Ideas in the Wild: Tomer Rabinovich On How Sellers Can Ride the Amazon Wave

Many sellers launch their first product on Amazon — or second, or third — and begin to plan another launch. They inevitably wonder, Will it succeed? What if it fails? Sellers need a strategy to improve the odds of success, but growing an Amazon business can be overwhelming.

In Ride the Amazon Wave, Tomer Rabinovich shares critical secrets to selling on Amazon. He lays the foundation with chapters about the Amazon seller’s mindset, the prelaunch process, and product launch. In chapters on Pay Per Click (PPC), Inventory Management, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Tomer provides vital steps for reaching the next level. He shows how to go from Amazon seller to business owner, offers strategies for selling a business, and shows readers how to leverage what they’ve created to follow their dreams.

I recently caught up with Tomer Rabinovich to learn more about why he wrote the book and the ideas he shares with readers.

Why did you write this book?

I have met many, many Amazon sellers. Here’s how it usually works for them: They get into the business, launch a few products, and have some success. Then they get excited, but instead of figuring out how to do more of what they’re doing — and do it better — they get complacent. Some get, well, lazy. They launch a bunch of new products without the same due diligence they applied with their first products. Or they get distracted. They want to try something else, so they start a website, thinking it will be easier to sell their products on their own site than selling on Amazon. Or they decide to go into retail, thinking they can sell more products in a store than online.

I can joke about this now because I made mistakes like these — and worse. I stopped doing what was already working and did a bunch of stuff that didn’t work. And I had some major failures. But the failures showed me what not to do, and they showed me how to refocus on what worked. Not just what worked some of the time or most of the time, but what worked every time.

If you want to stop working for other people, build a business, and create your own brand on Amazon, then I can help you. If you want to do all that and work less, I can help you too.

What’s an idea you share that really excites you?

Whether you’ve launched a few products that were successful or weren’t successful, whether you’re doing well or not doing well, here are five pieces of advice that you can use right now to reach your selling goals:

1. Think of Amazon as your best friend, not your competition. Some sellers try to pull customers away from Amazon. They want their email addresses so they can market to them outside of the website, thinking they can do a better job and make more money. Instead of seeing Amazon as the competition or even the enemy, embrace the company for the amazing platform they’ve built. Recognizing and respecting these people as Amazon customers will put the company in a whole new light and make your selling experience so much better. Look at it from the customer’s point of view. They don’t know you. They don’t know your product. Yet, they trust that when they purchase one of your products on Amazon, they will be satisfied, because Amazon has created that trust.

2. Choose products that align with your cash flow. In the simplest terms, if you have $5,000 to invest, don’t invest all of it in one very pricey, untested product. You could bankrupt your business before you even get started. It’s safe to say that whatever you spend for your initial investment, you need two and a half to three times that amount in the bank.

3. Expand your product line to mitigate risk. Going deep makes a lot of sense and can be very lucrative, but it can also be risky. No matter how successful you are by going deep with a product, mitigate the risk by continuously going wide by researching new products and launching new products.

4. Use packaging to bring an element of surprise. The product listing is the initial “packing.” It’s all a customer sees when they order your product. You could show the actual packaging on the listing, and if your packaging is especially attractive, you may want to. Alternatively, you can surprise them with it. They’ll expect the product to show up in a plain box, but when they open the shipping box — woohoo! They get something completely unexpected. Something that makes them smile. Look at your competition. Are they all showing the packaging? Then you should also. If they aren’t, that’s something you can show to differentiate your product, or you can save it as a surprise.

5. Bundling usually doesn’t pay off. On Amazon, customers buy exactly what they need; they usually don’t care for bundles unless it improves the overall product. For example, if you look at “baby proofing kits,” you would think that an entire kit would sell better, since it comes with locks for your cabinets, straps to hold dressers in place, and outlet covers. The truth is, each of those individual products sells a lot better than the whole kit, even if buying them individually is more expensive, because customers buy what they need at a specific moment in time, knowing they’ll get free shipping and two-day delivery. Basically, if you’re going to bundle products, the additional products have to increase the value of the main product to the customer. They can’t just be “add-ons.”

How will following your advice improve your readers’ lives?

Here’s the deal: You can keep doing what you’re doing, but you’ll never scale your business until you do something different. You have to build a real business and go from “product launcher” to “business owner.” That means creating systems and processes, just like the big sellers. You can get there from here, and that’s what Ride the Amazon Wave is about — leveling up to a whole new stage where, instead of focusing on launching, you’re focused on running a business that meets all your goals. Granted, launching products is part of that, but it’s not everything and it won’t get you where you want to go.

I coached one seller from $50,000 a month to $400,000 a month. I coached another seller from working 16-hour days to just 4 hours a day. I’ve had more than a thousand one-on-one coaching sessions with Amazon sellers and spoken to many more thousands of sellers in person, online, and at various events over the past few years, and of course, I’ve grown my own private label business exponentially. In just five years, I went from initial launch to running multiple, hugely successful businesses.

Wherever you are as an Amazon seller, my book will take your business to the next level. Even if you’ve never sold anything on Amazon, my book will help you — though I wrote it mainly for active sellers.