Will is the Co-Founder and CEO of BellaVix. He has a decade of experience working in eCommerce. He has experience working with Seller Central, Vendor Central, Amazon Advertising Platform, and DSP. BellaVix works with established consumer brands and private label sellers in the strategic planning, implementation, and execution of their business plans for products across Amazon and other 3rd party marketplaces. His portfolio includes brands like Insta Pot, Pyrex, Wilton, Think Baby and Outward Hound,

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, Josh Hadley interviews Will Haire from BellaVix. Will shares his digital marketing background and the growth of his agency. He delves into case studies, revealing strategies for targeting demographics, managing PPC, and utilizing programmatic advertising for audience building. Will also advises on the benefits of programmatic advertising, the significance of PR, and diversifying sales channels. Additionally, he offers solutions for reducing return rates by improving customer education through product listings.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Action Item #1: Diversify Your Sales Channels: Take a cue from BellaVix’s success by investing in multiple sales channels beyond just Amazon. Build your own website and leverage social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok for audience building and engagement.

Action Item #2: Harness the Power of Programmatic Advertising: Programmatic advertising, especially when combined with data from platforms like Amazon, can yield impressive results for e-commerce brands.

Action Item #3: Mitigate Return Rates Through Education and Detail: Combat high return rates by providing detailed product information, including sizing guides and educational content.

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This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Josh (00:00:00) – Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Matt Clark from ASM. Today I’m speaking with Will Haire. He is the co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, and we’re going to be talking a lot about specific case studies in action items that other brands have taken in order to scale to eight figures and beyond. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Will, I started my business back in 2015 and grew it to an eight figure brand in seven years, but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. That made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it needed to. There were times where I had to make a lot of mistakes, such as bad hiring decisions, or I had to invest my own personal money back into the business in order to fund payroll because of cashflow constraints.

Josh (00:00:44) – During Covid, our business dropped 90% overnight, and so there was a lot of stress and anxiety that came with like knowing whether our brand could survive or not. I remember wishing for a mentor that could guide me through the maze of scaling up my business. Someone who had been there, done that, and could share all the secrets of helping me overcome those obstacles and that’s why I’ve decided to offer that one on one coaching and consulting, where I share the nitty gritty details of cash flow frameworks, the sales strategies, and the operating systems that have helped me scale my own business. And because I believe in giving each entrepreneur my undivided attention. I only work with three clients at a time. But first, in order to make sure we’re a perfect match, I offer a completely free, no strings attached, comprehensive business strategy audit session so that we can dive in before we take that plunge. And this audit is my way of showing you how committed I am to your success. So, to our listeners, if this sounds like something you’re up for, drop me an email at Josh at Ecommbreakthrough.com.

Josh (00:01:32) – That’s Ecomm with two M’s. And then in your subject line say I want to pick your brain. And then let’s chat about how we can take your brand to the next level. But today I am super excited to introduce you all to Will Haire. Will is the co-founder and CEO of BellaVix. He has a decade of experience working in e-commerce. He has experience working in Seller Central, Vendor central, Amazon Advertising and DSP. Bella works with established consumer brands and private label sellers in the strategic planning, the implementation and the execution of their business plans for products across Amazon and other third party marketplaces. His portfolio includes brands like Instapot, Pyrex, Wilton, Think Baby and Outward Bound. With that introduction, welcome to the show, Will. Josh, thanks for having me. I appreciate being here. And, man, that, that exclusive consultant sounds like a great opportunity. I might set up myself. Well, well, you have a lot of experience yourself. I’m. I’m super excited to dive in because you’ve been working with a lot of different brands over the last few years.

Josh (00:02:27) – You have a decade of experience in e-commerce. You’ve seen how the landscape has changed drastically on Amazon, and it is only getting more challenging. And it’s requiring people to really execute with laser precision operational efficiency at this point in order to survive so well, I want to really just kind of kick things off, getting into the meat and potatoes of these case studies. But before that, why don’t you just tell us real quickly, how did you get started? Why did you decide to start offering your services, services as an agency?

Will (00:02:53) – Yeah. Great question. So, over ten years at this point, I’ve been working in digital marketing. I like to say started with SEO and Google ads and was the gateway to get into Amazon. And I became the Amazon guy at the different agencies that I worked at. And then back in 2018, decided that I think I can do this better myself. I have a lot of experience. so like a lot of agency owners, I started off freelancing and then grew my agency.

Will (00:03:13) – So what it is today, we’re able to service some pretty premium brands, and we’ve been really fortunate in our journey so far. And we believe in world class people delivering world class results. So, it’s worked well for us. And, and the brands that choose to have us represent them on these platforms.

Josh (00:03:26) – I love that. How big is your team?

Will (00:03:28) – we stay relatively small. We have a little. At this point, we’re over 20 employees. But our advantages, our teams are small, so they won’t manage more than a handful of accounts. where other agencies you might work at, you could be managing anywhere from 20 to 50 accounts, depending on how much they’re trying to squeeze you. But we really focus on quality service. So we consider ourselves boutique, and we’re not trying to be the biggest and baddest. We’re just trying to deliver really great results and work with some really fun brands. The best part about being an agency and working in e-commerce, especially for a guy like me who has AD, it’s great.

Will (00:03:57) – There’s a lot of things that change and working on different product lines and different categories. You get a lot of different experiences, so there’s no one category that’s the same. There’s no one brand that’s the same. So the challenges are always different and it’s fun. It keeps things really interesting.

