How Chinese New Year Impacts Your Amazon Supply Chain

Transcript

Colleen: Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We are here to talk to you about how Chinese New Year can impact your Amazon supply chain. I'm excited to have our featured presenter, featured guest with us here from Noviland. This is Francois Jaffres. He is the director of Business Development at Noviland. He is a Mountaineer from West Virginia University where he studied industrial engineering. West Virginia University is actually my alma mater's... I went to Virginia Tech-

Francois: Rival.

Colleen: ... so we're somewhat rivals. But I won't hold that against him. But anyway, he worked at Coca-Cola for years while he was in college, and he's been at Noviland since 2016. He splits his time actually right now between Atlanta and Pittsburgh. He guest speaks on a lot of podcasts and webinars, and he helps onboard the new users for Noviland and just really works alongside marketing and sales to grow their company's brand. In a minute I'll let him tell you a little bit about Noviland. But for anybody who doesn't know who I am, my name is Colleen Quattlebaum, and I'm the marketing manager at eComEngine. eComEngine, we have a full suite of Amazon tools. One is FeedbackFive, which is a feedback and review management tool. We have MarketScout, which is a product sourcing or research tool, and RestockPro is an FBA inventory management tool. And then SmartPrice is another tool that we have in beta. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. But I'll go ahead and turn it over to Francois who'll give you a little bit on Noviland, and then we'll jump right into the webinar.

Francois: Yeah. Thank you so much, Colleen, for having me. I appreciate it. We are a little bit of a rival, but it's okay, I won't hold it against you either. But in regards to Noviland, yeah, we're a full supply chain management company that handles every step of the process, whether it comes to sourcing, factory vetting, production oversight, quality control management, logistics and freight forwarding, as well as 3PL fulfillment. We are truly a factory to door service for Amazon sellers, for Walmart sellers, really for any business that's looking to purchase private label products from overseas factories. And of course do that by just this very efficient and streamlined process with experts along the way that work as a team with all of our users and all of our Noviland partners to really make this efficient supply chain and really make something that is so antiquated and historically has a very steep learning curve more accessible to everyone, Amazon sellers of all sizes.

Colleen: Yeah, thank you. So what we're going to talk about today, Francois will share what to expect during Chinese New Year. He will share the importance of quality RFQs, as well as tips for vetting quality suppliers and factories, and also how a 3PL partner can help you maintain your IPI score. During this webinar, we will be recording it. And if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the question and answer section of Zoom. We also have my co-worker Becky here on backup to help out with any of the facilitation that we need as well. But I will go ahead and get started with some questions for Francois, and will keep an eye on the questions from all of you. So if I see any questions pop in, I'll be happy to interject and see if he can address those. So without further ado, I'll go ahead and just stop sharing my screen so we can talk directly. So Francois, what is Chinese New Year and what can sellers expect from importers, factories, et cetera?

Francois: Yeah, Chinese New Year, it's a great question because it's essentially the Christmas of China. It's where all families get to get together, all the factory workers that were traditionally working this 996 schedule, so that's from 9 AM to 9 PM six days a week, get to go home and relax. They get to bond. This historically has over three billion trips every single year in just one country, which I find fully fascinating, but we'll see how COVID really impacts this year. It's really a time for everyone to also reflect and see what they did in this past year. Aside from the smaller holidays, with one of the longer ones before Golden Week, this is one where they can actually start to reconsider, "Is this where I want to stay? Do I want to continue working at this factory or are there new opportunities more inland or closer to home?" So when it comes to Chinese New Year, it's essentially a time where the economy in China shuts down when it comes to manufacturing. Everyone gets to be their families and really enjoy themselves.

Colleen: And so when exactly does it begin and end?

Francois: Technically, it starts February 12th and it goes for about a week, so it goes until February 19th. Now, when it comes to supply chain though, it really starts, I would say, beginning of October. That's when you really start to feel it. So yes, that's what? Five months? About five months in advance... Four or five months? Something along those lines. Factories start getting in all the orders for... We have the holiday season here in the US. We have Black Friday. We have Cyber Mondays. So all these businesses are rushing to place their orders to meet these holidays, as well as Christmas, which of course everyone loves to spend so much on Christmas. But then they're also planning for Chinese New Year which starts two months after Christmas. The main reason for that is because those factories start to really shut down two to three weeks before Chinese New Year starts. And then about two to three weeks after, they're still in this ramp-up period where factory workers, like I said to you, they are considering leaving and going to other factories. They may just not return. And so now those factories have to account for that and hire and retrain new workers as well.

