T.A.A.A Talk About Anything Amazon

We gather at the end of Season 1 of The Longer Game to talk LIVE about the current state of Amazon, the largest ecommerce retailer in the US, and where the future of retail is headed. I've got the best and brightest minds with me to chat it out and answers questions.

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Michael Maher  01:53

Welcome, everybody to The Longer Game. This is a podcast about retail. And we are live for the first time, I've never been live before. I've never done anything live, my whole life has been pre-recorded. And so now all my flaws are on display for people to see. Thank you for joining me. The podcast that I launched this year, The Longer Game aims to talk about the future retail, and what retail looks like now. It's reimagined, it's different. And a big part of that is the Amazon Sphere. I intentionally tried to bring on a variety of guests, because I could talk about Amazon all day. And I don't know how many people actually want to hear that. But today is all about Amazon. So I brought on three awesome guests that have already been on the podcast, so they know how it works. And I'm excited to have them because we just get to talk. These are friends of mine, and colleagues as well. So I get to talk with them. And we get to hang out and shoot the shit. And that's pretty much about it. So I just like to thank them for joining me. I like to say thanks to Elizabeth Green from Junglr, full time mom to now helping people on Amazon. She just posted that on LinkedIn today. So that's fresh content. Ryan Cramer, Head of Marketing at First Choice Shipping. And Brett Bohannon of Amazon with Brett. Thank you guys for joining me. We're here together.

Ryan Cramer  03:23

What's Michael? What's up, everyone?

Brett Bohannon  03:26

Hey, guys. 

Michael Maher  03:28

I see you changed your fish, Brett. It's always, it's always the same.

Brett Bohannon  03:34

It's always been there. 

Michael Maher  03:35

I've always noticed the fish. But I didn't know if it was a specific fish.

Brett Bohannon  03:39

Yeah, it was a fish. We're in Florida, a while back with no kids, and my wife and we walked into a shop and I was like, I want that. Had it ever since.

Michael Maher  03:49

I want that. How, how nice. Is it to just be able to walk into place and say I want that and have unlimited money.

Ryan Cramer  03:56

Yeah. That's an Amazon dream, man. Right?

Michael Maher  03:59

All right. So super casual. I really could care less about what we talk about, because I'm having a good time. So and that's really all that matters is pleasing me. I wanted to say a couple things. And actually Ryan and I were chatting earlier this week about some of the things that are happening in Amazon, but also I would say across e-commerce because I've seen this happening. So I'm interested to get people's take on this. One of the things that I think is beneficial for me as an agency owner, and being in the sales process with people is not just knowing how Amazon works, but being able to tie that to what's going on in the public sphere of Amazon. So when you see you know that they were pulled into antitrust hearings, being able to decipher what that means for them, being able to understand what the e-commerce market is doing. And oh wow. So yeah, so just see, you know, Justin, and Brett have unlimited money. So that's the first secret that was shared.

Elizabeth Greene  05:06

Wait up, teach me your secrets.

Michael Maher  05:08

Yeah. Justin said, Justin said he's here for the secrets. And I just said, good, because that's all we have.

Brett Bohannon  05:14

A huge caveat that no one heard in there. That was before we had kids.

Michael Maher  05:18

Oh, okay. *inaudible* So the thing that I'm talking about is the fact that there are just in general Shopify has announced that they are laying a bunch of people off. And there is now, Ryan sent me an article of a big Amazon Seller that's laying people off. And it looks like, I don't know if these things are totally related. But it seems like there's been a lot more focus on the Amazon sphere, notably, because of the amount of venture capital that's come into the space. And I think that is, it's changed a lot of things. It's changed the, what the shows look like, when you go to a show, it changes - who was there, it changes, maybe what the private parties, after parties look like. It changes what CPCs are in advertising, because people are spending more money on advertising. And there's no guarantee that they know what they're doing. So they could be artificially driving up costs. I don't think these are the secrets. I just think these are some of the I mean, I'll give Justin the secrets later. But I think these are the things that actually impact people and whether, you know, maybe there's unwritten rules that we're not supposed to talk about that. I don't know, I don't have unwritten rules. Because we do things pretty wildly in my house. So I just wanted to throw that out there. I don't know if you guys had thoughts about that. Or if you feel like that's something that you're seeing impact you, Elizabeth, I'm sure you could speak to an advertising perspective. But I'm just curious to know what you guys have to say there.

Elizabeth Greene  07:03

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, things are getting squeezed from a lot of ends. And honestly, I talked to a lot of sellers or, you know, brand owners now. And it's like margins were always important, like margin should have always been important, your profit should have always been important. But when you have really low CPCs, or conversion rates, because you just don't have a lot of competition, you just don't have to look at it, like you can squeak by with scraping the bare minimum. And just the nature of the platform maturing and the current economic market right now, you just have a whole lot less wiggle room. And so that's, I think what we're seeing, and we're seeing people just looking for ways to navigate that, and I definitely come at it from like an advertising perspective, and how does advertising play into, you know, the market on Amazon as specifically, that's when I'm seeing is just things are getting tighter, you are having to play a much more sophisticated game. And for those sellers, or those brands who have just relied on being, you know, just kind of the OGS in the market, you're no longer getting as much of a benefit. Just saying, like, there's a lot of sellers, unfortunately, who are like, Hey, I've always dominated this category. Why has that changed? And it's like, if you go and look at the landscape, your conversion rate is less than the category average, it's that Amazon wants to showcase good products to the market. That's what they're all about having a shopper have a good customer experience. And you might have a similar product, you might have put a lot of money into development. But if you haven't kept up with the market, and you know, modified your listings to continuously demonstrate to the market, that you are the premium OG product, then you're just going to end up falling by the wayside. So I think we're seeing a lot of that now, people just needing to learn to play a more sophisticated game, needing to learn how to dig into and read the numbers. So I've talked to my team a lot. And I'm like, as much as we are like the advertising advisors, I find myself becoming more of like a business advisor, you know, like your conversion rates. This may not be all you know, the ads might not necessarily be the problem because we were on a tight ship. It's just we need to shift strategy based on you know, what you're seeing with margins, or you know, maybe we can coordinate with brands to help them with their pricing strategy coupons, other things that impact conversion rates, and then we can leverage ads to help accelerate it.

Ryan Cramer  07:03

Elizabeth, go ahead.

Michael Maher  09:48

That's one of the things that in starting an agency I really loved advertising and that was one of the actual things that I did for a client is when I'm working directly with them on accounts. And there's this aspect of running your own business, which I think Elizabeth, you're starting to, to experience. And that's when you start a business, you may start doing work, but what you actually end up growing into is someone that grows a business and not necessarily that specific work. So I don't do not doing a bunch of advertising work anymore. In fact, I just step back into doing some, because there's been so many changes, and I want to make sure I'm current, like the idea. And the strategy behind it, I don't think is different. But the tools that you have to get there are different. And so you're starting to move into a realm where you're not doing all of the things. And there's a lot of things that are changing, and you want to stay current and up to date on that. But you're getting to a place where you're now focusing on growing the business and directing the people. So I think that's always an interesting part of owning and running a company. And then part of the reason why I decided not to just do advertising was because I felt like, you know, maybe we'd be shortchanging people if we weren't focusing on some of these other aspects. So it sounds like coupons, pricing, all those kinds of things are things that you're starting to incorporate and include as a part of services. And you're just saying, hey, well, it helps us do what we're doing right now. So why wouldn't we offer that? Is that? Is that what I'm hearing?

