Today I’ve got an invincible king on the show, coming live is Ed Kohler, who’s 43 years old  has been selling on Amazon for 3 years and is now doing 7 digit sales for more than a year.

What you’ll learn:

• How Ed built his 7 figure amazon business


• Channels he uses including one big golden nugget


• How he expanded into office space


• Multi-Channel Fulfilment


• Wholesale strategies


• Wholesale problems Ed faces


• Predictions and analysis of Amazon landscape


• Amazon wholesale strategies

And much more!

DAVID ALADDIN:    Great to have you on the show, Ed.

ED KOHLER: Thanks, David.

DAVID ALADDIN:    So, can you take us to the beginning before Amazon, where did your journey begin?

ED KOHLER: Well, I guess as far as songs of our line it goes back quite a ways. That should have, I think I’ve set up for eBay at around 10 years ago, so I’ve sold stuff online for least that long. I think that’s a lot more tedious at that time because you’d have an auction closed and then you’d have to wait for a check to arrive in the mail, wait for the check to clear before you ship stuff out so that was pretty slow. But actually back then I also ran a small sporting goods software clothing company, where I’d sell stuff for a cross-country ski racers. I’m up in Minnesota. We have snow and so I built my first website around ’97 and actually I think I built it using the Aishima editing within Office ’97 which is tedious, but you know I learned something from that. But didn’t go into ecommerce in any larger way until recently. But it was still pretty fun at that time.

DAVID ALADDIN:    Did you get like www.ski.com, or one of those crazy domain?

ED KOHLER: That would have been awesome, but yeah, I somehow missed the land grab-on on domains. That would have been cool. But actually, the product I sold was pretty fun. It was called the hand, and it was wind proof jockstrap for cross country ski racers because when you’re skiing wearing lycra ski suits and it’s 10 degrees or colder outside, there can be some issues for guys. So this product was four fleece jockstrap. Basically they had like a soft flex shell on top of it so it cut down on the wind. So anyways, it was called the hand because it was black with a white handprint on the front of it. So it made it kind of fun. But I’d get emails from moms of high school cross country skiers saying, can you make this without the handprint on. Yeah, yeah. Of course the kids want it with, because it was cool.

DAVID ALADDIN:    So how much did that like retail for?

ED KOHLER: Like 17 bucks.

DAVID ALADDIN:    Pretty good.

ED KOHLER: Yeah.

DAVID ALADDIN:    It was a one product website?

ED KOHLER: Yeah.

DAVID ALADDIN:    That how it started?

ED KOHLER: Yeah. I’m creating a bra.  A sports bra called, The Hug.

DAVID ALADDIN:    How did you get into that?

ED KOHLER: So, well, when I was into cross country skiers this is like the product to have. And I…

DAVID ALADDIN:    Oh.

ED KOHLER: I don’t know. I have always been a little bit unto girls so I called up the guy that, who happen to create the product. He happens to live not too far from me. And I asked him if he wanted someone to be a rep for him because I travel around the country racing a lot. And he said, you know actually, I’d be pleased if you’d buy the company from me. I’ll just sell it to you if you’d like, because it started to come a little bit of a hassle for him so this is before things like [Inaudible] existed and so you’d have like the biggest holiday rushes like red roll on a holidays and so it’s like, it’s the last thing you want to be doing was going actually, physically into the post office as a huge stack of packages like, which was tedious. But, so I think for him, it just became a hassle. So then it became my hassle instead. But it was so fun. I learned a lot about just like an entrepreneur like, just everything that you might need to know how to do, like create labels, or ring in supplies, or you know dealing with supply-chains issues, manufacturing. Like, there’s a, you know, it was all a very small scale, but still you’ve got a taste of everything.

DAVID ALADDIN:    So, did you acquire it from him or did you end up selling that business?

ED KOHLER: I end up selling it. I bought it from him

DAVID ALADDIN:    How much did you get for it? Hope you don’t mind me asking.

