518: How AI Is Transforming Ecommerce With John Lawson

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You’re listening to the My Web Quarter job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Today I have my friend John Lawson on the show to talk about artificial intelligence and its effect on e-commerce. AI is just moving at a ridiculous pace and John is just one of those guys who is following this industry closely as it relates to selling online. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

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The Seller Summit 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, is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not just some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now I personally hate large events

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so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, we’re pretty close to sold out on the mastermind passes. Also,

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If you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

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Fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:05
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Drop podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have John Lawson on the show. Now John is actually someone who I met 10 years ago at perhaps one of my favorite e-commerce conferences of all time, the Startup Bros Conference. Too bad they didn’t do it again. But he is the CEO of Third Power Outlet, online retail clothing and accessories company. He is a platinum eBay power seller, a top rated Amazon merchant and small business influencer of the year. He’s also written

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many bestselling books and speaks all over the world. Now, John has been really deep into AI. So in this episode, we are going to talk about how to apply AI to your eCommerce business. And with that, welcome to show John, how you doing? What’s up? That’s so funny. That is the best eCommerce conference I’ve ever been to. And everybody I’ve met from there always says that and means it. It’s so weird.

03:03
from that event. They spent gobs of money, lost tons of money, but it was a blast. Yep, yep. That’s why it was a blast. So it was good seeing you a couple months ago at the Alibaba Co-Create Conference. Now, for the audience who might not be familiar with you, how did you actually get into the apparel business, selling on eBay, and all the different things that you do? Oh, man. I’ll give you the abbreviated story of my nightmare.

03:33
So I was a consultant. I worked with like a Accenture and you know, I was making a pretty decent wage and I had a friend he was, you know, always hustling up something. This is early 2000s and he came to me and was like, hey, we should flip a house. And I was like, okay, what is that? You know, he’s like, oh, like you see on TV and all you got to do, you, you be the, you know, financer, time to pay for it. We’ll get the house flipped.

04:02
And we’ll split that like, you know, 50-50, probably 10 for you, 10 for me. Like, oh, okay, sounds great. I’ve signed the paperwork at the closing. We have a hard money loan, which means that it had a balloon payment in three months. So we had three months to change the house over or, you know, refurbish it. And when we got the house, it was a three-bedroom, one-bath, you know, so it’d be good for section eight. I do the walkthrough.

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and it’s a two bedroom, two bath. What the heck happened to the other bedroom? Long story short, Section A ain’t gonna give you the same amount that they give you for a three bedroom, for a two bedroom. I don’t care how much nicer it is. So I ended up upside down and I was not going to get out from the hard money loan. Time moves forward and I’m really in a struggle. I’m making two mortgage payments.

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on my one salary, which I wasn’t, you know, I had my own home, wasn’t ready for a second one. And I was about to go broke and bankrupt. And somebody mentioned, well, you should sell stuff on eBay. And that’s how I got started selling stuff on eBay. Right. And so we started selling my used books, you know, which I had around the house. And that was like the first thing I started. Ran out of books, start looking for other things to sell.

05:28
Ultimately, I landed in doing like accessories. So I didn’t actually do the clothing. I started with clothing, hated it because, you know, they sell clothing in weird packages and bundles. Yeah. Right. So it’s like you always get left with the smalls and the mediums and all the extra large and the two X’s go. So anyway, so I landed in the hip hop accessories category.

05:58
So we would sell bananas, sweat bands, jewelry, all the things that a hip hop kid would want back when I was a kid. You know what I’m saying? So that’s how I got started. Yeah, I know what you mean about apparel. I think selling apparel is one of the most difficult things to sell. Probably also because the return policy is like 40%, like the return rate. Right, right. Is it like that in accessories also? No, no, way lower.

