In this episode, the host interviews Josh Gibson, founder of Sojourn Group Consulting, about strategies for growing e-commerce sales on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Josh shares expert tips on protecting profit margins, optimizing product listings, leveraging Amazon’s NARF program for international expansion, and efficiently managing inventory shipments. He discusses the benefits and challenges of expanding to Walmart and other platforms, emphasizes the importance of strong team communication, and recommends trusted industry resources. The episode concludes with actionable takeaways for maximizing sales and diversifying channels for long-term growth.
Chapters:
Introduction to Josh Gibson and Sojourn Group Consulting (00:00:00)
Overview of Josh’s background, company focus, and personal life.
Protecting Margins on Amazon: Categories, Weights, and Inbound Shipments (00:01:15)
Importance of tracking product categories, weights, dimensions, and optimizing inbound shipments to protect margins.
Challenges of Managing Amazon Shipments and Auditing (00:02:19)
Issues with Amazon’s inventory reconciliation and the need for ongoing auditing to avoid losses.
Prioritizing Marketplace Expansion and Expected Sales Lift (00:03:10)
Discussion on which marketplaces to expand to first and typical sales lift percentages.
Expanding with Amazon NARF (North America Remote Fulfillment) (00:03:50)
How NARF enables easy expansion to Canada and Mexico, and the expected 7% sales lift.
Considering Deeper International Expansion (00:04:53)
When to consider establishing a physical presence in Canada or Mexico for further growth.
Selling on Walmart Marketplace: Opportunities and Challenges (00:04:53)
Walmart’s marketplace growth, operational challenges, and the shift to Walmart Fulfilled Services.
Walmart Advertising and Early-Stage Advantages (00:05:49)
Opportunities in Walmart’s less competitive ad platform and strategies for early success.
Walmart Sales Lift and Rural Market Penetration (00:06:56)
Typical 5–10% sales lift on Walmart, with strong performance in rural and Midwest areas.
Three Actionable Takeaways for Marketplace Sellers (00:08:49)
Maximize success on your primary channel.
Fully optimize listings, especially for mobile.
Expand to new marketplaces after optimizing the first.
Optimizing Amazon Listings for Mobile and Conversion (00:09:48)
Detailed tips for optimizing titles, images, videos, and A+ content for better conversion.
Expanding to Additional Marketplaces Beyond Amazon and Walmart (00:10:54)
Consider Target, eBay, Newegg, Etsy, and Wayfair for incremental revenue after maximizing Amazon and Walmart.
Most Influential Book Recommendation (00:12:31)
Gary Vee’s books and content for building a brand and leveraging social media.
Favorite Productivity Tool or Resource (00:15:00)
Slack for team communication and the importance of a fast, reliable computer.
Most Admired E-commerce Influencers (00:16:14)
Recommendations to follow Steven Pope, Bradley from Helium 10, and Kevin King for free, valuable content.
Closing Remarks and Appreciation (00:17:26)
Harry thanks Josh for sharing actionable insights and expertise.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Websites
Sojourn Group Consulting
Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)
NARF (North American Remote Fulfillment)
Walmart Connect
Helium 10
Influential People
Gary Vaynerchuk (Gary Vee) on LinkedIn
Steven Pope from My Amazon Guy on LinkedIn
Bradley Sutton from Helium 10 on LinkedIn
Kevin King on LinkedIn
Events
Sell and Scale Summit
Productivity Tool:
Slack
Transcript:
Josh Hadley 00:00:00 Today I’m super excited to introduce you to Josh Gibson. over the past 20 years, Josh has been leading sojourn Group consulting, a company with a strong e-commerce focus. Sojourn Group consulting specializes in marketplace sales, and has evolved from being a third party seller into an agency that helps other sellers grow their marketplace presence without having to hire a full team. Their years of experience and team make their bolt on solution very simple for many companies. Outside of work, he is happily married for 15 years and is the father of four children ages eight, six, four and two. That makes him very busy at this stage in his life. He says there’s little time for anything except work and family. So welcome to the podcast, Josh.
