During The Canton Fair Experience Course, we encourage e-commerce entrepreneurs who sell on Amazon to go from dipping their toe in the pool of online selling to stepping into the ocean that is all of retail. Can you imagine getting your product into just one retail chain with 9000 store locations across the US? What would it mean for your business to have an order that large? The weekly profits on one of those orders would even make a 7-figure Amazon Seller blush.
Selling in independent and big box retailers can seem like a giant mystery. But it doesn’t have to be. There are experts to help you along the way. In the Canton Fair Experience Course, we introduce our participants to these experts so they can learn from them first hand and ask questions. One such expert who spoke to our group is Tim Bush, also known as Mr. Costco, Tim has a well-known podcast about getting your products into retail called “On the Shelf”. In this excerpt from our interview with Tim, he talks about the requirements to be retail ready. Use these tips to check on your own readiness and reach out to Tim or listen to his podcast for more great information.
Before you can get started selling outside of your own website and Amazon, your products need to meet some basic requirements, which Tim discusses in this interview. One of the main requirements is that your product needs to be unique. Retailers don’t want a product they can source on Alibaba themselves. They want products that solve problems for customers and bring traffic into their stores. They also want to make a 40-60% margin on your products, meaning you sell it to them for a price that is low enough they can actually make some money when selling it to the customer. Many Amazon sellers source products only at a 30% margin thus setting themselves up for failure when wanting to scale outside of Amazon to the rest of the 96% of retail channels.
If your products are already unique and you have great margins, congratulations! You are almost ready for retail. Watch the interview to solve the rest of the equation. If you aren’t sure how to come up with unique products or how to source at a better cost. Consider signing up for the Canton Fair Experience Course, our next course starts in August and we have 20+ hours of training teaching you these fundamentals of success.
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