Rolando Rosas 4:09
Awesome, Dave, thank you very much. And big props to all those folks that were on earlier. You know, Dave, we’re Amazon nerds here at Global Teck. And I’m excited about our next guest, Kevin, who is the VP of Marketing at My Amazon Guy, and he’s the founder of Maximizing Ecommerce. Needless to say, Kevin has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to this arena. He’s been in the game for a while he’s got his own podcast. He’s got a blog, and he’s got a lot to say on what’s happening with Amazon today. Because it’s not your granddaddies Amazon or even your kids Amazon. Let’s bring him on and stop talking about and have him. Tell yourself. Let’s bring out Kevin Sanderson.
Dave Kelly 4:56
All right. Hey, Kevin. Hey,
Kevin Sanderson 4:59
thank you for Having me awesome intro. We’d love to set out and use it myself.
Rolando Rosas 5:06
We’ll let you use it. Awesome.
Dave Kelly 5:09
Hey, and before we get into it with Kevin, listen, quick read from our sponsor, this podcast
Rolando Rosas 5:14
is brought to you by Global Teck Worldwide your Technology Office experts that’s been around for 20 years providing trusted, personalized office IT solutions. Check them out at amazon.com/teck. That’s amazon.com/teck
Dave Kelly 5:34
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Rolando Rosas 5:58
That’s right. Thank you, Dave, for that read. And Kevin. So I would say you’re a jack of all trades. Yes, you’re an E commerce nerd, which for a lot of us that start. You’re wearing all the hats. You’re the guy taking out the garbage and you’re taking the return look. But before I ask you about all of the insights you have, I gotta know, what are you nerding out on right now from a tech standpoint, their app or software or something that you just like, it’s consuming my time?
Kevin Sanderson 6:29
Probably ChatGPT, the AI software that lets you I still don’t understand how it works. Like, fundamentally, I get the general concept. There’s looking for language patterns. I was watching some interview with a computer scientist named Lex Fridman. And he was saying, we don’t truly understand how it works. We just know it kind of does. So it’s kind of scary when you think about how much the robots can figure stuff out with little direction, compared to what a human would need, and come back with really good results. I don’t think it’s 100%. You just run with it. But it’s phenomenal. What is it? What is
Rolando Rosas 7:07
it that you like about ChatGPT? It could do a lot. But is there a thing or things that you have found like just fascinating that you’re like I now I can’t live without?
Kevin Sanderson 7:17
Yeah, so some of it is I just love playing around with some of the prompts. Summarize is a good ones, let’s just use for Amazon sellers, you could take a whole bunch of reviews, copy and paste them into ChatGPT. Summarize the top three things people liked, summarize the top three things people didn’t like. Now, the things people didn’t like about this product. Now rewrite that as a competitive advantage as benefits statements. Now incorporate those into the bullet points. I mean, just amazing the things we’re able to do with it relatively quickly. Yeah, it’s pretty good.
Rolando Rosas 7:53
It’s in the language it writes it in is good. You know, one thing I found when writing with ChatGPT, it liked adding a call to action that Amazon doesn’t love. And we found this in Canada to be the case where it would say, you know, everything you just said as an advantage and then go ahead and buy this today or something to that effect. They was getting rejected out of our A plus content, they did not like that. So we had to remove it. And in the prompt, which for those that don’t know, the prompt is the thing you’re telling ChatGPT Like, act as a content writer and spit out like you said this summary, you got to tell it in that prompt do not add a call to action at the end because it almost always has it at the end of the paragraph or the last sentence.
Kevin Sanderson 8:40
Well, there’s one way around that and it’s called the backspace button.
Rolando Rosas 8:43
Ah, yeah. I like it. I like it. Oh, man, I’m nerding out on that right now. Yes, yeah, it’s
Kevin Sanderson 8:52
definitely it’s let’s just say it’s 80 to 90% of the way there to your point, there’s things that are like, Okay, I can’t get away with including that or that sounds off. But you can either one, tell it please remove that statement, or an amazing how it’s able to figure that out, which are you describing, or you just delete, and type over whatever it is. There was
Rolando Rosas 9:13
a tip that I saw somebody give I can’t remember who it was right now, I may have seen the Tick Tock on it. And he was explaining that one of the things that you could do to avert some of these things is at the end of the prompt you want to put Do you understand and it will come back and spit out I am a writer have 20 years experience. I’m writing for Amazon A plus content, yada yada yadi and it spits back out a summary. So that you know the moment that you hit go and you tell it yep, please do this summary like you were talking about got it. It’s gonna write it in the style or voice or prompts are everything else now before you hit? Go again. It’s exactly going to be putting into the context that you want it.
