380: The Latest Crackdown And How Amazon’s Practices Are Killing Your Business With Mike Jackness And Dave Bryant

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Clutter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have two very special guests, Mike Jackness and Dave Bryant. And if you don’t recognize these names together, they are the e-comm crew where they help other entrepreneurs grow their e-commerce businesses. Now, both Mike and Dave run the e-comm crew podcast, which is actually one of the few podcasts that I actually listen to. And especially if you sell on Amazon.

00:27
you should definitely check out the e-comm crew podcast on your favorite podcast app in order to stay up to date on Amazon and the latest e-commerce trends. Now right now, Dave, Mike and I are recording this episode in Palm Springs, California, where we’re at the Indian Wells tennis tournament. And in this episode, we cover the state of selling on Amazon right now, what Amazon is cracking down on, what is black hat, what is white hat, and how to succeed on Amazon today. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

00:56
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01:26
I also want thank Cleview, who’s also a sponsor of show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you the time to work on the rest of your business? And do you ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change.

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02:24
And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:53
All right, what up fellas? Here we are recording live from Palm Springs. The three of us, the full e-comm crew, Dave, Mike and myself. We attended the Indian Wells tennis tournament. Mike, according to you, it was kind of empty, right? Yeah, it’s kind of sad. I mean, I’ve been here in years past and we’re here for finals weekend. it’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday, which is like quarter semis and finals. And usually those sessions are completely full. And I we were trying to guess maybe during the semis yesterday.

03:24
What do you think about 30 40 percent something like that? Yeah, probably like that. Yeah Good thing is we’re not actually here to watch tennis We’re actually here to record the podcast which is the main purpose of this entire trip and by we mean me and you like Dave’s not really necessary for this well, you know Dave was the reason why I came out in the first place because I I always hear from you I never hear from Dave in fact, you’re monopolizing the mic right now. I don’t even want to take it out of my hand here I’ll pass it off today. Let him say something So Steve

03:51
did not have the foresight to bring three mics. So we’re sitting here sharing two mics and of course I never get in the microphone, but hi everyone. This is Dave. Yeah, it’s been a great tennis tournament. Obviously the Canadians not being able to come down here except for me has really impacted attendance because like Mike mentioned, there’s only about 30 or 40 % attendance. And I guess in previous years, the other 60 % are made up by Canadians. So I’m here on my own representing Canada. Yeah. I mean, Dave is the face VCOM crew. Mike is the voice VCOM crew for good reason.

04:21
I grew up on the ugly tree and fell out of it and hit every branch on the way down. What do want me to do? It’s not my fault. Well, what we’re going to be talking about today is I guess the future of Amazon e-commerce. It’s kind of a broad topic. Translate it into we need an excuse to write this trip off. So I don’t know where you want to start with this. Should we talk about what happened recently in the last couple of days? Yeah. mean, it’s been an interesting trip. I woke up one of the mornings here and…

04:49
had messages from elite seller and Rebakey that they were being shut down by Amazon. It’s kind of a crushing blow to our friend Ian who we’ve known for long time, done a lot of traveling with in China. It reminds me very much like the day in poker when we were doing online poker at Black Friday. So I messaged Ian to kind of console him. It came out of left field. I don’t know that they’re really doing anything wrong.

05:16
Amazon seems to have gotten a bug up their rear end because the FTC I think is pushing back on on reviews and you you can make an argument that maybe there’s a wink wink that if you get something from rebate key that you’re expected to a review, but not really. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, it’s definitely not a part of terms of service. So I don’t know. think Dave has something he wants to say about that too. Yeah. And so the backstory is rebate can lead seller that basically had their API privileges removed from Amazon. So basically

05:44
Elite seller and rebate key right now cannot tie into Amazon to get different information regarding a seller, uh, like they had been using before for the API. What they seem to have been shut down for. is my understanding is kind of traffic manipulation and, uh, basically using some type of URL to trick Amazon into ranking products better. And this was the most surprising thing. This is really what happened. And this is all a kind of hearsay right now. Nobody really knows the whole reason why.

06:12
Amazon shut down their API privileges. If this does turn out to be the case though, that Amazon is just worried about people using different kind of manipulative links to rank better on Amazon. This is the first time I’m aware of Amazon really taking any action against either a seller or a SaaS product for just trying to trick the algorithm. Most of the suspensions, as far as I know, have been typically in the review space, so manipulating reviews. And Amazon hates people manipulating reviews because

06:41
that impacts the customer experience. think everyone has a little bit of a suspicious eye when they buy something from Amazon about whether those reviews are positive or just fake reviews. legitimate. Well, I mean, they’re just cracking down on ranking manipulation now, right? That would seem to be what is happening. That, I think, is a whole new game for Amazon to be going into if they’re trying to stop sellers from manipulating Amazon’s algorithm. And let’s face it, I mean, I don’t know, probably…

07:08
a large majority of sellers are trying to trick Amazon in some way or the other into ranking better. Now, obviously that’s a wide spectrum of black hat tactics that you can have there. It does go to show that potentially Amazon is taking a closer eye towards these types of things. I mean, I wonder, like services like Rebakey, even if you don’t hook up to the API, I would think that Amazon could detect patterns between buyers and sellers.

07:34
Because statistically speaking, if you have a rebate key user that buys a lot of stuff, that should stand out, statistically speaking, right? Yeah, and I think they’re creating a footprint. Those buyers, which was one of the things that Elite Seller was helping with, and the whole idea was to create funnels with your own polls of buyers, however you found them, through Facebook ads, through your own email list, through other giveaways and other things you might be doing, so you didn’t have the same footprint that you would have with the poll of rebate key buyers.

08:04
And there’s also obviously Facebook groups and other things as well that are out there. I don’t know. I I think that ultimately it’s going to be impossible for Amazon to stop. They’re probably playing whack-a-mole one one at a time. Just like anything else with black cat tactics, people are doing the flavor of the day. This is going to change things significantly, but people will be back up to their old ways and trying to figure out the trick of the day. Yeah, and.

