Matt Edmundson (00:04)

Welcome to the eCommerce podcast. My name is Matt Edmundson. It is great to be with you on this very sunny day. Yes, it is a warm welcome to you. If you are a new listener to the show, it's great to have you join us. And of course, if you're, if you've been around for a while, like my good self, then a warm welcome to you too. It's great that you're here.

⁓ listening to us talk about e-commerce, which probably means you've got an e-commerce business or involved in e-commerce of some kind. Otherwise, I'm not quite sure why you'd be listening. ⁓ unless you're thinking about starting an e-commerce business, whatever route you are on, I would suggest dear listener, ⁓ that you head over to e-commerce podcast.net. ⁓ and check out the website, especially check out the thing about e-commerce cohort. Come join us on that. These are free groups that you can join.

Well, you get to chat to fellow e-commerce is around the world, all about e-commerce, what they're going through, what you're going through and all of that sort of good stuff. And just chat with people. We've had a few groups going and they're great. I absolutely love them. They are totally free. Check out the website, ecommercepodcast.net if you want to join that. Now promo over the promo is it a promo is a free thing and it's really cool. Maybe it is a promo. I don't know. Sean, what do you think? Is that a promotion?

Sean Stone (01:22)

thought it was, if it's promotional, it's barely promotional. It's like, hey, I want to give you something for free. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (01:26)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. ⁓

But listen, Sean, welcome to the show, man. How you doing?

Sean Stone (01:35)

Doing great, thanks for having me.

Matt Edmundson (01:37)

Nice. Great. I'm talking about e-commerce. It's all good. And specifically today we're talking about all things Amazon, ⁓ because all the people that know anything about anything, tell me you're a bit of an Amazon expert and guru. So, ⁓ I'm looking forward to the show, ⁓ looking forward to getting into the conversation. ⁓ but before we do my overriding question right now that I have for you is who are the faces on the cushions behind you?

Sean Stone (02:05)

⁓ well, these are my coworkers. That is Nicolas Cage and that is The Rock, Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

Matt Edmundson (02:12)

Ha ha ha!

course, everyone listening to the podcast like Matt, what you're talking about. But if you're watching the YouTube video, you'll see in the background, there's some cushions on a, on a couch, a couch behind you, which is yeah. Nicholas cage and Dwayne the rock Johnson. I'm curious why those two.

Sean Stone (02:25)

Yeah, David. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, ⁓ they were the funniest of the two. My wife got them for me because I worked from home all day every day and she used to go to an office so she felt bad leaving me alone with no one to work with. And so she got me two co-workers.

Matt Edmundson (02:42)

Yeah.

Your wife sounds like one interesting lady. That's really cool.

Sean Stone (02:53)

That is a fair statement.

Matt Edmundson (02:55)

Yeah.

Fair play, fair play. Well, listen, it's great that you and Nicholas and The Rock could join us. ⁓ know, kudos. This is such a big show. Why would they not want to join us? Right. And it's great that you're all with us. But you yourself are a bit of an expert in Amazon. So let's jump straight in. Right. The question I'm starting to ask all, guess, at the start of the show is, is what's the biggest problem that we're making? The biggest mistake that we're making or the biggest problem that you see with Amazon right now?

Sean Stone (03:30)

The big thing for me is I find that a lot of people try to treat Amazon like it's not its own unique channel. And Amazon is like this amazing opportunity for somebody who is trying to sell products on the internet. You know, when I, when I first got into Amazon back in 2017, it was 50 % of e-commerce in the United States back then. And I was like, this

Matt Edmundson (03:57)

Yeah.

Sean Stone (03:59)

And the trajectory was looking unbelievable. I thought, okay, this is the place to be, especially if you are maybe not overly into building websites and understanding Facebook ads, all that kind of stuff. And so I looked at all this and I thought, okay, this is a huge growth opportunity. But then I met person after person who tried to treat Amazon like it was just the same thing as their Shopify website.

Matt Edmundson (04:25)

Yeah.

Sean Stone (04:26)

And it's like, you wouldn't do that if you started selling your products on in Walmart, but why are you Amazon the way you're trying to treat Shopify? It's like, it's a completely different thing. And there are a lot of specific things you can do that will just give you an insane advantage that I don't know why people don't do them. So that's why I started going on podcasts and talking about

Matt Edmundson (04:47)

Yeah, no, fair play. So how are we then treating Amazon the same as everything else? What are some of the things that we're doing which lead you to this conclusion?

Sean Stone (04:59)

So a lot of people get hyperfixated on what Amazon calls ACOS or what you might call your return on ad spend. But a better metric to be focused on is your what Amazon sells called tacos or what the average e-commerce seller would call a media efficiency ratio. But then on top of that, the thing that people don't really think about is that Amazon, the thing that makes it so powerful is not just the fact that it is a

platform full of high intent buyers. So that on its own is a huge opportunity that I think people just kind of misunderstand. And the second thing they don't really think about is like what the Amazon shopper actually wants. They just try to shove what they're already selling into a platform that maybe doesn't want that exact version or the majority of people who are trying to buy it aren't trying to get that specific type of thing.

Matt Edmundson (05:51)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (05:57)

I

can give you example after example of like people taking the wrong approach and then switching their approach, like maybe adjusting what it is they sell or how they sell it or what the size of what they sell is. And suddenly Amazon becomes this like amazing opportunity for them instead.

Matt Edmundson (06:18)

That's really interesting. it's not, ⁓ well, go ahead, give us some examples. Let's put some practical things to this. I'm really super curious.