Kevin Sanderson 9:57
That’s interesting. So you’re basically forcing it To summarize what it’s doing before it doesn’t Yes. Which could save you time because then you could just hit stop generating and then yeah, no phrase.
Rolando Rosas 10:08
Exactly. No. Awesome. I’m nerding out on ChatGPT. We’ve given it the name, Eddie, because ChatGPT 100 times a day. It’s just insane. Around here, we just call him, Eddie. So did you get Eddie to write that? You know, all the different? Exactly, exactly. So Eddie is the fewer syllables are
Dave Kelly 10:27
much easier to say, Eddie, everyone on the team has been geeking out on this for a good six weeks, you know, when each department is using it differently, one of the things that I like to do with it, I don’t use it so much for writing as I do for summarization of articles. So I get a lot of info that comes my way, and I want to read it, but I don’t have all the time to read 500 words. So I’ll just drag paste, then I’ll just say, Eddie, please summarize three or four bullet points. And it just brings up what’s most important so that I can get the gist of the article. And then I can give my feedback to it. It’s such a time saver,
Rolando Rosas 11:04
no doubt. And before we move off this topic, I don’t know if you’re using this as well, Kevin, but you can now integrate ChatGPT into Google Sheets. So for Amazon sellers, who are doing a whole lot of stuff, we’re doing translations, we put it into Google Sheets. And you can get French for if you’re doing in Canada, and you could do Spanish, if you’re doing translations in the US, which you have the ability to do that with a plus content, as well as for Mexico is really good at putting things into the right context, when it comes to translating into those other languages. So if you’re a seller, and you are needing help with translations, Edie, aka ChatGPT does a really good job of that,
Kevin Sanderson 11:46
like better than Google Translate off.
Rolando Rosas 11:50
Please buy mine not even close. Yeah, no, it’s more like a speaking language. So for example, for the Mexican market, which is still tiny, but it’s still relatively important for us in the prompt. I tell it to speak. Spanish for the Mexican audience.
Kevin Sanderson 12:07
Okay, that makes so much sense. Yeah. As well
Rolando Rosas 12:09
as if you’re using let’s say, in a plus content for the US you want to put Spanish for the American audience or something to that effect or Spanish that uses the slang of an American? Yeah, it’s so it’s going to pick up on that language nuance. It’s well as if you’re doing in Canada, not just French, they’ll translate to Canadian French, which is different than French from France. Right? Yeah.
Kevin Sanderson 12:35
Or you could use that I never thought about this, but to localize it for UK. So if you’re selling UK, please localize this. For British,
Rolando Rosas 12:44
yes, British, British English instead of American English. I don’t know about you, but I’m an avid fan of The Great British Bake Off. And they have, like they call biscuits and I’m like, where’s the biscuit? Gravy is gravy. They don’t have a word for cracker or cookie like we do things or biscuits, right. So if you’re selling food, and you’re, you know, this is the best, most edible organic cookie, and you put that into the UK. Nobody’s really going to get that. But you put this gray. Eddie knows how to do that for you. Gotta stay. Yeah, no. Interesting. So let me ask you something else. Kevin, when it comes to Amazon, we all have picked up some things along the way that we know are things Oh, my goodness, I should have never done that. Or I’m never going to do that. I want you to fill in the blank on this one. Amazon sellers should never and blank. Amazon sellers should never blink.
Kevin Sanderson 13:48
Amazon sellers should never feel that they have to do everything that everyone tells them to do.
Rolando Rosas 13:56
Interesting like that one. Give me an example. What would you say that is common things that are being said that you ought to do this or this tack that are that will be blue. What are some of those things that you’re specifically?
Kevin Sanderson 14:08
So I hold virtual summits, they bring out a lot of really smart people that know a lot of stuff. We’ll just use PPC. So in May, I’ve got a PPC summit planned. And what will happen is, I’ll have a bunch of different speakers, we’ll say 2025 speakers are all experts on PPC. And oftentimes they contradict each other. And what happens is sellers will say, I really like what Person A said, and I like what Person B said, but they’re not going a mile deep and an inch wide. Unlike what one speaker said. They just go a little bit of everything and then they end up kind of contradicting. Okay, their Strategy. And then also just when so I started selling 2015 You guys have been doing it even longer than that. The levers that we had the pole were fewer than they are Today,
Dave Kelly 15:00
indeed, here comes a pro tip.