06:27
Okay, way lower. Not only that, our cost of goods was lower, right? And I mean, we ended up niching out in shoelaces. So interesting. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s a whole nother story, right? Because we’ve been around so long. But if you think about it, you know, in the first or the other recession, right in the 2008 frame, with you know, people stopped wanting to

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wear fake jewelry even, right? And so we had to shift. I did that 80-20 rule, right? And I started looking, I’m like, wow, shoelaces, we sell a lot of shoelaces. And then I went to the categories and there was like, if you go to Amazon right now, there’s hundreds of shoelace sellers. When I did it before, nobody, literally, I believe we built the category, you know? So,

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But when I looked and I said, hey, this is something we could go deep in. This is something we could brand out. And that’s how I ended up with shoelaces. before we get into AI, I know you said that you’re not really selling on eBay anymore. What is your view of the marketplaces right now? Amazon and eBay, the competitiveness, just the overall landscape? mean, you know what? I think they keep taking market share, which is kind of interesting. It’s amazing to me that eBay

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It’s still doing what it does so much in fact that I’m like, well, maybe I’ll go back and revisit eBay a little bit and see if we can actually move new merchandise on eBay as well. Because I’ve noticed there are people that drop ship our product from Amazon to eBay buyers, you know, which I don’t care. I get paid the same amount whether you do it or me. But I’m like, there’s some things that I would like to just offload.

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on eBay, so I’m looking at it. But I’m thinking that especially when you look at what these TikTok shops are starting to do, that the marketplace competitiveness is about to heat up. Oh, yeah, for sure. Everyone’s getting in the game. It is. Yeah, they have to. They have to because they recognize that, especially with this AI thing, which we’re going to talk about.

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I just think that, you know, it’s going to even the playing field for marketplaces. Like you’re going to be able to build your own marketplace for real now, where, you know, people have tried in the past. But did you leave eBay a long time ago because it just got too saturated because you used to be a platinum seller, right? Yeah, I was a platinum seller. It wasn’t that it got too saturated. They were making too many changes. the changes at the time.

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this look at the timeframe, you know, when they were getting rid of the old CEO, new CEO coming in, trying to compete as if they were Amazon, they weren’t, they didn’t have the same, you know, systems in place. And it just got to be such a pain that I was like, okay, and the sales started slowing. So that’s when I took Amazon seriously. And then suddenly over maybe a two year period, it went from our sales on eBay were here, Amazon here to this.

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And then I was like, you know what? I’m cutting you guys out and just focusing on the Amazon platform. So it was more of a focus play while eBay got themselves together. That makes sense. Yeah. And I know you’ve been kind of on the forefront of AI. You said you’ve been into AI for, I don’t know, it seems like eight years, I think is what you mentioned before it even became mainstream and popular. I’m just very curious, what are some use cases that you’re using it specifically in the context of e-commerce?

10:21
I mean, for e-commerce, mean, more than anything, it’s content creation. OK. Right. So I mean, that, course, is I think that’s the initial phase. Yeah. You know, so people don’t understand. when you think about it, just a week ago, it came out a year ago. It’s only one years old. Right. And now, you know, actually, it’s exactly exactly a year old. Right. So now we can see it can hear it can talk.

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I mean, it’s absolutely amazing how far it’s come in just one year. So what’s going to happen in 2024? Oh my God, right? However, yeah, I’ve been back in the day. I don’t even remember the day I got a question. I’ll tell you my story. What was the initial question? Because I want to answer that. Applications of AI. Applications, right. So like I said, yes, that’s what it was. So it was.

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great for content creation, right? Written word content creation. So writing product titles, descriptions, getting SEO rich descriptions, creating audience segments, creating a very detailed avatar and long tail keyword reports, right? So these are things you used to have to spend a lot of money on or get experts to do, right? And now I’m able to get that done

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with a short command inside of ChatGPT. And we really have seen an increase in effectiveness of a lot of the content we put out. And that’s just on the salesy side. That’s not talking about market leadership kind of and thought leadership type of product or content that you create as well. So it’s…

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When you’re talking about effective, are you talking about effective in ranking and search or you just talk about effectiveness in conversion rate? You know, here’s the deal. I don’t, it’s effective in ranking and search, but search ranking is only in my opinion, based on how much it resonates with our audience. Right? So it’s more effective for me in sales. It’s answering the questions that people are having and the conversations that they’re having in their head.

