00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I invited my good friend Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation back on the show to give you some realistic side hustle ideas that you can start right now with very little money. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit.

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is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

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I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

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Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:38
Welcome to the My Wife Could a Job podcast. In this episode, I have my good buddy Nick Loper from Side Also Nation back on the show. And today we’re going to give you a bunch of million dollar business ideas for you to take. Awesome. It’s become a tradition. I think this is our third round of business idea giveaways. If you like this format, make sure to go back and check out the other two. We’ll link up those episodes in the show notes for this episode. Now I want to pitch you an idea that came to mind recently. This is

02:07
a household item that I can almost guarantee you have several of in your house that experts recommend you replace probably more often than you do. This item, experts say, can contain up to 16 different species of fungi, and up to 10 % of the weight of this item is now dust mites and their waste. Do you have a guess of what this is? Is it a water filter?

02:34
This is neither of those. This is your pillow on your bed. Oh, no way. OK. So the idea that I want to pitch is pillows as a service, a pillow subscription service. You would take some quiz, determine are you a back sleeper? Are you a side sleeper? OK, what density? What thickness is going to be perfect for you? And then we’re just going to ship you a new one of those every three to six months, whatever the cadence is that turns out to be like optimal for cleaning.

03:02
this thing and having a less gross sleeping experience. kind of like that. So is it the pillow or the pillowcase or both? I think it’s the pillow itself that, you know, obviously, you know, wash your pillowcase as often as you care to. But like the pillow itself collects all of this nasty stuff that just is difficult to get rid of. Interesting. I kind of like that idea. I’m very particular about my pillow, though. Yeah.

03:29
That’s I like a personalize it. But once you once you find one that you like, it’s like, OK, I’ll just keep getting that one. I like that idea, actually. I never thought of that because come to think of it, one of my buddies cannot sleep at night. And then he started, well, changing his sheets like three times a week. And that actually fixed it. Interesting. So this is similar, I think. Yeah, we spend, you know, we’re supposed to spend, you know, eight hours a day sleeping. So you spend a lot of time, a third of your hours on top of this thing.

04:00
and you start to think about like, oh, this is kind of gross dead skin cells and everything else is going on in there. like, yeah, we should probably replace this more often than we do. I can’t remember the last time I got a new pillow. You know why I like recording these episodes with you, Nick, is we have completely different ideas. So mine are kind of very e-commerce focused, selling focused. Yeah, well, there’s an e-commerce angle to this, right? No, no, there is. is. is. So my idea was

04:27
Because right now I run an e-commerce store and a lot of us don’t want to be doing customer service, meaning like answering phones and whatnot. And you know how AI is all the rage right now. And so a lot of stores are having these chat bots, just being like the first line of defense. it’s really easy to just train your chat bot to know your products. And so I was thinking of service. And again, you have to figure out how to do all this stuff, which is not surprisingly not that complicated.

04:57
train them up, and then offer it as a service to just create one of these bots, customer service bot for an online store or any store that just knows the products and can answer simple questions. And so this would be a process of feeding in all the product details and… Exactly. Kind of like the frequently asked questions, basically like the database of knowledge. And you could probably feed in chat transcripts from like the previous 10 years of human customer support representatives.

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and say, well, how did they respond to this? I mean, the least techie way to do this is to literally just create a spreadsheet of all the products, product descriptions, and everything, and then just send them into an AI bot and train it just for that store as a service. Yeah. OK. And then targeting, the question is, would you just send cold pitches to people on Shopify, do random product searches, see what stores show up?

05:54
So what I would do is I would just go through the Shopify database of stores and just start reaching out to them through their contact forms. There’s a lot of demand for this, I know, because I’m a member of all these forums and people are asking how to do it. And then there’s like ridiculously overpriced services that offer more than this, obviously. But at the base level, it’s a very simple thing that an individual can do for other companies.

06:20
OK, so you go sell it as a service and the pitch being, we’re going to save you so many human hours of customer support time, or that first line of defense, right? If we can reduce the number of inquiries, and you see this on so many tech support, where it’s like, check out our knowledge base, or check out our frequently asked questions. Do you still want to submit a ticket? Did this question, did your question get answered? Sometimes it’s not even clear that you’re going to get, that a human is going to read your question.

06:50
Yeah, and oftentimes, like if you look at our most commonly asked questions is where’s my order and or what should I buy? Like I’m looking for this. What should I buy? And you can answer that question really easily with an AI bot because that knows your products. So. OK, yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I help people on their decision make not just, you know, tech support, troubleshooting triage, but like actually on the front end of, well, this is my situation. Help point me in the right direction.

07:19
Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, OK. I’ve got one that I’ll throw out. This is probably under the umbrella of smart home automation. But I’m going call it the second guess remover. Because how many times have you pulled out of the house, and it’s not until you turn the corner out of the neighborhood that you start to think, did I close the garage door? And now that you’ve planted that seed of doubt, your wife is like, I think we did, but I’m not really sure.

07:48
Why don’t we just go back and check? And so the second guess remover is, you know, maybe it’s an app on your phone. Maybe it’s some way to either remotely close it with some smart device or it just, you know, some way to double check like, yes, in fact, we did close it. And you turn around and nine times out of 10, of course you closed it because you always do. But one time, the one time I can remember where we didn’t actually close it was when we were starting our 13 hour drive from California back up to Washington. And we turned around and we’re like,

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oh crap, we were gonna be gone for a couple weeks, and this thing was wide open. So it’s like that, for that reason, we always do turn around and go check. How did you know that it was open? It was just that seed of doubt, like, we better turn around and we better go check. Yeah, so actually, I haven’t talked about this publicly, but our house got broken into a couple weeks back. And so now we’ve got like cameras everywhere. So I guess that would accomplish the same thing as this.

08:44
Yeah, if you had the camera pointed at the garage, you could check. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I like that idea. I do that all the time, actually. I second guess myself all the time. It’s bad. It’s bad. Yeah. It is like, of course you closed it, because that’s just part of like the pulling out of the driveway process. But sometimes it’s like, did I hit the button? I don’t know. Another one, while we’re on the topic of theft deterrent in this ballpark, a neighbor of ours has

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You know how people have the yard signs like this home protected by Xfinity monitoring or ADT or even like simply safe. You see all the stuff. This guy went a different route and his sign said something like this home protected by a trigger happy second amendment voter or something. I was like, hey, that’s a bold move. I don’t know if this guy is armed or not, but it’s enough if I’m a prospective criminal to be like, I’m going go to the next house.

09:44
I think that would work in 49 out of the 50 states in California that would not fly. You don’t think so? I don’t think so. But you’re right. mean, yeah, they might think twice. I mean, it’s all about being less appealing than the next house. Right, right. Try to make it broken into. Right. Yeah. Make it just again. How can I make myself less of an easy mark, less of an easy target? So my next idea also has to do with shopping. But this is a trend that’s been happening.

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all over Asia. I’m not sure if you watch TikTok or any of those, but there are these people. So there’s this one lady who’s who’s famous for this amid all over the news. She made thirteen point seven million dollars in seven days live selling on the Chinese version of TikTok. And she’s just taken other people’s products. I thought TikTok was the Chinese version of TikTok. There’s like a doying is a doying is a Chinese version. The Chinese version of TikTok has educational videos and stuff, not the stuff that we have in America.

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but it was just this lady holding up stuff, you know, then just holding up for like three seconds and then sliding it over. And so basically there’s a lot of e-commerce stores that want exposure to this audience. So you can offer live selling services. And again, you don’t need an audience to do this on TikTok, is the beauty of it. But if you just go on, it’s a consistency thing and you go on, sell.

11:14
There’s a whole career of people doing this now, but they’re not doing it on a mass market trying to recruit other companies to list their goods. So this would be, I’m the micro influencer selling random stuff? So basically you send me your product and you reach out and then you will just live sell on Facebook, TikTok, just stream all at once. And you just be like a virtual salesman, kind of like an affiliate.

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in a different way. Like remember we had affiliates in the web world where you click on a link. Yeah. This is literally like the home shopping network. OK. But if you don’t have any following like who’s who’s that’s beauty of it. You don’t need a following on these platforms as long as the your selling style is appealing over time you will you know these platforms like TikTok will find people that watch you. OK. So are you sending your wedding linens to

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people doing this kind of thing? can see if we can move funny about all this, the reason why I came up with this is I like, I was going to do this for our own products. Yeah. But like who wants to see a middle-aged Chinese guy selling wedding linens, right? I would want to find someone probably female for our products, probably, you know, in the demographic that we’re looking toward for doing this. And so what’s funny is a lot of these ideas that I’ve come up with here today are things that I actually need.

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for myself and I know stores are looking for this.

12:45
Interesting and so and tick-tock affiliates have already been big. It just hasn’t been organized as much We’ve heard from some ecom sellers that they’ve had some pretty good success going after micro influencers in their niche and even People kind of doing product reviews and pointing towards a tick-tock shop Yeah I think the problem is you have to go out and find these people Whereas if there’s someone, know, who’s very eloquent and and good on camera and you go to the store

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More often than not, they’ll be like, hey, sure. Because it’s all on consignment anyways, right? You don’t have to pay the person until they make a sale. OK, all performance-based where you kind of set a target, the cost of acquisition. Yeah, pretty much. OK. All right, that’s new to me. I don’t spend any time on TikTok or these other ones. I don’t really know. Let’s see, what’s next on my list here? Oh, we have.

13:43
We have one. you have solar panels on your house? We do not. OK. This is something that we’ve been trying to figure out and contemplate, even though we live in the gloomy Northwest. We have a south-facing roof and very simple roof structure where it’s like, OK, this would be good. And it kind of pains me every summer when it does get hot out. It’s almost this greenhouse where it’s like, we’re just soaking up all this juice and just absorbing it. We’re not doing anything with it. How could we harvest this in some way?

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But the world of solar sales is pretty opaque and sometimes a little bit shady and people making all kinds of promises about, well, this tax rebate. And then you can claim the depreciation on top of this. And other people are like, yeah, that’s not a thing. Who told you that? so the idea here is the local consultant person who can kind of play matchmaker, analyze your

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your situation and your needs. And they might tell you, look, this is just not a fit for you. But we’ve got relationships with the local vendors, the local installers, and figure out, what is a realistic and good price for this type of install? And we also just had a few months ago the bomb cyclone 2024. This was like a mass power outage event where half a million people or something out of power. And we were down five days or something in the dark. And I had to toss all the

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food out of the fridge. Thankfully, no property damage in this storm. it was like, you got everybody thinking about like, well, what is my home energy backup plan? Like, is this a battery system? Is this a generator system? What makes the most sense? And this was a once in a generation event. So was like, well, maybe if I just allocate what I would have spent on a battery towards a hotel room and restocking the freezer, like, could survive the next several storms and it would still be coming out ahead. But it’s something that a lot of people were thinking about.

15:43
In response to that so it’s kind of the the home energy backup consultant I know on a previous one of these we talked about the you pitched the zombie apocalypse consultant. Yeah, it’s like in that same Same thing, you know since we’re talking about solar there was this article that I was reading where like within like the first couple years the Effectiveness of your solar panels degrades dramatically because dirt gets accumulated on this

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So how about like a service where you just go around and clean people’s solar panels? Yeah, we can boost the efficiency. we can get you back. Yeah. I mean, that wasn’t one of the ones I had on my list, but your idea made me think of that. Yeah, put it down. All right. Here’s one that literally I just thought of the other day as I was eating at a restaurant. So I was ordering from a Chinese restaurant for Chinese New Year, which just passed. And I noticed that the company that I was ordering from

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was offering to pay $3 per photo of their food so they could populate the app with like authentic pictures of their food. And these photos are meant to be casual, so they come across as authentic, right? Not like a stage shot. And so I was thinking my business idea is to just go around to these restaurants, there’s this need, and offer to just take organic pictures of their food. And maybe in the beginning you just do it exchange for a free meal,

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kicks, but maybe over time you could turn this into, you know, a real business because restaurants want people taking pictures and making videos of their food and posting them, whether it be on the app or are on their own accounts. they’re trying to incentivize like a crowd sourced image gallery basically like, of course we’re to have our, you know, fancy professional product photographer come in and take these shots. But you know, it looks

17:36
more it looks more legit it looks more official if it’s you know just random customers posting pictures of their food yeah if it’s a customer like holding up the plate or the food or eating it or whatever okay instead of like a stock photo and so they were willing to pay three dollars per photo wow and of course we did this yeah take some pictures yeah you just take a picture of the food that you just got like eating it so clearly there’s a demand here and maybe you can do this on a mass scale

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And it only takes one to get a toehold. And then you start going to the neighborhood or the restaurant down the street. Like, did you know these guys must be onto something? They’re paying $3 a picture to get these different things. Is just to populate Yelp? Or where they putting these things? So the one that I used, I can’t remember the service. There’s a whole bunch of these delivery services that they have. maybe like DoorDash. We didn’t use DoorDash, but DoorDash could be one of those, right? It’s one thing to see like

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photos of just the food, it’s another to see real people enjoying the food. OK. OK. And so maybe that’s a way to, I don’t know the economics behind it, but if they’re willing to pay $3 a photo, clearly there’s a demand for this. Yeah, so that helps. Maybe that helps their average order value. That helps their conversion rate in these apps or something. Yeah, conversion rate, probably, yeah. Huh. Interesting. Yeah.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

19:22
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

19:33
I’ve got one that is related to software price increases. I think you and me both share a frugality gene. so whenever some tool that I’m using jacks up the price, it pains me a little bit. And it pains me that the switching cost is so high, it pains me that I feel kind of powerless to do anything about it. And so it makes me want to research alternatives, better, faster, cheaper alternatives. The one that really hit me was

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lead pages recently where to their credit, they had not increased the rate in 10 years. And so was like, I understand this is due for a rate, but it was such a shock because it almost doubled. I was like, really? Like, hey, I’ve been a customer for 10 years. Is this what you’re going to do to me? And I spent the whole day researching alternatives and trying to migrate over to optimized press for 25 % of the price. So the service that I want to pitch is the software migration service.

20:30
And it doesn’t have to be lead pages. could be anywhere you see people complaining about a price increase. It could be people looking for filling the blank product alternative, like Zapier did this a couple of years ago, where they really increased their rates. anytime you see people complaining about that, there may be an opportunity to be like, hey, I’m a specialist in migrating from this thing to this thing. And maybe you build some tool to help you do it. I don’t know. There’s probably a way to do it.

20:59
And the thing is, a lot of these are kind of proprietary closed off software systems. Like maybe it’s a little more challenging than that. But if you get good at it, I imagine you can knock these out pretty quickly. You know, it’s funny that you mentioned Zapier because I can’t remember how many years ago when Zapier doubled their prices, I moved everything over to Make. Yeah, me too. Oh, you did? It wasn’t called Make. Make acquired the company. can’t remember what it was called. was like IntegraMat first. IntegraMat. That’s what it was.

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But yeah, because in the challenges, there’s a learning curve. It’s like, well, I already know how SafeHear works. Do I really want to do this? Is worth the time? It’s like, well, if I’m going to have this for another five or 10 years, then yeah, it adds up every month, but totally. Yeah. I like that. You would have to specialize in something, but yeah, that’d be really easy to do because people tend to complain on Reddit, right? Right. And you could say, hey, I just use this to migrate. And it’s like your own service. Yeah.

21:58
I love it. I like that one. like that one. Can I go again while we’re on the topic of Reddit? as you know, the world of SEO has kind of been turned upside down in the last year, year and a half or so with Google really prioritizing both AI search results, but also sites like Reddit and Quora, kind of these user-generated content type of sites. I’ve actually met somebody doing this, but they’re providing Reddit marketing services where we’ll create these different

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accounts and we’ll kind of build up their Reddit credibility. So it’s not like they’re just coming in and spamming links, but they’re kind of like strategically and intentionally highlighting your brand in kind of an organic Reddit approved way in a lot of cases where you could start. Well, if Reddit is all of sudden siphoning off a bunch of my traffic, like how can I get in front of that traffic in a way that at least from the outside looking in appears to be authentic and playing by those rules?

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Those gamification services started happening almost immediately after. Have you been approached by the Reddit services? Not by anybody serious, that I can tell. I mean, I’ve been approached, and I always thought it was spammy. the people who approached me. But yeah, there are companies paying lots of money for this service. absolutely. Because basically, it’s a ghost writing.

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service where they’re taking your content, your ideas and putting it up there. And like you’re probably not going to get the same traffic, the same traffic value, but it’s a way to get your message. Our mutual friend Spencer Hawes, think, tried one of these services. Oh, okay. And he had some good results. I know you probably had him on this podcast at some point. Yeah. I’ll have to catch up with Spencer for sure. Yeah. Okay. So my next idea.

23:52
has to do with the fact that we recently moved my mom into our neighborhood and she was moving from a gigantic house to a little teeny tiny house because you know housing is so expensive over here. Anyway, she had to get rid of a lot of stuff and you if you go to these estate sale people it’s all like a super sketchy industry. Like you have, they can’t give you prices on anything and they just kind of give you this check and they don’t even give you like an itemized

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list of what was sold and for how much they just kind of hand you this check at the very end, which I found really sketchy. We interviewed a whole bunch of these services, but so I was thinking there’s a lot of people moving, right? And they need to get rid of their stuff. So why not just put like an above board, uh, sort of selling service where you’ll offer to just eBay all of their stuff. And it’s completely transparent. You show them the auctions, you just go in, you take photos,

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For some reason, I could not find a service that was willing to come to my mom’s house, take a full inventory, and just list everything on eBay. Oh, OK. No, I like this. It taps into the trend of empty nester, baby boomers downsizing. a typical, what’s it a state sale fees? They take 40%, 50 % of everything they sell? Yeah, they pretty much take half. But it’s the lack of transparency that bugged me.

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Like they can’t make any promises and they don’t even give you the itemized list of everything. At least the ones that I interviewed in Maryland. And I could not find a place that was just willing to eBay everything and come to the house. Like you can bring all your stuff to them and they’ll eBay. I found those services. Okay. I met a guy a couple of years ago who was doing something similar. It wasn’t, maybe some of it was eBay, but another segment of his business was like a dedicated.

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like auction site, like almost a dedicated estate sale type of sites. Like I’ll manage the whole thing for you, partnered with local real estate agents who kind of knew the customers as they were selling their house and knew they were going to need to get rid of some of this stuff. And it was all on consignment. It was all on performance. well, whatever sells, we’ll take a cut and we’ll pass on the rest. Yeah. I mean, the key for me was transparency. Yeah. Right. I like to see the auctions and whatnot and sure, you can take your cut.

26:10
But at least in Maryland, the estate sale people that I went through, it just felt like kind of dirty to me. So I think there’s a need. Yeah, I really like this one. And then do that realtor partner angle or start with friends and family who are going through this process, get a few reps under your belt and figure out how to streamline that process and then provide that. Because it’s kind of the anti-positioning. It’s like you position it as, you know, we’re

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transparent, where the homeowner advocate, there’s different ways. It’s like when you see cruelty free on a shampoo or any other product or something, you’re like, now I automatically assume that every other thing is filled with cruelty. And you’re like, well, that’s an interesting anti-positioning. Yeah, just the fact that you can see the auctions that they’re conducting and what the actual selling price is, that’d be good enough for me. OK, cool, cool, cool.

27:09
Um, what else do I have? Do you have a aura ring? No, I do not. Yeah, me neither. And the reason I don’t is I believe the sleep score is largely irrelevant where it’s like, I’m going to wake up today and I got to be the best version of myself. You know, whether I slept well or whether I slept poorly, I still got to show up. I got to be a dad. I got to do all the things. I got to go crush the day. And so it’s like,

27:38
Maybe there’s an opportunity for the aura ring that just shoots back, 98, 99, all the time. It’s like, nailed it last night. You might feel tired, but no, the data says you did great. You might as well go out and crush your day. Something that’s been on my mind is like, sleep is getting a lot of attention lately with recognizing how important it is for brain recovery.

28:06
you know, all sorts of different health consequences. And it’s like, yes, do all the things to make sure you try and get the best night’s sleep possible. But it’s kind of silly, like, oh, I’m not going to do what I plan to do because I only got a 73. Like, well, really? Like, you still have to go do your day. So this is like a positive reinforcement type of ordering. Yeah, I like that. It doesn’t even have to be connected to any data. Like, it just has like fake looking Bluetooth or something.

28:36
I’d consider getting the aura ring because I know what you eat has a lot to do with how well you sleep. So by just eating certain things and then taking the score, you can narrow it. Because I know, for example, if I eat something super greasy, like Chinese food, example, like the night before, I don’t sleep that well. And it’s taken me years to figure that out. Whereas maybe something like that ring could have told me. So maybe more like an application specific type of ring. Where you enter in what you ate.

29:04
and then you get the data to see if there’s any correlations. Some of those simple things, and maybe it’s just like a reminder in the morning, like Carpe Diem. It could be something simple, like a simple push notification, like, hey, today’s the day. Go get it. You’re not getting any younger. We had some guys on the show years ago. That was their app. I think it was called We Croak. And it was just like a daily death reminder. was kind of like the memento mori thing. It was like, hey, just.

29:33
just to, know, I don’t know, 127 PM, hey, just a heads up, you’re gonna die someday. it’s like, well, shoot, I better go get after it. Nice, nice. So this next idea is, I hope Tony doesn’t get mad at me, but what was funny about this next idea is I got it from her during Seller Summit. So Seller Summit is the annual e-commerce conference that I run. And hilariously, at the last event,

29:59
she was actually helping some attendees optimize their dating profiles. Because there these guys that they come to Seller Summit every year and they’re still single. we just struck up this conversation like, yeah, how do I improve my dating efficiency? So Tony looked at their profile and they’re like, OK, you need to change this, this, this, this, right? So now, with a whole bunch of these AI image tools and whatnot, and AI just in general to help with the copy,

30:29
you can easily put together a profile that at least gets your foot in the door, and then it’s up to you to screw up the date or whatnot. But so Tony was doing these, helping people with their dating profiles for at least two or three people at the event. And I was like, Tony, should do this business, her next side hustle. Exactly, exactly. And there’s all these AI tools that can touch up your existing photos to make you look better from an existing photo that you upload too. Yeah. So. Yeah, no, I had a friend who recently did

30:58
an AI LinkedIn headshot. They fed in a bunch of existing pictures like, hey, this was a lot faster and cheaper than hiring a photographer. Yeah. I mean, of course, you know, once people all start doing this, you’re not going to be able to believe anyone’s profile, but you know, at least it gets you in the door. know, I mean, how many of these dating profiles are, you know, completely honest and truthful to begin with? That’s true. That’s true. But it’s very easy to screw up one of these two because certain people are looking for certain things, right?

31:27
Yeah, my brother’s role was, know, anybody who had, you know, anything Seahawks related was like an automatic out. He’s like, I do not care about football. Anybody who’s like, you know, holding a beer was like automatic out. He’s like, is he sober? And it was just, you know, it’s kind of interesting. Like everybody has their own different filters and criteria where for somebody else who have been like, hey, know, you’re drinking beer and watching football. It sounds like my kind of guy. My kind of person. Exactly. Exactly. But the conference shows that a lot of people need help in this department. So there’s clearly a demand for.

31:57
Yeah, think that taps into some other trends too of people postponing a lot of major life decisions, getting married later in life, having kids later in life, the loneliness epidemic. This is a real thing, help people find their partner. That taps into a big, big market. That is until AI becomes that partner, but that’s a topic for different episode. That’s another episode. I just aired a

32:24
recently was like I interviewed my AI self like Robo Nick, know, just prompted chat GPT to respond as me. And it did it surprisingly well. It’s like, hey, that’s, that’s kind of the answer I would have given. And you know, it only made up a few facts, which were a little weird, but it did surprisingly well. like, are you published you publish on your podcast? No, I haven’t tried that yet. That sounds like a very interesting episode. Yeah, I mean, because you’ve got, know, this 10 year body of work out on the internet, too, where you know, it absolutely could respond to Steve.

32:54
Link that episode up. I want to listen to that one. right, I’ll send that one. That sounds like a great idea, by the way. Yeah, love it. All right, what’s next? Is it my turn? It’s your turn. I got a couple more, too. Next one for me is in the world of content creation. And I’m calling this I’m feeling lucky for podcast editing. And so what we’ve learned over 10, almost 12 years of podcast editing, is

33:24
at least as much about what you don’t say as what you say, like what you don’t air. And so my job as the host is to cut the fluff, cut the stuff that doesn’t add to the conversation or like, you went off this tangent, really go anywhere or that question kind of landed with a dud, like, okay, fine. And so my job after recording has been to go through the transcript and find those little sections, just to try and tighten that up. And maybe we’ll record for an hour and try and find the best.

33:53
50 minutes and maybe there’s a sliding scale on this, you know, I’m feeling lucky editor. I think this is going to rely on AI. You feed in the transcript, you feed in examples of past episodes that you really like. And my thought is this is going to make suggestions on where to trim the fat. could you cut out of this and not lose the overall message and takeaways, but just make it a tighter listening experience? I’ve been waiting for a tool like that.

34:22
as long as I’ve been podcasting. I think the closest thing that I’ve used for that is a tool called Opus Clip. Have you tried that tool? No, this is like the, we’ll make AI shorts for you. Yeah, it’ll make shorts for you, but it actually does a reasonably good job of picking out like something that you can just cut to the front, you know, to get that hook and the attention. Okay. But something like that more along the lines of what you just described, I would definitely pay for it.

34:52
No questions asked. Because it’s like the time, that’s the time consuming. This is where I love being a podcast guest, where I just show up and as soon as a recording is done, my work is over. But as the host, it’s like, well, now I got to review this whole transcript to figure this out. And thankfully, we have an editing service to help perform those actual cuts. if there was even just a starting point, maybe that’s what it is. It’s like, OK, we want to end the sliding scale. It’s like, I want to.

35:20
How strict did you want it to be? Like, okay, it’s only going to keep the best 15 minutes. I think that would be really, really hard. But if you’re just, want to trim 10%, uh, you know, give me the bottom 10 % of this episode and maybe it will make suggestions on that. So all these ideas that I’ve given you are just ones that I’ve come up with as a result of things that have happened in my life. So as I mentioned before, my mom just moved in our neighborhood and you know, as you get older, you want to spend more time with your parents, right? And what I’ve discovered just hanging out with my mom a lot more.

35:50
is that she has all these stories to tell that you don’t know about that you probably wouldn’t have asked when you were younger, right? And so there was this service that we used a while back where the company basically just emails your mom or your parent a list of questions and then they compile their answers in a book for you, right? But I was thinking of taking that one step further. So this is a book that sits on my shelf that I treasure now because it’s all stories. what service did you use for that? I forgot what it was called.

36:20
but I can find out for your listeners if they want. The problem with that service though was like the parent or whatever has to do a lot of writing. It’s actually quite burdensome for them, especially if English isn’t their first language. So what I was thinking about doing was taking that one step further. All you have to do is come up with the questions ahead of time and then you just take a film crew and you just go interview that person. That way you have it on video. I think that would be much more valuable than

36:48
the book, I love the book, don’t get me wrong. But it was just kind of hard to make sure it got written in. Whereas with video, if you send a film crew there, you know, there’s no, you know, it’s just off the cuff. And it’s actually your parents speaking, which is a valuable keepsake for anyone to have. Yeah, and then they can turn it into like a documentary style. Yes. Yeah. And maybe that could be an extra service. You turn it into you do the editing and you turn into a documentary.

37:16
I think this would be really cool because you’re exactly right. I looked into some of these, you know, parent story capture services and you’re exactly right. It’s like it really it’s not. I mean, it’s a gift. That’s what we’re looking at for Christmas gifts. But it’s like, is just a lot of work. Like how all of a sudden every month it was a lot of work. All these questions. And, know, for what real benefit? Like you already know these stories. This is more of a gift for us. But it was really challenging. And it kind of first came to mind with

37:48
my grandpa on my dad’s side. listen to the hardcore history, like 18 hour saga of World War II in the Pacific. And I know we served there, know, quartermaster or something in Northern Australia. That’s like all I know. But it’s like, what else, you know, what was your level of involvement here? Like, did you see combat? What was it like being shipped off at 20 years old across the world? Like, all that kind of stuff, you know, is

38:15
is gone now. And I think this is a really powerful one to potentially capture some of that for future generations. And this is instantly why I interviewed my mom for the podcast. It wasn’t for my listeners. You know, it was more so I could have her on the episode so you could do the same thing just audio wise to just over zoom. It’d be, you know, kind of informal. And if you’re good at asking questions and getting extra information out like me and you are, for example, we could turn this into a service.

38:44
It was on SNL, like where the son is interviewing the dad and then they, you know, get super vulnerable, you know, because they just have these conversations because all of sudden you put mics in front of their faces and then they turn to the camera and do like a Squarespace ad read and it’s… I haven’t seen that episode. I’ll have check it out. I think it was a fun one. Okay, so that’s kind of the…

39:10
end of life or approaching end of life, how do we capture some of these stories? You know, it’s like the movie Coco, know, and Hector is fading away like, oh, he’s being forgotten, right? How do we, how do we remember the people who came before us? I think that’s a really cool idea. And like that, you know, professional filmmaking, so like to rent out even freelance professionals to do this for a day, it’s, it’s not gonna be cheap, but it’s not gonna be like over the moon expensive. Yeah. Then the one I have,

39:37
is the opposite of that, not end of life, but beginning of life. I’m going to call this the digital baby service. This is we’re going to secure your kids’ domain name. We’re going to claim their social media handles. We’re going to register their Gmail account. And for this, we’re going to charge you, I don’t know, $100 a year. It’s going to be a decent margin because basically, all this stuff is free except for the domain, which maybe costs $10.

40:06
12 bucks a year to renew, but we’re just going to secure this for you so you don’t have to worry about it. And so when your kid becomes old enough that they care about this, you know, all of a sudden we have that locked down for you. Is this something that I did when the kids are born? I would better go register their domain names just in case, you know, we wouldn’t want anybody else to have that. So it’s something that would probably be there might be a market for that as a service. Yeah, actually, there’s a lot of things that you could do.

