Drive and Convert

Announcer: [00:00:00] You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.
Jon MacDonald: Ryan, as we approach Q4, it seems new channels are becoming more and more attractive to brands, especially if they're struggling this year and missing those growth targets that everybody wants to hit.
And, obviously, there's TikTok, but Amazon is the largest ecommerce channel out there. I would say. I've heard 40 percent plus of online transactions.
Ryan Garrow: Kind of disgusting how big the number is.
Jon MacDonald: That's a lot of books to sell, right? But just having your products on Amazon over the years, I know you have had a lot of success there, but just being listed on Amazon doesn't mean you're going to boost sales or profitability.
So I'm interested because Logical Position is one of Amazon's largest agencies. I know, as I just said, you have scaled brands to seven figures personally on Amazon. I [00:01:00] think you could probably shed some light on what a brand needs to do to be successful on Amazon. Am I accurate in that statement?
Ryan Garrow: I hope.
There's some people that have probably taken my advice and if it worked, great. Let me know if it didn't. Nah, don't tell me. It'll just make me sad.
Jon MacDonald: That's right. When we hit episode 200, we can include that. Yeah. People
Ryan Garrow: submit man, you really screwed my business up, Garrow. What'd you do that for?
Jon MacDonald: Love it. And we'll just stop the show at that point, right?
Ryan Garrow: Yeah. But it's true with just Amazon, the sheer scale. Size of it. Brands can't shouldn't be ignoring it. And it does surprise me still that I come across a lot of brands that are still not leveraging the platform yet. And they'll come at me and I've had a lot of questions over the last.
It's probably two, three weeks about Amazon. I was like should I get on Amazon? When's the right time? I don't know what to decide. I'm like, you know what? We probably need to address Amazon. It's probably been a little while as I scroll through some of our historical podcasts where we really dug into Amazon, what it's doing and what people need to do to be on it.
Jon MacDonald: Well, with all of that ecommerce volume that Amazon has, and as you [00:02:00] just said, the kind of need to be on there or the questions that come up about that. I think the best place to start is should every brand be adding Amazon to their channel mix? I think it's a valid question.
Ryan Garrow: It for sure is. No matter who you are, you can't ignore 40 percent of all transactions in the ecommerce.
That's just an astounding number. Hundreds of billions of dollars being done through that platform. But I would caution if you are a sub segment of e com where you are a Sure play retailer, meaning you're just selling other people's products. You don't have any of your own. I'm not confident Amazon is going to be a good place for you.
I actually look at Amazon as a retailer more than I do a channel or a marketplace necessarily, because they do take some of your margin. It's not awesome often from a Martian standpoint. And so Amazon is not going to nurture them as a customer of yours. That is an Amazon customer, pure and simple.
What I look at as like a pure marketplace where it is your customer and you can do some things with that entity, that customer, even within that entity, then it's a little bit different. But, it is an Amazon [00:03:00] customer. You can, you need a trademark as well. I think I would probably put that in there as, have your own products but also have a trademark.
So if you can't go to Amazon and register something there with a trademark and get a brand, that's Amazon. On Amazon, then I think you're going to struggle a lot more than you would unless you have that trademark.
Jon MacDonald: All right. That makes sense. That's a good kind of guidepost in terms of where you should be headed.
And if it makes sense to even be on Amazon. So let's suggest that you are have your own products. You're not just reselling. And let's say you have a trademark for the, for your name or products. How do you get started at Amazon? What do you recommend in terms of the first step? And if you're already on Amazon, maybe double checking that these are done.
Ryan Garrow: Maybe you haven't done some of these. So outline, the kind of the foundational aspects of success on Amazon would be use the Amazon brand registry. It's not hard to find, go through the process. They basically verify that you are the trademark holder. And there are some scenarios in which you can act as the brand on Amazon.
So we have some of our [00:04:00] retailers that we work with that retail brands. They got permission to say, yeah, I'll be the brand on Amazon because the brand just doesn't want to do it. And so something to consider, but having a registered trademark, it does give you extra access to add inventory. You get your own storefront.
