[00:00:00] Welcome to The Professor’s Podcast where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape. Your host, Howard Thai, generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.

[00:00:21] Hey everyone, Hurricane Liz here. If you guys don't know me, I am the emcee for The Professor’s Podcast and here with me today, I have the man, the myth, the legend himself, Mr. Howard Thai. So Howie, we've got an exciting guest today. I know you've known this guy for a while now, but can you just tell everybody the exciting story of how you actually met him,

[00:00:43] Because it's pretty unusual. You were telling me earlier and I was like, wow. How on earth did that happen that randomly you met this genius who people are going to see here in a second? Just randomly, so tell us a little bit more about that. So, I mean, let me go back like maybe three years or so where I heard about this little, this software.

[00:01:03] Right? It's called TotallitiX where it can actually kind of dissect the market share and stuff. I won't talk too much because I'll let the guy talk to tell you more about it. But where, so three years ago, I've heard of this software, all of a sudden between, I had to go to Prague for him for one of the last event that I had, and also then at the airport when I.

[00:01:25] When I was like three days earlier or two days early for the, for the event, and this guy was sitting in the airport, was standing there like saying hi and wanted to shake my hand and be like, what happened? Who is this guy? So that's actually how I met him. Him, himself you know. So it was really strange. And after that we, we went to the,

[00:01:48] That was pretty late. We went to the coffee shop, like for the hotel, from the hotel, and we were just sitting there like we were talking about so much cool stuff. And we're sitting there like hours and hours drinking coffee and talking about all these crazy things that he's working on and crazy stuff I was working on.

[00:02:05] So he really liked what I had to share and I really liked what he has to share. Fascinating guy. That's amazing. This is totally amazing. You know, it's just goes to show how many, your credibility and your actual reach in the actual Amazon marketplace of all things, where you randomly met somebody at the airport that was able to recognize, Hey, this is the man, the myth, the legend Howard Thai in the airport.

[00:02:31] And then here we are today. Almost, how long ago was that was? I think the event was like March something or March, March, mid March, I would say. A month later, a month later and now you find that all these tremendous things that he's actually been working on is, you guys are gonna hear, he's been developing these things for quite some time.

[00:02:59] So just to remind everyone that we’re here talking to the handpicked speakers that Howie has chosen for his next Professor's Pandemic Event, which will be his first-ever, live, online event that you can attend in the comfort of your own home. And, I'll give you some more details on how to actually find out more about that event here at the end of the podcast.

[00:03:20] But first, let's just jump straight in and meet this mystery man who randomly came up to Howie at the actual event. So I'm here with Mr. Netzah Topaz and I practiced that about 20 times, just so I wouldn't butcher it. I’ve been known as the butcher of Amazon right now on the internet for butchering all these guests’ name but Netzah, I practiced that. You heard me ask you about 10 or 15 times to make sure that I got it right.

[00:03:46] So let me ask you the first question that I have for you. Let's pretend you are on an elevator with Howard and you know he's the man, the myth, the legend, or in this case you were at the airport with Howard. In two minutes, what is it that's so fascinating about you that was able to make him raise his ear up and want to know more about you?

[00:04:04] To the point where now he's dying to have you speak at his event? What is it exactly that you told him? I wish I was a fly on the wall, in that incident, but tell me more about yourself and why he's so mesmerized. Okay, so my name is Netzah as you said, that was rightly pronounced. I've started selling in 2016, starting from scratch, just launch a new product, let's say three weeks.

[00:04:32] I was already on Amazon, on Amazon warehouses. Started selling, looking for reviews. I created my own platform to get reviews to help me. And then I just released it to my friends to use it again. It exploded. At the end of 2016 and 2017 we made a huge difference. We got the product viral on social media, so viral is basically the social media exposure and for the franking and in the last one year, so I joined a group of great, great people in the eCommerce field that developed a TotallitiX and Quantify Ninja.

[00:05:14] together we are using enormous amount of that, that trade, to help sell it to trade better. Okay. So TotallitiX is for market tracking, which is one of the most important things on  Amazon. Quantify Ninja is about managing their accounts. What I do, I do marketing and

[00:05:37] trading by myself. Apparently Howie’s falling asleep here. So let me ask you something about that stuff, hile Howard finishes his nap over there. What do you consider yourself as the foremost expert in when it comes to Amazon? What's your main area of expertise.