Sean Stone (06:28)

Yeah, so the average, and again, I'm gonna use Shopify just because it's easy, but if you're listening to this, Yeah, that's fair. I mean, I'm Canadian, so I try to be nice to Shopify because they're like one of the few Canadian companies that have actually done well. yeah.

Matt Edmundson (06:35)

We just like to pick on Shopify, Sean, if I'm honest with you. It deserves it, to be fair.

Yeah

Yeah, no, it's fair play. It is. They have done

very well. They don't sponsor this show. We do use them. ⁓ but I, on some of the sites that we have, and some sites we don't, we do bespoke, but, we do use Shopify a little bit. ⁓ and so I feel like I'm in a good place to go. Yeah, it's not, it's good, but it's not really, really good. it? But anyway, ⁓ that aside, let's pick on Shopify. Sean, go for it.

Sean Stone (06:55)

wow.

Yeah, okay, yeah.

All right, so you're a Shopify seller. One of the first things you do if you kind of like, you've got some success, one of the main things you're focusing on is increasing your average cart size so that you can afford to spend more money to acquire more customers and acquire them more profitably and kind of get your own flywheel company. You you ramp up your email marketing, ramp up your ad spend, you kind of like, you build your own little ecosystem.

That is an amazing play on Shopify. And if you try to do that on Amazon, you're going to get killed. ⁓ So one of the easiest things that people can do, ⁓ and a lot of the companies that I work with are, you know, sell some kind of consumable. So whether it's hair care, I mean, you know, I need a lot of it, ⁓ or supplements, know, supplements and vitamins and stuff, stuff like that, or something else consumable. ⁓

Matt Edmundson (07:45)

Okay.

Sean Stone (08:09)

One of the main things that you'll notice is shoppers, like the products that do the absolute best, show up at the top of the page and get half a million dollars worth of sales each month. Those products are small case packs that kind of fit an individual's best trial offer. So instead of focusing on getting your CPA down to $20 a customer and selling an $80 product through

Matt Edmundson (08:20)

Yeah.

Sean Stone (08:38)

series of funnels and that kind of stuff. What you end up doing on Amazon instead is trying to get your price point down to a place where you can sell a call it $14.99 product with a $3 cost per acquisition and then make that still profitable and massively scale it. And so that's kind of like, it's kind of the inverse. And so that's a really good example of how somebody can go from the Shopify space

Matt Edmundson (08:40)

Mm.

Yeah.

Mm.

Sean Stone (09:07)

realized

that, okay, well, what ends up happening is they go on Amazon. They're like, oh, I tried going on Amazon. was so bad for my brand. I'm like, was it bad for your brand or did you just try to shove stuff that nobody wanted onto the shelves? Because I sometimes think that there's a lot of opportunity left on the table where somebody just didn't think to try the thing that made more sense for the channel.

Matt Edmundson (09:34)

Yeah.

Sean Stone (09:35)

That's like a really, really common example that I hear a lot. And so whether that's a supplement where instead of selling a year supply, you might sell a 30 day supply. uh, and then another thing might be the idea of, of selling like a huge case pack, you can just, you can pare down your offering and then have the same big offering still available, but pair it down so that people can buy in.

Matt Edmundson (09:40)

That's interesting.

Sean Stone (10:04)

that they want on a website like Amazon, which is often a smaller amount.

Matt Edmundson (10:08)

Right.

Yeah. And you mentioned $14.99. Is that a magic price point, sort of under $15, or is it sort of $20, $25? I'm curious to where that would be.

Sean Stone (10:19)

No, ⁓ the magic price point is the lowest you can get while still making money. ⁓ And so, you know, I've worked with people who sell products for

Matt Edmundson (10:25)

Yeah.

Sean Stone (10:33)

$4.99 and still make, turn a profit. ⁓ And, you know, I've worked with people who sell over a hundred and still make a profit. ⁓ It's really about what does a shopper actually want? Like what's a real no brainer opportunity for them and what's going to actually convert because a 3 % conversion rate on something like a Shopify website is pretty good. You're like, ⁓ I'm doing well. On Amazon, you're like,

Matt Edmundson (10:36)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (11:02)

I would be telling you that your product is broken, you should liquidate your inventory and get something new. A price point of $20 or under, I would be shocked to see a product with a less than 20 % conversion rate. And so that's another thing. No one really thinks about Amazon as this conversion machine that it is. It's just people go there with the intention of buying something.

Matt Edmundson (11:19)

Right.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (11:31)

And

what they're doing is they're comparing your products versus your competition's products and making a decision based on what they want. And so that's another thing that Shopify sellers don't really think about. It's like, you're basically in a market and everybody's got their stalls right next to each other selling the exact same thing. And so you really have to do a good job.

Matt Edmundson (11:35)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's an interesting thing you mentioned about the conversion rate being higher. And I'm, as you're talking, I'm thinking, well, goodness, we have a, we have a, an Amazon site. Is that right? An Amazon store is probably the right language, isn't it? For one of our supplement brands. So we have a supplement brand and we have that on Amazon. Fortunately, it's all in 30 day supplies, which is, you know, I'm like, The price point is around 20 bucks.

Sean Stone (12:19)

Mm-hmm.

