#302 – Howard Thai, The Professor of Amazon, Spills the Beans
In episode 302 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Howard discuss:
- 01:45 – How Kevin Heard About Howard Thai
- 03:05 – How The Elite Seller Society And High-Level Masterminds Started
- 05:00 – Western And Asian Sellers: A Cool Mix Of Philosophies And Techniques
- 07:00 – Is Selling Today Now A Level Playing Field?
- 09:40 – Knowing Your Competitor And How Can You Protect Yourself
- 12:30 – The Difference Between Western And Asian Competitive Cultures
- 15:10 – Product Research Using Helium 10 Xray
- 16:45 – How Can Western Sellers Improve Their Product Sourcing?
- 19:40 – How To Find A Good Sourcing Agent?
- 21:00 – Pakistani Seller’s Advantage Over Chinese Sellers
- 21:35 – Understanding The Massive Pakistan-Based Seller Community
- 24:15 – What About Other Foreign Places Like The Philippines?
- 26:45 – What Is A Good Salary For Amazon VAs
- 27:40 – Renting A Castle In Paris For A Mastermind Event
- 28:15 – Howard Thai’s Backstory And How He Got Started In E-commerce
- 31:30 – Being A 9-Figure Seller And The Hoverboard Story
- 35:12 – What Motivated Howard To Stop Selling And Just Start Teaching
- 37:45 – There’s So Much More Knowledge That Amazon Sellers Don’t Know
- 39:45 – Building True Brands Outside Amazon Matters
- 40:00 – What Is Signalytics And How Do They Help Sellers?
- 41:45 – Howard’s View On Where E-commerce And Amazon Selling Is Going
- 43:00 – You Need To Diversify More In This New Age Of E-commerce
- 43:40 – The Rats Story By Howard Thai And Kevin King
- 44:50 – The Haunted Room Story
- 51:00 – This Golden Nugget Tip Of The Week
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 302 of the AM/PM Podcast. In this episode, I speak with the professor of Amazon, Howard Thai, we talk about some of the crazy tactics and things that were going on a few years ago, and some of the differences between Asian-based sellers and Western-based sellers. Plus, we talk about how you need to really think about your business differently now as an Amazon seller or an e-commerce seller, and some really cool things about some stuff that’s happening over in Pakistan. This is gonna be a great one. Enjoy.
Kevin King:
The professor of Amazon, Howard Thai, how are you doing man? Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast.
Howard:
Thank you, Kevin, for having me on.
Kevin King:
So Howard, why did people call you the professor of Amazon? I see all your Facebook posts and all your, emails and everything out there and that’s kind of how you’ve become known. Where did that come from?
Howard:
As actually in like 2017 ish, when I was in China, Zhongnan university, I was kind of teaching some courses to the university, just a couple of courses and talking about Amazon and e-commerce in the US. And that’s where I guess the professor came out from.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I remember when I first learned about you, I think it was from Leo. Leo was at I think it was like a ManyChat conference or something like that here in Austin. And we were at dinner and he is like, oh, have you heard about this mastermind that’s going on in Vegas? This guy from China, this like professor of Amazon guy is coming over and like, and bringing all these people and it’s gonna be this advanced level stuff. I was like, how do I get into that? How can I go to that? He’s like, I don’t know. It’s like an invitation only. And you gotta fill out this form and all this stuff. I’m like, well, well hook me up. And then I remember reaching out to you. And I was like, who’s this professor guy?
Kevin King:
And reached out to you. And then you said, yeah, yeah, come on, come on. I think there are a few people that were like, no, don’t let Kevin come. We’re gonna have be sharing a bunch of secrets. He’s teaching a course with his I think back then it was called Illuminati and now it’s called Helium 10 Elite. He might share some of those secrets in there, but you’re like, Nah, dude, come on out, here’s the bank account, send me some money for your ticket and then come on out. And I remember we went to this mansion in Vegas and it was cool. You had a good little group of people there, some very advanced, some huge sellers, like sellers doing like a hundred million plus. And just, you brought in a couple of guys from China and a few people from the US were speaking and it was just some really high-level stuff. So that’s kind of what you’re known for really is these high-level masterminds, these elite groups, you have the elite seller society that you do. So how did that come to be, really?
Howard:
Well, it was, I think it was like 2018 when I first had my first mastermind. Not a lot of people knew about it, but it was actually based in Shangri-La, Shenzhen, Fujian district. So we had announced, like we’re gonna have a private mastermind with about–, we’re gonna have groups coming from all over the world to come and talk, but the majority is, will have like Chinese sellers too, and, and Western sellers, right. Because it was never done before. So it was always about like Black Box, how China works. My goal is always, how do you bring like both sides together, you know, skills and the whole entire different kind of ranking, different kind of techniques to one place. So that’s where we had all these people from China come over high level. I mean, advanced people. And then we had also had like people from all the world, we had like Israel, we had India, we had like US, we had everywhere, everyone from everywhere coming
Kevin King:
Over. Yeah. I remember now it’s jogging me what you said. That was the first event because I remember I was at somewhere else and a couple of other people, then I know in the space said, Hey, we just, we were over there in China for maybe they’re there for global sources or they’re there for some other thing. And then you are having your deal and they went to it and they thought, man, this was like, incredible. Afterward, we sat in this room with this, this guy who was just like doing crazy numbers on Amazon. They’re doing all this like black hat type of stuff, all this crazy stuff back then that was going on, and this wasn’t at your event. This was like, you know, out at a, another restaurant or something. They like, yeah, this guy took us to this place and showed us this whole phone bank of stuff.
