Selling Off Amazon – Is It Worth The Hassle?

Richard Morgan
March 16, 2018

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Joe Reichsfeld works with thousands of SKUs and will try to convince Danny that this is worth the effort.

Chad Rubin is a unicorn with Skubana software and makes lots of sales off Amazon. Viral launch and Casey talking about working with many clients and can pin any of them that were once on Amazon and then going off Amazon and trying to make a dent in revenue numbers but it doesn’t work as well.

Danny will argue the that it’s not worth selling off Amazon.

Joe works with larger Enterprise businesses with lots of SKUs
Selling off AMZ is a mindset
People who were on Amazon and have been suspended and off don’t necessarily look at it the same way
Amazon ‘should’ be only a channel for your business not your whole business
Amazon is 43% of worldwide e-commerce
e-commerce is only 16% of total worldwide retail sales
Facebook has 7 times the users of Amazon – one in every 5 in the US
If you are advertising on Facebook but you’re only on Amazon then you’re alienating people if you don’t have a non-Amazon payment method

Shopify & Pinterest

Shopify is good and Joe is on Shopify but it’s not the answer for everybody when looking at selling off Amazon
Click-funnels can offer multiple payment methods – a small site solution
Moving forward it is to your advantage to have a Stripe account and things available to you for people off of Amazon that you’re driving traffic from
Pinterest is the fastest growing – 81% Female and 87% made a purchase from a Pin they saw

Selling off Amazon Traffic

Build your brand and drive your own traffic – don’t keep relying on Amazon
Don’t drive your traffic just to Amazon for 15% (you could get 4% elsewhere)

The Path for the Amazon Seller to go next

Been an AMZ seller for a few years,…
Once you start building Shopify, conversion optimisation and cart abandonment, writing content, running data to send in paid traffic, driving organic traffic
These are all different jobs that need to be done
But Amazon covers a lot of this for you

You’ve Sourced your Product for Amazon

You have researched for Amazon
Your product and conversion is tuned to AMazon
The Demand is on Amazon
The payment gateway, prime relationship is all with Amazon
You can use ‘sponsored ads’ as it’s like Fisher-Price and easy
But you can’t know how to use a sophisticated tool like Adwords and driving demand off-Amazon
They go build a Shopify store, make it look pretty but it’s not conversion optimised
You open the Shopify store and nothing comes of it

Seasoned Approach

Having a seasoned view to content management
Knowing about conversion optimisation
Building out funnels
Having a traffic strategy to drive traffic to your store
Knowing that this takes time and elbow grease to get it there is a big risk to people coming out of the soft-cuddly Amazon seller platform

NEED TO REALLY KNOW what’s involved

Agree you must have a way of selling off Amazon
You need to really know what’s involved in all these different steps
Lots to put together to get a return on investment
People will be lazy and put their new product out on Amazon rather than do all this work
They will think that it’s easier to go to Amazon

Where do your start with off-Amazon selling

Most Amazon sellers do not optimise and throw stuff up there and get lucky
A lot of Sellers should not try and move off-Amazon they should stay
The focussed sellers that are working hard at their business could do it

First stop after Amazon is Facebook

Facebook is the go-to place if you’re going off Amazon
It’s the next best and has lots of traffic and can drive sales
It’s about mastering FB advertising and finding the target
There’s so much data and so much information
FACEBOOK is to DATA what AMAZON is to traffic

Conversion Factors

It might take you a year to get upto 100 visits per day
Every 100 customers you might do 1 acquisition in Sales
The conversion rate on Amazon is far higher because of trust levels than your own website
Then you need to make sure you cart software is setup right, optimised for conversion
Cart abandonment issues need addressing
The right payment options and car option to pay

Right type of products

Have consumable goods as you only need to win the customer once and they’ll come back monthly
The cost of winning the new customer in the beginning is inherently high
So if you’re selling a spatula, the customer comes and goes again – cot of acquisition is important
Also, if you can manufacture it yourself and not sell on Amazon and be more competitive than the product being sold on Amazon then you have a chance
Having consumable goods that are higher quality and more competitive than anyone else you have a good chance at success

Not whole Shopify straight from Amazon

You need to have a business that you ‘take’ to Shopify
Test your path before going that route
Suggest take 30 mins a day and get an SEO guy to drive traffic
150 ways to drive traffic – 30 mins 4 times a week to learn how to drive traffic
Build on-going traffic
Everyone wants to focus on ONE THING but it’s not a one-thing that makes a business but a lot of small things working together
Put a little bit of effort into lots of things and over time it builds solid steady traffic coming from many different channels
It’s difficult to juggle all this stuff and make it work

Go where the traffic is

There are channels like Facebook, Shopify, Snapchat etc that you can use for selling off Amazon
Market to people where they are
Not all people can be marketed to on Amazon, teenagers can be marketed to on Snapchat
Build a landing page and drive traffic to it to test the market (Leadpages with Ad-words running to it)
Adwords is good for general, Facebook is more Social
Clickfunnels is a good tool to test things with but pricey
Thrive Themes and a good developer on WordPress is great

Test your market first

Buy a domain and put up a landing page
Spend $50 on Adwords
Get a little help to setup the campaign (Adwords is more sophisticated that sponsored ads)
Put one product there and optimise it and learn from it
Learn if it’s relevant for you product
Test Adwords, Bing ads, Facebook, Pinterest and see what gets traction

Bottomless Rabbit holes

A lot of these platforms, Shopify stores, etc can be bottomless pits
Leverage things with very little investment to start
Google, Youtube, Blogger, there are lots of platform that are owned by Goole and Youtube and they rank more easily if you leverage them against themselves
Don’t go to Shopify and listen to all those Shopify courses that push it
Test things first and in the right place where your demographic is