So like when I had Joyful Dirt, it was Amazon. com forward slash Joyful Dirt. I assume it still is. I haven't been back to it, but you can brand it that way and use it. There's a lot of value there. And then you've got to get your products on there. Depending on how many you have may not be easy. If you only got a few.
It's not that hard to manually build them out, create it. It's called an ASIN. That's essentially Amazon's version of a GTIN or a UPC code. It's how they categorize a product says this is a unique identifier. Everybody that sells this particular product will reference this and we'll collect all the reviews, that one number.
It's a character series of alphanumeric characters. If you have a lot of products, it may make sense to leverage a feed system that can just [00:05:00] submit them all and create them in a batch and oversimplify that process. So we work with a company called Cetanomics for that. There's a few out there that'll do it.
Some of them more expensive, less expensive. Some have more. White glove service and others, but there's, there are ways to get your products built at scale on there. . Occasionally you're gonna have some struggles if you've had some retailers of yours that have created products on Amazon before you've moved in there, and you've gotta somehow either work with them to get it if they're friendly, if they're not.
And you sometimes have to work with Amazon to get that there and make it yours.
Jon MacDonald: And that's where having the trademark. comes in, I assume, right? Because then you can say, Hey, they shouldn't have that.
Ryan Garrow: Helps, but Amazon still has some things to work through in the process because Amazon is also the opinion that anybody can sell anything.
And so it's not like what some trademarked companies have come to expect from Google, where you can say, I'm the trademark owner. Nobody gets to use my name in the ads period, unless I give them permission. If you sell iPhones and you've experienced that with Apple, you just can't do [00:06:00] that. So just go in with The idea and the expectation that Amazon is not going to be easy to get to do what you think it should do.
Like it makes sense that if you own the trademark, you should own that product. That's logic. That's how the laws work. Amazon system is a little bit different. So just expect that.
Jon MacDonald: I will say as a consumer, I find that really frustrating. It is one of the big usability issues I have with Amazon that it shows me that there's several different stores selling a product.
And they all have different shipping policies and timelines and reviews of that store specifically. But also, I don't know if I'm getting an authentic product unless I'm buying from the brand. So I always look like if I'm buying, okay, good example, I just bought a new Google Nest thermostat. That's sitting over here, right?
They came out with a new generation. Mine's the first one. I was like, okay, we'll get it. And I went on Amazon to get it because they would deliver it in time for me to install this weekend. And I was looking around and there [00:07:00] were several different things, people selling that, but. I really only wanted to buy from the official Google store.
And so I had to do a little bit of digging to make sure I was doing that. And it's not 100 percent evident when you search that's who you're buying it from. It's not like
Ryan Garrow: I've accidentally found that really interesting from the wrong company online better than probably the average person. And so I shouldn't get sucked into that when I'm trying to buy from the brand, but I do.
And so it is a struggle on Amazon and there's a reason, for example, we live in Portland, Nike, big Portland brand does not sell on Amazon. There were problems with fake products coming out of China and getting on Amazon that Nike couldn't control and Amazon wasn't gonna. Stop it. Cause they had no way of doing it.
There's ways you could pay Amazon for this hieroglyphic sticker thing that you can put on every product you make and only products that have that sticker can get into Amazon. So it's them attempting to get through that, but it's also not cheap. It can get rather expensive when you're adding stickers to every single product you produce.
So there are some areas there, but it is. It's frustrating. As a brand too. [00:08:00] Like I, I prohibited my retailer from selling on Amazon in my agreement with them. The reality is they could easily go do that still. And it would be, it's not always easy to find the retailer that's doing it. Cause you can create up new brands.
It's in the beauty space. It's in particular, a very difficult one to control on marketplaces because certain beauty products are like, Hey, we'll sell direct to consumer. But if you buy it for your store or your salon, you're not supposed to be able to as a consumer, go buy that product, at the beauty supply store.
