Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:00]
A
The number one thing Amazon looks at is sales. Then the second is relevancy from a keyword perspective. Third is fulfillment. Are you fulfilling by Amazon via Prime or are you fulfilling by merchant through a three pl? Price and promotion influences it, reviews and ratings influence it. And then the quality of your content.
- [00:18]
B
Hey there. I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband dad of three and I'm the founder of Ever Be, Ever Be, Ever Be Everbee, where we serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human as 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 builders get built. Will, what's up man?
- [00:53]
A
Hey Cody, thanks for having me man. I'm excited to be here.
- [00:56]
B
I'm excited to have you too man. Thanks for, thanks for coming on. Also a fellow host of Selling on Giants podcast.
- [01:05]
A
Anybody who's in the marketplace world, that's, that's where we discuss all the tricks, trades, secrets and hacks that we, we, we find for, for brands.
- [01:14]
B
Super cool. Well, really grateful that you, you're sharing your time with us. I'm excited to kind of talk about the e commerce landscape, talk a little bit about Q4 Prep, things like this, talk a little bit about what you guys do and kind of what are you guys seeing in the market when it comes to like building brands online. But maybe we could start with just Will. What is, what is Will? What does Bellavix do? All that stuff.
- [01:36]
A
Yeah man, appreciate it. So I've been doing e commerce mainly advertising since 2010 or 11, give or take. Always worked in E commerce, always through agencies. And then in 2018 started Bellavix and we were hyper focused on Amazon as I worked in different roles and because I was working in e commerce it was hard to avoid Amazon. So started working in it, got a lot of experience with it and then like any entrepreneur, I was like I could do this better myself and, and started Beloved. And our mission is to provide world class customer service to help brands scale on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. And we've been doing that since 2018. So we was seven, eight years, we've done half a billion dollars in sales, uh, we've worked with some world class bland brands as well as some medium sized companies and it's been a fun journey. I like E commerce And I like working with entrepreneurs.
- [02:37]
B
Super cool. To give us a, give us some context about who you guys typically work with. Like you guys, you said medium and then you also said like you know, bigger brands of course. And the whole idea is to grow. So I imagine they start at medium and they grow into big. Yeah. Where does typically like your ideal icp, like person, perfect brand come in? What's, what does that typically look like revenue wise and then maybe what kind of industry too?
- [03:00]
A
Yeah, sure. So we can work with a variety of different brands but typically our average customer is probably doing between like 5 and 10 million a year via E commerce. And they are large enough where Amazon is generating some sales but they're not large enough to hire a full time team. So usually they'll outsource to an agency and that's, that's usually kind of our sweet spot. And then we'll help them scale on the marketplace, you know, hit their sales goes so on and so forth and that's awesome.
- [03:36]
B
So when you say.
- [03:40]
A
Sorry, there's a.
- [03:40]
B
Little lag, we're fighting through it. Oh good, there's a little, there's a little lag but we'll fight through it. Okay, so you said about 5 to 10 million in E commerce meaning like they have their own sites, typically their own store. They're pushing 5 to 10 million in revenue there. And then they usually come now to, to scale on marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart.
- [04:02]
A
It'll vary. It's a good question. So they'll be doing 5 to 10 million across all E commerce. They may already be on Amazon, they may be selling on Walmart. They also may be in other places but generally digitally wherever they sell they're in that range and usually they're in it's omnichannel now. So they're going to have you know, three to five different places you can, you can buy their stuff and then for our more enterprise level brands they'll have like retail distribution. So you'll, they'll be at Target and Walmart and that presents a whole new set of challenges in terms of like map policy and msrp. But those are typically the brands we work with.
- [04:43]
B
I love that. What typically, what kind of categories? You're about to talk about that when we jumped on top of it.
- [04:49]
A
Yeah, all good. So it varies on the category but we have the most expensive experience with supplement beauty home specifically in the kitchen space and then pet, pet toys and treats. And supplements are like our, our main areas where we do a lot of, do a lot of business.
