Proven Advertising Strategies by 8 figure Amazon Sellers

Discover game-changing strategies in Amazon selling with our esteemed guest, Klaidas Siuipys, the founder and CEO of AMZ Bees. With over eight years of experience in e-commerce, Klaidas has a treasure trove of insights to share. From managing his parents' business in high school to transforming a client's annual revenue from half a million dollars to $30 million with just one product, Klaidas surely knows how to effectively navigate the complex world of the Amazon marketplace.

Sit back and glean strategies for boosting Amazon success while sidestepping common e-commerce distractions. Listen as Klaidas emphasizes the importance of sticking to basics, such as quality products, customer feedback, and market fit.  Furthermore, he tackles holiday event such as Prime Day advertising strategies to optimize profitability during the fourth quarter.

As we end the episode, Klaidas provides valuable insights on running effective lightning deals and spotting advertising trends to stay competitive. He also divulges his views on external traffic and Amazon's AI-powered advertising. Get ready to have your mind blown by this episode crammed with practical strategies and tips for every stage of your Amazon journey. Join us and be inspired by Klaidas' captivating journey and insightful advice.

15:59 Holiday Event Advertising Strategy and Profitability
24:00 Lightning Deals and Prime Day Strategies
44:22 External Traffic and Amazon Advertising Takes

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Klaidas Siuipys Socials:
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Linkedin URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/klaidas-siuipys/
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Episode link & contact info
Shareable episode link  - https://bit.ly/3t9KzMW
For content collaborations, please email us at: grei@sellercandy.com 

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Never Talk to Seller Support Again.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I think that there's a whole trend with external traffic. From my point of view, majority of it is bells and whistles. A lot of it doesn't work. For it to work properly, it needs a sane amount of work and a really proper focus, and has to be done extremely well.

Speaker 2: 0:20

All right, hey, there, I'm your host, ben, and welcome back to season two of the Amazon strategy show. The show that's all strategy no hacks, no silver bullets and no magic pills Just real, practical strategy for serious Amazon sellers. All right, we have an amazing episode for you guys today. I just finished recording with Clitis from AMZBs and, wow, this was a very, very good discussion. So if you're an Amazon seller at the beginning, middle end of your journey, there is a lot of value all along the way. Clitis took us through how he actually took one of his clients from a half million dollars in annual revenue all the way up to $30 million, which is pretty impressive, and that's with one product. And then we got into a lot of other amazing strategies, tactics, tips that are really applicable in the matter of what stage of the journey you're on. So make sure you guys watch this video or listen to this podcast wherever you're watching the listing, and let us know in the comments, let us know any feedback that you might have. I'm sure you're going to get some value out of this one.

Speaker 2: 1:11

So, without further ado, let's dive right in. So today we have the pleasure of being joined by the incredible Clitis, and Clitis is an Amazon entrepreneur with more than eight years of experience in the space, so he's been around the block here. He's also the founder and CEO of AMZBs, which is a full service Amazon account management agency that helps brands grow from zero to their full potential on the platform. So he's got an impressive track record, including one of his clients that he's literally taken from a half million dollars to $30 million in annual revenue, which is quite impressive. So, without further ado, very happy to have him here today. Clitis, welcome to the show. How are you Thank?

Speaker 1: 1:47

you for having me, ben. I'm doing good, doing good. Thank you for the introduction.

Speaker 2: 1:51

I was going to say whereabouts in the world, are you? Calling in From because I have the pleasure of it only being 10 am here, but I think you're we're recording. I think it's much later for you.

Speaker 1: 1:59

Right, right, right. Now it's almost six six pm here in Lithuania.

Speaker 2: 2:04

Well on a Friday, so well thank you for taking the time.

Speaker 1: 2:08

It was a bit difficult for us to find the time, that's true.

Speaker 2: 2:11

Yeah, so we were talking a little bit before the show started, also just about. I've kind of been feeling this recently with all the traveling, like it's sometimes you don't even know where you are, what time zone you're in. So I know you've been to a couple events, you've got a couple on the horizon. Where are you? Where are you going next?

Speaker 1: 2:26

New York, Iceland, China. That's the plan for the entirety of October.

Speaker 2: 2:32

That's just in October. That's why. Yeah, that's October I don't know how you do it Well, somehow. Well, you better rest up while you can To get started. I kind of wanted to dive in and just ask you, you know kind of the typical question which is can you tell us a little bit about how you got started on your Amazon journey? So, if you take us all the way back, we'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Sure. So I think the good starting point is I've been doing Amazon for a third of my life.

Speaker 2: 3:01

at this point it's a good way to put it. It is.

Speaker 1: 3:05

It's, I think it's. It sounds better than eight years, right, eight and a half or so. So I started in around 2015 with my parent business I was still in high school, I think, or beginning of high school, wow. And my parents promoted me from warehouse assistant to e-commerce manager Nice. So I had to put all their 400 SKU products to Amazon, ebay, etsy and kind of work on their e-commerce presence. Obviously it was just myself who was kind of working in that department per se, and we quickly grew to seven figures in a couple of years.

Speaker 1: 3:42

And after that, after high school, went to military, did my. In Lithuania we have the voluntary, semi-voluntary, nine month military training to be in the active reserve. So I did my military training and then started studying IT. Unfortunately, I had to drop out pretty much after the first semester just because financially didn't make sense to continue the studies when all of my clients at that point were asking for more and more time and I was already making more than I could have after finishing my degree.

