Jing Gao is the founder of two multimillion dollar eCommerce businesses on and off Amazon. She shares her experience pivoting from retail arbitrage to private label selling, and best tips on how to manage logistics and suppliers in China.
Tommy Beringer:
What's up, you data hungry Amazon sellers? This is your host, Tommy Beringer, of the Sell, Rank, Win podcast from MerchantWords and in this podcast we give you the answers to your most burning questions, actionable insights that you can take away and implement into your business today. So let's go ahead and dive right into today's episode. What do you say? Let's go.
All right, everybody. Thank you for joining the podcast here, episode six. I have a very, very, very special guest on. I'm so excited to have her on. She is one of our hard core power users on MerchantWords. She actually broke one of our tools called the Digital Shelf report. I think she broke it in like 24, 48 hours but breaking stuff is good in a SAS company because that knows we need to improve and do better which we are doing. We're taking her feedback into account and making this tool better, better for her and for all of the other power users out there.
So just to give you guys a little bit of background on our guest before we bring her on, she started out in retail arbitrage and then successfully pivoted over to the private label model, the FBA model on Amazon, very successfully without skipping a beat and has created a big brand in her space and is doing it very, very well. So without further ado I bring you guys Jing Gao. Jing, how are you today?
Jing Gao:
I'm doing good. How about you?
Tommy Beringer:
I'm very good, I'm very good. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking shop with us. I really appreciate that.
Jing Gao:
Thank you for having me.
Tommy Beringer:
No, absolutely, so excited to have you on. So Jing, tell us a bit about yourself. What were you doing before you got into selling on Amazon and how did you get into retail arbitrage to start out and then go into the private label model? What peaked your interest there to get started on Amazon?
Jing Gao:
So before Amazon, I was an accountant. Well, mostly doing receiving, AR account receivable, and that's so long ago. That was my first fresh out of college experience. And then I was helping my previous boss with his Amazon business and I was selling a lot of designer handbags on eBay, just buying them retail, selling them retail, hence why I started with RA. And I was helping him, I was helping him upload spreadsheets, I was seeing his sales on Amazon and I realized Amazon is the next marketplace to be on. So I'm like, "Hey, why don't I try this myself?"
So I started doing it on the side and then I started seeing sales just pouring in to the point where I couldn't work a full time job anymore so I bid my farewell with him and I started my own business on Amazon doing RA for a good two years. So that really brought a lot of good revenue, gave me a lot of experience until things didn't go so well anymore. So before when I was doing RA I didn't know about the whole Amazon community existed online. I was doing everything on my own. I realized that I was getting a lot of customer complaints because, number one, products weren't packaged the same way, they were fresh out of the factory. So people are complaining, "Hey, it doesn't look real," even though I was able to provide gift receipts and all of that. So that initiated a lot of inauthentic claims and everyone knows what happens when you don't deal with it, Amazon shuts you down.
So Amazon shut me down in the year of 2016 at the time that I had entered escrow on a warehouse near southern California. And I said to myself, "Hey, I need to go meet someone. I need to go meet someone who can help me." So I went to a conference and I met a bunch of really amazing sellers to which they recommended friends who could help me get reinstated back on Amazon. And after that I just started realizing the challenges that people face with RA, retail arbitrage, on high end products. You're so prone to inauthentic claims. And I thought, "I have good taste, somewhat good taste in products. Why don't I launch my own line?" And that's when things got started.
Tommy Beringer:
Awesome. I mean, Amazon will shut you down for any little given reason, right? But it's such a good platform to sell on and especially going from the RA into private label, I think there's always much more room for margins there as well. And it's really good because Amazon does everything for you there on their private label model. So other than just getting shut down, which is horrible, what other hurdles did you face switching over from RA to private label?
