#214 – Helium 10 has Partnered with Alibaba.com – Here’s What It Means for Amazon Sellers

Selling on Amazon can mean something different to everyone. However, there’s one activity that most sellers share. Once they find a product opportunity, the vast majority start their sourcing process on Alibaba.com. 

After identifying a product opportunity, most Amazon sellers head immediately to Alibaba.com to make use of the platform’s endless filtering capabilities and the massive number of suppliers to begin their search for a product and supplier. 

In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes the President of Alibaba.com in North America and Europe, John Caplan. He’s here today to talk about the different ways that Alibaba.com can help Amazon sellers find success. He also explains why they decided that Helium 10 was the right company to partner with, and how he feels it will benefit Amazon sellers. 

John says that “Alibaba.com was built for the B2B trade.” Alibaba.com has been expanding globally and has increased its focus on security as well as adding shipping services to the growing number of ways that it supports small businesses. 

Want to know how to take advantage of the new Alibaba.com filter? Curious about Alibaba’s Trade Assurance program? You’ll find the answers to those questions and more in this episode. 

In episode 214 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and John discuss:

• 02:15 – John Caplan – “I Bleed Small Business”
• 03:45 – What is Alibaba.com?
• 05:20 – Alibaba.com’s Platform Was Built for the B2B Trade
• 07:15 – Alibaba.com – Growing Globally 
• 09:00 – “Trust is the Essence of Our Platform”
• 11:00 – Making Payments within Alibaba.com’s Platform Adds a Layer of Security 
• 13:30 – Who Does Trade Assurance Cover? 
• 15:00 – How Does Trade Assurance Work?  
• 17:00 – Alibaba.com’s Shipping Services   
• 20:45 – “Buyers are in Charge of their Own Privacy Settings”
• 23:00 – Alibaba.com Cares About Protecting Your Images
• 27:00 – Alibaba.com’s Partnership with Helium 10  
• 30:00 – How to Use the Alibaba.com Filter 
• 32:45 – Alibaba.com for Product Research?   
• 36:00 – How to Reach Out to John

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Most Amazon sellers after finding product opportunity, turn to Alibaba.com to start their sourcing search. We’ve got an exciting new tool available to streamline the process. The president of Alibaba.com North America and Europe is on the show to talk about this, plus all your most frequently asked questions about Alibaba.com. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, organic unscripted and unrehearsed conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. And we’ve got one of our most serious guests every here. I think he has a sense of humor, but he’s pretty serious and he’s a heavy here, John, how’s it going?

John Caplan: It’s great. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Bradley Sutton: Thank you for coming out here now, John, your position, can you let everybody know, can a quick introduction here to the world?

John Caplan: Sure. Hi everybody. I’m John Caplan. I am president of alibaba.com in North America and Europe, and I’m head of global growth at Alibaba.com and I’m based in New York. I am coming to you live from, or not live as it may be from my living room.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. It’s kind of like “Live from Saturday Night”, I almost want to say there, but anyways, John, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. I mean, I think there is not one person in the Amazon world who does not know about Alibaba, it’s almost a vital aspect in the Amazon process for so many sellers out there, especially when they’re just getting started for sourcing. We’re definitely going to talk about how Alibaba.com can help Amazon sellers. But what I like to do on the show is no matter what kind of position we have now, or whether we’re selling on Amazon or not, or somehow in this e-commerce ecosystem and we all come from different backgrounds. So just real quick, where were you born and raised in New York?

John Caplan: Yeah, so I am a born and raised New Yorker come from a family of entrepreneurs. If you scratch me, I bleed small business. I’m all about building companies, help creating jobs, sending kids to college, all the things every entrepreneur wants to do.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. Now, growing up. Did you have that entrepreneurial bug? Like, were you one of those kids who would trade baseball cards or things like that? Or what did you think you would be when you grew up?

