#120 – Want to Find Your Next Great Amazon Product? Here’s a “Magic” New Product Research Technique

A lot of you selling on Amazon have at the same time, spent many years heading into the office, five or six days a week in order to keep those paychecks coming.

For many Amazon sellers, there comes a day when they’re able to scale their business to the point where that’s no longer necessary. That moment must feel magical when it arrives.

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton speaks with an eCommerce super-star and former professional magician who’s the guy that helped push Helium 10’s data scientists to create some of our top tools. Now, he has created a “magic” product research strategy that is so cutting-edge, Bradley says that, “he’s never heard of anything like it.”

In episode 120 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Tomer discuss:

• 01:45 – Tomer’s Origin Story
• 03:15 – Offering Great Value and Keeping His Numbers Close to His Vest
• 05:20 – Tomer’s Unique Product Research Technique
• 09:30 – “You’ve Got to Have Your End Goal in Mind”
• 12:15 – Tomer’s Product Research Metrics
• 15:50 – “Competitors” isn’t Necessarily a Bad Word
• 18:15 – Looking for Reasons to Say Yes to a Product  
• 21:10 – It Often Comes Down to How Much it Costs to Launch a Product
• 24:30 – Using Filters in Black Box
• 27:30 – First You Validate, then Look for Profit
• 32:00 – If You’ve Done the Work, the Launch Will be an Easy One
• 34:20 – Variations Alone Can Help You Scale Up Your Profits
• 35:25 – When You Get a Hit, You Want to Go “Deep”
• 38:00 – Tomer Talks About Brand 
• 41:55 – Tomer Tackles Bradley’s Search Volume Game
• 44:45 – Tomer’s 30 Second Tip
• 48:35 – How to Connect with Tomer

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: Today, we’re speaking with one of the Serious Sellers Podcast’s favorite all-time guests. He’s an e-Commerce superstar and former professional magician, who’s going to be sharing with us a magic product research strategy that is so cutting edge. I’ve never even heard of anything like it. 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. Now guys, when I first made this podcast, I had told you my goal was not to have the same person twice in one year. So I didn’t want to have to– I wanted to have the biggest variety of guests. So, now, finally, we’ve actually been around for a year. We just hit our one year anniversary and so now we’re cycling back to some of our best guests from 2019, and the very first person to be on the rotation here twice on the episode is none other than Tomer from Israel. Tomer, how’s it going?

Tomer Rabinovich: Very good, Bradley. How are you?

Bradley Sutton: Pretty good. Thanks. Welcome back to the show. Even today, you still have one of the best-reviewed podcast. For any of you guys who haven’t heard that podcast, we’re going to be talking about something completely different today, but it’s still very relevant to things that Tomer was talking about; listing optimization and keyword research, so make sure to check that out. That was one of the first episodes we did, I believe it was Episode 3 or 4. So guys, if you haven’t checked that out, go to helium10.com/podcast, type in Tomer, T, O, M, E, R and then you’ll see his very first podcast. Still great information, but today we’re going to talk about something different, but before we get into that, let’s just catch people up for– we have now up to 50,000 listeners a month. So I’m sure there’s plenty who didn’t hear that first episode, they might not know much about you. So real quick, you actually, were a magician in a previous life, right Tomer?

Tomer Rabinovich: Oh, right. Yeah. I was a magician, professional magician, for over 10 years. That’s what I did, and I felt comfortable on the stage and when I got the opportunity, like Amazon events and stuff, I just started speaking, so there are many events and we get to meet-up as well, different events, so that’s great.

Bradley Sutton: About your background selling on Amazon. How long have you been selling on Amazon now?

Tomer Rabinovich: So, I started in 2015. My first product went live. I’m running right now multiple rounds. I’m doing consulting for six, seven, eight-figure sellers, and also have my own events that I do as well for experienced sellers, called Top Dog Summit. So, staying busy, but also running my own business with a team in the Philippines and it’s going really, really great.

Bradley Sutton: Now, how many brands do you personally have? Just yourself, not the ones that you partner with people or–?

Tomer Rabinovich: I still have partners, investors in some brands, and I ditched everyone pretty much. And now I have just four brands on my own and that’s it.

Bradley Sutton: And what was your 2019 sales like?

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah, so this was the only thing I never discuss, which is my numbers. I really think that what I tried to do whenever I speak on a podcast. So I lecture or whatever, I always tried to give as much value as they can because when you ask someone their numbers, I can give you any number.

Bradley Sutton: You can make it magically appear. Some fancy numbers probably.

Tomer Rabinovich: I can just tell you this, that my bank account is always empty because we keep scaling this business and they think this is a very cash-flow type business in general. So I think like everyone’s bank accounts are empty.

Bradley Sutton: Now, is that something that you have a plan for? Is that how always you want to run until you’re a certain age or “Hey, I’m going to do it like this for three, four years and then start building up.”?

Tomer Rabinovich: It’s not, literally. I’m kidding. It’s not the main goal is empty, but–

Bradley Sutton: No, but I’m assuming you invest, you reinvest most of what you make, right? And to scale it?

