1568 – Earning Income With Amazon with Mommy Income’s Kristin Ostrander

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:59with us right now kristin ostrander kristin you are the founder of mommy income you are also a podcaster your podcast is called the amazon files you're also an author uh kristin thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for having me all right give us an overview what what is mommy Income? Well, on Mommy Income, I teach people to start and grow businesses on Amazon using e-commerce. And why is that a great option for folks that are looking to create kind of an external, maybe revenue source? And then, you know, maybe if they've been working for part-time, it might be an opportunity for them to kind of slide into being able to do their own thing.

1:43For sure. So Amazon's a great opportunity. We work, we have a small team. It's just my mom and I and we use a third-party warehouse and we are able to run a seven-figure business remotely and we have just in a remote team so we don't touch our inventory yet we sell um unique gift sets and and like accessory boxes to things so that's what that's our main business there and with the success that we've had with our Amazon store we also teach other people to start and grow on Amazon that's the mommy income side so two businesses well obviously that didn't happen overnight how did it start well i i've been in e-commerce for 20 years so i started in 2003 really started thrifting with ebay and then moved into amazon 2008 and there was tons of different business models to try throughout the years and we kind of honed in on our own have some ups and downs along the way but we first started with books and thrifting moved up to wholesale then private label products and now we do a combination of wholesale and bundling yeah and and what are the, so what is wholesale and bundling?

2:43You know, I've heard of like FBA, you know, I help us under, what are all the ways or maybe the top five ways or whatever, three to five ways of it and you're working with Amazon? Sure. There's multiple business models on Amazon. First of all, the FBA is for multiple different styles of inventory fulfillment. So it's fulfillment by Amazon. If you own any product or product line, something that you want to sell online, whether you have a Shopify store, your own. Fulfillment by Amazon is simply you send all of your products or inventory into Amazon's warehouse and then it qualifies for two-day Prime shipping.

3:16So that's their FBA program. So no matter what you sell, you can take advantage of Amazon's fulfillment by Amazon. That's how you qualify for Amazon Prime. So as you're ordering from Amazon Prime, everybody is. If you look at that, if you look at the stores, it'll say sold and shipped by Amazon or it'll say sold and shipped by so-and-so. So-and-so is all the tiny small businesses that are contributing products to Amazon. So a lot of people think they're just buying from Amazon. They're actually buying from millions of small businesses globally. So that's a really, really awesome point that I'd like to make to people.

3:48A lot of people just think, oh, you're buying from Amazon. It's this big, huge monopoly company taking over the world. Actually, it's not. It's a company made up of 153 million small businesses sell on Amazon. And as you're buying Prime, you're buying from people like me. So I always like to educate on that point. So that's just one area of using FBA, but there's also a couple of different business models. You can do straight up wholesale like a lot of brick and mortar stores do. You buy, whether you import or buy stateside, you send your inventory into Amazon and you make some profit there. Private labels, creating your own products, selling your own brand on Amazon.

4:22And then there's retail arbitrage. You might see some videos or ads every now and then people are going to Target, scanning the clearance section, buying some stuff, sending it to Amazon to make a profit. So there's all kinds of different ways to make money on Amazon. And I've chosen what I call a combination of private label and wholesale. It's called a hybrid of that. And it's what I call poor man's private label, private labeling and taking and making a huge brand and, you know, really investing into it takes like a year and probably$15 ,000 to kind of start and tie up that money for that long.

4:51And most of us want to make money a little faster. Yeah. Wholesale bundling is really kind of combining the private label concept with a wholesale concept and putting it into the best way to describe a wholesale bundle is like a subscription box only without the subscription. You can create as many boxes as you want, make them available for sale on Amazon and people are buying them globally. So it reduces the risk in the inventory without spending so much money creating a brand and hoping for the best. Yeah. For someone that's listening and let's say they're already a small business owner and And they've got a good thing going, right?

5:26Do you often or do you work with existing business owners that are looking for a secondary income stream? And if so, what are the considerations that someone might want to take? Because obviously, their time might be a big sensitivity for them. But would this be appropriate for a secondary revenue stream? Absolutely, especially for anyone who owns a brick and mortar, anyone who already carries inventory. there's absolutely no reason why not add Amazon as a second sales channel. So if you're sitting in your, even I think of hardware stores sometimes, I mean, this might be a bad example, but sitting in a hardware store, you own it, you have all this inventory all the time, people are coming in and out, but you could also have all of those products available in your Amazon store where then Amazon is fulfilling them for you.