Speaker 1: 4:14

So in the beginning of my studies I started being more involved in the Lithuanian Amazon seller community. Slowly I took over leading that community, started speaking in the events, in the meetups, organizing meetups here in Lithuania, started speaking at other Amazon conferences and after a lot of PR that just because people in the press they like a young face and I was 19, 20, eight years old and already we had relatively good results People just started kind of grabbing my attention as much as they could. So I got featured in TV and the multiple radio interviews, all the media articles, people's Magazine and all that nonsense here in Lithuania and slowly started getting agency clients, not necessarily just consulting or technical stuff, and basically that's how AMCB was born. We still work with a lot of the initial clients to this day and they're doing extremely well. And yeah, that's the beginning.

Speaker 1: 5:21

I never really sold myself, never been really a seller. My family is a seller, but I don't consider myself a seller just because it's not my business, it's their business. I was always on the side of managing the accounts, on the account management, on the advertising, on the technical aspects, on the strategy, and that's where I put my focus for the last eight years and I think so far our clients are happy that that's where our focus went. Yeah, it definitely seems like it's paid off.

Speaker 2: 5:50

I was going to say your story is really impressive, right? Because, like a lot of people, I think, follow a similar track to maybe the track that I followed, which was like Broke College Kid here at podcast about Amazon, try to start selling, you know, and then have success or not. Yours is like I got featured in People Magazine, I built you know all this crazy stuff and that's really cool. I think it's also because, like you were successful, you were like first to the market, but you also like were there, persisting and continuing to grow in the space and help others, right, I guess.

Speaker 1: 6:16

So I wouldn't put myself first in the market because there were definitely older gentlemen who had definitely had a lot more e-commerce experience in the Lithuanian Amazon space. And we still talk with them and work with them on some cases to this day and we have good relationships because it's a very small community. But I think I was the one who started, I would say, aggressively educating the Lithuanian community and not just the community but overall Lithuanian populace. I started writing dozens now of articles about how to sell an Amazon, what the Amazon world looks like, trying to attract people to the market. The world looks like trying to attract more manufacturers here from Lithuania, because we have a very big manufacturing capacity here to Amazon. So that gave a big impact to Lithuanians to kind of start going on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 7:10

I also launched a couple of courses in Lithuanian language. Other people convinced me to launch those courses because they just wanted me to put my thoughts to video and to this day, the majority of Lithuanian businesses Amazon businesses. When they hire a new person, they give them my courses to watch and learn and only then they start doing the practical stuff. Those courses are free Now. They used to be paid, but it's not like it's a lot of money. So we're trying to put more emphasis on growing here in Lithuania the Amazon seller community, but the agency focus shifted to the global markets back in 2019, almost in the very beginning.

Speaker 2: 7:55

So I was going to say do you have a lot of clients? Now, I know you have a ton of Lithuanian clients, but do you guys also work with people in other parts of the world? What's your level of work? Like I would say, our Lithuanian clients are about 30%, maybe 25%.

Speaker 1: 8:11

The majority of our clients or revenue is coming from the US and Europe. So Germany, uk, australia, japan, etc. The biggest case studies we have and the biggest successes and the one you mentioned, the $30 million, it's one product. We started with one product. Yeah, that's one product.

Speaker 2: 8:27

Wow.

Speaker 1: 8:28

Now it has more variations. Now that company they since literally we made them over tens of millions of dollars over these years. They've been doing it. They started cooperating and they started, you know, they created their own R&D departments. So now we're slowly launching new products. But the $30 million it was $29.5 million was one product. So we started with that in 2020, june 1st and just kind of took them off the ground.

Speaker 1: 8:58

But even in Lithuania, when we work with small, normal, like family-sized businesses, a lot of them are doing relatively well compared to what the potential of the niche is. And even if we look at the big numbers that you know $30 million a year, $12 or $11 million of profit, like these are huge numbers that, if we're being fair, aren't really reachable for the majority of Amazon sellers Like, statistically, most likely you're not going to reach that. But what we find is that what is very reachable is from $10,000 to $50,000 or euros a month of profit for a family business, for a family factory. It's absolutely reachable and it happens more often than not if they have the right product resources to get to that level.

Speaker 2: 9:46

So, being that you kind of work with so many of those people, have you identified, like anything that they're doing differently in general that's working really well, or some of the common characteristics?

Speaker 1: 9:57

It's definitely a good question and something that I always like to point out, like there's no magic in any aspect of what we do, of what our partners do, of what Amazon sellers do.

Speaker 1: 10:08

It's just proper, good, solid principles, business principles and a good product market fit.

Speaker 1: 10:13

So I think the biggest aspect initially, where it doesn't even depend on us, we just make sure to select clients and partners that have that covered is really a good product that isn't too competitive, like we want to target a product or a niche where there's the niche itself is still in the growth phase, it's still having reached plateau, where the cash flow phase is still isn't too oversaturated and the product quality is something that we really want to put a lot of emphasis on, just because when we have a really good product that is selling at the right price, that kind of has that meeting point. Eventually things work out well right. Then we have the standard right. We want to make sure that we have the absolute best premium content, the visuals, the A++ content, all the brand stories, amazon lives, amazon posts, have proper SEO in the listing, make sure the listing is like super, super optimized and then it's just a lot of advertising, a lot of advertising and trying not to go out of stock as much as possible.

Speaker 2: 11:23

That was a really, really great. Like I can tell now that you've done courses, you're an educator, right, Because that was a really good way of breaking it down.