40:36
But yeah, it would be a service where you just lock down the names for any relevant service that you might not be able to think about, right? That you might not have necessarily thought of, besides the obvious ones. So yeah, I like that idea. I like that idea. Kind of along those same lines, my next idea is a little bit more, well, it more caters to like the personalities of the younger folks these days. So I kind of got this idea after reading an article

41:06
about how people are paying money to rent venues for social media. So for example, a lot of these, these make money online guys literally rent a jet set. So it looks like you’re on a private jet when you’re really not. Okay. And I think that’s such a, like a reflection of where society has been going, but you could profit from it by just creating a bunch of these sets, whether it be a private jet or

41:36
a luxury hotel suite or a botanical garden or just something cool where it’s literally just the set for Instagramming or doing lives from. Wow. And then just rent that time out to people. I might have a problem with this one, but I thought of it because people are paying for these services. Yeah, I think there’s probably something to that. And yeah, you have a warehouse space where you have like

42:00
four or five of these set up and people come in or you your two hour block, you know, they come in and knock out a bunch of reels or not much videos and you’re set. And this is very pervasive in China actually. So if you see like a TikTok video of a factory of someone like, you know, making stuff, chances are it’s fake. Like literally it’s just like a table and just like the backdrop of it with this machine, like rotating the same products over and over again. Okay. So

42:29
I’ve been just seeing a lot more of those, you know, debunked. Because, you know, people want to look like they’re successful or doing these things. maybe it’s just like a sad reflection of where we’re going. you know, there’s a market there for renting out these services. Yeah, this was a speculation for, for years or certain influencers like, oh, you know, they’re standing in front of the rented Lamborghini. They don’t really own that. Like, that’s not really their life. That’s like, this

42:58
I don’t know, I guess maybe a certain demographic that appeals to it’s like, who cares? It’s the younger folks. Because we’re old and crotchety now. Get off my lawn. No, but this is cool. And I do love me a rental business. We’ve talked about the photo booth business. We’ve talked about renting mobility scooters. We had a guy renting out reusable moving boxes or plastic storage bins, basically.

43:28
Here’s another example of something. Hey, build it once or build that set once and get paid for it over and over again. Yep. Cool. What do you got? You got a couple more? I’ve got, I think, one more. And this is around a personal pain point of mine. And I’m curious to get your take on this as a prolific YouTuber these days. What I struggle with is the scripting.

43:56
That’s kind of the bottleneck for me. And we’ve got this huge body of content. We’ve seen, in my mind, people stating very obvious things like, hey, have you ever thought about this as a side hustle? Really? That is getting 100,000 views? That’s the most basic idea ever. But it’s all in this scripting. So some sort of video scripting service or

44:23
you know, maybe it’s an AI or maybe it’s a human where it’s like, just, just tell me what to record. Like do it in my voice, you know, load it up. I could fire up the teleprompter or I could just do the voiceover and we’ll lay over some other imagery, but just that’s like the big a bottleneck in producing more video content for me. If you find such a service, I would sign up in a heartbeat. Uh, you’re absolutely right. The scripting is where it’s the most time consuming. I’ve got it down now where I can script something.

44:53
with the help of AI in about 90 minutes for a 10 minute video. That’s still 90 minutes though. But it’s to hear that it’s not instant for you. Well, if you think about it this way, I used to spend a lot more time on a blog post. I used to spend like three or four hours on a blog post. And what I like about YouTube scripting is it doesn’t have to be grammatically correct, nor does it have to have the proper punctuation either.

45:21
And so that’s why it’s faster for me. But yes, I’ve tried so many things, Nick, training AI to talk like me. And we have enough body of work between the two of us now that it’s pretty easy to do that. But I don’t think it’s just hard to find that replacement from what I’ve seen. What’s a typical process for you going from something that you maybe have written about? It could be years ago, but it’s still relevant to turn that into a video version.

45:52
there’s different, there’s a different formula, right? You can just read off the blog posts and have that be compelling. You know, what’s funny is that’s how I started my YouTube channel. Yeah. I just read the posts and you’re right. That doesn’t work. Well, I can corroborate that. Uh, so what you, can just feed it into chat, GPT or Claude. Yeah. And I have a prompt for this because I do less of this now, but I had a process for this where you give it a prompt.

46:20
And since we have enough workout that you can say in the voice of Nick Loper or Steve Chu. And it comes out with something that you can modify into a script. And then you also have to make changes to it. So it’s not, it still takes time, but it makes things much faster. Because there’s a whole big difference between SEO written blog than there is a compelling YouTube video.

46:46
Well, speaking of YouTube, you’re closing in on half a million subscribers over on the My Wife Quit Her Job channel. What kind of videos do you find do well? Like help me out on the YouTube. I can’t. it’s been a struggle. It’s been a struggle, Nick. So I teach e-commerce and what I found is that if I just go and teach e-commerce on that channel, it gets like no views. Right.

47:12
Because that’s not what people want. The common folk does not want e-commerce strategies, which is unfortunately my specialty. mean, that’s what I like creating content about. So the struggle is mixing that content, my teaching content, with something that the mainstream viewer actually wants to see. So it’s basically dumbing down the content, maybe that’s not the right word, making it more appealing to the masses. That’s the secret.

47:40
Any videos that have done particularly well for you? I mean, I have a whole bunch of videos that have gotten over a million views that that when I published them at the time were topics that were in the news too. So recency helps to what people are searching for and wanting to look about, you know, read about. And right now, if you think about it, I feel like the world is in chaos right now. At least the U.S. is in chaos. There’s tons of topics that people are searching for right now.

48:06
And you use like a TubeBuddy or a vidIQ to? I use vidIQ. Okay. To come up with, you know, what’s the metric you’re looking for? Like minimum search volume or minimum score there? I don’t actually even look at search volume anymore. I mean, I do as a last step. should say, I shouldn’t say I don’t look at it at all. Okay. But I’m just trying to create topics that I know I can do a good job writing a good hook for. And then keyword research is actually secondary. It didn’t start out that way, but now that’s how I do it. Okay.

48:36
Yeah. Hook first. Okay. I got one more that I got one more idea. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. For the audience before we go. Um, this is something that once again, I got from talking to with my mom because we hang out a lot more now. She lives right down the street. This is what I call like a forgotten skills online course series. So my mom, you know, back in the old days, she was telling about all these skills that she had to do from first principles. Like there’s a lot of things we take for granted now, right? That, that everything’s machine made and whatnot.

49:06
But back in the day, they did stuff by hand. so we’re talking about skills like Asian calligraphy, Morse code, how to read a map. I don’t know. I don’t think my kids know how to read a map, right? Because it’s a skill that you don’t need anymore because you have GPS and whatnot. Metalworking, old school photography where you’re developing photos with the chemicals and everything. Just a way to document and teach all those old school things and put them in one place.

49:37
I mean, what’s the point of learning Morse code at this point? You try to signal, send to somebody a telegram? Well, so the idea is there’s a bunch of people out there that, like for me, as an example, who would want to just learn these things from first principles. My personality is such that I don’t like depending on services handling everything for you. Because once something goes down, you’re in trouble.

50:07
So I actually would like to learn these things from first principles and I can’t be the only one out there. Fair enough. How to read a map I’m on board with. Metalworking has not been relevant to my life ever since like metalworking merit. Well, are just examples for me, right? Like Asian calligraphy, know, artistic things that are not as big of a deal now, but they’re still beautiful. I think the art should be carried on.

50:35
to future generations, that sort of thing. That’s fair. And even would be more relevant, it’s just like fixing stuff around the house and not being like powerless to just throw your hands up in the air. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. And we had a light go out this weekend and I do what I know how to do. Well, I’ll replace the bulb. And then that didn’t do it. And so then I’m like, hey, dad, what does it mean if you replace the bulb and the light still doesn’t work? He’s like, well, maybe your switch went bad.

51:04
Okay, how do I test that? Well, we got to take it apart. You got to use this little multimeter thing, which he had, which we don’t have. So he brought it over. It’s funny you say that. Look what I got right on my desk. Fancy.

51:19
All right, those are all the ideas that I’ve got. You got anything else? I think that’s pretty much it. Yeah, we’ve covered a lot in this episode, actually.

51:29
Hope you enjoyed this episode. All of these side hustles are great ideas that you can start right now with very little money. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 579. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

51:58
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I’m exposing five dirty tactics that Amazon is using to undercut sellers and raise prices. From sneaky fee increases to private label knockoffs, you’ll learn how Amazon is stacking the deck against small businesses. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit

00:28
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:58
I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:27
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:41
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. I don’t usually put out episodes like this, but in the next 20 minutes, I’m going to give you an untarnished look at the brutal reality of being an Amazon FBA seller. I’ll dissect the predatory algorithms, expose the hidden fees, and reveal the psychological warfare Amazon wages against its own sellers. Now I’ve been selling on Amazon FBA for 10 years now, and I’ve generated millions of dollars from the platform. Once upon a time,

02:09
Amazon was the go-to place to sell your stuff. It was easy. The audience was large and the FBA program made shipping a breeze. You could focus on marketing your business while Amazon handled the rest. But in the past several years, things started to change. Fees kept going up, Amazon began pushing its own products and their algorithms stopped making sense. Now, instead of being the dream marketplace it used to be, it has gone to total crap. Let’s start with Amazon FBA.

02:38
Back in the day, it was amazing. You’d send all your products to one warehouse and Amazon would handle the rest, shipping them to the right fulfillment centers. The costs were pretty reasonable too, just a small part of your overall expenses. But then things started to change. Every year, Amazon raised their FBH storage rates and piled on more penalties, especially during the holidays when sales matter the most. Next came the inbound placement fees. Now, just to get your products into their warehouses,

03:06
you’re hit with charges ranging from 27 cents to $1.58 per unit. As if that wasn’t enough, Amazon dealt another blow by penalizing sellers for having both too much inventory and not having enough inventory in their warehouses. Hitting the exact inventory sweet spot that Amazon expects is nearly impossible and has become one of the toughest parts of running an e-commerce business. And here’s the kicker. You could avoid all these fees

03:33
if you switch to Amazon’s warehouse and distribution or AWD. Convenient, right? AWD is marketed as a storage and logistics safety net for sellers. Instead of shipping to multiple Amazon FBA warehouses, you send everything to one central warehouse and Amazon handles the rest, sorting, storing, and redistributing your inventory as needed. Sound familiar? Well, that’s exactly how regular FBA used to work.

03:59
except now they’ve added extra fees for what used to be a standard service. Sure, Amazon pitches AWD as a way to save on storage costs compared to FBA, but here’s the catch. They’ve inflated FBA rates so much that using AWD feels less like an option and more likely the only way to avoid getting fleeced. Now this might be tolerable if AWD actually worked, but this holiday season, AWD has been a complete disaster. When Q4 shipments ramped up,

04:28
AWD capacity maxed out and Amazon simply couldn’t handle the load. They ran out of space, logistics fell apart, pickups were delayed or outright canceled, inventory wasn’t getting transferred from AWD to FBA on time, and deliveries were stalled. I know so many sellers who got completely screwed. Missed pickups, canceled shipments, delayed deliveries, you name it. And just when things could not get worse, Amazon announced that they’re raising AWD prices this year. Oh, and last week,

04:57
They also announced that they’re no longer reimbursing sellers the full retail price for inventory that they lose in their warehouses. Instead, they will only reimburse you with what Amazon determines is your true manufacturing costs that does not account for freight forwarding, tariffs, or customs duties. So let’s say a product you sell for 10 bucks that costs you $2 a source gets lost in Amazon’s warehouse. Amazon used to reimburse you the full 10 bucks every time that they made a mistake and lost your product. But now,

05:27
Amazon’s not going to even reimburse you the $2 you spent to source the product. Effective in March, Amazon’s only going to pay you back what it believes you paid to make the product, minus any shipping fees from China and import duties that you’ve paid. So basically, you’re going to take a loss every time Amazon screws up and loses your product. And here’s the kicker. Both the price hike and their new reimbursement policy was announced

05:52
right after Amazon claimed that there would be no new fee increases in 2025. They flat out lied and are now charging more for a service that was an absolute train wreck this holiday season. And to top it off, 2024 saw the largest price increases Amazon has ever rolled out. Not just financially, but in terms of workload and complexity for sellers. It is becoming harder and harder to sell profitably on the platform without jumping through endless hoops. By the way, if you’re tired of getting screwed by Amazon,

06:22
Make sure you sign up for my free six day e-commerce mini course below on how to start your own profitable online store. It is a hundred percent free and I guarantee you’ll learn a lot. Now the second way Amazon is hurting sellers is through their lowest price enforcement policy. If your products are priced lower off Amazon than they are on Amazon, your listings on Amazon basically disappear. This is a huge problem for sellers because Amazon is where the majority of sales happen.

06:48
Amazon uses web crawlers to monitor pricing on sites like Walmart, Target, and eBay. And if they catch you selling for less elsewhere, your products get buried in the search results. This practice is one of the key reasons why the FTC has sued Amazon. But here’s the strange part. For some reason, Amazon doesn’t seem to enforce price checks on Tmoo, which ironically makes things even worse for sellers. Tmoo doesn’t charge listing fees and keeps transaction fees ridiculously low for U.S. sellers.

07:18
And because of this, many sellers are listing the same products on both platforms, but at much lower prices on Tmoo. Now as a shopper, why would you stick with Amazon when you can get the same exact products on Tmoo for much less? Take this floor mat. On Amazon, it’s 40 bucks, but on Tmoo, it is only a dollar. Granted, selling on Tmoo has its own set of problems, but the point is that Amazon’s policies and fees are artificially raising the price for consumers.

07:46
And don’t even get me started on Amazon’s atrocious customer service for FBA sellers. It is nearly impossible to get a human on the phone. And when you do, you’re met with canned responses that rarely solve the problem. Take Amanda, one of my students from my Create a Profitable Online Store course. She designs her own custom party supplies and has gone above and beyond to register copyrights and trademarks for her top products. But despite owning the rights, she’s constantly dealing with Chinese sellers filing false copyright infringement claims

08:15
to take down her listings. Amazon’s policy treats sellers as guilty until proven innocent. So every time this happens, Amanda is forced to fight back. And while she eventually clears her name, it costs her months of lost sales. Worse yet, the cycle never ends. It just keeps happening. Recently, an eight figure Amazon seller named Molson Hart had 126 of his products taken down on Amazon last week for infringing on the trademark Liahart. But here’s the thing.

08:45
His company name is Via Heart LLC. His seller name on Amazon is Via Heart and he owns the trademark Via Heart and it’s in Amazon’s brand registry. But when he complained to Amazon support, he received a canned response explaining that all products using the term Via Heart would be suspended. Sure, Wilson eventually got his listings back, but he lost tens of thousands of dollars in sales during the 48 hours he was suspended. Right over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the biggest sales weekend of the year. Now for me,

09:15
It’s a different story, but just as frustrating. Almost every single year, one of our competitors buys out all of our inventory so we have nothing to sell during the holidays. And then after the season is over, they return everything. Because of this, we don’t make any sales for that SKU during the most critical time of the year. And worse yet, we actually lose money after paying Amazon’s FBA and return fees. To make matters worse, Amazon keeps piling on more and more promotions. It started with Black Friday,

09:44
Then came Prime Day, followed by multiple Prime Days. And this year, Cyber Weekend somehow stretched into a 12-day event. Every time Amazon runs a sale, sellers are forced to pay deal fees and slash their prices to participate. For example, to join a Lightning deal, sellers must pay a flat fee ranging from $150 to several hundreds of dollars per product. If you want your products to be visible during Prime Day, you’re required to meet strict pricing criteria, like offering a minimum discount

10:13
off your regular price. Now on the surface, this might seem great for consumers, but the reality is that sellers have to raise their prices during the rest of the year just to survive these deal days. And keep in mind, these sales often take place during peak shopping periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And the result, all sticker prices on Amazon are completely fake, artificially inflated for most of the year to offset discounts during sale events.

10:40
But the biggest way Amazon screws its sellers is by actively preventing you from building a strong brand presence. And they make it incredibly difficult for customers to find the brand that they’re actually looking for. Take my store, Bumblebee Linens, as an example. If you search for it on Amazon, only three out of the top 10 results are my actual products. The rest are from competitor brands. And unless you’re willing to shell out a lot of money, your competitors will always take up Prime Search real estate. Remember Viahart, the brand I mentioned earlier?

11:10
Despite owning the trademark for their product Brain Flakes, they don’t even hold the coveted Amazon’s Choice badge for their own brand. Instead, a Chinese knockoff owns it. How does Amazon even allow that to happen? Chances are, if you search for your own brand, or any brand for that matter, you’ll see a flood of Chinese knockoff brands ranked ahead of you. But it gets even worse. Even if a customer manages to find your product, Amazon will often place ads for their own private label brands

11:38
directly on your listing at a much cheaper price. Here’s a picture of my friend’s emu oil product in Amazon. And right smack in the middle of her listing is an ad for Amazon’s own branded emu oil at 30 % off. The ingredients are more or less the same, so guess what? Amazon is siphoning away sales from her listing, a listing that she paid Amazon for advertising. So where does this leave us? It’s clear that Amazon has no loyalty to its sellers. They’ll take your money,

12:06
bury your brand and even compete against you with their own products, all while pretending to be your partner. But here’s the truth. Amazon doesn’t need you. They built a machine that thrives on exploiting sellers, manipulating prices and feeding consumers a false sense of savings. And as long as there’s a steady stream of new sellers lining up, they will keep doing it. So if you’re a seller, the message is clear. You can’t rely on Amazon. It’s time to diversify.

12:35
build your own audience and take control of your business, focus on creating a brand that people recognize off Amazon. Invest in your own website, email marketing and direct customer relationships. Because at the end of the day, the only way to beat the system is to stop playing their game. If you found this video eye-opening, make sure to share with other sellers who need to hear the truth. And together, we can help each other navigate these challenges and build businesses that aren’t at the mercy of Amazon.

13:05
Hope you enjoyed this episode. As you can tell, Amazon is not the same as the platform as it was before. There’s still money to be made, but it’s a lot harder today. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejobe.com slash episode 578. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event.

13:35
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitherJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. This episode was supposed to be published at the beginning of the year, but there’s been so much happening that we never got the chance. In this episode, Tony and I talk about our strategies for both content and e-commerce for 2025. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit,

00:27
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:57
I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:26
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:40
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today, we’re to talk about what’s going to happen in 2025 and what our strategies are going to be on both the content side and the e-commerce side. I’m excited. You sound really excited. I know. Both of us were chatting right before this about neither of us really quite have nailed down what we’re doing in except for 2025 is like four weeks away. There’s just going to be so much uncertainty.

02:09
We got a new president who’s going to change a lot of things, increase tariffs. China is changing too their policies as a trade war. Even Amazon is copying places like T-Mobile. Lots of stuff going on and a lot to digest here. I would say, I think the uncertainty with everything, I actually see that impacting a lot of different things. I see a lot of people in the blogger space

02:37
wanting to sell their blogs. I don’t know if you’ve seen this as much. I’m in a lot of the lifestyle type blogger groups. A lot of people are like, this is it, I’m done. It’s been several years of Google issues, low traffic, ad revenue going down, getting screwed by affiliates. It’s like a variety of things. People are like, they’ve already either moved on to another

03:04
thing, right? So they’ve kept their blog, but they’re doing something else or they’re like, I just can’t do this anymore. I’ve got to go get a W-2, right? Which I think is, okay, so it’s funny, right? As someone who has been like a serial entrepreneur, I feel sad, right? I feel sad. Cause some of these people, like, I feel like I grew up with, like a lot of these people started blogging shortly after I did. So they’ve been at this for 15 years. To see them just shut down is

03:34
hard, right? But the other part of me is like, ooh, should I buy up some blogs? I don’t know if I would do that. Well, I know. If it’s like to me, it’s like, should I buy up the content? Right. Because my biggest thing, like when I think about 2025 and of course, like I’m in the middle of like a massive home renovation, which has thrown a lot of wrenches into some stuff that I wanted to do this year just because that’s pretty much

04:01
Not only has it taken up all of my extra time, but I don’t have places to make videos, right? My office is still under construction. My house is under construction. I wanna start making these videos, but I’ve realized that I actually need to have, I’m not like you who can make a video with a backdrop. Yeah, yours is harder. Yeah, and most of my videos that I’ve realized, after doing a lot of video last year and putting stuff out and seeing what hits,

04:26
My videos do well when I’m showing people how to do things, right? So I need to have a space like inside my house, primarily the kitchen where I can film and my kitchen is still, it’s done-ish, right? So that’s my first hurdle that I had this year, which will be fixed, right? The kitchen will be finished. It’s not like it’s not gonna happen. But the other thing is like I need content, right? I need content to film. And obviously I have Happy Housewife, which has a ton of content, but to me it’s like you can never have enough.

04:54
You can never have too much content to make videos about. And I was like, well, if I bought some of these properties, I would own the content. And not that I would necessarily use them for blog content, but I could use them as like video content, right? Whether it’s recipes or DIY or things like that, I could just make the video about it. anyway, just seeing all that happening right now has got me, has got the wheels spinning. You know what? So blogging, I think Google’s gonna die in the next two or three years. The traditional search method.

05:24
But I still think the blog is valuable. I don’t know if I would start one as a business today, but ranking, like if you’ve used search GPT or perplexity, there’s gonna be links to popular blog posts and just all the stuff that you’ve done for Google so far will help for AI search going forward. So I don’t think there’s, if you have a blog, mean, selling would be, I think kind of dumb unless you’re just gonna drop it because you’re just gonna put pennies on the dollar. When in fact it is valuable.

05:54
You know, what I think is interesting because I know we’ve talked, we’ve done a lot of episodes on Google and just sort of getting into the search issues really quickly. One thing I have noticed is that, so I’m going on a trip next week and I’ve been doing a lot of Googling. And like I said, we’ve talked about this before, I don’t Google a lot of things. I usually look on Pinterest or I just ask ChatGBT. But I have been Googling, like for example, yesterday, where can I go on a reindeer ride? Right?

06:24
And what I’ve noticed is when it comes to that travel space, like what ferry should I take from this place to this place? It’s all blogs coming up in search. There’s no Reddit threads. There’s no Quora. There’s very little AI. know, normally now you get the AI at the top of the search. You get that a little bit, but it’s pretty much like Visit Finland, whatever, like all these blogs that are coming up at the top of search. So that got me thinking too, like, hmm.

06:55
Is certain stuff making a comeback, like certain topics? Or did these topics never disappear? I hadn’t been searching them previously. Well, there was a November update. I actually haven’t read up on what the November update, the effects of it so far. The trend right now is to start your search on AI and then clarify with Google. Something like travel, I don’t want to start on AI because I want to know these places.

07:24
Do they still exist? Are they open? Do they have a phone number kind of thing? Yes, for businesses and business search, maybe Google become like the old yellow pages. Oh, I would like that. Google is still well regarded as having accurate information, especially for businesses. That’s why I still think it’s probably worthwhile to blog for an e-commerce store or if you have a place of business. Yes.

07:52
So you can show up higher in the search results there. don’t think, so Google’s not gonna die, but like I think their search business is gonna take a big hit, especially when the DOJ kind of, they were talking about breaking apart Chrome from Google. And I think if they do that, that’ll hurt. Like if Google is not the default search engine for Chrome, that’s gonna change things. Yeah. So just piggybacking on what you said.

08:18
That is where I see there’s probably still a big opportunity for businesses. So if you have a local business, and I’m thinking about actually someone in our course that sells the wooden flowers, where her flowers are in retail stores. Now she doesn’t own that store, right? But like those local businesses I think can really still win with Google search because like when I was looking for stuff like in local areas, there’s not a lot of competition, right? The people that have even a basic website

08:47
with a link to book or a phone number and pictures really were dominating, right? And it was a very minimal effort as far as like, it wasn’t this complex website put together, you know, it was pretty simplistic. And so I think if you do own a business, that’s still a really viable option for you to get traffic. Yeah. And just because Google might lose market share, that

09:15
market share is going to get picked up by someone else and chances are they’re going to use similar metrics to rank or show up. but someone like me who does not have a local business, one trend that I’ve noticed that I feel like, okay, what should I do with this is that there are people on TikTok right now who are literally putting their entire Thanksgiving dinner recipes on TikTok.

09:40
They’re literally doing like, okay, this is what I’m making for Thanksgiving. And then each recipe has its own video. Like here’s how I’m making the turkey. Here’s how I make the mac and cheese. Here’s how I make, just this morning, my daughter and I were watching this like scallop potato recipe where she’s like, please, please, please, will you please make this please? And my, literally my entire phone is text messages between me and my girls sending back TikToks of like, well, no, let’s make it this way. Let’s do this. So I’m wondering, because I have like a whole Thanksgiving, like I have that on my blog, right?

10:10
So is the trend for 2025 or is the next logical move to put those recipes in like basically lists, right? On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, whatever. is absolutely the right move. Yeah. I am doing that too as we speak. Actually, know, video is my primary platform now. Yeah. And so that bumblebee linen strategy for next year, it’s going to happen. Yeah.

10:37
You heard it here first for the 15th time. You know why? I decided to de-emphasize TikTok for my wife, Quit, and just create them out of my YouTube videos and then only focus my efforts on TikTok for Bumblebee. Chinese guy is going to be a face of a hanky company. It’s okay. It’s way it’s got to be. It’s been fascinating though to watch the shift as someone who’s been putting up recipes before you even used photos.

11:05
I probably still have recipes on my site without photos. I think I’ve updated them all, but it’s very possible. I have 700 recipes, so there’s definitely one or two that snuck through. That’s a really interesting strategy with any topic. Obviously, I’m in the recipe space, but if you’re redecorating a room, make an overview video. It’s like the old school, that’s your pillar post and then you can-

11:34
branch off and do individual posts based on, well, this is how we redid the fireplace mantle or whatever. I definitely think that is the strategy I need to have moving forward. Those videos are hard to make. Cooking videos are hard. I know, but I see that as a good thing. Less people are going to do it. Yes. I’ve seen all levels of edits.

11:59
I’ve seen some people who have really great editing and they’re using a really, you can just tell. They’ve got a full professional setup. But I also see people that don’t have that level. In fact, there was one girl that I watched this video where she was making, I think it was the mac and cheese recipe we’re gonna make. And she’s like, I bought this, I can never think of what it’s called. It’s like the boot that hangs your camera so it can film from the top. Oh yeah, yeah. Bill always has to tell me what the swing arm.

12:27
or whatever, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, every time we do this on our course, Bill’s like, it’s called this. And I’m like, I will never remember that. Anyway, so she’s like, I got this new tool so I can show you from the top. And she films like four steps using that. And she’s like, I don’t like this at all. And then she put her camera back to where she’s like in the video. So even in her own video, she’s trying out things and being very transparent about it, right? And the video’s got like a million plus views. It’s not like it’s hurting her. So anyway, I think that

12:56
I don’t think that for people listening, the quality doesn’t have to be absolute professional editing level. think just making sure that it’s the same things we always talk about, clear, good sound, easy to follow kind of thing. mean, these Bumblebee TikToks are not gonna be professional. It’s gonna be me at the office just talking about what’s going on and hopefully I won’t drive my wife crazy too much. Which I think brings up a point, because you were like, I’m all in on video. I need to be all in on video.

13:26
I do think, and we get on our friend Kevin about this, right? Because he makes videos for YouTube and he does a ridiculous level of editing, hours and hours worth. And we were always like, Kevin, you don’t need to do all that. But I will say that like, if you can do cool edits, that’s actually a way to grow your channel. I don’t know if you, see we are in such different TikTok algorithms, every time I say something, I’m like, he’s not gonna know what I’m talking about.

13:54
Have you seen Lady in the Bathroom on TikTok? She basically lip syncs to just like absolute any genre of music in her bathroom. They tried to cancel her for dumb reasons and whatever. She went through a little controversy, but because she went through this controversy, everybody’s talking about her.

14:20
everyone’s like, well, she got popular because of her awesome edits. And she always appears on my feed. so I watch like four or five of her videos, like just for the purpose of like research and her edits are really good. Like, and it’s just how she’s cutting the clips. It’s real, like she doesn’t have any text overlay, doesn’t have anything. It’s just how she’s literally editing the movement. And it’s really good. So I’m like, either one, if you do have editing skills or two,

14:48
if you want to hire someone overseas, it’ll be very easy for someone overseas to do this for you. And you’re looking for like the angle, that could be the angle for you. Bottom line, if you just put out stuff that’s interesting or if you’re interesting, it’s going to do okay. Yeah. So I just hope I don’t tarnish the Bumble Bee Linens brand as Jen sees it. That’s why you will 100 % guarantee. Because I want to say some stupid stuff, know, you know, just

15:17
Whatever comes to mind, I always stick my foot in my mouth. With the Bumble, I’m curious about this because I feel like we’ve been talking about this for years. It hasn’t been years. I have a bunch stored. I don’t know if you this. have 15 to 20 videos stored, but I’m not sure if I like them, so I’ve never published them. Interesting. What are they? We had our employees film three videos a day just on what they’re doing.

15:45
I just had MJ compile them into videos. But they feel like sales videos in a way. Yeah, I think that’s what you’ve got to fix. And they’re just showing the merchandise and whatever. I can’t see that drawing any interest. So that’s why I’ve never published them. Yeah. So one cool to that same footage and just kind of narrate what’s going on. Like, oh, man, for some reason it’s slow this year or wow, we just got, I don’t know, just make it.

16:14
a behind-the-scenes look at actually running the business. I think one that you could easily do and do it once a week is pack a box with me. Yes, we have one of those actually. That’s one of the ones that are keepers. People love seeing that and also another fun thing you can do is as you’re packing the box, add in something extra.

16:40
and being like, Anna in Massachusetts, you’re getting a little surprise, you know, and like, because people. No, but like, you know what I’m saying? Like, I think that like for the cost that it takes for what it costs you, right, to do something like that is very minimal. But the excitement of like people are like, oh, I’m going to watch this. want to hear my name called out. Right. I want to see. Like, I think those are actually really effective. Yeah. And.

17:07
I’ve also seen things like that where people are like tagging their friends named Anna. Like Anna, did you order from this company? You know what I mean? Like it has a really nice virality to it. And like we’ve talked before about like sales and discounts, it’s a way to build a brand and like get engagement without paying, right? I mean, you’re paying like two bucks, whatever, three bucks, maybe tops for something like that. Less than that actually. Yeah, but I didn’t want to give away your secrets. So. Yeah, that’s why the personalization like

17:36
Highlighting personalized merchandise is actually really important. And we’ll just like announce their first name and maybe on off chance, someone will see it or pick the funniest ones. I already have a collection of those actually. So I have all the raw materials. It just needs to get to something that I’d be happy with and something that I can sustain with very little energy. That’s the key here, very little energy. Okay, so that’s my question for you is how are you going to do this with as little energy as you have?

18:06
Well, no, I just hop into work and I film myself talking about what’s going on. Then I already have all these clips, which I’m still going to have the employees film and then just mash it all together. What’s your goal for how many a week do you want to put out? I’m going to start by doing three a week with the goal of going five a week. I need to get into a flow. That’s the hardest part about all this. Once I’m in the flow, going to five should not be a problem.

18:33
So when you think when you go down there to film, are you going to film like a week’s worth of content? I’m going to do, yes, a week’s worth of content or if I’m just inspired by all the hankies and linens around, I’ll just get it all over with. Because in theory, it should be a lot easier than filming a long form YouTube video for me. It’s hours of prep for me on a YouTube video. Yeah. Right.