Josh (00:04:09) – Awesome. No, I love that. And one thing I’m really excited about talking to you about today is the aspect of you having managed a lot of different brands in very different spaces. You’ve managed supplement brands, you’ve managed beauty brands, you’ve managed, you know, pet related brands, you’ve managed kitchen related brands, and all of those have very different nuances. Yet you’ve been able to share actionable tactics and strategies that have been able to help scale those businesses to eight figures and beyond. And so I’m excited to dive into those different strategies. And for our listeners, that’s where they’re at, right? They’ve crossed that seven figure mark. They want the actionable strategies and tactics that can help propel their business forward. And so here’s what I would say to our listeners, even though you may not have a supplement brand, is there something that you can do that you can replicate what’s working for other supplement brands into your own business and vice versa? If you have a supplement brand, what’s a kitchen brand that you could consider? Implementing into your own business.

Josh (00:05:01) – So will I want to dive into all of those case studies? We we went through a list that we were chatting about before we hit the record button. so I want to just start. Let’s go off, at the top here with the supplement brand and the strategies that you had, you know, they were doing some external marketing. They were doing programmatic marketing. And how did that help them scale?

Will (00:05:19) – Yeah. Beautiful. So in this particular case, what was unique about this is that they were targeting kind of an older demographic, which was interesting. And they did a lot of comparative marketing. So they would drive traffic to a lot of websites that were like, supplement reviews. Com and they would have some influencer who would review a handful of supplements and it would have, you know, their supplement a plus top of the page and then it would prepare it to all these others. So with that being said, especially in the supplement space which is trendy is very educational. So they talked a lot about the ingredients, the process, all the certifications they had and specifically was difficult in the supplement spaces.

Will (00:05:50) – And even with Amazon releasing here in April, they’re cracking down on, the type of certificates and requirements you need in order to sell supplements on there. So this brand manufacturing in the US and having all those was definitely really helpful. And so what the challenge was, is that we had to get them, you know, saturate the PPC market and then see if we could build audiences off of Amazon using programmatic advertising. So the first thing we did, obviously is we go PPC. We try to cover the basics like, let’s lay down some foundational work. And whenever we start with a brand, the first thing we want to know is what’s our cost per acquisition to acquire a customer who’s been exposed to the brand? What’s the cost per acquisition? To acquire a customer who’s in market, and what’s the cost per acquisition? To acquire a customer who’s in discovery? They just need like demographic information. And we do kind of a bottom up approach and depending on what our budgets are, is really like how fast we can move.

Will (00:06:39) – So in this particular case, they had good product, great product line, and we were able to establish that we had a relatively low cost for acquisition. Looking at the brand, I think the brand was like $2 super, super affordable to create that app. But obviously you just don’t want to build on the brand. There’s always competition coming in. So the product cost per acquisition was pretty good too. We were under $30 in this particular case and that’s targeting somebody who is searching for our product or something very similar to a product. And then we would do a lot of conquest thing. So we pick like the top products in our category that are direct competitors. We’d also look at complementary products. So products that could be taken together, or products that work well together. And then we kind of build off of that in conjunction with what we’re doing on PPC. We’re also building audiences behind that. So first and foremost, the easiest bottom up approach is retargeting. And programmatic gives us the ability to target somebody who’s visited our product but hasn’t made a purchase or visited competitor’s products that haven’t made a purchase.

Will (00:07:32) – So to kind of get these users into our funnel and start building audiences, and when we can get to a point where profitably we can get into the consideration stage of getting shoppers that are just in-market or they’re they’re maybe researching these types of things because we have some contextual audiences we can build around, we’re able to kind of pull those shoppers in and get them into our funnel, affordably. And then we knew we had the data, give or take. We’d get 4 or 5 purchases a year, and we spent a lot of time building subscribed and savers. So while driving traffic is a big part of it and building these audiences, we also implemented features into a plus content and storefront. most importantly, on the storefront, we would have them follow our storefronts so we can hit them up with brand tailored promotions or these other features that Amazon, you know, manage your customer experience, which they have recently taken away. But that was a great email marketing tactic. But our goal would be to get a lot of followers.

Will (00:08:24) – And then specifically on the A+ content, for example, we would have subscribe and save and the benefits and what you would save by subscribing and saving. And we use a lot of these tactics to drive that and within give or take like a two year span, we managed to grow from, you know, zero subscriber savers because they weren’t on it to over 6000, which is recurring revenue. This is lifetime value. Every month they’re getting this product consistently. so we’re able to build that. And then another advantage we’re able to kind of one off bundles and multi-packs. so typically we would see buyers buy two, three and four packs. So we offer those. Keep in mind we had a lot lower volume. So a lot of the tactics we did those specific products were fulfilled by merchant. but they did add they were additional revenue streams that we weren’t counting on. And then this specific seller had the ability to bundle those and send them off. So we were able to do and use that tactic. And then with regards to the bundles, like we knew certain products that work really well together.

Will (00:09:16) – So we created virtual bundles and then we advertise those virtual bundles using sponsored brand ads and then through programmatic advertising. So we’re able to generate a lot of awareness. And we would take like a really good selling products that had sales velocity. And we would tier them with new products, or we would tier them with products with low sales velocity that we probably weren’t going to keep around. We were just kind of going through like a liquidation process, because we do want to make sure that there’s some level of efficiency. But overall advertising drove a lot of that, you know, off of Amazon. They were investing, consistently and they had higher cost per acquisitions. But I know it’s a little different. And then on Amazon we were building audiences. So working together, we were able to kind of build it up to the point where, you know, there were eight bigger seller. and they were pretty happy with the results.

