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Ted joins us to talk about Sales off Amazon
- Diversify your risk by selling off of Amazon
- Ted has been selling on Amazon for a long time
- Fall of 2015 when everyone started getting hit with suspensions
- If anyone can snap their fingers and put you out of business then it’s not your business
- Realised he was ‘working for Jeff’
Shopify Store
- Runs on Shopify because it’s configurable if not easy
- Setup the Shopify in November and did some business as sold out on Amazon
- Struggled for a while but kept cranking away at it
- There is so much that you can do using Shopify and you don’t get the same feedback as you do on Amazon
No Silver Bullets
- There are no ‘silver bullets’ to getting sales off amazon
- It’s just an accumulation of things that all add up to increase sales off Amazon
- You are trying to replicate what Amazon has done with an average conversion of 10% on Amazon
- This is done with building trust and urgency with customers as Amazon has built over the years
- You have to build this off of Amazon
- And buyers are more comfortable buying off Amazon now
Branding
- Putting a sticker on something is not a brand
- Ted’s brand actually has a brand with a ‘voice’
- A lot of people building up brands on Amazon do not have this
Have an Identity
- Started as a private labeller doing compression socks and things like that
- Used Jungle Scout to find his niche and understood the niche very well
- Was always good at bundling and that’s why they gained traction on Amazon
- Any time Ted buys on Amazon he keeps the packaging and analyses it for branding ability
- If you’re going to build a store it has to be something that people have a connection to come back time nad time again to buy
- It has to have an identity
- When spinning up a new Shopify store it has to have an identity
Visibility
- Do product inserts like a lot of other private labellers do
- Tried Google adwords that didn’t work out well
- Moved to Facebook and had success with Facebook ads initially
- Are really good at having a self-liquidating front of the funnel – have a breakeven offer at the front and…
- With retargeting campaigns and a good back funnel with upsells via email and everything else (a lot of little things all together – lead bullets)
- Cart abandonment is about 24%
- Spend a lot of time working through what makes a compelling offer to customers
Intentional Interactions
- Very intentional with every interaction that a customer has with them
- Swapping out what Shopify puts in there and using things that resonate with their customers in their brand voice
- A little quirky but works really well with their customer base
- Every interaction is an ‘experience’ for their customer
- Used Derek Sivers email sequence as an example of how they wanted the buying experience from their brand to be like
- Have customers that come back and keeping buying year after year because of that emotional impact and connection
Traffic Sources
- Using Facebook and have used Google
- Found and agency that managed to make them profitable on this
- Started focussing on social proof
- Get organic from Facebook and Instagram
- Were very intentional about how they approached it
- Built beachheads on each of the platforms and drove heavy with Facebook
- Now do Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube
- Getting organic from all of those
- Facebook is the biggest driver but Pinterest is the dark horse due to Google image search helping
- Traffic comes direct from Google Image Search but via Pinterest pins
Site SEO
- Spent quite a bit of time on SEO for `google to establish trust
- Shopify doesn’t let you get totally deep into SEO but we’re in business to sell products not top SEO
- Fine being in top 3 search results
- Write blog posts on websites to seed content
- Syndicate using Zapier to bring people to that content across Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr
- Don’t focus on every niche but just show up and put stuff there
- Paid search is great as it lets you evaluate if anyone cares
- Think of it as a series of nets through retargeting to capture interest
Assess Competitors
- We go through a regular assessment of competitors
- Found that one of them was getting lots of traffic through Twitter
- Can’t figure out how to crack that nut yet, but will keep showing up there and come back in the future
- Twitter can build look-alike audiences on Twitter and market to them there
- Go try to see where your customers are and run with it until you stop getting the growth you want
Revenue Split
- Revenue split is around 50/50 on Amazon but this month might come to more on Shopify than on Amazon
- Walmart really sucks currently with room to grow, the feedback loops are so slow (similar to Shopify not Amazon)
- The SEO aspect of Amazon is the reason and need to get better at it
- Walmart are so hyper-focussed on price that it may not be worth it with our brand – might go white label instead but not sure it’s worth it for the volume
- eBay orders are mostly international customers
- Charlie Munger said – if you can’t be the price leader there’s little benefit in being second best – applies to us with Walmart
- Amazon gives you the tools to go make decisions yourself
- Walmart don’t do that and give you worse tools and no visibility
Shopify to do 50% Sales off Amazon
- No silver bullets and won’t happen overnight
- ToS legal ways you can get customers off of Amazon
- Inserts are key
- Consider that you have a customer base
- Really look at the purchase process for successful Shopify stores and study what they do
- Social proof and checkout process is HUGE
- Pura Vida bracelets – checkout their process and all the things they have to make customers comfortable entering their credit card and buying from them
- They address all the customer concerns in the beginning
- How quick does it ship?
- If I get it and I’m not happy?
- Do you accept these forms of payment?
- Shopify lets you integrate with a wide variety of payment processors – upto six processors increases your conversion rate
Be a Human
- Amazon puts you on rails
- You are not going to convert as well if you’re not a Human
- People go to your About Us page
- You’re not a corporate monolith
- Connect with people and resonate your brand
Send traffic to your own store
- Big new product development stuff is now
- Usually go to Kickstarter and the email lists to drive traffic
- Then after delivered the Kickstarter then push people to the Amazon site to drive the initial traction there for new products
- Don’t get the Shopify Analytics with Amazon
- Can’t retarget on Amazon the way you can elsewhere
- And am building someone else’s business with Amazon
- Backend for Shopify is the enhanced ecommerce portion of Google Analytics
- Use Ad-espresso for Facebook to do split testing
- Most of our customers are male – even though market is not overwhelmingly male
