Burak has 8 years of experience living in China and sourcing thousands of products, he brings valuable insights into global supply chain and inventory management, eCommerce, and logistics. He has been a speaker on various podcasts and events, such as Alibaba Co-Create. Finally, he hosts Forceget’s YouTube channel, where he shares industry insights and updates.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Burak Yolga, founder and CEO of Forceget Supply Chain Logistics. The discussion centers on the challenges Amazon sellers face, including rising fees and increased competition. Burak shares insights on optimizing supply chains, understanding landed costs, and the importance of diversifying sales channels beyond Amazon. He emphasizes the need for effective inventory management and proactive customer service. Burak also highlights the benefits of leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT for market insights and content creation. This episode provides valuable strategies for scaling e-commerce businesses to 8 figures and beyond.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

1. Diversify Sales Channels to Mitigate Risks:

   – Explore Alternatives: Don’t rely solely on Amazon. Begin exploring and testing other marketplaces like Shopify, Walmart, and emerging platforms like Temu and Shein to diversify your revenue streams.

   – Analyze Costs: Regularly conduct a comprehensive analysis of all your expenses related to fulfillment, PPC, and logistics to identify areas where you can reduce costs and improve profitability.

2. Optimize Inventory Management and Fulfillment Strategies:

   – Evaluate Third-Party Logistics: Consider using third-party logistics providers to maintain better control over your inventory distribution, especially in light of Amazon’s new inventory placement fees.

   – Monitor Inventory Levels: Use data-driven tools to monitor your inventory closely and avoid overstocking, which can lead to increased storage fees and reduced cash flow.

3. Leverage Technology and Stay Informed on Industry Trends:

   – Invest in AI and Digital Tools: Stay ahead of the curve by embracing AI and digital tools for managing shipments, optimizing inventory, and enhancing overall operational efficiency.

   – Stay Informed: Continuously educate yourself on the latest e-commerce and supply chain trends to adapt quickly to market changes and maintain a competitive edge.

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This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Aaron Cordova’s and Michael Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I am speaking with Burak Yoga, the founder and CEO of Forceget Supply Chain Logistics, and we are going to be talking a lot about how to optimize your supply chain to be more efficient and profitable. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure e-commerce companies to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious entrepreneur looking for a partner who can help take your business to the next level, my team and I bring the hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. If you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for an investment partner, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com and let’s turn your dreams into reality. But today I am super excited to introduce you all to Burak Yoga.

Josh Hadley 00:00:46  Burak has eight years of experience living in China and sourcing thousands of products. He brings valuable insights into global supply chain and inventory management, e-commerce and logistics. He has been a speaker on various podcasts and at events such as Alibaba co-create. And finally, he hosts Forceget’s YouTube channel, where he shares industry insights and updates. With that introduction, welcome to the show, Burak. Thank you, Josh, for having me. I am super excited to have you on the show today. Because, you know, one thing that I feel like I’ve heard time and time again this year is people being eaten alive by all of the fees that have now been baked into their supply chain that they didn’t have originally. You know, we’ve seen inflation take a hit, which has increased the cost of goods for some sellers. We’re seeing an, you know, US marketplace where, you know, I think the US consumer is more apprehensive to purchase the more expensive product. They’re trying to save costs. I’m curious to hear from your perspective.

Josh Hadley 00:01:35  You have a lot of meetings with your customers, other Amazon sellers. What are you hearing? you.

Burak Yolga 00:01:40  Know, Josh, I think there are two sides that we can look at this story. When you look at the numbers of Amazon that they’re going to public, their stock rate, they’re doing great. You know they’re like every Prime Day. They’re you know, they’re they’re coming up with better and better numbers. But let’s look at the story from the seller side. Right. I mean, we all know that Amazon does not love their sellers as much as they love their customers, unfortunately. And, and then most of the sellers got hit really bad with all these additional fees, like new rules, maybe new measurements about their account health, inventory scores. So you can’t ship as much as Amazon FBA, even if you do, you got hit by almost 40% to 45% of your sales price going to Amazon include the, CPC like PPC costs. And when you look at all these details, international shipping price is changing.

Burak Yolga 00:02:25  business in China is not that good. A lot of suppliers, they’re having problems because there’s not enough demand. And now, especially this year, with the newer marketplaces are coming to the play like Teemu Shein, AliExpress, which there are some rumors that there will be a couple of new Chinese e-commerce platforms will be coming to direct consumer USA and North America. So it’s even harder for Amazon FBA sellers, which, you know, we work with hundreds of them, which you work with. Many of them, they are having problems with the visibility, profitability as well as, funding issues. So, when we talk to our clients, most of them are complaining about, you know, the fees, the challenges, but what are the solutions? So that’s something that obviously I would love to focus on today’s podcast.

