Hi, everyone, and welcome back. It's great to have Hamish Conway from sell global here today. So Hamish, welcome along. Thanks very much, Jessie. Great to be here. My first Kiwi on the podcast. I think, I think, I think I've had an Aussie, but maybe not a Kiwi.   Alrighty, we'll try not to talk in too strong an accent so the rest of the world can understand us. Okay, do you want to give the audience an intro to you and your business and and what you've been up to? Thanks, Jessie. Yeah, so Hamish Conway and I own an agency called Sell Global and we're an Amazon specialist agency and we're into our eighth year    , so I started Selling on Amazon back in 2013, which is a sneaky 10 years now, and with my own products and brands and then that evolved into helping helping existing companies who are generally selling in other channels to also go, well, how do we sell on Amazon?   

 we've worked with over 300, , different brands and, and we've learned a lot in terms of what works, what doesn't, and maybe share some of that today. Awesome. 

When should a brand decide, like, what are the kind of trigger points or what's the stage at which it makes sense to start selling on Amazon? Now it'll depend on which country you're in. If you're in UK and Europe, where Amazon is present or the same in America, then My answer is actually quite early on in the piece.

You'd want to obviously have your brand established, your socials established, your own website working, having all of that done first but as soon as you can then to move into that. And the reason I say that is because Amazon is such a dominant place, a marketplace for shoppers to go, they're in that habit of being there.

So if you, uh, being on the platform gives you a lot more discoverability, there's opportunities to build your brand awareness and actually then draw people from Amazon over into your own ecosystem, you know, because people will. Depending on the product, right? And price point and how curious they are.

They'll go Google you and they'll find your website. They'll look at your socials. What are people saying there? And then they'll decide to buy where it's most convenient for them. And often if they're a new to brand customer, buying on a marketplace like Amazon is really low risk because something goes wrong, they can get a refund.

 So there's a lot of trust that you can, you can borrow from, from Amazon. And then, ideally, people get your product and consume your product and then want to engage more with your brand and then they'll start to follow you.

And then they trust the reviews there as well. And they'll, they like the price comparison. It's not always about price, right? And we'll talk about that later, but. It's an easy comparison for people to make 

if you're in a country like New Zealand, where we are, it's a different story. Like you've really. You know, mostly because you're going to be up against a lot more barriers of distance in terms of freight, you've got compliance and you really want to have your business being more solid and stable and really having pushed the domestic market a lot more before and building up a bit of a war chest to really give it a, give it a decent crack just because you've got higher.

And a barriers to entry, just given that compliance and distance to to deal with. Yeah. Interesting.  What I'm hearing you say is if you're in the U S or the UK, if you've got product market fit and you're kind of. You kind of the product selling people there's a demand for it and you're, you're, you've kind of established the brand then unless there's a strategic reason not to then it could be worth going on Amazon.

I mean, I guess I would counter that by saying sometimes these things can be a shiny object when you. You know, as the entrepreneur, you need to make sure you've got the resource and the time to be able to fully exploit the channel. It shouldn't be something you kind of just like dabble in a little bit, like you need to really commit to doing it.

Well, it will take some time or take, so   do it, but do it really well and make sure you're ready to do it. Well, if you're not keeping up with the orders on your site or you, you're very distracted, trying to crack your marketing on Facebook, it might not be the best time to add another, you know, thing to your plate, having worked with lots of entrepreneurs that can often be the problem of like trying to do too many things at once, I do agree with you on the discovery. I've been that person myself when I lived in the UK and shopped on Amazon a lot, like discovering like food brands and things like that through Amazon and then shopping with them directly afterwards.  

 In terms of like, not all products work on Amazon, although Amazon sells almost everything. Are there any kind of product categories that stand out to you as being like absolute no brainers or product categories that are kind of doing really well at the moment that you think really stand out as being like a great fit for an Amazon strategy?

