Steven Pope With My Amazon Guy

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by On pay. Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Steven Pope with my Amazon guy. Welcome.

Steven Pope: Hey, thanks for having me on, Lee.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about my Amazon guy. How are you serving folks?

Steven Pope: Uh, so I run a 500 employee company called my Amazon Guy. And we help brands grow their business on Amazon. So that’s why they call me the Amazon guy.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your back story?

Steven Pope: I used to be a TV reporter overnight in Wisconsin, and then I was doing a live weather hits in, you know, Madison, Wisconsin, biggest blizzard the state had seen in a decade. And, uh, 10:00 at night missed my cue to go on the air. And I had hair back. Back then, uh, my hair froze over. I missed my cue. It felt like an idiot. And everybody was else was home in their pajamas. And I said, you know what? I would rather get into this e-commerce game where I could work from home. And so I actively transitioned my career and have been doing that since the past 15 years. Uh, so I’ve done everything from women’s plus size clothing to kitchen equipment to gold and silver coins. And, uh, after I got laid off about six years ago from a lighting company, I said, you know what? I’m tired of growing these e-commerce brands and making these guys millions of dollars. I’m going to go do it for myself and the true entrepreneurial spirit. And it’s been a it’s been a really good big growth since then. And, and, you know, we run $20 million in, in, uh, gross every year now as an agency that what clients pay us. And it’s been a good ride. So I accomplished my mission.

Lee Kantor: So do you still have brands that you’re selling yourself?

Steven Pope: I do. I grew a brand called Age of Sage. Uh, you know, selling some soaps. Uh, we have a brand called Whole State that sold holsters. We’re a manufactured holsters from scratch over in the Carolinas. Uh, some things went well. Other things were a disaster. And, uh, turns out nobody wants to buy an American made holster when they can buy the Chinese version for half the cost.

Lee Kantor: So, um, but you’re still keep kind of, uh, a toe in that water just to keep fresh or to try your own things, uh, on behalf of your clients? Or is now the majority of your work helping other people be successful on Amazon?

Steven Pope: So I did sell one of my brands so I could go back and focus on my agency, and I ended up losing a quarter million dollars in stock or inventory. And, you know, a lot of people, if you go on YouTube right now and you listen to some gurus about selling on Amazon, they make it out to be this easy thing. Oh, it’s passive income and it’s so easy. All you gotta do is follow my course and buying my course for $1,000 or whatever it might be. And I have kind of an opposite experience where I think it’s incredibly difficult. And, and sometimes you need an expert to help you along the way. And obviously I’m biased to say that, but, uh, it’s it’s been the biggest wealth transfer in my lifetime. It’s it’s made me a millionaire. And I’m open about how how it’s helped me and selling on the platform. And you know, we felt, you know, thousands of other brands do the same thing, but it’s but it’s extraordinarily difficult. You have the Chinese hitting you from the left, and they’re lowering their prices and making margins difficult. You have aggregators hitting you from the right, where they ingested $7 billion into the space in the last three years, buying up brands and making it more complex because they’re adding techniques, they’re adding tech, they’re adding AI. And then from so you’re getting hit from the right, from aggregators, and then you’re getting hit from the top, from Amazon, because they’re making it harder to sell on the platform. They’re adding regulation, they’re adding fees just if you have low inventory. So there’s a lot of complex dynamics going on in the Amazon. Seller is squished from every side in a box right now. But you know, at the end of the day, the consumers that get those brown boxes shipped to their their house and you got prime. Now, you don’t even have to wait a full day to get a shipment and get a box. I got to say, it’s a great consumer experience, but the seller gets the shaft in many instances.

Lee Kantor: So now is there kind of a. A type of seller that, um, that this works best for. Or is this something that, like you said, you started? Hey, I got this idea, and I’m going to be this guy, and I’m. I can do this out of my garage. Like, is that really a path for somebody that doesn’t have, you know, the resources you described? Or is it now kind of matured to a point where, look, if you don’t have, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in this venture, it’s going to be difficult for you to be successful.