Matt Edmundson (12:26)

for our best-selling supplement, you know, the one which really kills it. And so it is around 20 bucks. And Amazon's growing both here in the UK and also in the US. What I've never done is, and as you're talking, I'm thinking,

It's intriguing the way you're talking about. I've never played around. We've bundled things together, like you can buy one or you can buy three. And if you buy three, you get a discount. And normally that's what secondary time buyers buy, right? It's that kind of thing. ⁓ but I've never played around with creating something which is of a lower quantity and a lower price to make it easier to sell on Amazon, which I think is quite, that's

I don't know why I've not thought about that, right? But I'm listening to you talking and thinking, actually, that's quite a smart idea that actually I can take something, break it down, make the price cheaper, make the quantities smaller, which ultimately with Amazon, it's not always the case, but price is an issue, right? And if you can get the price down, then you're buried, you're buried to entry falls. And then actually you, hopefully you've got them and they'll come by from you again.

Sean Stone (13:40)

Yeah, well, we that is like one of the concepts that we really preach. It's like this idea of rank ability, which is a made up word. We define it. Yeah. Thanks. But again, right? Like the big opportunity on Amazon is not just the fact that you can sell a product and like, and you know, limit your ad spend and make a sale. Yeah. The big opportunity is you can sell a huge quantity.

Matt Edmundson (13:46)

Mm.

Mm. I like it.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (14:07)

get a ton of new customers who now know about your brand and get them through getting your product to show up at the top of the page without paying to be there. Like that's the big thing, right? It's like these organic sales is we call them. It's like you get to the top of the page. So rankability is, we define it as a product that ⁓ can reach the top five organic spots with a combination of PPC, which is Amazon sponsored advertising.

Matt Edmundson (14:10)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (14:37)

And then also deals. so the main thing that we do is we kind of focus on, first, we look at your catalog and see which products we might consider rankable and which ones we would call incremental. Right? Because like the idea is not every one of your products is going to be like fit to be at the very top of the page. And we have one, we have one ⁓ company we work with who they just, every product they launch ends up at the top of the page. ⁓ but

that is just they have a really, really good finger on the pulse for what their market wants. And so, you know, I can't take credit for that. But the main thing is, do you have a product that is rankable? And so the way you can tell if your product is or is not rankable is you compare your product's conversion rate to the top competitor's conversion rates. And, you know, we've got like a process called

Matt Edmundson (15:22)

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (15:35)

where you benchmark your competitors conversion rates to make sure that you know if you are or are not going to show up at the top of the page. And so,

Matt Edmundson (15:43)

Is that easy to do? mean, you know, you're

comparing conversion rates. It sounds easy enough to do, but is it easy enough to find that data?

Sean Stone (15:57)

Yes, it's all like data that would be available in your Amazon account. ⁓ And then so it's easy to find. It's tough to get because you have to do a bunch of math. We made a completely free custom GPT. It's in the GPT store. ⁓ We don't even we don't want your email just like we want to create a tool that people could use to get the stuff.

Matt Edmundson (16:12)

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (16:24)

And so you can just plug those reports into this custom GPT and you can get your competitors conversion rate from this tool. Now we also, it's great.

Matt Edmundson (16:29)

Yeah.

Love that. That's

genius. That's how AI should be used, I feel.

Sean Stone (16:41)

Well, we were doing well. Okay. First we used AI to code a dashboard that does this for us all day. So like, look at my competitors conversion rates all day. And then after that, we were like, kind of not fair that like other people don't get to use this. So we just built it. Like we built a custom GPT because the inputs are the same. Like we use API data to do it, but

Matt Edmundson (16:49)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (17:09)

The first time we did it, actually just use ⁓ Excel exports from the seller central platform. And so we just plugged it all into this custom GPT. ⁓ And then it takes a minute or two because I'm not a great coder. I'm an ads guy. And so, you know, once that's done, ⁓ it spits out a report and you can look at your conversion rate from ads and compare it to your competitors conversion rate and see like, do I think I could win? ⁓

And yeah, that's kind of, that's how we determine if a product can or cannot rank on a specific keyword. So you kind of get like a short list pretty quickly of keywords that will work for you.

Matt Edmundson (17:47)

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really fascinating. So where is this GPT? So it's in the custom GPTs in the chat GPT store. What's it called for those that might want to go and dig it out?

Sean Stone (18:00)

Yeah, it's called conversion rate benchmark, buddy Now the problem is the custom GPT store is an absolute nightmare I can hardly find my own GPT and I made it and I named it ⁓ We have a link on our website that will take you directly there and we don't ask for any email or anything like that ⁓ We just set up this page so that it was easier to ⁓

Matt Edmundson (18:21)

Mm-hmm.

Okay. And your website, just so listeners can know.

Sean Stone (18:29)

stonesgoods.com, then you'd go to resources, then stones, plural, goods, plural, dot com, then you'd go to resources, and then once you're under resources, you'll see conversion benchmark buddy, and yeah, this tool's just sitting right there. ⁓ It's got instructions on the page, too, that way you can kind of just like, okay, I get this report, then this report, then this report, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (18:46)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And away we go. That's fantastic. We will link to that, of course,

in the show notes, which just as an aside, if you haven't yet subscribed to the newsletter, why not? I genuinely am curious. No, seriously. But if you have, then it will be in the show notes, which will be emailed to you. It will also be in your podcast app. If you're listening to this on a podcast, just scroll down into notes. It will be there. If you're watching on YouTube, just look in the description. It will be there.

Don't go yet though, because obviously we've got more stuff to talk about, but it will be there. The link to the website where you can find all this great stuff. So Sean, this is great. I'm, what have you got any other goodies up your sleeve maybe that we can pilfer?

