Hack Your Way into Amazon - Global Teck Worldwide | EP. #27

On this 27th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Rolando Rosas of Global Teck Worldwide, an office expert in the technology space providing premium electronics and devices for work professionals.

In this episode, Rolando will be taking us on his journey from his humble beginning before the tech bubble burst in 2022 to launching his own podcast and building his own brand on Amazon. You will absolutely love this episode if you're still navigating your way through Amazon waters or you’re planning on starting your own podcast with your e-commerce brand.

Tune in and enjoy today's E-Comm Show!

If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to rate, review, and of course, SUBSCRIBE! 

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

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Hack Your Way into Amazon

SPEAKERS

Andrew Maff and Rolando Rosas

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

About Rolando Rosas

Rolando is an entrepreneur, gadget lover, and master composter. He has explored local historical sites around the world and was able to be part of an archeological dig.

Rolando is the Founder of Global Teck Worldwide and CircuitLoops. For the past 20 years he has had a track record of successfully growing an e-Commerce business using digital marketing and online marketplaces.

He is the host of a tech podcast called "What The Teck" which focuses on reviewing office technology products.

Transcript:

00:02

There are no tricks there are no hacks it's about blocking and tackling and executing that well. Hey everyone this is Nicole B. the chief pretty chick in-charge at shopprettypieces.com this Rolando with global teck worldwide. Hey, this is Tanner Leatherstein with Pegai and you are listening today and you're watching and you're listening to The E-Comm Show.

00:30

Welcome to The E-comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr. The number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew. Hello,

00:50

everyone. Welcome to another episode of the E comm Show. I'm your host Andrew Maff. And today I I'm here with Rolando Rojas of global tech and the host of what the tech podcast was sure we're gonna chat about Londo. How're you doing right for good show?

01:03

I'm doing it. I'm doing fine. Andrew, how are you?

01:06

I'm doing good. I love doing episodes with someone who also has a podcast because I mean, you got Clemson under

01:14

you and my interviewing you are you're interviewing me,

01:16

we're gonna see we'll see how this episode goes. So let's I know you're you know, you're all over the place. You got your podcast you guys do all the time. So I'm sure a lot of people already know who you are. But let's pretend that they don't. So why don't you kind of take a second here, give everyone some more insight into yourself and global tech?

01:34

Well, I guess like you said, you pointed out very well, I host a podcast called what the tech. But let me start a little bit at the beginning and how I got this, how I got started. I was working somewhere in the tech industry. And at the time, it was right before the tech bubble burst. And a lot of my friends were going into tech and say, Hey, Rolando, you're missing the boat. And you have to be in Tech because you know, they were giving away Ferraris and signing bonuses and everything in the early late 90s, early 2000s. Who knew the tech boom, the tech bubble burst, in this case, the telecom bubble, which is what I was in, and you know, got laid off. And then about two months after that couldn't find a job. Everybody that was in telecom was pretty much out of the job. A lot of people that were that everything, you know, MCI cratered. Worldcom cratered, you know, a lot of these big names cratered. And so a lot of people were out of work, I happen to have the fortune that the company I worked for, didn't ask for all their goodies and toys and hardware back. So after about two months, I said, you know, maybe that box is sitting there, I could, I could throw it away. Maybe I could make some money on it. Maybe somebody wants some. So I got dialed up a couple clients. And I said, Hey, look, I've got some headsets here. Would you be interested in and so I called a call center. And this insurer, we're always looking for headset, so I went over talk to the person. And she's like, Yeah, I'll take that. I'll take some more. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe there's that maybe there's a business here. You know, instead of just repping, the company being I was a national account manager for them at the time, why don't I just sell it myself, I think I could do a better job. So that's where the journey started for me as an entrepreneur. And then I needed to get a computer. So I decided to dust off my old six year old computer from college, because I didn't have a computer, the work that I was at taking my laptop back or their laptop back. So then I decided, well, let me go get some cards, got cards, needed a website, got a website, had somebody do it back. This is when you couldn't order online, the way we do now you had to like click to call, or it's Paulus now or something like that. So if you if you did a Yahoo store, that's how I started. And so and that's progressed over the years and to now where, you know, we're selling in multiple countries selling on Amazon, multiple platforms. And just now for the last year, like you said, I've got my own podcast here. And talking about technology and how companies can be more efficient in buying technology and bringing those into the office.