But I can go to Amazon or eBay or Walmart online and find it pretty easily at a big discount.
Jon MacDonald: I have done that several times.
Ryan Garrow: Yeah, but then, even that some of my, some of the shampoo I'd bought was fake. There's like fake brands that are proposing is that so very big issue in the beauty space. Base and not as much probably in most other industries, but just as an example of what it takes.
Jon MacDonald: So you need a feed to be in the brand registry. Is there anything else when you're getting started you need to make sure that you were doing?
Ryan Garrow: I would say if you're trademarked, you need to have the a plus content, which is really [00:09:00] the section in the middle of your listing that is. The images, if you will, I find that a lot of brands get really hung up on, Oh my gosh, I've got to get a developer or a creative graphic designer to do all of this for me.
And Amazon made it pretty simple. Like essentially WYSIWYG editor in there. If you've got some pictures or you've got access to some images that on a system, we paid for a system to give us. Access to like kind of B roll video and just images that we can leverage for marketing and have the ownership up.
And I was able to create a plus content. And if you know me, I have very little creative genes going through me. And I was able to make a work and it's really just there to people are used to seeing those when it's a trademark product, if you will. And so just have it there. Don't worry as much about making it perfect because you can always edit it and come back to it.
You've got to have the bullet point content and think through that at the top of the listing. You have the titles, which are important. What am I going to title my product? So that it shows well in the search results. And then a bullet points, I think you get five, maybe [00:10:00] you're up to six now where you can say bold.
These are the five most important things about my product that you need to know. That people just skim it so that really you're adding keywords after the initial bullet point that's all caps or bold and I forget what you can do maybe both. It's really just for making sure Amazon understands they could show this for.
And then images just like you would on your website. You need to have some good images. Make sure you have some lifestyle images. of your product and video, Amazon, just like everybody else on the planet, from an econ standpoint, video, people can't get enough video. So I have something there. It doesn't have to be really complex or professionally done.
It just has to be something because Amazon tends to reward people to have more of those images and videos when they're, when you're competing.
Jon MacDonald: Okay. That's all really helpful. It's a lot to think about when you're first getting started, but once you're up there. It doesn't get less complicated, I assume.
Ryan Garrow: Yeah.
Jon MacDonald: I assume also since you're a traffic guy, right? And most [00:11:00] brands have to pay for traffic. Wouldn't be a big deal. We wouldn't be talking about it today. Probably not. You need to pay to get traffic on Amazon. Is that. Oh yeah. Just like
Ryan Garrow: every other plot. Like you just can't put your products on your website and expect to start selling.
It's just, that's not the way it works. So you've got to figure out how you're going to start driving traffic to your listings on Amazon. And for the vast majority of you listening to this, it's going to, you're going to be spending on Amazon ads. And I think most people should start there because it proves a couple of things.
Is there existing demand on Amazon? From the majority view there, there is, I guarantee it. There's this area. If your competitors are there and they're selling, you can see the reviews. So you can see Hey, they're selling. And I can see that there's people buying. You can see the dates of the reviews.
So you can see when they're buying. And some of the tools I have, I can see how many things are being sold per month, which helps. Not everybody will have access to those things, but at the end of the day, you're going to pay to get your listing sold. And hopefully over time that will be.
If you keep paying an amount, there will be some organic sales that start happening, some repeat purchases that [00:12:00] happen that, you're rolling a snowball up a big hill with these ads that hopefully the snowball gets bigger and then starts rolling downhill. Would be the idea.
Jon MacDonald: Okay. So how do you set that initial budget then to get that boulder kind of rolling?
Ryan Garrow: Always a fun question, Jon. It's going to be the answer I give everybody. It's it depends. It's going to be different for everybody. So it's not going to be, Oh, everybody must spend 10 grand a month on Amazon ads where you're never getting anywhere.
But I will give you some guardrails. Like generally speaking, I think you should go to Amazon and look at it as a percentage of your Google spend. If you're not spending on Google, you probably should go there first because on Google, you're driving traffic to your website. And you're buying some customers to yourself and that generally is going to be a good idea.
