King:
You know why they do that right? It’s because they can get a trademark on it. They don’t have to go back and forth because they’re not in words, and so it’s easy to get a trademark on those.
Chris:
And Amazon did try to do the right thing right cause they said look, you gotta have, you know, in order for brand protection or trademark, you can get a brand, a trademark on that. But Amazon didn’t tell the poor USPTO, the United States Postal Trademark Office didn’t say, hey, we’re requiring this of all sellers to have this or to get brand protection. So those guys were caught with their pants down. The government’s like, hey, heads up would have been awesome. So first action sometimes on this stuff takes, you know, 12 months for the for, for the poor, the trademark office, like Holy smokes, what do we do here? So you know, it’s this comedy of errors that has allowed this whole situation to happen. So the point of the, the, the flashlight, uh, business. So, that company that was doing 30 to 50 million in retail, nothing on Amazon. They had an incredibly hard time getting into the space. Why is that? False advertising? Full-on lies the company’s light salt, fantastic brand, fantastic product. It is LEDs, flashlights and handheld spotlights and these kinds of things. And what they realized was we’re having a hard time breaking into the marketplace because we’ve got very high powered, high quality made for retail. Pick them up and touch it. Like you can’t, you can’t hide showing a great digital image. You go to the store and pick this thing up and go. This thing’s just like junk. No, no, no, this thing had to be legitimate stuff.
Chris:
Problem is, when you sell it online, you have a very bright flashlight. Now, I don’t want to be super nerdy here, but lumens is the measure of brightness for a flashlight, right? So basically, candle power, lumens, lumens is the measurement. So, it becomes this weird arms race. If you go, look when you guys, when this podcast launches, have a look. It’ll hopefully be almost all gone. If it’s not, we’re on top of it. But right now, as the federal case has been filed, it’s not working through the process. There’s a funny thing that’s happened. There’s an arms race to be the biggest and baddest and most awesome. Okay, so Cody from Lightsall may have a flashlight that’s very, very bright. 10,000 lumens it’s an amazing flashlight and it’s like obscenely bright. It’s great, but that’s really bright. 10,000 lumens is a is an aggressive amount for it for a handheld flashlight. If you go, if you go to Amazon when he first came to us, I’m like what is this stuff? That’s 200,000, 500,000, 1 million lumens. I mean hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of listings and that’s just physically impossible. I think when we did it, when we looked at it, the world record for lumens was something like 50,000, but it was a joke as an engineering kid with a great YouTube channel that built this thing. It’s not something that slips into your pocket. This thing is like a battery pack and he, like a couple of guys, had to haul this thing around. So just physically impossible. Yet there are. There were hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of these listings, Kevin, that say oh yeah, it’s a million lumens, it’s 1.5 million. We found a 3 million lumen’s claim.
Chris:
So why does that matter? That matters because when you’re at a store and you can touch something and you feel it, you’ve got the tactile part oh, this thing’s rugged, it’s heavy, I like this thing. And then, next to a kind of a like, ah, it’s kind of cheaper, I can tell it’s kind of junky. Okay, that’s a tactile real thing. When you’re online and you see a great digital image and you’ve got a Chinese seller that has exponentially lower cost of goods because it’s kind of a piece of product, but they say, yeah, but this thing’s, this thing’s a hundred thousand lumens. You’re like a hundred thousand is a lot more than 10,000. I’m buying a hundred thousand. So, you’ve got this false barrier to entry because people are just plain lying about it. So, we went after him and said, look, that’s blatant false advertising. This can’t stand. So, our lawyers said, dude, that’s about as cut and dry as you can be now. It required testing of each of those units. We bought hundreds of them. They went to an actual independent lab, tested every single one of them and the chart is alarming. We aren’t talking about well, it’s off by 10%, it’s off by 20%. The vast majority, more than 75% of these things were about one to 5% of the advertised number. One to 5%. Imagine an auto manufacturer saying, dude, this thing gets, this car gets 50 miles to the gallon. And you sit in and you’re like, yeah, I tested it. It gets like five, five miles to the gallon. What are you going to do? Am I right? That’s the same equivalent. Like, that’s not. It’s just blatantly false advertising. You got a company that’s well-established, been around for a decade, full health and wellness of their business in the retail space. They’re legitimate. They can’t break into a space because of just plain lying. We got to fix that.
