#345 – The Latest Tips For Finding Product Ideas And Launches With Trevin Peterson

In this episode, Bradley welcomes back YouTube and TikTok influencer and entrepreneur Trevin Peterson to talk about updates in his businesses. They also talk about the biggest obstacles this 7-figure Amazon seller faced in 2021 and how he was able to navigate, adjust, and adapt to come out on top. Make sure to listen to the very end as Trevin shares his tips, strategies, and insights in finding product opportunities, influencer marketing on TikTok, sourcing, product launches, building capital for an Amazon business, mindset hacks, and more!

In episode 345 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Trevin discuss:

• 02:00 – What’s Going On With Trevin
• 03:10 – Revisiting Trevin’s Goals From The Previous Years
• 04:45 – An Entrepreneur Needs To Adapt And Adjust
• 06:00 – Trevin’s Biggest Obstacles In 2021
• 08:00 – Getting His Momentum Back
• 11:20 – Launching A New Brand That Crushed It
• 12:20 – Methods For Finding Product Opportunities
• 15:00 – Using Black Box To Validate Product Opportunity
• 16:30 – Off-Amazon Strategies To Find Products
• 19:00 – Getting Organic TikTok Features For His Product
• 19:50 – Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus Program
• 21:50 – The Recipe Of A Successful Product Launch
• 24:00 – Trevin’s Sourcing Tactics
• 25:40 – How To Start Building Your Amazon Capital
• 28:19 – Building Habits Benefit You In The Long Run
• 29:30 – Getting Into Sports Cards
• 32:30 – Get Hobbies That Are Also Investments
• 34:30 – Meet Trevin Peterson At The Sell And Scale Summit!
• 34:50 – Trevin’s 30-Second Tips
• 39:24 – How To Get In Touch With Trevin 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got Trevin Peterson back on the podcast to talk about everything from spying on family members, purchases for product ideas, to sports card investment hobbies, to product launch strategies, and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon to do that. You need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for maybe at the top of page one, you can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10’s keyword research tool Cerebro. Now that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool, my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for eCommerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro, h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount coupon, SSP10. 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 Amazon or Walmart world.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got a serious seller, who’s gonna be here on the podcast for the third time. And it’s been about a year and a half or almost two years. And it’s the last time you came on and it’s really been really awesome to see your journey. You were on episode, first of all, 89, for those who want to go back and see his original episode. And then he was on episode 213. And so one of the few to make it to three times on this podcast, but it’s just because your life story and adventures just keeps getting more and more interesting. So we gotta bring you back. So, as a matter of fact, you just told me that you just saw what spent the last six weeks, like not even barely in your house, cuz you just been on the road, huh?

Trevin:

Yes. First and foremost, I’m honored to be back three times. It’s an honor. I love, love these podcasts. More than anything. I mean all my students, Amazon students love and are loyal fans of the podcast. So just wanna applaud you for the work that you’ve done. But yeah, these last six weeks have been chaotic with different traveling different events. But it’s been an amazing journey over the last and it’s been now close to five years selling on Amazon and it just continues to get crazier and crazier day by day.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Yep. For sure. For sure. I remember going back to that original episode, actually. I don’t remember. I just have pulled up some notes from your old episode. So, you know, my memory’s terrible, but it said here that, you know, at the end of the episode, I always ask people like, what’s their goals. And then, so this was in 2019 that you were first in the podcast. And then you had said, oh yeah, my goal for 2020 was to be seven figure seller, you know, to be around 1.2 to 1.5 million. And then when I had you on, in early 2021 in January of 2021, you actually, you know, you actually did hit that, you know, hit what you wanted and you had launched 12 different products to help you get there. And then your goals for the rest of 2021 were, let me check my notes here. It says you were launching, I guess a second Amazon account. And then you were like, Hey, I want to hit seven figures on my second account, too, launch four more products, and then grow my TikTok follower. So let’s start there. Like how did you do with some of those goals that I just mentioned there in 2021?

Trevin:

My second account did not quite hit the seven figure mark, but there is a lot of progress. I think this year we’ll do on my second account, close to 600 to 800,000 is kind of where we’ll be this year.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What about your first account? Cause I, I didn’t even my,

Trevin:

My first account definitely 2020 just absolutely blew things up. And then 2021 took a little dip. But 2022 will be back right up around that one to 1.2 million on my main account.