Now, if you're spending on Google, I will tell you, if you're not into the five figures on Google, you can probably keep pushing there, but I say, and it's, I would say about 25 percent of your Google spent. Look at that on Amazon. Now, the big, but in this situation. It would be if you are launching a brand [00:13:00] on all channels at once and you've not been selling on your site much and you're trying to get retail space and you're going on meta that you're doing all the things.
Amazon can be a good place to launch a brand. If you haven't launched aggressively on your website yet, especially if you have less views, you're competing against large competitors. So the example would be from my own experience with joyful dirt. We were competing against some massive companies. You may have heard of Monsanto and all of their massively large miracle grow brands, and then there's Dr. Earth, and then there, there's so many very large established brands selling at home Depot and retailers that I was never going to get into initially. We, I went into it. And one of the reasons we picked plant food was because the competition was not doing a very good job on ads. And so I said, Hey, I think there's an opportunity for us to spend on ads to get some pretty quick, easy, inexpensive conversions that we can build on. So that was my threshold of I didn't really care what I was selling as long as I could get the ads in there and get it at a cheap price. So we did it.
Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a [00:14:00] podcast focused on ecommerce growth.
Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position,. A digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.
If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.
Ryan Garrow: And so we went on Amazon aggressively. First, and that was a good move because there was a ton of volume there and I didn't have the trust on my own website from a depth of product or from a brand awareness that somebody was going to find me on Google and be like, never heard of this company.
I see Miracle Gro, heard of them, but I've never heard of this company. I'm going to go buy from them. We were able to do it on Amazon because people trusted Amazon that if I was a shyster in business or I was, selling a crappy product, they could go back to [00:15:00] Amazon and say, Amazon, this sucks, give me my money back.
And they would. So that's one caveat I would bring up is you haven't launched your brand already. Amazon can be a good place to launch it because you're borrowing from their trust. Now. If I looked at the arena on Amazon from a plant food fertilizer standpoint, I probably wouldn't pick that category. Miracle Gro has gotten so aggressive there and they're going vendor to vendor means Amazon's buying the product from them.
Massive quantity of reviews. Lots of competition. The skew depth is huge. Everybody in COVID decided they need to take care of a plant. And so there's tons of plant food there. So I wouldn't do it now
Jon MacDonald: better than a dog,
Ryan Garrow: but there's less and less of those categories over time that you're going to see on Amazon, where there is, some really low hanging fruit there.
So I don't expect that to happen often anymore. You're going to pay for traffic. So you got to have that budget. And if you're starting with your budget you need to understand that Amazon is taking 15%. So you're going to have your cost of the product. [00:16:00] 15 percent is going to Amazon. And then you're going to have that cost above that.
And the vast majority of brands, let's say you're going to be at 50 percent or greater. there's And then if you're going to have a little bit of cost going in before ads, you're going to need to adjust goals based on what you would do differently on, on Amazon, on Google, for example.
Jon MacDonald: Are you saying 50 percent including that 15 that amazon is taking?
Ryan Garrow: I think most brands are going to have 50 percent or higher margin direct to consumer. And so the Amazon 15 percent and then you have the fulfillment cost, which if you're starting out, you're either going to go I would say most of you starting out are probably going to sell through your existing channels.
So you're going to do probably seller fulfilled prime, where you just fulfill quickly and make sure you're transparent to Amazon about what your shipping is. They have a company called Zico, which allows you to print labels very quickly and do. A self fulfilled prime, which means you fulfill it, but they still let you show that prime badge.
So it's, I don't necessarily like it as a consumer now, cause I think of prime, like I can get it same day or tomorrow. So it's still prime. It still shows the badge, but it says yeah, [00:17:00] you're going to get this in three to five days. That doesn't feel like trying to be, but Amazon is doing it. So I can't fight them.
I'm not going to just know that it's there. And so as you're figuring this process out and the value and the volume you're going to get. You're probably not going to ship a pallet of every skew to Amazon until you know what kind of volumes available there because you don't want to pay warehouse fees. That's not fun for anybody.