Speaker 2: 11:30

So much of it is so much of the whole Amazon game, from what I've seen too, is just it's really just doing the simple basic things, that they're not easy, but they are like straightforward and following and making. Following that process, getting really good products, listening to your customers, making sure it has product market fit, and then there's all these other shiny things that are important and really useful, right, but they're kind of distractions until you're at that stage, right, like A++ content doesn't matter if your product is horrible and you're getting a three star rating, right. And I feel like it's really easy to forget about that stuff when you're like, oh, I got the product, it's okay, but now I've got I need to do my A++ and all this other stuff, you know.

Speaker 1: 12:07

This is a very, very good point the shiny object syndrome, and this is what we find in businesses that are failing. In a way, they are really chasing the shiny objects, the fugaise, the feng shui, the fairy dust, like they say. You know, like some things, things that don't really bring enough value but they look good and you think they might bring value. But when you're a $30,000 a month business, amazon Post isn't going to do much or Amazon is not going to move the needle per se, like you probably still have to put all your effort and money into advertising, like into your content and your listing into your product and advertising, until you get to the point where it makes sense, like we start doing press releases when the brand is at least 100 or $200,000 a month. We start doing DSP when we're already maxing out what Amazon advertising has to offer, because DSP is just expensive as hell. So not following the shiny objects is one of the key things, and what I think it's also differentiates the brands that we work with that are successful versus those that aren't, is the actual business owners or the CEOs or the team leads that lead this particular project from our partner side, because we have had experiences where our clients are in business people. And I say I don't want to offend anybody and I say that with utmost respect, but some people have the mindset of an employee which is it's a good thing, like it's nothing bad.

Speaker 1: 13:32

There are crazy people that are entrepreneurs and there are normal people that don't want to live this crazy, stressful life as an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1: 13:41

So we had clients where they broke down to the pressure because this business is risky.

Speaker 1: 13:49

Anything can happen at any point.

Speaker 1: 13:51

The account suspensions can happen at any point and we had that situation where the account was suspended for 15 days.

Speaker 1: 13:56

We managed to get it back, but it's stuck in the in the CEO's mind and a year later he undersold the business to his factory where he had $400,000 of loans 0% interest, by the way just from that pressure from all the sides and that nervousness that the business could go under because there has been a situation where the account was suspended. So some business people don't have the strength to continue moving on and growing that business to the potential where it could be, because that brand that he sold and as far as now undersold for what is worth it would be worth a whole lot more now and it was definitely not the right time to sell, but he managed to get out of that stress and now he's employed at that company that he sold and most likely, he's doing very well for himself. So sure, yeah, it's more about the mindset and the entrepreneur that is leading the company, if they have the right ethics, the right principles and the right will to continue on this crazy journey that is Amazon, because it's really really stressful work.

Speaker 2: 15:03

So, like you've almost got to be you know I think there's a bunch of like quotes and studies about this too like Fortune 500 CEOs or whatever, or founders. It's like you almost have to be somewhat delusional to really go and build some massive thing right. And the other thing I wanted to say too.

Speaker 2: 15:20

that I've found interesting is that sometimes maybe you're great for getting that company, for maybe this guy who started that brand, he's great from getting it to this point to X number of million dollars, and that's the role that you want to play. He doesn't want to grow a Fortune 500 company and that's totally okay too, right.

Speaker 1: 15:37

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 15:38

And then there's the people that are like they want to go all the way. There's people who only want to buy it and then grow it 10x. You know, I feel like there's so many different ways that you can do this as well, but yeah, there's also nothing wrong with being on the other side as an employee working for the company. So I feel like I've been in a few of those different stages not the very, very large one, but yeah, now that's interesting. It's really good insight. So I want to talk now. Just one thing that I know you guys are incredible with is advertising in general. You know there's been just as we were approaching Q4 here depending on when you're watching this, but when we're recording it, we're right about to start Q4. And so how do you guys go into Q4 in terms of talking to your clients about strategy around PPC? Is there anything that's really changing drastically or that you're doing around? Maybe some of these holiday events like Prime Day or you know any of that stuff?

Speaker 1: 16:26

So something to keep in mind is obviously there's a lot of different scenarios. So we have products where we don't need to do anything different for Q4. Q4 is just any other quarter for us, like we're not really participating in different types of deals. We might do a 20 or 30% off T5 or a big Prime Day deal discount, but not necessarily doing anything different. Just because it's a stable market, right, people always need the boring products, the products that you wouldn't really give to anybody, but just the boring products. If we have or you know, when we're talking about the Christmas products, toys, overall winter stuff going into Q4, we really put a lot of emphasis on the deals, the lightning deals, in some cases 70 deals, definitely in majority on, as far as I know, all the cases where it's Q4 products. We're very aggressively participating in the T5 and the Prime Days. So something that we do with some of the bigger brands where we have that access, is Top Deals and Multi-Brand Top Deals, which helps us with the additional traffic In terms of advertising.

Speaker 1: 17:41

What we do in around September is we optimize for profitability.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Like we cut off a lot of the tests that we were doing and we are basically taking one step back in September because Christmas shopping slowly seems to go into, be started but not yet really and we try to kind of restructure the advertising to the point where we have solid profit margins going into Q4. And when the Q4 comes, the Christmas keywords come in into advertising. We get a lot of new keywords that we had last year, we get a lot of new keywords that we didn't have ever and there's a lot of new opportunities to spend money where during the summer that opportunity wasn't really there. So in September we try to take one step back so we can take two steps forward during the end of September and the beginning of October. Then we really start well, not aggressively, but we slowly start adding in the Q4 related keywords and in a lot of cases we have similar keywords there where it's all giftable stuff. If it's toys, then it's gifts for this, this, this and that, toys for this, this, this and that Sure yeah that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 18:55

That's the general gist of it.