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when they’re trying to determine who to buy from and when they’re going to purchase. So top Give me an example of how you’ve used it for maybe one of your shoelace products or something like that. Yeah. So like tying shoelaces. Okay. It’s a very, shoelaces are a weird kind of category because shoe people are weird people, right? They’re absolute

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fans of the entire thing. And so having to, it was hard for me to communicate without somebody actually touching my shoelace versus another shoelace, because you think all shoelaces are made the same, right? And once I started putting in, here’s the materials we use, here’s the weaves that we have, and if you have a problem with it, we will refund you or replace.

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Getting that to look, I can’t even talk about it myself, but having chat GPT talk about it has made it very, very real for our laces. So it’ll have that conversation. Hey, do you know how it feels when your shoes start looking dirty? What’s the best way to clean them up? Buy a new pair of laces, right? That kind of thing. So we have, there’s just so many different kind of people. got the skaters, we got the collectors.

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We’ve got the everyday fitness person. You’ve got the runners. They all use shoelaces, but the conversation with each of those are different. How do we make content for those different audience segments for this exact same product? So in terms of chat, you BT that you mentioned several times. Are you using the paid version and do you in your opinion, is it worth it to to get the paid version? So up until so up until now, I would say you can use any version.

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Right. And most of the content that I wrote, I wrote in 3.5. Okay. 3.5. Right. Right. And I’ve really been good at isolating content in 3.5. So most of the stuff I teach for e commerce folks, you can get out of the 3.5 with recent advancements in the last couple of weeks. Yeah, two weeks. Literally weeks like literally last week. Yeah. Yeah. So

15:12
Its ability to do imagery inside of there is you’re only able to do that with plus and the GPTs that are coming out, which are like these little modules that are being made to do one specific task over and over again. You can only get that with four. So I think those are reasons to upgrade to four. But if you’re just creating everyday content, I’ve never found like, oh my gosh, you know.

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This is so much better with four. If you know how to prompt it right, you can get away with 3.5. And I think, you know, in the next six months, four is probably going to be, you know, I’ll say six months to eight months. Four is going to probably be the lowest level as five gets ramped up and put out here. We got 4.5 for now. I upgraded to four right away, like as soon as it came out because of the plugins.

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And the fact that it was only up to 2021, the four lets you browse the web and it just made a lot of things faster. personally I recommend. Yeah. Three. Yeah. What’s that? It’s up to April, 2023. is. Yeah. It’s up to April now. Yeah. That’s all very recent. Yeah. Yeah. So I think those little things have made it worth the $20 upgrade if you can get in.

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because they’ve just put it on hold. They’ve paused it. They really? Yeah, because so many people were trying to get in, slowed it down. It’s like, OK, we need to put this on pause. I didn’t even know that. Good. guess I’m great. Yeah, in the cool room. So what are I imagine you’ve been playing around with it? How are you using the new features? So honestly, I actually wrote all of the prompts that I used to use into a GPT.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

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just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

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Okay, right. Can you define for the audience what that means? Yeah, so basically, chat GPT is basic knowledge, it has knowledge on everything. And a GPT will allow you to create a little robot that only is good at a specific task. Right. So I’ve taken all of the prompts that I used to put in the knowledge base, and are not into the knowledge into the

18:19
general knowledge into this one GPT. So if you go to that GPT, you can write a product title and description, create a customer avatar, get an audience segment report and a long tail keyword report. So those four things I’ve programmed it to do using my methodology. Does that involve coding or is there an easier If there’s no code needed.

18:48
You’re able to do it with natural language and just typing in commands, or you could actually do audio into it as well if you got that set up on your computer. This is only for the latest version, right? It’s only for the latest version. It literally just came out a week ago. Yeah, literally just came That’s what I was asking. You’re quick to the trigger there. Oh yeah, man. like, look, I think, well, we know. This is all the future.

19:16
And honestly, is what we’re seeing now is you’re going to be able to have these little robots do a lot of the research and the repetitive work that we used to have to do manually, or we would outsource. A lot of that is going to be done by these type of robots. So if I’ve got a robot that I can put in a product skew or an ASIN even,

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and it go out to the web and give me all of the product details of other people, all the reviews from other people take out. This is something I do. I’m giving away secrets, but you can get all the reviews. You take out all the reviews, right? And guess what? When it comes to reviews, it’s like, you know, the Olympics, you need to throw out the top score and the bottom score and take the ones in the middle, right? Because the ones in the middle all have the information.