Josh Hadley 00:03:04  Yeah. Well let’s go ahead and dive straight in there. I think that the biggest change that happened this year is Amazon introduced the inventory, you know, fees the placement fees. So now it’s more expensive to distribute your inventory into Amazon FBA centers.

Josh Hadley 00:03:18  Right. Amazon’s been very aggressive in trying to get people to use the same thing AGL. So Amazon’s trying to steer and kind of give you bargain prices so to speak, to get at least started with them. And then I think we all know the end play here is in a couple of years, once we get everybody in, then we just jack up everybody’s rates and guess what? They have nowhere else to go anywhere because we we have everything. So give me your lay of the land in terms of AGL inventory placement fees, what should a smart Amazon FBA seller be thinking about right now? you.

Burak Yolga 00:03:48  Know, especially since we’re we’re in the fourth quarter, a lot of people hopefully start seeing increase in the, in the sales. But we all know that also FBA fees increase So one of the things we realize is you’re right. I think that everybody who’s in this game long enough knows that Amazon welcomes you with a great prices, great service, which, you know, we all know that the NHL has a lot of issues.

Burak Yolga 00:04:07  But eventually Amazon wants to do everything in in their hand. They want to control the sellers. They want to. One of the biggest issue that I don’t like, actually, when the sellers work with AGL is Amazon knows their supplier. I think that’s a very big risk. Nobody really talks about it. But you know that Amazon has like a different brands, over 200 brands that they’re doing like under different. Amazon’s brand names such as Amazon Basic. They manufacture cables pillowcases like they manufacture everything. And there are some also competition problems on Amazon. Whenever you search a product, their product pops up in the first place, so you can’t really blame them. They’re spending so much money on their supply chain, investment in the fulfillment centers, all this truck business, so they kind of want to handle everything. So that’s like a big confusion also by the sellers. They’re like, oh, we’re gonna save you a lot of money. But what about the customer service or what about the transit time. So we have clients that they’ve switched to AGL partially, and then they still work with us.

Burak Yolga 00:04:55  So that one of the experience that they tell us, okay, there’s no updates, they don’t know when the shipment is going to come. And I was like, they don’t know that. So you can’t really manage your inventory as well as your money when you’re going to place a new order, because you never know your product is going to check in. And if it doesn’t check in on time, if you run out of your memory, Amazon is not going to take responsibility because they delay to deliver a container like one month. Another secondary issue that we hear is their pickup time, because they’re busy. And whenever you ask Amazon to go pick up the shipments, the supplier doesn’t hear back from Amazon maybe one week, two weeks, or even if they do it, there’s no firm schedule. So that’s another issue. So this if we were talking about this like maybe 3 or 4 years ago, nobody would have a problem with that because the sales was good. there’s not that competition. there is no problem borrowing money because, you know, basically there was like free money in the market, but now the rates are like 12%, 30% when it comes to getting a business loan.

Burak Yolga 00:05:41  Maybe low Ten’s the best scenario. So it’s very hard to go get the money with the lower margins. So a lot of companies, they’re looking for a solution like you know how we can avoid the delays. How can we avoid just to maybe get more revenue from different marketplaces or different sales channels, which I personally recommend, especially in the fourth quarter, to have a decent offer to avoid some of the Amazon fees, because in 2023, you know, the checking times in October, November, December got way longer than the previous years because of having less employees in the warehouses, less appointments. So basically, Amazon cut a lot of jobs to increase their profit. So we see a major issue with delivery times and checking. There’s a lot of sellers. If you’re an experienced seller, you probably know when your product checked in. It takes almost like 3 to 5 weeks, fully receive those products and then deliver to the different, fulfillment centers across the country, which we have the connection with the placement fee, why Amazon did that.

Burak Yolga 00:06:40  One of the main reason is to reduce their own distribution costs. Someone very smart from Amazon’s supply chain team was like, oh, why we are paying for the distribution? Why not sellers pay for that? So that’s how they came up with the placement fees, I guess, which affecting a lot of sellers. The reason is, number one, you have to use agile. But we did a case study in our company. So basically if we distribute the product at three different locations versus Amazon is sending to one fulfillment center especially and then distribute themselves, it’s almost the same price. So there’s some sort of a thing wrong advertisement on there. But it’s it’s what it is. You know, we work with Amazon, in different aspects. We go to their accelerate this year again, you know, it’s a great event. But long story short, as a seller, companies are looking for solutions like how we can avoid FBA fees if they use one risk that has a has is, whenever you want to send an automatic replenishment, you need to be very careful.

