242: William Fikhman — Navigating Amazon’s Complex Marketplace

Foreign. Central to scaling up in any time, but especially at this time, is the need or importance to get your processes nailed down right, to execute consistently, relentlessly, again and again. If you've got team members who are asking the same questions to you over and over again, and you wish there was some way to direct them to help themselves on their own so they can get their work done without burdening you with answering those same questions or doing things in an inconsistent fashion, well, there is a way to do that, and that way is our thanks to our Sponsor Suite Process. Suite Process is a software tool that helps companies centralize the place for all their procedures, processes and policies for the business. It makes it easy for the managers and the leadership of the team and all levels of employees to collaborate together, not only to create the procedures and policies and processes, but to then refine those and make it easy to follow those on a continuous basis. So create them, improve them and use them. So there are a couple things that you want to get right. We want to get everybody using the same kinds of things on a regular basis so we get that relentless repeatability. And then when a process, a procedure or policy isn't working right, we want to refine it and we want to have a central place where everybody can do that in a collaborative fashion. That Suite Process. Suite Process is the one source of truth that your company can use to get itself handled and create that kind of relentless repeatability and get that monkey off your back with having to run every little aspect of the business all the time. So it'll make it easy as well to train new and existing employees in order to assign them tasks and give them things that you want done in the same way on a regular basis and to make sure that that's being done in the most current way possible. By default, Suite process offers a 14 day trial, but using our dedicated signup link for the Scaling Coach and the Scaling Up Business podcast, you'll get an extended 28 day free trial nearly a month to work through the Suite Process tool. Get used to it. Throw up a couple processes and start to feel like it's there for you. There's no credit card required for this signup, so just go to. Slash scaling up all one word lowercase so sweet process.com sweet process.com if you're in Canada Scaling up having a little fun with our Canadians. The link There is your dedicated signup link to get the special offer of this ad because we want to help all of our Scaling up listeners get great access to this great tool. And get yourself executing more consistently and reliably. Good luck. Sweetprocess.com/scaling up today's show is really all about Amazon. What it represents, how to deal with it, how to thrive with it, what to do about it. But in general, the whole world of E commerce, if you're impacted by E commerce, if you're thinking about it directly, indirectly, like Harvard is, we're going to get some experience sharing from somebody who knows well how to win in the world of Amazon. We've talked about this recently with how to survive in general in the world of shipping, with one of our clients has written a book about this. Adapt or Die was that title with Jeremy Buddenhammer recently. And today we're going to go into the other side of it. How to thrive on it, how to deal with it, what it represents, what are the learnings from the world of Amazon. We'll get into that Just a minute with our guest today, William Fickman. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host, host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. I'm one of the 200 or so scaling coaches around the world and I get to host this show, which I'm super happy about. Every week we bring somebody new to talk to you about something in the world of Scaling Up. A little bit more about that in a second. One of the things that all of our clients are dealing with not just this year, but every year, this year's compounded things, accelerated things but is the world of optimizing processes to scale. If you've got team members who ask you the same questions over and over again and you wish there was one place that you could go to find out everything about that, like that online manual suite. Process is a software that enables companies to have one place to document all the procedures and process and policies. It makes it easy to manage the program to know how things are going to let every level of employee in the company collaborate together to not only to learn and implement the procedures and processes and policies of the company, but keep improving those things over time, which is so critical not only as you scale but also as you deal with extreme circumstances like we've had this year. So it'll suite Process is the tool that helps you do that. It's one source for truth and the one place where every employee can come regardless of the team department information to get the key view on how things are done. So it also makes it really easy to train new and existing employees because in order to give a task to someone, it's got to be based on something that's existing already in that. So when employees get tasks done, the instructions are right there. They can figure out how to do things and you don't have to go crazy answering every question all the time. There's one place to go for our listeners, viewers. We have a special offer. They normally have a 14 day trial scaling up listeners and viewers can get an extended 28 day free trial. So you can really play with this thing for the whole next month and see how it helps you to get your year started off right. Just go to, you know, HTTPs www.Write all that preamble suite process.com suite process if you're in Canada sweetprocess.com scalingup One word, all lowercase sweetprocess.com scalingup Sign up there. No credit required. You'll get that 28 day free trial if you go to our special link there. This is one of the things that comes up again and again and again. And I'm really excited to have Sweet Process as a sponsor for the show because it's core and I've heard from our past listeners how important this topic is as well as from our Scaling clients. The other thing to tell you about our show is we do bring a show like this every week where there's over 240 of them. Now that whole back catalog of these shows is really useful because they deal all with people, strategy, execution, cash, all the things you need to know about scaling up you need to get right in order to grow and scale your company as well. As we talk a lot about the thing that I like to call the fifth decision. The fifth decision is how to elevate yourself as a leader. How to elevate yourself in the way that you lead. What kind of leader do you want to be? That's our fifth decision is around leadership. So all that@scalingcoach.com so go there and find that stuff out. William Fickman, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Bill.