04:14

That's that is quite the background. One of the things I want to ask you because this was I knew this was the first thing I wanted to ask because I've often spoke to a lot of ecommerce sellers about the benefits of them starting their own podcast and how it can actually help them grow their business and a lot of sellers don't it maybe it's just me communicating incorrectly, but they just don't get it. You obviously have already started one. That's fantastic. Like what's what made you decide to start a podcast and what made you think that it was going to help your business in itself?

04:47

Well, you know, a podcast like I was in that camp that you were talking about, where what's a podcast going to do for me? Most of what I'm doing is mostly transactional. Anyways, And so what what value does it have during the pandemic, just kind of the way we looked at it a lot more, a lot more people than today were home. And a lot more, I was looking at the numbers on YouTube, on Google searches on everything that has to do with consumption of media was going up and up during the pandemic. And so if more people are at home, it's a lot easier to reach them were right on their mobile phone screen, my mobile phone turned off, right on their mobile, or on their computer, right. So if they're there, I don't have to go on a plane and travel to California, to New York, to Florida to Texas, to Chicago, I can reach them right there, right where they can see me. And that was kind of more of my thinking. It's more strategic. And when I started the company, back in 2002, my thinking was the same. I by myself, when I started as a solo player, let's call it a solopreneur. I can't reach everybody in all those states. And I want to sell in all those states. If I had to do that, I have to get in a car on a plane go everywhere. So my thinking started to come back around to where I started, why not hit everybody where they can see me or I can reach them. From a scalable perspective. I have a guy, Dave Kelly, who hosts also with me, he's my co host, he's always says, when he looks at the numbers on a particular clip or something on our YouTube, he says, Oh, wow, that's got 7000 views on it, that's 7000 people that I don't have to go see, they can see me or they see us or they see the information. So that information lives on. There's a lot of ways to get into somebody's not just straight into the website anymore. People are doing research. And so the easiest way to get to somebody is when they are doing that search, art of that search today includes media like video, audio podcast, not just what it used to be, which is, here's the Google page, and they found my Shopify store, or they found the Amazon store or whatever big commerce store. And that that way they get to me directly. If you look at Google Now, Google serves up a bunch of other things, including the organic results, ads, of course, but they serve up questions from around the world, or around your region. They serve up videos all on page one, that used to not be the case. So if you're not taking advantage of the media tools available to us today, the multi-platform capabilities, the YouTubes of Facebook, the podcasts and all of the rest, you're missing out on part of the search that's being done for a customer to get to you. And in order for us as a company to be really effective. We had to make sure not only were we good on the on the ads, and PPC, but also on the other forms of search, which includes YouTube includes tick tock includes Facebook includes all of those other media, that a podcast or even if you're not doing podcasts, and you're just shooting tutorial videos of how to use a product or service, that also gets indexed and gets out to the world. And your message gets out to the world. So that helps search. I think it was Gary Vee Gary Vaynerchuk that basically said something that I was very fascinated by recently. He said, and you follow Gary Vee?

08:21

Mm hmm. Of course.

08:23

If you're following Gary Vee, right, yeah, he said something about, if you're a brand, whether you're a small or big brand, the more your brand name gets out there. And the more it's recognized, the less the PPC will cost you on a per click basis. So if more people click on it, because they don't already cost you more when your brand is less known. And you also have a higher bounce rate. Now, if your name even if in passing, somebody heard about your brand, now, the number of attempts going into that ad go up, right and your cost goes down. So the effect over time is that if you are doing PPC alongside all your media stuff like podcasting, your overall cost for advertising should either be flat or stabilized or go down rather than just continuously going on.

