Strategy Audit – The Three Levers to Scale with Karen Bonnici

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Strategy Audit – The Three Levers to Scale with Karen Bonnici

Karen Bonnici – the visionary behind Moon Sonder™ and its iconic products, the Super Blanky®, Dreamighty®, and Super Towel®. Karen’s story is a testament to the transformative power of passion and purpose, as she crafts unique experiences that seamlessly blend comfort, self-care, and imagination for her customers.

But Karen’s journey doesn’t stop at product creation. With a rich background as a seasoned storyteller, musician, and teaching artist, she’s no stranger to captivating audiences both on stage and online. Her foray into ecommerce has been driven by her diverse creative talents, allowing her to weave compelling narratives and melodies that deeply resonate with her audience.

Here’s a glimpse of what you will learn…. 

  • Leveraging TikTok shop to convey your brand story
  • Leveraging TikTok Shop as a platform for brand messaging and influencer engagement.
  • Exploring the potential of TikTok Shop as a driver of traffic to Amazon and the trust factor associated with Amazon among consumers.
  • Importance of leveraging Shopify to collect customer data and strategies for audience ownership outside of Amazon.
  • Highlighting the value of conducting product variation tests to optimize conversion rates
  • The necessity of continuous testing, leveraging Amazon’s AB experiments, and the potential impact of 1% improvements over time.
  • Driving growth by launching new products and analyzing competitors’ actions. 

In this episode of Ecomm Breakthrough podcast host Josh Hadley chats with Karen Bonnici, a successful Amazon brand owner. They explore the challenges of low conversion rates and high ad costs, and the necessity of launching new products. The discussion also covers the effectiveness of storytelling in branding, the potential of TikTok and other platforms for promotion, and the use of influencers to drive traffic. Karen shares her personal story of resilience, aiming to inspire through her brand. The episode concludes with an emphasis on innovation, competitor analysis, and the continuous improvement of product listings for business growth.

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

Action item #1: Driving growth by launching new products.  Constant product innovation is paramount, akin to Apple’s strategy, emphasizing that product diversification fuels sustained expansion, preventing sales stagnation over time.

Action item #2: Consider TikTok Shop for brand promotion, leveraging its potential for virality and broad audience reach, irrespective of follower count, thanks to its algorithm favoring resonant content. Unlike platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, where visibility relies heavily on audience size and engagement rates, TikTok offers a cost-effective avenue for expanding product awareness.

Action item #3: Continuous testing through Amazon’s AB experiments is essential, facilitating ongoing refinement of product listings. Embracing iterative improvements enables even marginal gains to compound over time, driving significant growth in e-commerce endeavors.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

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!

Full Transcript

**Josh (00:00:35)**** ((-)) – – Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interviewed the top business leaders in eCommerce. Past guests include Adam Heist, Kevin King, and Michael E Gerber, the author of The E-myth. Today I’m speaking with Karen Bonnici. She is an Amazon brand owner that crossed the seven figure mark last year, and we just finished an audit on her brand. And we’re going to let you all peek under the hood and hear the challenges that she is facing, and also hear the solutions that we discussed while conducting her brand audit.

**Josh (00:01:07)**** ((-)) – – This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Karen, I started my business back in 2015 and grew into 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 really take a lot longer than it needed to. There were times where I had to take money out of my own bank account in order to pay payroll. I didn’t understand the cash flow. I had challenges in hiring, and I wish I would have had a mentor along the way that would have been able to help guide me around a lot of those obstacles and stumbling blocks more quickly and easier. If you’ve hit similar plateaus and want to know the next steps to take your brand to the next level, then go to Ecommbreakthrough.com to learn more. That’s ecomm with two M’s. And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one free comprehensive business strategy audit session normally valued at $10,000.

**Josh (00:02:05)**** ((-)) – – But I’m doing it completely for free. And so all you need to do is email me at Josh@Ecomm breakthrough.com, and plead your case as to why I should choose you and your brand to work with. Now, Karen is one of those individuals that actually reached out and applied for a strategy audit, and so she was fortunate enough to be one of the people selected for this month. And she we just conducted her brand audit. So today I’m excited to introduce you all to Karen Bonnici. She has an amazing story of never giving up despite surviving breast cancer while trying to launch her brand on Amazon, also going through a divorce and having her products removed from target stores. She has been so resilient that she has now built her brand back up to over seven figures on Amazon.com. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Karen.

**Karen (00:02:58)**** ((-)) – – Thank you. I’m excited to be here. Really, really thrilled. Thank you for that introduction. Kind of Karen makes me think, oh wow. That’s really what has happened.