Burak Yolga 00:07:32  I recommend companies not to set up rules for auto management, because Amazon is kind of still optimizing that part where you will be overcharged. If your shipment is sent in and and your sales ring suddenly drops, you will have all the inventory in the FBI. And you we all know how expensive to have long term storage in FBA. So it’s very important. I think to people to understand their own business. Not letting Amazon to sell replenishment inventory and other things for the world is, they only accept small items right now. They’re improving this. They’re adding new price. But also another thing is you don’t have visibility when you transfer the goods to FBA. You don’t know when exactly is going to check in. Where’s the product. So that’s another thing. And you know, before we start recording, Josh, we were talking about the options that we’re talking about. What could be like really good for the FDA sellers is to start looking into omnichannel sales like FBM, Shopify, Walmart, some of the categories, they have really good demand, some of the categories they still are trying to pick up, but also like companies I’m talking about.

Burak Yolga 00:08:25  But we can also people can also open a store like an FBM option for companies like target or other marketplaces that I believe that brings traffic to your own website or to those third party companies, and then you reduce your risk because you never know what Amazon is going to change tomorrow. So, I think this is the one thing that we hear a lot from the customers talking about the fees, the Amazon services, but also what they can do next.

Josh Hadley 00:08:49  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense now. I think you gave us a great lay of the land. I would love to go deeper into each of these topics. So let’s dive deeper into AGL. Let’s talk about, you know, what are the pros and cons with AGL. You talked about, you know, some of the cons being you know, sometimes they’re there. They delay picking it up from your manufacturer. They now know who your manufacturer is. Right. But what are some of the advantages. And then so kind of like let’s weigh all the pros and cons for AGL.

Josh Hadley 00:09:15  And then and then I would love your recommendation. Like if it’s not AGL then what are your recommendations. Because I know we’ve seen like you know freight costs go all over the place this year. I mean, we’re back up and down. I mean, it’s just so variable right now. And what are your thoughts.

Burak Yolga 00:09:28  Let’s go back a couple of step actually steps actually Josh when I, when I lived in China, my first business was I was doing sourcing. Then I started a B2B brand. So I was doing wholesale sales from, from China to more than 40 countries. And there’s one thing that I learned is no one cares my business more than I care. And that’s what is going to be the rest of my life. And there are so many People if they sellers or companies, the brand owners, they left AGL to handle their business, but then they cannot control the outcome. What I mean with that is you can eagles do so for some. So for some companies it’s a great solution.

Burak Yolga 00:09:59  They’re oversized. They have a lot of SKUs. They don’t want to deal with all these things and they want to deliver everything to one FBA location. Maybe they have a good margin. So Asia is a great option for them, because sometimes when the companies work with the freight forwarders from China, they have a good communication, they have a time difference. So AGL came up to the market with actually good idea. So when it comes to the advantages, we can talk about these advantages. But one of the disadvantage is that you cannot control your own business. You cannot control the delivery times. You cannot control your landing cost. Sometimes we have some clients that they had issues with using the wrong import code. So Amazon overcharge them. So one of our customer paid extra $14,000 for a container that they’re not supposed to. And because their agent account connected to their seller Central and Amazon withdraws the money immediately, so you can’t even claim open the claim. So there was like out of nowhere and other issues like, you know, the delays.

Burak Yolga 00:10:47  We talk about. That could happen in any marketplace. But I know that another issue is if your shipment goes to an exam, especially in America, you know, we have a way to contact you. The CBP Coast and Border Protection to speed up, maybe open communication, but then you need to wait. Amazon representative, which can take between 4 to 6 weeks, which is going to cost you a lot of money if you run out of inventory. So these are something that may be very technical, but you know, these kind of things happen in the business. And if it does happen to you then you don’t have it control. And then eventually you are the one who’s money tied up to that inventory that’s sitting there. You can’t sell. And the other thing is getting really popular right now. As I mentioned, selling omni channel, entering new markets. If you’re using Amazon, your only option is that that inventory goes and sits in which Amazon actually came up with this new idea to drop shipping from Amazon FBA, which it was against almost their rules like a couple of years ago.

Burak Yolga 00:11:36  But Amazon now see that they can still make money with the fulfillment. So which is an interesting idea. Another news that we heard, Josh, is that Amazon is actually kind of open for China dropshipping model for cheaper items, right? It’s kind of when we see all these kind of things. I feel like Amazon don’t want to lose their marketplace like market share against other newer, cheaper options. But I think it’s also damaging a lot of their sellers business. That’s why a lot of brands or FBA, if they’re looking for alternatives like options. So when it comes to AGL, as we summarize it, I think the advantages are like easy shipping and if you’re not in the rush and if you want to save money, AGL is a great option. If you want to have multiple, shipping options like multiple, sales channels where you want to control your landing cost, control your shipments, I think it’s better to work with the freight forwarders who based out of the US, not only in China, because then you have the problem, the time difference, communication, etc..

