Future Changes Coming For Amazon Sellers, eCommerce Entrepreneurs, FBA, and Physical Products Brands

In this video, I am going to tell you what is coming for physical product sellers this year, next year, and in this next wave for Amazon for selling on funnels in retail through audiences. We're going to cover that in this video. And what inspired this was a question that I was asked, and I am asked this often, and I'm getting a little bit tired repeating myself on this question. And is, are the good days over for physical product sellers? The good old days, in my opinion, are defined as the times a few years ago when you could take crappy old products, throw them up on Amazon.com, throw them up on Click Funnels or Shopify, take sales, and everybody party is because everyone's making money. Listen, in every single market, there is a period in which there's what I call a wide open west. There's a period in which there is a lack of suppliers, but there's a lot of demand. In fact, I was just on the Aubrey Marcus podcast and I was using the example of CBD oil. CBD oil is highly regulated. It's illegal in some states, and as a result, there's a lot of red tape in supplying it. So those who do supply it, those who cross all of those regulatory hurdles, they make a lot of money. They have really high profit margins because there's more demand than there is supply right now. There's no easy way to get that. So prices are really high on that. Throughout the next couple of years, you will see those prices come down in prices and. And profit margins whittle away as it becomes easier and easier to supply that good. That is the case in every market. It's the case with every opportunity. So, for example, back in 2006, I was getting my start as an entrepreneur. I was in my college dorm room, not in Austin, Texas. I was in Marion, Indiana, at a school called Indiana Wesleyan University. And I was building websites and I was selling affiliate products and I was selling advertising on some of those websites. And I had a period in which I was making a lot of money just building websites, ranking on Google before it was cool to do any of that, and selling affiliate products before it was cool to do that. And I had a colleague, a friend, Ryan Dice, say something to me that freaked me out. He said, in every market, on every channel, there's a period in which there is this room to grow where everybody can enter the marketplace and everybody makes a bunch of money and then that window closes and people get squeezed out of the marketplace because they can't hack it. And then they get Pushed over into whatever the next opportunity seeking adventure is. And I decided in that moment that I was not going to be one of those people that got squeezed. It freaked me out. I had worked too hard to learn certain skill sets to be squeezed out of the marketplace just because an opportunity changed. But what's interesting about that time is this is a time before WordPress. This is a time before click funnels. This is a time before there were a bunch of tools that made it easy to rank and sell advertising. So was it really the good old days? Was it really easier back then? I was hand coding websites on a dial up computer in 2006. Do you realize this? I had a 56k modem. I'm hand coding HTML, working 12 hours a day making websites. There was no WordPress, there was no even blogger.com back then. There was nothing. So the wide open west was this period in which you could, if you got through the regulations, if you, if you got through the hard stuff, the money was there, the money showed up, the profit margins were really high. Now if we now look at 2011, 2012, 13, there's a lot of demand on Amazon.com there's a lot of customers coming and buying Amazon prime accounts. There's not a whole lot of suppliers because the prices are low. So what happens? They open up FBA and people like you and me come in and start selling physical products on Amazon and the supply starts to rise and profit margins are great and people start pouring into the marketplace because FBA has come out and made it easier. And now we have a new wide open west period in which there's an opportunity to sell physical products at high profit margins and people are celebrating and people are making millions of dollars. And that's exactly what happened. And now what we're seeing is the shift towards a different direction where we've seen the market fully consolidated, we've got a bunch of suppliers in the marketplace, but there's new things changing. There are things coming that are going to create new opportunities while simultaneously putting other people out of business. Now if we bring it back to my example in 2006 while I'm blogging, if I had just decided I am not gonna change, I am gonna keep hand coding websites on a dial up computer. Do you think I'm gonna get squeezed? Yeah, because as it turns out, things like WordPress are really helpful and make it easier. And it creates a bunch of new competition, it creates a bunch of new ease of entry into the marketplace. A bunch of bloggers came in once WordPress existed and everybody made money. A lot of people made money. Anybody who was good made money and anybody who wasn't got squeezed into another channel. What does that mean for physical products? What does that mean for Amazon sellers? Well, it means this. It means that FBA was that turning point that opened up a bunch of new opportunities. Facebook advertising was one of those things. It was one of those things that opened up new opportunities for physical product sellers and brands. We're going to see a few more of these. And if you weren't paying attention in the last couple of years, if you did not pay attention when Amazon bought Whole Foods, you are missing a sign of what is to come. It is only a matter of time. Amazon and it is not going to be far away.