**Josh (00:03:10)**** ((-)) – – It is amazing. And I think we all need to pat ourselves on the back, right, a little bit more often than we do. Yeah. Because if you really take a step back and you look at where am I today, where I was even last year or five years ago or even ten years ago. And you think about the growth that occurs. It’s always amazing, right? If you never give up and you keep going even when the going gets tough. And let’s just say this, Karen, you’ve gone through a heck of a lot more than 90% of other Amazon sellers, I would argue. Yet you’ve been able to cross that seven figure mark. And so I want to pay respect to you on that, which is very impressive. And we could have and we probably should record a whole entire podcast episode just on the obstacles and challenges that you had to face personally to get to where you are today. But we’ll save that story for a later date.   Karen, what I want to focus on today is why did you sign up for a brand audit or a strategy audit to begin with?

**Karen (00:04:13)**** ((-)) – – Well, I’m a fan of the podcast.

**Karen (00:04:16)**** ((-)) – – I’ve been listening for a long while. I’ve probably listened to at least 80% of what you’ve created out there. So I’ve got 20% to go. Yeah. I really like your. Really. You’re. You seem like a very a person with great precision. I love how you go through the,   talking to whenever you’re interviewing somebody, your ability to wrap up and and you’re an amazing listener. Right. So I always feel like, wow, he definitely gathered that information and collated it and then represented it to the audience in such a strong way. So that is how I think you must run your business. Right. So I think you’re probably a really good student and that you take the things that you. And apply it to your business. So why? Of course. I wanted to reach out to you.

**Josh (00:05:08)**** ((-)) – – Awesome. Well, I appreciate that. Now, with that being said, Karen, what were some of those challenges that you were facing?   that you are seeking to, you know, hopefully obtain some insight, maybe some potential solutions as you prepared for this strategy audit? Yeah.

**Karen (00:05:25)**** ((-)) – – So,   you know, we. Have not as high conversion as we would like to see.   and not as high conversion rate as our a lot of our competitors. You know, we’re running a profitable business, thank goodness. But there’s room to grow. Right. So conversion as I kind of was telling you earlier, is like the big troublesome spot, but like, everything falls beneath that, right? So, we want to convert higher and reach more of an audience. I think, you know, with our product being a unique product that stands out uniquely outside of what our competitors are doing, I think that we have challenges with that. But, you know, with the things that we talked about today, which we’ll go into, I feel as though you gave us some really good ideas. On just generally converting higher. So, you know, we also have, you know, our tacos are too high, we spend too much on advertising.

**Karen (00:06:33)**** ((-)) – – And if we can boost our conversion, we can raise or lower those tacos, hopefully, and be even more profitable than what we are. Because when it comes to profit, right, we want to grow faster. And I can grow faster the more capital I build for the company and put in place. And I always reinvest in the company. Right. So,   so just lowering those tacos, boosting those conversion rates and then being able to launch new initiatives, new idea, spend more money in marketing,   product development, improving products for our customers is definitely, you know, a our goal. So,   those are, I would say the biggest two, two to ugliest things that   but but still big picture things that we’re just challenged with is lowering is raising our, our conversion rates, getting closer to what our competitors are doing in lowering some of our costs so that we can just reinvest back into the business.

**Josh (00:07:33)**** ((-)) – – Yeah, 100%. And I think that that helps.

**Josh (00:07:37)**** ((-)) – – Like, I think many of our listeners are in the exact same boat that you are. And so we’ll dive into like, what were the things that we talked about,   to help with your conversion rate. We’re going to dive into that. But I also want to just tee it up. Here are some of the other things that you kind of like mentioned briefly when we first started the audit. You know, you talked about tacos being high. You talked about not having an email list for your customers, okay, that you are looking for to hopefully create one. Right.   you were having some challenges on maybe some new designs that you launched and those weren’t selling like you had hoped. Yeah.   inventory planning is a beast. And I know we didn’t really get to dive fully into inventory planning. Right.   but FBA fees and product packaging. Right.   then I think the overall picture, Karen, that I think was important that you brought up and that I could see from the onset of, of the audit was.

**Josh (00:08:36)**** ((-)) – – And I’m trying to understand which levers to actually pull in the business because I have limited time, limited bandwidth, and so does my team. Right. And so if I have limited resources, which lever do I actually really want to be focusing on? Because you talked about a few things to begin with, right? You talked about creating blog articles, right? And sending Google ad traffic to blog articles in hopes that those blog articles would then convert to a sell on Amazon. That’s a great opportunity. It’s a great idea. You also talked about getting onto TikTok shop. You also talked about getting onto Shopify. You also talked about wanting to do your own email marketing. Right. All of those things. Require a lot, right? And if you just dabble in each of them, then guess what? None of them are really, really going to take off. And that’s kind of what we talked a lot about. But we gained a lot more clarity. And I hope that that’s one of the things that you walk away from this audit with, like, okay, if I have limited time and resources, what are my three priorities that I should actually be focused on in my business that are significantly going to move the needle more than others? So.