Kevin King:
Like all these things, that crazy thing, you know, Amazon, I mean like the wall street journal and some others have since done stories on it, but it was some crazy, crazy stuff that was going on. So like you said, the Western people were good at marketing and good at building listings and all that kind of stuff. And the people from Asia were really good at figuring out how to kind of manipulate the algorithm and the system and stuff. And the two sides kind of wanted to know what each other was doing and wanted to learn. And it was a really, really cool mix of philosophies and techniques that came together.
Howard:
Correct. Currently right now and, and before the Chinese are really good with strategic and actually analytical and very, very detailed in origin on exactly how to rank products. When you’re talking about conversion and everything it, on my first mastermind, we already talked about that, way before anyone really talked about conversion rate, you know, in order for you to get your products up. So we tactics, like a lightning deal, best deal, how to rank those deals onto the deals page, that’s something that no one really knew about in the Western world.
Kevin King:
And these guys said these guys in China had figured it out. I mean, through trial and error through sometimes access to different kinds of information, they had figured out this is exactly what you gotta do. And this is exactly how the system works. And they had really broken down the A9 algorithm. Like if you do this and you do this and you do this, it’s gonna rank, it was very insightful stuff. And there was a lot of gamesmanship going on back then, you know, that, that kind of thing, it still happens in place to place today, but it’s way, way less than what it used to be. And Amazon’s cracked down. You know, there was, there was people at one time, you know, inside information coming out of Amazon and India and China and other places and there was all kinds of you know, the search, find, buy stuff they’ve cracked down on, some of the other ranking techniques they’ve cracked down on. So now would you say it’s more of a level playing field or from what you know, or what you’ve seen out there is, there’s still a lot of differences in between the way a Chinese seller approaches selling on Amazon and a Western seller does?
Howard:
So currently let’s say first let’s go back and talk about the China side right now, what they’re currently doing because the most recent like where all these big sellers got suspended for review and manipulation or other things where you talk about the biggest sellers out there on Amazon got suspended and they’re account is gone. Okay. their brands are gone. So China started to understand this is not the right way to do business because it’s not sustainable. So what they’re doing right now is really clean. They’re like really clean. They’re looking into external traffic, and they’re also looking at Shopify, and other venues instead of Amazon. They’re not putting all their eggs in one basket anymore. So this is what they’re doing. So I would say, I can tell they are doing really good on TikTok right now. They’re doing really good on advertising on TikTok. So go come back. Yeah, it’s different now in the China side, when they’re doing
Kevin King:
Amazon, what are some of the most shocking things that you could reveal that were going on a few years ago, maybe that there was like, holy cow, that they’re able to do this or do that. What are most of it doesn’t exist anymore, but what would you say are some of the things that really were kind of eye-opening?
Howard:
I would say probably when you were saying about ranking, you know, Chinese are able to–, they’re very mathematical and they know a lot of those algorithms, how it works. So with knowing all that, they would try to kinda rank products without even having too many purchases at all. You’ll see them going up in the first page of Amazon without even having to even have any sales or even, even reviews for the matter.
Kevin King:
Yeah. They had figured out like add to carts and they were doing like wishlist stuff and they were doing like, you know, like the little heat map things, and there was brushing that was going on. There’s all kinds of crazy stuff that was going on that Amazon really is, is cracked down on. And it gave them a competitive advantage at one point. That’s why a lot of Western people were curious, like, what the heck is going on? Not that they wanted to do that. And most of them didn’t do that, but they wanted to know what was going on. What are they up against? Where are they competing against? And so I think that’s why a lot of Western people were like, Hey I wanna know this stuff, how hard is it gonna be for me to, to beat someone that’s maybe playing by a different set of rules,
Howard:
Correct. That’s probably the reason why so many people go to the mastermind that I had from the very beginning because they wanna understand why these Chinese sellers are like having an edge and want. And also, I believe it was mainly because maybe they were getting attacked or something and how we were able to make sure that what was needed in order to protect yourself. That was mainly what we were teaching during those masterminds. So you don’t want that you have your business from like eight to nine figures and then all of a sudden become nothing based on people getting attacking you and stuff.
Kevin King:
Yeah. That’s one of the things that I was most curious about because, you know, there, there were sellers based in Asia that were actually targeting accounts and like, you know, changing out the pictures, they were somehow being able to go in and change out the main photo from a resist, I remember one there’s one that was resistance bands. And they would change out the main photo to like a pornographic picture or something like that. And immediately get a listing suspended you know, it’s their top competitor. And they were able to do all kinds of crazy stuff. So when I went to one of your events, I was like, I need to know how the heck are they doing this? And how do I prevent it? Exactly. Like you just said, the answer was you need to get your own first-party account, a vendor central account.