John Caplan: Actually, the truth is when I was a really little kid, my folks, I was so argumentative. My parents thought I was going to be a defense attorney representing those who didn’t have representation. I’ve always been a champion of the underdog. And I think that evolved in my life to being all about entrepreneurs and small businesses. The heartbeat of our economy globally is entrepreneurship and small business. And so, the US government defines a small business owner as somebody with 500 or fewer employees. So, there’s micro businesses where it’s– or side hustles with just somebody individually and then there’s companies with hundreds of employees, they all sort of fit in the definition of a small business. And I care a lot about those folks, the big companies don’t need my help, the little ones, I’m an ally to those folks.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent. Excellent. Now you’ve been working at Alibaba for how long now?

John Caplan: Just about four years at Alibaba.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So for somebody out there who maybe is not as experienced with Alibaba, what is Alibaba.com about for somebody who has never heard of it?

John Caplan: Sure. So alibaba.com is the first business that Jack Ma started like over 21 years ago. And it’s a global marketplace for global buying and global selling, but it’s entirely dedicated to B2B trade, right? Sourcing, figuring out what’s hot, sourcing it, connecting to a manufacturer or wholesaler and selling it. Now, there are over 190,000 sellers on the platform, 26 million active business buyers from 190 countries, we’re no longer your dad’s online yellow pages. Alibaba.com is an end-to-end trading platform with all the services built into it, to facilitate trust and trade between buyers and sellers around the world. And what really makes us different than some other folks. When you sell on alibaba.com or buy on alibaba.com, we take no commission, we’re not a retailer or a wholesaler. We’re an ally to the businesses who buy on the platform, always seeking ways to make it easier for the buyers to do business or for sellers to find more customers. Probably the thing that’s probably most important for your big audiences, we were built for B2B trade, right? We’re not a carbon copy of something that was built B to C that migrated a bunch of merchants over to do B2B trade. All the technology tools, experiences, all B2B specific, the average order on our platform, a couple of thousand dollars big, we don’t sell the individual consumers who are trying– looking for an iPhone case for yourself. We’re not the right place looking for a pallet or container load of iPhone cases. 2020 was a crazy year and maybe we’ll dig into this, but we introduced online trade shows because nobody could get on a plane and travel any place. We’ve launched a concierge service to help folks who need to source PPE, but their warehouse workers or for their hospital to try to react to the craziness of 2020. But if you drill it all down, alibaba.com is the largest, fastest growing platform to help small businesses buy and sell from one another. Whether it’s the raw materials they need, finished goods they need. You name it. That’s what the alibaba.com platform is all about. And lots of the goods that get sold in online marketplaces or physical retailers start their life at alibaba.com. And so if somebody is looking to find something hot to sell or find a quality manufacturer they can rely on and trust, the best place to do it is we think with our platform at alibaba.com.

Bradley Sutton: That’s great. I think that a lot of people, when they first think of Alibaba, they think specifically of just Chinese factories, but in the last few years, you’ve also integrated. A lot of factories are using the platform from other countries. What are some of these countries? And are there any numbers you can give, like it’s 5% now or 10%, things like that.

John Caplan: So we’re actually about 10% of the supply on the platforms global, and our fastest growing supply markets are actually the US and Europe globally. So, their supply from Vietnam, their supply from India, their supply from Taiwan, Italy and here in the United States, around the world. And what’s important about that is if you’re an entrepreneur looking to find what’s hot and find quality supply around the globe, we’re really a good place to get started doing that to put the buyer in control of her discovery so that she can feel confident about what she’s getting and what she’s offering at the end of the day to her customers.

Bradley Sutton: Now, I think that a lot of people, when they’re thinking about sourcing from overseas, regardless of the country, some of their main concerns is like, okay, Hey, how do I know if this factory is legit? How do I know if I’m sending money via wire transfer or something, you’re like, it’s not like a credit card transaction. I can do a charge back on. So they have all these like fears and concerns. And I know, over the years, Alibaba is trying to implement different things that can help alleviate those fears. So can you talk about that? I know trade assurance is something I’m sure you’re going to talk about, but what in your history has been the fears that buyers have when they’re buying from China or India or other countries, and what have you guys done to kind of alleviate that?

