BB8 - Sorting, shooting, shipping,and a little creative packaging

Before I could send the product to Amazon I had to do something a get a little creative with the packaging.  I had planned ahead for this so had everything we needed when we got back from our trip.  I also had to shootsome pictures before the listing could go live. When I was ready to ship the product in to Amazon, I was amazed by how inexpensive Amazon makes it to ship to their warehouses. For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/8/ or see below. --- Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 8 of the Branding Blitz! Life has been pretty crazy trying to take care of my health while juggling this business startup and trying to prepare for a move across the country! I haven't been able to move as quickly as I'd like with this business, but for everything that has been going on, I'm really excited about the progress I've been able to make. I've got some exciting news to share over the next couple of podcasts.   Today, I'd like to talk about what it took to get my inventory live and selling on Amazon after receiving the shipment from China.   First, since all 3 products came loosely packed in the same box, we had to sort them into separate piles. This was easy to do with the main product, but since the two secondary products look very similar it made the process take longer than it should have. Anytime I order these two products at the same time in the future, I will make sure to request that all the units of each style are bagged or bundled somehow to keep them separate and this should save a fair amount of time sorting. That's one of those little things that didn't occur to me before hand, but it is definitely worth keeping in mind if you're considering ordering variations of the same product.   Ultimately, they need to be sorted because Amazon wanted us to ship to multiple warehouses and they specify how many of each product you ship to each one so we had to count them out. But there was an additional reason we needed them sorted. Since I was ordering off of AliExpress rather than Alibaba as I originally intended, the vendor was not prepared to do custom packaging.   They did offer to print labels for me, and I nearly took them up on it, but I insisted on seeing a picture of the labels ahead of time and they were very low quality. I'm most of the barcodes seemed unscannable. If you're working directly with a manufacturer or even a vendor that is used to customizing orders, this shouldn't be a big issue. But if like me you find yourself working with a vendor that isn't experienced with even basic customization, you will need to find some other way of labeling your product.   I do have a label printer, but all I have are really big shipping labels that would be too big for these products. And I figured rather than spend money on the proper size of label and still have to do the work of printing and sticking all of the labels, I might as well look into getting something done for me.   I looked into several companies online that print labels or stickers, but in low quantities the prices didn't really make sense. Still definitely within my margins, but I wanted to keep looking for a better option.   That day, I got a coupon in the mail from Vistaprint. I'm honestly not a huge fan of Vistaprint... I've ordered from them a few times and the quality has always been fine, but I think just the way they push you really hard to buy pointless things like a mousepad with your logo on it bugs me... just let me order what I want to order without having to click through seven pages of advertisements...   All that aside, I realized that a business card was about the right size for my products, and that coupon made them a pretty darn good deal – I think pretty much anytime you Google “Vistaprint coupons” they'll have some kind of sale going on.   So I bit the bullet, designed some quick labels to fit on a business card, uploaded my art, clicked through several pages advertising useless stuff I could buy from them, and got 2,000 business cards headed my way. 1,000 for the main product and 500 for each of the other two.   I did all that a couple of days after placing the order with my vendor, so all of this arrived while we were out of town visiting family and was ready to go once we got back.   So once we had finished sorting the products, it was time to start labeling them. I've got a pretty nice stapler that doesn't jam very often, so it actually went really quickly to staple these business cards to the product packaging and it even turned out looking pretty nice. I definitely want to get something set up where all the packaging is done in China and I can skip this process on my end, but for now I'm really happy with how it turned out and it wasn't as much of a time sink as I feared it might be.   By the way, if you happen to have experience working with a manufacturer in China specifically to get a zippered plastic bag with a custom label printed on it, shoot me an email to [email protected] – I'd love to get a recommendation for a manufacturer you were satisfied with.   