Tomer Rabinovich: Right. So, we keep reinvesting everything into more products or invest in other things. And I also did consulting. I do also help obviously with the cash flow for the business and the event and everything. So, right now I’m just focusing on gross. I’m not focusing on selling any of the brands or anything like that. At least not at this moment of time. But yeah.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Now in the previous episode that everybody’s going to go back and listen to because I told them to, we talked about some of your great keyword research. You and I were the ones who, especially you more than me, but we’re the ones who finally pushed Bojan, our former CTO who now is our COO, into that integration in Cerebro for the multi-ASIN, and different things in Helium 10 actually come from the great brain of this individual we have on the line with us here today. So I wanted to talk to you about something else you do in a unique way because again, so many people are always worried like, “Oh, if everybody’s doing something the same way, aren’t we all going to come out with the same things and the same keywords, the same products, etcetera?”. And you have a very, very unique way of keyword research. But from what I hear around the water cooler is that you also have a very unique way of doing product research. And this part I haven’t really heard from you before, so I’m going to learn this along with all of our listeners today.

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah, so product search, I believe, we never talked about this actually, Bradley, but I believe this is the number one most important thing when it comes to selling on Amazon. The reason being that you can do everything wrong. You can have a bad listing, you can have not even getting index, not running PPC correctly or whatever it is. But if you chose the right product, a lot of times you will still get sales and sometimes a lot of sales, and it happens a lot in many different accounts that they looked at. But if you chose the wrong product, everything needs to be right. Do you have beautiful images? You know how to do PPC, manage your inventory. In keyword research, you do everything correctly, but you still don’t sell anything because he wanted a saturated product or a product without any demand. So he won’t tell anything. So that’s why I do what I mean. Everyone thinks product research is basic because that’s what you learn in different courses and things like that. But no one talks about product research. Once you are established, once you have a few products, once we have a product line, how do you expand that product line correctly? How do we really scale this business and make it big? And once you are big, once you have revenue, once you have cash, which product should you go for? I mean those products, once you have cash are very different than the products you went for when you started. So yeah, it’s a very, it’s the most important topic I believe when it comes to selling on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton: Now, this strategy that we’re going to talk about today, is it something that just you kind of developed by trial and error over time, or something that you’re just barely doing in the last few months, or you’ve been doing for a couple of years, or what’s the origin of how you came across this strategy?

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah, so this strategy is something that I’ve been preaching for the past, I would say three years. I spoke about it at very small, intimate events. Not really– I don’t think we spoke about it at any big events I spoke in. Because I kind of keep it to myself and also to the people I consulted and things like that. Almost all of them are using this method because it makes sense. It makes more sense. And when I look at extra screenshots from Helium 10, I can almost immediately say this is a good product to a bad product do you go for, which most of the time you can’t really do. So yeah, this is what we use now.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So where, where does it start? What do we start? Do we start on Amazon? Do we start off Amazon?

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah, everything we do is in Amazon. I don’t look outside. I know you and Tim, Tim Jordan is a good friend and I know both of you like to look outside and kind of get a feel on what’s going on, and what’s going to work and things like that. For me, that’s going to be a big risk. I don’t really want to risk anything. I want to go into a launch and into a new product knowing what I’m going into, and knowing what to expect in terms of revenue and sales and profits, and everything together. So let me first start this with the theory basically of what this is and why this first makes sense before it gives you numbers on what to look at. And the criteria I’m looking for because of the criteria, each person on the podcast probably has criteria in his mind. Maybe from a course, he did things like BSR ranges, his price ranges. It needs to wait– product needs to be very light or something like that. I have reached units sold on the first page or even a number of reviews. If someone has over a thousand reviews, you’d never go into that product. Or different criteria are that everyone has, from the courses they learned, or from things that came up on their own. So all of the criteria, as I just mentioned, I don’t look at any of those. Okay. So again, I had my own, but I will share on the podcast, but it’s different than what everyone else is doing., So basically when you think about product research, you need to think about the end. You need to have your end goal in mind. Are you aiming to do $10,000 a month with this product in sales, or twenty, or fifty, or what is going to happen with time? And how long is it going to take you to get there? And are you happy with that? We have a list of products that we want to launch, and we prioritize them in different ways, which if we’ll have them can also discuss. But launch and scale basically mean I need to see that I can launch this product relatively easily. So if I get 10, 20, 50 reviews, as soon as I get there, I know we’ll have organic sales, and once I do get there with the organic sales, I’m going to get reviews, I’m going to grow the product. And after a while hopefully, I can scale this product. So this is the basic theory behind this. So, you want to make sure there is room to get in with 10, 20, 30 reviews, get organic sales.  When I say again, that means organic. Can we piece it together? That pushes your– you will start getting your reviews organically and everything, and then you will scale once you have more reviews, once you have some more history, optimize your PPC, things like that, and then you can really scale this product. I hope that that makes sense.

Bradley Sutton: Absolutely.