08:31
Again, I think what RebateKey is doing in terms of the rebates is totally fine. know, not retailers, but brands have been giving away rebates since the beginning of retail, basically. So whether it’s a Black & Decker coffee maker that gives you a $10 review for registering your warranty or a pair of Nikes that gives you some rebate on a second pair of shoes if you go to the Nike website and buy them there, brands have been doing this forever. So I think what RebateKey is doing is just fine. And they’re pretty tight on what not telling.

08:59
people buy a rebate on RebateKey as a buyer, there’s no assumption there that you need to leave a review. I think where they got into a little bit of trouble is that RebateKey was kind of opening the door, hey, if you want to use like a two-step URL, that’s okay by us. And I think that’s what’s going to happen. As RebateKey, they’re going to have to really tighten that up. I think they’re fine. I think they’ll get their API back. I think they’re going to have to basically… I mean, they don’t really need the API. No, RebateKey doesn’t.

09:28
It does help in certain ways because it can help you verify orders a little bit quicker, pull different data from Amazon a little bit quicker. They don’t need the API. But I think rebate key as a company is totally fine. Like giving out rebates. I don’t think that’s an issue. It’s the fact they were allowing some of these tricky little links. OK, so what is your view now on using a service like a rebate service? I think there’s nothing wrong with rebates. Mike might have a different opinion, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using rebates. I mean, I’ve always been a f-

09:54
the whitest of the white hats. I’ve never used any rebate services in general. I’ve done some things with Facebook Messenger in the past, which I feel is a little less detectable because it’s not like a group. So you’re not white hat. You’re only that’s as long as it’s not detectable. okay. It’s like Steve’s like if a tree falls in the forest, no one’s going to know unless they’re there. The one thing I’ll say about rebates and I and I agree the company line is exactly what Dave just said. You know, companies have been doing rebates for

10:24
100 years and this is very normal. But it’s like you know and I know and we all kind of know the reason that we’re doing it is to boost the ranking algorithm, right? I mean like you aren’t giving away products at 99 % off just because you want to get them in people’s hands, they get their feedback. I mean you’re doing it because you’re trying to get sales and all of these tools like Helium 10 and Jungle Scout, et cetera, like give you a number. Like how many need to give away a day to like be able to rank towards the top? And so like

10:54
Yes, rebates are given away for various reasons by traditional retailers and large companies, but they’re very rarely 99 % off type rebates. And they typically are doing it because they realize that the majority of people will buy it and forget to fill out the form and go through all the hoops to get the rebate and it’ll lay in a drawer for a while and they never actually get the rebate. So that was a big part of their pricing structure.

11:21
Yeah, the only reason I would say why I don’t think this comes down to rebates at all is all the other rebate services, they were not shut down. And when Amazon acts in these types of cases, normally what they do is they build a case about all of these either sellers or sales providers and they build a case against all of them. And then in one massive swoop, they’ll suspend them all jumps go all the other rebate services did not get suspended. So I think this goes beyond rebates. I don’t think that’s the issue here. Otherwise you would see all these other services being suspended. Interesting. You don’t think they’re just going to come.

11:50
crumbling down one by one. think that if I had a guess and there’s obviously no way to know, but I think it might have something to do with elite seller pushing the envelope with some of these links that they’ve created and I think it might be guilty by association. like, you know, it’s the same company, the same people running it. They know that it’s like, going to, you know, make your life, we’re going to give you maximum pain. doesn’t matter if this other thing is within our TOS or not. Again, it’s hard to know. We’re all speculating at this point and I

12:19
you don’t feel like it’s fair to call up Ian and ask him these types of questions unless it’s already painful enough. We’ll all find out what’s going to happen in the end. And how it pertains to the future of Amazon is interesting in terms of what is it going to mean to sellers moving forward? Again, I really do believe that six months from now if we do a follow-up podcast and there’s a world where rebate key and elite seller don’t exist, it’ll just be called something different. There’ll be something else. Especially the Chinese sellers.

12:50
I mean, I am Chinese and Dave, you may as well be Chinese, right? I you always find a way to skirt around the rules. We were just talking about, what were we talking about the other day? Craps, right? You aren’t allowed to have dice games in California, but then they came up with a way to use cards instead of dice to play craps. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’ll be interesting to see in six months what the landscape looks like if rebate services exist. My bet would be that they’re

13:17
going to be a A-OK, even Rebakey is going to be around. But the fact that I’m betting for them, that’s probably the kiss of death. And that means that they’re all going to be gone in six months. when I make these types of predictions, my law seems to be I have 100 % accuracy in being wrong. So sorry, Ian, I just screwed your company. But that’s my feeling is that they’re going to be OK. I think if you use ads, it should be relatively untraceable. I know Google uses these footprint algorithms because it’s pretty easy. It’s very rare for someone to do something twice.

13:46
Even twice. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s the issue is that Elite Seller, just got a little bit, they were too good. mean, they’re built by sellers. They know exactly what sellers want. The tools that they had are incredible. And that’s why I think, hopefully, they figured this all out because Elite Seller, I this is the ultimate plug for them. It’s a fantastic tool. They probably pushed the envelope a little bit too much in being too seller friendly and having some amazing tools within them.

14:14
that obviously caught Amazon’s eye. But I mean, to elite sellers credit, mean, obviously, the tools were pretty great if Amazon had to crack down on them. What are you guys seeing these days in terms of competition? I know that we’ve been consistently getting like negative reviews on a regular basis on one product. it’s pretty, at least it’s pretty clear to me that I think it’s malicious, but it’s not in like high frequency anymore. It’s just like a steady trickle in. Are you guys seeing that? I think the smart black hat sellers are

14:44
letting it trickle in versus like bombing you all at once because it looks more natural. You were just talking about before that people don’t repeat a particular pattern. And so like when you start like having doing things that are like seven standard deviations from the norm, which is like translated into like you win the Powerball lottery three days in a row, which is yes, it’s possible, but not possible. Right. Right. Like people find these black cat tactics and they push them to the extreme. If you drip one one star review on your competitor a month, you’re probably going to be fine.