I look at, this is a really hard one, right? From, from the very beginning, it was, it was super easy to find pockets of opportunity and, and I was buying products out of China, putting a sticker on it and sending it in and anything would sell from spill stoppers to like car seat protectors and, and everything there, but the game has massively transitioned to, you know, the number one thing is you have to have a great product.

And, and regardless of the category. So a product that does what it says on the tin, and ideally it's got a defensible point of difference. And so that could be from a design point of view, from an ingredients point of view, something that is going to be hard for people to copy and replicate. So regardless of the, of the category.

 And because otherwise you, you know, you'll just fall by the wayside because it is competitive, right? There's, there's hundreds, if not thousands of other competing products that you're up against, so it's got to be really good. Then from, then there's probably a few other things here just to go, right?

It needs to be like e commerce friendly, uh, from in terms of size and bulk, right? Because otherwise you kind of get pinged and your margins are really important. You got to have margin and this, otherwise you, you end up not being profitable. So, um, you know, things can be big, but the price point has to be higher, you know, so it was relative to, to that.

Look, I mean, this is such a, such an interesting thing. I, I like consumable products, but again, that's some of the more competitive Earrings and, and it's. It's not impossible to get after these categories, but Amazon does favor the incumbent. Even if your product is better, just the fact it's been on the platform and the algorithm has it locked in on on a whole bunch of keywords and they've got 10, 000 ratings and reviews, and they know the conversion rate, so they're just going to keep on presenting that one there, and you've got to work and earn your way.

through regardless of the category. So the, you know, so health and personal care or grocery, like those consumable type products, those categories can work really well, but it's just a tougher game to actually win. So it's going to take you. 18 months until you kind of feel like you're winning. 18 months.

Like seriously, it'll take that long. So you've just got to be prepared for that game and not expect in those competitive consumable type categories that, because in many cases you're up against multi billion dollar conglomerates. So, you know, they've got big, big budgets. So you've got to pick, pick your battles and, and, and again, it comes back to having a great product and a point of difference.

And so, I mean, for example, we work you know, I'm thinking of consumables like health supplements, right? So there's a company, a New Zealand company we work with who had this broad range of, of supplements, but a lot of them were just in really, really competitive areas. But there was one in around telomere that, you know, one specific.

Niche that, ah, there's not as many people doing that, and this product works really well, and so there's like one product in there. This is in the USA. So, so then, and then that now, you know, six figure channel for that for that one SKU, you know, so, so it makes sense. So, yeah, I mean, look at, in, in some ways what I

like is categories where the market, the competition's marketing is generally weak, and in some cases that could look like in the agriculture. space you know, or like, and some, you know, whereas more of a techie or, you know, engineering type of products there that generally are really good at making stuff look bad at marketing.

Whereas often I, you know, you find with a lot of the be it snack foods or you know, that, that sort of area there, like the marketing can be really good because people, you just got to be really good to sell it. Some other, other things that are harder to make work is clothing. Now, and this, this comes down to a number of factors because Amazon likes evergreen.

Always the same. And you might have some clothing items like a staple, like black black top, you know, that's always going to sell well, but it doesn't work. So, you know, seasonal kind of changing year after year, that's harder for Amazon. And also you just got multiple sizes and returns you know, can be a real.

you know, a real problem in there as well. So it's not to say don't do that, but it's, you've got to have a very focused range. So I might not have answered your question because there's so many moving parts, it's almost like what not to do, but the product that works consumable is good. You know, the margins have to be there, you know, given the weights, but every, every category has possibilities.

And then. Finding how you're going to win in that particular category is the, is the key. Interesting. That's so interesting. So the 18 months thing really piqued my attention. So is that 18 months to be. Kind of delivering a good, solid kind of consistent revenue in a category that's fairly competitive.

 Yeah, so it's generally like if you're starting from scratch because you've just got to build your momentum, relevancy and indexing on, on the, on the key words. And you've, you've just got to build your way up from.