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on how to make a product better, right? It’s like, oh, we like this product, but it would be cool if it did X, Y, Z. So you find all of those and you have ChatGPT go through it, right? And then find the areas where you can make a better product than your competitor, shoelaces, based on what people’s suggestions, complaints actually are. Walk me through the training process since it is pretty new. Like, what does it take?

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to create this GPT that you created? And is it for public consumption right now, or is it behind a paywall? Yeah, actually, let me make sure because I don’t want to turn it off and on sometimes. OK. And that’s because I’m actually asking people to go out there and beta test this for me. Right. So it’s at Ecom AI boss dot com. Ecom AI boss dot com. OK. Dot com. Right. And the training process is

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if you can imagine having a screen that’s split in half. On the left-hand side, it’s where you create and configure the app, the GPT app, and on the right side is just a little bit of a preview of how it’s going to work. So as you are talking to it and creating this GPT, you can see what you’re doing on the right-hand side. And so when you start the GPT builder,

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It literally says, what do you want to create? And you tell it simply with natural language. Hey, I want to create an AI based bot that will write product titles and descriptions for e-commerce products. That was the first thing I would put in. And it would be like, hey, OK. And it’ll start configuring that in the background. You’re not even touching it. Right. Right. And then it’ll come back and say, hey, well, here.

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Here’s what you should call it. Do you like that name? You know, now I don’t know what it said that it should call, but I already had the URL for Ecom AI balls. So I said, no, you’re going to call it that as a name. And then it comes back and says, okay, great. That’s a good name. You know, nothing you ever do. Does it tell you that sucks? It never does. Right. But it’ll, it’ll come back and then it’ll say, okay, cool. Now let’s create a little icon for it and it’ll use.

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you know, Dolly three inside of chat, TPT and create the actual icon for the GPT. And then it’ll come back and say, how do you want it to speak? Right? What kind of language do you want it to be very professional or informative? So you put that kind of information in and literally going back and forth like that in natural language. You don’t have to use a whole lot of, you know, tech speak.

23:10
You just tell it what you want it to do. And as I’m telling it, I’ll go over to the preview, try it, see what the outcome is. If I don’t like the outcome, or if I was saying, hey, I want more bullet points, you know, and then I’ll tell it, hey, let’s make it where it has five to seven bullet points. Hey, let’s make it so the title is no more than 200 characters. Things like that. And it keeps writing the instructions as you’re going through this conversation.

23:39
Ultimately, you end up with a app, which is a GPT. So a GPT is just an app that runs on chat GPT. Ultimately, one more thing, ultimately, they’re gonna build an app store. Yeah, I know the master plan. Do you think this is gonna put all these AI companies out of business that have these very specialized apps? Yeah, it already has. I mean, so, you know, cause so many of them jumped up.

24:08
to do these little specialized things. And I remember when I was seeing it, I was like, yeah, that’s not gonna be around long. Because if you think about it, like I said, I’m a dinosaur, so I’ve been around a long time. But I remember when we used to have word processors, right? And then you had Microsoft Word, right? And the things that the word processor would do,

24:35
Microsoft would look at it and then make it part of Word. mean, spell check and all that kind of stuff, which is AI, right? Yeah. Did not exist in the first versions of Microsoft Word. People built these spell checkers and said, hey, use this, then create your content with that, put it in your Word doc. Well, ultimately, Microsoft literally found out what other people were doing and just put it into the product as a feature.

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So I knew a lot of these things people were doing were gonna end up being features anyway. It’s just the way it has, that’s the way it goes, Yeah, And now that this functionality is kind of sanctioned by ChatGPT, everyone’s probably just gonna use it to create their own apps, right? I think so. At some level, you know, there’s certain people that just won’t be technical. There’s always an opportunity for do-it-yourself. There’s always like,

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people that will do it themselves, right? Then there’s people that need to have some guidance that will do it in a group, you can do it with them, or you can actually have a service to do it for them. I think there will still be a tier of do it for you. That’s my business. Can we talk a little bit more about the training process? So it asks you questions and you respond. How do you add your knowledge to it?