Jon MacDonald: So do brands find that they're liking Amazon better than going DTC?
Ryan Garrow: It's it's kind of apples and oranges really to the day. There is so much volume on Amazon that part can be exciting and you can't deny when you see just a bunch of sales there, the top line's fun to see, but your margin is smaller.
And in Denner, we, as I said at the beginning, it's not a new customer it's Amazon's customer. So you don't get to email them once they buy from your company, you don't get to send them an SMS. You don't get to put them in your loyalty program. That's an Amazon customer and they are doing that on their own behalf.
Cause Amazon doesn't care if they ever buy your product again, it's there. They don't care that if they buy my plant food and then they [00:18:00] go buy Miracle Gro next month, Amazon doesn't care. They're still an Amazon customer.
Jon MacDonald: They still make their money. And I see all of that and I understand that to me, that is the biggest reason to not be on Amazon early in a brand cycle, but I assume there are some things you can only learn by being on Amazon and perhaps by growing your brand there. Is that true? What are the things that you
Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there is, there's a lot to be learned on Amazon. So I like seeing quick reviews. And so the reviews that you have on Amazon, because there's so much volume there, if you're collecting them appropriately, usually you're going to use a third party because manually doing all that is challenging, if not difficult or impossible based on what Amazon allows you to do, but there are some companies that let you scale review volume.
If you do it right. And seeing those responses, like at Joyful Dirt, we were able to solve certain issues within our product mix. Like we didn't know, for example, in certain climates of us, where there's a lot of humidity in the summer, [00:19:00] we were going to have problems with our product clumping together in those markets.
Like we're very dry in Oregon. Most, it rains, but it's very dry air here compared to Austin's just down there last week with big commerce, just sweating profusely. Because it's gross in August in Austin, but that causes certain ingredients to clump. So we had to change some things up to make sure that we weren't experiencing that customers weren't experiencing that because we're like, this doesn't clump.
What are you talking about? We'll leave it outside for days. Yeah. That. It's a problem in humid climates. So reviews are helpful there. And it also helps you scale. And once you start getting the volume of reviews going competing, like we were able to accelerate beyond a lot of brands bigger than us because our review collection was quicker.
I had a good partner for reviews and allowed us to appear bigger than we were because a higher percentage of our customers were reviewing us. Which helped us scale up and conversion rates, increased all the good things that come with positive reviews. Amazon has also realized that there's a review problem on Amazon because it's discouraging to [00:20:00] small brands to go onto Amazon when your competitors have a hundred thousand reviews,
Jon MacDonald: That wasn't the reviews problem I thought.
Ryan Garrow: There's also a bunch of fake reviews, which pissed me off. And I've had to uncover some of those some things to competitors that were lying about my product, that they're, they regret ever lying.
Jon MacDonald: I was going to say if I had no morals. A great business idea would be to just set up an agency that does nothing but leave false reviews for your competitors.
Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there are.
Jon MacDonald: I'm sure there are companies that do that. Amazon. I'll bet you there are too, but they hide pretty well. At least I don't play in that circle, so I have no idea. But I would say it is a challenge. I have, it's hard as a consumer when you're looking at reviews and some of them are like best product ever.
And some of them are like. This product is actually horrible. Don't listen to these reviews. They have to be fake and you don't know, okay, who do I pay attention to, right? Yeah.
Ryan Garrow: I uncovered a lot of the nasty underbelly of Amazon reviews trying to solve for like, where are these reviews coming from that we don't understand.
And. [00:21:00] They're lying about the product and there's reddits about it, about groups that say, Hey, this is how you get free product from companies. Here's how you hold them hostage by bad reviews. There's a Facebook group entirely dedicated to Hey, we get bad reviews here, but if you should get product, just we give good reviews here.