Kevin King:
We need a consumer reports for e-commerce. Just get a certain badge if it’s been independently bought and tested. You know, random, random spot buying or something that that could be an opportunity for someone actually some sort of some sort of badging on that. But you talk about. So back on the IP. So even if you have IP or you’re in the process of doing that, a lot of times you can’t do anything. I mean, I know people that will hold off on going to Amazon until their patent or the design patent or utility patent which can take a year to three years sometimes or more gets approved and then they’ll go into the marketplace because they know at least they have some sort of something in their back pocket to fight the copycatters. But I remember about 10 years ago, right before I started doing FBA on Amazon, there was a product that was on Amazon called Bunch of Balloons. It was in the toy category and it’s one of these balloons things that you attach to the water hose, faucet and if you’re going to have a water balloon fight with your kids on a hot summer day, instead of having to fill up one water balloon at a time and tie it off, you could do like I don’t know, 40 of them on this like it looked like a spider web and have all these balloons attached to it, so it’d fill 40 balloons at once and it would automatically untie them when you ripped it off or something. It’s a really brilliant thing. These guys out of Dallas were doing it, so I ended up. I had not done FBA yet or private label yet. I just wanted to test the process. So I bought $10,000 worth of them. I drove up to Dallas, put them in my SUV and drove back down, shipped them into Amazon and tested as a reseller. Did really really well.
Kevin King:
Next thing I see is they’re on infomercials and the big infomercial company out of New Jersey, Telebrands, was actually running infomercials and they didn’t call it Bunch of Balloons, they called it. I forget they had another name for it. It’s a direct knockoff and I looked into it and I talked to some people like how are they doing this? Because the other guy said they were in the process of filing their design patent so it hadn’t been approved yet. They had filed and everything, but it hadn’t been approved. It had been four or five months or something. So. they still had six months to a year to go before it would be signed off on. But Telebrands knew they had a window where, while that’s being looked at before it’s certified, they can do the product. So, they’re like we’re just going to take advantage, we don’t care, this is a US company, not a Chinese company, this is a US company knocking them off and just running with it. And then, at the end, when they figure that, okay, if this actually works, we’ll either license it from them or we’ll pay for them or we’ll merge with them or something, and that’s what they did. So once they got approved, they came back to them and said hey, okay, we want to continue selling, we’ll give you a bunch of money, cause we know, and that that was their whole business strategy. Um, and so what do you do to? Uh, in the case of the woman that was married, that was selling the lights, she waited to go on Amazon until she had her, her patent um signed off on. She just sold a direct on her own Shopify site for a. But what do you do, I mean, other than, like you said, you can fight them. But what steps can you take? Or are there any to try to prevent this? Or should you just say heck with it, I’m just going to launch it and see what happens.
Chris:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I want to be very clear too. I don’t want to. I’m still, as I said, very bullish on Amazon because I, when I have conversations about this, it paints a rather scary picture right, like, oh my God that. Like, why would? Why does anybody do anything? Because there are predatory.
Kevin King:
I equate it to the mafia business. I mean, you said it earlier, there’s so much money involved here. It’s like I equate the Amazon to the Sopranos. You know it’s the mafia. Wherever there’s money, the mafia is going to come and the bad guys are going to come and they’re going to do whatever they got to do to get an edge and take an advantage and pressure other people. And that’s what happens when you have something that’s a money printing machine; that’s New York garbage or New Jersey garbage or whatever it was in the Sopranos to selling on marketplaces like Amazon.
Chris:
Yeah, that’s a great point. I think the blue-sky part of this is that’s actually a good problem to have, and I know that sounds okay, sure, Rosie, like people ripping my stuff off. If someone’s willing to do that, it means you’ve probably got a really fantastic product or there’s great opportunity there. So that’s the blessing and curse of this situation. So, yeah, kind of like the Sopranos look, if those guys are there in the in the waste and the container management business, there’s a reason for that. Everybody gets rid of that garbage. It’s a lucrative business. So what do you do? The? I think that one step if you’ve got patents and not everybody goes to that process like, oh my God, I don’t want to take two, three, four years to do it to your point, maybe wait. Or if you’ve got something in place to say, okay, I know that it’s going to be a problem and I think this is kind of the next mousetrap, I don’t want to have it ripped off, I’m going to wait until I get. If you can wait, wait till you get your patent there. But a lot of people aren’t even going to get a patent on there. So, what do you do? Trying to create that digital moat is smart. What we have found is like the product of the easy outlet, like the flashlights. If there’s legitimate competition, that someone has to make a quality product that’s not junk, that isn’t unsafe, that isn’t terrible, they’re going to have to compete rather fairly. It’s the guys that get in there with really cheap, they’re fake, they’re lying about it, they’re overstating something.