Tomer Rabinovich: Okay. A lot of the times, when you look at the product and you say, okay, this has a thousand reviews, I’m not going to go into that product. I don’t really like looking at it that way. So let me explain what I look for. So let’s start with the launch. So we have launch and scale. So I want to see that as soon as I get the product into Amazon, I can get to $2,000 in revenue. I know that sounds very low. $2,000 in revenue, as soon as they have 10 20, 30, 50 reviews, okay? So they will know that that will happen is if I see competitors on the first page, or it doesn’t matter on whichever page it is, because um, I don’t know if I put the main keyword in Amazon and maybe it’s a product with a lot of different keywords. So, what I do in Xray, let’s say type in yoga mat right now, I type in a yoga mat, and I click to open the next page as well, contracting stage. It shows me let’s say four or five pages, and I arrange everything by revenue. They’ve arranged by BSR or something like that. Because you don’t really care above the number of sales, you only care about revenue. At the end of the day, that’s the important thing. So I arrange it by revenue and they see how many sellers, how many products I do over $2,000 a month, and have less than a hundred reviews. And then I want to make sure that they’re not in their launch phase, that they’re done launching the product. So I make sure all of them are also over a hundred days. So, to see that over a hundred years, this is not in Xray. So I have to open the listing, I need to look at the extension inside the listing, and then see that there were actually over a hundred days on Amazon. So if I have a few of those, two, three, four of those, then I know that once I launched this product, if they would launch it today, I know that it’s going to work out probably as long as I bring hopefully a better product, have a better listing, have everything better than everyone else, which is what we discuss about kind of the last podcast I did with you. So, as long as I can have everything better than everyone else, and I know everyone is improving the product, and whenever you want to stand out from everyone else. So hopefully I can launch this product easily if I can’t find anyone with– although the minimum is a hundred reviews. Maximum, sorry, maximum was a hundred years. If I can’t find anyone with less than a hundred views, doing over 2K a month and everyone is doing, let’s say all of those that they’re doing over 2K a month, I have over a hundred reviews. For me, that’s a saturated market. So that basically means I need to get at least a hundred reviews to start selling anything, organically. Is this part clearer? Hopefully.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. So actually do you know about that secondary success score that we have as an option in Xray now?

Tomer Rabinovich: No.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So, what we do, you know there used to be the success score there, which still is there, but if you go into the Chrome Extension, and then you hit the settings, and then you change to the two-factor success score. And then basically what that is doing is it’s taking a list, or it’s taking the top 10 products, and then you put in two things. You put in the max number or average number of reviews, and then the average revenue.

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah, but the thing is that it’s two different sets of products. The launch is one set of products, and the scale is the second set of products, because look, if you go to the gym right now, okay, and you see someone who just signed up for his first day for the gym on one side, then you sit, there’s a huge guy, a lot of muscles and abs and everything on the other side. You can’t compare yourself to that guy if this is your first day in the gym. Right?

Bradley Sutton: Yes, especially me.

Tomer Rabinovich: If you are established, if you have a few hundred reviews and everything, don’t you? Yeah. You can compare yourself to that guy for sure. The guy who was like the first day in the gym right now, and that’s the only guy you can compare yourself to, it’s not really a fair comparison to see how much you can lift compared to the other guy because it’s not really comparing yourself to the person who is in the same situation you are in. So there was this lunch three, four, six months ago. It doesn’t matter when exactly, but similar to me in terms of the number of reviews basically, and obviously similar pricing, more product, everything. And if they are getting sales with just a few reviews organically didn’t, I know I can get there pretty quickly probably.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So then you don’t– if somebody else, if there’s a couple of people on the page, or even half, or any number, you tell me that have 500, 1000 reviews, that does not necessarily disqualify the niche for you. You’re just as long–

Tomer Rabinovich: It’s on the other hand because of look if this is a big market okay? They knew their business and that just means the market is bigger now. So if she can get to one, 2%, all of their sales, you will grow as well. So this is kind of, again, I just want you to right now zoom in on the launch product. So as long as those are there, that means you can go to 2K, 3K, whatever relatively quickly. Right? The scale part is the interesting part because my goal with the product is not to do 2K, right? My goal is to do hopefully a lot more. So the next set of products– So I’m looking for, my method is to look for at least two, that are less than a hundred reviews over a hundred days. And are you doing over 2K a month? And also I make sure those are, if sold by FBA, I don’t want to compare myself to A and Z, or merchant, or anything like that. So by Amazon, or by Merchants, or anything because that is not comparing apples to apples, right? That is not a really fair comparison. I want to see some that are doing the same method as I am doing. I don’t mind having them on the first page. They don’t bother me. If I see them, that’s okay. I just want to see those that I look for basically. So as long as I see those, then I can look for the scale. Okay? The other products, so let’s say in this case, let’s say the goal is to get to $10,000 a month. Okay? Let’s say that’s my goal. So I need to look for two more products. Two additional products, that’s already doing over 10K a month, have less than 350 reviews, and they’re also over a hundred days and sold by FBA. So if this happens, if they see two more, two additional products that are over $10,000 a month have less than 350 reviews.

