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- [00:00]
A
I would say 95% of people I talk to on a day to day basis don't really think about Amazon the way that they should. And these are people with multi like eight figure businesses, some of them on Amazon. So the people doing over a million, over 10 million a year often still don't think about the way that Amazon operates in the right way.
- [00:19]
B
Hey there. I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband, dad of three and the founder of Everbee.
- [00:24]
A
Ever be. Everbee.
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B
Ever Be. Where we serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe, I believe every single human is a creator. And I believe every single creator should own a business. A business that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built online is where creators, entrepreneurs and leaders get real insights, real stories and the edge to build something that actually lasts. This is where the next generation of builders get built. Sean. What's up man? How are you?
- [00:56]
A
Hey, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
- [00:58]
B
Happy you're here. Very excited about our conversation. We've already talked a little bit and talking about a little bit about your story and, and where you live and stuff like that too. But I think it'd be really good to let people know. Who's Sean Stone?
- [01:11]
A
Hey. So I'm Sean Stone. I live in San Diego, California and I run an Amazon advertising agency called Stones Goods. Yeah. And I'm, I was telling Cody before we got online, I had a goal of producing a certain amount of content this year just to make sure that I give back to the community that's kind of served me. And so, you know, that's, that's why I'm here.
- [01:39]
B
Very cool. Well, it's cool because you're, you're here because, because you have, you have value to bring to our audience. And that's what I'm most excited about. And I, I'm really, I'm looking forward to that because there's a lot of people that listen to this that are different phases. People are just starting their online business. They're like, I have an idea, or maybe I don't have an idea yet. I just want this like lifestyle freedom and I want to start an online business. They kind of built online somehow and they're listening to us. So today we'll be talking about Amazon primarily and that's a vehicle to do that. There's also, you can start on Etsy. Cool. You could also start on Everbee Store just like. Or you could also like start on WIX or Shopify or things like this too. There's a lot of different vehicles in order to like have that online business. Today we'll be talking about Amazon and Amazon ads more specifically, right?
- [02:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, Amazon ads and Amazon organic sales and how to kind of how those things work together because it's different than most other places on the Internet.
- [02:38]
B
Very cool. Which would be fun too for me because I haven't really thought so much about Amazon FBA for years, like myself personally. But my first online business, like my first real online business was an Amazon FBA brand, which was really cool to like start that because I think I started on hard mode. Actually. It's actually a little bit more challenging than I think the other. Well, maybe you could tell me how about that. But maybe before we go there, how did you even get started in Amazon and how's it been for you?
- [03:14]
A
Yeah, so back in 2017, I was somebody who worked in B2B software sales. And to be frank, I didn't necessarily love it. It was something that paid the bills and produced an outcome for me, but it really wasn't my be all, end all. And I kind of had the fortunate situation. I know it sounds. This is going to sound kind of funny to say, but the fortunate situation of randomly getting fired one day, even though we had, like, produced some great results, the company I was working for just suddenly cut me and three other people in the same day. And so I kind of found myself in a situation where I was saying, well, okay, I don't necessarily need to go get another job at this exact moment. And that time freedom for the brief period of time kind of led me to ask myself, like, okay, what do I actually want to do with my time? Like, what. What does my ideal lifestyle look like? And that kind of thing. And so what I did was I just bought people dinner, bought people drinks. You know, I'm a pretty social, outgoing person naturally. And so I used my only skill of being able to talk to people to figure out, like, okay, well, what, what does this next chapter look like for me? Like, if I had to copy someone, who would I copy? And I met one of my friends, Evan, who had been in Amazon in 2017. He'd already been doing it for three or four years. And he was like, look, man, if you want help, I'll help you. But most people who ask for help never take action. And so I said, I will absolutely take action. And so what I did was I started an Amazon brand and had products up and selling within, I don't know, 60 days of making that decision.
- [05:15]
B
Cool.
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A
And that's kind of what led me down this journey.
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B
How many years ago was that?
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A
So that was 2017. Is that eight years ago? Eight years ago, yeah. Wow.