Here's how we do this. It is, it's like a mom, like a bunch of monsters under there trying to get product from Amazon. Or brands on Amazon. So Amazon's realized that to a degree that there are fake ones, but also that there's a high volume of reviews for a lot of products that can discourage more products from coming, which Amazon wants more products on there and needs more products to continue scaling.
And so there are tastes you'll be there testing placements now. Where you'll see no reviews being shown on the search pages, which is interesting because I think that reviews are important as well. I go to Amazon to see how people reviewed a product before I buy, even if I'm not going to buy from Amazon.
I will go say I see that there are 4. 6. Great. I want to look at the one star reviews. I want to look at the three star reviews. I know people are putting five stars up, I can see by the ratings, but what are they saying about the three [00:22:00] stars? Which is usually a more honest review. Somebody that had a problem, did the brand respond?
Many of the things you talk about constantly about conversion increases and responding to reviews.
Jon MacDonald: This is so true. And I've argued for ages. So it certainly isn't a change and that's happened recently. But Amazon is one of the larger search engines for shopping. I don't go to Google when I'm looking for a product.
I'll start on Amazon because I know all the product information should be there. And if I can't find it on Amazon, that's almost a red flag to me.
Ryan Garrow: Yeah. If your brand isn't there, you need to be there. I think that's, I think you're dumb for just not even having a listing. Even if you don't do seller fulfilled, we just do something super simple, just to have a presence, if nothing else, to keep retailers or competitors from putting products up that could take your brand identity.
So again, got to click reviews. It's going to keep evolving and changing. I think quite quickly over the next year as Amazon tries to figure out how to deal with All the review issues, Amazon, SEO and I say SEO usually when I'm doing air quotes. So if you're listening to it on a podcast with no video here you're, it's [00:23:00] Air quote SEO because there's a lot of companies that say they do Amazon s and the reality is that's a bunch of crap.
Amazon. SEO is based on sales velocity and how much money is Amazon making. They're not going to give you a ranking number one on a product category because you put the right keywords and the right images and the right descriptions on your page. They don't care. They are there to make money and they're going to take 15 percent.
If they make 15 percent and it's more on this product because it sells more, it's going to rank higher than you. It's not complicated.
Jon MacDonald: And so focus on sales velocity. Is that where the Amazon's choice badge comes from?
Ryan Garrow: Yes, and that's the holy grail on Amazon is you want the Amazon's choice badge.
And the only way to get that is to have a lot of velocity on sales, and it's around a keyword. So Amazon knows people search this, these are the top sellers, and this is the actual top seller, and we want to sell more of that, and if it keeps selling, great. So once you're in that, you can really keep velocity because, I'm a sucker for that too.
Amazon's choice okay, it sells a lot, and The reviews are pretty solid. All right. I'll take it. And the price point's okay. You will also [00:24:00] see, if you get that, you do have some price elasticity on there. So let me finish the Amazon SEO and then I'll jump into price elasticity. But Amazon SEO, you want to be aware that sales velocity isn't just from traffic on Amazon.
There's a limited number of people searching for something on Amazon. You can drive traffic from other channels to convert on Amazon. And so I did that from Google. I took traffic from Google. They were searching for a non brand keyword. I knew they weren't going to convert at a high rate on my website. Cause I only had four skews and I didn't have the brand awareness to compete against a miracle.
Ryan Garrow: But if I sent them to Amazon, I had the whole Amazon ecosystem there where they could trust okay, it's going to work, but also here's other options that if I wanted to go somewhere else or see something else, I could see that.
So brands will get a discount when they send traffic there and get conversions on the Amazon fees, which is helpful. TikTok is a big one. Amazon and TikTok are getting very close so you can leverage TikTok traffic and get some additional benefits there. To rank higher for a keyword, you need to tag the traffic with that keyword.[00:25:00]
You need to have that keyword on your listing, but it's all about, how much are you selling based on that keyword. And then when it comes to the other things that you can see on Amazon or experience on Amazon, you can't do other places. It comes down to what's the perception of your brand. So when you're on Amazon, people trust you more.