Tomer Rabinovich: And I can estimate how long it’s going to take me to get to 350 reviews. You can use –look at the review velocity in Xray, you can kind of estimate how long it’s going to take you to get there with this product. And if you’re happy with that, then this means that you can launch this product, get to 2K, start getting organic reviews, and then scale up. And the difference between this method than any other method that they ever taught is, I’m not looking for reasons to disqualify the product. I’m looking for reasons why you should go after this product. So as long as they find my four products, you can say. So during the scale, during the launch in between the scale, that means this is a good product. Now there is one thing we– what do you like to look for, which is into the market saturated. So if I see products on the first page, let’s say the tablet has a thousand reviews, and they’re doing the 4.5-star rating, but they’re doing $3,000 a month. We have a beautiful listing and everything. If they see a few of those like that, then I know, yeah, this is saturated. It doesn’t matter what I find outside of that. One of the reasons I gave in the recent lecture I did was with a yoga ball. So I showed a yoga ball, and I showed that it fits the criteria, but then they showed how I know that it’s saturated. So basically what you want to do is you want to analyze Xray on a deep level. So you just mark each one on the first page, and you say, does this make sense that it’s making this much money with this amount of reviews, with this review rating, with this phrase? And if you can kind of answer that question, then it makes sense. If someone, for example, drops to four stars or 3.5-star rating and the dropping fills, that makes sense for me as well. But if they have a very high star rating, a beautiful listing, a lot of reviews, and they’re not making any money, then that triggers a red light and I know, yeah, this is probably saturated by now.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, makes sense. I’m digging this now. I think we’re on the same page now. I totally get you.

Tomer Rabinovich: Okay, so what I mentioned with now, 2K, 10K, that’s what I call it. So $2,000 in launch, and then $10,000 in scale. That’s okay for someone who’s doing less than a 100K a month. So some of them were– I wouldn’t say starting out, but even if you’re doing 50K a month, now you are a pretty established seller. But you probably can’t take huge risks in launching like investing 30, 50K in a product launch. You can’t really afford for that not to work out. So those sellers that they’re doing less than let’s say 80K a month, or 100K a month, this is what I recommend them to do. 2K or 10K products, well which we call them basically low hanging fruit products. So hopefully we can kind of launch them quickly and then scale them up. Now for advanced sellers, for people who are doing over a million a year, over the 100K a month point, what I recommend is looking for, again, two sets of products for launch and scale, but those are going to be different. So, in this case, the scale is over 50K a month because when you think about product research, product launch in general, any product, they be product A, or product B. We are both exactly the same in terms of creating the listing, images, board points, titles, running PPC, inventory management, everything’s the same. For product A and product B, the only two differences are time to market. How much it’s going to take you to develop, improve everything in the product. But let’s say that’s the same. So, the only difference really is how much you invest, how much does it take to actually launch a product. So I prefer to launch 10, 12, 15 products a year, but that is going to generate 50K a month, instead of investing a lot more effort, a lot more resources into launching 40 or 50 products that are going to generate me 10K a month. So we are looking for bigger fish now, for much more, I would say difficult products, or competitive products, or things like that, but scale them up with enough, like the market is deep enough to launch them, and hopefully get to that 50K mark.

Bradley Sutton: Okay.

Tomer Rabinovich: And, if no one is doing 50K a month, let’s say on the first page, then I feel like if you think about that just probably not really possible. It is not, there is a pie. There is a pie with buyers, and later the first page is 3,000 sales or whatever. So, this is the pie, 3,000 sales in a month for this product. How much of that pie can you– what kind of bite can you get from that pie? So, if no one’s doing 50K then I just move on. I again, I look for those at least two products that are doing 50K a month, not less than a thousand reviews. So I hope this is clear. I know it’s a lot of numbers.

Bradley Sutton: This is super interesting. I love– I thought I’ve heard every kind of product research strategy, but this is interesting cause it’s more on the kind of the validation side. Now, just taking it a step back, are you first putting things into Black Box to try and at least give you– find some of these kinds of keywords and products?

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah. So, in the Black Box, the easiest way to do this because if you look for the– launch a product, it’s going to be very easy to find a lot of them over 2K, less than a hundred reviews. And a lot of them are just launching. So what we do is we look for the skill products. So let’s say you want to look for 10K products. What you need to do in X-ray is simply put over 10K a month, and less than 350 reviews. And then mark the categories that you’re selling, or your brand, or whatever. And people are saying Amazon cause you can’t find any products, but you can find a lot of products this way. You will see a lot of low hanging fruit products that can generate 10K pretty easily. And then if you want to do the 50K, do the same thing. So, the processors, you would put over 10K a month, less than 350 reviews in search, and then you just– I like to arrange it by revenue, like in Xray. So, I see the highest revenue first. And then, one thing about x-ray, they don’t know if everyone knows actually. So Xray gives you 10 pages and if they are more than 10 pages, you won’t see the other products. So what I arrived to do is I like to keep filtering until I get nine or eight pages because then I know these are–

Bradley Sutton: One more time, Black Box not Xray, right?