Chris:
Well, of course, their cost of goods is going to be exceptionally lower. I think the current administration love or hate them getting rid of, at least as far as this podcast, when we’re recording it, the de minimis exemption has been removed. That is massive for us as sellers, because a lot of these things that were coming from the Easy Outlet product were being shipped FBM. They want to take advantage of it real quickly and they’re kind of a little bit fly by night right. Just send someone, buy something and they’re just riding on the wave of what’s there. So, being vigilant about your product, talking to a law firm, talking to somebody that can help out, reach out to us. People like us say, hey, what can we do here? Because if someone’s selling a crappier version, they’re always much, much cheaper because they’re probably junk. Be vigilant, stay on top of your product, stay on top of the vertical and market that you’re in and find out, hey, buy a couple of them and say, hey, this thing is just not legitimate, it’s not real, it’s incredibly cheap, incredibly crappy. There are usually avenues when someone is that cheap or is able to take over a market. They’re cutting corners somewhere. Find out where they’re cutting those corners and try to help out. There are things you can do within Amazon brand registry. They do have the Apex program. You have the ability. If you’ve got a patent, you’ve got copyright, trademarks, you can have stuff taken down there. People may roll their eyes and go, dude, I’ve tried that a hundred times. Amazon just never listens.
Chris:
Okay, sometimes it does take like anything in seller central, um, the backend there, a number of times opening those cases or saying the right things, sometimes even a quick letter from an attorney. That’s a few hundred bucks, a couple thousand bucks, instead of like a massive, massive case that usually shakes the rattles the cage a little bit of the folks at Amazon saying, hey, this is a very real thing, we don’t want to get things tied up in the legal. You know channels, listen to what we’re saying. We’re not just a frontline. You know a case here with a with someone within vendor seller central. Please listen to this, because my client has a problem with A, B and C. At least that then elevates the problem and then that usually gets listened to. So, the steps to take is if you can get some IP, great. If you’ve gone to go that process, awesome. If you can’t get products where there is a competitive advantage there, find something that’s not super ubiquitous, like the example I gave earlier, like a cat toy, a little feather on a string, really hard to not to have something there. That’s anything better than what you said. If someone’s shipping direct from China, it’s going to be hard to compete with that. It’s not very innovative, it’s not very new, it’s just a basic, basic product that can be sold for a couple of bucks.
Chris:
Find products that are priced a little bit higher. By the way, I mean I think we’re seeing for the longest time. I think you’ll agree. I think 2,499, 25 bucks, 26 bucks was kind of like that sweet spot of the average selling price on Amazon, with fees increasing, with everything else increasing. Look for higher price things, because a lot of times they’re not going to go after those kinds of products. It’s harder to get a better product, a better quality product. So those are a couple of steps that you can take. My biggest advice is just fight for it. If you know that you’re right and I know that sounds crazy, but business is hard, it is a contact sport and if you know you’re right and you say, look, these guys are lying about it, I have proof of that. Or this thing’s junk, or they’re stealing my images, they’re stealing my IP, keep fighting for that. Is Amazon going to be the first line of defense? Probably not. I think they want to do right by sellers when they can, but they’ve got-.
Kevin King:
They’re so big and it’s just unwieldy. I mean, the massive scale of what they do is just it’s hard.
Chris:
What are the numbers, Kevin?
Kevin King:
I mean it’s 700 million plus, sorry, 700 billion, sorry, $700 billion plus in sales top line GMV last year. Compare that to TikTok shop, where you hear people saying that they’re TikTok millionaires and doing TikTok shop was under 20 billion, which is a weekend for Amazon, and just put that in 2.5 billion products across all Amazon’s marketplaces worldwide. 2.5 billion products, different products, across all the marketplaces.
Chris:
And what’s the percentage of those sellers and products that are native to China? I mean not just manufactured Chinese brands?
Kevin King:
It’s like 60, 70% somewhere in there are Chinese-based brands or sellers worldwide.
Chris:
You brought up a fantastic point and it’s a drum I want to beat and I think it’s very important. This needs to be, I believe, needs to be elevated to a higher level because there’s just no recourse here right now for a lot of brands. They just, you know, if you’re China-based, for such a customer-centric company that Amazon, they beat the drum. Customer’s the most important. I get that and this is me being a little snarky here. But when you go to those random letter brands and you click through, look at the brand, you click through to that second page and then you scroll down and look at the name of their company and then the address of that company. This is the amazon.com, US-based, Seattle-based company. We all know that US-based, with a lot of US-based sellers. Okay, you’re trying to compete against folks that have a. You know they’re trying to kind of phonetically spell the Mandarin typically Mandarin Chinese name and then Mandarin characters in their address. Technically, we don’t have to reach out to those customers. We don’t have to reach out to those companies because Amazon handles it for us, because that’s the business that they built. Good for Bezos.