15:14
And yeah, I do think it’s malicious. My concern as an Amazon seller right now is that I’m in my mid 40s. This is not my first rodeo. And you see certain patterns develop in multiple businesses and multiple industries that you’ve been a part of. And I see this cycle of very similar to the online poker world where there’s lots of money to be made. Wherever there’s lots of money to be made, it’s going to bring in people who are willing to do it for less margin. It’s going to be people that are

15:44
you know, willing to do more black cat stuff. It’s going to be people who would be willing to like hit their mother and back up over her to make money any way they possibly can. And I start to see these tactics happening now within the Amazon world. And it worries me as an Amazon seller because what you’re talking about there is very hard to combat. Like you can’t prove without a shadow of a doubt that that one star review was fake. But you know, it’s true. It’s not, you know, it’s it’s a handkerchief, let’s say there’s only so much that could be wrong with it. What they’re saying

16:13
simply isn’t true. And you know that, but you can’t get Amazon to listen to you and remove the review. And so you’re in this bad spot and it’s not just reviews. mean, they can manipulate your rankings in other ways and do a bunch of other things that you drive up your return rate. And there’s other kinds of things I’d rather not even just talk about here, but I see it happening relatively often. Yeah. The reviews, also think what a lot of people aren’t aware of is what happened is last year they changed to a review and rating system. So

16:42
If somebody is leaving a positive review, normally you don’t have an overwhelmingly abundant amount of information that you want to share on a five-star review. It’s pretty weird that you get wowed that much that you’re going to write a four-paragraph five-star review, but it’s very easy to go in there and just leave a five-star rating. However, if you have a negative experience with a product, then what’s going to happen is you are probably going to leave a very long dialogue about why you hate this product. And you’re going to leave that with a one-star review. So I think what has happened is that you see this proliferation of

17:11
five-star ratings and one-star reviews. And so in your reviews, what happens is these one-star reviews show up and not as many five-star reviews. Instead, those five-star reviews that used to have are now just five-star ratings. And so I think that is part of the reason why sellers are seeing a little bit more activity in one-star reviews, just because there’s a greater probability that you’re gonna leave a five-star rating instead of a five-star review. Actually, come to think of it, when I shop, I actually never look at the five-star reviews.

17:39
I jump straight to like the threes actually or the fours maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And see what people are really saying. But again, I mean, now it’s hard to know is that someone that’s being malicious. in general, I feel like the negative reviews that we get are legitimate. You people have their feeling about things. I do think that in general, it’s an opportunity for you to improve your products, right? I mean, like some of our best selling products are like a third iteration of the product based on negative reviews that we got. You know, it’s a

18:08
that people were, one of our ice packs, they were melting it because they were putting it in the microwave too long. So we ended up doing this, we just made it a cold pack only until people don’t microwave it. One of the other things we had, people were complaining that there was condensation and it constantly got like their back wet or their sofa wet and they were complaining about that. So we put a cover in the box with it, know, to absorb the moisture. And now we have one of the best selling products on Amazon in that category. That’s all from listening to true legitimate negative reviews that customers were leaving.

18:37
But again, I do think that there is a contingent of people that are leaving fake one-star reviews. It’s easier to hurt your competitor and make them disappear to rank rather than do the work yourself. And there’s definitely people in this world, they’re not just all in China, that are willing to do that stuff. again, it comes with just seeing these types of market cycles, the same type of thing happened again in online poker.

19:04
a lot of money to be made, people are going to do unscrupulous things, just like there’s credit card scams, or the people are selling warranties, or they’re trying to call you for Microsoft support all over the world. If there’s those types of things to be made, they’re going to do it, even on Amazon.

19:21
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

19:50
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

20:19
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s EMERGECONSCL.com. Now back to the show. You know, Mike, I remember you got knocked off by Amazon, like almost the packaging exactly. Have you seen that happen to some of the other products? It was like a cold pack. Yeah, it’s brutal. mean, but that’s as much as that sucks. It’s not. Has it happened since then? So it has. Okay. It’s going to happen. And

20:49
The thing that upsets me about the way that Amazon does that is you know that they are doing it in an unfair advantage, right? They’re able to get reviews at a faster rate because they must be sending out emails in a different way. They use different ad placements that don’t exist in other ways. They rank their stuff higher. They know their exact way to do that. They’ve testified in front of Congress that they don’t do these things. And then over time, it’s kind of come out that they were lying, really. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal, I think, debunked that. Yeah.

21:18
Yeah, and I think if we’re going into the future of Amazon and you know, maybe rebates go away, maybe they don’t, that’s a pretty minor. I rebates are legit. mean, if you think about, is it Rakuten that the whole business is based on rebates? yeah, absolutely. But either way, I mean, I think that’s a relatively minor ground shifting event for Amazon. What could be a major ground shifting event is if Amazon’s private label business comes across even more scrutiny from Congress and these governments and they have to split it up into a different entity.

21:47
Or as Amazon would like to sell it to sellers that, Hey, if we have to have a choice between having our private label brands and third party sellers, we’re going to screw you third party sellers and only do our private label products, which is of course complete BS. But they sent out an email to sellers a few months ago saying that, that, Hey, our private label brands are coming under scrutiny and we might have to make a choice between our third party products and our private label brands. Now we know what will happen is Amazon will probably ditch their

22:15
private label brands way quicker than their third party sellers. But either way, if that happens and they have to make that choice, that will be a fundamental change in the way that Amazon operates. And hopefully that would be a positive for sellers if they had to get rid of their private label brands. But there is that small, small chance that Amazon gets rid of third party sellers and goes through a first party seller only model where basically you just sell to Amazon. Again, it’s a minuscule chance that that could happen, but.