The, the, the deep dark pages, you know, to the, to the first, the first page. And, and it's really a function of what you, what you're able to, or prepared to the homepage. And, and, you know, early on, if you're prepared to do that, that'll help your rankings and give you more speed. Generally 18 months, I'll say that's where you're feeling happy about the profitability.

Cause you know, your organic paid split is starting to, you know, favor organic over overpaid. buT it can move quickly. Like, I know we've had this, you know, two, two stood out to me where it was going along at about 10, 000 a month for the, you know, kind of got it to 10, 000 and it was really hard to move above that.

Might go to 11 or 12. And then after 12 months, in the next three months, it went to 30. And then in the next three months after that, it went to a hundred thousand a month and it was just that kind of a little hockey stick thing where a combination of repeat purchase and indexing and reviews and then it just kind of, and optimization and changes and then it just really started to, to to move amazing.

Yeah. And I'm, I'm from hearing you and thinking about it, it's very different from paid social or Google where you get back what you kind of put in instantly. Like, so yes, we, we usually talk about a three month optimization period where if a brand's new or. Hasn't cracked ad say it takes about three months unless they're really, really unique and have really great ads from the get go for us to figure out the combination of like ads to, you know, the creative and the landing page and the set up and all of that.

But then once we've got that, we can kind of scale it, but it's not,  it can go up and down from there after that. And it's like, it's not like it's like, Oh, it's going to suddenly go from 10 K to 30 K to 50 K. Because it will depend. It could, if you spend that much, but it sounds like with Amazon, once you crack it, it kind of delivers those return.

Like it continues to then deliver as long as you maintain your position, I guess. That's quite exciting to me as an entrepreneur. That sounds like, you know, yes, you've got to have a long term view and you've got to kind of commit to getting there. But once you get there. It's a nice tap to have on, yeah, it's, it is, it's that medium, long, long term play.

And so, you know, and you've got to stick at it there's a brand who does really well on Amazon out of New Zealand, 15 million haircare product, Boldify and the. And, and the, the interesting thing there is, you know, asking, asking them the question around, you know, what's your secret sauce and, and it's actually consistency.

It's constantly doing the basics really well, making the tweaks, making the changes and just eyes on the eyes, eyes on it and constantly improving. And then it's, it's the steady, steady upwards trajectory. So it's wow. Amazing. So do you want to give us an example of like a client you've worked with that's kind of had that success 

what strategies did you employ? What does that day to day kind of consistency look like? So, so it's one, actually one of our first clients in the agency back in 2016. So they sell these beeswax crayons and they so they were, you know, a circuit that was selling through retail, retail channels and a little bit on the website, but.

We took the, they, they really shared three SKUs and one hero product and around, and these are crayons that your kids can eat and they're food grade and amazing, right? So talk about that defensible point of difference. And, and, and there's actually quite a few factors come into play here, like an even, even price because it was a premium product.

Now, a lot of people go, Oh, can I do premium? Premium on Amazon, you absolutely can. So they were, their price point for these a 10 pack of crayons, you know, about yay, yay, big, high, you know, little ones for kids to hold easily and what have you, was 22. 99 US dollars, which is around 30 at the time, it was like 32 to whatever NZD or, you know, a lot compared to what they were.

They were literally double the price of what they were selling them for in New Zealand, in the shops, the retail price. So, but, and, and compared to Crayola, which was about one third of the price, and, and interestingly, they outsell Crayola on Amazon with these premium crayons. So it's a really interesting story.

But they, I mean, so it was easier to get going at that, at that stage, and so they had things to kick in really nicely. But then how they grew is they, you know, they had some longer, skinnier crowns, but then they, they hanging off that hero product, which still sells like crazy today. Like this is evergreen thing, right?

It's there. It's still the main product, but then they've added. That this new product extension, so they've taken the, you know, expanded what the brand can do to like bath, you know, bath crayons, you know, that, that actually come off or bath bombs and cutlery inbox. And so they've really started to build a brand, you know, around the, not just the, a single SKU, but they've really built the story of the brand.