When an FBA seller is on Amazon.com, their product is killing it in Denver.

Somebody at Whole Foods has access to that data and they're like, man, this collagen peptide product is just really killing it in our area. Bring it onto the shelf.

You will walk into your store in Denver after killing it online and you will see your product on the shelf and you'll be in Whole Foods all over the world. This is why.

If you're not on Amazon, you need to be. And if you're an Amazon seller, it's time to grow up. It's time to play a bigger game because you have the things that are about to happen are about to put a lot of people out of business and make a few people insanely wealthy. Now, if you think Amazon is done with their acquisitions, I think they are just getting started. But here's the other side of this equation. What happened when Jet came on the radar? Jet.com and Amazon was already killing it. Walmart wanted to make a push for E commerce. So what did they do? They bought jet for $2 billion. You are going to see more acquisitions not just from Amazon, you're going to see it from other places too. You're going to see Facebook come out and acquire Target or what I think is going to happen, you might see Walmart get their Tish together and release new features for sellers to try and make a play against fba. You already saw Walmart acquire Bonobos and and a couple other brands. That's going to continue. And what you're going to see happen is this retail distribution start to get acquired by what's available online. And you as an online seller, whether you're used to selling on funnels or through affiliates or on Amazon or on Shopify, you are going to Be in the position to syndicate your products that you're selling online into retail stores on over the country. And you'll now have two places to collect orders. You'll have the retail side of the business, which is basically all managed online. You won't even need retail brokers anymore. They're still relevant now, but that's all going to be managed online. And you're going to have the retail, you're going to have the online side of it, which is probably what you're doing right now. That is what's coming. And as a result we're seeing a lot of old money moving into buying these types of brands. If you didn't pay attention When Kellogg's bought RXBar for $600 million, you were missing a sign of the times. You were missing a lot of money from old brands. Realized that they don't know how to innovate, they don't know how to play in today's changing digital world. So they're buying up the businesses that do. What does that mean for you? It means you need to be one of these brands that knows how to compete in that world. It means you need to get more than just your Amazon listings dialed in. It means that you have got to think longer term than just buying traffic on Facebook to a front end funnel and then hoping that you make money on the back end. If you play this well, we are entering into what I would consider a new type of golden age for physical product sellers. You have got to play this well. If you play your cards well. We are on the forefront of some amazing changes now if you follow my work. You know, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, but I think that blockchain could open up some very interesting distribution opportunities for businesses who take orders online. So if you are able to eliminate some of the supply chain due to blockchain, that's very interesting. That's a game changer that breaks down the barriers of you manufacturing product or ordering from your supplier. It also makes it easier for people in third world countries to move online so you might have easier international distribution. Now I'm not a fan of individual coins like this Bitcoin or Stellar or whatever it is that you're buying right now. But I am a fan of the technology that I think could break down some barriers and bring new money into the E commerce world. We're about to see.