Kevin King:
And if you have that, if you do this, this and this, you can protect against that. And that was what was important to me is because once on Amazon, once you hit a certain level of sales, you become a target by a lot of people, not just people from Asia, but people all over, you know, your competitors get jealous, they wanna take you down right before Prime Day. They wanna do, you know, crazy, crazy stuff. And you need to know how to protect yourself. There’s so much money that’s flowing on Amazon. It attracts good people and some of the worst of society as well. And so you have to know how to play, be offensive and be defensive. And that was what, one of the things that you were teaching is, look, this is how to be defensive. Not, you shouldn’t be doing this stuff cuz you, you could put yourself at risk, but you need to be defensive and this is how to defend against it, which was really, really cool and what I really enjoyed.
Howard:
Yeah. Like I always tell people like if you want to be understand to how to do computer security, you have to understand what the hackers are doing in order for YouTube, like maybe build software in order to detect malware or other things like that. So it’s really important to understand the basics of the principle, and how these attacks are getting done. I mean, honestly, it’s not all about China attacking this worldwide. Everyone’s attacking, not just China, you’ve got India, you got Israel, you got UK, you got like Germany, you got Russia and especially in the US, US if you talk about it, US, China doesn’t even sound in the US where supplements, but they’re just getting attacked, left and right in the supplements based, based on actually probably the US people or US against US.
Kevin King:
What do you think the difference is in sellers from Asia versus Western sellers? I mean, not so much in the Black Hat or the tactics, but just in general, the mindsets, because I remember going to events and this is pre-COVID, so I’m sure these aren’t happening now, but maybe they are. But I went to the event and it’s a Sunday afternoon, it’s like 2000 people in this room in Shenzhen, Amazon-type people, some of ’em were sellers. Some of ’em worked for companies that were selling on Amazon. And there were like tons of these going on. Like every single weekend I mean, the conference in the US, the biggest one is like maybe prosper or selling scale. It’s about to come up, 1500 people and but this was like, and that’s like once or twice a year or something like that on that level, this was like every single weekend. And do they see this as a huge opportunity to get ahead? Is it the competitive nature of the culture? What is it that you see the differences between the two cultures in selling e-commerce?
Howard:
I feel like in China, There’s more of a sharing kind of environment. You see all these events, you see thousands and thousands of people, you know, like just every week you have two or three of these, you know, events all over the country and then you have in the US, you see like like the big sellers, anyone that are big sellers are actually they don’t really have a lot of good employees. It’s usually the seller themselves or the owner themselves are the one that knows the tricks of the trade. So they don’t want to share to even their employees because they’re scared the employees will actually learn this and actually go in and open their own shop and do the same thing. So you see all these big sellers in the US, Western side are always holding onto all the secrets.
Howard:
And also as well as I want to point out, Chinese sellers are very good analytics skills to analyze what is going on. Okay. Analyzing the niche I really great at product selection. They’re great at analyzing why is the ASIN is not doing too good. How do we improve the rank without even having to do too much PPC in a White Hat way? You know, so there’s a lot of ways that they look at things that in very detail I’m talking about in minute detail that the Western sellers don’t really do. So that’s the reason why, if you go head on with exactly what to do, a lot of the Western sellers don’t really know exactly what it is.
Kevin King:
Yeah. That’s one of the reasons like when I’m doing product research on Helium 10 and I’m looking at Xray, it’ll show you what country on there that the sellers are based in, based on the registration with Amazon before, we didn’t really have that information before Amazon made that public as part of a couple of years ago, it was always in Europe in some other countries, but it only came to the US recently. And now when I see that when I’m doing product research if I see that a particular category on page one is more than like 60, 70% sellers based in China, that’s something that gives me a big red flag. I’m like, you know what? These guys have a major competitive advantage. One who knows what kind of techniques they might be doing, or like you just said, they’re analyzing stuff in the most minute detail using custom tools that are only in Chinese, you know, stuff that we don’t even have.
Kevin King:
That’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And they also have a competitive advantage with sourcing. I mean, I know you just recently posted a TikTok video where fellows talking about the disadvantage that American or Western people have in sourcing that there are two different prices. When I go to Latin America I always say when I go into a store, a local little convenience store to buy some water. There’s the gringo price. And there’s the local price. And my price is usually a little bit higher and the same thing happens a lot on Amazon. So the Chinese-based sellers that are over there in China speak the language that has that know the culture that has the connections, they often can get lower prices. And this TikTok video that you just recently shared showed I think the guy was talking could be as much as 30% in some cases if you don’t really know how to do it. So what are some things that Western sellers can do to try to help when it comes to the sourcing side of things?
Howard:
Honestly a lot of Western sellers, try to go directly to the factory. So directly to the factory is great, but there’s still communication. And there’s still kind of a culture barrier like you said before. You know, it’s, it’s one thing that you see in that person. It’s one thing that you go into those maybe KTV or drinking with them and stuff like that. That’s another thing. But then Chinese sellers do all that as well as they speak the language. It’s like, it’s like someone that is not able to speak the same language as you, and you’re trying to communicate, there’s always a barrier, right? So it’s also the way they talk to each other the way that they like to help each other. And it’s like let me help you do this without any string attached, but and then you kind of, then the factory itself will say, okay he offered to help me with this.