Colleen: Got it. So that causes a backup at the factories to get all the orders completed and such.

Francois: Right.

Colleen: What are some of the issues that you see?

Francois: Yeah, so just like you said, it actually creates this massive bottleneck, but it's a bottleneck at every stage within the supply chain itself. Within the supply chain, you have the factory production outputs, you have quality control, you have shipping and logistics, which also includes domestic truck delivery. It includes express air freight for last minute inventory refills, that includes sea shipping as well, and then congestion at the ports. So every single one of those creates its own bottleneck, starting with the factory output, because they're typically working at a 120 to 150% capacity than what they usually do at the beginning of the year. With them producing more products and of course this being on a larger scale, so not just a few factories doing it, everyone rushing to get in their orders, it really creates this massive influx for freight forwarders and for truckers and for the logistics industry overall to maintain and export out to different businesses. So within those bottlenecks you see a lot of quality issues, you see a lot of issues with damages, whether it comes to the boxes or the pallets, lost items, that's fairly common, especially when it comes to right before Christmas or right before Chinese New Year when it's really at the peak of the peak season. I guess those are a few of the bottlenecks and issues that I typically see.

Colleen: Okay. Maybe we can take a minute just to ask a poll to the audience here. We do have a couple of polls just to get an idea of what some of your pain points are and such. The first one is a pretty simple one, I'm going to just ahead and just launch. It just asks if your supply chain has ever been impacted by Chinese New Year. If you can just a minute and just say yes, no, or you don't know, and then we will wrap that one up. Again, we just love-

Francois: And you may not know.

Colleen: Maybe you've been lucky. We'll give it about five more seconds. Okay, so it looks like 33% said yes, 0% said no, and 67% said I don't know. So we'll do one more poll real quick. This one has to do with the issues, because this will help us to determine what focus to have the rest of the webinar as well. But what is the biggest issue that you've encountered during Chinese New Year if your business has been impacted? Was it shipping delays, quality issues, pricing issues, maybe a communication issue or something else? We'll just take a few seconds and complete that poll. Okay. It looks like it's pretty split down the middle, one third shipping delays, one third communication, and one third other. So, go ahead and end that poll so now we have some of that information. With these common pitfalls that you said that we can expect, what are some things that they can do to avoid these common pitfalls?

Francois: Yeah, it sounds like, just from those that have answered, the communications and shipping delays are the biggest downfalls. It's funny because they all tie into each other, right? Without proper communication you're not going to get the right information from your suppliers, and you can't coordinate with your freight forwarders or you can't plan forecasting appropriately because they won't tell you production lead times. In regards to what you can really do about it, particularly when it comes to communication is looking at it from more of a relationship base or angle rather than looking at it as just another transaction. This is one of the, I guess, the hardest aspects, which is to break out of this consumerism mindset, I think that's the right word at least, where you like to think about everything as, "This is my supplier. I'm just paying my supplier to give me a product." When in reality you are quite literally building an entire chain that realize on each other through relationships.

Francois: So you're going to be relying on your supplier to produce your products in a timely manner, at the right quality levels. If you build a relationship with them, they'll increase their communication with you. They'll be more proactive in letting you know, "Hey, there's a delay with this." or, "Production is going to take a little bit longer." or, "We got it done quicker." But those things aren't going to be communicated well if they look at it as just a transaction, mainly because they don't care. They just see it as, "Okay, you're paying me 30% of this invoice, and I'm just giving you this product." Now, with a relationship, they would say, "Okay, their business, it's an Amazon business, it has to get there before Christmas otherwise you're going to be losing sales." And they're only going to know this if you have these conversations with them and ultimately, I hate to beat a dead horse, but continue building that relationship with them. That's one of the biggest downfalls that I tend to see specifically US Amazon sellers who are trying to work with Chinese manufacturers.