Kevin Sanderson 15:06
Sometimes people stretch themselves way too thin, because they’re trying to do everything that they heard about in a blog post, or in a virtual summit or in a YouTube video. And at the end of the day, it’s better to pick some things and go really deep on them, test them out, make them work than to try to be average, at best at everything. So be
Rolando Rosas 15:31
a specialist, I hear you saying, Go into the thing, whether like we were talking about ChatGPT and AI, going deep on it, figure it out, you’ll see how you can really leverage it for your business instead of 20 different things that you’re going to spread yourself and probably not be an expert in ChatGPT, for example,
Kevin Sanderson 15:49
yeah, exactly. Or tools. Sometimes people will sign up for tool, thinking the tool is going to solve all of their problems. XYZ software tool, I don’t want to pick on any of them. Because it’s really more of the mindset of us using it, it comes down to pick the tool, figure out how to use that tool, and give it months. But sometimes, and I’ve been guilty of this over the years of the hearing a podcast, this is going to revolutionize whatever oh my god, I got to sign up for that get the 14 day trial, here’s my credit card, I’m gonna be with it and then realize, two months later, I’m like, I don’t know that I’ve ever really looked at this. So
Rolando Rosas 16:27
can I ask you about that tools? Because you know, you’re in this space for a while. And there’s a lot of tools now, today that weren’t available just three years ago, before the pandemic or five years ago? Is there a tool or tools that you would say, Are your go to tools? You’re not necessarily endorsing them, but you’re saying this is the go to tools for me?
Kevin Sanderson 16:50
I use Helium10, like most of us do. And could I switch to another tool that probably could do just as good of a job? And maybe even more? Yes, the challenge with most tools is they all have their pros and cons. Indeed. And so the challenge is, if you find that one thing you don’t like about the tool you’re on, is it really worth switching and the learning curve to switch to go to another tool that might do a better job of that one thing? They’re not going to advertise? Here’s the five things we do worse, right? So no doubt, always challenge yourself before you switch tools, not just the cost and money, but the cost and mental focus of switching again, some of my maybe a little bit more Zen philosophy on tool like it strategies
Rolando Rosas 17:42
like it, it keeps you maybe a little bit more grounded if I were to use his N word, right? Yes, yes, hair on fire, because you can’t manage any of those tools.
Dave Kelly 17:51
Yeah, I’m just gonna make a comment that when we are using new tools, you know, definitely at that time it takes to understand the user interface, where am I looking for the data, just to get acclimated to the program itself definitely takes time. And once you conquer that, like with Helium 10, you’ve studied Helium 10, to bring something else into the mix. It may solve one problem, but like you said, it might open the door to some other problems. Kevin, I wanted to ask you a question. So we’re expanding our offering of communication devices, so people know us for our hardware. That’s speakers, cameras, it’s all for communications. So we’re looking to expand and offer complementary solutions in the services world for like UCAS or C casts. So on the services side, do you see that Amazon can help to facilitate and sell complementary services to hardware? Is there an opportunity for us to use Amazon to grow and expand our offerings for services?
Kevin Sanderson 18:56
Gotcha. For people listening who aren’t sure, including myself? What is the difference when you cast and see cast? Just out of curiosity,
Dave Kelly 19:03
one is unified communications. The other is call center. So they’re both voice communication platforms, like God on
Rolando Rosas 19:11
agent RingCentral, those kinds of things. All right, zoom.
Kevin Sanderson 19:17
Got it. So basically, you’re looking to get people into your ecosystem, essentially, right? That they buy the product they might buy your services. Now, my opinion on this has fluctuated over the years. I grew up in a corporate background, where early on in my career, I worked for a large company. It was magical with a mouse in Orlando. And a bear was this Florida. That’s exactly exactly the number one employer in Florida. And there was always friendly, but you’ll get fired for breaking the rules. It was always just so peppy. Under stated like no one actually ever said it quite like that. But there were a lot of things you just knew you couldn’t break the rules on. Amazon has a little bit of that, like you break the rules, you might get fired, I have come to learn, as long as you understand Amazon’s sacred cows of don’t ask for reviews don’t incentivize reviews, reviews are sacred to Amazon, because that’s such a core part of their experience, don’t manipulate the algorithm. Like those are kind of the core tenets. And so I don’t use product inserts. I say if you’re going to use product inserts, be very cautious. But I used to be like, almost don’t put it in a product insert, don’t ask people to do anything with that product insert, I’ve almost come to believe. And this could all change tomorrow. So no one say Kevin said go do anything because I didn’t
Rolando Rosas 20:53
Kevin told us stop doing that. Give us a stop
Kevin Sanderson 20:57
doing that or start doing that. I would say if you could get people onto some sort of email list, but you just got to be very cautious and how you do it and what you communicate to them knowing full well, that someone who’s an executive at Amazon is going to sign up for your email list. You know, I always have the they used to call it the New York Times test. I sometimes call it the Your Honor test, whatever you’re trying to justify, just put the words, your honor on the front of that state. And see if you still feel the same way you did about what you’re justifying. But then you also have to have the Amazon bought compliance test. And so if a bot at Amazon was reading this, what are they going to think you’re trying to get, or you’re trying to get one over on them. And so with that lens, you might be able to get people onto an email list. And the people who would purchase X might purchase why, if you’re not comfortable with it, don’t even go down that road. If you are like, it could be worth risking it, of at least getting people on an email us through a warranty or sign up for updates. The warranty
Rolando Rosas 22:03
warranty is still kosher, right, you could have it let’s just say an insert that says for extended warranty, go here. And if that was the language you put on there without Oh, and by the way, leave us a five star but you can leave you can’t do that anymore. But yeah, we’re an extended warranty go here, that’s still kosher.