Josh Gibson 00:00:45 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Josh Hadley 00:00:46 Well, with how busy you are with a young and growing family and the business, we’re excited to have you share some of your time with us. So thanks again for joining us. What else is there that you know? You’re saying that Amazon eats your margin for business lunch and dinner or for breakfast? Lunch and dinner, right? So what else is there that you know, people should be paying attention to? And Amazon specifically for now that, you know, there could be a lot of, you know, marginally going out the business.
Josh Gibson 00:01:15 Yeah. I mean, it’s important to to track your weights and your gyms and your categories of what products you’re selling in because there’s some products. Say you’re selling a printer. A printer should be in an 8% category, but sometimes they’ll slide into a 15% category. So you’re losing that that amount of money. You don’t see it unless you’re tracking tracking it. Or they could dim it out wrong. Say something. They as they went through their Cuba scan, it dimmed out incorrectly. So being able to go in and update and fix those dimensions and then do do file backs on those. also trying to find better, more efficient ways to do inbound shipments. and so there’s, there’s tools out there that we use that can take like right now we’re running a full truckload, for $400, inbound FBA, where that same truckload going, another the route could be 3 to $4000. So it’s the more time you do this. And the nice thing about our team is we can sit in a bullpen and go, okay, what are you guys learning? What’d you find out? and trying to take our collective knowledge, plus being able to go to, like, this, scale and sell summit and meet other people that know more things and aggregate this information to become more valuable.
Josh Gibson 00:02:19 which, to your point is, if you’re an owner operator trying to do this yourself, it becomes complicated because you don’t have the resources and the ability to to learn all these things. Yeah. But to your point, it’s it’s the weight in gems. It is the categories. It is inbound shipments. I’m blanking on a few others, but it’s really managing that protection of your bottom line. that’s important. And it’s also like specifically with inbound shipments is the annoying part is you can get that FBI ID cleared, they can say fully received. And we’ve seen with some clients ten, 12 months later, they say, actually we’re five short. And if you’re not going back and reordering those, even though you thought you did a good job auditing it. You can lose.
Josh Hadley 00:02:59 It. Interesting. So even Amazon will mark it. Let’s say a month later, it’s like. Yep. Fully received. Yep. We got them all. But then 12 months later they’re like, actually we were five short.
Josh Hadley 00:03:10 Right. And I would argue most sellers aren’t paying attention to that. for sure. I want to go down the list of what you would consider like priority of importance. If somebody is like, hey, I do. I’m interested in expanding our distribution channels. What would be the top ones people should focus on? And then with that, I want to hear from you kind of what’s the estimated sales lift in terms of like percentage right of revenue. Like, hey, you get on to Walmart. It’s an extra probably 5% or is it ten? So like if you wouldn’t mind like let’s go down the list of marketplaces. What sales lift do you typically see on average? and then what you would recommend.
Josh Gibson 00:03:50 Yeah. So I’d start off if you’re doing FBA, which I wouldn’t imagine why you’re not doing FBA. I would start off with naff. Nerf and being able to expand to Amazon in Mexico. Turnkey. the reps in Canada and Mexico are really easy to work with to build out your listings.
Josh Gibson 00:04:06 And if you’re not familiar with NRF, what it does is it takes your US inventory and lists it in Mexico and or listed in Canada, increases the cost to the end customer to cover all the inbound fees. and when the customer, if the customer returns the product, it comes back to the US on a removal order. So you’re not having to worry about taxes, duties, tariffs, inventory that anything. I mean, I guess not that but I mean in that is easiest. We see a 7% lift almost overnight once we’re able to get that implemented. And it doesn’t cost you anything more. It just gets you exposure into Canada and Mexico. And what that does is then it lets us know, okay, if Mexico is seeing this much of a lift, or Canada seeing this much in a lift, maybe it’s worth us looking at expanding and getting a presence up in Canada or getting a presence down in Mexico. Even those, even though those tend to be more complicated, than just doing naff.
