Jean Kloker is joining us today. And I'm super excited to hear her story and chat to her about all things Amazon online arbitrage. Hi, Jean, lovely to have you here.
I'm excited to hear all about your Amazon journey and online arbitrage business.
So tell us a little bit about you, and how long you've been selling on Amazon. And when you got started and all that sort of stuff.
"I have been in business for myself all of my adult life.
I got a degree in elementary education. And when I did my student teaching, I said to my husband, I would be in trouble every day of the world here. I don't work well for others, with myself there's nowhere to quit.
I started doing Amazon a little over 11 years ago, it's changed so much since.
I mean, it's still kind of the same basic concept. I got involved shortly after Amazon started the third party seller, FBA program where you send your inventory into their warehouses, and they sell it. One of the common things is that people will say, oh, Amazon's trying to get rid of all their third party sellers and, or they're doing this or that, and, and I say, you know, if Amazon wants to get rid of their third party sellers, they're gonna send everybody a letter, say you got 90 days to get your stuff out of our warehouses. We're done.
They don't have to play games, more than 50% of their annual sales come through third party sellers.
I don't know whether Jeff Bezos came up with this himself, or what, but the idea that they have developed this fantastic platform, and then they invited us to sell our products there and be processed, shipped and handled by their warehouse, multiplied the number of items that are available for sale and the revenue tremendously. Some people say, why would they do that? Because they could sell it. Well yeah, but they didn't have to buy any of this stuff."
Absolutely. Right.
"They've had their ups and downs over the years, one of the biggest deals happened about the time of Disney Frozen, they got taken by a bunch of Chinese counterfeiters. Amazon bought a lot of that merchandise and got caught with it. So they sort of overreacted and started dinging everybody, meaning third party sellers, creating blocks and issues that they didn't really need to. But that's been something that you are constantly trying to be on guard against as counterfeit merchandise."
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good thing. Because none of us want that on the platform because it damages everybody's business.
"Exactly, it's challenging. I don't know how they could do it better but sometimes another seller will report you for selling counterfeit merchandise, unfortunately at this moment in time, you're guilty until you can prove yourself innocent, which I don't think is quite fair, but it's just part of being a business.
You got to figure out how to manage the bumps."
I agree with you. It's not not the fairest thing but I guess Amazon say like, it's so important to them and their reputation that, you know, they're gonna just take the hard line on it, aren't they?
"And they do."
Yeah. Do you still have lots of other businesses? Or do you just focus on Amazon now?
"I pretty much focus on Amazon now. The interesting thing, and a good thing about Amazon was that I got involved in going on the road to sell some things. And I really, really like it because I'm a real people person. And I really enjoyed that but it was really costly, but I was able to kind of set my Amazon business on the back burner on simmer. But when I was ready to go back to it, I mean, I never quit. But back to it and focus on it. It's there."
Yeah, absolutely. You must have like a completely open account as well, having sold on there for like, 11 years, you must be ungated in just about absolutely everything there is to be ungated?
"Not everything but a lot of stuff. I'm really not sure of a few things. Sporting goods brands like Northface, Under Armour and New Balance are three brands that I'm like, what's the deal here? But there's enough other stuff, I really realized that new sellers are constantly going, I'm gated in everything! Well, no, you're not. But there's so much that you can sell on this platform, you just need to steer away from the big brands initially.
Build up some account reputation with Amazon and continually reapply. Doesn't take much to click over to the thing and try again. Back in the day, I paid people to set up ungating things for me, but you can get in big trouble for that now.
You have to absolutely do it 100% by the book for sure.
I guess now Amazon, they've got a lot more sellers than they had when you joined 11 years ago. So there's a lot more people trying it on a bit. They are a lot stricter with their processes, like ungating and such like than they used to be.
"My brother said he orders from Amazon all the time. It doesn't matter how much money a person makes, the one thing you can never get more of is time. So ultimately, it's time saving.