Kevin Sanderson 22:24
No one’s gonna give you a straight answer to Amazon’s no one knows.
Dave Kelly 22:29
Amazon is trying to sell extended warranties on everything. It’s like our listing is up there and then buy the extended warranty is over here. We’re not collecting that. So Amazon must be.
Kevin Sanderson 22:41
Yeah, that’s a good point. So on that note, though, that’s a little risky. But on the front end, you could always look at like doing ads, it’s a loss leader. Or even if you lost on let’s say Facebook ads, but you collected the email address on the front end, in order for people to get a coupon code, you own that customer. In fact, Amazon will give you 10% for sending them traffic so. So there now that goes into external traffic Strategy. And in that case, that would make sense, because you have a high ticket service you’re looking to, to work on if you’re selling a calculator, you probably don’t have a high ticket service. That is the people that would buy the calculator would be highly likely to purchase that it’d be worth you doing Facebook ads at a loss to get somebody to an email list in the hopes that you can somewhat liquidate some of that costs by getting them to buy on Amazon. So that would be a very white hat way of doing things that Amazon is going to pay you for 10% of the sale. If the attribution link works correctly, but that would be I would say about official gray hats, people will argue to death, whether or not it’s white hat or black hat to add some level of opt in on a insert card, which I’m not saying it is or it isn’t. I personally don’t use them. But I have come to have seen people doing them over the years. And as long as they’re not asking for reviews, they never seem to get even their hand slapped.
Rolando Rosas 24:16
Right. And interesting. And there’s another one that’s fairly new. Kevin, I would love to see if you’ve heard of this, when you buy a product today on Amazon for a while now, before you return. If you’re using your app or whatever, there’s buttons, right? And you can say I want to return I want to track yada yadi there is a button that would say get support and you could get support from an Amazon employee. Right? That would provide quote, support. There is now the ability for that get support sanctioned by Amazon and it goes to you on a landing page. And then you’re able to dialogue outside of Amazon. Really With Yes, yes, yes, yes. And yes. And there’s no way to manipulate that button. But Amazon has an internal way for sellers that have signed up for that program. When again, you’re sending information to Amazon to bless it and give you then that support button now says, Get support. And it goes off to you to handle the post support questions and whatnot. So there is a kosher way to do that. Just talking to somebody at Amazon just this week. And I said, Can you give us that same capability for post support? Pre support, especially for us? Because we deal with devices? And oh, yeah, you’re Casey complicated. And they, I heard something like that may be in the works. You know, they couldn’t hold me to it. Yeah, we’re gonna release it next month. But there’s rumblings about some possible chat support that’s on a page on Amazon. And they can ask you the questions in real time, I would love for them to do that. Because that could also reduce returns frustration, reduce friction, and customers can feel confident when they’re getting what they want, right up front, rather than sometimes guessing. That’s why people buy four or five things because you’re not sure if it’s gonna work. Yeah, exactly as a seller don’t want to deal with returns. And I can bet you that Amazon doesn’t want to deal with more liquidated merchandise or any of the grading so called grading, they do that, which is a great job anyhow. But anyways, I wanted to let you know that if you didn’t know, there is a way to get some of that. And when you get that you can collect the email at that point.
Dave Kelly 26:33
And the customers love it, you know, the customers that we have. So we’ve been using it for about four months, four or five months now. When the customers reach us, they reach us fast. And I would say 90% of them are so happy to be speaking to us and not be speaking to an Amazon. Yeah, you’re actually just taken aback by it. They’re so surprised that they’re getting the support without calling nine people. For five trouble tickets, it’s just click here for support. They come here they see us, they can live chat, they can give us a call. It’s all right there. It’s really nice.
Kevin Sanderson 27:12
It what’s interesting about that is when I worked at the magical mouse company, one of the things they taught us was you never want to intentionally initiate the sequence. But guests or customers who had some sort of problem during their stay, and it was resolved to their satisfaction, rated their experience at a higher level and surveys than those who had no problems at all. Because they get to see like, oh, okay, here’s a human side to this business that they’re willing to help me out. And so I would say for people who, especially if you have something where somebody buys, you know, one headsets, and they might buy 50 More for a call center, they’re gonna be a lot more likely to buy those other 50 headsets. If they saw, Oh, I’m gonna be supported, in case there’s an issue. And they resolved it and they were friendly, and I liked them. You know what I mean? 100%. That’s pretty exciting that Amazon’s giving that ability. Yeah, cuz I think Amazon knows probably deep down inside, like, they can have all the SOPs and scripts or whatever, but their staff isn’t gonna know everything about every product,
Dave Kelly 28:24
or anything about any of it.