Sean Stone (19:35)

Yeah,

I mean, I feel like I'm just getting going. ⁓ I mean, what do you want? Like, do you want to know how to rank a product? Do you want to know?

Matt Edmundson (19:39)

Hahaha

I would love

to know how to, yeah, I mean, let me act like a e-commerce podcast host and ask more pointed questions rather than general ones. it's, from my point of view, right? Like I say, we have this Amazon store and it's doing okay. So how do I, how do I go from okay to better? How do I rank? How do I think about this type of thing? So I can look at the key, I can look, you know, compare my conversion rate with my competitors and go.

Holy moly, they're doing so much better. And obviously I can analyze their listings and try and figure out what's going on. But what can I do to shrink the gap between myself and my competitors?

Sean Stone (20:30)

Yeah, so there are a bunch of different things. The first thing I would recommend you do is look through your catalog and kind of do this benchmarking exercise ⁓ and compare yourself, like compare each of your products to kind of get a sense of like which one has the best chance of winning. Now you probably already know the answer, but there's sometimes, ⁓ there sometimes will be a situation where you realize you're sitting on a mound of gold and

because again, like especially when it comes to selling any kind of consumable, a lot of the time your competition, you are not that dissimilar. know, it's not like mine has a handle and his has like a button, you know, like it's like we're both selling supplements. Maybe the ingredient makes us slightly different. Maybe the quantity is different, like, but the, the comparability is quite strong. And so what you might find and, ⁓

This, this happened with one of our clients is we started working together and I had to say to them, like, look, man, you're going to need to triple your inventory order on this product today. And they're like, what are you talking about? And again, I just went through, like, I went through the exercise I was talking about where it's like, look, we compare your conversion rate to your competitors. And this guy had double the conversion rate on his products. Like, and so we went and we looked at this and I was like,

His is 20 yours is 40 is this 15 yours is 35 like we just went down a list of all these Keywords where I was just like you have an insane advantage here. Why are we not capitalizing on it? It was like I didn't think this is a good product And so that's the kind of thing where before you even focus on shrinking the gap Look at where you might actually already have a huge advantage and just not be aware of it Now when it comes to shrinking the gap

because there are a lot of things you can do. ⁓ One of the first things, and this is not something that maybe is my idea, but something that a lot of people talk about is the easiest way to improve your sales on Amazon is to improve your click-through rate. And so really what that comes down to is best practices around how to make your product stand out within the rules that Amazon has set up in their terms of service.

So ⁓ one thing that we like to do, we like to put the main keyword of the product in as large font as possible, excuse me, on the product. So you can see very quickly like, hey, if you searched for vitamin C, this might, like what the main image will say is like vitamin C on thousand milligrams per capsule kind of thing, right on the main image on the packaging.

Matt Edmundson (23:13)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (23:32)

Because again, we're telling the shopper like, you know, I don't know what else you're going to see here, but this is exactly what you're looking for. And that's, that's one of those things that can immediately improve your click through rate because you are doing your best to improve a shopper's experience by saying like, Hey, I don't know what everyone else is selling. Maybe it's something you want. Maybe it's something you don't want, but this is definitely what you want. And if you take that principle and apply it to every single one of your main images,

⁓ whether you're selling a supplement or whether you're selling more of like a durable good, the same principle applies.

Matt Edmundson (24:06)

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I, I, I've seen this happening a lot more and more now on Amazon where people are starting to add a lot more text and graphics to images. It's not just simple product images anymore. There's, there's all kinds of things. I mean, even on our own ones, you know, um, some of the benefits that they're going to get, um, and so on and so forth on the product. So we've realized that

A lot of people actually just look at the images. I'm one of them. just go on a mobile and scan the images and go, yeah, that's what I want. That's the price. That's fine. never read mainly because I just, I don't think Amazon make it particularly easy to figure out where the description of the product is. it is there obviously, but you, you've got to search for it. And so I, I, and as you're talking, the thing that's in my mind, Sean, we were talking for, we hit record. You've got your own show. You've got your own YouTube channel.

The thing which gets YouTube clicks is the thumbnail and title, right? And it's the same principle, isn't it? It's all about the thumbnail and title. So on Amazon then, is it all about that image, that first image in the product title?

Sean Stone (25:11)

When it comes to your click through rate, yes. ⁓ It's the same thing. I actually have a couple of friends who sold their Amazon businesses and immediately went full time into YouTube instead. Cause they're like, it's all the same principles. However, there's no inventory cost. I don't have to do.

Matt Edmundson (25:23)

Ha

Yeah.

That's so true. Yeah, it is so true.

Sean Stone (25:30)

Yeah,

yeah. I mean, they, yeah, the two guys I'm thinking of, they're both like absolute sharks. Like they would do exercises like this where they compare themselves to their competitors and how to get a better click through rate, how to improve their title to make sure they show up for more keywords and show up for more relevant keywords. So like the principles are actually shockingly similar. ⁓ And yeah, it's really just about finding the people.

Matt Edmundson (25:51)

Mm.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (26:00)

who are really looking for what you want or what you're offering and making it interesting, making it interesting enough for them to want to click. Yeah, that's the thing that's really jumped out at me. ⁓ It's like when you're trying to grow your sales on Amazon, improving your click through rate helps a lot. But the main thing that really is going to make your business grow is focusing on your conversion rate.

Matt Edmundson (26:02)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (26:29)

And

then once you have a conversion rate advantage, pressing that advantage as hard as you possibly can.