Josh (00:09:57) – That’s amazing. well, there’s so much to unpack that. So. My first question is what was the cost for their product? Like, what was your, I guess the average order value on the front end purchase there on Amazon? 49.99.

Will (00:10:08) – Give or take. And most of our sales were on single units.

Josh (00:10:11) – Okay. So 49.99 and you had mentioned that your CAK or the customer acquisition cost was about $30 across all the different was that including PPC and the programmatic ads as all in. Yeah, that.

Will (00:10:23) – Was all in. That’s an aggregated average. But generally we were looking around $30 and then we knew, you know, lifetime value is only measured in a year on Amazon. So we knew we’d get 4 or 5 purchases from majority of those customers.

Josh (00:10:33) – So the question on that would be with a $30 CAK, right, where they profitable on the front end, where they was at breaking even for them, or were they losing a couple dollars on each. So, you know, it’s a great question.

Will (00:10:44) – And we do have customers that are not profitable. This particular seller was profitable. It cost them anywhere between 2 and $4 to manufacture the product. So they had killer margins. So it allowed us to be more aggressive on some of our tactics where if they had a lower, cogs, we may have not been able to go as aggressive in the category.

Will (00:11:01) – And this particular seller wanted to make sure and they were on breaking even.

Josh (00:11:05) – okay. No, that makes a lot of sense. dang. Those are some killer margins, that’s for sure. but obviously what you were saying is that there was a customer lifetime value. Will, you said that they were willing to break even, but if they’re not on subscribe and save, how would you be able to determine how many times that customer would come back and repeat, purchase and buy from them?

Will (00:11:26) – Beautiful. Yep. So on the back end to Brand Analytics, we had the repeat purchase behavior report and we were able to leverage that to know. Also our Amazon rep through programmatic advertising was able to pull that for us. We also saw that we were, slightly above average compared to the median, based on the basket of sellers that Amazon analyzed in the report. So typically, they said a seller in that specific niche was doing 2 to 3 purchases, and we were closer to that 4 to 5.

Will (00:11:50) – And I think a lot of it had to do with the quality it was made in the US. And there were some other elements, and then being super niche. But I’ve learned that having worked with a lot of brands is like the riches are in the niches. So really niche products tend to do really well. The challenges like expanding that catalog line when you’re when you’re a little too niche. Yeah.

Josh (00:12:08) – the other part that you talked about that I thought was really interesting is like you were able to help them grow their subscribers and say from zero to over 6000 people. So can you shed more light on, like, what were those tactics that you were doing and how were you driving more subscribers and save subscribers because again, that tool is pretty static on Amazon, right? It’s like, here’s your add to cart button. You can choose the subscribe and save feature, or you can just do the add one one unit to the cart feature. And that’s about it. You don’t get, you know, an e-commerce on Shopify.

Josh (00:12:35) – You could have all these different like upsell funnels and you can keep hitting people back, you know, after they purchase and all of that. There’s a method to that madness. But on Amazon, it’s kind of like your hands are pretty much tied behind your back. So I’m interested to hear the tactics that you employed to really grow that subscriber base.

Will (00:12:49) – Absolutely. A lot of it came down to images. So we’re able to incorporate an image in the six image lineup that goes on the product detail page. We had the image in the A+ content. We also had it on the homepage of the storefront as well as the sub page associated with that category for those particular supplements. On top of that, when we advertise on programmatic, not all the ads, we have the ability to advertise as a subscriber and save a product is one of the features. So those were primarily the four ways. But I’d say what drove the best results was having it in your image carousel, and it was like a really nice image that’s like subscribe and save and then having it on the bottom of the store.

Will (00:13:23) – Sorry, the A+ content having it right there. So they know, you know, subscribe and save gets every month and the benefits around that.

Josh (00:13:29) – Yeah. Awesome. I love those strategies, especially putting that in the secondary images and it high up in your A+ content. Now to kind of wrap things up with this supplement brand will you know programmatic advertising can be good, but I would imagine it’s good for select brands. Right. where it makes sense. Maybe they have a customer lifetime value. Not every brand can go out and put up billboards. Or maybe you would argue that point and say, no, arguably, I think everybody should be building, you know, top of the funnel, acquisition. So give me your thoughts on programmatic advertising. Who’s it right for? you know, is it worth experimenting with any brand and where would you get started? If so.

Will (00:14:06) – Yeah, I would say it’s definitely right for any brand. I think you should always experiment. What I found is like some categories.

Will (00:14:11) – It works really well, specifically supplement and beauty. We’ve seen a lot of luck with it. I think a lot of that has to do with the audiences that are available and the repeat purchase behavior around those products, but at the end of the day, what we find when a lot of brands come to us and they’re like, hey, we’ve hit sales stagnation. And to be clear, you can use it as our launch. And we do. But typically we find we get the best results when the brand is doing, you know, between 80 to $110,000 a month. And they’re just like, you know, the PPC market saturated and they’re like, what can we do outside of meta ads or Google to drive results? And what’s nice about Amazon is like the data is all shopping behavior. And at the minimum minimum, just do the bottom up approach. So, you know, make sure you have retargeting active and you’re at least doing some conquest thing over your top competitors. You want to steal customers from because you have a superior product.