Howard:
Now I have to offer to help one more to look good and I will help him even more. So one thing goes another, I’m helping you do this. You’re gonna, I’m gonna try to help you even more and do this. So then you have this kind of like a favorite thing that they do. So it’s kind of like showing face. So in the community so if you want to like, let’s say, get a better price. You just have to drink with them, talk to them, go visit them more often and have a presence in China. Cause a lot of the time, like a lot of westerner can’t even get any terms because they’re not even based in China because there’s no way that they can go after you when you’re in the US and you don’t pay.
Howard:
Let’s just say, if you got terms, how do you do that? They don’t feel safe, but if you’re based in China, you have an office, you have anything that happens. They can actually go over to your office and say, Hey you owe me money. You know? So it’s, it’s a different story in that case. So a lot of people in the Western that are buying products in China don’t have this kind of advantage as well as the culture, as well as going there as often as possible, you go there once a year, maybe global source or some kind of event that you go over to China once a year, they go over often. Like maybe even if you based interested on Jen and your products in such Jen, maybe once a month or more, you know, and drink tea with them, talk to them, how’s your wife, how’s everything, you know? So it breaks down a lot of the upfront thing. So after several a while, you become best friends with the supplier, that’s where it’s gonna lead to. If you’re gonna be a best friend with the supplier, how can you not give them a good price? How can they not give you a good price as a seller? So that’s what we’re looking at. That’s what you see.
Kevin King:
So that’s what you see too. Like a lot of people don’t wanna, Western sellers don’t wanna use a sourcing agent. They’re like, well, I’d have to pay the sourcing agent a commission, or they’re gonna add something to the price. I’d just rather go direct it. But what you don’t realize is a lot of times price, like whether they add a something on top or whether the factory kicks them back, something, it depends on the arrangement you have, it still oftentimes is gonna be better than anything you could get on your own. Even once all those fees are in. Plus you have someone like on the ground there managing it and that can really stay on top of it for you. And that’s what I think a lot of Western sellers just don’t look or they don’t even know how would a Western seller even find a good sourcing agent.
Howard:
There’s a lot of sourcing agents out there. We also do sourcing for big sellers as well. We’re based in China. I have an office in China that does that for a lot of the big sellers as well.
Kevin King:
China was where a lot of–, and Amazon kind of corded this, and they kind of backed off of a little bit, but they were recording sellers from China and factory selling directly to try to get better prices to the consumers on Amazon. And so that’s one of the reasons that a lot of sellers based in China started to sell on Amazon. But one of the things I’m seeing right now is there’s another country that’s actually taking over and that’s Pakistan. It seems like in Pakistan, there’s a Facebook group that has over a million people in this Facebook group that are learning either selling on Amazon learning how to sell on Amazon or they’re being VAs for Amazon sellers. And they have an advantage over the Chinese-based sellers because they speak English. You know, English is one of the languages, the younger generation, at least in Pakistan, because it used to be part of Britain that actually speak some English. So they have an advantage there. What are you seeing? I know your company’s analytics is doing some business with Pakistan. What are you seeing going on right now in Pakistan? And should we be paying attention to either utilizing that as an asset, or as a Western-based seller? Or what should we be considering there when it comes to e-commerce and the Pakistani-based seller community?
Howard:
So within Pakistan, it’s a growing community. It’s if you recently looked at marketplace pulse, they’re the top three of the most sellers in Amazon. So what I can tell you is there are two groups, right? Of like a Facebook group that actually has over 1 million Amazon sellers in, within the community. There’s one that’s called Enablers. That’s the one that the group that is 1.2 million, I believe that is where Bradley Sutton actually went over and they kinda hosted him to speak within the crowd. I think one or two times, I don’t remember. There’s another group that is about 1.1 million sellers in the community. It’s Extreme Commerce it’s by Sunny Ali. So we talk to him and their group a lot, as well as the other Enablers as well.
Howard:
So we know that community and what we do in Pakistan is actually helping the Pakistan people to teach them to sell about Amazon and trying to train them, getting them better at doing Amazon. And because I mean, the government and the country is not doing too good right now because of the inflation, as well as the currency valuing so much, but we’re trying to help the country out and they have the best one of the best Amazon employees out there, I would say because a lot of, it’s hard to find employees that know Amazon and at a good, good price, cuz in the US, everyone that really knows Amazon, like I said, they wanna keep everything to themselves and they’re the owners and you, can’t not hire.
Howard:
It’s hard to hire an owner, an entrepreneur, right? So over there, it’s a lot easier to find talent. And that’s what we do. We do an RPO, which is a recruitment process outsourcing. We help sellers we’re talking about big brands, big congregators out there, and other companies to help them find a good fit. So there’s a lot of talent there, I would say. We have an office there in Pakistan that like sits a lot of our employees that we kind of find for the company that we kind of help train the employees on what they need and what they want. So it’s pretty a good environment to find people over there
Kevin King:
In the past. A lot of Amazon sellers have used the Philippines and some cases, India for programming and stuff. But in a lot of cases it’s been the Philippines is where they’ve gone for VAs because the Filipino people where they’re hard-working, they’re fairly loyal. They speak English. Do you think that Pakistan is gonna has overcome or has it overtaken the Philippines as the go-to spot now for good quality, well-trained VAs for your business?