You're down in la, are you?

We're in la in the San Fernando Valley, if you know where that is.

We do. Who doesn't know where the San Fernando Valley is? If you're of a certain age, you will never forget the valley girl. Infamous for lots of things. Anyway, I'm glad to have you on the show and to talk about it. Our listeners should know that William Fickman is founder and chief strategy officer at their company Amaz. Do you say. How do you pronounce it?

Amazia.

Amazia. Based in LA and What they do is help people navigate and maximize things in the world of Amazon. So I have lots of friends who sell products on Amazon and some do really well with it and some really struggle with it. Amazia helps companies to get that right. And this is not a one hour infomercial for Amazia. This is a chance to learn from William what they are seeing with that and see if you can apply it to. Of course I'm sure they are always happy to find really great companies but. But we're really looking to share some of the wisdom that William and his clients have have figured out around that. So for 16 years now roughly they've been helping people maximize growth in the E Commerce channel. And my last company was deeply affected by the shift to E commerce. Many of our clients have been affected and worked in and around the shift. This is a massive multi, multi, well really probably multi decade shift now of things moving online and it's been greatly accelerated by the pandemic this year. So welcome to the show William.

Thank you.

As we get started why don't you tell us a little bit about, tell us a little bit like your background. I'm guessing you grew up somewhere in the area there and how your career evolved. Talk to us a little bit about that.

I mean I've been in California and LA most of my life. I was trying to, I was going to school, trying to be an accountant. It never really materialized even though I finished my, my degree and all. Later when we started our business but first started with ebay drop off stores, I don't know if you remember those. Yes. So that's if you've ever seen 40 year old virgin, you've seen that was a real concept. In fact that store where that was filmed was just like 2 miles from where I'm at today. Starting for my, my partners who are my brothers, the three of us started these franchise ebay drop off stores, worked to make that business take off for five years. Waved away. I still have PTSD when I think about doing that business but was very just the fundamentally the business model was flawed. People didn't care enough to sell their old stuff stuff as much as they care about buying new stuff. And so fundamentally it just never took off. We spent five years hitting our head against the wall but at the same time trying to find new ways to do business. And somewhere at the end of that five years discovered selling on Amazon and I'd say that was 09. And so if you look on Amazon stock chart it goes like this and then it just takes off after 09, and that's exactly when we started selling on Amazon. So we've been lucky enough to ride that wave as Amazon's been exploding since 09. So that's now about first five years in eBay, then 11 years selling on Amazon. And then 2016 pivoted the business into more of a brand management business, working much deeper in partnerships with brands, really collaborating and helping them grow those brands on Amazon, not just selling stuff on Amazon, which was the first, first five years of Amazon. It's kind of the wild, wild west. Everybody was just buying what they could, where they could, throwing it up, selling it, flipping it. But the business started to consolidate and get more serious and competition started to get really clear at who does what. Probably because everybody was doing, scaling up and figuring out what their business really needs to be, but certainly got that clarity in 2016 and then started building the business into what is Amazia today. Yeah.

And tell us a little bit about the business today. The kind of work you do, where it begins and ends. Give people a little bit of picture of that so they have some context for the stories that we share.

A typical client will be a brand that has no control over their channel on Amazon, both from a map, which is minimum advertised pricing perspective, but also from the content perspective. They're selling to retailers, distributors, whoever, and all those people are then eventually flocking to the Amazon market, whether with permission or behind their back to sell their stuff on Amazon. And what you end up getting is kind of a ran a digital swap meet experience where depending on who you actually buy that product from, you may get an awesome experience, or you may get the wrong color, or you may get a fake, or you may get a counterfeit, or you may get a return that somebody else is liquidating returns out of. Best Buy is reselling on Amazon and they dust it off and they think it's retail perfect. But the brand is not happy that their returns are being resold on Amazon as new to consumers. So we come in and the first thing we do is what we call brand protection. We, we clean up that market, we kick all the bad guys out that shouldn't be selling on Amazon. People that are breaking the rules, not respecting the brand's minimum advertised price, using their trademarks against their, you know, permissions. We clean that up and sort of take control of the market, help them get down.

I think many folks have dealt with that on the vendor side in our audience. You're able to address that. You can do that.

We've been addressing that for five years. So we have a portfolio of over 60 companies at this point who you know, are squeaky clean on Amazon. They're nicely controlled. So yeah, we've been addressing that for 16 years. And that's sort of the secret sauce and everything starts with that. Because if you can't control that first, if you can't control who's selling and vending in the market to begin with, you're gonna have a hard time controlling content and all the other things. So you'll look on an Amazon page and you'll sometimes see, you know, a high end product. But the pictures like on someone's dining room with the cat in the background and they're like, you know, why does my product look like crap? That's not how I intended to go to market with my high end whatever, baby stroller or whatever. You'll also notice sometimes misrepresented items. So let's say we do some health supplements, big FDA regulations on that. You'll notice people, the sellers will change bullets that say cures cancer. You can't do that.