Tomer Rabinovich: Right. Black Box. Yeah, sorry. So if I keep filtering down, then I know these are all the products if I get eight or nine pages.

Bradley Sutton: That’s music to my ears, Tomer. That’s what I’ve been trying to teach people. “Hey, there’s not enough.” I’m like, we did that on purpose because it’s the indicator that you might be missing something. So you need to filter, you need to narrow down your search, and then you know you’re not missing anything, and you’re not going to be skipping over things, and allows you to segment it. So music to my ears guys, we did not plan that. He said that without me paying him. That is great, Tomer. Please continue. I love it.

Tomer Rabinovich: So if you’re looking for, let’s say over 10K a month and less than 350 views, and you see 10 pages in your category or let’s say categories that you can either narrow down to one category and look one by one, or you can just change it to be 150 reviews, 250 reviews, or a hundred reviews, and see how many pages come up in Black Box. Oh, one more thing you want to filter is only with FBA products because you only look for FBA products in this method I will say for product research. So once you see a good product, so you skim through the products, and once you see a good product, probably that you don’t know about or might be a good fit you click on it, and don’t start going down reviews. Don’t do any of that. All you want to do is copy the main keyword for that product and you want to be as specific as possible. When I say the main keyword, it’s not a huge deal because you are going to extract some more pages. You are going to click X and those that are irrelevant, or very different price points, or very different products. That’s what I like to do is I like to look for product keyword, which I believe the first page of the entire first page is going to be the exact same product. And that’s usually not the first two or three words. It’s usually the first phrase of that product. So, that’s what we usually do. But it’s again, it’s not a big deal. It’s not, it doesn’t really matter because when people consulted or asked me how many products do I need to see on the first page or whatever, how many files do I need to see? I told him, you see everything, you see every single product. There’s around this product that you are researching because you need to see the entire market. You need to understand the market and to make sure there is room to go into that market. Well, making sure it’s not as saturated as I mentioned. So once we tied that keyword in the search, again, I don’t scroll down, you can just skim through it to make sure that the images– it looks the same. Everything is okay. You click on Xray, and then you extract a few pages and arrange by revenue, and then you do that next phase, which is the first thing I mentioned, which is the research to go line by line and say, this is over 2K, this has less than a hundred views. This is blah, blah, blah. And then once you had those four, or five, ten products, whatever, that’s fair to my criteria basically you want to open all those listings and make sure all of them are over a hundred days on Amazon. That’s the process. I hope that’s clear.

Bradley Sutton: Yes, absolutely.

Tomer Rabinovich: So, after you validate the product, this does not mean you are launching that product. It’s very plain to understand a lot of the times, people are literally doing product research, and they look for a product and they say, Oh, this might be okay. Then they go to Alibaba and check prices and whatever. Don’t do that. You need to understand there is a process from the time you research until the time that you launched your product. So what we do, is we first validate the product in the method I just mentioned. So we make sure that everything is okay in terms of the rule to go into that market. You figure when right now, let’s say there are enough profits to be made, okay, let’s say that’s the case and I decided to go into that market, that’s fine. But then what you want to do is you want to check suppliers. You can check Alibaba, we have some source we’ll work with and everything. You want to check with anyone and then you want to make sure you have enough profits. Now people are talking about ROI and margins and things like that. I will just say that we are probably– there’s going to be an entirely different podcast, but we look at this a bit differently. But let’s say for the sake of this, we look for at least a hundred percent ROI. So if I invested $5 landed in Amazon, I want to get $10 back from Amazon. So if I bought a thousand units, so, let me think. I want to be able to purchase another 2000 units afterward. Okay? This is not like– this is like the basic rule that we follow, but we have exceptions. If it’s a very cheap product, we find products that are 200, 300% ROI. People think it’s reversed, but it’s usually cheap products. That’s what happens when I say cheap. That’s under $10. Yeah. So those have amazing ROI. And you mentioned that also when you talk to suppliers, this does not mean you are launching that product. It’s still a part of the research, all the samples that you have in your closet, and you never launched are all part of your product research. So– and that’s very important than just the product launch happens when you pay your supply to deposit. The 30% or whatever you pay them, that’s when you actually launched the product. That’s the light you give to yourself, to your team to launch that product. And until that point, everything you do is research, and just before you pay your supplier, what I always recommend is going back to the research, go back to Xray, click again, make sure it’s not saturated. Look at all of the new settlers that are under a hundred days. See what they’re doing. Maybe they improved their product in ways you didn’t think about. So from the moment you did research until the moment you pay your supplier, that can be a two months process, right? That can be even longer than that. And a lot of the times people are saying, “Oh, but I did all this work.” That’s just research. It doesn’t mean you have to go for that product. So, don’t get confused with research and with actually going for the product.

Bradley Sutton: Okay.

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah. So, this is just one method that we use for launching products. Do we have time for one more?