Jing Gao:
Oh, so many. It's a big move pivoting. At the time when I switched over, I had already had a smaller house in California. Well, I didn't, I leased a place, it was about 3000 square feet. I had four or five employees. All of a sudden you're going from packaging hand bags to packaging something completely different and everyone had to shift their mindset of packaging one, two of the different kinds of products into 50, hundreds of the same pieces. So that was a major management change for everyone so we had to get used to it. And in addition to that, I was doing RA not very conventional way. I basically went to the store and I thought, "Hey, I like this purse. I'm going to get it." I had to learn the whole sales rank system, what that meant, had to learn the FBA system. So the research phase was really challenging but that laid down such a solid foundation for me to understand how keywords perform, how advertisings work. That was a good move for me.
Tommy Beringer:
It just sounds like you just grabbed the bull by the horns and go into, you're like, "Let's go. This sounds like a good thing to do. Let's go, I'll figure out the rest later." Right?
Jing Gao:
Sounds about right.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, awesome, awesome. So where do you source from mainly right now with your products?
Jing Gao:
Right now with my products I source mainly from China. All of my, I want to say 13 to 14, suppliers right now are all located throughout China.
Tommy Beringer:
Okay, awesome, and how's that going right now getting products over? Do you see any higher tariffs because some other sellers are telling me that they're seeing higher tariffs now than normal?
Jing Gao:
You know what? I am actually working on that at this moment exactly. I am seeing higher tariffs this past container which just arrived and it's going to go into my warehouse tomorrow morning. I am still negotiating with my broker to figure out exactly why, has there been any policy changes? But overall, the easiness of working with suppliers in China has not changed. It was more challenging during the past few months when China was shut down for Chinese New Year and then COVID and the importing was an issue and there was a fluctuation of sales online. It was just all over the board, crazies going on, but ever since things stabilized it's been a lot easier.
Tommy Beringer:
Good, good. Yeah, I forgot to mention in the beginning that you are helping sellers out now. You've just started creating a service business to help these sellers out, to source from China and do all those things that people don't even want to do such as creating shipping plans, making sure that the logistics are correct and making sure that the price per kilo or, I forgot what it's called, per dimensional weight and all that stuff is down. You told me that you just started out a service doing that. Why don't you tell us a bit about that service and how you can help sellers and bigger brands outsource and get products into the Amazon warehouses?
Jing Gao:
Sure, sure. So very recently because of COVID it got me thinking there's so much hurdles that you have to get through as a seller to start selling on Amazon, or bigger sellers to find better suppliers overseas. So that's where we come in with Outsourced Prep and Outsourced Import is to help sellers or brands alike to find a good supplier. I personally spent two months in China going from factories to factories to visit them and to the point where one of the taxi drivers said to me, "Hey, you know, you need to figure out a way to get back, right? Because I only drop you off near the factories but there's no bus, there's no taxi. You're on your own now there."
So going to places in China was really fun, meeting the factories, and really getting to understand how they work culturally and as a business entity, was very interesting. That's where we come in with experience, expertise, we will help you find the right supplier. From finding the supplier, making deals all the way to helping you prep in our California warehouse.
Tommy Beringer:
Awesome. I think I might have to use you guys for some of my products actually then.
Jing Gao:
Awesome, awesome. Welcome.
Tommy Beringer:
We're going to get those 16 ADA prices, right, maybe?
Jing Gao:
Yep, if not better.
Tommy Beringer:
If not better, I love hearing that. Okay, perfect. And talking about [16-ADA 00:15:36], that's a whole 'nother podcast, but if you guys have time check it out, 16-ADA.com. But other than that Jing can help you out with all of that because that website's pretty hard to navigate. So Jing, as a major brand owner on Amazon yourself, how important have you found it to be, to be a branded force on Amazon these days? Because you switched over from RA into the private label model and, I mean, how do you see right now on the Amazon landscape, how important it is to be a brand on Amazon right now?
Jing Gao:
So we talked about and you mentioned before, I am type that is go big or go home. So from day one, I said, "If I wanted to do private label I wanted to do it right." So when I first started, I got my business established, I applied for a trademark, I got my trademark license number, everything, before I even started selling a product on Amazon. I think it's so important that you do that. I think it's such a game changer because once you start selling the same products under the same brand, people build brand loyalty and they start coming back to you for any occasions and they start recommending you because building a well rounded brand is a good way of showing your expertise. It's a good way of showing how professional you are. It actually enhances customer experience.