After the pandemic, there were many people in the Amazon seller world who were perfectly positioned, they have lots of personal items, health and beauty, things like that already, that was our business. Many people commented, they were doing more than they did in q4 but that wasn't my case. That wasn't the kind of areas I happen to be in, but t it didn't fall apart for me.
Just start slow, go slow, and you don't need to get involved with some guru that's going to charge you thousands of dollars to 'show you the ropes'. Maybe it will help you, but you don't need to do that. I know, personally, people who literally had a couple $100 when they started. That makes a big difference.
There are plenty of people online who are willing to help you answer questions. You will make plenty of mistakes, but just keep going. Kind of go an inch deep and a mile wide, get a feel for what works for you, and what doesn't work for you.
It's a journey. It's definitely a journey. I constantly hear people say 'I'm going to start and I'm going to do private label' Okay, that is not easy, and requires a whole lot more depth and a whole lot more work that anything that I would do. Yeah, I personally am still 100% online arbitrage. I have a team of 4 VA in the Philippines, who give daily lists. Some people would order and have things sent directly to a prep center, they never see it, never touch it, never get a box to their house. Which of course anyone overseas who is going to be selling on amazon.com is going to have to do that. But why not? It's a viable a business plan and it works."
Do you use a prep center? Or do you do your prepping yourself?
"I do not prep myself, but my prep center is my sister who is across the road. She likes doing it, so I pay her to do it. I would encourage people to find someone to help you.
I don't care whether it's Amazon or whatever it is, there are certain things that only you can do. If you have yourself physically tied up with little things that someone else could easily do, then you're not concentrating on the ideas and innovation that are uniquely your responsibility.
My sister and I see totally differently on that, which is how we ended up each having our own Amazon business. She doesn't see any reason why anyone would pay someone to pack boxes and ship, I do."
Very wise words from an extremely experienced seller.
One of the questions I was gonna ask you is what do your neighbours think you do for a living? They know, don't they, because it's your sister?
"That was a biggie in a lot of forums in the early years, people would say all they all try to come up to you with all these questions, and I just told them! I think there was a mentality where you didn't want anyone to know what you do, because then a whole bunch of people will start doing it and that'll be too much.
I realized that even now I cannot wrap my head around the immensity that is the Amazon platform - it's never going to have too many sellers.
This is just the story of entrepreneurship, a lot of people would like to be in business for themselves, but they are not entrepreneurs. It's sort of a gut thing.
The one thing I've learned is that you're going to make mistakes, and the most important one is that you have to be able to solve issues because things are going to come up all the time, they may not be great, but you can't spend an inordinate amount of time and emotional energy on that thing.
You figure out what you're going to do right now, what you're going to do to get around the bumps in the road, and you pivot and go on.
And if you don't, you're just going to be wasting a lot of time and energy that cost you money."
Fantastic.
"Yeah. And those things will happen. You just don't know when you come across it you you take advantage of it until it's not around anymore."
Absolutely. So let me ask you a question. If you could go back in time to your 21 year old self. What advice would you give yourself?
"I have considered that type of thing recently. I'm 65 now and it gets here a lot quicker than you ever imagined. I was married then to the same guy, my husband. I would just say, you know, look ahead and know that it's coming and make decisions accordingly."
Yeah, it goes much quicker than you think.
So let me ask you another question. Would you consider yourself a spender or a saver or an investor? Which one do you think you are?
"I'm a spender.
My husband is a saver. People who are opposites marry all the time. We might need some of that someday, you know? When you're this age, you're kind of going to someday be more of a spender. I don't know if you've ever read a book called The Five Love Languages? Well, it's worth reading, because it helps you understand anybody close to you in your life, we speak love in different ways. And sometimes we're even with our, my spouse, he doesn't speak the same language I speak. You know, his primary love language is words of affirmation. He needs to be affirmed and appreciated verbally. Some people it's quality time."