Elizabeth Greene  11:30

Yes. So I don't think it's a, we might end up offering those services later on. Prices touch a whole lot of things, you know, like, what's your cost of goods ships, and it would like unravel a can of worms, that I have no problem, you know, kind of helping buyers or seller's navigate that. And what we've actually done is I'm currently like paying for tools out of my pocket that help us give more sophisticated insights to our sellers. So that's kind of how I'm navigating that and like, hey, you know, because you'll get those questions all the time, like, because the benefit of running advertising is you can get like definite numbers on like, what's the cost per clicks on this one, like on our main keyword, what's our click through rates change, like, however, our conversion rates change. And you can see in very specific areas of the market, how that change where you're looking at business reports, it's very much kind of like an aggregate of everything. So advertising definitely can give you insights into maybe some changes that you're making on your listings. Phenomenal. But it also means that a lot of times sellers will change prices. And then they're asking us like, Hey, how did that perform? Can we get insights on that? And so what we've done is I've just gone out and partnered with a tool provider called Cape Hawk, and they give us a really sophisticated insights into how was our advertising spend looking according to sessions, and how is our advertising conversion rate versus, you know, like your unit session percentage and being able to like, see in a continuous chart like, Okay, so here's all the things that touch sales. Here's the things that, you know, here's how sales have changed and allows us to dig into that. And then also see on that same line, like how the product margins are doing. So for instance, there are a lot of sellers that say, like, okay, my sales are down, but are your margins better? Or are they worse, because it's very often you might have, like less sales, but technically money in the bank went up,

Michael Maher  13:31

Sales are very sexy, they're sexy, because it's, they create taglines, like, seven-figure, eight-figure, and I'm not saying if I'm an eight-figure, seven-figure seller, I probably would use that to my advantage as well, because it means more money is being brought in, but what actually pays the bills is your profitability. Because if you don't keep any money in your bank account, you could get $100,000 put in your bank account. But if 98 comes right back out, you know, there's not a lot that's keeping you in business, is that really worth it. And so that profitability piece is something that I feel is super important. And if you're not honing in on that, you may have like, you may have an incredible rank and you've got the best seller badge and you got all this stuff, but you're not actually making that much money. What is it? What is it worth to you other than boosting your pride, and I boosted my own pride, it feels good, you know, sometimes to do that. But ultimately, is it really helping you that much if you're not profitable if you're not keeping money in your bank account?

Elizabeth Greene  14:39

Yeah, I would say and then on the flip side of that, there's some products because the margins are so low, it's a game of volume. And if you drop off on volume, then you're in trouble. So you know, it's honestly our job is learning how to read the data, interpret it and help sellers make strategic decisions based on that and then just you know, us getting building out the ad piece. So they can say directions like, hey, we need to push this product we need to pull back here. And then instead of having to go in and, you know, change the levers and nuts and bolts on the ads, we just come in with that, you know, we do all the above,

Michael Maher  15:15

You're looking at, you're going and looking at conversion rate on products. Okay, not just the ads conversion rate, but you're looking at the actual product.

Elizabeth Greene  15:22

Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Maher  15:26

Brett, Ryan, words into life into existence.

Ryan Cramer  15:33

What do you want to talk about man? 

Michael Maher  15:34

I want you to talk about what you're seeing happening in the grander scheme of things in Amazon, and to interframe it, I think a lot of people that are on here know a lot about Amazon. But Amazon makes up about 40% of the e-commerce revenue that's available in the US. And it's last time I checked, e-commerce was like 16, it grew to 20% at the end of the pandemic, but then kind of leveled out at about 16% of total retail sales. And one of the interesting things is digital-only sales is not something that has gone grown linearly across all demographics, the thing that is actually increased across anyone from Baby Boomers to Gen Z, which I'm also kind of like these arbitrary names for generations just seems so silly. And technically, I'm a millennial, but I like kind of hate that. Because I'm like, I don't feel like a millennial. But that's the conversation I have with my therapist. I don't have to talk with you guys about that. It's probably not as interesting. But the thing that I think is interesting is in store plus digital sales, is what has actually grown across all demographics and less people. There's actually, if you look at the change from Millennial to Gen Z, the digital-only actually decreased a little bit. So people that are only shopping digitally has gone down a couple of percentage points. But the people that are doing both, that's grown. And so to me, when I see things like that, or I hear how there's a gentleman named John Casey used to work with Snap 36 of really big photography companies based in I think Seattle, maybe had an office in Chicago to not sure, but they were some of the first people to do 360 photos. And they had a case study that talked about how a bug spray company added a 360 degree photo to their product detail page on Amazon. And you think, okay, bug spray like, it either kills the bugs or doesn't really care if the can looks like, I don't care what the name is, I just want to know the efficacy of it. But they added a 360-degree photo to their product detail page. And conversion rates went up 10%. To me, that says people want a more tactile experience. And even though they want to shop online, they want the convenience of that they also want to experience things as much in person as possible, which is why I think the in store and digital advertising digital purchases have gone up in conjunction with each other and we see things like Wayfair having an in their app, they have a VR component where you can look at a couch in your room or you can look at a piece of furniture in your room. And so I think all those things speak to people wanting to have a tactile experience and so Amazon is going to continue to be super important. But I think the retail landscape in general is changing towards really providing a great experience Amazon is no longer it is still very product focused because people are purchasing super quickly 28% of people purchase in three minutes or less. But Amazon is favoring brands and giving them more opportunity so just to set that for people who are watching all 10 of you just know that Amazon is a big part of what's happening but it's still not the end all be all, but Ryan I'm curious because you and I had talked earlier in the week and I'm not trying to throw shade at anybody but it's something that I think is worth noting that people are, things are changing quickly.

Ryan Cramer  19:27

Yeah and so and I apologize if there's a lot of baking in the background. There's work being done in my house.

Michael Maher  19:32

No, I can't hear anything 

Ryan Cramer  19:33

Perfect. I've been playing with audio settings this whole time so you know one of us is trying to be a pro over here or professional so yeah,

Michael Maher  19:41

For episode is brought to you by Topo Chico with wine. 

Ryan Cramer  19:44

Man, you need a sponsor for this.

Michael Maher  19:46

I do, look I got a free shirt, Ecomengine. They're not sponsored but I just said thanks for the free shares.

Ryan Cramer  19:52

A lot of good things going on ecomengine. There's that, there's actually a quick plug for a thing that we're sponsoring. It's actually a seller awards. Um, that's going on. We're trying to promote the, you know, a great brand that's really growing in the space right now. I can send you guys details later. But we're trying to give like a scholarships to brands and help them grow and recognize them like, Hey, your industry sees you as a really good player for agencies and things like that. So yeah, anyways, speaking of Ecomengine, shout out to Colleen. And that team over there. Yeah, we were talking about the other day, the huge news broke that foreign packs. You know, the number, their number five, number one last year for us sellers, number five in the world are in the US as of recent, they are liquidating all their inventory, and then they are going to actually be going out of business. And I posted that article online. And the surprise in the responses I got from people were actually pretty phenomenal. People selling goods to foreign pets. And like, yeah, in the last couple of months, they weren't paying our bills, like paying bills to us for inventory. It was just like, really sad and unfortunate thing. But Michael, you and I were talking about foreign packs is actually technically a reseller, if I'm correct and do a major component, they rely heavily on inventory, just like the rest of us. But other people's inventory, not their own, they don't own the supply chain, though on their own goods, they are buying and selling at wholesale selling at retail, and just have a really good ecosystem. So because they don't have control of that finance, financial obligations. And again, I don't know their numbers, I can only assume from there from October when they're going to go public versus where we are here in almost a year later. It's really sad to see the turn and how much inventory plays on a brand such as the large one of the largest ones on the Amazon, marketplace space.

Michael Maher  21:55

Walmart, that and to Elizabeth's point margins, right is this, if the prices are going up, margins are definitely going down. And if you're not raising prices, which Amazon is doing, when it comes to fees, fees are going up, I think, you know, maybe another 20 25% Ryan, I've seen you post about that on LinkedIn as well. So like things are changing, if you're not working around that, which ultimately the cost ends up going into consumer. There's all kinds of economics 101, that's going to be the episode one of season two is we're just going to talk about economics

Ryan Cramer  22:32

They make that work for you. Well, it's funny, because you alluded something else recently to the fulfillment fees actually have gone up 30% In the last few years, very incrementally, but they've gone up in the past two years 30%. That doesn't mean a lot to a lot of sellers. But it looks like a couple of dollars, like $1 or two for people. But at scale that really does add up when you have to recoup that. And other ways whether if you're playing the, you know, the pricing game on Amazon, which is really difficult to do. If you're playing very thin margins, which a lot of people are struggling with, especially getting inventory costs are going up.

Michael Maher  23:11

I think people even know what all costs they're dealing with. Because the reporting is not super intuitive. And when you look at the thing I always struggle with when I was a seller on Amazon is, I tried to close out my books at the end of the month. But Amazon's on a bi-weekly system, so it never lined up perfectly. And so I had to work with my accountant and bookkeeper to like figure that out. And I was the one that was inputting a lot of the transactions myself just to save money. And it was frustrating because it didn't always line up. And it was like, oh, man, I had a great December but that actually didn't show up until January because that's when I got my payment.