- [05:08]
B
Interesting. So it's not even like this one, one niche that you guys are like kind of carved out, you guys legit. So, so, so it sounds like the majority of these, these businesses are the same, just with different type of products, different niches. You guys don't feel like you have to specialize in any, any type of category.
- [05:25]
A
Yeah, that's a good, good point. And our specialization is the marketplace. It's Amazon and Walmart. We have categories we stay away from. Like, we don't do sexual wellness. We don't do certain types of toys. We stay away from like industrial products. So like there are certain categories like we don't really mess around in for various reasons. But yeah, with Amazon, it kind of works like what's nice. It's kind of like it's very templated. So it's like this is how the system is and it's its own ecosystem. So when you understand the fundamentals, it works. And why we like certain categories like beauty and supplements is because like a lot of times it's a consumable product. So like lifetime value is something we can work on building together through their Amazon or Walmart storefronts.
- [06:19]
B
Super cool, man. That's awesome. What do you. Let's jump into Q3, Q4 type of checklist that you're talking about. What should brands be thinking about? Any type of size of brands be thinking about rolling into Q4, yes.
- [06:31]
A
As you roll in the Q4, no matter what, like, well, it is somewhat category. Like if you're selling plungers or things that are not very giftable. Business as usual, man. Just keep doing what you're doing. But if you're like a giftable category, people are coming to marketplaces in general looking for some type of promotion or deal. Even if you're a premium brand, I recommend if you are going to run sales one time a year. It's around that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, massive amount of shoppers online, they're all looking for a deal two weeks before they're all window shopping. So from an advertising perspective, you want to make sure that you're. You have a promotion locked and loaded, ready to go for that period. And before that, you're getting in front of customers who have shown intent that they're in market or that are, you know, building that list as they're getting ready to go holiday shopping.
- [07:29]
B
What are there any other things like email? Like do you guys, do you guys leverage the email list, the email thing, all that stuff too, Even though they're selling on marketplaces Is it something that you guys can leverage rolling into Q4 as well?
- [07:40]
A
Yeah, so we love to. And not all brands do it. So for brands that are like built first on Amazon, they'll generally leverage their list. The reason a lot of brands don't is because like obviously if you send that traffic to your website, there's less fees, you own the customer data and even when our brands ask us. So for like Amazon holidays like Big Deals day in October and Prime Day in July, we recommend that you let us email your email list and put out some social media posts. Buy it on Amazon, but any other time of the year, generally I don't recommend it. Send it to your website and it spills over. At this point they don't cannibalize each other. The omnichannel shopper shops where they're going to shop and it's more important to have the products available. So an investment in Google, an investment in Meta, it's all going to pay forward onto Amazon one way or another. So that's how we look at it. And inventory planning is really important. So August, September is really when you want to try to get that in there. I think for, for Big Deals day it's like September 10th and September 19th, which has already passed by the time this episode airs. But for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like mid October is the is when that window closes where you won't be able to get your inventory checked into Amazon fulfillment centers before the holiday rush. So it's important that you know a number one, make sure you have inventory available and it's in route prior to the mid October date which Amazon put out. And then outside of that, you know, make sure you have ad budgets, make sure you participate with a promotion. We have some tools we can leverage like brand tailored promotions allows us to run coupons to customers who maybe didn't purchase in a long time or in market or viewed your product but didn't make a purchase. So we could send like customized offers through some features and creator connections is another one that works really well in Q4 and that's your ability to work with Amazon affiliates. They'll promote your products and what's nice is performance based. So they will buy the product on Amazon and they won't get paid unless they sell, they sell some product and the commissions can be anywhere from 10 to 50% depending on how aggressive you want to be. So those are all like good marketing tactics that work pretty good for Amazon brands.