**Karen (00:09:52)**** ((-)) – – Right.

**Karen (00:09:53)**** ((-)) – – So we talked about launching and launching more products. And there’s no question, as a matter of fact, I didn’t mention earlier, but I am going to China this April, so I am definitely in search of more product ideas while I’m there. And,   so the idea of always be launching. New products within our brand that are really relative to what our brand is all about. But as well as looking at competitors and seeing what our competitors are doing and launching, and I think I told you some of that, I thought, you know, I don’t want to look just like our competitors. I have this like concept about my brand, that it’s a standalone and that it’s,   you know, it’s about resilience and strength. And, and our competitors don’t have that story. Right. So I tend to not necessarily want to do everything that everybody else is doing. Right. But I still think I know there’s our own way we can bring those products in, tie them to our brand and tell the story why those products fit.

**Karen (00:11:02)**** ((-)) – – I not I’m not the type of Amazon seller that will ever sell products just because I’m not going to go into do data research and say, oh, this looks like it’s selling a lot. I’m going to sell this because we can sell a lot of them to. That’s not the kind of seller I am.   I am definitely a person that leads from the heart, my entire company, my entire brand. And the reason why I do this, you know, ultimately, in the end, leads to so much fulfillment and,   ultimately, things I can give others really,   with the with what I’m building out of the company, not only not only some of the financial,   strength that I’m being able to build, but also some of the just the story that I’m able to tell. And, and that’s so important to me. Right? It’s so important to me. And I will never just find data and launch products. However, there are products that are out there that I know we can launch that are really that are tied to our brand and that we’ve so far been launching new colors and some graphic, a little bit of graphic designs on our current innovation, but not necessarily anything beyond that.

**Karen (00:12:15)**** ((-)) – – But it’s definitely time to start looking into that.   and I’m   yeah, I’m excited to be going to China this spring. Kind of see, see whatever else. You get some ideas while I’m while I’m there, but   and, and do the innovative things that are really tight and still connected to us that,   that I think will resonate. You know, I know that like, the Amazon customer is, you know, we talked about this that is not necessarily looking for the, the, the brand. If I’m not if I’m sitting on a store shelf, if I’m sitting, you know, in a Shopify store, and I have a big old brand that I’ve built through Facebook and ads and really driving traffic and really people start to recognize what it is, then I know that that’s not the customer always going into,   to Amazon. However, I know that in order to compel me to keep going, it’s got to be those things have to be tied to it.

**Karen (00:13:17)**** ((-)) – – I have to have the heart for it.   so it’s about finding the products that really will still resonate with both our customers and with our brand. Yeah. And just be authentic. I just, you know, just authentically stick with,   what we believe our customers, what we can do for our customers, what can we give to our customers, continue to tell them the story of, you know, strength, resilience, uh, you know, personal empowerment and, and, um. And also that’s important.

**Josh (00:13:49)**** ((-)) – – Yeah. No, I love how you kind of sum that up. And I think for anybody listening, one of the most important levers and this applies to any business is you have to be coming out with new products. Right. And Karen talked about she had been coming out with some variations of her current products. Right. Maybe some new colors and patterns and things like that. But that can only take you so far.

**Karen (00:14:16)**** ((-)) – – Right? Yeah.

**Josh (00:14:17)**** ((-)) – – And then being able to expand out and in the audit I shared with her, uh, kind of this story from Apple when Steve Jobs wanted to launch the iPhone, guess what was trending? Really? Well guess what? One of the best selling products was for Apple at that time before the iPhone.

**Josh (00:14:34)**** ((-)) – – It was the what? Karen?

**Karen (00:14:36)**** ((-)) – – It was the iPod.

**Josh (00:14:37)**** ((-)) – – It was the iPod. And so Steve Jobs presents this like, hey, I’m going, I want to create this iPhone, right? People said, hey, don’t do that because you’re going to cannibalize all of the sales for the iPod. You are already the market leader here. Why would you go disrupt yourself? Guess what? He disrupted himself. And then arguably, I think you could say like he even expanded his reach and his market share by doing something that had even greater mass adoption and changed most of our lives,   because of that new technology that we hadn’t had before. And so that same principle needs to apply to all business owners if you don’t disrupt yourself. Yeah. Guess who will? Your competition. Yeah, right. So you should always be innovating. You should always be looking to expand into adjacent product categories while still staying true to your brand and your identity and your vision and the mission that you have.