- [05:26]
B
Okay, cool. Very cool. And then when you got fired from that job, that's, it's. It's inspiring because. But you also said something that was interesting. You said that you had. You didn't need to go get a job right away. Why. Why did you not need to? Because did you have money saved up or did you have some other cash flow stream? Like, what was it?
- [05:43]
A
Yeah, I just, I had money saved up. That job kept me so busy, I didn't really even have time to spend money.
- [05:50]
B
And you were a tech sales, so you probably did pretty good. It sounds like you're.
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A
I. Yeah.
- [05:56]
B
Ask you a ballpark for. For anyone listening to this or whatever you're comfortable sharing, but like, how much did you have saved up? Like, what gives you confidence?
- [06:04]
A
What.
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B
What's the amount of money that gives you confidence to be like, all right, I can change my chapter. I could change my. I could change my careers for you?
- [06:13]
A
Yeah. So what, What I looked at was like, what's my lifestyle burn at the age of 28? It wasn't a lot. And so I looked at it in like a number of months before I was in a.
- [06:24]
B
Right.
- [06:25]
A
Yeah, it was over 100 grand. So I like, I looked at it and I was like, at my current lifestyle burn, I could go probably two years. Yeah, two years of like purposely losing money and I'd still be okay. And so that was what I looked at and I said, okay, it's probably worth taking a shot at living my dream life instead of living a life I knew I'd be unhappy with.
- [06:53]
B
Cool way to. Really cool way to look at it. And I look at things like that too now. I don't think I did it when I was probably. I didn't know to look at it that way. Probably younger. But I think anybody listening to this, it's a cool way to look at that. Like, look at your lifestyle burn, which is basically just like, what does that mean?
- [07:07]
A
It's like your.
- [07:07]
B
Your monthly expenses on average. Or you can take total, let's say six months of expenses, total them up, divide them by six, and like, that's on average. Let's say you spend, say, 10 grand a month. Let's just say make it easy. So you spend 10, 10k a month. How many months did you. If you had no income at all, could you like, survive with the money in your bank, it could be zero months. And if that, if it's actually really common to have zero months. So don't feel weird if you're. That it just means that you have to like optimize to build that thing up. And it could be six months and it could be two years and it could be. Ideally it's forever. Eventually when you have interest income and things like this, um, that's the goal for like true financial freedom. Uh, but I love the way that you think about that. I've never had that conversation before, so I wanted to make sure I noted that.
- [07:54]
A
Yeah, and I like, you know, I really appreciate you asking that question because I hope that somebody on here is thinking about that. Like, hey, how do. If I'm looking to really escape and get into financial freedom, one of the best things to do is to figure out a way to not spend too much money. And I mean that's different for everyone. You know, not everyone who is listening to this is going to be a single 28 year old guy with a, a decently paying job. Like some of you might be, you know, living a completely different life. You might have kids, you might have family, you might have other dependencies in your life. But the, it, it doesn't matter what your circumstances, this principle can still be applied to your life if you think about it in the right way.
- [08:43]
B
You know, it's really cool now that you, you hit that. Actually I just, it just occurred to me when I first started Everbee. So this is over four years ago or probably when I had the idea for everybody five years ago. There was a point where I had a job and then my wife had a job and then I also had a side business which was Amazon. I was also selling on Etsy and selling all these other things too. But I didn't have, I actually owned real estate. My first company was in real estate investing. So I actually owned rental, rental properties and also flips. Oh wow. I was like trying to sell them, they're on the market and stuff. But there's eventually when I made the decision I'm like oh, I'm like asset. I look really great on assets but I have cash poor. And I remember feeling like dude, anything could shift here and I'm out of cash. Like I, I will like my, my, my family is at risk because I have just no cash in my bank account. And it really was a flip, a switch that I flipped at that time because I was like, okay, got it. I'm going to narrow in on what I'M doing next, which is the next chapter for me, which is what you did and for me. And I want everyone to learn from this is I started using my resources to turn it into cash. And so what I did is I'm selling every piece of real estate. I, I mean, I like sold every single thing I had, which wasn't a lot, and it wasn't that much equity, but I just started being like, okay, I'm gonna need 12 months of Runway to do this next chapter. And I don't want to like have my family suffer so much. So I'm gonna stack it to where I have 12 months of Runway minimum. And so I sold, I sold everything and put it all in the bank account. And I'm like, cool. I have 12 months to make this thing work. 12 months is enough time to make something work if you trust yourself. Just keep going. So anyway, side story.