09:18

Well, that and you also benefit from just the fact of now they've gone from basically Google searching something that they hadn't really committed to a brand for yet. So it's a more general term to just going straight to your site, in which case your paid advertising costs should definitely come way down, because you're only fighting for net new customers at that point. However, I'm sure it also does help that a lot your product line is basically like is is what I'm looking at right now. Do you sell that on your website? Is that a microphone that's available on your site? Or is there anything around you this one always something? Yeah, there's

09:51

always something Yes. And off camera, there's a bunch of more but yes, so we sell a product like this. These are mainly geared for professionals. that are working from home, or in an office or in a call center. You know, we, although consumers can buy it, our approaches, we want to be that Technology Office expert, the office experts for phenology space, especially within the office. And so these devices help folks sound and look better. You know, we have, there's a video stuff. So that goes with that. So we sell the professional version of the webcams, rather than the $40 stuff that's out there. And so we help brands, and companies look and sound better, because one of the things that we I realized early on when I started this company was that there, there are products all over the place when you're looking at this stuff. But when it comes to that person that has to, or knowledge worker, as it's called, or an office worker, there, the options are very specific. If you use something, and you need it for three hours a day, there's something for you. If you're a call center worker, and you're on your desk, or tethered to your desk, do something for you for all day. And there's a price range of options. And then when you're talking about the office, are you using teams are using Zoom now are using all these different in offices and businesses Oh, fragmented what they've, what they use and consume that they are stuff just geared for that. Just geared for your desk phone, or just geared now for your mobile and your computer. So we're in the past, you needed maybe two of these. Now there's one, and one can do your mobile, one can do your PC, and so forth. So from an Office perspective, you have 3040 100 or hundreds of people, and you get the wrong tech. You're going to have a lot of frustrated workers working from home, you're going to have stuff that doesn't work right and doesn't sound right. Imagine if you went on a podcast with an I get frustrated to no end. When I see people on podcasts, and they're wearing the just the earbuds to communicate no microphone, right? Yeah, just the $20, white wire earbuds with the microphone dangling down here. Right? It is horrible. And if if you're watching this or listening to this as a professional, you want to up your game, here's some free advice, get rid of the earbuds, invest in a quality, quality headset, and you will sound better and your folks that are listening to you whether you're talking to them as customers or colleagues, they will appreciate that.

12:22

Yeah, well, it all comes down to having the right tools for the right job, right. So you're constantly working from home, if you have a bad setup, like like when we started this podcast, like I'm not gonna just use my airpots. Like, I'm gonna have to get like a nice microphone light and all this whole setup and do it correctly. And it's the same concept and makes it makes a ton of sense. Do you slowly sell other brands products or have you private labeled anything of your own. So we

12:47

started our journey as a reseller selling for other brands, because that's what I knew. Back in 2000. Becoming a private label or selling a private label was much more difficult. The barriers of entry are higher. Mo Q's were very rigid. Now, no, for less than $10,000, you can have a private label you can have if you're no matter what, if it's a if it's a small item, like we felt like this is a small item, we focus on accessories for these more expensive professional office products. Because the MO Q's are smaller, we now have the relationships. And so we have a private label that goes alongside a lot of these products and are complimentary. And that used to not exist in our industry. And you know, and they also poo pooed them because the manufacturers made a ton of money selling accessories. And then anybody knows the money is in the accessories. Yeah,

13:42

what's really smart when you are first starting off a brand, where a reseller instead of competing with the brands that you're reselling, find something that complements them because then you can leverage the the pre existing brand awareness that those brands have as opposed to trying to build your own from scratch and then competing with people that you're also basically helping same time.

14:01

Well, you know, you also find out what's working and what's not what customers are buying, and what's not because every manufacturer has dots, no matter if you're, you're making a car, all the way to a webcam. There are dogs in the in the SKU bunch, right, there are winners and there are cash cows in that bunch and you get to find out which of those are the cash cows and those are the ones that I want to put sell alongside rather than the dogs and usually their dogs because of a variety of reasons, but I want to sell alongside something that's selling cotton quick like hotcakes. That spillover effect is going to be greater than the dog that barely selling you know, a few units a month. Yeah.

14:42

Do you primarily sell on your website? Or do you primarily sell on Amazon?

14:47

We are somewhere else we were so we're omni channel where sell everywhere. But what in when we again when we started we were mainly on our website and my philosophy like Oh, Amazon who wants to be on Amazon That's ridiculous. That's so crazy. There are no real businesses on Amazon. Are you kidding me? That was seven, eight years ago. And, and so when we started on Amazon and by the way, Amazon's become our biggest channel right now on there's no stopping Amazon, Walmart, you know to bar number two, they're making up ground, they're appealing to sellers. But still they're distant number two. And so we're on there if everybody decides tomorrow to go to Walmart, we're good. We're position prop, we're decision fine. You know, if everybody decides, you know, these big mega companies, we're tired, we want to deal directly with the small guys, which is kind of what Shopify is trying to do. We're ready for that we got our own website. So I think it's smart to have a diversified strategy, but also smart to be realistic. Amazon's driving the E commerce phrase, nobody else, you know, better but now Amazon's driving the cart.