Ryan Cramer  23:54

Right. And that's something to do with cash flow, we're going back to the other major component of, this is his cash flow. So farm packs has all this and they were selling a million, three million for this year in terms of revenue per day of inventory. So if you're talking about at scale, where cash flow is coming in, it's getting tied up in inventory, or it's getting tied up and you're not getting in two weeks, you know, getting it two weeks, maybe not a week, for some lucky sellers. At scale, that's just really hard to manage volume like that, if you're not used to it. So form packs has been around for a while. I mean they're started retail, they've moved to Amazon. Everyone knows the great story there. But it's really sad just like how quickly you know numbers don't work in your favor when you're constantly reevaluating every month or every quarter, you know, for in cases of PPC every week. I'm assuming for you Elizabeth makes sure that things don't get out of hand crazily. But there's competition and there's ways for people to still find growth and be successful on Amazon. It's just very interesting to see the pivots of you said VC money coming and space, a lot of people are actually turning to a retail now and looking for shelf life, I was a billion-dollar seller summit this past week in Austin, Texas. And you would be shocked to see the amount of conversations that people talking about, hey, how do we take our brand and move to retail? How do we take our online brand that is established and has a value, and we can get into a, you know, a Walmart or a Wayfair? Or that's an online marketplace, but you know, I mean, like, target retail stores still have some major footprint and hold in the United States, especially as well as the world. So e-commerce still growing at pace, we're not seeing the same trajectory as we did. Right after the pandemic. 

Michael Maher  25:46

Oh, sure. 

Ryan Cramer  25:46

But yeah, overall, it's the number one goal. And I think I jokingly said I would fight anyone who said that inventory is not the number one thing that if you don't have an unlock that you will be going out of business, I don't care how good your PPC is, or how good your listing is, your A plus content, anything like that, if you don't have inventory, at scale, on lock, and you have a good plan in place, your business will tank and it will cost you way more money or your business.

Michael Maher  26:14

Those are the secrets people, you have now been let into the club of the secrets and the secret sauce and how the secret sauce is made. And it's made with margins and fish things on the back of your wall.

Elizabeth Greene  26:29

Now, I just want to second, third and forth what Ryan was saying about inventory. Like, so important. And I know especially, it's better now. But when everyone was dealing with like supply chain issues, and that was like an absolute disaster, there's people just hanging on for dear life. But as somebody who manages ads and deals with a lot of like re-ranking situations or product launches, when you run out of inventory for a significant amount of time. I don't care how dialed in your PPC was before you went out when you come back in it is *inaudible. 

Michael Maher  27:04

Always more. 

Elizabeth Greene  27:05

It's like a relaunch scenario. 

Michael Maher  27:07

Yeah, exactly.  Yeah.

Elizabeth Greene  27:08

the listing is right, it does happen. But I would say most of the time it doesn't. And so if you can just completely I know it's stressful, and it's hard. But if you can possibly avoid that scenario altogether, that actually will do more to win long term than having the best like Ryan was saying the best listing, the best PPC. And a lot of times, we were asked like, why aren't we doing you know, like our 15 or 20% A cost the way we were before we went to A stock and was like, hey, look, you lost out, we're starting at square one, essentially. Sometimes you can bounce right back, you know, sometimes if the market is right, if the product is right, 

Michael Maher  27:49

So we're talking about Amazon and how it's playing into current economics and looking at how it's a part of the changing retail scene for anyone who's joining us throughout the broadcast. And I just want to say my whole mission in putting out this podcast, it was not about being the number one podcast or I mean, like if we became number one, it's something I would love that, that'd be great. But the goal for me was about getting a lot of different varied perspectives, I think, to use a word that's used a lot diversity, I think the diversity of thought is so crucial. And we need people that are looking at things from different sectors and I had an incredible guy on on the show name Ron Thurston, and he is like, 100%, retail, all you know, in store, and he's just talked so much about how the people that are on the front lines that are often not treated well or not paid well, or, you know, it's like, well, you're working, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, because those are the busiest days. They're the ones that are the face of the company, and you're relying upon them. Like if you work at Nordstrom, and you're not treated well, you could treat some customers bad and badly and they don't come back and you're relying upon those people. So there's a lot of different perspectives that are out there that I think actually make retail what it is. So that's where we're at in the conversation. Brett, what are your thoughts?

Brett Bohannon  29:17

I'm gonna echo what everyone said, you don't have product, can't sell anything. You know, there, I've seen it with a lot of different companies and some that you would think would have everything kind of in line in regards to inventory management. But a lot of them you know, there's good problems, you know, usually when they're selling so fast, they need to allocate product to different channels. That's a good problem. And then there's bad problems where, you know, they send in you know, especially in the CPG site where they send in lock codes that only have like a month or two day Amazon. So, you know, those are kind of all the problems with inventory that you know, certain different categories, definitely play around with.

Michael Maher  29:59

When you're launching too, you only have so much inventory to start with, people don't start with unlimited inventory anymore. You start with about, I think a thousand units is what we've seen with every account we've launched this past year.

Brett Bohannon  30:10

Yeah, and that was a fun one when they like lassoed that all back the last couple of years.

Elizabeth Greene  30:17

*inaudible* Are people dealing with inventory limits when they launch now?

Ryan Cramer  30:21

Yes, yes.

Brett Bohannon  30:22

Oh, when they launched? Yeah. 

Michael Maher  30:23

When they launched for sure, if you perform well, you can go back, to being unlimited. But yeah, when you start, doesn't matter how much money you're willing to put into it, to a thousand and then they change it. I've heard people say that you can get an exception if you reach out to someone, and it might take some time, but it's possible. But I wouldn't rely upon that. 

Elizabeth Greene  30:47

Yeah.

Michael Maher  30:47

Because, you know, Seller Support may or may not come through in that area. So yeah, it just really depends upon that, how that first quarter goes. And then when you when you get inventory lifted. And then you can go back to whatever unlimited status, you might have.

Ryan Cramer  31:02

Well, I throw another *inaudible* in there too, for you guys just add on to it. It's different for every brand, no matter what marketplace you're selling in. So we're actually seeing sellers who are really big in US have their inventory limited and actually drop in, like Canada, for example, so it depends, you're almost taking like that step and even a step farther and like squeezing them to figure out, okay, it's not same across the board. Demand is different in Canada versus the United States, I get that, but why am I dropping when I'm still selling very well there, what they're rewarding, like we said is, we're seeing a lot more people have to send in fewer items, but more frequently. Amazon used to not like it sit there, but now all of a sudden they have space so it's kind of like, oh, nevermind, we want your space. We don't want inventory, put it in here so we can get some sort of money or fulfill through buy with prime things like that. So it's a good thing but it pivots at a quick, like, instantaneous moment for brands and that's very stressful for people. We've heard that stressor and all of a sudden on our NBC, why are you slowing down in this lane? You were doing very well, and what's changed? sales down? What's it like now we just can't send any more they're like, we want to, we would send more inventory if we could, but they won't let us. So it's a brand-by-brand, case-by-case basis, it's nuts.

Brett Bohannon  32:19

One thing I always like to do so when they limit that inventory is you know, if you exceed that, and your sales are just going well and you know, you can't keep up with getting it out is you know, have that parachute. And what I mean by that is just have that FBM,

Ryan Cramer  32:32

Yeah.

Brett Bohannon  32:33

You know, option. It's a condition that you can put on any listing and I call it the just in case condition. You know, just in case, if you sell out of all your FBA products, you'll have FBM, it's not going to convert as high that's for darn sure, but at least you're still there for someone to buy it, when you kind of figure out all these issues. Another thing with profitability is, you know, an established brands, when they get into kind of different marketplaces, and prices are and even go up these days and some what not. Some of those marketplaces are going to take a little longer to raise those prices, you're gonna have some, you know, suppressed buy boxes on Amazon for some of these brands. What I did recently with a brand and it works really well, here's a secret for everyone is hard bundle those products. And basically, if you can hard bundle those products and have them within the same size requirement as that other one, you're only getting that same fee, but your ARV is a lot higher. So you're going to have a margin that's going to be significantly higher as well.

Michael Maher  33:36

Well, that's something, that's a play for a lot of CPG, especially food brands too, their item might be just from a cost perspective, their item might be you know, $3, but you can't sell something for $3. So they have to package it into maybe like a six pack. And now they can sell it for $18 or $50 if you want to give people a discount, but it's not a ton more space or volume and so your margins are actually better than that way. And one of the things that I think a lot of food and beverage brands struggle with is someone wants to try your product they don't maybe know what flavor or what size they want to try and so from I've heard this hands down and any food CPG brand that I've ever done an audit on their account, their number one selling product, it's a variety pack, so having a variety pack and hard bundling those together is how you get people to try your products even see that they like them and that's the way, like people still want to test stuff, but the way that they go about testing is just going to be different they are not going to buy one individual one because they realize they could just go to the store to do that or pick it up as an extraneous item.