- [10:30]
A
But that's, wow, that's, that's really, that, that's really inspirational, you know, like, there are so many people who use family as an excuse not to start a business. And I, like, I truly respect you for thinking about how do I make this work. So, I mean, congratulations to you, man. That's super, super cool.
- [10:49]
B
Thank you, man. I appreciate that. I, I think where people right now are, have families right now and they're just like, or maybe it's you. Some people like you, they're like, I don't have family yet, but like, I better be super risky now because I'm gonna miss my window to be entrepreneur. Do you ever feel that way?
- [11:05]
A
Every day. I'm like, I gotta charge forward non stop.
- [11:09]
B
Yeah, super cool. Can I, can I give you something though?
- [11:12]
A
Yeah, please.
- [11:13]
B
I have three kids, married, just hit our 10 year anniversary. And dude, the fear, that fear right there, that, like, fear, whatever it is, that worry of like, I lose my entrepreneurship if I, when I have kids. It's a, it's a myth. It's not true. It is. I became more inspired, more, more ambitious when I had children and it, I came laser focused when I had, when I had kids, and the more kids I had, it seems like it just kind of like amplified, which is really cool. It might not go forever, but my point is, it's like, I don't. You're an entrepreneur at your heart.
- [11:54]
A
Having.
- [11:55]
B
Throwing a kid in the mix, two kids in the mix, is not going to change that. It's going to amplify it anyway. I'm not sure if that's helpful for you or anyone.
- [12:03]
A
That's incredibly helpful. It's more than anything, it's a nice reminder because it's like, look, I don't currently have kids, but it's definitely something I want. And when I look at it, I think to myself like, yeah, if it's something that I want in my heart, it's never gonna leave. Like that spirit's not gonna leave me.
- [12:22]
B
No, no, no. I mean some people, it does, but they didn't leave them. They just like suppress them and they like, they have, they love fear. But if you're thinking about burn rates and you're thinking about all this stuff now, like that stuff will just continue to carry on. You're gonna just, it just keeps going.
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A
That's exciting to hear.
- [12:41]
B
Yeah, really cool. I know we haven't talked about Amazon yet, but yeah, I'm just happy to be here. Let's talk about, let's dive into Amazon. Let's get a little bit more granular.
- [12:52]
A
Yeah.
- [12:53]
B
So maybe let's target the person who is already selling on Amazon and that person, let's say it's me. And I'm just like, cool. I just launched my first fitness product on Amazon. I'm super excited about it, but it's like my first business and I don't know what the heck I'm doing. What are some things that I should be thinking about right now and, and doing right now and how can you help?
- [13:15]
A
Yeah, so I would say 95% of people I talk to on a day to day basis don't really think about Amazon the way that they should. And these are people with multi, seven figure, multi, like eight figure businesses, some of them on Amazon. So the people doing over over a million, over 10 million a year often still don't think about the way that Amazon operates in the right way. Amazon in my opinion. And we're going to start at the very bottom and we're going to work our way up. But it should make sense pretty quickly. Amazon is a search engine just for products. So on its own, pretty simple. It's like Google, but just for products. A lot of data now shows that consumers skip googling products and immediately will just go to Amazon whether it's the website or the app on their phone. It's one of the most popular apps on the Internet. Yeah. High intent and you know, most people who are going there are looking for something in particular now. It's not the only place. You know, I like when I work with some of my clients, I recommend they get onto some kind of web property they own as well as well as Maybe other platforms, whether that's Etsy or TikTok, shop or anything else or all of those things. Yeah.
- [14:42]
B
So every store I agree with, I'm preaching the exact same thing. Like your home base should be the platform, whether it's wix, Squarespace, Shopify or ever be store unbiased. And then you have a sales channel, Amazon, which is an excellent sales channel. Is that correct?