22:43
Something big is probably going to happen one way the other with Amazon. actually, I’m very curious what you both’s opinion are on this. Amazon private labels are brands, but if you walk into Costco, they have their own Kirkland brand, which I often buy instead of the name brand because it’s significantly cheaper. So that’s all you buy, Yeah, that’s true. You’re right. Thanks, guys. You’re right. That’s all I buy. But so do you think Amazon’s doing anything wrong here? All right. Okay. So there’s two things here. There’s the first thing that Dave was just talking about in terms of like, does Amazon become nothing but their own brands?

23:12
Even at their size, that’s not possible. You can’t make Apple products. You can’t make Nike shoes. There’s too many name brand things that people want that name brand and there’s too much IP that goes into it. They even Amazon themselves can’t do everything. So I don’t think that’s going to happen. Now, on the other question of is it, you’re right. You go into Costco and there’s Kirkland. We were just in Walgreens last night. There’s a Walgreens brand. CVS does the same thing. They have their own house brand.

23:41
I don’t begrudge those companies for doing those types of things because they aren’t creating what I would call an unfair advantage in order to do it. First of all, they’ve created this brick and mortar store. They have a very expensive footprint to get people on the door there. Their products are on the shelf right next to the other products in an equal and equitable fair way. So much to the point where these other companies, they realize that and they’re still willing to sell through there and it’s an equitable, I think, relationship.

24:11
really is. think that in some ways, I might even give more cache to the name brand because some people are just name brand type people and that’s what they want to buy. What I think Amazon is doing that’s ridiculous is circumventing loose IP, where you’ve done all the work upfront, shown all the sales data, built all their infrastructure on their back, and then then manipulate the rankings

24:39
and the way that they do business with their own products in ways that simply don’t work in brick and You don’t know that. Okay. So let give you one really good example. So if I just paid a dollar for a click to get someone to my ice pack listing, is it fair for them to then have an ad right on that thing underneath the buy box saying buy our house brand product? like, you you don’t, it operates in a way that is manipulative and unfair.

25:08
You know, I’m a business person. We all do things. I we want to make money and I understand that and I wish I look at things from the other way. But it really is at a point where like capitalism becomes evil in my mind. Like there’s a level where it just, it’s, it’s just, it isn’t right, you know, and it’s not obviously like in business, you can’t just complain that this isn’t fair. I think that it goes, it goes beyond that in a way that is, is, should be legal. And you look at other parts of the world.

25:37
And it doesn’t work there. Like India put an end to this, the UK put an end to this. I think the EU has also put an end to it. The United States is really the only jurisdiction where Amazon can get away with operating in this manner. Let me just tell you what happened to me at Walgreens. Just the other day, I went to buy Allegra and I saw the generic, but I was going to get Allegra anyways, but it was locked up. Like I had to actually get the representative to get that, whereas I could just grab the generic off the shelf. That sounds sketchy to me. Well, and that’s the argument that Amazon’s going to make is that

26:05
Yes, we advertise our private label products sometimes on a third party sellers listing. But how is that different from Walgreens giving preferential self placement to their own brands? It’s not a lot different. Just self placement is the new or the I guess the old advertising that similar to what we have on Amazon now. So that’s what they would argue is okay, you know, brands have been or retailers have been giving preferential shelf placement to their brands forever.

26:31
Walgreens does it with their private label brands, Walmart does it with their private label brands. So that’s what Amazon’s going to do. They’re going to argue, hey, we’re no different than that. The unfair advantage in my eyes that Amazon has is the data that they have access to. So Walgreens might have access to two or three different allergy medicine and the data, the selling data from those. Amazon has access to millions and millions and millions of individual product.

26:57
data and they get access to it. They say they don’t and they only look at it from a meta standpoint, but that’s complete BS. And they’ve gone on record now saying that, oh, well, maybe our employees look at it, but we tell them not to. So that’s the big issue is that Amazon has access to all this data from individual sellers. And we know it’s about 2 million third-party sellers and they get access to all that data. So either Amazon has to, in my opinion, either be split into two different companies. So there is no information sharing like that.

27:25
or they have to give sellers an equal access to all that selling data, which I don’t think is gonna happen though. Here’s the kicker for me, and this actually has never happened to me, but I know students where Amazon has asked them for their factories and where they got their stuff. And if they were, let’s say to get popular, Amazon in theory could just look at that information, hit the factory and say, hey, we’d like to buy like 100,000 units and get really good pricing. Amazon has contacted our factories. Well, of course they have. I mean, I hate it when people say that. That’s one thing I take.

27:53
exception to it. sound like I’m supporting Amazon here, but come on, let’s face it. It’s not hard for a major retailer like Amazon to find out what factories are making any product. They have far greater resources than Alibaba. They have, they have hundreds and thousands of staff on the ground in China. So when people are dubious of that, I mean, come on, what factory use that’s not this impossible moat to cross. It’s pretty easy for somebody of Amazon’s size to figure out with or without you having to submit like your supplier invoices.

28:23
I definitely agree that they have the capability of doing it, but I think it’s very under headed for them to just force you to give them the data and then contact the exact factory. They should at least have to go do the work. Go do the work that I did. They just, you have no choice. It’s like if you’ve lost inventory, which they do all the time and you want to get refunded for, you have to submit an invoice. If you want to get approved to get ungated for lot of categories, you have to submit an invoice.

28:48
There’s there’s other reasons why we’ve had us submit invoices in the past they I think they just dream things up if they really want it it seems incredibly unfair that they can force you to take that Give you them that data and then they can just look up that factory and go right to them again I know they have the resources I get it that they they can go on the ground they can go find somebody but at least make it

29:10
a one in a hundred chance that they find my exact factory and they go with someone else. why I don’t like that argument. They have the resources to release all their own products too, but I mean, this just makes it easy. They have all the data in front of them. I know. I just think you’re talking like I have a trading company I’m pretty close with in China and they want to find a factory that makes any one of your guys’s products. They can find it in a matter of 10 minutes using the Chinese sites. I don’t think that’s a big issue. think sure you’re talking, does it make their life easier? Maybe a little bit, but

29:37
Compared to the advantage they get from having all the individual seller data, it’s minuscule. And that’s the real kind of elephant in the room when it comes to Amazon’s private label brands. And we’ll see what happens there. All right. So what do you guys think about just the landscape as a new seller who is entering Amazon right now?

