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#116 – A Two Time Stanley Cup Winner Tells How You Can Build a Successful Amazon Wholesale Business

Every year after playing 82 regular-season games and 16 playoff games, North America’s National Hockey League awards the Stanley Cup to their champion. Commissioned in 1892, it is the oldest existing trophy to be awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America.

There are many stories of players having played long careers having never come close to winning a Stanley Cup. The money these days in professional hockey is very good. Still, most players would willingly give up a significant percentage of their salary to have the opportunity to play for a Stanley Cup.

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton welcomes Stephane Yelle, who in addition to being a successful wholesaler on Amazon, spent 15 years playing in the NHL and won two Stanley Cups.

Stephane is an Amazon seller who has built a $3,000,000 wholesale business and he’s full of great information that will dispel the idea that private label is the only way to make money on Amazon.

Listen in for more of Stephane’s story. 

In episode 116 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Stephane discuss:

  • 01:30 – Stephane’s Origin Story
  • 02:40 – 15 Years in the National Hockey League and 2 Stanley Cups
  • 04:05 – After the NHL, a Move to Las Vegas and Lots of Learning
  • 05:05 – Transitioning from a Locker Room Full of Friends isn’t Easy
  • 07:00 – Understanding Where to Turn for eCommerce Help
  • 09:25 – Almost $3,000,000 on Wholesale Shows that Amazon isn’t Just Private Label
  • 11:30 – He’s Looking for Long Term Wholesale Relationships
  • 12:45 – Negatives? – There’s Competition and it’s Not Really “Your” Product
  • 14:20 – Learning Enough to Intelligently Outsource Responsibilities
  • 16:00 – “Terms” Come With their Own Challenges
  • 19:00 – What Does the Wholesale Infrastructure Look Like?
  • 21:00 – Up Early, a Workout, Time with the Kids, then Work
  • 24:00 – A Private Label Product Helps Him Expand His Knowledge Base
  • 30:40 – How Does Stephane Put Helium 10’s Tools to Work?
  • 32:05 – Stephane’s 30 – Second Tip

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: I often talk about how much we like to feature stories from everyday Amazon sellers. Here’s another one, but with one big difference. This Amazon wholesaler is a long-time NHL player and has his name engraved twice on the Stanley cup. 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, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got a serious seller on the line with us today. Stephane, how’s it going?

Stephane Yelle: Good, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton: Excellent. I’m doing just ducky. They don’t say that in Canada, do they?

Stephane Yelle: Never heard that.

Bradley Sutton: I don’t think they say that here in America, but my dad somehow started saying that and I say it sometimes. Anyways, as always, I love talking to people who come from different backgrounds and we’ve all kind of getting to the same place here in e-commerce in every single episode we’ve done¾over a hundred now. There are always very unique backgrounds. You know, we’ve had lawyers; we’ve had people studying to be doctors who are now in e-commerce. We’ve had elementary school dropouts. Even some now become nine-figure sellers. We’d had some great origin stories, and you’ve got one of the most interesting, but let’s go ahead and take it back a few years away before you started e-commerce. You actually grew up in Canada, right?

Stephane Yelle: Oh yeah. Back East. Just West of Montreal.

Bradley Sutton: And growing up did you have life goals? “Hey, I wanted to be a firefighter.” “I wanted to be a doctor.” What did you envision your professional life coming out to be when you were younger?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah. I grew up in a small town, maybe a thousand people. I played a lot of hockey growing up, and my parents are teachers, so I thought I’d go to school and get an education.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Then, how did things work out as you got older and what did you get into?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah. Again, the school was a priority for our family, but I ended up moving up the ranks in hockey, and I was lucky enough to play in the NHL for 15 years.

Bradley Sutton: Excellent. Excellent. That’s so cool. And you actually had some minor success there¾ something called a Stanley Cup or two, right?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, I was lucky enough to do a move to Denver, played for the Colorado Avalanche, and we won my first year in the league, so that’s pretty exciting, and then we end up winning in 2001 again.

