Episode Details

Before I could send the product to Amazon I had to do something a get a little creative with the packaging. I had planned ahead for this so had everything we needed when we got back from our trip. I also had to shootsome pictures before the listing could go live. When I was ready to ship the product in to Amazon, I was amazed by how inexpensive Amazon makes it to ship to their warehouses.

For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/8/ or see below.

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Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 8 of the Branding Blitz!

Life has been pretty crazy trying to take care of my health while juggling this business startup and trying to prepare for a move across the country! I haven't been able to move as quickly as I'd like with this business, but for everything that has been going on, I'm really excited about the progress I've been able to make. I've got some exciting news to share over the next couple of podcasts.

Today, I'd like to talk about what it took to get my inventory live and selling on Amazon after receiving the shipment from China.

First, since all 3 products came loosely packed in the same box, we had to sort them into separate piles. This was easy to do with the main product, but since the two secondary products look very similar it made the process take longer than it should have. Anytime I order these two products at the same time in the future, I will make sure to request that all the units of each style are bagged or bundled somehow to keep them separate and this should save a fair amount of time sorting. That's one of those little things that didn't occur to me before hand, but it is definitely worth keeping in mind if you're considering ordering variations of the same product.

Ultimately, they need to be sorted because Amazon wanted us to ship to multiple warehouses and they specify how many of each product you ship to each one so we had to count them out. But there was an additional reason we needed them sorted. Since I was ordering off of AliExpress rather than Alibaba as I originally intended, the vendor was not prepared to do custom packaging.

They did offer to print labels for me, and I nearly took them up on it, but I insisted on seeing a picture of the labels ahead of time and they were very low quality. I'm most of the barcodes seemed unscannable. If you're working directly with a manufacturer or even a vendor that is used to customizing orders, this shouldn't be a big issue. But if like me you find yourself working with a vendor that isn't experienced with even basic customization, you will need to find some other way of labeling your product.

I do have a label printer, but all I have are really big shipping labels that would be too big for these products. And I figured rather than spend money on the proper size of label and still have to do the work of printing and sticking all of the labels, I might as well look into getting something done for me.

I looked into several companies online that print labels or stickers, but in low quantities the prices didn't really make sense. Still definitely with