Will (00:14:58) – So is it right for everyone? Potentially, but I always think you should test it. And what we found, if you’re a brand and you’re between like 80 to 110 and you’re just you’re stagnant and you’re, you know, you can’t get any more juice out at PPC, I highly recommend using programmatic. And what’s different from programmatic to display, which is have more tools on programmatic. We have more levers we can flip in order to like, get more granular with audiences. The types of advertisements that we can, we can serve or different or display is a great starting point to get an idea. But we have worked with brands where like display, you know, wasn’t really working so hard. And then we got them on DSP and we set up some audiences and they happen to perform a lot better. So, you know, I think one day, honestly, they’re going to roll it all into one platform. But while it’s separated, it is worth testing. And just to add one more caveat on that, a big advantage if you do DSP, you’re probably working with an agency or have somebody at Amazon you’re working with have them pull reports, get their recommendations at audiences.

Will (00:15:52) – They took this tool away from us, but it was called the Overlap Audience Report. We’re able to like look at two assigns and, pull data on their behavior, whether it’s like demographic or, what their interests like interest are. And we’re able to test those audiences and like, it’d be some, like, weird stuff like birdwatchers. You do yoga and Pilates and are 40 and older, and they would be like a really good audience to serve. And so, you know, aligning to test everything with your Amazon rep can help generate those reports. they can help make audience recommendations for you to test. And let’s be really clear, Amazon’s incentive is to get you to spend as much money as humanly possible on programmatic. That’s how those sales reps are paid. So understand that whatever they give you can be useful. But it doesn’t mean you should blindly follow everything they recommend. We usually take bits and pieces of it and test it out, and generally because programmatic is like a longer window, because it’s impression based and it falls like Ogilvy, law of advertising, like somebody has to see it 20 plus times, even recognize that they keep seeing this ad.

Will (00:16:47) – So it just takes a little longer. So like in PPC, we have like a 6 to 8 week process where we’re able to get good data and understand what our cost per acquisitions are at different phases of the funnel. You know, on programmatic, we’re probably like more 12 to 16 weeks. So like generally you want to give it 90 days. And if you’re unsure when to start it, you know, look at your busy period. So if you sell something very giftable and you’re considering DSP, you know, I might not launch it in July and August, I might wait till October. And that’s what I play with it because demand is going to naturally increase and I’ll see good sales velocity, and I’ll know I’ll get more data that I can use to build audiences. And then maybe after December when things die down, I keep certain audiences active and I could kind of kill the rest of them and wait for the next big event, tentpole event that I can return these on. I can re I could add audiences and everything else.

Will (00:17:31) – So long winded way of saying I think it’s worth testing.

Josh (00:17:35) – Yeah. No, I love that. I think you shared a lot of golden nuggets there that I think brands can kind of implement. I do think it is worth testing, but do it in small chunks and in batches, which you mentioned. so I love, love those strategies. Well, let’s go to another case study of another brand that you worked with. let’s talk about the kitchen brand just because it’s very different. This one does not have a subscribe and save feature. They’re more one off purchases. In fact, when you started working with this brand, they were already a large brand and so they were already doing very different things compared to a small private label seller that was just crossing the seven figure mark. So I’d be interested to hear from your perspective, what were you seeing this bigger brand already doing when they came to you?

Will (00:18:13) – Beautiful. They were doing everything under the sun. it was really illuminating to understand what some of these enterprise level, clients or brands actually do.

Will (00:18:22) – and I would say, you know, off the bat, they’re advertising across the board. They’re fueling the top of the funnel. and what was crazy is like when we had, like Prime Day or the holidays around Q4, we would do this War room, like literally the war room, they called it. And we would all organize and we would meet pretty regularly, and we would be discussing, like, the omnichannel tactics and how they’re driving eyeballs, results, how things are being shared across social media and how they were syndicating that. So in this particular case, this brand, you know, before Prime Day, they were lining up interviews with the Today Show and Good Morning America to have these people talk about their products. They had their products in the hands of like hundreds of really top notch influencers who were already creating content that was being ready to be released. So they had their email marketing fire, they had ads up and they were ready to just accelerate. And we were reporting, you know, in damn near real time, with results around sales.

Will (00:19:13) – So that’s the war room. We would check in specifically on Prime Day, the week of Prime Day, and a few days after, you know, we were meeting twice a day. And then for those actual events, we’re meeting every hour on the hour from, you know, six inches the morning till 10:00 at night. And it was all about, you know, adjusting budgets. And what’s the return on this? Have we tried this? Hey, we just got more budget for that. Like where did this budget come from? I have no idea. But they would find budgets and they would say, you know, which of these products is working really well, let’s dump budget into that. And also on the other side, if products weren’t selling well, they would just cut the budgets midway and they would dump it somewhere else. Or we had a lot of policy violations. So something that, was doing really well, but Walmart tried to jump in and kill the map. The list thing got suppressed.

Will (00:19:54) – So we had to quickly take the budget from that and move it to another product. So it was insane. And another. Another piece that I thought was really, you know, I don’t do a lot in brick and mortar retail, but we do work with brands that have that presence. It’s something that my point of contact said to me that was really interesting was, you know, programmatic advertising can be expensive in terms of impressions. And I was like, oh, what do you mean by that? And he explained to me, like being in every target store, you know, what is it, 5000 or whatever they have, and knowing that every day they’re going to have, you know, 10,000 shoppers walk through, you know, having a place on the corner aisle builds authority. it gets a ton of eyeballs and that does spillover. So like, well, I can’t directly target them with ads. They’re exposed to that product and that exposure is worth a lot. So, you know, understanding just the full mix of how everything is tied together.

