321: Why Ecommerce In Q4 Is Going To Be A Disaster With Casey Gauss

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today, I invited my friend Casey Goss back on the show to talk about the e-commerce disaster that is approaching for Q4. Cryptic, I know, but Casey’s message is important and you have to prepare. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

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So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now it’s safe to say that most of us have been doing more online shopping lately. And if you’re an e-commerce brand, that means you might be seeing more first time customers. But once they’ve made that first purchase, how do you keep them coming back? That is what Klaviyo is for. Klaviyo is the ultimate email and SMS marketing platform for e-commerce brands.

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That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. Now on to the show.

02:14
Welcome to the My Wife, Critterjohn podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Casey Goss back on the show. Casey is the founder of Viral Launch and he’s helped tens of thousands of e-commerce entrepreneurs drive billions of dollars in sales on Amazon. He has also spoken a couple of times at my e-commerce conference over at the Seller Summit with great feedback. And he is an expert in all things Amazon and I’m happy to have him back on the show to one, talk about his story because a lot has changed in just the past year alone. And two, discuss some high level trends and strategies in the e-commerce space.

02:44
And with that, welcome to the show. Casey, how are you doing today? I am doing amazing. Steve, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. We met so long ago. It’s kind of always looked up to you. So I definitely appreciate this. It’s been a while now, right? I I missed you this past year, but those past couple of years when we got to hang out, it was a lot of fun. It was for sure. But like, you know, we met back in 2015 and it was like, oh, this is Steve Chu. And so that’s the place that you hold in my mind.

03:09
Yeah, whatever, dude. Whatever, dude. It was a fun mastermind that we had though. I got a lot out of it. That was a lot of fun. It was, for sure. All right, so last time you were on, we talked a lot about how you taught yourself to code and how you started this amazing company to help Amazon sellers. And then one day, I was just randomly checking Facebook and you posted this really long post and I saw that you had left. And I wasn’t 100 % shocked because I hadn’t heard from you in like six months to a year, but would you be willing to share a little bit about?

03:39
What happened? Yeah, man. Yeah. I left. yeah. So, you know, founded this company was a hundred percent owner for a long time. Bootstrap this thing just poured my life into this. Yeah. In, in March of 2020, I officially left. basically kind of, and we can dive into any details, you know, feel free to ask questions, but like basically, you know, I had brought some investors in, I brought some people into the company and

04:08
If you give up certain kind of rights as you raise money, some are normal, some are less normal. You kind of lose control of your, you lose your ability to kind of steer the ship and the investors wanted to go one way. And I did not want to be associated with that. I felt like it was kind of going to kill the company and was not best for our customers or our employees. And I just didn’t want to be associated with it. So put in my resignation and I left as an employee of

04:37
A of months later, I left as a board member. I actually still own the majority of VyreLaunch. So I own majority share of VyreLaunch, but yet am not involved at all. That is very interesting. Can I just ask, this might be a cautionary tale for some people doing software out there. Why did you actually decide to take money in the first place? Yeah, I mean, there’s like some fundamental reasons, like a couple. So like I’ve always associated the greater VyreLaunch scales,

05:06
bigger the impact that we can have. know, a billion dollar company has billion dollar impact, you know, hopefully in a positive way. And so I felt as though, you know, raising money and would allow us to move faster, do more to help more people essentially. And I think that raising money in some ways could be good. I think that basically it was just kind of this like series of unfortunate events of like, you know, I bring in this, so getting down to the fundamentals, like,

05:35
lack of confidence, I guess, is like one kind of contributing factor in myself, whereas like, you know, I’m like young twenties and things are going well, but I’m like, I only have experience. If I brought on people that had a ton more experience than myself and have been there, done that, like things would go so much better. And like, I was just hungry for what I didn’t know and just thought that all these, you older people were going to know so much more than me. That’s like one of my fundamental flaws. And I’ve just repeated it a couple of times where I just bring these

06:05
people with great resumes in and— and ex— think that they know better than me and will trust them over my own instincts and like basically brought some people in. Absolutely wrong people. Literally, you know, the month after bringing in this real high level exec, uh— that was the last profitable month of our launch. So like the month— the month after and things kinda just went downhill from there for— for a number of reasons. Not just this individual but— then that individual brought it— helped me bring in the wrong investors and I thought they were helping, you know, look after me and—

06:35
you know, they weren’t exactly and so it’s just like one bad situation after another. guess, you know, when you bring in investors, they expect you to grow at like, really, really fast, right? And they expect you to spend your money and not be profitable, right? I mean, yes, it completely depends. And a lot of it is just expectation setting. I mean, if you go in and say, hey, we’ve doubled our business every nine months for the last three, four years, and we can we plan on

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continuing this trend and actually accelerating with this investment, then that’s what they’re going to expect. If you say we’ve been running profitably, we’ll want to continue to, but we want to add some more money to the balance sheet so that we can move faster. you know, again, it’s really about setting expectations and you know, we went a little less traditional route and it was kind of sold to me as like a positive thing. And I think in some scenarios it can be positive. We brought in a family fund. it wasn’t like for our