Burak Yolga 00:12:31  I think that’s my personal opinion, cuz I’ve been in the business like more than 15 years, and I think my leverage is I’ve been in the both sides, like I’ve been a service provider as well as I’ve been a seller. So, you know, I exit my business like three years ago, FBA business, I sold it. So which helps me to put my put me in other shoes so that I can understand how they feel, what they feel. So he has a good solution. But I feel like disadvantages are more than advantages. And I think kind of, giving very openly information about your supplier is a really wrong idea strategically, because you never know if Amazon wants to be your competitor one day, which we have seen that in the past many times.

Josh Hadley 00:13:04  Yeah, I think that those are really good insights. And I think good takeaway is, are there any service providers you would recommend as as freight forwarders that are based here in the US? It sounds like that’s where you can have more control.

Josh Hadley 00:13:14  You know, if you have any issues, like you actually have some boots on the ground here. Like are there any like give me three of your favorite freight forwarders that you would recommend working with them? I mean, obviously.

Burak Yolga 00:13:22  We are one of them because we are partnering with Amazon Canada UK, Alibaba. and then I think Fosgate is doing a good job. That’s how we grow organically. The second website, I would say if you want to get an instant price code, freighters.com is a really good websites and marketplace where you can look at different companies, look at their reviews if they’re specialized on Amazon FBA, and you can play around because I think right now Josh is being successful in e-commerce. I’m not chasing Amazon FBA anymore. I believe that, like, you know, going on the channel is a smart way to do it in 2024, at least 2025, is really to understand your landing cost. So sometimes you need to play around. Maybe you want to ship 15%, 20% by air.

Burak Yolga 00:14:01  The rest is the quickest option by ocean or slow. There are different shipping lines. They have different transit times. I talked a lot of times about the carriers versus the freight forwarders. So free tools, they get a great website where you can look at the options and then kind of give priority and understand your landing cost for each, each time. And then it’s not really any fancy topic. People don’t like to maybe do that kind of calculation, but eventually, I think this year is one of the most important topic is the profitability. Can you be sustainable in the business? Can you continue to run your business? in the past, everybody was like really proud of being seven eight figure seller. But even I personally know a lot of big sellers that they’re eight figure seller, but they’re not profitable. So why is that? You know, so I think the game is changing. I think also another really big company export is a really great digital. I think it’s important to have all your shipments in front of you.

Burak Yolga 00:14:47  Documentation, the communication on a digital platform, where, of course, it also has that, it’s changing, like, you know, a lot of AI is going to affect in the forecasting of the inventory, the supply chain and also profitability. And if you talk about AI when it comes to the supply chain, we are expecting 55 to $60 billion investment in 2024 in the industry when it comes to the AI and digitalization. So I think it’s extremely important to follow the market and look for the options. You can’t just expect Amazon to deliver the goods for you if you do that. I think in some point you’re going to run into an issue and it can be a very expensive issue.

Josh Hadley 00:15:22  Yeah, makes makes a lot of sense.

Burak Yolga 00:15:25  I’m sure you have seen a lot of stories where people just try or like, you know, trust one of the service providers, but then they get like, really, have an expensive, experience with them.

Josh Hadley 00:15:36  Yeah. I think you provide some great recommendations there. so thank you for sharing those.

Josh Hadley 00:15:41  And also the insights. Now, tell me about your thought process with, what is, you know, do you recommend. Food is a is a good solution, especially to avoid the inventory placement fees. who is right for. I think there’s kind of like two topics here, right? If you’re just only selling on Amazon, in my opinion, probably make sense. But if you’re trying to go omnichannel, that’s maybe where things break down a little bit more. So I’m interested to get your thoughts on. Dive into the weeds.

Burak Yolga 00:16:08  So both AGL and food is our direct competitor like Fort Scott has multiple warehouses across the country. So I’ll try to be, like, very, unbiased about the situation. the idea of food actually came up 2 or 3 years ago where when Covid happened, Amazon was the number one place where everybody would go and buy a lot of products. And everybody thought that demand is going to stay that high in e-commerce. And now we all know that it dropped back to retailers, back to a different market channels.

Burak Yolga 00:16:33  So Amazon came up with all these like additional fulfillment center plans, which they build it, they start operating in and then suddenly demand went down. So that’s why they come up with this placement fee. Even, you know, they take the average of 30 sales. And if you don’t keep enough inventory, they’re charging with that, which is sort of crazy technically. They’re saying, hey, if you don’t keep enough inventory, we are going to charge you for money where you don’t actually keep stock in international shipping or fulfillment. We call that like allocation fee basically for Amazon. Things like, hey, I trusted you, that you going to sell that many units, but now you’re not selling those products. So basically I did this investment, billions of dollars to create all these fulfillment centers, create this fulfillment supply chain. And now you’re putting me down that I’m going to charge you. If you want to still sell with me, you need to pay this money or you should be enough. So that’s the idea.

