A few months ago my business partner had seen an ad on Facebook that Daymond John was putting on a Shark Tank Entrepreneur seminar at a hotel near us. While we didn't really have any intention of attending the paid weekend seminar we thought it would be interesting to checkout.
Ever since he has been getting retargeted with Facebook ads for various other seminars, how to sell on Amazon, how to trade stock options, how to run an AirBNB business, etc. Occasionally on a Friday afternoon we'll head over to check one out. I always find it interesting to see their sales tactics during these events.
Anyhow, most recently he got one about a how to sell on Amazon Course put on by a company called Sellers Playbook out of Minnesota. I'm pretty sure I've heard of this company before. Prior to attending I did a quick Google search on them and saw a bunch of ripoff report complaints about how the $1,000 course is nothing more than a sales pitch to an upsell of a course that cost $35,000 to $37,000, which is absolutely insane.
Anyhow, we attended the presentation. The entire thing was a big commercial for Amazon, but they told us very little about what their course was about or what Sellers Playbook was all about. The presentation talked about how much Amazon did in sales. They talked about how Amazon is rolling out new services like they will put groceries away in your fridge or put packages inside. They showed us videos from CNBC about how busy Amazons warehouses are and how large Amazons profits are and then said it's mostly 3rd party sellers and how would you like a piece of that 150 Billion?
The only thing they really told us about their course is your gonna learn how to find good products, how to win the buy box, and you get access to their 2,000 trusted sellers, which are basically just a list of Alibaba suppliers they have maybe vetted minimally. They also told you that you get access to a BSR calculator on your backend dashboard with them, yeah the same tool that Jungle Scout provides for free on their website.
I wanted to also talk a bit about paying for information and/or training in general. I find that most people fall into one of two camps. They love paying for info and find it valuable, or they think anything that's not a tangible product is a ripoff. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Information is incredibly valuable and learning someone's methods who is doing what they are teaching can also be incredibly valuable. That said so many courses are vague and don't really teach you anything. So many courses are nothing more than an upsell to another course, and so many courses are taught by people who know how to make money selling courses, but not necessarily doing the activity they are teaching you about lol.
Another thing about courses is majority of people who buy a course don't even complete it. Don't waste your money on a course unless your committed to actually going through it. I can attest to this myself, I don't buy a ton of courses but the majority I do I don't even follow through and complete.
Lastly, I would encourage anyone thinking about buying a training course for hundreds or even thousands of Dollars, I would encourage you to give learning on your own for free a try. There's tons of free resources on Youtube and blog teaching you everything inside of a course all for free. Granted the info may not be completely organized for you but it's all out there.
If you still feel you need a bit of further assistance there's sites like Udemy that have Amazon courses and other courses for $10 or $20 as opposed to paying thousands. There's also sites out there like Teachable or SKillshare where for a flat fee of $10 or $20 per month you have access to unlimited courses on photography, ecommerce, and Amazon selling and you have access to all their courses for a flat fee.
I guess what it boils down to is like anything in life, there's good products and bad products. If your going to buy a course I personally would say there's very few courses out there worth multiple hundreds of Dollars let alone thousands of Dollars.
Have you bought a course or product about selling on Amazon? Which course was it? Did it help you? Would you recommend it to others?
These guys attended the paid event and were given their money back and asked to leave because they seemed too knowledgeable
This video is a testimonial from one of the Sellers Playbook employees that was at the meeting I attended. While it's possible he actually went through their course and had success and they hired him, it seems to me like they are having their own employees leave testimonials as if they were customers to add legitimacy to their program...