Bradley Sutton:

So, together it’s still, I mean, regardless that it’s down a little bit still, it’s still over $1 million then?

Trevin:

Yes. And, and it’s been, it’s been an amazing ride. I mean, ups and downs. You’ve obviously in the last few years, you’ve just had to adapt to different things with the pandemic shipping price increases a lot of different obstacles, but for me, that’s kind of the part of entrepreneurship being an Amazon seller that’s just part of it. You just gotta always adapt and adjust. So that was didn’t quite hit that goal. Hopefully, this year will improve TikTok has been awesome. Definitely grew more in 2020, and 2021. I just feel like during the pandemic, everybody was watching TikTok, and not very many people were on there, but I’m still super consistent on that. And just continuing growing every day and just trying to better myself every single day. So

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Now, now the last time, you know, it was actually, it’s hard to believe that this pandemic’s been going on for so long, but you we’ve even last time, we’re talking about how the pandemic affected you and, and you had to like switch to FBM.

Trevin:

I did.

Bradley Sutton:

For a while due to, you know I’m assuming that you know, they didn’t allow to send stuff in cuz it wasn’t essential or whatever, but you know, most of those problems got kind of fixed, you know in 2021. But as you said, there’s other issues, you know, the prices have gone up and shipping prices skyrocketed and then shipping times skyrocket and then just this general inflation. So which of these things, or maybe something else I didn’t mention, what were some of the biggest obstacles for you that were different for you in 2021? And the first part here are 2022 that you’ve had to overcome.

Trevin:

Honestly, the first part of 2021, the ship times were extremely long compared to what they were, I would definitely say that has settled down and I’ve been able to get shipments in a lot quicker, but I would say that was probably the hardest thing was just ship times lead times with manufacturers as well. They’re really busy. Every once in a while suppliers might have issues cuz yeah, this pandemic, hopefully, it will end soon, but it just kept lingering along and just kept going and dragging out. And so more than anything, I think it just delayed on the process when it came to selling on Amazon and I think in the last few months, at least in 2022, knock on wood, everything has gone a lot smoother than in the past. And hopefully that’s a step in the right direction.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you find then that you were running out of stock due to the shipping times? Did you find that maybe your profitability like took a big hit due to the shipping prices? What were the ones that affected you the most? Would you say?

Trevin:

I would say being out of stock some of my best sellers, it takes forever to, to first manufacture and then the lead time. And when you have delays like that, and if you’re outta stock for even two, three weeks trying to get back up to where you were originally, when you went out of stock that’s grinding of itself. And so I would say that was probably the biggest hit was just running out of stock. And now luckily I’ve just what I’ve done since day one is try to reinvest like 90% of all profits just right back into the business. And that’s, what’s been able to sustain my growth is just keep reinvesting back into inventory, which allows me to not run out of stock because every day that you’re outta stock, I mean, you’re essentially throwing money down the drain.

Bradley Sutton:

What were some of your things that you did in order to kind of like get your momentum back, first of all, were you able to get your momentum back on all the stuff that you went out of stock on? Or did you find that it was just like, you know what, no matter what you did, you couldn’t get your ranking back and your sales never, never matched? What happened before, or were you able to recoup that?

Trevin:

I would say the majority of the products, I was able to get it back up and going. There was one and I’m still selling it. It’s just not doing as well. It’s like a $50 product and I was selling like 10 units a day, and now it’s doing like three to five units a day. So it dropped significantly, but I mean, it’s still a great product, still good profit margins and slowly working it back up. So that was kind of the one product that did take a hit, but the other ones, I would say, for the most part, I was able to get back up and going. Yes, I did have to push PPC a little bit more, had to throw on some coupon codes to try to get that momentum back up and going. And I would say a lot of new Amazon sellers just Amazon’s sellers in general, don’t quite understand the importance of keeping in stock. And if you do run out of stock it’s not that you have to launch from square one. I mean, you’ve got reviews, you’ve got momentum, but you do have to really push as soon as you do get back in stock to continue to the trajectory that you were originally selling.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Did you, you know, due to the increased shipping prices or just inflation in general, have you raised your price? And regardless of if you did it, have you noticed any of your main competitors raising their price in the last like six to eight months or so?