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to lead kind of our series A is like this family out of New York, they’re just billionaires, have tons of money. So like it was pitched as like, yeah, you know, it’s just this one decision maker. And so things can move really quickly. And like, you know, if this person’s, you know, backing you up, then that’s great. And if things are going well, then you can move faster. If things are not going well, or, you know, they’re

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vision or they read the wrong articles and think that things need to go one way and you think things need to go the other, whatever, then they also have this unilateral power in this one individual, whereas like a typical VC, that’s not exactly the case. you mentioned you still have the majority of shares. Doesn’t that give you the majority of the decision-making power still or no? Is that not how it works? No, it’s not how it works. I mean, there’s a lot of DEs that are meant to kind of protect investors. like, again, some are normal, some were less normal, but

08:24
To me, one mistake I made, I’m like a cheap guy. So like I didn’t have a personal lawyer. And you know, I just thought that between, you know, the people on my team that were helping through this, I thought that, you know, we were good. They have all this experience. They’ve been there, done that. And like some of these things were not as normal as I thought. And by the time that I had kind of realized that it was, it was too late. And so, no, yeah. I mean, there are some things where I have majority vote. And so,

08:51
They can’t do things without me. They can’t sell the company. They can’t like raise money, but a lot of other things, I mean, they can do and I can’t, I don’t really have much of a say. Okay. Well, let me ask you this. If you were to do things all over again, how would you have tried it differently given the experiences that you’ve had? Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, I would have one, I would be a lot more appreciative of what was working. Like we had a lot of things that were working. I just always thought that there was

09:20
is this fallacy of like, well, what I don’t know is probably so much better and I desire that thing. And I would have doubled down on what and I would have focused on growing profitably. I just think it aligns incentives with your customers so much better. And I would have just focused on that. And I wouldn’t have brought in some of these high level execs that just completely broke, you know, our culture. And it just in so many ways kind of.

09:47
mess us up, I would have just focused on kind more responsible growth and appreciating what invested more in, you know, the young team members that we had that were doing well, that could have been doing even better versus like saying, there’s probably a bunch of other people that know way better than us. So let’s bring them in and forget about everything else. Yeah, you know, it’s funny, you’re not the only person that I know that has had these issues, you know, when they’re taking funding and

10:16
things just kind of get out of hand because you’re spending money all over the place and then you’re hiring like, you’re probably hiring like crazy too, I would imagine, right? We were, yeah. Yeah. And it’s hard to kind of integrate everyone into the culture and then the culture gets diluted and that sort of thing. So if you were to do it all over again, it sounds like you would not take money and you just kind of grow organically. Yeah. I mean, we were growing well organically and then, you know, I brought, like, I just brought some people, trusted them way too much to help us avoid issues. They,

10:45
steered us right into these issues and I just would have grown much more responsibly and profitably. I mean, I still love the tool. I still actually use it all the time. So I mean, you created something really great and I hope it continues to be that way. Thanks. Yeah. mean, obviously I wish the best for viral launch. I still have a lot of shares there, like, know, when part of this kind of…

11:11
breakup, you will, of me leaving was, you they wanted to cut the majority of the team. They wanted to focus on things that like were more about money in my opinion than like customers and just, so I wish the best for Vyrelaunch, but you know, it’s definitely a different company and it will be interesting to see what they are able to like produce and maintain moving forward. Yeah. And then we can talk about your new opportunity towards the end, cause I know that’s something pretty exciting, but before we get to that, also in your Facebook,

11:40
post, you said a couple of cryptic things that I wanted to extract some more nuggets of knowledge from you. right. So you made a couple of predictions. You’ve made a lot of predictions in the past because I used to listen to your other podcast in the e-commerce space that have, you know, have been pretty accurate, right? So I am kind of curious to your thoughts as where e-commerce is going. So what are some trends that you’re noticing, especially this year with COVID-19? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some predictions work out some don’t, but yeah, I mean, trends in general, mean,

12:10
saying this, so this is not like, know, unique from me, but COVID has absolutely accelerated e-commerce by, you know, 10 plus years. And that’s like very exciting. And you see it in so many ways, more than just like Amazon itself has grown. mean, you see Marketplace polls, I think put out an article just today talking about how some of the biggest players in e-commerce or the biggest growth in e-commerce was coming from the big box retailers, Best Buy, Target.

12:38
And this was driven a lot by this kind of curbside pickup. And so I think what we’re going to see like come. So, you know, I had this whole. Like I think the second half of 2020 is going to be an absolute bloodbath. It’s going to be this nightmare for logistics because you have demand. Ecom demand has picked up 40, 50 % in, you know, overnight. And what hasn’t grown overnight and can’t is our logistics infrastructure. And so we saw this in, you know, March and April.