Francois: We try to help streamline this really through this communications by having our product specialists work with them. We in turn relay all the different communications to the factory and build a relationship with the factory. But aside from that, the shipping. This is particularly important now more than ever because COVID really has impacted the shipping and logistics industry more than it has even production. Because if you look at the latest PMIs, or the purchasing manager indexes, all the countries are performing at above 50. What that means is that they're all doing better than they were the previous month. Of course, we saw the biggest downfalls when COVID was at its peak though. When you wait too long to place an order with your supplier, your supplier's, first of all, going to have a production queue. Particularly with Chinese New Year right around the corner, they're going to have a very long production queue. And if you don't have a relationship with them, you're going to be put at the back of that production queue. Now, once they're almost done, if you've built that solid foundation with the relationship, then they would let you know at least two or three weeks in advance, "Hey, your product is about to be completed." or, "It's about to go through production." Because realistically, production doesn't take two months from those products, that's just the queue itself.

Francois: Once they let you know that, it's really vital to speak with the freight forwarders that you have in your network to let them know when that cargo ready date is going to be here. It's called a CRD. When you let them know that CRD, it doesn't necessarily have to be, "It's going to be done at Thursday 12 PM, but it'll be done this week, probably on Monday or Tuesday." They'll interact with the suppliers to actually schedule a booking within the logistics industry through the shipping carriers that they partner with. Depending on if it's LCL or FCL, it's going to vary with the methods that they do it. But right now more than ever, LCL shipments are going to be faster than FCL, because there are equipment shortages, there are the containers that are just over capacity in regards to the different shipping carriers. So when you go LCL, they just bundle all of them into a container and just ship them together and deconsolidate them when they get to the US. That covers the communication and the shipping aspect.

Francois: But I guess another key point that I really wanted to drive home was that this isn't the best time to necessarily be looking for a new product to test the market with. The main reason being you likely you won't be ordering enough inventory from reliable enough factories for them to want to take on the project. Now, when I say that, it's also important to note that you don't have to be spending 10,000, $20,000, but if you're coming to them with a $5,000 project, that's probably about what they're about looking for. If you're going on Alibaba or AliExpress, you could definitely find trade agents that can work with less. Definitely work with ones that are not keen to just lock in your order though, because I've seen this a few times, they'll lock in your order and then after Chinese New Year they'll tell you, "Something's wrong with the factory, and it's been difficult to refund." They do this so they could retain a lot of their factory workers actually to show them, "Hey, we have all this business for right after Chinese New Year."

Colleen: I know we're at November 12 here now today, so is it too late to plan and prepare for Chinese New Year and some of this? I guess that's one question I have, and another is, you talked about factories and now is not a great time to be finding a new factory, because probably all the good ones are pretty booked, but how can you vet or find a good factory? What are some tips?

Francois: It's never a bad time necessarily to start sourcing, but it's more of a time where you need to be more prepared than not. It's a time where you can't rely on the suppliers to fill in those blanks for you. Whereas the months between, let's say, April and May, you really could. You could let the factory try to fill in, "Hey, this is the type of material we suggest." or, "This is a better design for what you're asking for." or, "This is going to be a faster lead time than that." Right now is a time to really be as prepared as possible. You could do that by really formulating a great RFQ, and an RFQ being a request for a quote. We do have a guideline, actually, that we have prepared. We've created this guideline by surveying a lot of our factories and finding out, what are the most important parts of an RFQ that you really want to see in order to want to work with someone? Thank you for sharing that, Colleen.

Colleen: Sure. There we go.

Francois: There's a few very important components to it, and it's something that you won't be able to formulate within just two or three hours. There's far too many times that I see a seller trying to rush the process and not really build a solid foundation to where they could be saving weeks at a time when working with an RFQ that's properly made and sent of to the proper suppliers. There's four key components to it, first one being the project. The project really is talking more so about budget than anything. But you also want to set the right expectations for the timeline. Especially if you have customizations or you want any alterations to an existing product, you have to account for those in your timeline, and I would put at least two to three months to be conservative in your sourcing process. Because you want to nail down the samples, you want to nail down the right materials, the right thicknesses, things like that as well.