And, and then, and then also grown to other countries and just consistently looking to, you know, so they're in the UK, they're in Germany and all through Europe, and they're in Australia now. And, and even I think Japan coming up and so they've consistently just gone right. What's next? And, but made sure the fundamentals.

You know in play and every time there's been a, an upgrade every three months Amazon does something different that they, they then they do that thing, you know, improve the A plus content because there's now new options there or it's just that consistent improvement there over time. And now, I mean, very, you know, multi millions on, on the platform.

So. It's an interesting example, starting small and then just building, but that's been a seven year, probably, you know, coming eight year journey, right? But it's, but that's one, one there that springs to mind. Yeah. So great product from the get go premium, which gives nice kind of margins for them to be able to scale the business.

uNique point of difference, but then you guys launched them. What was it? You that actually launched them on the platform or they already dabbled a little bit when they came to you? No, we, we, we launched them from amazing. And so what does that launch process look like? Client comes to you and says, we've got this product.

What are you actually doing for them to ensure they have the best chance of success and getting, you know, Getting it to work in that 18 month time. Yeah. We start by looking at, let's have a look at the demand, you know, and there's tools that we can use. And if you look for them on Google, you can find them. But a bunch of them there and around what are people searching for in the estimated estimated search volume? Because Amazon's the only one that really knows it.

And when you get an account, you actually can then see the actual search volume. But for that category, you, you start estimating. What it is, and then we look at the competition to go, okay, well, what kind of sales volumes are they doing? Again, there's some other tools. There's one there's a number of them there.

There's like Helium 10 or Zonguru would be two, you know, kind of basic ones there to start with. So you can kind of estimate the sales. They're not very good at estimating Australia because we got a lot of data for Australia and we, and they're out by a lot, but that's another story. So you're looking at the competitive set to go, okay, what are they doing?

Well, what are they ranking for? Are they doing a good job of their brand presence, et cetera. And we're really trying to find this, you know, how do we go and compete? We're looking at the value equation of you know, price to what is the. You know, what are people getting for their money and, and what's our offer going to look like?

And, you know, can we compete? So we do that background search, like really important to understand the size of the prize and, but understand how you're going to compete. And then with that there, then we, we roll into the commercials and we go, okay, well, based on. You know, what could we charge and where we're going to need to charge?

What are our margins? Amazon takes 15 percent on the, on the top line commission. If you use their warehousing, which is highly recommended that you've got FBA fees, that will depend on the size of the product. It might be, you know, 5, for example. I'll use that as an example there. And then, you know, we work at a margin level skew, or skew, skew level margin.

And and then we start to go, well, that won't work. What have we bundled? You know, what if we did a six pack instead of a single pack? And you kind of, again, start to play around with the offer to make sure you've got margin there. And really you're looking for margin that is. Definitely at a GP level after taking into account Amazon fees, your cogs, your freight warehousing, excluding ads for now, you want to be 30 percent is a good target.

Definitely above 20. you just can't, it's just not going to. Going to work. And, and then it's like, okay, we make some decisions there might reduce down. Okay. These are the skews that make the most sense that we've got the highest probability of success. And then we do a channel forecast going right?

What's our ad costs likely to be here? We can find. The cost per click and then go well and the we know the typical conversion rate for products at different price points and how to make them convert and so we look at conversion rate we're looking at the organic paid split and then we go well you're gonna need to invest this much in ad spend per month to kind of get this sales velocity might have to change price at the beginning to get more velocity and get the conversion rate up and so we we look at those kind of tools and then go okay 12 months this is what we could really expect, is that worth playing, playing for?

And, and then it's really then making a, a, a yes, no decision about, about the channel. Now, cause before you invest that time and energy to go, let's do this, we want to make sure that, that it makes sense. There is a third piece. So, you know, competition, commercials, and then compliance. There is compliance to consider in terms of it's boring, hate it, but it's there in terms of packaging or, you know, safety labeling on there.

