Expanding and Diversifying Your Amazon Business with Andrew Maff

Join us for an exclusive insider's journey into the world of e-commerce expansion and diversification with our special guest, Andrew Maff, founder, and CEO of Blue Tusker. With a rich history of over 15 years in the e-commerce realm, Andrew shares candid insights and practical strategies that go beyond the Amazon horizon.

Episode Highlights:

1. Leveraging Amazon as a Customer Acquisition Channel:

 - Andrew guides us through the art of using Amazon not just as a marketplace but as a potent customer acquisition channel. Learn why reliance solely on this platform may not be the best strategy for long-term success.

2. Diversifying to Other Platforms:

 - Ever wondered about successfully expanding to platforms like Walmart and Wayfair? Andrew breaks down his agency's full-service approach to assisting clients in this expansion journey, providing valuable insights for diversification.

3. Driving Traffic Beyond Amazon:

 - Put on your thinking caps as we explore strategies for redirecting traffic from Amazon to a direct-to-consumer site. Navigate the rules and discover how to stay within Amazon's guidelines while broadening your reach.

Buckle up for a roller-coaster ride of e-commerce insights, strategies, and light-hearted banter. This episode promises a blend of valuable knowledge and engaging conversation that you wouldn't want to miss!

Connect with Ben Smith:
Instagram: https://bit.ly/3F4hrt8
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skipwithben/

Business Social Media Links
Website: https://www.sellercandy.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/SellerCandyPro
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellercandyamz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sellercandy

Connect  with Andrew Maff:
Website: https://www.bluetuskr.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AndrewMaff/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmaff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrewmaff/
Podcast: https://ecommshow.bluetuskr.com/

Shareable episode link  - https://bit.ly/3GRjeD0
For content collaborations, please email us at: grei@sellercandy.com

Never Talk to Seller Support Again.

Seller Candy is the expert operations arm of your Amazon business. We provide outcome-driven support for time-consuming and challenging Seller Central issues so you Never Have to Talk to Seller Support Again! With Agency-Level security practices and an experienced team who’s been through the thick of it, we give sellers bandwidth on demand without the hassle of hiring, training, or managing.

#amazonsellercentral #amazonsupport #ecommerce #amazonbusiness

Never Talk to Seller Support Again.

Seller Candy is the expert operations arm of your Amazon business. We provide outcome-driven support for time-consuming and challenging Seller Central issues so you Never Have to Talk to Seller Support Again! With Agency-Level security practices and an experienced team who’s been through the thick of it, we give sellers bandwidth on demand without the hassle of hiring, training, or managing.

#amazonsellercentral #amazonsupport #ecommerce #amazonbusiness

Transcript

Andrew Maff: 0:00

I think that Amazon is a better customer acquisition channel for a company that is trying to build a brand and shouldn't be so reliant on just Amazon.

Ben Smith: 0:17

Hello, I am your host, ben, and welcome back to season two of the Amazon Strategist show. The show that's all strategy, with no hacks, no silver bullets and no magic pills, just real, practical strategy for serious Amazon sellers. All right, I just finished recording an awesome episode with Andrew Maff of Blue Tusker. We talked about all kinds of different things wide range in conversation, both talking about Amazon and then how to actually expand and sell off of Amazon, and how to do it with a really nice framework. Andrew actually breaks down how you can actually start by slowly inching into selling off of Amazon using things like buy with prime and a number of other amazing tactics that he has. So he's got 15 plus years of experience in the e-commerce space. So he's got a ton of knowledge to burn to the table. So I hope you enjoy this episode.

Ben Smith: 1:03

Without further ado, let's dig in. Today, we've got the pleasure of being joined by the incredible Andrew. Andrew Maff is an e-commerce marketing focused entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Blue Tusker, a full service marketing agency for e-commerce sellers that helps brands expand their reach through robust digital strategies, targeted media buying and data driven analysis, as well as the host of the Ecom show podcast Andrew, welcome to the Amazon strategy show. How are you doing today?

Andrew Maff: 1:28

Doing. Good. Thanks for having me, ben, looking forward to it, appreciate it.

Ben Smith: 1:31

Yeah, likewise, it's always fun when I have someone on that also has a podcast, because you just know that the conversation is going to be really solid. So I guess my first question to you is how did you get into the podcasting side? Was that after you started your agency, or was it the other way around?

Andrew Maff: 1:46

No. So before I started Blue Tusker, I was a partner in another agency and I had started dabbling in podcasts and we ended up exiting that in late 2019-ish and I had just kind of got the podcast thing going. And so when I wanted to start Blue Tusker, I was like I enjoyed that. That was fun, like just being able to keep your ear to the ground and chatting with people. So I started up a new one and we had launched in early 2020.

Andrew Maff: 2:10

So within obviously a couple of months we were in deep pandemic and so I had nothing to do. So I was doing daily shows and so the show was structured completely different. At the time I'd called it marketing interruption. It was catered to e-commerce, but a little bit more generalized, and then I just like I did not have the bandwidth to do daily episodes. They were short, like you know five, ten minute, like just here's a quip thing kind of thing that we were doing, but God it got long. So it changed it to e-com show, that one. We actually just passed our hundredth episode about a month ago. It's great, it's so fun interviewing, like you know, we get. I'm a big Shark Tank fan, so I've had probably like 15, 20 people from Shark Tank on there that were specific in the e-com area, then handful of vendors, some really good size e-commerce brands coming on that doing like nine figures and just wildly different conversations from some of the Shark Tank people, like it's a good time, it's interesting.