Chris:
The problem is, what’s the recourse there? Our lawyer actually has the law firm that we work with had a case of in Pennsylvania. A private school company had a product from China was a shoddy product, caught a room on fire. Now they’re like who do we sue here? Like this is just a crappy product. I mean that’s a dangerous situation. So, I think your point is well taken and I agree with you. This needs to be elevated at some. I’m not a big fan of government intervention, but there’s got to be some policy in place saying you’ve got to have a US based entity, entity not just registered. You know they don’t even really need anything right for a Chinese entity. You just you’re selling on Amazon. You have to make sure you’re who you say you are and the dollars you’re sending is not being money laundered. I get that. My vote is just as you said it. Well, you got to set up in some state. You’ve got to set up a nexus. You have to set up a business entity here where you exist, with an address, you have a registered agent, somebody where you can be served and you’re held accountable. There is no accountability at this point. You can false advertise; you can sell a crappy product. You can sell a knockoff product. You can sell an unsafe product and what’s the recourse? Almost nothing. Sure, your account goes down. But who gives a rip? We know the black hat side of things. There’s, there’s software out there. They just they advertise it. Hey, we’ve got great software that’ll help you manage your flood of seller, seller accounts. And it’s so hard because you’re logging in and sometimes you get blocked. Yeah, cause you’re not supposed. I mean, how many times have we heard stories of people like setting up, just can I set up a second account because I have two entities and Amazon like cuts them both off because they’re like you’re doing something nefarious.
Kevin King:
They have hundreds of accounts and two or three of them they keep clean and the rest of them they do all their stuff on. They don’t care if it gets shut down. So they’ll launch a new product with, they’ll send a thousand units in and they’ll put 20 units in each of these accounts that are going to do some black hat, crazy stuff, and then they’ll keep the clean account, will have a hundred units in it and then they know that those to get it launched they’ll do whatever they got to do on those back bad ones and they’ll get them shut down and then they’ll just the last man standing is the clean one and it stays and it rides the wave of all the bad stuff. But you’re talking about too on the IP side. I had a podcast about a year ago or so with a couple that was in the process. This is like 2021, I believe. Their process is selling their business to Thrasio and it was closing day and the day that the money was going to get transferred four million or something like that was going to get transferred to their account and they had gone on and they were selling a kind of generic product. They had gone on Alibaba and found one of these iPhone charging stands kind of things and it would charge like six different iOS devices at once or something, and they were selling that and doing very, very well.
Kevin King:
And they had one big competitor that was also based in New Jersey, but what he ended up doing is they both were manufacturing at the same factory. He got together with the factory and they actually filed IP on the product in China and in the US, which then blocked the other guys, the top seller, this couple from actually being able to place orders or bring it in or sell it on Amazon. So, the day that the closing was happening, their listing went down for an IP violation the day the money was supposed to be transferred. They then went back and reached out to the guy and went through all the channels and luckily they were able to get a hold of the guy and they just took the approach of like look, we’re just a small family. You know you’re kind of messing with this, why don’t you do this? He’s like well, I need protection. Uh, it’s an American guy, um that, or someone based in America that did it to him in conjunction with the factory, and in the end he ended up negotiating with this guy to get him to release it, and the only way the guy would do it was if in the contract they put that this guy was a Muslim and they put that if, as long as when he went before Allah on judgment day, that this wouldn’t be held against him, and they had to actually write that into the contract. The lawyer’s like this has no legal binding, but okay, we’ll put it there anyway. And then he released it and actually-
Chris:
That’s fascinating.
Kevin King:
Yeah, it took him about six months and then he just he released it and actually, yeah, it took him about six months and then the deal went through. But it’s, it’s crazy what goes on out there and the stories that you don’t hear and the things that people are fighting. And I believe Amazon, like you said. You know, when we first started it was easy. Just go find something, slap your name on it and sell it. Now you have to have that differentiation, you have to have that IP, you have to have that real, true brand and you have to go way beyond, because everything else is just short-lived. You might have a product that’s going to. The window is even shorter now and, especially with AI, you can get stuff to market. If you come out with something. Everybody’s got a Helium 10, everybody’s got all these tools. Everybody’s got the data. You can see what’s working. You can jump on something, and the Chinese especially will do that and they’ll be out in a week or two weeks drop shipping, like you said. But the de minimis thing definitely is going to help someone on that. But I think it’s going to be an ongoing battle and it’s almost like we need to have you know, everybody’s talks about ACOS and TACOS and all these things for your PPC.