Matt Edmundson (26:35)

Yeah. And the conversion rate that you're talking about is that, so I've got a thousand people to click through. I've got a 20 % conversion rate. So is that based on the people that click through and buy? Right. So if I increase, if my, even if my conversion rate stays the same, just increasing, increasing my click through rate, I'm going to get more sales, right? But if I can increase, this is back to the Jay Abrams thing. ⁓ there's only three ways to grow a business, ⁓ idea whereby

Sean Stone (26:48)

Yes, yeah, that's the conversion rate we care about.

Matt Edmundson (27:05)

And this is old school, Sean, this is going back to the 1980s when I heard this. And so that's how long ago it was this strategy. But he said, he said, there's three ways to grow a business. increase the number of customers, you increase the average order value, and you increase the average order frequency. And if you focus on any one of those things and you increase each of them, if you increase any one of them by 10%, your business grows by 10%. So if I increase the click through rate by 10%, my business will go up by 10 % on Amazon, right?

But if I can increase my click through rate and my conversion rate at the same time, so they both go up by 10 % because they've both gone up, you start to get this geometric growth, if that makes sense. So it's not a 20 % overall increase. be like, I don't know what the math is, 21, 22%. Someone will tell me, I'm sure. And so when you pull each of those levers at the same time, you start to enter this territory of geometric growth, which gets quite interesting, I think.

Sean Stone (27:40)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I would absolutely agree. ⁓ Some of the things you really want to look out for when it comes to Amazon is you just want to see if, for example, if you do have a conversion rate advantage, how much do you have and what can you do with it? You know, like we have even talked about like the, like what you can do with it because most people, when they sell on Shopify, always think about things in a linear fashion because for the most part,

Matt Edmundson (28:17)

Mm.

Sean Stone (28:33)

That's their day. I spend, you know, I spend $100 a day on Facebook ads. I get $300 in sales that day. And I want to just do that again and again and again. But what they don't think about is on Amazon, you spend $100 a day. And if you do it right, you can get $1,000 back instead, because you made still those same 300 sales. But if you make the right sales, it's going to push you up the page.

Matt Edmundson (28:44)

Yeah.

Mm.

Sean Stone (29:02)

and you'll get those $700 worth of extra sales from Amazon just putting your product up at the top of the page because it benefits them. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (29:07)

Right, I'm with you. Yeah. So how do you

do that? How do you press this advantage?

Sean Stone (29:15)

Yeah. Okay. So we have something called the payer process stands for PAIR. And it's really, we named it just so was easier to talk about. So stands for promotions, advertising, inventory, and rankability. ⁓ And so say you have a conversion rate advantage, it means you went through the rankability process exercise that our custom GPT does. And you notice you have

Matt Edmundson (29:41)

Yep.

Sean Stone (29:43)

a product that's rankable on some keywords. Okay, great. ⁓ So again, vitamin C 1000 mg as an example. I have a better conversion rate here than all my competitors. I'm gonna go after this. You might say to yourself, okay, great. I already have the conversion rate advantage. What do I do with it? Well, one of the easiest things you can do is run a promotion. ⁓ The one that gets the best organic ranking growth is what is called a best deal.

And when you go on Amazon, you'll notice these badges that say limited time deal. And those are legitimate. You can't really game those. you know, they've got a lot of smart and like software developers who kind of make sure you can't just have like a fake sale going on. ⁓ but what you end up doing is you run a promotion on one of those and that's going to get you all kinds of increased visibility, but also it's going to improve your conversion rate because you'll notice like

Matt Edmundson (30:26)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (30:41)

it's going to attract more people to your product because it's just like, why wouldn't I click the one that's on special right now? And then on top of that, ⁓ you also are going to take advantage of the fact that it's a limited time deal. So people know that if they don't buy it in whatever timeframe, they're not going to get this deal. They're going to have to go back to paying full price. And so those two things give another advantage to you on your conversion rate.

which you already have a conversion rate advantage. So it's like, have a conversion rate advantage and then I want to increase that advantage at the same time by putting my product on special. Then the rest of the framework is pretty simple. It's like, you want to use advertising to spend money where you know you're going to grow the most. And again, focus on growing your organic ranking. And then inventory comes into play because a lot of people, especially

Matt Edmundson (31:19)

Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Stone (31:39)

people who are from the Shopify world, don't worry about going out of stock. They're like, it sucks that I'm out of stock, but like, it's okay, I'll turn off the ads. And you know, when the product comes back in the stock, I'll send an email to everyone. It's like, no, on Amazon, you are going to be punished aggressively by the algorithm for going out of stock. And so it's better to turn off your ads while you're still in stock and pause all your deals and pause everything else to make sure that your product stays in stock all the time.

Matt Edmundson (31:49)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (32:09)

because Amazon's algorithm cares a lot about it. And then again, you kind of the end is rankability. You can do it first, but then once you've run this exercise, you want to kind of evaluate what happened when you ran a promotion with good ads, with good inventory strategy or inventory reordering. And then, you know, think about what could happen next from a rankability perspective. Like that's like the, that's the big process that

Matt Edmundson (32:36)

Yeah.

Sean Stone (32:39)

just just works. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (32:45)

And this is what's worked from what you've seen, right? I guess I'm listening to you talk, there's a couple of questions that come to mind, Sean, right? First, if the limited time deal is limited, are you running them ⁓ fairly consistently, almost like, obviously not all the time, but almost back to back to try and retain that limited time deal?