And you know, if, if you're selling it to the U S you've got FDA, if it's food or health supplements, et cetera. So you've got to make sure that's all covered off and or child children products certificates. And there's all those sorts of things there that a lot of people, big mistakes people make, they kind of overlook that.

And that'll just stop you on day one, you know, so it's really important to, and we've got a long list of, there's at least 21 items on it that we know things that go wrong from trademarks to you know, trademarks being part of it, that's actually really important. You want it in the country, you're in, not hard to get, but as long as no one else has already got that trademark, which is.

You know, that actually right there stops a lot of people going into, into another country's like, ah, okay, that brand's taken and then little Segway having a trademark on Amazon gives you what's called brand registry, which opens up a whole lot of marketing options, including a plus content storefronts, video ability to video ads.

So it's really important that you have that actual trademark locked, locked in. So quick question. What is a plus content? Also, I mentioned it a couple of times. If you look on Amazon, when you open up, you have the titles and bullet points, and this is on a desktop at least. And then you have like six, seven photos.

But then if you scroll down a bit, you've got. Some additional content there that you can put in and around the brand you can show other products like comparison charts that you can do of your products. And it's a great way to handle a lot more of the concerns or objections and a better shopping experience on your, on your product listing.

On a mobile, often that A plus content comes up higher, higher in the, in the, in the experience. So yeah, so it's really Yeah, and I, and maybe I'll touch on that on that now as well. So it's kind of like, first of all, we're just going to go, is this a good idea? Can we do it? And often people at that point go, ah, right.

There's a lot more to this than I thought. I like it, but that's next year, you know, or we've got a few other priorities to do first, you know, that, that, and, but that's really useful to, you know, there's no point playing a game. That you don't actually know what the the playing field is and what the rules are.

So, so that, that's often really the best way. If it's a yes, then it gets down to opening an account. And Amazon, oh my god, like this is a major pain. Like it's the hardest account you'll ever open and try and keep open. And particularly in UK, Europe, they just want to know everything. It is crazy. So getting an account open, but then the, the brand content and the product listing content, this is a, it's like the foundation just must do really well piece like world class should be the benchmark.

And, and this is where actually for marketplaces, Amazon has a lot of scope for what you can do. You do a good job with Amazon and then that can, That you can actually use it and not all even on your own socials or on other marketplaces as the, as the base baseline, but you've got, you've got your individual skew listings with images that often shoppers are only looking at the images.

So your images have got to have like. Key messaging embedded in it with text and that's all they saw. You're going to answer their questions, handle their concerns or objections in advance and, and get them to hit buy now before they scroll and see all the competing options. So you've got that. A plus content we talked about before, there's great opportunities to cross sell or upsell or downsell and tell a bit more of the brand story.

And then you've got a storefront, which is like a website. And you have different tabs for different categories. Great for video and and, and a great customer journey, almost decision tree type of thing. You've got posts on there, which is a bit like Amazon's kind of answer to, you know, social. You know, social posts, people can follow you on there as well.

And so that's really important to, to get right. If you don't have as many skews, it's a, you know, even if you've got a three kind of three minimum is what you really want to go in with. You can do that and it can just be simpler. But it's actually quite a few touch points in terms of your brand that you just really, you know, big mistake to see people who dabble at it as they just make a meal of that and then conversion rates drop and it just doesn't work.

So That's really key part to get right. Interesting. Yeah. There's a, there's a ton to it. Definitely. Understatement of the year. Yeah. So

we've talked a bit about this, but are there any other big challenges that DTC brands face when selling on Amazon? You know, that you've kind of come across that. A typical kind of pitfalls or mistakes they make you mentioned not kind of optimizing their profile and using all those opportunities, anything else that's kind of in the compliance, obviously, but anything else.

yEah, I mean, compliance is usually it, you know, from, you know, shipping into countries, you know, that take that stuff seriously, like that's where details matter more than anything. And then actually, it's just Amazon. It's kind of like a lot of people have a love hate relationship with it because there is just weird stuff that happens that there's no logical reason to it that you know, listings can be shut down accounts can run into problems there.