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Sellers had this dead inventory where it takes four to six weeks for customers to even be able to get your product when it’s prime in FBA and you can’t pull your inventory out. I think this was, and this is like, you know, March and April shopping. This is not big holiday shopping. And you know, so many stores have said that they’re going to be closed for Black Friday, meaning people are going to be buying online and who’s going to be delivering this stuff.

13:35
We don’t have the fulfillment infrastructure to keep up. Amazon certainly doesn’t. Amazon relies a lot, like almost 50 % on USPS, UPS, FedEx, and these regional carriers. USPS is getting cut and having crazy delays. It’s August already. UPS has said they’re not gonna increase their fulfillment capabilities to meet demand. They’re just gonna charge higher prices. FedEx certainly isn’t gonna be able to take over the load. Amazon’s been trying to get new infrastructure in place. They’re not able to. I, as a customer, am already getting

14:04
packages delayed. Again, this is August, not like crazy holiday shopping. And then, you know, I’ll buy something and it gets delayed by a few days. Sellers are having such troubles getting inventory and so. Anyways. I’ve noticed just running my e-commerce store that, especially USPS actually, a whole bunch of customers have been complaining that they haven’t been getting their packages or they’ve been delayed. And I think priority mail is just junk now that there’s a whole bunch of packages that are taking weeks, even over a month to get delivered. Some don’t ever make it.

14:32
And I’ve also noticed that Amazon Prime, when they promise you two days now, oftentimes it’s gotten delayed like 50 or 60 % of the time for me recently. Dude, it’s August. That’s the thing. This is the slow month, right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it’s just going to be, you know, wild. And so I think the solution, like what we’re going to see happen is we’re going to see temporarily these retailers, like Best Buy, Walmart, like we’re going to see them increase their kind of

15:02
share of the market, e-comm space, as they move to kind of like curbside pickup for deliveries where like, yeah, you can order it from Amazon and get it in four weeks, even though like, you know, Christmas is in five or something like that, or you could get it in a week, but you got to go pick it up from Walmart and it’s a COVID safe pickup or something. So I think we’re going to see more of that. And I think like, this is, I think retailers like Target and Best

15:29
I are really stepping on the gas to accelerate their kind of overall sales push to ecom in the Amazon space. I mean, there’s a there’s a couple of things here. Like one sales are up on Amazon, which is just incredible. I think sales in Q2 grew like 40 some percent year over year, which is just astounding considering how how large Amazon is, which is very exciting. I think the opportunity is greater than ever on Amazon. But you also have, you know, the waters are getting kind of more shark infested, if you will, like, you know,

15:59
there’s more of these kind of private equity companies coming in and trying to do roll ups, just pouring more money into the space, which is just gonna make it more kind of difficult for sellers. But also, I mean, if you have an existing seller business right now that’s doing decently well, you’re in such a good space. And I think that you should either cash out soon because you can get a great multiple, or you should just like your ability to continue to scale your Amazon business will be kind of unprecedented now and you can exit.

16:28
you know, very soon. I also, so there’s that something that like I’ll touch on a little bit deeper here soon, but like one thing that I’m kind of seeing at Thrasio is that like organic. So back in, sorry if I’m like, you know, talking to my- no, no, I’m listening. This is good stuff. Go for it. Yeah. Okay. So in 2015, we helped this brand. They launched their very first product ever. Never sold a single product anywhere. Launch it June of 2015, 2016. They do $36 million on Amazon alone in just the U S. Yeah. It’s-

16:58
Yeah, these guys are crazy. It was Beauty Space. This is one brand. mean, 2017, want to say they did like 2017 or 2018, they did about 200 million on Amazon across multiple brands, not just that one brand. But anyways, I mean, these guys are like unicorns, right? And so the point is in 2016, we spent very, very little advertising.

17:21
with this brand. I’m like family friends with these guys now but I’ve been to one of their son circumcisions as an So like I’m very close to these guys but in 2016 you barely spent any money on advertising even still these guys hardly believe in advertising and we drove this $30 million just through organic. Now fast forward to kind of 2020 or it so I would say in 2016 I can’t remember the stats but maybe like

17:49
70 % of sales potential on Amazon came from organic search results. Ranking was everything. Fast forward to mid 2020, I think organic represents maybe 30 % of sales potential on Amazon. as the seller, I still think Amazon is early days in the 3P space. And I think that we are gonna see just rapid acceleration in how sophisticated Amazon sellers are. organic represents in some cases,

18:19
30 % or less of the overall Amazon pie advertising represents maybe 40, 60%. And there’s more than just, you know, sponsored products. But I think that you need to be looking at kind of non, I can’t remember. I have a term for a it’s escaping me, but these kind of like non or non-traditional items in search. mean, there’s editorials, there’s new sections pretty much every week or month. I’ve actually noticed that whenever I do an Amazon search now,

18:47
feel like it’s 50 % ads, right? Yeah. mixed with the listings. And then there’s a whole bunch of these other things on the side. There’s videos now. There’s, yeah, there’s people doing live selling even. So. Well, and not only that, yeah. So there’s all of that, right? And keeping up with that is rather difficult in and of itself. And then on top of that, I mean, you have people that are just getting better and better and better at driving external traffic to Amazon or in some fashion they’re doing that. And so what you see happen is like,

19:17
let’s say the vitamin C serum market, a product that market from an Amazon demand perspective only would support like $500,000 a month in sales on an individual product. But for these, these people focus on external traffic as well and starting to like really build maybe like a brand or something outside. they’re also on these other channels like Facebook and Shopify and Walmart or whatever.

