217: The Future Of Ecommerce With Scott Voelker, Greg Mercer, Mike Jackness And Steve Chou

Podcast: Download (Duration: 59:43 — 82.3MB)

Launch on Amazon first, then build your own website once you know the product line is worth committing to. That was the near-consensus answer from four sellers with very different businesses, and the disagreement was about how long you should stay Amazon-only.

This was a live Q&A panel hosted by Toni Anderson with Greg Mercer of Jungle Scout, Scott Voelker of The Amazing Seller, Mike Jackness of EcomCrew and ColorIt, and me. Listeners submitted the questions.

The panel covers where to start selling, how to pick between Google and Facebook ads, escaping the Gmail promotions tab, how much software a store actually needs, polling customers for new product ideas, splitting Amazon inbound shipments, and how to think about tariff exposure.

Key takeaways

• Start on Amazon for the built-in traffic, then add your own site and email list once you commit to the brand.
• Mike Jackness draws the diversification line around $1 million to $2 million in revenue.
• Avoid me-too products. Differentiation on brand, functionality, or design is what protects you from Chinese sellers going direct.
• Pick one paid traffic channel and get good at it. Google works when people search for your product, Facebook works when they do not.
• Facebook ads depend on your product mapping to an existing interest group. Aches and pains is not a targetable interest; camping is.
• Poll your customer list before developing new products. Mike killed a project his most vocal fans wanted and it ranked last in the poll.
• You need roughly eight touchpoints before a customer buys, so do not send paid traffic anywhere you cannot capture and retarget them.
• Buy software to solve a specific pain point you actually have, not to find a silver bullet.

Should you sell on Amazon or your own website first?

Start on Amazon, because more than half of all ecommerce product searches begin there and the traffic infrastructure is already built. Greg Mercer takes the strongest version of this position: factoring in the time and brainpower required to drive traffic to your own site, that effort is better spent on Amazon.

Scott Voelker agrees on launching there and adds a condition. Building outside channels alongside your Amazon listings means you can direct traffic wherever you want, which matters when a competitor hijacks a listing or you need to push the algorithm.

Mike Jackness puts a number on the transition. Stay 100% Amazon until you hit roughly $1 million to $2 million, because a solopreneur trying to run a standalone store on top of everything else is overwhelmed.

My advice is to use Amazon for quick wins and early sales, then start your own site once you know you are sticking with the product line. Building a memorable brand on Amazon is genuinely hard, and my mother still believes she is buying from Amazon rather than from any brand on it.

How do you compete with Chinese sellers on Amazon?

Stop selling exactly what they sell. Mike’s framing is that the way to win over the next few years is building a brand with its own look and feel, improving on existing products, and adding functionality that makes the item yours.

A listing that is identical to ten other listings competes purely on price, which is a race you will lose. A product with genuine differences gives shoppers a reason to pick you.

Scott’s related warning is about longevity. Even a well-differentiated product attracts imitators eventually, so you need owned assets that let you spike sales on demand and defend the ranking you built.

Should you start with Google Ads or Facebook ads?

Choose based on whether people actively search for what you sell. Google works when there is existing search intent and Facebook works when you have to create the demand.

The bigger mistake is spreading across channels. Pick one and become genuinely good at it, since trying several and failing at all of them is the pattern I see most often.

Start with paid rather than organic if you need revenue soon. SEO takes roughly 18 months to ramp, and paid traffic produces wins as soon as you clear the learning curve.

Within Google, start with retargeting and then Google Shopping. Shopping ads carry an image and a price, so a click represents much stronger purchase intent.

Google is generally more expensive and requires meaningful spend before the algorithm learns where your conversions come from and costs start dropping. Our own Google ads are very profitable now, and getting there took investment.

Why Facebook ads work better for some products than others

Facebook ads perform when your product maps onto an interest group that already exists on the platform. Mike’s brands illustrate the split cleanly.

ColorIt targets people who like coloring, which is a real interest category. Tactical targets camping, hunting, and fishing, which are also real categories.

IceWraps is the counterexample. There is no way to target people who have aches and pains, so the same playbook produces much weaker results.

Demographics matter too. Younger audiences skew toward Instagram, older toward Facebook, and women lean toward Pinterest and Instagram more heavily than men.

How do you keep marketing emails out of the Gmail promotions tab?

Get subscribers to interact with your first email, which teaches Gmail that your messages belong in the primary inbox. Two approaches work.

The first is instructional. Tell new subscribers exactly how to drag your email from Promotions into their inbox, which marks you as a safe sender going forward.

The second is engagement-driven. Ask them in the first line to hit reply and answer a question, since a reply is the strongest possible signal that they want your mail.

Scott’s version strips the first email down entirely. A generic subject line like “thanks,” no links, no promotional language, and an invitation to reply if they have questions.