John Caplan: Yeah. So I thank you for asking. It’s a really important question because trust is the essence of our platform. So let me walk through some of the areas and if folks have questions, I’ll share my email address and people can send me emails and we’ll make sure to repeat that answered. So, the first thing is we verify our sellers, and so you should look for sellers that have been verified and they’ve uploaded their certificates, but they’re recognized as being capable of doing that, that’s number one. The second is if somebody is a trading company, they’re not a manufacturer, they are an agent we encourage and sort of enforce a policy of trading companies, identifying them as such, but there’s times when it makes sense as a small buyer to actually work with a trading company, as opposed to working with the manufacturer directly, that’s an alternative. The next is when you want to be keep yourself as safe as possible. What you should do is place your online orders with what’s called trade assurance suppliers. Trade assurance suppliers are deeply vetted by best. And when you pay them in our platform, right, but you use the platform as your means or method of paying you, don’t pay them off of our platform. When you pay within the platform, your money sits in escrow with us until the goods arrive to you in Los Angeles or New York, or wherever you are. And you get the venue verify that the glasses you bought are the size, the material designed to the specification you made. When you approve that the money that you’ve paid us gets released to the manufacturer who sold it to you. And so, we are in the middle of that transaction, holding the funds until you’re a happy customer.

John Caplan: That’s really important. You know, the, the basis of the protection is that the order takes place within the alibaba.com platform. So that’s really important. We can’t, if the transaction takes place off the platform, we can’t do anything. Everybody understands that I can’t do anything to support it. And if there’s an issue with the order, you can request a refund within 30 days. And that’s really important because timeliness is the essence of making sure we’re doing the right thing by a buyer and doing the right thing by the supplier who is selling on the platform. It’s important to us to sort of be a fair arbiter in those cases and disputes, and like in all kinds of trade disputes come up and people aren’t happy, and we try to navigate that. But the best thing a buyer can do is pay within the platform and use our trade insurance product, because then I can make sure someone’s well taken care of.

Bradley Sutton: Now, does that cost extra money on the transaction, or how does that work?

John Caplan: It actually doesn’t cost the buyer anything. And what’s important about that is sometimes suppliers like to sort of try to convince a buyer, Oh no, no, don’t use trade assurance. It costs me the seller some more to go do it, or what have you. And the customer is always right? So you’re the customer, you’re the buyer, insist on trade assurance when you transact. And if sometimes sellers add a few basis, points of upcharge on that, I think that is a small price from the seller. We don’t collect anything, but from the seller’s perspective, I think that’s a– from a buyer’s perspective, that’s a small price to have comfort and assurance of everything should go nine times out of 10, everything will go as planned. And I think that’s a good protection. If I were a buyer or my son actually just bought something on alibaba.com for his– he’s a college student and he’s in EMS and for the EMS group, he bought some face masks and other things. He did trade assurance order. The Caplan family fully supports trade assurance. 

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Now, is that something available for every single transaction or only like the sellers who opt into that service?

John Caplan: Yeah. Yeah. So not all sellers participate. I would encourage a buyer to select sellers that are trade assurance, participant. We do not force all sellers to participate in the program. We certainly reward the sellers who do higher promotion, all the kinds of things that you’d want to do, which is if our seller takes good care of our customer, we want that seller to take care of more customers.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Excellent. And actually some of these questions come from, I did a post in our Helium 10 members, Facebook group, and I was like, Hey, what would you like to ask Alibaba? And so, thank you all. If you guys are watching some of these questions come from you along the lines of trade assurance here, one individual asks, does trade assurance cover non-Chinese suppliers like the ones from Vietnam, India, or US?

John Caplan: Yeah. So, trade insurance is not available in all countries for all suppliers. So if you want to make sure you have orders covered with trade assurance, look for the badge that says this is trade assurance. And you can insist with your seller that you use trade assurance if it’s not available, because they’re in a country or region where it’s currently not offered. I would factor that into your planning and assessment.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Speaking along the same lines of trade assurance, what is, and is not covered by it? Like, Hey, I don’t like the way this smelled, okay, I’m going to get my $10,000 back, or what are some of the major things that you’ve seen that for sure are covered, but then where a buyer thought that they might be covered, but nope, that’s not covered.