Burak Yolga 00:17:19  A lot of people, they’re looking at the results they don’t look at like, why did this really happen? So this is the reason why they came up with the because FBA like fulfillment centers capacity was not enough. So Amazon started building these giant distribution centers, Amazon warehouse distribution. And they came up with this opinions. So they’re like since they can’t make sure that it’s enough shipments, they’re there galaxy rest. We’re going to use that as a long term storage facility, which makes sense again, if you’re selling the Amazon FBA, if you have a similar products, if you’re not in the rush, you should use is a good idea. But one of the issues is the, the time frame when you want your products to move from to, FBA, which there’s no really visibility. The product might be lost or damaged and, you know, you’re going to wait a long time. So I think depending on people’s business and cash flow, if you’re not in a hurry, yes, this is a good idea.

Burak Yolga 00:18:08  But again, if you want to control your business, I recommend you to work with independent triple where your cost is going to be same. At the end of the day, you’ll have a better service. Your shipping time is gonna be 1 or 2 days. You’re going to have the tracking information bill of lading. You don’t have any of these things, which I think the area of these things, they’re going to fix it all the time. But right now, in the short term, if you want to expand the new marketplaces, I recommend to get your own triple. So that’s my personal opinion. We work with people who try that they have good experience with, and I’m not saying it’s not a good service. Some of the people, they didn’t have a good service. It’s just like all about luck sometimes. So I think if you want to test it, test it, but don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.

Josh Hadley 00:18:41  Yeah. Great. Great insights. So let’s now focus on you talked about you know going more omnichannel.

Josh Hadley 00:18:48  What’s the ideal setup if you are trying to go omnichannel do you recommend you know there’s Amazon’s also trying to do their multichannel fulfillment more. Right. And I think we’re also seeing on that aspect Amazon’s not shipping in their original Amazon packaging now right. Even if you don’t select the hey I don’t want the ship buy an Amazon in an Amazon box. Amazon’s still just sending it in a blank box. That’s what we’ve noticed. But it’s definitely more expensive. All your eggs are in the Amazon basket. So how do you know. Especially with profitability being so tight this year for sellers it’s really hard to make a bet and say, well, I’m going to take 50% of my inventory, go to Amazon, or 80% goes to Amazon, then 20% is going to go over to this warehouse, and I’m going to hope that I get orders on target, Walmart, etc..

Burak Yolga 00:19:32  Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:19:33  Yeah. How do you recommend if they want to go omnichannel? What’s the best you know, supply chain set up, to fulfill those orders.

Burak Yolga 00:19:41  It’s really depending on a category. So we have, we have a client, that he’s selling, car seats, and he started building his Shopify, website. He start collecting, he starts collecting emails, running advertisements to just attest, you know, we we used to we keep his products in our warehouse and then we fulfill for Amazon FBA. So he asked us, hey, I want to try this for the Prime. So I think it’s a good idea to maybe wait for a special day to launch the strategy to put Amazon FBA listing, additional to your FBA, put the price a little lower and then see if there’s any demand. Once you do that, you can start actually shipping separate orders from the triple. And then the idea is to see how profitable is that. Right. when you do that successfully, the next option, in my opinion, to start running Google advertisements and put your product on different places like TikTok, Shopify, there are great softwares that you can connect all your stores on the same marketing platform as well.

Burak Yolga 00:20:37  The same inventory channel platform, which we are working on that. And I think it’s just like a really good idea to test you. And if you have 4050 SKU, try with three. And probably Josh, you have a better strategy for expanding to different marketplaces. But as a supply chain person, what I like to see is if you have orders from different marketplace and it kind of starts adding up, you have two orders from target, one order from Shopify and order from TikTok. The next day you have 1 or 2 from TikTok, one or from Shopify maybe, or target, and you start testing out. Eventually it adds up, and at the end of the day, you have like 10 to 15 different orders from 3 or 4 different marketplaces, and eventually it’s your customer. It’s very important. That is very powerful. When you launch a new product, you have the database to ask them to order product, and you already start having a brand owner. And I think there are little strategies where you can try to work with, influencers that can run your advertisements or it’s a full time job.

Burak Yolga 00:21:27  I’m not saying you just put your product there, sits there. If you don’t try to drive traffic, maybe you need to do an SEO optimization in your website. Use special hashtags. It’s kind of like doable. You can you can hire a full time marketing person in, in in maybe, cheaper countries like the VA or South America, if you don’t have that much budget, it eventually takes like time to organize these things or work with great agencies like yours. so it’s just like it’s all try and see if the product is worth it. You have enough margin. Some of the products are like really cheap. You don’t really have much margin to do that. So we have seen like some successful cases with our customers to successfully launched the product in the marketplace and start getting orders which they’re like, which they tell us, like, I wish we tried earlier, you know? So I think it’s very important to see your product, what category you have and what marketplace could be a good idea to actually get some products.

Josh Hadley 00:22:14  Interesting. Do you do any, like do you hear people having success going the wholesale route, trying to get into more traditional brick and mortar? And then do you guys help fulfill that? From the three PL standpoint, it’s a.