Howard:
Don’t get me wrong, the Philippines is great. We actually have employees in the Philippines. We have an office also. We have also in Pakistan and also China and also the US. So they’re great at communication. Like you’re talking about like emails, you’re talking about like on phone calls, like those call centers, you know they’re great at that communication-wise, India is great with tech like developers, IT, very technical, but in Pakistan, it’s more on the analytic and marketing side, you’ll see a lot of, so they’re different skill set in different countries. It’s not like Pakistan is good at everything, but I would say that what we are looking for as an Amazon seller to find talent, to help you grow that Pakistan is they have what we want, analytics people, brand managers, PPC people, really good people out there.
Kevin King:
And by Western standards, they work fairly inexpensively because I, I think the average wage in, in Pakistan’s like somewhere $400 or $500 a month, something like that. So if they can make a little bit more than that, where they’re selling on Amazon or actually, being a VA and helping somebody out in that as they’re learning as well and make more than that, they’re super eager and super hardworking and want to really help themselves and their family. Is that what you’re seeing?
Howard:
Yeah, of course, they’re very excited they want to learn, and they want to also support their family. If you wanna find like talent, a really good people in Pakistan. We don’t suggest trying to lowball at 400-600 dollars. We do pay pretty well when we hire because we want to keep them as well as make them don’t have to worry about too much on them trying to survive. So if you’re looking for a good person, it’s gonna be a level more than 400-600 dollars.
Kevin King:
So what would be a good person’s salary? If I came to your company and said, Hey, help me find a VA in the Philippines what should I expect to pay?
Howard:
So depending on the arrangement, but let me tell you like for us when we come in, we pay at least $800 for like a entry-level brand manager for a team leader or something like that, we would pay up to like $1300 for someone that would lead a team, that those are just the basic how much we pay. We pay more than the industry standard, but we just make sure that we keep them long term.
Kevin King:
Cool. And now your background, I mean, before, right now, you have a service-based company that helped called Signalytics do AI that helps sellers. I’ll let you talk about that. You’re doing this thing in Pakistan, but before all that you and you also, you do these big events, you just did one a few months ago in Paris that I went to, Howard ran this castle on the outside of Paris and had all these top sellers come for this like a three or four-day mastermind there. That was really, really cool. So you’re doing that kind of stuff, but before all of this, you actually were a seller. So you sold back we’re back in the hoverboard days or something like that, right? Where you kind of got caught up in that mess. Can you tell us that little story about, and I’ve seen pictures where you had a huge warehouse, like in LA, like, you know, you were driving around on a forklift or something like that, or some crazy pic, I can’t remember what it was some crazy picture? Can you tell us a little bit about the back story of the professor before he started doing all this, helping other sellers that you were a seller yourself?
Howard:
So, yeah, I started selling online in 2003, right after college computer science. And I didn’t know what to do with all my books and the software that I had from school. So UC San Diego. And then I thought about, Hey, this sell on eBay. So I was selling it on eBay and it, so it’s really easy. So I was able to like sell a lot of everything that I had that I didn’t want to get rid of because I was graduating and I didn’t need it anymore. So that’s where I started that entrepreneurship with e-commerce. And then after that, I came in and had like a partnership with someone regarding selling ink cartridges. That’s where I started selling on eBay. And later on, we manifest into other countries. We were selling all over the US with all the marketplaces back then, and then we were selling worldwide with all the other marketplaces, like PriceMinister, Rakuten, and Japan.
Howard:
We were selling PriceMinister, in all the different countries back then before anyone could even think about selling multi-international marketplaces. But we were doing really good UK, Amazon, eBay all the ones out there that were doing pretty good volume. Then after that, we started whole selling products out where we have to actually import it in any kind of consolidate. So after that, I thought about it. We, we wanted to like have an office. So I jumped a gun and took my wife, me, and her to Shenzhen China. That’s where we started Amazon in 2009. And then we had an office, we grew the office up to 150 people from China and US warehouse. The warehouse had like maybe 22,000 square feet.
Howard:
We had big racks, forklifts, and everything. And we were packing shipping doing like maybe 23,000 orders a day, I believe so that was the highest point we had 23,000 orders a day selling on different marketplaces. And also it was a peak. That was a peak. So that was really interesting cuz we had to, we were one of the, you know, oldies, right? We had to have a warehouse. We had to have you know marketing and customer service, not like right now, Amazon FBA is so much easier. Now you kinda only focus on marketing mainly, right? Of course purchasing. But you know, marketing is the main thing that you kind of focus on. But before, as a seller, we have to do everything. We had to have a warehouse, we had to ship it out all those headaches.
Kevin King:
So you were like a top 100 seller on Amazon back in the day, right?
Howard:
In all of Amazon, I was probably ranked 35, but I always tell rank top 50, it’s easier than top hundred, but it’s easier saying.
Kevin King:
So what happened with that business? Did you end up selling or did some big disaster strike and you had to move on or what happened with that business?
