Amazon Is Not Your Business Plan: Why Omnichannel Selling Wins Every Time | EP. #199

Andrew Maff 00:03
You can't just keep thinking that Amazon is going to be there all the time for you, Amazon's going to get more expensive and there's gonna get more and more competition.

Narrator 00:11
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host. Andrew MAFF, owner and founder of blue tusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.

Andrew Maff 00:26
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing myself. I'm doing this one solo today, and there's kind of a reason around it. I have really done a lot at making myself known for hating Amazon but acknowledging that they exist and that one must be friends with them and make things work out. And I have always been known as someone who really likes to preach omni channel marketing, and so when I say that, I'm referring to encouraging brands to really explore selling on other channels, outside of Amazon, or at least putting more effort into selling off Amazon. And I want to take some time today, I wanted to do this episode to really use this opportunity to just kind of talk about, like, why I feel this way, and what I've seen happen over the course of my career and where I think things are going. So to give you a little bit of background, right, like where, where all this thought process started, I had been in E commerce, marketing for, I think it's like 16 or 17 years at this point, when I was in college. In fact, I might have even been in high school. My father acquired a small e-commerce company. Well actually, I say that my father acquired a small company that sold shocks like car suspension stuff. And the company used to just like door to door to dealers and things like that. And my dad was always big in computers and stuff back then, because this was, like, right around, like, I think early, mid, 2000s or something like that. And so him and his buddies bought this company, they put it online, and they scaled it up, like, within a couple years, like it was, it went from, I I want to say, if I remember correctly, I think they bought it for under $100,000 and it was doing well over, you know, three, four, $5 million within the first several years, they were one of the first ones on the internet. One of my favorite things, in fact, to make fun of him, is that they were approached by Amazon to be one of the first people to sell on Amazon something other than books, and they turned it down. And it is my favorite thing to yell at him about, because I probably wouldn't be doing this podcast right now. But basically, they started this company I wanted. I knew I was wanting to be in marketing. I always want. I was fascinated by how bad advertising was, and I thought I could do better. And so that was always the route I wanted to go in. And so my dad was like, hey, you know, you're still in high school. I need help in the warehouse. Help me out in the warehouse, and in turn, I will also have you help with some marketing stuff. So I actually started helping them out with, like, email marketing, things like that. But so that was where I started. Flash forward a little bit, started an agency in college, so I got involved in the music industry for a little while, and got out of that pretty quickly. But that agency ended up kind of focused in more like retail, brick and mortar for the most part, that kind of bled over into hospitality because of the music side got out of the hospitality side, got out of the music side. Stay focused on retail and the brick and mortar side, that obviously at this time, is when e commerce started to grow. And so I started to get more and more involved in the E commerce side. And back then, what I was seeing from an omni channel perspective was you were now slowly starting to see brands encourage people to shop on their website as well as in the store, whereas obviously things have changed now.