So.

And the brand's liable for it. So we'll go in there, we'll clean all that up, make the pages accurate, make them, you know, sound and look right to be accurate, first of all to the consumer to provide a good experience. But second of all to sell more product and create some sales and then we wrap all that up into a distribution relationship with where we're physically managing the actual logistics, buying, selling. So we help a brand achieve its true Amazon potential and essentially they're outsourcing their Amazon operations to us. And we have many stories of brands that we're doing it in house. A key employee leaves. They have no idea how to do Amazon. They throw clerical people on it to solve it. But it's a beast of its own. It's a specialty at this point. You can't just throw up stuff and expect it to sell. You really got to know how to do it. And even if you have digital people that are good at Google AdWords, it's different than the PPC on Amazon. All of it is very specialized. And so just because you've been successful on your website doesn't mean you're going to do Amazon well.

Yeah, it does seem to be its own world that is distinct from the rest. Even if the consumer is competing and seeing it both places.

Yeah, the consumer has no idea. The consumer thinks they're buying everything from Amazon. They sometimes, to be honest, don't even realize there's third party sellers Selling them stuff, and they don't even realize they're buying from a third party. Like, if I asked you, Bill, what's the last thing you bought on Amazon.

Chemicals? To adjust my hot tub.

Okay, what was the seller's name?

It was some spa company.

See, but you wouldn't know. There's no real, like, you know, I bought this from Lowe's or I bought this from Home Depot. There's none of that, like, type of.

So I've learned to go look, oh, is this. Is this fba? Is this fulfilled by Amazon? Is this sold by Amazon? Is this some other third party? Is this shipping within my own country or is this shipping from overseas? I've started to look at that. I didn't used to. But you're.

First of all, you're in business. You know, you've had other businesses before. You're a different breed of person. The general consumer out there who's just buying some cool stuff is not thinking, like. They're just like, what do I need? Search for it, add to cart, check out. And it's a different type of thought process. So most don't even realize there's a third party behind the scenes. Most don't even realize that there's various third parties. And depending on who you pick, you might get a different experience.

So, yeah, so it's funny, at the beginning of the pandemic, I ordered some, like, novelty face masks, and I'm like, oh, that's really cool. It says like, oh, it'll ship or what. I don't. I don't even know if I paid attention to shipping or not, but. And then they're like, okay, it shipped. And I'm like. And I went, I looked. I'm like, why haven't I gotten that? And I'm like, oh, it shipped from China, and I'm not due to get it for like a month. There was a whole bunch of little things like that at the beginning of the pandemic that were like, yeah, bizarre.

So that's a weird thing, the China shipping in. It's a weird thing that exists today. But literally some Chinese sellers are able to ship. I. I don't know exactly the law or whatnot that enables us, but some Chinese sellers are able to ship stuff into the US for cheaper than I could ship an envelope next door. So. So there's. There's some sort of subsidies or whatnot going on, but effectively, Chinese sellers are able to ship stuff in for cheaper than you could mail a small package literally across the street through the post service.

Well, in this case, in several cases, it was all fulfilled by postal. So it was not coming through DHL or UPS or anything like that. It was coming in and they were small, like it wasn't substantial things like, you know, a couple face masks or whatever.

But yeah, but then that affects, you know, the postage, affects the overall experience you get as a consumer. So most prime members, the 100 million-plus, will only buy prime items. In fact, like my default search, I, I don't even want to see things that are not fulfilled by Amazon because I know the experience is going to vary. And so most prime members that are pretty, you know, the people with piles of packages every day at the door, they're gonna want prime shipping. And so you'll see that stuff.

So we'll talk about the implications in just a second. Let's talk about what you're seeing this year. What are the. Tell us some of the stories about the crazy moves and things, because I think noticing how things shift around is really, really useful. And from that we can infer lots of things for many businesses not just selling on Amazon.

Yeah, it's been a, obviously a crazy year for every industry out there. I mean, we're blessed not to be a spa or a restaurant business right now. I would say we're, we're definitely on the right side of the pandemic where our business is actually growing as a result of some tailwind, you know, coming in. But at the same time, it's not been easy. There's definitely been. We've been making U turns all year long, trying to, you know, adjust and pivot and deal with what is. So the first complexity is Amazon supply chain. I mean, we used to ship stuff to Amazon. Within a couple days, it goes live. You could buy it, it creates revenue. We went from that to.

Can you see my camera?

Yeah.

Keep talking.