19:43
Now that $500,000 becomes $750,000 or a million dollars and these like elite sellers that are focused and able to build like you know real organizations that are focused outside of Amazon now are playing in a completely different ballgame than the seller that’s just focused on ranking number one and running sponsored ads you know. And I just don’t think enough people are like talking about that and I think a lot of the kind of content that’s put out is

20:13
Uh, just still focus on the old, here’s the best keyword research strategy. Here’s how to get to rank your product using search, find, buy or whatever. And here’s how to run sponsored ads. And no one’s talking about this other, you know, major portion of the market and where like a decent amount of kind of new Amazon growth potential is, coming from. think those people, they running ads to Amazon listings or are they running it to their own branded sites? Both. mean, you, see good halo effect when you run to your own branded site.

20:43
because not everyone wants to check out on Shopify, they’ll go buy on your Amazon store. But they’re also using Amazon Attribution Program to run ads directly to their Amazon listing as well. Yep. Yeah. I actually just got approved for that earlier this year. So nice. But I haven’t been using it yet because I’ve been running ads to my own store and I find that people like it actually increases my Amazon sales too. Cause some people just want to check out on Amazon as you just mentioned. Yep.

21:11
So yeah, and so one prediction that like so I think I put this out like publicly two and a half years ago at bar lunch and everyone was like no way that’s that’s weird is You know, I’ve been saying Facebook is gonna be the number two player in e-commerce They’re the only ones that can really like, you know compete against Amazon from the perspective of and they have three billion monthly active users almost three billion monthly active users Instagram over a billion monthly active users

21:41
No one is talking about this, but from a pure user perspective, I’m pretty sure that Facebook Marketplace is the largest e-commerce marketplace. They have 800 monthly active users on Facebook Marketplace and no one’s talking about it. And you can sell new products on there too. You can sell direct and I have some friends that have done super well doing that. Facebook and are launching their shops feature here soon. And I think that changes the game. mean, how many, or you know,

22:11
a good portion of D to C traffic, so traffic to your Shopify is driven from Facebook ads, just kind of in general. so Facebook is absolutely in one, in I think two different forms, going to kind of like subsidize the ad cost. If you are running it to the Facebook shop, check out on Facebook or check out on Instagram versus to Shopify. So one conversion rate is going to be higher. A customer only needs to put in their information one time, right? Versus going in and putting it in in each.

22:39
Shopify sort of which, you you got to convince them to trust you on that. And so now it’s going to be in Facebook and it’s just closed loop conversion naturally is going to be higher making ads cheaper. Right. And then secondly, at any point, if Facebook wanted to say that, you know, any ads running to Shopify are automatically going to be more expensive because it creates a worse experience for our users or whatever. Boom. Now like

23:03
you trying to send traffic to your Shopify is that much more expensive and you sending traffic to your Instagram shop or your Facebook shop or whatever is that much cheaper. So like, I think this is going to be a big trend. I I’m seeing more and more people do really well with DTC. And I just think that like Facebook is going to have some, some real significant impact on your DTC site. Like I’ve actually never used the marketplace before. Can you kind of just describe how that works? I mean, I’ve seen it before, but I’ve never even browsed it before.

23:33
Nice. Yeah. So, so like, think a lot of the usage on Facebook marketplace is kind of like eBay style. like, you know, my wife was a teacher. She’s not probably going to be a teacher for a while. We’re having a baby. So she like, uh, listed, Hey, here’s my teacher stuff. I’m giving it for free, but people will like charge. I bought a computer this summer from somebody on Facebook marketplace. It’s kind of like an eBay, but you’re not bidding. It’s just like peer to peer, but you, there’s also kind of new products as well. And so you can list your products for a while. I don’t know if it’s still going on, but

24:03
Facebook wanted new products listed and so they would basically pay merchants $5 per order that was placed so that you could cover fulfillment. And so this guy had really, really cheap product and the cost to fulfill was really cheap. So he was charging like a dollar, $2 or something for his widget that he was selling on Facebook Marketplace and he was profiting a dollar off of this because Facebook was covering the fee. basically peer to peers,

24:33
Number one, like if you’re looking for like a deal on something, you can go look on marketplace or, you know, they have new products as well. It’s just not set up that great for it. But coming out with Facebook shops where you can run ads and have people just check out directly on Facebook or Instagram. Like a traditional storefront. Like I know you can already do that on your page or that’s been available for quite a while. So, okay. Yeah. But now you can like, it’s closed because you can check out there versus on the website. Right. And then Facebook already has the credit card. So you just need to hit buy and you’re good. Right.