18:58
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

19:27
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

19:38
I have an idea for you. Just throw some hankies on the floor and lay down and make a snow angel and have your employees be throwing hankies on you and you could have White Christmas playing in the background. That’s a winner. That’s a winner. I like that one. I got all sorts of ideas for you. That one’s funny. Also, if you’re ever at a Warriors game, you should have one to dry your tears of happiness.

20:06
about happiness last night with that. All right, let’s switch gears and talk about the new president that’s coming in and its effect on e-commerce because I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this. The number one thing I just have to say about all this is we’ve been here before. Yeah. Like when Trump was president in 2016, he announced 45 % tariffs across the board. But that was not the case. That’s not what ended up happening. Most of the tariffs were at seven and half percent all the way up to 25%.

20:36
Most of our stuff fell into the seven and a half percent. Like most of the staples and everyday goods fell into like the lower bracket. But here’s the other thing. I don’t remember us raising prices that much to account for the tariffs. Because if you think about it, the tariffs aren’t that big of a deal. Like let’s say you have a 25 % tariff. Let’s say you sell something for a buck. There’s a 25 % tariff. And typically you sell that stuff for four bucks, right? So 25 % tariff.

21:06
So that means it’s going to cost you a buck 25. So if you were to even pass that cost to the consumer, you would charge $4.25. Right. Right. You wouldn’t charge 4x that amount. And so I don’t think from a from a vendor point of view, it’s going to be that big of a deal, even if he raises it to 60%, which I don’t think he will. But even if you do decide to get suppliers outside China, all the

21:36
All the Chinese factories are actually moving to Mexico. So I’m not sure how it’s going to work. They’re moving to Vietnam and they’re owned by the same owners in China. They’re just physically located somewhere else. So I’m not terribly worried about the tariffs. Okay. Who should be worried? Anybody? Who should be worried? I guess if you’re a Chinese supplier or if your supplier doesn’t

22:06
doesn’t do that and you have to pay the tariffs. I don’t know. See, there’s a lot of things that China can do also. They can devalue their currency and make it more attractive. I don’t know how this is all going to play out, but I guess the consumer is the one who’s going to pay. Yes. That’s the issue, right? I would say if you have your own store, you’re selling on Shopify, BigCommerce, whatever,

22:36
you’re in a much better position than if you sell on Amazon. Yes. I think the Amazon sellers are the ones that need to really be paying attention because I feel like I think about some of my clients and what they charge and adding an extra 25 cents to something is negligible. Even if you do have to, maybe you sell something for $10, now you sell it for 11. That’s really not a huge price jump.

23:06
when you’re on Amazon and you’re already fighting those margins, I mean, we know a lot of people on Amazon that their margins are like 10, 15%, right? When it’s all said and done. And to me, that’s where I would start to get worried about some of these extra, because it’s just another fee that you’re going to be paying. And on Amazon, you can’t always pass that along to the customer because you’re constantly in a price war. That is the problem. Amazon’s prices aren’t that elastic.

23:35
Let’s say you raised it to like $4.25, that might put you over some guy who’s selling it at four bucks. Then because branding isn’t that big a deal on Amazon, they’re going to probably pay for the $4 one, buy the $4 one. Yes. In fact, just speaking of branding on Amazon, I went to buy a turkey roaster this weekend because I need one for Thanksgiving. I was shocked.

24:01
I was looking for, and I don’t wanna say it’s a US brand because they’re probably all manufactured overseas, right? So I’m not pretending that I think that if you buy a Black & Decker or something that’s manufactured in Ohio. But I was surprised that I could only find two brands that I had heard of before. And in the kitchen space, I’ve heard of a lot of brands, right? So it’s like, I could only find two turkey roasters that were like, Hamilton Beach was one and I can’t remember the other one.

24:31
and every other brand was clearly a brand that you’d never, those brands that are like, is zing zong zong. Alphabet soup is what they’re. Yeah, alphabet soup, yeah, it was 100%. And I was like, so are brands like, know, Oster or KitchenAid, right? I mean, they still sell KitchenAid mixtures on Amazon, things like that, but are they moving stuff off? You know what I mean? Are they just relying on their retail presence and- This is what’s going on. You know?

25:00
These Chinese companies are actually opening up multiple, multiple accounts and selling the same stuff under different brands. So they flood all the listings of the same stuff, pushing everyone else down. And I don’t know how to really police that. don’t know how Amazon, they clearly haven’t done a good job. But this flood method from the same company works. So maybe that’s why you’re not seeing it. And that’s the other crazy thing is like, you know,

25:28
There were roasters that were like $109, right? But then there were like multiple ones that were 35. The exact same roaster, right? Or basically, like there was no additional features or anything like that. So it’s kind of like, not only are they opening multiple brands and flooding, they’re also dropping the price so drastically. Like how can you compete? Like, especially when you think of something like a roaster, right? It’s a real, like the box is huge, showed up yesterday. You’re just pushing people out and then they can raise the price.

25:57
when they’re the only sellers. Anyway, that’ll be interesting to see what, but all that leads to people just don’t have the same play with pricing as you do if you have your own brand. I mean, you try to buy a pair of Uggs on Amazon, good luck. I’ve never tried. Can you get Uggs on Amazon? You can, but you’re paying Uggs pricing or more because someone’s arbitraging it.

26:26
No one’s out, because Uggs is a known brand, same with Nike tennis shoes or anything that is an actual known brand. That’s where I think that becomes so important as we continue moving forward. brought up Uggs and do we have this conversation? We actually just bought my wife a pair of Uggs for her birthday. Okay. And Uggs are expensive. Yes, they are. And so I was looking at

26:53
I was just going to shoe stores. There’s a lot of Uggs knockoffs, but we ended up getting the Uggs because she wanted the Uggs, right? Yeah. And so that just demonstrates the power of the brand. This is a great segue, by the way, to what my strategy, I think I probably announced it on this podcast before, but we’re going straight into digital printing for our products. So anything we can personalize with the printer is super easy because it’s all done in Photoshop. We’re also doing

27:20
We’ve done custom embroidery for many years now, but we’re also going to do handwriting embroidery going forward. I didn’t even know this was a thing, but you sign something and you want that in a handwritten form for your wedding. And that couple with digital printing, I think it was in Office Hours that I said this, but basically every special occasion under the sun, we’re going to have images and personalized stuff for.

27:46
That way we don’t actually have to carry a variety of that much inventory because we’re printing on the same substrates. That’s going to be, think, our strategy going forward in the long run. I think that’s a genius strategy because you’re basically providing something where there’s a huge barrier to entry. You have to have one of these printers or some kind of printer, which you have said many times, it’s a very big pain in the butt to It is a pain in the ass, yes. Or my cussing.

28:16
I feel like just the average Joe isn’t going to go buy one of these printers and start a linen embroidery business or digital printing business. I think that’s a way to tariff proof, regime change proof, whatever you want to call it, your business because you’re providing something that is very difficult for people to get anywhere else.

28:43
I wouldn’t say it’s difficult, but there’s certain barriers to it, right? Like one, the price, the cost of the printer. You still have to import stuff to get the cheapest stuff. then, yeah, just maintaining that thing. Like people listening to this don’t know, but I got a DTF printer last year and it has broken down multiple times just because of user error, actually. I didn’t know what I was getting into. Yeah. Cause the thing worked great for like the first.

29:11
six months and then I started having clog problems and cleaning. I’ve taken apart that machine almost bare bones. I feel like it’s monthly you have to take it apart. Well, now I’m just trying to figure out the system to do it and I think I’ve finally got it. Thank God. Anyway, people aren’t going to want to go through that. In that, think there’s, yes, people can get these things, but it’s hard for someone else to start this business.

29:40
You’re not just going to go outlay all this capital to buy the printer and the inventory and train somebody how to do it. There’s the other issue of how do you actually use this thing. That’s a whole barrier to entry. It reminds me of, so why did these… Obviously, we’re talking about huge brands. Uggs is a giant brand.

30:01
There’s something about Uggs where your wife didn’t want the knockoff. I actually have a pair of Uggs. Well, my daughter, of course I don’t. My daughter does. Just like I’m more an Old Navy and she’s wearing Lululemon. She’s got a pair of Uggs and a pair of knockoff Uggs from Imelou’s Boutique. Probably made in the exact same factory. I’ve put both of them on my feet. Now, she has a smaller foot than I do, so I can’t fully wear them. They feel exactly the same. Exactly the same. Yeah.

30:31
Very little difference. Small differences in like the actual appearance, right? The stitching is a little bit different kind of thing. But like as far as like comfort, no difference at all. Are they called eggs by any chance? They’re called eggs. No, no, I’m not even joking. I know this brand called eggs. Yes, there’s a couple of knockoffs that basically are like this almost the same as Uggs. But like Jen still wanted Uggs, which I totally understand. I actually just bought a pair of slippers.

31:00
So I had a pair of Land’s End slippers that I bought like 20 plus years ago. Last year, they were literally 20 years old and they’re moccasin slippers. So you can wear them outside, you know, and stuff like that. And they were literally disgusting. Like they were so gross. The whole bottom, like I’m pretty sure there was like gum and dog poop and like, and Brian was like, those need to go. Like you cannot keep wearing them. They’re absolutely disgusting. And so I threw them out. Worst decision of my life. I’ve missed them all year, right?

31:28
And so I have bought probably six pairs of slippers to like replace this pair and I keep returning them cause they’re not, they don’t make this kind, they don’t make the kind that I threw out. So anyway, like you create that brand where it’s like, I need the Uggs, right? I need this experience. I need the stitching, the comfort, the whatever they use on the inside material. It’s the same thing. Like once again, you don’t see this on TikTok, but there’s like the Hermes.

31:51
lady who people bring in their purses and she like, you oh, this is a palladium, blah, blah, blah. And this color is, and it’s like, Hermes has created this thing where like they don’t even let you buy their stuff. Right. Like there it’s like, it’s like you have to wait till March of 2026 to come in our store and buy a bag. Right. So like, but I think that creating a brand that does something similar. Right.

32:17
where you create this experience, this difficulty, whatever it is to, like Uggs sells out, right? The Tasman, I’ve been trying to get Tasman’s for like two years for Cora. Can’t find them anywhere. They get in stock, they sell out in like 10 minutes. And it’s like, if you can do that with your brand, right? So you figured out how to do that with Bumblebee, where you’re putting, they can get a Mother’s Day or they can get a Valentine’s Day or they can get someone’s name handwritten. That’s pretty cool. Like I think if you had like someone special pass away,

32:45
like having their signature on a handkerchief would be really cool, right? Gift to give somebody. the point of all this is these are things that are hard for someone, know, thousands of miles away to replicate. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so that’s what you have to think about because there’s services like Tmoo, Shein just announced earnings. had a 68 % increase. Shein is this knockoff clothing place. Like they literally take high end brands and create the same thing and sell it for like 10 % the cost.

33:15
Yes, they’re so cheap. It’s ridiculous. kid shop there? Oh, yes. I hate that they shop there. Yes, but the stuff is fast fashion. It’s cheap. Yes. But it looks pretty similar to the real thing. Yes, very much so. Then you have knockoff like Tmoo. Amazon just announced their Tmoo clone Amazon All. It’s terrible, by the way. Did you try it yet? No, no. Okay. Here’s the problem.

33:42
In the example I use in my YouTube video, I was in the market for jump rope. So I looked on Amazon, it was $7. The exact same thing was on haul for three bucks. Okay. And then the exact same thing was on Tmoo for 250. Okay. So where am going to buy from? Right? Amazon’s hurting themselves. Yeah. By having it. And I think they’re in a rock and a hard place because they can’t do too well on haul because it’ll eat into their main Amazon businesses, which is their bread and butter.

34:12
Right. The product selection sucks. It’s not going to be around, I’m pretty sure. Where did you buy it? Did you buy it on Tmoo or Haul? I ended up buying it on Amazon because I wanted it the next day. Whereas Haul and Tmoo, takes one to two weeks for stuff to arrive. I didn’t get the cheapest one either. I ended up getting one with the weight on it. You got one that jumps for you.

34:40
You just stand there. It comes with two people to turn it. My point is that if you’re just selling something that you can get anywhere, it’s probably going get knocked out. If it’s clothing, it’s probably going to knocked off on Shien. If it’s a regular everyday object, it’s probably going to knocked off on Tmoo. Really, you got to think of something that’s better.

35:08
or makes you stand out or you start a brand or you do content like we talked about earlier. Well, and I think the brands that are doing content like are the ones that are able to get that experience. Like I’m never buying an Hermes bag. Like, let’s just be real. I couldn’t I can’t spend that much money on a purse when I could have a car. Right. But like and I like purses. I was just going to say you have some pricey purses. I have some nice purses. No, they’re not. But like

35:39
they’ve created that experience, that exclusivity, and their content creation that they’re doing now is just skyrocketing their brand, right? It’s just pushing it to another level of exclusivity, and you’re seeing, so they’re doing a great job of taking what was something that was already, they’re probably doing just fine, to taking it to a whole nother level.

36:08
with social media and creating the content. We talked about this, I think, a couple of weeks ago. Chili’s, my daughter works at Chili’s. They were actually struggling financially as a business. And a TikToker posted their, they have this great deal. It’s like three chips, an entree and a Coke for like 10.99. And she posted how great, it’s been responsible for like a 40 % growth in their profits.

36:38
It’s insane. It worked. But I think if you are any kind of brand, but specifically in e-commerce, doing something that creates that value for the customer outside of just the buying experience, the content creation, it works. We joke about the old school commercials and things like that, but those worked too. It was just in a different medium. Back in the day, you only had television commercials to convey the message.

37:07
Now you can do it in so many different ways and what’s nice for smaller e-commerce brands is you don’t need a television budget. You can do this all on social media. In fact, one of the supplement companies that I buy from is now doing TV ads and I’m like, now I’m not going to buy from them anymore. They’re too successful. If you have TV money, I don’t want to buy from you. TV, they’re hurting. True, true. I’m like, I want the brands with podcast money.

37:37
That’s exciting as a brand because you can leverage this for so much less than you could 15 years ago when the only thing was to like, remember back in the day when someone would do a Super Bowl commercial and it would be like this huge deal, Like, like GoDaddy. I think GoDaddy did a Super Bowl commercial when you’re one of those type sites and everyone was like, what? They’ve arrived. Now anyone can do anything with social Get some more exposure. Yes.

38:07
Yeah, because you could get more exposure if your video goes viral. So I guess that’s the moral of the story here. So pick a product that isn’t easily replicated and do content. That’s pretty much the formula for 2025. think all these ad platforms are getting more more competitive also. like Google ads have just been on this decline for for actually ever since AI, they’ve kind of been on this decline and meta ads are

38:36
pretty competitive these days too. you know, social media is free. You can even use TikTok shop in the way where you’re just listing your products and you get affiliates to promote it. Affiliate, influencer marketing is still a pretty good thing, provided that your product is reasonably interesting. Yeah. And I think that’s the way going forward for 2025. Hope you enjoyed this episode. What’s your plan for 2025? Let me know in the comments.

39:05
For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejobs.com slash episode 577. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you wanna hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejobs.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course.

39:35
Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I talk about AI models, especially the latest free one that came out of China called DeepSeek and its implications on privacy and the AI market. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit

00:24
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:54
I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:23
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:37
Welcome back to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today, Tony and I, we’re going to talk about AI because there’s just been so many things happening. I woke up the other day to my Nvidia stock crashing. oh. Like 16%. And I was like, what’s going on? And it had to do with China’s release of the new DeepSeq AI, which ironically I’d heard about the week before and I was going to try it. And then, you know, all this news came out saying, oh, they used

02:07
like 10x the resources to train that model and they’re giving it out for free open source. And apparently I think the investors took it as, well that means people need to buy less Nvidia chips. so, and then open AI obviously, who’s the leader that runs chat to PT, they crashed because this model is supposedly better than open AI’s model chat to PT and it’s free. So anyway, we’re not going to talk about the news today because that’ll bore everyone.

02:36
I don’t know. I’m like already invested. Just are you really pair? Yes. Okay. I am. Well, the other thing that happened like this morning, I don’t know if you follow Alibaba released a Okay, but didn’t they talk about this at the conference we went to last year? Wasn’t this like up and coming? No, no, no, no. Alibaba at the conference talked about using AI to help with sourcing. Okay. Yes. So this is a whole different thing. This is an AI model like Chachi PT.

03:04
Okay. That’s supposedly better than chachi PT and the one that deep deep seat, which is the latest one that came out. Yeah. And they announced it today right before Chinese new year. Okay. I have so many questions. have so many questions. Okay. Sure. My first question is, what is it called? Deep seat, deep seat, seek, seek. Deep seek. So this is a Chinese product.

03:28
It is. It’s a Chinese open source project, which means all the source code for everything is all released and you can download it and run it on your laptop if you want. Right. My first question is, since we just recorded a podcast on the uprise and fall of TikTok, is this something that will be around? Is this going to get banned? I don’t want to talk about conspiracy theories here, but there’s this conspiracy theory that now that China’s lost TikTok,

03:54
Like, it’s like you have to enter in all your information to get access to this model. What’s all your information? I think name. Actually, I didn’t fill it out. I didn’t completely fill it out. You use my name and address? But definitely email, for sure. OK, yep. But once you’re in, all the things that you type into it, if you look at the terms of service, they’re allowed to look at all that information. OK.

04:23
Unlike OpenAI where you can, I think there’s a box that you can check or something where they won’t, you know, look into all the stuff that you’re typing in personally. Yeah. Yeah. So my, I wonder like, this, will this stand the test of Trump? guess is the question, right? This is much more invasive in my opinion than TikTok because you’re typing in questions about your everyday life. You’re asking it stuff. Yes. Potentially giving, you know, the owners a lot more information.

04:51
that you get from TikTok. Because I can only imagine. Do you remember like, I don’t know if, I don’t know, because I don’t use Google a whole lot anymore. And I don’t know if chat GPT does this, but you know how in Google you type in, how do I, and then it will start finishing it for you. Yeah. And like the top one is always like, how do I poison my wife? Right. It’s like always something like really crazy. And you’re like, are that many people searching for that? Or like, how do I fake a car accident? Just your search history. That’s all. Not mine. Mine’s not like that at all. But.

05:20
You know what saying? When you start typing into Google, you can see the most common things that people type in. My thought is that people ask AI questions that they probably don’t know they want. They don’t want the rest of the world to know about. Yes. By signing up for this and using their free service, you are passing all that information to the Chinese government, essentially. Right. Then also, can it be used to convict you of a crime? You could go down a rabbit hole on this thing, but…

05:50
Yes. So that’s the conspiracy theory. I didn’t want to even bring it up, but you brought it up. I’m like so curious. And then the new Alibaba one came out. I don’t even know what it’s called. It’s got some weird name, supposedly better than DeepSeek literally just announced one week later and it’s better than open AI. It’s better than DeepSeek. And once again, it is free. And who owns that? Well,

06:17
Good question. It literally just came out this morning, so I just saw the headline and I didn’t Is it owned by Alibaba? I think so. That would also be Chinese. I think it’s open source. Let me just do a Google Haul. Alibaba AI model, is it open source? There’s just no way that this DeepSeek is going to be allowed to be used, especially if you said you can download it on your computer if we won’t let people have TikTok.

06:46
It doesn’t look like, I don’t think the Alibaba one is open source, but the DeepSeq one definitely is open source. So it looks like the Alibaba one’s owned by Alibaba, but it’s a Chinese company. in theory, the government could get access to all the queries that are typed in there. Actually, that’s another, let’s just get, I want to get this out of the way because now I’m not going to be able to sleep at night. So you know how when you get arrested, I mean, you don’t know and I don’t know either. Oh yeah, know. Yeah, of course.

07:16
This is what happens when I spend a weekend with Andrea watching her true crime shows on TV. You know how they can use your Google search history or your computer? Our friend Kevin talks about this a lot, like incognito isn’t really incognito. So they can use your browsing history to help convict you of something. Can people can law enforcement, the authorities, whatever, use your A.I. history? Like, can they log into your is that also like available for people to use to then? You know, what’s funny is these are not the questions that I think about in life.

07:46
But I would imagine the answer is yes. Well, it goes to the privacy issue, right? It’s not because you or I are planning on committing any crimes. It’s more about if all of the because the whole reason why TikTok, you know, they banned it and then brought it back is the whole data issue. Right. And where is your data going and who has your data? And so to me, with these AI tools like this is basically overtaking Google. Right. It’s going to be the new search. It’s the new search for people. And so.

08:14
Is that something that they can use then against you, for you, whatever? I think if the government subpoenaed that information, I don’t know the answer to question. It hasn’t happened yet. So I don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know this is what I think is going to happen since we’re talking about predictions here. I think that China is just going to make all these models for free because right now you have to pay for Chachi BT, you have to pay for Claude. And I think you have to pay for Gemini, actually, the higher tier. Yes, you do.

08:43
So China is just going to release all these models that are as good as what’s out there for free and harvest all this information from people. I agree. It’s like the next TikTok, but better. But then what do you do with that information? What would you do? As a Chinese person? Yeah, well, you’re Chinese, so don’t you? I don’t know what I would do, but you can mine it for information. Based on what people are acquiring, it’s kind of like Google, right?

09:13
What are people interested in? And then use that information for marketing or, and if you want to get really nefarious, you can introduce propaganda. I don’t know. Right. Here’s the big conspiracy theory. Once they have all these users, they can tailor the AI results to feed whatever information that they want. And what’s funny about this is I think someone typed in

09:42
Tenement Square into Deep Seek and I think there was nothing. Right? So clearly it’s already been tainted in some way. Yeah. So this is so interesting because they can obviously they have the power to do this, but I like how we automatically assume that like Chachi BT and Claude are not already doing that. The difference is it’s an American company.

10:09
But you think Americans are that good? I don’t. I don’t. But supposedly in OpenAI’s terms, and I never read these terms in privacy policies, but they’re not supposed to. Well. Right? I mean, do you really believe, like, genuine, I mean, I don’t want to get all like conspiracy theory. I don’t believe this because, OK, here’s a story that just kind of popped in my feed. It was an older story. But you know how when you’re just talking about something on your phone and all of a sudden you get an ad for it? Yes.

10:38
Well, it turns out there was a company that was listening. Yeah. And they told us for so long, oh, we can’t listen. It’s not possible. It’s against terms of service. They fed us that for years. And Zuckerberg still fed that to us. Yeah. in the end, it was some third party company that was doing it through whatever, right? It reminds me of when my kids were little and like I used to have to hide cookies after I made them and they would always like

11:06
wake up in the middle of night and eat the cookies and then I would confront the culprit and he was always like, it was obviously one of the boys. And he’s like, I didn’t take the cookies, mom. And he didn’t take them. He had his brother take them and then they both ate them. But it was like, I didn’t do this. I’m fully aware of the other party that’s doing it, but I’m going to maintain my end. That’s what it sounds like. The seven-year-old, I didn’t take the cookie prank. But I can’t tell you how many people have signed up for Deep Seek already in just one week. Don’t you think that’s terrifying?

11:36
I mean terrifying. Or did you sign up? No, I didn’t sign up. I was afraid to because it asked me for all this. Well, you can sign up through Google, ironically, with a Google login. can, yes. Where Google will pass your email and all that stuff. I was going to wait till someone else downloaded it and gave it to me so I could run it on my PC, actually. One of my buddies is going to do that on a burner box. OK, we need to have Kevin do it. He’s probably got all the equipment. Yeah, Kevin can probably do it.

12:06
But yeah, this all happened in the last week and I’m still processing it. I mean, free is pretty compelling, right? It’s only 20 bucks a month, though. 20 bucks a month? That’s a Netflix. Actually, does it even pay for a Netflix? I don’t know anymore. their prices. know. Everything’s so expensive these days. just. Wait, I always wanted to ask you this. Are you paying for any tool right now, AI tool? Yeah, I pay for Chachipetit. Chachipetit.

12:34
I’m about to switch it and pay for Claude and not pay for you, but I haven’t run out of the free Claude yet. don’t use it. I run out of free Claude. My kids use it in 20 minutes. They’re out. Now that I just hired a video editor and I’m going to start making more videos and scripts and stuff like that, I’m going to switch it over because I don’t use it. I use ShoutGPT, for example, the other day when-

12:59
We had to switch our AWS login information and I couldn’t figure out how to add you as a user and it wasn’t super obvious. I was like, I’ll Google it. And you’re like, chat GPT it. And I was like, but chat GPT isn’t a verb yet. So let me keep saying Google. I mean, I was planning on looking at chat GPT for the answer, but I was like, I don’t know how to say that as a verb. But that’s kind of how I use chat GPT at this point is like today I was doing something in Google Sheets and I needed to know how to create a formula. So I just went to chat GPT and of course they tell you exactly.

13:28
And with that stuff, feel like ChatGBT is always pretty correct. You don’t get in a rabbit hole of this wasn’t right. But yeah, with the script and stuff, I’ll probably be working more with Claude. So I’ll probably end up switching the paid subscription over there. But yeah, $20 a month is, it adds up when you have a couple of those. I mean, just $20 a month versus free and potentially better. don’t trust anything that’s free. That’s the problem.

13:58
Well, that’s you, but just think of like the average American. Yeah. Right there. Let’s just take the employees that work for Bumblebee. I know for a fact that they would go for the free version. They don’t care. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Over the paid version. Even me today, actually, I recently just canceled my mid journey subscription. Did tell you this? In case you guys are listening, mid journey is like an

14:23
Image AI tool where you can just generate images and I was using those for my YouTube videos thumbnails and whatnot But the free ones are they’re not as good, but they’re good enough Yeah, you know, so why why am I paying ten to twenty dollars a month for something that I? get for free as long as you don’t have hands. You’re fine Yeah, so same same goes I mean if

14:50
If this deep seek, and this is something that you could actually in theory just run on your computer, I’m pretty sure most people aren’t gonna do it that way. Yeah, I was gonna say, that was my next question for you is like, can the average person, like you say open source, that doesn’t mean anything to me. I mean, I know what it is, but like I’m never going to take advantage of that. I think most people are not gonna do that. And it does require kind of like a hefty computer, like you need a good video card. The reason why that was attracted to me,

15:20
was because right now when you do image generation, it censors it. Like if you wanted to do an image on like Trump, for example, or something like that, it would not let you do that. It doesn’t let you do images of famous people just because I guess there could be a lot of abuse for that. But when you download the model and tweak it or whatever, you can do whatever you want with it. Okay, so this is gonna be a dumb question, but I…

15:48
I promise you there’s someone listening that has this same misunderstanding that I do. If you download it onto your computer, then how are they going to get any data if it’s now your- They can’t. They cannot. Okay. I couldn’t make that connection. That’s correct. They cannot. Like you said, no one’s going to do that, right? You have to spend $1,000 on a video card, a couple thousand dollars to run the better models, the bigger ones.

16:15
And so we’re talking maybe like a $3,000 expense just to be able to do this. But if it’s open source and… So let’s say I’m… So could you potentially use this for… Let’s just use Bumblebee as an example. Could you use the open source to build your own AI for Bumblebee for customer service and all that? Like, where’s my order and those types of things.

16:43
Or does it I don’t know about that bit. And here’s why. Let’s say 200 people decide to chat with Bumblebee Linz at once. My little PC is not going be able to handle that. OK. So it’s more about resources. Yeah. For me, I would just use it as my own personal AI that I could just tweak and mainly generate images that I want to generate. Because that’s one of the reasons why I canceled Mid Journey also.

17:10
Like I just wanted some basic, like I wasn’t gonna do anything malicious, just some basic pictures of people who are well known, right? And it wouldn’t let me do that. This is not where I thought the episode was gonna go. I you had so many questions. I have a lot of, okay, we can shoot. Well, no, no, it’s okay. mean, what I wanted to talk about was like all the models and everything that are out there just for people who are listening that don’t follow all this stuff. But I mean, that was the big news for the week, obviously, deep sea.

17:37
which caused markets to crash. And I think Alibaba’s announcement today caused the markets to crash again today, because I woke up this morning and seeing a bunch of red. Interesting. So for the everyday AI user, I think every AI tool minus the new ones that have just been released, they have a paid tier. Yes. So what would you tell someone? Because I’m always amazed. I feel like because we live in this digital marketing world, everybody we know has been using AI for like two years.

18:07
Right. But then I talk to people who don’t really live in this world and they either have heard of it, they use it a little bit, but they’re not. I would say, where do people get started if they haven’t really jumped in yet? I just introduced one of my clients to it six weeks ago and she’s literally said she wanted to marry Claude when I was with her this weekend. That’s what my mom said.

18:30
Because she has to write these scientific papers and her grammar isn’t great, right? She has all the data, but it’s hard for her to put on paper. She’s like, oh my God, with ChachiPT, I can write these papers so quickly now. Yeah. Yeah. And so she said something along the same lines, not Mary, but She’s marrying Claude. My friend is marrying Claude. But imagine, most people haven’t even scratched the surface. Have you used voice with ChachiPT where you can have a conversation with it?

18:59
No, my brother has, but I have not. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of functionality that most of the public has not even tried. Yeah. Yet.

19:11
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

19:40
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

19:51
One of the things that I think is a very public use case for AI that my brother has been doing is that he has been putting in medical results. You know how you go to the doctor and maybe something’s a little bit wrong with you when they run a bunch of tests and you can see the results but you have no idea what they mean, right? He will put those results in AI and they will give him multiple

20:21
OK, this level is high, but it’s actually not high based on your age and whatever. this is like this is like five common things. And it literally spits out like kind of like what your mom’s doing, this full like basically report. that I think what’s really helpful about this is that before you go to the doctor, you can basically create a list of questions that are pretty educated, right? For what you know, what your symptoms are, your test results or whatever, as opposed to going in there and not really understanding anything.

20:51
and you’ve got 15 minutes, right? To me, that’s a really good use case. But then, of course, I’m thinking, if you put all that information in there, then they have all that information about you. Maybe they do, they don’t. is correct. mean, the question is, what are they going to do with it as an individual? I was thinking, when we were thinking about harmful things, I was thinking about more as a collective, right? If everyone signs up for this free Chinese AI, the Chinese can make, it’s funny, I’m talking about Chinese people, I’m Chinese.

21:21
They can make up whatever answers they want and like massage the answers. know what I’m saying? So that’s the tricky part. That’s where I think there’s a national security threat. Because they can just put all this negative US propaganda as an answer in there. Doesn’t it feel like we’re like living in some sort of Avengers movie and Tony Stark has like created that? Like it just feels like this can’t be real, but it is like it is. But it just yeah, like the ability to manipulate the information. Like I didn’t.

21:50
I knew this, but I think I had forgotten when the whole TikTok thing blew up. I guess they have TikTok in China. In China, it’s like the stem. You have the stem tab on your TikTok account where it’s all science, engineering, math. What I’ve heard is that in China, that’s what they’re feeding kids. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I don’t know either. The app is called Douying. I know there’s a lot of sales that happen on that, like online selling.

