#224 Retail Isn’t Dead. Amazon Sellers Are Ignoring a Market 3x Bigger

If you're selling your products online, wherever you do sell them, you are ignoring about 3 times bigger market than the field you are playing at right now. Yeah, this is where I come from. I've been in retail for 25 years and I think each and every brand, even a micro brand, you know, small ones that are doing all this process and they do it solely for Amazon or Shopify or both. But I think ignoring the rest of the market is one big mistake.

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Selling on Amazon and Shopify feels like the whole game. While Amazon and Shopify dominate the conversation, more than half of US retail sales still happen outside traditional e-commerce. Our guest, Taylor Offer, brings 25 years of hands-on retail experience and breaks down how brands can realistically expand expand into retail, off-price stores, retailer.coms, and subscription box channels. We cover the biggest myths holding sellers back, the language retail buyers expect, how pricing actually works, and why retail can be easier to navigate than Amazon once you understand the rules. If you sell physical products and wanted to scale beyond ads, algorithms, and marketplace pressure, listen up. This episode is for you.

Guys, did you know there's over 1 million retail stores that do not have your product in the United States? So I brought somebody here today who understands that at a granular, detailed level. And I wanted them to come on and share that with those of you who might have an existing brand, a physical product, uh, in the marketplace that you might consider putting in retail, uh, in 2026, if you haven't already done it. And we're going to talk about the pros and cons of that today. So let's unpack this as I bring in Taylor. to the call to expose this pros and cons opportunities. How do you want to approach this, Taylor? Like which direction do you want to head first?

I'll explain in a second, but first of all, thank you for having me today, Neil. It's a pleasure being here. Yeah, I mean, the first point that you mentioned is the biggest point. Like a lot of people are selling on Amazon, on Shopify, sometimes even, you know, more advanced type of marketplaces like Walmart, Costco, Target, and eventually the market in the USA, the entire market the online market is no more than 15%, 1-5, 15. That's true. It took me a long time to verify this information, but it is the number. And it's not like brick and mortar, which is my field. It's not like this is the 85%, but it is more than 50%. So if you're selling your products online, wherever you do sell them, you are ignoring about 3 times bigger market than the field you are playing at right now.

Yeah.

This is where I come from. And I think, you know, this is one thing that, I mean, I've been in retail for 25 years and I've been mostly speaking, I would say supply chain language, you know, production, logistic, producing things, struggling with manufacturing, with designs, with branding. And then social media came in as well. And I think each and every brand, even a micro brand, you know, small ones that are doing all this process, and they do it solely for Amazon or Shopify or both, it's, it's okay. It's fine. It's good. And I know that Amazon could be both heaven and hell, but I think ignoring the rest of the market is one big mistake. That's what I think. Yeah.

Agreed. Well, I agree. We talk a lot about omnichannel and we don't always bridge the topic of retail because in some cases it's a little bit of a, you know, a mythical beast to tackle. Like, how do you do it? Where do you do it? How much does it cost? Where would I even start? How do I know the language and lingo of getting going? There's, You know, it's hard enough to kind of learn the online world and, you know, business owners are usually in their daily, weekly, monthly throes of trying to get that moving in its biggest capacity and would love to have 15% of the share of some market for their products and stuff. So let's just like break it down. Give me like 3 of your biggest points that you think, you know, break the myths of retail that a lot of people might have.

So in terms of the language, which is, you know, this is the shell of everything, language of retail, I think there are As you mentioned, 3 points. The first point is like finding the buyer. This is a huge point, pain point, I would say, because, you know, you could play with LinkedIn, you could play with databases, you could, you could pay for lists of emails or whatever it is, but eventually finding the right buyer for our products is combined out of a lot of different factors. Now, the first factor inside it, which is the second point actually, is what you're gonna tell the buyer. If you're gonna wave hello to them on LinkedIn, just try to put your li— the link to your Amazon store and hope that someone will, you know, turn back to you and say, oh, I wanna see more. That's not gonna happen in most of the cases. And there are a few different methods of how to approach them, but there's, there's main things, main points of not what not to tell the buyers. And one of the things, by the way, is not to share the Amazon link. They would look at it, they would see it. It's like, you know, the elephant in the room, but they don't wanna say they wanna see your website. And the only reason for that is because they wanna see branding as well. And to see that you have a real brand in your hand and not just, you know, buying and selling on Amazon is all you do. They wanna see like a brand, okay? Established one.