Steven Pope: It’s going to be a mixed bag answer here. So what’s what I love about Amazon is that if you have 4 or 5 $6,000 to set aside, you wouldn’t lose your shirt. You could still pay rent if you lost it. That’s enough to get started. Uh, a lot of people will start with certain models, like retail arbitrage. You’re going over to the toys R us when they go out of business and buying some stock and then, you know, reselling it on the platform. Um, I specialize in private label, and that’s where you make a brand, and it’s very possible for somebody to do it out of their garage, do it out of their closet, whatnot. Um, that’s how I started. And you’ll you’ll find thousands of those stories online. It’s harder today than it was five, six years ago. You know, I was in the beta program for advertising on Amazon, and I was getting PPC clicks in position one for $0.02 a click. And that’s unheard of today, where, you know, if you sell a supplement, you’re paying $5 a click. The nice thing about Amazon is that the average conversion rate is 10%. So one out of ten people that go to your listing is going to buy.

Steven Pope: That’s an incredibly high conversion rate. Compare that to a Shopify or any sort of web store where their average conversion rate is closer to 1%. So Amazon has solved a lot of problems, which makes it easier for you as a marketer or as a product. Sourcer to to have a chance at, at, at launching a product or launching a brand on Amazon. That’s why you hear of the concept native born Amazon brands. You won’t ever hear that about Walmart, right? Because Walmart’s not really a marketplace. It’s a retailer that’s kind of allows you to sell on their platform, but they still cheat the in retail products. On the top of the search results, Amazon is very much a fair, open marketplace. It may not feel like that at some times with some of the policies, but in reality it is because you can launch something and know within six weeks and you could have 40 $50,000 in monthly sales within, you know, a couple of months. It’s not guaranteed. It’s an investment, but it’s possible. And you can’t say that about any other platform in the United States today.

Lee Kantor: Now. Um, like in in any marketplace, you’re kind of beholden to the marketplace like you. These are your customers. They’re Amazon’s customers. Is is part of your strategy to help these, um, brands get the business out of the platform and, and into the lease their database so they can market to them without having to pay. Because like any, any marketplace, when you have, um, you’re the place where business gets done, then you control who is seen first, and then it becomes a lot of times a place where, oh, you want to be first you have to pay, and then you’re ending up paying the marketplace to be seen. Whereas at the beginning, like you said, it was $0.02 a click to be seen. And now it’s, you know, whatever, five, $10 a click depending on what the product is. So now you have to pay a more and more money. Like that number is not getting less. It’s only going to get higher.

Steven Pope: Amazon is about a one third partner. So if you sold an item for $100 on Amazon, they’re going to take $33 of that, give or take. And it’s a 15% referral fee right off the top. After that you’ve got logistics and advertising. And that usually comes out to be right around 33% depending on the category. It can go up or down a couple of points. Uh, is there incentive to go off the Amazon platform? I think there could be a case to be made about that, I think I think you’d hear arguments for both sides, but why would you want to send the consumer to your 1% converting Shopify account when you get 10% conversion on Amazon is generally the default position that I hold. Uh, yes. You don’t get control of the customers. That’s a downside, and it’s a pretty major one. But there really isn’t any incentive to try and collect that data. Amazon is basically encrypting that data now. You can’t even send email messages without getting in trouble unless it’s about a shipment, so you can’t market them at all. That’s a fact. But the nice thing about Amazon, though, is you can acquire new customers and the lifetime value is still very apparent. So they have a program called Subscribe and Save. Well, if you’ve got a supplement that you sell and maybe it costs you more than the product to acquire the customer, but they hit that subscribe and save button and then all of a sudden your lifetime value of that customer is five x or ten x. That’s where people are making their money. And and so subscribe and save program. That’s very common for for customers. They’re they’re acquainted to it. There’s a 10% conversion rate on the Amazon platform. When you add all those things up. A lot of brands that I work with, out of the 400 brands I work with, at least 300 of them only sell on Amazon or have 95% only sells on Amazon. So. So a lot of Amazon native born brands don’t have to go anywhere else to have enough to run their entire company.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned that, um, you know, the end customer is Amazon’s customer. It’s not your customer. Um, I don’t know if this is true. Maybe this is one of the myths, but if something is being successful, I’ve heard that Amazon has all the data and says, oh, that brand is is killing it. Why don’t we have an Amazon Basics brand of that? And then we take all this market research on the back of all these people who have products out here, and then they say, okay, let’s us handpick and manufacture just this thing because we know that it’s working in the marketplace because we have all the data.