Speaker 2: 18:57

Yeah, I mean, and I know it's different for every account, right? So you spend totally where you're at with your brand, how much money you have to throw around, you know what kind of products.

Speaker 1: 19:06

In some cases, our goal like we're not really going, even for revenue, our goal is just to make as much money as possible, Like that's our entire goal, like we are sacrificing revenue. Our goal is just to make as much money as possible to milk the niche the holidays as much as possible because the products are dying, like we have products that are oversaturated.

Speaker 2: 19:26

You know we're on the way out.

Speaker 1: 19:28

We know that most likely next Q4 is going to be half of the sales that we have now and our full push is just on optimization and on profitability. In some cases, revenue, revenue, revenue. In other cases, revenue, revenue, revenue. We don't care about revenue. All we want to do is make as much money as possible, milk this as much as possible and we're gonna rebuild in Q1. Like, even if our rankings get hurt, we're gonna try to rebuild in Q1 because we still have the thousands of reviews and everything else, but sacrifice the rankings, sacrifice some positions, sometimes for the sake of profitability, in a Dying niche that will be dead in a couple of years just because of over saturation and the product got boring.

Speaker 2: 20:10

And I feel like, yeah, so that's where it's obviously important to be watching your trends and know exactly what's happening, Both when you're a product, but also the bigger market, right, I think the other thing, too is it's it's interesting because when I used to manage, like advertising on accounts, like I would think a lot about like, oh, prime day, I need to try to, we need to increase our budget, we need to spend, we need to participate in lightning deals, all the things, and I've talked about it a couple different on a couple different episodes of this show. But you know, I think there is definitely. My views towards that have shifted and I've and I've heard the same from other brands too, or some brands are like, hey, we know everyone else is gonna go and blow a huge budget on this thing, and so we we don't want to go and do that.

Speaker 2: 20:46

Right, those brands are doing it, maybe just so that they can increase their ranking, and they're exactly what you said like they're. They know they're not gonna be profitable for prime day, but they want to get ranks better in their space and really set that foundation going into the rest of the holiday season. But then it's like on the other side, you save your budget by not, you know, going that route and you know so.

Speaker 1: 21:05

There's really always like different strategies and arguments, but I so, when we're working with supplements that are extremely competitive, like prime days and T5, is like a bloodbath, like we are just hoping to not go into negative too much Just because if we don't do nothing if we don't do deals, even the 30% Deal it's, it's almost at a 0% profit margin now.

Speaker 1: 21:33

So and then we have to spend money on advertising. So if we don't do that, we're gonna, we are falling behind, and we have been through this with some of the brands when they didn't Want to do those deal. We are falling behind in some cases. We really try to kind of Put the advertising budgets into frames like not overspend, not go above and beyond, because in a lot of cases, a Lot of those clicks, they are just wasted and we still get the visibility from our organic rankings that are boosted because our product is really better than the competition. And something that we are considering testing for this T5 and prime day, something that the manager of one of our SAS core managers advised us to test, is Turn off advertising during the T5 or prime day entirely For the products where we are running the best deal. Do you know what the best deal is? That $1,000 deal?

Speaker 2: 22:36

Like when you pay you pay.

Speaker 1: 22:38

You pay Amazon a thousand bucks and you get the best deal, which was previously 70 deal, now it's called best deal. And during prime day it's during the you know the entirety of prime day or doing T5, the entirety of T5. And Then Amazon's dear reps say, like their logic is you're paying us money to advertise your product. If you advertise your product yourself, you take up the space that we would have put your product in. So what we're gonna try to test with Not necessarily not essential products and not the products that are like our big, big winners To see if it works out is turn off like run the best deal, pay a thousand bucks to Amazon, have our product featured in the deals page and most likely rank to the top of our main category first page is turn off all the advertising for that particular product and see the performance, because then you see a person you you give that deal like.

Speaker 1: 23:31

You still have a very compelling offer, you still have your higher organic rankings and your conversion is going to be increased. It's just more giving Amazon the space to put your product into placements that you would have taken with advertising. So that's that's theory yet and Obviously like I'm not sure if it's confirmed or not, but we will. We will test it out where where we have the capacity to do that and most likely right opposed about in the LinkedIn or something like that.

Speaker 2: 24:00

I was gonna say I need, we need a Report back, just because I'm really curious about that too and yeah, that's super interesting, so that I didn't know they renamed them. I thought they were still seven day deals.

Speaker 1: 24:11

So I was. It was very successful this, this prime day, like in the summer, because, like, if you're running lighting deals in primary, you're gonna crash, like it's not gonna work out Well in a majority of cases, because lighting deals just they just don't work. Doing T5 and prime days, so we had to run like the prime exclusive discounts. I wasn't added the option to run the best deal with. Yeah, we pay a thousand bucks but if we have the large enough revenue, it's it's not that big of a percentage From our sales, so we pay that thousand bucks, we get the best deal. We get the the prime day deal for all the Customers, not just prime members. Right, and it says prime deal but it's accessible to all of the customers, not the ones that just have prime, and it's also placed in the deals page.

Speaker 1: 24:59

Deal speech is a place where, with high velocity products, we are getting a lot of Traffic. Like this is one of the strategies that we use with high velocity products to just get not free traffic, but every single week we're on a lightning deal and we get a bunch of free traffic from there. So, doing the T5 and during the prime days, running the best deal or you know well, best deal. It brings us that traffic as well, alongside the natural avalanche traffic that is searching for our products.