25:02
Yep. A hundred percent. are your thoughts on the Shopify app where all the stores and Shopify are going to be part of the app and presumably they’ll have all the credit card information from all the stores as well. Yeah. I mean, it’ll be very interesting to play out. I don’t have like a strong conviction of like how that will go. My assumption is that like it will get little use because it’s such a like, I don’t know. my assumption is that Shopify

25:30
invest in it, tries it out, doesn’t go super well. Because I think from a catalog perspective, Amazon has just done such a good job of kind of integrating third party sellers into their catalog. And I think that they’ll pull back and just focus on like what they do really well in helping people kind of build their audiences. I’m not sure I just have a hard time seeing Shopify grow as a marketplace.

25:53
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26:51
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27:01
Yeah, you know, I’m thinking that if they made all the listings somewhat uniform in order to be placed in this app and then they have everyone’s credit card information for their entire storefront so that they can save the credit cards checking out could be like just like Amazon. Yeah, but the main thing of Amazon is like Amazon is just driving all of this traffic for you. So if Shopify was going to go invest in like insane, insane amounts of dollars in

27:28
and getting this traffic for their Shopify sellers, that’s compelling, but that’s gonna be so difficult for them to do. They also are trying to lay their own fulfillment infrastructure. They’re so far behind if they’re trying to catch up in a marketplace like that. They have no strategic advantage other than a bunch of people are already using it, and the way that they’re using it, it doesn’t really seem to me conducive to a uniform marketplace versus a bunch of point solutions. You mentioned Facebook, it’s gonna be number two.

27:58
Is Google number three then I guess? Dude, I was thinking about this. I don’t have, like I need to do more research, but like, yeah, I mean, when you think about fundamental building blocks of why I came to this conclusion of Facebook way before you could even, you know, they had mentioned shops or anything like this. I don’t even know if I knew about marketplace, but basically like what they have is attention. Shopify doesn’t have attention on the consumer side. Like, okay, that’s super important. Facebook has more attention than anybody else in the

28:27
Okay, that’s that’s a major asset to their technology infrastructure is, you know, world class. And they’ve proven that they can, you know, take on Instagram and they can like, make these pivots and copy kind of shop Snapchat and these kinds of things. So number three, like Google has this attention, their tech infrastructure is amazing. Their capital access to capital is incredible. Like, I’m surprised that they haven’t put out a more compelling offer for sellers. I mean,

28:56
A lot of, from what I understand from some, I guess inside sources, a lot of the Walmart marketplace sales are driven straight up from Walmart, just paying for traffic from Google. So like Google’s sending buyer ready traffic. We see it on Amazon sales as well. So like, why do you think Google hasn’t made a compelling offer? I mean, I think the UI has always been kind of screwy. I mean, that’s never been Google’s strength.

29:23
So for my store, actually, we get most of our sales from Google PPC, mainly shopping, actually. this is just my store, so it’s just one data point. But I found that most of my customers that come from Google have a much longer lifetime value than the people I’ve been attracting from Facebook. so I’ve been focusing on Google. And then they just recently made the shopping. They have a free tier, whereas they didn’t have that before to try to attract more people into their shopping platform.

29:51
Yeah. I mean, they have so much attention. They could subsidize ad costs. mean, you know, there’s this whole like, uh, and I trust stuff like anti-competition conversation, but like, yeah, they, you know, they can subsidize ad costs and say, Steve, instead of sending them to your Shopify store, send them to, know, your Google store and you know, we’ll, allow checkout and all these, different things. already do that to certain extent. They’re waiving the transaction fees. think when you do that. Yeah.

30:18
But like, so, so why are you sending them to Shopify, not Google? I don’t edit. just don’t know enough. Oh, like if I send them to my site, then I can gather like an SMS, a text message number, email, you know, pixel them, get their messenger, all this stuff that I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. Yeah, that’s fair. I don’t know. So, but yeah, I mean, Google could just create a search engine just for products and make that more public and then just make it free for a while. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know enough. So

30:47
Yeah, I mean, they have a lot of like good raw materials where, if they were kind of like combined in the right way, they may be able to make a compelling run. I just think like, yeah, I just have a hard time seeing Shopify make a good marketplace move. I have a hard time seeing, you know, I’ve been so disappointed with Walmart Plus. A lot of people, you know, there’s all these silly articles about how Walmart Plus is going to take like a third of Amazon Prime customers are going to sign up for Walmart Plus. And it’s just not going to happen. mean, when’s the last time that you

31:14
you decided not to buy something from Walmart because you had to pay for shipping. So it’s been zero times in my six years buying online. I just don’t like Walmart. Actually when they first, when the fulfillment program just kind of first started coming out, it was terrible. And then that just kind of left a bad taste in my mouth going forward. So dude, I’ve, I’ve, spend a lot of time on these sites. It just like poking around and just, you know, trying to find interesting stuff. And like, I can’t tell you how many times literally just like running through Walmart as a customer I’ve got.