I can hear you should have bought a battery charger on Amazon. So we went from, you know, normally things, you know, going live within a couple days to in the middle of the pandemic, we'd ship Amazon stuff. It would be sitting in a trailer at their distribution center for sometimes as long as 60 days, which means, and probably because, you know, the demand. It's like when all the water was sold out at the stores and all the toilet paper was sold out, everybody then flocks to Amazon and starts stocking up all the bread machines, flour, water, every, you know, possible supply, trash bags, all the stuff that you would normally be buying at your normal shopping, wherever that is. All of a sudden, everybody Flocking to Amazon and over buying they don't need a case of water, so they buy 10 or they buy 20 cases of water because who cares? The UPS man bring it. And so that created, I think an abnormal amount of demand where Amazon just could not ship stuff out fast enough. And so we actually wrote a funny article about this because at that time, in order to deal with Amazon classified essential and non essential items. To get the essential stuff out ahead of non essential items like a camera lens would probably be non essential. But what was funny at the time is we sell some adult products and things like lube and vibrators and they're in the sexual wellness category, which is actually part of the health category. And at the time Amazon prioritized everything in the health category as essential. At the same time we were selling air purifiers which are in the home category and Amazon deemed everything home non essential. So at the time it was funny and you can Google the article, we wrote it. But it's like at the time in March you could get a vibrator delivered expedited, but you couldn't get an air purifier because Amazon considered the vibrator essential and the air purifier was not. So it's just kind of a, in.

Every part of our, not just the United States, but where you and I happen to live, but worldwide, there have been some wacky ramifications of misclassification and adjustments like that where something got prioritized against something else and it made no sense, but it was just a policy applied without thinking. Right?

Yeah. The reality is Amazon's got 300 million products. There's no way they're gonna be able to human, you know, make decisions like obviously air purifiers are more important than sexual products at the time, but it's just kind of funny. So we kind of had some fun with, with that at the time. It was just an ironic situation. But so that's that then. The other force that's happening is, let's say we represent brands that are skincare or salon sold products. Well, when their salons are closed and not buying products and selling them to their retail customers, they get desperate. I mean, I understandably see how that happens, but their business is suffering. So the manufacturer that supplies the spas, it's not even the spa that's closed, there's a supply chain behind that. Right. So the manufacturer that sells its product into spas, if the spas aren't working, they're suffering just as much because their product's not moving. And so they start to get desperate. And we've had some of those brands that go, hey, Amazia, we're going to do Amazon ourselves. We're just going to take our stuff, throw it on Amazon and sell. In fact, we had one brand that did exactly that. And after a couple months, it was like, okay. You know, we kept watching them and it's like, okay, nothing's. You're not really doing the job you said you would do. And so we had another conversation. As it turns out, you know, they're a manufacturer. They're not prepared to do Amazon the way, you know, we would be, for example. So they tried, you know, it didn't work out. And we ultimately got them back and started selling on Amazon later in the year. So there's some. Some of those nuances definitely happened throughout the year. You know, for some of our brands that are in verticals that have been affected, they see Amazon as a channel where they're sharing margin with us. You know, they want to take some of that back because at least at some margins, you know, when they're suffering, but they're not really prepared to do the business to capture that margin. And again, right.

No matter where you sell, if you sell in a physical store, if you sell in a store kind of corner, a street corner, there's always an art to something, right? There's some way that you're going to display the merchandise and some way that you're going to transact things. And there's a whole world of things wherever you sell, of considerations to deal with that are unique. And the way that Amazon works a little different than the way everything else works.

I think of I lived in New York for a couple years way back when, and I think of chicken over rice, you know, or the bagel carts in New York, right. Like all over the city. And that guy knows that there's four corners. But for whatever reason, that corner is a better corner because of traffic, the flow, because of time of day, whatever the factors are. But if you just were a hot dog vendor setting up shop, you'd pick one of the four corners and you have a 25% chance of being right. But someone knows that one of those corners is the ideal corner to be on.

It works. Yeah. That's where the people are. They're pausing long enough. That work? Yeah.

So there's nuances like that that every business probably in every vertical figures out and they become specialized over. So, yeah, that's some of the funny stuff that's happened this year. With Amazon, there's probably many more stories I could tell you, but we can't get them all in today.

So with my old business, one of the things that we would do frequently is walk the retail. So if we're in a downtown area or in a mall or whatever, we'd walk around and we'd look at the show at the stores and we'd look at what's the lighting like and what's the overall decor and what merchandise is front and center and what is by the register and how are things displayed and are the sales staff trained and are they engaging and like, there's a whole world of stuff. And I can remember many times where we'd be shopping, you know, walk in the stores and people would come up and they could tell the way that we were looking at things, that we were shopping as industry people, like, what company or what brand are you with? Because you're just. Your eye is clearly, you're not here like a regular shopper. We would get out it all the time and doing that kind of thing. And. And of course, you want to, like, you want some pictures of what the cases look like and the racks and things like that as you're doing that kind of work. And I think we don't do enough of that in the. In the online space. What does your brand look like? How does it show up relative to the competition? What does your storefront look like? All of those kinds of things are not being done enough. Whether you're an Amazon or got your own website or selling through Etsy or who knows the environment that you're selling in, Right?