Mike uses GlockApps to test placement before sending. It routes your email to seed addresses and reports which tab it lands in, and refining across two to ten edits moved their campaigns from Promotions to primary, lifting open rates from around 20% to around 30%.

The honest caveat is that Google is running machine learning against this and continuously changing it. Consistently promotional email will eventually get classified as promotional.

How much software does an ecommerce business actually need?

Buy software to solve a pain point you can name, and skip anything you are buying in hope of a silver bullet. Greg’s test is straightforward: identify what is actually hurting in your business, then look for the tool that fixes that specific thing.

Scott’s addition is timing. Add tools as the need appears rather than in anticipation, since an inventory management system makes no sense when you have very few SKUs.

The costs are real and they compound. Mike notes that between sales tax software, inventory management, shipping, accounting, and an email platform, the SaaS line item reaches mid four figures a month and keeps climbing.

The test that keeps a tool is whether it returns more than the subscription costs. That is easier to satisfy at scale and much harder when you are just starting.

My own philosophy is to avoid recurring fees for apps that do very little. I recently spent two days building a countdown timer to replace an $80 a month app, which Greg reasonably points out is a poor trade for most people.

How do you drive traffic to a B2B ecommerce website?

Google ads generally outperform Facebook for B2B, because businesses buy when they have an active need rather than spontaneously. Mike’s IceWraps B2B experiments on Facebook produced limited results despite being able to target job titles like procurement manager.

The alternative that works well is mining your consumer customers for business buyers. Look at who buys in volume, find out whether they work for a larger organization, and reach out with special pricing and treatment.

That is how we win B2B customers at Bumblebee Linens. We ran one Facebook campaign targeting event planners with free napkin samples and got one or two customers out of it, which is thin but not worthless when a single wholesale account buys consistently.

Cold outreach still beats ads for this. Calling wedding and event planners directly and offering discounts produced better results than any ad campaign we ran.

Should you poll customers before launching a new product?

Poll your list once you have around 1,000 to 2,000 actual purchasers, because smaller samples produce false positives from a vocal minority. Mike ran a poll across ColorIt’s 10,000-plus customers and it changed their roadmap.

The vocal-minority problem was live. A few hundred people attend their weekly ColorIt Live session and several kept requesting a color-by-number book, which seemed like clear demand.

The poll ranked that idea last. Building it would have been a much harder project than their usual books for demand that did not exist.

What the poll surfaced instead became their best selling title to date, a mythical and fantasy book. That is the value: your loudest customers are not a representative sample.

Why chasing new projects hurts more than it helps

Greg’s biggest recurring mistake as an entrepreneur has been running too many different things instead of doubling down on what already works. Hearing about someone else’s success on a new channel is the usual trigger.

The discipline is staying with one or two marketing channels that produce results rather than adding Snapchat ads because they exist. Scott’s version of the same lesson is about persistence: several projects he abandoned might have worked with sustained attention.

Distinguishing between expansion inside your brand and starting an unrelated venture matters here. New products for existing customers is a different decision from a new business.

Do you need a brand ambassador or a face for your company?

A recognizable human face gives you an advantage because people prefer buying from people rather than from a company object. Scott’s brand uses a personality, and Greg’s observation is that customers want a behind-the-scenes look at who they are buying from.

You do not have to be that person yourself. If you are not suited to it, find someone in your market who genuinely enjoys the subject and pay them hourly, or bring them in for a small equity stake.

The requirement is energy rather than expertise. Someone who is animated and visibly excited about the subject carries a brand in a way a flat delivery cannot.

It helps and it is not a deal breaker. Plenty of brands succeed without a face, and having one accelerates the connection.

What does a podcast production workflow look like?

The sustainable workflow is record, drop the file in Dropbox, and have someone else handle everything downstream. All four of us converged on essentially the same system.

My setup is Libsyn for hosting, a scheduling tool for booking guests, and an editor who takes the raw file from Dropbox and publishes the finished episode. Mike records with QuickTime or Call Recorder for Skype and hands it to a full-time employee who adds bumpers, ad spots, and intros.

Scott batches three or four episodes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, records in GarageBand, exports, and uploads. His team handles show notes, transcripts, and posting.

The point is removing friction. A 30-minute episode should cost you about 35 minutes of total time, because anything that feels like a burden is a podcast you will quit.

Podcast or YouTube: which should an ecommerce brand start?

YouTube gives you discoverability and podcasts give you loyalty. Greg’s argument for YouTube is that podcast search is genuinely poor, so a new show is invisible until it breaks into the top rankings, while YouTube lets you target keywords people search for today.

Scott’s argument for podcasts is depth of connection. Podcast subscribers listen to every new episode, listen longer, and come to know and trust you faster than a YouTube viewer who found one video and watched two minutes of it.

The practical answer is doing both from one recording. Record video, publish it to YouTube, and strip the audio for the podcast feed, being careful not to reference visuals that make no sense to a listener.