Will (00:20:39) – And then what it’s like for these super large brands to like, get behind an event and the budgets and advertising, then all the people involved from, you know, operations, inventory, logistics, all the different marketing departments, the design departments ahead of time. And this, you know, honestly, it was like two people organizing all of this. And I remember just leaving some of those calls being like, dang, my head spinning. I can’t imagine how somebody in their positions can do that level of logistics and drive results. You know, that they did really well. So it was quite the experience.

Josh (00:21:08) – Fascinating. So here would be my question, will, based off of that experience of seeing how this large enterprise brand operates, how what are some like actionable strategies and tactics that you think like a private label seller can begin implementing in their own business? Do you feel like the the PR exposure was was worth it for them, or was it the influencers that was driving a significant volume? Like what would you say? Like, hey, what’s what’s within the realm of a private label sellers, ability to execute on some of these strategies?

Will (00:21:36) – Actually, I’m going to say the PR element.

Will (00:21:38) – I thought it was really interesting and getting exposure on mainstream TV and other elements, they were in tons of articles and stuff. I think that really helped. And jump back to our supplement brand. something that they did that aided in our growth was actually hired a PR agency, and the spokesperson for the company was getting a lot of mainstream media time. And we definitely saw the correlation between good public relations and how that lifts sales. So that exposure to the general public granted, like the supplement and the kitchen brand, they were good for the general market like anybody could take them, you know, wasn’t like, like a video game, for example. That might be super niche to a younger demographic. So but there’s obviously PR elements that work really well. You know, Amazon has Twitch, for example. So I’ll say I believe PR was something that is underutilized and really led to strong, strong growth numbers that spilled over into these other platforms, including Amazon.

Josh (00:22:28) – What are your thoughts? You know, it is challenging.

Josh (00:22:30) – You can’t really track, you know, a mention on the Today show other than like, is there a lift in sales? Obviously. Right. you could follow that, but there’s no link that people are clicking that you could follow through. I’d be interested to know your thought process will, you know, at what point is it worth people, you know, diversifying themselves off of Amazon. Right. If Amazon’s their main sales channel and you’ve worked with a big brands that are on multiple sales channels, like at what point like how do you know, hey, I should send traffic to Amazon. Sounds like this big enterprise brand was like all in for Prime Day and like feeding the Amazon beast. Yeah. Whereas like, what were they doing differently for their own website versus what about Walmart versus Target Plus or anything like that?

Will (00:23:09) – Yeah. And they participate at all of those events. And what I would say, you should always be following your website because at the end of the day, don’t be wrong.

Will (00:23:17) – I drank the Amazon Kool-Aid. And I do think there’s a lot of opportunity on the platform for brand. It continues to change. And I’ve been in situations where products got suspended or there’s craziness going on with third party sellers doing some blackhat stuff that gets legitimate sellers to spend and, you know, browse through the forums any day of the week. You could find tons of examples of where Amazon in the system of Amazon has failed sellers. So those sellers that have the ability to operate their DTC, are in better positions because they can kind of split that budget. Typically what I see in terms of like revenue and I know you guys do annual I do I do monthly because that’s how we measure a lot of stuff. if you’re doing between like 50 to $60 a month on Amazon, it’s time to take some of that, funds and start investing it on your website. Start building your audience off of Amazon. we don’t do a lot of that off Amazon advertising, but we work with agencies that do it sounds like meta.

Will (00:24:05) – Instagram and TikTok are pretty cost effective ways to build audiences and generate general awareness. And user generated content is gold. so don’t be shy to participate in promotions like BazaarVoice, where they do like a bunch of samples and they get you they get you traffic reviews and, and user generated content that can be used, on your direct to consumer website. And of course, you can use that on your Amazon as well. User generated content looks natural. It looks organic. It’s good for programmatic advertising. It’s good for sponsored brand video ads. It’s good to have on your storefront and your listings. So it’s a great opportunity. So that’s my recommendation. I love that.

Josh (00:24:41) – So you shared the tool. Was it Bazaarvoice? Do you have other tools that you recommend for UGC? I have not heard of that. That tool.

Will (00:24:47) – Oh yeah, Bazaarvoice is pretty cool and I wouldn’t recommend some of these for Amazon because Bazaar voice they have the ability to have clients cut shoppers, leave reviews, and we don’t believe in anything that risks you being associated with something that could get your account.

Will (00:24:59) – For example. So that’s strictly for the website. But Levanta is an affiliate and influencer program that is an Amazon approved third party software. We also use Archer affiliates, which is the same thing, but there are 100% performer performance based. And those two softwares we tend to use to get user generated content to work with influencers. And then keep in mind we called the content creator data to say that three times pass, right? But I think it’s, I’m drawing a blank on what it’s called, but, it’s the ability to work with those creative connections. Thank you. The ability to work with Amazon Associates, 100% commission based. Obviously, if you send samples to these influencers and typically you send them to you tend to get better results. But these are all programs we recommend, but specifically are pretty good. And you get access to that user generated content and it’s all streamlined. It’s all in the back end. So pretty nice to use.

Josh (00:25:45) – Awesome, excellent. I think those are some great strategies that you shared there with us.