Yeah. It actually reminded me of a funny story in the early days trying to figure out what brands to carry. I was running around Sephora with a phone, taking pictures of all the brands that I thought were good. And eventually security came and was like, you're breaking. You know, you're breaking. Why are you taking pictures all over our store? So I was like, oh, I'm just scouting. Like, I didn't know, you know, and I left. But it's funny, I literally just got off a call this morning where, you know, we're talking to a brand and they said, well, well, this product is a lost leader for you. And I said, there's no such thing as lost leader because you don't walk into the front of the store and go get the milk at the very back. Like, you do a search for exactly what you want and that product gets brought to the front of the store for you. And that's where you end up doing your consuming. There's no such thing as a lost leader on Amazon. Sure, there are bundles and things that go with you buy a phone, you need a phone case, you need a charger. Sure, there's accessories and up sales and cross sales and all that, but there's not really a lost leader. And so the equivalent of product, merchandise, nice on a shelf is you do a search for, you know, I'll give you an example. Let's say you're buying a gun holster or any kind of, you know, accessory that has a certain shape. You look on that page, there's all these different options. Are they all facing the same way or is there one holster left, one holster's right, one holster's tilted, one holster's got other graphics in the background. That's the equivalent of that digital shelf of, you know, when you walk into Whole Foods or like an Erewhon, there's a reason they're charging so much money is because every bottle of milk is facing the same way. And every orange is like perfectly laid out. And then you go watching the Vons and there's like oranges, however they are off the floor.

Not really, but hopefully not.

So that's the equivalent of the digital shelf on Amazon. It's in presenting your graphics and your content to make sure it's consistent and you'll see it. Sometimes let's say you're selling a shampoo bottle, you know, is one image zoomed in to just the square of the bottle and then your other image is the whole bottle. And then your other image is the shampoo and conditioner next to each other. There's different ways to present that. And ideally you want customers search and to make it as easy as possible to figure out the next click, the next decision they need to make is what click to make. And so when you do a search, the next click is what product to dive deeper into. And so when there are these inconsistencies, you kind of throw off the consumer. They go, wait, why is this one zoomed in? Why does this come with a bundle? Why is this something else? They're trying to figure out where to go next. And so that's a split second decision, by the way, that happens. You want it as easy as possible. So that means good reviews, lots of reviews, good looking product. That's the equivalent of what you're saying in a research.

Can I see it? Right. So I'm mindful of sometimes when I'm looking for product online, I realize that I can't the Photograph isn't very clear or I don't have the right angle right. On a piece of electronics or whatever. I want to see the back of the thing to see all of the inputs and outputs of the audio. I got a new audio controller down here. How does it connect in? What are the options that go with it? Like the rigorous specs that let me know what's the scale like with certain things? Like how big is this thing? And does it just photograph well? It's nice to have a pretty photograph, but also, if the angle and the lighting is such that you question what you're seeing, you create an issue for people. Right.

That's why it looks like more office.

Right.

I'm actually at our office. We're all working from home, but I actually like going to the office because it's quiet, nobody's here, and there aren't kids in my lap. Yeah, yeah, I hear you on the, you know, what you're saying about the audio, video stuff is, you know, it's like at the end of the day, what's the consumer thinking? What info are they searching for? And how can we answer questions that they may not explicitly be asking? They're just some, you know, subconscious questions that they're thinking, will this work for me? Will this fit? Is it the price point I want? Is it good quality? Can I get it in time for whatever I need? How do we answer all those questions for a consumer proactively so that they don't have to go dig for information? Because I always tell brands, when you hit that page, there's only two places you can go. You can go forwards, add to cart, or you can go backwards, back button. There's no in between. And so we got to make it quick and easy for them to add to cart checkout. You know, give us the money and move on.

So here's a question for you. We didn't talk about this in the prep for the show, but is there something that non Amazon sellers. If I'm over on Shopify, what could I learn from what's happening on Amazon that I could do to make my Shopify site better?

Yeah, certainly. So, like, what we just talked about is like catalog consistency. That's a general E commerce concept. Does your product look the same in every single picture? Does your shampoo position, you know, when you look at the picture, your shampoo and your conditioner, is your bottle face the same way? Is it zoomed in the right way? Is it the same lighting? Very simple things, just product consistency. Second of all, when you're describing the product go in the same order. And to be honest, we got really good at this because of the ebay days. We didn't make any money. It sure taught us a lot. But in the ebay days, the way you write a description, you write with the most important factors.