- [14:58]
A
Yes. That you're, you're making my point for me better than I can. So thank you. But the, the way that you should think about Amazon is different than the rest of the Internet. Everywhere else on the Internet there's no built in traffic engine for you. And so on Amazon there is a giant gigantic amount of traffic that is already there, that is there for you to capitalize and for you to start making what we'll call organic sales or sales you don't pay for on the platform, aside from the FBA fees and the referral fees. But like you're not spending any money on advertising to make some of these sales. Now really what you're looking for is to maximize that percentage, the percentage of sales you're making that are not paid because those are going to be your most profitable sales. And so there are a lot of acronyms and things like that that people talk about like ACOS and Tacos and organic sales percentage. But let's just throw all that stuff aside for a second and think about this. From first principles, what Amazon is, is a comparison shopping search engine.
- [16:06]
B
Okay?
- [16:07]
A
So what shoppers are doing when they show up there is they're not just looking at any specific product, they're looking at a product and comparing it with other products. And if you look at Amazon search results, that starts to really shine through. So that's like the, the first major point that I want everyone who's listening to this to kind of take away is like comparison shopping search engine. Does that make sense?
- [16:34]
B
Does, does make sense.
- [16:36]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [16:37]
B
So how do you take advantage of this?
- [16:38]
A
Yes, exactly. So how do we take advantage of this? What you need to do is you need to think about if I am trying to take advantage of the organic sales percentage, then what? Or try to take advantage of the organic sales and the organic traffic that exists on this platform. Then you need to ask yourself, okay, why do they give organic sales and organic traffic to any one product? And the answer is actually quite simple. And so we're going to talk about this all from the concept as if there's only one person who works there and his name is Jeff. So imagine this entire website, this entire e commerce experience, all of the operations, all the logistics, is just run by one guy named Jeff, Jeff Bezos. And he doesn't have any employees or anything else. So you got to think what's going to make Jeff the most amount of money. Well, it's actually not the highest price product. It's not actually the product that's willing to give the most fees. It's not the product that somebody spends the most advertising on. None of those things actually matter. Jeff. What matters to Jeff is the product that is most likely to convert quickly, leave the shopper happy, and most importantly, bring that shopper back. Because Jeff's entire game is not, I want somebody to buy the most expensive thing at any one time. Jeff's big move, his main play in his playbook, is bring that shopper back 24, 25 more times this year. I mean, I don't know how much the average person listening to this shops online, but there is a big subset of the American population who just buys and buys and buys nonstop on Amazon all day long. Yeah. And so Jeff's big goal is not to make the most money on any one individual transaction, but to maximize customer lifetime value across all the products that are selling on there on his, on his website. And so Jeff's goal is to get the highest converting product at the top of the page in front of that shopper so that they see it, they buy it, they love it, and then they keep coming back for more. Excuse me. And so that's, that's really like the first principles of selling products on Amazon and how to become one of those people who sells 10 million a year on any one given product.
- [19:19]
B
Okay, so now it does make sense. And now if we take that, then it's like, okay, what are the inputs to make sure that that happens? Like what do we need to do to take make sure that happens? Right. Is the next questions to solve for.
- [19:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we're going to get a little bit nerdier here, but I'm going to try to keep it at first principles because I, when I started selling on Amazon, podcasts like this were like gold to me. I would be walking around the streets with my AirPods in and like listening to things like this non stop. So I'm going to try to be as helpful as possible here. So we have an acronym, there are lots of other acronyms. This is just the way that we recommend you do it. But it's promotions, advertising, inventory and rankability, which is a word that I made Up. But when I define it, it'll make a lot of sense.
- [20:10]
B
Pair, pair, pair.
- [20:12]
A
T, A, I R Pair. Perfect. It's the pair process. And so I'll hit you with like a one sentence definition of each of them and then we'll kind of dive deeper into anything that you're kind of interested in.
- [20:26]
B
Beautiful. So before you do that it's yeah, if, if I'm, if I'm Cody and I'm starting a fitness brand right now on Amazon fba, I have a product, it's live and if I apply the pair, I should, the outcome is I'm going to succeed on Amazon. Correct? Yes. Beautiful.