John Caplan: Yeah. So Bradley, this is a fantastic question. And this is an important question. The way the alibaba.com system works. If you let’s just role-play this. So if I was going to– I needed new glasses, right. And I found a supplier who made acetate eye glasses, whatever. I might order a sample to– I described the specs I want. I might order a sample to make sure confirm the glasses exactly as I want them. And then all of the messages I’m exchanging with that supplier in the messaging application that’s built into alibaba.com form the basis for the contract between me and the seller says, they pay half a pound, they’re made of this kind of material. They have scratch proof lens, is whatever the specs are those specs form the contract. That contract is what is covered in the trade assurance agreement. So I don’t like how they smell when they came out of the box. If that wasn’t included in the agreement, that’s hard for us to arbitrate. If you said I wanted tortoise shell glasses, but they all came and they were red. That would be pretty easy for us because you take a photo of that. You’d say the contract says Tortoise, where I got her red. No, we got to fix this and mistakes and problems happen, right. We all know that with billions of dollars of goods. I mean, Alibaba is the largest marketplace of its type globally. We are bigger than Airbnb or Uber in 2020 in terms of dollar volume flowing through the alibaba.com platform. But if you get red glasses, when you ordered tortoise shell and you ordered, you use trade assurance, you will be covered.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Excellent to know. Another thing that was kind of news to me, because I haven’t used this service, but in the last few years, Alibaba now has shipping services available. And this is another one of those kind of fears or pain points for sellers. They’re worried about like, how do I know this is going to be a good rate when I order from another country? Or how can I follow the process. So can you talk a little bit about the Alibaba shipping services for people like myself? We didn’t know that that was existed.

John Caplan: So, our goal and we’re on the journey here, like every other business. So, we’re on a journey to provide all the tools and services every buyer needs. One of the things that buyers want is certainty. We just talked about it as it relates to trade assurance, certainty that what I bought, what I get is what I bought. The other certainty that buyers should insist on is certainty of delivery. Right? I ordered it from a factory 8,000 miles away. I want to know when– how much it’s going to cost to get here. That it’s got to get through customs, that it’s going to arrive in my warehouse the day I said, that’s an FBA warehouse or my own garage. I want to know that it’s coming. And so what we did is we’ve done some pretty exciting work in the logistics space with air express ship things. So you can order– if you order a small amount of things that you can in an integrated way, it can get on an airplane and get shipped to you really quickly. And that’s a good thing for folks that are replenishing fast selling items that are selling on Amazon or elsewhere. And if you want to use ocean shipping, we’ve launched them called alibaba.com freight powered by Freightos. Freightos is the world’s largest digital sort of freight marketplace. We’ve integrated Freightos system into the alibaba.com system. So, you get the fastest comparison and booking. You can compare quotes from– we handpicked 12 freight organizations that we have pretty, really good. I’d say, exceptional relationships with to get the best rates and you get full visibility and control with end to end tracking live updates, flexible payment options. And you can manage how it’s organized.

John Caplan: You can manage all the important documents in one place. So, if you’re doing freight and you’re putting it on a boat, we’ve got the solution powered by Freightos. If you want to send something by air, our air express rates are the most competitive in the market. The delivery rate time is on par or better than the market. And it offers low MOQs for international buyers who want, you want to buy, you need a hundred glasses, not a hundred thousand glasses, it’s probably cheaper and faster to put them on a plane. You have that ability to do that on our platform. If you think about the value prop to a buyer of alibaba.com. Find what’s hot, right insight into what you should sell, find the factory that you know, because we verified them is capable and quality to make it for you by using trade assurance. So. You’re protected that what you get is what you ordered and use our freight solution. So it arrives in a certain way, your FBA warehouse or elsewhere. And that sort of– those four or five steps means as an online seller, you can focus on winning the buy box on pricing well, on taking care of your customers, managing your email list to get better reviews, all the things that are critical for the buyer to do for her to optimize her sales to be a growing and profitable digital business.