Kevin King:
Maybe a AMZ watchdog needs to start something called a COP, the cop for counterfeit operation protection or something like that, I don’t know. Come up with some sort of name that’s COP.
Chris:
Love your brain. Yeah, that’s a great point.
Kevin King:
Is to actually to monitor. You know what’s your COP number. It needs to be 5%. I don’t know that’s your target COP number. So, what’s 5% of COP? I’m just making this up off the top of my head. That’s 5% of your sales or of your bottom line, of your contribution margin needs to go to protection and you just need to plan on. This is a cost. That is just a cost of doing business, like you said, and we’re just going to have to spend that to fight and build that into your margin and build that into your operations and actually do it. And or hire someone like I mean. So how does like your company AMZ Watchdog, how does that work? So I come to you, or most people come into you when they have a problem and you’re like going and fixing the problem, or they come into you beforehand going okay, I’m coming out with this new, uh, new iron or whatever. Um uh, that’s a robotic iron that irons your shirts and jumps around from room to room in your house. I don’t know some crazy stuff. I got my IP on it. I’m about to launch it on Amazon. I’m going to hire you now. You just guys keep a watch and if something pops up, you go knock them down. I don’t want to mess with it. Or is it more of a? I’ve got a problem. Help me solve it.
Chris:
Yeah, great question, yes, so any of those things, and it depends on where you are in the process. I mean, that’s the good news when we deal with, we are not lawyers but the law firm we work with. They’ve been doing nothing but IP law since 1989. So, these dudes are they eat, sleep, breathe it, that’s it. So, if you’re early, early days of actually filing patents, they’re great. I have we have no cut of that. There’s no, that’s not, that’s not our business, but that’s what they do. So, they’re a group that understands the Amazon space cause a lot of times, you know, people look at you like you have three heads. When you, even nowadays, when you mentioned e-commerce, it’s still alarming to me, Kevin, people in my family when you know I bought it on Amazon is what they’ll say. And you say you know a third-party seller, you mean no, no, Amazon sold it to me. I’m like, you know, like most of the things sold.
Kevin King:
Most people don’t understand. Yeah, I don’t understand. It’s me and you sitting in our underwear punching something on a computer. Uh, they actually bought it from.
Chris:
That’s exactly right. And I’ve had to school some I mean I won’t give names, but some folks in my family have like sort of proud of like returning stuff being dodgy and like, oh, I just sent them, you know, an empty box. I’m like dude, that’s me, that’s my business. Like you don’t understand how many of these are small companies. These are. This is a great American story, truly, or Chinese, as it were, in some cases. So, we help at all aspects because the IP side of the house, the patent side of the house, early that the law firm can help with that. Other parts, if a lot of times I’ve got a problem and it’s reached critical mass, great, bring us in. Another part of what we do is we’ve seen some people say, look, a brand says I can’t do it anymore because it used to be. I mean, and again we’re getting up there in age manufacturers manufactured, distributors, distributed, retailers, retailed, sold stuff, that’s it pretty flat, everybody got that deal.
Chris:
So the margins are shrinking more and more now so much more of manufacturers are just kind of selling direct. But what does sell direct actually mean? Okay, great, I’m selling direct, but I’m selling on Amazon.com, I’m selling on my DTC site, I’m selling on Walmart.com, I’m selling on HomeDepot.com, I’m selling on Lowe’s.com, which are completely and fundamentally different from Home Depot and Lowe’s the retail side of the house and I’m managing all of my retail channels and I’m managing my distribution manufacturing. They’re like dude, I can’t do this anymore. So we’re helping brands from when they say I can’t run Amazon anymore, we’ll do a full wholesale agency where we’ll run their Amazon side of the house for them. So, people are coming to us early or even late in their life cycle saying I don’t even want to deal with it. I mean, Easy Outlet’s a good example. I don’t want to deal with it. Amazon is just overwhelming. I dipped my toe in the water and I was immediately just punched and dragged down to the sharks and I was like, wow, that was a lot. You guys, you do that. I’m going to go invent more stuff, cool.