Josh (00:25:48) – Well all right, let’s go to another case study. Let’s talk about maternity wear brands. You also had a pet leash brand as well. You said they were dealing with a lot of high return rates. What are the tactics that you implemented there in order to help them scale their business faster?

Will (00:26:02) – Yeah, that’s a great case study. So I’ll start with that. Brand is a little easier. They were doing harnesses. And what we noticed is like every time we increase sales we see returns increase and it becomes a battle. And you know from somebody in the advertising world, you know, when I can’t when we’re losing, when we’re losing margins to returns and products get damaged and always come back in good shape, users will take old products and return it for the new products, and you’re none the wiser. It could be really painful. so one of the things we noticed is, putting in images on your specific, A+ content, but also on the product detail page in this particular case for the pet brand, because it was crazy.

Will (00:26:41) – We had a huge chart like the main image, right, like the top of the A plus content. And it would have been like the breed of the dog and, you know, drawn out. So it was consistent with branding and then we’d have it in harness like an extra small 16 inch Yorkie terrier, and then we’d go on to like, you know, mid-sized dogs up to larger dogs. And we would have breeds in the column to the right. So like if you’re like, oh, I have a dominant, is that a medium size or whatever else? You know, we kind of listed the breed that it would fall between these two. And it helped reduce return rates pretty significantly. So a lot of it, you know, similar to what I mentioned with the subscribe and say, like people, you know, they still read, we’re not we’re not big on reading this things all the way. So there’s fewer elements that could still be wrong. But images, they help out a lot.

Will (00:27:21) – And anything that has sizing associated with it, having an image up front and center and same thing like don’t just put it in one space like I have it on my product detail page. If it’s a pain point for your business, make sure it’s in your A+ content and it’s in your storefront. And the same thing for the maternity wear brand had like this V slim component. And you know, women who go through that, God bless them. It’s a difficult time as it is. But you need to make sure that this belt essentially straps, right? Otherwise it’s not really helping you. So two things is we had to incorporate video into the images, but also on the storefront sorry, the A plus and then the storefront but a plus content like right up at the top that’s like this is how you size yourself. You know, use this if you don’t have it, take a piece of string wrap around your belly. And this brand was great because like they had those assets for whatever reason, they don’t think they needed it on Amazon.

Will (00:28:08) – And then they’re like, wow, Amazon’s not a good platform for us because it’s like three times the return rate than our website. And it’s like, well, you’re not really educating your shoppers on how they’re supposed to size themselves and how they should look at this. So we had to put up educational material. And, you know, shoppers do them because we saw a reduction in return rates. We’re not as low as the website. And I’m thinking because they can implement more features and it’s easier. But we cut it in half, which was a huge improvement to what it was. And a lot of it was just taking content that already existed. They already paid to have it built and just incorporating it into the listing strategically, as well as the storefront when somebody’s on that page and they’ll go back, is what we found, too. So, you know, they’ll buy the product and then they’ll be like, oh, yeah, how do I put this on again? Even if there’s a QR code on a package insert and, you know, tell them to go on YouTube, be sure to watch it here.

Will (00:28:53) – what we find is, like, wherever they bought it, they’re likely to go back to that either product detail page or storefront. So just have that there and then have good customer service to deal with returns like understand if you’re selling anything that has sizes, like you’re going to order the wrong product, that’s you know what I order? I have a puppy at home. When I order leashes and harnesses, I order two and I plan to return one. So I got the right size for the first time. Like, because I could be more patient, but I’m not. And I’m assuming a lot of shoppers suffer from that. So a lot of it comes down to just educating your shoppers and being creative on where you put that content. Yeah, I love that.

Josh (00:29:24) – Those are great strategies. And I think, you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. I think we know this over and over again. That comes up. Nobody reads the bullets, nobody reads the description. So you better be able to convey everything in those secondary images.

Josh (00:29:35) – Right. And I love what you talked about. You know, with the drive to subscribe and save through your secondary images, drive home the sizing issues like that should be like your second most basic, you know, infographic. And it needs to be easy to understand for the consumer. And I think, like you mentioned earlier, operational efficiency is becoming so, so important on Amazon. So lowering your return rate is going to go. A lot further because it’s going to allow you to invest more in advertising. And that, in turn, is going to allow you to scale your brand faster again. I have another question I want to ask you, which is this: when a new brand comes to you, let’s say they’ve crossed that seven figure mark. Walk me through what you’re going to think about to say, hey, how can we help this brand scale to eight figures and beyond? So let’s say a brand comes to you. They want to scale to eight figures and beyond. They’re like, we need help on Amazon.

Josh (00:30:24) – Walk me through like the decisions and like the different levers because there’s countless. Right. We could talk about programmatic advertising. We could talk about just PPC. We can talk about A+ content. We could talk about secondary images. We can talk about keyword research. We could talk about launching new products, etc., etc.. What are like the main levers that you feel like over the decade of extremes that you have? You’re like, these are the levers I hit every single time, and it’s produced really good results.

Will (00:30:46) – Great question Josh, I love it. the first thing we do, people are going to be surprised because I’m an advertising guy. It’s operational efficiency, no joke. A lot of what we find is like improper cattle organization. So there’s opportunities for better parent children. Relationship, there’s listing attributions that aren’t filled out properly. back end search terms that are all jacked up, in proper titles and bullets, insufficient A+ content. Like usually when they come to us, they have problems.