- [10:13]
B
Super cool and super powerful too. I have a question for. It came to my mind of like when does a brand really start to think about okay, I want to. Let's say I have a store, right, they have an ever be store and they're building their brand and let's say they're doing about $5 million in revenue but they haven't really ventured into Amaz or Walmart or any marketplaces yet. Maybe they're questioning, okay, do I even need to do that? Because it seems like I got a pretty good thing going on over here with DDC and so what's the opportunity? And then the next question to this is how, how do I actually make sure that I get ranked and actually do all that stuff on the marketplace? Because I understand personally from experience that ranking on Amazon and Walmart is a beast and that takes a specialty as well. So what are your thoughts around all that?
- [11:02]
A
Yeah, beautiful. That's a really good question. So in terms of entering Amazon by 5 million, you should be on it. You don't necessarily need to be investing and you probably should have been on it like $3 million ago for argument's sake because your customers are there at the other day 50% of E commerce still happens on there. I've seen reports saying search E commerce oriented searches start on Amazon at like 60% or something like that. So the data shows that you should have a presence. And like what's the drawback if you don't first is unauthorized resellers will sell your products. And if you find like Dr. Gundry is a great one in the supplement space. If you go search Gundry, Dr. Gundry, his ultra beats, one of his beats products are really popular but if you look at the listing, the main image is garbage. There's poor title, there's. If you go onto the product detail page, it's just not a very good experience. And if you click into the reviews and look at a lot of the reviews, it's poor shipping, poor handling, damaged product and poor customer service making these shoppers whole. And they don't know it's some reseller. That's not Dr. Gundry. But because Dr. Gundry neglects this channel, his products have not the best reputation. Meanwhile, on YouTube and on social media, Dr. Gundry is very reputable and he has some top notch products. But it's like because he has all this, he's able to sell it. But obviously because he's not paying attention to marketplaces, people who are buying his product are not having a good experience. The second piece of this too is for sellers who are just not as honest and don't do the right thing. They will make counterfeit products. There's tons of documentaries at this point where, you know, people, somebody in China knocks off a supplement or topical product, they've tested it and found things that should not be in humans or on humans in these products. And it's just a scam. And like we've actually helped brands where a seller comes on unauthorized and we buy the product and find out that it's 100% counterfeit and thank God we got it before any customers bought it. But those are like what you should consider if you don't have any presence and what that can do. And then taking over a product that has three stars because of all this other issues is its own challenge. What was the second part of that question, Cody?
- [13:39]
B
How does somebody get ranked? So it's like, okay, now I have, let's say I'm Dr. Gundry, right? So I have some sort of brand following. But then it's like, okay, well how do I get ranked for these keywords that are important or does it not really matter because my brand is so strong?
- [13:51]
A
In Dr. Gundry's case, it's not going to matter that much. He's done such excellent work outside of the space that like people are searching Gundry, they're searching for these products. So like he just needs to list the products with all the information he already has and people will find it. For most other brands that, that aren't like talent led or they're not doctor backed or just, you know, it's a different story of how they got to where they, they got it needs to be inside their copy. So in the title, the alt text on images inside the bullets, your A plus content, which is the visual content on your product detail page as well as the store which is your Amazon asset. It's your, your Amazon website that nobody else can advertise essentially. So you want to make sure you have those in there. And then we use like I'm a big fan of Data Dive which is a Brendan Young system and they have something called Rank Radar. So like a lot of what we do when it comes to search engine optimization and indexing for keywords is like we want to find the root keyword that has the most volume and the most relevancy to a product. So in Dr. Gundry's case, it's a beet supplement. So beet supplement would be the root keyword we'd want to target and then we would build the listing around that. So maybe like longer tail keywords. People search Bead supplement with whatever root, vitamin C, like whatever that search query is, is kind of to bake that into our listing. Make sure we're tracking how we rank against it. And Amazon has the best seller rank the bsr so we can see what that sales velocity, like how well we're selling for that in a category. And then we usually put a little advertising dollar behind whatever we're trying to index for. So a title, one to two keywords at most inside your bullets, you're going to sprinkle in maybe you know, two to three in a bullet. But you want to be more strategic. It's about conversion rate, not so much about keyword stuffing. And then like the product description, if you're using A plus content, it's hidden on the back end. You would just try to load that up with as much information that makes sense and then that's kind of how you would build it then over time. Are we ranking, are we getting sales? And when it comes to like the formula, the number one thing Amazon looks at is sales. Then the second is relevancy from a keyword perspective. Third is fulfillment. Are you fulfilling by Amazon via Prime? Are you fulfilling by Merchant through a 3/plus? Price and promotion influences it, reviews and ratings influence it. And then the quality of your content. How good are your images? How well are you at illustrating your unique selling proposition that you know to an audience that will see that and just want to buy it. I went to a lot. Cody does that.