[00:05:59] Because I'm doing both SAAS and I'm saying using the data so I can divide it to two, the market-, the marketing part and the analytics. Those are two heads that time. Moving from one by, one by one. One time, I can talk with you about marketing and how to do it outside of Amazon and how to rank products, but I've never, I always think about the foundations about how to get the best, the best decisions based on real data and relevant data.

[00:06:37] So I can, let's say that's the data driving. Data driving, marketing and trading, together.

[00:06:48] Okay, so, sorry, my internet was crapping out on me, so I was kinda off there. So I'm also a, well, no one really knows it, but he's actually, can you tell us where you're located at?  I’m from Israel. So he's the, that's the one of those places where you don't really hear a lot from like in the Amazon world, but there is, there is a lot of people in Israel, so, and then there's a lot of, they're very smart.

[00:07:17] The stuff that they do. I've, I've seen and heard about some underground stuff too as well. So the question I wanted to ask you, what, what do you think that you're, that you're different in the way you think outside the box compared to your other competitors out there. All right? So everything that I learned, I learned from, from one of the most sophisticated sellers that basically developed TotallitiX by his own hands.

[00:07:48] So I can say that the competition view. Dude, I view that real on the Amazon space and  when we get into a certain niche and when we view everything that happened in this market, and then we check it five years back and we can, in the last two years, we had so many KPIs that we wrote to ourself, what is better and what is.

[00:08:18] Less better, and recently in the last few months, more people are talking about the market environment and how to calculate your market share and to get your attention to this area. But really basically do that for the last three years. We do that consistently every day by day. This is what we look at.

[00:08:40] This is what we live in the last few years. So I think that what is different from me to other sellers, other competitors, is how we look or what we do and how we take decisions. I can give you a short example for an emotional action that sell in States, and we don't. Okay. For example, if I have a product that is selling 100 units per day, okay, it's 100 units day by day, we have the history, we know what to expect and one week we only sold 50 units, okay.

[00:09:20] The whole week, 50 units per day, it's a 50% decrease. So. I love to ask. I love to ask sellers when we talk, when we, when we present. What would you do when you see something, when you get 50%, less sales in a certain days. So, most of them say, I'm going to lower my price, I'm going to check what's going on. Maybe I maybe have I went down from the stage or maybe something different.

[00:09:53] But the question is how much sales I have in my market? So if my market sold 100% and 1,000 units per day, and I do 100. Okay. I'm talking by units to make it more comfortable, but it's mainly the, it's, it should be. It should be said by dollar and how much money. Actually, but I'll do it so it will be more easy if the market, so 1000 I got 100 I have 10% market share.

[00:10:24] And if in that certain week when I got 50 50% decrease, the whole market sold 500 and I kept my own 10% percent. So I'm good. I'm, I'm not doing anything. I follow my competitors and see what it is. So this is a small action that we take day by day for years, and that's how we handled. We are trying to lower the ego is just the right decisions when we trade.

[00:10:57] That's amazing. There's some things there that I've  actually never even really heard, and I consider myself pretty savvy Amazon seller, so I can clearly see that people can learn a tremendous amount of knowledge from you. So tell me, with that being said, what are three to five topics that you really think you could talk about that would really wow people out there that are going to participate in his Professor's Pandemic events?

[00:11:21] All right, so we are going to talk about marketing data and what is between them. It means we are going to talk about your, your competitive environment. Well, how do you compete? How to compete better. We are going to talk about a little bit about PPC and how to use your competitors and other niches to take some PPC actions that.

[00:11:47] Never thought about the inevitable taking and how, how to use Amazon advertising, just like Facebook advertising. That's a little bit, it's a test, let's say, and it's also based on the competition and about 20 products and how to do it properly inside Amazon and outside of Amazon. Those are, yeah. Well, you said that people can't see you that are listening to podcasts, but you had this smirk come on your face.

[00:12:17] That was actually, it's actually pretty adorable smirk, but it showed how much passion you have for talking about some of this stuff. So I, for one, I'm truly excited about that. Now, I know that you also mentioned that you worked for one of the most sophisticated Amazon sellers that you'd ever actually had the pleasure of dealing with.

[00:12:35] What was that like and how much of what you do in Viralix is based on what you learned working with this seller? All right, so the man is Kobi Edri, by the way. He is the developer of TotallitiX from scratch. He started doing it using Excel sheets, and today it's all automatic. So he has all the credit about creating critics and how was it to learn from that view?