Brett Bohannon  34:51

Yeah, a low price point barrier to entry to try the product is very crucial. You know, especially if no one really knows the brand.

Michael Maher  34:59

You're crucial. Like that? Your mom's stuff gets passed along at my house very often and my daughter is doing it now, and she's nine. And sometimes it's like, oh man, I don't think your mom really wanted you to say that. Actually, your mom's stuff I think was outlawed for a little while, but it's come back. And it's I'm loving it. Your mom's loving it. And I'm like, Yeah, that's your grandma. Your mom's slow? Yeah, that's your grandma, you're saying your grandma slow? Do you want to call her and tell her that? We don't, but.

Brett Bohannon  35:01

Tried to be.

Ryan Cramer  35:36

Michael, I'm curious for you. Like I'm gonna ask the question to the host here. What are people asking more from an agency side like you guys are handling, fielding all these different questions, inquiries, things like that. What are brands want to do moving forward, like in the end of this year, like goals, things like that?

Michael Maher  35:52

Honestly, we've taken a lot of brands that are new to Amazon, and they're funded, so they can actually put money into advertising. And that's one of the things as you just evolve, especially as a business owner, you start out with maybe smaller clients who are just willing to do small projects here and there, and you start taking on people that are willing to, you know, retain you for multiple months. And they're looking to, then you're able to look to clients who are able to pay more, because your services are more valuable, you've got more of a team, you've got all this additional collateral that you can bring to the table. And this is something that I heard someone who, a guy named Kenan, this is only name that's on LinkedIn. But he is a sales dude, I will say and his whole, one of the things that he talks about, and I say this to clients, it's even prospects, when you hire a service agency, or someone to help you, people talk a lot about adding value and that's actually not true. So when someone hires us, we don't instantly add, we don't inject 20, grand or 50 grand of capital into your business, we're taking money from you, what we're doing is helping to uncover the value. That is, if your product is great already inherent in your brand, and if your product is inherently good, we can help turn that into something that can generate revenue on Amazon. So that's what we're doing. And people are asking us to do that. But they're asking right now, especially people that are new, they just want to grow, and they want to scale but something we've seen with some of the brands that we've been able to bring on their leadership is saying we need to get profitable right away. And it instantly kills the brand because people think I'm gonna get on Amazon and there's so many sales and it's just gonna grow. Well, yeah. Here's a secret, getting sales on Amazon in advertising, it's not difficult, but getting sales that are worth getting is, and that's where the execution comes into it. More secrets for Justin Wilhite, go to Amazonsecrets.com. And you can find all,

Elizabeth Greene  38:09

You better google that first to make sure *inaudible. 

Michael Maher  38:11

It's not, I have no idea. I have no idea if that is something.

Elizabeth Greene  38:14

Click by the *inaudible.

Michael Maher  38:16

So the thing that people are asking us is to grow, but they're very conscious of, hey, I can only fund this project for this long or leadership is telling us that we need to get profitable right away. And one of the other big issues has been supply chain issues, and sometimes it's not, we can't it's like, hey, this one ingredient isn't happening, or this company that we're working with, they're having a really hard time getting our products shipped out the door, because they're not running efficiently. So when you have a normal market, I think when there's not a bunch of supply chain issues or other economic issues that are affecting you, when you have a company that sucks at what they do, you just go to another company, but now everyone, those companies that suck make it even harder, because they're making a more difficult situation even more difficult. So I mean, I would say we have brand, some of the brands that we've been working with, we have a brand that we launched on Amazon three years ago. And he's now saying, how do we double our sales? So we've gotten him to a really profitable place. He's grown maybe 10-15% every year, but he's got a 30% profit margin. And that's, when I say profit margin. We tell people how profitable they are on the channel. So that means what are Amazon's referral fees? What are your fulfillment fees? What are your ad fees and what are our fees? So sorry, I can't really put my fourth finger out without my fifth finger coming out. But the profitability should include what our fees are because if you're not profitable with our fees, you're not profitable across the channel and if you're looking at as a branding play, well then that's a different story. But I think it's you know, sales and profitability, how do we grow? But how do we also get profitable? Because a lot of people, I've heard say are we're at a crucial point right now where we have to generate revenue, we have to generate profitability, we have to put money into our bank account.

Ryan Cramer  40:16

Goes back to cashflow, man, inventory and cash flow. It all comes back, I think to Michael is the other question that I was, or it's something I've noticed too, we've seen a lot of people who figure it out a lot of the retail space and is a lot of that question of how do you figure out Amazon in how do you figure out their multiple markets? Because again, it's now 20, it's going to continuously grow. I think it's secretly out there that there's four more markets that are coming into place so it's not going anywhere, but it's a marketplace that people have to figure out, so what is it that? Is it just going to be .com? Or is it going to be different marketplace that people have to start looking at any Amazon channels, that I can start to make more margins really work for me, whether my competition is not there, no one's like trying to block at me in the United States, you're not trying to sever my inventory or my supplier from me, a lot of those things, we're seeing people really try to pivot in those ways to not just off of Amazon, but within Amazon's own ecosystem. So it's really fascinating that people are trying to like, spread out and almost find their own little corner of the world. And then, and kind of like, hold tight there. And so and make it profitable, as much as as long as they can until someone else figures it out and then,

Michael Maher  41:30

Let's be honest to Amazon's promoting the new marketplaces, that doesn't mean that the demand is totally there. Just like Amazon sends you, hey, your campaign is out a budget. And part of our onboarding with clients, whether they listen to it or not, I don't know is, hey, you might get some out of budget requests on your advertising, that's normal. They don't do the Amazon doesn't send those to you based on the return you're getting while you're getting a three to one return, you should really turn your campaigns more it's simply you spent all your money. If you want to spend more money, and we recommend it of course, why wouldn't you? That's how you create a $31 billion ad business is about encouraging people to spend money, and I believe in the advertising system, so don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, you know, it's not always altruistic in nature. And I think a lot of people, you know, know and understand that. But it's about, hey, how do we get more people to join in on this? Well, we have to get more people to get excited about it and so we send people in these areas, but some of the biggest things I think getting overseas into other countries. In Canada, there's just not a ton of demand, so there's opportunity there and if there is demand for your product, you can come in and perform really well. But I think the expectation is that it's going to be another US and it's not even close to that. But the other two marketplaces like UK, and Germany, Germany's second behind the $310 billion US platform at like 37 billion and then the UK is I think 31-32 billion. This is all 2021 numbers.  Actually, Japan has subverted both of those marketplaces now. Japan has passed both of them, do you know what they're at currently?

Ryan Cramer  43:17

The visibility or the both the pageviews, as well as shopping, has surpassed now UK and Germany, I think recently.

Michael Maher  43:26

But Japan has had better viewability for a long time, because I remember when I was selling on Amazon Japan several years ago, they were saying hey, we've got you know, 2 million people coming to the site every day or something like that. But how many people are actually buying the product? You know, it takes time to get that stuff to catch on?

Brett Bohannon  43:44

Yeah, how long was the EU market? What's been what? 2017, 16? Maybe? Like what *inaudible.

Michael Maher  43:52

No, the EU markets have been around because I launched over there in, when I was saying selling product,

Ryan Cramer  43:59

It's the year 2010, yeah. 

Michael Maher  44:00

It was like 2012, 13? 

Brett Bohannon  44:04

Yeah, cuz I remember in 2016 we were kind of looking at doing it and that the whole deal was there's less volume but there's less competition.

Michael Maher  44:15

And here's crazy, what's crazy is I was not even using prime in those areas. I was fulfilling from and getting sales, I was fulfilling stuff from US which is crazy to think about now. By the way, everyone's looking sharp so swing up ready.

Elizabeth Greene  44:33

I would say over the multiple like other markets from the outside looking in as someone who just runs the advertising but as seen kind of you know, conversion rates needed for like, yes, the competition is a lot lower. But if you're doing decent sales in the US and you haven't fully locked down like your supply chain, your replenishment, your cash flow in the US like do that first before you go overseas, because you could say like, Okay, if I sell across the entire EU, you know, maybe I'm doing UK, maybe I'll tie in Germany, maybe they'll do Italy and Spain for good measure, like your listings need to be market specific. 