Mike’s warning applies either way. Expect to talk to almost nobody for the first year to 18 months, and do not start unless you will keep going through that.

How do you stop Amazon from splitting your inbound shipment?

Amazon deliberately splits inventory across multiple distribution centers, and you cannot fully prevent it. Setting your ship-from zip code to Southern California sometimes routes more of a shipment to a single nearby center.

A common workaround is creating a shipment plan for more units than you intend to send, then filling only one of the resulting shipments. Amazon eventually sends warning emails about this, and it violates the rules.

Mike’s variant avoids that problem. They create the full three-shipment plan and actually send all three over time, filling the second and third on subsequent restocks rather than deleting them.

Sellers who get warned are the ones who repeatedly abandon the unfilled shipments. Staggering real inventory across the plan keeps everything legitimate.

How do you protect a listing from inauthentic claims and hijackers?

Amazon’s Transparency program serializes every unit before it ships in, which guarantees you are the only seller of that item. It requires Brand Registry, which in turn requires a registered trademark.

The trademark timeline is the constraint. It can take eight to 12 months, which is the argument for filing as early as you can rather than waiting until you have a problem.

For retail arbitrage and wholesale sellers the answer is different, since you have no control over what Amazon considers an approved source. The practical advice is to avoid buying deep on any single arbitrage item, and to plan a longer-term business model that does not depend on it.

How should ecommerce sellers plan for tariffs?

If you are below roughly $1 million to $2 million in revenue, build your business and deal with tariffs when they arrive. Scott’s point is that worrying about macro policy at that stage keeps you stuck without changing anything.

Tariffs also hit your competitors equally. Margins in most categories are too thin to absorb the cost, so pricing generally passes through to consumers after a period of short-term disruption.

Mike’s hedging strategy at larger scale is adding US-manufactured products to offset imported ones. EcomCrew acquired survivalfood.com and moved toward US-made freeze-dried food, plus US-made organic shampoo and body wash for WildBaby.

The timeline for any disruption to work through is 12 to 18 months, since inventory already in the country ships first. The bigger hazard he flags is sellers who do not understand their true landed costs and are already selling at a loss without realizing it.

What should make you walk away from a product with good demand?

Walk away when there are too many competitors selling an identical item and you cannot differentiate. Greg’s test is whether he can put something in the listing that shows a shopper why to buy his version.

Concrete differences are what qualify. A mason jar in the size people actually want, in thicker glass, or with handles gives you a reason to exist in a crowded category.

My contrarian addition is that difficulty is a feature. The more work a product requires to launch, the higher the barrier to entry for everyone who comes after you, so the easiest option is rarely the best one.

What do experienced sellers wish they had learned earlier?

The four answers split cleanly into two themes: persistence and brand building. Greg and Scott both named consistency, specifically not abandoning a working path for a shinier one and giving projects enough sustained attention to know whether they work.

Mike wished he had figured out branding and list building sooner. ColorIt now launches products straight to a number one bestseller badge on day one because they have a list and a community, after six to twelve months earlier on of chasing any product that would sell.

Scott’s answer was building a company with a human personality behind it. Toni’s, from the host chair, was connecting with other sellers rather than isolating, since most of what she has applied to her own brand came from watching people in different categories.

My own is that the painful work is the durable work. The podcast, the blogging, and the personalization on our linens are all a pain to run, and each one is a differentiator competitors do not copy.

Frequently asked questions

Should beginners sell on Amazon or build their own store?

Start on Amazon for the built-in traffic and quick wins, then add your own site once you have committed to the product line. Mike Jackness suggests staying Amazon-focused until roughly $1 million to $2 million in revenue.

Is Google or Facebook better for ecommerce advertising?

Google works when people actively search for your product and Facebook works when you need to create demand. Facebook also depends on whether your product maps to an existing interest category on the platform.

How many touchpoints does it take to convert a customer?

Around eight. That is why you should not send paid traffic to a site without email capture, Messenger opt-ins, or retargeting pixels in place to bring people back.

How do you get emails into the Gmail primary inbox?

Ask subscribers to reply to your first email, or show them how to drag it out of Promotions. Stripping links and promotional language from that first send also improves placement.

How many customers do you need before polling for product ideas?

At least 1,000 to 2,000 actual purchasers. Smaller samples let a handful of vocal customers distort the result, which is exactly what nearly happened to ColorIt.

Can you stop Amazon from splitting your inbound shipments?

Not entirely. Setting a Southern California ship-from zip sometimes helps, and the compliant approach is to create the full multi-shipment plan and actually fill all of it across successive restocks.

How long does an Amazon trademark take for Brand Registry?

Eight to 12 months is typical, which is why sellers are advised to file early rather than waiting until a hijacker forces the issue.

Should small sellers worry about tariffs?

Below $1 million to $2 million, build the business rather than restructuring around trade policy. Tariffs affect competitors equally and generally pass through to consumer pricing over 12 to 18 months.