Build Your Own Table: Creating Your Own Demand on Amazon with Ecomm Breakthrough | EP. #176

Do you know what it takes to succeed on Amazon despite tough competition from overseas sellers? On this 176th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Josh Hadley, Founder and CEO of Ecomm Breakthrough. Josh shares his Amazon journey, offering tips on competing with overseas sellers by building your own demand rather than fighting for it.

Instead of giving up or complaining, Josh encourages sellers to focus on what sets them apart—branding and creating demand through retail opportunities. As Josh explains how to play the game and work harmoniously with Amazon, you'll start seeing the platform in a whole new light. If you're hitting a wall with your Amazon business, these are the insights and strategies you need!

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  

Build Your Own Table: Creating Your Own Demand on Amazon with Ecomm Breakthrough

Andrew Maff and Josh Hadley

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Josh Hadley

Josh Hadley is not just the founder and CEO of an eight-figure e-commerce brand; he is also a leading voice in the e-commerce space as the host of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. His professional journey took off at American Airlines' Leadership Development Program, fresh from earning an MBA from the University of Utah. While maintaining his corporate career, Josh and his wife co-founded a custom wedding invitation business, leveraging their unique skill sets in the evenings. Recognizing an opportunity in the Amazon marketplace, they strategically pivoted their venture to create a stationery empire, growing their portfolio to over 1,300 products. Josh relishes the rewarding challenge of balancing business growth with family life in Dallas Texas. Raising four children while building a successful venture with his wife, he exemplifies the possibility of harmonizing personal fulfillment with professional success.