Howard:
So what happened to that business was that we were doing good. We’re like nine-figure seller, but to a point where in 2000 and I think it was 15 or 16 regarding the hoverboard incident where we were the best seller we were talking about we’re selling a thousand hoverboards on a normal day, right? Maybe 500 pieces of hoverboards in the USside and another 500 pieces in the rest of the world on Amazon or eBay or whatever marketplace that we’re selling on. Even I think it was NewEgg. We were selling on NewEgg and at the time so we were doing really good, but eventually, we were doing so much that no container is coming in. When you on Amazon, when you do stuff, you roll with it, right? The more sales you have, the more inventory you need to buy and then it just keeps on rolling.
Howard:
You try to roll over and everything. So it grows more and more. And were a point where when the disaster of people trying to make a lot of money on, on the hover reports, they had the cheap quality products, which led to explosion and everyone, the government started like cracking down saying that you cannot import the dangerous goods anymore. So that’s where you get like boatloads of hoverboards. Weren’t able to come into the country. And we were, and having Amazon at the time they actually stopped everyone from selling. It told everyone that bought before too return it there without any problems. And in Europe itself, they told everyone to just throw it away. And then they just without saying not all hoverboards are bad, they don’t, you know, some people had a different quality, right?
Howard:
So we had all, we were strict on quality control. We had to test everything before we shipped it out. But a lot of people just had really cheap wiring and also the battery was really cheap in order to make more profit. That’s where it hit us the most. We had so much getting made at the time in the factories. And we had so much that was shipping out to the customer. And we had so much money that was sold already. Everything that was sold was a lot of ’em was returned back, open boxed used and everything that was flying over there, couldn’t get to the end-user or couldn’t sell anymore. And we had like factories making so much more that we couldn’t even send it out anymore. So it went to like, it was like a standstill where all these inventories weren’t able to get out and I got returned a lot. So that’s where we actually did really bad where we lost a lot. So then from there on my wife was really sad, because we had to like sell a couple of properties and in order for us to be able to float the boat, you call it.
Kevin King:
So then you just, with that big hit, that’s, that’s a major hit with all those losses of stuff that’s deposited are made to the factory inventory. You can’t sell, getting hit, all hit with all these fees coming back out of your account for all the returns and stuff. So that did you just so you had to dig into your own pocket to help cover payroll and help cover a few things. And at that time, did you just say, okay we’ll just wind this thing down and move in a different direction?
Howard:
Yeah. Then I said, okay I’m getting, getting older now. I can’t take this kind of risk much. I’m like 44. So I have to like kinda make sure my wife doesn’t get stressed out anymore. Cause when you sell on eBay, you sell on Amazon, you get, you get kind of like stressed out a lot because of you might get your account suspended any time you dunno when. But for me, it’s okay. I can handle it because I’ve seen it so much that it doesn’t really affect me too much, but I can’t, I can’t really stand it when my wife gets stressed out. That’s the only thing that I can’t handle because you know, she, how can I affect her life? You know, it’s okay if I can affect my life, but then if it affects her life and then she’s sad and I feel bad. So I stopped what we were doing, which is selling, and started doing this thing that was teaching like professoring out there.
Kevin King:
How do you see that going in the future? There’s, there are tons of courses out there now there’s tons of masterminds and events. How do you stand out? How do you make sure that you can continue doing that? I mean, I have the same issue with the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, you’ve been to quite a few of those. I’m gonna see you here again. And next week at the Billion Dollar Seller Summits, what is the, you see, as the challenge there in teaching, there are so many YouTube videos, there are so many things that it’s old information, there’s new information. There are a lot of people trying to do high level and low level. How do you carve out something in that space that you can sustain?
Howard:
I mean, so we actually had before, when we were doing masterminds, it was four times a month a year. So every quarter we had one, but we had less and less because it was a lot more work for the masterminds. But in reality, I wanted to focus more on the business itself, Signalytics. So that’s why we had less, but there is a lot of like stuff that we don’t know as e-commerce, right? We only know the Amazon side, a lot of the sellers only know Amazon side. They don’t know about the other, like Shopify, how do they get traffic? How do you get you know, internet marketing or affiliate marketing, all those other marketing styles? We’re still just touching the edge of e-commerce. There’s so much social commerce. There’s, there’s so much stuff that we don’t know as Amazon sellers that we can actually teach. Like I’m breaching the gap between Shopify sellers and Amazon sellers so that they could actually learn from each other. You know, this is another thing that we were having. We can start going towards as if, as instructors as in you know, trainers, because there’s a lot that we don’t know.
Kevin King:
I agree with that. I think, you know, there there’s been a focus on Amazon-centric selling and why worry about selling anywhere else? Amazon’s got all the eyeballs. You can make enough money on Amazon and you can, and even the aggregators have kind of shifted. At one point, they were only buying Amazon-based businesses. They didn’t really care if you had Shopify or anything. And then there are other people there saying, well, it’s great to expand to Shopify or to eBay, but Amazon’s still gonna be the bulk of your business. So if your Amazon account gets shut down, like you just said, still gonna be screwed, cuz it’s, it’s so much. And that could be true. But if you go back and listen to last week’s AMPM podcast with June, she’s based in Hong Kong and she’s developed a company called Catalyst® that does iPhone cases and they’re crushing it with their iPhone cases.