- [20:42]
A
Yeah.
- [20:43]
B
Now what is the pair process? Tell me, tell me.
- [20:45]
A
Great, great, great. So there are no secrets. Like I throw this information everywhere I possibly can because I think it's so helpful. So there's no back end. The pair process is this promotions. You want to run promotional activities on Amazon that are going to maximize your conversion rate both in the short term and long term. So there are things like when you go on to any big keyword on Amazon, you search vitamin C, you'll see this badge that says limited time deal. That is a badge telling you that somebody is running a short term deal on the Amazon website. There are also coupons, there are also subscribe and save coupons. There are all these different things you can use to basically tell somebody, hey, we're giving you a special discount here, take advantage of it because it's not going to be around the entire time. And so that's the first thing. And they're primarily their main goal is to enhance your existing conversion rates. So that's the, the first thing. Perfect advertising is Amazon's built in advertising platform. So it's now the third biggest on the Internet behind Google and Meta. And really it works very similar to the way the Google keyword bidding system works where you spend money on specific keywords and then you get some data back about the amount you spent. Your clicks, your, your impressions of clicks, your orders, your sales. And then you can calculate things like conversion rate, return on ad spend or ACOs in the Amazon world. And it's basically that's advertising. And you can use your advertising to enhance your organic ranking by continually telling Jeff, hey, when people see this product on this keyword, they buy at a high frequency. You should start to push this up the search results. And especially when you combine a promotion with really effective advertising, those two things together will drive up a lot of good results. On. Yeah, so that's, that's already the secret sauce. The other two things are how to. Like, they're the two insurance policies. Okay, so inventory. Again, we're gonna go back to this analogy of a guy named Jeff running a website. Jeff really wants shoppers to come back. And one of the key things he's kind of noticed is that when shoppers get their products really, really fast, they tend to keep coming back because they're like, this is an amazing experience. Amazing experience to the point that Jeff actually tells you in the search results when a product will most likely arrive at your door. And so one of the things that you need to do to optimize your performance on Amazon is make sure that you have enough inventory that Jeff can take it and put it all over the United States so that it's not just you in your local place where you live that gets two day shipping, one day shipping, or even in some cases, same day shipping. But everybody else across the entire continental United States also has that experience. And so the people who are selling a ton of product on Amazon are usually optimizing their inventory levels to really maximize their performance across the United States, not just having a little bit of inventory in there to kind of take advantage of something. It's like, how do we give Jeff's customers an amazing experience every single time? Make sure you have enough inventory for Jeff's customers to get your product very quickly and optimize around that. Beautiful. Yeah. And then the final thing is a made up word called rankability. Now, I really just came up with this word because I needed some way to describe this concept. And the concept is, how do I take a product? And through a combination of promotions and advertising. So pa. And if I were to use a combination of those two things, do I realistically think I could get this product into the top five, top five organic spots on Amazon? If like, yeah, on one of its major cubes, not if on one of its major keywords. And so the general idea is I've got a list of the major keywords, and I've kind of done my analysis of my competitors on those major keywords. If I use promotions and I use advertising in a really thoughtful, intentional way, do I think I could get myself into the top five? If yes, that product is rankable. If no, that product's what we call incremental. And you can still make an absolute ton of money with incremental products. But generally, the people who make the most money on Amazon, both from sales dollars but also profit, have at least a few rankable products, and they use those rankable products as kind of like a flagship in their store on Amazon to get lots of new customers to kind of like bring people in and then by bringing all those people in, kind of maximize their profitability.
- [26:20]
B
Okay, so if I'm Cody, I'm selling a fitness product and let's call it a foam roller. Right. Which actually I was selling foam rollers back in the day.
- [26:30]
A
Cool.
- [26:31]
B
Highly competitive at the time. And foam roller was like a hot thing at that moment. Ranking for that. And how would I determine if this is rankable? Like, am I looking at foam roller and then look at black foam roller and look at, you know, foam roller massage and foam roller vibrating and foam roller this. And I just pick one or I just pick all of them and like how do I determine what's rankability?