Bradley Sutton: That’s awesome. Cool. Side note, one of our content writers here, and he’s actually one of the main gentlemen who edits these podcasts and writes the notes and everything, he actually used to play hockey, not the NHL, but he’s a big hockey fan. Then when he found out we were interviewing you, he’s like, “Oh wow, that’s so cool.” I remember he actually lives in Colorado now. He’s like, Stephane was the gel guy, the glue guy of the teams back in those days.” I’m like, “All right, cool.” Myself, I’d never was much of a hockey fan, but it was kind of a bandwagon when I was younger when Wayne Gretzky came to the LA King. That kind of got me into it; my first exposure. But anyways…

Stephane Yelle: I remember my first game at the forum against Wayne, he was my idol growing up.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Cool. Getting to play against your idol. Imagine a dream come true for any kind of athlete, but now you’re kind of dreams are different than when you were a child and when you were a hockey player because you’re now outside of the professional sports ranks. I assume when you retired, you weren’t just thinking about, “Hey, I’m going to go, on the beach, in Cancun for the rest of my life.” You kind of had that entrepreneurial bug, and you wanted to do other things right after retiring. What were some of those things that you got into after retirement?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, so I retired roughly 10 years ago, took me a lot to figure out what to do next after hockey, but eventually moved to Las Vegas in Henderson and opened a fitness studio there and kind of did that for a few years. Met some people down there in Vegas that had an e-commerce business. They’re good friends of ours, so that kind of piqued my interest. So I started looking around and learning to see if I could dip my toes into that space. And then for the last three years now, we’ve been doing this.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. So how did you react to running a business? You played professional hockey for so long and now you’re running a gym. Was it kind of like a culture shock or did you go stir crazy at all no more traveling? How was that transition?

Stephane Yelle: The transition was tough for me. You kind of lose all your, your buddies and all you know is hockey. I had to kind of soul search for a little bit to see what was of interest to me. And opening a gym was kind of a good fit because I love fitness, and I’ve been in that fitness space or hockey I guess for a lot of years. When you own a gym, there’s a lot of stuff that comes into play as far as marketing and other kinds of business aspects. That was kind of my introduction to some of the business stuff that we’re learning right now and trying to apply to my own business now.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Cool. Now, by the way, guys, truth be told, usually, I don’t know too of what my guests talk about because I haven’t talked to them before, but Stephane, we actually met in Arizona. I was doing a road trip to New Mexico and as some of you guys know, who follow our Helium 10 Facebook groups or FBA High Rollers, what I always do whenever I travel, whether it’s for work or for personal, I’ll post in there and say, “Hey, anybody here in the middle of nowhere” or “Anybody here in Barcelona” or “Anybody here in Scottsdale, Arizona” or “Anybody here in Denver, Colorado”? Wherever I go, I love meeting up with Helium 10 users. And actually Stephane was, well, the only one who could come out. And so, we had a great conversation. It was just great to hear a lot about this. But I’m already hearing a couple of things that I haven’t heard before, but let’s get back to this story now. What year exactly was it when you were kind of were introduced to the Amazon opportunity?

Stephane Yelle: Early 2017. We took a kind of seminar or like a workshop in Vegas and then, started searching, looking at YouTube videos, trying to find some teachers I guess or coaches and kind of find my way around all the good stuff that’s on YouTube and in Facebook groups, and it’s taken a couple of years to kind of find my way through that. There are so many people that want to offer training and coaching and so forth. Now I kind of has a good grasp of who to follow, who to reach out to when I have questions.

Bradley Sutton: Now, what was your mindset as far as even being interested? You were running up a business already, but was it you wanted a lifestyle change and not to have to come to a gym of sweaty people every day? Or was it that even had you looking two other endeavors in the first place?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, no, I love the fitness space; it was awesome. People come to the gym because they want to be there and want to get better. But my friends that own a business in Vegas know they’re super cool. They’re always traveling and they had good flexibility as far as their lifestyle. That’s something that was super attractive to me.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now one of the courses that you ended up taking, was it the Wholesale Formula?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, we took that, I think, summer of 2017. That was a great course and foundation. And from there we branched out. The other courses I’ve taken, Kevin King’s private label course, which was awesome as well. Just a medium ticket is hard. Yup. Just a little more, I mean it’s private labeled based and it’s got a little more information as far as a little deeper information I would guess. The wholesale for me is wholesale, that’s our business, but I just wanted to know more as far as private label game.