Steven Pope: So the FTC is actually suing Amazon for literally doing exactly that. Um, it’s kind of a farce of a lawsuit, in my opinion. Uh, I don’t think anything meaningful will come from that, but I do think that Amazon will give us a sacrificial lamb, so to speak, where they’ll be like, oh, we’ll cut out some of our private label brands we’re losing money on anyway. Uh, and they’ll sacrifice them. But at the end of the day, uh, Amazon did do some corrupt things. Uh, we I’ve heard the personal stories. I’ve met the people that have gone through it where where they own where a brand would own the manufacturing facility in China. And the only information about that manufacturing facility was because they submitted a CoA document, certificate of analysis document, um, into Amazon and Amazon, reverse engineered it, and then called the manufacturer to try and cut them out. So I’ve seen the stories, I’ve talked to the brands that have experienced it. Uh, yes. Amazon has a problem. Uh, there’s there’s a culture of corruption with the monopoly. And this is inevitable with any monopoly ever. Uh, but but overall, it’s also, you know, while it is the elephant in the room that we all have to talk about, and it’s a nice big, fluffy pink elephant, it’s also the elephant you have to work with. Right. And so, uh, there’s things you can do to try and protect yourself. But but really, you could be ripped off by the Chinese just as easily as you could be ripped off by Amazon. And so you just have to build a really powerful brand. You just have to focus on your marketing and your customer delivery, and that’s what can protect you from some of that corruption.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, do you mind doing some kind of on air consulting? I’ll give you a product, and then you tell me what you think. Um, so a friend of mine is, um, got into the Amazon business. This true story. He developed a product, and it’s called firewater. And it’s a tea that has, like, cayenne pepper in the tea. And it started out as a gargle. Now it’s a tea. And he’s been on Amazon and he’s just a guy. You know, he is an experienced uh like you in, in the platform. But he, he’s just went through the process I guess like you were at the beginning and he’s getting some traction. But it’s not he’s not he doesn’t have escape velocity. What would you do if you were him to achieve escape velocity?

Steven Pope: So the price of his item. I just looked it up on Amazon. So he’s selling it for about $8. It’s firewater for a sore throat. I think he has a challenge brand name because when you type in firewater what comes up is fire extinguisher products. And so he’s made a unique, uh, brand name position. Uh, that will be challenging for search engine competition. Uh, so that’s a challenge. Uh, I see that he’s built a brand store. He’s got some mild A+ content, but a lot of the optimization techniques that I preach haven’t been done yet. So there’s no humanization. There’s not a single picture of a human anywhere on his listing. Uh, there. There’s not a video. Uh, he doesn’t have 500 words of copy in his A-plus content. He doesn’t tell his brand story. And and so if I were to order this right now, there’s no subscriber. Well, actually, actually, there is. Subscribe and save. So that’s good. So that one’s enabled. Um, but he probably needs to fund it a little bit. So instead of it being like the standard 5%, subscribe and save might need to go to 10 or 15% to try and incentivize that. Uh, he’s only selling 20 statutes, is what he’s calling them. Um, and I would probably try and create a bulk box deal and offer a further discount to try and increase that AOV.

Steven Pope: I would add a video of somebody stirring the tea and maybe making some jokes about how how his throat’s on fire or how it makes the throat feel better after, you know, whatever, you know, it’s firewater. You got to make some jokes here. But there’s really like this one very much needs the dude wipes treatment to to go viral. Right. Like make it funny. Have a TikTok video where somebody’s drinking firewater and it’s all of a sudden it’s the 15 year old Cinnamon Channel challenge again in the kitchen. Um, so there’s a lot of things that could be done to take this brand. But, you know, with a 3.9 star, uh, review brand, it’s it’s polarizing. Right? There’s 50 reviews average 3.9 star. And because it’s polarizing, I think he’s going to have to embrace that. Right. So if you look down at the reviews, what are people saying. And the people that don’t like it make fun of it. Right. The people that do like it, why do they like it? And using the language that the consumer speaks. So I’m just looking at a random review here from from Rebecca, who was a vine reviewer, which I wouldn’t recommend doing. Vine review, by the way, um says smells Great gave it a three star review, unsure of its reliability.

Steven Pope: Right. And so having to come speak to that reliability and explain why it is what it is. And the tea is a light yellow green color and it smells delicious. However, even after six minutes, the tea doesn’t have an abundance of flavor that I would imagine with all the bold ingredients listed. And so there could be, uh, some product best practice use instructions that need to be included or or explaining that another person writes a two star review. Okay, this doesn’t have much flavor besides spice. A few members of our household tried it and agreed. We all also agreed it didn’t help with the sore throat. So there’s there’s some challenges where people have expectations versus the delivery of the product. Um, and even another person wrote one star weak flavor. So there’s probably some really big branding emphasis, but also some general best practices the listing needs to do to kind of collect its demographic. Right. There’s no customer avatar to say, like, yeah, this is the perfect customer. So for example, if I was selling a Russian mail order bride right now, my perfect customer would be a three time divorced truck driver. I don’t know what the equivalent is for a firewater sore throat tea, but we need to identify that and it needs to be present on the listing to get that velocity.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody if he wanted to work with you or your firm, like what does it take to get into the queue to get your team helping.