[00:13:03] It was the first time I met him and he opened TotallitiX. And he told me how we trade. It's like my mind was, and it was two years ago, and since that day, I never looked at Amazon the same as I see, as I saw it before even was when I launched my first product. It was amazing. But, look at what is happening with my market that you just went back to the first product.

[00:13:34] I have launched and I created market for them and then I, I saw what's going on. I got it big of the end of the year and it was explosion in this market specifically. And I had luck by choosing the right product back then. If I had the information and that I learned from this guy back then when I just started selling, that was, I believe, 90% different, different decisions.

[00:14:03] About what products to launch, how to price it, how to monitor the advertising for those products and learning from someone that does that. They read it and you see the biggest sales in Israel, at least getting his knowledge, using it on their stores. And see the increase by 5,100 versus 100% 200% increase each time.

[00:14:32] I mean, never failed is just, it was amazing. It was amazing to learn from someone like that. Okay. So I wanted to ask about what kind of problems do you see that are a lot of Amazon sellers are having in 2020 now regarding the pandemic? In the beginning issue that in the last two days I was on, just the option to send back products.

[00:14:56] So that's one problem that we, I can say solved maybe, but the main issue I can see in 2020 because, and maybe not only because, but mainly because of the pandemic is about how do you manage your business one year ahead, ahead. What is going to happen in the, in the eCommerce field? It's going to explode or it's going to go down.

[00:15:25] Now when everyone is going down, how much inventory you should hold on Amazon. Okay. Many of the people, many of the sellers of the sophisticated sales are using the warehouses. They send inventory to sell out of the warehouses and sending back to Amazon each time they need to refill. But this time it was wrong.

[00:15:47] A lot of sellers that was out of stock and the early time, the early time in the pandemic, we already going down, but in the US it's not even the peak. So lots of people went out to stock a lot of stuff. They lost the ranking. They lost the there, the whole credibility of the in front of Amazon. So how do you handle it?

[00:16:11] You find now as a seller that's lost one of one of these. I lost my ranking and re-launching the product they sent inventory now and get it in two weeks. What is going to happen with my sales? Am I going to sell the same as before? How much inventory do I give? Is this product is it even going to be sold in the new environment that is going to happen.

[00:16:33] What is going to happen to the campaign, the camping market or what is going to happen on a central product? What people are going to buy, everything is, everything changed and I believe this is a main problem for big sellers. And it's a great opportunity for big sellers, okay. Because this unknown can be amazing for sellers who have the money to invest right now against those who have looked inventories that they invested in at the beginning of the year.

[00:17:06] They sent tons of tons of money to Amazon warehouses and nothing is being sold right now. I have as as a business, and I have the advantage over those sellers. Am I going to, to go to other brands through other markets to other niches? I don't know, but this is the main issue that I can see.

[00:17:27] It's the uncertainty about what is going to happen on my market right now. People are going to buy it or not. Is it going to do well in the next few months or how long does it take. So, and that's how, I know you mentioned that you like to look at things, and most people don't do this a year in advance and sort of get an idea for what could happen to your business in a year.

[00:17:52] And I know that you've had the ability to look at a ton of different markets through using all these tools that you use. And my question to you is, what kind of problems do you see for Amazon businesses beyond 2020 I'm talking about in the next 18 months. Do you see any kind of ripple effect because of the pandemic or do you see things getting better.

[00:18:13] Other other problems to the next 18 months I, I actually, when I take a look on when I need to take a look on everything that is happening right now is the huge amount of new sellers about to join in the next few months.

[00:18:33] You can see that the tons of products of the new sellers that just launched the products, if they are going to be launched. If they will, should be launched since the end of 2019 and they waited because of the Christmas. And then the pandemic just started and then there’s the limitations of Amazon. So we are born to get product launches of 5 whole months

[00:19:00] In the next three, four months. And it means a lot, a lot of competitors in many, many, many different markets. Trends that we have invested on a certain time, So it was one time was the garlic presses and then it was the watermelon slicers. So everything is going to come back together. We are going to see some explosion on some markets of people that find the same opportunities or the same time as soon in January, everyone is going to launch the products.

[00:19:26] Right now, so 18 months in advance, If I see, if I'm looking for main issue, it can, I can definitely see the competition is rising. And again, if I'm talking, if I'm thinking about the opportunities that they have, at the same time, there were, those are big sellers that have the ability and more to sell brand registry, brand registered sellers, brands that they have the experience and they can play in the market.