**Josh (00:15:37)**** ((-)) – – And that is 100% realistic. Yeah.   on Amazon. So I think that’s an important takeaway there.   Karen.

**Karen (00:15:45)**** ((-)) – – I agree completely. So I just want yes, I want to kind of revisit and say that that is the goal because that and that we said. I want to tell you, Josh, that I believe that the product innovation and product launches are new, but I probably didn’t mention that earlier. Talk to you like how priority it is for me to be attaching it to our brand, albeit aware of the Amazon audience? Not necessarily,   having that as their focus because they’re just shopping for a thing. I know that they’re shopping for a thing, but in order to compel it to,   I think there’s still a connect, right? There’s that still in the background that connect, that a brand can still have a bit of a presence. And I think that Amazon really recognizes brands and brands that are building stories and, uh, something that, um.

**Karen (00:16:41)**** ((-)) – – Can be built upon with their customers. I don’t think there’s space anymore, actually, on Amazon for anybody not building a brand. So brand is really, really important. And then the heart of what I build is tied to the brand. So it’s all tied and connected product development with. I resonates with with the brand.

**Josh (00:17:02)**** ((-)) – – So yeah, 100% agree with everything you just talked about there. Amazon is doubling down on brands. They’re giving brands more tools and more resources than they ever have before. So yes, building a brand is extremely important. But as you launch new products, you should be tying all of that in cohesively. So, Karen, I would love to hear some of your other takeaways from your strategy, audit and lessons learned. What were some of the epiphanies that you had that you would like to share? Maybe with the audience too, to help them with others that might be struggling in the same boat?

**Karen (00:17:37)**** ((-)) – – Yeah. So. So January 1st, I put some intentions into place for the business.

**Karen (00:17:43)**** ((-)) – – Right? I sat down, wrote the goals and had certain plans to go. And then January started rolling around and I participated in some events and got some more ideas rolling in it. I’ve been trying to pull a bunch of levers like, I’m like, this is a lever, this is a lever, this is a lever. Albeit I know that while I’m pulling all these levers, my time is being divided and I have to be cautious on all the things, on the choices that I make right, and where I’m going to spend my time. My time is limited. My team’s time is limited.   and, you know, it’s just resources. Right now, we do not have an enormous budget to just blow up and invest in all these ideas. So I have actually been and I mentioned this earlier, I have been kind of like nervous knowing that I’m doing all this stuff and I’m going, what am I doing? Am I doing too much? Can I handle everything that I’m trying to take on? But one big lever that we had that you and I discussed and that we planned from the beginning of the year, and that I revisited when I have been attending events recently in January.

**Karen (00:18:47)**** ((-)) – – And, and,   as well as we’re moving forward with is TikTok. We’re definitely opening a TikTok shop. And in the process of learning all that, like, that’s a whole nother platform. And that alone, I mean, I think it’s,   like you mentioned earlier, the wild, wild West, right.   and I think it’s going to be easier to build there because we have than from where I was when I launched two and a half years ago,   my brand, because I have so much more e-commerce knowledge and all, but it’s going to be big. It’s like it’s all that alone is just like a giant lever and so much time needing to be spent right there and, you know, but,   why is.

**Josh (00:19:32)**** ((-)) – – Why is that lever so important?   you know, because I tied this back into you have a big mission in heart for, like, conveying your story of resilience to others, right? Right. And so how does we talked about this briefly.

**Josh (00:19:49)**** ((-)) – – But like, why is TikTok shop a good lever that can also magnify your brand and your brand story?

**Karen (00:19:56)**** ((-)) – – Well, for two reasons. Because we can use and tell our brand story,   and share what we believe is, is this human nature of, of strength and empowerment that we,   when we’re in a really dark place, we don’t know that it’s there. And we want to be able to just I want to be able to tell that story and just give people some hope, for what they can do, in this world and kind of share my personal story, but share other stories about, you know, everybody goes through these really tough things, right? Like nobody know. I always say nobody gets off scot free. You don’t get through this life without getting through troubles, right? You got to go through the tough stuff.   but we get to go through the good stuff, too. And,   while you’re going through the tough stuff, I always say you need to know and hold on to,   that it’s not going to last forever.

**Karen (00:20:53)**** ((-)) – – You won’t be there forever while you’re in the blessings as well. Remember that right now that the blessings are wonderful. Where you’re there, when you’re with them, but they’re not there forever either.   and then when you’re going through that tough stuff, though, know that there is a way that you you’re you’re capable and you can climb out of it and you can get past these dark places. It’s so many people struggle with not knowing that, I think. And,   our brand definitely wants to be able to share that story and share other stories and share my story and just let people know that that’s, that’s, that’s there and that that’s so accessible to us as humans.   and then our product is really highly demonstrable. So it’s, you know, it just shows up great on video. And I think that people will really find it fun and it will physically,   you know, remind people of. Some funny things to do with it. You know, you can play with it and get cuddly, you know, it’s a blanket product and, and you can, um.