And what I found out accidentally, because I, the order I did, it didn't have a lot of consideration, but we did Amazon first. And then we went out to retailers. We found out that the physical storefront retailers, including people buying from us on fare. They weren't going to go to our website to check us out.
They weren't going to Google us and see what our reviews are. Our Google My Business page was going to say they went to Amazon because they knew that they could see sales velocity on Amazon. They could see reviews on Amazon. And it's much more difficult to fake at scale on Amazon where I could upload a thousand fake reviews on my website because I own the website and I can do whatever I want to it.
And they can't do anything about that. Most [00:26:00] retailers aren't sophisticated enough to go use the tools I have access to, to see how big is this brand? Where's the Google keyword planner to see how many people search for this brand. I can go on Amazon and be like, Oh, they're advertising there. I can see these big brand pages, right?
I trust them. So that was an accidental win that I didn't know about or expect, but I'm glad I did it and had a bunch of reviews on Amazon talking to them because they could see that I was big. retailers on fair would specifically say they don't they only buy companies that don't sell on Amazon i'm like you're buying my product so I sell on Amazon and but I protected the price point so I wasn't going to undercut them on Amazon so they respected it and they knew that they weren't gonna have somebody at their store googling it and finding it for half price on Amazon.
Jon MacDonald: Yeah interesting, so okay so I've Dirted out my brand. I'm looking to move to Amazon. What expectations should I have?
Ryan Garrow: You're going to have some patience because new brands are I like to say you're upsetting homeostasis. There's a bunch of brands existing, they're competing.
[00:27:00] And then you saw another competitor in there. It's going to shuffle and mix things up before it settles again and everybody figures out where they are. And so have patience and expect to have to test and measure a lot. You have to test and measure your images. You're going to have to test and measure your titles.
Description, which ad, which keywords make sense. A keyword that makes sense on Google may not make sense on Amazon. There may be lots of volume for this keyword on Amazon, or on Google, and not very much on Amazon. So you've got to see how people are searching Amazon a little bit differently. You can put ads on your competitors on Amazon, which is something you can't do on Google.
If your competitor allows AdSense on Google, you should just do it, but that's very rare now. On Amazon, you can get a listing right there on there. On their product page and take some of their brand traffic and then to go into some of your stuff. DXO or CRO is necessary on Amazon. You need to be testing these things.
Jon MacDonald: And saying, Hey, it's interesting. We've been getting a lot of inquiries about that.
Ryan Garrow: As you should. I think it's a huge thing. I think brands similar to Google, they just aren't usually as sophisticated on looking at the traffic patterns. [00:28:00] Again, you can manipulate conversion rates very easily, but you want to find non brand traffic.
What does it convert at? You can't just take your conversion rate as a whole. So we had to get pretty sophisticated when looking at non brand traffic. Where's it converting? Cause we did some math problems when we were investigating this traffic to our website would come cheaper on Google than it would on Amazon to our store.
But Amazon was converting it five to six times the rate it was on Google. So it was worth it from a business profitability standpoint to sell on Amazon, just because the conversion rates were so high, like Amazon, there was such a trust there that people will go just click buy, where the price point is very impulsive, under 20 bucks, very simple for somebody, yeah, I'll take that, it'll be fine.
You're going to be doing a lot of testing and measuring on the Amazon. It's just not, you're not going to be able to put it up and then assume it's going to work and run ads and be done and then go to the next channel or next marketplace.
Jon MacDonald: Then maybe I'll do an offshoot of the good that's just sunk because I think it'd be interesting.
Ryan Garrow: Amazon, the good or the good Amazon. He's probably in trouble. He's using the Amazon name.
Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I was just going to say, we probably can't do that, but [00:29:00] this has been a really interesting topic regardless. And I feel like I know a lot more about Amazon now. Where to go, how to start it. I'm still cautious.
I still think that I probably, if I was starting a brand, I wouldn't go to Amazon first, but I now know what I need to do, so thank you, Jon.
Ryan Garrow: Let me know when you start that brand up.
Jon MacDonald: I will.
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