Trevin:

I actually, literally, probably two hours ago. I increased my price on a few of my products. I got back in stock and I have a lot more inventory and things are going well. And like compared to my competitors, I feel like I was fairly reasonably priced. And so I was like, look, I’m gonna increase the price. And honestly, my sales have not dropped if anything, they’ve gotten better. So I did increase it a couple of bucks, nothing crazy. But hopefully, that will make up for the price increases, the new 5% feel surcharge on that. Amazon’s rolling out, I think April 28th. So not sure when you guys will be listening to this, but that fee will happen. And more than anything, I mean, just the economy in general, I mean, inflation is up 8.5% and I think consumers–

Bradley Sutton:

Well, you have a Tesla. So, so the gas price increases is not affecting you as the rest of the people. I’m still trying to sell my Tesla but that almost makes me want to keep it. Now, when I see here in California, $6 gas price is just–,

Trevin:

It’s insane. So with inflation going up, I think consumers are just getting used to spending a little bit more. Yeah. So I don’t think increasing your price now, depending on the market that you’re in, it might affect your listing, but for me increasing my price a couple of bucks, honestly, hasn’t hurt my listings at all. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now, you said you had launched 12 products in 2020, your goal for 2021 was four. Did you end up launching those four products or did you launch more, did you launch less?

Trevin:

I launched actually more in 2021 than four products. I launched a new brand that just absolutely has crushed it. And in that, inside that brand, there’s four products on that brand. And then on my second account, I launched, I guess it’s one product, but there’s like five different variations inside that product. So, so I was able to, and that was in the last like eight months of, in the last eight months I’ve launched what eight products now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Let, let’s talk about those a little bit, obviously, you know, we’re not gonna, you know, try and docs your, your products or something, but you know, the there’s 75 million ways to find product opportunity, you know, I could look on Pinterest, you know, I could look on Etsy, I could just run Helium 10 Black Box. I could just browse bestseller guides. I could look at what’s trending on TikTok. I mean, there’s just so many ways to, to find product opportunity. If you can think back, you know, 6, 8, 9 months, whenever you found these, what were the methods that you used in order to find these opportunities?

Trevin:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And as simple as it sounds over the last five years, selling on Amazon, my brain has completely shifted into a sense of every time I see something, whether it’s on the internet, whether it’s in person in the store just in general conversation, I try to, and it just now comes natural, but I try to think, oh, like, is there an opportunity to sell on Amazon? And sure, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, I hope you’re listening to this because if you are new to Amazon, this hasn’t hit you yet get ready because it’s fun for some of us, but then some people they say like, Amazon has ruined my life. Like I’m going to my friend’s houses and all I keep saying every, oh, that would be a good product to sell on Amazon. I wonder if I could sell, like, guys, it literally changes the way you go about your daily life. Exactly what Trevin is talking about here.

Trevin:

But what’s funny is as simple as it is, that is like in all honesty, that is how I found my best selling product to date. Is just in general, just observation relating everything back to Amazon. And so just as I’m going through, I mean, even just shopping on Amazon, and this is another little tip that you could look at doing at least in my family, like my mom, my wife, they are, they shop on Amazon two, three times. It feels like a day. And so what I do is I’ll actually log on to their Amazon accounts and I’ll go to their orders and I’ll scroll and I’ll just scroll and scroll and scroll until I see, oh, like, what is this? And it’s actually really funny. Like, my mom has been on top of trends. Like, I see stuff in her house and I’m like, where did you get this?

Trevin:

She’s like, oh, I got this like a year and a half ago. And I’m looking, and I’m like, I just found this product on Amazon, like two months ago. And here you are on top of the trend a year ago. So just in, in conversation with, with my, with my mom, my wife, friends looking at Amazon accounts past orders, that’s an easy way for me. There’s no extra effort. Yeah. Granted, once you do come up with the idea, you gotta vet it. You gotta look at the analytics and whatnot, but that is one of my favorite ways of finding products as of late.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Let’s talk about that. Vetting and validation because yeah. You know you could be looking at your mom’s, you know order history and it’s maybe a bunch of collagen peptides that doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing to sell on Amazon. So like, once you see this product, what, what’s your process on when at what point do you get excited? Like, Ooh, I think I see something here.