Bradley Sutton: Yup. Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. We actually had, I don’t know if you’ve heard that, but we actually had Dan from the Wholesale Formula on the podcast a few weeks ago. Make sure to check that out. He told us a little bit about what he does, but I’d love to get a different viewpoint about wholesale because again, there are people out there who say, “Oh no, you know, private label is the only way to go. Things like arbitrage, things like wholesale. Those are dead in 2020. But can you tell our listeners strictly through the wholesale model of selling, what was your gross revenue in 2019?

Stephane Yelle: Just shy of $3 million.

Bradley Sutton: And that was all wholesale guys. So, guys, this is still a very viable way of getting businesses. Now in your first year, how did you grow? Obviously you didn’t go zero to 3 million in a couple of months. What’s the process like? What do you look for when looking for a potential partner using the wholesale model?

Stephane Yelle: Well, initially the first year was just tons of learning. Again, my background was hockey. I didn’t know how to open a spreadsheet. I’m on YouTube, looking out for spreadsheets and how to run spreadsheets or spreadsheets through different software. But 2019 was more the growth year; now we have a little more systems. We know them; we’re understanding the platform a little better. We’re reaching out to companies where there’s probably more potential and growth. And I think a lot of that is by going through Kevin’s training. You know, when we talk to brands, we understand a little bit better what they’re going through and how we can help them and bring value. We might not be going after the same people that your typical wholesalers are going after. What, what you’re bringing to them is not just, “Hey, let me resell your products, you know, sell it to me with 30% margins, let me put it up on Amazon and let me get my own profit.” But it’s more like presenting to them a kind of like an almost full-service and “Hey, we’ll revamp your listings, we’ll manage your PPC, things like that.” More along those lines. We’re looking for long-term relationships where we can, like I said, add value and be in conversations with them on a weekly basis where we can buy them on Amazon or maybe even provide some insight off Amazon as well as the marketing. And that’s one thing I’m kind of fascinated about: the marketing part of our business.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I think that’s so important because maybe three, four or five years ago, you know, you could make a great living just reselling the product, finding a wholesaler. But then everybody got into that kind of got saturated. And so a lot of these companies were saying, “ we’re not looking for other Amazon sellers.” But then when you come to them with actual proposition and you take the knowledge that private label sellers have about, what makes an optimized listing, what makes good photography, how do you make your bullet points, how do you manage your PPC, these are things that a lot of these bigger companies or even smaller companies might not know how to do. I could see how you’ve been; that’s a very successful model. Now, what to you would be the biggest kind of drawback to the wholesale model? Or if there’s any, what’s a struggle or an obstacle that people wanting to eat get into that kind of model might come up against?

Stephane Yelle: Good question. I think as you said, I wouldn’t say it’s saturated, but there’s a lot of competition and with wholesale, it’s not your product. So you’re at the mercy of the brand or I guess of the brand owner. Sometimes, they might not be listening to exactly the advice you’re providing. I guess when you have a private label product, it’s your own baby, so you can make the decisions and you’re in full control. That’s one thing when we approach brands; the more you help them, the more it feels like it becomes your own product.

Bradley Sutton: One question about what you do with your wholesale customers. Obviously you’re managing their listings, you’re optimizing them, maybe helping them with PPC and things, but are you doing anything off Amazon for them? Are you helping them at all build their brand image or build an email list or build Shopify sites or build Facebook groups or drive outside traffic? Is any of that involved in the wholesale model that you run?

Stephane Yelle: Not yet. It’s something that I’ve put a lot of work in, and in 2020, that’ll be my focus: to learn more about it. And again, I’m not trying to know everything. I just tried to learn enough and then I tried to outsource it and find the right people to do it so then we can offer it to the brand.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Makes sense. All right. Now maybe some of our listeners might be thinking, “okay, well this is an ex-professional athlete. He probably had tons of money. He had a successful business even after that that he was making money. That was probably why he was so successful. Now, having capital’s not a bad thing, but if there’s a 20-year-old kid out there or if there’s a stay-at-home mom or dad who might not have thousands of dollars or them might not have a business that they’ve been making a lot of money on so they don’t have a lot to invest still. Would you suggest wholesale? Is it still possible to scale to start small without much money using this model and then grow from there? Or do you need like $10-, $20-, $30,000 at the beginning to be successful?

Stephane Yelle: Again, I think it depends on your goals. If you want to add a few hundred dollars a month to your regular job, and you want to do this on the side and kind of get started, I think you can do it on limited capital. But if you want to replace your daily job, I think you do need a lot more capital than some people might suggest.