So if you, if you woke up tomorrow, and someone had put $100,000 in your bank for you to invest, what would you invest in? Would you invest it in Amazon stock? Or would you do something different?
"At this point, my life, I would probably put half of it in our investment accounts. And I would definitely, but I would set up some teams, I would use those some of that funding to set up teams of people to do some of the processes. And that's really, really important. And I'm sure you know that because you guys have teams, you cannot do everything. And do it well."
Absolutely.
"Let's say, you're starting Amazon, first thing you're going to want to do as soon as you feel like you can, is either use a prep center, or hire a trustworthy teenager to do your packing. Yeah, getting things ready to ship.
As you build, then you still need to develop a team of people.
Do you have time? See, this is a reason I developed virtual assistants to do the sourcing, because even though I have to still go through everything on their list myself and decide, does that fit what I want? Does that meet my criteria? So I'm still sourcing, I'm still checking, but at least it's not from scratch. Like I said, at this point, I could spend every dime I had every day, just on the list that I have."
Yeah that's a great position to be in, isn't it? So I guess BuyBotPro helps you with your sourcing?
"Oh, tremendously.
It is a tool that I would not want to be without.
And I have used many, many tools over the last 11 years. There's only one other one that I still use, which I don't need to because of BuyBotPro. You guys keep adding more and more. And I'm always like going, oh, wow. Yes. And I think it's incredibly reasonably priced. I spent a whole lot more money on tools that haven't been nearly as helpful."
We've got a long, long list of features going in yet. We're never gonna stop.
"Once you start using it and you've got a feel for it, it becomes almost automatic.
If occasionally I log into my Amazon account and the BuyBotPro doesn't come up on the right hand side of the page I'm like wait a minute, what's happened? Is that off on the bar at the top or what's going on? Because I feel like I can't move ahead with my sourcing day without it."
Yeah, I'm glad it's such a beneficial tool.
"I'm like to everybody, do you own BuyBotPro?"
I definitely agree with that sentiment. Absolutely.
"That's just my honest feeling about it. I don't know how long, has it been two years?"
Two or three years? Yeah.
What keeps you up at night worrying about your Amazon business, what are the biggest challenges that you think sellers face selling on Amazon?
"Once you get some of this basic stuff in you're just kind of part of an automatic thing where you've been doing it a while, you've been sourcing and you kind of have a handle on how to do it.
The biggest things I think are to me are right now I think of as annoyances and I've never been suspended but are somebody saying that you're violating trademark, or a counterfeit item because I don't know how to prove otherwise. Every piece of information was already on the page and a dozen other people are selling it, I just listed against it. How does that make my item counterfeit?
I suppose people would say their biggest worry is getting suspended. It hasn't happened but sometimes it's kind of random. It feels like it's kind of random. I honestly don't worry a lot about it but if I had a concern that would be it."
Yeah, I think I think having sold in them on Amazon for 11 years I think no one's safe but you know that you've got a reputation with Amazon, you know they're not gonna just quickly accuse you. They're going to at least think about it for a few minutes before they do it.
"Hopefully. Hopefully, you've been doing this all along you know you're playing by the rules and you would hope that would be the case."
You'd hope so. It definitely won't stop them but I would hope it would make them just think about it first.
So you use Profit Protector Pro? What's your favourite strategy in Profit Protector Pro?
"Cautious Sales Enhancer."
Yeah, that's probably one of my favourites.
"Well when I went through the videos that you did where you went down each thing, that makes the most sense for most products at least initially. When I started people thought nothing of having things in there six months to a year, but because of the growth, that Amazon has experienced and people's inventory and so on so forth, they've changed things so you can't do that. It was frustrating initially because we weren't thinking that way. But in the long run it's proven to be a good thing.