31:44
floor page like, you know, broken links or whatever, just clicking on products or banner ads. It’s just it’s trash. And I mean, this is a major this is what the highest revenue company in the US and they can’t get e commerce, right? know. I know. Yeah, I agree. Actually, I had to. What was I just happy? Oh, so my air conditioning in my house went out and so was looking for a portable unit. And that’s that led me to Walmart because they said they had stuff in stock. But you’re right. I got a couple of broken links. And that just

32:13
totally turned me off of the whole experience. I didn’t even trust that they had the item that I was looking for in stock anymore. The only reason you go to Walmart is it’s not in stock on Amazon or I couldn’t find it on Amazon or this price on Amazon seems higher than I thought it would be. So let me go see if I can get it cheaper on Walmart. And Walmart is just gaining market shares simply because more people are shopping online. And it’s like pretty much the only real alternative to Amazon. mean, of course there’s niche sites and stuff, like.

32:43
Right. think it’s, they’re just showing up and that’s half the battle, I guess. And that’s why they’re doing okay. Let’s do this conversation back to this Q4 nightmare. So most of the listeners, they run small shops, right? Six, seven and eight figure stores. How are you going to fight this? Like, so let’s say Amazon decides to, they have an inventory crunch and you can’t send stuff in. Like, how are you going to prepare for this? Yeah. I mean, I think that diversification is really important here. Now, like what I, I, I,

33:12
don’t have enough of the answer to understand exactly what that should look like in various scenarios. I can’t say like, you know, here’s the scenario where you should have a one three PL and a FBA. And then here’s a scenario where you should have, know, whatever that may look like. Basically, I think that you need to be diversified. I think that you, is absolutely okay to be, have an FBM listing. And there’s actually some like tricks to still show up in search if you are.

33:41
fulfilling through FBM and someone filters for prime. though- is the trick? I didn’t know about that. Yeah, so basically this is perfect for people that are facing like tough storage fees or like overage fees because maybe their IPI score wasn’t high enough. But basically you just have your worst. So if you have you take your kind of worst selling variation, you raise the price on it and you keep like five units in stock in FBA.

34:10
But really, what’s in—you don’t even care if it’s not fulfillable, you know, if Amazon gets locked up or whatever. And the variation or variations that actually sell well are the ones that are being fulfilled via FBM. And—so the Prime badge doesn’t show in the search results on the variation that’s selling well. But it still does show in search of people are filtering for Prime. And I think what’s gonna—like my prediction is basically like, if you can fulfill a product

34:40
faster than your competitors. That may be two weeks later into the season, then you get to set the market. You can charge higher prices. So yes, you know, three PLs a lot of times are more expensive than what you’re going to be paying via FBA. But being able to get the product to the customer before Christmas is way more important than, know, having it. If I’m saving $2 per order, but I can’t ship any of those orders, doesn’t matter. And so like,

35:07
basically you need to be diversified so that at any given point, whoever is the fastest kind of fulfillment provider, sometimes it’s going to be Amazon, sometimes it’s going to be this 3PL, sometimes it’s going to be this 3PL, that’s the offer that you should be, that should be like basically optimized for the sale. That way you have the best chance of having kind of the fastest delivery times. So are you suggesting that if you are selling on Amazon FBA right now, that you go out and get another 3PL just in case?

35:37
You absolutely need at least one 3PL. And you like depending on where you’re at in your inventory position, your inventory position is like in a good place because we all know what happens. Like one, this Q4 is going to be like insane in terms of the amount of volume that is going to be going on. Uh, and then like COVID and all these stores being shut down and like anyways, but then you just need to, ideally you have enough inventory to kind of like, you know, split it up. This is where I like, I get caught up. So you,

36:07
Like diversification, I think is gonna be super important here, but it’s like it’s a risk in any scenario. If you keep all of your inventory in FBA, it’s a risk that, you know, your Amazon decides that your product category, whatever gets pushed back and now it’s two to four weeks and you know, the last day to order your product, but to get it in time for Christmas is November 31st, right? Like that would really suck. But it’s also a risk having it in, you know, some of your inventory in one three PL because

36:36
that 3PO gets like one of their warehouses gets COVID or you know, whatever, like a COVID outbreak. So it’s a risk, but I just know that diversification is going to be important for optimization. And if you’re like, the risk of diversifying is too high for me, I’ll just, you know, take whatever I can get from Amazon, then you know, that’s what you should be doing. diversification is so important and the people that like basically kind of get lucky in this diversification game in

37:05
when their competitors are locked up with Amazon and they can’t remove inventory and they also can’t fulfill inventory, these other people selling FBM listings are just gonna clean up shop, they’re gonna charge way higher prices and they’re just gonna borrow out this. Right, it’s interesting because it’s only August right now as of this recording and I’ve already noticed that it takes a lot longer to get stuff in Amazon. I’m not sure if your clients have noticed that too. And it hasn’t even, I mean the holiday season isn’t even close yet. Yeah, I mean we.