Rolando Rosas 28:28
Leave Kevin, I like Voss water. So vos, if you’re listening here, I’m here. I love to push a product. But like, Oh, yes, yes, give me a feeling like I get those by the case. And we’ve had cases come in broken, you know, this glass, in the moment you go in and try to get either support or refund has been a nightmare. And you’re telling us you’re buying from Amazon, Amazon buying it from Amazon. And so, you know, they’ll tell you no, you can’t return everything up until you get to the top, you can’t return this isn’t an eligible, and then finally find a way to get to somebody on the chat side. And then you tell them and inevitably, for the ones that cases have been broken, they’ve provided a refund. But that’s all they have the option to do. But with this type of support, you’re engaging the customer so you can like you said, somebody that could have given you a one star, you turn that around like in the mouse kingdom, right? You make them happy, they’re more likely to give you a higher rating because of our review because you took something where they’re irate dammit, you guys are robbing me and you sent me the pink one and I wanted the black one. You hear all that stuff and
Kevin Sanderson 29:44
you do this?
Rolando Rosas 29:48
You really it’s all your fault and sometimes, sir, hit the on button or hit the restart and problem solved and then they’re happy as can be Intel, for those that don’t know that, check into it, Amazon has this post support capability, you’ll find that your customers will be much happier when they can reach you as a product expert versus a gal or guy that’s sitting in 13 time zones away in another country, right?
Dave Kelly 30:18
Kevin, I’m gonna test that theory, I’m going to pay closer attention to the reviews that are coming in a lot of the reviews, we put a lot of attention to negative two star one star three star reviews, it’s nice to see four and five star reviews, we get a lot of those, but the ones that really catch our attention or anything that may have gone wrong. So now that we’ve implemented this support piece, I’m gonna pay more attention to those four and five star reviews to see if they’re specifically calling out any post sales support, because I think I would agree with you on that a lot. So I’m curious to see for myself,
Kevin Sanderson 30:53
yeah, I’ve had customers who sent the wrong product, for whatever reason, and I just fix it. And they actually were like, commented about it in a review on Amazon. So I would imagine you guys being in something that needs more customer service, more issues would come up, whether it’s user error, or whatever, you know, getting people more comfortable with the product, you should definitely see an increase there, there should be a correlation between more chances to fix the problem. And getting four and five star reviews, assuming the issues are fixed to the customer. Right,
Rolando Rosas 31:29
right. And that’s all we want. That’s all we want. Because the more complex the product, the more touches the customer can have with you whether pre or post, the less friction you have in the entire process from the beginning of the line all the way when you get to the fuzzy rope, and they let you in, the better. Now, he’s like a fuzzy rope and, and the beginning and ending of line. I want to have a little fun with you, Kevin, and oh boy, this segment that we have,
AI 31:54
well kept safe as well. Secrets. Gotta keep them safe. And sound. Well, let’s see. perceivers are just like diamonds
Rolando Rosas 32:10
by the way, that was written by Eddie.
Kevin Sanderson 32:13
By Eddie, Eddie.
Rolando Rosas 32:15
And that was written by another I don’t know what we’ll call her. Elvira Elvira wrote, actually that whole composition. It was all AI.
Kevin Sanderson 32:24
Oh, wow. It was the graphic AI two.
Rolando Rosas 32:27
That was our producer, Oregon.
Kevin Sanderson 32:29
Okay, got it got it got not quite there yet. But it’s not quite there.
Rolando Rosas 32:32
We you know, you could do dolly and all those other things. We just said we’re still have a hand in it. We won’t let it be 100%. Yeah, I want to share with you and dialogue with you about best kept secrets. And I’m calling it the top three things for 2023. Number three, and you touched on you touched on external traffic going to Amazon. And you get I wouldn’t say you steal my thunder. But you’re reinforcing exactly the notion that Amazon is right now. Changing. This wasn’t the case three, four years ago. Right now it is. And those sellers that are paying attention should pay attention to bringing external traffic because it boosts relevancy, organic ranking and so forth. What do you say to that?