Andrew Maff  00:03

Whenever they started to pull back their Facebook ad spend, they noticed a direct correlation with a decrease in sales on Amazon, not just Shopify, Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, as usual, Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Josh Hadley, who is the founder and CEO of Hadley designs, as well as the E-comm Breakthrough podcast, which I am so excited about, because it's so much more fun to have a conversation with another podcaster. Josh, how you doing? Buddy? Ready for a good show? I'm doing great. Andrew, excited to be here. Yes, I'm so excited to have you on the show. It's always so much more fun when I'm like, Oh, we got other hosts. This is gonna be good. We're gonna we're gonna have a good time. I always do mine podcast kind of stereotypically of just kind of giving you the floor. Tell us a little bit about you know, your background, how you got started with Hadley designs, and, obviously, how you got obviously, how you got into the E comm breakthrough podcast, and we'll take it from there. I play, yeah. So for me, I grew up as the kid on the corner of the street with a candy stand, and so from a very young age, nobody in my family was an entrepreneur, but I was just naturally myself, like I was always driven towards, hey, what could I go buy for X and go sell it for two or 3x whatever that price was, right? And so it just like it came naturally to me. And I remember my parents at a young age saying, you know, hey, you're going to be an entrepreneur. One day, I had no idea what that word actually meant. And I was like, I don't even know, like, there's no, you don't go get a degree in entrepreneurship either. Like, so by the time I got to the college years, you know, I knew I wanted to go get further education. And so I ended up studying finance. And even while I'm there in college, like, I'm still not, like, fully sure. Like, what is it that I want to do? I know I want to be like the CEO, right? Who doesn't want to be the CEO of a business? And I have good leadership, good management skills, but where do I go? Like, there's, you know, you can do management, behavior, management and stuff like that in college, but that's not, that's not what I was really looking for. So I did finance, and I still didn't know what I wanted to do. So then I continued on. Did the non traditional route of I went straight into an MBA program right after undergrad. And so in my MBA program, I did an internship with American Airlines between years one and two, and then I actually got a job offer with American Airlines after that interview, or after that internship, which meant that, you know, I had a job offer as soon as I graduated with from my MBA program. Now, as soon as I got to American Airlines, within the first couple months, I knew that I was not meant for the corporate world, just all the red tape, and, frankly speaking, the amount of waste that happened in just any given day. Like, maybe, at best, somebody is working one of the eight hours that their butt is sitting there at the office, right? Yeah, the rest of it is gossiping about this guy, talking about the weather with that guy, talking about the sports game with that guy, like, the amount of actual work that got done, I was like, mind blown that. I was like, this is like, I don't know how people do this. Like, I'm always wanting to be doing something productive, and so for me, like just shooting the breeze with people, I was like, I'm just wasting my time. So what I was doing at the time, like, the reason why I've created my own podcast too, is I listen to podcasts all the time, and so there was one of the podcasts that was talking about, you know, there was one that I listened to that was teaching you how to like, start your own SaaS software. Then there was another one that I stumbled upon that was teaching you how to like, flip stuff and make money on Amazon, which kind of like retail arbitrage got my mind interested in the whole Amazon game. Yeah. Long story short, yeah, I find myself buying one of those courses. It wasn't like the the normal, Amazing Selling Machine course, some other name I don't even remember at this point. And yeah, we got into the Amazon game. And. And that's kind of where, where my mind started to to go towards that. But on the side, I think one important part of the story is like, my wife and I are in business together. She had started doing custom wedding invitations on the side. And so it was really like taking her world of graphic design and what she had been doing and blending it with, hey, what could we do on Amazon? So I know that's, that's a mouthful, right now, we can dive into the Amazon stuff. But any questions that make sense so far? Yeah, I'm with you. So how? So obviously, that's kind of how Hadley designs got started. Are you still heavy leaning on the Amazon side, or are you more on, like, your own website? Are you in retail, like, what's, what's kind of the split of your sales channels right now? Yeah. So our biggest thing right now is shifting towards, how do we Amazon's always been 95% plus of our entire sales. Yeah. And 2024, was our first, like, big push to say, like, hey, with all the overseas, cheap competition coming in. The only way they know how to play the game is to copy your listing and then charge 50% less. Like, look, that's never going to go away. Yes, we will go File copyright infringement lawsuits and things like that. We'll do that however, like, that's their MO overseas, right? They're not creative. They literally just like to like the only way they can approach business is, hey, I need to win by lowering my price, by lowering my price. So for me, and as I've talking, as I talk to so many other e commerce entrepreneurs, I know the game on Amazon is changing. It's 10 times harder now than it ever has been, and my prediction is, over the next five to 10 years, you hearing somebody making a 20% profit margin on Amazon is going to be a big thing of the past. Unless they have a patented product that like nobody can touch, and they're super aggressive in defending that patent, maybe they can maintain a 20% profit margin. But anybody else that's maybe in, like, the commodity space, you're looking at