So it is just, you know, you'll think it shouldn't be this hard, but it is, it is. So that's probably the thing. And there is, you know, obviously I've got an agency. So we help companies and that works for some and not for others. But either way. Whether you work with an agency or not more. So if not, then, you know, you've really got to self educate as much as you can in terms of these, these nuances, get into some forums or groups there where people, you know, can, can help with the weird stuff.

I mean, I guess it's very similar to Facebook and Google advertising where you can get your account or your ads disabled quite at random sometimes.    It's just something that happens. And as an experienced agency owner, I know that it happens a lot and that like, there's, you know, there's ways to fix it.   Yeah, it's I mean, like, we've got a, we've got a client at the moment who, you know, with Halloween coming up at the end of the month.

So they've got this peak, peak month and they, they spell that they sell. Yeah. Effectively glow in the dark spray paint, you know, so it's got this real this kind of long lasting glow And so he's invested a bunch in products, you know, like a lot of products and we've got it opened up the inventory capacity and but if people don't follow the instructions on it that can not work as expected and Like one of my team said, Oh, they got three one star reviews yesterday.

And I'm like, Oh shit. And so, so this, you know, that could like quite quickly become a problem that listening could get shut down. So as you know, so with those. Once they were having to you know, be ready for that to happen, literally, because it's like a disproportionate volume of sales and therefore reviews at the minute.

And so you just can be all over that. That sort of stuff. Yeah.  Can you talk us through like paid Amazon paid advertising? What are some of the best practices for running that? Well, is it essential to kind of launching?

Is it always something that brands will be running or was it optional? How does that all work? Good. Yeah. So Amazon ads is, I think one of the, the best paid advertising opportunities for products. It's, now it's not essential, but very highly recommended. Like it, it is, it is a critical thing. Like if you were to look at the growth of Amazon ads, you know, it was well behind Meta and Google, but it is now.

It's snapping at the heels. You know, it's obviously a lot to catch up because it's very product focused, but it's one of the most profitable arms of the business as well. And, and it's so our take is like, if you are at launching, you have to use ads. It's the way you get on the first page. If you don't, then it's just a very, very, very long road.

Yeah. That there's a lot of ad opportunities, like there's some 48 different ways to go about it. Like, so it's increasingly become more and more complex, but if you break it down into the basic options, you've got the, the sponsored products, sponsored brands, and sponsored display. And then, so sponsored products is the, you know, the, the core one that it started with where, you know, your, your, Either branded search, if people know your brand, you're, you know, you're, you're bidding on that, so the competition doesn't get in, or category search terms that relate to that, such as, you know, kids crayons, or non toxic crayons, for example, you know, for the Honey Sticks example before.

So when people, Type that in, you're showing up at the top of the search, where it's got a little sponsored or if you're using sponsored brands, you could have the whole headline at the top, which will then take people through to your storefront. And then you've got, you have middle of that, that sponsored products, you have middle of the search and bottom of the search as well.

And so they are the core ones there that you just like in the, kind of the engine room, you could say of and you can be targeting other Other specific ASINs as well. So when you open up a product listing off a competitor, um, Crayola, say, then there's advertising options available there as well. So you can target in there now.

I mean, there's a lot and this sponsored video video is actually, if you've got. Good video, 30 seconds or less really goes amazingly well, you know, because it's, it goes right across the page in the middle or it can be on competitors listings as well. So video ads are performing extraordinarily well, but ultimately what you do with advertising starting out you kind of go broad, you're trying to find out, well, what are the performing search terms?