Bradley Sutton: All right. That’s really cool. I’m going to definitely start suggesting people to use that because that’s always one of the top questions, especially if in 2020, I think that became even more critical. When shipping things happen in the Coronavirus happened, people were just like, the regular, freight companies were just completely maxed out and people had no idea where to go. So that’s good to know that Alibaba.com can help with that as well. All right. So, one question I had about, about on the privacy side, actually, this wasn’t for me, but this was asked by multiple people was, you know, like, let’s say, I’m searching on Alibaba for a coffin shelf supplier we’ll maybe I’ve checked with 10 different suppliers. Now, can those suppliers see what I’m doing? Like, can they see how many people I’ve contacted, or how many purchases I’ve made? What all can they see about my buying history on Alibaba.com?

John Caplan: But this is a great question. And the key for every buyer to know is your in charge of how you handle your own privacy settings. You can go into your profile info, sort of a dashboard as a buyer on alibaba.com and manage your own privacy settings. So you can say, let people know my address where I’m located, let people know what I’ve done a lot of searching or a little searching. There’s the fields that you’re able to control or things like, what recently searched keywords I’ve searched, or you can hide your transaction history. You can hide your search keywords, or you can expose them. And I think the way to think about this for buyers is do what’s comfortable for you. There’s some times if you’re in a physical trade show and you walk up to someone’s booth, where you walk up, you extend your hand and you say, hi, I’m John. I have a business that does X. I source these kinds of products. Can you help me? And then there’s other times where you’re a little more discrete and don’t want to share. I would– I think the guidance I would offer to a buyer is to share what you feel comfortable sharing and nothing more, and know that my information could may help the seller on the other side, provide value to you as their customer. So they– it’s all designed to help the buyer and seller relationship flourish, but it’s in the control of the buyer.

Bradley Sutton: So I had one more question here from our users before I wanted to talk about some exciting things going on with Helium 10 and Alibaba. But one thing that comes up a lot is, is Amazon sellers. They’re worried about like a lot of their images on Amazon. They see different suppliers like using it to kind of promote their own services or their own products. And so, is there a way like for Amazon sellers to report this at all, or is it kind of open game, or how can they keep suppliers from using their images in their own advertising?

John Caplan: Yeah. This we take this seriously. This is very important. If your imagery in any way is being used by someone that you didn’t give permission to use the imagery, we encourage you to let us know, and then we get those images taken down. That’s full stop, really important to us. Second also, we’re working actually with sellers around the world to provide images that buyers can use. So like those images, it goes in both directions, right? Obviously, if someone’s using your images, you didn’t give them permission to do so. We don’t want that to happen. And we want to take those down and penalize folks that use them. And if you need high quality image, and we’re actually working with manufacturers around the world to improve their photo-shoot ability, their way they create content, better content for products to help alibaba.com buyers, Amazon sellers, to get a jumpstart on how they merchandise their products that been merchandise. But this is an important topic. And I will make sure Bradley, we get you the full workflow and steps. Someone should go through if this happen. So you can share that with the community.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. That’d be very helpful. Thank you for that. Okay. Now, speaking of a community, most of our community are definitely, obviously Amazon sellers. Now, originally Alibaba.com has over 20 year’s of history. There was no third party Amazon sellers in those days. I’m sure you’ve seen like a big influx of Amazon sellers now using the platform in the last five to 10 years. And that’s the majority of our community here. So real quick, I mean, have you heard of any kind of cool stories about maybe like a mom or pop operation? They didn’t have anything, and they just started on– they found their first product from Alibaba.com and now you’ve heard that they’re making big money on Amazon or anything like that.