So my personal model right now is, I want to turn it over in 90 days or less. So which is hugely different from the very beginning but, I keep a close eye on things and then I want to start you know, getting the price down or whatever I need to do to unload it and then I go into the Profit Protector Pro and those items, I might switch to aggressive sales. I need to be messing around with it more and I'll adjust my minimum price of this and stuff like that.
It is a cool thing to have that many options.
Yeah. And the one thing that I'm aware of and I hear the most about in forums that sellers don't like in repricers is ones that are like penny dropping. Penny drop, a penny drop, a penny and then everybody raises to the bottom."
Yep. It's the worst thing isn't it?
"I would love to say to people, you know, you're not helping yourself. No, you're not helping anyone. On the other hand, as a long term seller, I would say, it's gonna happen. Yeah. And one thing that you can do is just sit there and let everyone else sell out. Let them, let them do that. Yeah. And then you're sitting there."
Yeah, you sit and now you take all the profit.
"Right. I know, my good friends that sell that don't mind listing against Amazon. That's not something I do. But, but I know people who do it well. They also are really, really good at reading keepa graphs. Yeah, really good. And they know how to play when Amazon happens to be out."
Absolutely. Very, very good advice, I think.
Let me ask you a strange question. So if you could have any superpower, what would it be?
"Ah, the ability to transport myself anywhere, anytime."
Very nice. Very nice. Yeah, that'd be really handy wouldn't it?
"Phoenix, Arizona, and that's 2300 miles from here."
Yeah, that's a long way.
If you could go to dinner with anybody dead or alive, who would it be?
"Probably my dad. Four out of five of us kids still live here in this little small town, where we were raised and grew up. And our dad was somebody who was always our go to guy. He had an office that was his real estate business. And if you saw his car there, you'd stop and go in and just sit down and have a chat. And even within hours after he passed away, we were all having lunch somewhere and talking about a property that he had, how could we do this or that and somebody said, you know, dad would know exactly how to do that. And even at my age, and as old as we all are, like, he just always had a way, if he didn't know how to do it, he knew who to call."
That's very nice to know.
"Yes. Well, he was a born entrepreneur."
That's where you get it from, your dad's side.
"Absolutely. And saying that, I want to go to work. I want to know what they want me to do. And I want to come home and be done with it, and that's fine. My husband is the kind of guy if you needed an employee and you hire him, you would be lucky. Because he will always give 110%. And I'm not that person. But it's better to realize where you fit on that spectrum."
Absolutely. Otherwise, it's just stress and worry, isn't it? Because you feel like you're not achieving what you want to achieve? If you can find your right place, then you get to do what's best for you, don't you?
"Exactly. I am not an employee, I just am not, I'm forever going, well, why aren't you doing it that way? Why don't you do this? And that doesn't always work well in that setting. When you're self employed, you can try any of those ideas you want to and you may fall right on your face. But you can do it."
So what advice have you got for new Amazon sellers to leave us with?
"I would just say, don't try to rush it. It's not a get rich, quick scheme.
There are tons of support systems available to you, people who can help you.
Definitely start out by, when you buy products by an inch deep and a mile wide, those are things that will allow you to see what works for you and what doesn't.
I hear stories all the time of people who have garages full of stuff, they bought hundreds up. And you're like, oh, because that's the nice thing. Amazon doesn't require you to send in 60 of something, you can send in one of something. And a good thing to do is if you're you, let's say you're using BuyBotPro, and you're checking it out, looks decent. Test it out, buy three or four, see how it goes, see how quickly it sells or doesn't sell on what happens to the price. And after you do that a little while you begin to get your feet wet, you begin to get a little wisdom about what works, why it does or doesn't. And you're not drowning in money you've spent with items that you can't sell."
Very good advice. Jean, it's been such a pleasure having you with me and chatting to you, you know, you're a hugely experienced seller and just having the opportunity to listen to some of your wisdom has been, you know, I feel really privileged, thank you so much for joining me.
"Thank you so much. Bye everybody."