single digit profit margins, oh yeah, and you're going to be happy with it, like, it's, it's the grocery store, it's like, a tip channel, yeah, like, but, but that's where it's going, and that's what all the overseas sellers, that's what they want. That's the only game they know how to play. So I started to think more strategically with all right, what are the things that those overseas sellers can't do? So number one, that's branding, being able to actually tell a story. Okay, so that's something we've enhanced a lot of our branding and product packaging and things like that, to actually tell a story. But then secondly, it, yeah, retail is a big push for us. And why is retail a big push for us? Because that's something that those overseas competitors will fail at, right? They can't tell a story. They're not going to be able to show up at a trade show and actually present something to a buyer that's going to be appealing, right? Like, they're gonna be like, No, this is just like, you're just, you're just Hawking garbage at me, right? Like, yeah. So for me, I see it as a moat around my business, okay, in addition to it's also going to increase and raise awareness of our brand as well, right? So you see my products in boutique stores or in retail storefronts, right like, some people may buy it there, but a lot of people still just decide to go to Amazon. So the nice part about that is it's kind of like, like this flywheel. They see it, they'll come search for your product on Amazon. They buy it. Guess what? Now you've got search, find, buy happening right there from retail stores, and now people are gravitating to your your product on Amazon and influencing your organic ranking for the better, which is great. So big push that way, and then big push in terms of social commerce, right? So we, we lit up tick tock shop last year, and it was amazing for us. And I think this is the big shift that the E commerce entrepreneurs need to capture right now, or they're going to be caught. The shift is happening. We've been more targeted to a demand capture methodology, especially on Amazon. Those that are Amazon first brands, it's all about, what are the keywords? What is this guy doing? What's that guy doing? How can I capture more of this existing demand? Yeah, the people that win over the next five to 10 years are going to be the people that are able to generate the demand for their product. So like I said, retail actually is a demand generation opportunity, because you're raising brand awareness for yourself just by being in some of those stores, social selling, and especially with Tiktok, knowing that anybody can go viral at any given point in time, allows you to like just hit the charts and then have a massive amount of search volume wanting to come find your product on Amazon. Um, and imagine what that does when you've got all this external traffic that's coming over to your listing, right? That's going to increase your your sales velocity, it's going to increase your ranking. So it really rises all tides. And then guess what? At the same time, it's also going to boost your Shopify revenue. So at the end of the day, those are like, the those are like, the key pillars that we're focused on is like, what can I do that my overseas competitors can't do? And I'm gonna lean really heavily into that, and I'm going to go above and beyond and do the things that they can't do, because that's how I'm going to stay relevant. Yeah, and you are speaking my language so much right now, all we do is preach like the omni channel marketing side, because of exactly that. I actually have a theory that Amazon is fully aware of this is, this is where things are going. So like you obviously Amazon, not only are people getting undercut from overseas sellers, but Amazon's increasing its pricing, right? So they're closing that window of your margin faster and faster every day, just by the ecosystem that they've built. And so what became very interesting was a couple years ago when Amazon released that buy with prime feature where, you know, people can basically order prime directly from someone's website. Now, when they released that, the first thing I thought was like, Oh, this is great, because I used to do that. Anyway, I just created a fake button and would send people straight to a listing to kind of surpass, you know, anyone who's undercutting my pricing or anything like that. But then when they released it, I was like, this is interesting, because Amazon has, like, held their data so close. Like, why are they letting us kind of keep it now? And why are they letting us leverage it? And what I'm realizing is Amazon is going to slowly start to become this channel where, because of what they've built, it's just flooded with, you know, cheaper products that are just they're not great, and it's gonna hurt their own branding. So they're now letting other brands build the brand off Amazon and still benefiting from the orders by just getting the orders off someone's website. So it's very interesting how they've kind of already gotten a little bit ahead of that because they position it like, oh, you know, we're gonna just your consumers are gonna benefit. And, you know, you you get all this benefit and this and that, but, and I'm sure those costs will continue to rise too. I know for commodity products, it doesn't entirely line up because of the cost structure and things like that, but I can see how so many consumers are hopping from one website over to Amazon, or they're going, you know, from Tiktok to the website then to Amazon. Like, everyone's shopping wherever they want to. And brands really have to do exactly what you're referring to, which is, like, develop your own demand, and that will actually lower your cost, because you won't have to compete with all of these guys that are just coming in and just dropping costs on you, yeah, yeah. I think that Amazon's gonna stay very, very relevant in the E commerce space for a long yeah. Oh yeah, Amazon. I think where the play on Amazon becomes is like, people want their product now. And I know one of the initiatives at Amazon is like, How can I from point, from click to buy to within an hour or two, that product sitting on your your front steps? That's