Speaker 2: 25:26

Sure, that's cool, that was actually gonna be. My follow-up question is with lightning deals, because you said those aren't as successful for your clients. From what you've seen During you know these events, have you seen a lot of success utilizing? Lightning deals outside of the event kind of.

Speaker 2: 25:40

For you know areas and and is it a? You know, I've run a couple of them before, so I don't have a ton of you know Personal data to understand them. But is it ever gonna be helpful to run just one and that's it, or do you have to run subsequent like back-to-back, like every week or every other week, like what's kind of the strategy in terms of lightning deals?

Speaker 1: 26:00

So first I'd like to set the the scene. The purpose of lightning deals is to bring you traffic. The purpose of 70 deals, or now, as they are called, best deals, is to bring you conversion and ranking Right. When you run a 70 deal or a best deal for seven days, you are getting the audience that you currently have, like you're currently a rank, you are advertising your products and you're getting that audience that you would normally get at a higher conversion with better metrics, which means you're gonna grow organically more right. We take a period of seven days. That's good enough time for him to give you an organic ranking boost.

Speaker 1: 26:39

Whether you stay ranked higher or not. That's up to your product and does it have to write to rank in those higher spots at your current price without a deal lightning deals we rarely see ranking increase. With lightning deals our main goal is to get the traffic from the deals page. Our goal isn't to increase conversion on our current traffic because this is only for 12 hours. It's not that big of a needle mover. So what that means to rank on the deals page to actually get that traffic we have to have Higher velocity product, then majority in our main category. So that means our product already has to be successful enough, with good content, with strong reviews Most likely we're talking in tens of thousands of reviews, with strong reviews, at least 4.5 stars, of course and and it has to have more general audience interest. If you're selling, trying to look for a Product that is not, that is like super high-end skincare.

Speaker 2: 27:49

It's like expensive skin.

Speaker 1: 27:50

Yeah, let's say let's say you're selling high-end skincare for women above 36 years old, right, you have a specific audience and it might be a specific skincare product for specific type of skin, like it's a niche thing. Yeah, you might be doing good sales, but it doesn't really apply to the general audience. If you're selling phone cases, how many people are phone cases? Men, women, children have phones and they would like to buy a phone case, so it's a very broad category, right? That makes sense.

Speaker 2: 28:20

So you wouldn't stand a chance of ranking pretty much on the deal page for your category If, when you're running a lightning deal, if you're selling kind of this more niche thing versus if you're selling something it's a very like consumer-friendly, high volume thing, you can really rank and capitalize on that traffic. Is that right?

Speaker 1: 28:36

It's more or less yeah. So if your product isn't appealing to the general audience, we're gonna have a lot harder time. And then the next thing is the way to rank isn't just to sell a lot of units during the lightning deal. The way to rank is to sell From what you committed for that deal, is to have high enough velocity From your normal sales to what you have committed, percentage wise, to rank up the claimed units Percentage as fast as possible initially, then Amazon's algorithm is gonna rank you in deals page higher.

Speaker 1: 29:07

When we're running lightning deals successfully and we incorporate that into our strategy we run them every single week if possible, without, without a gap and by default. In majority of cases we see double the revenue for that day, with profitability being a bit lower. But we're not hurting on profitability because the traffic that we're getting from the deals page yeah, we paid 20% from our product price but we don't pay the referral fees from that 20% and we don't need to pay advertising from that percentage of people that are coming from the deals page. So we do have lower margin a little bit, but it's still profitable and that's how we get them on the long enough time frame.

Speaker 1: 29:55

We basically just get more eyeballs on our products, then we would have otherwise. But the product has to be more general. So then we incorporate lightning deals throughout the years, every single week, if possible without any gaps. Once a week we do a lightning deal, 20% off Some. We try to kind of keep on the not lowering the price too much. Eventually Amazon starts forcing you to lower the price too much. So we have to kind of take a take a, take a pause a little bit.

Speaker 2: 30:22

Yeah, that's that's that makes sense. So yeah, I mean it sounds like it's really something that's more for a mature product listing and brand. What a happy it's not.

Speaker 1: 30:30

We tested with products that Might not seem such a great fit for lightning deals, just in case, in different periods of the years. Of example, if it's a summer product, like we obviously tested during the summer, and see if it works out or not. More often than not doesn't work, more often than not it fails, but in some cases it works out well and we incorporate it into the strategy and it's a big needle mover in the long term. So it's definitely worth testing in multiple different periods of the year. I it's just more of some cases to work Well, some cases doesn't.

Speaker 2: 31:02

Yeah, and I feel like and that's I mean just one comment too is Amazon? It's all about testing constantly, right?

Speaker 1: 31:07

It's like you gotta always be testing different things.

Speaker 2: 31:10

I have a couple other questions I just wanted to ask too. So one is just about long-term strategy. I know you're we just said that this is more of something you'd implement later on in kind of your Amazon trajectory. But how do you plan with clients that you like this person who went from you know half million annually to 30 million? What are you guys doing to kind of, and how far out are you looking when you're kind of planning their Amazon strategy?

Speaker 1: 31:34

So that particular case is a little bit unique because when I started working on that brand and when I took them to those results, I didn't have a lot of my team and I was myself with an assistant and one employee. Now we're a team of 20 people or so and with that client for my team, mainly I represent the client, if that makes sense. Like this is the only account that I, as a CEO of an agency, still manage on the high level. So I'm the one who's making sure we don't overspend. I'm the one who's looking into the strategy of the top level strategy, where usually the client should direct us what to do with their money, how much to spend on DSP, how much to spend on advertising, if to spend less on advertising with the client themselves, with the company that they've built over the years, we don't necessarily touch the advertising spend or ACOS or things like that. We look at the revenue and bottom line profitability. Like these are the KPIs that we work with when we plan a strategy to the future. Obviously in Q1, we actually have live meetings. So I take some of my team and we fly to Florida to them and we have live meetings over multiple days to strategize for the remaining of the year to forecast what we think we could reach so we can begin taking out loans and start manufacturing hundreds of thousands of units of products, because the scale is relatively big and it's a heavy Q4 product per se. We still do well in the rest of the year, but Q4 is a big part.