Ben Smith: 3:10

Yeah, that's rad. Congrats on that milestone. I mean, now that I've been, this is so. The season first season of our show was actually led by our CEO, john, and then he passed the torch to me for a second season. So I've only got maybe like 15 episodes under my belt, so I've still got a ways to go to catch up to you. But I did previously have a YouTube channel on my own and I had put out like a hundred videos on there and I started by trying to do daily videos and it was so exhausting. I kept it up for like a month and a month and a half and I saw the gross. But it was also just like, oh my gosh, it burns you out really quick.

Andrew Maff: 3:41

It's exhausting. Plus, like you think that you have ideas to talk about for years on end and then you get like 20 or 30 in and you're like I don't really know, I'm just going to poke other stuff I had already mentioned. So that's also challenging too. I've been there before.

Ben Smith: 3:59

I think for me, the once I got a comment saying hey, I think you guys need to talk about something new, I was like I need to switch to like one once per week episode. So anyway, man, enough about that. I just want to kind of take it back and you give us a little bit of kind of insight into kind of some of your backstory. But can you kind of fill us in on how you kind of got into this whole world of e-commerce and Amazon.

Andrew Maff: 4:19

So I have actually been in the e-commerce industry for a little over 15 years. It was actually one of my first like big boy jobs. I was in high school, actually, and my father acquired a company that sold like car shocks and suspension and small little company but he was part of the whole dot com boom and that fun stuff. So he knew he wanted to take it online. So he took it online and he wanted help in the warehouse and I was like I'll do that. But I knew I wanted to get into marketing. I was like but I want to, at the same time like I want to help with something marketing related. So I got started there kind of on the email marketing side at that time.

Andrew Maff: 5:02

Then, as time went on, I was a touring drummer for a little while and my role in the band, outside of the obvious, was concert promotion, and so venues actually started hiring me to do other concerts they had coming in events that they were doing, and so I got into basically developing kind of an agency around that hated the music industry, so took that kind of hospitality and ended up more in retail and started doing a lot of retail and that's when e-commerce really started to pick up, and so then I was just in e-commerce. Then in 20, 2014, I believe, 2014, 2015, I was in house at a couple of different places, some in e-commerce, like working with e-commerce sellers as a vendor, then in house just at different e-commerce brands and started an agency with a partner of mine in 2016. Had that for a few years, exited that in late 2019, started Blue Tusker in 2020, and now I'm on this podcast.

Ben Smith: 6:07

Dang man, that is a wild story. It's always fun to hear how different people's stories are. I like to think that they're all somewhat similar, like, oh, we all wanted to do some e-commerce thing to not know the traditional route. But the reality is, the more people I've talked to, the more I realized they're really wide or ranging right.

Andrew Maff: 6:22

Oh yeah.

Ben Smith: 6:23

You guys started through the family business side and then that led into were you selling merch for the various bands? Is that what it was?

Andrew Maff: 6:30

No, we actually would run ticket sales and stuff. We were at the time I lived in Florida, so Central Florida at that time and a little bit of South Florida was my region, so pretty much any concert that came through there I would be more or less the promoter and put in the show on and that kind of stuff. But God, that industry was horrible. I only did that for a couple of years and I was like I'm just going to help these retailers and do that.

Ben Smith: 6:55

Yeah, well, nice. So it's all led you to where you are today, which is leading the charge of Blue Tusker. Can you kind of tell us just an overview of what exactly Blue Tusker does for your clients?

Andrew Maff: 7:06

Yeah, so real high level. We're a full service marketing company for e-commerce sellers. Our biggest differentiators really are that we have a full team of experts with experience in different areas, and so our account strategists act as almost like fractional CMOs, and then our individualized departments that specialize in areas fractional aspects of that department, so we have someone who's solely focused on SEO and email marketing, paid ads and marketplace marketing, amazon stuff, obviously. So what we do is we actually find ways to bring all of that under one roof and make sure that the strategy is kind of cohesive across the board. So we work with sellers typically that are usually either on Amazon and also have their own website, and then maybe they're on Walmart and Wayfair, chewie like anything like that, or they're on Amazon and they want to find ways to start to diversify off Amazon and kind of test the waters in building their own brand, and so that's kind of where we come in.

Ben Smith: 8:07

That's awesome. When you started the agency, did you start it just with kind of one vertical? Did you start it as just an Amazon only agency? Or did you go in because you had that previous agency experience and just say, hey, this is what we're doing and it was all the channels right out of the gate?

Andrew Maff: 8:22

So our previous agency was very much Amazon focused. It was probably 80, 85% of our business. We said we were full service, but really it was just pretty much full service marketing on Amazon with a little bit of off Amazon stuff. Sure, one thing I noticed right after we exited that and where I kind of saw the industry going was we which actually I know we'll actually talk about here we used to just make our own available on Amazon buttons. So we would actually put that button on someone's site because we did a bunch of tests where we would like increase let's say, facebook get spend by like 10%, we'd see a relevant revenue increase on the website by six, seven percent. But then we'd see the Amazon business increase by like three or 4% and we knew we had a good amount of people that were leaving the site and going straight to Amazon. So we actually used to just develop our own available on Amazon buttons and take them there.