Trevin:

I think it comes with time. So one of my, again, other favorite strategy is using Helium 10 Black Box using the keyword tab. And after I’ve scrolled, probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of products, just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, you, you kind of get a feel or an eye for what to look for. And after I’ve done it so much, I can, like, honestly, I don’t know if this is just, just come naturally or if I got some special gift, probably not’s probably just something silly, but–

Bradley Sutton:

Six Sense.

Trevin:

Yeah. Six sense or something, but I’ll just be scrolling. And like, I just know when a product could potentially have potential. But not necessarily like, it’s gonna be a killer home run product, but like, I know like, okay, this might be worth my time to go down the rabbit hole to do a little bit more digging, to do a little bit more research.

Trevin:

And my main thing that I’m looking at, as soon as I go to verify it is just looking at the search volume. Is there actually demand for the product because obviously if there’s not demand like there’s absolutely no sense in selling it. And then I like looking at the competition and just breaking down, like, are there sellers with low reviews that are doing decent numbers? And then looking at the overall market at like, okay, what is the average competitor? Like what’s the average reviews and, and different things like that. So that’s kind of the second phase that I’m going into to verify products. And then once I do that, then I’ll go down a little bit further and a little bit further, and then hopefully things check

Bradley Sutton:

Out now. You know, I remember before you had some pretty unique like off Amazon strategy too, like you mentioned, you know, talking about you look in orders and stuff like that, but if I recall, like you would use like TikTok in some other ways to find some, some interesting ways to get product ideas, too. What else are you? It doesn’t have to be necessarily product research could be keyword research or whatever, what non Amazon, non Helium, 10 ways, obviously there’s just tons of ways to do it with Helium 10 with Amazon, but what are some off Amazon things that you’re doing? It doesn’t have to just be on the product research side, maybe it’s influencer outreach or maybe it’s on finding the top keywords or finding trending viral Instagram reels, or what else are you doing?

Trevin:

I mean, to kind of go along with the, the TikTok, and then also looking at like past orders of my, my family’s accounts or friends accounts I think a super underrated way to find, and I know I talked about this on the last episode but is TikTok or just social media in general. It’s actually kind of crazy. And I don’t know how many people listen to the last episode, but there are so many accounts that how they make a living like they’ve built businesses around Amazon fines and products that they find on Amazon and all they do is reviews of them. And they’re doing the research for you. So just go watch the videos and see what could potentially have opportunity. The,e one thing that’s kind of hard with techniques or strategies outside of like, let’s say Helium 10, like the Black Box is you don’t really know the competition, the demand until you actually dive into it. So it might look like it has great potential, but that’s kind of only one part of the equation. And so you still need to go in and, and vet the product. But I do think that the TikTok, Amazon fines, if you just go do hashtag Amazon fines, both on Instagram and TikTok, like there’s hundreds of accounts that that’s all they do, they’ll post like five videos a day about just random products that they find on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

And then like, you look for the ones that, that are getting a lot of, you know, plays and likes and stuff, and go from there.

Trevin:

And then every once in a while, yeah. Exactly, every once in a while, my wife will find one of those products and she’ll actually order it, and it will show up on my doorstep. I’m like, what is this product? And then that’s when I’m like, oh, and then my wills get turned in. And then that’s when I dive in a little bit deeper, but yeah, that’s basically the general.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you ever do the opposite where you take your products and try and get these people who do these viral videos to make one about your product?

Trevin:

So it’s actually kind of funny. My brother is big into TikTok as well, and my products on Amazon without me paying and I’m sure they’re out there even more, but my brother has sent me two different videos of talkers that have done reviews or had my product in their videos. So without me even doing an outreach, like it’s just naturally happened, which is actually kind of really funny. But I’ve also paid influencers both on TikTok and Instagram to make videos and like, I actually pay him to do it. And I’ve seen great success with that. And there’s actually a new thing. If your brand registered, I can’t remember what it’s called. But it’s like the brand referral program, and Amazon is incentivizing. Amazon sellers to basically if you’re driving outside traffic. So if you’re running Facebook ads, if you’re doing influencer marketing, if you’re doing TikTok, if you’re doing any sort of outside traffic into Amazon, then this brand referral program is essentially, I think it’s like 10%, you’re saving 10% on Amazon fees. And so that’s another way. I mean, if you’re spending money on an influencer post, and if they can use your brand referral link, then essentially that influencer post was “free”. So that’s another thing that, that, that people can try.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I’ve heard a lot of people using that lately. I haven’t yet myself, but I think it’s a great way to promote your product. And you’re kind of like doing it on Amazon’s dime. Now going back to like product launches, you know I say product launch in May of 2022 is definitely different than may of 2021. And before, because, you know, we would all we or not, I don’t know about you, but a lot of people out there would do rebates. I would do rebates. It was within Amazon in terms of service, as long as you weren’t like, you know, trying to do it for reviews or stuff like that. But, you know search find by two step URLs, nothing wrong with that explicitly in the terms of service until it became explicitly against terms of service, you know, towards the end of 2021. So, people who ask you like, oh man, you know, this was my method of launching before. Like well, what do I do in 2022 for launching a product? If I’ve, I’ve got to get all this action organic instead of paying services or, or doing those things. So like what, what, what are you and like your students and community doing for new product launches now,

Trevin:

I would say the most important part for successful product launch. And we’ve talked about it for the first 20 minutes is the product itself. And for me, if I have a good product, if I’ve done the research, if I’ve gone through the process I’m not gonna say it’s easy to launch on Amazon, but I would say it solves 99% of your problems. So for me, if you have done your research, if you found a good product I mean, technically yeah, you can, you can rank fairly easily with just PPC and throwing a coupon on it and just going kind of hard and targeting those specific keywords. And that’s another thing is if you aren’t using a service, then what you have to do is you have to spend money.

Trevin:

Yeah. You have to be willing to spend the money to launch your product. And I feel, I see so many new Amazon sellers get to that point of launching a product. They’ve gone through product research. They’ve ordered the samples. They’ve, they’ve ordered the product. They’ve done photography on their listing. I mean, they’ve done the whole nine yards, but then they get to the launch and they’re scared to spend $5 a day on PPC. And they just expect it to magically launch to page one. And I’m like, look like, if you want to launch it to page one, you do have to pay and you do have to push pretty hard on those certain keywords that you’re wanting to rank for. So that’s kind of the way that I go about it is look like you just gotta be willing to pay. And yeah, you might not be super profitable in the very beginning. And now, depending on your product, you might be profitable from the very beginning, but there’s other products that you might not be as profitable.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, absolutely. Now, once you found that product, you know, before the launch phase, you gotta get that product. So what are you doing these days? You know, of course, anybody can do alibaba.com and some people, even years, and years use alibaba.com. What I do for Alibaba is I just like, kind of like get a price range there, but I actually have a sourcing agent who goes and tries to negotiate best deals as far, instead of me trying to, you know, like negotiate directly with factories. What about you? Are you using Alibaba? Do you have a sourcing agent? Do you have your own person who just trying to find suppliers or what do you do?

Trevin:

Yeah, so I’ve done both. And honestly, for the last five years, Alibaba has worked amazing for me. The one issue and maybe I just need to find a different sourcing agent, but I’ve gone through some sourcing agents. And I just feel like it’s taken a little bit longer than if I was to do it myself. But obviously, that’s a huge win if you’re super busy and you don’t have the time to do it, obviously that saves a lot of time off of your plate. But for me sometimes if I can go in and do it and, and maybe get the samples done a little bit quicker maybe get the order done a little bit quicker than my sourcing agent, then that could be a benefit. So for the most part, I’ve kept it pretty simple. Like I said, I’ve used a sourcing agent in the past, but now, for the most part, it’s Alibaba find just a bunch of different suppliers, vet them, make sure that, Hey, they’re legit, they’ve got good reviews. The communication is good, the samples checkout. And then through that, it’s just that’s kind of been my process.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, you know, obviously private label is still a great way to go, but, but due to inflation, due to shipping prices, you know, sometimes it can be a bit price. You know, I’ve done tests where, like, I was able to launch a product for only like about $2,000, but, you know, if you only have $2,000, absolutely can have, you can, as in can have success on Amazon, but it might take a little bit longer because your profit is not gonna be much cuz you know, $1,000 of that is probably shipping. So you’re, you’re probably selling something that’s super, super cheap with low profit margin. But if I wanna save up to get five or six or $7,000, so I can go after maybe, you know, more of a product range I’ve only got, you know, four or $500 right now. What do you suggest to those people on how you can start building up your capital so that you can invest in maybe a more expensive product down the line