15:53

You and I actually met? Uh, wow, I think it's probably like, might have been like three or four years it actually might have been more than that long time ago prosper. I don't know if you remember that or not. But I so I remember like, you are all you're hanging out with like, the the, basically like, I referred to him as like the Amazon like influencer collect like Chad Thompson and all amateurs, ya know, they're always together. And I was always laughing. And I was like, It's hilarious that this is the case. But if you guys all knew your stuff, inside and out. So now, from then to now I feel Amazon is very different. There's not as many like cool little tricks that you can do on search terms clamp down, like, yeah, so what, like how, what's your approach like now are you still trying to find like, little tweaks that you can do here and there or every,

16:47

every, every day, every day, you have to keep your ears open. And the best way to do that is to have information from other sellers. And so being part of a group, I'm just to put a plug in for a million dollar sellers, and belong to them, as well as a couple of other groups, because you want different points of view on what's going on. And that's how you know what's happening on Amazon, as well as your own experience. I think that's that has a lot of value. And so when it comes to tips and tricks, Amazon's clamped down that we used to have on where it was a little green neon cross on the main image to indicate that there's bonus items included or additional items. Well, that's gone. And for a long time, that was that was the rage, you know, you could do this and it was gray. And in a gray area. Amazon said no, no, no, no, no, no more of that stuff. So what what we've really turned to and talking to other sellers, that are doing really well is there's no shortcut, or having your own catalog team, or having clean, attractive listings, or doing keyword research. And this is the boring stuff. Boring, it is boring to a lot of people. But what we've looked at just just on Monday, I was talking to our person who's in charge of doing some of the analytics for us. We have to skews where we started this effort in terms of really trying to go in look at all the little levers that are in the listing. So about three or four months ago, we finalized that on a couple of our listings on Amazon. And on those first batch of listings that we did that on, and compared the numbers from January of this year to January of the previous year, sales doubled, and in some cases more than doubled one SKU doubled, the other one more than doubled, but not quite a third. So one 2x and one was two and a half x from the previous year.

18:48

Was this just changing like attributes in the back end? Or was this completely revamping like all the front end stuff as well.