Steven Pope: I love the fact I get to pitch myself, but it feels weird. My Amazon geek.com anybody can come over. And by the way, you can. There’s a bunch of free content I put out there on YouTube, and my LinkedIn guys are welcome to follow me. Um, a lot of times when I work with somebody, they’ve watched 20 of my videos. We get on a phone call together and they’re like, yeah, I want exactly that. Just give me that. And I say, cool, no problem. And then I give them what they ask for. Um, but we do have some a la carte options. You know, if somebody wants to get a coaching call or they just want to get a specific design made, we’re happy to help a customer anywhere we go. Um, we even filed trademarks, basically, kind of the concept as an entrepreneur is I like to never lose a customer, and I like to give customers exactly what they need. And so I’ve built my entire business to do that. Uh, and, and I like to joke. I’m an education company that happens to be an agency, and that’s done well for me. It’s made me a lot of money. And not everybody that, you know, watches my, my content will become a customer. But if 1% of them do and I have 5 million people watch my content, I’ve got a lot of customers and I’m pretty happy with that.

Lee Kantor: And then what’s a reasonable expectation like how quickly if something works, is it something like it flips a switch and it works, or is it something that has to slowly build over time?

Steven Pope: Certain elements are flip switch. So for example, if you switch your main image on Amazon, you’ll see the sales impact within the first 5 to 7 days. Other things like search engine optimization could take three months plus because you’re jockeying for competitive position. But the nice thing about SEO long term investment, it doesn’t cost a whole lot and it pays dividends for years. Other things like PPC somewhere in between, maybe like 2 to 4 week turnaround on on advertising. Sometimes it could be a little bit faster, sometimes it’s harder depending on what level somebody’s at today. Um, but but there are elements of short term wins, long term gains and just depends on what the goals of, of the brand are and what you’re trying to do.

Lee Kantor: Now, is it something that like you can tell like, okay, this is not going to work, or is it something like, well, it may work. Let’s just keep throwing money at it and we’ll see. We can turn it around.

Steven Pope: So so here’s the best part about this is that even though I’ve done this thousands of times, I’ve worked with thousands of brands. I personally have some preferences. Like I love working in kitchen, I love working in home goods and obviously this tea would would be right up my alley way. But there are a lot of products that I think will work and fall flat, and there’s a lot of products I’m like, oh, this is a slam dunk and we can’t do jack for and and so I have I’ve got enough road rash to know that my, my best practices will work 75% of the time, but one out of four products will not. And and and it’s been very interesting to find out. Like, I’m not as good at guessing as I thought I am, even though I’m an Amazon expert. So the reason I share that is because you really can’t get a gauge on whether it’s going to work without going through the motions. And even if you have the perfect data set, the simple form of action in business is more important than having it perfect. So for the people that are listening to this that are high detail perfectionists, you’re not going to like that answer. And I totally understand. Um, but for the guys that are more big picture and they just they, they’re high drive and they love winning, Amazon is an easy platform for you to work on because you get fast results. So if you if you embrace that hummingbird methodology where you flap your wings really fast, you don’t need to measure twice and cut once, you just go from from nectar to nectar and you move really fast at agility is rewarded on this platform. So making a lot of micro adjustments adds up really fast.

Lee Kantor: So now when, um, when a process like yours that requires a lot of tweaking and a lot of iterating, is that something you do or is that something that your client does?

Steven Pope: So we’re full service. We do everything, um, everything from SEO, PPC, design, catalog work, a lot of people who are buyers on Amazon and then become a seller are usually, uh, thrown off by how much catalog work there is. Uh, and troubleshooting, like, your listing will just be yanked off the platform one day and Amazon’s a shoot first, ask questions later type of platform and it takes them, you know, weeks to get it back up. And and we see that on like a by the hour process on our side with with the amount of clients we work with. So we’re always constantly reinstating listings and troubleshooting and all those challenges. Um, the one thing that you can count on when, when selling on Amazon is that it’s going to be, uh, never ending changes. And, and you need to always be optimizing. So it’s kind of circular logic and all ships rise together at the same time. So if if you focus on one key element, you can see some improvements, but you’re going to have to come back to that key element later. So if you set your title on Amazon and then never change it for five years, that’s not good. If you set your price, but never move the price up or down and it’s static, that’s not good. You have to consistently come back and back again and rotate all of the copy, rotate all the keywords, rotate the PPC, rotate the imagery, and and for whatever reason, we find that Amazon rewards that dynamic approach. And it’s important to always be optimizing.