Trevin:

If people had the solution? I mean there’s solutions, it’s just that the reality is is you, you gotta be willing to put in the work to be able to get to that point. What I tell people and how I started is I made a ton of sacrifices. I did not go eat out. I did not buy any fancy things. I was not like you see people that make $20,000 a year yet their priority is buying the newest. And for me, don’t upgrade your phone maybe instead of having–

Bradley Sutton:

A thousand dollars right there.

Trevin:

Yeah. I, mean that that’s a thousand bucks and there’s a lot of expenses and like, I’ve, I see people they’ll go buy a new car or they’ll go do different things. And I’m like, guys, if you’re looking or trying to save up, that’s not the way to save up. So that’s all the obvious yeah. Is just cut out your expensives try to budget. And more than likely there’s I would say, I bet you could save 500 bucks a month easy just in simple budgeting at the end of the day if you really want to save up the $5,000 or whatever it is to that it’s gonna take to launch the product. You can make it happen. It’s just if you’re willing to put in the work to make it happen.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. You know, no matter what you guys use to make more money, whether it’s a side hustle or, you know, whether it’s you know, start on merch by Amazon or some stuff that doesn’t require investment, all of that doesn’t matter if you don’t have what, what Trevin was talking about, the beginning, which is, Hey, you gotta start saving your money. And, and you know, you don’t need the new Gucci shoes. You don’t need the iPhone 17, you know, stick with the iPhone 10, you know, for a while, the phone still works. Guys, if your battery gets bad, it’s an $80 replacement from apple instead of a $800 new phone. And sometimes we take these things for granted and we don’t realize how much it adds up. So, so keep that in mind, guys, like you can make more money, but it’s not gonna do any good if your money burns a hole in your pocket.

Trevin:

And another thing to kinda add on to that is building those habits right now is going to benefit you in the long run. Because again, what I see, and this is where people don’t take their Amazon business to the next level is they start making decent money. They let’s say they start doing five, 10 grand in sales a month, and they start having money come in. And as soon as they’re like, oh, I’m starting to make a bunch of money. They, they start blowing it, they start spending it instead of reinvesting back into the business. And from what I’ve seen unless you have some source of funding or you had saved up a bunch of money, but from what I’ve seen is the people that have had success. Majority of the times, they’re reinvesting almost everything for the first little bit to build up the inventory, to build up the business, to get the momentum, and having those, those, those habits. Yep. Budgeting from the very beginning is something that you’re gonna want for your business in the future.

Bradley Sutton:

Great point, you know? Sure. You can make some quick money like maybe you have some instant success on Amazon. It’s not guaranteed, but it could happen. You could have some instant success, but then if you go right back to your old habits, instead of reinvesting that money into your company, you know, your, your, your growth trajectory is gonna definitely stall. So that’s, that’s a good point. As well now, you know, outta curiosity, I know, I saw like in your social media, you got like into sports cards a lot, like me now, was this something that was just like a hobby you picked up, you know, now that you’re an Amazon seller, or was this something that you’ve been doing since you were little or what,

Trevin:

So, yeah, that’s a good question. I collected basketball cards when I was younger. And then it kind of faded away. And then during I think it was like, it was probably during 2020, I just started getting back into the hobby and I just got addicted and I had some money.

Bradley Sutton:

It was addicting.

Trevin:

Yep. I had some money and I was like, oh, this is super fun. And when I was younger, that was kind of the main reason that kept me back from the hobby was my parents didn’t wanna waste a bunch of money on cards. They, they didn’t want to just go spend all that, and I didn’t have that money either. And so now that I had some money, I was like, oh, let’s go buy some cards. And it ended up probably, I mean, I still got a big collection. But I guess we’ll see what happens in the future, but I just spent a bunch of and have fun.