Sean Stone (33:11)

Yes. Yeah. You're, you, you're only allowed to have a limited time deal for a maximum of 14 days of a 28 day period on Amazon. ⁓ you can tell I've had to read the fine print on this. yeah. ⁓ so the, the ideal outcome is, you have a, a deal 14 out of 28 days. ⁓ and you can stack them as all 14 in a row, or you can do

Matt Edmundson (33:21)

⁓ Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (33:40)

call it 11 days and then three days where you have deals so you can do another 11 day one after the other. But the general idea is yeah, you want to run these fairly consistently. You want to bake this into your margins in a way that kind of works for you. ⁓ Now, again, the pro tip that a lot of people don't really think about is they just create a listing for ⁓

Matt Edmundson (33:47)

Yep.

Sean Stone (34:10)

for ranking that they don't put any of the higher count or like more expensive variations on the same product detail page. And that is a real miss because you can just spend money on the version that's going to put you at the top of the page. And then anytime somebody clicks through and thinks, ⁓ actually I would buy the higher count because it's a, ⁓ you know, it's a better deal. If you don't spend money on ads, but you do make sales on that product.

Matt Edmundson (34:18)

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (34:40)

It's going to really improve your profitability. So that is another pro tip that you can use to really improve your profitability while running these deals. Because a lot of people look at the numbers and at first glance say, I can't afford to do this. I'm like, you actually can. You just don't realize the way the math needs to work.

Matt Edmundson (34:42)

Yeah.

Yeah. That's, that's really clever. Really clever. I'm, I suppose that I'm, as I'm listening to you talk, having gone through my own journey with Amazon and realizing the sheer amount of money it takes to get started these days is quite extraordinary. And don't get me wrong. It's, it's not a regret for me from, from Amazon and the team have done great, you know, but I'm

I know we get a lot of people listening to the show who are fairly new or who are thinking about starting an econ business. And if you've been on YouTube, which I know you have, you're a YouTuber. Uh, there are, I don't know how many million videos telling me how can start an Amazon business tomorrow for no money and make $3 million in the next 25 seconds, you know, kind of a video. If you're just starting out on Ecom, maybe you've got a Shopify site, maybe you haven't.

but you've got a product or you've got an idea. Is Amazon still worth looking at from the get-go or would you do it differently now?

Sean Stone (36:05)

Well, ⁓ I hate answering questions like this because it doesn't really help anyone, but the answer is it depends. let me, let me kind of break down how would think about this. So first question I'd be asking myself is does this product already exist in the market? And so if you're launching a net new product that didn't exist before, like me, and again, we're not trying to put some high bar on this, like you're.

Matt Edmundson (36:12)

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (36:32)

the inventor of a new product is like, are you watching a new variation? Like maybe, maybe no one ever thought to combine vitamin C and vitamin D together. And you're the first person ever to do this. Or maybe you're the first person to do some kind of keyboard that is actually a lot more ergonomic. Amazon will be a good place, but the drawback is that you're going to have to fight for

Matt Edmundson (36:42)

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (37:03)

like fight for attention on a platform that's really designed for keywords that already exist. So you might have a hard time launching a product that doesn't already have keyword search volume on Amazon. So I would encourage you in that case to start with a Shopify first, Amazon later approach. Because you're launching something that is new to the market and you might as well

Matt Edmundson (37:09)

Yep.

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (37:32)

build up your own prowess and maybe it's Kickstarter or maybe it's just your own Shopify site or maybe it's something else. But in a situation like that, Amazon can be a bit of a challenge. Now on the other side of things, if you're launching a better version of something that already exists and you think that you are going to have a better conversion rate than your competition, like people will see yours and be like, why hasn't it always been like this?

That is the ideal situation for Amazon. It's like, I have a product, it's better, and people are already searching for it. That is the best place to be getting onto Amazon.

Matt Edmundson (38:15)

That's a really interesting point. I guess if I, let's say, you know, I've, I've, I've got, I have kids, ⁓ and I, I should probably refer, I have great kids. It sounded like I've, like I was in a prison sentence when I said it, I have kids. and so there are the, kids are of an age where they're like, you know, do I go to uni? Do I not go to uni? And some of them have, and my daughter's thinking about other things. So let's say I say to her, listen, ⁓ so why don't you think about.

starting an Amazon business, where would she start? Right? mean, is there a, ⁓ a sort of a place, a piece of software that would help her figure out this is a good selling product and then, you know, I can use your, ⁓ chat GPT thing and see what the conversion rates are like. ⁓ I wonder if I can do this, this and this and start to do a bit of product research is, is there something like that out there?

Sean Stone (39:10)

Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of free Chrome extensions. There's Helium 10, Jungle Scout. There are a bunch of different tools out there that you can use to kind of get going. And they might not all be free, but they'll be cheap. We're talking less than 40 bucks a month to do some product research. The one thing I will say is if you have no internet advertising experience,

Matt Edmundson (39:23)

Mm.

Sean Stone (39:39)

Amazon has gotten very professional since I got on. Like I started doing this back in 2017. ⁓ and it's gotten a lot more professional and so it can be a lot more challenging. You know, I go onto Reddit sometimes and I'll see people being like, Amazon is not working for me and I invested 20 K inventory to get started. And it's like, that really sucks. ⁓ so I would highly encourage you to,

Matt Edmundson (39:41)

Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (40:08)

play it smart and try not to get into something that's too competitive because you've got to remember there are multi-million dollar businesses on Amazon who just, that you know, this is not their first rodeo. They've got a team of people. ⁓ So yeah. So.

