TRANSCRIPT

Aaron Cordovez: 

All right. All right. Hello, everybody. I have a very special guest today, Mr. Joe from cellar locker center locker, the top tool that I’ve seen to get back your money from Amazon, because let’s face it, Amazon is not just going to give over their money unless you would demand to ask for it and demand for it. And in fact, if you don’t use some sort of refund tool, and ServiceNow, you are leaving so much money on the table. And I’m bringing Joe on to show you what he’s doing for every seller right now. For 1000s of sellers, actually. And so Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe Aribitol:

Thanks for having me, it is nice talking to you again!

Aaron Cordovez: 

And your accent? I’m assuming you’re in New York somewhere. Is that am I getting that? Right? 

Joe Aribitol:

I didn’t even know is that noticeable? I am from Brooklyn

Aaron Cordovez: 

Oh, yeah. You know, wasn’t we were talking on the show the pre show. And I didn’t notice it. But right when you said that, right. Now, when you answer that. I was like, Oh, I got it. The New York, you know, so. New York City

Good deal. Brooklyn. Awesome. And awesome. There’s actually, from what I know of a very, very strong concentration of Amazon sellers out there. Yeah. And did you find Amazon through a community out there? Did you find it another way? Another way?

Joe Aribitol:

So no, I actually brought in watches on my own in 12th grade in high school. So 11th 12th grade, my father and I started buying these wholesale watches overseas in China. And it was a time where we were ranked number one, two and three for top sellers of watches in the country. Not on Amazon, this one Amazon on Amazon in 2013. But nobody told me about FBA. Back then it wasn’t so known. And we were doing these in our basement one at a time six to 600 to 1000 watches a day manually picking packing when I got home. And that was just my first exposure. Had I known about FBA, you know, I probably could have been much scaled a little bit more. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That’s amazing.

Aaron Cordovez:

So who found the was you or was it your dad?

Joe Aribitol:

Was my dad and he brought me in as a Hey, I got these great prices on watches. What can we do with it? And I said I heard about Amazon. Let’s start looking at it.

Aaron Cordovez:

that’s a great team. That’s it. That’s like a great story. Yeah, Father, father and son. You know, find the product and then you bring in the new school. And that’s amazing. I mean, you’re what like 16 years old or 17?

Yes about 16 or 17 years old.

1617 that’s quite amazing getting started like that. I then such a healthy thing to get people working as young as you know, physically possible. Um, that’s that’s incredible. 2013 also being on Amazon. That’s like, wow, you got the that’s really it’s pretty early. Right? 

Joe Aribitol:

I lost touch until again 2018 because I didn’t know how big it was going to be your you know, I went to school after I didn’t know it was to continue it and I didn’t know about FBA. Yeah, at that time, I was just, I was a pick and pack guy. pick and pack guy.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And so you guys were sending 600 units a day? Plus right maybe 800. And then what it died out at some point like, why did you guys stop? Or was he that he didn’t just pack up someone else?

Joe Aribitol:

The supplier decided to take it himself

Aaron Cordovez: 

Oh, Snap

Joe Aribitol:

And that was a perfect time for me to start going to school, so we just dropped it.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And because you already made the listings? You guys made listings? 

Joe Aribitol: 

Yes, we made the listings with their brand name. oh well. Those again were the early days and I was so young. I didn’t really know. It was a side item. It wasn’t even my dad wasn’t even doing this full time. It was a side hustle at night for a few hours a night. 

Aaron Cordovez: 

Did you get paid for that?

Joe Aribitol:

I got $100 a week.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Remember that’s all right. Look, you learn you got it. You got the ability to sell on Amazon like that’s, that’s totally valid, and look where you are now. So let’s move forward a little bit. So you said you lost touch and you went to school?

Joe Aribitol:

It was a college or overseas: Religious Studies overseas in Israel

Aaron Cordovez: 

wesome. Awesome. How long? How long do that for?

Joe Aribitol:

two years. And then I came back to become an econ manager by this company equity brands. They have the license to many top premier brands on Amazon. And that’s when I you know reinserted myself, became the eecom director started getting very overwhelmed with scaling as all sellers face. decided, instead of trying to do everything myself, we got to start streamlining, creating slps bringing in people to specialize in these tasks. You can’t wear every single hat every single day. Sure. And in doing so, one of the biggest obstacles were reimbursements and getting overcharged on products on FBA, especially because we had big items, you know, Black and Decker air conditions, very heavy, expensive items are getting lost that’s just forced me to become reimbursement crazy. Because it was killing our margins. And there was nothing out there that was doing what I needed to be done because I couldn’t find any enterprise company just throw it to another company to do without having visibility, transparency, then they weren’t into that. So I built it on my own. I said, Hey, let me bring in a developer. Let me build something for their company over 150k in the first six months for them, not for me. Yeah, yeah. And then I said, Okay, let’s test it with some friends and family. And then before you knew it, word of mouth went to that first prosper show met a ton of sellers there.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And What year is this now What year is probably 2018 or 2019? 2018 I think that’s when reimbursements were getting pretty strong because before then it was kind of ignored. I think a refund, like some tools came out and like people were just getting money like hand over fist. And I think Amazon’s p&l, as they saw like reimbursements, and they got scared, and they changed the system. Now, but there were a few golden months maybe at that point when it was just like, people are getting a ton of money. Um, okay, let me back up a little bit cuz I’m quite interested. Um, you said you went to studies in Israel, right? For two years? Was that? Did you become some like a, like a rabbi Rabbi in training or some, was there? Like, what was it? What was that?