29:56
I obviously it’s getting more and more difficult. I mean think that when we first got started I always make this joke that I could have sold a bag of poop in 2015 and could have looked at anything. I wasn’t even running ads when I first started. It was incredible. Now I think you need to work on building legitimately better products, creating a brand. That term gets thrown around quite a bit. It can mean a bunch of different things. Sometimes it’s kind of BS. Well let’s talk about that. What do you consider the steps to create a good brand? Well I like to think that we did a good job with this with Colorate.

30:26
for instance, where we went and found a niche that was ripe for disruption. didn’t invent coloring books. We kind of reinvented coloring books. We just made them better by looking at the reviews and talking to customers and just making some assumptions that by putting hardback covers on a book and using a spiral binding and using art grade paper and using perforations, et cetera, we can make a book that people would legitimately want more than all the other crap that was out on the market.

30:55
And it worked. And you can do this in a lot of niches. think what’s really coming to an end, it’s really in our rear view mirror at this point, is going on Alibaba, finding an existing product that a zillion other people already make and just listing that. That’s not going to work. And then the other part of branding is doing all the other hard work that we did. We would give away free drawings every week. We would do giveaways. hosted a…

31:22
thing called Color It Live all the time. We put out a bunch of content, how to color and stuff like that, and built a community of people that not only liked our products, but we communicated with on the side and they helped us develop our new products and became our super fans and defended us in the marketplace when someone did say something negative. We have like an army of people that really had our back, which is really helpful in today’s internet world of marketing.

31:48
I think that that will still be successful. There’s lots of new brands that come out all the time that follow that footprint and that blueprint, should say, that are successful. think, again, what’s really coming to an end is I’m going to go to the Canton Fair, get a MeToo product and list it alongside of 10 other people who have the exact same thing, including Amazon who might come copy your exact product some day down the road. If you can create some even slight differentiation.

32:15
and work on some of the other outside marketing, outside traffic, Amazon, I think that there’s still lots of money to be made in this space. I think branding these days is actually all about one-on-one communication. Like I actually hate responding to people, but like getting DMs, Facebook Messenger, SMS now, like anytime I can have a conversation with that person, they tend to become a customer for life. This is a large bulk of our customers are event planners. Every time we see a bulk order, we actually reach out to them. Usually by phone.

32:44
and just that little conversation that you had, they’re just much more likely to buy from you. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. mean, that’s been the whole D to C direct to consumer brand revolution of being able to talk to customers one-on-one like that. I think there’s certain industries too that are more fit for disruption. Like you mentioned, Steve, you’re basically a B2B business. I don’t know what percentage of your sale. It’s significant now, actually. Is it more than half-half? It’s not more than half. No, definitely not.

33:09
So the consumer, probably about 30%. Yeah. Yeah. But definitely that’s an opportunity. And Amazon’s always trying to push like their business pricing. But overall though, B2B sales is a big opportunity. When it comes to a new seller though, you know, obviously it’s a harder landscape. There is one advantage that sellers have right now. And it’s the fact that Amazon has gone from about 10 % paid placements on a search results page, just a couple of years ago, up to 30%.

33:37
As of 2021, so what that means is that now if you’re a new brand, you can basically pay your way to the top of search listings. And again, most customers don’t know the difference between a paid search result and an organic search result. So now more than in the past, it’s actually a little bit easier to pay your way to the top and just be really aggressive on advertising. The issue is that long-term you need to be able to get off of that heroin.

34:02
Heroin needle that you have in your arm that is Amazon paid advertising and get yourself away from it and be able to Be in a strong position and have 80 % of your sales coming from organic and not 80 % of your sales coming from PPC Like you probably need in the beginning when you’re launching a new product or brand I don’t even see organic listings anymore. Literally the whole top of fold is all ads at this point Yeah, absolutely. And you know if you can have a killer ad which often means like a killer main gallery image and

34:29
Depending on what type of ad type you’re using a good headline Video ads on Amazon are still underutilized and can be really profitable if you have good creative There are opportunities to have profitable PPC on Amazon. If you can you can actually make a sustainable Amazon product or brand just based on Amazon Amazon’s PPC, but again, it’s not like it was in the old days We just set an automatic campaign on Amazon set it and never look at it. Now you have to

34:58
be paying attention to your advertising campaigns on Amazon because there’s a lot of them and it’s more important than it was in the past.

35:06
Alright, so let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk about having your own website. When do you guys advise transitioning outside of Amazon? when did you guys throw up your site? Because you guys, Dave, I know you’re mostly an Amazon brand, right? You’re an off-road company? Yeah, it’s mostly Amazon. But to that point, the first thing I did was set up the website. Okay. So what do you do with the website today? In terms of like percentages or what do I do with it from a marketing standpoint? but marketing standpoint.

35:32
Yeah. So I mean, the website only constitutes about 10 % of sales. But what I do, and this is what I’m a big advocate advocate for is we do a lot of marketing, Google shopping, a little bit less Google ads, Facebook ads, organic, trying to get organic traffic through SEO, get that traffic to our website, and then try to direct that traffic as much as possible to Amazon. And the reason for that is that Amazon really rewards

35:58
when you can send external traffic to their website. They love that. And that’s where Elite Seller and Rebakey kind of circle back to this conversation. That’s where they got in trouble is trying to kind of trick Amazon into thinking that we were sending all this external traffic to them through Rebakey when really we weren’t sending them. It’s a big backstory, but basically Rebakey and Elite Seller were tricking sellers or tricking Amazon into thinking that sellers were sending traffic directly from Google when it was actually coming from either an email list or

36:27
Rebake here wherever so your websites add to cart links go to Amazon directly the add to cart links Don’t go to Amazon directly you can still buy on the website, but we heavily push them towards buying on Amazon So if you go to a product detail page on our website, you have an option to buy on the website But you also have a very strong call to action to buy directly on Amazon. It’s just a link to Amazon interesting I’m curious. is your is your pricing identical on Amazon in your own website? Yes, everything’s identical. Okay I actually I’m curious about your rationale for that because

36:57
And granted, you probably get a lot of repeat customers I would imagine in that space or where you can upsell. That’s a whole other conversation. But no, surprisingly not. We don’t get a ton of repeat customers. Or from from cross sells. There’s a little bit, but it’s not as much as you would think. And that’s actually one of the more disappointing things that the whole brand when when I first started, I thought it would be much bigger than it is. But yeah, it’s not actually that huge. I’m just curious how you would quantify getting a customer’s information, because Amazon now hides like the name and everything now.