Andrew Maff: 9:19

The more we started to do that stuff and the more we started to test it. And then obviously the iOS change was coming out around that time and all this stuff was happening. I knew that the customer journey was going to get really fluid. You're going to go to a website and then they're going to go shop wherever they want, or they may find you on Amazon or Walmart and then they may come to your website, which we've seen kind of happen a little bit as well. And so as I started to realize that, I knew I wanted to position Blue Tusker a little bit differently, where we were actually going to focus on how we can use all the assets that a seller has available to them, basically pivot their marketing strategy based on the needs at the time.

Andrew Maff: 9:55

So product launches on Amazon are a nightmare. You might as well start a whole new business over, because it doesn't matter how many sales you have in your other product. You've got to start this guy over again, right? So what we do is, if we build a brand with their own email list or we start using now we've got Buy With Prime and things like that we can take that audience that we know shops on Amazon, direct them to Amazon to get that product launch moving with that nice little, you know, 30 to 68 honeymoon period, get a little bit of a boost and then send it back to the website because you know typically their margins are better there. So we find ways to develop things like that so that we can help a business use all of his assets to benefit each sales channel, as opposed to focusing on individual sales channels. That's awesome.

Ben Smith: 10:40

So I come from. Before I was at Sellercandy I worked as an account manager at our founder. He owns a full service Amazon agency so we just did Amazon stuff. So I kind of come from that side of the equation, certainly where we weren't doing any of the other pieces. But I feel like it's challenging to pull off what you guys do because there's so many moving pieces. But I guess the flip side of it is when you can pull it off really well as an agency, it gives you so much more power to help a client out right, because there's so many more levers you can pull, when you can look at strategy across the board, versus if you're a brand that has to go and work with a Google ads agency, a separate Amazon agency, something else for SEO, that kind of thing it becomes a lot more fragmented. From just the conversations I've had Is that still what you hear, I don't know from maybe clients that are coming to you guys from elsewhere.

Andrew Maff: 11:29

Yeah, I mean, look, we always get the pushback of you can't be great at everything, what's your specialty, blah blah. It's a very sound argument and it makes sense because, as our brand, we are basically saying, from a marketing perspective, we can help you with everything, but the fact of the matter is I'm not great at most of it. I'm really more of the strategy guy my team. We have someone whose whole department solely focuses on SEO. That's all they do. There's a bunch of full service agencies out there that do the whole. You've got someone who knows a little bit a lot and you just get X amount of hours from them and that kind of thing. Ours is very different.

Andrew Maff: 12:09

There was actually two reasons I did this. When I was in house, I was at an eight figure brand. It was two weeks before Black Friday, cyber Monday. 85% of their business was on Amazon Ad spends ramping up and credit cards can only go so high Until you can pay it off fast enough. So we had to switch out a credit card for whatever reason. Amazon thought that it was fraudulent and they completely shut the account down for two weeks. So we didn't get back up and running until right after Black Friday. I had just started there for like three months so I thought I'm losing my job. We just lost 85% of our business, screwed. So I knew like, okay, sellers need to diversify. Everything grew, things got better and then good size, eight figure brand.

Andrew Maff: 12:52

I was the only marketer in house and so I had contractors and multiple agencies and all this stuff and the thing that drove me crazy is I could never get all of them to talk to each other. The agency we worked with for Amazon advertising it had no idea what the other advertising agency was doing. So they would see an increase on Amazon, they'd take all the credit and then these guys would get a ton of shit because basically they didn't know that so many people were going to Amazon. My Google ads company wouldn't talk to my SEO company. No one knew what the email marketing guy was doing. So social looked weird.

Andrew Maff: 13:25

If it wasn't lined up, it made no sense and I spent more time managing my own accounts across all these different agencies and contractors that I kept saying like if it could just be done where these specialized agencies are all under one area and I'm basically paying for fragmented pieces of their time, and then I have one overarching like fractional CMO. We could say that is overseeing the full thing and making sure the strategy is cohesive and works. And you know, if we're pivoting to Amazon for a product launch, great, but please don't do it forever because the margins aren't awesome. So, like, we got to pivot it back and so having that kind of internal communication where everyone is on the same team, as opposed to 500 different agencies where you're trying to get everyone to talk to each other, seems to have worked a lot better than a lot of the specialized ones.

Andrew Maff: 14:17

Now, in some cases too, though, we like puzzle, piece, like sometimes we work with someone. They're like hey, we've got a Amazon ad agency that we just love, they're doing great. Changing agencies is a chore, it is a nightmare. Everything is a pain. So I always say, like, look, you got someone you like, keep it. Like we can puzzle, piece in and help oversee the strategy. Let them keep it. Same thing if they've got someone internal. So it's a little more malleable, but it's more or less the main reason that we put it this way.

Ben Smith: 14:46

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense the way that you explain it to see. I mean, I like the idea of that fractional CMO, right, which is a. When I first heard about that term, it made a lot of sense to me as well. But that person's kind of the conductor, so to speak, of the orchestra and they're making sure all the different pieces coordinate. It's cool that you guys have developed it so it can be flexible in that way, Cause I've talked to a lot of brands that they already have a couple of the pieces established, or maybe they even come to us, for example, and they already have some in-house Amazon people.