6:11So you're not saying, oh, Johnny bought a paint bucket over here. I need to go and ship it. It's not like that. Amazon will have some of your inventory there. you'll have some on the shelf and then you can always meet customer need as well if someone comes into your store and they say oh i'm out of stock in this but i have it online i can get it to you in two days just like amazon um then you're winning on both sides of the coin both in in brick and mortar and e-commerce so or anybody who owns a brand and that's not have a brand presence on amazon absolutely can can open that up as a second revenue stream and once the foundation is set and it's set up um it's semi-automatic i mean right now i'm sure i've got i mean we're doing two three 400 orders a day, but we're not fulfilling orders every day.

6:51We're shipping our inventory in through a third-party warehouse. And as those orders are going out, I just get emails, your order confirmed, your order confirmed. So I don't have to sit there and package 400 orders per day. Amazon's taking care of all that while we're earning a profit in multiple ways. What would you say for first timers or people are just kind of getting started this, what would be kind of the biggest pitfalls or traps or areas where they're like, well, that's really disappointing. You know, if they're going into this without, you know, the right guidance, the biggest mistakes that newbies make.

7:28Absolutely. Number one is having unrealistic expectation about your margins for wholesale. A lot of people think, great, I'm going to get right into this. I'm going to go open some accounts with some wholesale companies. I'm going to sell Nike shoes and KitchenAid mixers that, you know, just like like Walmart would do or something. And the biggest misnomer about wholesale is that their margins are actually way thinner than we expect as as retailers. We're thinking that these big companies like Walmart or Target are making, you know, 50 to 60 percent margins. When honestly, they're in volume. They're they're making maybe a five percent margin, a two percent margin, a 10 percent margin on different products.

8:06but then combined, they're selling millions of products a day. So if they're making a dollar here and a dollar there times a million dollars times, you know, 50 ,000 stores, they work on volume. So our small sellers need to work on margin base. And the reality is with wholesale, the margins are about 20%. And with the fees that Amazon takes, which are well worth it, but they're still realistic. You're not going to make a whole lot of money just selling single unit items. You'll have to do, you'll have to sell 5 ,000 units a month of everything just to kind of make ends meet and that's honestly exhausting so i've created the business model of wholesale bundling which is combining products that are already used together so if you think about a desk stationary we're both sitting at a desk here we have desks that we have we have your your pens and your sharpies and your all your your notebooks and everything else to buy those things or sell those things even online individually a package of sharpies you know you might make 50 cents on that but if you're creating a whole desk stationary kit with all the office supplies that you need and you're putting them all into one box then you can charge 20 25 for that and you're putting more meat on the bone for yourself with one package one fee and one transaction rather than trying to piecemeal all that together to make a few cents so we combine complementary items together in one package and we make a lot more profit doing it that way yeah um so you know I don't want to set unrealistic expectations because there's absolutely, there's risk involved.

9:33There's a lot of work involved. But I would imagine that you've had experiences where you've worked with someone who's followed every best practice. They were super, super coachable. They followed the program. And what kind of experience did they have maybe over the course of their first year? her. So the first, I've had several ladies who have started our program and have quit their nine to five within one year of starting. So there's one lady in particular, her testimony is on the Amazon Files podcast. She tells her whole story of what the first year she started with doing wholesale and bundling and really putting her, her skills to the test.

10:13And Amazon was able to quit her six figure job, stop commuting an hour and a half every way and stay home to be with her son so she could do FBA full-time to do Amazon. So I have several, several people doing that within the year. It also depends on what you're investing and how much time you're putting in. You can't expect to have that done when you're doing five hours a week of work. But if you're really going to take it seriously, you could move into a full-time income in a year or so, depending on your investment. Yeah. Well, that doesn't sound so bad. And then Kristen, explain like how you work with people.