37:24
Right, so how do you quantify driving them to Amazon versus potentially getting a really good, maybe a B2B customer that would be like a customer for life? I the B2B customers will always find you one way or the other. They’ll call you, they’ll text you, they’ll email you, whatever. They find you through their website. Like they’ll contact you nine times out of 10, because they want to get better pricing. And if they’re a smart B2B customer, they will figure out a way to contact you directly and get away from Amazon’s messaging system. So in that regard.

37:50
You know, trying to quantify like a B2B customer. don’t think it’s really an issue because they’ll contact you one way or the other. But in terms of having an individual customer’s data, it’s hard to quantify. I mean, our lifetime value is not that high. Typically they’re just buying one product and they’re off to the other guy. If we had a higher lifetime value, it might make more sense to have people on our website. But my opinion is if you’re not, if you’re selling just kind of a typical product, like a rooftop tent or a kinetic recovery rope.

38:19
doesn’t really add that much value having somebody buy on your website and having their information. Now, if you’re selling like a beard grooming kit where they’re buying that same kit month over month over month, then yeah, you don’t want to send them to Amazon. But for most products, whether it’s an ice wrap or an off-road product or even a handkerchief to a lesser degree, know, sending them to Amazon is not that terrible. And you get rewarded so heavily in organic rankings on Amazon when you do send them that traffic. I imagine that’s definitely true for you, right, Mike?

38:48
ice traps, like they’re just buying it to solve a problem. They’re probably not coming back. Yeah. And we talked about this a couple of years ago. I kind of discovered this by accident as we started putting up content sites and sending traffic off to Amazon. It actually happened at first with Color. We started launching our products by saying, it’s available on Amazon first and it’ll be available on color.com later. If you want it now, go buy it on Amazon. The reality is the inventory was coming from the exact same spot because we did fulfillment by Amazon for everything. But what we realized was that

39:18
sending that traffic off the Amazon, yes, there’s a disadvantage of you don’t get their name and their address, their telephone number, their ability to market to them, et cetera, et cetera. But the overwhelming advantage of being able to break into something as competitive as gel pens, for instance, and we had one of the top five best-selling gel pen sets on all of Amazon. This is a product that sells hundreds and hundreds of units per day. And the only reason I believe that we were able to break into that

39:44
into that niche is because of all the outside traffic that we owned, all those resources that we had built up over time, our email list, our Facebook Messenger list, our Facebook pixel audience, brand equity that we had up to that point. And we had people that were clamoring, really didn’t want our new products when we launched them and would buy anything from us because we had built loyalty, because we had good products. And when we launched them on Amazon, we were able to send all this additional traffic and crack into these really

40:14
really competitive niches that ultimately helped us sell that business for seven figures, which was kind of cool. it’s something that we’ve continued to do since then and have really been doubling down on it by making these content sites that can also organically send traffic off to Amazon on a consistent basis. I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

40:41
Now what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods,

41:08
and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Seller Summit will be small and intimate. Every year, we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year, many months in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th,

41:38
And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

41:54
Yeah. I mean, here’s what I found. Like my shopping behavior is the same. Like if I want to buy from Amazon, I’ll buy from Amazon. Like that’s where I shop. Whereas if I prefer shopping and boutiques, I’ll buy from boutiques. So, you know, if you’re steering someone, if you’re trying to steer someone from Amazon to your own site, it’s probably not going to happen in the long run. So just, just try to be everywhere. And that’s probably your best bet. Yeah. And if you can get their information before you send it to Amazon, that’s kind of the field and all if you can keep their information.

42:24
get their email at least and then when you have a sale, promote that sale, they’re probably gonna buy it on Amazon anyways, but if you can do like a cross promotion where you have coupon code for Amazon, again, you’re sending that external traffic to Amazon. If you’re doing a product launch and you still have those emails before you send them to Amazon, that’s going to really make your probability of a success for a product launch that much higher. So I mean, that’s the be-all to end-all is if you can get their information before you send them to Amazon. Again, easier said than done, but that is kind of the…

42:54
ultimate goal. thing to keep in mind, just real quick, is the conversion rate on Amazon versus your own store. I like the best conversion rate I’ve ever gotten on my own Shopify store is in the 3 % range. We really average more like at one and a half to two. We have products that consistently are over 50 % conversion rate on Amazon. We look at conversion rates every single week for all of our products. We really have gotten very analytical about this. So you’re talking about a 20-fold difference.

43:21
in conversion rate. And so yes, you’re leaving on the table some of this other stuff like their information, some of the other ability to sell again. But like when you really extrapolate out the success you can have by sending traffic to Amazon, how much better it’s going to convert. And also look at all the additional sales that you’re going to get that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It starts to make a lot of sense. mean, the problem is when you start looking at it in the macro and you end up one day in the situation that we’re in where

43:51
where I’m jealous of you, Steve, is like, you we are something like 85 % Amazon and we rely on Amazon so much. It’s really, really uncomfortable. We make a lot of money doing it. It’s been very lucrative, but like I do feel like we’re playing a game of musical chairs and it’s someday when the music stops, you’ll be laughing because you have, you know, mostly your traffic all on your own store and we’ll be holding a bunch of inventory we can’t sell otherwise. Here’s how I see it. I optimize for peace of mind.