Ben Smith: 15:11

They just want to maybe augment that team, but they don't need like the full of gambit, right and some of that. So everyone's slightly different, but that's pretty cool. So I guess kind of to dig it a little bit more. The audience here that's watching this is normally going to be a lot of Amazon sellers, and so I want to dig into kind of how to diversify and take things off Amazon a little bit more. So what do you think is kind of the smartest way to actually go into diversifying off Amazon?

Andrew Maff: 15:33

My preference now, like the way that I've mapped this out, of like okay, you're on Amazon and you want to diversify off Amazon. No matter how large you are on Amazon, you could be doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. You could be doing a couple hundred million dollars a year. No one wants to spend the money on a good website without some kind of like. Is this going to work? Like, how do we test this? So we've mapped out a few ways that we test it. The typical way is you've got some good products you're selling. Chances are you've got an Amazon storefront. You're probably running some brand ads, so you've figured out that your storefront can convert. Right, let's read the analytics in the back. Is it converting? If the traffic is driving there, is doing well, do we know the storefront works? Does great, awesome. Then we go okay, let's just test the off Amazon market. If we're knowing we're wanting to get into our own website, chances are okay, what type of brand do I have? Do I need to educate the market or is there a lot of search volume for this? So then it's going to tell me do I want to try like a Facebook and Instagram ad? So I want to do like TikTok? Do I want to do Google ads or Microsoft or one of those? Figure that out, set up the Amazon attribution, send the traffic directly to the storefront Very, very easy way to get started.

Andrew Maff: 16:46

Right, you're testing the battlegrounds. The difficulty is none of those platforms know if you're converting right, like Facebook, learns on its own after you convert. So the problem there is you can only optimize for link clicks. So it's a short period of time. You want to do the test, but really what you're trying to figure out is there is there off Amazon traffic that is willing to convert on Amazon. I never say let's make sure also that it's like incredibly profitable, because that model of just sending it straight to the storefront is tough. So, because we want to track stuff, we want to improve on it. So I just want to know that it's possible.

Andrew Maff: 17:20

After that, which is usually a short period of time, then we go okay, now let's ease into this and see how we can start to build a little bit more here. Then we just do a very basic landing page, right, doesn't have to be a whole site, let's do just the top product. We already know that the off Amazon market is willing to convert. Now let's see what we can do to improve the experience and have a little bit more control here. So we'll do a very basic landing page, just focus on like a product or two or a bundle or something like that, and what we'll do is we'll leverage the buy with prime button. So now what I can do is I can have a traditional cart. I can see getting them to convert from an off Amazon perspective. But I'm also going to keep that added Amazon brand awareness so that if someone's a little bit uncomfortable because they don't really know who we are and we don't have that many reviews off Amazon, I can benefit from that button. Anyone who's still interested in shopping with Amazon can purchase, plus buy with prime. I can pull my reviews over from Amazon. So now my landing page looks like it has reviews. So that's a nice way to get that started too. So so far what we've done is we basically tested on the storefronts we're still on Amazon Then we tested a little bit off Amazon by just doing a landing page and then at that point it comes down to how do we make that profitable?

Andrew Maff: 18:33

Do we replicate the landing page and just do several funnels to build up enough profit from an off Amazon perspective to justify doing a site. Or do we just go ahead and go into a site? Do we know that this is a very social heavy brand? So now I've just got to focus on starting to build my social media, following and working with influencer and stuff like that. Or is this a more of a search play? So do we want to start getting into SEO and working on backlinks that can go to and from Amazon? There's ways to do that. So that's where it kind of becomes like, okay, dependent on the brand, what do we change? But that's typically how we kind of ease into just testing the off Amazon market.

Ben Smith: 19:11

That was an amazing framework. So thanks for spelling out. I do have two kind of follow up questions and one, excuse me, because I'm not as familiar with off Amazon stuff. I know of the buy with prime button. I understand what it is, but I've never personally gone and rolled that out on anyone's website. So when you go and roll that out on a client's site or using kind of this strategy that you talked about, are you normally doing just that option for a checkout? Or do you normally say, hey, here, we want you to convert on our website, let's say on our Shopify store? Although I don't know what that is, that's necessarily what you guys recommend. And just in case, here's the buy with prime is kind of the backup option. Or do you say, hey, we're just going to use buy with prime at first as like kind of our soft, like progression towards getting them maybe to convert directly on our own shopping cart? Do you have like a good framework for that?

Andrew Maff: 20:02

So the one thing you mentioned, I do usually suggest Shopify. There's a handful of times where we'll actually suggest big commerce. It depends there's certain like types of products in certain audiences, with the way that the site's got to get structured that big commerce actually works out a little bit better. But typically Shopify. To answer your question, though, usually I will do both. I will have buy with prime and the add to cart. Go ahead and build the landing page on Shopify. Shop Five's like I think this basics like 30 bucks a month or something. It's no one's going to die over it, it'll be fine. Test it out on there. A single page. You don't need a homepage or anything like that, it's just the landing page that takes you directly into a cart. I like having both, mainly because I've never seen a reduction in conversions because I still have my add to cart button and I don't just have buy with prime. I want people to know that shopping through Amazon is an option, but I'm going to put the added bells and whistles in place so that I can try to get them to convert through my cart, because really building a brand off Amazon, the largest benefit hands down outside of the obvious, which is your improved margin is you get to own your own data, and the nice thing about buy with prime is they give you that. You've got their name, you've got their email, you've got all that fun stuff, so let them shop however they want. You're going to get their information.