- [26:56]
A
Yeah, so I, I have a horrible acronym for this too. It's bucket bcit. But it's so bad, it actually becomes memorable after a while because you're like, it kind of sounds like I'm spitting or something. So benchmark, compare, isolate and track.
- [27:17]
B
Okay.
- [27:18]
A
And so a lot of people, this, this kind of immediate comes back to your product strategy. So you, you want to even use this process before you launch a product. Okay. You want to look at the product and benchmark what you think your product can do compared to all the competitors. So like, do I think that my product is going to do better than my, my main competitors products before I launch it? Okay. And having like a good reason why, generally speaking, we ask our clients in one sentence, why do you think this is going to work? Give me an, give me an answer and I'm going to give it a score out of 10 and that almost always gives us a really, really solid.
- [28:08]
B
What's a good answer?
- [28:10]
A
A good answer is we have a low cost of goods sold and a, and we've made a, you a new unique change to the product that's going to make the product experience better. Okay, that's, that's a great answer.
- [28:27]
B
Clear differentiation would be a great answer. Like let's say I have a toothbrush and I'm in the toothbrush category and somehow I've like, I made this toothbrush made where it like I put it in my mouth and it just like cleans all my teeth for me. Um, and there's nothing else really on there that does that. I know there's. That exists nowadays. Cause I have one. But. Yeah, but that would be a measurable improvement to the toothbrush experience.
- [28:50]
A
How about this to stick with your foam roller example that this Is just something really embedded in my head. Right now we have a foam roller in our house, but we also have a lacrosse ball. And they kind of serve different functions. So the foam rollers to kind of like take care of big body parts. But then the lacrosse ball is sometimes really handy for if you've got. Which I often get like neck pain, like I get like a seized up neck, neck or something. Now you could sell a foam roller plus a lacrosse ball. And if you find some way to get them both really cheap, you could go after foam roller plus lacrosse ball or you know, like mobility neck rolling kit. Yeah. Like you find, you find some keyword that makes a lot of sense, but then you take it a step further and you say, you know what, the average person has one or both of these in their home already. But what they always end up doing is they end up losing the lacrosse ball. And I'm telling you this personally. I have had a neck, a pain in my neck since last Thursday at exactly 7:15am when I woke up. And we have not been able to find low lacrosse ball in that time. So imagine on the foam roller at one of the sides, you had a little attachment where you can keep your lacrosse ball. That would make a great product. And I'm telling you that from a source of pain that I am currently in.
- [30:20]
B
And there's a million examples, there's a billion examples of those things for each specific product. Like a hairbrush that turns into a hair dryer also. Which now exists. Right. But it didn't exist. Yeah, right.
- [30:29]
A
Yeah. But the, the, the changes, the improvements, they actually don't have to be that big. And a lot of the times, like, and something else that can be an improvement is we just found a way to make this product cheaper. I've seen that quite a few times. So it really, what you need to do is put yourself in the mindset of the shopper and say, like, okay, what is a better. Like, what would be a better result for the shopper? A lot of the time the answer is just like, I want the same thing for less money. And that is, that is a big thing that Jeff likes to provide. Like, he's. Jeff thinks about himself compared to the rest of the Internet and says, like, there are all these Internets that charge for shipping or all these websites that charge for shipping, that have slow shipping, that like have an overpriced product. So you're just paying for a brand. Jeff doesn't want any of that to happen on his store. Yep. But coming back to book Hit benchmark. So you basically figure out your competitors conversion rates. There's a bunch of different ways to do this. We, we have a YouTube channel and our first video was like we built a custom GPT that shows you how to get your competitors conversion rates on Amazon. So yeah, super cool, plug in my YouTube channel. But like yeah, benchmark compare. So then you're going to compare your conversion rate to your competition. And so Cody just launched a foam roller and he now has some advertising data because you needed to turn on advertising campaigns to look at how you did compared to your competition in your first few weeks of selling. I would be looking at all of my search terms that produced two or more sales and if you have more data then keep raising that threshold because you'll get closer and closer to statistical significance. But the point remains the same. Like if I have a bunch of advertising data now how do I use that advertising data to kind of figure out how I how my product specifically converts compared to my competition which I benchmarked in the first step. So that's benchmark, find your competitors competition, compare. Look at your conversion rate and compare that to the conversion rates in the first step. Does that make sense?