Yeah.

And I think another point inside that is like, okay, you found a buyer. Let's say you found a buyer. Let's say you found out how to approach them and what exactly to tell them, how to craft and brief everything. Next, there's gonna be a couple of questions that where the language steps in, in terms of really retail language. So it's gonna be either asking for your catalog or for pricing or for other questions like more professional ones. Now I'm not gonna go into details and like, you know, stuff like EDI and so forth, but then I think both pricing and catalog are the most important stages you need just to have in your pocket before you approach those buyers because they're gonna ask for it and that's the main thing here. Now people tend to think that not only, you know, they don't know how to craft a catalog, which is a piece of cake if you ask me.

Mm-hmm.

And it is a piece of cake. And same thing goes for the pricing. If, as long as you know the pricing for retail, that's it, you're there. You understand the game, you understand how to play with the numbers. And it's the same, by the way, on Amazon, 'cause As an Amazon seller, as an online seller, you have been struggling with, you know, pointing out what's gonna be your MSRP, your retail price.

Mm-hmm.

The same way you did that, you could do the same thing with wholesale price. It's just the same thing. It's even easier. Okay? Because you don't need to go and hunt your competitors because wholesale price is not based on what your competitors are offering, but rather based on the retail price, which you already established. So halfway is there. And then going back to the catalog, I will give you a tip. I'll give the audience a tip. It has to be a PDF and not an Excel. It's a lot of manufacturers from different countries would offer it in Excel. Doesn't look good. It doesn't look professional. It's not appealing and there's no lifestyle imaging in it. And if there is, it's all crumbled. You know how it is. You put a lot of pictures on Excel and boom, you have one big mess rather than doing it on PDF, nice and organized SKU by SKU, page by page. Going back, to going into retail. So vendors, yeah, I, and I've seen that many, many times with a lot of vendors I'm speaking with. I guess I spoke with hundreds, if not thousands of different vendors from the communities, you know, in India, in the States, in, in Europe, in Australia. I've been involved in a lot of communities and I've been trying to capture what's the biggest thing with people not trying to hit retail. And what I found is exactly what you started this podcast with saying, I don't even know how to do it. Well, you didn't know how to do it with Amazon as well, right?

Right.

But somehow you've been managing to build that bridge, right? Not to mention that what our company does is, you know, being that bridge, but that's a side thing about in our conversation. What I wanted to say is that there's nothing to be scared of and it's even easier than Amazon because eventually at this other side, there's no bots like you usually find on Amazon or other places, other marketplaces. There's people, there's humans, and it's easier and, and more fun to communicate with people and, you know, get your products eventually on the shelves.

Well, and that just, you know, you break it down really smooth. You've got 20 years plus experience, 25 years of experience. And so you, you really understand the inner workings of this. How many retails have you been connected with over those 25 years or so in the United States? How many have you worked with?

When I started, I was living in Asia for 12 years and I started with a couple of brands. I was playing, you know, back and forth to see what, what's gonna work. And one thing did work for me very well. And it was garment, surprisingly. I don't do garment myself. I didn't do garment afterwards, but I did garment and I did it with one, a very good, very good fellow of mine. And he was like my leader and he taught me everything about retail, by the way. Thank you. But thank you for that, Joseph, if you're listening by any chance. So Joseph.

Yeah.

And so we were doing, first of all, we were doing like, you know, private label for Walmart.

Uh-huh.

And then we started working for other companies like TJ Maxx, I think it was. in Costco in Canada. And moving forward, I created my own brand, which was like wearable tech accessories. And I was able to take it to around 60 different department stores, including companies like Williams-Sonoma, Anthropologie, Kate Spade, on the off-price as well, you know, Marshalls, HomeGoods, all these companies. And then when I started this agency that I do today, like connecting vendors to buyers, I thought, you know, Working with 60 department stores looks like huge, but I might need a couple of more. And very quickly we realized, me and my team, that 60 retailers is literally nothing. And it's not nothing because of the volume. The volume is huge with 60. If you work with the entire 60, forget it. If you work with 6 of them, you're gonna see volume that could be probably far more than what you're doing online on Amazon. But thing is that there is conversion just like you have on Amazon, On any other, you know, social media, you pay per click, right? And if you pay, let's say an X amount, you get X percentage of conversion. And if you double the amount, you would probably get double conversion or at least something close to that. It's the same thing with retailers. So I thought, okay, we need to have as bigger, wider list of retailers as possible. And then one by one, We're gonna dig and hunt them until we build, you know, the right connection with them so that we can offer them ongoing different brands. And even if the new brands that I offer them tomorrow is not on their category, they would be kind enough to forward me to the right guy in their organization. Because think about Walmart with tens of thousands of stores around the world. These guys solely in the US, they have a couple of thousands of buyers, just buyers. I'm not talking about GMO, CMO, SVP, all these big titles. I'm talking buyers, you know?

