66. Shoptalk Live: Andrew Hamada (Reason Automation) on Getting the Right Amazon Data

Sa.

Okay, thanks Andrew, for joining me here in this conversation at Shop Talk. Nice to meet you in person, by the way.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

No problem. So maybe, so the audience gets acquainted with you, maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself. You're just telling me that you're from Hawaii, so that's a good way to start.

Sure. So I was born and raised in Hawaii, but now I've lived in Seattle, Washington for the past almost 20 years now. And like many people in Seattle, I ended up working for Amazon in their retail business as a vendor manager, marketing manager, operations person, et cetera.

Oh, wow, you did like cross functional many different functions.

I then worked in the devices in the Alexa orgs, working on customer insights and data. And then when the pandemic hit, I did the economically responsible thing and decided to quit my corporate job, start a startup.

So you quit Amazon to start your startup. How long were you an Amazonian?

For about seven years total.

Seven years.

Wow.

And how was your experience working there? Because like, from a culture standpoint, you know, it's a very strong culture. It's a bit like you don't get much visibility from the outside to the inside of Amazon. So how was your experience?

Amazon was the best job I never want to have again. It was incredibly valuable. It taught me so much about E commerce and when I joined Amazon, I had no data skills. I was a business major in college and when I left I knew enough about data to start a data company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's all thanks to Amazon. That said, you've probably heard some good and some bad things about working at Amazon, as everybody has. And what I usually tell people is they're all true, all of them. So, for example, so there was an infamous New York Times article that came out in 2015, 2014, about how everybody cries at their desks and it's high pressure all the time and lots of yelling and yeah, that's all true. It's definitely a high pressure environment. But I do think that it's not just for the sake of being mean to people, it's in order to drive better, sharper, faster decision making. And that culture, I think is both hard to adapt to, but also really, really valuable. It means that in a room, when you're debating a topic at Amazon with a bunch of functional leaders, you don't have to worry about whether or not you're getting the best ideas because everybody is fighting as hard as they can to be heard and to make sure that their ideas and their teams win. And it can be very confrontational. But it does mean that more often you get the best ideas.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it means that there's no, like, spirals of silence.

Exactly.

Basically. Which are extremely toxic, as we know, and not good for creativity. So what took you to, like, start your own business? Did you start it, like, when the pandemic had started? Had you already taken the decision and you just went through with it?

Great question. So we'd had the idea, my co founder and I, but we didn't really get serious until the pandemic started. And then In March of 2020, we started building quietly in the background, and then we launched in June and I quit.

Okay, cool. Congrats. I started my headhunting business in March 2020 by coincidence.

Wow. Yeah.

So that was interesting. So what do you do at Reason Automotion?

So what we do is automation. Sorry, you got it. At Reason Automation, we help brands spend less time on their Amazon data. So anybody that's ever sold on Amazon as a vendor or a seller has had to deal with vendor and seller central and the less than perfect interfaces and reporting that you get there. Yeah, but then also, even as Amazon has rolled out APIs, they've been very well documented, but still a lot of development work to create interfaces for. And if you're a giant corporation, you might have those resources internally. But is that the best use of your engineering resources to get data out? How you get the data isn't a competitive advantage, what you do with the analysis. And so we're helping those companies spend a lot less time on their data so that their data scientists can spend all their time on models and AI and predictive analytics instead of building and maintaining a data pipeline.

So why would a company want to do that? Like, what is the outcome that companies get from that? You know, I'm not a data guy.

Well, the first and most immediate one is just higher ROI on very expensive resources. So your engineering for data pipelines, your data scientists, your. Your analysts, these are expensive people to bring on board. They're hard to recruit for, they're hard to keep happy. And a lot of times companies hire them in, expecting them to immediately do things like forecasting and machine learning models and whatnot. But the data scientists and these engineers discover that nothing is set up for them to be successful. So 80, 90% of their job is just getting data, making data ready for analysis. So sometimes that can even mean literally logging into vendor central and downloading reports or seller central every day, because that's their fastest path to getting data. And so for those folks, we are automating away all of that work so that they can spend all of that time on actually producing which companies love. But it also makes the job satisfaction quite a bit higher.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they can be more focused on strategic stuff.