Francois: In regards to the budget, it's really staying true to what you can afford to lose or at least you can afford to make do without for a certain period of time, until you recoup some of those funds back. Because not every seller is going to be the most successful seller, not every product is going to be the million dollar product. That's just the reality of it. So setting a budget that you're comfortable with and that you know that you cannot go over. So if you have $10,000 in the bank and you know that you can't go over those $10,000 dollars, you might only spend a quarter of that with the sourcing, because you have to take into consideration the quality control inspection, the import duties, logistics, FBA Prep stickers, a fulfillment, all these different aspects that go into your COGS, or your cost of goods sold, right?So it's staying true to that budget also and letting your factory know, "Hey, I understand that you want a $5,000 project. This is all I have right now." If they tell you no, it's ten times better than them trying to lead you now at close that deal at the end by them expecting you to just come up with those additional funds.

Francois: Now, the second component is the product. This is probably the trickiest one because just about no one is going to be a product engineer or an expert in the product that they're trying to sell because they didn't invent it, right? So you might see an awesome fidget spinner and you're like, "I like that. I want to sell that." or pop sockets when they were popular, and everyone wanted to get into them. But you have to, at the very least, understand the basics of what goes into that product and trying to research technical drawings, trying to research patents to make sure you're not infringing on any patents, which is what happened to a lot of sellers that were selling pop sockets. And so in all that research, you'll put together things like the dimensions, the sizing charts if you're doing textiles, materials, colors, potential areas to put your logo on. Very important are certification requirements.

Francois: For example, if you're in the baby category, making sure that's BPA free. If it's in electronic and it has to UL-certified, making sure that you know that ahead of time and only working with factories that can product that documentation, and they're willing to produce it, that's another aspect to it. On top of that, it's of course realizing, "Do I want a card insert? Do I want to just skip that, use a QR code on the packaging?" Those are two very small aspects that aren't thought-out enough early on. They're usually put off to the very end. But the sooner that you do it, the sooner you will find a supplier that's willing to work with you to actually achieve those goals.

Francois: And then with the project itself, also realizing that you do need to figure out what you need to buy that product for, and it could be a range. If you know that you can't sell it for more than $10, you know that you probably have to buy that product for $2 or $2,50 at the very most when you're sourcing. When you create that range, what you can do is weed out essentially anyone that isn't willing to get to that target price or you don't see a path forward to victory with that target price. Because there's always the opportunity to increase your sizes in regards to quantities and work with their MOQs initially for a product that you don't have the best margins on but you expect to get to those margins eventually. So figuring out your target price is very important. Down at the bottom we're talking about samples.

Francois: Samples are also extremely important. If you could order your competitors product, I would highly suggest you do so. Remember, you might be spending 50 bucks on that product, but you're thinking about spending thousands of dollars in your own product. So you want to get it, you want to see how you like it, what breaks easily, what are people saying in the one-star reviews, so what can you build on and really lay down that foundation with them. Aside from that, it's really establishing key quality indicators, so defining what you believe is a quality product and how you would inspect it when you receive it. If you get a wattle bottle, does it screw on all the way? Does maybe water leak out? When I drop it, does it dent? These are different aspects to quality levels. Third is packaging, and packaging is so important, again, to really think about early on. The main reason being, sooner that you think about, sooner you'll also figure out if that product is an oversized product or is it going to require additional Styrofoam or a bubble wrap. Because you have to keep it safe, right? You have to make sure that the carrier that's having a bad day doesn't just toss it from his truck and onto the doorstep, which I've seen a few times personally, and it's going to be safe. They get the product, you're not going to have to handle a return. They get it right first time.

Francois: Lastly are the key quality indicators. Key quality indicators, again, are really just how would you inspect that product yourself and getting that to the proper channels, so getting that to the QC inspectors and letting them know, "Hey, this is the quality level that I'm looking for," and also sharing that with your suppliers. Again, building that relationship with them. When they look at it, they'll tell you, typically, "I can do this but I can't do that." They try to manage your expectations. The number one thing that I would suggest there is not to try to force anything. The more you try to force it, the less likely it is going to happen. Because at the end of the day, all they're going to do is abide by the contract. They're going to say, "Well, in the contract you didn't say that you needed a 0.5% defect rate maximum. You just needed a product with these specifications and that's what I produced."