Speaker 1: 33:23

So we don't necessarily look at where Amazon is concerned, we don't necessarily look at 10 years into the future. We look one, two, three years into the future. We look at new products, when we're launching different new products, what the strategy for those new products is. What we're doing with the current product line. Main focus is going throughout the following year, but we do look two, three years into the future with the product launches to make sure that we have new things invented and, as far as I know, almost all the products that we launched we patent. We make sure to patent because we are following the model that we began with and it's working really, really well. So we're creating unique products that aren't in the market yet, literally something that's been invented and created from scratch or basing the idea on what we currently did Interesting.

Speaker 1: 34:14

So, yeah, so the strategy meetings, they don't extend 10 years into the future In the business sense where we look at their entire business model. We look at 10 years, 20 years into the future. What our plans for exit is if we want to exit or not. In this case we don't want to exit. So, aggregators, please don't reach out to me. We don't have plans to do that in the nearest future.

Speaker 1: 34:39

But we talk about the overall company because that company now they're doing good revenue with distributors. They're doing good revenue with other marketplaces where, even though we don't necessarily have a we don't charge for that, like we don't really work with that we still help them to make sure everything's on track and other areas of their business will not hurt Amazon. Because, as more seasoned Amazon sellers know, you know if you start, when you start mixing in retail distributors, there are a lot of moving parts that come to bite back on Amazon With barcodes, with transparency programs, with counterfeits, with other marketplaces, with catalog changes where you can't change listings, with different types of products, suspensions, etc. So there are a lot of moving parts that I want to make sure that we have covered that in two years or three years we don't run into problems that we already know would happen with or happened with our other clients in the past. So we kind of try to prevent that when we look at the entire business strategy, not just Amazon. Yeah, I'm not even going to question correctly.

Speaker 2: 35:48

Sorry, you did. I mean you answered it. I'm like impressed by how they're like that's a very comprehensive look at it. You know, and I know that, I know that client maybe there may be a higher touch point client of yours, but generally speaking, you know, I feel like that's. It's just impressive you guys really take a look at it.

Speaker 1: 36:02

Like it's the thing, the thing is right. They're not special in any way she performed, but when you reach the eight figures of revenue, that's what is needed and when our clients are getting to that point, that's what we start doing, because it's we have. We have, you know, portfolio companies that are over 100 years old, like we have companies that have been alive longer than well I think my grandparents yeah, longer than grandparents and some great grandparents Like they have been long, for a long time, and with them we have to. Even though we're doing very little revenue on Amazon, there are so many moving parts that we have to touch a lot of different departments from their company to make sure that things are being done properly with other areas of the business. So we can proceed with Amazon that we want. It takes a lot longer, we are definitely moving slower, but when we get to multiple 70 figures, eight figures, multi eight figures, nine figures, etc. We have very strong foundations where the business itself is concerned, because eventually things come and bite you in the ass.

Speaker 2: 37:09

Yeah, it's definitely starts getting complex pretty quickly. I wanted to ask Kles what are you most excited about in this whole Amazon or e-commerce world right now? Is there anything that you're like really like, oh, this is an interesting new release, or I don't know? Or, as AI, the buzzword, what is the thing that you're kind of excited about right now, like, aside from what you do just in day to day operation?

Speaker 1: 37:31

So there's a lot of buzzwords, as you say. You know, yeah, all these things, and I know a lot of thought leaders and I don't necessarily consider myself a thought leader. I just post stuff on LinkedIn sometimes that I found and it's definitely not something that I make money from but there's a lot of thought leaders that are jumping on every single opportunity, that are covering it as much as possible. They're incredibly excited about every single feature, like even the recent one the hourly bit changes that Amazon just introduced, which is impressive. It's awesome, like we were doing that with some accounts on softwares, but now we're going to be able to do that with Amazon. So it's definitely there's a lot of definitely exciting things.

Speaker 1: 38:14

I would say we are not slower to adopt those things, but I would say that we are a lot more cautious with the majority of our accounts on the new features that Amazon launches that are just aren't yet experimented on, and the new buzzwords that AI, written listings, etc. Like we still prefer to do what works and like kind of keeping on the old fashioned way making sure the structure is there, repeating the things that work and not repeating the things that don't, and if something doesn't work, repeat it in a different way to not become insane. Right, there are things that I'm excited about, but I think there are more things that I'm very not excited about. The the, the amount of focus that Amazon is putting on advertising where is definitely going to help agencies, right, where it's technically I shouldn't be saying this right, but it is going to help and is helping agencies advertising agencies, agencies like our, like mine, where normal seller family run business. They won't be able to keep up Like you're not able to keep up when it's more complex.

Speaker 1: 39:28

Yeah, even even in my case, right, I'm running an agency, I'm running a 20 people team. We have multi million dollar clients that we're running and right now my team is not more knowledgeable on every single nuanced advertising thing than I am, just because this is not my job anymore. And a lot of thought leaders in the space like it's not their job anymore to go in the trenches and and manage every single account. Yeah, you still are up to date, you still know what things are and you might test it out, but you're not doing that. You know eight hours or 10 hours a day, seven days a week or six days a week, depending on your work schedule. So it's going to.