- [32:54]
B
So far does make sense.
- [32:55]
A
Yeah.
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B
And what, what are the. You work with a lot of clients and you also have your, your own experience selling on Amazon. Do you still sell on Amazon today or do you mostly moved it?
- [33:06]
A
No, I, I transitioned full time to Consulting in 2019 when I went, went out of stock for like the fifth time and I had a Facebook messenger full of people asking me like hey, can you run my ads for me?
- [33:21]
B
Very cool. That's obviously market pool you.
- [33:25]
A
Yeah, perfect.
- [33:25]
B
What is like I want to kind of size up the opportunity for selling on Amazon for Cody looking to sell foam rollers for example on Amazon. And I have a fitness brand. So I have a, I have a fitness fitness brand on my everyby store. But I also, and I sell there too. But I also want to like I heard about Amazon fba. I'm like I'm going to do it. What kind of, if I executed well, what kind of revenue and profit should I be expecting and that sales channel?
- [33:55]
A
So I hate answering questions like this. So I'm going to say it depends and I'm going to unpack it. I hope that's okay. Yeah, yeah. So what it really depends on is how well suited your product that you're selling on your Everbee store is for the other platforms. Like the other platforms you're considering whether that's Google shopping Whether that's Amazon, whether that's TikTok shop, it's really about like how, yeah. How well is that product suited for the rest of the Internet or whichever other channel? So for example, say you have a bunch of unique features and you have a very competitive price compared to what people are selling for on Amazon, then the opportunity is massive. And it really comes down to what keywords can you capture? Okay, you know, I think foam rollers probably sell something in the top. I would say the top five foam roller sellers probably sell at least $5 million worth of foam rollers per month.
- [35:06]
B
Per month.
- [35:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, some of these guys are selling insane volumes. When you look at foam roller, the main keyword, and then kind of like the top few sellers, the, the opportunity is quite, quite substantial.
- [35:21]
B
Wow. Okay, so, yeah, so the point, it obviously depends on the product, it depends on the market, everything, all this stuff. But the point that I was trying to nail down and you nailed it for me, was there's millions per month to be made depending on the product. So Amazon at least is, is worth exploring. If you're not, oh, if you, if you haven't opened up that sales channel yet and if you are on that sales channel and you're not getting any sales, just learn how to do it and it'll probably open it up for you and it could be a major, it could be the sales channel for you. I personally have Amazon FBA friends that have built multimillion dollar businesses and sold them as well. So I've personally seen it happen. I also ran my Amazon brand not to be to that scale, but it was certainly, you know, it was a revenue stream that was. I could live off of. Right. I could definitely. It was meaningful. So that was really important. I want to wrap up because I know we're, we're getting close on time, but there's a couple things that I wanted to ask. Maybe I'll just, I'll add them into our rapid fire questions. Is that cool?
- [36:21]
A
Perfect.
- [36:21]
B
Yeah, let's do it.
- [36:22]
A
Of course.
- [36:23]
B
Giveaways, Amazon giveaways. Are they still a thing?
- [36:27]
A
They're not so much a thing anymore. They've morphed. There is a different, there's a different version of the same thing where you give product to micro influencers and then those micro influencers search, find and buy and then they have to post about it. And that's like the workaround.
- [36:44]
B
Okay, so you're giving away. Do you still like mathematically work out how many you have to give away and how many posts you have to have. Is there still, like, a formula to that?
- [36:52]
A
There is, but the people who. A lot of people actually just got away from them because you can use advertising and other things to get better, faster results with more control. Got it.
- [37:06]
B
Without having to, like, coordinate delivery and making sure they post and all those. The human things.
- [37:10]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [37:12]
B
Okay, beautiful. What does it typically cost for an Amazon to set up an Amazon sales channel? Total, like, all in?