Burak Yolga 00:22:25  Great idea, an option. Josh, like when your brand is in multiple different locations and if you’re a wholesale company that you don’t have online presence either. The brick and mortar stores or the traditional wholesalers will approach you, ask you to sell their products online or opposite. We have seen that and one of our big brand went to our customer and ask them, hey, can you sell our product? And they offer much cheaper product compared to what they would order from China, but then in a better most favorable payment terms, which is the goal because not a regular production sign for full content of a product 40 to 45 days, the shipping times delay, checking times delay. So you’re looking at time up money like 3 or 4 months versus you can buy two products after you sell it.

Burak Yolga 00:23:05  You pay them back 30 days later so you can make money or you can actually you will be discovered by some wholesalers and they want to sell your product, which is a great idea. And you know, that’s how Anker did their global success. They start selling online. They positioned themselves really in a good place. Obviously they had marketing budget, but then they have 78 different distributors in different marketplaces. So you can go open a booth in a trade show like in Hong Kong and China and locally, if you’re selling toys, you can go have a booth in the toy together. You wait. It’s an investment. It’s kind of like 10,000. 12,000 for Booth. But then there could be some brick and mortar stores can find your retailers or their wholesalers. So that was my main business from China, and I had no money. When I moved there, I was like 23 years old. I didn’t know how to prepare for my invoice purchase order. So my friends like taught me how to do it.

Burak Yolga 00:23:47  But I was the middleman and I didn’t have any money to buy and sell inventory. What I did was I receive an order from a customer overseas. 20%. I paid to the factory, got money, got my cut and the remaining 80% before the shipment. I get paid, I pay the factory, I start making money. So it’s still possible to do that in your local market because eventually not everybody really knows how to import product. They don’t know how to clear customs. So that’s a great way to make maybe we’ll have like less margins, but it’s a guaranteed business. So that’s why if you have a good triple you have the products and someone requests, hey, can you send me a sample? We will ship the sample to the wholesalers, and the wholesalers can actually start ordering products. So imagine you have a 4000 container coming to a warehouse and then 20% goes to wholesale, 10% Shopify. And you eventually have a business that you don’t rely on only one marketplace because we even know, like, you know, with Brandon Young’s my good friend, and I see his post a couple of weeks ago and that Amazon just closed his listing for fake IP claim, which it can happen, but if you have multiple channels, then that’s how you distribute, how you put your eggs in different, different baskets.

Josh Hadley 00:24:46  I love that now, from your experience and working with a lot of different clients, are you seeing people have success in like one particular channel over others as they look to expand? Like, is it TikTok shop that you see a lot of people having success with, or is it Shopify is at Walmart? Is it target? What do you think? If a, you know, seller has limited resources and they want to open up the next you know.

Burak Yolga 00:25:06  I talked to also a lot of partners as well as the customers. if you want to do Walmart, it’s a great option because it’s FBA option like it’s it’s Walmart Warehouse distribution. So it’s a great option to ship out 1 or 2 best selling FBA skew to Walmart test out. Another great option is Amazon Canada. If you’re not selling on Amazon Canada, you’re missing out big time. Partner with Amazon Canada. We can help you to register free company in Canada. Do the customs clearance to ship it We can also introduce you to Amazon Canada if you want to have better inventory requirements.

Burak Yolga 00:25:34  So if you’re not selling in the UK Australia, maybe your product is suitable. Definitely stop looking at the global expansion. It’s Amazon makes it a lot more easier. This is number one. Number two Walmart is a good option if you think that there’s a demand. But I’m a big fan of honestly having your own website just because eventually it’s your own business. You can take that to many different places. You can make it bigger. You can add more categories. You can ask your supplier to offer you newer products with a better payment term. You can just say, hey, you know, I want to add additional 50 of this, this, this products, to start launching in my own website because you can’t need to launch 50 product on Amazon FBA, can you? We all know that it’s not really possible. You need to do giveaways. Maybe you need to run very aggressive PPC. You’re going to rank the product in 2 or 3 keywords and then you’re going to go wider, broader. PPC is very high versus you have 400, maybe baby baskets.

Burak Yolga 00:26:25  Organizer. You have 400 mothers that who bought your product, you can go and try to offer them with 50% discount of another baby product, which if they like your brand, if you like, if they like your brand story, they will, they will do it. And if you tell them, hey, look, we’re a small business, please order this product. I’ll give you a 50% off. You can celebrate even or you can say, hey, can you send this to. If you don’t need this, can you send us to your friend? You can send them an affiliate link. And these people like this kind of stories. And now we’ve seen a brand who has done this like very successful in the baby business. And they right now they have plus 300 products, different products. And they started as only two years ago, you know. So it’s just like they buy they and I love the story. We we were part of this story and I’m just like really, really nice, you know, to have someone you see grow.