- [16:53]
B
It's good. No, thank you for going for a lot too. And I wanted to cut you off or at least ask you more questions in there, but I know we're got this lag thing going on so I'm like wanted to make sure you thought. But we're good, we're doing good. Thank you for that. That's. It's super powerful and I do understand that. And you actually just covered through a lot of stuff that, that I had to do when I was building my Amazon FBA business. My, my first, one of my first E commerce businesses and, and plus more. And the reality is, is like all that stuff, you made it sound like really easy. But that's why you exist, right? Yeah, that's why Bellavix this for all these things. Because there's a lot that has to go into this for people that are owning these brands and they are interested in kind of using agency like Bellavex. Like what is the. What should they be expecting to pay? How should they, how should they be thinking about leveraging, you guys?
- [17:48]
A
Yeah. So our prices vary. A lot of it has to do with, like, the. The size of the catalogs we manage. The more. More SKUs, the more categories, the more time, the more expenses that come with it. It's hard. I don't want to give, like, an exact price, but our. Our average retainer size without commissions is about $5,000 a month. You know, we manage anywhere between 20 to 40 accounts, so you can kind of get an idea of how we operate. But we're boutique, so, like, we're not good for everybody. We don't manage a ton of accounts. So what they get is a fractional marketplace team. So it's a small team. And that's why I said, like, we literally, like, my ideal customer profile is large because they're doing sales, but they're too small to hire a team. And we're. We're typically. We play the role of that team, and because we're. We're playing the role of a team, it's hard to take on, like, you know, I know other agency owners have, like, hundreds of accounts, and I don't even know how they. How they're alive. But it's different business models if you have a smaller budget. I love using upwork because you can get. You can get refunded if they do bad work. The challenge with upwork or any freelance website is, like, unless you know it, you don't know it. You know what I mean? Like, they could tell you they optimize your listings. And what I find a lot of people do who aren't very competent is just data dump. They're like, here's a bunch of spreadsheets. Good luck. Figure it out, sucker. And then they ride off into the sunset with your bag of money. And then on the other side of that, I've worked with and have acquired customers from really large agencies. And large agencies are great because they usually have some type of proprietary software or they have just tons of expertise. But what I find the challenge with brands who end up moving over to, like, a pattern or tenuity, which are huge agencies in our space, is that every position is specialized. So, like, in order to get something done quickly, it requires, you know, almost a work of God to kind of get, you know, if you needed something done asap. And then there's always like, four or five people you have to work with. And they tend to be really much more expensive than what we offer. But they're also, you know, they're working with, you know, your. Your proctor and gambles and your much bigger brands. Too. So I get that. So that's, that's, those are the three for your Lou listeners in case they didn't know. And we're right in the middle. We're boutique. So like we, I feel like we offer fair pricing for what we offer and we, we definitely invest the time. So customer service is important in my humble opinion, for doing this for a while. Difference between a good agency and a great agency is just good, good customer service, good communications and being really organized. So my two cents, Cody.