John Caplan: I was talking to one last week about what he does is he sees a four-month window for hot new products that he launches before they get cluttered with other competitive people copying what he does. And so what he did is he realized because of the rate of new car sales in the United States with the pandemic, right. Car sales have been off the charts that more families needed more wiper blades. So the average family used to need a packet of four wiper blades because they had two cars, maybe eight, but there’s now the average household is getting another truck and another car, or what have you, that he was selling packages of 12 or 16 wiper blades. And he started that sort of mid-summer and it blew out right hundreds of thousands of dollars, a wiper-blade sales on Amazon sourced on alibaba.com, that he was able to capture a pretty unique opportunity. And I think that’s the sort of magic of alibaba.com and Helium 10 collaborating together to be allies to small businesses, right? I can’t choose for you what to sell. Well, I can’t take a photo for you, but I can sort of knit together the software you need. So you then can make the good decision about whether the wiper blades or flower pots or canopy awnings, or– and I think the thing that’s happening today is the pandemic has totally really shaken up what people buy, right? People are buying home office stuff or home gym stuff, or backyard furniture in a way that a year and a half ago, people didn’t envision quite the same way. And so the creative entrepreneurs can say like, Hey, every everybody is like needs to set up a home office and nobody has enough room to do it. So let me figure out a creative desk solution for people that turn their couch into a desk. And those creative solutions turn into business opportunities between– if you use Helium 10, alibaba.com and Amazon, you can make a lot of money as an entrepreneur. And it starts as a side hustle can turn into a real business or big business.

Bradley Sutton: Yep. I completely agree. Now I think it makes obvious sense, like, okay, well, why would Helium 10 want to integrate Alibaba.com into what we do? Just out of curiosity, like from Alibaba.com side, like what was attractive about Helium 10? What made you guys decide, you know what, this is a good potential partner for us here at Alibaba.com.

John Caplan: Yeah. I’m glad you asked that. We have a small team here in the United States and one of the things we’re really focused on doing is getting closer to our customers here locally. And you’re at the Helium 10 community, right? The content you create, the information, the insights, it felt like a really interesting fit for us, right? The software you provide and the content, the software we provide and our global network of supply felt like, I don’t know, peanut butter and jelly to me a little bit, right? Like the sandwich just tastes better. So we could take your insights, your tools, our insights, our tools to help the entrepreneurs who are hopefully listening to this, make your day 10% easier. Right. And if Helium 10 and Alibaba working together can make the hundreds of thousands of folks who use both of our platforms gains 10% easier. That’s a good thing.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and just for those who haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, just guys, you can see this new integration completely free. Just go to H10.me/extension, and download the Chrome Extension for free. Now, some of the things that this Chrome Extension is going to be allow you to do for you, Amazon sellers, a lot of our process right now is at least I know what I do is I’ll search using the Chrome Extension for some product research, and I’ll be analyzing what’s going on at Amazon. And then I’ll have a window, another window open on Alibaba.com. And I could start like, trying to find suppliers for that. Well, guess what, guys, it’s all going to be done in the same window right now, you use that Xray Chrome extension. You hit the find suppliers and now, right away, like if I had searched coffin shelf on Amazon, I’m going to be able to see what the coffin shelf search results are going to be on Alibaba.com. And a lot of those things that John was mentioning earlier on in the show, like, Hey, check if they’re a verified supplier, see if they’re– how long they’ve been on the platform, you can use those exact filters within your Helium 10 Chrome Extension now. So you can start vetting your suppliers and even going directly to them, like within an instant now, where as opposed to before you would have to have all these windows open and go through it. So, we definitely want to get a lot of people using this. This is only version one. It’s only going to get even a more robust in the future. So start using it now, guys, let us know what you like, let us know what you’d like to see, and we’ll definitely implement it. Now, John, have you heard of all the things that we’re doing on the Alibaba.com side with that same extension? Like what people may be who aren’t Amazon sellers, or maybe who hadn’t thought about selling, what can they now see if they’re on Alibaba going to reverse way?

John Caplan: Yeah. So, I think you explained it perfectly, right? It’s this idea of like taking a process that an entrepreneur has to sort of juggle, and jury rig together for herself, and frankly use the engineer and time to actually integrate those things. So on our side, what we want to do is tell alibaba.com users, Hey, Helium 10 is this incredible utility. You need to download the Chrome Extension. So you can, when you’re thinking about what your source connect direct, you can get the data that is really so robust and useful that healing and the insights of Helium 10 provides, then go the other direction, right into the alibaba.com platform. I really feels like– there’s not a– sometimes companies collaborate together and there’s like a marching band and a big announcement and blah, blah, blah, like that. And it’s a big done. It doesn’t do anything because the reality is there’s no marching band here, but I know millions of entrepreneurs days are going to get easier because Helium 10 and alibaba.com are working together because that’s our goal, right? Our goal is to make your day easier and we’re not perfect. And I agree with what you said, Bradley, we’re pushing this thing live quickly, urgently. And I would encourage folks to share feedback and say, it would be better. I would be more efficient if you change X, Y, or Z, I do a better job, like tell us so we can sort of prioritize things. We won’t do everything everybody has, but we’ll try to do as much as we can to make your day as easy as it can be. So you can sell as much as you can possibly sell.