ED KOHLER: Oh, I didn’t get much for it by the time I sold it.

DAVID ALADDIN:    Yeah.

ED KOHLER:              But I kinda gotten eventually in the same thing that he did like started a family and stuff. And got busier…

DAVID ALADDIN:    I hate that.

ED KOHLER: Oh, it’s a hassle for me now. So, it was not quite big enough to deal with, but…

DAVID ALADDIN:    Yeah.  And so, ’98, you had a small size setup and then in 2007 you had the eBay setup. And you did that for 10 years. And how many, like trolling on eBay I’ve actually started to see, you know I’ve doubled up there. Let’s talk about strategies on eBay, because I feel like we just list products a lot on eBay and we don’t really focus on increasing sales. Is there things that like I’m missing out, like in terms of what I’m doing with my listings?

ED KOHLER:              Well, I don’t know. I think there are a lot of things, like there’s just so much going in Amazon. Just syndicating your content can be a good way to pick some incremental sales. If you’re selling replenish-able products, then there’s more justification for doing that, you know.

DAVID ALADDIN:    I see.

ED KOHLER:              If someone’s business is just purely retail arbitrage, where you know, you’re buying just a handful of items that you’ve find on sale somewhere, you put one in Amazon. There’s not a lot of incentive to really syndicate those around to other places because they’re just going to come and go. Like you have more of a challenge of finding enough inventories often than figuring out how to move it. But if you have products that you can get in larger quantities or replenish-able, then maybe it’s worth syndicating them to other places like eBay or other stores, but, I don’t know. For us, like still one of the primary things we use eBay for was just to clear out our returns so when stuff comes back we’ll put it on eBay at 99 cents together with the party mail shipping and you know just let it ride so it’s gotten a week. So…

DAVID ALADDIN:    Poor eBay.

ED KOHLER:              So it doesn’t just keep accruing. Well, people they get some good deals out of it. There are things that, people definitely have gotten some good deals, but to me the deals, I just need the space back so it’s good for that. But I do syndicate all of my inventory over there, and use Ship Station to tie that all together for fulfilling orders. So that Ship Station is probably one of my favorite pieces of software. It’s just such an efficient thing to use but like when I put something on eBay, if it’s something saying, like what the Ship Station rule I’ve set up are, when… when the eBay order comes in, the Ship Station firsts checks to see if the product is stock in Amazon, and if so it will fulfill the order, you know from an Amazon warehouse. And if not, it kicks it to me and then we go find the product and ship it out. So, you know, if it’s just something I’d seen in Amazon, its, you don’t even have to touch it.

DAVID ALADDIN:    Yeah, yeah. You know like one of the cool things I like to buy at Ship Station is you can quickly copy like you know the four, if you’re trying to send a replacement to an Amazon costumer, you can just copy that entire thing and just paste it in the Ship Station. Whereas if you’re trying to fulfill an order in Amazon you’ve got to copy each one; one by one. So…

ED KOHLER:              Yeah. Like the name and address and City, State and  Zip.

DAVID ALADDIN:    Yeah. That takes a lot of time.

ED KOHLER:              Yeah. It just pops it up.

DAVID ALADDIN:    Yeah.

ED KOHLER:              Yeah. That is a nice feature.

DAVID ALADDIN:    So, what kind of rules do you, I mean, I’ve seen the rules set, it’s inside of Ship Station. Is there like other optimization that you can do with the rules?

ED KOHLER:              Yeah, like I’d, I have some sort of for things I want to ship myself it’ll have; it’ll pick the weight, like based on the weight. Like if it’s under a pound, it’ll automatically select that it’s going to go first class. And you know, there are things like that where you could just, you get a little bit further along than starting completely from scratch. And then of course, it will remember everything that you ship. So if you shipped the same thing more than once, you don’t have to keep putting that stuff in, that’s definitely keeping it. So it’s like you know, this is always going to be the exact same weight, It’s always going to be shipped on a 6 x 9 bubble pack, so we don’t need to start from scratch every time. So that re