10:47Do you just, you just have courses where you teach this or can you go through like for someone's like, I'm interested, I'm intrigued. And maybe this listening to this podcast conversation is part of like, they already know who you are. Now they want to, you know, maybe hear you in the interview chair and well, this is what it is. And so from, from here, what would you recommend their, their next step be where they can maybe learn about, you know, both the risks and opportunities? So the best way to do that is go to mommyincome.com. We also have a YouTube channel, but most of my training is going to be, it's all new for 2023 as well.

11:23Just redid it wholesale bundle system 3.0. And we literally teach you if you've never sold anything on Amazon before, it's completely foreign to you. We have modules for that. And then all the way up to the advanced skills that we have. My training is very comprehensive. And that's the major base point. After that, we have a exclusive coaching calls once a month where we help people out, continue, continue to find success with that because we know it's a lot of information. Our course is, sorry, excuse me. I know I talk really fast. Our, our call, our class call is. It's okay. It's okay. Listen, I'm like, I can't say it.

12:02I just can't say what I'm trying to say. Yeah, as a podcast listener, I often will put it on 1.5 or 2x speed. Podcast listener, I dare you to put this podcast on 2x speed. We're going to sound like a bunch of chipmunks. I dare you. You and me both, Kristen. You and me both. Absolutely. I know because there's just so much to say in such a short time. Okay, let's try that again. Our class qualifies for college credit because it's over 50 hours of training. And so because it's a skilled trade that you're actually learning something very niche, something very exclusive, it actually qualifies for college credit.

12:37So we made it qualify on purpose because there are a lot of people that want to learn. It's a trade. It's not just going to school. You can pay lots of money to go to college and learn something. And that's awesome and amazing. But if you want to learn something right out of the gate that can start earning you money and something you can invest in and build a business, this is an actual million-dollar strategy. So it qualifies for that college credit. it if you if you need that for 50 hours of training and we've just put our heart and soul into it it has changed my life and I wanted to just help other people decide that college and four years of college isn't for everyone or traditional business ownership isn't for everyone and this allows you to do business anywhere in the world as long as you learn and set up your foundation so and I'm convinced of that because we have global students enrolled we have people on a global level succeeding with the Amazon wholesale bundle business model.

13:25So we know that it's proven and it works. And it's just another opportunity for someone where traditional school or traditional nine to fives, it just isn't for them. It's a great opportunity for learning, growing, and starting your own income, whether it's on the side or not. Yeah. You know, I was just thinking too, I wonder this could potentially be a good option for maybe a college student. I don't know. Do you have any examples of that or kind of how that's worked or not worked? I actually have a young man who we end up working with. He's part of our third-party prep facility team where all of our products are shipped to their third-party warehouse.

14:04So this is a young gentleman who his dad kind of was doing Amazon, and he kind of followed in his footsteps. He went to college for two years and realized he could make tons more money on Amazon selling than he could even in the career he was going into. So he dropped out of college. He started his own business. And now at 24, he has moved out. He has not one, but two businesses that he's doing. And he's really succeeding on Amazon, paying his own bills, making his own way. And it didn't have to put him$100 ,000 in debt, which is one of the biggest reasons he dropped out of school. He ran out of scholarship and he's like, I don't want to go into debt.

14:37I would rather pay for school up front. And as he was saving for school, he realized, why save for school? I'm actually profiting a lot of money doing this. So he's a really good success story. Again, there's another, there's a podcast interview on Amazon Files, hear his story as well. Yeah. Kristen, your website is mommyincome.com. Your podcast is the Amazon Files, which to our podcast listener right there, listen, there's a search button. Go search for Amazon Files. You're going to find, Kristen, your podcast. And you also have a book, right? I do. Dream Big, Step Small. Tell me more. So it's not really about Amazon.

15:16It's a little just a little bit more about motivational entrepreneurship and how we went from$50 to home foreclosure to seven figures and just how little steps really can allow your dreams to come true, whether you're dreaming of a beach house or a bigger business or quitting your nine to five. It's all about small, consistent steps and continuing to do that regardless of your circumstance. Yeah. Awesome. I love it. Kristen Ostrander, again, founder of Mommy Income, author, podcast host. Kristen, it's been great having you on the show. Thank you so much. Anything else that you'd like to share?

15:52No, I'm just really grateful to have been on the show. Thanks for letting me come. You're awesome. Kristen, thank you so much for joining us. Have a great, great day.

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