Josh Gibson 00:04:53 It may be worth it because your 7% may turn to 14%. Now that it’s in country, it’s a little bit cheaper. So on and so forth. That’s on Amazon. and if we if I take it off Amazon, I’d say the next one would be Walmart. I think Walmart’s finally made good strides in their growth on marketplace. I thought this is gonna happen. Right. When they acquired jet, I figured it was going to be a turnkey process. Walmart is highly difficult to work with. Their customer support, their service, their ticket process is not great. And they’re making it more and more complicated, because they’re pushing everything toward, Walmart fulfilled services. and they’re making that. So that becomes a little more complicated in regards to, where inventory sits. for a while there, you’re able to do a brown box program with Amazon and then use MCF and ship that product, all these different places in Walmart’s terms of service. Now don’t allow that. So that makes it that makes it more complicated.
Josh Gibson 00:05:49 So now you’re taking an inventory having to divide it in two places. but play around with it. But I would say Walmart and I’d say Walmart specifically with Walmart fulfilled services, starting off with a small amount of inventory in there based on what’s selling on Amazon. And also, I believe Walmart’s ad AD Council is ripe for the picking. It is not nearly as complicated. It is complicated, but it’s not as, as heavily diluted as Amazon’s PPC is right now. So if you come in there with with good data that you’re able to take from Amazon, your buyers are different. So not all keywords and terms and they don’t all cross-pollinate well. But there’s not a lot of people on Walmart connect doing ads well. So you have an opportunity to put your put your listings right to the top pretty quick with limited ad spend. Yeah.
Josh Hadley 00:06:37 I think that’s a great point to to point out, is that Walmart still kind of in that new phase where Amazon was maybe like it, I don’t know, maybe a decade ago, right where it’s still kind of fresh new.
Josh Hadley 00:06:49 Hopefully I see some growth there and maybe you’re going to get to this, but like, what percentage sales lift do you see from Walmart?
Josh Gibson 00:06:56 Walmart? That one’s still unknown. the mic or the WCF? We’re seeing anywhere from 5 to 10. initially. And that’s if you’re doing Walmart Connect as well. but it’s also trying to do that page jockeying. Right. So right now is that process. Walmart’s listing process is is odd and different and a little wonky where you have some of them. so say your competition selling belts. and they have ten belts on ten different pages and ten different. Or sometimes they can have that same belt in multiple different listings because they’ve, they’ve bent the system. And Walmart hasn’t had the, the infrastructure to help clean that up a little bit. So there’s a lot of noise. but I think if you can come in and come and swing with good ads, you can set yourself up for success long term, because then you start getting that placement, you start getting the click through, you start getting the reviews.
Josh Gibson 00:07:46 early on. So I’d say 5 to 7. I think it’s conservative. but I’m also we’re still early stages of what this Walmart fulfilled service is going to do, what their timeframe is, how they’re going to keep up with Amazon. are we going to see any type of Prime Day type stuff from Walmart? what we do find is we’re we’re Walmart is really strong. in regards to their retail locations. We find that we’re getting a big pickup in sales for Walmart in those areas. and so they tend to be more rural. They tend to be more, Midwest. so we’re seeing because typically our heat map, you see California, Texas, right, Florida, New York, Washington, like, you see the corners, you see the big, big cities. But what we are seeing is pickup in these rural areas from Walmart, because that’s in a lot of these places. That’s the only store in town. Yeah. Walmart. And so there’s a lot of brand recognition, brand loyalty. Walmart’s doing a lot of good jobs in advertising their products.
Josh Gibson 00:08:42 So you may get you you may not have the same amount of sales, but you’re getting a different client that you didn’t have, on Amazon.