Bradley Sutton: Sure. Let’s do it. You’re on a roll.

Tomer Rabinovich: Perfect. So the other method that I want to discuss is something that is very, very important. So if you use my method to launch a product like two slides of product, or you have your own methods or whatever, once you hit it, once you get a good product and it starts selling well. So let’s say you launch a yoga mat, okay, let’s say you’re killing it and it’s only really well and everything is fine. And then he said, “Oh, I sold really well in a yoga mat, I’m going to launch a yoga ball next because they want to build a brand. That’s what Amazon wants me to do. They want us to build the brand and everything, and I can cross-sell between my customers and everything. Now, that’s okay. You can do that if you want to. What I do– you can also do that at the same time, but what I like to do is something we call selling more of the same. So if the yoga mat for $10, let’s say launched it, and it works well, what I’m going to do next is I’m going to launch more colors, more sizes, more a two-pack, three-pack, four-pack for all of those things. I’m going to do a lot of research. Okay? I’m going to do a deep research analysis and everything to make sure those are actually good ideas. Once, I’m going to check which competitors, what variations they have, what they’re doing that is actually doing well, and then I’m going to launch more of the same products of the product I could just have because if you think about it, it’s going to be the easiest launch ever because you want all the keywords. You can see from the research you did. It’s going to be probably very simple photography because you know the product and you already did it once. It might be just graphic designing and Photoshopping everything to change the covers, or pack, or whatever. And I know a lot of people are doing this, but maybe we don’t think about this too much when they do it. So it’s really important that once you get a good product, once you get going with the product, don’t just go to the next product in the line. First, do everything you can do, maximize the sales and revenue and everything out of that one product. Now the question that comes next is, should you launch the next one as a variation or a new listing? So what I always suggest is first looking at competitors, see what they’re all doing, and usually, that’s what’s working. If they all have variations, then you should probably do the same. Just know that you can’t really gain the system anymore with variations that you could in the past. So when you have variations, you need the listing to be almost exactly the same, except changing the color, or the size, or shape, or whatever. But everything else needs to stay the same. We’re not doing any black hat tactics with that, or anything like that. So we are staying legit. But if the launch was very easy. If it was an easy launch for me, like I got 10, 20 reviews, it started selling ahead towards or more star because it was selling too much and whatever. I would probably most cases I would launch the next product as a new listing. The reason they do that is when you have separate listings and this is not something everyone knows apparently. If you have separate listings then you will appear in the organic search twice. And the same with PPC ads. You can appear twice in the ads. If you have variations, you will only appear once. So, variations are great for competitive niches, for specific categories as well. But, if the launch was difficult, if you need to give a big push, or if you need to bring a lot of inventory to get that product going in some way, then yeah, we are probably going to launch variations as much as possible. And, probably that’s 30K a month with a single variation. If you have two, three variations that can easily be a 50K a month product. And that’s a lot of times how we get to 50K a month by just launching a few variations, or just let’s say you launch your yoga mat for $10, and maybe yoga mat for $40 from a decent material can work as well, and that’s going to be from the same supplier that you already work with and everything is fine. You can probably fill up containers with that same supplier and save a lot of money on shipping and there’s just only advantages to do this. The only thing that you need to be aware of, if you keep on launching yoga mats and that’s the only thing you actually sell, you are not truly cross-selling on Amazon. You are just selling a yoga mat. So, a person doesn’t need more than one yoga mat. They’re going to buy one product from you and that’s it. So it feels like you’re putting to a brand in New York, product catalog eventually. So we call it going deep and growing wide. Going deep is basically launching more and more yoga mats, but growing wide is like launching yoga balls and then you’ll go blocks or whatever it is that you sell, but you want to keep expanding your product line eventually. But whatever you can get a hit on something, then you want to go deep with that product and launch more of the same of that product. When you go deep, it doesn’t need to fit that same criterion I just mentioned. When you grow deep, like if you say, “Oh this can add me another 5K a month to my bottom line.” That’s great. It’s just up to you, but you need to know your numbers, you need to know what you expect to get in the what efforts that’s not there from you. Launching in either a color, or a two-pack, or whatever. It’s all you need to do. It’s just one conversation with your supplier and stuff. So, yeah, go ahead.

Bradley Sutton: When you are talking about going deep and expanding our product lines, and offering different options and things. Now, in all of these cases, do you suggest trying to build brand awareness and build a brand, or are there cases where you could still expand out and you don’t even have to worry about building an email list and building a Facebook audience and things like that?

Tomer Rabinovich: So, I don’t feel like saying what Amazon wants us to do, but they’re looking at everything they’re doing to kind of understand what they want us to do. So if you look back, you can see frequently bought together right. That was the first thing that came out with Amazon. So they want to do cross-selling, and then they give you a brand registry. They didn’t give you brand registry if it was a trademark, they gave you certain fonts, they give you ads for your brand registry products, and they give you so many things. They want you to build a brand. And when they see a brand that means one customer that you sell multiple products too. So I have a lot of Apple products. Okay. So basically I have an iPad and I have a MacBook. I have an iPhone and basically I can buy all of Apple’s products, right? But, I’m not going to buy more than one laptop, right?