Speaker 1: 40:08

It's getting more scary for normal businesses that have in house teams that don't have the budgets to hire three or four people team who are just working in advertising. It's going to be a bit better for agencies, I guess, from that standpoint. But what is what tends to happen is that we have to spend more money on advertising and from our partners side, like this is something I don't like. I don't want to spend more money on advertising. We want to make our partners as rich as possible, because in that means they will have more money to invest into the business and we can grow together. So that is something that scares me, not necessarily excites me.

Speaker 1: 40:53

The AI, I guess yeah, I'm not sure what I'm like so excited about that would be worth really sharing. Like we're doing things that are working well. We are generating results that are doing like working, where we're launching new brands almost, or new products, new brands, etc. Every single month, and we try not to jump on these types of trends. So, for example, remember when Amazon took off like included rebates into their terms of service, where generally you can't no longer Launch rebates. We never did that Like we never did rebates for our clients.

Speaker 1: 41:26

When that was introduced, when the whole Amazon community was in turmoil, everybody was freaking out for our clients. For us, absolutely zero things have changed. We have still been on the right track for growth in every single case because we weren't relying on strategies that are questionable and aren't the pillars of business right? And the people. After half a year, once things settle down, they started using advertising strategies that we've been using for a year already that we're working for us without any rebates right, and we were making a lot more money with those strategies than with rebates.

Speaker 1: 42:06

So I'm cautious on jumping on new trends and these types of topics, just because I like to focus on things that are working and when they stop working. Obviously we're testing things, but when all things start working, they don't immediately start to stop working. They slowly kind of degrade, and then you are implementing strategies and things that the market has tested. Then we begin testing it on our clients, except for awesome out of the future like videos. When Amazon video ads came out first, I think it was 2019. We made bank, honestly, we made bank with clients that had content already. We were advertising for 10 cents. Now I think it's like 25 or 35 cents minimum, but we were advertising for 10 cents a click on the most like literally top five, biggest keywords in the entire Amazon. We were getting 10 cents a click and we were just waking in money like we had 10%, 7%, 12% A-costs with huge numbers. It died down quite quickly in like half a year, but these types of things, when they do come out, we try to jump on them.

Speaker 2: 43:22

That's a great answer. I'm sensing kind of a theme with you and your team is like you guys really it sticks to the basics to do them really, really well. That doesn't mean you don't experiment, but for the most case, like most of the work is in just repetitively doing the stuff you need to do?

Speaker 2: 43:38

There's no magic, really, really, really well, yeah, and we say that too. When I talked to an Amazon seller, or like anyone you know, we say the same thing. There's not a magic wand you can wave. Everyone has the same Amazon platform to work with. You might be, you just have to know how to do, like, what levers can you pull and which one should you not pull or stay away from, and sometimes maybe that's that lever. That's the brand new release of this feature that you're like wait for version five. You know what I mean. But other times it's what you said it's jumping on video ads because your CPCs are, in me, insanely low. You can get rent really high for an expensive keyword because other advertisers are being slow to get there and you you're already in the mix, you know. So it is kind of a balancing act, which is cool. I want to take a second, so class have you ever had pineapple on pizza before.

Speaker 1: 44:27

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:27

Yeah, does it belong. Does pineapple belong on pizza?

Speaker 1: 44:32

Generally. If it has enough meat, yeah, like it's it's. It actually adds good contrast to the pizza. I don't necessarily go out and order pizza with pineapple on it, but if there's a pizza party and somebody does like I will eat a slice. So the answer is yes.

Speaker 2: 44:46

The reason I'm asking this because this is kind of my transition and our controversial take section. So I normally just like to ask our guests and they can give us kind of a controversial take, an opinion that maybe is different from the space. I actually feel like what you just said it was actually one of those, but maybe if you have another one, do you have something else. That's kind of a controversial take that maybe you believe that other people don't, or other people are currently focused on the wrong thing.

Speaker 1: 45:11

So, like what I said before, yet that's I guess that could be controversial. I'd like to pull from that and that being as the base for everybody to more understand what my thought is toward these things. I think that there's a whole trend with external traffic right now. Tick tock advertising was like a huge thing and everybody was like jumping on a tick tock influencers, facebook groups and a whole lot of external traffic. For my point of view, majority of it is bells and whistles. A lot of it doesn't work. For it to work properly, it needs a same amount of work and it really proper focus and has to be done extremely well. And when Amazon sellers or smaller businesses that don't have human resources to concentrate on those things really solid, good people who are knowledgeable on tick tock, who know how to get things far they don't have people who are very knowledgeable on on influencer marketing and they try to do everything themselves. They take away effort, focus, time and money from Amazon internal advertising.

Speaker 1: 46:24

We've seen time and time again that if we just focus on Amazon's internal advertising and even within that I'm just separating sponsored products that gives you actual ranking we are able to generate really well, a lot better results than when we have a brand that is putting half money into Facebook ads, have money into Amazon, they're taking some of the money to influencer marketing, some of the money to tick tock. I'm not saying those things can't work. I'm saying that in majority of cases, in niches that aren't overpopulated, because that's the niches that we can actually make a successful business and make money without burning money. The lowest hang fruits in 90% of those cases, or 95% of those cases, is going to be Amazon advertising sponsored products, and I think that's one of the reasons why I'm not really like in LinkedIn. I'm not really covering too much of the external traffic, whereas a lot of other thought leaders they are pushing tick tock quite, quite a lot. They're pushing influencer marketing, etc.