Matt Edmundson (40:22)

Yeah, yeah, they know what they're doing. Yeah. It's an interesting

one, isn't it? And it's the same with Google Ads. You when I first started Google Ads, mean, man, we killed it. And we had no one had a clue what they were doing. And we spent, you know, like a fraction of a dollar and we got all these sales and it's great. And it's just not like that anymore. And you can lose a lot of money really quickly ⁓ on Google Ads. You can with meta ads.

Sean Stone (40:35)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Matt Edmundson (40:47)

so I'm assuming

now it's the same with, ⁓ all the platforms, really Amazon, you know, all of them. ⁓ where would I, I'm aware of, know, if you're, if someone's sort of running a Shopify site, but it's just them, you know, it's a small business turning over 400 grand, 500 grand, whatever it is, just a little mom and pop kind of business. Where would they go to learn that? Is it, is it some, because I, I get that there's a point like for me.

Sean, I'll be totally honest with you. I could care less about learning all of that sort of stuff. I've got too many other things to think about. So I'm like, right, let's go talk to Sean. Let's get Sean involved. They're an agency. Let's get them working for us. Bang. It's working great. Awesome. But there's a point, isn't there, there's a crossover for many people where they can't necessarily afford that agency just yet. And the reason why I'm asking this is I had a text message ⁓ from ⁓ one of our

Sean Stone (41:14)

Thank

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (41:43)

cohort members. I'm just going to pull it up here because I thought this was a really interesting point what he said and you'll understand why I'm asking the question. So he said to me, he's in the cohort and he said, I'm a fan of the podcast. I've listened to every episode for the last three years, which is great. And I'm like, well, thank you for doing that. Yeah. And I can only apologize.

Sean Stone (42:06)

Wow, that's awesome.

Matt Edmundson (42:13)

⁓ and so in one of the shows a couple of weeks ago, I said, can you send me some feedbacks? We started doing a few of these solo episodes as well. We just wanted to see how that went. ⁓ and so he sent me a massive long message, ⁓ which was super kind of him. Right. ⁓ and so one thing I think is a huge gap, he said in this type of content creation, which is the feedback I'd like to bring is to have people who are not in their millions of yearly revenue yet.

⁓ which I think is a fair comment who are in the trenches trying to survive every, ⁓

which is trying to survive basically month to month people who have to take money out of the business to pay bills while keeping an eye on their ad row as ⁓ overworked and yet hopeful for the future. We've all been there. Right. And so what, where, where does someone like that go?

Sean Stone (43:10)

So. ⁓

I would not say that I have the best channel for someone just getting started on YouTube. There are a bunch of people who have full-blown courses on YouTube about how to just kind get started. ⁓ And I think, so I'm gonna plug some people. So the Ad Badger podcast is good, but they're more of a podcast, more like this, but they do cover a lot of beginner topics, and that's really nice. ⁓

Matt Edmundson (43:18)

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (43:42)

There is Brandon Young. He'll do a lot of really in-depth stuff, so it can be easy to get overwhelmed by him. But he has like really, really like, if you followed what he's talking about step by step and you're willing to put the time in, that guy is amazing. He's got such good stuff. ⁓ There's a guy called Dr. Travis. He's a legitimate medical doctor in the United States and also sells products on Amazon. ⁓ Profitable Pineapple, I think his name is his channel.

And then ⁓ you might need to go back in time. Like you might need to kind of like look at some of the old videos, but the Helium 10 YouTube channel, which is a software company, so they're obviously going to plug their own software, but it's like, that's a good place to go. And then Jungle Scout, same kind of thing. They've got a lot of good, like how to learn stuff on YouTube. So that's, that's where I'd kind of go and get started. ⁓ When it comes to. ⁓

like getting started or kind of early on. I am someone who, most of my clients, most of the people I work with are in the millions of dollars per year. But we do have, we will occasionally work with somebody smaller. And the main tip I have for you, if you're like a ad agent or a smaller Amazon seller is don't over invest in ads.

but just try to collect some data and kind of try to do some smart advertising. So Dr. Travis has like a whole like how to get started on Amazon ads, ⁓ like five hour video with like really good chapters so you can skip to the part you need. ⁓ And so what I would recommend is getting started and getting a little bit of data just to see if you might have an opportunity on your hands and

Matt Edmundson (45:36)

Yeah.

Sean Stone (45:40)

The main thing that we'll like to do is try to get cheap clicks and then try to control where those clicks go. Because you can still get cheap clicks on Amazon. I have people I work with who sometimes still get like 20 cent clicks. But the glory days are still here. ⁓ I'm sure we'll all five years now be like, remember when we used to get such cheap clicks. ⁓ But the main thing is, if you're on a tight budget and you're just trying to get something that works,

just run a couple of automatic campaigns is what they're called on Amazon. See if you can get some cheap data, some cheap clicks, maybe you get some sales, you might find out which keywords are actually gonna work for you. And then from there, figure out if it makes sense for you to double down and try to grow on Amazon or not. So that's the way that if you're a small business ⁓ who's thinking about getting started on Amazon, also don't send a lot of inventory. ⁓

It's okay to go to inventory when you first got a product on Amazon, but after that you have to stay in. ⁓ So yeah, I know I contradicted myself, but there's just a lot of nuance. But if I were, are getting started today and I know what I know right now, that would be the advice I'd try to give to somebody. Cause I think that would be like highest chance of working lowest downside.