What when you don't make money or you lose money, but you gain a lot of experience. That's tuition.

Yeah, expensive tuition. But write the description top to bottom, from the most important to the least important. Like what's the very first thing that the customer could be thinking of when they're looking at this product? Start with that. And so you know your bullets or your description, however you're writing it out, do that and then do that consistently across your whole catalog so that when they're on your site and they hit the shampoo page, if the first bullet talks about, you know, chemical free, whatever, no parabens, no sulfates, make sure when they hit your conditioner page, the first bullet will say the same thing. No chemicals, no parabens, blah, blah, don't make, you know, this page, the first bullets about chemicals and the next page the bullets about, you know, this product's good for people with curly hair. You start to confuse the consumer. Yeah, keep that consistent. That's just general e commerce. You know, thinking of that's the digital shelf, that's digital merchandising. You know, knowing that and then you got to give proof. The other thing I think today very important on the Internet and Amazon probably got consumers expecting this is social proof is do other customers like this product? Are the review, are the reviews good? But consumers are smart. They know, okay, review. Like if you're on a Shopify site, you know, you can have fake reviews technically. But if those reviews are lots of different consumers smiling with your product in every single picture, that's harder to fake. And so that starts to give social proof. Like get your customers to create videos and content because it shows that your product's being used by real people and you're not the only dummy that's about to buy this thing. Interesting.

Really helpful. Yeah. So, and then what can average folks learn about dealing with Amazon? If you are selling with Amazon now, what are some key lessons that are Amazon specific?

I think the first one is don't swim against the current. That's a very hard lesson we learned early on. And Amazon's a very strong current. You're not going to win. You're not going to convince them they're wrong. So the first lesson is just swim with the current your life will be so much easier. And there's so much that people like, especially very entrepreneurial people. We saw a lot of it early on in the pandemic that want to instantly sell hand sanitizer and this and take advantage of all the pandemic. Meanwhile, Amazon's developing lots of rules of how you shouldn't be doing that and don't do this. And we don't want hand sanitizer on our site because it creates massive potential rip offs for customers when people sell, you know, bad things at a, at a time where so many people need the right thing. So the first rule is just go with the current. Follow the marketplace's rule. Don't try to be entrepreneurial or creative and think you're going to outsmart Amazon because you won't. They'll catch up to you eventually and just swim with the current. Do the right thing now can you be creative? Can you pass strategy? Of course you can do all that. But don't blatantly break rules and think you're going to outsmart Amazon.

I have seen people do things like take deposits on things and pre sell things and I have seen some things that seemed really likely to be a scam and in a couple cases I was like, well it's on Amazon so I have some protection.

Not really. Unless if it's not prime, they're going to give you a hard time returning it and then you're going to go through an A to Z claim and it's going to take 30 days. It's kind of a big pain when you get stuck and Amazon doesn't like those experiences they don't want. That creates a bad experience for imagine that was your first time shopping on Amazon. You're never going to go back there. So you might deal with that because you've had lots of good experiences. But someone new who's doing Amazon for the first time is not going to go back and buy other stuff on Amazon if they get a bad experience.

And then what about pricing? What can we learn about pricing? Up, down, left, right, bundle, unbundle.

I mean, well, first of all, a lot of it is competition driven. So you do a search for a similar product. Let's selling, let's say you're selling a camera lens. You'd have to do start by doing a similar search to what a real consumer would look. And I mean the, the unfortunate thing today is there are quite a bit of brands on Amazon that do a killing. I mean there's brands doing hundred million dollar businesses on Amazon that don't have a real business or brand outside of Amazon. And so unfortunately some of those, they are using some of the black hat tricks and doing things that you know are going to be harder to compete with. And sometimes just because of their sheer size, they'll be selling things at a crazy price. Or maybe it's a really a cheap product, but at the end of the day it's marketed really well. And so it creates this big perception what you actually get in the box is not so important. So first of all, it's gonna be hard to compete because you have brands on Amazon that you would not normally compete with in the normal retail world. Right? And obviously those brands don't have the same overhead and investment that you might do if you're a real brand selling stuff on Amazon. So the first thing is just do a quick search, you know, search for that camera lens. Hey, if your lens is a hundred bucks and everybody's coming up on the market at 50 bucks, you may want to think about creating a $50 lens to even enter the competitive landscape or, you know, unless you're Apple, unless you're right, there's certainly premium brands out there, but I think most of your listeners are not, you know, Apple. They're probably small or mid sized, you.

Know, saying that if a brand quality is known and known to be different, you could sell against what might be perceived as a generic or knockoff thing, you know, by that in the world of Apple. Right? So I have a bunch of wireless chargers. I have some that live in my suitcase for when I travel in any other year. I have some around the house for let me set my phone down and that kind of thing. And then there's like the Apple ones that are way and some of the other brands that are way more expensive. And I'm like, okay, I know the one that I'm buying is kind of crap, but I also know that it works and it works well enough I'm not gonna pay the $151 when the 35 is just fine.