Bradley Sutton: Usually in the wholesale model you are pre-purchasing the products as opposed to just like maybe taking a cut of the profits after the sale.

Stephane Yelle: That’s how we do it. I know some people usually use terms. From my experience, it comes with maybe larger purchases or larger commitments. But yeah, we pay upfront.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. And then, do you actually handle any of the products yourself or does every one of your clients or partners send it to Amazon directly themselves?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, we handle it from the beginning; that’s something we’ve worked hard on. And I know some, even after getting some brands to kind of give us some pushback as far as shipping straight to Amazon. It’s a pretty simple process. And, we don’t touch any products it goes through.

Bradley Sutton: You’re running a $3 million business and you don’t have to have some 20,000 square foot warehouse with 30 employees packaging all day.

Stephane Yelle: No, not at all. Yeah, we have a small team to run and source. But we don’t touch any products. We don’t have a warehouse either.

Bradley Sutton: So is that your current sales or are those sales from last year? About how many brands is that? I mean it’s probably a lot, but you know about approximately how many products are we talking.

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, I think we’re up to, I don’t know, 20 to 30 brands and maybe a hundred SKUs.

Bradley Sutton: Oh wow. That’s actually less than that than I would have thought. You know, sometimes when people think about the wholesale model, all I’ve got to take their whole entire lineup is 1000 skews and I’m making one sale a day here, one sale a day on this one. But that’s only a hundred SKUs. You can make that.

Stephane Yelle: Well, there are so many ways. There are so many different ways for this business model. The more I talk to people and I network here and there, everyone does it a little differently. So you can see some people do have thousands of SKUs and I wish I did too, but that takes time to get to that level. I mean there’s different strategies I guess.

Bradley Sutton: And what would the profit on, on this model? Do you guys have a target? Like, “Hey, we’re not going to take this on unless we know we can get this of this kind of profit margin” or what’s your goal usually in that?

Stephane Yelle: It varies, depending on how much work you’re going to put into helping a brand. Some products where it just another side like another seller and with other brands, we have higher margins, but we might offer more kind of like services I guess. It varies. I think in wholesale, typically people shoot for maybe 15% but then you’ll have a product where you can have it 30% margin.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Okay. What would those kinds of margins then, like how many employees do you need to kind of run to still be able to be profitable, keep your margins, but also be able to service what they need, like a $4-,  $3 million business, let’s say.

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, that’s something that we’re still trying to figure out. The whole outsourcing and having a team. We have a small team with a couple of VAs, me and my wife and around the front-end with someone else that does a more of that kind of sales calls. Yeah. So, as I said, it’s not set in stone yet what the right structure should be. But we’re on our way.

Bradley Sutton: Do you even have an office or do you work out of your house?

Stephane Yelle: We did work out of our house for the first couple of years, for the most part. And now, we moved into an office, because I’ve taken on a kind of like a private label golf product and my business partner has a little small warehouse so I’m kind of snuck in the front office for and kind of get us out of the house and try to grow this way.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. I definitely want to talk about you getting into private labels because that’s new for you since you’ve been doing wholesale. But let’s say right before you started on the private label and going into now in the office, I’m assuming last year or something, what was your typical day like? I mean you’re a family man and you’ve got a wife. How many children do you have? Two daughters?

Stephane Yelle: Two daughters.

Bradley Sutton: All right. So what was  summertime of 2019 like? You’re just still strictly doing wholesale, no office. What was your typical day like?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, the last few years I spent when I owned a gym, I used to teach, like cycling or spinning I guess. I get up early to do the six o’clock class. I kind of got used to getting up early. Now we try to get up at 5:00 every morning, me and my wife and we’ll do some work. And then at around 6:30 or 6:45, we’d go work out from our garage, and then, after that, it’s a race with the kids, get them to school. And then typically we’re from 9 to 12, and then, the afternoon it’s kind of getting missed because we have to drive the kids around a little bit. And then, nighttime, my girls are gymnasts.

Bradley Sutton: Not hockey players, huh?

Stephane Yelle: Oh no hockey, no, no. A little bit of skating here and there. But yeah, mostly gymnastics. And we sit there.

Bradley Sutton: Is that painful? There’s not going to be one other offspring here carrying on in the family tradition.