Tommy Beringer:
Yes, absolutely. And segueing into that, are you running any sponsored branded ads or display ads? Is that helping your brand? Do you see that being a successful part of your business?
Jing Gao:
We are running Amazon sponsored brand ads. As far as display ads, we are going very light on that because display ads are still fairly new to some users. Every time something new comes to the market we just want to be cautious about it. That's just the way we operate and with sponsored brands, I find it really useful to really establish three, four products that's related to a certain keyword, right on top, right there. It's a good way of using advertising and not to mention we love sponsored products.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And what sponsored brand ads are, if you guys don't know, it's that headline, they used to call it headline search ads and it's at the top of the page on Amazon. When you see a brand with their logo and then they have three products, that's what we're talking about when we say sponsored brand ads. You got prime position on the search page there, right at the top, and I really suggest you guys go out and utilize those ads if you haven't. Yeah, and on the display ads, Jing, actually on my products I've been seeing some pretty good A cost on there and some pretty good sales so for me, it's been working. For some people maybe not so much, but if you just test it out, try it out a little bit and just continue with it it should prevail hopefully positive for you. That's what I've been seeing though but of course it depends on everyone's market for sure.
Jing Gao:
Yep, highly agree.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, no, for sure. So Jing, at the end of every podcast, so we're going to wrap it up here. We like to keep our podcast short and sweet and to the point, give our users value bomb after value bomb, as you have been doing. And we want to give them a special, special value add here right at the end so is there a pro Amazon brand owner tip or just a pro seller tip in general that you can give our listeners that they can take away today?
Jing Gao:
Sure. I see this in a lot of private label sellers is maintaining your listing. By maintaining, I don't mean you just create it once and forget about it. You want to constantly come back every month, every other week. You want to look at the keywords that you're targeting and tie into your ads performance, what new keywords, going back and fixing that, doing touch ups, it's such a game changer.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, no, totally agree. Do not be complacent. Always look and make sure that you are highly relevant in your ads and inside of your listings. Keep them optimized and at MerchantWords we do that. It's called our listing advisor service, just wanted to give that little plug there. So Jing, regarding your service outsourcedprep.com, where can people find you if they need help importing from China or importing from overseas, that huge pain point that a lot of sellers have and even finding a really good price and shipping agents, sourcing agents and all that stuff that you can provide for them all in one shot. Where can they reach out to you if they want to get a hold of you for that?
Jing Gao:
Sure. It would be outsourcedimport.com. So it's two different aspects of our business. One's helping with prepping and the other part is helping with import. So outsourcedprep and outsourcedimport.
Tommy Beringer:
Outsource. Is it sourced with a D or source, just [crosstalk 00:14:20]
Jing Gao:
It's with a D.
Tommy Beringer:
Sourced with a D. Outsourcedprep.com. What was the other one? Give it to them again.
Jing Gao:
Outsourcedimport.
Tommy Beringer:
Outsourcedimport.com. Perfect. So they can go ahead, go to the website and then contact you guys from there?
Jing Gao:
Absolutely.
Tommy Beringer:
All right, all right, Jing. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Really, really appreciate you coming on. Always very exciting speaking to a fellow seller, a fellow brand owner on Amazon and seeing what they're doing to get better and get ahead right now, currently. And I want to have you on again and I want to come visit your warehouse out here in LA area sometime soon and meet you sometime soon for sure.
Jing Gao:
Awesome. Welcome, come look at it.
Tommy Beringer:
Thank you. We'll do it. Thank you so much for coming out.
Jing Gao:
Thank you for having me.
Tommy Beringer:
All right.
Jing Gao:
Thank you.
Tommy Beringer:
All right, bye.
Jing Gao:
Bye.
Tommy Beringer:
All right. Thank you guys so much for listening and if you got any value out of this podcast at all, please let us know at the place that you listened to it at, whether it be iTunes, Stitcher, whatever it is. Give us some love, give us an awesome review and let us know maybe some things you want us to talk about on the next podcast. So next time, guys, stay awesome and be awesome.