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that is not prompted by the bot? Yes, that is a good question and something, excuse me, new that’s just came up. They’ve got a knowledge section, right? So these are conversations you can, or conversation things that you can put into ChatGPT. You can upload, you know, images, PDFs, CSV files, and docs. And I think a couple of other things, right? So you can upload those.

26:31
and they become part of the knowledge base that the GPT will reference when it needs to respond to customer inquiries. So when I say that I put my prompts in there that I used to use individually, I took them, put them in a PDF doc and uploaded it and it goes and references that when it makes the responses. these are not, know, the responses you get are not,

27:01
just the standard knowledge-based responses. They’re very, very tailored based on the prompts that I’ve put into it. And that’s how I put them in there, was with that. Now, having said that, there’s also the ability to have actions, right? So you can use API actions. So I could have Zapier APIs put into one of my GPTs where it will

27:30
let’s say I wanted it to go reference a Google Doc or a Google Sheet to find out like what is my latest inventory and it’s all in this sheet. Go check that sheet. It could go pull that from that sheet, make the updates and it could then go back and update the record through a Zapier kind of Zap. Lots of possibilities here. So your APIs

27:58
now can actually be part of a GPT. Haven’t gone that deep into rabbit hole yet, but it’s only a week. So I’m guarantee you it’s going to have a whole lot of functionality, you know, as I start learning more and more. And here’s the cool part, right? I mean, do you know about how to use API’s? Of course. I’m a former electrical engineer. Okay, great. Great. All right. So I have no idea how to use.

28:28
All right, I do. I know the concept, but I’m not a coder. Now, I can literally have it go out with the URL to the APIs, go read through the API, and then code what I want the API call to be. That’s just, dude, and I did that by telling it to do it, not doing it myself.

28:53
Yeah, I’ve been using it for coding a lot, because I don’t know the syntax a lot, because I don’t do it every day. It’s not my main thing anymore. But it works remarkably well. I mean, it does put some bugs in there and you have to understand kind of like how to read the code in case something goes wrong. But it’s pretty good. It’s pretty good, right? Yeah. And it’s only a year old. What’s it going to be, you know, in 2025? So we were talking about this before we hit record, but

29:20
I was going to create SteveBot a while ago. And I was always worried that I’m passing all this information to a large company who’s just taking that information and incorporating into the bot. Do you foresee the ability to be able to do this on your own that’s not owned by one of the large conglomerates like Google, Bing, or Amazon? Absolutely. Matter of fact, so you got to think about this, right? There are people out here right now because you know,

29:49
these language models are LLMs and the first L is large, right? And so there’s research all over the place on how to compress the learning experience for these LLMs. And it’s very similar to the fact that we can, I remember my first MP3 player, right, was

30:18
It was a brick. It a big old brick and it held a thousand songs. Was it the Rio? Was it the Rio? I learned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had a thousand songs on it. Yeah. Right. Today, you can get like, you know, five thousand albums on your phone. I mean, give me a break. Right. So the deal is, is that, you know, memory compression is going on at the same

30:48
speed and at the same rate as a lot of this stuff we’re looking at in terms of functionality is LLM. I will project to you that by this time next year, you will have a chat GPT 3.5 version that will run on your phone in its own environment. Right? Where it doesn’t need to go out anywhere. Matter of fact, there’s already stuff inside of these developer communities.

31:17
that are, I was just watching a video on it yesterday, don’t remember what it’s called, but there’s already one that’ll run on your laptop that has all the functionality of a chat GPT 3.5. So it’s totally inside of your own environment. So if that’s something, I think that’s gonna take off like crazy, right? So we’re not gonna run around trying to get to, I’m getting, hey, you’ve reached your limit over here.

31:47
to write this, that, and the other, I’m going to have it all inside of my own environment soon. So yeah, it’s coming. So we talked about ChatGPT. Are there any other programs that you’re actively using, or is ChatGPT the main one? You know what? Honestly, that’s the only one that I’m actually using. And it comes from the fact that I recognize all these other ones are pretty much using that as the back end anyway.

32:16
So the more I learn about it, the better I feel about myself. But I’m really actually waiting for the next iteration of what Google’s going to do. Honestly, between Google and Microsoft, mean, those are the two. And like we were talking, it’s like, yo, either Google, Microsoft, or Amazon is going to be probably the big three that are playing in this game. I’m probably putting my chips behind Google.