Bradley Sutton: Yeah.

Tomer Rabinovich: I’m going to buy more than one MacBook. But they did go deep with different MacBooks. They did go deep with different iPhones. They did go deep with colors and sizes and shapes and whatever. So, you’re doing one to expand your product line, but at the same time, you want to go deep. And when you think about a brand that you were thinking about the customer not selling yoga mat, a Yoga mat is not a brand. A yoga mat is a factory. So, when you sell a brand, then you sell to someone. Okay. You sell to a person who’s going to buy all of your products. That’s a brand. If you sell a yoga mat for kids, and then yoga mats for men, and yoga mats for women, that’s again, not a brand. A brand was a specific person you sell to. Eventually, that’s going to be people that do yoga, that can be people with a healthy lifestyle, then you can sell supplements to those people, and then yoga mats, and then different things. But you still sell to someone. So, I think again, I really believe that’s what Amazon wants us to do because they understand how people shop. So they want you to appear to frequently bought together with your product. And a lot of the times you see that you sell product A, and you sell 10 units a day of that product. But when you launched product B, which compliments that product A, all of a sudden product A jumps to 15 sales a day or 20 sales a day because of the cross-selling between those two products. So, and again, I believe, and I see that over and over again. Amazon pushes people, pushes buyers, shoppers to do that. They push them to buy more products from you if it’s going to very thing if it’s working if they actually want those products from you.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. So now we’re going to get into your 30-second tip. That was your 30-minute tip. But we have a section of the show that we call it a 30-second tip. But before we do that, a couple of things, we’re going to play a search volume game really quick that I do with the listeners or the listeners and the guests. But I want us to talk about your upcoming conference now. Can you tell everybody why, and this is important too, why Bradley Sutton is not invited, or cannot attend this conference that you have coming up. Does it because you’re a mean person, or what’s the reason?

Tomer Rabinovich: That’s the reason number one. So, yeah. Top Dog Summit. So, I’ve been to a lot of events, these past few years. This is going to be the 4th time I’m doing the Top Dog Summit. And all those events kind of see the same thing. I mean some events are better than others, obviously. I like all those events in some way. And I especially liked the networking and those events, but a lot of times, it feels, especially for bigger sellers, they are sick of those events already. They don’t want to hear someone pitch things on stage, or listen to a sponsor, or being pitched all the time and upsold and things like that. So, after going to a lot of events, the first year and a half I’ve been in Amazon, I decided that the events I want to go to don’t exist. And then I like to do an event. I wanted to go to an event that they can just sit down and everyone in the room is just selling on Amazon, no one’s going to pitch me anything. No one’s going to sell me anything. And that can be very open. So in the top of that, we have a lot of people that share their brands and products and everything. So this event is usually– it’s a lot different than any other event. It’s mainly networking. We have only a handful of speakers. It’s a full three-day event that’s going to be in Sofia, Bulgaria this year to make it accessible to anyone traveling internationally from the US, or we have a few coming from Israel, and from all over Europe and things like that. So, we did it three times in a row in Israel, this time it’s going to be in Bulgaria. So as you know, Bradley, I have a lot of friends in the industry from different software, events, things like that. None of them are invited. But they, I believe all of them respect this. Kind of. So, this event is really different. So if you are just selling on Amazon, you are doing seven figures or more, then you are welcome to check topdogsummit.com or message them on Facebook. We can chat about it. You can also go– lastly, you can go to my websites, which is basically my name.com. So, tomerrabinovich.com, you can go there, and also check the events, the events of speaking out you can come up to me and say hi.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Now before we get into the tip, now we’re going to play the search volume game. You probably– we didn’t do this a lot. We didn’t have this last time you were on the show. But I give you three keywords and I also give three search volumes. And then you try and pick one, or to each one. Now until this morning– this morning, I recorded another podcast. Until this morning– like the 14 times. I’m sorry?

Tomer Rabinovich: Pick one for what?

Bradley Sutton: To pick which keyword goes to which search volume. So, I’m going to give you three different keywords and then you’ve got to keep trying to guess which one goes to which one. Now, until this morning, only one person had ever gotten an all three right? Like every other of the 13 people got it at least one or two, or two of them wrong. So, here we go. The three keywords first from the smallest keyword to the longest is magic. and be better not be cheating with Magnet open. Magic, magic tricks and a magic wand. Okay, magic, magic tricks, magic wand. Three search volumes from least to most. One of these keywords is about 9,000, one is about 20,000, and one is about 23,000. 9, 20 and 23. Magic, magic tricks, magic wand. So which one goes to which would you say?

Tomer Rabinovich: Magic wand is probably the 9,000 I would say. And then magic tricks I would say actually is the 23,000 and then magic 20,000.