Andrew Maff: 21:17

One of the things I always talk about is when you go to exit a Amazon business let's say it's solely FBA, and let's say you're doing great. You're clear in seven figures. You're in a good spot. Really, what someone's going to come acquire you for is obviously the profit, your inventory in the product and your process and like that's kind of about it.

Andrew Maff: 21:37

Whereas if you start to diversify off Amazon and you've got a face, a social media audience, you've got an email list, you've got organic traffic coming in, with all these people getting pixeled, all of a sudden you've got all these additional assets. You can exit for two to three times more than if you were just an FBA seller, because you now have all these additional assets and it opens up your buyer pool. So if you're solely selling let's say, fishing stuff on Amazon, someone's going to come in and buy you. But we can only have one seller central account. You can only do so much so like there's no way to really benefit from that audience. From an off Amazon perspective, I could have a hunting company be interested in acquiring me and they just want to expand into fishing. But they also want to sell their hunting stuff to a likely the same similar audience. So by expanding into having your own brand, it really elevates the overall value of the company if you're looking to hopefully exit one day.

Ben Smith: 22:34

Yeah, that's a big deal, and that's kind of my leads me into my follow up question, which is I know this is kind of tough to answer, but do you have like a sense of when is a good time for what's saying Amazon seller to start looking at these other channels or to do a strategy like what you just said? And I've asked this to a couple other guests and so I'm curious kind of your take on it, right, I think that way is going to be something in my. My guess is not for a brand new seller, right? If they're just getting started on Amazon, maybe they're under five or 10 K a month in revenue, probably focus on Amazon. But where is that turning point where it's like maybe I should start going to these other looking? I should explore this a little bit more.

Andrew Maff: 23:11

It depends on the product line Because, honestly, there's products out there that you could be killing it on Amazon and you probably really won't do that well off Amazon, because Amazon's also got a lot of product that is just kind of you know that quick, like you're at the register, let me grab it, kind of thing, and it's so inexpensive that you would have to do an obscene amount of volume on your own website to get it to actually start moving. Now, if you think you're going to eventually go into retail, then you do want to have a website, almost as a showcase. Do you want it to be profitable? Yes, but it's probably going to be cutting it close because those costs are going to be too high. However, it depends on what your product is and how you're trying to grow it out.

Andrew Maff: 23:57

Right, if you're an Amazon seller that, let's say, you got into a certain product because you saw a hole in the market on Amazon, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have that as an option off Amazon.

Andrew Maff: 24:12

And if you've got a really like total, random amalgamation of products that you're selling, there's no cohesiveness of that brand, of that product line.

Andrew Maff: 24:20

So that experience for the user off Amazon they're not going to know, like, why would I go to your site? You've got such random stuff. I'm not going to remember to come to you for these things. But if you're getting into a certain product line and you're trying to build a brand and you know you've got your strong focus on your you know, on Amazon you've got a strong focus on your branding, your product imagery, your A plus content, your storefront, all that fun stuff, like if you've got that cohesive across the board and you know there's an audience off Amazon as well that would be interested in the product line, then you can start to test it and just do like a couple products at the time. I think Amazon's fantastic for proving out the viability of a product, but when you go to venture off Amazon, you've got to kind of do that again before you just jump into spending, you know, tens of thousands of dollars on a website.

Ben Smith: 25:08

Yeah, that makes sense. It's all about testing. Now that we're kind of back onto the Amazon side, you get a lot of data obviously from all the work that you're doing. Like if you're working with a brand that maybe is doing all the other stuff, like they have their own Shopify store, they've got their email list and they're now just getting into Amazon, which is that the less common case, or is that, so a big percentage of people.

Andrew Maff: 25:29

It's incredibly less common. It's kind of funny because I do see like Amazon sellers as like their own little click. And then you've got like Shopify sellers and they'll click and they talk bad about each other all the time. And it's hilarious because like working in high school, so like you'll get these people that are just on, let's say, shopify, and they just don't want to give Amazon any of their data. They're afraid that Amazon's gonna knock off their product and start selling it themselves.

Andrew Maff: 25:55

You know there's that aspect. Then you have the Amazon people that are like why would I put so much work into doing that when I've got Amazon and I've got money coming in? And blah, blah, like I don't want to bother with social media and it's too many things at once, like it's overwhelming and so they stay away from it. So there's just like they just don't like each other. It's hilarious. Then you get the ones that are in the middle, right. So then you get the ones like, oh, I'm everywhere. And then that's where it becomes like it comes down to the owner of what they want to do at that time.

Andrew Maff: 26:26

A lot of times if you see someone is doing well on Shopify or big commerce whatever and they want to start selling on Amazon, usually what they'll do is they'll use Amazon as more of a customer acquisition channel and less reliant on using it for revenue. So they might take like a handful of their products and put it on Amazon. Use that to start to build the brand on Amazon and try to get people back to their site so that they can see the rest of their product line. That I usually see works pretty well, especially with like apparel brands. If they're doing drops and stuff all the time, it is what it is. But if they've got like a handful that are doing really well and they obviously are just a quick like, do a quick search on Amazon. You'll see if your brand name is being searched. If people think you're there, you should probably be there. So that's when usually you'll see those sellers start getting on there.