44:17
Like if something bad happens on Amazon, actually ruins my wife’s entire day. And then she’s pissed and she comes home, she vents about it. And then I’m miserable. So that’s one of the main reasons. Like I can leave some money on table. Like I don’t spend that much money. You know, I’m cheap as hell, right? So why not just maximize for life? So you have a completely different attitude. Plus you have a whole team that can help you deal with this stuff. So you don’t have to personally deal with it, right? And your wife can’t quit this job. So do you actually ever deal with any of that Amazon crap right now?

44:47
I do, but for the most part, so ever yes, we had a situation that came up this year where they actually called me. I couldn’t believe it. First time I’ve ever gotten a phone call from Amazon, they were telling me about a product that was a dangerous good and had to be removed from their warehouse immediately. Otherwise, they were going to close our entire account down. So it freaked me the hell out because I actually, they called to like kind of warn me of this and I was like, oh gosh, okay, well I better obviously listen. And so that particular incident, I personally got wrapped up in because

45:16
I was like the first point of contact and I just took the bull by the horns because it was like I got the call at like 10 a.m. Pacific and my team doesn’t come in until like 4 p.m. For the most part and I learned my lesson with that particular incidence, my team takes care of all of it. Like I tell them I don’t even want to know. Like please don’t tell me. And like unless it’s been days and we’re just stuck, I’d rather not know because I get so upset like having to deal with, I just had to deal with getting a…

45:44
a hijacker off one of our listings as it was a procedure that we haven’t had a deal with, this new business that we’re involved in. Someone was selling on our listing and I hadn’t been through that process in so long. I couldn’t just ask my team to go do it because they don’t have a SOP to follow. So I had to do it myself and it’s just like this rat’s nest of like constant circles of you have to fill out this form and they send you back a riddle of like you didn’t fill it out quite right and then…

46:09
And then they send you this other link, you fill that out and they’re like, that doesn’t work. And they send you somewhere else. Then they eventually send you back to where you started. And eventually I figured out that all the different combinations, it was like a cipher lock till I finally, after six days of going back and forth with Amazon. And every time it produces this acid reflux situation in my stomach because I hate dealing with stuff like that. I just want to do it once, check it off, and be done with it, and deal with a company that

46:39
You know, has some sense, but they don’t, you know, and, and, so again, the way that I typically handle this is that pay someone else in the organization to deal with it. Cause they, they’re not emotional about it. You know, they just doing their job. Yeah. I would say that’s the only danger though, is that they’re not emotional about it. And sometimes things that they should be emotional about kind of get pushed to the back and they don’t take as much care and attention to it as maybe you would as an entrepreneur. And that’s.

47:06
I think where we have a little bit of a differing opinion that I guess there’s one of two frames of minds that you can say, okay, I’m just gonna be completely hands off about this or I’m gonna be completely hands on. And I’m still really divided on what the best mentality is because I know when I try to give jobs to my VAs, for example, we have a product suspended right now for some documentation issue. And I told our guys, okay, you gotta figure this out, doing the Mike Jackbess approach. It’s still two weeks and they haven’t figured it out. And I know.

47:35
If I get my hands into there, I’m going to get it fixed probably within a couple of days. They’re not going to pick up the phone and push Amazon and push them and push them and push them like I will. And I don’t know. I feel like it’s two different frame of minds when it comes to having employees with an Amazon business. in the long run, I think your way is better, Mike, but it’s painful, right? I think my team will pick up the phone and do that. I I feel like they’ll get it done almost as quickly as I can, you within hours, you know, as quickly as I can.

48:05
and I’m much happier. Like even if it does take them, let’s say a day or two longer, like over the long run, yeah, that’s going to cost X dollars in sales and other repercussions. like, it makes me so unhappy. It’s like if there was, if there’s, not even joking. Trust me, I know exactly what It’s horrible. Like that’s how horrible Amazon is to work with. It is, for me, it just, my personality type, some people are different. Some people are just really good at grinding through the bureaucracy.

48:32
And it doesn’t upset them in any way. Like they’re just emotionalist to it and they just go through the paces. I don’t know anyone who’s been unemotional with empty. I do know some people that do with it lot better than I do. I really, it’s a leak for me. I’m not proud of seeing all this. just, know that it’s true. I shouldn’t get that emotional because they don’t care about me. Why should I care that much about them in the situation? It’s just, you know how it is and you can’t change it and you accept this. You’re signing a contract, whether you

49:00
physically sign the timeline or not, you’re signing a virtual contract, let’s say that you’re going to put up with this crap if you continue to sell on Amazon. And we keep on getting deeper and deeper into it. And we know that this is the repercussion. so again, I’d rather have someone else deal with it than make me miserable dealing with it. Because that issue I’m talking about with the ice packs that they suspended was awful. Like we destroyed a bunch of our inventory because they told us they had to get out of there really quickly. We lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales.

49:30
we were going in circles, like, how come you guys can sell your version of this? The exact same thing that you ripped off, it’s got the exact same ingredient list on it. Same packaging too. Same packaging, everything. Like it was almost indistinguishable product. How come that’s still up there? And they’re like, it doesn’t matter, you gotta take yours. And eventually what I found out what the problem was, that, talk about Black Hat stuff, some competitor had a vendor central account. This is one of the Black Hat tactics from like six months ago, that you can get a vendor central account in another marketplace, so like another country.

49:59
the UK, India, whatever it is, add that product to that other vendor central list and then add keywords. And so they added keywords in there that they know that Amazon will immediately take your listing down for it. And that’s what happened. Boom. And they went in and they did it for all the competitors. And so they were like the only one remaining. And that’s a great way to get yourself to the top. And it’s…

50:26
I think that Amazon’s put an end to this to a certain extent now because when it gets to be on this big of a wide scale, eventually hits Twitter and gets in the press and they’ll correct it. But for six months, people were dealing with pesticide claims and dangerous good claims and all this stuff. And luckily, from going through the paces and arguing with Amazon over and over again on the telephone, eventually I got someone that cared and knew what they were doing. And they’re like, look, here’s what’s happened.