Yeah.

Not even buyers assistant. A couple of thousands. You could, you could literally run from one to the other endlessly without knowing who's the right guy because everyone was gonna point you to another guy. But then eventually you find the guy. But this is Walmart, they're big. I know that for a fact that with companies that are smaller, like, you know, Nordstrom, Gabe's, even Macy's, definitely Bloomingdale's because they're smaller, like 40 or 50 stores. you would be able faster to find faster the right buyer. So going back to what I said, we've been building connections with like hundreds of different retailers. Some of them are strong connections, some of them are, you know, so, so, but eventually they know what they're getting and they know they're getting it served well in terms of how we present the brands to them. And I think, I think like this, we started the conversation with stating there's more than 1 million stores, physical stores in the US.

Yeah.

There's actually close to 4 million, but I'm not calculating, you know, coffee shops or whatever things that are not related really to retail. Like really brick-and-mortar stores that are probably suitable for sellers who are listening to this, it's going to be around a million. And that million is across, if I remember correctly, it's across 6,000 or 7,000 retailers, companies. So the market is huge. And sometimes funnily, you know, small retailers like Shields, we 30 stores or companies like that, they would have bigger volume than companies with 200 or 300 or even 400 stores. There's a lot of reasons for why, but yeah, that's the reality.

Like conversions on any other channel, there's just maybe less people show up, but they buy a lot more when they do show up, right?

Like, that's one point. Yeah.

Yeah.

There are a few. Yeah.

Ready to escape your grind? We help entrepreneurs build real wealth with private label brands. Visit voltage dm.com to start now. Which channels are your favorite to work with?

I think the off-price is my favorite, and that's mainly because you can, you can literally be as lazy as hell and still be able to work with them. I just got an email from Ocean State Job Lot. They have like, I think, 130 or 140 stores, something like that, if I remember correct. So they're a very niche type of off-price retailer. They literally, you know, they are very responsive, super fast. But then the interesting part is that they sent a question to the vendor we work with and saying, what would be approximately quantities and pricing for 40-foot high cube loading? And we are asking you because we are already purchasing direct from manufacturer. Now this is heaven because they literally tell you everything you need to know in like one sentence on an email. And that's the, the first response they gave. And the guy responded them and next they got, they sent the email Saying, okay, this is what we're interested in. Let's start talking about pricing. In the meantime, please set up yourself as a vendor. Now, if you look at a setup with companies like Costco, setup vendor process with company like Costco will take you as a vendor probably at least a month. It is that hard. Okay. It's unbelievable how many files they throw on you and forms to fill in. And then they go back and forth with you with, you know, corrections and mistakes and so on. With Ocean State Job Lot, and by the way, it's even easier with TJ Maxx, but with Ocean State Job Lot we're talking about, it's a form with your name, address, point of shipping, warehouse address, and phone number. That's it.

Yeah.

It's like, I mean, you look at it, it's like a joke. You're like, it's unbelievable. These guys are gonna buy all these quantities based on, you know, so basic questions. And obviously W-9, you know, normal form that everybody knows. And if you don't, then just search on it, W-9 or W-8 if you are not a, not a US vendor, which is also acceptable. So that's why I like off-price retailers. It's very easy for— to work with them and they're very vendor-oriented. But if you give them a price and they're not happy with it, they will go back to you saying, listen, our price is this, this is your price. Let's find something in between. They're literally gonna tell you that. You know, crystal clear. They're not going to play with you. They're not gonna shadow. They're not gonna disappear on you. They literally do what they need to do to make it comfortable for you.