Michael Maher  44:36

Yeah.

Elizabeth Greene  44:37

Your inventory needs to be on point, again, you have different inventory levels across all, you know you need to work on replenishment, and each of them is going to have their own cash flow. Like, if you take your eyes at the ball of US, which is the one public sustaining you move into those other markets, 

Michael Maher  45:32

Yup.

Elizabeth Greene  45:32

How solid are you going to be? And are you going to slip in the US, dollar for a dollar like we did, I did an evaluation for one of our clients. They kept saying like, hey, we need to focus on you, focus on you, focus on you. And so we were doing that from an ad perspective but we weren't as focused on like launching new things or doing more creative advertising in the US simply because we had been given that focus. And it's a lot of times what I'm learning as an advertiser is I need to be comfortable saying, this is probably not the best for your business, even though you're telling me you need to do because when we did the evaluation, the entire I'm talking about every single market in like all the other markets out in Canada and Mexico for good measure, it's not that they shouldn't be selling there. It's that made up 8% of you know, million dollar business and 8% is not a thing as need that but you have to focus on it that's spread over eight different marketplaces.

Michael Maher  46:28

That's one of the things that hurt my business,

Elizabeth Greene  46:30

Yeah.

Michael Maher  46:30

And why in 2016, when I had a couple products that were selling really well and majority of my sales on Amazon, which was 70% of my sales, why my business crash. And it was because I was launching a brand that was in a very saturated market, it was in the fitness and like equipment market and we were just reselling a lot of stuff, but I was really putting a lot of effort into this brand. And then when stuff with regarding to Amazon, which was majority of our sales, Amazon opened up the marketplace to China in 2015. And all the manufacturers were coming in and selling my product at my price point from them. So they were selling it at a wholesale price point and people, I didn't have the cash to say, Oh, well, people will come back around and realize we're gonna have better customer service and the product, we're gonna stand behind the product more. No, people went immediately to the other price and I wasn't paying attention to looking at complaints from customers and saying, Okay, well someone complain about this in the feedback, I'm going to make adjustments so that we can hopefully get better reviews. I was like, oh, well, that's just user error but doesn't matter if it's user error or not, if someone doesn't like it, and they want to say this thing smells like poop, whether it does or not, they can say that I actually remember reading a review when I was doing research recently, and there was someone who was putting a review on like a vegan protein bar. That's just a common example I'll use in like a presentation or something is vegan protein bar. And this person said something like, Man, this tasted good but it gave me the worst gas ever, it smelled like a world war two battlefield was like falling behind me. And I just thought that was hilarious, it was a one out of five star review, and you think this makes no sense. Who knows what else is going on in this person's diet? And they left it, Amazon left up. I remember, I was selling iPhone three cases when I was selling on Amazon, which is crazy. And it took me like years to get, I did donate those to like a Goodwill or St. Vincent DePaul because no one would take them because they were so old. And they look stupid, even some of the cases that we had. But someone left a comment on an iPhone for listing that said, Man, this didn't fit my phone at all. My iPhone three is not fitting into this, it was totally the wrong case. And we complained about it, and Amazon said it's their opinion so. I think what it comes down to is this shiny object syndrome. It's just, you know, Yeah.

Brett Bohannon  49:04

it's just chasing things, and Amazon it comes up with new things all the time. And they're not bad, but it's just that everyone kind of season comes out. And they're like, oh, I want to go do that. I need to go do this. Let me go do that.

Michael Maher  49:16

I guess I feel like what's more important, and I would say I've fallen subject to or prey to the shiny object syndrome, even this year, like just this week. I've said okay, like, we're changing course in what we're doing, we're dropping a lot of extra things we're doing and we're just going to keep going hard into really helping brands grow and Amazon really well, like that's the focus that's bringing in money. That's what we're going to focus on. So it's easy to get distracted by that, but what's more important, is it the fact that you know, you're able to say hey, look at this shiny new thing and you're announcing it to people, or is it just doing the basics over and over and over again, I think if you're focusing on one of those things, I know what I'm gonna pick, because I know it's gonna continue to bring in money, and it's gonna help get people profitable. The shiny stuff while it's nice, and it's interesting, it takes time to be proven. Yeah, I guess I'm just thinking, like, I thought about this the other day, actually, it's like, all of us have so many different strategies and tactics to use, like, if we were to help a client, but it's like, how many of those would actually fall into place like, the first month? You know, it's kind of like, where they all kind of sit, it's interesting, if you'd like to look back and go, Wow, I've had this client for, let's just say three years, that's a good *inaudible* having a client on Amazon. You just never run out of things that you can do. You know, but those things that maybe you do in the third year, you would never even touched in the first year, but it's in your tool belt, and you have it in your tool belt, you're gonna sit there and be like, when they're ready, I know that they're going to be ready. And I think that's, that's super important for service providers and people in this space to identify when an account or brand is ready to, like, implement that particular strategy, you know, because if you do, it could just blow the whole thing up, and then maybe their inventory is gone. And then you're just kind of starting from square one.

Ryan Cramer  51:24

Yeah, I would echo to what Brett said, I think anyone who come to us at First Choice and says, Oh, yeah, I'm looking to start on selling Amazon and I want to do all 20 marketplaces, I'd say you're crazy go away. But say, you're gonna be out of business quicker than we can even help you. And that's the thing with us is, I think, in the space a lot of people are trying to do, it used to be the I want to do this quickly, I want to do it effectively, I want to do it as quick as I can as fast as I can, make my money and leave. And now even kind of like reared its head in the last two years I want to come in but, for example, buy a lot of brands, I want to scale these brands quickly, effectively, while the e-commerce market is hot, and then I want to bail. And then we're like sell those brands, or I want to like turn a profit, it's almost like buying the house and flipping the house. And not money people, when they got stuck with these assets, they're like, okay, well, I guess we need to take some time, understand what we have here, and start making some sort of, you know, logistical business out of this, not just a, hey, you're doing really well, we can take what you're doing and replicate that, but also grow because we have money. Like that's just not a cut and dry scenario here. Because there's all these curveballs get thrown at with terms of services changing, how you rank products, how you can ask for reviews, how you can launch products, what's in and out of your ecosystem. So it's understandably, so it's very frustrating for brands but I think a lot of people who have like waited it out, they understand it and I finally know what it takes. I think that there's gonna see this next year and a half, I think you're gonna see a lot of this, this wave coming right back. A lot of people are picking up steam with it, with more capital, more brands who are not on Amazon, coming on Amazon and trying to figure out this e-commerce, retail and wholesale play like the three major pillars you need for a successful multi-million, multi-billion dollar business. 

Michael Maher  53:18

Okay, so here's some more secrets, people, we've got so many secrets. I mean, I don't even know that people can possibly contain the secrets. And one of the secrets is that people are trying to come in and figure out Amazon, that's what Ryan said. And here's the secret, I've been working with Amazon for a decade or more, and I'm still trying to figure out Amazon, there is so much to wade through that even the experts have a lot to get through. And you know what, I don't even call myself an expert, because, I mean, I have a lot of accumulated knowledge about Amazon but there's so many different things that are out there, that I know how to really help brands grow. That's, that's what my focus is. And so there's a lot of components that go into that. But my team has to, you know, speaking about owning and running a business, my team has to be better advertising than I ever was because they're the ones that are doing it every day. I'm not the one that's doing it every day, my team that works on advertising, or that are uploading flat files and in inventory and like they're doing way more than I ever could and that's great. But you have to, you can just go deep in so many different places. So actually saying, you know, I'm an expert on all things Amazon, well, no, I am either very knowledgeable or I can help find the answers but that doesn't mean I can just recall everything. So I honestly think that is one of the secrets. People are still trying to figure it out and so when you see a bunch of, I think people that are you know, like to Ryan's point they're buying brands and they're wanting to skill them? It sounds cool. And it sounds like yeah, well, that makes sense, we're gonna put money behind it but if you don't know how it works if you don't know what's going on, and I think a lot of the venture capitalists that have come in, that were well intended, are realizing, wow, there's a lot of roadblocks and we need to hire people that can actually, that can actually are worth their wait in selling product on Amazon, they're realizing that they're coming up short and part of that's because there's such a lack of talent that actually knows and understands Amazon, which is why Brett, you're doing the whole Amazon with Brett thing. You've started that because people need training. And they can't just take a course, because things change so often and so frequently is, talk about that, talk about what you're doing and how that's actually impacting people. 