37:34
We I’ve seen there’s there’s been a couple of houses that are like literally down. They’re like, uh, we’re, we’re so backlogged. We can’t fulfill anything out of this warehouse and we can’t receive any inventory from this warehouse. So can you please reach out to seller central and find a different warehouse? Hmm. I mean, it’s August dude is like, that’s crazy to me. I mean, this is traditionally our slow period, July and July and August. And then it ramps back up. Yep. So yeah. And you’re right. This holiday season is going to be crazy because

38:02
there’s not going to be any retail stores really open. yeah. I mean, well, USPS is going to crap too. Exactly. And every, like everyone’s already been, you know, trained to shop online. Like the people that now we’re spending online and they were in store. What is, what’s the catalyst for them to be like, you know what, that was nice buying on Amazon or, know, online, but I really miss going into the store in the middle of November to go, you know,

38:29
So should I run my Christmas sales now, Casey? Is that what I’m hearing? Yeah. yeah. Like I think that as much as like pull the man forward as much as you can, that’s also like something that you should be considering. I mean, that looks different to different people, but yeah, it’s going to be so wild. And I basically feel like it’s going to be so difficult to get inventory or, you know, get products shipped out to customers. And if you’re as a consumer, you should be ordering early. Like my wife is like, okay, we,

38:58
probably start ordering my Christmas stuff now because I usually wait till like the last day and I think the last day is gonna be early December, late November for some products and it’s not like you’re gonna run to the store to go pick that thing up. Well, so from the perspective of an e-commerce store owner right now, I actually don’t trust any carrier. We’re in the wedding industry and people need their things on time and USPS certainly is not dependable at all.

39:26
Even FedEx and UPS has been late a lot more lately, probably because of the increased load, I’m guessing. So I don’t trust any carrier right now, which is why I was suggesting like doing Christmas shopping earlier. That way, at least you’re guaranteed that it’s going to get there on time. Yeah, you know, I’m friends with the CEO over this company, Deliver. They’re the kind of like 3PL that I read in. Yeah, I mean, he has good insights into kind of like what’s going on. And he’s trying so hard to push.

39:54
relationships with the regional carriers. And honestly, pretty much everyone in logistics in this industry from at least what I’m hearing is just freaking out because everyone knows that collectively we’re just unprepared. Right. Okay. So let’s just kind of summarize. You say maybe move up the demand, get an alternative way of shipping items through a 3PL and then maybe don’t be afraid to do FBM and fulfill your own stuff. that what Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely do not be afraid to do FBM.

40:24
A lot of people with like ranking and stuff like that. should not at all be a concern in my opinion. Okay. Okay. And then you can use that trick to show up in the prime search by doing a parent child variation. Yeah. Nice little hack. I came up with that one yesterday. We tested it out. It works. So nice. Nice. All right. Let’s switch gears again, Casey, because I want to talk about what you’re working on now. So you left viral launch. Where are you at now? Yeah. So I’m at a company called Thrasio Thras.io.

40:54
Thrasio is fastest company in the US to profitably reach a billion dollar valuation ever, which is like, you know, pretty cool. I actually, so we acquire Amazon brands and we completely take over operations, rarely do the, you know, owners of the business kind of stay on though. They’ll like, you know, have a good relationship with our brand managers and we like brought in a couple of business owners and now they’re like valuable members of the Thrasio team. But basically Thrasio is just like, uh,

41:22
in Amazon seller. In my opinion, I Thrasio is one of the top five, top ten Amazon sellers from like a capabilities perspective. mean, we’ve taken brands doing tens of millions of dollars and literally in 30 days, two to three X to them. it’s like, yeah, like our ability to, you know, increase sales on Amazon for these products or in these brands that we take over is insane. It’s incredibly impressive. know, I have friends

41:50
multiple friends doing nine figures and they built these businesses from the ground up. And I think, think Thrasio is just head and shoulders of the majority of the market in terms of our ability to drive sales. So yeah, we basically are kind of just rolling up Amazon brands. help entrepreneurs kind of exit their business. There’s like a backend kind of- Are you guys like a private equity firm kind of for Amazon shops? So I don’t know enough about private equity and maybe if I said yes, I would be like chastised later.

42:19
So we’ve raised money. We have this money and then we go, we acquire these brands and we have, you know, this whole operations checklist. Like we run operations. So I don’t know if private equity, don’t, Steve, you threw me off there. Sorry. All right. Okay. So basically you buy these companies, you take them over. You literally completely buy them out for the most part. And then you improve them and then you maybe sell them off later or you just keep them. Yep. just roll them.