Kevin Sanderson 33:20
I say it could be a very good Strategy with an asterisk, okay, of it depends. Everything in business has the word it depends on it, and there’s no sacred cows. So anytime you control traffic, meaning they’re on a list that you say, I want to send this right now, and you hit a button, and it sends an email to people, that is traffic you control that is the best type of traffic, because a percentage of them will click on whatever links you put in there. And a percentage of people that click on the links will buy whatever it is you ask them to buy. The challenge with external traffic is it can take a long time to build up an audience that’s monetizable, or it can be very expensive. So if you’re selling a $12 calculator, external traffic is probably not a good Strategy for and there’s no margin for that. There’s no margin for it. You know, on Amazon, you can kind of look at a costs and as a percentage of the sale of your product, and Amazon works that way. Whereas on almost all other ad networks, there is a minimum expense to acquire a customer. And so you could lose money. In some cases, if you’re selling supplements, or if you have products like what you have where somehow down the line just because they’re familiar with your brand, they might buy your higher ticket services, or they might be likely to be a be to be cut funny. Yeah, it might make sense. One thing I’ve dabbled in, and this might be something that some people might be like, Kevin, I never thought you To say this is cold emails. So
Rolando Rosas 35:04
please, this is a topic we’ve been talking around internally a lot lately, what’s going on with cold emails that we should know as a seller?
Kevin Sanderson 35:11
Yes. So cold emails, I’ve dabbled with cold emails. And let’s just say you have a use case. And it’s something where maybe it could be somewhat graphical in nature or something, where I use yours as an example, let’s say you’re sending out to companies that you have these headsets and whether or not you actually have them engraved on him, or you just Photoshop it. On the side, it’s their logo. For a pro tip. Yes, so let’s say you were going to do cold emails, which is a whole other podcast to research into how to even do cold emails, do not do cold emails with your regular domain, unless you just want to destroy it. So use MailChimp for whatever you’re using to do cold emails, there are services like lead list that are exactly for this particular thing. But if you want people to actually look at your emails, everything has to be looked at through the lens of W I fm, that’s the radio station, they’re listening to what’s in it for me. And one of the things people like is to see something that represents them that doesn’t look like the email was copied and pasted. And one of those things, it could take more time and effort. But you could Photoshop the logo of the company onto the side of the product. So it makes them feel more like oh, this is something we have to use it because there’s our logo there. Love it.
Rolando Rosas 36:39
That’s a great tactic. Dave, are you taking notes?
Dave Kelly 36:44
I’m taking notes, I hope our media team is listening.
Kevin Sanderson 36:50
Not worth testing out.
Rolando Rosas 36:51
I’ll just say that. Absolutely. I’ve Duly noted. Absolutely. Now let’s go to number two. I don’t know if about you, Kevin, but stuff is really changing on Amazon, the way they are approaching the legal aspect of sellers and rules that apply to them apply to Amazon, therefore they’re applying it to sellers. So understanding how strict Amazon is right now. They’re just recently a ruling came out on the FTC side about supplements and the language that you need to have. And they’re striking down listings that have claims of any sort. We’re seeing an uptick on that. And I’ve seen in a couple of the Facebook groups that I belong to validating that. And then the other one that’s really creeped up in an interesting way is the prop 65, the prop 65 warning that you have to apply to your product. Now something I heard recently, and I’d love to see if anything or heard about this and or add that. Because California prop 65 is strictly a California thing. There right now is an open season against sellers that don’t have that warning on their listings. And Amazon, which was the one defending some of these claims and lawsuits is now essentially passing down the responsibility to the seller in trying to defend it. Because in the business agreement you have with Amazon, you’re gonna hold them harmless, right? That’s part of the deal. So Amazon, from what I heard from a lawyer say that in their discussions with Amazon, they are then holding hostage funds for the sellers if a prop 65 thing comes against them. They’re making it Yes. And they were able to come to some agreement within the Amazon legal team to understand, hey, you shouldn’t hold the entire funds, like all your money. So there’s a limit right now on what they’re doing with that. But he’s this I never heard about this until literally just a couple of weeks ago. So Amazon’s getting more strict. They’re getting more mature. There’s more heat on them and the heat is flowing down.