Speaker 1: 47:30

I like to keep things within the platform and when we have solid stability there, then we might try to experiment on this thing, experiment and that thing and the different story when we have a client. So we work with one of the fastest growing startups here in Lithuania with supplement products and they have massive outside traffic, they have massive teams for Facebook and tick tock and etc. And when we are advertising, we are absolutely utilizing those assets. Right, we want to utilize those assets we have more money than we can put on Amazon advertising without burning that money, then those resources really really help and help us give good initial base.

Speaker 1: 48:15

But in majority of cases when we work with a family business or one man show Amazon seller company, they might want to spread themselves to all these different things because they've heard it on a podcast, because they've seen this is working really, really well. This is working really well. What ends up happening is a whole lot of chaos, a whole lot of money just thrown out the window, and the end result is in all the cases is either we facilitate everything back into Amazon advertising, put all the money and effort into sponsor products and sponsor brand sponsored video display when it's time, or that seller quits selling on Amazon, or we stop working with them because there's no way to generate results. When we have no ability to do that, we have no ability to focus on the thing that actually works. Yeah, so I think that might be a controversial take. I'm not sure if it fits.

Speaker 2: 49:08

I agree. I agree because I think, especially right now you know just my experience I think there's been a lot more buzz around this, like the Amazon attribution space and driving external traffic.

Speaker 1: 49:19

Like you, know even Google.

Speaker 2: 49:20

I think I have a space there, but it's.

Speaker 1: 49:23

It shouldn't be the main focus of, or sometimes even, you know, 10% might be a lot to take away from from the initial thing that actually is proven to work.

Speaker 2: 49:35

Yeah, well, I agree to an extent to like my. My take on it is exactly what you were kind of alluding to. There is like it makes sense when you're a mature brand who's really maybe tapped out a lot of the ad format types that you have available to you and like you're really well ranked, it's like, okay, maybe then it's time to go explore these other opportunities. Well, not if you have $5,000 a month budget and you're trying to decide we know I'm going to put 2000 on Facebook, 2000 on Google, 1000 influencers, then I have 1000 for Amazon one you just now.

Speaker 2: 50:04

You have all these platforms managed, which sounds miserable. But two, it's like you can't do as much to drive the results on platform, which I'm. I agree, you know I like to try to keep a lot of the stuff on platform until it's time to maybe look elsewhere. But yeah, no, that's a great, great controversial type.

Speaker 1: 50:22

They like the buzzwords. And then they like going through topics on LinkedIn and YouTube and taking all these golden nuggets where some of them are like really golden nuggets, just not for you, you know, in those in your situation maybe, and you just kind of lose themselves in their business to the shiny object syndrome.

Speaker 2: 50:40

Sure, yeah, no, that's good. So I want to be respectful of your time and that was an amazing shot. We had a really good discussion and I really appreciate you coming on. I think probably worthwhile to have you back for two or three or four more because you've just gone through like so much good stuff in that. So I wanted to turn it around real quick to you and just say you know, where can people or ask you, I guess, where can people reach you? What's kind of the best place to connect to the? You mentioned LinkedIn, but what works best for people who might want to reach out?

Speaker 1: 51:09

If you want to, if you just want to reach out or, you know, follow, read some of my content. Linkedin definitely is the best place. I'm sure we might have a link somewhere or my full name somewhere to copy and paste into LinkedIn. You can connect with me there or follow me there and engage in my post and we're going to connect. So if you are a midsize brand, you know, with solid, good foundations, with products, and you think that there is possibility for us to partner where I don't want to sound too obnoxious, I would say, but we do have quite strict criteria to who we accept or not, because we are relatively smaller agency with their limited capacity.

Speaker 1: 51:49

But if you think that you have solid product, good business plan and you're already selling and you are showing good results, definitely go to our website, fill in the application, have our team, like our team is going to reach out, we're going to talk and at the even if we don't start working together, we're going to audit your account. Show you the areas that you can be improving yourself to grow to the point where we might begin working together. If you are an Amazon seller, go to our website, fill in the application. Let's do an audit on your account and see where it takes us. And if you just want to follow me on LinkedIn, please do. Let's connect there, love it.

Speaker 2: 52:27

I love it Awesome. By the way, for anyone watching this, all the links will either be in the show notes or, if you're watching on YouTube, down below in the description. So we'll make sure we put your full name there, clydes. How do you say your last name again? Remind us Flyless Shoopies, shoopies, okay, cool. So all of Clydes's information will be down there, but I just want to say again, clydes, thanks so much for coming on the show and for everyone watching today. Yeah, anytime, we'll have you back 100%. Bye, bye, take care.

Speaker 2: 52:52

So that brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks again to Clydes from AMZVs for joining us today. That was an awesome, awesome episode. We got to learn about his background, his eight years in the whole Amazon space, how he took a client from half million to 30 million dollars in annual revenue, which is pretty incredible and a lot of really, really valuable nuggets along the way.

Speaker 2: 53:12

So I hope you guys got some value out of that, wherever you're watching or listening to this, and if you did find value, we'd appreciate it if you could kindly give us a rating. If you're watching this on YouTube, give us that thumbs up button and share this to a friend if you find some value and you think they would too. Obviously, don't forget to follow us on our social media pages for updates, behind the scenes, content and more, and you can find up the links to everything, as always, in the description box or show notes for this show. So that's it for today's episode. Mark your calendar, because we're going to be back next week for another captivating discussion, but until then, my name is Ben Smith and I'm signing off. Happy selling.