If you can’t beat them, join them. Amazon FBA is a natural next step to help you grow your business. But sending out your first shipment can be ripe with potential problems.

On today’s episode, we’ve got a novice and a pro discussing how to ship to Amazon FBA and the intricacies behind FBA shipping, including the differences between a UPC, FNSKU, and an ASIN, along with expert tips for optimizing your FBA experience and nailing it right from the get go.

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(With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Bill D’Alessandro of RebelCEO.com)

Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven-figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I’m your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur, Andrew Youderian.

Hey, hey, guys, Andrew here and welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. And today on the show, talking about how to not screw up your first inbound shipment to FBA, something I don’t have any experience with. I’ve got a shipment of goods coming in that I’m going to be sending to FBA for the first time and figured who better else to grow with questions about this, for my own benefit and hopefully yours as well, other than Mr. Bill Dalessandro, the man behind Rebelceo.com and Elements Brands. Bill, how’s it going?

Bill: It’s going well, man. It’s great to be back on the show, as always.

Andrew: Yeah. I feel like it’s been…I don’t know if it was just the holidays or the New Year, but I feel like it’s been a while.

Bill: Yeah, the ECF Live and holiday hangover. It kind of all ran together.

Big Goals for 2016

Andrew: Quickly before we jump into this one, any big plans for 2016? Or did you like sit down and have a big kind of pow wow with yourself to really plan out the year? Are you big on the New Year’s resolutions things? I know we’re talking about this much after the New Year, but…

Bill: So I’m not big on the New Year’s resolution thing, but I am big on planning for the year and setting goals. So I sat down with all my employees. We’re trying something new this year, and we’re doing bonus programs. So we sat down with all the employees, and I set six goals for each of them for the year. I set up a bonus pool of 12% of each of their salaries, and each goal was worth 2% of their salary as a bonus. So everybody has sort of six goals for the year for 2016 hanging above their desk, and if they hit all six goals they get a 12% bonus at the end of the year.

So as a way, something new I’m trying this year to…and I made some of the goals were monetary. They were hit a certain number. For my salesperson like a certain number in wholesale sales, or for my eCommerce marketing manager a certain amount of website sales or a certain number of new accounts, new products in stores, or getting a new website launched. So some were monetary, some were more kind of projects that needed to be done. Like we’re implementing a new shipping and inventory system. Things like that. So like getting that launched was a goal for my warehouse manager. I basically looked at this list of all these things and said, “Man, if all like 20-something of these things are done by the end of the year, I’ll feel really good, and it’ll be easily worth me paying everybody a 12% bonus.”

Andrew: Nice, very cool. One thing we did this year, at least on the eCommerceFuel site was tried to focus more. I mean, we’ve got kind of this dashboard across all of our businesses with a myriad of different metrics. You could come up with 100 probably metrics you could track for a business, if not more. We tried to focus in on three metrics this year. One that was like the overall king metric, and two other kind of secondary ones, but be able to…

Bill: What are they?

Andrew: For eCommerceFuel, they are the biggest one that we’re focusing on is new members that hit the leader board in the community. So as you know, Bill, there’s like a little leader board that shows for every month who’s contributed the most value to the community, and we’re really trying to grow in a meaningful way and incorporate new members. So our biggest goal is to make sure that every month we’ve got at least one person that’s a new member on that leader board, that we’re really working into the community, and make them feel at home to the point where they contribute.

And then the other two are podcast downloads. Laura’s coming on board to help with a lot of production of the podcasts, and so really trying to focus on putting out quality podcasts and increasing the downloads we see there. And then the third one is just number of paid members in the community. So those are our three big metrics that we’re tracking for there.

Bill: Nice. So you’re really refocusing a lot on the community it sounds like, for goal-wise. Yeah.

Andrew: For eCommerceFuel. Yeah, at least on the eCommerceFuel side. Yeah, absolutely. That’s what we’re really doubling down on this year. Trying to improve, keep quality high, and grow in a way that doesn’t undermine what makes it special. So, yeah.

Bill: Yeah. I like that you’re focusing on not just as many new members as possible, but also member engagement. So people are hitting the leader board and actually interacting with the community.

Andrew: Yeah. It was interesting thinking through trying to set those metrics. You know, you want to try to come up with metrics that if you can focus on that metrics a lot of the other ones will fall into place. So we measure things like the number of comments people make, the overall level of activity in the community, all these different things. But we figured if we can do a good job of incorporating new members authentically in, which is what that metrics tracking how many new members are on that leader board, a lot of those other ones will fall into place naturally. So I think if you can set up the big KPIs, you follow with that in mind, it can help a lot.

Bill: Yep. That makes sense. Cool.

Andrew: Anyway, Bill, I’m excited to dive into your experience with FBA. So, shall we get started?

Bill: Yeah, absolutely.

Bill’s FBA Experience

Andrew: So, Bill, quickly before I just barrage you with questions, what’s your experience with FBA like? I mean, you’ve been doing it for how long? Multiple years at this point, right?

Bill: Yeah. So I think we’ve been selling all of our brands on FBA for at least probably three years. I started my company five years ago, and when I started, I was…well, in the very early days I was shipping it myself, but I very quickly ended up in outsource fulfillment. FBA was kind of a thing three or four years ago, but it wasn’t the monster that it was today. But a good friend of mine, Mike McAdams from Drinkwel, and he was selling supplements on FBA. He was all over me.

I would see him at trade shows, and he’d be like, “Are you selling FBA yet? You’ve got to do FBA. It’s going to be huge for you.” I was like, “I don’t know, man. It’s kind of a pain in the butt.” I was like, “I’ve got to manage inventory in two places. I’ve got to pay shipping to ship it from my warehouse and then shipping to Amazon FBA. We’re already listed on Amazon and people buy our stuff, and we just fulfill it from our outsource warehouse. I don’t think I’m going to do it.”

I drag my feet for like a year until finally about three years ago, we started to sell on FBA. So we got the little Prime eligible batch. Mike finally convinced me to send a case into FBA. Within a month of going to FBA, our sales tripled on Amazon. And that has been a sort of rule of thumb I have seen over and over again, both with my own brands and other entrepreneurs that I work for and do consulting with. When you send your product to FBA, it usually triples your sales kind of without doing anything else. So it’s been awesome.

Andrew: Yeah, I love it. I feel like I’m actually kind of late to the party. The product I’ve got…I’ll be doing some kind of content in the future about this. But as a proprietary product that I’ve designed, it’s currently inbound from China, the first kind of limited size production run. So, yeah. Completely proprietary, not white label, so it’ll be the first chance I’ll have to use Amazon. Because on Right Channel we pretty much resell everything. Bill, as you know, like you try to resell existing SKUs on Amazon, it’s a pretty brutal game. So I needed something proprietary to be able t