Why I will NEVER be an Amazon seller again...

I'm making this video for those of you who watch YouTube videos about selling on Amazon or have seen my old stuff about how I made money on Amazon. And it's true, I sold millions and millions of dollars worth of stuff in a bunch of different markets. Beauty, supplements, yoga. And I have investments in businesses that are in a bunch of different industries as well. But I always knew from the beginning that if I was building an Amazon business, then I wasn't building a real business. And so many of the Amazon e commerce space is so focused on becoming a good Amazon seller that they miss being a really great entrepreneur. I hope to convince you in this video that there's so much more action outside of this little puddle that we step in. And I don't just mean Amazon being the puddle, I mean the focus on optimizing that one channel rather than putting your focus on building a brand, building a company that you can scale and sell.

Back in 2017 when I sold my business, I thankfully had diversified. I was in about a thousand retail stores, we had a little bit of a social media presence, we had some sales on our website and we were on Amazon.com still. About 60 or 70% of our sales came from Amazon. And when I sold the company, there were people who saw that as a big win for the industry. They saw it as there are now eight figure valuations on businesses that take most of their sales on Amazon. When I got labeled as an Amazon seller or an Amazon expert, that made me feel like a liar because I knew that I could barely navigate the back end of Amazon.com the truth was I was an entrepreneur. And an entrepreneur is someone who builds something that they're proud of, who sees problems in the world and solves them. Still to this day, Amazon is the best place to be able to take sales for your physical product line. It's the best place to cross seven figures, sometimes even eight figures. But if that's where it ends, then you are missing where all of the value is. By value, I mean the value of your company, the value of what your business can be scaled and sold for. If you're an Amazon seller or it's a big part of your business, I would invite you to consider starting to make the pivot from Amazon seller to real business. And I wanna share with you how I would recommend that you do that. It starts with by giving the customers that are coming to you from Amazon an amazing experience and a reason for them to follow you elsewhere. That can happen with a killer product. It can happen with a killer message. Or it could happen with just the values that you represent as a business and as a brand. I always work with my students and my clients at finding the underlying branding. And by brand, I mean the values, the mission, the message, why you're doing this before they even think about selling products. Or if somebody is actively selling a million dollars a year, finding the story that weaves the entire product line behind one central mission or message or person, that customer that you are trying to help. When you focus on the person that the brand is serving, it becomes much clearer what products to release and what price points you should be able to sell them for. One of the challenges of just being an Amazon seller is that you are beholden to this competitive marketplace where most businesses are selling the exact same thing that look exactly like everybody else. There is this downward pressure in the marketplace to lower your prices and get more reviews, which squeezes out all of your profit margins. Now, I love that capitalism does that. But I also know as a business owner that you have to maintain healthy profit margins for one reason. To do a great job for your customers. When you start sacrificing an incredible service and experience for your customers, you start losing rank, you start losing reviews, you start losing your eye on the prize, which is, which is to build something that is truly valuable, valuable enough to be sold to someone else who will pay you for it. Or a business that has lasting value, meaning that it will grow beyond you and pay you dividends for years, if not decades to come. The only way to do that is by having the customer at the very center. Which is Amazon's thesis, by the way. Amazon's thesis is whatever is best for the customer. What we will back. If you want to be a great Amazon seller, join them in that fight. Do what's great for the customer. Yes, lots of people shop on price. And yes, you can get a temporary bump by lowering your prices and getting a conversion rate increase. But the way that you win long term is by making all of your decisions focused on what allows the company to serve the customer with no other focus. It's rare that that happens. By being the cheapest, having the lowest price, having the most aggressive pay per click strategy. The pivot starts when you start serving that person off of the channel. One of the ways that we do this is we encourage some of our clients or students to have a charity that they support. What is one cause or one mission that you believe in enough that will resonate with your audience, resonate with your customers, and put an insert in your packaging that says we donate X amount for every order confirmed. Go to this URL to confirm your purchase. Now, what that does is, first of all, it gets people to go over to a page and enter their email address so that you can follow up with them. But it does one other thing as well. It connects the customer with the values of your business. That is the pivot point for building a brand. Now, you don't need to do a charity offer. There's lots of things that you can do in order to begin that conversion. But I like the charity approach because it forces you to think about what would resonate with my customer. What do I need to present to my customer that has nothing to do with what I want. I actually have to do something for someone else in order to connect with my customer. That's when you start thinking about what is best for that person. Whereas most people say get your next thing for free or get a free rebate or whatever it is, that doesn't build brand, it doesn't build customer loyalty. When you start thinking about connecting with that customer and joining them in their values and the mission that they are on. Now, you're building a business and of course that opens up opportunities like you have a big email list of buyers who believe in what you are doing enough to give you their email address. And now you can launch products on Shopify or you can drive them to social media. But all of that is immaterial if the rest of the business doesn't match with the values and the vision that you are communicating in that insert. Do you actually believe in the things that you say? Do you actually believe that you're an advocate for that customer? If so, it will show up in your social media content. If so, it will show up in how you communicate, in your emails. If so, it will show up in the types of products that you release. The beautiful irony of this is that when you make that shift, you start being able to charge higher prices, you, you start getting higher conversion rates, you start getting raving fans who voluntarily leave you reviews, and you start crushing it even more on Amazon because you have the margin to be able to invest in scale and growth and contribution to that customer. There's one other pivot point that can help take you from Amazon seller to real entrepreneur. And that's when your focus goes into customer acquisition, which you can only do, by the way, when you've figured out the first part of relentlessly serving your customers and serving them off of a channel like Amazon. When your focus can go into how many customers can I Acquire how much money can I spend or how many losses can I mitigate? Then you can start outspending everyone else, because you have a system for being able to get people into loving your business, turning them into raving fans, turning them into followers that want to buy from you over and over and over again. Those two pivots, being able to communicate directly with the customer, making them your focus, and then aggressively investing into customer acquisition through outspending everybody else, running retargeting ads, and being able to outspend to get new customers, that has this beautiful result of making you succeed on multiple channels and making you have a very, very valuable business. No one wakes up in the morning and says, I want to be an Amazon seller when I grow up. No one looks up to famous entrepreneurs who are Amazon sellers. We look up to entrepreneurs, we look up to creators. And if you're an Amazon seller, you have that ability. In fact, you're sitting on the most beautiful platform ever. To make the shift from just selling stuff to having something of real value that people become raving fans of. It just requires a few simple pivots of actually focusing on the customer rather than the platform aggressively getting customers. And I would add in having a clear vision for the business that you want, not the business that you think that you can build. Build the business you want, which is almost never selling random things on Amazon.com that's why I'll never call myself an Amazon seller ever again. It's why I cringe when people say they have an Amazon business because there's so much more action, there's so much more juice, so much more excitement, so much left in the tank for you if you put your focus on a much bigger vision. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. I'm just your average multimillionaire. I did it through building businesses that you can scale and sell. And I help entrepreneurs do that and I invest in them and I help them make the pivot from being marketers and selling stuff to having real businesses that they can scale and sell. One of the ways that I do that is inside of our incubator. So if you are ready to make this shift, we can help you get clear on your vision and build the foundation of something that you can scale and sell that has real value. You can find out more in the description and if you're an entrepreneur building businesses, I'd love to be a part of your journey. So hit the subscribe button. Thanks for watching. See you next time.