22:19
But that’s what I heard too. I’ve just never verified it because I never tried to download that app. Yeah. But anyway, it’s like, you know, like it makes sense, right? China is feeding us stupid dances and, you know, garbage and they’re feeding their kids math, science and engineering. Right. Yeah. It’s just like, well, that’s what I would do. Start with the kids, right? Get to the kids, dumb them down and you’re you’re setting yourself up for success.

22:46
I mean, if we’re already going down this rabbit hole, you know how there’s been export controls on the chips that power AI, Nvidia chips to China, right? Yeah. And the reason why this was such a big breakthrough was they don’t have a lot of chips supposedly to do this. like a group, they made it sound like it’s just a group of researchers use like one 10th or one 20th of the amount of compute that the U S has to generate this model. That’s better than what open AI has been working on for a long time.

23:17
I see, I’ve talked to some friends here. They all think it’s full of BS. They have this underground stockpile of Nvidia GPUs and they trained it based on OpenAI. They took OpenAI stuff and trained on top of it. I don’t even know what’s true or not, because it’s still only a week old. But that’s what some of my buddies think who are in the industry. I wouldn’t…

23:46
There’s a lot of good tools that you can use already without downloading that. Yes, but you have to pay. Yes. Having to pay is, mean, look at me, right? I don’t pay for anything. I know. It’s a strong impetus to sign up for something when it’s free, I guess the other problem is that if you, like you as an individual, you’re like, well, this is totally free. I’m going to start using it. I don’t care if they know this about me. Right?

24:15
But you’re not thinking of the collective, right? Who cares if they know something about you, honestly? I don’t care what people know about me. There’s nothing that interesting. But if all of a sudden, 5 million people, 50 million people are all inputting similar pieces of data, right? Data points start to make sense. That’s where the danger is. It’s not in your individual data. It’s in the collective data. Right. So the question, I guess, is the US going to ban this?

24:44
I don’t know, but it seems much more intrusive to me than TikTok. Yeah, for sure. Like I, yeah. But let’s, let’s move on to your choices since we’re talking about this, right? Okay. So we’ve already talked about chat. Actually, let’s just talk about what things are good for and what we use them for. Yeah. The chat GPT is like my general purpose AI tool that I use all the time. like your new Google. It’s like my, yeah, it’s like a new Google. It’s like my, it’s like a Toyota.

25:12
It keeps running, Reliable. Good old reliable. Good on the gas mileage. Then Claude is what I use for creative writing and coding. Actually, I use ChadGBT for coding too. It just depends on what I have open. I want to pause on that because we get this question a lot in the course. We have some people in the course developing things using AI tools, extensions, plugins, things like that.

25:43
I thought initially you told me you like ChatGPT for coding, but now you’ve moved to Claude or you still use both? Okay. So the reason why I like Claude better and ChatGPT actually just added this feature and I haven’t really had to got a chance to try it. Claude has this nice canvas window where you can actually see in real time that it’s run. It like runs inside of it. Okay. So if you’re doing like a web app, you’re actually running the web app on Claude first before you make it live on your server, which is nice. Yeah. ChatGPT just added that functionality.

26:13
haven’t gotten around to playing around with it. So that’s why it was better. And then all the, I don’t want to get too technical here, but all the integrated development environments, I think connect to Claude by default, because Claude has been the one for coding for a while now. Who owns Claude? Anthropic. They’re the least well-funded, I think, of the AI companies, I believe.

26:41
So I think, Claude, for me, I think I just said this earlier, ChatGPT is my Google. How do I do this? How do I find this? How do I create this formula? I’m not great at math, as we all know, so I do a lot of math equations in ChatGPT. If this is a sales and I want to find out this percentage of this and that, I use that for a lot of those sorts of things. What I like about ChatGPT, if you struggle in the math-ing,

27:07
is that it tells you how it comes up with the answer. doesn’t just give you the answer. It says, take this number and multiply it by this and then divide it by this and times it by percentage and add this, whatever. So actually, I think that’s one of ChatGPT’s nice features. I haven’t really tried to do that in Claude, but for me, Claude in the creative writing is leaps and bounds better than ChatGPT for the stuff that I’m doing, as well as I feel like Claude is really good at hooks and headlines.

27:37
over chat GPT. To me, chat GPT, the headline is just too sensational. Like when you say give me a click baity title or give me a good YouTube hook, it’s like it tries to over perform, right? And it’s like, I’m gonna give you the Actually, I found it the opposite. Really? I Claude is too sensationalistic at times. I gotta tone it down. Whereas chat GPT is the opposite. Oh, maybe it’s how I’m asking for the prompt.

28:03
It could be that because I feel like Chachi BT gives me this radical new energizing transformative. I feel like that’s what- Oh, yes. I don’t use it for opening intros. I only use it for titles. Oh, okay. Yes. I do it for both and then I compare it to Cloud is always much more sensationalistic to me for a title. Interesting. I always use conversational tone.

28:30
as part of my prompt. And I think that’s why maybe I get a toned down response from it. anyway, but I also find Claude really good for creating scripts that don’t deviate too far from the original content. And then I just recently, this past week, used Claude for two contracts. Now I’m not attorney.

28:55
And I don’t recommend doing this if it’s like a contract that you like this is not where you could do your divorce papers, right? Like this is but I do think like for so I just hired this video editor and I wanted to get like a very simple contract just kind of like an agreement of like how many hours you’re gonna work. What are you gonna get paid? What are the expectations? And I didn’t want to like type it all like I was just lazy.

29:17
And so I just typed in, you know, basically like, hey, I have a contract for a video editor. These are the hours required. This is that. I gave like the parameters and it actually spit out a really good contract basically that I would be fine like using in that scenario. Right. Or like basically a work agreement, I guess is probably a better word. Contract seems pretty contract. You say make it completely unreadable. Yes. Make sure no one knows what they’re getting or losing.

29:46
But it’s done that for me a couple of times. then also, think kind of like what your mom likes it for is taking like a bunch of information. So I’m getting ready to launch something. And we basically have all these like pieces of information in it. And I was like, OK, I want to get it all in like one document that makes sense. And so I just dumped in all the information and it like first try was pretty good. First try was good enough to where all I had to do was go in and tweak it. I didn’t even have to send it through a second time. Yeah.

30:16
Yeah, it’s good for that. Usually what I do is I just take something off the web and I say, hey, is this, know, and then I modify it from there. So same thing, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. OK. I haven’t tried Gemini at all, have you? Oh, yeah, yeah. used Gemini. The image stuff is not bad, which is one of the reasons why I quit mid-journey, quit paying mid-journey. So you’re using the free Gemini? The free Gemini, yes.

30:44
The only thing I’m paying for right now is ChatGPT and Claude depending on whether I keep running out or not. So I actually recently quit Claude because you said, oh, I never ran out of credits. I’m like, oh, okay. Let me try it for free then. And then I ran out credits. So back on the Claude bandwagon again. If you need something free, mean, things have been free for a while. Like Facebook completely open sourced their model called Llama.

31:12
that you can use within Facebook, you can use it within WhatsApp. Have you ever tried it? No, I didn’t even know about it. So you’ll notice if you open your app, there’s in the search, you can actually ask it a question, I believe, and it’ll spit out the answer. Okay. Yeah, and that’s 100 % free. And it’s open source, which means you can download it and run on your machine. From what I heard, Alama is pretty good. It’s not quite as good as ChatGPT, obviously.

31:42
It’s, know, if you trust meta, I guess you can just stop, just stop talking.

31:52
Are there any new ones on the horizon that we should know about? Is something coming? Well, there’s also Elon’s model, which is called Grok. I don’t think anyone’s going to use that, right? The problem is they all… When someone says a model is better, it’s based on these artificial benchmarks that aren’t really realistic to what most people use it for, in my opinion.

32:19
Really, you just have to try it and see if it works for your use case and how well it does. That’s what I think is probably the most important thing for people to take away outside of everyone’s data being stolen all over the world or given away freely. I guess they’re not stealing it. They make it very clear they’re going to use it. I think it really depends on what you’re doing and for what you want to use because we have people in the course that love ChatGBT. We also have people that love Claude.

32:48
I think there’s someone in there that’s using Gemini. So it really varies on, and I also think it does depend on how you write your prompts. Because you and I are getting a lot different responses from the same tool. So I’m sure we’re just doing prompts differently. And for me, it’s getting probably a better result than what you like for sensationalists and stuff like that. And then if you’re willing to pay $200 a month right now, there’s agents.

33:17
I didn’t pay $200 a month, one of my friends who’s in this industry has it. So he was like, oh yeah, go book me a plane ticket from New York to Boston or California to Boston. And it’ll go out and you give it the primers. Like, I don’t want to spend more than this. I want it to be direct. It’ll come up with the flight for you. And then it’ll stop at the credit card processing part where you can enter your credit card. supposedly DeepSeek is going to have all this stuff

33:47
It’s doing your credit card info. Yeah, for free. Right. And so if it pans out like I think it’s going to pan out, people are just going to flock to this free tool, which will maybe force the other players to go free also. Right. Which will kind of go free, though, because nothing is free. All these subsidized by the government. Well, right. But like all these other tools aren’t subsidized by the government.

34:15
By the Chinese government? No, no. Deepseek. Deepseek. Well, I’m sure it’s subsidized by the government somehow. Right. But I mean, is Claude subsidized by a government? Claude has, I think, the smallest pile of chips that they’re training on. I don’t know enough about this because to-

34:43
People call BS on me, but I think you have to selectively decide what to focus on when you’re training a model, right? Right. You want to be good at this. Do you want to be good at that? And the rumor mill here is that DeepSeq was trained for the benchmark. So it could say that it was better than ChatGPT. And this is not an uncommon practice, right? Like, I’ve been in the PC video card space for a long time.

35:11
And a lot of times in video, AMD, they tune their drivers and they tune their chips to pass these benchmarks, right? Even to the point where there was one time there was a scandal with video cards where they actually detected the name of the program being run. And then they completely did different things knowing that it was running that program so that it could perform better. So there’s all this manipulation and stuff going on behind the scenes, I’m sure.

35:40
Let’s talk about this agents one real quick, 200 bucks a month. That’s expensive. It’s agents, not Asians. I said agents. I didn’t say Asians. It’s really just a room full of Asians booking your plane tickets. No, agents. Sorry, I did not emphasize the guh. Here’s the thing.

36:08
DeepSeek comes out with a free model of this, let’s just say hypothetically. But agents, they have to, like this stuff costs money, right? Yes, to run. Yes, like you’re paying programmers, you’re paying for server, like you’re paying for all this. It’s not like some guy in his basement doing this. Right. So I don’t like, can’t be free forever because there has to be, there always is a monetization play. can be free forever. Yeah, if the government is subsidizing it. Well, Google’s been free forever.

36:39
They’re making money through ads. yes. makes money through other ways. So what’s the monetization play? Because to me, DeepSeek, there’s no monetization play. It’s a data play. And eventually they’ll sell all your data. So is that going to be the monetization play for all these people or companies over time? Because there has to be. It’s just like, so is Facebook’s free. But is it free? Not really. We’re inundated with ads and junk we don’t want to see I that’s, I think, the first business model that they’re going to try.

37:08
with ads, right? Ads and the search results. So yeah, there will be some business model for it. I think you need to attract users first, right? Which is what all these companies did. Like Meta resisted monetizing for a long time. Once they had the users locked in, then they started doing it. Same with Google to a certain extent. Once upon a time, there was no ads. I don’t know if you remember back then.

37:40
1994, I want to say, right? Or five? That was when I first started using it. Yeah, it was a very long time ago. 30 years. Yeah. I didn’t want to say how many years it was. 30 years. You were 10 using Google. We know. Right. so like to me, if you’re going to make something free, do you have a monetization plan down the

38:02
Or you you you’re going to get one. I know a lot of people start and like, well, figure it out as we go, which is not my favorite business model. But yeah, I just wonder if they make these tools free. What are we giving up for that? Because you’re paying for it some way or another. talking about US companies or Chinese companies? US companies. I think the Chinese companies like no hate on China, but I think they’re mining data. That’s what I would do. Well, yeah, this is like the best data ever.

38:32
Yes, it would be dumb not to do Why would you do it if that wasn’t your plan, in my opinion? That seems like a international espionage thing to do. for US companies, think they also want to mine data. Why do we love Klaviyo? Why do think Klaviyo is so great? Because it gives us so much data about the people, even people that aren’t customers. We know what pages they visited and what their actions are.

39:01
to the point where we can tell when people hover over stuff with certain, you know, it’s like, that’s Google, I remember Google Analytics? I hate Google Analytics now, but you know, they had like, you could have it. They did. But like, you could put it up on your, like, you could put your webpage up there. You probably can still do this. And it would show you like hot spots on your page, right? And I think, is it?

39:24
There was a Shopify tool that did that as well. It told you where people hovered There’s a bunch. Yes, there’s a bunch of tools that did that. The data is really valuable, but to me, I would rather pay than have too much of my data taken. If you want every user in the US using it, then you got to make it free. Right. Then with that data, I’m sure there’s a way to monetize it somehow, whether it be through ads or just selling the information, perhaps.

39:53
to someone who wants to. Wouldn’t you want to know if you wanted to start something or create something, wouldn’t you want to know what… It’s kind of like, do we like SEMrush and what’s it? Ahrefs, right? Because it’s telling us the volume of things. Is there an AI tool that tells you the volume of things yet? I mean, if you think about it this way, I’m just thinking about it from Bumblebee Linden’s perspective. If there’s a user who’s typing in all these wedding related questions into AI, like where’s wedding venue? Where can I get favors? Whatever. You better…

40:22
They know, right? AI knows. so, like, I would pay to get in front of that customer. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that’s probably the likely monetization path going forward. And plus, you know, they’re making all this money with selling API access to all these tools that are incorporating into their tools, right? Yeah. So I’m sure they’ll find a way to fund itself. The real question is whether the return on that is

40:51
going to be more than the cost of them, all the engineers, all the hardware that’s required to do all this because it’s very heavy on compute, all the energy costs involved.

41:02
Hope you enjoyed this episode. What AI models are you using? And would you dare use the free Chinese AI model? For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 576. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

41:32
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on what might be Amazon’s most calculated move yet against its own sellers and why their fee freeze announcement for 2025 is just another lie. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit,

00:27
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:56
I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:25
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:39
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. In this episode, I’m diving into Amazon’s latest announcement and how they’re totally destroying the profits for FBA sellers. I’ll break down what’s really going on and why it’s hitting small businesses hard. So what exactly did Amazon just announce? In their own words, they are updating their FBA inventory reimbursement policy to help provide you with greater transparency and more predictability in how reimbursements are calculated for items that are lost or damaged. And this will help drive a more consistent approach that works.

02:09
So first off, I just love how they phrase things to suggest that they’re doing you a favor. What a crock. Here are the guts of the announcement. Effective March 10th, 2025, Amazon will reimburse you based on the product manufacturing costs of the affected inventory instead of the selling price. Now, for those of you who are new to Amazon FBA, let me explain. According to Getita, every year, Amazon sellers lose approximately 1 to 3 % of their annual revenue due to inventory discrepancies.

02:38
including mishandling lost or damaged items. These discrepancies can arise from various issues such as products that incur damage within Amazon’s fulfillment center, discrepancies between the number of units recorded in Amazon’s warehouse and the seller’s records, items that go missing during transit to or from Amazon’s facilities, and when a customer requests a return, gets refunded immediately but doesn’t send back the item. Now, prior to this policy change,

03:04
Amazon will reimburse you the full retail price of your goods. For example, if I sell a handkerchief for $10 and Amazon loses 100 units of my inventory, Amazon will pay me $1,000 even though it only cost me $2 per hanky to manufacture. But with this new change, Amazon will now only reimburse you the manufacturing cost of your goods. Now the real question here is how Amazon determines what the manufacturing cost is. According to Amazon,

03:32
Manufacturing costs is defined as your cost to source a product from a manufacturer, wholesaler, reseller, or produce the item if you are the manufacturer. It excludes costs such as shipping, handling, customs duties, or other costs. And here’s where the language gets super sketchy. To help provide you with greater control and accuracy, you can choose how Amazon determines the manufacturing costs for your products. One, Amazon can provide a manufacturing cost estimate for you.

04:01
This estimate is based on a comprehensive evaluation of comparable products sold by Amazon, by other sellers, and through wholesale channels. Or two, you can provide your manufacturing costs directly and basically give away all your supplier information and financials to Amazon. What also sucks is that your reimbursed amount is just your cost of goods, which does not include shipping, handling, or customs duties, which is actually a huge part of your overall cost of goods. For example, with my store,

04:30
Shipping and customs can make up about 30 % of the cost of the product. So even though my cost of goods is $2 per hanky, Amazon will only reimburse me $1.40 for something that isn’t even my fault. Let’s break down the implications of this new policy change. Even though it’s Amazon’s mistake that they lost your inventory, you now have to take a loss on your inventory because you will not get your shipping costs back. You will not get your import taxes back and you will not get your prep fees back.

05:00
I’ve been selling on Amazon for 10 years now, and I’ve had cases where Amazon literally lost an entire shipment of 500 units. By the way, if you’re tired of Amazon’s abusive policies and want to start your own profitable online store, make sure you sign up for my free six-day e-commerce mini course below, 100 % free, and I guarantee you’ll learn a lot. Now, what’s worse is that this issue hasn’t improved over the years. In fact, it’s only gotten worse. If you ask any Amazon seller who has been using Amazon warehousing and distribution,

05:29
or AWD this year, it has been a total dumpster fire. When Q4 shipments started happening, Amazon’s capacity went through the roof and they simply could not handle the sheer volume of deliveries. So basically, Amazon ran out of warehouse space and they didn’t have the logistics in place to manage pickups and they weren’t getting inventory from AWD into their fulfillment centers on a timely basis. As a result, I have many friends that got totally screwed

05:56
with delayed pickups, canceled pickups, delayed deliveries, stalled inventory, and lost inventory. So bottom line, they couldn’t get their products into Amazon and ended up running out of stock during the biggest shopping season of the year. And now things are about to get worse. Amazon’s new policy essentially shifts all the blame and financial burden for their warehouse mistakes onto sellers. They’ve completely abandoned all responsibility for their own services.

06:23
If this policy had been in place during the AWD debacle, thousands of sellers would have lost a fortune. And to make matters worse, Amazon had the gall to announce a price hike for AWD services starting in 2025. And here’s the kicker. This price hike was announced right after Amazon claimed that they wouldn’t raise fees in 2025. They flat out lied to us. Now they’re charging more for a service that’s been an absolute disaster this holiday season.

06:50
while taking zero accountability for their failures. Now you might be thinking to yourself, at least Amazon will still reimburse you for the cost of your goods, right? But here’s the problem. How does Amazon determine your true manufacturing costs? I’ll bet you a million bucks that Amazon’s estimate will be less than what you actually pay for your products. And don’t forget, Amazon won’t reimburse you for transportation, logistics, or import duties either. If you want an accurate reimbursement,

07:17
Your only option is to submit the actual invoices for your inventory to Amazon, which basically means telling Amazon who your suppliers are and your financials. Now over the years, I’ve had so many friends that have had their product knocked off by Amazon’s own private label brands. Take one friend of mine, for example. She was making hundreds of thousand dollars per year selling Emu oil on Amazon, but then Amazon launched their own private label version of her product at 30 % cheaper. If that wasn’t bad enough, Amazon had the audacity

07:47
to advertise their own branded emu oil directly on her product listing. And the result, her sales tanked overnight, all because Amazon decided to compete directly against her. One of my close friends, Mike Jackness, used to sell gel packs on Amazon, and he was making millions of dollars per year. But then Amazon decided to knock off his product, charge 30 % less, and even copied his packaging and photo layouts. Now, do you see why handing over your supplier and cost of goods information to Amazon is a recipe for disaster?

08:17
With this data, Amazon can easily undercut you. They can go straight to your manufacturer, negotiate a better deal than you ever could, and use their sales data and clout to knock you off entirely. And let’s not forget the hassle of actually providing this information to Amazon. Dealing with Amazon customer support is already a nightmare. Every time I’ve had to contact them, I feel like banging my head against a table. You’re always stuck with reps and foreign call centers who give canned responses that never solve your issue.

08:47
Now imagine having to deal with that level of incompetence for every single one of your products. It’s a massive time suck, total headache, and just not worth it. Now let’s take a step back and look at this new policy from 50,000 feet. Amazon already controls the entire shipping and logistics process, giving them complete authority over your products from the moment they enter their system. By refusing to compensate sellers for loss or mishandled inventory, they’ve created a serious conflict of interest. Think about it.

09:16
If Amazon loses 10,000 units of your product, what is stopping them from turning around and selling those same items as their own? They wouldn’t have to pay import costs or taxes on those products and no one would be the wiser. Now you might think that sounds far-fetched, but in my 10 years of selling on Amazon, I’ve seen it all. I’ve had my products shipped under the wrong listing and I’ve had customers order from us only to receive products we don’t even sell. Just this Christmas, someone returned what was supposed to be our linen towels

09:45
and we got shipped back a weighted vest instead. And it gets even crazier. I’ve had hundreds of units that Amazon claimed were lost, suddenly reappear for sale on my own listing, but from other sellers. This level of mismanagement and lack of accountability is exactly why this new policy is so dangerous for sellers. Amazon holds all the power and when things go wrong, you’re the one left to pick up the pieces. Just think about it. There is absolutely nothing stopping Amazon.

10:13
from mysteriously losing your inventory and then turning it around to sell it under your own listing at a lower price, winning the buy box in the process. This isn’t just a hypothetical. It’s happened before and it will happen again. But now with this new policy, Amazon stands to profit from these mistakes, creating a dangerous incentive to do a bad job. The harsh reality is that it’s in Amazon’s best interest to lose your inventory now. When they control every part of the process and face zero accountability,

10:43
It is a recipe for disaster and sellers are the ones who pay the price. And here’s the thing, things were already bad. Amazon’s advertising costs have been skyrocketing, increasing by 20 % year over year. They penalize you with excessive FBA fees if you have too much inventory in stock. But if you have too little inventory, you’re also hit with more fees. This year, they added an inbound placement fee, charging you on a per unit basis just for the privilege of letting your products into their warehouses.

11:12
Oh, but don’t worry. You can avoid this fee by using Amazon’s warehouse and distribution service, which has been a complete disaster for sellers, mismanaged, unreliable, and downright horrific. Do you see the pattern here? Amazon keeps stacking the deck against sellers, making it harder and more expensive to succeed on their platform. Amazon controls everything, and every single policy change is designed to extract more money from sellers while offering less in return.

11:40
Meanwhile, their Amazon Prime service for shoppers has gone downhill too. This holiday season, I’ve only received about 50 % of my orders within the promised delivery window. And as for sellers, Amazon promised no new FBA fees for 2025, but now it’s clear why. The financial impact of this inventory reimbursement policy change will easily outweigh years worth of FBA fee hikes. Amazon’s playing the long game, and unfortunately, it’s at our expense. Right now,

12:10
Amazon sellers are being squeezed from every direction. Direct from China marketplaces like Tmoo and Shien are cutting out the middlemen, selling directly to US shoppers at rock bottom prices without paying taxes or import duties. To make matters worse, Amazon has doubled down on the competition by launching its own Tmoo-style dropshipping service, Amazon Haul, which directly undercuts their own FBA sellers. At the same time, Amazon keeps increasing fees for sellers

12:37
while reducing the quality of service for shoppers. And now with this new policy, they’re passing the cost of inventory losses directly to sellers. The sentiment in the Amazon seller community is clear. Amazon is no longer the land of opportunity it once was. Sellers feel the company is abusing its monopoly power and this inventory reimbursement change could very well be the last straw. Many top sellers are already scaling back their reliance on the platform. And with this new policy and the potential for abuse,

13:06
It’s likely that only high margin sellers will be able to survive in the long run.

13:13
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re worried about these new Amazon fees, you should be. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 572. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event, go to sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

13:42
head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, Tony and I are doing our first annual awards episode from the best investment of the year to the coolest moment of the year. We’ll celebrate the wins, laugh at the losses and reflect on the lessons that shaped the past 12 months. Stick around as we crown the biggest winner, call out the biggest loser and share the life hacks, personal changes and standout products that define the year. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale.

00:29
Seller Summit 2025 over at SellersSummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business

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entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the seller’s summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year,

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We also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:47
Welcome back to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. It is 2025. And what we’re going to do today is we are going to reflect on 2024 and do, guess, our first annual awards show, so to speak. I got this idea from another podcast. I thought it was pretty cool. And both Tony and I, we all have our own spin on things. So ready to rock,

02:12
I’m actually curious to see how far apart our answers are going to be. I know. know. Because we’re totally different. I am very curious also. Yeah. OK. So the first award is best investment that you’ve made of the year. It can be a product. It could be a stock. could be anything that you want. Yeah. This one panicked me because I’m not a

02:37
I’m like a dump my money into fidelity, not pay attention. And when I hear the word investment, I immediately think like, money, right? It can be a product that really helped you out too. Yeah. Right. So I would say like just financial wise, because I’m not like a fine, I’m a good at saving money. I’m not, don’t ever follow me for investment advice. But one simple thing that I realized that I didn’t take advantage of early enough last year was just the high yield savings accounts. Like the numbers are still pretty good, right? Like they’re not as good as they were last year, but

03:07
I do think moving some money, because I’m the type of person that would just have your money sitting checking account. just taking advantage of that was a really good investment. And then the other investments that I actually think was just investing in like personal growth. So whether it was just taking more time to like subscribe to podcasts or, you know, buying a better pair of like walking shoes.

03:30
I think anything that I did last year in the personal growth space, I saw the best return on investment. Actually, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it’s something that’s very important for me in 2025. Okay. I had a couple of answers for this and I wasn’t sure where you were going to go with it. My first stock investment best of the year was Nvidia. I’ve owned that stock for a decade now because I used to game a lot. Yes, yes. I was always bullish on that company.

04:00
it just blew up like this. mean, not just this year, but the past couple of years. And then I was using Highbeam, which was really good, which is this bank for e-commerce stores where you get really insane yields because the interest rate is so high. Yeah. And what’s great about this company actually is you know how money comes and goes when you’re running a business, right? Right. A lot of times you’re paying for expenses and stuff and it’s sitting in a checking account that’s not yielding. Yep.

04:30
Well, by using like a high beam account, for example, the money comes and goes and even the checking earns interest. But you can put it into this high yield savings where it instantly like instantly at the snap of a finger, it’ll start earning, you know, as high as four and a half percent. Now it’s gotten lower because the rates have been cut, but it’s just a great easy way to to just make money on the money that you’re making.

04:54
Yeah, and that’s kind of going back to what I was saying is there are a lot of opportunities out there still where you can do that even on a personal account. think actually Capital One has something similar for personal accounts and check all fact check me please. Just because I was researching this this week just for personal reasons because I like to have money sitting in my checking account for whatever, know, like today I’m taking a car to the.

05:17
To the repair shop because someone got into an accident, know It’s like you have this money sitting for emergencies, but it’s nice to see that money earning a little bit of extra money Yeah, actually what sets the high beam apart though, and this is not a commercial high beam. They’re not spot-seeming I’ve just been very happy is that you can write checks you can wire out of it You can credit cards out of it essentially make it your real bank. Yeah Okay, what’s the worst this one? I really struggled with

05:45
Okay, this one’s easy for me. That stupid BMW. Oh, yes. so I had just gotten done paying about $2,500 to fix the thing. Because it was at that age where stuff starts breaking. And then all of a sudden I have catastrophic engine failure. I actually haven’t told the story on the podcast, so just give me 30 seconds to just crash BMW real quick. once, so the engine failed. I think the timing chain had failed.

06:13
And I reached out to BMW and I was like, hey, you know, it’s only got 50,000 miles on this car. What’s going on? And they didn’t tell me anything. They weren’t willing to do anything. And then I just did some research and I found out there was a lawsuit on my exact car. And when I thought I had the smoking gun at that point, so I went back to them, I said, hey, you guys lost this lawsuit. You should fix my car. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you issue a recall if you knew this was going to fail?

06:41
if you knew that my car was a ticking time bomb. And they said, Oh, you know, when you lose a lawsuit, or when there’s a settlement lawsuit, we’re not required by law to tell people. And I was thinking to myself, wow, my son was in my car at the time. And if it broke down on the freeway, could have been really dangerous. And that answer of they’re not obligated just really pissed me off. So anyways, worst investment of all time for me, worst investment of the year to

07:09
All that money I spent into it and it just died. And BMW is a rotten, horrible company. I hope they go down and they’re hurting. I This is also not sponsored by one of their competitors. This isn’t sponsored by Toyota. Okay. What is your worst investment? I didn’t have a bad investment this year. Thankfully. I have had many bad investments over time, but this year I somehow managed to avoid because I didn’t really, I bought one thing this year and we’ll talk about this in a minute.

07:38
But I started thinking about this like, okay, what do I think are really bad investments from last year? And just based on, and this is terrible, I get most of my news from TikTok, but I think if you purchased real estate without, if you just bought something, you probably paid too much money in 2024. Also, I think if you have a car loan and you got a car loan in 2024, it was a horrible investment. Interest rates are sky high, car prices are nuts. There’s supposed to be a major auto crash coming.

08:08
And those are like, did buy real estate last year, but that’s, there’s a nuance to that. But I almost bought a car last year and I’m so glad that I didn’t. feel like I, cause you know, I was like on the fence for like six months about buying a car. And I didn’t do it because I, I often feel that making, staying put is better than making a decision sometimes for something. And I just felt like, especially with cars, the price is so volatile right now that it was not worth.

08:34
even though I would get more for my car if I decided to trade it in or something like that, it just wasn’t worth the risk. So that is the worst investment that I guess I avoided in 2024 was I did not buy a car. Well, I had to buy a car in 2024. Yes, did. Junk broke. Yes. But on the real estate front, actually, I consider it the best investment. We did move my mom out to my neighborhood. So she’s literally like six streets down. And that’s the best investment just for me personally, because I get this fear all the time.

09:03
Yeah, like literally almost every day. I think if you didn’t have to buy real estate in 2024, you could have could have made because pricing was prices were so high at the beginning of the year. And ironically, that house is already up 20 percent. And that crazy. Yes. But you live in you live in a different area than I know. OK, next topic is the biggest personal loss of the year. I’ll let you go first, because mine’s going to be a little long winded. OK.

09:32
I do not have one at all, thank goodness, because I have had some massive personal losses over the past four or five years. I needed a break from loss and I got one, thank goodness. I know it’s not true for everybody, but I am very thankful that I didn’t really have a personal loss in 2024. I think for you, just like in the last couple of years, I feel like your life has profoundly changed for the better. Yes, yes, for sure.