Yeah, depends what you need, right? Depends what you need. I mean, I was going to pull out, but I don't want to unplug all this, but I have like a MacBook, you know, USB C adapter and what I really needed to be able to plug in Cat 5 cable into it. So yeah, there's tons of adapters with HDMI, you know, USB C, but not Cat 5. But I really want to be able to plug in and I don't want to rely on WI fi, because sometimes that could change. So.

Right.

And the adapter I got was, you know, double or triple the price as all the other ones. But that's what I need. I needed the Cat 5 adapter, so, so I paid that. So the other learning there is, you know, can you differentiate? Can you make, whether for Amazon or a product in general that's truly a little bit different than everybody else out there? And so in this case, you know, they're one of the few decently rated adapters that had the Cat 5. That's why I bought it.

So in a second, we're going to talk about where things are going. I want to remind folks about Suite Process, our fabulous sponsor. You've got to hone your processes and get everybody doing the same thing in a really ridiculously repeatable fashion if you want to scale up. So if you've got people coming to you to ask the same kinds of questions all the time, not sure how to get things done. Suite Process is a software that lets companies keep one central pace for their policies and procedures. And all your processes document things, train them from the senior managers all the way to ground level employees. Get everybody doing the same thing consistently and working together to continually improve that process. Suite Process makes that whole world of implementing, adhering to, refining process and policies and procedures a consistent thing. It becomes the one source of truth, your online operations manual where you get everybody going in the same direction and getting all the tasks done with the right instructions. And our sponsor has a great offer for you. They'll double their normal free 14 day trial so you can get a 28 day free trial. Just go to suiteprocess.com scalingup Sign up now. No credit card required to get that free trial. Suiteprocess.com scalingup and that link ought to help you to get that special offer not available to anyone else. Right there. Sweetprocess.com scalingup I also want to give a big shout out to the author and creator of all things Scaling Up, Scaling up framework and the original Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish. If you liked our show, go ahead and share it with somebody else. If you like it, subscribe it. If you give us a review right, that helps us to get discovered and get the following there. You can go find that whole back catalog you can subscribe to, get weekly updates from us. We'll give you a copy of our book for free. You could call that a loss later in the world of Scaling Up. If you'd like a copy of the book Scaling up for Free. Just pay the shipping and handling@scalingcoach.com plus downloads of all the tools that and offers that our guests talk about. Our show is produced by Lucy Summers, who's in the background feeding crawls and things like that. Who gets the show ready, who schedules things, who promotes it, who does all that kind of stuff. Our audio is edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions and our show notes are written by Ayn Kadina and proofread by Tim McGowan. So let's go to all of the things that you see kind of coming next. What do you see next on the horizon for people? Where do people need to think about over the next six months?

Now, this is my favorite part to actually talk about. I guess it's just the entrepreneur in me to look at like the future and what's changing, what's happening and how I predict, you know, things will happen. So what do we know? We know this year more than ever, Amazon has gained more prime subscribers. So while their prime subscribers would have normally started to taper off because eventually everybody who wanted prime by now obviously knows about Amazon and would have signed up, there was still a big community of people think, you know, they don't necessarily have to be older or though sometimes the correlation is that they happen to be a little bit older. But there are people that are like, no, I love going to the store. I love Jim at the shop. I like seeing them anyway, so I'll go buy my toilet paper there. Well, when the, you know, when Jim was out of stock of toilet paper, that customer needed it, they started to sign up on Amazon and go there. And so what I think will happen is you have tens of millions of new subscribers that will realize the convenience of shopping on Amazon and online in general and have the late adopters, right? So we have the early adopters, but they're like the last of last, the left, that last wave of late adopters that just got on Amazon all at once. And so they'll realize like, oh, shoot, this is cool. I don't have to drive to the store anymore. I don't have to lug this stuff. I could get it. Next day I may find something that my local store never had. They'll realize all the conveniences of buying on Amazon, buying online, and they'll continue to do that behavior for their next purchase and next even post pandemic. When everything resumes, I think back to normal, they'll realize how cool it is to buy online, which is probably one of the bigger shifts we've seen In a long time of brick and mortar shifting to online. So that's one thing. The next thing is, I don't know, do you use Instacart, Bill?

I don't use Instacart. I know that we sometimes have at the household here.

But personally, you know, in February, there was probably in my area, let's say, four or five choices for Instacart. You had, like, cvs, Whole Foods, you know, maybe two or three other stores. Whole Foods then went prime and did their own thing. So they went off Instacart. But for a while, you had a couple stores on there. Today you look and there's like 50 or 100 stores. All of a sudden, you literally have like, every week under the sun from, like, you know, Kohl's and, like, Sprouts Market. And, like, I mean, just every retailer out there is totally on Instacart. And I think what will change is this mindset of delivery on demand, like anything you can imagine with that many stores online is now deliverable to you.