32:46
just because of all the data that they have and own way more than anybody else. So if you’re talking about training, they’ve got more data to train on. But I don’t know. We’ll see where that’s going. used Bard or do you use Bard at all? You know what? I have, yes. I’m on the version where you can use Bard with your apps, but you can’t use it with the paid apps.

33:13
So it’s like my JohnLawson.com is a paid URL. I can’t use it there. I can only use it right now in beta on one of the free IDs that I have. So the things that it’s able to do in terms of updating and filling out spreadsheets, being able to do chat type, chat GPT type functions in the doc.

33:42
and having it come back in the doc is pretty exciting. So I can update the doc right there as opposed to, know, chat to PT copy paste, make adjustments there, you know. So yes, I like it. But the content yet it’s not it’s like still for me at GPT three level, not even three point five. So I know what’s happening. You know, you they’re in the background watching loading up.

34:12
and then they’re going to release. So probably at the beginning of next year, Google will come out with their answer to GPT’s Developer Day. And we’ll see where we are after that. How do you think AI is going to affect search? Because Google released the Google search. I can’t remember what the acronym was, but it had an AI response at the very top. How do think it’s going to affect search and all the affiliate sites and all the SEOs out there?

34:42
You know, to be honest, I think they’re in trouble, you know, but I think they were already kind of in trouble. If you think about it, and me and a friend of mine were having a discussion about this, is that the world pre-TikTok and after TikTok, TikTok has changed user experience so that people are not doing the things that they used to do, you know, they don’t necessarily sign up.

35:11
and follow things. They don’t follow things, they discover things. So I think that nature in and of itself was going to be a big impact on SEO. And I think Google’s not stupid, they understand that. When we started this conversation, one of your first questions was about me and content. And I was saying, in the SEO of the content, I said that the content, it’s really about the

35:41
consumers engagement with my content. That is the most important. I don’t care how it ranks. don’t care if they read it and they take action on it. That is the KPI that I’m looking at these days. So I want to usurp the, let’s stuff this with keywords so we can get to the top. Cause you’re not going to be able to get to the top. The top’s going to be basically, you know, curated from an AI and it’s going to serve it to you.

36:10
as a discovery as opposed to a search. So I think there is some deep impact that’s going to be had. you figure like this, it’s a whack-a-mole kind of world for SEO anyway. It’s like every once in a while something pops up and it was a way for somebody to cheat to get at the top and Google responds by smacking down.

36:40
the mole and you know, AI has made the moles pop up even faster. And I think, you know, their response is going to be like, you know what, forget it, we’re going to take up the whole first page. And then everything else will be after that. And it’s close. Unfortunately, that’ll kill their business model though, right? They have to figure out something else. Yeah, but they know that. You know what I’m saying? I’m sure. Hey, they built this thing really.

37:10
You know, they were one of the leaders. So I’m not really sure how advertising. So the real question is how will advertising change? Yeah. You know, it’s not just SEO, but advertising itself is going to change. And I’m sure you’ve you’ve done this. I mean, you’ve had a podcast for years. Right. And I mean, you advertise. Do you take advertising? I did. Yeah, you did. Right. So like.

37:37
in-stream advertising is way more valuable. When Steve holds it up and says, hey, this is what I used to drink, that’s a lot of value. But you just got to have an audience. So I think we’re moving to the influencer as opposed to the SEO results. Yeah, I would agree with that. What about e-commerce? Where do you foresee people shopping?

38:05
going forward, like looking fast forward maybe like five years, what platform? If I said, I don’t know, would that be okay? Oh yeah, no one knows. Okay, so I don’t know. What’s your best guess? My best guess? Yeah. Honestly, think my, you know, I’ve been saying a long time, you know, that something will replace Amazon. I mean, that’s just inevitable. Yahoo got replaced by Google.