Stephane Yelle: Not at all. I wanted the daughters, kind of dates back when I played juniors in Toronto. I mean I still watch hockey and watch hockey highlights, but it’s not something necessary.

Bradley Sutton: Then basically it sounds like, you’ve been able to give your kids, at least the last couple of years, a lot more time maybe than the typical parental structure where maybe mom and dad are both working eight to five. You see the kids in the morning, maybe you don’t see them again until six, seven at night, but you’re there when they wake up, you’re picking them up from school, you’re able to take them yourself to activities. Is that, I would assume, a very satisfying feeling to be able to do?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah. I mean that’s kind of like, not the purpose, but that was the reason why we kind of chose to go along the lines of e-commerce because it gives you that flexibility. But on the flip side, you’re in charge of your own business and the hours you put in. You have to be, try to find that structure and that discipline to put the work in when it’s the time because there are so many distractions.

Bradley Sutton: How has it changed? How has the vibe changed now that you are in an office?

Stephane Yelle: It just feels a little better when I feel when you’re walking through the doors of the office. Your mindset is, “I’m here to work” and there are no distractions. There’s no one ringing the doorbell, dropping off some Amazon packages, for example. It’s a different mindset than you when we get home, it just feels like home again instead of the office because you can kind of get trapped into the whole business mindset.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Okay. Now let’s expand on that part a little bit. Right now about the office, is it because you’re going into a private label? Was this something that you were looking to get into or was it just because you had a partner who came to you with an idea and you’re like, “Hey, I can help you with that”? Or how did this come about?

Stephane Yelle: It was actually a product I was looking to sell wholesale. And then it turned out that I could kind of invest into it, but at the same time, and that’s why I’ve taken Kevin’s training is that the more like when we talked to brands, I feel the more we know about what they’re going through as a brand, then we can relate to their situations a little better and help them or helping a friend. So having my own private label, I’m going through the same issues or concerns or processes that they are going through. Hopefully, over the next couple of years it’s going to help me run my private label and at the same time grow our wholesale business.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Okay. Cool. Has that launched yet or are you still in the process of building it up?

Stephane Yelle: We’re just about to launch. The product was around for a few years and it’s more of a relaunch. It’s a seasonal product, obviously with golf, so for the summer. We’re kind of getting ready for it, for the relaunch.

Bradley Sutton: Is it all still all going to be on like the same ASINs or are these brand new ASINs that you guys are creating or how’s that work?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, same ASIN. Obviously, we’re trying to get into retail, so that’s another space I guess that we’re trying to learn. Yeah. The Amazon sites shouldn’t be a problem. And then, we have our own site and then we have the retail play that we’re trying to get into.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent. Excellent. Looking forward to the end of 2020 and best-case scenario, what’s that look like to you as far as, you know, maybe growing up, I mean, are you still planning to grow your wholesale business? Do you want to get that above 3 million? What do you think you can get that private label launch up to? Or how do you envision the rest of the year turning out for you?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, it’ll be busy. I want to keep scaling obviously wholesale. One of our focuses is on having better systems and processes. While trying to keep our team intact or about the same size. Keep learning. There’s so much to learn as far as the different business models and Amazon’s changing on a monthly basis. So we stay on top of that and then, with our own product. That’ll be interesting. There’s so much again to learn and to apply so we can be successful.

Bradley Sutton: Excellent. Excellent. What about now that you have a little more time on your hands? Like how have you taken up any hobbies? You know, you’re in a much warmer state now then you grew up in and that you played your professional career and so can’t really go skiing that much I imagine. Or skating.

Stephane Yelle: I grew up skiing. We do that around Christmas time typically, but obviously golf is a big thing. I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona, now. You don’t have somebody that played golf. I do that a little bit. I stay busy with the kids and work. I spend a lot of time in Starbucks, gymnastics, and I’m on my computer and just chipping away at this living the life, living the life.