And then you, you move those into exact and, and then you can start to optimize the, the bidding there, like the broader, it's, it's a higher, well, that's going to perform less than exact. So, so that, that's one thing there at a, at a high level, probably nothing unusual about that, but account structure is really important.

In terms of, you know, often people will have high price products with low price products all in the one campaign or high converting or low converting it and it just messes with the metrics and it just means it's going to put budget to the one that's performing better and the one that's not.

It's just not going to get anything. So we, we're really big on splitting out as getting more and more granular. Like we'll end up with in some cases, like 10, 000 campaigns, you know, that are splitting out by SKU and, and search term search term and different bid types. So that, that's if you've got like a couple of hundred.

Products that you're marketing, it can, it can get quite big and to do that, we also use software AI that primarily helps with the, the bid management and the budget management and will you know, transition from research into exact for us, you know, and so it works to, to targets, but. Mostly the account structure, people just get that really wrong.

I mean, look, super complex area, but at a high level, it's like absolutely using it. And it's a, it's an essential part of the success criteria for Amazon and you, you do it well. And and. Keep on adding new targeting types, and we, we like to measure TAR costs, so total advertising cost over sales, rather than A costs, because the whole point of advertising is to get your rankings up so your organic searches increase as well.

So, so we, if you're keeping TAR costs, 10%, you can ramp up your ad spend. aNd, and your sales will go up, but you know, you're just operating inside of that, that channel and, and that's really how to, how to scale. It's just getting more targeting types, more impressions just that, that's really how, how you can scale.

And it's great to see when, when that happens, how brands can. Quite quickly, like we had a food brand that was sausage casings, would you believe? Talking about niche, like it started out and, and we just applied that, you know, a strong tacos at the beginning and within, I think it was about six months, they were doing 30, 000 US a month.

So it was and, and the graph was just upwards and to the right. Amazing. So yeah, I think tacos sounds similar to what we would talk about in like DTC is blended ROAS. So we're taking the total amount of advertising spend and then the total revenue that's happened on the Shopify site. And that it's that ratio rather than just looking at what's happening inside the ad account.

Cause we know there's things that the ad account is driving organically, but also. Organic traffic is driving the paid, so it's really difficult to separate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly the same, same concept. Cool. Okay. And then just quick one on pricing strategies like you mentioned, you know, working through with the beeswax carrot crowns brand, like they were pretty new to market.

So you could probably figure out a price that's going to work and hit the margin they need. How does it work when a brand already has a price on their website? Do you have to match the same price on Amazon or is it sensible to go more expensive because people won't be paying shipping? Like how does that work?

Yeah. It's a really. It's a really, really good question there. The consideration is that rather, I mean, there's again, a number of ways to do this. You might have products on Amazon that you don't have on your website. Well, they could be specific to Amazon and that gives you a bit more freedom. Typically though, you, if it is a like for like, um, You can be the same or exactly as I said, less to offset any shipping that, that may be, may be required.

I think there's probably like out of the gate, you go, well, this is our target price where we want it to be. But, you know, prices is definitely a factor in building velocity. Velocity on Amazon is really important because it's showing relevancy and which is conversion right for every hundred people that hit.

You want to be converting the average is 10%. You know, like Amazon's average. So it's kind of higher than, than a DTC website. So often out of the gate, we will have a lower price. That could look like either from a coupon or. Just a straight out lower price and then you can increase it gradually.

You can't, you can't just go from 20 bucks to 30. You've got to do a dollar at a time over time to lift it or Amazon, um, doesn't like that. But that, and because of the sheer volume of people coming through the site, it doesn't matter. Like you, you just have this launch window that that's what you're doing for six weeks where you are just going to have a lower price to get that velocity because that will then help you.

I remember when I was selling car seats and car seat protectors in Italy and Spain, and I, for whatever reason, it had picked up the UK 9. 95 and made it 9. 95, and at the time that would, it should have been like 15, but I I ended up, and I didn't pick this up for three months, so this is a bit poor, but it ended up, but it means it was the number one seller in Carseat Protectors over three months.