Burak Yolga 00:27:03  And it was like a single mother and she was just like drove the business to a big business. Almost.

Josh Hadley 00:27:08  Yeah. That’s fantastic. great inputs, great advice. So as we wrap up, what, are there any aspects that we haven’t touched on yet that you feel like Amazon seller needs to know right now?

Burak Yolga 00:27:21  I mean, I think these are like really the hot topics. I highly recommend to understand the cash flow. Highly recommend to understand that the profitability, the lending cost on each product and focus on, instead of maybe launching new products focused on increasing the profitability of your product and try the new marketplaces with the new product, I think next 12 to 18 months, we will be talking a lot about this new marketplaces, changes on the e-commerce business and the Amazon FBA, and I would love all the brand owners to take over control their business, not to just let FBA run it. I know it’s a big part of our lives. It’s hard to like give up from the FBA business. We will not.

Burak Yolga 00:27:55  None of us as a company force will be part of the FBA community. We’ll be delivering the products to FBA. Sometimes we deliver and we work with the customers. But the idea I think is to add more marketplaces, go global, enter maybe dropshipping websites to promote your products brands, find wholesalers and create more revenue. I’ve been in the business for a long time. When I moved to China for the first time, it was a very interesting time where a factory in China sell their product to a wholesale company in China. Then the wholesale company in China trade Company. Sourcing company would sell the product to a wholesaler overseas. The wholesaler will sell it to retailers or small e-commerce company or commerce company would go. So there was a big layer tiers of the business doing traditional method. This was like 2012, 2013. Now, ten years later, the factories they sell directly on Amazon, not even that factory selling products on Time.com right now directly to direct consumer. This has a dramatic change in ten years.

Burak Yolga 00:28:52  Ten years ago, no one would ever guess this would happen. So imagine what can happen ten years from now. So we need to adjust to our business, to the like the right ecosystem in the e-commerce and wholesale. And I believe that this is the right way to do it. Like not to put all your eggs in the same basket. Like, this is what my experience tells me.

Josh Hadley 00:29:08  Yeah, awesome, Burak, this has been an awesome episode. Thanks for sharing these insights. I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. So action item number one is you. You kind of touched on this over and over again, but it’s looking to expand to omnichannel. And I love the approach that you took that it’s like, hey, you might open up Target or Walmart and it might be a slow trickle at first, right? It’s one sale, but over time, right, you take your best sellers and you launch them on those other platforms and you begin to just test out the waters.

Josh Hadley 00:29:40  We got on chain. And I was surprisingly shocked with the volume that we did on. Sheehan was outpacing what we were doing on Walmart and what we were doing on Etsy. Right. And so my recommendation there is like, if you don’t test something, you’ll never know. But I love the example that you also shared with I don’t think people need to necessarily be scared of Amazon, but I think it’s smart to be diversified because with Amazon being as big as they are, sometimes you are going to get caught in the crosshairs of a mistake and honest mistake on Amazon’s part. Maybe you’re suspended for a couple of weeks even though you’re not doing anything wrong. Now you will get things back, but how are you going to be able to manage the cash flow in the meantime? And if you have these other platforms generating sales, you know it breathes some additional life into your business.

Burak Yolga 00:30:22  You know, there’s a possibility one day a target might ask you, hey, we have a pilot program. We would like to put your product on our actual physical shelves.

Burak Yolga 00:30:29  So, you know, this has happened to many people you are selling on Walmart.com. You have a good performance in Walmart is going to be, hey, we want to put your products to 50 physical stores. That could be a life changer. So these kind of things are happening. Those brands are looking like those retailers are also looking to compete with Amazon. Those retailers are looking to increase their revenue. They want to bring back a new version, maybe like exciting products to the physical stores. So it could be a life changer. This this happens to a couple of our customers actually.

Josh Hadley 00:30:54  I love that love that. So action item number two is getting into the details of understanding the true costs that are involved in your supply chain. Right. And you mentioned, you know, we talked a lot about AGL and Ord, but ultimately you need to see what works specific to your business. But you need to be able to identify each of the costs. And I think that’s the important aspect of it is you’ve got to measure, you know, what is the cost from AGL? What’s my cost and benefit? Right.

Josh Hadley 00:31:20  Is it am I getting things shipped in on time or am I losing sales? And so it might be a cheaper rate to get started. But what if that means you go out of stock for a couple of weeks? Is the cost of a lack of sales greater than, you know, a $0.05, you know, per shipment or unit that you’re saving to bring something in? And then my third and final action item, you touched on this and we didn’t go into too much detail, but understanding your landed cost of goods is so, so important. Because what if you airship something over, right? 20% of your order gets airship, then the rest of it comes over in a boat. You’ve got to make sure that you take all of that into calculation to understand what was your true cost of goods sold. And I think there’s a lot of sellers out there that don’t understand their financials very well. And even to be honest with you, as I’ve done some consulting for some other brands, I’m seeing a lot of the e-commerce accounting firms not calculate landed Cogs correctly.