**Karen (00:22:08)**** ((-)) – – And I just think that it’s going to demonstrate really well. I think our product is could be very, very comfortable in places like QVC and HSN and any of the, you know, seen on TV kind of places.   long ago we could have launched there, you know, but with partnering and going into all those. But we can do it ourselves on TikTok.   and I think that shop that the opening, the shop is where we want to be right now, definitely for our brand,   to be able to do those two things is just share, share the story of resilience and strength and,   this personal empowerment that we have,   and that we get to live at, we get to choose living a happy life so we can do that and we can,   show what our products do to, to,   kind of lean into that.

**Josh (00:22:58)**** ((-)) – – So I love that. Yeah. I think you hit the nail right on the head there with TikTok shop A, you can convey your brand message really, really well.

**Josh (00:23:07)**** ((-)) – – But number two, there’s so much potential because even an influencer or an affiliate that has only 500 followers that maybe just started their account six months ago, three months ago, but they want your product, they’re willing to create a few videos for your product, and they’ll post it on their accounts. Give it 100. You know, heaven forbid a thousand different people post about your product, right? You have a very high likelihood, hopefully, of one of those going viral. Right? And if one goes viral, then some of the other ones will also start to pick up steam as well. And so then that translate into that then translates to more people searching for your products on Amazon naturally, because they’re not just going to buy from TikTok shop my. I think why I’m so excited about TikTok shop is, yeah, I’ll pick up some orders from TikTok shop. I’m not necessarily worried about those orders. I’m really excited about the people that 50% of people that are watching that TikTok video are going to stop what they’re doing.

**Josh (00:24:12)**** ((-)) – – They’re going to move over into Amazon and they’re going to search for my product. Right. That’s the exciting part. Now you’ve got this flywheel going on on Amazon that it’s really going to have a significant lift. Whereas again, focusing exclusively on like a Shopify storefront, it’s like you’re going to Shopify and it’s not directly attributing to like an Amazon storefront.

**Karen (00:24:35)**** ((-)) – – So yeah, I agree. And isn’t it true that people don’t necessarily trust,   you know, TikTok as much to necessarily buy from there? I know there are discounts in place that TikTok will, you know, add to your product, but people are still don’t trust it. And people trust Amazon and they will continue to trust Amazon. So they’re just going to drive and go right over there. So and yeah so it’s not just for I agree it wasn’t the intention isn’t just to just um sell lots of stuff on TikTok. It’s to drive traffic over to Amazon because people will see products and say, well, if they’re on Amazon, I guess I can, I can trust it.

**Karen (00:25:14)**** ((-)) – – So yeah.

**Josh (00:25:16)**** ((-)) – – 100%, I love that. Yeah. All right. Karen, other epiphanies.

**Karen (00:25:21)**** ((-)) – –   I think that I have, like I said, a lot of levers. I’ve been thinking this lever, this pull this one, pull this one. We’re going to keep doing all of this stuff this year. And and again, I’ve been really nervous about these things. I’m pulling the levers I’m pulling and already seeing my time divided. I’m getting a little bit anxious about that, but I,   one of those levers has to do with driving traffic to Shopify. Now, I am a listener of the podcast, and I hear you say a lot, and I believe you, and I believe the story that you tell about when you launched on Shopify, how much, conversion was really happening over there and all the time and energy spent over there. And I’ve heard that from other brand owners, too. I mean, we know that Amazon has an audience, right? They’re there.

**Karen (00:26:12)**** ((-)) – – We know that there are people there because they’re there to shop. If they’re on Amazon, they’re going to convert because they’re, you know, at a much higher level than any other place because they’re there to shop, then Facebook or Google ads or any of that. So but I have not we don’t have people. Right? All of our people are on Amazon, but we don’t own them. Amazon owns our people, our customers. And we have, you know, some little things on,   on our labeling. Actually, I got real I was really scared in the beginning of, I really follow rules to maybe my own demise sometimes. I’m definitely a rule follower and so I am pretty like spot on toes compliant, right? I don’t put things on the packaging that shouldn’t be there. I don’t put inserts that shouldn’t be there. And, um. I. Have been driven with the idea that in order to collect an audience, I need to get an email list going in.