Matt Edmundson (46:42)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's wonderful. I appreciate that. And we will of course link to those YouTube just I love the fact you just talked about YouTube. No expensive courses is just on everything's on YouTube. Now you just got to go find the right channel right? It's just it's a beautiful thing. Sean stones course. ⁓ Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. Nice. Brilliant. For those you said Sean that ⁓ your show is maybe not for the out and out new starts. But for those that may be that

Sean Stone (47:11)

No, by my course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (47:31)

aren't new starts. Tell us a little bit about your show. Tell us how people find you, how they connect with you if they wanted to do that.

Sean Stone (47:39)

Yeah, so I think ⁓ I have a small but mighty show. ⁓ It's my name, Sean Stone. If you type in Sean Stone and then Amazon, I should come up first. ⁓ The famous movie director, Oliver Stone, had a son and also named him Sean Stone with the same spelling. So unfortunately, ⁓ he's going to show up first if you just search Sean Stone. But Sean Stone, Amazon, you know, I'm the number two Sean Stone on the internet. Watch out. ⁓

Matt Edmundson (47:49)

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

you

Mm hmm. Yeah.

Sean Stone (48:09)

Yeah, the main thing for me is like, we want to give really actionable tips for people who are kind of not in the, not in the beginning stages, because that's what I found was, like, once I kind of started selling on Amazon, I was like, I don't want another thing about how to launch your first product. I was like, I'm more interested in like, okay, how do I get this product to the top of the page? Without being like,

Matt Edmundson (48:30)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Sean Stone (48:37)

Now buy my course or buy my software. It's like that was kind of like the, like the things like I'd rather just give away all the tips that my agency has without ever charging anyone. Cause I just think it's more helpful. Like I want to contribute to the general ethos of selling products on Amazon. And so that's really what my channel is about. And probably would be a lot bigger if I said.

Matt Edmundson (48:39)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That's great.

Sean Stone (49:05)

And here's how you make a billion dollars in three seconds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (49:06)

With a clickbait. Yeah, it's all about the thumbnail and title. And you can just hold

a wad of cash going ⁓ in it and it'll be fine. No, we don't do that. You don't do that. And that's why we get on well. I think it's, it's one of those isn't it? And I love this idea of giving away your best knowledge for free.

Sean Stone (49:23)

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (49:29)

it works in e-commerce and it works for us in agency as well. And I, I think it's, it's, it's a wonderful idea. So we will of course link to all of that in the show notes, which I'd mentioned earlier. Sean, before we go, ⁓ for those that have made it this far, we like to have this segment now called saving the best or last. ⁓ this is where you give like the best tip for these guys, two minute tip. The mic is yours. Go for it.

Sean Stone (49:57)

Okay, so my best tip is gonna sound like a reiteration of what I already said, but this really works. So if you have a product that has a better conversion rate in the competition, again, we call it conversion rate advantage, it's a rankable product, blah, fancy naming. But you have this product that can rank. You want to, we have a secondary framework that I didn't really get into called Bookit, B-C-I-T. Again.

terrible name, but it really, really works. So you want to benchmark, then compare. So you want to benchmark yourself to the competition, then compare. So go find your competitors conversion rate, then go and compare your conversion rate to competitors conversion rate. That is benchmark and compare. We already talked about that. When we didn't talk about the thing that is absolutely killer is isolating each of your keywords where you have a keyword.

Matt Edmundson (50:47)

Yep.

Sean Stone (50:56)

Keyword conversion rate advantage. So the way that works on Amazon is you would create a new advertising campaign and you would in exact match, put the keyword that you have a keyword conversion rate advantage in. And that's the only keyword in that campaign. And then you would isolate that keyword because it's got its own budget. There's nothing to compete with it. And then you want to spend like crazy on that keyword. And on the other side of things, you also want to

Matt Edmundson (50:57)

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (51:25)

your keyword organic ranking. So benchmark compare, isolate, and then track. And when you do that, you're going to get really fast feedback about what different experiments you run on that keyword that are going to lead to organic keyword rankings. So maybe you started out 10th organically, but then suddenly you realize, I ran a deal and my organic ranking shot up. Okay, great.

Matt Edmundson (51:29)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Sean Stone (51:55)

let's run more deals. ⁓ actually, the deal didn't do that much. But when I doubled my spend, I went from 10th to fifth. ⁓ let's do more of that. So it's like the feedback loop of benchmark, compare, isolate and track. That is like, to me, it seems like a no brainer, but people don't do it. And it is just like, just do this and watch your organic rankings climb and watch your sales climb with it.

Matt Edmundson (52:04)

Mm-hmm.

Fantastic, fantastic. Benchmark, compare. What was I, sorry? Isolate, I was gonna say iterate, but I was definitely wrong. Isolate and track. Wonderful. Sean, listen, man, it's been great talking to you about all things Amazon. Thank you for so much for coming on and sharing some great value. Super appreciate it. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Sean Stone (52:29)

Isolate.

Thank you so much. I love what your show stands for. And ⁓ I hope that I just did it justice and did a good enough job trying to share value. So thanks so much, Matt. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson (52:57)

no, totally. No, it's been

great. Thank you so much. And thank you, listener and watcher. If you're watching on YouTube, thank you for joining us this week. Make sure, like I say, you've subscribed to the newsletter if you haven't done so already. And do check out eCommerce cohort if you want to come join some like minded individuals. It's pretty easy. It's just on zoom. You don't have to go anywhere. And they normally about once a month, that's about an hour, hour and half somewhere around there. So come say how's it meet some people. Be great to see you in there.

But that's it from me. That's it from Sean. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.