Ben Smith: 27:12

How do you advise clients that are trying to bring you know they're using Amazon as per customer acquisition and this is pretty much everyone, I feel like but to drive traffic ultimately, eventually, back to their direct to consumer site? How do you do that, or what do you advise them on? You know to do it without breaking any rules, violating terms of service, getting suspended on Amazon. Is it product inserts? Is it, I don't know, with a coupon code? I you know what, like what exactly? Is it that works well?

Andrew Maff: 27:42

So that definitely all comes down to pretty much the packaging. I am a big fan of inserts. When you, when your packaging is built, that you can do it, because we all know it's technically kind of a gray area with Amazon's TOS on whether they allow it or not. Realistically they don't allow it, but if it's inside the product packaging, it's considered part of the product and it's actually like it's a little bit of a gray area. So if you've got like packaging where you're it's not a clear thing and you can stick it in there like then yes, I love inserts Coupons to come back, offers to subscribe on the website, like anything you can do to just get them to shop on the website once that's all you need, then you can kind of get them into the motion of all your attention, marking that kind of stuff. Let's say that you don't have that as an opportunity.

Andrew Maff: 28:29

The other thing that you really should be doing regardless is making sure that your brand is cohesive across the board. Any channel that you sell on Amazon, walmart, ebay, your own website, like your imagery, your voice, your all the different product images that you have, your video etc. Like it should all look and sound the same so that if someone is willing to shop with you, they start getting used to your branding. They're comfortable with your branding if they shop with you before. So your branding, your overall voice and your aesthetic are so important to make sure that at least people start to recognize you so that, as time goes on, you start running social ads or something like that, and they come across you. Maybe they've shopped with you on Amazon before and they're like oh, they have a website and then all of a sudden you're able to pull them in from there because they're used to your brand from Amazon. So it's, it's all about just making sure everything stays cohesive, really.

Ben Smith: 29:19

Do you have any sense of like the brand halo effects, like how many people truly do make that first purchase on Amazon and then continue their subsequent purchases on a direct to consumer site? And I know I'm putting you on the spot so I don't have the answer, that's all right. I just always personally been curious.

Andrew Maff: 29:39

I wish I knew that. If Amazon would share their data with me, then, yeah, I could figure it out.

Andrew Maff: 29:43

But every time I ask they say no yeah you know there isn't really a way for us to tell that, because we don't know who shopped on Amazon really, until they come over and they actually, you know, tell us. The nice thing about buy with prime is that we can track that kind of stuff. So, like when we do product launches on Amazon, if they're on their own website and they have that buy with prime option, I make sure that the button's pixeled so I know everyone who clicked on it. So even if they didn't purchase, I'm aware of it. And then you can integrate it with Facebook and Google so I can also see who actually purchased. And then it also integrates with Klaviyo. So I just put them into a separate segment in my email list.

Andrew Maff: 30:22

So when we do a product launch, I just do a big old campaign to that group of people, take them all into one big thing, send them directly to Amazon, get the benefit of that kind of you know that 30, 60, a honeymoon period and get the reviews in the sales in, and then I just pivot it back to the website and try to keep them on the site, but almost like a little Amazon VIP program kind of thing. But at least that way when I launch a new product. It's not a nightmare, but in terms of like the brand hail effect, the only thing I can go off of is watching my wife shop, which is she knows nothing about what I do. She thinks I post on Facebook all day. Just it's fantastic.

Andrew Maff: 30:58

But I actually kind of like it because then I watch her shop, which she does for a living, and she'll go to someone's website and if she's like I don't really know this brand and like there's not a ton of reviews, she'll go and see if they're available on Amazon. But she'll also do the other the other way around. She'll look on Amazon to see if, you know, she'll come across something She'll be like oh I wonder if they have their own website, because sometimes they have like a 10% off or something, so she'll pop around and move around. So I think that the customer journey is so fluid now and people know that you know it's kind of like shopping in an old department store, right, like if you're in there and you're in there about to buy something and you there's a brand that you like and you need it, you're going to go ahead and buy it. So that's why I always say like you really should be on Amazon and Walmart wherever your customer is, so that when they're ready to purchase, you're there and ready to go.

Ben Smith: 31:49

Yeah, it gives you more real estate. It's going to be more dollars, I mean, it just makes sense. And also that low key that was what you just said is actually one of the my favorite tips that no one's ever said before, which is watching, either like your significant other or like close friends or your parents or something siblings shop and if they're not in the e-commerce world, like it's actually like a really telling, like I've learned a lot from watching my friends how they're shopping behaviors are. I've got friends that buy everything through Amazon. I've got people that they hate Amazon for whatever reason. It only buy direct to consumer or retail.

Ben Smith: 32:21

It's just funny watching people, so it's an interesting one. One other thing I wanted to ask about too, andrew, is because we get a lot of data on Amazon that we can use to make decisions on Amazon or even carry off Amazon. But what about the other way around, like if you're running ads on Facebook, like any of the meta platforms, google, how do you use any of that information to maybe help inform decisions that you make with your listing optimization or your advertising?