Will (00:31:11) – And like the lowest, most cost effective solutions are a lot of these operational stuff because we know improvements to efficiency will lead to improvements in conversion rates. And something I like to say is like operations does not rely on advertising, but advertising relies on good operations because we need to have all those pieces in place. Not saying you’re if you’re already doing seven figures, you’re going to come to us. We’re like, kill PPC. That would be absolutely terrible. But the first thing we do is just a good look at your operational and your cataloging, just to see where there are opportunities. Then outside of that, we do something within the first 60 days. We got it from Gino Whitman’s book traction. You have the concept of rocks, and anybody on iOS probably gets an understanding of this, but conceptually it’s like a brand will have a year goal and we take that year goal and break it into 90 day achievable chunks. So within the first 60 days, we’re building this blueprint of where the opportunities are.

Will (00:31:58) – What types of budgets are we going to need, what’s the competition and the market landscape. And then where are there opportunities for us to drive in order to hit sales goals? Then every quarter after that, we’re going back and saying, what do we learn? What went well? What were some of the challenges and how are we going to pivot? And like a concept we adhere to is like incremental improvement, but it’s the long term growth. So they can really do everything at once. But we try to make the changes that are going to have the biggest impacts of the business and then continue to make those changes as we go through time with the goal of hitting, hitting your annual goal. Then on top of that, you know, like PPC, programmatic, if they’re not doing programmatic, we’re starting it. we’re going to run through our process of bit optimization and keyword harvesting, and all that other fun stuff. Make sure there’s no gaps in our targeting tactics. And then we’re, you know, we’re blanketing the bottom of the funnel, and we’re doing everything we can on the product and conquest thing, which is big.

Will (00:32:44) – So there’s a lot of moving pieces. But summarize it. It’s like having a game plan. That quarterly report is key. It’s like we need direction. Where’s our Northstar? Low hanging fruit is like operational efficiencies. Where can we clean up? Where do you have stranded inventory? I can tell you how many breads we take over that’s got, like, stranded inventory. That’s like three years old. And it’s like, you know, you’re paying fees on this. Let’s clean this up maybe. And then advertising, which gets the most attention because we spend money. But, it does have a big impact. But cleaning up is more of a process. So it’s like coming in and just little by little getting things in place where, you know, we’re analyzing our cost per acquisitions and we’re making sure we’re covering all the elements we need to cover in order to be effective and kind of help aid our growth goals in the account.

Josh (00:33:27) – Yeah, I love that. Well, those are some great words of wisdom.

Josh (00:33:30) – And it’s great to hear. Kind of like the way you approach, you know, your strategies of how you help these brands scale. And so I appreciate all the case studies and the wisdom you shared with us. And so I’ll leave one final chance for you here to share any other wisdom that you feel like our listeners need to hear that we haven’t yet touched on at this point to help them scale their brands?

Will (00:33:50) – Beautiful. Yeah. I’m gonna hit home the operations. You know, Amazon continues to increase these fees. It continues. And new elements of fees whether it’s your low inventory replacement fees. So just make sure you understand all your costs a big part a lot of times it’s crazy to me. But like a seller will come to us and they’re like, they don’t have all their costs down to the like. And we’re talking about 7 or 8 figure businesses that are like, you know, our costs are roughly around here. And it’s like, you don’t have your exact cost for us to operate off of.

Will (00:34:14) – Like, you don’t know, you don’t include all these different elements like your fulfillment or getting it to a fulfillment center. So I would say understanding all your costs because like, the more, you could be tuned in to how much it cost to manufacture a distribution product, the more we know how affected we could be when we’re doing advertising and marketing, and we’re making recommendations to help you hit your sales goals for the quarter or for the year.

Josh (00:34:35) – Yeah, I love that. Well, that’s a great way to cap this off. So as we wrap things up here, I’d love to leave our audience with three actionable takeaways. So here are the takeaways that I have noted. Will you let me know if I’m missing something. So action item number one is what we’ll just talked about. That operational efficiency I think is action item number one. If you do not know your financials and your books, if you don’t know. What are my true landed costs and getting that product actually into Amazon? How much is that actually costing me? Because what you know, the new placement fees and everything, you have to get that detailed in order to survive in the future of Amazon.

Josh (00:35:12) – In addition to that, it is making sure that you have a good process. Let’s imagine you have a couple Vas and you’re just assuming that, hey, we need to create a new product listing. You assume the fact that they’re going to fill in the right back end search terms, they’re going to put you in the right category. They’re going to optimize your title the proper way. What if they’re not? What if they are missing attributes in the back end of Amazon? You’re missing out on those things. same thing. What is your process for coming up with secondary images? Do you have a good process for what your main image is, what your secondary images are, and why? Because your secondary images need to be there to sell the product more than anything, and get them to subscribe and save or reduce the return rate. And so that’s the basics, right. And I would say that’s step number one because step number two would then be launching more products and turning on advertising. But if you have a leaky bucket right.

Josh (00:36:02) – And you’re not very good with your costs and there’s a lot of money being wasted because your conversion rate could be better, but it’s not because you’re not paying attention to it. You’re missing out on certain keywords because nobody. When was the last time you looked at the back end search terms and tried to optimize as the evolving world of keywords changes? If you’re not looking at those things, you have a leaky bucket and you think the answer is PPC, because everybody’s main question is, oh, how do I get more efficient with my PPC or programmatic ads on DSP? solve the operational efficiencies, make sure you have really good standard operating procedures first. Then you could start talking about external marketing, Google traffic and all of that other fun stuff. So that’s action item number one. Long winded answer. Action item number two is experimenting with external marketing. And that’s what I took away from you. Will is a lot of these brands that were doing well that you worked with. The common theme was that they had stuff going on off of Amazon.