**Karen (00:27:14)**** ((-)) – – In order to get an email list going, I need to get my Shopify going and then get Shopify going to get those people. And now I have a bunch of people I can email and tell the story or brand story to, and then build an audience that way that we begin to have some ownership of our audience outside of Amazon, that we can then still drive over to Amazon. Right. But what you and I talked about today was other means to,   collect our customers,   and, and be in community with our customers and have them, you know, subscribing like through text messaging. And so and because I’ve been so scared about this, pulling the Shopify lever, knowing that I didn’t expect big conversion, but the only purpose, the biggest purpose was just so we could collect those people. I think you opened my eyes up to a little bit like, oh, there’s more out there that I’m not even considering. And tapping into to, to collect customer data and communicate with them, the ways to more ways to communicate with our customer than,   just through email lists.

**Karen (00:28:17)**** ((-)) – – So that’s kind of that’s really actually very exciting. And we didn’t even have time to go into enough of it. Josh. So,   but.

**Josh (00:28:25)**** ((-)) – – We need to have multiple part twos, right? Yes.   yeah. But for sure, what we talked about, you know, with Karen is like she had this idea or preconceived notion that, like, I need to have Shopify in order to, like, really collect emails and, and send people to that landing page. And I said, hey, all we’re doing on every single one of our products, we have a QR code that says, congrats, you’ve won a free gift, and there’s a QR code that automatically pre-populated a text message that they just need to click the send button and then Bam! They are in our flow. They’re now our customer. They are in our customer list sequentially. Then obtain their email address and be able to offer more things to them. So we get them on an SMS platform.

**Josh (00:29:10)**** ((-)) – – We also get them on the email platform as well. And it’s just from one simple QR code, right. And so you could easily change your product packaging. Just adding a QR code,   can start building that list without the massive involvement. Of creating a Shopify store, maintaining that Shopify store. Figuring out everything. All those little details. Because it’s a big undertaking and everybody brushes it off as though, like, you should just create your own Shopify store. It’s like there are so many thoughts and decisions that have to be implemented into Shopify. And Karen, I told you this in the audit, but just as much time and energy as you’ve spent on Amazon. And think of all the Amazon experts that are out there, just as much time and energy we have put into understanding Amazon, the SEO algorithm, the way we do our main images, etc., etc.. Yeah, there are those people that are doing that exact same thing on Shopify and driving their traffic through Facebook, Instagram ads, YouTube ads, Google, etc..

**Josh (00:30:17)**** ((-)) – – Right? And that in and of itself is their full time hustle. Like they’re constantly they have full time teams that are making constant tweaks to the Facebook ad. Right? And they’re monitoring it on an hourly basis. And so to a lot of the Amazon sellers that are bootstrap businesses and you only have a full a few team members, I would just advise you that if you want to have success driving traffic off of Amazon to your own website. You’ve got to put in the same amount of time and energy that it took you to build up Amazon, to then build up your Shopify store. And is your time better spent doubling down on Amazon that’s already proven to be working for you and just expanding your catalog? Or, you know, if you do have that ambition that you want to go, you know, crack the code to Shopify and external traffic, just know that that is another set of expertise that you are going to have to learn just as much as your expertise in Amazon. And so otherwise you need to go hire an expert that is already an expert there.

**Josh (00:31:22)**** ((-)) – – Right? Or maybe partner give up equity for somebody else that has that.

**Karen (00:31:27)**** ((-)) – – At this point, that’s what it would take is is really just investing financially by hiring somebody who’s able to run most of that. I because I fully agree, everything that, you know, it’s just taken to get to where we are on Amazon right now is man, I, I am not a 40 hour a week worker. Right? I work a lot more than that, you know, and this is not a side hustle for me or anything. I’m putting in 40 way plus. Right. So some weeks go by and in order to just like do the whole Shopify thing and all that, we already do have our, you know, we have a Shopify website. That’s who we have our website set up through. We just aren’t selling there yet.   it’s. It’s an easy place to build a, I think, a website and get some things going, but just, just really pull triggers on driving traffic there and running that whole thing as a business and driving revenue there.

**Karen (00:32:23)**** ((-)) – – Big, big deal, big, big deal I agree.

**Josh (00:32:26)**** ((-)) – – Yeah, I love that. Now, Karen, as we start to wrap things up here, you talked about you know, conversion rate optimization is one of the leading things that you said, man, I would love to see better conversion rates. We didn’t really have a lot of time to focus on, you know, what our discussion was because we spent probably the half of our conference, our audit time just focused on conversion rates. So I would love for you to kind of digest to the listeners, what were your overall takeaways when it came to conversion rate optimization? Some of the ideas I shared with you.

**Karen (00:33:01)**** ((-)) – – Well, I think the idea of launching products, coming in with new products so that we are driving more attention to our listings that exist,   kind of oh, what you said was, if this was really cool, I didn’t think. I haven’t thought about this.   dividing up our parent actions in a way, because we have 14 variations on one parent assign right now and then four variations on our children’s product on another parent.