Bradley Sutton: All right, now before we get into your 30-second tip for us, we’re going to play something called the search volume game. Right now. This is something that the listeners here can play along. And but what I do with the guests now is I give you three keywords. These are keywords, search terms, search and Amazon. Yep. And I’m going to tell you three different search volumes and they’re not going to be necessary in the same order or they could be, you never know, but you’re going to match the search volume to the keyword. And I think I, out of all the times I’ve done this, only one person has got a right because a lot of the times I do it, I find weird ones where I know they would get wrong cause it’s kind of a trick question. But then again, sometimes because people are thinking about that, they still get it wrong because now they’re second-guessing themselves. So here are you ready for the three keywords? All right, the three keywords are hockey, hockey sticks, hockey tape. Hey now the three search volumes in ascending order are 5,000 so one of these has 5,000 searches. One of them has about 11,000 and by the way, you better not have Helium 10 open trying to cheat. And then the last one is about 16,000 searches. So again, five thousand eleven thousand sixteen thousand the three keywords are hockey, hockey sticks, hockey tape, the which one is which do you think?

Stephane Yelle: Oh, I’ll say hockey. 16,000. Okay. Yes, it wouldn’t be let down hockey at 25,000.

Bradley Sutton: All right, you got one right? And that was hockey. Hockey is 15,000 but surprisingly hockey tape is 11,000 and hockey sticks is the 5,000 and I would think that the reasoning maybe is his hockey sticks is more of a bigger kind of purchase, you know, and maybe something that people would do, I don’t know.

Stephane Yelle: In-person they want to feel it, I don’t know. You have to feel your stick. Yeah. And then hockey tape is just something that people need constantly. So maybe that’s why they’re there.

Bradley Sutton: What is hockey tape? Is that for the stick or for your body?

Stephane Yelle: Good. Well, it could be both. It could be for your pads, your shin pads, but typically it’s for your stick.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. There we go. All right. That’s something important to like always we need to understand our buyers, our customer avatar all the time. The point that I always do this game is it tells people that we can’t just rely on what, even if we’re knowledgeable on the subject, our personal mind is not necessarily that of the entire population of the country that we’re trying to sell into.

Stephane Yelle: So always use the different tools to get these insights because no matter how well you know your craft, that’s not the same way that people think always. Speaking of Helium 10 and using the tools in the wholesale method, how have you used Helium 10 because you all, a lot of people think that helium 10 is only for private label sellers, but what do you use Helium 10 for?

Stephane Yelle: Yeah, a lot of it, I mean we use most of the stuff that you guys have. We use Profits, we use Follow-Ups personally. And some of my VAs use some of the different tools if we’re trying to figure out the potential of a brand or their products if it makes sense at first to carry it or to optimize, so we’ll use Magnet.

Stephane Yelle: Cerebro, we’re getting more into keyword tracking. That’s something we’re learning.  That makes a difference. It makes a different for us when we’re reporting to certain brands. So yeah, you guys have a great tool. Cool. Thanks.

Bradley Sutton: I mean, out of all the things you know about and e-commerce, Amazon having a balancing family life and e-commerce, whatever, dig deep into your knowledge base here and we’ve come to the part of the show we called the TST or the 30-second tip, TST, 30-second tip. What is something of value that you can give our listeners that takes 30 seconds or less to say but might be able to help somebody listen out there. It doesn’t have to be out of e-commerce, it could be about hockey. It was whatever you want it to be, just 30 seconds or less and really valuable.

Stephane Yelle: I think looking back the last couple of years, I think it’s just you have to put in the work on like on a daily basis even when you don’t feel like it and kind of played the long game instead. Trying to make a lot of money over a year or two. I look at it over, you know, five years or six, seven years until my kids are or going into college. Same as when I started, when I played hockey since I was three or four years old and it took me 15 years to become a pro. It takes time and I think if you’re patient, there’s definitely, there’s a lot of opportunities, especially in e-commerce.

Bradley Sutton: Absolutely. Well Stephane, thank you so much for joining us on the show here. If we could give the Hart trophy to someone in Amazon wholesale, I think you would get the Hart trophy. That’s kind of like, isn’t that the name of that? Like the MVP, right? For the NHL? So we got the Hart trophy winner here for Amazon wholesale. Thank you so much and I’d love to reach out to you next year and, you know, 2021 and see how many of those goals you mentioned that you were able to reach here in 2020.

Stephane Yelle: Absolutely. Thanks Bradley.

Bradley Sutton: Quick note guys. Don’t forget that regardless of where you are listening to this podcast, whether it’s on your iPhone or on Stitcher, on Spotify, that you hit the subscribe button so that you can be notified every time we drop a new episode.

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Published in: Serious Sellers Podcast

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