So some of the first ones you probably would recommend those who are getting started work with, it sounds like, just because of the, well, harder to screw up in the learning process.

Right.

Yeah.

It's, it's a good, it's a good definition. Harder to screw up. It's a good one. I'm gonna adapt this.

Okay.

With your permission.

Well, that's what happens a lot, right? Because I mean, there's that fear you're gonna do something wrong, say something wrong, lose your opportunity. And it's kind of like, well, where's— where are the retailers you can put your training wheels on to get there?

I mean, I can, I can write not a book but a library on the mistakes I did with buyers. I mean, you have to, you have to jump in the water if you want to, if you want to learn how to swim. But then off-price retailers could be good if if you are capable of lending your goods at a very, you know, low COG, cost of goods. We call it LDP, landed price, but it doesn't matter. It's the same term. And that's because their pricing is tough, much more than it is with regular retailers.

Yeah.

Such as, again, Nordstrom. With Nordstrom, you're gonna end up selling them for around 45 to 50% off your MSRP, your retail price. So if your product is $50, you're gonna sell them for $23, $24, $25. With off-price, you're gonna sell the same product for around $15, $18. Now all depends how much you're gonna lend your product at and if you can afford those, these type of pricing. So that's one point to keep in mind if you're gonna start specifically with off-price. So you can, mm-hmm. And, and again, if you have a luxury type of products brand, then obviously off-price is not for you. You need to go, you know, suitable retailers like Barnes& Noble, X-Fift, and so on. Goldman's, I would say. But then another interesting channel that we worked with in the last couple of years is subscription boxes. Now people tend to think, oh, brick and mortar, you know, physical stores, and that's what it is. No, retail means a lot of different channels. So the same way that you guys are working on Walmart.com, there's Macy's.com, there's a lot of .coms, you know, all the big 20, 30, which are probably, you know, not probably, but very good volume. I just had one of our brands selling on Q4 alone in 2024, talking Q4 alone with macy's.com, only the .com, more than $4 million, which is absolutely amazing. And it shocked me as well.

Yeah. Okay.

And it's not, you know, they're considered, I think, number 9 or number 10 if you rank them, you know, marketplaces in the US.

Yeah.

But then subscription boxes is a complete different way of doing business and that's based on companies. If you can check them on Google, if you want, like CauseBox, Alltru, Ipsy, and others, FabFitFun also, they're very good. What they do is like wrap up every month a couple of products, like 5 to 7 products in a box as a surprise to the consumer. Now the customer is being defined by demographics, age, income, and so on. And they literally send them like box and it surprises. Obviously the cost for the for the consumer is very low because, you know, they have the volumes, so they afford, they can afford to buy a couple of hundreds of thousands every time they buy a product.

Yeah.

Now the business model is not easy in terms of pricing, but it's a lot of money to gain in one shot. And more than that, it's an absolutely crazy, unbelievable exposure. It's like, it's like It's like getting paid for someone to do your marketing. That's what it is. Right.

You're borrowing their brand in the same way we borrow brands with Amazon and Walmart, right?

Right. Like, your products is gonna be delivered to hundreds of thousands of consumers overnight. And you know how it is. She's getting the box, she's looking at what she got, she's telling her friends, her neighbors, exposure and they also have websites always. And there's YouTube channels always talking about unboxing products from these subscription boxes and stuff. It's a real buzz in the States for the last couple of years. So that's also a very interesting channel. It's not typical brick and mortar, but we also do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We've had someone on here, Paul Jarrett, in the United States has an operation out of Nebraska that does subscription boxes. That's on a previous episode that really went into the depth of this. I learned a lot. About the subscription box industry. The box industry has gotten bigger. It's grown over the last 3 or 4 years, actually pretty large. You need a certain kind of product or you have to develop a certain product line in order to really fill that, you know, monthly requirement. It's not as complicated as people might think of it right now.

Right.

Because if they're selling anything in the physical product world, as you know, there will be gear, accessories, ancillary commodities, reusables, things that could be packaged into you know, monthly or quarterly boxes, um, that really increase that customer lifetime value, um, similar to the Subscribe and Save on Amazon, but in a, you know, slightly different mechanism. And of course, um, being offered to retail is not a bad idea either. Um, obviously you know your stuff, man. What is changing? Let's just kind of shift gears for just a second. We're headed into 2026 at the time of recording this. It may, you may be listening to it in 2026. Happy New Year. Um, but if you are listening to that, what is changing? What do they need to know? What's the, is there any adaptation, anything dramatic? Stuff's pretty fast.