A slew of new opportunities in the e commerce and physical products world if you are in position to do this. And brands that play this. Well, are already seeing the results of this. For example, one of my colleagues in California as A deodorant company, 2 years old, sold it for $120 million in two years. Crazy. So, by the way, I just got in touch with a deodorant company that I am a fan of and I'm trying to invest in them. Not because there's all the money's in deodorant, but if you look at the old markets where you could never compete, all of a sudden you can compete now if you play the digital game, right? If you play Amazon well, if you dial in your Facebook ads, if you build an audience of raving fans that will follow you anywhere. If you do these things well, then things like deodorant is cool again. It's cool to promote stuff that you never thought there was profit margin in because it's being acquired by old brands for $120 million. Things like food. The opportunities in food are crazy. Did you. And by the way, did you ever think that there was room for another coffee brand? And yet Dave Asprey comes out with bulletproof coffee mold free coffee. And because he has a raving fan base, he has a blog. Back then he had a blog and a podcast, launched a coffee line, and now he's raised a bunch of money and Bulletproof is on the front shelves of every Whole Foods around the country. That's what's happening right now. This is the era that we're in. We're not in the era of selling more spatulas. We're in the era of building brands. And brands are built with audiences and they're built through distribution channels. And the distribution channels that are opening up for brands, massive. They're much bigger than anything we've seen in the past. And the changes that are coming are going to make it easier, faster and cheaper for the first movers to take advantage of them. This is why I invest in physical products brands, why I advise physical products brands, because I'm very, very bullish on this sector right now. Old brands that are owned by Procter and Gamble or Johnson and Johnson are now under threat because of the ease of distribution that you, as a scrappy entrepreneur or a small brand now have. Which, by the way, Johnson and Johnson and Procter and Gamble are great companies. I own stock in both of them. And they're not stupid. They're buying up businesses like yours, which is why Kellogg's makes a play for RX Bar, which is why Unilever buys Dollar Shave Club for a billion dollars off the back of one viral YouTube video. This is the era that we're entering in. And if you are playing the game of Amazon reviews, or if you're playing the game of just having funnels with upsells, you're playing a short term game that might play really well for now. But if that doesn't factor into a bigger overall strategy, if you are not using those customers that you're collecting from, click funnels and from Facebook to build a bigger brand, you are gonna miss out on this gold rush. If you are just worried about your Amazon reviews and you're not using your Amazon reviews as social proof to run Facebook ads, to build a medichat audience, or to build an email list, or if you're not taking the people who buy from Amazon and killing them with kindness and getting them to become raving fans of your brand, you are going to miss out on all of this upside that is happening. So there's a few of you watching who can see what's coming and you don't want to be pushed out with everybody else. And if you recognize this was just like recognize this. If you see this and you know what's coming, it's your moral obligation to stay ahead of the curve. Because if you've got something that's good, it's your obligation to share it with as many people as possible.

I'm doing an event here in Austin, Texas August 24th and 25th called the brand Builder Summit. I'm bringing in some of my advisors, some others who invest in physical products, brands, some private equity groups that are buying up businesses. If you'd like to come, you can get on the early bird notification list@brandbuildersummit.com if you can't make it to Austin or you're watching this after August. I share a ton of this stuff about what's working right now in our businesses or the businesses that I advise and invest in on my podcast which is is called Freedom Fastlane. You can find it on itunes, Stitcher, Spotify or the Google Machine. I am very, very bullish, very bullish on this sector. I am basically all in besides my allocation in places for passive income like real estate syndication funds, some.

Cash flowing website funds, dividend paying stock, things that pay for my life. I am pretty much all in on physical products because I can see the money moving into the sector and I also believe that Silicon Valley is going to wake up and realize that buying companies with no profit isn't where the money is. And buying companies that have raving fan bases and recurring billing and distribution on places like Amazon is where the money is, and you're going to see valuations on companies continue to go up. It's a very exciting time if you're a brand builder, but if you're just a physical product seller, you're about to get squeezed. So you can join us this August at the Brand builder summit@brandbuildersummit.com or you can always just subscribe to my podcast and my YouTube channel. You can find me under my name or just search Freedom Fast Lane I believe in what you're up to in the world. I think that if you've got something that matters to your customers, you are sitting pretty right now and it's time to go all in. Thanks for watching. Talk to you soon.