Brett Bohannon  55:52

Yeah, I mean, that's how it all came about. Is just kind of eyeing the evolution of the whole entire space over the past. Shoot, I've been involved since 2016. But the evolution, you know, there was no, just a PPC service provider agency, like it was. I mean, Michael, you and I, and I think YouTube, probably we did everything. I've done everything. Like I've had my hand and *inaudible.

Michael Maher  56:19

You want me to write copies? Sure. All right.

Brett Bohannon  56:21

No, but yeah, exactly. I mean, I write copy for my clients, I do. So what I see is that there's an influx of people coming in going, I can help you, I can do this, there was and there probably still is a supply and demand issue within the supply is good service providers that can help clients. I mean, I've been in the agency side, I helped develop a large agency, and we had a lot of clients, and we, you know, it just wasn't there for anyone to basically get what they needed in the space, client wise. So there's always need for more education in this space and that's kind of what Amazon with Brett is all about is just being able to provide value to people. I like courses, I don't take too many of them because I'm a horrible self learner. So I like to be involved with other people so that's,

Michael Maher  57:14

Yeah.

Brett Bohannon  57:15

The main thing with Amazon Brett. It's like a cohort style so it's like me, a group of people. And we're just jamming out, we talked about the basics, we talked about everything and then we can just go off into space and talk about whatever else you'd like. 

Ryan Cramer  57:29

Yeah.

Michael Maher  57:29

The cohort style is important because it provides that group learning and group conversation together, which I think is huge.

Ryan Cramer  57:37

I'll add this, for anyone who's out there that is new to Amazon space, and you're listening to like Microsoft, the 10s of people are listening to this right now, which will be more obviously later on friday afternoon, guys, let's be serious. People are hard at work right now and they're trying to figure it out but if you're a new seller, and you're listening to this, the thing I can constantly tell you, and I think a lot of us in this, everyone in this room will say is if you have an advisor, or an agency, that is either a not actively selling on Amazon, or helping people actively sell on Amazon, or B, they're not figuring out ways to constantly learn. They're like, oh, and by the way, this tactic back in 2017 is what I still use today, you have to ask the question, why they can't give you an answer. Why? Like, how is it an updated, then they're probably not a good fit for you like as an advisor and agency or someone who's like teaching a course.

Michael Maher  58:30

You know, I've had clients come to us and say why are we doing this? Now? Why are we changing strategies? And we've said, look, things change on Amazon, and what we've been doing, we don't think that's the way to move forward so we're making adjustments and the client didn't say, well, you should have done this before, they just said okay. That's how you figured out you say, okay, well we're doing this and we're realizing this isn't working anymore. Just trying to rank for this one keyword is not actually helping us because we're spending so much money. It lets in the category like beauty, there's so much competition and beauty. So you might try to rank for one keyword. If it's got enough demand, you could drop money for months, and we've seen clients in the beauty space that don't get profitable. It takes them a year to get profitable, which some people can't sustain they don't have the money to do that so you have to be smart and you have to look at other ways to influence sales on the product or send traffic which is why I think a lot of people are looking to influencer marketing. We're building that out right now what is influencer marketing look like? And we're not, I'm not wanting to go after macro influencers, I wanted to go after micro-influencers because they're more authentic, they're real, I think people will believe in and listen to them. So there's a lot of new stuff that is shiny, but you have to figure out what's gonna actually work and when it does work, you have to change, you can't just keep saying, oh, I just, you know, keep 200 characters I'm going to stuff the hell out of this title and get as much as they can out of it. It's like, okay, well, how does that look? Some of it is just appear to like this. It looks spammy, it doesn't look good. And I don't need a piece of data to tell me, oh, this looks good, or it doesn't look good. I just, I can tell it look, this looks terrible and I wouldn't want to put this on a listing so I'm not going to.

Ryan Cramer  1:00:20

Yeah, it's a living, breathing organism that we're all like working with on a daily basis, no matter like, if it's PVC, or like listings or, you know, shipping logistics or anything like that. Yeah, it's breathing heavily in your ear constantly keeping you up.

Brett Bohannon  1:00:41

I'm gonna make a plea, what Michael said, if anyone's doing outside traffic, tear to Amazon, please use a brand referral bonus program. There's so many things that I've seen all look at this, what I've done, it did $100,000 in sale, or whatever, like to use brand for a bonus program. And that's not a secret, that's what you should be doing.

Michael Maher  1:01:02

You could have gotten 10%, or you could have gotten even more than what they're giving you. One of the things I want to say to everyone that's out there. Sorry, Brett. Is that if you go to The Longer Game website, and you sign up for the email list, we'll share that with Elizabeth Greene of Junglr. With Ryan Cramer, First Choice Shipping and Brett Bohannan of Amazon with Brett and will give you, they'll be able to send cool stuff, do you have a wall so send you a one-pager just on the future of retail that gives you some insight into some of the things we're talking about. I just wanted to mention that. So go and sign up for the email list. You can go to saying words now. Right?

Brett Bohannon  1:01:43

Oh I'm done, that was a beautiful quote.

Michael Maher  1:01:47

Got the? I don't know. There's just, there's so many different. There's so much to talk about here that sometimes I have to filter out what I'm saying to someone, which is why, you know, I know Amazon really well but I didn't know how to actually selling my services super well. So I had to hire someone to help me and I think that's one of the things that people are starting to realize in the Amazon world is someone just comes in and I think people are, I think people are well-meaning when they're saying, Oh, we can help you with Amazon because it's that entrepreneurial spirit of we're gonna figure this out, we'll do this. But when they when someone's used to doing PPC on AdWords, and they come into Amazon, and they're not taking into consideration that how visible the listing is organically can be impacted by advertising sales. And so they're instantly not seeing a campaign that's got a 10 to one row as and so they're turning it off, or 10% A cost I don't I don't really like a cost. And we don't like talk about that a lot with clients because I just don't think it's the number one we're looking more at row as if I'm honest. But I just don't think the hype of I have a friend he and I would always talk about a cost chasers as people that are like, oh, I was at a, I think Brett and I were even at the same conference and someone said, what's the Rite Aid costs? And I just was like, oh, *inaudible.

Ryan Cramer  1:03:17

Oh, do you give me your favorite answer? It depends.

Michael Maher  1:03:20

Yeah, it depends. But I think some of it, I actually saw someone on Twitter recently say, if you're you know, you have to spend the 20% of stuff. That's where you need to be spending. And I just said why? Well, that's just standard across the board. Why? Why is it standard across the board? Like, what's the reasoning, I said, it depends upon your price point, it depends upon your category, it depends upon what your profit margins look like, all that stuff comes into play. And it really does depend, so if someone's just saying, this is the blanket standard across the board, how we stylize a listing in the apparel category is probably going to be different than what we're doing in beauty, if we're doing our research, right. It really does depend.

Elizabeth Greene  1:04:03

Yeah, it does. And I think where a lot of like, yeah, I agree with you, the term expert is thrown around so much, I heard a good quote, and I'm going to be paraphrasing and butchering it. And it wasn't necessarily about Amazon, but just business in general. You know, by the time you start your second, third, or fourth business, it's not that like you're an expert in basis, it's just you've been through sequence before and you get the pattern recognition. So Michael, as you've grown, you know, multiple brands and help them scale as you go through, you know, on the brand or so thousands. And you're like, okay, I know the sequence, I know the pattern.

Michael Maher  1:04:44

It's probably closer, like maybe hundreds, we've been very intentional about who we work with. And so I'm not going to say help, I saw someone's title on LinkedIn last night and it said, helping thousands of businesses over ten years. And I'm like, I have no idea what you do, I know that you've helped thousands of businesses do something over ten years.

Elizabeth Greene  1:05:05

So if you're just like, selling consulting calls then you could say that I mean if you go that volume.

Michael Maher  1:05:09

I helped general businesses do general things. But that's not what people need, they need specialists, which is why Elizabeth why you have an agency you might, and I think it's crazy. When people say Amazon is so niche, like, and I'm like, Do you know how like, Yeah, it's true compared to the rest of the world but do you know how big that niche is like there are people that all they do is help you get reimbursements from the money that Amazon should have paid you back already.

Ryan Cramer  1:05:34

There's a joke that Chris Freiburger a friend of I know, you, Michael is, he put Amazon in the *inaudible.

