E-comm Business Story: Hard Milestones, AMZ Suppliers & Manufacturers | David Applegate, ImportYeti

What are the most important things to know when sourcing something from China or other countries? How do you build a product that people would fall in love with?

David Applegate started selling being a child, then built an eBay company where he imported bulk products through Alibaba, now his main business is WrestlingMart, the world’s largest wrestling store. During the pandemic, he created ImportYeti to give back to the eCom community that has given him so much.

“I really struggle with Alibaba. ImportYeti (https://www.importyeti.com/) lets you import products easier than Alibaba by showing you which factories export which products.” - David Applegate

“I started out selling cigar cutters in my early teens, which my mother hated, but you know, it's cool. I was selling these things for like, we'll say $10, a cigar cutter. And my costs from China would be like 50 cents or something like that. We were charging $3 in shipping. So the profit margins were bananas, you know? In the beginning stages, anybody could sell exercise rings and make a killing. And now it's changing so that because everybody has access to those suppliers, everybody can bring, you know, these products in. And the question becomes, how do you create a product that is truly unique in the marketplace and sells itself. And that, when I started to kind of move into more of that mindset, it really changed things because I was building products that people would fall in love with and they'd want to order them and they’d talk about it online and I’d get natural sources of traffic.”

LIVE TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - From being a seller to building a tool to help sellers
01:30 - How David’s selling story started
02:19 - Hard milestone that it took to hit
03:35 - Building products that people would fall in love with
04:17 - Gold rush versus thought-through kind of marketing plans and product creation on Amazon, Walmart, Ebay
05:30 - “Hey, can I get 1% better today?”
07:00 - Amazon as what the app store was to apps
08:30 - The biggest changes in selling online
11:20 - “I really struggle with Alibaba”
12:15 - Finding a reliable supplier
14:48 - Tracking down counterfeits
14:51 - Confidentiality
16:44 - Developing a product that solves a problem
17:33 - How to increase margins
23:15 - The most important thing to know when sourcing something from China or other countries
26:16 - Expectations for this next year

???? Thank you for watching! Try Sellzone, a powerful toolkit designed to help your business grow and keep on growing: https://www.sellzone.com/signup/?redirect_to=%2Fpricing%2F%3Foffer%3Dsellzone_trial_2021

Seven complimentary tools help sellers find the winning product, boost their visibility, grow traffic, improve conversions, and make the most of advertising.

Sellzone is designed by Semrush, the platform trusted by seven million users and 30% of Fortune 500 companies.

#amazonselling #amazonseller #amazonfba