18:53

So we had some of the elements in place where we thought our listing was already smoking, we had good images, we had pretty good titles, but we had not taken into account. How important are vital, like tools like helium 10 for the backend, as well as combining the the keywords that you can now the search terms that you can extract from Amazon itself. You know, two years ago, they didn't have that. So a lot of the Blackhat techniques were to try to get that stuff. And Amazon's giving it to you now, right? And they're opening up more and more every quarter because what they rather have rather than what what's happening right now and in the in Seattle, where they've got some insiders that have been taken to jail and all this stuff that's been happening. They rather now start opening up and say, Okay, how do we try to mitigate this problem of insider activity and give sellers enough information so that they can create listings that work for them and for us and That means that they have to open up, there is no, you can either keep a rigid tight control, and you're going to have more black hats, you're going to have more insider information being leaked. Or you can start opening up and just opening up so that there's enough for sellers to use. And that's what's happening. So we started taking that information and combining them. So Helium 10, alongside with a couple of other tools that we've developed, and trying to strategically find, where can we make up some ground? Where are we not being indexed? What keywords are we not in the on the first page, because if you're not on the first page, you're nowhere on Amazon, really, let's be that I think, some people have said, if you know, in the first half, the top half of the Amazon page of results for whatever keyword you're searching, you're not really going to get any any real results. Yeah, so that's what we started doing with with a handful of listings and where now the results are starting to show up, we've to x and some cases two and a half x. And we're still waiting for this stuff to catch up to us. So we can analyze the rest of the batch that we've done. But so far, the initial results look really good. But again, that's the boring stuff does not sexy, it doesn't sell a lot, you have to it takes time, it takes a lot of back and forth. Some tools make it a little bit quicker. But at the end of the day, you just have to apply the best possible optimization on every single listing, keywords, images, I'll give you something that we found out about two years ago, that's really awesome. We found out that on images. If you apply a gradient background, black or gray on the image, this is a secondary one, not on the main one, but on this on the secondary one, you will see an increasing conversion. And so and so more recently, I started talking about this with another seller. And I said hey, do you realize if you go on Amazon right now, and you Google, let's say Bose, I think beats I'm sorry, not Bose, but Beats by Dre. And that's an Apple Company. Right? They've got a lot of people, a lot of people a lot of analytics going on. Right? We could agree to that. Right? Yeah. Guess what they're doing. If you go on Amazon, right now, as of this taping, you'll find that the Beats by Dre, all of the different variations have black backgrounds on the image, red, gray, white, even black, black backgrounds on the image. And so it validated what I think and I talked to a designer guy, when we're looking at this. If you're on mobile, and you've got a white screen, blasting you blue light at your face of all this of all because Amazon's white unless you have it on dark mode, right? Yeah, that just gets you but the moment you start seeing these black images, you're pausing because your eyes, especially when you're older, let's just say 30. Plus, you find that that's a little bit more easy on your eyes to read and look at. And so you're staring it at it longer than if it all the images were white, and the entire screen were white. Same goes for being on the computer. So now the black breaks up, how much light is coming to your eye, as well as how long you can stare at that screen? It's because it's a little more comfortable, the black is a little more muted. That's why we have dark mode, right? Why do we have dark mode? Right, because a lot of people are saying that white screen is just awful to look at all day long. So take that and take it to the next level, which is okay, let's apply this to the listing. So we applied it and wherever we applied black backgrounds, we found conversion go up. Even on old established listings, that was the kicker to we are already doing well conversion wise 5060 70%, we went from 60 to 70, from 70 to 75. Now take that any day. That's

23:50

so interesting, because like you started off talking about the listing side. So like we do listings here, like all the time at this point, it's like you said, it's not fun, it is not sexy, but it's something that's necessary. And a lot of times, you know, we'll get brought on because there'll be like, you know, our listings aren't doing as well. And we look at it. It's the typical way that people used to do them years ago, where it's the shoving keywords in there, the bullet points are all caps for the first like couple words and like, you know, if they still could fit emojis in the bullet points, they got those in there. And it's like it looks spammy. And our approach has always been like you need to stop trying to cater to the Amazon algorithm and cater to the consumer because all Amazon wants us to cater to the consumer. And that's basically what their algorithm does. So the fact that you are able to figure out that we're going to cater to the consumer not only in just writing easier and making things easier to read for mobile, but also being aware that even the color of the screen actually has an effect on how long someone's willing to read something which is genius that makes a ton of that

24:52

look. Some of this some of the of the science is science, right? Like this isn't rocket science. You can we can talk we can Talk episodes around the algorithm and how people have been trying to game it. And all of the all of the hacks, right, we can talk just about hacks. But you know, those hacks have a short lifespan. And if you're in it for the long run, so if you are a business wants to grow and grow, grow on Amazon means that you have a strategy that could be long term. And that's maybe a year, two years, three years, you have to invest in into the listings, you have to invest into the catalog setup. If you don't do that, the green cross check mark that like we were doing it for a long time we got away with no everybody was getting away with it. But they put a kibosh on it. So we had listings that were searched, suppressed, until we could fix that main image. So that takes time going through and all of that, where we could have done the right thing from the beginning. And just had really good images and which is the other part that that we have really doubled down on is taking just an image and taking it to the next level. Because taking it to the next level, not not just impresses people, you come away with a distinction that's different, especially if you're getting a result of let's say you sell candles is that's competitive. Those products that are selling better, I guarantee you the candle images on page one are much better than folks that are on page three, four, and five. All right, and and so and then you go into the listing itself, you'll find the supporting the secondary images are just as nice. And something that we have found is as important as images as part of the listing, you have to have kick ass a plus content. Yep. And the a plus content gets you that next level, you throw in a little video to try to minimize the return side of things. Now you've got a listing that's kicking, you've got really good reviews, and there's no substitute for that, then it's just a matter of pouring fire. Sorry, putting fuel on the fire. Let's add some PPC, right? Where are we kicking butt. So one of the trips, we found ticks that I'm having trouble talking, one of the tricks that we found on the PPC side. And I might have picked it up from like the ad badger or one of these other guys that's on out there. Or Steven Pope, I'm sure you've heard from my Amazon guy, one of these guys. Anyways, they said Look, just put do an ad on one keyword, which I thought was ridiculous. I don't know if you've tried this? Mm hmm. Yeah, it works. Yeah, it's a key word. But you gotta you got to find the right ones, the ones that have been working for you isolate them use that as a PPC strategy. And the ads that we run that on, and it runs more efficient and better arrives. To my surprise, now?