Michael Maher  1:05:40

Yes, he was very close to me in fact.

Ryan Cramer  1:05:42

Exactly. They're in good old Cincinnati, Ohio,

Michael Maher  1:05:46

Cincinnati, Ohio!

Ryan Cramer  1:05:46

Right? If you put Amazon at the end of any title that exist in marketing, it's like you have made yourself more attractive than any other like job probably in the space right now, for a lot of different brands, it could be a brand, it could be an agency, it could be some sort of, you know, any retail store, to put Amazon at the end of like, SEO specialists, or SEO Amazon specialists, then he all of a sudden have made yourself a niche of a niche, which is really fascinating. The same thing with Shopify, or direct to consumer, or any sort of logistics, if it's any sort of like Amazon-specific or e-commerce specific, you made yourself a niche of a niche wishes, is going to continue to grow. It continue to evolve. And that's what everyone in this space, if they do their job, right, and they're still in business, they're continuously learning, they're growing, we all are different than where we were like last year at this time. It's such a fascinating space to be in. And you'll never find somebody who's got it all like now. And that's why a lot of people like us come together and just talk like this for hours or a couple hours. Now if it feels like an hour plus, I guess, but it doesn't feel like,

Michael Maher  1:06:51

I could go for three, I don't know if people would tune in, but I could go for a long time. I also say to your point, my sales coach and one of my business coaches, and I lean on those people, because I don't know and have it all figured out. And I was even saying that this week, I met with a business coach of mine here in town. And I'm just talking about some of the issues I'm running to in my organization right now. And he's like, I think you're trying to do too much. And I'm like, and you need to better define things for the people in the organization. I'm like, yeah, that's totally it. And so I felt this huge sense of relief, because I'm like, okay, well, I'm not going to focus on these five other things. I'm gonna focus on this one thing right now for the next several months. And we're just going to crush it in that area. And we're doing a great job. But I'm like, how can we be better? And I think that's one of the reasons Amazon has been successful, because they say, all right, cool, we deliver two days shipping, now we're gonna get one day shipping and same day shipping. And my wife ordered something before my daughter's volleyball practice on Wednesday and got it right after at home shipping. So they're constantly trying to say how can we do something better? And I think you have to bring in people that know what they're doing. But my sales coach told me to Ryan's point about, you know, being a niche of a niche. He said, who makes more money? A general, and I think this is a good way to quantify like you can you become more valuable. When your price is higher. It's just, if people are willing to pay your price, that means they value that service at a higher rate. And I think you should charge what you're worth don't charge minimally. Because a lot of times you attract I think the wrong people, when you're saying, hey, we just yeah, I'll take you on for this amount, because I just want clients and I've been there before, but I don't think that's what I would recommend. But he's like, you know, who makes more the general practitioner, the primary care physician or a specialist, what's a specialist? But why did they make more money, because they spent additional time training in school, they specialized in their residency, and they've had to do all this additional work. And like, if you've got cancer, you're not going to go see your primary care doctor, he's going to refer you to that specialist because he knows how to treat that specific thing. So someone's really like if someone has, you know, their content and everything buttoned up, and what they want is advertising. I'm not going to try and sell them on the services, I'm gonna say go to Elizabeth and do advertising only because you don't need what we can provide for you. And there are people that sometimes we even turned down not because we're so exclusive, you know, talking about hundreds of thousands of brands, and I'm just like I don't know that we're honestly the right fit for you and I don't want to sell you on something that is not going to work for you.

Elizabeth Greene  1:09:45

When you get specific there's also a level of, I think we've all seen the move on the websites or like the LinkedIn tags where it's like oh, I'm an expert on like Amazon and Walmart and Shopify and drop shipping and I can help you do all in your like your for one person, it's not even an agency. And you're like, I think any person who's being logical, it understands that the amount of knowledge you have to have to be able to be any good at any two of those things is astronomical and takes a very long time to acquire. So I mean, I have clients asking me about other services all the time, or people wanting full service management. And I'm like, I probably could, I probably could go out and do a team. I just know, I'm really good at ads.

Michael Maher  1:10:32

Yeah.

Elizabeth Greene  1:10:32

I like ads. So as long as I can survive sticking to my lane, I'll be fine with just partnering with other people where it's like, okay, so if you want to let yourself let me go talk to Brett, if you need full service, let's go talk to Michael like, you know, so you make connections in the space and then having places like this where, you know, maybe if someone has a question on ads, you know, I get DMS all the time from people I know in the industry are like, I'm the bulk file person. So it's like, hey, you know, I'll get people asking like, Hey, what's this? And oh, yeah, I troubleshot that problem a week ago? And here's the answer to it, you know, you make people in the industry, or make friends with people in the industry who can help fill in those additional pieces. And I think it just, it just all really ends up working together in the long run.

Ryan Cramer  1:11:23

I guess, I guess, Michael, for your perspective, or I guess for you guys, you're all perspective. Is there a? For everyone who's listening to this? I'm trying to think to phrases. Is there? Is there ever the right questions to ask? Is there what like, what's the right questions to ask when they're coming to like an agency or PPC? I guess a lot of people I think are afraid to start asking like how to figure it out. Or it takes time to figure things out? What are the right questions that people you think should be asking to see if it's a good fit for you guys, but also from them? Like you've seen clients of all sizes? What are those questions for the PVC agency? Or?

Michael Maher  1:11:59

The number one thing for any, I'm just gonna say this across the board, It's expectations.  What is that person that's coming to you? What are their, by the way, this is bonus material people because we're only supposed to go an hour, but you're getting bonus material, talk about secrets, secrets, on secrets, we got a secret meeting after this secret, live conference call. And we're not even going to tell you what the URL is. You just have to guess because that's how secret it is. But it's expectations. People coming in one of the questions that I asked is, what does success look like for you? what are your goals for Amazon? I want to be seven-figure I want to do this, and this. Okay. And then I coupled that with an additional question, what do you want to spend on advertising? Well, you know, we really got to see your return. So you know, probably going to spend $500,000. And we want to make it to 2 million next year, I had someone on a sales call say that. And I said, that's not going to happen. You're not going to see that happen, because you don't see instant profitability on Amazon, it will not be profitable. Okay, well, sure. Right. But you have to get attribution on the this is not rocket science people, this is just how Amazon works. If you want to grow your brand on Amazon, you can go and do this yourself. But people will want other people to do it for them. Because they're either better at it, or they don't want to spend the time doing it. And they've got the money to be able to do that. I'm not going to do my own books now. Because someone else can do it better than me and quicker or efficiently. And so I'm going to pay them whatever they, you know, 50 bucks an hour, I don't know, pay them, whatever they want to be paid for that service. But you can go and do this on your own right now, if you so choose, you have to focus on your category and specific areas in your category, which can get boiled down to keywords. And you have to get enough sales attribution organically or through advertising to get you to actually show up more on the first page. Because most people don't go past the first page. And most people are shopping on mobile. And so your search results are much more limited on a mobile phone than they are on a desktop. It goes from 48 results on a desktop to like 30 on your mobile phone. So you, I think you have to start with expectations because I can right away say okay, well this person has really high expectations. I don't know that we're going to be the right fit. So maybe what I pitched them was a little bit different. And they're like okay, well you know, we're not into that but someone who I know is we're you know, we're a small business we really like we'd love to get to like $10,000 a month and you know, we're willing to put in money but blah blah blah I'm like okay, this is someone who knows that the market is legit and they want to be a part of that market.

Elizabeth Greene  1:12:06

Yup. I would echo that for sure. I've had conversations where people, cause the thing is with advertising is we do touch sales like my little said, you know we can we can put pedal to the metal we can help bring products or advertising. But advertising is not the only thing that touches sales. There's a lot more things that go into it. So oftentimes what we'll see is, you know, maybe clients come to us like, Oh, my sales are down. So I need the advertising piece. And then it's like, we go look, we're like, well, if you look at month over month, your conversion rate has dropped. So maybe you should figure out that first, I can refer you to somebody who does better on listings, and then you know, we'll come in with the advertising. So again, setting the expectation, especially seeing as we're only the advertising piece to the puzzle, my favorite clients to work with are the ones that come in, they know what the ads can do. They say, I just don't have the time, nor do I have the expertise to keep up with every single new, you know, launch up a platform because we had a conversation with a client the other day, they're like, oh, what about this new ad type, and like, that's great. We're focused on profitability. We're not launching, you know, brand new advertising types in your account. We tested this on their accounts, we don't see our high ROI. So it doesn't make sense for us to do right now. Once you hit peak season, let's revisit this. And we're like, okay, cool, because we've tested it, and we know enough to know, hey, now's not the right time, where they might have just gone ahead and tested it. And it probably wasn't great because we're focused on profitability. So I like clients where I can have those conversations. And then the hardest conversations are I've had before where they'll say like, oh, I want to hit these sales numbers. And you go back and look and you're like, you've never hit the sales numbers historically. In fact, your highest ever sales was the peak, q4 was half of this. And you want me to get there in a month on offseason. Like, it's just, it's just not possible.