**Karen (00:33:33)**** ((-)) – – Jason.   the idea of actually, because we’re getting ready to launch new colors, right? We’re going to be bringing those in this year to. And I just thought, well, we’ll just add those on to the other parent Jason’s. What? onto the one parent, Jason. But what you said was to take and divide our top sellers and put, either the new launches or the slower selling,   sellers underneath the, under higher, higher converting products and parent them in a way that doesn’t necessarily align with color. So we have like some graphic blankets. We have some on buffalo plaid, for example, kind of printed,   colored blankets. And we have solid color blankets. Well, the idea of it would automatically occur to me to put all the solids together, all our buffalo plaids together and all of our,   our graphic, graphic images together. But what you suggested was to do,   instead was just a put it in, you know, take a buffalo plaid and maybe put it with a graphic along it alongside one of our really fast moving asins.

**Karen (00:34:49)**** ((-)) – – And we’ve got a few top selling asins of those solid colors. So just divide it up that way and that’s okay.   it didn’t that never occurred to me. So that is something I am definitely going to, um. And look into how to divide those up. That’ll be a really, really interesting test. I’ll try try and test it. And then as we launch new colors, put those in in the right places.   so yeah, that that was a big one. That was good. Yeah. Um.

**Josh (00:35:19)**** ((-)) – – And we also talked about one other thing. Testing. Right. Yeah. Tell people more about testing and what type of testing were we talking about?

**Karen (00:35:28)**** ((-)) – – Well, we definitely don’t do enough testing. And just to always be running a B testing. And our products are very giftable, so we run seasonally. So I get really reluctant because we change keywords, we change the little things, we change images, you know, a little bit with the seasons,   and, and holiday gifting periods.

**Karen (00:35:46)**** ((-)) – – So I don’t always feel like I, I’ve stayed away a little bit from a B testing,   because we’d make those little polls, but they’re not big enough polls is what you suggested that I can’t always just have a B testing running at all times on on all of our things. So always B testing. And yeah, we just need to we’re always making little tweaks and changes. Why aren’t we testing those? I don’t know, we just think they’re a good idea and we think, oh, let’s just try these keywords. And you know, I mean, I know that we’ve we change keywords and we see we’re using Data Dive now. And that’s a really great tool for us. And we’re seeing higher conversion on our base has gotten a lot much lower. We’re in the top ten in our BSR.   from where we were in the 50s uh, late last year just by doing that. But we didn’t really test. We haven’t additionally tested like, oh, let’s try this,   keyword change in this keyword change or this image change is having a B testing and running at different times, and then run it on the different colors and different variations that we have.

**Karen (00:36:53)**** ((-)) – – So testing different things on different, different, uh, different variations of it. So we’ll definitely move into more testing this year. That’s an easy trigger to pull. It’s an easy thing to do. So we can definitely do that.

**Josh (00:37:06)**** ((-)) – – Yeah we talked about just making sure you’re always leveraging you know Amazon’s AB test experiments right. Doesn’t cost you anything right. And Amazon’s only going to make the change or update if it’s statistically significant right. So why not just always be looking to optimize your main image. Why not always be looking to optimize your secondary images especially for your product? It’s very demonstrable. People almost need to see it and almost watch a video to really understand how it works, right? So that those secondary images are key in terms of like explaining to the customer what this product is. We also talked about using a tool, whether it be product opinion or pick few or many of the others. Right.   but to actually give people, hey, go to this link and record, like what do you think about this product? What are maybe some objections before you would buy this product? Like any unanswered questions that will help shape some of those decisions that you make to say, let’s test this for the main image.

**Josh (00:38:10)**** ((-)) – – Right. What about this for our secondary images. So but long story short, always be testing because guess what. It’s those 1% improvements that will then snowball and compound. And really like you can look back a year from now and see that conversion rate change. But it may not be a 100% increase or 50% increase tomorrow. Right. But over time it could be right.

**Karen ((00:38:33))** (-) – – Right. Yeah. Yeah, I’m excited about that because and actually over this last year as we’ve been growing we’re so busy. Right. And I always have the next thing to do and the next thing to do, I keep thinking we should go test, we should be testing. But now it’s, that’s ad that’s on the list. That’s on the lever list. Things removed from the lever list. But that’s being added.

**Josh (00:38:59)**** ((-)) – – Good. Well, overall Karen, what would you like to convey to our audience from this brand audit? And a was it worth your time and would you recommend other people do it and why?