Andrew Maff: 32:47

back on Amazon itself, so there's actually a handful of Amazon sellers we work with now where we're slowly working on helping them diversify, and one of the things we wanted to do to help mitigate a lot of that risk was OK, well, what can we do to help improve your Amazon business at the same time? And so instead of oh you know, let's build out a landing page and send your people to the storefront or anything like that, we also test like OK, how do we just send people directly to listings and get them to purchase certain things? So there's theories on. You know, if you're driving a ton of external traffic to a listing and it's not as qualified, it doesn't convert as well, it's going to hurt your organic ranking. Your overall BSR is going to fall, right. I don't know how true that is. I do think it's possible. You know, amazon knows the difference between someone who came in from an external traffic as opposed to someone who searched. So sometimes I don't know if I entirely believe that, but either way, you don't want to send bad traffic to anything anyway. So we'll work with sellers if they're doing like Prime Day we did a bunch of stuff just send people straight to the listing. We didn't bother with anything else, like we know what we know. We know that they shop on Amazon. Let's send them on Facebook. And well, especially Facebook, you can narrow your audience based on people that are interested in Amazon. So you know that chances are they have a prime account. So I know I'm hitting the right audience.

Andrew Maff: 34:14

Then you've got like the SEO side of things, which I think is wildly underrated, which is, you know, when you're doing off Amazon stuff, you've got traditional SEO creating articles and you know, focusing on certain keywords and then making your sites in a good spot and all that kind of stuff. And what I realized is like no one does this for their own listings. Every domain on the internet, I should say, has a domain authority. Right, amazon's like 99 or something, it's out of a hundred, but every page has its own page authority as well, and so if a domain has a really high domain authority and a page authority is lower, it has the ability to get really high because that domain is so high. So we actually will focus on getting backlinks to just listings. Or we've got a couple of people we work with where we do like we have a blog for them. They don't have the ability to convert off Amazon but we link a lot to all their products to get those products backlinks. And we do outreach with other people and guest blog posts to get additional backlinks to those pages.

Andrew Maff: 35:12

Because what happens is when you do a listing optimization, you know you're using your traditional stuff. You're using Helium 10 or Jungle Scout or Data Diver whatever you've got. Do your listing optimization. You're focusing on Amazon keywords, right, and then on Amazon data. We also look at like SEMrush or Ahrefs or Moz and pull that kind of data when we're doing listing optimizations as well, because usually those terms are interchangeable and it'll work on a Google side. But if we can actually get your listing to improve its page authority from Google, now, when people are searching stuff on Google, your listing is showing up first, so you can actually get a lot of organic traffic from just an off Amazon perspective on Google because your listing has such a high page authority. So now all of a sudden that's going to be qualified traffic, because it's people searching just on a different search engine for a product like yours. You're up at the top and now they're coming over and purchasing. So we see a lot of benefit from that as well.

Ben Smith: 36:12

Yeah, that was a really good advice. I haven't thought about it in that way before. I'm not again. I've only dabbled in the SEO world, so honestly, you've got my brain spinning a little bit. I'm thinking about some of my own products and what I could do with them. To me, I was always thinking about that with editorials when those were still around. Did you ever mess around with the Amazon editorials or did you have access to those?

Andrew Maff: 36:30

Yeah, yeah.

Ben Smith: 36:32

And yeah, I think they do show up in Google search results directly, and is that an organic thing?

Andrew Maff: 36:37

Yeah, it's completely organic. You could pay Google ads and drive the traffic. But to what some people worry about is that extended amount of traffic that may not be ready to buy. Is that going to hurt my listing? So, from a backlink perspective, you're not driving really any traffic, but you're going to start to improve up the Google search rankings and so then if they're clicking on it now, they're interested. Plus, the nice thing is you can start to see like okay, which keywords am I ranking for? Really well, from off Amazon, maybe those you want to try Google ads with and you can test and see how you want to do that.

Andrew Maff: 37:14

But then you also have the benefit to have like not only do you get the backlinks, but you're getting the added awareness on all these other websites. And if you, especially this time of year, at least at the time of this recording like we're in Q4, you can go get on those others. You know how many listicles are out there right now, like, oh, top X, whatever, like you know, and you can get on all those. Great way to get external traffic from off Amazon over to Amazon. Benefit the listings, benefit the Amazon business. And then, just you know, you're not so reliant on worrying about building a brand off Amazon. It's just a nice way to focus on how do I get other channels to benefit my Amazon business, because Amazon ads CPCs are going up, just like always, and Amazon's doing what they do best, which is just expanding into 500 other places that you could run ads, but the attribution levels are really high. You've got DSP that takes credit for almost everything. So it's kind of like do you want to keep paying for stuff? Or, at a certain point, do you actually try to build it into more of an asset so that you're not so reliant on your advertising because it's pay to play is tough?

Ben Smith: 38:18

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that was amazing. I'm going to have to think about that a lot more for some of the clients that we work with too. We don't do advertising, but that's a we might have to send some people your way. I want to ask you a question that hopefully is not the hardest question of this show so far, but does pineapple belong on pizza?

Andrew Maff: 38:36

No.

Ben Smith: 38:37

No, okay, no, I've had a hard no right off the bat. I've had two Italian guests so and they kind of just are like I can't talk about that on here.

Andrew Maff: 38:53

No, no, I think fruit on a pizza just doesn't. I don't get it. There's no other fruit I can think of, although you could argue if tomatoes are fruit, but no, we don't want the hard one.

Ben Smith: 39:05

Okay, good to know. So the reason I'm asking obviously is this is our controversial take. So I always like to ask our guests what's something that is kind of the most controversial or debatable opinion that you might hold that other people in the industry don't hold about Amazon or just e-commerce in general, if you have anything, I think that Amazon is a better customer acquisition channel for a company that is trying to build a brand and shouldn't be so reliant on just Amazon.