Joe Aribitol:

Learn More study, you know, the, the the Tommen. And just also the experience over there, get the freedom the dorms, learn about the culture. It’s kind of like a gap year. gap year in terms of family and not to say that, again, you’re saying gap, a gap, you’re like in terms of business gap, you know, some people before they go to college after high school, they take a year to go traveling the world and stuff.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay, okay. And did you? Um, just, you know, I’ve seen I’ve seen a lot of people and I and just I know people, you know, in that area, like Israeli like in from Israel from like, kind of Hebrew descendants. I mean, just happened to be extremely, extremely good. Online, like, I don’t know, maybe it’s like a, you know, it’s a positive thing. I’m not trying to be you know, whatever. But but it’s very true. And I’m wondering, has, you know, your faith, and you just talk briefly about it?

Joe Aribitol:

We study and in the studying, there’s a lot of logic back and forth, to Scott, you know, disputes how to understand that how to understand this. And in doing so, you’re training your brain every morning, you think it’s intense, intense thought and study and it really gets your mind sharp from the morning legit. Like, no, seriously from six 7am you’re already getting your brain working. You get to the office, you ready firing? You don’t need that, you know, so from 9am you get to the office, you brains ready to go.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay, good, good, fine. But let’s put it I suppose, just to wrap this segment up, it’s been extremely helpful for you, you know, to be extremely, let’s say faithful and, and having foundational values that you do every day. And you’re Yeah, I’ve known your business, you guys are very much you’re giving when you’re to your employees and to your customers, because I’m one of the customers of a company. And you know, I think we’re treated extremely fairly. And you know, the payments by percentage, and you guys have a lot of people working in our account and so fair to say that it’s, it’s helping you in a big way. And then you said, How did you find this company working for e commerce agency, or whatnot? Um, how did you get in touch with them?

Joe Aribitol:

Um, family friend, family friend, taking their business, their wholesale business online, I had a drop of experience building my own business. Young 18 year old, ready to work hard and learn and that’s why I went beautiful.

Aaron Cordovez: 

That’s amazing. And you had no what not, you didn’t do any sort of college. Is that correct? Good. Good for you. I didn’t do college. You know what I mean? So and, and and was that? Were you planning to not go to college from from the get go? Or what? How did it happen?

Joe Aribitol:

I was planning to go to college, um, throughout high school. And then I just when I started thinking about business and how much I enjoyed selling those watches on Amazon and getting the work experience in this corporate environment, where I had to have the ability where I got an opportunity to get a leadership role in this enterprise level company from an early age I felt I can learn from you know, Great people in this company, that would probably be more valuable for me in the business world, which was the path I was taking anyway.

Aaron Cordovez: 

That’s brilliant. I think that’s a super smart move. And you know, maybe you didn’t get the Commission on the watches, but you got the ultimate commission in terms of getting you on the right career, and being an extremely successful business owner at this time. So. And that’s, that’s amazing. Okay, so you did this stuff, you’re now the reimbursement King within the company? And when did you kind of decide like, hey, and first, can you maybe talk about then? Because I don’t know if I was so deep into reimbursements. At that time, what exactly were the the top refunds that you were successfully getting from Amazon? What were the in the categories? Right?

Joe Aribitol:

So it started the whole business started with FBA fees. This was something that no one was tackling at the time. It was not monitored in any way. But everyone knew it was a problem. That was what we started building the interface for. Because we need to communicate with the seller to get their dimensions in order to really kick off this category. That was huge storage fees was massive.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Was that because the dimensions are off? And then if you did dimensions were high, you calculate the storage fees?

Joe Aribitol:

And then think about long term storage fees. So it’s all starting with dimensions. So that meant was that we needed an interface at that time, so that led us into Okay, what are the inventory discrepancies, which maybe you don’t need an interface for. But one of the other key components was I don’t like and the company that I was working for instilled this into me, you can’t just spray and pray cases at Amazon hoping that they’re going to reimburse you make an accurate claim. You know, it doesn’t make sense if you really only shipped 800 pieces while you’re making claims for 1000. Yep, I’m sure Amazon employees also get frustrated seeing hundreds and 1000s of inaccurate claims. This interface also gave us the ability to speak to the sellers and say, hey, these are sidelined. Four or five cases we don’t feel comfortable opening. They’re beyond our comfortable limit of saying, hey, this looks inaccurate. Can you please verify? So that what that did is that took our success rate through the roof. And you know, those two things of Hey, we must have an interface. What are the tools that we can plug in? Really? people fell in love with that concept, especially the enterprise selling it.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Was that that was ready, and then pretty quickly, because then we’re talking 2018? Still at this time, right?

Joe Aribitol:

So yeah, 17 2018 we started going for customers.