Chris:
Or we’ve been at this Cody’s brand. He’s been at retail and doing tens of millions. He’s done hundreds of millions of dollars at this point saying can’t get traction, man, can you help here? So, we really run the gamut on on helping somebody out. If we can’t help you, I can’t help you. I know a lot of folks in my network, Kevin King included, and otherwise I can say, look, I don’t know what you know, I don’t know if I can help you here, but we’ve been at this long enough. There’s a great set of resources phenomenal in the Amazon world. I know somebody that knows somebody that’s going to be able to help you out there. So, the resources are there. I’m still super bullish on the Amazon side of the house. Regardless of where you are, what problem you’ve got, fight for it. Do everything you can on the front end. If you say I tried everything, ask the questions. Reach out to us. Reach out to somebody else and say, look, take this problem and look at it in a couple of different ways, look at a couple other angles. Where else could I defend this? Where else could I put a moat around it? What else can I do to change this or what could I add to it to make it that much more competitive? That’s not so ubiquitous in this space and, you know, I think that’s going to give you a competitive advantage because the dollars are huge that are out there right now.
Kevin King:
You see most of this, these issues, coming out of China, or do you see it also stuff that’s made in Turkey or Mexico or Columbia or Vietnam or something? Or is it primarily coming in China, because in China it’s a cultural thing or this is no big deal for them to do this?
Chris:
Yeah, that’s a great question.
Kevin King:
I think it’s 1.3 billion people and they’re all just so hyper-competitive to try to get ahead. They’ll do whatever and they don’t really see it as cheating.
Chris:
It tends to be mostly China for the reason you mentioned it. Have you heard of the phenomenon tall poppy syndrome?
Kevin King:
No.
Chris:
So, I think it’s known. I’ve heard it a lot in New Zealand, Australia. I saw it a lot in Singapore. So, the idea that why is America so full of like those innovators, the Steve jobs, why is all coming kind of kind of from the US? Early in the conversation you mentioned that, like we’re really good from the just start up, like I don’t give a rip, just bootstrap this thing. Like yeah, I’ll tell you, I’ll start a company. Sure, a lot of cultures around the world are like are you out of your mind? Like no, you can’t do that. When I was doing a lot of work in Singapore, that idea of like you, there’s no failure there. Like if I start something, I need to make sure I’m gonna see this through and I cannot fail. So, when people do stick their neck out or get a little bit taller, little tall poppy syndrome, you kind of like hacked down where like no, no, everybody’s got to be here, cool, like we don’t want that whole. Hey, look at me, I’m like I’m driving a better car and I’ve got a cool company and I’m like I’m going to push the envelope here a little bit. People like whoa sailor, why don’t we just slow down a little bit? So that sort of cultural zeitgeist is the thing that goes on with a number of countries. China tends to, and this is very broadly speaking, as you said, in multiple billions of people, the culture tends to be I’m going to win at all costs, I don’t give a rip. So it’s a bit of a sliding scale of, in fact, to your point, it’s not even seen as cheating. If you find another way to do something, hey, awesome, pat you on the back like good on you. Even like you know companies within China, that’s just what they do, like hey, cool, awesome, high five. That’s just the way it works.
Chris:
So that’s a main reason. I think two big things. A lot of stuff is culturally there’s a difference and a lot of the manufacturing is right there. So the human part of me says I get it, Kevin, because you’re in a factory and you see these products. You know you said it exactly right. I mean, we’re in a great Helium 10 podcast. Right, for relatively short money, that plant can hop on and go on Amazon and go. They’re selling how much like wait what I’m going for scraps here in my country and I’ve got a dude that’s out there selling $150,000 in revenue per month from this product. I’m sure he’s going to find a way to knock this thing off and sell my own. I get that. The capitalist in me is like hell, yeah. So that now, unfortunately, has been exacerbated because Amazon has made it too easy. There’s no good stop gaps there. I don’t think. I think Amazon has done a really good job of building an amazing platform, but it’s kind of gone off the rails because it’s too damn easy to cheat, it’s too damn easy to obfuscate what’s really going on and there’s no checks or balances there. Hey, this thing’s a million lumens. Cool story, bro. Like there’s guys out there doing stuff with just blatant lies, with crappy products. They’re doing two $300,000 per month on that product and revenue.
Kevin King:
Yeah, the Chinese are leery of each other too. I mean, you go to a Canton fair you’ve been to Canton fair and the. You go, look at the booths. The good stuff is not in the booth, not up on the wall or on the shelves in the booth. The good stuff it’s under the counter or it’s back at the factory, cause they’re like no way am I bringing this, this out here, cause I’ll just get knocked off by the other booths. So, it’s prevalent and-
Chris:
When you go to trade shows in the US, you just don’t see this. How many times it’s very rare you see no photos, don’t take any photos, like you, just don’t have that problem. You go. How many times are people like you can’t take any photos here? What, like? Because you’re exactly right. Like, hey, man, there’s something innovative. I’m going to, I’m going to take this thing, I’m going to rip it off as a negative connotation, but at the end of the day, that’s really what’s going on. Like I, there’s somebody with an edge. I mean, remember the story, remember the, the course you do. But those standup scooter things, what were those things called-
Kevin King:
Hoverboard, hoverboards.