Bradley Sutton: Absolutely, absolutely. A hundred percent agree. And just, let me give you guys Amazon sellers, another tip, you might have heard just right now about this, how you can use Helium 10 on the Alibaba.com side. Well, you might be thinking, well, wait a minute. I have already went one direction. I found something on Amazon. Now I’m on Alibaba.com what I used to do is use the Chrome Extension to get the Helium 10 information. Going back, I already have that information. Well, here’s a tip guys using that same coffin shelf example. Guess what guys, if you find a coffin shelf supplier, I guarantee you, they are not only selling coffin shelves. They’re probably selling like coffin bookcases, or there might be a shelf that’s shaped like a spooky bat, or all of a sudden you can find other ideas looking at that suppliers page, not just the exact product, but click on that supplier. If you find a good supplier, look at what else they do. And it– I guarantee you every single time I’ve done this, I’ve always found it where they are manufacturing stuff that I didn’t even know existed. I’m like, well, that’s looks interesting. So in that case, now you see a bat shelf or a Gothic skull or something like that. Guess what? Look at that on Alibaba.com, use the Chrome extension now and instantly, without even having to go back to Amazon or go back to Helium 10, you’re instantly going to be able to see search volume and search history and sales history for that keyword on Amazon, right within your Alibaba.com window. So that’s like for a lot of you guys that can be a game changer for how you do product research, the reverse method from Alibaba.com going back to Amazon. 

Bradley Sutton:                One last thing, John, what we do on this show is we have this segment where every episode we call it the TST, the “TST” 30-second tip. So, you’ve been giving us a lot of great strategies, and giving us some insights into the Alibaba.com platform throughout this whole episode. But for somebody new to the platform, what is something maybe you can say in 30 seconds or less like a best practice or something that we’re really helped somebody new to get started on Alibaba.com?

John Caplan: I think the thing I would suggest is use the hot selling products as a way to get started would be number one, number two, if you’re third or fourth on a product you’re too late. So if you like bringing innovation to the group, you’re bringing to the market and innovation could be small, it could be packaging, it could be pricing. It could be– there’s a lot of ways to bring innovation, but bringing innovation and use data to drive the decisions you make. Because the more data you use, the more likely you can do you risk your sourcing and your selling efforts.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Excellent. Excellent. All right, John, this has been great. Thank you for coming on the show. I think it’s really amazing how Alibaba.com is very buyer centric. And it’s funny because now Amazon sellers were actually kind of like the buyers under this scenario, and we’re kind of used to having to have Amazon buyers be the kind of focus of Amazon. And so it’s kind of refreshing to see a platform that’s putting more of the focus on we, the Amazon sellers out there, and really, especially helping sellers here in this country in North America and also in Europe, try and succeed. I really love the dedication to what you had said at the beginning of the show about how you’re dedicated to the small business. You’re not just looking to try and service the GEs or the Samsungs, and stuff of the world. You’re looking to help those mom and pop sellers on Amazon. And guess what? That’s what the majority of, I think our listeners are. So I really thank you for that.

John Caplan: Thank you for having me. It was great to join you here this afternoon.

Bradley Sutton: All right. So, John, I mentioned that the way that people can download the extension for free at H10.me/extension. You also mentioned that people can reach out to you for more questions. How can they do that?

John Caplan: So my email is the letter jcaplan@alibaba-inc.com, and so folks have a comment or question or suggestion, jcaplan@alibaba-inc.com. And it goes right to my inbox.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Thank you so much, John, for joining us, and we’d love to reach out to you maybe next year, and let’s see what we were able to accomplish together here in 2021.

John Caplan: That’s awesome. I’m excited. Thanks for having me.