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Now you can get a ton of any, just about anything delivered. And before maybe you had to go to a specialty store to get something, but now like, you know, you can get it delivered from Best Buy like same day by a local shopper, which to be honest, beats Amazon. We never thought about, I mean, we haven't thought about that in a while. Could Amazon ever be beat on their delivery and reliability and all this other stuff? But I think in the short term here there's some instances where Instacart is actually beating Amazon because you send a real shopper to pick that specific Item up within 2 hours. Amazon can't do that. Even with drones that they're promising one day they won't be two hours to most points around the world. Maybe within a mile of the distribution center you could do that. But where I live there's not a distribution center for 100 miles. You're not going to be able to deliver it within two hours.

It also helps like local merchants as well, so you can get out of that, if you have something compelling in the area that people are jonesing for.

Right, yeah. So then let's talk about the retail, the, the real estate mix up of that stuff. Because before you needed to be where, you know, malls and retail and all this stuff, but now you could be a specialty hardware retailer out of a warehouse and then you get instacart shoppers that come in there, grab stuff and go deliver it to your consumers. So what does that change to retail all of a sudden? You know, I don't believe those. You know, we have Ventura Boulevard or, you know, Santa Monica Boulevard or whatever boulevards with high end retail stores. Do they have to be there? You know, sure, they're all, not all stores will disappear. But if 10, 20, 30% of them do figure out that they don't need to be there, that significantly changes the real estate markets and so much more. You know, beyond that.

In restaurants now, where some restaurants closed and some reopened with outdoor dining, then some have converted to like ghost kitchen things where you might have three or four brands operating out of one kitchen and one restaurant. And all that dining room is now being used to organize and prep and that kind of thing. Beyond the kitchen, 100%.

I picked up sushi last night for, for dinner from a place we really like, really nice sushi place. They're on Ventura Boulevard. So it's like, you know, they're probably paying really high rent and they're busier than ever. I almost wonder if they're selling more sushi on delivery than they could really fill. Because let's say the restaurants like 40 seats, they're doing way more. When I came to pick it up, they got like 30 orders lined up ready, waiting for people to pick up. I think that value is worth more than what they would have sold in a night of sushi in the restaurant. And so then you think of the plastic and those suppliers, because all of a sudden all those takeout suppliers, all the plastic jars and styrofoam and cups and you know, the ginger was in one packet and the wasabi was in another thing. And I was like, dang, imagine our household just made this much trash out of one dinner. Now every household out there is doing that. Some seven nights a week, some three meals a day.

Yeah, that's a really unpleasant side effect when you think about the full, like, impact of stuff. So is it really optimally packed for shipping and transport and that kind of thing? And is it done in a reusable way? We saw where in the past it was like, hey, bring your own bags down to the local Trader Joe's. Now it's like, nope, you can't use your own bags anymore. And then they started doing these transfer stations where they would put it back in the cart and then you could go out to the parking lot and swap everything out, but you couldn't do it in the store with your own bag.

So there'll be some change there. But I think the most important, massive changes that we had, a lot of consumers that normally were not used to buying online suddenly forced to buy online will enjoy the experience and continue to buy online. And so if I was a brick and mortar retailer, I would be scared for the next decade because it's like the last of the last people that were maybe even patroning. Some of those brick and mortars are going to shift.

When I think about still going in person, I'm looking for an experience. Setting aside the current pandemic situation, I want the experience of roaming around, that kind of thing. And it's discovery, it's experiential. I want maybe unique products that are not available elsewhere. If I just need a new filter for the range over my stove, right. I'm not going to go and see if they happen to have that particular one at the hardware store. I'm going to find the exact measurement or whatever online. It could be Google shopping, it could be Amazon or whomever is going to make it easier for me to find. I'm going to go solve that problem that way. But if I want to go wander with my wife or do something, that's a very different thing. And some of that will be there. Yes.

Or I was just thinking like a Home Depot. If you're remodeling a kitchen, you don't know what you need. You don't know what the selection is. You want to look at it, touch it, then you know you're going to specialty hardware retailers. Home Depot. You're doing that stuff. Yeah.

Yes. All right, listen, if you want to learn more about William's company, amazia.com we will put the link, of course, in the show notes like that. But a M a z z I a.com amazia.com and anything else for them for our, for our listeners.

Viewers, go buy something on Amazon after you listen as possible.

All right. And thanks again to everyone for listening. Reminder sweetprocess.com ScalingUp is our great sponsor with their special offer. Thanks again, everyone. Talk to you again next week. Bye bye.