Chris:
Hoverboard yeah. Mark Cuban got involved in that one for a while. Like that got out of control and so huge, so quickly. No one actually knew who owned the original patent for this thing because it went so fast and was ripped off so many times. It just became just sort of like kind of everybody. It became like public domain instantly. Someone actually invented that thing and that’s a pretty badass little-
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Chris:
Old disclosure. I think it’s the technology from a guy kind of near and dear to my heart. I live in New Hampshire. Manchester, New Hampshire is where Dean Kamen is his name. He’s a really huge inventor, but he made the segue. So that’s basically, at the end of the day, that gyroscopic kind of tech. I think that’s probably his tech. At the end of the day, he probably could have been like bro, I, you know, I built that thing, but China takes it and figures out how to knock that thing. But that thing was knocked off so quickly. It was amazing to see how fast and how rapidly. You’re right. So the Chinese are kind of knocking each other off. I get it, you. You had mentioned something earlier. Um, we’re seeing unbelievable success and another thing people can do um, as a, where else do you go? Amazon is a great channel, for sure, but we are seeing and people roll their eyes a little bit, but do not sleep on TikTok, and I know that’s kind of in favor, out of favor. Is that thing even going to exist in a few years? Personally, I think there’s no way that can go anywhere. Someone’s just going to acquire. It might be Amazon wink, wink. That’s kind of my that. That’s the horse I’m backing.
Chris:
But we’re seeing brands launching and getting traction on TikTok. Incredibly, that helps bolster the Amazon sales, does expand the possibility of kind of knockoffs and that kind of stuff. But it’s a really amazing way to expand your offering, to generate some more sales, to generate some more profit so you can have some extra dollars as that war chest for as you so kindly gave me a tip of cop of that protection part of your war chest because, yeah, you’re going to have to defend some stuff and I think this feels a little bit like older school manufacturing and older school tech. I mean, people used to have to worry about people are going to knock my stuff off. Early on, it wasn’t as big a deal. You didn’t have the downward pressure of China. China was happy to manufacture that stuff. But they woke up and I understand it. Just as I mentioned, I can say man, we’re setting a million units of this thing every few years over to the U S. How much are they making on this stuff? Someone’s like dude, we can’t just keep making $2 a unit. They’re making, you know, $10 per margin on this thing. So the incentive is there.
Chris:
So TikTok, we’ve seen crazy, crazy, crazy results. We’re helping brands launch their, last success story, we had 160% growth on of the brand. This is not like I went from $10 to you know, 16 or 20 or a hundred bucks. These are established brands that are doing multiple millions per year increase six figures on a monthly basis, just on launching on the TikTok space. So I think that’s another avenue that you can take that is Amazon adjacent, because you can launch it over there and you can send them a TikTok shop. Or you just mentioned it, people still use Amazon as a search. It’s kind of like a Google thing. Well, I’m gonna go see if it’s on Amazon. The splash there is unbelievably big. So that’s another way to not have to deal with a PPC machine or get yourself kind of launched. I’m bullish on that idea where you can launch and get some traction, get some sales, get some proof, send them over to the Amazon side of the house and that’s kind of it’s not free, but it’s pretty inexpensive, relatively speaking, to get massive sales. Then you get some extra dollars, you get your boots on the ground, then you’ve got some money to defend your uh, your product.
Kevin King:
So what’s it cost me to defend if I can’t defend a product? Is it based on? Is an hourly rate, is it a flat fee, is it a percentage or something? What? So when I come to AMZ Watchdog and I hey, I got this, uh this, uh this easy plug or whatever, uh, I got a problem. I’m going to knock off 153 knockoffs or whatever, what am I looking at?
Chris:
Yeah, great question. Really, yeah, thanks for asking. I wish I had a really super clear answer. Typically, it’s how big the problem is, right. So we try to keep things relatively inexpensive, and that is relative because I’m a seller. I am a seller first. I cut my teeth on Amazon. I get this game. I know most people are boot strappy and most people are startups. Um, typically you’re in the five to 10K range is where we usually live in what we’re doing. It depends on what you’re doing, though. It depends if someone’s got like 10 people and it’s a relatively easy product. They’ve got a utility patent and it’s a clear, cut and dry knockoff and we can kind of get them out of there using, you know, going through Amazon’s back end, the apex, their, their patent program, that’s. That’s pretty cheap. We do that as low as four or five thousand bucks.