10:00
because there was many, many decades of misery. Yes. I was looking at that question last night and I was thinking about it and I was like, I’m really happy that I didn’t have one because I feel like I’ve been hit from all sides year after year after year. It was really nice to not have that for 2024. For me too, actually, I was really good.

10:29
And technically, this didn’t happen in 2024. Yes. But my house just got broken into three, three days ago. I don’t know. It feels like it happened again. But it wasn’t a personal loss financially. I mean, they ransacked the house, took a bunch of stuff and like the house is disaster. They broke windows and everything’s in disarray. But it wasn’t like the financial loss. It was it was more the mental security loss. Yeah. Because, you know,

10:59
My wife is visibly was visibly distraught. The kids were distraught. They’re worried. I had this big gaping hole still in my in the back of my house where the sliding glass door and in the other windows that they broke. Because for some reason they had to break multiple windows to get in. And now, like I’ve been looking at alarm systems and beefing up security. And this is just not where I want to put my mental energy. And now we’re setting the alarm.

11:30
Even when we’re in the house at night. Yeah, that’s hard. It’s hard to not feel safe outside to even do run a quick errand. We set the alarm and then we forget like in the past couple of days, we’ve forgotten that we have it set and then we open the door and the alarm. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just a huge personal loss. I think it’s because if you think about your house is supposed to be sort of your safe space.

11:55
and now it doesn’t feel that way. And then on top of that, I feel like most of us start off the new year with like this sort of refreshed energy of like, oh, I’m gonna get to all these things. And you started off the new year with like crap. I’ve got all this extra, like you can’t even get into work yet because you’re still dealing with the aftermath. So it almost is like a double whammy, right? Like the pain of like having to take care of all this stuff plus the like feeling of like being violated. And then on top of that, you’re like, hey, I was.

12:23
Roarin’ 2025 and now it’s like screeching halt. Yeah, I mean, we didn’t exactly roar into 2025 anyway. I was giving you some credit where you didn’t deserve it, but it was the worst 2024 Christmas break ever. I know. Also, not to go into too many details, like at our Christmas Eve Christmas party, Jen’s cousin’s dog passed away and then Jen’s uncle passed away.

12:53
It was just terrible. Yeah. So those are my biggest losses for the year. And maybe we should just skip on to the more positive awards of this episode. OK. Yeah. What was your biggest win? Let’s get you some positives. you want? OK. My biggest win was writing the script to automate the creation of new print products for our store. So one of the strategies now that e-commerce is changing and whatnot,

13:22
is we’re focusing more on printed custom printed products because the margins are super high. The problem is, like whenever I want to make a custom printed product before I’d have to take the image, Photoshop it on a product. Actually before that we were taking pictures of products, but now it’s like Photoshopped on, then we got to write a product description, upload it and all that stuff. It takes a lot of time. So I just took some time to write a script thanks to Chachi BT and it automatically Photoshop’s the image on

13:52
the three products that we’re printing on automatically uses AI to create a product description or product title, uploads it, and all I have to do is just kind of massage it before the product goes live. And the goal here is to target every single special occasion known to man and have print products for those occasions. And this is kind of like taking a page out of the Hallmark book because Hallmark made up all these holidays and that’s how they thrived. You’re capitalizing on the Hallmark.

14:21
Yes. I feel like my business last year was just a little bit on autopilot. I had a lot of just personal stuff that I was dealing with. My biggest win of the year goes back to the best and worst investments was that I sold my house. I had someone say to me the other day, oh, you got lucky selling your house. I was like, no, I didn’t. I studied the market for six years. Did it crash? I don’t know the market in Florida.

14:49
So now it’s it went from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market literally overnight. Really? Yes. And I think for a lot of reasons, right? Too much inventory, high interest rates to the point where like sellers are giving concessions, all sorts of things. And I had been I knew that I wanted to sell my house at some point because it was big and very it was like just expensive to operate. Right. The payment was super low thanks to 2020, 20, 20 interest rates. But just the operating cost of the house was something that I didn’t want to

15:19
continue to like incur. And so I had been watching this for years, right? Like just the market where, especially specifically to my area, right? Like my county, my zip code, things like that. And so I feel like I sold at the absolute top of the market, which one made me a good amount of money that I could put into another house, which is why, you know, if you sell a house, usually have to buy something else to live in unless you’re gonna go RV it for a year or two, which is not me.

15:49
So I felt like that was my biggest win. Just being really in tune to what was going on and basically, I mean, you know, because like one day I woke up and I was like, I got to sell, I got to sell in a month. And I was like, I mean, yeah. And it was a house that I bought for the purpose of renovating and eventually selling. But like I had a lot of renovation products that were like projects that were like half done or three courses done or nine eights done or whatever, eight, ninths. So

16:18
Like getting it ready. I mean, we turned it around in about six weeks and sold it. It was nuts. I remember that. Yes. It was crazy. Yeah. Which was part of the reason for like my business kind of having to be on autopilot too, because then I bought a house and once again, it’s another renovation project. So, you know, I’ve been living in a half renovated house for the past four months, which is not not definitely not going to be the coolest moment of my year. It’s not going to make that. How you live like that, because you have so many people in that house. But I guess you’re used to it. Your family’s used to it.

16:48
There’s certain, I mean, that’s a whole other podcast, right? There’s certain things you got to take care of and certain things you can live with. Although there’s definitely some things now that are grading on me. Like I still don’t have a bathroom and that’s super annoying. But yeah, so, but I, that’s definitely the biggest win for me financially and personally. Mainly, know, financially, obviously I made a lot of money selling that house, but then also personally, like, it’s kind of like when I, we talked about when I had my Audi.

17:14
and I loved that car so much. That was just my favorite car I’ve ever owned. The stress of owning that car is like the BMW. It breaks down and you’re out 2,500 bucks when you sneeze. You need brakes, $2,500. You need tires, $2,500. European cars are not inexpensive to maintain when you don’t live in Europe. That house started to feel like the car.

17:41
Like, oh, this is broken. Oh, I need to fix an AC unit. Oh, that’s $50,000. It got to be like, I dreaded, oh, what’s going to break next? Because it’s going to be this big expense. So that was a big stress reliever for me, just cutting out the expenses as well as just the financial wind.

18:04
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

18:33
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

18:44
This just reminded me like when our house got broken into, I had just sold the BMW, the broken BMW for a thousand dollars. So I just happened to have a thousand dollars lying around in cash in the house and they found it. Anyway, just pour salt in your wounds for that car. I I was wondering if it was an inside job, but the guy who bought it was actually our neighbor’s friend. I doubt you. Yeah, probably not stealing his money back. So yeah, my biggest one had to do with the business. My other biggest win, you know, just

19:13
in general was we got my mom’s house at a really good rate. And it just so happened, like it doesn’t usually rain that much here in California, but that week during the open house, it had rained and I think there was some other disaster or something. So people didn’t really attend the open house. And I think the agent screwed up on the pricing too, because they, set it really high initially and then they cut it by like $500,000.

19:43
Which I people listening to this like, oh my God, how much is this house? They just way overpriced it. Yeah. And so that drove a lot of people away from it. They’re like, oh, what’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with it? So we I think we got it at really good price. And then, of course, the win is my mom is right down the street, too. Yes. Big win. Yeah. OK, what about the coolest moment of the year? Moment. I have a couple, so I’ll let you go first. This one was really hard for me, too, because I feel like I always have really cool moments. Well, I really.

20:13
Don’t you think I do? I think I get to do cool stuff all the time. Yeah, I guess that’s that’s the positive way. But there’s nothing that stood out. Yeah. No, no, no. I it was hard for me to like narrow down because I feel like, you know, there’s always really cool things. I would say hands down and we have to go back a full 365 days. Last New Year’s Eve, I was in Budapest. Oh, yeah. Which is my one probably my favorite city.

20:38
and then went skiing in Austria for my birthday. And that is something that if you would have told 30-year-old me that I would be doing that, I would have thought you were crazy. And so just realizing that I have had a lot of really cool moments like that in my life, and that one definitely topped the chart. The other one happened just last month, and of course, it’s another travel moment, but being in Denmark during Christmas time and

21:06
kind of happening on an outdoor cafe that had heaters and heated seats and blankets that you could wrap yourself in and just sitting there like watching the people. Like those are the moments that I love. Those are the moments that you can’t really put a price tag on. And so those would definitely be my top two of the year. That’s true. You’ve been going on a lot of vacations. They’re educational trips, Steve. More so, yeah. Yeah, they’re business related, right? They’re business trips.

21:34
That’s true. Yeah, you’re living your best life. More so than any other year I can remember, actually. Yeah, it’s been a great year. And I’ve had lots of other great moments, too. But those were definitely. And you know, my other quote, I got to give a little shout out to one of my kids who is not a good student. And I know you cannot relate to this, but my only kid left in school is not a great student. And she made the honor roll for the very first time, I think, in her life.

21:59
and she’s in high school now. That was a really cool moment. I was really proud of her. I didn’t have anything to do with it. She just woke up one day and decided she wasn’t going to slack anymore. Shout out to her for- What’s the secret? Did you do anything? Other than just continue to yell at her for 10 years to get her grades up. threaten her? Other than threaten to kick her out of the house unless she made the autumn? It’s a cool moment when you see a kid that doesn’t get it and then they get it like, this is important.

22:25
And you you’ve tried everything. You’ve tried taking the phone away. You’ve tried all the things. And then all of a sudden they just figure it out like, I need to be better. That’s always a cool moment. OK, I got to tell this story now. I was at dinner with my family and my mom last night, and my mom just spoils the crap out of my kids. reports are report cards are coming out tomorrow. And my son was.

22:48
he was like, Oh, you know, I might get a B on this. I’m like, what a B. And then my grandma or my mom, their grandma was like, Oh, you know, that’s okay. B is okay. Well, we’ll celebrate. You know, just I’m like, what? You know, this is the same mom when I grew up, I couldn’t get bees. And now you’re telling my son that he can get a B and it’s okay. What world am I living? I’m like, who are you?

23:15
It’s I’ll tell you, as someone who has grandkids, it’s 100 % a grandkid thing because during Christmas time, I took all three granddaughters to Target to let them buy gifts for their parents. And I was like, we can go through every toy aisle. You can play with all that. Do you think I ever let my kids go through the toy aisle of Target or play with a single toy? Absolutely not. I was like, we’re in, we’re out. I’m like, we got nothing to do. Push all the buttons, make all the noise you want. I did not care. So, yeah, it’s totally a grandparent thing. It’s great. I mean,

23:45
Your standards change. Your standards change 100%. Yeah. Okay. Wait, so my coolest moment, and I actually had two. One is always been on my bucket list to go to the Super Bowl. That’s right. Yes, I forgot. I went to see the Niners and the Chiefs. Unfortunately, the ending was not what I wanted, but it was probably the best Super Bowl that I’ve watched in recent history. It was close. Yes, it was a good game. and everything.

24:13
And it somewhat justified the gobs of money I had to throw at it to get really good seats. I told my wife it’s a once in a lifetime thing. I’m not going to do it again. Well, the Niners aren’t making the Super Bowl, so you’re definitely not going this year. the playoffs. Good Lord. In terms of fun, though, I think it was better than going to an NBA Finals game because there’s only one game. Yeah, everything’s on the line. And the halftime show is just ridiculous and whatnot.

24:44
You know, but outside of that, you know, it’s just something that I wanted to do. Second coolest moment of the year was going to the Paris Olympics. I had always wanted to go to the Olympics as long as I can remember. So that was like a bucket list item too. And we watched my favorite sport, which was indoor volleyball among other sports. We watched beach volleyball underneath the Eiffel Tower. I went to a basketball game. Actually, basketball was not that fun. Olympic basketball. Oh, bummer. Well, the reason is, is because like all the stars are spread out.

25:14
on other teams. it’s just like, since we had the NBA, it’s like watching bad basketball. Yeah. It’s the best way that I can describe it. Yeah. Compared to the NBA. But yeah, that was an amazing experience. That was my first time in Paris, too. And I think… I didn’t know that. didn’t know Yeah, it was my first time in Paris, even though I took like 12 years of French. I got there actually, and I could not communicate with anyone or understand anything.

25:42
Okay, but you don’t need, I was just telling this to Andrew this morning, you don’t need to speak French to go to Paris. You don’t, but I wanted to be able to read the signs and maybe try a little bit. Your coolest moments are basically unaffordable for anyone in the real world, by the way.

26:04
Yes, it was an amazing experience. Again, don’t Paris was just amazing. It’s probably one of my favorite cities. I know it’s not yours for some reason. not. I want to go back, though. I want to give it another chance. had July. Oh, I went off my low carb diet. had literally a lot of every day. had these chocolate croissants. I love a chocolate croissant. So much better than anything in the US. Yes. And I was expecting everyone to be impolite there because I just heard that. No, everyone was super nice.

26:33
Because everyone there was there for the Olympics. Yeah, probably everyone there were was expats and everything. They weren’t real Parisians. Yes. Probably. But beautiful city. The weather was perfect every day. Yeah.

26:47
Okay. What about your best life hack? Move on to some practical achievable things for people other than unlike going to the Olympics. I mean, a trip to Paris. How many people have been to Paris before? I like I, I just never been there. Yeah. All that. Okay. Best life hack. This one’s super easy and it’s probably a cliche at this point, but using chat GPT and Claude to write code and to help write YouTube scripts. Huge game changer for me.

27:15
I’m so much more productive. got rid of all of my writers as a result. So I used ChatyBT to write a loyalty program, which I, which was, guess, a big win for Bumblebee Linens. I can’t remember when I launched that, but that’s just like another excuse to email people, another excuse for people to buy and add more to their order. And then I also used it to code up a spin to win pop-up, a two-step version.

27:42
If you guys want to check it out, it’s over at Bumblebee Linens. But basically this new pop-up increased my email conversion rate by about three X, three and a half X, which was a huge deal for Bumblebee Linens also. just AI, know everyone’s using AI, but I think especially the coding and if you’re using, if you’re doing any sort of creative writing, Claude.ai is fantastic. It writes better than, than humans.

28:08
I was going to say Claude, but I knew you would use it, so I had to come up with some other ideas. I have another one too. can use it. How are you using Claude? For the scripts. For the scripts? I’m using it to take blog posts and turn into scripts, which I started doing last year and then moved and now actually was working on two scripts yesterday. Then also using it, and I think we talked about this in our webinar, using it for the hook. I actually think it does a great job for the hook.

28:37
For some reason on YouTube videos, I’m great in a hook in email, but I’m not great for a hook in video, so I’ve been relying on that. What’s your other life hack? The other life hack was 11 Labs. What I did is I cloned my voice. Now, if my assistant over in the Philippines needs a voiceover for something or whatnot, she’ll just type in what she needs and it sounds like me.

29:07
I sent you a sample. What did you think it sounded like? think it does sound like you. Yeah, I do. And then there’s this slider that allows you to add intonations where it thinks and it’s actually pretty good and it keeps getting better. They’ve updated the model since since the last time and this new model is amazing. Oh, good. So if you need yourself cloned, uh, voice wise, I, I guess it’s only really helpful if you’re a content creator, a podcast or something like that. But

29:37
It just does an amazing job. I knew you would use Claude, so was like, I got to think of another one. I have two more. My first one is my morning routine, which is get up, get directly out of bed, don’t check your phone. I know not everybody’s a morning person, don’t email me. This isn’t for you.

30:03
basically doing the morning meditation, like the five minutes of breathing. I will tell you, I was not a breathing fan like 18 months ago. I thought it was a bunch of bonk. I mean, I like breathing in general, like guided breathing. But Mike Barnhill, shout out to Mike and Dana Jean-Zima, shout out to Dana, really changed my mind about this. just doing, and I’m not one who can sit for 30 minutes and do this, but five minutes of guided breathing is…

30:30
radicalized my mornings and my energy level, along with sitting in the sun, whether it’s walking, sitting, whatever. So something like my last house, I could sit out on my balcony and like sit in the sun and do the breathing here. I have to I walk and then I do the breathing another time. But huge life hack. Highly recommended if you’re not doing that. My other one, which is like I am definitely late to the party, so don’t come at me.

30:58
Why was I not following the points guy before? I don’t know. I was talking to someone and they’re like, oh, yes, I found on the points guy. I’m like, know who that is. Why am I not? I just signed up for the daily emails. You definitely get stuff that you don’t want, but I’ve learned and you know I’m a travel hacker. We talk about going to all these places. I’ve gone for almost free on points to all my trips.

31:21
But he has like the ends, like I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to find out this information where he literally like the website’s amazing. The information’s great. It’s all real. It’s not gimmicky. Obviously, he makes money if you sign up for certain credit cards and things like that through him. So like good for him. But I will say, like if you want to travel hack and you don’t want to have to do all the work, I would just sign up for the email for points guy. And we’re not affiliated with them in any way. Can I get mad real quick?

31:50
Yes. Do you remember when I came back from Mankation and I was raving about Wim Hof breathing? Yes. But you didn’t like bat an eyelash. But now when Dana and Mike Barnhill tell you that breathing is really good, then all of sudden you do it. Yes. I’m sorry. I feel about that. I’m sorry. Okay. Wow. We’re running out time. have a couple more here. Okay. Best product of the year.

32:18
Okay, mine are all like construction based. They’re not work based. That’s okay. So anyway, best two products of the year for me, noise canceling insulation. If you are building a house, you need to this installed. This does not apply to like 90 % of the people here. it blow or what is it? No, it’s like roll. You roll it or it’s in sheets, but it’s like the pink stuff, but it’s not. It’s basically still wool. It’s amazing.

32:42
Never thought I would be singing the praises of insulation. But in the sound of you might think that I hate noise, I got the, I have them right here with me, my Bose open ear headphones. If you hate headphones in your ear, like the ones like Apple AirPods, the ones that stick inside your ear canal, which I cannot stand, these actually hook to your ear. So if you walk, run, cycle, anything like that, you can actually still hear everything going on around you. But the sound quality, 10 out of 10 amazing.

33:12
I like them so much better than AirPods. I’ve had an issue connecting them to my Mac computer, but that’s almost 100 % user error. But I love these little bows. Can you hold up the camera? curious. I want those too, actually. Yeah. So they hook. Let’s see if I can show you. Oh, I see. I see. OK, so let me try to describe it since you guys are listening here. They hook. My nails are too long, but they hook around your ear. Right. So nothing goes physically in your ear.

33:40
Nope, they hook on your, what’s the outside of your ear called? I don’t know. The part that like loops around, that’s where they hook so they’re on the backside. And to me, like, I don’t know about if you’re a female and you’re getting ready and like trying to do your hair and you have AirPods in, I always knock an AirPod out and then it’s rolling across the floor under the bed, whatever. These do not come off your ear. So, definitely recommend. My best product of the year is a service, I guess, and it’s

34:08
It’s not chat GPT, it’s search GPT. Okay. Uh, search GPT came out earlier this year and now it does citations and it does somewhat of fact checking with citations. So it has replaced Google for me across the board. I do not use Google at all anymore. Um, I tried perplexity as well. Perplexity is another AI search tool, which is much better than Google. I just prefer search GPT because I think it does a better job of citations. Um,

34:38
And there’s just less clutter in the answer that it gives you. Nice. Google’s, you know, I hate Google. Yeah, I’m going to to check that out. I agree. Well, it’s already kind of built into Chachi BT. So yeah. What’s your biggest change for the coming up here? Ah, so. I used to play Ultimate every week. Yeah, but then we’re all old now. Like one guy I was playing with was like 60. And so people just started getting injured.

35:07
Like literally every time we went out and played. so that game kind of died and I’m playing tennis once a week now, but I still need to wait to exercise the other days and not, I hate running. And so I don’t want to, I tried running and I tried to force myself to go running. I’m usually good for a couple of weeks and then I stop. So biggest personal change of the year. And this might be my product of the year, even though it’s been out for a long time.

35:34
There’s this exercise game on the Nintendo Switch. Okay. It is called Ring Fit. And there’s like this Pilates ring that you get, and then you fight monsters by exercising. Okay. And I’ve been doing that every day. Nice. Nice. And so the goal is to exercise five days out of the week, whether it be lifting weights, playing tennis. So that’s two and then a Ring Fit for the remaining three days. Nice. I like it.

36:04
It’s a game of fine fitness. always works. So I spent the last week with our friend Liz and Adam and Mike Jackness. And this was the biggest change was like the number one topic of our conversation. And so I started the conversation out by saying, I need a gigantic change this year. I don’t know what it is, but something needs to change drastically in my life.

36:30
And then as the days went on and we continued to have these conversations and Jackness was like determined to figure out what it was gonna be. And I was like, the problem is I don’t know Jackness if I knew I would tell you. But I woke up one morning actually on my birthday and I was like, you know what? It’s not a big change. I need to shift. And the idea came to me because of, I was thinking about like, and I’m not a science person so, ugh.

36:55
But I think about like tectonic plates, right? And how they move and shift over time. And it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal when you think about the size of these plates, but actually it causes like massive issues, right? It causes earthquakes. causes huge crevices and canyons and mountains, like, right? So this shifting of the plates is a really big deal, even though like in theory it’s not, right? Shift doesn’t seem like a big word, but I was like, that’s what I need. I need to shift. So I need a slight change that will produce massive results.

37:22
And so that’s kind of what I went with after I did the cold plunge and all the world became very clear to me after that. So a couple of those things that I just kind of came to like real practically. So, you know, last year I bought that big ass calendar, but I lost all the pieces in the move. So I had this calendar that was like empty. this year I was like, Liz was like, I’m going to buy the calendar. I was like, I’m not buying it. It sucks. You know, it doesn’t suck. I’m joking, but.

37:49
We decided we were to buy it basically together and fill it out together on a call. That’s a big thing as I want to plan my, I want to get an outline of my year now. Wow, we’re like the opposite. I know we are. That was the big one. I was like, if I have Liz or anybody to do it with me, the accountability will be there to get it done.

38:14
Because I do know that because I have so much chaos like in my personal life and my house and everything like the things that I can control I really need to control and then in in that conversation I realized the one thing that I feel like all of us for the most part have been missing over the past several years is like I need to get out more I’m very happy in my cave. I’m very happy in my office. I’m very happy in my house You know, I’m like a whole if I leave I’m getting on an airplane and I need like more

38:44
people in my life that are in are like not necessarily doing exactly what we do, but in like the entrepreneurial slash founder space. And so just making a concerted effort and I have a lot of things like in the works for this, like probably attending more events, networking more, just being better about getting out there because I tend to like close in if, because I wanna get stuff done, right?

39:10
And I’m realizing that I’ve missed out, especially like if you think about like 2020 and everything that happened and how like my life before that and now like we are going to multiple events a year. And I’m at the point now where my kids are all older. While it’s still difficult to travel a lot, I can make it happen. And I think that’s really important for my own like personal growth. You know, it’s funny is I’m going in the opposite direction. I know. And I think it’s because our kids are at different ages, like your kids are older. Yeah.

39:40
I feel like my kids need us right now to be at home because over the break we toured colleges for my daughter and it’s just so hard to get in college now. There’s so many things that… Not when you make the A honor roll. Not when you make the A honor roll. I wish that’s all it took. Yes, I know. But there’s a lot of work involved and so many activities now. Both kids are playing volleyball. I’m literally driving to the gym.

40:09
like four times a week, five times a week. there’s and yeah, Karina is learning how to drive. Yeah, that’s a nightmare itself. I told you this story, right? I go in, she gets in the front seat and I’m like, OK, let’s drive. And the first question she asks is, OK, which one is the brake? I’m like, OK, get out of the car, get out of the car right now. Yeah, yeah.

40:38
We went to like a parking lot where I could show her which pedal was which. This is after she she passed the learner’s permit test. And I don’t think they ask you that question. So here’s and you’re right, like we’re in very different seasons. Like think about this. I’m teaching my seventh kid how to drive. I know I’m just like I’m in there smoking a cigarette, like drinking a glass of wine, like let’s go, kids. You know, really guys, but like.

41:04
There’s very little, not all my kids are great drivers. I’ve had some near-death experiences with them behind the wheel. Now I’m just like, let’s do it. It just very much unfazes me at this point for driving. That’s so funny. I think once they’re off to college, I’ll be there with you. I’ve just realized that I miss that part of I need people to hold my feet to the fire.

41:35
And I think that getting out there for me is the best way to do it because I quickly go in. I quickly am like, I could not leave my house for a month and be totally fine. Like literally not leave it, except for I have to take a kid to school. But like I don’t go to the store. not like it. I don’t want to interact with you. Like I very quickly want to go inward. So I think this is a good push for me. I mean, those were great years. They really were.

41:59
I was speaking like six or seven times a year at various conferences, had a blast, met so many people. I would love to go back to that actually, but just not these next two years for sure. Maybe afterwards. Actually, I feel like there’s less events now too. There are less events. yeah, anyway. Okay. Biggest loser of the year. I have a list. Oh, you do. Okay. Let me just get my one out of the way then.

42:27
I think the biggest losers of the year were Amazon sellers who only rely on selling on Amazon. That was on my list. was okay. Amazon introduced so many new fees. You could avoid some of those fees by using their new service, which was a disaster this holiday season. was Amazon warehousing and distribution. just recently they announced that they are not reimbursing you the full price of a product when they use your product. I saw that. Just the cost of

42:55
Good, whatever it is. the cost of goods. Yes. What they consider your cost of goods or you can submit your factory invoices and get that reimbursed, but it doesn’t take into account the cost of customs duties and freight forwarding and all that stuff. Just the pure cost of the product, which- That’s garbage. To me is outrageous. Yes. Okay. This was my funnest part. I was like, I love fighting the losers and winners.

43:24
Biggest losers of the year, SEO blogs. Blogs that rely totally on SEO. Pooh in the toilet. The Democratic Party, guys messed up. We’re a little bit tone deaf. We don’t talk about politics here, but they are definitely a big loser for the year. Did not do a good job marketing, that’s for sure. Actually, if you’re in marketing, learn from this. Chain restaurants, the Red Lobsters, TGA Fridays. Once again, I feel like a lot of this has to do with like

43:51
people being tone deaf to their audience, not knowing what people want, not adapting to the new world, right? Department stores, right? Macy’s closed 150 stores, same thing. I didn’t hear that. Yeah, do people not shop there anymore? No. As department stores. So I read a couple years ago that Macy’s does the majority of their sales online anyway. And a lot of people just walk into Macy’s to pick up their order, right? And I don’t know about you, but like shopping malls, like the traditional everything’s inside shopping mall,

44:21
Bankrupting right the outdoor malls the plazas. Those are the ones that are are doing better malls Yeah, were you walking? Yes. Oh, no Yeah here they are packed Yeah, so you know like Red Lobster filed they got a new CEO so they’re restructuring but TGI Fridays went down Okay, another big loser Aaron Rodgers. What are you doing, dude? Like once again like but

44:47
Like, once again, I feel like all this kind of relates to like they’re like a lot of these people are just tone deaf, right? To what’s going on around them, not like understanding the market. Right. Aaron Rodgers did not understand what it was like to play in New York where your fans will boo you. Right. He was in Green Bay where everyone loves you. They’re all cheeseheads. Right. I would say X, formerly known as Twitter, big loser this year, lost a lot of users. Once again, I feel like in that tone deaf category. I mean, you stopped putting effort into it.

45:16
I feel the opposite about X actually. Oh, really? Okay. Why do you feel the opposite? Because I think X has become the platform for people for free speech. I think X is on the rise. We’ll see. Especially after the Trump victory. It might turn around, but I feel like in 2024 it was not. Then I think the absolute biggest loser of the year was anybody who stayed up to watch the Mike Tyson, Jake Paul fight.

45:46
Biggest loser, if you could even get it to stream correctly. then we have to add Netflix to that list of biggest losers for screwing that one up. like we should have just made an entire episode on this. You got a long list. OK, but biggest winners. OK, biggest winners, Nvidia stock, Elon Musk. Those are right, too, that I was thinking of. Like, Elon banked so much on this election. Yes, he did. And he would have gotten screwed if Trump had lost. Yeah.

46:16
So Nvidia, Elon Musk, anything related to AI, killing it right now. the company, not Amazon, the seller. So everything that hurt the sellers benefited Amazon. Since chain restaurants took a tank, these fast casual restaurants like Cava, where you like go up and order, but they bring you your food. don’t know. You know, all those restaurants really did well because they kept their price point right. Right. Like Shake Shack’s like, you know, those places are doing actually really well. Walmart.

46:46
big winner of 2024 and are still coming hard after Amazon. And then people in general, because I had to add Aaron Rodgers, I got to add people that are winners. A huge winner, probably my number one 2024 winner, Caitlin Clark, right? Just crushing it and not only crushing it for herself, but bringing up an entire industry. Like who cared about the WNBA before Caitlin Clark? Nobody. Right. And then along with that, we got Simone Biles, right? Coming back and the Olympics, like

47:16
once again, huge personal winner, Alona Meyer, right? Rugby player in the Olympics that then has, what I like about her is in her and the pommel horse guy, Steven Naderosic, who transformed their Olympic wins into like outside of that monetization and fame. Cause I think so many people like get their 15 minutes and don’t know how to leverage that. So I think they did a really good job of being like slightly obscure, but then leveraging it for huge social media followings, Dancing with the Stars,

47:45
You know, all sorts of stuff. And then the other two big winners for me are YouTube and TikTok. Who knows what’s going to happen to TikTok. We might not be saying this in 2025. In one more week, we’ll find out. TikTok, TikTok, we’ll see. But anyone creating content on YouTube and TikTok, big winner in 2024 and definitely on YouTube. I see that in 2025 as well. I agree. I also wanted to add the biggest loser of the year, I think is the NBA. Yes. Your ship is down like 58 percent or something. It hurts my heart.

48:14
hurts my heart to say that. must say the game has kind of devolved into just like chucking it up. Yes. Yeah. From 3.9. Drive and kick, drive and kick. Yeah. Anyway. right. Well, that concludes our first annual awards show. You’re only supposed to pick one in each of these categories, but maybe we should just do an entire episode on biggest losers and biggest winners because that’s when you like perked up.

48:41
Well, here’s the thing. I know I had to double for some other ones. Here’s the thing about the biggest winners and losers is I think that you can you like the audience us can learn so much from what’s happening in the world. Right. Like you can look at people who like look at Aaron Rodgers. Right. Like so how do you avoid that in your own business or your own branding? Right. Because he’s he’s a person, but he’s also a brand.

49:10
Right? So how do you avoid that negative backlash? How do you avoid getting in that position? Same thing with like, how can you do what Caitlin Clark has done? Right? Now, obviously most of us are never going to be in the WNBA. Mainly we’re too old, and you’re not a woman, but details, details. But like looking at some of these people, looking at what like Walmart is doing, right? Looking at some of these bigger companies or people and like, how are they leveraging what they already have?