**Karen (00:39:13)**** ((-)) – – Absolutely.

**Karen (00:39:14)**** ((-)) – – It definitely worth my time.   I really appreciate your insight. Josh. I it’s just like really great to have somebody from the outside. Although on the inside world looking in at your brand, it’s so hard. And we as Amazon sellers, you know, we just don’t have enough ability. We’re all in our different places across the world, right? We don’t have enough time and space to have people look at, look inside and dig deep. So yeah, I would definitely recommend it.   it’s like, you know, when you’re raising your own kids, you can’t, you can, you can see somebody else and go, oh, but that’s what’s wrong. That’s what’s wrong with that situation. And you should be,   you know, putting him over there instead of over there and. And you can’t do that. It’s so hard as a parent. You can see it for somebody else and that’s what it is like in a business.

**Karen (00:40:06)**** ((-)) – – Sometimes it’s your baby. You love it so much, or even if you don’t love it so much, you’re just so tied up in it. You’re so deep in it and you’re just constantly digging, digging and digging and climbing and having an outside point of view. Perspective is really, really powerful. Thank you.

**Josh (00:40:22)**** ((-)) – – Awesome it I’m glad. I’m glad that you received value from it. And so to our listeners again, if you would be interested in receiving a complimentary strategy audit, just like Karen did, I only do one of these per month. I because this is just a thing I do just to give back to the community. So if you want to be entered to win, email me at Josh at Ecom Breakthrough Comm. Remember that’s two M’s for Aecom and you could be entered to win there. Now Karen, like I famously do, I love to wrap up each episode with three actionable takeaways for our listener. I’m going to give three actionable takeaways. Karen, you let me know if I’m missing something okay.

**Josh (00:41:04)**** ((-)) – – All right. Action item number one. Always be launching okay. To our listeners, your number one growth lever, no matter where you’re at in business, is launching new products. It’s the same with Apple. It’s the same with all big corporations. What is Apple doing? They’re always coming out with a new product okay. That’s how they’ll continue to grow. If you’re not expanding your product line, I promise you sales will eventually shrink and things are just going to continue to compress. Yeah. All right. Action item number two is give TikTok’s shop some consideration and some love. Not in the form of oh, I’m going to generate thousands of sales on TikTok shop now, is that realistic? I truly do think that’s possible. But where I see so much potential is you can work with a influencer that has a very small following, and they everybody on TikTok has the chance to go viral. That’s what I love about TikTok is they give love to kind of everybody. Compared to the Instagrams and the Facebooks, where it’s all based on how large your audience size is and your engagement rate, blah, blah, blah.

**Josh (00:42:14)**** ((-)) – – TikTok’s like, well, let’s just send this out to the world, and if people start watching it, then we’ll send it out to more people and more people and more people. And so I would argue that it’s the one of the cheapest and most effective ways that we can expand awareness about our products than any other channel right now.   because there is a chance that you hit the jackpot with a video that goes viral or even hundreds of thousands of views is great. You don’t need the millions, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands helps. Okay, action item number three here is always be testing okay. Always be utilizing Amazon’s AB experiments. It’s free for us to use always be you. You should have a process that you should always have multiple main images to choose from. And just have Amazon run it in the background. It doesn’t matter. But if you’re always doing that, those 1% improvements and when you find something that you know, maybe you don’t think is necessarily going to win, but the Amazon customers, for whatever reason, resonate more with it, then guess what? Those things are going to snowball and compound in massive ways.

**Josh (00:43:25)**** ((-)) – – As you look back a year or 2 or 3 years from now. But you need to put focus on that. So, Karen, anything else to add that I missed here?

**Karen (00:43:35)**** ((-)) – – Uh, no, I think I think that’s pretty spot on. I think that the Amazon customer, you know, is coming over from TikTok. I think that’s such a driving force and fully agree with you there. And, and the other two things, like just the launching of new products and really pushing in a direction that we haven’t and looking at some of our competitors. Yeah, really, really, you know, what they’re doing and the testing that is a big, big,   lever we’re going to pull this year. And I think and just see what those that tick, tick, tick of that conversion rate, if it just keeps climbing up then we’ll be happy. I think it can happen by testing. Yeah.

**Josh (00:44:17)**** ((-)) – – Wonderful. Well, Karen, thank you so much for your time. And I know you attend many, uh, conferences and things out there.

**Josh (00:44:25)**** ((-)) – – So those of you that watch this, you know, say hello to Karen. Now that you’ve seen her on the podcast and now you know a little bit more about her story. But Karen, thanks for sharing your story and joining us today.

**Karen (00:44:37)**** ((-)) – – Thanks, Josh. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for your time and your fabulous ideas. I’m really excited. It was great and I appreciate you. Thank you. Okay.