Josh (00:36:58) – And you mentioned a few platforms people could leverage Levanta, Archer affiliates, Amazon Creator connections. Those are tools that you can reach out to people, give them samples, they can create some videos and just grow more awareness about your brand. And then if you really want to take things to the next level, then go hire a PR agency that can go get you on the Today show or to various media outlets. And then action item number three is implementing a, I would say, an operating system for your business. If you’re not implementing traction or iOS into your business and you don’t, you know, as we’ll talk about those big rocks, if you’re not doing those and setting up your quarterly plans, you need to do that because I promise you, you will make further progress in your business. When you have active goals that you’re working towards, and every day you should be taking actions that will move you one step closer to achieving those monthly goals that will then help you achieve those 90 day goals that will then help you achieve your yearly goals.

Josh (00:37:48) – More often than not, 90% of the entrepreneurs I talk with, one of their biggest challenges is they’re so busy doing and they think because they’re so busy that it’s going to allow their business to grow. But if you’re too busy focused on emails, just going back and forth with your manufacturer, and I guess getting caught up in the thick of thin things, then your business is going to stagnate. You, as a business owner, need to be focused on moving the needle, pushing actual levers on a daily basis that are actually going to drive revenue in your business. And if you’re not, you will stagnate. So, will. There are my three action items from this episode. Anything else that you would add that I’m missing here? Are you.

Will (00:38:21) – Nailed it. Well said. You took some great notes, Josh, that was an awesome wrap up.

Josh (00:38:24) – Awesome. All right, well, let’s move into the last three questions here for each guest. Number one, what has been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Will (00:38:31) – I’ve been reading a lot of Ryan Holiday.

Will (00:38:33) – I’ve been getting into stoicism as just a general philosophy, so The Daily Stoic and The Daily Dad are two. I’m cheating. I’m giving you two books or two books by Ryan Holiday that have strongly influenced my life, how I make decisions and how I handle stress. So, but highly recommend those books.

Josh (00:38:46) – I like that Ryan Holiday I heard him speak. he is he does a great job writing books and would recommend those as well. I need to pick up that daily. Dad, that one sounds interesting. question number two. What is your favorite productivity tool or new software tool that you’ve recently discovered that you think is a game changer?

Will (00:39:02) – Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s new, but we use Clickup. sorry, not Clickup. Excuse me. ChatGPT I use it for everything. it’s really helpful. there are ways and I have an article about it that you can use to help with listing optimization and all that fun stuff. It is not perfect, but for me, in terms of how I use it for business, for marketing, for organizing, even now, it connects to Canva to help build images and templates.

Will (00:39:24) – It is. It’s insane. It’s absolutely game changing. So, we keep diving deeper to figure out how we can better leverage that tool. But we’re firm believers in AI, and we’re looking forward to seeing how it develops over time.

Josh (00:39:34) – So give me some specific use case scenarios. The best way that you’re using ChatGPT that’s producing some good, good output for you.

Will (00:39:40) – Beautiful. I’d say, responding to difficult emails. I could be a little rough around the edges, especially when, some of these situations are delicate. So, having a lot of times I’ll dump the email in, and I’ll be like, how does this sound? And I’ll be like, it’s not a little aggressive. Return it back. It’ll do me some really good, features. And then something we’ve been doing on the marketing side. The things we’ve been putting in. We write a lot of articles, so I’ll summarize that article and I’ll dump it in, and I’ll be like, I’ll be making an infographic about this or help me create this around this concept, and it’ll pull out a blueprint.

Will (00:40:08) – It does like an 80% good job in terms of the content based on what I dropped in there. And then I’m able to take it to my marketing team and they go in and help me clean it up a little bit and make it more user friendly, and then adding in some additional writing elements. So, we use it a lot for the marketing side of the business.

Josh (00:40:22) – Awesome, I love that. All right. Well last question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Will (00:40:30) – There is a whole bunch of them. But I’m a big fan of Brandon Young and his data dive tool. He puts out tons and tons of great content that I highly recommend. If you’re not following Brandon, check them out. If you’re not using Data Dive and you’re already on Jungle Scout, for example, it’s an extension that you add on to your tools and it gives you like unbelievable insight into the marketplace, into competitors listing opportunities and improvements. And it’s done, you know, so you like click, click click add basket.

Will (00:40:54) – Knock out this report for me. So, it’s really a game changer. Our team uses it on all of our accounts, and we use it to get competitor insights and data that we can use and apply to the brands we work with to help feed and sales.

Josh (00:41:05) – Awesome, I love that. Yes, Brandon Young, he’s a great friend. I would highly recommend following him as well. Well, thank you so much for your time today. If other people want to follow your journey, they want to learn more about your services. Where can people reach out to you at it?

Will (00:41:16) – Definitely check us out on the website. Com but personally, I’m on LinkedIn. Will Haire like on your head with an E? I put out tons of content. I’ve been quoted for sharing stellar news and summaries on how specific changes to the platforms affect sellers, so that appreciate if you reach out and follow me there.

Josh (00:41:32) – Awesome. Well, will, thanks again for your time and joining us on the podcast.

Will (00:41:35) – Josh, thanks for having me.

Will (00:41:36) – This is great.