- [20:45]
B
I love that. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Typically when a brand comes to Bellavix and they're like, okay, let's say I'm doing $2 million in revenue outside of Amazon, outside of marketplaces typically in your experience, I know this is a loaded question, answer the best best that you can and they come on to a marketplace like Amazon or something like this, what kind of would you expect or what would they normally be doing? Are they doubling their revenue outside of their, outside of their specific store or they're like, they're missing a. I'm trying to understand the opportunity that they're missing out on.
- [21:19]
A
Good question.
- [21:19]
B
Right when they're not on Amazon, I.
- [21:22]
A
Would say getting started. If you're already doing D2C and you're already in retail, reasonably you could probably do like between 20 and 30% of whatever that revenue is. So if you're doing a 100,000amonth on your website, you know, reasonably within the first three to six months you could be doing 20% of that depending on your investment. When brands launch on Amazon, generally we can achieve most of their sales goals as long as they, they shave off 20% of whatever that is into a budget for us. And most launches in their first year, it varies. Obviously brands that have like brand equity, like the Gundry situation, you know, they could do a million dollars plus in their first year because they have, you know, good build up new to market brands on the low end, like brand new and they're using Amazon to check the viability of the market, you know, for one to three products, quarter million to 300,000 is kind of on the low end with a small support budget that 20%. So it varies and it's a really hard question to answer, but I'd like to give you a few scenarios based on what I've seen having launched a lot of brands over 15 years, give or take.
- [22:44]
B
No, that was great. That was a perfect answer, honestly. Better than I was expecting actually. So you kind of gave a few different scenarios there, which is helpful. Are you ready for the rapid fire questions?
- [22:54]
A
Yeah, let's do it.
- [22:57]
B
What is your favorite business book?
- [23:00]
A
Ooh, good one. I'm a big fan of Michael McCallowicz. Profit first changed the game for me, and then I've read Clockwork and all of his other books, so. Michael Malowitz. I cheated. It's an author. But Profit first is probably one of my favorite books.
- [23:18]
B
I love that. What is the one thing that you wish that you knew before starting your agency?
- [23:23]
A
That I wouldn't really do the job I did when I started the agency. So, like, I am a. I love advertising. I've been advertising for a long time and I could talk shop all day, but I didn't know as a CEO and owner, my job is mainly sales, recruiting and putting out fire. So it's. I don't know, it's just. I didn't. I didn't expect that would be my job. Not that I don't like it. I love it, but I don't do advertising anymore.
- [23:49]
B
Would you have changed anything if you did know that ahead of time?
- [23:53]
A
No. I like what I do. I love being social and sales. Like, I get to meet people who have, like, really hard problems and it's fun being to help them, like, uncover it and then checking back in in six months and then being like, your team is great. You know, look at all this great stuff we've been doing. So that's great. On the other side, it stinks when things don't align and customers, you know, it just doesn't work out for various reasons. And that's. That's hard part of the job too. But it is what it is. Yeah.
- [24:22]
B
Last question. Do you. Who do you think should be a business owner?
- [24:26]
A
Somebody who's very optimistic. It can take L after L and just get up with more enthusiasm than they did before. I've probably got seven unsuccessful businesses under my belt at this point. And yeah, I think it just takes a special type of person with an attitude. A very the glass is half full type attitude.
- [24:49]
B
Love that. Well, thank you so much for the time, man. I appreciate you coming on and sharing your knowledge and sharing your time with us guys. Go check out selling on Giants podcast. We'll link to that below. But, well, where else can people find you, follow you, learn more about you. Maybe book a question call if they are in that kind of wheelhouse.
- [25:04]
A
Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate it. Will hair like on your head with an E. Check me out on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn and you can always check out our website Bellavix v I X dot com. You can submit a form there to get into the sales funnel or you can email me directly. Hello Vicks. Com.
- [25:24]
B
Cool, thank you. Will appreciate you man. Talk to you soon.
- [25:27]
A
Thanks Cody.