Colleen: Francois, this is a lot of detailed information. It's really helpful. But it seems like this would take a lot of time to put together an RFQ and do it the right way. How much time would something like this typically take and what are some other options?

Francois: Yeah. A lot of the seven and eight-figure sellers that we work with, they tend to spend at least 10-15 hours with putting all this information together, and that, of course, for products that they are planning on investing 10, $20,000 in initially. Now, if you're looking for products just to start out, again, you don't have to be an engineer or any sort of expert. You just have to have Google as your best friend, so being able to google, hey, what material is X, Y, Z? And looking at the reviews for that, does that material work, thickness of X, Y, Z product. You tend to find out somewhat of a thickness could be a 0.3 mm, whatever the case may be. Same thing with colors, not all reds are the same red. Trust me, I've seen a thousand different variations of red. So looking into what a Pantone color or a PMS color would be, and getting that to your supplier, and when they make that sample, asking them to print that color. Because a red on a t-shirt is different than a red on silicone. Red on silicone is different than a red on rubber or a different type of plastic. Just like at Home Depot, you're getting different shades of colors and you see an entire wall filled with them, very similar concept. So don't just go with, "Hey, I want a metal." Or, "I want red." Try to be as specific as possible. Don't be vague by any means. At the end of the day, they can't read your mind. It's important to specific. Spend those 10-15 hours putting it together.

Francois: In regards to what you can do to mitigate that time, you can hire a VA. A VA is definitely an option. You can try Outsource School. I just had a podcast with Nathan Hirsh of Outsource School, great guy, knows what he's talking about. He was the former founder of FreeUp also. They help hire virtual assistants. But the reason that I say that is because you could pay someone 4, $5 an hour to actually gather all that for you if you're not willing to invest all that time. So that is an option. And then creating a process for that, right, knowing how much time, maybe which days you want to allocate to putting together this RFQs, putting together a few of them at one time and then approaching the suppliers, whether it be Alibaba or whether it be Noviland, and submitting a few RFQs to try and get as many quotes as possible.

Colleen: Okay. Becky just put in the chat a link to Noviland's website where you can subscribe to the newsletter and the first thing that'll you get is a copy of the RFQ. Correct, Francois?

Francois: Correct. Correct. If you follow that link-

Colleen: If you want a copy of that, yeah.

Francois: It will be there. You also get a little guideline on Chinese New Year. I don't think it's as in-depth as what we're talking about here, but it has a lot of the key points in it.

Colleen: Okay. We had a couple of questions that came up. Let's see. I have somebody here just asking about... It looks like they have some challenges in regards to logistics and how could a 3PL help.

Francois: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. When it comes to logistics, I guess it really depends on your size. But as I said before, you want to try to book at least a few weeks in advance, and you want to try to look at a little bit higher of quantities in regards to a 3PL. You can store a lot higher of a quantity in 3PL for a lot cheaper than you could at an Amazon FBA logistic center, particularly in Q4. What they can help you do is actually expand off of just Amazon. So you could try to do Walmart, you could try to do Etsy, eBay, all these other marketplaces that are out there. By using a 3PL to store a part of that inventory, they can also fulfill it, they could provide you with a shipping labels, thy can reconsolidate or deconsolidate a larger truck load that they receive and ship part of it to FBA, part of it... If you run out of stock, you can sell it via FBM. But when it comes to logistics, placing a little bit higher of orders with your suppliers is a never a bad idea. It's better to have too much than too little, unless you plan on just scrapping the idea all around. So I guess a long answer to a short question, but I hope I helped you out.

Colleen: Okay. And then I have a question to the East Coast versus the West Coast. Are there any benefits to choose one over the other?

Francois: Yeah. Yeah, so the West Coast of course is going to be cheaper than the East Coast, but the West Coast ports tend to be far more congested, so you'll be dealing with that a lot particularly in Q4 and into Q1. Now, on the East Coast, it's a little bit more expensive, definitely takes you 10-15 days more depending on where it's going, whether it's going to Miami, whether it's going to Alabama or Atlanta, South Carolina, wherever it's going. But what it can also help you do is reach a different market in regards to if you are going off of Amazon. So if you were selling on Walmart and you ship to the West Coast and the East Coast, you can have two-day shipping time to pretty much everywhere in the US. And same thing for FBM. If you run out of stock for FBA, then you can go onto your FBM listing or activate that FBM listing and fulfill that from either the West Coast or the East Coast. And then in regards to... not really a trick, I think it's more common knowledge now. But Amazon tends to give you an FBA logistic center closer to your ship from address when you're creating that shipping plan on Amazon Seller Central.