Bradley Sutton: You got one right. One right. And this is how usually it happens and even an expert searches differently. Yes. I told you we look at the brand analytics, you know we could see actually for whatever reason magic tricks is actually the least. I would have thought magic tricks too. I searched for magic tricks. It has 9,000. Magic is just a general one. So I might’ve thought that might’ve been low too, but that’s actually 20,000 and the one that has the most is a magic wand with 23,000 search volume. So who knows the, again, the point of the game is just to tell all Amazon sellers, and I know you teach this method too, that don’t just rely on what you think is the best keywords. You look at what the data is telling you what the other people do. Because just because the way somebody would search is not the way that your customer would search. So look at what your competitors are doing, look at what the numbers tell you and base your listing optimization, things like that on that instead of your own preferences. Now, we got to the part of the show. It’s another new thing that we haven’t done, we didn’t do last year. It’s called TST, which stands for TST, 30-second tip. So you gave us some really long strategies that are absolutely wonderful for product research. Now, this part, it can be about product research, it could be about listing optimization, it could be about keyword research, it could be about how to come up with magic tricks, whatever. But what is something that you think you have unique insight on that’s very valuable, actionable that you could say in 30 seconds or less.

Tomer Rabinovich: Cool. Yeah, I didn’t expect this, but, one thing that I see a lot of sellers struggling with is liquidating their products. Now, with the virus going around. No one wants the liquidate maybe, but if you have a product to liquidate, there was a very good method to do that. So inside Seller Central, and you can actually profit from this. So what we do is we go to promotions, and then you have something called social media promo codes that you can create. That’s the first one in promotions. You click on that and you add your product that you want to liquidate and you want to give a discount of at least 50%. So, what that does to your product is it actually gets published to all of Amazon’s affiliates. So all those blogs, they’re going to see that you are giving 50% off. At least we usually give 60, 70, 80% just to break even. We are not looking to make anything drastic. If you can give me such a big discount, where’s the price? They’ll give a big discount on your product to break even. And then what you want to do is you want to make sure that it’s ticked by– well when you open it up, it’s only a text, but it’s basically Amazon associates and affiliates I think that can publish this. And only to do is click like– I don’t know, send, or open, or whatever the button is. Oh, just before you knew what to make the coupon unlimited so someone can buy a thousand units from you if they want to. So we want to take that and that’s it. Then you’re done. You click send, and we tried to do this one time and then run it for 14 days, and it was okay. But what we do now is we open one every single day for seven days. We do that for seven days. So, every day we open a campaign of this for seven days, and so eventually you will have like multiple campaigns running at the same time, and 40 days total. Just one thing you need to know about this, you can’t limit to the stock. So if you are doing this to liquidate, that’s great. If you’re doing this to try and make money with like 20% off or 50% off, just know someone can buy you out basically when you do this. And we’ve tried giving lower discounts, but they didn’t do any increase sales that much, or it didn’t make any effect. But if you need to liquidate giving 60 or 70%, it’s was amazingly good. I didn’t know people in this podcast in different times of the year if you lose in Q four and you have some gift items, it’s growing amazingly well. We also checked for keyword positions and ranking, but it didn’t really affect that at all. Okay. It’s going to be 30 seconds, but I think–

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, that was like for– TST TST TST TST TST, because that was a bunch of 30-second tips. But guys, quick hack on that if you want to limit it. The last time I tried that, this is something I haven’t tried in a while, but if you do a removal order on FBA or your inventory, and then there’s an option to put it on hold so that you could put maybe 200 units on hold.

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah, I heard Amazon doesn’t really like it when we do that. We stopped the word tools and did that to automatically and they all got shut down afterward and—

Bradley Sutton: But it is important. Be prepared because some people who have tried that, they didn’t want to liquidate everything, but then it went over so well. They literally sold 2000 units in two days and now they had zero stock. So it is something to think about it. So, maybe to be a little bit on the cautious side at the beginning. Alright, Tomer, I think out of 120 episodes, this has now been the longest episode in the history of Serious Sellers Podcasts other than the Manny and Gui episode. So you’re right up there in our hall of fame, especially since you are now the only one who has been on here twice for a regular episode. So thank you so much, Tomer, for coming on. And again, just one more time, how can they find out more information about you or your conference?

Tomer Rabinovich: Yeah, so if they want to find out about the conference, you can go to topdogsummit.com. It’s going to be May this year 2020, and then they can go to tomerrabinovich.com. If you want to check my coaching, then you can go to that same domain /coaching, and view about what I do. Yeah, I think that’s everything.

Bradley Sutton: Alright, awesome. Thank you so much, Tomer. And we’ll reach back to you, and next year 2021, so that you can again tell us, not tell us how many sales you had, but I like that. That’s good. Guys, going back to that, that’s important because we ask people that, but don’t let those kinds of things discourage you because there might be some people who just as Tomer said, might be a fit being a little bit on their numbers and what really matters is your profit anyways, but anyways, thanks, Tomer.

Tomer Rabinovich: I’m going to give value as much as I can.

Bradley Sutton: Lovely. You did that today. For sure.

Tomer Rabinovich: Thanks, man.

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.