Aaron Cordovez: 

So 2017, you built it? And was the company work for using the same exact tool or they had a different system? 

Joe Aribitol:

They weren’t using anything. So we built it for them. And then I said, Okay, this is too good to keep to myself. So that we went to the prosper show in March of 2018. Ray Berman was speaking about FBA fees in his opening ceremonies statement. There’s an issue with fees, everybody should get on top of that, find some internal tool somehow, but it’s very important. As they walked out of the trip out of that opening speech, this is us standing there saying, Hey, we built a tool for FBA fees. So that trade show put us on the map right after that calm conference, a speech. And then word of mouth. Just got around. And that’s 2018. prosper. Yeah, you signed up 827 2018. So you signed up only a few months later.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Yeah, it was, it was getting around, because there was a lot of, you know, the very first one that came out that people kind of jumped on was the helium 10. One, because I think they were very quick to market. And they I think probably they did more of a spray and pray because again, they don’t have virtual assistants working on your case. And they don’t ask for dimensions. It was just, it became a subject and boom, I saw a person who got like, 160 grand, they opened it putting out 160 grand, I was like, Oh my god, like, what is this? So we went in there, and I think we got eight grand or six grand, I forgot what it was. And I was like, Oh, this is amazing. But that was it. And that was like for the Big History in the past. And so, um, anyway, so your tool, you know, from from mine, and I want to explain what I know about it, right? When you go in, you could put all the dimensions and it’s so important because people do not realize and how small dimensions can screw up their entire company really entire margins, because not only does Amazon get it wrong, but sometimes you can rework the product. So when your tool you put in like okay, it’s you know, 12 inches by 18 inches by four inches or something like that. And if Amazon scans it to be 18.1 inches, right, now, your oversize you’re getting charged, like $4 more unit or something like that. You’re You’re, you’re basically they’ll split your shipment into multiple I’m not exaggerating

Joe Aribitol:

Great point. Now that you fell into a different tier, your inventories go on in different locations. And sometimes the locations are far from your warehouse because it only has certain facilities that can handle the oversized items, and everything became a headache from one simple inch.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Or even one centimeter or like, a 10th of an inch, right. And so I’ve seen people and they have a product that’s, you know, point eight inches. And I’m like, Look, your packaging is so fat, make it smaller, get 2.75 inches, boom, you’re gonna save yourself 70 cents on every unit. And to a lot of people, this is a concept. And I think I’m talking fast for a lot of people because this, this concept is ignored by a lot of people because they just send it in and like Amazon charges what they charge charge. But before, if you’re using seller locker, you put your dimensions in. And if Amazon has dimensions that are not one match, then you guys will be able to find and be like, hey, we’ll get you reimbursements correct? Yes, one of the features.

Joe Aribitol:

Yes. The other feature to your point is we built a calculator that tells you how, if you put in your product, and it’s maybe on the threshold or close enough, we’ll give you recommendations, the calculator will spit out and tell you hey, if you lower your your smallest side by point two, you can fall into the smaller trs scholars and pop.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And is that tool for only for Seller Locker users? Or is that open? Everybody? It’s a calculator? What’s the URL?

Joe Aribitol:

It is for everybody, I will get the URL and send it to you. 

Aaron Cordovez: 

So in the in the notes, we’ll have that the FBA fee kind of monitor check. And I actually built one of these myself, because I mean, it’s so it’s ridiculous, right? a product that’s maybe $1. Right, a cogs, your actual cost of the goods, your fee might be $1.50 more because of a wrong dimension. So your fee mistake is more than your entire cost. So imagine if you get your product for free. That’s what monitoring this stuff and actually doing an audit on it can actually bring you so this is a this is a topic that is huge for sellers, and a lot of them don’t know about it. So okay, cool. And the storage fees. Okay, give me give me some how do you get back to storage fee? So if that’s only after you kind of fixed the dimensions, and how does that work?

Joe Aribitol:

You really spot on tonight. So you go in and you win the FBA fee case, right after winning the FBA fee case, there is not even such, it’s not so hard to understand that the information is hidden from Amazon, it’s a different reports. But potentially, you can go ahead and calculate the volume of the product that your skew took up, compared to what the new measurement of so it’s what they had your product listed as which our tool already knows, versus what we got Amazon to change it to. And the amount of inventory that Amazon is telling us that they stored for the last three months, multiplied by the difference by the number that’s within that tier. Yeah, we go ahead and ask for that item for that. So that dollar amount.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Nice. Now, I mean, that’s brilliant. And now a question for you, if you and if they scan it, and let’s say they scan it, and it turns out a little bit bigger rather than smaller. They don’t go back and charge you more storage fees, do they?

Joe Aribitol:

No, luckily no

Aaron Cordovez: 

So that’s one thing they’re not they’re not hawks on in that direction. Right? Um, and then what about what are the time limits? Because I believe when this started there were almost no time limits, right? Meaning it didn’t expire. If you had a refund do for you like two years ago? Or at least 12 months I think was for sure the limit that I remember and you found out about it you can ask her refund and they’ll give you your money back for you know inbound shipments that that had pieces missing things like that, no, a year maybe even two years ago. Right. So what was the time limits kind of originally and and what are they now?