27:52

Well, you think because basically what's happening is you're prospecting for all of these terms to figure out alright, what what else should I be running ads on, and then you see, like, Okay, I'm getting a good conversion rate on this one, you separate it out and run that one on its own. And then you can jack those bids up as high as you want. And then as you were saying, like, then it's just a matter a matter of focusing on the listing itself to make sure that it's just as conversion rate friendly as possible. So there's your listing images, your A plus content, all stuff like that. So you had mentioned, all those aspects, which are all, you know, standard now, like those are almost like you won't be successful on Amazon, there's no substitute for it, they really think there's not the thing that's still difficult to gain game is the review side, which is still the one thing that Amazon takes into account in their algorithm that's really comes down to just you know, good customer service, great product, and obviously making sure the listing is very clear. So what is it that you guys do to kind of make sure that you're generating reviews and obviously, ideally positive?

28:50

You want to get you want me to tell you something? From day one, we never did. Amazon vine, we never did the buy click sale or whatever is called. We never did. You know, Here's a coupon for $5 off rebate programs. You know, we never never, uh, you know, I'm a person that I believe I hate giving things away. Yeah, right. And a lot of people were doing it when we were when we started, you should do it. And I'm like, there's just something wrong about that. If somebody wants to leave a review, let him leave a review. But I don't want to encourage and give somebody $5 off or $10 or a coupon when they may have given a review anyway. So when they they shut all that stuff off. We didn't lose that much because we weren't. We weren't giving anything away and telling people to leave reviews the way people were doing in the past, right. So but reviews, there is no way around the fact that it is difficult and is hard. You may get one out of 100 people that leave a review, right? And wherever you go, are all around. No matter what industry you're gonna find that the no buys two reviews is that the ratio is very low, right? So how do you get more reviews, the best way to do it is to just keep using some of what's available today. And if you've been trying to bend and squeeze and find other ways to manipulate those, Amazon, when it comes to reviews, they are cracking down inside. So those hacks are short lived, they don't even look, you used to get the phone number. So you can call them now that's masked with a virtual number. You have a virtual email. And so Amazon's gone the way of, we don't want you as a seller to even talk to the customer. Right. And so everything in every turn that they've tried to do and makes changes and modifications, they made it so it's even more difficult to get a review from the customer. So we use the basic, you know, one of these tools from seller labs to go out and just hey, you know, you bought something from global tech you bought XYZ product. If you like it, I can't You can't even say that anymore. If you want to leave a review, go ahead, we would appreciate that. And that goes out. And we get reviews that way. We also put insert cards into our products, so that people have a reminder that way as well. That also tends to work well, because there's some there's some products that is crazy that well, we just have a lot more reviews and others. And it turns out when we go back and look at what were the products where we started this whole insert card. Oh, those are the ones that got it first, because we didn't do it across the board. And we wanted to find out does this actually work? And it does. It's not 100%. But you're going to get more than you would have if you didn't do it. And if you print, you know, little insert cards like this, about this size, stick it in the ticket in your product. You know, you can get 1000s 10s of 1000s of these printed in China for pennies on the dollar. Yeah. Right?

32:02

Are you doing anything to incentivize people who purchase from you on Amazon to go to your site? Because I know a lot of those insert cards that tends to be, they'd rather get you to come over to their website, as opposed to leaving a review on Amazon? Is that something you guys have tried? Or are you just stick in? Like, play by the rules?