where they want to be like. That is where they are heading. And that's the appeal of why people will want to go shop at Amazon. And so I think any e commerce entrepreneur like you'd be stupid to run away from Amazon and be like, Oh no, Amazon's like, Amazon's gonna fail. They take too much margins. Like, I think that Amazon is actually like you were in front of or you're basically on the world's largest retail storefront, right? Yeah, it's all online, but just as much as you would want to have an end cap, like right as soon as you walk into WalMart, imagine your product sitting on all of those store shelves right as soon as you walk into Walmart. But it's based on keywords that you're searching for, right? And so I think that Amazon becomes a really, really focal part of anybody's e commerce game, but it's shifting from back in the 2000 10s, when it was like, hey, all you have to do is think of a good product and put it up on Amazon. You'll make millions. The game's changing. As you said, like you've got to bring the demand to the market. Yeah, exactly. They're becoming it's like they're leaning less in well, I don't want to say they're leaning less into it. They're going to keep doing what they can for as long as possible, but you can tell that they're putting more effort into becoming both an advertising provider and a fulfillment center, and now they're implementing things like MCF and allowing you to run ads from Amazon back to your own website like they're getting to a point where they're just like, if they come to our marketplace, great, but We can still get a percentage of everything else even off our marketplace by putting these initiatives into place. So it's very they're definitely going to be around for a very, very, very long time, but it's just a matter of it. In my opinion, how you, you know, you get a lot of brands that are like Amazon's the devil, and I don't want to work with them, and I want them to share my data. Blah, blah. But I kind of see it as like, if you learn to play nice with them, they can make you a very wealthy person. It's just a matter of, you've got to do what's best for your business, leveraging what they give you as the tools to help do that. You know, I was actually so I was invited to go speak at Amazon's headquarters to some of their team members and to some senior leaders last week, one of the things that they talked about, and that some of the other agencies and people I was conversing with were saying, is that the brands that are not on Amazon that think, oh, Amazon takes way too much commission. I call BS on that because, like, you're like, I said you're in front you're paying slotting fees and all that crap to retail outlets. Why would you not do that on Amazon, which is just the cost of doing business with Amazon. But here's the reason why they're missing out. If you've got a Wicked Smart D to C site that you're you've got a perfected funnel going from meta, and it's going to Shopify, and you're like, Oh, I'm printing money. Okay, that's great. However, your row as whatever your row as right now, if you're profitable on the front end, great, but your row as is probably higher if you had an Amazon sales channel and then you did your blended row as metrics between the two channels. Because of this, we have seen this in our own data, and I had Brett curry from OMG, come onto my podcast, and he said this statistic, which was mind blowing any of their native Shopify brands, whenever they started to pull back their Facebook ad spend, they noticed a direct correlation With a decrease in sales on Amazon, not just Shopify, yeah, Shopify makes sense, but on Amazon, they saw decreased decreased rankings. They saw decreased sales volume, all of it just from meta spend. So what does that mean if you're, if you're a Shopify brand owner, and you're like, Screw Amazon, I know that you've got at least 25 to 30% of your audience that's seeing your ad that is immediately leaving meta. And this, I can confidently say this, because this is the way I shop. I will leave the platform. I immediately go look at Amazon first, and I'm like, what's it doing on Amazon, and what do the reviews look like? And then if I can't find that product on Amazon, I either say this is probably, maybe this is like a sketchy company. They're like, the the products actually not that good, because you can do whatever the heck you want with your reviews on Shopify, right? Yeah. So either the products not really that good, or they're too stupid enough to think that they need to be on Amazon, and what happens is you're gonna find a bunch of cheap overseas knockoffs of that exact product. And the reason like there are overseas sellers where their entire business model is what Shopify stores are spending money on meta ads, but not on Amazon. Yeah, and they're scooping up all of those sales because the brand owners are too high on their horse, thinking that they don't want to get any margin to Amazon, and they're actually doing themselves a disservice and giving money to all the overseas sellers. Yeah, you know, it's funny. We actually did, I did that same test years ago, but in the inverse. So we took 10% increase spend on the meta side, and saw like, you know, five to 6% incremental revenue increase from what we would have expected on the website. Amazon, saw three to four. We did that across like several brands, and had the same result almost every single time, with obviously, some variations here and there. What had happened was I actually was sitting there watching my wife shop one of the holidays, like six, seven years ago, and I watched her get hit with some standard Instagram ad. Clicks the Instagram ad goes to the website, gets a pop up, fills out the pop up to get her incentive, looks around, does some looking at the reviews, realizes she's interested in buying the product. Immediately leaves and goes to Amazon to see what those reviews are, because she knew that they control those reviews. She went to Amazon, saw that she didn't necessarily it was priced the same. She didn't need it in two days. So she knew that she got the discount from the pop up. Went back to her email, opened up the email, clicked the email, winter website, purchased product. So