- [37:21]
A
I. I think a lot of it comes down to actually just doing the work. We don't set up Amazon sales channels for people, but really it comes down to, do you have all the paperwork necessary? Do you have the bank accounts that. Inventory.
- [37:34]
B
Like inventory, though, if you can.
- [37:35]
A
Oh, inventory. I would try to launch. I. I would try to launch a product with a thousand at least, units. So whatever your cost of goods sold is multiplied by a thousand is probably where I would want to launch for that fact.
- [37:51]
B
$5 per unit. A thousand units. Five thousand bucks all in. And then probably you should have a little bit of money in the bank, maybe a couple thousand for advertising, probably to get that going.
- [38:01]
A
Yeah. So I. I personally would recommend somewhere between half to 75% of your cost of goods sold as available advertising budget. If you have less than that, you can kind of shoestring it together. But the more you have available for advertising, the more you kind of set yourself up for success. And some of that actually comes down to being willing to just have a lower price point.
- [38:31]
B
Okay.
- [38:31]
A
And so you kind of need to think about your advertising budget as, like, money you're willing to spend, and there are a lot of different ways you might end up spending it.
- [38:40]
B
So If I buy $5,000 with inventory, I spent 29amonth or whatever it is for an Amazon seller account, or 40.
- [38:47]
A
Bucks or whatever it is. Yeah, 40. Yeah.
- [38:49]
B
And then 5,000 worth of inventory. And then. Okay, so that's 5,000 and 25,000. 40. And then how much cash should I have available for advertising in this case? Thousand.
- [39:02]
A
2500 to 4000 in the bank.
- [39:05]
B
And then at that point, as long as I've done my research and worked the pair strategy and maybe worked with Sean and your team, chances of success are much higher in this case. Yeah. Beautiful.
- [39:18]
A
Exactly. Yeah.
- [39:20]
B
What's the biggest brand that you've ever. That you have a client as a client, like, what kind of revenue are they doing? Just inspire somebody.
- [39:26]
A
Oh. So actually, a lot of the clients we work with, they stop working with us when they cross about the $15 million to $20 million a year. Cool point. And the reason is because it makes sense to bring somebody full time in haps at that point.
- [39:43]
B
Good problem to have.
- [39:45]
A
Yeah, it's a great problem to have.
- [39:46]
B
That's your job. Well, job well done. Right. Kind of thing. Like.
- [39:49]
A
Yeah. So a lot. It kind of. You kind of end up hitting a fork in the road. Some people will sell the business at that point. So we've lost quite a few clients to them selling their business, which my favorite way to lose a client, honestly. And some of my clients are actually in the process of trying to sell their business. Cool. So. And yeah, that's never been. Some people like you. You help people fire you, like all the time. All the time.
- [40:20]
B
They outgrew you. Yeah, of course you want that. The market's always growing, which is. Which is a cool thing with E commerce. Yeah. Yeah. Sean, thank you, man. For. For this time. Where can people find you? Learn more about you, all that good stuff.
- [40:34]
A
Yeah. So stonesgoods.com is our website. Sean Stone. Amazon is what you can search into Google and you'll find me pretty quickly. You'll find my LinkedIn, you'll find. You'll find my YouTube channel, which is Sean Stone Dash Stones Goods, Amazon Tutorials. So again, there are lots of places on the Internet. My main goal is to provide as much helpful information as possible. If you want to work with us, you can reach out to us. And yeah, we'd love to do an audit of your store. It's something that I do all the time just because I find it interesting. So it's. Yeah, it's pretty great.
- [41:14]
B
You charge for the audits?
- [41:16]
A
No, no. Yeah. Free audit of your store or free strategy call. We love talking to people. I mean, I don't know if you can tell from the way I'm talking about this stuff, but I absolutely love it. I find it so interesting and I think it's great that I have a job where I get to do this all day.
- [41:34]
B
Yeah, it's a blessing for sure.
- [41:35]
A
Yeah.
- [41:36]
B
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Sean. I appreciate you coming on and excited to have you back on in the future.
- [41:41]
A
Yeah. Thank you so much, Cody. Thank you for having me. And I hope that I was helpful to everyone who listened to this awesome talk.