49:40
to grow and be better. And then also looking at like, hey, if YouTube is blowing up, should I be on there? Right? How do I need to get on? It’s like just watching these things and making decisions in your own business and personal life, I think is really, really good.

49:56
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If there are any awards that you think we missed, let me know by sending me an email. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 571. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

50:23
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, I’m breaking down why President Trump introduced tariffs and what they mean for trade with countries like China. We’ll look at how these tariffs affect American consumers, businesses, and global trade. Plus, I’ll cover the bigger economic picture and the debates surrounding this policy. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025.

00:29
over at SellersSummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods

00:58
and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the seller’s summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.

01:26
The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:45
Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. In this episode, I’m taking a closer look at President Trump’s tariffs, why they were put in place, and how they’re shaking up trade with countries like China. I’ll also explore what this means for e-commerce sellers and dive into the bigger economic impact and the controversies around it. Let’s start with the policies that Donald Trump has outlined for his second term as president. Trump has said that he will impose a 10 % global tariff on every product no matter where it’s coming from,

02:13
and a whopping 60 % tariff on anything coming from China. Now a 60 % tariff sounds pretty extreme and consider this, over 70 % of the products sold by wholesalers and retailers on amazon.com today are manufactured in China. Now you might assume that a 60 % tariff would push Amazon FBA sellers to raise their prices in the US by an equivalent 60 % to cover the costs. However, it’s not that simple.

02:40
Fortunately, we can look back at Trump’s previous administration for insights into how such policies might play out. Now, for starters, Michael Feroli, JP Morgan’s chief U.S. economist, suggests that the likelihood of a 10 % across-the-board tariff in 2025 is relatively low, let alone a blanket 60 % tariff on all Chinese products. It’s probably not gonna happen. Second of all, Michael Feroli also stated that a 60 % tariff on China

03:07
could raise the price level only by a bit over 1%, assuming tariffs are fully passed on through to consumers. And in practice, the effect could be even smaller if higher tariffs are absorbed into business margins or if there’s a substitution away from China towards other suppliers. Now, if you believe Michael Feroli, a 1 % increase in prices doesn’t sound like much at all. Now, personally, I think the actual price hike will exceed 1%, but let me explain why I think Michael’s estimate

03:35
is reasonably accurate based on my own experiences with the last round of Trump’s tariffs. I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2014 and my own online store since 2007 over at BumbleBeeLinens.com. And even though we source from Switzerland, the US, Italy, Germany, India, in addition to China, most of our products do in fact come from China. During Trump’s previous administration, he initially promised a sweeping 45 % global tariff on Chinese goods, but that’s not how things played out.

04:05
Instead, the tariffs were implemented in stages ranging from 7.5 % to 25 % depending on the product category. For example, many of our products were subject to only the 7.5 % tariff. So while Trump publicly announced a global 45 % tariff on all Chinese products, the reality was far more nuanced. There were numerous exemptions and many items fell into the lower 7.5 % trench, showing that the actual impact varied significantly by product.

04:33
I believe that even though Trump has publicly stated he would impose a global 60 % tariff on all Chinese products, it is unlikely to actually play out that way. Let’s face it, when you’re campaigning for president, you can’t stand in front of the public and announce a plan for a series of small targeted tariffs. A bold declaration, like a 60 % across the board tariff, makes for a stronger, more attention grabbing stance. Now, even if you’re not a fan of Trump, he has some sharp advisors on his team.

05:00
including figures like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to guide him. It makes zero logical sense to impose tariffs on products that the U.S. doesn’t even manufacture. Instead, it’s more likely that the highest tariffs will target industries where the U.S. is actively working to boost domestic production, such as automotive, semiconductors, and electronics. For everyday consumer goods and staples, a sweeping 60 % tariff seems far less likely. Now, if history is any god,

05:28
the price impact of tariffs likely won’t be as significant as you might expect. Michael Farole predicted only a 1 % price hike, which isn’t a huge deal. But to throw some real numbers into the mix, let me share a hypothetical example based on my own experience selling online during the last Trump administration. During Trump’s last presidency, we barely raised prices at all in our online store, and here’s why. Now in a typical retail environment, products are marked up around 4X.

05:57
So if we source a product for a buck, we sell it for $4. Now let’s assume Trump imposes a 60 % tariff as proposed. That would bump the product cost to a buck 60, meaning we’d sell it for $6.40, right? Not quite. For starters, there’s always a lag before price increases hit the consumer. When tariffs are implemented, it can take months for existing inventory to sell through and price changes tend to roll out in waves. Now on a competitive platform like Amazon,

06:25
Pricing is critical to maintaining rankings and sales. There’s very little price elasticity on Amazon as consumers are highly cost sensitive. Even a small price increase, like 60 cents, could drop your listing from the top search result to the 10th position. This is why sellers constantly monitor competitor prices to stay competitive. The pressure to maintain rankings often outweighs the immediate impact of tariffs, leading sellers to absorb part of the increased costs instead of passing them entirely to customers. Now back to the example.

06:55
If you’re a seller and you notice that none of your competitors have raised their prices yet, you’re far more likely to absorb the cost yourself, at least initially. Instead of making a $3 profit, you might settle for $2.40. And percentage-wise, that’s like offering a 15 % discount, which isn’t a massive hit. And that’s without factoring Trump’s extremely business-friendly tax policies. During his last administration, the corporate tax rate dropped from 35 % to just 21%.

07:24
which had a noticeable impact on small businesses like mine. Despite the tariffs, we ended up making much more profit than ever before. This time, Trump is proposing an even lower corporate tax rate, potentially reducing it from 21 % to 20 % or even 15%. For businesses, that would be a game changer. The tax savings will help offset the impact of even a 60 % tariff, though of course, this ultimately depends on your profit margins.

07:50
By the way, Trump’s business tax friendly policies are one of the biggest reasons why you should start your own business right away. As an employee, you’re taxed at the highest rates with very few deductions. If you’re interested in learning how to start your own profitable online store, I’ve created a free six day mini course just for you. It’s packed with actionable tips and I guarantee you’ll walk away with valuable insights. Sign up below, it’s completely free. Now let’s say you don’t want to pay the high tariffs on Chinese goods.

08:16
One alternative is to source products from other countries such as Mexico, India, or Southeast Asia. While that sounds promising in theory, in practice, it’s incredibly challenging, at least right now. First, there’s the issue of cost. China is significantly cheaper than many other countries, including the US and Mexico. Now my previous video, I mentioned that labor costs in China are about four times lower than the US. Even with a 60 % tariff, it’s often still cheaper to manufacture in China than elsewhere.

08:46
Another major hurdle is China’s unmatched vertical integration. China has suppliers for virtually every component needed to manufacture complex products, all within close proximity. Most products aren’t just single piece items. They’re composed of many components that need to be sourced, assembled, and integrated. Take the iPhone, for example. It’s not as simple as deciding to manufacture it in the US. You’d still need chips from TSMC in Taiwan, RAM from Korea, and various PCB components from China.

09:14
It’s a supply chain that is deeply interwoven and replicating that infrastructure elsewhere is not easy. Even if you find a supplier in Mexico or India, there’s a good chance that they’re still sourcing many components from China. We learned this the hard way when we sourced intricate lace handkerchiefs from Italy, only to find out later that the materials originally came from China. We were essentially paying a markup for the same Chinese goods. Now in the long term, if demand increases,

09:42
Other developing countries may begin to build the necessary infrastructure to compete with China. However, that’s not going to happen overnight or even within a single Trump administration. It’s going to take years, likely decades, for countries like Mexico and India to catch up to China’s manufacturing ecosystem. Now from running my business, I’ve also discovered that many Chinese-owned factories have already set up operations in Mexico where tariffs are currently non-existent. Chinese manufacturers are always finding new ways to bypass tariffs altogether.

10:12
I’ve been selling online and sourcing from China for 17 years, and I don’t expect tariffs to have as dramatic as an impact as the media suggests. Lower income tax rates will likely offset much of the tariff increases, and there will undoubtedly be loopholes such as Chinese suppliers shifting production to countries like Vietnam or Mexico. As a small business owner, you also have the flexibility to adjust your prices to account for the tariff costs as well. And it’s important to note that prices won’t increase by 60%.

10:40
as there’s not a direct one-to-one correlation between tariffs and selling prices due to the retail markups. Even if you pass the entire 60 % tariff onto the consumer, the final price would only increase by about 15%. And for most products, that is a manageable increase. And remember, these tariffs affect everyone across the board, not just your small business. Now as an Amazon FBA seller, what should you do right now? If you’re worried about the tariffs,

11:06
You should place your orders now as quickly as possible before the Trump administration takes effect in late January and get your products in as soon as possible. Most likely, other e-commerce entrepreneurs are thinking the same thing, which means the cost of freight will likely be higher in the near term. But in the long run, everything will likely even out. There will be inflation, but not nearly as high as the doomsday media is making it out to be. Bottom line, the tariffs give the U.S. some negotiation leverage.

11:33
We’ve allowed countries like China to have the advantage for a long time now, and I believe these tariffs will help level the playing field. Meanwhile, Amazon is already under heavy scrutiny for its monopolistic practices. Under the Biden administration, the FTC opened up an investigation on Amazon and ultimately sued them in 2023 for illegally maintaining its monopoly. We all know that Jeff Bezos and Trump don’t exactly get along, and Trump has been very vocal about how the Washington Post unfairly targets him.

12:01
Trump has also gone on record many times as describing Amazon as having a monopoly, and it’s highly likely that the FTC investigation into Amazon will continue forward as planned. As a result, Amazon will likely be on its best behavior going forward. They already announced that there would be no fee changes for 2025, which is finally some great news for sellers. Overall, I see the Trump presidency as being a net neutral for Amazon FBA and other e-commerce businesses.

12:31
Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’re worried about the effects of Trump tariffs on your business, I’m doing a three-part series on this in the coming weeks. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 570. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event.

13:00
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitherJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, Tony and I are going to discuss perhaps the most important way to generate traffic and repeat customers for your business. And this is a strategy that is often severely underestimated and underutilized. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit,

00:27
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

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I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

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Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job Podcast. Today we’re going to cover one last topic on this marketing series that we’ve been doing, and that is word of mouth marketing. And the reason why I want to talk about this is because I actually think the majority of Bumble Bee Linen’s business is word of mouth, mainly because we get a lot of our business from event and wedding planners today, which make up a significant portion. And what I wanted to stress,

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just to kind of start out with is that one of the questions I get from students who join the classes, do I have to do customer service? In general or themselves? Well, just in general. Interesting. Right? Because in the beginning, they’re like, hey, I’m just a one person thing. Like I can’t answer phone calls and I don’t want to interact with the customer at all. And that’s why people are attracted to Amazon so much, right? Because Amazon does all that stuff.

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But I was just thinking about this other day. It was a YouTube video I was watching about actually talking to the customer. And I was just thinking to myself, I get emails every single day, like a ton of emails every single day from my wife, quit her job. And I try to respond to all of them. And every now and then, this happens at least once or twice a week, someone emails back and goes, oh my God, I can’t believe you responded.

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to my email. I can’t believe there’s actually a real person behind this. I was thinking to myself, man, the bar is really low, right? Yes, it is really low. You can make someone really happy just by responding. Yes. I think to globalize this, if you think about people shopping behavior in general and what people like to do, I think people shop for two reasons.

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consistency or customer experience. Those are the two reasons why people shop at certain stores and do the certain things they do. If you think about Amazon, as a customer on Amazon, the customer experience is actually pretty good. If you need to return something, it’s always really easy if you have a problem with an item. For the most part, Amazon does a good job with customer service. The reason why everyone likes Amazon is because you know exactly what you’re going to get and when you’re going to get it. You place your order.

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within 24, sometimes five hours, it shows up on your front porch, right? But then there’s other people and there’s other shopping experiences that people have where they want to go down to the boutique, right? Like there’s a couple parts in my town that have these little boutique stores and I often wonder how they stay in business, right? Because they sell like a very specific type of thing. You can only go in there if you want beach wear or stuff like that. And they stay in business because they’ve built a relationship.

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with the customer. And I’ve heard people like, so in this one plaza, there’s like stores and restaurants, and we always go to this one restaurant. And I hear people talking about the stores in that, it’s not even a strip mall, it’s like a little shopping village. They love, they know the owner, they talk to them, right? The owner comes out and helps them find something. And so that customer experience, like, yes, could they probably buy that exact same thing on Amazon for probably less? I would say most definitely.

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But do they love that experience, that customer service, that feeling like they’re part of that family? Absolutely, so they make that. So people either shop one way or other, in my opinion. They know what they’re getting and that’s what they do, or they want to feel like they’re part of something else. Yeah, I mean, this is similar to that interview I did with Jerry Kozak, who does the print-on-demand company. He runs a printing company. And a lot of his printing business got destroyed by Ti Mu and Shien, but the bread and butter of his business

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are all the private clients that he actually makes uniforms for and whatnot. They continue to come back to him because he delivers, they have this relationship, even though they could probably find someone in China, I would guess, at a lot cheaper price. Yes, but once you have that relationship, I think it’s really hard to switch even if maybe there’s a better deal somewhere. A perfect example of this is, we own a lot of motorcycles in our house and my son

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uh, hit a pothole in his motorcycle month ago and bent his front wheel frame and he rides a Honda motorcycle. We bought it at a Honda dealership. Um, but instead of taking it to the Honda dealership to get it fixed, where we just, we knew the bike we wanted, we went in and we purchased it. We took it to the Ducati dealership to get it fixed because that’s where our relationship is, right? Those are where we know the guys.

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Those are the people that we talk to all the time. So even though, you know, was it probably a little more expensive to get it fixed at the Ducati dealership? I would guess, yeah. But it wasn’t worth not having the relationship, right? Because we know if there’s a problem, we know exactly that it will be handled. And I mean, there wasn’t one, obviously. But, you know, you picked we picked relationship over probably cost and maybe convenience. Yeah. I mean, so the real question is, how do you establish these relationships? They kind of have to be done

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You can’t automate it, Yes, you can’t automate it. That is correct. This is funny. I remember my wife, what she does is she actually sends little gifts to our best customers at the end of the year. I remember that first year she started doing that. I was like, what’s the point of this? They’ve purchased like 10 times already. They’re clearly a customer. Why are we – I mean, what’s this going to do?

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But clearly my wife knows about the softer side of things. It’s probably because of that reason that these customers have kept coming back for many, many years now. We’ve had customers buy from us since the beginning. Here’s a tip for that because I love that idea and I think it’s something that every business should be doing for their best clients, is sending them. If it doesn’t have to be around the holidays, that’s the most common time to do it. What I don’t like is when

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If you were to send, and I don’t know what you send, so I might be offending you guys right now, to send them a Bumble Bee Linens coffee mug. To me, They get the hankies that have been returned. No, but I see this with companies all the time. It’s like, think you’re valued customer. Here’s a pin with our logo on it.

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Which is like, no, if you’re truly thanking someone, then you get them what they want. And obviously you don’t know exactly what maybe your top 50 customers want or whatever the number is, but you wanna get them something that’s just nice and appreciative. It should not be something that’s branded with your logo or something that could be used as an advertisement. No one wants a Bumblebee t-shirt, right? Maybe they do. to do that. Yeah.

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But, and so like, you maybe it’s a Christmas ornament with something like commemorating of, know, maybe like, I don’t know, like, you know, I know every year for in Chinese, there’s like an animal, right, with the year. So maybe it’s an ornament with that on it, or maybe it’s a, you know, a Yeti cup that’s just, you know, like in a nice color, right, or with a pretty design. Or maybe it’s something that’s, you know, fun and…

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really shows your appreciation versus like, hey, please walk around with my Bumblebee branded hat on so that everyone knows where you buy your handkerchiefs. So I think that’s a big thing when you, if you decide to do this is you should make sure the gift is like something that you would actually want to receive as well. If you want to go the extra mile, you can stalk this person on social media and find out what they’re interested in. There was this talk that Gary V gave and I thought this was ingenious. It’s very calculated though. What he did is he went through his entire customer list.

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And he found the people that had really large social media presences. Oh, I remember this. Yeah. And then, uh, so one guy really liked Jay Cutler. So he went out and bought, he spent 400 bucks on an autographed framed Jay Cutler Jersey. Yeah. Sent to that guy. And the guy ordered only a hundred bucks worth of stuff, but he had a big Twitter following. think it was. Yeah. And then, you know, a couple of weeks passed and he’s like,

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He clearly already got it, but nothing happened. Then exactly one month later, he got this huge order of wine. It was a referral from the guy that received the J. Cutler jersey. There’s a little Italian place a couple of towns over from me that we stumbled upon one day. It is one of those, you feel like when you walk in, you’re in Italy.

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The owner is originally from Italy through Brazil, you know through like six other countries But you know we went in there the first time we sat we love to sit at the bar So we sit at the bar. We’re talking to the owner of the restaurant, you know, we’re Learning about him learning about where he’s lived learning about where he’s from the town He’s from all this stuff and you know as we’re in there we each have a glass of wine and

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Brian orders a second glass of wine and I was like, I’m good. And then he takes the wine bottle and just like gives me, you know, like maybe a half of a pour more. And he’s like, well, we don’t believe in drinking alone, right? Like so, and you know, doesn’t charge me for it, whatever, right? And you’re just like, wow, okay. Like customer service right there, you know, like, and I didn’t want another, you know, so it wasn’t like he was forcing anything on me. It was just like, hey, here’s a little more. So you’re not sitting there with an empty glass while he has another glass. And then we had,

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just got an appetizer and there was this salt that they had used in this appetizer that was, I don’t know what it was, but it was absolutely the best tasting salt. That’s weird to say, but, and so we asked him about the salt. We got into this whole story about the salt. So as we’re leaving, he brings us out this tiny little jar of salt, right, that was from the appetizer. Have I not recommended that place to everybody I’ve ever met in this town, right? We go all the time.

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You know, it’s like, just from that first interaction, right? He could have just served us, given us the food, been friendly, right? And it would have been like, yeah, it was a great experience. We’ll probably go back at some point. But like, we make it a point to drive to go to this place because the experience, and every time we walk in, same thing, walks up, shakes your hand. And it’s like, does this cost him anything, really? Like, other than a couple seconds of his time? No, but.

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Like I post about it on social media, not because I love it, right? And I want other people and he treats everybody that way, right? Like we’re not special in that like somehow he thinks, you we have a Twitter following, he’s gonna do this. Like he treats all the customers this way. And I think honestly, if you’re not doing that in your business, whether it’s digitally or in person, like you’re missing out on this huge opportunity to create like your most loyal customers for not a lot of money.

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It’s not just loyal customers, it’s really a brand. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot because we’re at a crossroads right now. I think Google’s gonna be dead in five years. And it just so happens that Google is about 25 % of my business right now for Bumblebee. And I’ve been like racking my brains trying to figure things out. I don’t know if you guys have been using Perplexity. Perplexity is an AI search engine that’s…

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Really pretty good. I mean, it’s got tiny market share. Have you used it? Very, very sparingly, but I’m about to jump on the bandwagon. Yeah. So basically it gives you an AI answer and then it gives you links. But what they recently added was shopping and it’s not just shopping. It’s literally a button where if you click on it, you instantly check out. Cause I guess perplexity has your information. So it’s like one click checkout on Amazon, except it’s through AI.

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And I was trying to figure out how this could possibly work, but I think they had this deal with ShopPay. think almost every Shopify store can use ShopPay, And so they already have the customer’s information as part of that. So when they click on the button, it automatically places the order on that e-commerce store. so I was just thinking, hey, is that the future? How do I show up on AI Search? And I think more and more

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important now is getting your brand out there. And I guess all the SEO efforts that I’ve made over the years contribute to this. But I think where most of the signals are coming from, honestly, today are social media. Do you have that brand presence? And so I was just thinking to myself, I’ve been dragging my feet on social media for so many years because it’s something that you have to do every day. But our friend Jim, he does it.

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Yeah, it’s really just a mindset thing. Yes. Yeah. And it worked when I was on TikTok and I, you know, did it every single day and I grew to one hundred and twenty thousand subs YouTube. I was very consistent once a week. And now, you know, that’s been growing like gangbusters. It’s really just this frame of mind. mean, this is where the world’s going. You think about word of mouth, right? How many TikToks have you watched? know this happens in our house a lot. My wife will see a TikTok for this restaurant. Yep.

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And she’d be like, hey, let’s try that place. Because this person said that it was pretty good and showed us pictures of her enjoying the food. That’s where the world is going. That’s where it is, I think, today already. Anyway, that’s my little soapbox thing. I’m trying to hit myself into admitting to this. It’s hard, right? Because especially, OK, so.

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I think, let’s just use Gary Vee, right? He’s actually a great example of someone who’s constantly building that social currency, right? He’s making, he’s always on social media. I always see TikToks of him, Reels, whatever the platform, he’s there, right? Sort of building that with, as himself, right, as the brand. But that’s kind of easy for him, right? Because he’s talking about stuff that like he’s doing every day. Like, have you seen those ones of him where he’s going to the garage sale and he’s buying like the bucket of hot.

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Hot Wheels cars and you know, like that’s all stuff he does. It’s in his business. Like for you and Bumblebee and for a lot of people, right? Like you’re not a wedding planner. You’re not really a hanky user. You know, so like. Do you cry on occasion? only during the NBA playoffs. So once a year is not going to be enough for this marketing. But like for most people, being able to create content around their brand isn’t just like their normal everyday life.

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They’re not just getting up. I feel like Gary V, most of his content is just based on his everyday actions. It’s pretty simple to have a camera follow you around. It’s not pretty simple, but in the social media world, that’s not as difficult as you sell linens. You’re not a linen person, so then how do you get over the mental hurdle and figure out how to make that content?

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to sort of bridge that gap that’s definitely not, I would say, in your wheelhouse. Well, here’s the thing. I think you can create content about anything and not even mention your business. People will find your link in bio. There’s this girl from Vancouver, her strawberry milk mob. All she does is she shares dating advice and stuff like that. Her videos aren’t flashy. She literally just picks up her phone and does stuff. But she has 2.2 million followers.

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and she also runs a swimwear brand, which she never talks about. But I’m sure that it gets tons and tons of sales because that’s her link in the bio. Yes, but she’s also talking about like dating. she, mean, at she’s talking to her target. You got to talk to your target demographic. Correct. But the content, doesn’t have to be about the product. You don’t have to talk about crying all the time. Although I just had a brilliant idea. I had a brilliant idea for your channel.

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One of our favorite things you and I to watch is sad fans. Fans that when their team loses and they’re crying, when the winning touchdown is scored, when the buzzer beater baskets. You could just do something with sad fans and hankies and then you could still do what you love, sad fans and mix in hankies. Looks like someone needs a hanky.

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I think would that work on women though? Yeah, that’d be guys, right? Maybe I don’t know. I’ve seen sad women fans like 90 95 % of our customers are women. Yes, they are. And they’re also they skew older also. Yes. In the demographic because hankies and towels and whatnot. Yes. Anyway, the point I wanted to make is you can just write content about anything and then just kind of insert your little call to action in there.

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It doesn’t even have to have anything to do with it. But over time, you know, people remember that or be associated with it. So what are you going to talk about for Bumblebee?

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Okay, so I’m going to do all the simple stuff like the day-to-day, right? Even though I’m not there every day. I figured I’ll just go in. is what I think happens every day. Jen’s going to love this. Well, I can talk about all the cool stuff. I’m involved in a lot of the cool stuff. A lot of people do embroider funny things on the Hankies. I was thinking about just setting up a camera in front of the embroider machine. I think I told you to do this five years ago.

19:36
Well, yeah, I mean, I’m not going to set up the camera or have it run all day, but I just have it like if there’s something funny that’s being stitched, I’ll just film it and then I’ll comment on it. Yeah. Or something like that. But the other thing I thought was interesting, this is a channel that I would watch is a lot of people are just kind of interested about what it’s like to run the business. Right. And I’ve actually been in there a lot lately because I’m the only one who knows how to use the printer right now. So I’ve been in there a lot.

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lately because in preparation for the holiday season. So I can get, there’s a lot of unexpected things that happen daily. It’s kind like your family, right? You have seven kids, something happens every day. Something happens every day at Bumblebee too. And it’d just be interesting to document that stuff, the good and the bad.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

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just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

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I’m actually interested in this because I not sure I’m 100 % on board with just putting any content out there to build customers, but I’m curious to see if it works. I feel like it’s got to have some sort of connection with your potential audience. Now, I do think how to run the business. Then there’s also this other factor because it’s social media.

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This is where it tricky because I actually love to watch the videos of things being bottled in a manufacturing facility or how people screen print things or all the making of stuff. I love those types of videos online. I also love the watch me work type of behind the scenes, packing orders, mainly probably because we’re both in this business. I’m always curious to see how these things work.

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But I do think like some of these brands that have gotten really big doing these types of things, then you do spill over into your audience, right? Because you get to the point. So perfect example of this are, we keep talking about AJ and Big Justice, but I’m in bed the other night and it’s like probably 11, 1130 and my two, you know, young adult boys are in the kitchen making some sort of snack, right? And I hear them like get food out of the microwave and then I hear one of them go.

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I’m bringing the boom. They’re not on social media a ton. They’re on it, but they’re not huge consumers of social media. I’m in bed and I yell from my bed, do you know AJ and Big Justice? They yell back, we love the Rizzler.

23:03
But like, I just think about like, you they started out as the Costco guys, right? And like talking about stuff in Costco. They have transcended, like everybody knows about them, right? So I think you get to a point on social media and this is what makes social media so cool, right? You get to the point where you’ve transcended all age demographics, all the traditional like buckets, right? Like anybody who’s on social media, I feel like has now heard of them.

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in some capacity, right? Because they’ve gone on TV, they’ve gone to sporting events. So I think social media can do that for your brand, right? It can get you to the point where you transcend all demographics and it doesn’t matter what you started talking about. You have a big enough following to drive business. It’s not easy to get there. I I was thinking about this in the context of AI search, right? Yeah. Like if you do a search for Bumblebee linens or whatever, like my name kind of comes up with it.

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depending on how you phrase the thing. So if you have a big platform or social media presence, I think that’s gonna make it much more likely for you to actually show up. whatever, mean, AI search is still new, so however it’s gonna be, but it’s gonna be based on what’s already out there. And how much do you think it matters, because I was thinking about this today too, how much do you think it matters if like, not only are you out there on social media, but maybe you go on a podcast to talk specifically about Bumblebee?

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or you go as a guest on someone else’s YouTube to talk about specifically Bumblebee, your name in relation to Bumblebee? I don’t know the answer to that question with podcasts. But you know what I’m saying? So I’m building my own website, just my personal website. And I was trying to think of all the things where I’ve spoken and podcasts I’ve been on and things like that. And I, of course, have not kept a great record of this. So I just Googled myself.

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to see what came up. like podcasts came up, speaking stuff came up, like all of that came up in the, I think I Googled my name with like e-commerce. And so I wonder how much that will play in, right? If you’re out there sort of like on all the multi-channels, right? Not just doing social media, but doing podcasts or YouTube, things like that. Well, here’s a presentation I’m going to give to profitable audience, probably in a week or so.

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But I made one little change to my blog that links all my press mentions and everything. And my traffic doubled in one day. That’s crazy. And it’s still been on a steady climb because now Google knows that I’m associated with the content. It didn’t make that correlation before. Yeah. So I think it’s very important, especially in this age of AI just spitting out spam, like people putting up sites and whatnot. Right. like the emphasis is going to be on who the actual author is.

25:48
Yeah. And the more that you’re out there, the more presence you’ll have, I’m sure, on AI search going forward as well. Yeah, that was sort of my initial hypothesis on this. Obviously, we don’t really have anything to, except for your traffic doubling. mean, obviously, that’s a nice… It’s funny. It happened because I made the change and I’m like, things don’t usually happen this fast. So I emailed Jeff. was like, were there any Google updates or anything that happened? He’s like, oh, no, no, it’s been stable for a while. Yeah.

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I was like, I’ll show you my change. Do you actually think that this is what did it? He looked at it he was like, huh, yes, I think this is what did it because all of a sudden my knowledge panel on Google shows all these things. It couldn’t have been just a coincidence, right? No, think, It makes sense, right? This is good and bad news for people, I think, overall because

26:43
I know a profitable audience, especially when we do webinars where we’re talking to a lot of people who aren’t in the course and maybe are thinking about starting to build content either around a brand they already have or starting a new brand. The question we always get asked is, can I do this anonymously? Right? Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons why people love Amazon, because you can do things basically anonymously on Amazon.

27:08
You can sell whatever you want under whatever brand name. No one will ever have to know you’re associated with it really. mean people can dive deep and find you, but that’s not, you know, it’s not the same. But I really think, it’s funny, I feel like we’re almost coming full circle because like when I was building my blog back in 2008, it was all about getting yourself out there, right? What events was I at? What magazine would I submit a paragraph to? What blogs were I commenting on? Who was I associating with, right?

27:38
in the blog space. then know, then I mean, SEO was still taking over at that point, but like, know, everyone, most people became very SEO focused. It became just like very much this process based, you know, content creation. You didn’t have to go to anything. You didn’t have to put yourself out there. And now it’s sort of flipped back to where I think putting yourself out there is actually very helpful. Here’s the struggle. And we’ve seen this happen to members of our class. Like we get them hyped about

28:08
making short form and then they post their first thing and it gets like five views. Right? Yes. And, and what I found at least with social media on Tik Tok is that, uh, you know, you could post like 20 things, but eventually you’ll get one thing that gets, let’s say a few thousand views. And then that means like, if all the rest of your videos are getting like a hundred or less, and all of sudden you get like a 2000 view video or a 4,000 view video, that means you’re onto something there. Yeah.

28:37
and you should examine what you did in that video and just make more of it. Yeah. And that’s how you get better. You can’t ex I would go in expecting nothing in the beginning. And the same has been true with my YouTube channel, right? Like I pretty much know what’s going to do well now. And whenever something doesn’t do well, I kind of go in knowing that it’s not going to do well because it’s content that I actually want to create. Yes. And not what I Yeah. Yeah. It’s the struggle that I have an internal struggle. So

29:07
Well, and I actually remember we talked about this a couple of weeks ago in office hours when I was referencing our friend Andy, who was, you know, he’s in the growth stage of his YouTube channel. I think he’s over 30,000 subscribers right now. But he said one of his biggest learning takeaways from the past couple of years was he’s got to make content that the algorithm likes. Right. And, know, he he’s very into like charitable causes. But, you know, the more every time he makes a video on it, it flops in.

29:36
I’ve watched a lot of his stuff and his charitable videos aren’t better or worse than some of his videos about paying off your mortgage early, right? They’re the same, just the algorithm is telling him people want more content about paying off your mortgage. It’s actually taken me probably three years to figure out how to phrase teaching content into something that the masses will actually want.