38:32
You know Amazon replaced eBay something will replace Amazon. Will it be in the next five years? pretty possibly In terms of you know overarching You know Amazon right now is the big gorilla in the room I see What tick-tock is doing to be kind of interesting? Yeah, I’d like to see what YouTube Actually lands at because they keep testing all of these different things

39:02
but they don’t seem to ever nail it, which to me has always been a problem with Google. They’ve always had the ability to really make shopping, you know, the thing, but they always would kind of sit back and like, but we had SEO and I think they felt like shopping was competing too much with their main core business that they didn’t spend enough time. But I think now they need to make that shift. So wherever influencers

39:32
have the most ability to do that kind of marketing for brands, I think is going to be the most important place. So would you say that if you were to start an e-commerce business today, that content is going to be king? I’ve always said content is king. OK. I don’t know. is that? See that thing? There it is. I wrote that book, Thick-Ass Social Commerce for Epreneurs.

40:01
Social commerce, right? This is what we’re talking about. Today, I wrote that in 2014. And in that book, I said content is king, but context is queen. Right? Can you define that? Yeah. So content is great. Telling me about your new car. Here we’ve got a new electronic car. I’m really digging the Lexus and their new car, right? So it’s the RX, the first RX, right?

40:31
That’s great, right? But if I get that commercial after I just bought the old RX, it has no relevancy. There’s no context for me there, right? But if from whatever they might know about me inside of these engines, it’s search engine, whatever, if they know I’m looking for a car, when they show me that ad, that context,

41:01
because I’m actually looking, deciding, and just really figuring out where I’m gonna buy that vehicle, it has a whole lot more meaning for me. So the more we can nail that context, the content gets way more valuable, right? So we’re moving from throwing spaghetti at the wall to, I don’t know, serving up Italians, I don’t know, a good way.

41:28
Saying that I mean this is when you wrote that book Facebook ads were just killing it, Absolutely busters before Apple kind of made it difficult for them. Yeah Absolutely, right and to be honest, it was even before that You know, that’s because that was when those ads were killing it but a lot of people didn’t even know that the Opportunity was there and how to use it or that it was going to actually

41:57
be a thing, right? So if you look at that book, I’m talking about, oh, this new platform that’s about to take off, which is Instagram. So where are we at with Instagram now? I mean, come on. It’s launched so many brands and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sales. And now it’s the dinosaur. But there’s principles.

42:26
That’s the key. Let me close with this question. Sure. Let’s say you have a product and we’ll just call it shoelaces just for kicks because because that’s what you sell shoelaces just for kicks. Yeah, I didn’t even mean to do that. I’m taking that. What platforms would you be using to create content on in order of priority for you? OK, first, I come from this real thought of one platform. OK, only one platform. I don’t want to be everywhere.

42:56
If you manage to exhaust one platform, fantastic. Start other places. Multiplication by zero is still zero. Nobody watching your stuff on Facebook. Go somewhere else. If I were starting over, I would probably start with TikTok. Okay. Right? And I’m actually opening up a shop right now. More than anything, my coaching consulting thing. I want to know what the opportunity is.

43:26
and how to take advantage of it. But I think that is an emerging platform. And sometimes you gotta be where the puck is about to go. And I think the puck is about to go somewhere in that realm. Will it be TikTok? I don’t know. The government could cut that out in a heartbeat, you know. But guess what happened? They just had dinner with China. Very important for those of us that are building TikTok businesses. They’re getting that

43:56
that harmony back or at least enough harmony to be able to exist in these kind of digital spaces. It’s very important. So I think those kinds of things are a TikTok type platform and with shops are going to be where this stuff is going for sure. So John, where can people listening to this episode find you? Definitely. I’m gonna make it easy. Colder ice. Just look up.

44:26
Colder Ice. Search for Colder Ice. C-O-L-D-E-R-I-C-E. And you’ll find me on every platform. I am Colder Ice everywhere. Of course, my name, John Lawson, but it’s very common. But Colder Ice is where to find me. And if you want to beta test that eCom AI Boss thing, check out eComAIBoss.com and you get straight to the preview of my product that I have a GPT around.

44:56
Cool. Well, John, hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show and talking AI. Awesome. Thanks so much, bro.

45:05
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, if you’ve been on the sidelines with AI thus far, then get off your butt. Otherwise, you will quickly get surpassed by your competition. More information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 518. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com.

45:35
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 it’s sending the course right away. Thanks for listening.