Josh Hadley 00:08:49 Interesting. That’s that’s a great perspective. I love to leave the audience first with three actionable takeaways from each episode. So here are the three takeaways that I noted. Josh, let me know if you think I’m missing something. So first and foremost, I would say you’ve got to establish, you know, a successful brand on a particular sales channel. That’s that’s your first action, right? And double down on that sales channel. First, make sure you’ve, you know, you’ve leveraged all the different selling points for that sales channel. And in the example of Amazon, if you’re on Amazon, make sure you’ve exhausted your resources there to grow your brand. Make sure you’ve turned on PPC. Right. I’ve even heard many, brands that are like, yeah, I don’t want to spend any on on PPC. And it’s like, well, you’re missing out on organic ranking, additional sales, etc. on top of that, you have the Narf program that Josh talked about, and I think that is super important.
Josh Hadley 00:09:48 Like leverage everything you can on Amazon first, because that’s going to be much easier than, you know. When you have to cross the bridge and go to these other platforms, you’re going to be doing a little bit extra work. So that’s number one, right? Leverage everything you can on the existing platform that’s bringing you the most success. Number two, I would say is kind of in that same vein. Make sure that you have optimized all of your listings in that specific channel where you’re finding success again. So if you’re on Amazon, make sure that you go through that optimization checklist that Josh talked about. And the first thing that you talked about Josh was like optimizing things for mobile views. So optimizing the title, what does my title look like when it’s on mobile? Optimizing your first and second image for your product listing, and even experimenting with some lifestyle photos for that main image. Then you would go into, you know, next would be having a video and demonstrating Trading. Like how that product works so that the customer sees it in action.
Josh Hadley 00:10:54 Not just kind of like a I think some people go the cheap route of, hey, I’m just going to turn my images into videos. And it’s like, no, the customer wants to see it in action, right. and then last but not least they’re with the optimization work on your bullets, your A+ content, your description, things like that. And then kind of my third action item for everybody is to begin once you’ve kind of accomplished number one and two you’ve maxed everything out. You’ve got your maximum conversion rate, you’ve refined things really well. Your keywords are, you know, humming along there. Then the next thing is to maybe look at additional distribution platforms. Right. We talked about, you know, if you’re on Amazon already, the next best place to go is probably going to be Walmart. And then, you know, you should even consider going through the sign up process with target because I know back in the day with Walmart, I think you had to wait like six months to a year to even get approved.
Josh Hadley 00:11:50 So why not start that process early now for target. And then you’ve got some of the other lower, hanging fruit marketplaces that would be eBay, Newegg, you know, even Etsy that you can experiment with, and even Wayfair. But just know that, you know, your, your sales, you might be looking at 2 to 3% of incremental revenue there. Josh, does that sound like the appropriate like next steps that people should be taking in terms of actionable takeaways from today?
Josh Gibson 00:12:19 Yeah, absolutely.
Josh Hadley 00:12:20 Awesome. All right. So let’s go into my final three questions for you here, Josh. what has been your most influential book that you’ve read and why?
Josh Gibson 00:12:31 That’s a great question. heads up on this would have been nice. I think if you are building a brand specifically and this is not to be, like, just tongue in cheek, but I think any book from Gary Vee is really helpful, because I think that there is so much that can be done through social media that’s not being done.
Josh Gibson 00:12:55 Like he talks about this TikTok ification, right? And just understanding, okay, if I’m building this brand, I can do PPC and I can do listing optimization, I can do lifestyle photos and I can do videos. How is the customer going to know about your brand? And so I think he’s done a really good job at building some of the basic stuff. If I was to look at books, then his his content and video was really, really good. but it does take a lot of energy and it takes a lot of time. But I think for, if you’re building a brand and building building a story, having having that out there as a big play is really important.
Josh Hadley 00:13:25 Yeah. I think I would echo what you just mentioned there. Gary Vee came and spoke at the Sell and Scale Summit, which is where I met Josh to begin with. And I think the knowledge that Gary Vee shared with everybody was, I think, very valuable. and he does put out, put out a lot of great content.