Chris:
If someone says, hey, I’m having a hard time in this space, I’m established I can’t do this like the, the flashlight case that’s in the multiple tens of thousands of dollars. But the upside is, hey, now I can actually launch my product and I can take my brand. That should be doing should be doing two or $3 million a year in that platform, not 300 grand. That’s a different conversation, right, because that becomes literally legal activities and that becomes a federal case, and that’s a whole set of things that go along with that. So usually, though, for somebody starting out, it’s in the, it’s in the thousands of dollars. It’s not a massive, massive, massive spend, but it really depends on what you’re looking to do. It’s so hard because we range from really small startup guys to well-established $20, $30 million retail brands that are riding the struggle bus. So, it’s a broad range, but I wish I could give you a little bit more clear of an answer, but hopefully that-.
Kevin King:
And there’ll be more if you have to go to court or litigation like in some cases, where you actually file a suit. So, there’s additional costs on the lawyer side for that.
Chris:
One note on that, though, and it’s not always guaranteed, but usually there is recourse there, unlike in the Amazon space only if you go through seller central, you can get stuff taken down and the listing kind of goes away, or they have to fix the title. If they’ve stolen your name, they’ve got to fix the title. They’ve got to get new images and not have your stolen images. If you do go the legal route, a lot of times there is dollars that come back from that because you have been damaged and you said look, this is false advertising. There are rules in this country and there are rules that you have to follow and there are penalties if you don’t follow through on that. So the good news is, if you end up having to go the legal route not us cause, we’re not lawyers, but they hand you over to the uh, our legal team that you work with those guys. A lot of times the stuff, that the accounts are taken down, the damages are there. Then there’s a negotiated out, there’s a couple of bucks to come back so you can recover some of the dollars, and a lot of people don’t realize that or have been told oh, it’s not worth fighting, you can’t do that. You absolutely can and you absolutely should do that, because there there’s money to be had, there, you have been damaged, you can’t.
Chris:
Our stance is people can’t keep getting away with this and right now sellers move with impunity and I’m really tired of that. So put your, put your foot down, and if you’ve got that stuff and it’s, you know if you’ve been told before oh, you can’t do it, no, it’s too expensive. Talk to us, reach, reach out. Reach out to somebody, but, but reach out, ask the question, because we have found time and time and time again the legal team is exceptionally good. Stand for what you know, what’s right, to do the right thing. I’m all for capitalism and making money, but do it fairly, like we want to level that playing field. I’m and I’m, look, I’m all for Chinese sellers selling a hell of a lot of good on you. I mean that’s great, but don’t do it unfairly and don’t cheat it and don’t you’re stealing money, you’re stealing money from people and you’re lying. Don’t do that. That’s never cool in any way.
Kevin King:
So, Chris, it’s amzwatchdog.com. Is that correct?
Chris:
You got it.
Kevin King:
Amz like Amazon amzwatchdog.com. Well, hey, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing and glad someone’s out there taking a stand for the sellers and coming at it from a point of view of understanding what the pain feels like as a seller to go through this. So, appreciate you, man, for doing that.
Chris:
I appreciate the time as well and I keep doing the good work out there because you’re an unbelievable resource to the community. It’s great to see that. The newsletter is invaluable to us, for sure. I mean, I don’t care how long I’ve been at this game. Every day I’m like, ooh, that’s cool, that’s some good stuff. So, yeah, we want to put our flag in the ground truly. We want to help out brands. I’m still bullish, just as you are, in the Amazon opportunity. It hasn’t been better, is it tougher? Sure, but there’s things that you can do, fight for it, and we’re glad to be the guys to be out there, kind of taking the slings and arrows but we’re willing to do it because it’s that important to us. So, I appreciate the time.
Kevin King:
No problem.
Kevin King:
Like Chris said, all the big brands are having to devote part of their budget to whack-a-mole because if you’ve got something worth copying and something that’s really good, it’s just part of doing business where people are going to knock you off. There’s certain things you can do, like we discussed, to fight that, but I think you’re going to have to start just building that into your budget. We’re going to have to have a division or a partner, like his company, AMZ Watchdog. That will actually help you protect yourself. I hope you enjoyed this episode and got something from it. We’ll be back again next week with another episode of the AM/PM podcast. In the meantime, remember what you put your focus to is where you will go. What you put your focus to is where you will go and what you will become. We’ll see you again next week. Take care.
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