[00:19:58] But you must see everything before you take any action. So you need to see who are the competitors, how many get in and how you can win them based on the advantage that you have on Amazon - the advantage that you already have on Amazon. So, I know you've said this before, like opportunities that big sellers could have for the pandemic.

[00:20:19] How about, can you give me more detail on what other opportunities that you see Amazon sellers are.

[00:20:30] What kind of other opportunities? What opportunities do I see during the pandemic? As I see it is obviously the ranking, the ranking opportunities when huge sales are out of stock. And with, with the right PPC, with a small PPC budget and the small promotion with minimum amount of units that you can promote, you just conquered the first stages one by one for any main keyword, especially for markets that have not sold anything in the last few months.

[00:21:06] So if I take a look on the campaign category, when that went down by 95 and 98% in sales. So you take your advantage, you drive your traffic, you make more sales on your end, and you just conquer the first stage, one by one, the bids are way more lower. So when everyone is going out now you've established your foundations to conquer the market in the, in the rest of 2020. Other opportunities that I actually see those sellers that just gave up and they are selling their, their accounts with our brands, with our trademarks, with our inventory in prices that you, it's just a shame not to buy.

[00:21:52] So someone is losing this money and he's, he's basically in a crisis. You can first help him get out of this crisis, and if you have enough money to buy the store with inventory and with, with trademark, now you can just go in and dive to another market and spend your businesses Amazon sellers with 50% less effort and time that you need to wait and the branding is everything is completed.

[00:22:20] You just buy and stop selling, if you have the expertise that you can see a lot of them that is harboring. There are a few websites where sellers are offering their stores for sale and you can see the prices and the amount of units and looks like a lot of sales just gave up, this pandemic. So you have low competition. So you can just take advantage of people that you can.

[00:22:44] buy in a competitive price, win the competition with a lower price that you can offer at least the first stock, and then you just work along with the brand, it's not, if it's working, if it's not working, you can give up on it, but you already got your money back. So settles that.

[00:23:06] Right. So, and that's, that's, that's great to actually know for the people that are actually paying attention and are educating themselves and continue to do things like go to events just like you do a lot for the people that don't, I recently actually heard about this. I'm not sure if you did that, so, but.

[00:23:21] Amazon is now requiring zoom interviews in order to allow people to even get an Amazon account. And I have an actual friend that just told me that he has a zoom interview scheduled with Amazon next week. But my question to you is, do you think things like this are going to weed out serious or less serious sellers and make this a playground for the people that.

[00:23:45] Go to events and pay money for education and extra training. Is that what you see with the future of Amazon? Definitely, yes. This change was happening, not, it was not only in zoom interviews. I can see the change on Amazon since 2017, in the middle of 2017 where they don't want the small sellers anymore.

[00:24:09] They don't want those, or taking the one, $2,000 and they’re getting some, some, some product that a lot of other sellers got the opportunity, so-called and try to launch new products without, without any trademark, without brand registry. So if you have all electric people competing going on the regular PPC without using sponsor brands, the big set ups and are about to take over Amazon and changing itself from a products catalog that anyone can post any product he wants to a trading arena.

[00:24:48] Basically you need to be a professional trader to understand how to trade online, how to manage your inventory. You are an exporter and importer, you’re marketer, and you need to be everything. That's a business needs to be. And if you don't invest in education, and if you don't, if you don't invest in, expand yourself as a businessman, as a business in general.

[00:25:14] And if you don't expand yourself with the knowledge as a student, so it's not the place for people. If you want to succeed on Amazon, you must leverage yourself and you must develop yourself into a better businessman or better trader and as a person as well. So yes, I think it's going to be conquered by bigger sellers, and it's going to be very interesting to see that.

[00:25:42] I'm waiting for that for a long time. So, you know, I want to go back to what you were saying about the big, the big seller is going to buy, buy out these like small little sellers I gave up because of their mishandling of, of their accounts or, or because of pandemic. They, they of gave up on on it, but there's that opportunity for big sellers

[00:26:05] That's what I was gonna, that's why I was looking at that where we saw some big opportunities where people are giving up their, their whole brand and everything. And it's just like, like 10% of the value of it. You know, that's a lot of money out there that could, that, that you can work on, as well as if you are a big seller and you know how to rank, you know, how to get reviews, you know, all the A to Zs, you know, it's, it's gonna be.