Kevin King:
And her sales are 50% Amazon and 50% off Amazon. But one of the interesting things that she said is Amazon. They don’t do a whole, they don’t do really much PPC on Amazon. They don’t, they’re not gonna be on page one for the results because they’re a higher-priced phone case, but they do eight figures a year selling phone cases because of the way they market off of Amazon with their social media, with their TikToks, with their press releases and all the other stuff that they do. And Amazon has just become the shopping cart of choice for some of its customers. And that’s something that I think like what you just said that it’s important for a lot of Amazon sellers and where I think some of the masterminds and stuff are gonna start going to is not just gonna be just Amazon content, but start thinking about more of Amazon as just one main channel and significant channel, but you gotta really build true brands.
Kevin King:
It’s much more difficult as Howard knows. Now, the old days of just go find something on Alibaba or 1688 and stick your logo on it and sell it is much more challenging now. And you really need to learn how to build true brands and, and, and really have a whole marketing system in place. And that’s what Signalytics does. Tell, tell me, you know, you started Signalytics as like it does influencer marketing. It helps you with keyword research what is Signalytics and how do you help sellers?
Howard:
So we’re considered a full stack or full marketing agency where meaning that we do from A to Z, meaning we even help product selection from China. We have a China warehouse. We help their logistics from China, which is a lot cheaper than a lot of average sellers can get we go in and we can even send it to FBA your warehouse as well as we can actually help rank your products. We do it from A to Z, right? To a lot of the sellers. So ranking we go, we do like DSP which is Amazon DSP. We do Amazon PPC. We do media buying. We help you put your products on deal sites. We help you with like SEO listing optimization, we help with images and videos.
Howard:
We help recruit what we talked about before, right? A recruitment process outsourcing fo you. So we do like a, to Z full full-fledged you know, so that’s what Signalytics does. And we, we mainly work with the bank sellers. We’re talking about like Shami or we’re talking about the big aggregators out there and a lot of the big sellers that are within our community as an elite seller society. So we, we do a lot, we just don’t push ourselves out there that much because not everyone can actually use our system because it’s just like there might be too small or whatnot. We’re pretty picky with who we work with. We don’t work with everyone.
Kevin King:
Where do you see this going? Where do you see this? The E-Commerce Amazon thing going a few years from now, what do you see it? How do you see it evolving?
Howard:
So we do have a lot of like Shopify sellers that we’re helping with their Amazon. So it’s gonna be bridging the gap. I see that more of the Shopify people out there are with marketing and maybe Facebook and stuff are coming into Amazon and Amazon people are going into to like Shopify or their own website and stuff like that. So they’re gonna be learning more than just Amazon. I see that Amazon seller needs to start learning new things in order to survive within the Amazon ecosystem because there’s the gap between Amazon and Shopify is getting closer and closer. So you’ll have to know a lot more about social commerce and TikTok and other places where these are called, like real marketing.
Kevin King:
I agree with you. I think it’s, you’re gonna have to be much more, you’re gonna need to know Amazon, and you’re gonna need to be much more rounded in the marketing and all the other marketplaces and diversify out and create true brands. And that’s what Signalytics helps people do is, is really not just be on Amazon business, but, but a true brand that’s out there that can stand the test of time. Whether Amazon goes away or Shopify goes away or whatever, whatever new marketplace or channel shows up you’re prepared and people know you by your name,
Howard:
Correct. Ha having different marketplaces that you’re selling on and different countries and also your website, right? You wanna diversify more in the new age of selling on e-commerce?
Kevin King:
Well, Howard, I really appreciate you coming on to the AM/PM Podcast is been great to have you here. I’m looking forward to seeing you next week at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. It’s gonna be good times have some cigars. You know, sometimes people always ask me, they, they see you post something, you know my plane was delayed headed to Phoenix or something, and you see me make a little post, like, ah, it’s probably the rats chewing on the hydraulics or something. And people are like, what is this thing with rats and Howard and Kevin? So can you tell the people, what is this thing about the rats that I’m always bringing up rats and we have one other story we’ll have to wrap it up with after the rats, but what is it about these rats?
Howard:
Oh, I had this it was my first US mastermind in Las Vegas in Mansion. This guy, right? This guy was sitting next to me all of a sudden, like, say, do you see a rat? I’m like, what do you mean this is like a mansion we’re, there are no rats here. And then he says, yeah, he just saw one. He ran across, across the floor and stuff. I’m like, no way. And I looking around like someone that, that was like, I think that he was for reals, but yeah. And he says, look, look at this muffin. It’s like, it looks like bit, you know, you know, I don’t know. Maybe I think you were there. Right. Kevin, can you maybe you can tell him who that was?
Kevin King:
It might have been me messing with you.
Howard:
This guy, you should tell him about the other one too, as well. The one that you were trying to mess with me.
Kevin King:
Oh yeah. Well that one, that one was actually, wasn’t trying to mess with you on that one. That one just was so Howard I didn’t the first Billion Dollar Seller Summit was in Austin back in 2019, may of 2019 and Howard came out and one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to bring one of his buddies that he knew over in one of the big sellers in China that could come over and kind of just say from a Chinese seller perspective, what they’re doing and stuff. And so this fellow named David came with Howard, from flew in, from China. And he brought an interpreter with him because his English was a little bit broken. We, this hotel that we used was called the Driscoll hotel in Austin. And it turns out that this hotel, it’s really old, it’s a kind of old school, Texas hotel, you know, it’s kind of reminds you of like a hundred years ago, like, you know, big, cowboy-ish kind of over the top place, but it’s got a lot of character to it.