30:02
It is probably the hardest thing that I, and I still make mistakes, but it’s like the hardest thing to do. Yeah. Well, here’s the thing too. I was working on my site this morning, so I was having all sorts of marketing thoughts because this is basically a newer endeavor. I was thinking, when I’m on YouTube, I watch a lot of big creators, right? I try to watch a lot of different things just because

30:29
We teach YouTube, so I want to feel like I understand what many verticals are doing, not just the ones that I actually want. I don’t want to just watch NBA highlights on YouTube. But there are a lot of people out there creating really good content on YouTube that’s teaching because I’m thinking about for our introverts, right? People who are like, I know Logan Paul. Which one’s fighting Mike Tyson this weekend or soon? Is that Logan or Jake Paul? I don’t know the difference between the two. Yeah, I always get a mix up too. Anyway.

30:57
Not everybody’s a Paul brother, right? There are a lot of introverted person people. I think about our friend Rob Berger. We talk about him a lot, like just turning the camera on, making the financial videos. But there are a lot of people out there that I follow or that I watch their content that are doing like purely teaching videos. Like here’s how you do this segmentation in Klaviyo or here’s how you do something in Shopify or here’s an idea for XYZ, right? Purely content. They have maybe 5,000 subscribers, right? So they’re not huge channels.

31:27
But yet you can tell from the views on the videos and the interaction on those videos that that’s driving their business, right? Because they usually have a service-based business or something on top of that. Maybe they sell a Shopify plugin, whatever. It doesn’t really matter. I think you can build content and put yourself out there in a very niche capacity where, like obviously we talk about wanting to get thousands and hundreds of thousands of views on pieces of content. And I think that’s obviously that’s great. And who doesn’t love that?

31:56
all of us, right? But I think you can create something that’s lucrative and that will support you as a full-time job if you find the right audience and you get into that niche and you’re driving it to a very specific product or service. I mean, there’s tons of people on YouTube like that. There’s this one guy I follow who teaches Facebook ads, and he’s got a tiny channel. It’s like 4,000. But I bet he gets almost all of his clients through that channel.

32:26
It’s niche, but the people who watch his videos. Yeah. Yeah. So you can go niche or go broad. Like I was always taught, because I had a YouTube consultant for a while and I’m a member of a bunch of mastermind groups. I was taught that going broad and funneling down will almost always yield you more customers than the niche method overall in the grand scheme of things. you can make a living off of just the ads also.

32:55
So I’ve tried to adopt that philosophy. Which I don’t think either one is right or wrong. I think you can do both. But for people who are like, don’t want to fight Mike Tyson, it is possible to do this in a very niche capacity and not feel like you’re going to be… I mean, we were joking right before we started recording that you have a video up right now on YouTube about the tariffs. And I was reading through some of the comments and…

33:23
Like I know stuff pretty much rolls off your back and like you don’t get offended by a lot of things. But you know, I think someone who maybe just put that video up because they were really into like tariffs and they hadn’t made a lot of YouTube videos, if they would be receiving some of it, you know, there was a lot of like, this is far too simplistic. You don’t know what you’re talking about. know, like stuff like we’re like, OK, whatever, dude. But, you know, I think people can get their feelings hurt, right, about stuff. so I think for people who are like, I just don’t want to like

33:51
be susceptible to that sort of thing. You don’t have to be. You can do this in a niche capacity or you can go broad or like as our friend Christina, she’s starting her pet social media for her pet product and she had a video basically go viral and she’s like, wait, no, I don’t want this, right? So anyway, I think…

34:14
But you have to put yourself out there. That’s the hard part for a lot of people. I actually don’t, aside from like all the strategies that we talk about all the time of like how to get over it, I really don’t know how people can get over it other than just doing it. Right? Like there’s not like a magic potion to all of a sudden wanting to be on video or make content like that. I mean, I’m thinking about all my priorities right now for getting top of funnel business to Bumblebee. And, you know, once upon a time that was search.

34:44
I think today it has to be social media. Yeah, which is like, can’t believe you’re saying that. I don’t want it to be that. I really don’t want it to be that. I mean, what else is there right now? And it’s ads. Yeah. Google ads are so powerful. I mean, like five years ago, we would be laughing at ourselves for recording this podcast. And, know, I talk about blogging and it’s still probably it still probably has like, you know, three, four years left. But I.

35:14
I mean, the writing’s on the wall. I think for the traditional way that Google is doing search and ads. And especially like the underhanded things that they’re doing too, which is the topic of one of my YouTube videos too. That should do well. The dark side of Google. You know how I’ve kind of hated and avoided social media, and I’m still avoiding it. I’m fighting it. But I’m just trying to think, like, how are you going to get more business?

35:43
I do think that just the old-fashioned word of mouth, obviously social media is very powerful for word of mouth. Just the stuff that you were talking about and let’s try this restaurant, let’s do this. I’ve gone to cities before because I saw them on social media. Oh, yes, I’ve gone to places in Europe because I was like, we got to go to this, the place is cool, let’s stop.

36:10
So I think that the amount of power in that is crazy, right? It’s at a level that I don’t think our 2008 brains could have comprehended. But I also think the old fashioned, once you get a customer, so you’ve worked really hard to get the customer, whether it’s from social media, an ad, Google search, whatever it is, you want to make sure that they then become, you want your customers to be creating the social media content about you. Right.

36:38
which is probably a whole other podcast on customer experience. But I think that that’s the next step in this, right? You create the experience and then they create an experience for someone else with your products. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, actually. I was thinking about as part of the checkout process, asking for someone’s Instagram handle. And then I don’t know how intrusive, I’m almost positive Jen’s going to be absolutely against this. Probably.

37:05
But you know, tagging them in some way, thanking them or whatever, or like, hey, your your hankies turned out great or something like that. Yeah, because

37:16
Back to the analogy that we started with was whenever I reply to an email, people are like, oh my God, thank you so much for replying. I feel like people are starved for attention and comments on their social media platforms. I don’t get that many comments on my posts for Instagram because that’s not my thing, but when I do get one, I appreciate it. I think people will appreciate the attention. I think people will also appreciate the positive attention because so much of social media can be negative.

37:46
And so to just see positive interaction with them involved in it, I think is very powerful and leaves a really good impression about the brand. Or don’t even tag the person. Once you have their social media handle, just go on their account and make a comment on something. Yeah. It’s a lot of work. It is a lot of work, but you can start out doing it. But once you have the SOPs, you can have someone do it. Correct. Yes. There’s definitely parts of this that can be outsourced.

38:14
It’s not like you’re writing a novel, right? You’re just making a comment like, oh, cool. You your children are so cute. I want to eat them. No, but like I remember so I used to rent all my clothes from rent the runway. We talked about that a lot. But I remember like when I would post an outfit that I like really liked, right, that I was like maybe at a conference and whatever. And I had a dress on that I had rented. I would always post and tag them. And I would love it when they reshared it to their stories.

38:44
Not because I wanted, I didn’t want to gain followers. I was doing it because I genuinely thought the outfit was cute. But I remember just the feeling that I would get of them reposting it, it felt good. It just felt good inside for them to be like, hey, we appreciate you, we’re sharing this too. And obviously it’s brand building for them for sure. But I don’t know, there’s just something about it. Even for us who probably are very cynical about social media in general,

39:13
I know why they’re reposting this, I’m not dumb, but it still felt good. For the regular customer who doesn’t live in social media, who doesn’t do this as a business, I think the impact that that has is really powerful. The other thing that I think is really powerful and probably a whole other thing is a handwritten note in an order. What do you do, Sanaki? Yes. Has these handwriting machines, you literally put in a pen.

39:43
and it writes it in your handwriting. I think that works too, but I think that all those things are really impactful. In fact, just got a new phone this weekend, which I’m not like, as you and I know, I’m not like a huge technology person, but I needed a phone. I reluctantly got a new phone and I forgot that the Apple experience is all about the Apple experience.

40:13
I went online, picked my phone out, and then I had the choice of having it delivered or I could have it picked up. I could pick it up at the Apple Store like that day. So I was like, my mind will just go get it. I don’t want to wait till Tuesday or whatever because it was coming up on the weekend. was like, that way if there’s any problems when I try to transfer my phone over, which of course there will be, I have the weekend where I’m not missing important stuff. So I go to the Apple Store. Have you been to an Apple Store lately? I have, actually. OK.

40:39
I don’t ever, you know, I never go out. like I was like, what is this mall thing in a parking lot and all this stuff? Right. So I walk into the Apple Store and it is, I mean, the mall is actually decently busy because I think the holidays are coming up. like the Apple Store is packed. Always. Yeah. Always. And I’ve never not been in an Apple Store that’s packed. So I walk in and it’s packed and I was like, oh, like I’m immediately irritated that I didn’t have the ship to my house. Right. But then I quickly realized that the Apple Store staffs like Chick-fil-A.

41:08
So for every person in the store, there’s an Apple employee basically, every customer. And they’ve got their red shirts on, I think. so I just walk up to the nearest red shirt and I’m like, hi, I have an order pickup. And the girl’s like, is this a repair or a new purchase? And her friendly Apple voice. And I was like, new purchase. And so she points me to the guy next to her who’s also standing there. Because there’s far more employees than they need.

41:33
in the store and he whips out his little scanner thing and scans my barcode and then walks me to the back of the store where we wait excitedly for the new purchase, right? So I’m standing there and you know me, I’m like, I just wanna get the phone and get out of this mall. Like I’m literally having anxiety. And he’s like, are you just so excited about this new phone? But as the whole day, as a marketer, I’m like, I know what you’re doing, you know? And I was like.

41:59
I’m really like, no, dude, my other phone is broken. I just need a phone. And I was like, yeah. And he’s like, I hope you know about the amazing camera features on the iPhone 16.

42:11
And of course I’m like, of course I don’t know about the amazing camera features. I just got the phone that I like the color of, you know? And so he whips out, you know, the same phone that I bought, it’s not mine. And he’s like showing me as we’re waiting, like he’s like, and then there’s this and then there’s, so immediately, right? Like he’s warming me up to the product. Like in his mind, getting me very, very excited about all these new camera features that I’m gonna be getting. And then, you know, within three minutes, a guy from the back appears.

42:40
with the white box with the white bag that they open up, put the box in the bag in front of me, which I’m like, I’ll just take the box, dude. I don’t care. But once again, as a customer experience, 10 out of 10. And then, of course, when you open up an Apple product, their box is open slowly on purpose. There’s all these. It’s everything about that product is designed for the customer experience. And when you peel off the, everything about it is all, it’s an aesthetic.

43:09
And as I was going through that whole thing, I’m like, this is why Apple can sell less superior products for more money and have the most crazy loyal following in the world. They’re at the Chick-fil-A level of loyalty. And it’s like, your products aren’t even that great all the time. But yet you’ve created this whole experience that everyone’s bought into and it works.

43:37
And then iPhone users shame other people into using iPhones and like, you know, there’s whole subculture, right? And so when you can get to that level as a business, I think you’ve done something right without marketing, right? That word of mouth. It’s like, people aren’t buying Apple phones because they have good commercials. They do, but like they’re buying them because they’ve been shamed in the group text for three years and now they’re like, they don’t want to be the green bubble. So, you know, it’s just fascinating, but.

44:05
If the big companies know it works, then the little companies need to start doing it too. If you’re going into this thinking to yourself, I don’t want to talk to anyone ever. Do any customer service or I don’t want to show my face. I think you’re to have to going forward.

44:28
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Word of mouth is still one of the biggest drivers of my business, especially when it comes to wedding and event planners. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 569. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event.

44:59
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, QuitHerJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, I’m going to talk about how both Amazon buyers and sellers are getting squeezed, which is resulting in much higher prices and worse service across the board. I break down exactly what’s going on and what you can do about it. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit,

00:28
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:57
I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:26
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:40
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. In this episode, I’m going to break down exactly what’s going on with Amazon right now and show you real world examples of how Amazon is causing price inflation on everyday items. I’ll also give you my take as a seven figure e-commerce seller on the long-term implications of these practices. By the end, you’ll be armed with the knowledge to navigate these murky waters and still make a profit. Now, first off, let’s start off with some numbers from Amazon’s last income report. In Q2 of this year,

02:09
Amazon’s net sales increased to $148 billion globally. And that’s up 10 % from 134 billion in the prior year. Meanwhile, its operating income increased to 14.7 billion, up from 7.7 billion. So basically, Amazon’s profits doubled year over year. But if you were to ask any veteran Amazon FBA seller if their profits doubled from the last year, the answer would likely be hell no.

02:37
So where are all of Amazon’s profits coming from? Well, if you look closely at the numbers, you’ll notice that Amazon’s online store revenue only increased by 4.6 % from 53 billion to 55 billion, which indicates that Amazon’s e-commerce sales are stagnant. They’re not really growing anymore. So how the heck are they so profitable? And where is the money coming from? Well, the answer is from you, the consumer. Even though e-commerce sales only went up by 4.6 %

03:07
the fees that Amazon charges for services like Fulfilled by Amazon increased by 12%. These are the fees that Amazon makes sellers pay when they use Amazon’s warehouses and shipping for their products. And this year alone, Amazon introduced several new fees, making it even more expensive for sellers to use FBA. Now to give you an idea of the new fees, Amazon is now charging an inbound placement fee just for receiving your goods into their warehouses. Amazon also introduced a low inventory fee

03:37
where sellers are penalized for keeping too little inventory in stock. And this is in addition to a penalty fee if you have too much inventory in stock. So basically sellers have to play a balancing game to ensure that their inventory levels stay within the sweet spot or else they have to pay more money. There’s also a new Amazon returns fee to handle returns as well. So overall Amazon sellers are paying over 30 % more in fees since 2021 and on average

04:04
Amazon FBA fees take a 61 % cut of sellers’ revenues today. But it doesn’t stop there. If you look closely at Amazon’s income report, you’ll also notice that other segments like Amazon advertising revenue increased by 19.5%. Amazon advertising is where sellers pay money to gain more visibility in the Amazon search results. And without advertising, your products basically don’t get shown. All these fee increases are brand new, and for the first half of the year,

04:34
Most sellers absorb the cost as it took time for the impact to really hit. However, if you’ve noticed sharp price increases recently, it’s because sellers have finally realized that they need to raise prices to avoid losing money. So basically, Amazon is forcing FBA sellers to pay more to use their platform. And in the end, it’s Amazon that benefits. But guess who’s actually covering the costs? You are, as the consumer. By the way, if you’re interested in learning how to sell online without relying on Amazon,

05:03
then sign up for my free six day e-commerce mini course below. It’s a hundred percent free and I guarantee that you’ll learn a ton. Now let’s shift gears and talk about the recent Amazon Prime membership changes as a buyer. Currently Amazon Prime costs $14.99 a month or $180 per year. And for that price, you get benefits like free two day shipping on millions of items across the U.S. and a generous return policy that promises hassle free returns and full refunds on most items you purchase.

05:32
Well, all that has changed this year as well. First off, if you live outside of a city or a large metropolitan area, you’re likely not getting the promised two-day free shipping, and this applies to far more locations than you might expect. Amazon’s delivery speed has greatly degraded over the years, and I myself consistently get late packages, especially over the holidays. Recently, Amazon also changed their return policy. In the good old days, Amazon used to refund you your money right away,

06:00
but now your refund may take up to 30 days to be refunded. And this delay has frustrated many loyal customers. But it’s the second change that’s really pissing off Amazon shoppers. If Amazon makes a mistake, like missing items in your package or saying the wrong or defective product, in the good old days, all you had to do was click a button in the app and Amazon will refund you right away. But now Amazon makes you send in a document reporting that something was missing and then they perform an investigation.

06:29
Then depending on what they decide, you may either get a full refund, a partial refund, or no refund at all. So basically Amazon’s return policy just got a lot worse. And Amazon can arbitrarily decide that they were not at fault and make you eat the cost of your order. So overall, Amazon Prime is declining in quality and they’re thinking about raising the price again. So let me ask you this, how the hell can Amazon get away with squeezing sellers and offering poor quality service

06:58
and still make a ton of money? Or a monopoly? Last year in September, the FTC accused Amazon of illegally maintaining monopoly power by engaging in exclusionary practices that stifle competition, inflate prices and harm both consumers and third-party sellers. Now Amazon has tried for months to get this case tossed out in court, but as of last week, on October 7th, a federal judge said the FTC can proceed with its landmark antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.

07:28
This order, issued last week by Judge John Chun, is a major defeat for Amazon, and thanks to this ruling, more information has leaked about the case. Turns out that Amazon is purposely using exploitative practices that degrade the user experience, raise prices across the internet, and crush the competition, all ultimately geared towards making Amazon the only game in town. No surprise there, but one thing that I haven’t really mentioned so far is that there are a ton of Chinese sellers on Amazon.

07:57
In fact, the top 50 % of Amazon sellers are in China. And there’s been a 25 % year over year increase in Chinese sellers making over a million bucks per year. And there’s been a 20 % increase in the quantity of Chinese goods. And these sellers are cutthroat. Because they’re overseas, they can get away with a lot of practices that are against Amazon’s terms of service, like incentivizing reviews and the outright copying of other people’s products. And if they get caught for cheating, five more sellers pop up.

08:26
There’s even a term that describes these sellers called alphabet soup because they trademark random strings of letters and sell the same products under multiple listings as a means of cornering the market. So basically you’ll have a hundred of these brands from the same company filling up the search results with the exact same junk and pushing everyone else out. Now Amazon clearly has the resources to clean up its act and thanks to the FTC, they’ve miraculously started enforcing some of these policies recently for Chinese sellers.

08:55
But why did Amazon wait so long to do anything? It’s because having bad players on their marketplace actually helps Amazon to get what they want. Amazon benefits from this kind of chaos and cutthroat activity because it puts real, legitimate businesses on the defensive. Amazon doesn’t care who’s making the sales, whether it be a legit seller or a Chinese one, because they make money no matter what. And having an unlimited quantity of Chinese sellers on their marketplace allows Amazon to squeeze and bully sellers on its site.

09:25
If you decide to leave Amazon, no big deal. Someone will always be there to take your place. Now, if you look at the lawsuit closely, the FTC’s core argument is about the control that Amazon has over sellers. Because Amazon owns over 50 % of e-commerce in the US, people who want to sell things on the internet don’t have much choice other than to use Amazon. Over 200 million Americans are Amazon Prime members, and that’s 70 % of US households. Prime members get great deals from Amazon.

09:54
especially fast and free shipping, so why would they want to shop anywhere else? Third party Amazon FBA sellers rely on two things, the buy box and the prime badge, which Amazon dangles over their heads. If you, as a seller, have the buy box, you can generate sales. But there’s a catch. If you’re selling a product anywhere on the internet for a lower price, they remove the buy box and make it nearly impossible for users to purchase your item. Amazon has bots that crawl the internet for your brand

10:23
So this rule is hard to get around. And because most sellers depend on Amazon for 80 to 90 % of their sales, they can’t risk Amazon finding out. And so what they end up doing is inflating their prices across the web so that they match the same price that they have on Amazon and don’t run into this retaliation. This means that you as the consumer are paying inflated prices everywhere, no matter where you shop online. This practice creates the illusion that Amazon has the lowest prices around and it often does, but

10:53
only by force. The FTC is accusing Amazon of artificially inflating its competitors’ to maintain its monopoly power. Think about it this way. In a fair economy, if you had a company jack up prices and provide worse service, it just wouldn’t survive. But Amazon’s power is preventing that from happening. Amazon sellers are forced to use Amazon FBA because most Amazon shoppers only shop the prime listings. Of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon, 90 % use FBA.

11:23
And if you don’t use FBA, you’re sacrificing sales and at the same time, using FBA allows Amazon to hold your inventory hostage. Many sellers keep large amounts of their inventory in Amazon’s warehouses and tailor their business around Amazon’s sales, which makes the prospect of selling on other platforms less attractive. And then finally, we have Amazon’s own private label brands. The FTC alleges that Amazon biases search results in favor of its own products, even when it knows third-party sellers are offering higher quality items.

11:54
Take this listing here from my friend. Amazon blatantly advertises their own copy private label product at 33 % off right on our listing. So how can she possibly compete? It’s all a race to the bottom. What we see on Amazon now is a whole bunch of cheap junk that lacks quality and random sellers with crappy customer service. Amazon isn’t really looking out for you. It’s just looking out for Amazon. Now that the HTC lawsuit is moving forward, if Amazon is found guilty,

12:23
It could face a fine of nearly $44 billion and possibly a breakup of Amazon into smaller companies. But in its current state, the company is powerful enough to bend sellers to its will and jack up prices for consumers. So what do you think? Is Amazon a monopoly or what? Now that you understand what’s going on with Amazon, watch this video here if you want to learn about Amazon’s recent changes to fight Tmoo.

12:50
Hope you enjoyed this episode. I still believe that you can make selling on Amazon work, but you now have to know what you are doing. Selling under your brand is pretty much par for the course. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 568. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event.

13:20
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitherJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, Tony and I are going to discuss why you need to have a side hustle today and what your best options are. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online.

00:28
Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate.

00:57
Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to SellersSummit.com and grab your ticket.

01:26
Now onto the show.

01:34
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about side hustles. And the reason why I think this episode is so important is because in this economy and in this generation, I really think that you need a side hustle in order to achieve financial freedom and actually make some money and save some money. So you know what’s funny is I think you put out a YouTube video about

02:01
a topic similar to this, basically about using a side hustle to help fund, you know, retirement type thing. And I had to laugh because as I was like looking, you know, just kind of glancing at it, I thought, well, my side hustle is my full time job. Well, no, goal is do I need another side hustle? That was my first it to become your full time job, obviously. So, yes. But yeah, I thought, oh, I turned all my side hustles into full time jobs.

02:31
So now I need to find the next one. I must admit, I’m a little paranoid about what’s going to happen in this world just because AI and robots and all that stuff is creeping in. And really, it’s right around the corner. Yeah. So when I was in, I think when I was in Europe, you know, there was someone on Zoom running the cash register. What? Yeah, instead of a real person. And yeah, right. then OK.

03:00
The place next door had a Zoom greeter and guess where they were all from? The Philippines. Yes, they’re so friendly. That was the first wave. Then I just did a little research on this for my YouTube video. There’s actually places in New York doing this already. Similar to this, I do not remember what airport I was in and you know me, it could have been any airport.

03:24
But was one of the larger, it was either international or one of the big international airports in the US where there was an Amazon store. Have you seen these? And you literally just walk out with your stuff? Yeah, that was all fake. What do mean was all fake? There was one right by us. It was all fake. Actually, it was run by 1,000 Indian people. It was all a hoax in the end. It was semi-automated. But yeah, you walk out with the stuff and yeah.

03:53
You don’t even check out anymore. It just scans your stuff when you leave. Right. So Amazon led everyone to believe that it was automated. But in fact, there was a thousand people from India actually with cameras. cameras? Yeah. Well, I just OK. So well, thanks for ruining that little moment that I had. Well, what I thought was so interesting about it was that like they’ve removed people from. So you probably good or bad, you probably can.

04:22
pay 1,000 people in India to do what you’re paying the people in a big metropolitan area to work cash register in a big metropolitan airport. The cost is probably the same. You have no theft because you’re literally 1,000 cameras watching you walk out with your diet soda and your bag of Pringles for the flight. I don’t know what your airport is like because I haven’t been to Orlando in a while, but they have

04:50
these robotic coffee makers now. There’s literally no one behind the thing. You just swipe your credit card and the robot makes the coffee for you. Yeah, I don’t know if they have them in Orlando, but I have seen those at other airports. And then there’s literally unmanned snack bars now. You go and you grab what you want and you check out. There’s no human around at all. I’ve seen we have those. So this has always bothered me. OK, like just to do a little side note before we talk about side hustles.

05:20
Like I have do you remember like 30 years ago there was like this restaurant chain that opened where it was like you grilled your own steak at your table? Like you picked out your cut of meat. Oh, they still have those. That’s like every Korean restaurant in California. Right. Oh, that’s why I hate those places because I’m like I’m like so this costs the same amount as if I were to go to Fleming’s and buy a steak that they cooked correctly for me or you’re going to make me

05:45
Hold meat up, like if I’m eating here, I don’t wanna touch the food until it’s presented on a plate. Just like I don’t wanna do self-checkout. I don’t get a discount for self-checkout. I don’t get to go through self-checkout and save 5 % for the cost of the cashier that I don’t use, right? I’m still paying the exact same amount of money. Like all that stuff to me, I understand it. I understand the automation. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, but like if I have a choice,

06:14
and I’m not saving any money, I’m not bagging my own stuff. Like you’re gonna, like absolutely, it’s like when you get to a hotel, right, you can choose to have them valet your car or you can park your own car and walk a mile. I’ll walk a mile to save that $30, right? But like if I don’t get to save any money, then like what’s the point? Anyway, that’s my rant for the day. Okay, so the other thing that’s going on also is like there are these robots that can be controlled remotely and.

06:40
People, stores in Japan have been doing this for a while. It’s literally some guy with his like VR setup, manipulating a robot and stocking shelves and stuff. Okay. Yet, and I don’t, we never get political, but yet why do our voting machines look like they were invented by Thomas Edison and never updated? Like why do we have robots doing stuff, but yet we can’t like get voting machines to work properly. Like that was one thing that absolutely blows my mind. Like let’s put technology to good use.

07:11
Yeah. So bottom line, think we’re going to, I mean, when AI comes, I think there’s just going be a lot of unemployment. so previously I used to feel that, you know, if you were in a job that required, you know, manual labor that you wouldn’t get replaced, but I think everything’s on the table now. Here in the Silicon Valley, graduates in computer science majors are having lots of problems finding jobs because AI can write code now.

07:41
So computer science actually is not a desirable major. There’s tons of people unemployed here in Silicon Valley, whereas in the past, it wasn’t like that. I agree with you. I don’t necessarily think the construction type jobs, yes, I mean, there will be more machinery and things that improve what can be done, but I think at the end of the day, a lot of those jobs are not gonna get phased out. I wasn’t thinking construction. I was just thinking just your everyday retail worker.

08:09
Yes, everyday retail worker. Do you remember when McDonald’s went to the ordering where you went to the kiosk and you punched in your order and removed the need for cashiers? First of all, good. I’ve never met a nice McDonald’s cashier. I’ve never met a McDonald’s cashier that I thought was actually punching in my order correctly. I also think there’s a reason why everyone goes to Chick-fil-A.

08:37
Right? Because they’ve got the two people in the brightly colored vest standing outside asking your name, giving you a high five, you know, making you feel like an amazing person. And like I just I think that, yes, technology is going to continue to and AI is going to continue to replace jobs. But people crave that like interaction. That’s why Chick-fil-A blows everybody else out of the water. That’s why their line literally they have to do city.

09:02
city planning when they put a Chick-fil-A in because of the amount of traffic it backs up. Do the roads have the ability to have a Chick-fil-A? There’s a reason for that because when people go to Chick-fil-A, they feel good about themselves. I don’t think you can get that from the kiosk at McDonald’s. Where I live, there’s all these promo tea places, boba tea places where the line’s out the door. There literally is no one manning it. No, I think it works for sure.

09:31
Yeah. And one time the guy was right there and I had a question. He just ignored me. Cause he was busy preparing orders. And I think efficiency matters. So you can actually have like six iPads out taking orders as opposed to six people. Uh, I, I personally would actually prefer efficiency. Like I’d rather just order on my phone. You can order on your phone and scan and then pick it up. But there’s still that lovely smiling.

10:00
teenager comes to your car with your chicken nuggets. And Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out actually hire really good people too. Yes. So same thing with there’s there’s several restaurants that on the culvers is like there’s like several places. In fact, sometimes we’ll go to like if we’re traveling and we’ll drive through a place that we maybe aren’t familiar with, like in our area, we’re always like, oh, do they like take the Chick-fil-A training manual or are they on the Burger King training manual? Right. Like which one are they on? Anyway, all that to say, I do think the jobs

10:30
jobs market is going to radically change over the next 10 No job is safe. Blue collar, white collar, nothing is safe. I’ve been a huge proponent of just, what’s the right word? Mitigate your risk. Therapy. Because more people are going to need it. No, there’s AI therapists. Yes, that’s a joke.

10:58
But yeah, anyway, you’re right. Everything’s gonna change. And so I think that’s one of the reasons why finding your side hustle becomes really critical as time goes on. Yeah. And I know you’ve been helping your daughter-in-law, is it? Mm-hmm, yeah. With certain things. So I’m curious, I’ve been doing this with my daughter, but she’s still in high school. I’m just curious what you’ve come up with.

11:27
Yeah, so my daughter-in-law, has a regular job working as a procurement officer for hospital. So she has her nine to five. But before she did that, she had several, she did the typical, she worked at Chick-fil-A actually. She ended up becoming an assistant manager at Chick-fil-A. She worked at a massage therapy place as the sales rep booking agent.

11:52
She’s had a lot of different type of jobs, but then she went and got her dog grooming license and she loves, she’s like an animal person, right? So she’s the type of person that you want. She’s not doing this for the money. She does it because she absolutely loves in a way that I cannot comprehend. So when she got this job at the hospital, which was a nice pay raise for her as well as benefits and things like that, which are really important. They have a family.

12:17
She didn’t want to give up the dog grooming and she realized that the dog grooming was like their path to owning a home. Right? So, you know, they want to buy a house and obviously the housing, it’s not a great time to buy a house if you, if you don’t have like a large income, I would say. Right. Yeah. So this is a way for them to build a down payment, right? With continuing on the dog grooming on the weekends. So, um,

12:40
She did work as a groomer for a while, so she had some clients that she could take with her basically when she moved it from full-time to a side hustle. She’s basically grown her business fully on word of mouth, which I think is honestly one of the best ways to grow a business that’s in the service space.

13:03
Because think about it, how many times have you gone on Facebook and seen someone post like, hey, I need my driveway re-poured, right? Like I’ve cracked my driveway. Or hey, I need a good sprinkler company. hey, who has a good babysitter, right? All these, most people would much rather know that their friends are using somebody versus even reviews, right? Reviews are very effective.

13:29
But if I tell you, you’ve got to try this new restaurant. We went there. We absolutely loved it. The staff’s amazing. Get this dish. That means more than a Yelp review to somebody who knows me. I think if you’re thinking about starting a side hustle, especially in the service space, getting that word of mouth out. And then she’s built her entire business on Instagram. Really? OK, I can see that.

13:56
which normally we say like, you got to have a website, you got to have a home base. And I still fundamentally believe that. But I know my daughter-in-law, she’s not like, she understands technology, but she’s not what I would call like, she’s not one of these like my 18 and 20 year olds who are like super tech, can do everything, know how to edit video. They’re all like, that’s their life, right? She’s like your standard edge of millennial. I know how to post on Instagram.