42:48
into our portfolio, think the latest public number. So we’ve acquired only 70 brands. And so there’s what, 30 some thousand million dollar plus sellers. And we’ve acquired 70 in the last two years. So we’ve done this in the last two years and just have an organization focused on just being amazing at Amazon and helping these brands. So it’s only Amazon that you guys do for the most part? Not entirely. That’s largely been our focus. OK.

43:18
But like, you know, we are getting a lot better outside of Amazon and the number of levers that we have kind of outside Amazon is growing every day. So we’ll, look at anything. We’ll talk to anybody like we’ve acquired just a single product from an account or, you know, we’ve acquired accounts with, you know, thousands and thousands of, of Asyns. Can I ask you like what the multiples look like for just Amazon products or businesses in general right now? I, it’s a really broad question. I know there’s a lot to it, but just maybe a range would be helpful. Yeah, that.

43:47
That is like, I don’t know enough there to, I get in trouble. I might say something. Okay. So careful now. Yeah. It’s like, you know, I gotta be careful. Like that’s one thing about like tactics and stuff is like, I gotta be careful. Like what I share and some things that we see in self just because like, uh, you know, some things are proprietary, but my natural disposition is like, I would just want to help everybody. So like, let’s just tell everybody, but, uh, that like,

44:15
that doesn’t exactly benefit Thrasio in every way. Well, let me frame this question in a different way then. When you acquire a company, what do you expect to get gains in what timeframe on when you acquire a company? Are you saying from the seller perspective? From the buyer perspective. You guys as Thrasio, let’s you want to buy an Amazon brand, what is your expectation in terms of growth? Yeah, I mean, we have, so I think the

44:39
The most recent number shared was our average is 175 % growth. Now don’t know what the timeline is, but it’s substantial. again, I’ve mentioned eight figure brands that we double in 30 days. Not every brand is like that, but. I’m just trying to understand, like you’re looking for a brand that isn’t doing a good job, but still making a ton of money and you want to acquire those. Yeah. So we’re usually looking for, usually again, we’ll look at anything.

45:09
And sometimes, you know, we’ve taken some some like weird stuff that people may have like pass off, but we were able to kind of turn it around very quickly. Our like bread and butter is that this is like a best in class in its in its niche. And best could mean it has more views than everybody else or it’s just has very solid rankings across the board or it’s outselling computers or it’s like a close second or third. I’m pretty sure. our bread and butter is like it has some kind of strategic advantage or

45:38
You know, even if it’s like a small niche, it’s outperforming competitors in some way. That’s ideal, but not always the case. Okay. And are you looking to acquire more brands right now? Just in case there’s someone listening out there who’s maybe tired of running their Amazon business. I was just trying to get out of you like what the criteria is, but it sounds like… It’s very broad.

46:02
Yeah, I mean, it’s like, you know, we’re absolutely willing, like, there’s, there’s been people that like, we’re hit kind of hard from COVID. And they’re just like, I’m done with this. I’m still in a good position. And you know, they come to us and like, you know, we’re happy to talk like, we have a great team, people like to help. And so it’s, it’s not like we’re, you know, these sharks looking for people that are hurting. And that’s all we go after. So I mean, again, we’ll look at anything, even if you if you’re like, thinking about selling, I think a conversation with a team and

46:30
having them in better detail because they do this every day, kind of walk you through, here’s what we are looking at. If we were looking at your brand, here’s what we would think about it and here are the things that like, you know, maybe you’d want to improve. We’ll have those conversations with you. But yeah, I mean, it’s very broad kind of set of criteria. Well, Casey, if anyone’s interested or if they have any questions for you, are you the right person to reach out to or? Yeah, you can reach out to me. We have a head of acquisitions. His name is Ken at Thrasio.

46:59
So it’s ken at thar.io. And if anyone wants some Casey Goss predictions, is there a public handle that are you on Twitter? Are you on Instagram? Like what’s the best way to to reach out to you? To reach out to me is probably Instagram. It’s just Casey Goss. Yeah, that’s probably the best way to get a hold of me for predictions. Yeah. So I recently launched like this newsletter or whatever, but I don’t want to like, you know, I’m not here to pitch my. for it. Pitch it.

47:29
Cool. All right. Yes. I recently launched this like blog newsletter, kind of the post thought leadership high level kind of concepts and help people stay ahead of the curve. Just not, like the latest hack on keyword research or anything like that. And so it’s called digital shelf labs.com, just blog.digital shelf labs.com newsletter podcast blog, just talking high level predictions, not trying to get anything out of you. It’s just fun for me. Well, Casey, thanks a lot for coming on, man. Really appreciate it. Yeah, man. Thanks. This has been fun.

48:00
Hope you enjoyed that episode. I’ve already seen the effects of the delivery Armageddon with my USPS and FedEx shipments getting delayed or lost. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 321. And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandon card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

48:29
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

48:56
Head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.