Kevin King:
But one of the things that it’s known for is it’s actually in, on the haunted tours of Austin. That actually one of the stops was when, if you do one of these haunted tours of haunted places, they actually stop there. And what happened is Howard we just assigned rooms at random or whatever. My producer mark did, and Howard got this, got, got this one room. And for some reason, I forget it was your birthday. It was the numbers, or it was bad luck, or what was it? You ended up changing rooms. How did that?
Howard:
Because David, the Chinese seller that I brought over from China to come over to the event to speak, he had my exact birthday, a number, which is July 10th, which was on his little which is key card, which is the room. And he gave me my birthdate.
Kevin King:
So 710. Yeah. So he gave you room. So y’all ended up switching rooms. You were in one room and because he was in room seven, 10, which is July 10th, he gave you that room. And so y’all switched rooms. And then I remember a couple of days later, it was one evening after some of the talks we’re sitting down it’s probably 10, 11 o’clock at night or something maybe later. And a handful of us are sitting down in the lobby, just shooting the. And all of a sudden we see David hauling down the stairs, you know, with this, this wide-eyed look running straight up to the reception desk. And, you know, he’s trying to communicate with the reception desk, but his English, he was having a little bit of difficulty because of his English explaining what was going on.
Kevin King:
And so mark my event producer got up to go make sure he was okay, cuz you know, he’s one of the speakers, one of the VIPs and he gets over there and what had happened is the room that Howard was supposed to originally be in that David now had been voluntarily switched to is actually the room on the haunted tour. And so right outside this room is like a shrine, like a doll and some pictures and stuff. And like a hundred years ago, somebody or a couple of people were actually murdered in this room. And so David was laying in the room trying to go to sleep. And all of a sudden he says that these ghosts were here and tried to start talking to him and he was freaked out. He was completely freaked out. He is like, thank God. They were trying to speak to me in English.
Kevin King:
Thank God. I don’t speak good English. I only speak Chinese. They couldn’t mess with me. But he ran down to the front desk to see about getting changed or what to do to get his stuff out of there. And so it was a pretty funny situation. And, and then Howard was like, well, Kevin, I think you were trying to mess with me again, you know, you did this rat thing you’re trying to mess with. It was just pure coincidence. It might have looked like I was trying to mess with him, but it was just pure coincidence and so it was a funny time. So the next day we actually showed some slides in the early morning presentation for David on how to get a ghost detector off of Amazon there are ghost detectors. You can buy on Amazon and everything, it was a pretty, pretty fun time.
Howard:
I remember that. I still don’t believe you, Kevin, that you didn’t do anything on purpose. I feel like it has to be, it can’t be a coincidence. I wish I was that lucky, I would’ve won the lottery or something like that.
Kevin King:
Well, I promise you there are no rats and there’s no ghost at the Fairmont next week for the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. So I promise you you’ll be safe. We just had some nice cigars ready for you to smoke.
Howard:
I love that. I love those times when we sit around and smoke the, cigars and talk about things, Amazon and good stuff.
Kevin King:
It’s good stuff, man.
Howard:
That’s the best part out of it.
Kevin King:
It is. I mean, that was my favorite thing at your event in Paris is sitting around that campfire till three in the morning, just, you know, talking with people and just hanging out drinking and smoking cigars and just shooting the. You know, that’s my favorite part of these events. Well, Howard, again, I appreciate you coming on, man. It’s been a pleasure. You’re a good guy. I always enjoy hanging out with you. Thanks again and we’ll see you shortly.
Howard:
Thank you for having me here. Thanks, guys.
Kevin King:
I hope you really enjoyed my talk with Howard Thai, the professor of Amazon. I really like doing these for you. Let you be a little fly on the wall and listen to us, and have a little conversation you don’t wanna miss next week’s episode next week is my Billion Dollar Seller Summit that actually starts this Sunday in Austin, Texas the live event. There’s also an option for online. If you, if you’re not able to make the live event, check that out, but I’m gonna be having some nuggets. I’m gonna be asking some of the attendees there to gimme a quick short little one or two-minute nugget of information as they check-in. And I’m gonna be sharing those with you on the podcast. So it should be a lot of action-packed, just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, cool information for Amazon and e-commerce seller.
Kevin King:
So be sure to don’t miss next week’s episode. And also don’t forget to check out the Helium 10 Elite mastermind that we do every month for Helium 10. It’s a monthly training where I come on and I speak and I bring on three additional guests and we do live training. We also do round tables once a month. So be sure to check out Helium 10 Elite as well. And just to leave you with this week’s golden nugget. One of the things that I really believe in is that life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet, not the physical things you buy. Life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet, not the physical things you buy. Because just remember this, you’ll never see a U-Haul behind a Hearst because you can’t take it with you. You’ll never see a U-Haul behind a Hearst because you can’t take it with you. The experiences you have and the people you meet, those last a lifetime physical things. Don’t, we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
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