Francois: So if you use a freight forwarder that has a West Coast location, you tend to get one in California. And then they'll redistribute that out to the East Coast, maybe to the Midwest. And vice versa, if you use it on the East Coast and you're shipping to the East Coast, then you might get an East Coast fulfillment center. Now, I see the West Coast fulfillment centers typically take about two to three weeks more than the East Coast fulfillment centers when it comes to LCL shipments, so that's another advantage of going to the East Coast versus the West Coast.

Colleen: Okay. Any other tips regarding Chinese New Year? I mean, obviously running out of stock is one of the biggest things that we're trying to avoid and not having enough supply. But what other tips do you have? Anything else you want to add?

Francois: Plan ahead, start communicating with your suppliers. When I say ahead, we are in peak season so it might seem like it's too late, but it's really not. Chinese New Year itself is a great time to plan for your own business and seeing what complimentary products might work out. It's also a good time to plan your inventory levels and collect from your friends and family that might owe you some money so you can place higher quantities of products. But I'm glad you actually touched on inventory. I know you have a tool, right? Was it RestockPro?

Colleen: We do. RestockPro is an FBA inventory management tool. But yeah, I mean running out of stock can not only affect revenue but it also affect negative feedback. So if sellers... I'm sorry. If buyers are not receiving items on time or if the expected ship times is 7-10 days, and it takes a lot longer because of maybe something in your supply chain, it can lead to negative feedback. So both revenue and feedback can both be impacted. People that are buying on Amazon are used to getting something within a few days. So just setting the right expectation, being proactive and communicating with your buyers if there is any delay is very important. So use Buyer-Seller Mesaging and follow the communication guidelines, but stay in contact with your buyers if there are any shipping delays on those orders so that, hopefully, you can ward off any potential negative feedback. If you do run into a situation and your supplier does not have the items ready on time or you're starting to run low on your inventory, then some things that you can do are just to slow down or stop your marketing and advertising campaign, obviously just to try to turn down the sales temporarily, maybe even temporarily increase your price to deter people from buying as much while you're trying to stay in stock until you can get the next big shipment. Yeah.

Colleen: And look at different restock models too. I mean, obviously shipping directly to FBA is great but maybe your most profitable items you want to have some of those on hand as well, just as a backup in case you run out at FBA and your supplier is taking longer than you expected. Factoring in supplier lead time is crucial from the time you order the item to the time you expect it to be on Amazon's shelf. So just making sure that when you are anticipating the need to restock, that you're also anticipating that supplier lead time. And that's something that RestockPro helps with. It has very sophisticated margin calculations and restock suggestions, so it flags things on when it's time to restock and when based on that lead supplier time... sorry, supplier lead time, your most profitable items, et cetera. So if it's going to take 30 days to get that item and you only have a few days worth of stock at Amazon, you will have known about it a while ago. RestockPro would have alerted you 30-plus days. It's a helpful tool that a lot of FBA sellers have found to be very beneficial to making sure that they never run out of stock, especially on their most profitable items.

Francois: So it helps with forecasting too?

Colleen: Yes, it sure does.

Francois: Okay.

Colleen: It does kitting and bundling, shipping labels, all kind of stuff. It's more than just the actual restock suggestions. It's really the whole workflow.

Francois: We're going to have to get some of our users onto to that. We have three Ws that we always abide by or that we always suggest, and that's working, water, and warehouse. You always want to have products in production, basically in that working phase. You always want to have products on the water, because it takes about 30-40 days for it to actually be at a warehouse. And you always want to have products in the warehouse to sell. Those are the three Ws. They fall in line directly with what RestockPro would do.

Colleen: Yes. I love that, the three Ws, I'd never thought of it that way.

Francois: Yeah.