Kevin Sanderson 39:09
I have a slightly different take on that. I don’t think Amazon’s strict at all, like enlightenment. Oh, yes, you can. People are gonna say Kevin doesn’t make any sense. Hear me out here. All right. When I was at the magical place, I was a restaurant manager. We had three layers of oversight for like health and sanitation. We had the state of Florida Health Department, which would come in maybe once or twice a year. Look around. Everything’s great. Here we go. Usually great. The company had a kind of internal health department and they would maybe once or twice a quarter come in and inspect and they’re a little stricter than the state of Florida was. Then there was more localized to the park. I was in somebody to go around to all the park this person their entire job was to go around to The banquet catering department and seven or eight restaurants, whatever the nugget was the time this person was in the restaurants every week, like looking for dust under a box in a closet that no one ever looks at, like looking for everything they were going out of their way. Amazon’s your internal inspector, this is the internal inspector. Okay, Amazon does not have a culture of internal inspectors that are going above and beyond. I think Amazon is 100% reactive. And they’re very libertarian, but they’re just not libertarian enforce it. They don’t go out of their way to create new rules. It’s only when it’s forced upon them by government. Okay, so with that lens, everything we know that Amazon has come down and people whether it’s pesticides, or prop 65, or whatever else, it’s not because Amazon says, hey, you know, we might have to get in front of this issue? No, it’s probably when there’s a letter from some lawyer from someone, because they don’t want to get evolved and all that they don’t. So yeah, so just know, there’s somewhere where you gotta see the writing on the wall, what legislations are coming out what places I would love. If Amazon were to say, hey, like in the European Union, you can say only turn on my inventory storage, or sales in certain countries, that maybe you could geofence certain states or out of certain states, if that was an issue for your product. That would be if I had any wish list for Amazon. Because as we’re seeing the direction in this country, we’re going to end up with two countries, in essence of two different philosophies. I don’t want to get political, but there’s going to be some states, I go one direction, and some states go another direction. Yeah. Florida and California are probably the polar opposite. So what can I say? And what is it? Exactly, and maybe your products do better in a California environment, and maybe your products do better in a Florida environment. And I wish it’d be nice if over time, we had a little bit more control over that. But that’s just a thought.
Rolando Rosas 42:20
It sounds like you know what you’re touching on there’s another thing that was very popular probably a year ago, where a bunch of states turned on the you must send us a sales tax yessing. And then, oh, you have inventory in the state of Washington, or you have inventory in California, not only sales tax, but now you got Nexus. So you got to pay a franchise, income, all of these things. And at some point, there are some states there’s like a common sales tax form for I think we have to get in that direction. Because if bigger companies, this is where I think the levers get pulled, when the bigger companies start pulling these levers and saying, Hey, come on Amazon, you got me doing 500 things just to sell one product, then we may see some change. But until then, I don’t know if the different municipalities are gonna get together and gang up on Amazon say, yeah, do this across the whole country. That theoretically could happen. That happened under the tobacco lawsuits were 40, some states got together and said, Hey, tobacco companies, all you pay out to all of us, and then that happened. That’d be the other lever that would be pulled. But under the current regime of California, Florida, we’re just going to have to deal with it until something changes.
Kevin Sanderson 43:35
But the reality is, it’s gonna keep changing, like in 2015. In some ways, state sales tax is a lot cleaner than it was in 2016 2017. Before the South Dakota case, on board, so
Rolando Rosas 43:49
that was a, it was a mess. But no, that’s because Amazon stepped in and said, Okay, we’re gonna start collecting because the states said, you know, I don’t want to collect from 10,000 sellers in California way, just Amazon pay us in one big shot every month from your bank account.
Kevin Sanderson 44:06
Yeah, I’m no lawyer, I have no dog in the fight. And what happens when it doesn’t, it’s just more just commentary on where I see things are weak. But I truly believe Amazon, to use the example of marketplace facilitator, I don’t think Amazon necessarily said, Hey, sellers, we’re going to start doing this for you as a service to get ahead of it was because there was legislation in certain states and then after the Supreme Court ruling, a bunch of states started saying let’s do this, and then other states are following suit and having their own legislation. And so then he was like, Alright, we have to so let’s do it. But to your point, too, we also have to remember there’s a push pull with powerful forces that were just stuck in the middle of as sellers of you have large companies like Amazon, but to your point, there’s also large companies that have a lot at stake selling on Amazon. They’re big brands, that they’re not selling in malls anymore, and and they have to sell their stuff online. And Amazon is the biggest place to do that. So, you know, collectively they have a lot of poll. And they probably have people in Washington DC who shake hands and kiss babies to influence.
Rolando Rosas 45:17
And so doubt no doubt I’m 20 minutes from from that place where there’s a lot of that action is going on. And you know that there are I would let’s call them influencers in one way or no influencers, they are the K Street influencers plus a whole bunch of other influencers running around town here. Which brings me to the last piece of this top three things for 2023 influencer marketing becoming the mainstream, if the growth is exponential. What are your thoughts? I know my thought here is that I’m seeing and hearing and talking to other sellers, that when they get the right influencer or influencers, promoting their product online, they have seen results just increase overnight. I’ve heard an example the other day of a company who didn’t even pay this influencer to talk about their product, but she’s mentioned it on a tick tock just Hey, guys, I tried this. And it really is such a time saver it Yadi I loved it. I don’t get paid, but I would recommend it to everybody. And like overnight, they went from selling something like 100 units a day to like 600 units a day. Off with that one tick tock from somebody they didn’t even pay. What’s your thoughts on the influencer marketing right now?