Josh Hadley 00:13:40 It’s a lot to, consume for sure. And there’s a lot of it’s much easier said than done, but if you’re trying to build a real brand. Definitely highly recommend that as well.
Josh Gibson 00:13:50 And I don’t know, maybe maybe, you know, Josh, I think it’d be interesting if there’s an agency out there that does support for like, TikTok and like all these plays or I guess someone that can come in and have, like, can build that. So I don’t know if you know anybody, but if you do, I think it’d be good to share, because that takes a lot of resources to build all that content where you’re posting it, what it looks like. And so I think that that’s an interesting play.
Josh Hadley 00:14:13 Yeah I agree. You know, I actually, it was I was on TikTok the other day and I came across the video. It was the guy who had run all of the media, social media for Gary Vee. And he’s open, he’s opening up his kind of own agency.
Josh Hadley 00:14:28 So I don’t remember the name off the top of my head. I’d have to dive into TikTok. Nobody wants to do that while I’m on the podcast. but, that is out there. So I agree with you, Josh. Like, it’s better to leverage somebody else’s experience rather than trying to, like, start that from scratch because social media is evolving quicker than we can even learn it, I think. question number two that I have for you, Josh, is what’s your favorite like productivity tool or resource that you use, whether it be in your personal life or even for business as well?
Josh Gibson 00:15:00 Oh, that’s a great question. tool, I say for our team, we use slack. that’s been really, really good keeping communication. I’m not a big meeting fan. I think it takes up too much time and you don’t get enough things done. but the the first, last second thing that came to my mind is having a computer that can keep up with what you’re trying to do. Right.
Josh Gibson 00:15:21 One of the worst things is having a computer that’s slow and you’re waiting for pages to load. Making sure the internet into your house, especially if you’re an online seller, is is up to par. because waiting can can take a lot. But my personal PC is stronger than our server just because I do a lot, on here. And so for me, that’s my biggest tool. I figure if I was a carpenter, I’d probably have all DeWalt or all Milwaukee tools to do everything I need to do. I look at my computer as my tool, and so I make sure my computer is up and operational the best way I possibly can.
Josh Hadley 00:15:50 I think that’s a great recommendation coming from the guy that used to, you know, sell refurbished computers. And I think you know that space really well. So I think that that’s good advice coming from you. last question here is who is someone that you admire or respect most in kind of this e-commerce space or even Amazon FBA space? And why? Like, who are the people that other people should be following?
Josh Gibson 00:16:14 I think what’s the name? Josh Pope from my Amazon guy.
Josh Gibson 00:16:17 I think he does a really good Steven Pope. Steven Pope thank you. I think he’s got really good content. I think he, provides a lot of value, out there in the space for free. you have Bradley from helium ten being able to pop on his his podcast, I think Stephen King. No. Kevin King, does does a really good job. And so finding these people that are willing to provide free content. but I think those three guys do a really good job in the space of sharing what they know. what some of the tips and tricks are and really unashamedly like, do this because it’s very similar. Like if you look at Toyota and they have been doing lean for years and they let any brand Honda, Chevy, they let anybody come walk in their, in their facility and do a tour and see what they did. But they never cared about people being there because they knew by the time they left that they were going to be better than the people, that they just they just trained.
Josh Gibson 00:17:10 And so I think those three people specifically are so great at what they do. They can give it away for free because they’re already seven steps ahead of where we’re at, trying to pick up where they just left off. Right. And so it’s trying to find those people that are that in the game that know what’s going on really well. They give it for free because they keep on growing.
Josh Hadley 00:17:26 Yeah, I love that. Well, Josh, thank you so much for sharing your in-depth knowledge about selling on multiple marketplaces and making them profitable today. I know that I’ve got a lot of action items for our team that I’m going to be taking away, and I appreciate your time.
Josh Gibson 00:17:40 Oh my pleasure. Thank you.