Yeah. Something very dramatic. Usually you will tell, you want to ask this question, I will give you a different answer. But today the answer is, is, is not something I expect. Here's the thing. Normally in the last 2 weeks of the year, we don't see a lot of responses from buyers, if at all. Most of them would be like auto emails saying, matter of office, get back to you later or stuff like that. And even if they respond, it's a very short response saying, talk later. We have been seeing, I think this month have been the busiest during Q4 for us in terms of getting purchase orders. Now you're talking about what, 3 days before Christmas? And I was going back and forth with my team and with friends and with people I know from the industry trying to understand what the heck is going on.

Yeah.

How does it even, how is it even possible? I mean, we've never seen that happening. And I think We've seen a lot of changes in our world in the last 5 years since COVID hit. I think so many things changed, so many things are changing, wars and peace and presidents and politics, a lot of stuff going on. You know, AI came in and so on. And what I think is a good thing to do is take advantage of all these things that's happening. And one very big thing that everybody knows that is happening is the tariff. Now, what I believe I'm not sure, but what I believe is that retailers, not only off-price, but all the retailers are probably assuming that the tariff is gonna roll again. There's gonna be another wave of, you know, whatever percentage the White House is gonna decide for, and they are getting ready for that upfront. Now put aside the fact that it's very soon gonna be the Chinese New Year, so a lot of manufacturers are gonna be shut for about 3 or 4 weeks. That alone is a huge, huge issue for retailers. So they're trying, you know, to purchase whatever they need for Q1. But this tariff prediction, I believe, is something that they're holding their guts to and they are trying to put their hands on today's price. Now, if they could do it just like off-price retailers and only off-price retailers did it last time, what they did, Yeah. TJ Maxx and Burlington, HomeGoods, Marshalls, all these companies, They bought as soon as the tariff topic was raised. They didn't wait a second. They just bought like crazy closeouts, inventory, normal inventory, you name it. And they ended up selling it when all the market prices are going up, but they still can afford whatever pricing they want because they are, you know, their cost is the old cost, the one before tariff was rolled.

Yeah.

So I think it's happening again. I'm—

Fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'd like to have you back probably first, second quarter of next year to follow up on that and kind of see where we're going and see where your headspace is at, you know, mid, mid next year. Because I, I do see a number of those things occurring in terms of contacts and relationships that were years in the making that finally reached out in the last quarter. And I'm kind of surprised at some of the things we're actually seeing. So it's interesting to hear you echo that same sentiment.

Sure.

And, and there's things that are going into, you know, 2027 on the planning docket and we're like, What? Like 2027? Seriously? What about next year? They're like, no, we already got that in the bag. So, you know, we're good to go. Let's keep going. Let's go into 2027. And I'm like, okay, well, something, somebody knows something I don't yet.

I'm off on this.

Sounds like you are as well, which is super cool. Well, man, I appreciate you coming in here, sharing a good word. Hopefully everybody got something out of this. If they want to keep following you, is there, you know, a LinkedIn, a YouTube, a channel, a website somewhere you want to go check out?

Yeah, I mean, retail-empire.com or on, on Retail Empire on YouTube, LinkedIn also, Taylor Offer actually in, in, on LinkedIn, also on Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's Retail Empire or Taylor Offer either way.

Yeah. If you guys want some more education, if you want some more learning, if you want to learn the ropes of what retail might look like for your products in the coming year or 2, as you're thinking about expansion, omnichannel, as we talked about before, online and offline, this might be something for you to dig into. Hopefully you learned something today. I did. So I appreciate you coming on, Taylor. You're somebody I consider a high voltage business Thank you for that.

I appreciate you having me today.

My pleasure. Guys, like, comment, and subscribe. You know, leave negative comments. It's okay. It just helps the algorithm. And share this with somebody who might need to know a little bit more about retail in their physical product business in the coming new year. It's at the time we're selling this. I'm probably going to say Happy New Year to all of you as well as a Merry Christmas, because when we record this and show it, you might be looking at it in 2026, into the future as our bubble goes. So appreciate you, brother. Talk to you all later on the next episode.

You got it. Thanks a lot.

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