Joe Aribitol:

So I’ll break it down for you for FBA fees the like you said it used to be 18 months used to be able to go back 18 months which was awesome. So and sign that we find the mistake, we go back a year and a half and get them huge reimbursements. Now in that category, they brought it all the way down to 90 days, 90 days, which means that if something’s wrong today, you better fix it now. Because if you have sales in q4, and you don’t fix it now you’re not gonna get the reimbursements for any of your sales in q4. So that means you have to act now you can’t wait another six months and say Hey, I’ll fix this eventually. You don’t fix it today. You’re not getting your q4 reimbursements back for FBA fees for inbound shipments anything related to inbound shipments, they give you nine months. That’s the window for inbound right now.

Aaron Cordovez: 

It used to be longer was always been nine months?

Joe Aribitol:

It has always nine months. If you’re nine months in one day, done, there’s no there’s no, they’re pretty strict on that rule. And when it comes to inventory related, discrepancies lost, damaged. customer returns that things of that nature. It’s still 18 months.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Oh, great. Okay. Yeah. Because I mean, they’ve lost your inventory. Yeah. And I have a story of a guy. And this is this is a case and I don’t know if you guys will flag this or have how many cases you’ve you’ve run into like this. But this company they sent in I want to say 15,000 units of a product. And no joke. They all disappeared. Okay. They did cases and this and they talked about it for like three months. Okay. And Amazon would just be like, No, these never existed never got it they. And they had to get a lawyer to actually go and like, threatened legal to Amazon after that happened. They go Oh, yeah, oh yeah, it did come up and we lost them and they got reimbursed for the cost of all those products on and then their product started showing up as being sold by Amazon and it goes all these these issues right. But there was a there was a point where they had to bring a lawyer in. And again, this is secondhand knowledge. It wasn’t there on the account, but it heard from this seller, right? And how often does it come where Amazon maybe does a huge error, and they won’t, you know, man up for it, and you have to bring a lawyer or anything like that.

Joe Aribitol:

So I’ll take it a step before then. Okay. And then we’ll talk about your scenario. I can I mean, this is a podcast, or people can watch this as well?

Aaron Cordovez: 

Well, we can briefly talk about I’ll have the video. So if you’re listening to podcasts, you can go on the YouTube channel, just search Aaron cordobas. And we’ll have this brief thing. But let’s let’s try to keep as much as much verbal as possible.

Joe Aribitol:

Yeah, I’ll talk to it also, almost every time now, Amazon does have pushback. So every time Amazon will tell you no, the first time, I’d say 80% of the time, their first knee jerk reaction is no.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Huh? Is that is that for? Not for the feeds, this is for inbound for last for everything?

Joe Aribitol:

It’s like, they make you prove it to if you make a claim. It’s like insurance, basically. Okay, they’re gonna push back on you, and you’re gonna have to prove them wrong. And I’ll tell you why I think they do this. They’re trying to go ahead and make people bring either more information to the case. Yep. They don’t want to give you the money that’s due to you. They want you to prove them wrong. Yep. So what happens most of the time and meet with sellers that do this in house with vas, or other third party agencies, when you have 1000s of clients, it’s very hard every day to imagine you open up a claim, you put in the effort opening up the claim, and this is the response, you get a long, complex response with links to go look at this. They drop terms like fair market value, which people don’t understand, how is it simple? That’s simple, but has an Amazon seller or a virtual assistant overseas? Or the VA is that work? For the third party seller agencies supposed to know how to respond to a case like this? And there’s hundreds of different responses Amazon has, it’s just impossible, and many times they leave it and expires and the sellers don’t get what they do. Okay, so that was just this is, um, let me see reconciled tab.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay, so those missing items, you said, hey, these were missing, we didn’t get reimbursed. Amazon gave me some money. Amazon says a bunch of stuff, please allow me a detailed explanation on why you don’t have any money, right. And then they give you a bunch of garbage.

Joe Aribitol:

So what happened in this case, specifically, Amazon did reimburse the seller with seller locker $1,000. So he got back $1,000 out of the 2000. So there’s $1,000 left. Now I want that full 1000. That’s all my profit margins, you’re gonna take half of the value of what you lost away, my profit margins were only 20%. In general, your my entire shipment is a waste of money or a loss, I’m taking a loss on the shipment. This tool that we built is built with machine learning. And we have millions of cases that we’ve submitted already. And we see so many with big data, our tool with one click of a button can disprove Amazon, using their own policies against them. Read the page, we understand what’s going on with one click will actually disprove them with their own policies justifying why we’re do the rest of the money owed to us. And this Chrome extension is has 120 different types of responses for 120 different types of scenarios, which we’re adding every single week to disprove Amazon and take the case to the next level. So your question was, Hey, you know, what are you doing? Amazon says no, for claims, we do have a process for that to take the process from A to B to C and keep escalating the cases as needed. We don’t take no for an answer. With this tool that we built. There are scenarios where Amazon is playing hardball, you know, $40,000 shipment, there is still a need for lawyers in that scenario. But we do win $40,000 claims we had a 25k one come in yesterday. So with this process, we are winning a lot. But yeah, we’ve heard about big ones to.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Nice bright and I’m sure since you guys, you know, I was talking to our freight team before the call and I was like if you have any questions or whatnot, and then we’re like, Well, no, I we know that Seller Locker is working for their money because you know, you guys take a percentage of that refund coming back. And you’re going to work for it right? Rather than just having like a flat fee where it’s like, I don’t care if let’s say that case right there, it’s 1000 bucks, that would be gone out the window, where you’re like, no, I I want that piece, whatever percentage that’s gonna be like, I want a piece that so you guys are gonna keep working on that. And it’s worth if you have all that data, you go no and you make you keep replying, replying. They don’t do they ever close out the case when you reply a bunch of times.