Bradley Sutton:

I view it as an investment, have fun. You know, you could make some good money off of it.

Trevin:

And that’s true. It’s just, that my issue is it’s so hard with all the businesses that I have going. It’s so hard to have the time to list the cards to then have, ’em sell it to then package the orders. I mean, you could go on like consignment and do it that route. But for me to make money in the hobby, you do have to really spend time doing it. Just like, if you wanna make money on Amazon like you’ve gotta put in the effort, you gotta do it every single day. And if you don’t, well, you’re not gonna see the results that you want, but it is–

Bradley Sutton:

Your most expensive card or your most prized slab that you have.

Trevin:

It’s, it’s probably still being graded. But I mean, I have a, a few like Kevin Durant, rookie cards that I, that I really like that I, that hopefully I’m not, and what’s funny is I’m not the biggest Kevin Durant fan. Yeah. But it was a good opportunity. And I was like, ah, this is a good potential card to buy. So I picked it up. And, and some of my best cards have been actually you can join like YouTube lives, where they do like live box breaks. Yes. Yes. And that was actually really fun. You pay like 50 bucks and they draw your name out of like a hat and you get a certain team. And I actually got an Anthony Edwards, like one of 10 rookie card that I sold for like 2,500 bucks, not graded. And I paid 50 bucks for the slot now that was pure luck. Yeah. But that was a fun kind of experience. The adrenaline rush.

Bradley Sutton:

I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Trevin:

Cards and that’s addicting. That’s fun. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. But again, guys, you gotta be careful this, you know, you can spend so much money, then all your Amazon proceeds go away. But Hey, as you know, this is something that, you know, when you were, you know, in 2017 or whenever you were doing your construction job or whatever you were doing before Amazon, you wouldn’t have had the ability to go, you know, go spend a few thousand dollars and invest in sportswear. And that’s what it is, guys. If you’re gonna have something fun, in my opinion, like a cool thing is something that can also be considered an investment. Like there’s nothing wrong with travel. You were just traveling for six, you know weeks. I love traveling, but it’s not like traveling is gonna get me money, you know, back that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t travel. You should definitely live life and enjoy it.

Bradley Sutton:

And guess what guys being an Amazon seller sometimes gives you opportunities. You can do, but it’s cool as like if you can somehow make even your hobbies money generating. So like, you know, I’ve invested thousands of dollars into sports cards, but it actually has value. I can sell it for a lot more than I paid, but you know, like Trevor the same thing for me, like I’m working at Helium 10, I’m doing my Amazon accounts. I don’t have time to be listing all these cards on eBay and stuff, but I could, if I wanted to. And that’s kind of like a cool thing. So if you guys are completely open to hobbies, looking to hobbies where it could actually make you some money at the same time, like me, I this is just me. Like, I couldn’t figure out cryptocurrency. Like I was just like, you know what? I don’t have time to learn this. I love sports cards. So this, this to me is a more safe investment than just like, you know cryptocurrency and things like that. That was just me though.

Trevin:

And it’ll be interesting. I don’t know if potentially Gary Vee will say anything about sports cards, but not sure if this is too early to talk about, but he’s gonna be talking at the big huge event coming up here in a couple months. And he was kind of the one that kind of sparked my interest back into the hobby, cuz he was like, Hey, get on, get on sports cards, like do sports cards. And what’s funny is if I would’ve just listened to this guy over the last few years and done everything that he said, like, it probably would’ve– He had a good track record.

Bradley Sutton:

He was talking about it like a couple of years before. I mean, cuz sports cards really started hitting again just like only like two, three years ago, but he’s been talking about it for like six years. And so yeah, me too. I wish I would’ve got in into it then. So what, you know I think what Trevin is, is referring to guys, you know, our Sell and Scale Summit, we just coming up in September. You’re definitely gonna be there, right?

Trevin:

Yes, I will be there.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. So guys make sure to come out h10.me/s3 can get your tickets, but you’ll meet Trevor there. You can meet Gary Vee, and we just announced a musical guest. Nelly is gonna be performing live there and, and we haven’t even announced a lot of the other speakers, tons of great speakers and great content. So make sure to get your, your tickets right away now going back to just the Amazon space, you know how we do on this show, we, we do our 30-second tips, our “TST”, so let’s try and do, you know, maybe one or two of them. So what’s something, you know, somewhat unique that’s been working for you over the last year or two that you think people can instantly add value to their operations if they implement this strategy.