50:56
someone injected these keywords in your backend, you can’t see them because you didn’t make the contribution. They did it through vendor central. So you don’t even have control over your listing any longer. So what you have to do, I can’t help you. Like this is what’s so freaking hilarious. He’s like, I can’t help you because you have to contact brand registry first and get them to tell you that they can’t help you before then you can contact us. And then we are allowed to help you. I’m like, this is the logic tree that you have. So of course I contact brand registry. They immediately said, we can’t help you.

51:23
I responded to them again with a saying in a different way that like, we can’t help you. Then I called back that same team. I finally figured out a way to get to this particular team and the lady’s like, oh, okay, you’ve done all the paces now. I’m going to take your case, upload it and within 48 hours we’ll have it back live. And they did. But I it took weeks to do that. It was our number one best selling product and I lost even more hair, which I can’t afford to lose. Well, this is how our buddy Taw lost his entire brand, right?

51:52
someone made a claim on, but I mean, he had nothing illegal in his ingredient list, but he never got his product listing back. Wow. Wow. That’s terrible. I mean, and that is the landscape of Amazon right now. And hopefully, you know, in the future, this will all change and Amazon will have tighter policing policies. But unfortunately, if they cut out these tactics, we all know there’s going to be a new tactic that comes along and a new tactic and a new tactic. Google’s done a pretty good job at cutting out these black hat tactics. mean,

52:20
Most of the listings that you see in organic search page for Google now are relatively good because their algorithm has become relatively better. Hopefully this is what happens with Amazon. They are relatively a new entity. I mean, it sounds weird, but they’re only 20 some odd years old and the third party marketplace is only about 10 years old. So hopefully this all gets rectified in the longterm. I wouldn’t hold my breath though for this to be fixed in the next year or two. So Google’s algorithm has gotten worse. I’m going to show you guys this website.

52:49
that got thousands of visitors per month in a relatively short period of time without any backlink building and it was all generated by bots. All the content. I’ve heard about this now. it’s amazing. I just want to real quick, you’re talking about the future of Amazon because that’s kind of, I guess, loosely the conversation here. I’m more pessimistic when it comes to this. I actually think that Amazon’s greed will continue to make this a slippery slope of

53:17
In general, think the quality of products on Amazon has decreased. I’m an Amazon buyer myself and some of the stuff I get is laughably bad. The quality is Chinese manufacturing, they’re sending you basically Western or Eastern world type products to the Western world, which if you’ve ever traveled to the East, you understand what I’m talking about. And it’s prolific. It’s not just one or two of these types of products and sellers.

53:46
monopolized like all of the top positions and when consumers start to lose confidence in what they’re ordering and the court of public opinion shifts much like it did for Walmart, you years ago, I think that Amazon might be in a little bit of trouble, you know, I, and I don’t know what the point of no return is, but like, obviously in this same timeline,

54:13
sellers will stop selling on there. Like we know people, good friends of ours who have disowned Amazon, right? And it’s not prolific enough yet where Amazon’s hurting from this because there’s plenty of other people in line willing to sell. But I do believe that the products that are in line willing to sell are lower quality, right? And the quality continues to drop. I don’t want to mention any brands by name here. I think it’s inappropriate. like, if you’re going to conferences like Seller Summit,

54:41
and talking to people there, there’s lots of people, there’s a handful of people that have just completely disowned Amazon because they don’t want to deal with all this BS, they don’t want to have the repercussions of people copying their products and knocking them out, so they’ve cut them out of their lives and I think that there’s going to be a trend much like it did with Walmart where people have realized that they don’t want to support them anymore. And so I do think that it’s potential that Amazon can go down that path. We’ll see where.

55:08
the future takes us.

55:35
pedal to metal type of guys. More of lifestyle. yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, I recommend validating on Amazon. And then once you have something you’re gonna follow through with, let it ride on Amazon, but then start your own website, build your own brand. It’s a slower burn, but at least it’s a consistent, happy burn. I couldn’t agree more, actually, when you’re first getting started, I do think that Amazon is ultimately the place to do that. You know, if you’re out there listening to this, and you haven’t sold anything online yet, and you’re aspiring to do so, it’s hard for you know, the three of us to

56:05
think back to that day, know, 10 years ago, whatever it was now, it’s overwhelming, right? There’s there’s so much to learn. There’s so much to do when you have your own Shopify store or your own store, whatever. In addition to all the things that Amazon does, you also have to get the traffic to your store. You have to pick, pack and ship and get the item out to the customer. And that never goes away. If you want to go on vacation or whatever, you know, you got to deal with it. You got to do with all the customer service. You have to deal with all the returns.

56:32
You had to deal with the SEO and tech and adding apps. Copy. mean, just the list goes on and on and on. So if you’re trying to get into e-commerce, Amazon, in my opinion, as you’re just saying, is absolutely the way to go because they do all that for you. So now your learning curve to get into selling things online is a tenth, maybe a fifth of what it would be otherwise. Right. I mean,

56:59
Amazon has an enormous amount of traffic, an enormous amount of people that already have their credit card information stored on the platform that are ready to buy your product in one click. And for you to get to a similar position in your own store, it will take a disproportionate amount of effort. And even as someone, feel like I’m good at what I do. I’m a hard person to give myself credit. I feel like I’m good at what I do. And even being good at what I do,

57:28
I still can’t get my Shopify stores to really exceed 15 % of revenue. No matter how hard I try, I put more effort into that, always, because I always want to have that… There’s other things that come out of it than just the sales. But regardless, even with all the effort we put into it, Amazon still gets so much traffic and so much business that even when you know what you’re doing, it’s hard. And so I think that if you’re just getting started, even with all the bitching that we said about Amazon, it still is the place to start trying to…

57:58
Prove your products out and start your brand and start your journey.

58:03
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And if you enjoyed listening to Mike and Dave today, go check out the eCom Crew Podcast on your favorite podcast app. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 380. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

58:29
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. 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 dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv.

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Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.