Lee Kantor: And when you say always is that daily? Weekly? Monthly?

Steven Pope: Yeah. It depends. It depends on which thing we’re talking. So something like search terms optimization somewhere between a month to three month rotations, something with with pricing. You know, if you’re exiting a high season you probably need to lower your prices prices shortly thereafter. So some things are timing dependent and goal dependent. Right. So if if we ask a brand like on a scale of 1 to 10, one being profit, the cost of growth ten being growth at the cost of profit, what’s your number. And they say I’m a ten. And I’ll be like cool, let’s lower your price. Spend $100,000 on ads and let’s go. Right. But if somebody said I’m a I’m a five, then a measured approach, okay, so we need to grow and be profitable at the same time. Very, very difficult to do that. Um, then we’re going to take a very different approach. So depending on the goal the outcome can be affected.

Lee Kantor: So um, who was your ideal client? I know that you say you have, um, hundreds of clients or hundreds of brands you represent. Is that is it the brand that’s spending $1,000 a month on ads, $1 million a month on ads, like, who is your. What’s your sweet spot?

Steven Pope: So the small mom and pop business owners are my favorite. If I had to tell the truth, uh, and it’s the people who are really good at sourcing but may not have a marketing background. So. So I’ll give you a couple examples. So I worked with a guy who made license plate, um, holders. And, and I also worked with a guy that did aftermarket Harley-Davidson motorcycle bars. And these guys were already, you know, doing somewhere between, you know, 20 and $100,000 a month. I would come in and blow them up in 90 days and double them because their product was good, but they didn’t have lifestyle imagery. They didn’t have the demographics showing up. They didn’t identify their customer avatar. They didn’t run ads at all. Uh, they didn’t have all of the, the the nice nifty a plus content enhanced brand content designs on the listing. And so when we come in and take somebody from a good product with no marketing to some marketing, the results are instantaneous. It. I obviously do want to go upstream and work with the enterprise brands. Um, but they’re a lot harder. It’s like way harder to go from good to great, which, by the way, from Good to Great is a great book in the business world.

Steven Pope: But it’s it’s more challenging. So that’s why I like to say, you know, working with the small mom and pop businesses, um, it’s more rewarding. They typically have never worked with an agency before. And so having a good experience with your first agency and setting them up right to begin with is pretty rare, uh, because there’s just so many people out there that that help with Amazon. There’s a ton of boutiques, uh, you know, one man bands and consultants and all that, but everybody specializes in something else. And, uh, and so you never know, you know, what you’re going to get. But but I just, I so fun to just see the, the look in somebody’s eye when you come in and double their business and, you know, their relationship dynamic is just so rewarding when you when you help somebody. I don’t say babies, but I do make livelihoods and and that’s and they have families. Right. And a job is temporary. You know, you might have 20 jobs in your lifetime, but families are forever. And if we can help somebody build their family business up, there’s just nothing better than that.

Lee Kantor: Now, when someone’s marketing their brand, is it best to just stay within the Amazon ecosystem or is it should you be, you know, running ads on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or other platforms?

Steven Pope: There’s no wrong answer to that question. I’m going to be biased and say, stick to Amazon because I’m my Amazon guy. But what I would say is it’s just simply more cost effective to stay within the Amazon ecosystem. There’s less complexity. That’s where half the economy is. Uh, they’re like 80% of the households in the United States are prime members, which is an absurd stat. You can’t say the same about any other membership program in the States as it relates to e-commerce. And so you could put the same amount of effort into another platform like Walmart and get 1/100 result. If you could do the same thing with eBay or Etsy or Target or some other platform or Shopify. And so for for the best, bang for the buck, there’s no question Amazon is the place to be, no matter what size you are today.

Lee Kantor: So somebody again wants to learn more. Um, you know, check out your videos, uh, hire you. What’s the website again?

Steven Pope: My Amazon guide.com. And we do have a lot of, you know, try before you buy content so you guys can check it out if you’re interested. Uh, we look forward to serving you.

Lee Kantor: All right. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work, and we appreciate you.

Steven Pope: Thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.