[00:26:34] It's going to be good. It's going to be good for that. So I wanted to ask, do you have any final, final say to our audience here before we leave? Yeah. First of all, good luck to everyone. 2020 is going to be a very interesting year. Amazon is a great, great opportunity. Don't stop and waste your time and effort. And educate.

[00:26:56] Yourself and try to learn. If they got  so far, it means they, they’re eager to learn. So I believe we are talking through the right people. Don't stop doing that. Don't stop listening, Don’t stop learning. Get any piece of knowledge you get. I learned from Howard a lot in three days in Prague. I learned a lot of things that I never thought to look at, even though we are in the same field.

[00:27:23] And never stop doing that. That's what I have to say. It's a great, great opportunities, learn, educate yourself, conquer the market. One thing before I, before you saying up, because I think what that says talking about is learning. That's what we are talking about here in PPE, is how to learn from others. And how do leverage because you have to improve yourself.

[00:27:49] You have to up yourself, level up. So that's why we're here to educate and hope that anyone can come in and join us on the PPE event and go ahead Liz. Amazing. That was, that was fantastic. Great point. And that's, that was really truly eye opening for me. And I know for a lot of people that are listening, they're going to be super pumped about some of the information you gave them and some of the tips, because let's face it, not all of us have had the pleasure of being able to work for sophisticated high level sellers, and it's quite an education.

[00:28:21] I would pay tens of thousands of dollars for that. Yet a lot of people are throwing their money away at college. And not really learning from people that I've talked to. They talked the talk, but they don't walk the walk. So amazing. And thank you so much for sharing your tremendous knowledge. I know there's a couple actual action steps that I got from this actual podcast.

[00:28:39] I'm going to go in and implement them immediately in my Amazon business, and I know that people out there will probably feel the same way. So if you'd like to hear more from this gentleman, including any one of those three to five topics that he mentioned. Then I encourage you to go to the a9mastermind.com/PPE and again, that site is a9mastermind.com/PPE where you will find all the details on the professor's pandemic event, which again, is Howard's first-ever virtual online summit.

[00:29:10] That's going to talk about. All that's going on Amazon and the strategies and tactics that are working right now in 2020 and beyond. And again, it's very different from his usual $12,000 per person tickets that are done in Mexico. We just had one in Mexico, and I can say this much. We had this event maybe about three months ago.

[00:29:32] Right Howie? We discussed the pandemic and can you tell people a little bit about what we talked about there during the pandemic, and we kind of foreshadowed what's already happened. We're, we're getting, we're saying that a lot of 'em. A lot of sellers would have problems with inventory, and I would say we're talking about a lot of Chinese sellers that especially when there were some problems with logistics.

[00:29:54] Currently logistics possibly is expensive right now for air shipment and a lot of custom problem because everything is getting brushed into customs. They're slower even going into FBA itself because of the lack of resources, even even a USPS is slower. So a lot of things are slowing down. And if you, if maybe you can think about maybe importing or, or even getting the local suppliers within the US to be, you know, like supplements or beauty and other things like that, which is still, a lot of people are still buying from the US.

[00:30:34] Absolutely. And I can say this much, we had a genius comment actually made at that mastermind. It was by Howie’s lovely wife Kat, who actually told everybody merchant fulfill. She said, merchant fulfill. And right now anybody that's merchant fulfilling is making a killing. And I will see this Kat says, she knows nothing about Amazon yet we were able to acquire knowledge from her that is probably making some people millions and millions of dollars.

[00:31:01] In fact, Howie showed us on his Facebook post the other day ago, the total amount of sales for one particular seller merchant fulfilling. What was that total in that single day, Howie? I believ, it was like $300,000 a day. $300,000 well, Kat, I'm sure that guy owes you dinner and a heck of a lot more and everyone out there, if this is something that you'd like to participate in, being able to pick the minds of geniuses like Netzah and the dozens of other speakers that are actually going to be speaking at this event.

[00:31:30] We don't have an exact total yet, but to get more information on that event, go to a9mastermind.com/ppe. I look forward to seeing you all there. I'm excited to MC the event. At the last event in Mexico, one single tip that I learned on there has pretty much has all my products ranking on page one number one, if they want to.

[00:31:49] It's almost effortless with the information that was shared there. So I look forward to seeing you all there. And Howie, any final words before we say goodbye? That's it. Amazing. So again, a9mastermind.com/ppe. Thank you so much Netzah and we'll see you all on the next episode. All right.

[00:32:10] That was awesome. Welcome to the Professor’s Podcast where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape. Your host, Howard Thai, generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.