Colleen: Well, I'll take a second here. We're going to take a look at any other questions that we have, and then I'm also going to just launch one more poll, one last poll to see... Hopefully you've learnt a lot from Francois today, and if have any interest in hearing more about any of these specific things that he spoke, whether it's sourcing, RFQs, vetting factories, quality control inspections, or the 3PL services, if you could just answer the question. If you're not interested, you could just click the No, thanks. But he can at least send you some specific information or set up a call with you to talk about your personal challenges or issues or questions if there is anything specific that you want to talk about.

Francois: Yeah and-

Colleen: Sometimes it's easier to talk to one on one because everybody's situation is a little bit different.

Francois: Right. We have an onboarding call with every single one of our users. I'm talking about some of these onboarding calls go over an hour, where we just talk every single piece of their supply chain. I love it personally, but that's really why we'd love to know what specific pieces you would want to have a conversation on too.

Colleen: Yeah, all right, we'll just give it three more seconds before we close that one out. Thank you, everybody. Okay. And now will go ahead and share my screen again. We will just share here before we hop into more questions. We do have a couple of offers. Noviland is offering a $20 credit and that can help cover shipping costs, quality control management, sourcing solutions. So feel free to use that from any time between now through the end of the year. Just contact them at noviland.com, and you can use code ENGINE20 or reference this webinar to get that credit. And then eComEngine, the tool that I mentioned, RestockPro, it's typically a 21-day free trial but for attending this webinar you get a 30-day free trial. Just use the code NOVILAND if you're interested or feel free to contact me for a demo. And then FeedbackFive, I mentioned negative feedback, if you want to get alerts on negative feedback or when you're sourcing and starting a new product and you want to look at competitive reviews on competitive items, FeedbackFive is a great way to do that. You can monitor reviews on your own ASINs or on ASINs that other folks are selling. So whether you want to use it to request feedback and reviews or just monitor, it's a great way to do that. It's typically a 14-day trial but because of the webinar, you can get that extended 30-day free trial. I will hold that up and just quickly see what other questions we have.

Francois: Yeah, just to actually clear up the ENGINE20 also, the referral code, it's valid through December 31st but that's only for the sign up. So if you sign up before December 31st, you'll have that $20 in your account, even if it's after Chinese New Year for example, especially since everything we've talked about relates to Chinese New Year and how difficult the time is.

Colleen: I have a question about returns and how to handle them. Is there a way to find a partner that can donate the products or arrange for those to be donated or what suggestions do you have for returns?

Francois: Yeah. Actually, you've hit the nail on the head. I would highly suggest running a fulfillment center, 3PL partner and talk to them about any products they get high rates of returns and find a donation center where you can actually use that as a write-off on your taxes at the end of the year, and say, "Hey, look, I donated this product. This is how much the value was." You can include all the shipping costs and things like that in it too. So rather than just destroying it, you do two great things; you get a great tax write-off and you get to donate it to someone that can buy it for significantly cheaper. Just work with your fulfillment center to actually remove any of your logos or stickers or anything like that off the box before they do it.

Colleen: Right. Since now is not a great time to start sourcing, what do you suggest that we do during this time as we're thinking about launching a new product?

Francois: Well, you can start planning for other products that you want to launch. It could be complimentary products. You can also start gathering all those specifications using the RFQ guideline that you can download. I don't want to take back what I said, but it's not better than it was four months ago, but it's also a time where you start building relationships with your suppliers. And it's a time where if you just tell them honestly, "Hey, I want to launch in Q2," and they tell you to reach back to them at end of Q1, you have now formed a start of a relationship with them, where you can follow back with them and say, "Hey, what's going on?" And they'll be more prone to working with you because of your patience. So there's a few things that you could do. I highly recommend using it as a planning time over a time to start launching your business then.

Colleen: Yeah, maybe do some keyword research and things like that.

Francois: Yeah, keyword research too is great.

Colleen: Good. Those are the only questions that came in, so I think it was pretty thorough and was a good overview. Again, thank you for joining today, Francois, and thanks everybody for joining and hope everybody ends fourth quarter great and doesn't have any issues with Chinese New Year. May the odds ever be in your favor.

Francois: I love it. Thank you, Colleen.

Colleen: Thanks, everybody. Have a great end of the year. Bye.

Francois: Bye.