Kevin Sanderson 46:33
Yes, influencer marketing. Again, it depends on your product. And it goes back to there’s so many levers we can pull. And so is the juice worth the squeeze and the time and effort it’s gonna take you to figure it out. Does it make sense? If you have a visually appealing product? Or a product that maybe could use some explanation, then it makes sense. And who is the influencer? Who’s watching? So there was after the Super Bowl? I guess Mr. Beast responded to some tweet. And for those who aren’t familiar with Mr. Beast, just look him up. He’s like the biggest YouTuber. That was Superbowl commercials like $7 million.
Rolando Rosas 47:09
He was in, like, two seconds.
Kevin Sanderson 47:13
Oh, was he? Oh, God. Yes.
Rolando Rosas 47:14
But he was I don’t know if it was Doritos. Or he had a three second little bit where you said something in one of them. figure what?
Kevin Sanderson 47:24
What his point was that you could spend to what is 100 million 200 million people watch the Superbowl or whatever, to reach them. 7 million Hearos. But I have a way you can reach that many people for less money. So he has a way. So it’s going to be less expensive than traditional advertising, which outside of sports, most people are watching the commercials, sports you at least are tied into live. Because people want to know in the moment, you know if their team scores. But outside of that, more and more attention is put on niche areas. So to use Mr. Beast as an example, I noticed that sometimes my kids love watching him. But sometimes we’ll have Domino’s Pizza suddenly is delivering a pizza in the middle of the video. They paid for that. Or it that’s more product placement. Or sometimes it’ll say This video is sponsored by honey, you know
Rolando Rosas 48:20
the Yeah, he does that? He does. Yeah, yeah. And so he’s getting big name brands Capital One and a couple Oh, exactly. That or if
Kevin Sanderson 48:29
you are a big name brand, it makes sense to get on a Mr. Beast where it’s the size of the audience. But for most of us, it’s not about the size of the audience is about the quality of the audience. And who are they? For example for you guys? You don’t have to have Mr. B sized audience to have a value and people wanting to get in front of your audience, because Amazon sellers are very valuable audience. Yeah. And so it really just depends on where is the audience and who’s watching it. And how niche are they in specific? And how good of a fit are they for your product, which I think that’s where people need to focus on and not worry about, I want to find another Mr. Beast because Mr. Beast isn’t going to respond to you. Even if he’s less expensive than a Superbowl commercial. You’re not gonna get the return on investment there,
Rolando Rosas 49:17
Mr. Beast for most Amazon sellers, probably not the right influencer, there may be one or two or somewhere out there, but it takes some research from what you’re telling me. Yeah. All right. Okay, Jack. We’re gonna check. Absolutely. All right. So what we want to do here is in another game, we want to play with you since you were a longtime referee. You were in the middle of the action, so to speak for football games. So this should come really natural to you. This what is the first word that comes to mind when I give you these words? Number one, here we go. word or phrase that comes to mind? FBA opportunity, Amazon advertising necessary. Chinese sellers learn from each other Amazon Seller Support, please improve Amazon q&a, video responses, interesting.
Dave Kelly 50:14
drone deliveries pipe dream, Walmart versus Amazon, Amazon, Elon Musk generational the future of Alexa at the prime. And lastly, Jeff Bezos. Thank you.
Rolando Rosas 50:31
Yeah. All right. Well, we want to thank Kevin for being such a good sport with our games. And so Kevin, if somebody wants to get a hold of you say, I need to talk to you. How do we do that?
Kevin Sanderson 50:48
Well, I do have some virtual summits coming up, I have some it’s about every quarter, you can always go to maximising ecommerce.com forward slash weight, w 80. And you can sign up for the waitlist to find out about upcoming summit and join us I always make them super affordable and have lots of great people on
Rolando Rosas 51:07
you just had one recently that was almost, I wouldn’t say free, but it was really like seven bucks for the virtual, which was amazing for the value could have been $7,000 with all the speakers that were on there. So we’ve been talking to Kevin Sanderson, as part of our Amazon series on growing your business faster on Amazon, I want to thank you personally for coming on. Kevin, you really dropped some serious knowledge today. And I want to thank you for listening today. And if you’ve enjoyed this, go ahead and check out our other guests. Steven Pope was on here talking about ChatGPT length and making predictions about where Amazon was going to meet you want to check him out, as well as Kevin King, another very smart gentleman. You can find all of those episodes on circuitloops.com or wherever you consume your podcasts. So I want to thank you for tuning in today as part of our Amazon series show.
Outro 52:04
Thanks for listening to What The Teck? Be sure to check out our other episodes featuring awesome tech and amazing guests. Find them on circuitloops.com or wherever you consume your favorite podcasts.
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