Exactly. It also ends up reducing friction from adding more data. If it's hard to get data, then your appetite for adding more into your insights is less. But if it's easy to get data.

Then you can go a bit further.

Exactly. Every time you think of something new that you want to analyze, you say, cool, let's go get it. That's what we help brands do.

And you help brands like you're like, don't really mind what sector they're at as long as they sell on Amazon.

Exactly. We're agnostic, but.

Agnostic, that's the word I was looking for.

But I will admit that there are certain verticals that find more value in our data because they have more data to deal with. In particular brands with either fast moving catalogs, like high sales volume, or with very large catalogs, they tend to be our best customers. For example, if you're an apparel brand, you manage not just a series of items, but then all of the size and color variations. Needing to be able to do analysis on that through vendor or seller central UI is painful. What you need is to get the data out, tag it with all your own sizes, colors, your own manufacturer part numbers, et cetera, feed it into your erp, and then you do the analysis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And silly question, how do you guys actually get that data and you save like your clients time doing it? Like how do you guys, how can you do it more efficiently?

So we built a series of applications that allow us to get data from. First from Amazon's own APIs. Amazon has both published APIs like the selling partner and the Amazon Ads API, as well as a bunch of other child APIs. Within those suites. We built systems to not only get data from those, but then to validate it at a very high level of accuracy and to do things like restate historical data. Because anybody that's worked with Amazon data knows they change the data over time.

Oh, wow.

If you download a report today and then download the same report two weeks from now, the data is different. Wow. And so a big pain point for brands is why doesn't my database match seller central or vendor central?

So you help companies have their own data set, not depend on Amazon.

Exactly.

That's interesting how like, you know, there's been these layoffs at Amazon. I know that they're in Europe, for example. They're changing their vendor management model to be like European instead of country based, I believe. Yeah. What changes are you seeing and how are you advising your clients to better work with Amazon? I know that you do the data part, but as an ex Amazonian, I'm sure you're involved in a bit more.

Sure. I mean, the main thing that I always emphasize to people based on my own vendor management experience is that you have to play whatever game Amazon wants you to play that year, even if it doesn't feel good. Amazon is the giant 800 pound gorilla in the room. They get to dictate a lot of the rules and the terms, and trying to completely not participate is a losing strategy. What you can do instead is leverage data to find opportunities of compromise and to see if there are ways that you can give Amazon what they want while also getting things that they weren't even considering in exchange. From a data perspective, you brought up the way that European businesses are being changed a little bit, not only from the structure of how Amazon manages it, but then even things like the cutting out of distributors. That was big splash in the news a month ago.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

On the data side, what we see is Amazon is making a lot of changes to how they vend data for European customers in particular, and it's causing both happiness and sadness. Why? On one hand, they're simplifying data for a lot of people. For example, if you're a brand that sells in six European marketplaces now, you can access one report from one API and get all six marketplaces data in the same report.

Okay.

Which could be convenient. However, that experience isn't the same across APIs and reports. So for some reports you get all the data at once. For other reports, you only get one marketplace at a time. And as we all know, there are a lot of rules in Europe about where you store data, depending on where it comes from, which country, et cetera. So it's not clear to me how Amazon is helping brands manage that.

Yeah, interesting how if anyone listens to this and they're interested in learning more, how should they get in touch with you? I can link your LinkedIn to your to the Show Notes. That's a done deal. Should they email you?

Yeah, absolutely. Anybody who's interested in working with Reason Automation and is listening to this podcast can email me. I'm@AndrewaSonAutomation.com you can also find me on LinkedIn. You can also simply fill out one of the contact forms on our website. Unlike a lot of other SaaS companies, we don't outsource those things to offshore teams. There's a good chance that me or one of the co founders owners will reply to your form request.

Excellent.