Joe Aribitol:

So what we see is they start ignoring us because they admit that they’re wrong, but then the tool smart enough. We’re not looking To pick a fight that we can’t win. So if we see that we hit a brick wall, we will let the seller know, the tool will let the seller know. And the tool also suggests, hey, it’s been three times that you’ve attempted this, you can either get more proof from the seller, or our tools suggest to the VA to just shut it down. Okay? Except your losses, because again, we’re not looking to pick a fight with with Amazon, we’re not looking to do that. We’re all on the same team. But we are fighting for the sellers. And we want to be accurate. So we don’t want just, we don’t just want to open up and we don’t want to fight. 

Aaron Cordovez: 

There are things and there might be maybe someone who did something manually there obviously, are some errors that could occur. But yeah, so as I was saying is that you guys work for that commission piece, because if you get you know, for our company, I was checking it, and it’s over $50,000 that you guys have gotten back for us, right, and you guys didn’t get it, boom, you guys got a chunk of that. And it’s worth it. We’re on the same team. And of course, Amazon, you know, I know there are people who let’s say, you have 1000 unit shipment, and 900 arrives and they’re gonna be like, well give me that 100 even though they didn’t send the full amount, like you mentioned, and your son or daughter school is like, dude, you didn’t send that. But Amazon is also has a point where, hello, they need to defend themselves too. Because if not, people are just gonna like, lie all the time. So they need to verify it. And, and the cool thing, I really think that Chrome extension is pretty awesome. Um, that’s relatively new, right?

Joe Aribitol:

That was last September. That’s it. But you don’t even know about it. We’re taking care of it’s like an internal tool we built for us. But it’s really cool. Oh, that’s not one that people install. Every everyone has access to it. But most people, we didn’t build a tool initially for vas. We built it for the sellers themselves, even when you came on. We didn’t have that. But then I guess sellers are too busy to even click one button, which I know, I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like. So you had to bring in VA to do the same things that you would have done. And we built this for them, but also for some sellers like to do it in house. So they use the Chrome extension.

Aaron Cordovez: 

That’s brilliant. Okay, good. And then could you um, could you say like, when someone comes on, do you have like an average amount that’s a reimbursement versus revenue? Or like, what can somebody expect? Let’s say they’ve never done any reimbursements, or gone for anything. And they’re coming right now. They’re selling on Amazon Associates at 30,000 a month, 100,000 a month. And they’re coming to you guys, they connected? What do you see? Or what do you expect to see normally in that account?

Joe Aribitol:

If someone’s never done reimbursements before, and actually, it’s pretty close, the average is between one to 3% annually. So the first year might be closer to 3%. And then every year after that, between one and two, that’s of the revenue of their revenue, we can recover, which comes out to like six to 10% of your profits sometimes. But yeah, one to 3% of someone’s annual revenue.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Wow. And and that’s again, yearly, right? annually, annually. Okay. And then, um, what do you see like, the biggest chunks come from? What are the biggest gains or losses?

Joe Aribitol:

I guess it depends. So some sellers, who are doing high high high volume, lost inventories, huge loss and damage inventory just keeps getting lost in the warehouse. For some sellers, it’s inbound shipments, for some sellers, like you mentioned, to are also doing high volume, and have different thresholds of where their products lie. It’s not even about the money they get back. It’s about the money, they save going forward and future profits because they fix their fees. That’s a component that nobody even thinks about. We have one seller that that right now recovered, made $4 million more profit this year, because they fixed their fees.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Wow. And and, of course, that’s a humongous company that probably has a ton of people already in their free department already doing dimension. So what do you think got? Like, why did seller make seller locker make a difference for them? Obviously, they already have a huge team. Already people monitoring most likely, What? What did you guys do special?

Joe Aribitol:

So on that specific account, and that’s an extreme case, but that specific account, the skew is on the threshold? It’s it’s, you know, it’s six, it’s 17 point, it’s actually Yes. 17.75. And now it’s on the threshold and all of their products are on that threshold, and every day keeps and we have to keep fighting. It’s not it’s not a one time fix. It’s an ongoing battle.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Let’s talk about that. Because here’s the here’s the crazy thing is we have products around that range, right? 17 and a half or 17, or whatever, but what happens is the box might get one unit might get a little bit squished. Yeah. And if they do a scan or receiving one warehouse, that one thing gets marked at 18.1 inches. You’re everything good. goes crazy. But most of them are there. So what if you do like, let’s say, I know there’s a thing called a cubit scan where they, you know, they actually scan it. That’s like, I think it’s a trademark of the machine they use anyway. So they’ll get it. And then what if they got a unit that was fat? And it went to 18.1? Like, what? What do you do then?