Andrew Maff: 39:38

And that's typically like we start looking at diversifying stuff. That's when people are like what are you talking about? I make most of my revenue on Amazon, blah blah. But when you put that much effort into a single sales channel, if you were to do that much effort on an off Amazon sales channel, you would be significantly more profitable because margins are much better. But Amazon's got the existing audience, so it kind of is what it is. The other side of it would be like the buy with prime thing that came out. There's some pushback on it, right. There's certain products where it doesn't work out for them. There's no FBA fee, which is great. It's a really small, like 3% commission as opposed to like what? Like a 20 or 30% whatever FBA sheet.

Andrew Maff: 40:20

So it's like nothing, but their fulfillment is different. The shipping rates are different.

Ben Smith: 40:27

I think they do it off of MCF, I believe, is it a multi-channel? Yeah, I was going to say, okay, that makes sense.

Andrew Maff: 40:31

I think it's off MCF charging If the product is under like $35 ish. The math doesn't really line up unless it's small, and then it's different. So it's always one of those things I'm like I don't know. You got to talk to our rep to figure out what your costs are actually going to be. So most of the time you know you're going to have to figure out what your costs are. It's completely better than than actually selling directly on Amazon. Your margins are much better.

Andrew Maff: 40:56

But people really don't like the idea of oh, amazon's gonna get some of my customer data and I don't want to help Amazon and it's still gonna hurt my margins and blah blah.

Andrew Maff: 41:06

I'm a big fan of taking a page directly out of Amazon's book, which is just provide the best experience you can for your customer, and that means making the shopping experience Incredibly easy.

Andrew Maff: 41:17

And if they want their product in two days and it means that you're gonna have to take a little bit of a margin, hit on it, it's better than not getting the sale at all and it's better to provide them a good experience so that they keep Shopping with you and so that you retain those customers, because customer acquisition costs are also going up. So I think that Amazon and Shopify are trying to play nicely together, and I think that sellers need to do the same, and they just need to acknowledge that. You need to do what's best for your customer and Let them shop where they're, wherever they're most comfortable, and not be so picky about your margins, because, while that obviously makes a ton of sense and though there's a lot of people are probably laughing at me for saying that you're actually losing money by trying to basically you know what is it step over dollars to get the pennies.

Ben Smith: 42:04

Yeah Well, especially when you're thinking on the longer term horizon, if you're trying to exit your business one day, then when you think about the potential Valuation that you're missing out on by just focusing on, you know, amazon only, not to mention like for me, just coming from the we help people deal with seller support world, like seeing how many Suspension issues or a wasting takedown issues, and, if you know, I mean when you step back from it, it's crazy to think that your entire business might hinge on one platform, right, like if your listing is taken down or your accounts shut down, knock on wood, but that that could ruin your business. So, yeah, I totally go, you're saying, although it's also Challenging. I mean, there's a lot of work that has to go into, but there's a lot of work that has to go on, no matter when you are, so might as well.

Andrew Maff: 42:50

Yeah, you know.

Ben Smith: 42:52

Why do? That kind of brings us to the end of the show. But I want to kind of turn things around to you and, just you know, let you share where people can find you or reach out to you if they have more questions or want to kind of get in touch To get some help or advice from your end.

Andrew Maff: 43:05

Yeah, our websites blue tusker comm. Feel you e to us k? Rcom. Otherwise, we're at blue tusker on all social media channels. I'm at Andrew math on all social media channels. So wherever, wherever you feel like communicating on there, email is Andrew at blue tusker. It's not complicated, super easy. Whatever works.

Ben Smith: 43:27

Yeah, cool, why, andrew, thanks so much for showing up today and bringing all that that wisdom. I'm hoping that this episode should air, but well before the end of the year, because I think you've got a lot of good stuff in there and I know that I've heard more and more, you know questions coming from clients and people that are on Amazon about Expanding off of Amazon, because you know things are getting a little bit more complicated and complex fun Just the Amazon world. So people are looking for other options. So for anyone who's listening who might be in that situation, definitely reach out to Andrew. Will put links and anything that he just mentioned down below in the show notes or in the YouTube description If you're watching this on YouTube. But without further ado, that's gonna bring us to the end of the episode. So thank you again, andrew, and thanks again to everyone who's tuning in. We'll see you on the next one. All right, that brings us to the end of the episode. So thanks again to Andrew from blue tusker. That was an amazing, amazing episode. We hope that you, wherever you're listening or watching this, got some kind of golden nugget out of this. Hopefully many, because there was a ton of good stuff in here as always.

Ben Smith: 44:24

Thanks so much for tuning into the Amazon strategist show. If you did find some kind of value in today's episode, we definitely appreciate it. If you give us a thumbs up, if you're watching this on YouTube or rate and review on your favorite podcast or Media player, your feedback definitely means the world to us. It helps us reach more and more new listeners and e-commerce enthusiasts just like yourself. So, last but not least, don't forget to follow us on our social media platforms. You're gonna get updates, behind the scenes content and a lot more there. You can find the links to everything from this episode down below in the description or in the show notes. So that's it for today's episode. Be sure to mark your calendars and join us again next week for another exciting guest in an exciting discussion. We're gonna bring a lot more insights and game-changing tips to the table. So until then, this is your host, ben Smith, signing off and wishing you happy selling.