Though about selling on Amazon? Learn some tips from Zack Franklin, CEO of AMZKungfu, as he sat down with Benjamin Yong at Affiliate World Asia for this one-on-one interview after his onstage presentation in Bangkok.
This post “Zack Franklin Reveals Valuable Insights On Amazon” first appeared on the AWC Facebook Page.
AWasia Interview with Zack Franklin, CEO of AMZKungfu
Introduction
- Zack Franklin:
- Hey guys, I’m Zack Franklin. I’m an Amazon seller based in Shenzhen. I do a lot of consulting for the big brands, I do software services and marketing for all the Amazon sellers out in Shenzhen. It’s great to be here at AWA.
Ecommerce in Shenzhen, China
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Hey Zack, welcome to this interview, it’s good to have you here. So can you just briefly let our audience know more about you because we all know that you’re special because most of the guys, they’re all based in US or at least, outside of China, but you are one of the few who actually chose to stay in China and conduct this business so I believe that you have seen a lot of different perspectives as compared to guys who are outside of China. So can you just let us know more about you?
- Zack Franklin:
- Yeah, so I’m Zack, I’m based full time in Shenzhen, China and doing business there is unlike anywhere else in the world. It’s the world’s fastest-growing city and you see it everyday. The speed at which people do business is unbelievable and once you spend enough time there, you can outdo anyone because you have this focus on speed.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Yeah and I heard that most people from China, they actually don’t sleep. They just keep working 24/7. Is it true?
- Zack Franklin:
- They only sleep during lunch. They’ll like break out the cots in the office and they like sleep for an hour and then they work until 10pm, but if they ever get a free day, if they ever have a vacation day, you ask a Chinese, “what are you going to do?” they’re like, “I will sleep.”
Amazon: What To Focus On
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Okay, wow. That’s impressive. Yeah. Okay Zack, so your presentation was stacked with amazing info on building these amazing stores, right? So if someone is profitable, right now, let’s just say that 4-figures profit a day on Shopify for example. So what do you think some of the most important aspects to focus on when they approach Amazon?
- Zack Franklin:
- Alright so when you approach Amazon, a lot of your problems from doing normal ecommerce are kind of taken care of. A lot of the fulfillment, you send it in once, you don’t need to worry. The marketing is simpler too, but you really need to understand how Amazon works in order to place your product. Even if you have a very good product, you need to rank very well, you need to send traffic to it with Amazon ads and you need to always make sure you’re getting reviews. So as long as you can send traffic, have a great listing, rank well, and get reviews, you can easily push that 4-figure a day profit on Amazon for so long and also on Shopify.
Reviews On Amazon
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Okay, but is it possible to fake some reviews on Amazon?
- Zack Franklin:
- Wow this is a huge topic. People do seminars about this for like two or three days in China, they will charge maybe, you know, 40,000-50,000 RMB for this type of info.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Wow so just two to three days just on reviews.
- Zack Franklin:
- Just on reviews because reviews are one of the most important topics you can do for Amazon. The important mistakes not to make are, people think friends and family, go to friends and family for reviews and Amazon has all this data because if you have the Amazon app on your phone or if they have it on their phone, they have the contacts, they can look at the addresses, and they’re very crazy about this stuff. Okay. So you kind of want to find kind of friends of friends of friends of friends in weird zip codes. They can’t all be in the same zip code too, right. So there’s a million little factors.
Amazon has like a buyer score for each buyer, right. And if it’s like, if it gets too low, they’ll flag all the reviews from that buyer. So you can also do the, you cannot do the Facebook review groups, and so it’s really hard to find those first couple reviews. I recommend one, the first no-brainer is Amazon’s early reviewer program. This is a must. It gets you your first five reviews.Two, you want to kind of have a Facebook campaign, offer people kind of a, contest or something like that, get people to buy, track who clicks to Amazon, and then three or four days later, you say “hey, we would love it if you could leave a review, here’s the link.” You just want to make it really, really easy and you need to give them a reason why they need to leave a review.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Interesting. That’s really, really interesting.
- Zack Franklin:
- Reviews are like the most fascinating game on Amazon. Another thing people do is they can combine listings, okay, that are not related.
So you see people finding old listings that had a lot of reviews that are dead products and they take them over and they combine the two listings and so then they have a ton of reviews, overnight, on a new product, until they have enough reviews to last.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Okay, yeah and would you say, so having a good review really helps, like the product to get a lot of sales.
- Zack Franklin:
- Yeah, the difference between like a 4.2 review score and a 4.3 is double the sales.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Wow. That’s just by 0.1.
- Zack Franklin:
- Yeah.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Wow that is unbelievable.
Advantages Of Living In Shenzhen
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Okay, so what are some of the biggest advantages that you have found living in Shenzhen and doing ecommerce? Also who would you recommend this to?
- Zack Franklin:
- Oh my god, pretty much everyone. So if you live in Shenzhen, you have the ability to build real relationships with everyone that’s going to matter in this business to you. You’re going to have real relationships with your suppliers, your freight-forwarders, and other Amazon sellers, there’s probably about 200 Amazon sellers – or 200,000 Amazon sellers in Shenzhen.
Even the guy that made this shirt is an Amazon seller. You can’t walk through the streets without seeing a ton of Amazon sellers or any coffee shop. So when you’re in this kind of environment, it’s like going to AWA every day. It’s going to, you know, if you’re focused, you’re immersed, it’s really going to help your business.
Building Your Ecommerce Business In China
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Let’s say if I’m someone not from China, and I want to start an ecommerce business in China, what would be some of the – what would be the challenges that I’m more likely to face and also that you faced in the past and how did you solve it?
- Zack Franklin:
- Okay so I think a lot of people initially would be scared saying like, “oh I don’t speak Chinese” or…
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Yeah, the language barrier.
- Zack Franklin:
- Which is not so much of a problem, really. They would say like, “I don’t know about China, can I live there?” But it’s like a very comfortable spot other than maybe them in that situation, which is like this. But it’s like one of the most modern cities you can be in. You’ve been to Shenzhen, you love it, like it’s incredible and so like, the standard of life is really high and being able to find the right people, the right network, can happen for you within a week. It’s very, very fast and if people have trouble if they come to China, they want to get connected to ecommerce, they can always reach out to me.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Okay, I see. Nice, okay.
Zack’s Advice To Starting On Amazon
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ So if there’s someone that wants to come into Amazon like selling products on Amazon, what would be some of the advice that you can give to them so that they can kickstart without worrying too much.
- Zack Franklin:
- Alright so, my number one advice, and this work for every single field that you could be in, is to find the top ten people around you that are doing this and it’s going to sound, you know, whatever, but, get them drunk.
Take ten people out, get them hammered, talk to them about what it’s really like, right now, and figure out if that’s something that you want to do and then say, “hey can you introduce me to anyone else doing this”. You’re going to build a network really fast, you’re going to get real information, good relationships, like, take people out for dinner, take people that you know are doing this, and spend time with them, okay. That’s it.
- Benjamin Yong:
- ?️ Yeah I kind of agree because like for example, conferences like AWA, Affiliate World Asia, is exactly like the perfect place for you to get to mix around with all these people and I mean, I can’t stress enough that networking is so important, right. It plays a big part in the business. Thank you so much, Zack for your time.