Joe Aribitol:

So what happens next, in our process is our tool will actually find it, it will create an internal case, on the dashboard, it’ll say, we have a new case ready to open FBA fees. We go ahead and we ask Amazon to re measure and they’ll re measure it and hopefully they re measure it correctly on a new skew, with a better packaging that didn’t have that issue, and they’ll correct it. And then they’ll credit you backwards for the other skews.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay. Okay. And, okay, so what what do you Is there a way like to not have the boxes like squish? You know, do you do have you talked to sellers like, hey, gets this x package? is better? Five layer cardboard versus three layer? Or is there anything you’ve seen that makes it not like expand? Because I’m imagining you’re dealing with a humongous seller? That’s right at 17.76? What have they done? That maybe we could use to like not have it ever be over?

Joe Aribitol:

Well, what they’ve done is they’ve looked at our calculator. And they kind of started seeing with their factory, how much they can cut out from the right and from the left, and they’re able to bring down their packaging, cumulate cumulatively by two inches, you know, point five there and 2.5 here, and they were able to bring themselves farther away from that threshold, which the calculator help them do. Right. Okay. So I also recommend never packing poly bags.  That’s, that’s like a number one thing,

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay. And these are for thin products or what like? like a cell phone case in a polybag?

Joe Aribitol:

Or even clothing, people do clothing and poly bags or gets the factories will deal with the air sealing. So they’ll go inside and be more expensive about, you know, a few pennies more to eat again, but that’s to prevent it. That’s like airfields perfect, right? There’s no problem with an air seal. Or they’ll do tight. The don’t leave the extra three inches of packing just the one time that the guy measured it with the extra three inches.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And then. Okay, good. So, if people want to want to sign up for Seller Locker, right, um, we’ll have a link below. We talked about this. But do you what kind of offer do you have for them to try it out? See, hey, what money can you get us back for? And I know you guys will, we’ll take care of them. But what what could you offer the listeners?

Joe Aribitol:

Sure. So right off the top, anybody who’s listening and wants to use Aaron’s pro promo link will get the first $500 that they recover on the house, give it a try. See, you know how we do what we do. And sign up, the way it works is you sign up, you get an account audit. So I’ll show you with your own dashboard. You know how to use the tools, the pieces of information we may need from you to get started, if necessary. Sometimes we don’t need anything from you. We’ll agree on a rate. And we’ll push forward, we’ll show you the different features that we need, like the texting feature, where you can actually whip out your cell phone, give that cell phone number to your warehouse if you won’t have them take pictures of bill of ladings. And you could text us your bill of ladings. It’ll automatically use image recognition to put the right shipments in the right cases, the right images in the right cases because you need these as proof, the stamped bill of ladings, and these documents, these are all necessary to win cases. So we built all these different tools. We’ll show you how to use them. 10 minute demo. And that’s it. We’re off to the races.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay, good. And then and then our last thing on seller rocker and then move on to this other thing, which we talked about. But you know, what is the big difference between seller locker and let’s say there are other tools out there, you know, search like FBA refunds, whatever, some guys will do 100 bucks a month, you get a two one it’ll like, do a bunch of random stuff. And we talked about a couple of differences. But what do you see? I know a lot of people are signing up to you guys after using other tools. Yeah. So what do you see?

Joe Aribitol:

Those are my favorite guys. So yeah, so the biggest difference is a point that we mentioned earlier, actually two points that I mentioned earlier. One is responses. There’s no company out there without a tool that has a Chrome extension, like the one that we built, which are the only ones that have that can manage Amazon’s responses if a than 80% of the time Amazon’s you know, giving you a hard time pulling your leg or they’re playing hardball and you don’t have the tools set up to fight back. Most companies are opening up cases and then not following up to actually win them. So if they get a reimbursement on the first try great. What we see when other people come from other companies is we actually pick up all those times that the person got denied. Hmm. And then we fight those two with our Chrome extension. So we pick up where they left off, which is funny, they did the beginning part and we take it to you know, you get stuck in the red zone you don’t get a touchdown, so we help take it off. All the way to where he’s got to be. And that’s huge just responding to cases, we are the only solution out there with a proper responding tool that doesn’t let cases get, you know, stuck behind an expire. FBA fees is something that cell locker built its business on and still specializes in. And then something that we call prep that prep section, getting us the documents using the texting feature, more verifying shipments with us before we submit them before we don’t feel because we don’t feel comfortable. Those are things that, again, are important to us that we built into the interface so that we can go ahead and open up each case with the highest success rate. 

Aaron Cordovez: 

Nice, nice. And then how much Oh, and again, that’s one one of the reasons we love seller locker is that you guys have an army of virtual assistants like opening cases doing this. Like, we don’t have to think about it. And these guys are pros. That’s all they do all day. So yeah, I agree. That’s it. That’s an excellent point. And to date. Now, do you know the cumulative amount of refunds that you’ve gotten for sellers up to today? This month?