32:18

No, you know, you can do that. Um, there's a bunch of different philosophies, like people want their, their website to be where you go, because you can get the email eventually and have them then be your customer. There's some validity to that. And your Marvin QingEr Yeah, yeah, I heard Kevin King say something, they asked him this question. And he said, You know, I rather Amazon keep the customer cuz I don't have to deal with some of the problems and marketing and all that the customer at the end of the day right now, if especially in our field in electronics 60 over 60% start their journey on Amazon. So that means 4030 Some percent are going out may have started Amazon, but they may end up somewhere else. And that number has only been increasing. You know, Google used to be the place to go for searches and start your journey. Now. It's Amazon. So it's you're fighting an uphill battle. And so why fight that uphill battle. If you're you're going to have diminishing results every single year, it's eventually gonna be 70. It's gonna be 80. And unless those other other marketplaces get their act together, it could be in the high 80s. And it's almost impossible to dethrone somebody once they got that much momentum, right. So if the customer Look, just ask yourself this question. I sell on Amazon, and I shop on Amazon asked me how many times I've gone to Walmart asked me how many times I've gone on eBay. asked me how many times I've gone to other shoppers websites. I'm very, very few I can tell you. I've been on Walmart zero on eBay only because I couldn't find what I wanted on Amazon. And those things that I went to other folks website. I did so because maybe I saw it on Shark Tank. And even when I did see something on Shark Tank, I will still went to Amazon anyways. If I can get it tomorrow or two days. Right. And here's another thing, business. We've we've had contact with Amazon business reps. Did you know this? Amazon has business reps out there that all they do is try to call on big enterprise like Cleveland Clinic, Ford Motor Company and all the rest. And they say hey, you've been buying cups. From staples. How many have you bought? Oh, you bought $2 million worth? How many headsets you bought $5 million was how many paper clips. So they get all this stuff and they say okay, we're gonna do better than the staples. We're gonna do all this stuff. And for those big companies, by the way, their back end system for buying stuff is now automatically connected to Amazon's back end. They're not connected to your back end website. So if you're at all selling anything that's non consumer related, you're missing the boat by not trying to have Amazon as really as your play. If you're focused on the consumer side, and as all about consumer activity, maybe supplements, fashion, that kind of thing, there's a lot more value being on your website. Because unless you're selling something fashionable that a business is going to buy a bunch of which like PPE, for example, then you're not going to find as much action. So why not be where the action is that that's my point. Nothing wrong with having again, nothing wrong with having your website, you just not going to see as much love and I know, a bunch of people from Shopify may come over here, and I can What are you talking about? And there's, there's some action here. There's nothing this is a no way. But I want the big pie. I want the big pizza. I don't want that little teeny anybody slice that I'm going to get from going to a little, little, you know, maybe a boutique store where, you know, they serve little boutique pizzas. That's not how I you know, I don't have that kind of appetite to have a big appetite. I want that big pizza. Yeah.

36:06

What I mean, you've clearly far surpassed you guys, past eight figures. Now at this point annually. What do you think that? What do you think attributed to that? Because we always say especially every time I talk to seller in the show, there's that 1 million mark, kind of that 5 million mark, and then definitely that 10 million mark like that are difficult, where you have to change your thinking you almost have to change your approach to get over those hills. Like what was kind of your, you know, what do you think was your bread and butter to kind of get you guys over that?