Josh Hadley 00:32:10  I know, yeah, that is a massive issue. You think you’re more profitable than you actually are, right? Right. And they’re not carrying the inventory balances on the balance sheet properly. It becomes it creates a whole host of issues, and then you wake up one day and you have no money in your bank account and you’re like, what do you mean? I’ve been so profitable setting my account.

Burak Yolga 00:32:27  In the market space. You know, unfortunately, they start buying brands and they’re like, hey, if someone’s offering me this brand, I’ll give you a Tesla. And that was like two years ago. None of those companies are in the market right now. So don’t go crazy with the business. So, you know, I think understanding your landing costs is the real thing you need to do.

Josh Hadley 00:32:42  Yeah, I love that. Brock, as we wrap things up here, I’m going to ask you my three favorite questions that I ask every guest. So number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Burak Yolga 00:32:50  you know, our team grew very fast last 2 or 3 years organically.

Burak Yolga 00:32:54  So I used to manage the business. Now I try to understand, like to managing our team better. So kind of reading the book called Atomic Habits, I really like it. I’m trying to be more disciplined, more mindful, more empathic to our team. So that’s that’s the book that I read a lot recently that helped me a lot to build a better team and surround myself with better people.

Josh Hadley 00:33:12  Yeah, atomic Habits is a great book. One of the other recommendations we had previously was a book called Tiny Habits. I haven’t yet read into it, but supposedly it’s like the the first bite into atomic habits because atomic habits, there’s a lot of good takeaways, almost overwhelmingly so I know. all right. Second question here, Burak, what is your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using that you’d recommend other people?

Burak Yolga 00:33:31  you know, I’m a little bit on the traditional side on that, that our team is using different things, but I still like my favorite is the ChatGPT, where I get to understand a lot on what’s going on in the market and then create the content.

Burak Yolga 00:33:42  I’m trying to focus on creating my content, understanding like the pain points and solve it and train my team also. So ChatGPT has been like, great, help for me to understand the market dynamics and where everything is going. So trying to understand and find some solution and better contact. So that has been like my favorite actually so far.

Josh Hadley 00:33:59  Are there any cool ways that you’ve been using ChatGPT? Any cool prompts or custom GPT?

Burak Yolga 00:34:04  yeah, sometimes, and I have, I have a really good assistant. She’s been also helping me with that. So I’m me personally, I focus a lot on the the challenges that we get, like kind of rejection we get from our customers when we when we talk to them, when we get to see what they’re going through. And I’m kind of using that in the solution that I think that can help for the next days because we focus in the company a lot in the present, the day to day, that what can we add more value to our customers life and how can we help them every day.

Burak Yolga 00:34:30  And that’s something that we’re very proud of, our customer service. Like, you know, to notify them what’s going on. I always tell our customers, hey, there could be so many things that are happening outside of our control, but I promise you, we will take responsibility and we will notify you if anything happens. You got to know earlier than anyone else. I think that’s very important. What is deserved by our customers. That’s what I’m using with the GP2 to make things better in the company every day.

Josh Hadley 00:34:51  Love it, love it. Final question who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Burak Yolga 00:34:57  you know, I’m a really good friend with multiple people. I really like Qian Gulzar. He’s my really good friend. is on the sourcing side of the business. He has a lot of different products. He has great insight when it comes to buying products, save money. And also I’m really good friend with Team Jordan. He has been in the market very long time.

Burak Yolga 00:35:13  I respect him a lot. He has a great person to connect with. Whenever I have some questions, I ask him. I have a lot of great friends. These are two people just came to my mind right now.

Josh Hadley 00:35:21  Love them. Those are great recommendations as well. Now Burak, if people want to learn more, they want to learn more about Fourchette like tell me more and where can people follow you?

Burak Yolga 00:35:29  you know, they can follow our social media channels and LinkedIn. personally, if anyone has a question, they can send an email to Burak at Foursquare. I will generally reply within 1 or 2 hours. you know, our YouTube channel, we’re trying to add value to the community. I’ve been in this part of this community almost like five, six years. And I really like to hear back from people. That recommendation you gave me that really save money. That’s what we’re trying to do. Josh, honestly, They’re great. they’re great. They are great, content in the market.

Burak Yolga 00:35:56  But I always want to be in the part where everything I talk can be actually applicable to the real life. Like you want to read and listen, and then you can apply to your business. That’s what I’m trying to be. Be practical, be to the point. So I believe that that’s what I have been doing. I’m going to try keep doing that.

Josh Hadley 00:36:11  Love that Burak. Thanks again for joining us today. This has been an awesome episode.

Burak Yolga 00:36:15  Josh, thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it.