Again, this is back when it was easier to do this. And then I bumped it back up to 15, but it stayed the number one. So it was kind of an interesting little accidental experiment, but Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, coming back to pricing strategies, one, you've got to be making margin, but two, this is where you, you know, considering pack sizes as well, because depending, like often we'll have companies will go, we've got a lower price product here for people to try it.

And then we've got a bigger bundle here for, for those that are repeat purchase, right? That's a better bit of value to them, but you know, the bundle bundle works. So you've got to consider that. Like we've had some companies start out with a 10 pack, but the price point was maybe a bit high. Like when you get over 50, 50, you know, you've got to work a bit harder to sell, but they end up going with a five pack and then straight out of the gate that worked better.

And so sometimes you've just got to experiment with different. Pack size to see what's going to work and even if you've got that value of the bigger one it's better But you still got to get people in you're gonna get that entry Yeah, price point as well. So it's man. It's a really interesting one, but you can do premium like yeah, actually the honey sticks example tested 1999 and it didn't sell any better At a lower price.

So, you know, so it's 3 extra actual GP. It was interesting. Right. Those little tests. That's where you get a test and experiment. Yeah. That was one that's brought out as like, interesting. Just put that back up to 2299 because it's making more money. Yeah. That's so fascinating. Yeah. There's so many variables to test and I'm sure a lot of kind of psychology goes into it as well.

Yeah. Hmm. Awesome. So before we wrap up what, what do you see on the horizon for Amazon? Like anything kind of big changes coming or trends that you are seeing that you are kind of planning ahead for? Yeah, there's, it's changing all the time and a lot, and the key thing at the moment is driving off Amazon traffic.

TikTok, Pinterest, Google Meta using Amazon in the US at least, has introduced Amazon attribution where you can get a, a rebate of 10%. So normally you've gotta pay 15%, but you can get back 10 of that 15. So 66% of it you can get back. Wow. . So it's really, you know. Amazon's going, hey, we don't want you to buy off these other platforms.

We want people to, we want people to buy on here. So we'll reward you for sending traffic to Amazon. So, and, and there's even an algorithmic boost as well. So yeah, so with influencers going, hey, here's an attribution link and you, you, you can, you can track this or Pinterest just to, you know, as it's kind of opposite, that'll have a longer shelf life on it.

Or Google ads, just focusing in on like three or four of the main search terms you want to be ranking for. And, and this is where it, it it's, it's hitting. So it's kind of building your own audience and controlling your own audience. And I really see, and this is for a lot of the people that you in the DTC space, it's not just one thing.

Like, I don't really recommend people just go to the States and just to Amazon. Like that's a bad idea. Like I'm really hard. So it's more around what is the whole ecosystem that we're operating in here and, and it all feeds each other and it's like a rising tide lifts all boats. So it's, it's really thinking about how you incorporate all of the, you know, Amazon's one marketplace, it's obviously a dominant one, but considering marketplaces, your own socials and how do you Get it all working together well to either send traffic to Amazon and then those people, you know, back it maybe with an insert card there to get them back into your socials.

And so you can control the conversation with them. So it's really that whole integration of the omni online omni channel approach is really what I think. Brands want to be paying attention to. Yeah, it's the same message that I preach to our clients. You know, you can't just run ads in a vacuum. You have to, you know, have a great website, have great social media, have email marketing, have a position, a point of view, you know, a story and be consistent across all of those and have great customer service.

Like we're building brands here. I think the days of like just being able to. Like you did buy a product in China, stick a sticker on it. It's very unlikely that people are going to make their millions from doing that. Only. So yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting times. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming along and where can our audience follow you and hear more from you and and sell global.

Great. So we're at gosellglobal. com. That's probably the easiest place there. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming along and I'll see you soon. Great. Thanks very much, Jesse. Appreciate it.