We maintain our own site for a few reasons:

• So prospective new suppliers can see us. Many won't accept a seller that doesn't have its own website. We are always looking for new distributors and new products. If you have something, contact us!
• We have a vast repository of outstanding articles that help people live better lives.
• The Mindconnection Brainpower newsletter goes back decades now, and we archive it here.
• Sometimes customers want to contact us outside a marketplace and they can find us this way. Need to call? 913-831-7483.

This is the part where we are supposed to tell you how wonderful we are and that we select only "premium" products. It's the online version of the "lying on the resume" game. Here at Mindconnection, we put our pants on the same way you do. So no superheroes here. Just good folks who try hard. We do take extra pains in product sourcing, for example we don't deal with shady companies (e.g., cheap Chinese knockoffs) and we discontinue items with high return rates. But, no, we don't tour factories and insist that manufacturers meet our exceptionally rigorous standards so that we alone have products people can trust (that's a common claim, what horse hockey!).

Amazon executives call Mindconnection an "Apex Amazon Seller". If you would like to benefit from that, here's some information for you.

In what capacity would we work with you?

You would be our supplier. This entails:
1. Ship our orders directly to FBA or Deliverr (now Flexport) if you can ship from inside USA; we will provide labels.
2. Provide technical support (usually, this is not needed because problems are of newbie variety we can handle).
3. Provide replacement packaging as needed. This is the industry standard; OrCam does not do this so sellers ship package-damaged returns in generic packaging which makes no sense.
4. Assisting with warranty claims.
5. Provide the documents needed to get your brand (and this product) registered in the Amazon Brand Registry (huge benefit to you).
6. Alert us to sales and promotions.
7. Alert us to increases in cost and pricing.

In return, we will:
1. Provide the best customer experience possible. Timely deliveries, rebates or small free items for when "the customer is right" even though actually wrong, take queries over the phone, answer questions posted on Amazon.
2. Provide frontline technical support. Ask you if we don't know. The goal is to get the customer going ASAP.
3. Recondition returns to New, but not sell them as New if this isn't doable.
4. Be the first contact for warranty claims if that's how the customer proceeds.
5. Get you into the Brand Registry.
6. Adjust our pricing to keep with sales and promotions.
7. Keep our prices on Amazon, eBay, and Walmart above those of your non-marketplace sellers if that is how you want us to price on those marketplaces. In any event, we won't violate MAP.
8. Use couponing (if you are OK with that) and pay per click advertising to boost your sales.


What are the terms and margins you work with?

Terms: If you accept AMEX, we don't need terms. We pay when you ship the product, because AMEX gives us 60 days to pay. If you don't accept AMEX but do accept PayPal, we can fund PayPal with AMEX. For any other payment method, we need 60 days terms. It takes about 45 days to start getting paid once a vendor ships our order to FBA or to Deliverr.

Margins. Except in cases of very high sales velocity, those need to be fat, both in % and $. The price of your product takes care of the $ part, which is needed to cover fixed costs. Margin is needed to cover the various costs of getting the product to the customer, advertising (we do this robustly yet get low ACOS), and other costs. You should already have margins determined for your non-marketplace sellers, and they have costs similar to ours in many ways. If we price as they do or a bit above them, margin should be OK.
 

What data are required to start the process of setting up the pages?

An excellent question! Actually quite a bit is needed to COMPLETE the page (all the stuff that's invisible to customers but helps in other ways).

To START the page, we need:

1. The UPC, EAN, or similar identifier.
2. At least 4 good product images. These must be on a white background and big enough that they can be "blown up" when clicked on.
3. Your brand name exactly as it is on your Trademark document.
4. A good product title. We'll need to collaborate on that to make the best use of this field in the Amazon system. The format is Manufacturer - Product Name - Descriptive Words. But if I get the brand "recognized" at the time I create the listing we don't need it in the title.
5. Five bullet points. we'll need to look at your site and come up with these. Or you can e-mail these and we will either use as is or edit them. |
6. A paragraph of description. I can get this from your site, also. But again, you can send me something.
7. A string of keywords. Not phrases, words. Amazon's system will assemble the words to make the phrases needed. So no long tail as in advertising. This is organic search.

Note that once certain information is entered, it can never be changed. For example, if we use the wrong UPC or the wrong brand name we are stuck with whatever we entered.

Note that to get you into the Brand Registry, we need an active ASIN (product listing). So we get this page up there and then go for Brand Registry.

See our brainpower newsletter. Here's a little info for you:

Recent Brainpower Tip #1

Here's an example. Since the start of the "financial crisis," the Federal Reserve (which isn't federal and doesn't reserve anything) has created $29 trillion out of thin air and given it to the major banksters (who then lavished huge bonuses on their executives). Source: Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray, professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

What's the difference between $29 trillion and, say, $400 billion? It's hard to picture. But compare it to, say, the population of 300 million people in the USA, and you can start to picture it.

This is a great comparison, because the creation of that money out of thin air was a currency debasement by that amount of money (inflation, in other words). And because it's a "taking" from dollar holders, that makes it a tax. How much was this tax per person?

• Divide 29 + 12 zeroes by 300 + 6 zeroes.
• The per capita tax is just under $97,000.

If "only" a $9 trillion counterfeiting operation, the tax would be only about $32,000 per capita. For a family of four, that would be $128,000. But it's not "only" $9 trillion. For a family of four, the damage is $388,000.

And now, with a little comparison, you can see just how egregious this stealing really is. No wonder that when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, it wasn't by light of day. It was pretty much a cloak and dagger operation, and guess who got stabbed?

Recent Brainpower Tip #2

Just two ways you can use your library to boost your brainpower:

• Watch nonfiction documentary videos (DVD or, depending on your library, via download). I watch these fairly often, and it's amazing what you can learn.
• Listen to audio books (typically today, you download and listen on MP3 player). I can go to university while pulling weeds in my yard or doing housework. I use this resource intensively.

Your library is no doubt strapped for funds. Help them out. Here are some ways:

• Buy a movie they don't have. Watch it, then donate it.
• Consider volunteering. If you can spare a couple of hours for a couple of evenings a week, they will have plenty for you to do.
• Be careful with library collection items. Handle DVDs by their edges. Treat books with utmost care, and never eat or drink while reading them.
• Don't reserve items that are already at your branch, unless the need is urgent. This is poor impulse control. Reserve items that are at other branches, yes. But if you can't wait a few weeks for something, you have discipline issues that create unnecessary work for others.
• Watch your county government for wasteful spending, and object to it. That means less cutting of the library budget if they listen and act accordingly.
• See what's at your library and talk it up to friends and neighbors. The more patrons a library has, the more political clout it has. My library, for example, keeps usage and patronage statistics for budget justification. And when that doesn't work, a few thousand phone calls from library patrons tend to get the county board's attention.

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