Trevin:

I mean, the biggest thing for me is leveraging Amazon’s brand benefits. So enrolling in the brand registry program, I feel like this is something that Amazon has been pushing a lot lately and they’re rolling out constant benefits features almost daily. And for me that has really kind of propelled my business with A+ Content. I guess my, my quick tip would be run video ads, just simple run video ads. Those are great. You have to be brand registered to do that. But there’s other I actually just made a video today about customer reviews. There’s a tab inside the brand dashboard where it says customer reviews and you can actually contact customers that have left reviews that are three stars or less. You can’t reach out and say, Hey, remove the one star review, but you can actually contact them, hopefully, solve the problem, solve the situation, maybe give a partial refund. And I’ve seen people actually change their review from a three star to a four star. And for me, that’s a big kind of boost in your listing. Anytime you can get good reviews, good feedback. That just adds credibility. So I would say that tab right there brand registry, in general, would be just a tip recommendation that all Amazon sellers should be leveraging.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Guys in 2022, if you’re a serious private label seller and you don’t have brand registry, you need to check your priorities because you’re not gonna be successful. Without that, I mean maybe three, four years ago, it was like, oh, okay. If you could do it, you know, go ahead. You know but now you can do so many things and so many different metrics. There’s like so many cool metrics. Now that Amazon makes available on the advertising side, and even on the search query side where it’s only available to brand registered sellers. So guys get brand registry customers back in the day, you know, going along with what you said is like, people would always say, oh man, how can I contact my customers who left a bad review? And that actually was against before it was against terms of service. You couldn’t, the answer was no Amazon doesn’t want you to, but then Amazon’s like, no, you know, what, if you’re Brad register, you can go ahead and contact these, these sellers who left you or these buyers who left you bad review and, you know, see if you can fix the situation. So, so guys get brand registry, any, any other tips for us? I mean, it could be about baseball cards could be about Amazon, could be about being an influencer on TikTok, whatever you want.

Trevin:

I mean, the biggest thing is you gotta be consistent. Everybody wants success. Everybody wants to have a raving Amazon business. At the end of the day, Amazon works. It just depends on if you’re willing to put in the work or not. And, and what I’ve seen is if, if you’re consistent with it, if you just keep going with it you will see the success that you want. I just feel like so many times, at least in this world, people get kind of scattered-brained. They have the shiny object syndrome. They hear one opportunity, oh, crypto NFT, real estate, Amazon, dropshipping, whatever it is. And they focus on one thing for two weeks or a month. And then they throw on the towel and they’re like, oh, it didn’t work. And the reason it didn’t work is because you didn’t give it a fair enough shot.

Trevin:

So if you’re an Amazon seller and if you’ve been in the game for a couple of weeks, couple of months, even a couple years, and you’re not seeing the success that you want, just try to stay more laser focused on that one thing. And, and that’s kind of what I did for the first little bit as I was scatterbrained. And then it wasn’t until I just laser focused on Amazon. And that’s all I did for literally two years before I started any other business. I just did Amazon and, and focused on that. And then obviously I was able to quit my job. And then once I was able to quit my job, I was able to focus a hundred thousand percent of my time in energy and focus on Amazon. And that’s what enabled me to scale to that next level. So, that’s another little kind of piece of advice for anybody. That’s kind of wondering like, ah, I’m stuck or it’s not working. You just gotta be consistent with it.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Now people wanna get, you know, some more of your advice out there through your videos or through your social media presence. How can people find you on the interwebs out there?

Trevin:

The easiest way is Trevin Peterson on TikTok, Facebook Instagram, and YouTube I’m probably most active on Instagram. Facebook, not Facebook as much, but Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. You can search my name. It will come right up feel free to reach out with any questions. Love helping new Amazon sellers get up and going.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Well, I look forward to if not sooner, seeing you at September at the Sell and Scale summit, and until then wish you the best of success and let’s check in with you may be in 2024 and or 2023 and see what other goals you’ve been able to crush in the meantime.

Trevin:

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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