as a marketer, my head exploded in terms of, like, how do I attribute that? Like, I can't Amazon should get credit. Instagram should get credit. Email should get credit. The site, CRO side should get credit. Like it everyone is is going all over the place to make these purchases. And so like, to your point, the way she found that listing was she had to go search their brand name. And so if they weren't running ads. There's a ton of knockoffs that are just going to run ads in your own brand name. So at a bare minimum, even these more premium brands that are like, no, no, I'm not going to Amazon. I want to control my brand here, like you have to be where your customer is, period. And then you can control as much as possible, but not being on Amazon. See. Seems ridiculous now, being on Amazon and fighting the good fight and going after, like, you know, more general terms, and if that's the brand approach that you want to have, like that, I could potentially understand, or the inverse, I know a lot of premium brands that take, like, some of their slightly less expensive product, and that's what they lean in on Amazon to just kind of build new customers and use it as a customer acquisition channel, and then build them back to their own D to C site. So I can see how a lot of that happens, but it just seems ridiculous that they're not on there at all in most cases. Yeah, it's true. What? Where do you see the puck moving in the E commerce space over the next five years? You heard my predictions. I think Omnichannel is going to be a big thing. I think, from a from a marketing perspective, I I've always said I think websites are going to be the hub of the brand. And so Amazon has started to lean in on that, with the buyer, with prime functionality of like, you know, come to my website, but if you like shopping on Amazon, you can do it from right here. And then if you like shopping on Walmart, you can do it from right here. And so all of a sudden you're going to have multiple buy buttons to get it from somewhere, or they're gonna have some type of, like, integrated, you know, buy now and then, just select wherever you want to purchase it from. Or like, what we're doing now is taking some of the data that we get of like through either like bioprime or however else, we're targeting people, if we know that they're interested in Amazon and we're doing a product launch strategy or something like that, we're just sending people sending people straight to Amazon. I think that, especially from a marketing perspective, digital marketing is becoming more and more like traditional marketing, where, like, you don't know the ROI of a billboard. You just don't you can't narrow that whole thing down and to your point of like, you're not going to get Amazon's data, so you can't really tell how much people exactly down to the individual person is jumping to Amazon, just like when you sell on retail, you can't really tell how much your meta ads might have helped grow more sales in certain retail outlets. So you have to look at your digital marketing as part of your entire marketing portfolio and evaluate how many eyeballs are you getting and what are you getting out of it, and then narrow it down by channel. So I think the most successful brands on at least from an E commerce perspective, are going to be the ones that realize you have to build a brand. You can't just pump out product like you did on Amazon, where you were just, you know, like arbitrage and stuff like that, like you're referring to. That's my opinion. No, I love it. I completely agree. I think omnichannel becomes more and more important. So real quick, econ breakthrough your podcast. Tell me how'd you get started on that? What made you get started there? Tell me about it. What do you got? Yeah, so econ breakthrough is, is the podcast that I started, what going on two and a half years ago, and it's because, as I shared in my original story, like I'm an avid podcast listener myself, and that's how I originally got started. And so it's my way of giving back, but I'm not helping it. It's not geared towards like the beginner, right? So my podcast is, get really geared towards, once you've crossed seven figures, what are the actionable strategies in order to scale past eight figures and beyond, which comes into a lot of branding, a lot of your business strategy, you're talking about cash flow management, you're talking about supplier terms, and all of the things that actually go in to make a good business. So it's not for the people that are just trying to make a quick buck on Amazon and flipping stuff. It's it's more about the people that want to try to build a brand. And so what I do is I bring on people that have either exited or they're successful brand owners, and I ask them, like, Hey, what are the actual strategies and levers that you've pushed in your business that have had, you know, direct impact to your top line revenue or net profit and so very actionable. I always leave the audience with, like, three actionable takeaways from every episode. So like, they feel like there's something they can go do in their business. So that's my way of staying engaged and knowing what's going on in the E comm world as well. Nice. All right, so let's take a page out of your book. I got two actionable everyone should go three, actually, everyone should look into omni channel marketing and go the route everything seems to be going. Two, check out Hadley designs and three, check out e comm breakthrough podcast, Josh, I really appreciate having the show. I love to give you the opportunity please everyone. Let everyone know where they can find out more about Hadley designs and more. And, of course, econ breakthrough, yeah, so Hadley designs.com, and then Ecomm Breakthrough. It's ecommbreakthrough.com, and then it's Josh@ecommreakthrough, if anybody wants to reach out to me. Love it, Josh. Thank you so much for being on the show. Everyone who tuned in, of course, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff and whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecom show.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you. Onyx. Have a good you.

Narrator  25:00

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.