Michael Maher  1:16:33

Yeah but I just want to grow Elizabeth, I just want to grow, okay.

Elizabeth Greene  1:16:36

I'm fine with growth. And I tell clients all the time, I said, you know, if we say it's gonna take 30 days, it doesn't mean like Sky parts on day 30. And all of a sudden, I'm like, Well, we're looking for is that slow and steady, move towards profitability, increase sales, whatever, 

Michael Maher  1:16:51

Progress.

Elizabeth Greene  1:16:52

Yeah, it's progress. You're looking for progress. You don't? You know, it's not like you wait 30 days, and all of a sudden, oh, yeah, this is working. It's like, you can tell in week two, you know, how, what the change trips are.

Michael Maher  1:17:03

And if you need to make a change in week two, you can say, Okay, we need to like open bids more. And we need to focus on top of search placement, because we know that's what's going to get the results you want. And I think for me, it's just saying, Okay, here's your expectation, here's what it's going to take, there was someone when and that, then they make their decision. I had someone in the middle of the pandemic, who said, man, we got these masks, and it's like masks like no one, no one else has these masks. And so we were, you know, we can do 2 million, we think on Amazon, I said, okay, I'll put together projections of what it's going to cost you to do 2 million in the next year on Amazon. And it was gonna cost them like a million and a half. And they were like, we're ready to go right now. And I sent that to them, which has changed our proposal process, but it sends these projections to them. I said, okay, cool. We're at a trade show, we'll get back to you. And then like, two weeks later, I was like, nothing. And I said, Hey, just curious if you guys still interested, I know you're really hot and heavy on this. And they said, they said, Oh, yeah, we're just gonna have to go to the distribution route or something like that. So I mean, they like if you want that you can get it. It's possible at what costs.

Elizabeth Greene  1:18:17

Right going back to profitability *inaudible*.

Ryan Cramer  1:18:22

It all comes back to numbers.

Michael Maher  1:18:25

Alright, that's a great segway into us being quiet and you enjoying the rest of your Friday. Here on W? WL. WT news 17. Ryan, tell people if they want to find you. Where can they find you behind the dumpster fire, in the middle of an open field? If someone wanted to know where Ryan Kramer is? 

Ryan Cramer  1:18:44

You're describing Indiana very well, just kidding.

Michael Maher  1:18:47

Yeah, no, everything out here in the Midwest is just cornfields people.

Ryan Cramer  1:18:50

No. I Love Indiana. Wink wink, nudge nudge, the Midwest is great. Now, you guys can find me. I'm on LinkedIn, just search for sure shipping or @RyanCramer. We're going to be at the Amazon accelerate conference talking about Amazon. Some news that I share with Michael that's going to be exciting. We're announcing their T's and yeah. 

Michael Maher  1:19:11

And I'll be there, I'll be there,

Ryan Cramer  1:19:13

We'll be there for the exciting. 

Michael Maher  1:19:14

whatever vip party they're hosting. I'm gonna make sure I show up.

Ryan Cramer  1:19:18

Amazon. Yeah, the diamonds on Amazon this time. Then we'll also be at Helium 10 Selling skill conference a week after. So if you happen to catch us and want to talk, international expansion and growth, anything about Amazon, feel free to come by and say hi.

Michael Maher  1:19:33

Cool. Elizabeth. Your turn? 

Elizabeth Greene  1:19:36

Yes, yeah. So LinkedIn to I put out the most content on LinkedIn.

Ryan Cramer  1:19:42

She's measured it. 

Elizabeth Greene  1:19:44

Huh?

Ryan Cramer  1:19:44

You've measured it. It's the most *inaudible.

Elizabeth Greene  1:19:46

I measured it. Everyone gets mad about selfies, selfies perform the best *inaudible.

Michael Maher  1:19:52

Hey, if I look like you, I would put selfies up too.

Elizabeth Greene  1:19:56

I try and sprinkled of it and it's not even weekly.

Michael Maher  1:20:00

Wouldn't I seriously whatever works for you? If something works then I've been using that. 

Elizabeth Greene  1:20:04

Yeah, go for it. Yeah. So I'm LinkedIn I post content about Amazon advertising. So if you want to turn in there I try and post logical, thought-provoking helpful content,

Michael Maher  1:20:19

Not just screenshots of random things in the ad coms. 

Elizabeth Greene  1:20:22

I did post a screenshot yesterday, but I gave you, 

Michael Maher  1:20:24

That's rare. That's rare.

Brett Bohannon  1:20:25

Insights.

Michael Maher  1:20:27

Oh scribbles?

Elizabeth Greene  1:20:30

Awesome. Yeah. And then, if you want to learn about working with us, best places to help the website junglr, junglr.com.

Michael Maher  1:20:40

Thank you. Brett, Bohannon?

Brett Bohannon  1:20:43

LinkedIn, Twitter, I'm starting to get more active on Twitter. It's kind of an interesting place. Definitely different than LinkedIn. But amazonwithbrett.com. Alright, sorry. Yeah. Sorry, it's been a long hour and 20 minutes.

Michael Maher  1:21:05

Oh, I just hit my teeth with microphone. That was fun.

Brett Bohannon  1:21:08

amazonwithbrett.com/newsletter, if you want to sign up for the newsletter. My goal with that is getting an actual tip out every week. So something that I've found very useful that I've done, or that I've seen very useful that other people have done. Nothing like no emojis is just straight to straight bones to pay the checkout this tip. And this is how you do it. So amazonwithbrett.com/newsletter.

Michael Maher  1:21:38

Awesome, there. Thank you guys for coming on. I genuinely appreciate the conversation. And it was so fun, because I'm not worried about what's going to come up. Because it's all legit stuff. You guys have all have great brands, First Choice, Amazon with Brett, Jungler. All those and I know that the work that you guys are doing is great. And we talk on a regular basis. And so I'm not worried about someone being super showy or self promoting. I want everyone to get business. And sometimes I lose business to you know, people that are that I know and that are in the industry. And I'm okay with that. Because I'm not expecting to be all things to all people. But it's just nice to have quality people to work with who are about solid information. And for me, that's what I've tried to do with my agency, cartology is providing good solid information, not necessarily being the hype beast, but saying, hey, you need to do this, you need to do this and you do this and just hammering it over and over and over. Because those basics are things that work. And that's what I feel like The Longer Game has been a to Ryan's point, you know, the 10s of people that are watching. My goal with this was I said not to be the biggest thing ever. It was just provide solid information and I'm gonna continue to promote season one well beyond season one. We've got lots of great tidbits. This episode will go up. Interesting word tidbits. We will put this episode up on anywhere that the podcast is as much longer episode than normal, but I think people will enjoy it and you can go to longergame.com Sign up for that email list that and we'll share that with the people on this team here and we'll get you access to a one pager about the future of retail thanks guys for joining us. Oh you can find me behind any dumpster fire, you can find me the back of Chick fil A just taking the leftover like sandwich meat if they're done,

Ryan Cramer  1:23:37

Waffle fries.

Michael Maher  1:23:38

You can find me in any ice cream parlor, I'm probably there sampling some flavors even though I don't really tolerate dairy very well but I'm also on LinkedIn as well I'm Michael Maher is my URL and thelongergame.com. Thank you guys for helping me in closing this out.

Ryan Cramer  1:23:58

The end of season one.

Michael Maher  1:23:59

Season one, we did it, I started with Ryan and ended with Ryan. 

Brett Bohannon  1:24:03

Wow.

Elizabeth Greene  1:24:03

There you go.

Michael Maher  1:24:04

And now I'm going to play us out with music you ready?

Ryan Cramer  1:24:09

Do it.

Brett Bohannon  1:24:10

Go.

Michael Maher  1:24:16

 I'm just gonna sit here for a second, THANK YOU.  Night everyone, peace!