14:25
And I’m like, great, then let’s use Instagram. And she’s basically used Instagram. She created an account for the group. She has her personal account where she posts pictures of their daughter and things like that. But then she has an account that’s completely dedicated to she does dog sitting and dog grooming. So she has an account that’s completely dedicated to that. And she basically posts pictures before and after of all the dog grooms. And the way to get in touch with her is to DM her.

14:55
So she can manage everything through a DM on Instagram. And here’s the thing that I think why this works on any social platform, but I Instagram especially is that one, you can do local searches on Instagram. people can find her and based on her location. So it’s like if you’re in the central Florida area, her stuff could appear in your feed. The other thing is like when she grooms my dogs,

15:21
then I share that on Instagram. So everybody that knows me now sees her as a… So I oftentimes when I share stuff that she’s done, I will have local friends message me like, oh, I need a dog groomer. Where do I contact her? So I really think that Instagram is super effective. And it’s interesting because she contacted me earlier this week and said, hey, she’s doing like an expo basically. She got invited to like have a table.

15:51
And she’s like, most people sell products at these, like it’s craft fair kind of thing. And I said, well, most people have pets, right? Like, mean, like huge majority people have pets and most people want, and she’s like grooms in her home. So it’s like, you’re not dropping your dog off at this like kennel and you know, it’s definitely like a personalized experience. And I said, you need to just make a, like basically flyer with your services and where people can contact you.

16:18
And honestly, I think once people talk to her, like she’ll sell herself. Right. So we’re doing a flyer with basically this, like basically one flyer that says why you should have your dog groomed. So basically giving people if they’re not in the like, because like I had a lab for a long time and I never took him to the groomer. I’m like, he’s fine. We give him a bath. But there are reasons to get your dog professionally groomed. It’s good for your dog. Right. And now I have two dogs that are like super high maintenance coats. Right. So they have to get groomed once a month.

16:47
And so just educating people on like, hey, here’s why this is a good experience for your pet. And then on the of that, a flyer where it shows her services. said, because people always want to know like what you offer and can they just go and get their dog’s toenails clipped or can they just go or do you do full service or like, how does all that work? I was like, let’s get it all so people can walk by your table and just get all the information at once and then talk to you about specifics. And at first I was like, maybe I should throw up a webpage for her.

17:17
Like, because I have all this free time this week. then I was like, no, she’s successfully done this with Instagram. Let’s like DM her. Let’s do is she using Instagram lists? She isn’t yet. Yes, we’re still we’re still in the new. OK. And I also didn’t want to go like she texted me and I immediately sent her back like a 42 page marketing plan. And I was like, OK, I need to like calm down.

17:40
Because she is a mom, she does work full time and she only has the ability to groom so many dogs on the weekends, right? Like it’s not like she can take a hundred dogs. But just seeing like how that one, you know, just one strategy, right? Getting on Instagram, posting your befores and afters. Like if you do, I have a friend that does like custom finishes. So like if you want like a faux wall, right? It looks like it’s a certain.

18:08
You know, he literally posts before and after pictures on Instagram, gets all of his business from Instagram and word of mouth referrals. People just need to see what you’re doing and know that you’re out there and have an easy way to communicate with you. And what easier way to communicate with people than a DM on Instagram, right? Like so non-threatening, so not a sales call. So I actually think that this is a pretty good strategy, especially if you’re just getting started and…

18:35
you don’t want to have all the technology hurdles of setting up a website. It’s just very complicated. And I think people that could do something don’t because they get stuck in the weeds on these sorts of things. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out.

19:04
It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

19:29
Actually walk me through how she got started. So she probably just had some initial clients that were friends and then she just started posting the photos on Instagram. And then her friends would share those posts of their dogs and that’s how it all started, right? Yeah, so she would groom a dog and she would post like, so excited to see little, you know, she groomed Penny, my dog this weekend. So she’s like, so excited to see Penny. She let me put bows in her hair at this time, which by the way, all my whole family is like, why did you let her put bows in her hair? I was like, she looks cute, leave it alone.

19:57
So then I haven’t had a chance to share it yet, but I will share this post. And then I am 100 % positive because every time I share it happens, someone will message me and go, oh, who’s your dog groomer? And then I’ll say, hey, here’s her Instagram. And obviously she’s tagged in the share as well. lots of people, since people love sharing their pets, this is great for anything where people like to show off. So yards, right? You get landscaping done.

20:22
something in your house, right? Anything like that. People love to show pictures of their remodeled bathroom, things like that. So anything in the service-based industry, I think is very effective to use this with because you get the shares without asking for them, right? And then she, so she started that way and then basically once she got a client, which I think this is just a genius marketing thing, is she put people on a monthly plan, right? Because I mean, in theory,

20:50
pets need to be groomed monthly, right? Or six weeks. So now she has a monthly plan or I don’t know what the frequency is. Since she’s related to me, I just call her and be like, can you pick up the dog? She looks really mangy. But then you get people who like they’re paying per month who are getting their pets. So now you have guaranteed income, right? Or at least more consistent income. My brother who has a ranch, they do trail rides, put people on a monthly ride program. So people who love to ride horses.

21:20
they can ride on this monthly plan for a discounted price because what they do is if you’re on the monthly ride plan, when they have a ride and they don’t have all the horses booked, they’re like, hey, you can come Tuesday or Wednesday at 4 p.m. and get your ride, right? So they’re basically getting a, like a substantial discount, right? But in reality, like if they didn’t fill that, it would be $0, right? So.

21:48
Getting people on that recurring revenue, if you have anything that you can do with recurring revenue, is the next level for doing that side hustle. I just thought of an idea that I can use for Bumblebee. OK, what is chatting A recurring crying plan? No, no, no. It’s about asking people for their Instagram handle at checkout. And then photographing the products that they’ve personalized for themselves and just tagging them. Yes. I think I would need to ask for permission, though, right?

22:18
Would I need to? I don’t think if you tag them, because the people that don’t allow tagging, I’ll just won’t let you tag them. Yeah. And then there’s nothing really super personal about these personalized things anyway. But people like to get tagged and maybe they’ll share it. Yes. OK, so I am going to try that because social has always been a struggle for me because I don’t want to do the work for social. But this probably will work with TikTok, too. I don’t think I’ve.

22:47
seen very many stores ask for people’s Instagram handles. Have you ever checked out? I’ve seen it very, very rarely. So I would say probably once or twice. But it’s really easy to do. Yeah. And here’s the thing. I think you can do the same exact thing with a Facebook page. Right. So once again, remove all the technology hurdles. Right. So if you have a service or a product that, you know,

23:16
you want to get out there, you can do the exact same thing with Facebook. And I cannot tell you, the people that I feel like do this the best are dog, what are they, dog breeders, right? Like if you’ve ever been to like a dog breeder site, they all use the same exact template from the same company. It’s terrible. It doesn’t ever load correctly. But their Facebook pages are amazing, right? Because when they have a litter of puppies,

23:43
they post that or when the dogs get pregnant, right? And they’re like, well, we had miles Turner, you know, breed with Sophia, whatever, like, you know, they’ve got these fancy dogs and it’s like, you know, this is the size of the litter. This is what we’re expecting. And these, sell out the litters before they’re even like born, right? Because everyone’s sharing and tagging. Like I think that that part of the internet still works.

24:06
That hasn’t changed. The virality of sharing and tagging people. When you post a picture of a puppy, everybody comments, everybody tags. It’s just like… It doesn’t work with everything. Obviously, dogs and animals are really great use case for this. I’ve seen it all the time with home stuff, like renovations where it’s like…

24:30
everyone’s sharing it because they’re sending it to the other person in their family. It’s like, oh, can we do this with the fireplace? Oh, can we do this with the pantry? Oh, can we get this refrigerator? Right. Like, like there’s lots of different spaces that still work on that, tag and share. And you don’t even have to ask people to do it. They’re doing it because they want someone else to see it. Right. Yeah. No, that’s a, that’s a great strategy. And then Instagram list, which I mentioned earlier, now you can actually ask people to subscribe to you.

24:58
And then you’re allowed to send them one broadcast per day. So it’s kind of like a poor man’s email list. Yeah. I would say. Which I think if technology is your hurdle, like to get started, this is the perfect way to do it. And there’s going to come a time where you’re going to be too big or too busy, where you’re just going to pay someone to set everything else up for you. And that’s fine. Right. And then you move over. But while you’re just getting started in the hustle, why not remove all your barriers?

25:28
Yeah, and then once you get a little bit more advanced, you can actually start taking transactions directly on Instagram, where you list your products and then you check out directly on Instagram. And if you have a Shopify store, it automatically ties back to your store. I think we talked about this on one of the last podcasts. So my nephews worked for that plant nursery, the exotic plant nursery. They do all their transactions on Instagram. They literally post a picture of a rare plant and be like, we have 16 of these. And they’re sold out in five minutes.

25:58
So yeah, they still have a physical nursery that you can, I mean, they still do business other ways, but like great side hustle and augmentation to like, they basically doubled the business of this nursery just from doing that on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s powerful. Like I often get asked the question, Hey Steve, do I really need a website, Shopify store right away? And my answer almost always is yes, I think you should just get something up so you can collect emails and that sort of thing. But

26:26
You know, every now and then I do have someone who just like, I don’t even know how to go through the wizard in Shopify, right? But I do know social, like I have an Instagram account. So just doing what you described is completely viable. Setting up the store is a little bit more technical. Like arguably it’s easier just to get a Shopify store and link it to Instagram, I think, than it is to get that hooked up. But yeah, completely viable. Actually, I have several students in the class, they get,

26:54
all their business through Instagram. Yeah. the most part. Yeah. Which is, to me, that’s exciting, right? Because I feel like it’s still not too late to utilize some of these platforms where it feels like, it’s so saturated. Oh, everybody’s. It’s like, no, not really. If you have an interesting spin on something, I think you can still monetize it. No, mean, word of mouth is just extremely powerful, even when it comes to e-commerce as well.

27:24
Yeah. Right. Because I mean, that’s that’s in a way how we started. We weren’t running like ads. I mean, we were running ads, but they weren’t like the bulk of our business. Like, but after year one, a lot of it was referral business. Yeah. And I remember we got our first wedding planners or event planners, and that was huge because they all talked to each other. Yes. And then all of sudden we were getting hotels and yeah. Don’t don’t estimate word of mouth. Yeah, I think that’s the thing to think about is that

27:55
in all these industries, right? So you and I live in the e-commerce online marketing industry, right? So when one of us needs something, right? Or needs an expert or needs help, we all talk to each other, right? Well, who are you using? Who are you talking to? And then usually there’s a consensus like, this person is the best or this person highly recommend, right? And then…

28:18
That person, like lot of people we know have built their whole business in the online space because other people have recommended them, right? Like look at Grayson Bell, right? Perfect example of this. Has a WordPress business, basically helping people with debug WordPress sites, basically. I don’t think he builds them anymore or ever did. But you know, he got his business by, he was a blogger and then he realized he really liked fixing WordPress stuff and…

28:45
started doing it for a couple other bloggers and then a couple other bloggers. And then between word of mouth and another strategy that’s great for side hustles, he went in blogger groups. And when someone’s like, hey, I think this plugin is broken. It’s showing this error on my site. He would come in and in the comments say, oh, have you tried doing one of these three things? And Grayson’s a great explainer. He’s a great teacher.

29:11
So he would basically walk people through in a comment, like how they could fix it themselves. And by doing, and never selling his services, ever. Never saying like, oh, and by the way, I do this too, not once, right? And so then after a while, it’s like someone would post in like the AdThrive group, right? Oh, I need someone to make this change or I want this plugin to set up a shopping cart on my site or I want, you know, to do X, Y, Z. 16 people in the comments are like,

29:39
Oh, well, have you talked to Grayson? Have you talked to Grayson? Because he put himself out there as the WordPress expert and gave all this free advice and free help. And so he built his business on two rails, right? The first one being the word of mouth, the second one being proving yourself an expert in these groups, which is still also effective, and then just getting business that way. I mean, it reminds me of Carson, a fuel mate. He designed Shopify websites.

30:05
He is like the de facto website designer for like ECF. Yes. Mainly because he was active in a community and word of mouth through that community. And this is a bad side hustle example, but another example of that is our friend Stephen Wigler, the attorney. You can’t really be an attorney as a side hustle. But same concept of when we always get asked legal questions.

30:32
Right. Always like, should I have an LLC? Should I do this? What do know? And you and I are not attorneys and we never want to give anyone legal advice because it will probably be incorrect. But we constantly refer people to Steve because he’s proven himself time in and time out that he is one, really great to work with and two, a very much like when you talk to him, you don’t feel like you walked away with bunch of legal jargon that you don’t understand. Like very basic.

30:59
explanations of why you should do something or why you shouldn’t do something. And so I think that you don’t understand how much people network with each other that, you know, just meeting one right person can change your business. And we don’t make any money off these referrals. I mean, we just refer them because we use him. So, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think that that’s really important when you’re thinking about doing something on the side. I mean, whatever it is, just leverage something that.

31:27
you’re talented at or that you have knowledge with. So one thing that my daughter is working on, has been a hell of a lot of work, is… The never ending story is what I feel like this is. Well, we’re actually close to the finish line now, but she’s been really into print on demand. So she started a class for her kids and she started this entrepreneurship club at her high school. And so those are going to be her first guinea pigs. And then she’s going to start selling the class.

31:57
But this is something that any teenager can do with no money. I mean, she has a laptop. She has her phone with a camera. We bought her a mic and she’s just been filming videos for a class. She put together the curriculum and we’re working on the sales page right now and that’s gonna be her side hustle. So she can drink more boba drinks and buy clothing, which she’s really into. Yeah. Right? It’s nuts. So interesting.

32:27
So one of my daughters is she’s gonna be in cosmetology school soon, but she’s always been really good with hair and makeup. And so I think I told this on a podcast a million years ago. So when she was in the sixth grade, she used to ask me to drop her off at school really early. And I will say my kids are not Asian, so they are not always the best students. And so I was always confused as to why she wanted to go to school early, because most of time you go to school early for tutoring, right? And I knew for a fact she was not getting any tutoring.

32:55
I was like, sure, I’ll drop you off early. don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to me when you get dropped off. Well, what she was doing, I found out down the road is she could do… Remember when those Dutch braids got really popular by the Kardashians where the braids were sitting on top of your head? Okay, you don’t know. People listening, do you know? It was a really popular hairstyle, but it’s actually kind of hard to do on your own head and she can do them really, really well. She was getting to school early to braid people’s hair for money.

33:23
So she would charge like, I don’t know what the dog, but you know, in sixth grade, like if you’re making five bucks a day, like you’re rich, right? And so she would get to school early to braid people’s hair, you know, so the, once you braid it, the style stays in for a couple of days. So you’re, you know, you’re getting a little longevity out of things. So these kids are probably using their lunch money. I’m not even joking to pay to get their hair braided, but like, that’s the thing with side hustles is that you never, and obviously for her, it’s turned into like she does.

33:51
cosplay, she does makeup, she does hair, does other, I mean, she’s doing side hustle hair right now without her cosmetology license, right? So, you know, eventually she’ll, she’s going to school for that and she will get, you know, she’ll be a licensed hairdresser. But in the meantime, she’s been side hustling, right? All these years doing these little things here and there. And so I never underestimate like what you can do as a side hustle and also don’t think that, this is the other big one, you don’t have the time to do it because you do.

34:19
You do. mean, you know, it’s funny the other day. We I asked my daughter, like, didn’t she film the next video? And she’s like, Oh, I was busy. I didn’t have any time. I’m like, OK, so I pulled up like the traffic logs in my router and I was like, OK, you were you’re on whatever, you know, YouTube or whatever for several hours doing what? Probably wasting time. So everyone has time. I waste a ton of time every day also. Yeah. So think everybody.

34:49
I think everybody wastes time. Sometimes wasting time is fine. I think everyone needs some downtime and some time to decompress from their day. I also think if you are in a position where you’re like, I’m not sure about retirement. I’m not sure if this is something that I can achieve in a comfortable way. Or if the side hustle is just so you can get ahead.

35:15
Right, like you wanna buy a house or you wanna be able to pay off your cars or whatever that financial need is, you have time to do it. You just have to make it, you have to decide if it’s a priority and how much you want whatever it is that you, do you really wanna pay off your house? Do you really wanna save for a down payment? Do you really wanna fund your 401k? Like how badly do you want that? Because everybody that I know that wants it, that wants it, wants it is able to achieve it.

35:45
I find very few people that are like, well, I just tried so hard and it just didn’t work out. I just don’t hear that from many people if they’re taking all the right steps. Yeah, and I can’t emphasize how important it is today. It’s weird. A bunch of my friends have come up to me wanting to do side hustles right now because the job market is tough. Yeah. I’ve never seen this happen before where tech people

36:14
were losing their jobs because they were getting replaced by machines. Right? mean, back when I was working, like a bunch of us got outsourced to India, but then those prices kind of evened up and then, you know, there were a bunch of hurdles there. So eventually that, that kind of worked itself out, but I don’t necessarily see that working out with AI. Yeah. And I actually don’t use writers anymore. And I used to love coding my own stuff, but now like I can code anything with AI.

36:44
And I don’t, need to hire anyone. It’s really scary what, can be done. So one engineer and that that’s my space. So that’s what I’m, I feel qualified to talk about. One engineer can do the work of like five engineers now. Yeah. Right. And in the retail space, I’m seeing automation and, outsourcing all over the place now. And pretty soon with the self-driving cars, like they’ve been testing it in SF for a long time, basically humanless Ubers. They’re not Ubers. It’s terrifying. Yeah.

37:14
So all these jobs are going to go away. Yeah. And you have to have something to protect yourself. Yes. And I think so think about this. Let’s just say that you work at Nordstrom, right? And you’ve worked at Nordstrom for 15 years, right? And you love the apparel industry and you realize that you’re going to get phased out from Nordstrom because they’re going to self checkouts and, you know, more technology, less humans. Right. So what do you do?

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Well, if you have 15 years at Nordstrom, I think about our friend Kelly Snyder from Adore Your Wardrobe. She created a course teaching people how to dress based on their body shape using math and science. So it’s a fantastic program. If you wanna look into it, it’s called Adore Your Wardrobe. Shout out to Kelly. But she’s basically, but she’s in the business of giving women their confidence back, which cannot be done by AI right now, right? So what if there’s something, you you take your…

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love of working at Nordstrom, your clothing, whatever it is, right? And you turn that into a side hustle, which then becomes your full-time hustle. Kelly makes more than anyone, probably than half the people that are in the administration of Nordstrom, right? Right. Or you think about, I saw this trailer being pulled the other day. It said, we hang Christmas lights. Right. Who likes to Christmas lights? Literally no one. It’s the worst thing, right? You’re on your roof. You’re hoping you don’t fall. Half the lights don’t work. Like, it’s a huge pain, right?

38:40
Genius business idea, right? So many people I know have their Christmas lights, their houses decorated, because people want to decorate for Christmas, but they don’t want to go through all the pain and suffering of the Christmas lights. So you start a side business of decorating houses with Christmas lights, right? Well, then you do that for 10 years, then monetize your knowledge. Monetize your knowledge of how to get in that business or how to get in the seasonal business and sell that as a course or.

39:08
coaching or sell your company, right? Sell your Christmas light decorating company to somebody else. Like most of these things, even if they’re in the service space, have a path to larger abilities to monetize in the future. So the perfect example of this is my first employee at Bumble Bee Linens that we ever hired. He started delivering stuff for Amazon just kind of as a side hustle when he was working for us, which is fine. He did it at night. We didn’t have any problems with it.

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And then took all that money and he bought his own truck before he was renting. And today he owns a bunch of trucks and has a delivery business for Amazon and other places. And so he’s a business owner now. What started out as a side hustle while working for Bumbley Linens has turned into a lot more. And I think you can’t underestimate like the ability to make money from these things over time.

40:06
and how you can leverage your knowledge and expertise over time. I had to laugh. I’m having a septic tank moved, right? It’s this huge ordeal. My whole yard is torn up. But the owner of the septic, which septic tank seems like the absolute worst job, right? Like I cannot imagine having to pump out a, it seems absolutely terrible. The owner of that company drives $170,000 pickup truck.

40:32
It is the nicest pickup truck I’ve ever seen. It has the Bentley tires where the tire rotates, but the logo of the septic company stays still, whatever the heck that thing is. I’m like, this dude’s not doing bad, right? Because he’s not pumping tanks anymore. That’s where I also think, I’m not sure if my daughter-in-law will ever want to do grooming full-time again just because of the healthcare. Unless healthcare changes,

41:00
Less healthcare changes. If you have a job with health insurance, it’s hard to walk away from that. But you get to the point where you’re not grooming dogs anymore, or you’re only grooming the dogs you want to groom. You’re owning the grooming business. And now you own Wolfgang Puck. Or what’s the Wolfgang Puck? The dog grooming business with franchise locations. I was about to that. I was like, it’s something. But now you own the franchises. And now you’re

41:27
You have 16 stores, and you’re not grooming a dog. You’re managing a business. And maybe that’s never what you want to do, but those options are available, and that’s what can become of your side hustle. And don’t underestimate where it can go. Bumble Bee Linens, our goal was only $50,000, and then it’s turned into so much more. My blog, actually, I was just planning on having it pay my mortgage, and I would have been happy, and it turned into so much more.

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The key is to start something. if it’s paying your mortgage now. Well, know, houses in California are quite expensive. That’s true. That’s true. It’s actually probably right on par. So yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way, at least not publicly on the podcast before, but things are going to change drastically in the next just two to three years. And I really think you need to protect yourself and diversify however you’re making money.

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Hope you enjoyed this episode. 17 years ago, a small side hustle selling handkerchiefs completely transformed my life. The key is to start something now. Give it time, nurture it, and you never know how far it could grow. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 567. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting,

42:53
develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to SellersSummit.com and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, QuitHerJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Today, I’m going to talk about how recent legislation is effectively going to kill drop shipping from China in the next 18 months. So if you’re thinking about starting a drop shipping business, you might want to reconsider. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit,

00:28
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

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I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people. So tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

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Go grab your ticket over at sellersummit.com. Now onto the show.

01:37
Welcome back to the podcast. In this episode, I’m going to break down why the China dropshipping model is essentially dead. I’ll break down what happened, why it happened, and what it means for you. Now, first off, those of you who have followed me for a long time know that I don’t like the AliExpress dropshipping business model. Not only do AliExpress products have poor quality control, but as a seller, you’re proliferating the sales of cheap throwaway junk. But for those of you who are new to dropshipping from China, here’s how it works.

02:07
As a seller, you list products that you find on AliExpress on your own online store without holding any inventory. Then, when a customer places an order, you then purchase the item from the AliExpress supplier who ships it directly to your customer. This approach removes the need for any upfront inventory investment and reduces the risks involved in managing stock. So basically, you can get started with AliExpress dropshipping for practically no money. Because the prices in China are significantly cheaper than in the US,

02:37
You’re basically charging a big markup to US customers for doing little or no work. For example, this snoring mouth guard sells for $39.99 on Amazon, but on AliExpress, it can be purchased for only $1.72. That is literally a 23X markup. Now shipping direct from China to the US is also super cheap because of ePacket shipping, which was created to facilitate the growth of eCommerce between China and the United States. Because of ePacket,

03:05
which started in 2011, shipping rates from China to the US are significantly cheaper than shipping domestically in the US, especially for lightweight packages. For example, shipping a 1-pound parcel from China to the US costs around a buck to a buck 50, while shipping within the US can cost several times more depending on the destination and the carrier. In addition, AliExpress dropshippers don’t have to pay import duties and tariffs either because of the de minimis rule.

03:33
The Minimist Rule allows any packages coming into the US that are worth $800 or less to not have to pay any customs taxes or fees. And this rule is in place to make it easier and cheaper for people to buy small items from other countries, like toys or gadgets, without getting hit with extra costs when they arrive. And these advantages are the reason why so many dropshipping companies have popped up over the years. Companies like CJ Dropshipping, DSers, Alley Dropship, and AutoDS

04:02
offer integrations to popular shopping carts like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce to automatically handle the backend logistics. So basically, all you have to do is install one of these plugins, pick what you want to sell, set your price, click a button, and your product is listed on your shop. Then, when an order is placed by a customer, the software automatically handles the supplier fulfillment from China. It all sounds super easy, and I hope I didn’t get you too excited because the government just destroyed this business model.

04:32
And here’s the full story. By the way, if you’re interested in learning how to start a profitable online store the right way without dropshipping from China, make sure you sign up for my free six day e-commerce mini course below that will walk you through the entire process and it’s 100 % free. So several weeks ago, the Biden administration introduced new changes to the de minimis rules to reduce the abuse by Chinese e-commerce platforms like Tmoo and Shiyin. Now I don’t want to get too into the weeds about Tmoo and Shiyin.

05:00
But Tmoo and Shien are companies based in China that ship products to the US direct from Chinese factories at rock bottom prices. Essentially, you can think of Tmoo like the biggest Chinese dropshipper on the planet. They round up Chinese suppliers and have them list their products online at rock bottom prices even lower than AliExpress. Then, when an order comes in, the Chinese supplier ships the product directly from China to the end customer in the US. The products and shipping are super cheap,

05:28
and they don’t have to pay any import taxes. Now over the years, Timo has experienced huge growth since its launch in 2022, rapidly expanding to 79 countries by this year and becoming one of the most visited online shopping platforms in the world. In just two short years, they managed to attract a third of Amazon’s traffic and their low prices have been crushing the competition. For example, Amazon’s apparel sales have fallen 30 % year over year as Timo and Shiyun continue to steal market share.

05:59
Anyway, the US government has taken notice of this unfair competition and finally decided to step in with new legislation to shut them down. There are three major changes, which I’ll summarize for you so you don’t have to read the official press release. Now, the first change basically states that all China dropshipping sellers have to pay both customs duties and tariffs under sections 301, 232, or 201 of the US trade law, regardless of the value of the package. Now in the good old days,

06:27
AliExpress dropshippers didn’t have to pay any taxes by keeping the value of individual shipments under $800. But not only do sellers have to pay customs duties now, but they also have to pay tariffs for every shipment no matter how small. And right now, these tariffs cover about 40 % of all imports from China. Section 301 targets goods like electronics, textiles, and machinery. Section 232 affects imports of steel, aluminum, and other materials.

06:55
and Section 201 tariffs cover products like solar panels and washing machines. So basically, if you dropship products under any of the above categories, your costs are going to go up big time. Most dropship consumer goods fall under Section 301, so chances are you’re going to get hit. Now you might be thinking to yourself, paying the extra tariffs and duties isn’t that big of a deal. After all, with the snoring mouthguard example I gave earlier, even if your costs double, you’re still making a killer profit of 12x.

07:24
but it’s the second and third part of the new de minimis changes that completely destroy the dropshipping business model. The second part of the de minimis rule change is that you as a seller must now collect information from your buyer to give to the government. So first off, you have to provide the 10 digit tariff classification number for the products that you sell, which allows the U S customs and border protection to flag problematic items or items that should be subject to duties. No big deal, right? But here’s the kicker.

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As a dropshipper, you also now have to reveal the buyer who is claiming the de minimis exemption. Typically, when you import something into the US as a business, you have to provide your employer identification number. The EIN is used for customs documentation, such as the importer’s security filing and customs entry forms. However, if you’re importing goods for personal use, like one of your dropshipping customers, you have to give them your buyer’s social security number. Now, how many customers do you think

08:23
will be willing to provide you with their social security number to make a cheap purchase for a product shipped from China. I don’t know about you, but I don’t give my social security number out to anyone, let alone some random dropshipping store on the internet. There’s just so much identity theft going on right now in the U.S. It is nuts. Plus, it’s going to be pretty obvious from anyone shopping in your store that you’re getting your stuff from China. People are already paranoid about Chinese companies collecting your information. There’s no way you’re going to get their social security number.

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Now, as if requiring your buyers their security number wasn’t bad enough, the third and final change to the de minimis rules make things even worse for dropshippers. The new law stipulates that whenever you sell something from China to a US customer, you must now prove that it adheres to US safety regulations. All importers of consumer goods will be required to file certificates of compliance electronically at the time of entry, even for de minimis shipments. Now, why is the US requiring this?

09:21
It’s because tons of crap sold on AliExpress is outright dangerous. For example, if you do a search on AliExpress for a phone charger, you’ll find that none of the products are UL certified. So basically, if it’s poorly made, it could cause a fire in your home. Remember those hoverboards from China that were popular several years ago? They basically died off because many people’s houses burned down from the batteries exploding. Dropshippers like Tmoo have been getting away with shipping children’s toys with unsafe levels of lead,

09:50
phthalates and other harmful chemicals. Xi’an has been accused of selling textiles and clothing that contain hazardous chemicals such as formaldehyde and azo dyes which can cause skin irritations or allergic reactions. Xi’an has also sold cosmetics from China with harmful chemicals like mercury or hydroquinone, which can cause serious health risks including skin damage or long-term toxicity. Now with this new rule, the importer of record will be required to file these certificates of compliance.

10:19
And guess who the importer of record is in the case of dropshipping? It’s the buyer. So basically, the government is putting the burden of compliance on your customer. And who in their right mind is going to take responsibility as a buyer of cheap junk from China? No one. Now, implementing these changes won’t happen overnight, as it involves a lot of additional paperwork. It’s not as simple as flipping a switch. And if the government started enforcing this immediately, our ports of entry would be backed up for years.

10:48
But it’s just a matter of time before AliExpress dropshipping and dropshipping from China will die. The prices will increase because the de minimis loopholes have been closed. And as a dropshipper, you now have to pay tariffs and customs duties. Customers aren’t going to give you their social security number and no buyer will be willing to accept the liability of filing a certificate of compliance. I chatted with several colleagues about this new legislation and most people think that it will take about 18 months for the changes to take place.

11:17
but it’s gonna happen. Now does this mean that all dropshipping is dead? No, it’s mainly dropshipping from China or international dropshipping that will be affected. If you dropship domestically within the US, everything should remain the same. And if you do AliExpress dropshipping, where the product is being shipped from a local warehouse within the US, you should also be fine. But let me ask you this, if you’re starting an online business, why put so much effort into selling cheap junk from China?

11:46
The poor quality will lead to constant customer service headaches and you’re not adding any real value into the world. I’ve interviewed many e-commerce business owners on my podcast and several of them used to do dropshipping. And the key phrase here is used to. Dropshipping is not a good long-term business model. Even the CEO of Spockit who came on my podcast last year admitted as much. Dropshipping can be a good way to test the waters of e-commerce if you’re on a tight budget.

12:13
but creating your own branded products is always the better long-term strategy.

12:20
Hope you enjoyed this episode. I’ve never been a fan of dropshipping and now the writing is on the wall. Just don’t do it. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 565. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event.

12:48
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, QuitHerJob.com, and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send the course right away via email.