36:35

I'll tell you, the first thing you have to look at is scale. Everything scales. Imagine if, like you just said, Imagine if let's say today, you're selling a million dollars worth of product here. This is make it easier for math sake. And I said, Andrew, I'd really love to sell $10 million in a year. And you said, Okay, let's make it happen. Now, imagine that happening in a month. I will tell you, I'll say yeah, I'll take $10 million run rate right now. But your business is not ready to handle that. So you have to think like a 10 million 20 million 100 million dollar business, in that. If things scale, do I have the pieces in place? Do I have? Do I have the pipeline to secure inventory? Do I have the cash flow? Do I have the manpower? Do I have the software tools? Can I scale my business to handle $10 million $100 million. And if you're not thinking along those lines, when you're moving your way up, you're going to experience a lot of problems, or you can stay at that $1 million run rate. And you have to break away from thinking like, I've got to manage every single aspect. Or I've got to be involved in every single aspect. And it's in when you start as a solopreneur that's just the way that I started that way, you know, I'm you're the IT guy, I'm the I'm the purchasing the seller, I'm the Marketing I'm doing what costs, you're doing it all. But as you're moving up the scale, you have to think of how do I scale up? And once you start thinking about what I need to scale, then you start thinking about okay, so we may need more than one warehouse. We may need more than one supplier. So what do we need to do that all these little things will trip you up you know when COVID hit. And you know FBA shut down really in the US they shut down unless you were selling PPP PPE. A lot of sellers got hurt. Because they were FBA only, they didn't have a way to move goods, the through three PL. And we were set up for three PL and three PL with multiple warehouses. And we enjoyed this huge wave like a lot of others that had product. Now that wave, even Amazon at large from the macro has come way down. And so you have to be able to if you can scale and grow as that that pie got bigger for us, we were shipping the only problem was, we couldn't get enough inventory. And so we were really in a good position to do that. Because you we could scale very easily. Our backend could handle it, we can handle orders just coming in. We had we didn't need to add more people to handle it the a lot of stuffs automated, that's what the other thing that I would say, growing, you want to grow without having to break the budget. Go ahead and start automating stuff, look for stuff to automate. Because the more that you can put on autopilot, the less you're going to have to, you know, put a lot of people behind it to make sure that it's writing efficiently takes some effort up front when you're automating things, but the more you can automate, the more efficient the more nimble and if you have to change things. It's as simple as hey, let's let's tweak the automation and it's done. Right So, scaling, automating those are things that, again, not so sexy, they're not going to sell a ton of books around that and a lot of webinars around that. But those are the kind of stuff that will actually allow you to go from a million to 10. And then 10 Look at what the aggregators of all promised, right? We're gonna take a small mom and pop and we're gonna make him a big business because we have all the tools to scale. Right? We have all the people, we have the PPC, we have, we have the sophisticated people, that's the promise, right? If you're exiting, and they kind of pitch you the idea, we'll take your small brand and we're gonna make it a big brand, because we're going to be we have the buying power, all that. So you kind of have to think a little bit along that way. It's like, what can I do to get there? What can I do to secure some of that if you're not looking to sell out or go the out of the way they're the aggregators.

40:48

fantastic advice. Painfully true. Easier said than done, but

40:53

it is totally easier said than done. Me. Look, there. None of this stuff is sexy. The it's like, who was I was, I was trying to find out. Um, I played football. So I have a lot of steam for different football coaches, even though I didn't I didn't play for them or or know them very well, like Chuck Noll of the of the Pittsburgh Steelers took them the Iron Curtain, right? The terrible towels. You have Bill Belichick. You have a lot of great coaches that had great teams, you know what they all say? They more or less say, there are no tricks. There are no hacks. It's about blocking and tackling, and executing that well. And I want to say it's the same thing with a business. If you want to be in long term, you have to see what allows you to have good cash flow, what allows you to maximize your investment, your return on investment, your ROI, what things will increase the value of your company, what will give you the most bang for the buck without breaking your bank, you know, doing out listing optimization does that for you scaling does that for you automation does that for you. None of that stuff is is going to again, none of that is going to be a New York Times bestseller stuff. But I guarantee you will help a business grow from a solopreneur to a multi million dollar company all the time.

42:21

Fantastic advice Blondo thank you so much. I won't take any more your time really appreciate having you on the show. I would love to give you an opportunity to tell everyone a little bit more where they can find you and obviously your podcast as well.

42:34

Sure I you can find us on youtube we're what the teck and that's spelled T E CK what the teck we have a weekly podcast we have a bunch of tutorials we talk to business influencers we do deep dives on reviews for Office Technology, and we're also getting a new venture off the ground called circuit loops. Calm circuit loops is geared for businesses that are looking to make sure their internet operations are running smoothly or need better bandwidth than what they've got. So check us out on circuitloops.com And you'll find some automated tools as well to get you that price right away. So also on LinkedIn if you want to reach out personally to me I'm on LinkedIn look up Rolando roses and you'll find my mug on LinkedIn. Rolando

43:24

thank you so much great episode loved having you on the show everyone who tuned in obviously thank you as well. Please make sure you rate review subscribe wherever you're listening to this on any podcast platform YouTube or at ecommshow.com But per usual thanks again and we will see you all next time. Have a good one.

43:40

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show. Head over to ecommshow.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 companies 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.