Once that was all done, it was time for the pictures. I already created the listings back before I ordered the products so I could get the FNSKU barcodes ready. But since I didn't have the final product in hand I hadn't taken care of the pictures yet. I didn't want to stall the process while I worked on that, so I went ahead and shipped the products to Amazon and held on to a couple of each product figuring I'd have time to work on the images while UPS delivered my packages.   The shipping process was fairly simple, they told me how many of each product to ship where. They had us split it into 3 shipments. So what came from China in one small box left in 3 small boxes, and in total to ship all 3 products, 600 total units, to 3 different warehouses it cost a grand total of $15.51 – I did the math on that dividing it out by the weight of the different products and it cost about 1.5 cents per unit for the main product and about 4.8 cents per unit for the secondary products. That was great news because I'd been allowing for 30 cents per unit shipping cost. I think I snapped a picture of those three boxes sitting on the porch waiting to get picked up – I'll try to post that along with the show notes at brandingblitz.com/8   Quick tip: I don't live anywhere near a UPS store or any other kind of UPS dropoff point. And I'd have to pay a fee to have them come out and pick up a package. But I've found that the drivers are willing to pick up a package if they're already out for a delivery. So it was cheaper for me to order something inexpensive on Amazon like a $4 storybook for my kid and have it delivered via Prime 2-day shipping. That gave me a couple days to do the necessary prep work for the shipment, I saved some money on scheduling a delivery, and got a free book for my 11 month old daughter who seems to think these cardboard books taste like candy. I'm not 100% sure if this is actually a UPS policy for their drivers to pick up packages along their delivery route or if I've just been lucky in the past, so your mileage may vary... but it's worked so far for me.   Anyway after shipping them out, it was time to take some pictures. I happen to have access to decent lighting an a good camera and have moderate knowledge of how to get the effect I want out of it. So I took the pictures myself. To be honest most modern cell phones have a camera that can take really hi-resolution photos. They don't give you as much control over depth of focus, shutterspeed, etc, but if you know what you're doing you can actually get a pretty decent picture out of a cellphone.   That said the pictures are one of the biggest selling tools you have – and if you're not confident with a camera, it is probably worth getting them professionally done – even if you are confident with a camera, this is one more thing you can outsource and not have to touch personally. When someone is browsing the search results your main image is the first tool you have to grab their attention. And once they click on your product images have the opportunity to convert to a sale by showing the quality of the product, and even preemptively answering any common questions the customer might have. If it's common for a customer to ask if your product has a certain feature, don't make them read the description or even the bullet-points for that. Show it clearly in one of the product images. Not everyone will look at the additional images, but for those that do it can be a huge help in conversions.   My main competitor has 3 poorly done pictures which was one of several reasons I felt confident I would be able to compete with him. I made sure to take several shots of each of my products. Size is an important aspect of my main product, so I made sure to show something in the picture that could be used as a reference for scale. Your main product image is basically supposed to just be the product on a white background, but you've got a bit more flexibility with the secondary images.   I got some pretty good images, but I'll probably have some professional ones done down the road. I think these are good enough that there are more efficient ways to focus my resources than trying to get better pictures... but there is improvement that can be made down the road once the business gets into more of a rhythm.   By the time I was done taking and editing all the photos, the inventory had already been delivered to Amazon's warehouse and much of it had already been checked in... some of it still hasn't but enough has that I was ready to do a quick review and edit of the descriptions and bullets then upload my images and let the listings go live!   In the next episode, I'll talk about the next steps I took and the results I've started to see.   In the meantime, if there's a full transcript of this show available at brandingblitz.com/8   And as always if you have a question you'd like to ask me head over to brandingblitz.com/ask and leave me an audio recording or just drop a comment with your question. I'd also love any feedback you have about the show.   And if you're enjoying hearing following along with my journey would you do me a favor and subscribe to the show? Just head over to iTunes and search for Branding Blitz to find the show and click subscribe. While you're there, it's be great if you're willing to leave a review. That would help me get back in the good graces of iTunes after not releasing an episode for a little while, and I'd really appreciate it!     That's it for this show, I'll catch you next time on episode 9 of the Branding Blitz!