Joe Aribitol:

Was 2.12. Point 1 million.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And then total? Maybe what is between 30 to 40?

Joe Aribitol:

Yeah 40, don’t tell Amazon… 

Aaron Cordovez: 

Well, they won’t know the difference, right?

Joe Aribitol:

They don’t know if it’s Seller Locker. Right. I know. And they do it, no, we’re not hiding, we actually are in Amazon’s App Store. They vetted us two to three times already, we had another meeting with them two days ago. They like to see how you know what logic we’re using. Every time we talk to them, they create another tool to make it harder for us. 

Aaron Cordovez:

But hey, as long as it’s really lost, then I don’t think they can make enough tools. And you guys will be on top of it. So that’s that’s pretty good. Okay, awesome. And then with this, our movies that you’ve you’ve had, we just talked about, you know, before we got on air was something you’ve been doing, you know, the kind of the next phase? And is this still branded, like SellerLocker? Are you making another company for this piece?

Joe Aribitol:

So it’s still Seller Locker, we saw that people have other needs, they have other things that cause them to lose sleep at night. I’ll give one simple example stranded inventory and suppress listings. Oh, yeah. like Amazon tells you, at least with enough detail what’s wrong with an item before they suppress it? Now you who’s focused on sales, new launches, advertising, q4, it’s the holidays, you just want to enjoy Christmas, get an email, you know, in the morning saying, Hey, your items taking down you have 24 hours to respond. You just it’s just so exhausting and taxing. Something that we’ve done is we already have this army of VHS. We’ve already built so many slps and tools to organize, watch streamline, they are running, we’re running a tight ship with them. What else can we teach them and train them with? And that’s what we did. We taught them how to manage 70 other tasks dealing with suppressed listings and, and stranded inventory is just one of them. But they can help with back end search terms, managing your promos and coupons. Nobody sets those up properly. You know, if you buy this, you get 15% off of the other and you get we get all that stuff altogether, set it up for people 70 different tasks that I’m not going to list all 70

Aaron Cordovez: 

Okay, okay. And then. And so, one of the tasks that I’m particularly interested in was these listing images, right? A lot of guys, when they start off, they like, oh, gosh, do you know a good photographer, no good, blah, blah, blah, they spent all these hours and hours on Fiverr or Upwork, or, you know, their buddies who’s a designer or whatever. And a lot of times their image, their listings are pretty bad. Or they get just images from the factory, which all the time they’re copyright infringement. So that’s kind of a thing to do images. So you told me about this kind of image package? Is that something you could see on the site? Or you could just talk about it? And then you have to email? Or how do you get this offer? We’ll put the link there. But talk about that image package. And if you want to, if you want to share it, too, you can share it? 

Joe Aribitol:

Yeah, well, I will. So again, here’s like you said, people, they start off and they’re trying to get involved with a small investment, and then to properly do these images the right way. And I don’t know if you know this, Aaron but if you ever look on your mobile as I’m sure you shop on Amazon images are 85% of that main screen. People are buying based off of reviews, images and price. That’s That’s the key. Maybe they have to click to see the features and stuff. But 85% of what people see when they make a mobile purchase is the image. And we know that the premium brands have jumped into lifestyle and infographics. Now, it’s usually very expensive between two to $300 per acent to do infographics, or that’s what it used to cost. And that’s simply because you have to work with a design team and you only giving them a little bit amount of work. So therefore they want to charge you a premium set a lock is 4000 clients now with a massive amount of aces and we were able to partner up with a design team and bring Ridiculous prices because of the high supply. So we have high volume, and we did a beta, we got to 300 people to try it. And we were able to guarantee ridiculous rates to get these products, you know, superimposed and optimized for about $89 for seven images, five to seven images of you know, give us your basic products, we’ll take it to the next level for you. with Photoshop and stuff, no matter how complicated it is.

Aaron Cordovez: That looks really real. That looks really real right there. And if is tough do you charge anymore? 

Joe Aribitol:

No, we don’t charge more. So yeah, our pricing is at $89 for one, a three-pack, which is three ASINs, not three images, three ASINs, five to seven images is about $229. And then we have more deals for the more ASINs that you give us.

Aaron Cordovez: 

And again, guys, normally, you know, a photographer for one image sometimes will charge 50 bucks, and up, okay, for one image for design work, you know, if you’re going to a lot of places that all designers might charge 20 $30 for an image or something like that, in this case, just doing the math, it’s like 12 or 13 bucks, and you can get it down to closer to 10 bucks if you’re doing three ASINs. And here’s the deal guys, and I preach about this all the time is like, you need to try images, try new images, testing your images is one of the biggest things you can do to actually increase your conversion rate and increase your overall sales. So you know, worst case, I’m actually gonna try this, I’m gonna send this so I have a couple of brands to try this out on. And I’m actually I’m excited and at SellerLocker.com/images 

So pretty cool. Pretty cool thing. I’ve never seen someone have it that low rate, and the images look pretty decent. Again, it’s not it’s not like friggin high studio super crazy thing. But honestly, use I’ve seen some top sellers that have horrible images. So like, you know, if you’re trying to be 100% perfect, this is not it. But like, Hey, you can get way above the what some people sell out is awesome.

Joe Aribitol:

I’ll go 80% you give us

Aaron Cordovez: 

80 to $80 is pretty good. That’s pretty good. And that’s 20% is the 20% 100 bucks. Okay, good. Yeah. Awesome. And I mean, that’s, that’s pretty amazing. And then what of the, you know, in hiring all these virtual assistants? Is there any Do you do hiring yourself?

Joe Aribitol:

Yeah. Okay, we have a whole training that we go through, it’s about three months of training until we get it right.

Aaron Cordovez: 

Whoa, Hold on! So when you hire somebody, they go through three months of training before they get on the job. So they work with that. And so like I’m talking about the virtual assistants within SellerLock, or salesmen and stuff. Um, either, I just want to get tip recruiting tips, because you know, you clearly have done a very good job and with these virtual assistants, on general, but also your team, I’m sure it’s extremely efficient. So just some hiring tips in general.

Joe Aribitol:

I mean, this is not typical. It’s not typical. They go through three months of training on their own, we have a virtual assistant Amazon training course. Okay, this is about 70 different tasks, yaks learn everything. Yeah, on those 70 different tasks. And then after that, we test them with reimbursements using the tool and monitoring them on low, easy level tasks, until they can become let’s say a responder, someone who’s capable of responding to cases with accuracy and communicating with sellers in a way that the sellers would appreciate. So that’s the process you have it all you know, streamlined.

Aaron Cordovez: 

What training tool to use? How do you keep those parts and procedures to training the people? Do you use a certain software?

Joe Aribitol:

We use Check Flow. I set up the processes one step at a time first do this then do that it’s connected to API’s, we’re feeding it data, we track how long it takes very intense stuff. 

Aaron Cordovez: 

I will have to check that one out. We’re looking for like a training. We’re not experts at that. So um, okay, that’s pretty cool. Pretty cool. Okay, um, and then, is there anything that you have seen your work with so many sellers? Actually, how large is your largest seller or your largest seller? Like, what kind of bracket? or their range? 100 million-plus? 

Joe Aribitol:

We have two of the top 10 to the top 10. Wow. And 12 of the top 100 like we work with outside the top, Amazon. So I think we have at least half 10% of the top 500 even. Wow, that’s amazing. I have one cell that I think in the next three days is going to break the million-dollar mark in one year. A million and recoveries 

Aaron Cordovez: 

Oh! In recoveries.  That is important and remarkable! 

Um, what do you see? Right? Because I don’t know how many of them you talk to right? Because, not all your customers have a podcast like myself, but what have you seen, like these top sellers that are extremely successful? How have they gotten there? Right? I got people who want to make it, you know, they’re not going to focus a lot of their time on reimbursements, right, they should just sign up for something, you know, and have, you know, somebody does that. But what has you seen is like the common denominator between the most successful sellers.

Joe Aribitol:

So I’d say the biggest thing to focus on right now is, is taking those things that are dragging you down, the stranded inventory, the things that take very long, maybe the keyword research, the items that are taking, you know, the two, three hours of your day, where you’re not focusing on putting together, you know, set up procedures, everything has to have a process, thank the 20 things that you’re doing. Anytime you have something that you’re doing three times or more per week, streamline it, automate it as best as you can, and hand it off, or delegate it to someone who can be doing it for less, meaning if your time is worth 2030 hours, or 20 $30 per hour. 20 $30 per hour, give it to someone who you can pay $6 an hour four or $3 an hour for they can do those tasks you focus on, you know, what’s my giveaway strategy, what’s my PPC strategy, stuff like that. And in doing so, you’ll start creating better effective launch strategies, which is really where it’s at.

Aaron Cordovez: 

If you want let’s go over your rates at SellerLocker for performing many different tasks?

Joe Aribitol:

We’re at $400 a month for about 30 to 40 hours of virtual assistant time, which is, you know, very, very cheap, a ridiculous rate unheard of. I mean, it’s an extremely, extremely good rate.

Aaron Cordovez:

And these are people who’ve gone through this three month training? How many of them will make it to your three-month training?

Joe Aribitol:

We work with them to perfect each and every task. It’s not about you know, not making it and we get them to they have to be.

Aaron Cordovez:

All right, Joe. It’s been great. And do you have any, you know, parting words? Obviously, sing up for Selle Locker. You know, check it out of you. If you use your refund tools, check it out. And just anything else that maybe we haven’t covered that you think people should know, either about the tool or anything in general.

Joe Aribitol:

He saves me one million dollars.

Aaron Cordovez:

Who’s that? Is that? Is that a business partner?

Joe Aribitol:

Yeah it’s one of my business partners.

Aaron Cordovez:

Yeah. Okay, there you go. I guess he’s also a seller.

Joe Aribitol:

Yeah, he’s one of our actually beta tested as one of our beta testers.

Aaron Cordovez:

Oh, sweet, sweet. Well, that’s a good testament. Alright, Joe! Thank you very much

Joe Aribitol:

You got it! Thank you