Andrew Maff 03:56
Flash forward again. Ended up merging that agency with another had them buy me out. Wasn't the best situation. Went back in house for a while, and so I went in house with and worked for someone who's pretty well known in the industry. They owned a eight figure e commerce brand that I believe at the time was about 80% e commerce, or 80% Amazon, I should say. And so at this time, the wife and I had taken a pretty big jump. We originally were born, I was born and raised in South Florida. It's where I met her, and we moved up to North Jersey. She counter communed into New York City. I worked for this company in Jersey, and we had just moved she had just got a job. I just got this job. We just got up there. I think I started in August, and by q4 so this was November. It was either November or the first couple weeks of December. I can't remember who was like peak q4 typical back then, especially we were, I think this is 2006 16, I think 2015,016, typical of Amazon scaling really well. Hit a snag with ads where credit card just capped out and we couldn't pay it off fast enough. So we were just switching out cards because of how much it was spending. And so we switched out the card, and for whatever reason, Amazon thought it was fraud. And so Amazon decides to shut down the entire account for a business that is 80% Amazon and is in peak Q4, and I'm there three months. If that, I immediately started to panic. I was like, we are screwed. Where this company's gonna shut down. I'm not gonna get paid. I'm gonna get fired. I'm gonna get laid off. I'm not gonna we just moved in his apartment, and so I was in a panic. Luckily, the person I worked with, he was he guy really knows Amazon, so he was able to get us back up and running within, I think, was about two maybe three weeks. So for about two or three weeks, I was in a panic, and all I did was look up different things that we could be doing to not be so reliant on Amazon simultaneously because of my constant need to be in the agency space. I guess I was also managing the marketing for several of his other businesses, one of which was a SaaS platform on like the EDI side, so it was still in E commerce. And I was helping out with a few other businesses he had, and I was the only marketer. It was just me. And so I got to talk to a lot of different e commerce brands and learn a lot about how they operate, what they do, versus, you know, from an operational perspective, but also from a marketing perspective, where they're pushing things, etc. I also worked with one of his partners. So he had a one of his businesses, he had a partner who worked under the same roof, very kind of ancestral relationship, but it worked out. He owned a wholesale business, so I also worked with him, and also got to speak to a lot of his brands. And so after having a lot of conversations with him, learned a lot about how everyone was feeling about the space. And one of the things that I thought was missing was a full service agency. Now I know a lot of you probably just shivered when you heard that, because the term, the term agency alone, has a negative connotation, let alone full service. I'm going to get into that a different podcast. I'm not going to use this to talk about that right now. We'll stick to the omnichannel stuff. But so we started this agency, and at that time, it was 2016 and Amazon was still like at its peak, people were losing their minds. You could throw up a product on Amazon with a garbage listing and it would do totally fine, and people loved it. So I think about 85-90% of our services were, well, all of our services were full service, but like 80 to 90% of our revenue was coming from Amazon stuff. So it was basically all stuff. So it was basically all we did. And so I lived and breathed the Amazon space for a long time, and I hated it. It drove me crazy. I thought anyone that solely sold on Amazon. They used to all drive me insane, because they would be so focused on really small minute improvements that would give them a semi like, minimal in percentage point improvement, like it was nothing. And I felt like all of this effort for you to make, like, a few extra bucks every month, when we could have taken this effort and helped you get onto other channels and help you diversify. And like, you know, it was the thing that drove me crazy about Amazon, was there's only so much you can do on there, and as a business owner, you want to constantly be improving, improving, improving, growing, scaling, growing, keep going, move, go, go, go, like, all the time. And so everyone we worked with was always like, what are we doing here? Let's do this. Let's do that. Let's test this. Let's just that. And you're doing so many things at once that it starts to actually dilute a lot of your data, because you can't AB test everything at once, because your data starts to get mixed. So used to drive me insane. And that was, you know, personal problem, I guess. But one of the things that we started to realize was, for some of the brands that we did have ads running off Amazon, started to realize that we would see increases in specifically like social media advertising, where all of a sudden, we would then see an increase in Amazon revenue, and we didn't see as big of an increase in the social revenue that we thought. Then we started realizing, okay, a lot of the search terms that we're getting for our ads are actually the branded name. Now, for some of the brands, it was like, how are we getting branded search? How do these people know about the brand, it's newer? Or it's not really a product that you would search for this brand for on Amazon. And so we did a test. I think we did it with about a dozen different brands, where we actually left their off Amazon. Spend flat, changed nothing, and then we left their Amazon advertising spend flat. We changed nothing, and we got like a control month. Then the next month, what we did is we left everything flat again, but we actually increased meta ad spend at the time as Facebook ads by like, I think it was 10% almost every single one of them we saw like a six to 7% like supplemental increase of revenue on the website, but then about a three to 4% increase on Amazon. So I started to think, like, okay, there's got to be people that are jumping from the website to Amazon.

Narrator 10:11
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Andrew Maff 10:43
One day, I was lucky enough to watch my wife shop. Lucky me. So sitting there watching her shop, we're sitting on the couch and watching her shop, and she knows nothing about what I do. I love to talk to her about it, and she it's in one ear out the other, which is fine, because I do the same for what she does and it works for us. So I'm sitting there watching her shop. And stay with me, because it gets convoluted. She got hit with an Instagram ad, standard Instagram ads back then, like pastels and that kind of thing. And it like, the products, just like floating in the air for whatever reason, and that's what got her so she liked the product. I was cool. Clicks on the Instagram ad. Instagram ad takes through the website. She gets hit with, like, a pretty standard pop up, right? Like, 10% off your first order, or something like that, fills it out because she thinks she wants a product, fills out the pop up closes the pop up, starts to look at the product on the product page. She then sees a lot of really positive reviews. And so I asked her, like, you know, she's telling me what she's doing and why she's doing it. And so she goes, the reviews are great. She goes, but because this is on their website, I feel like they have control over this. They're probably just hiding all the bad ones. So she left the website and went straight to Amazon. So she did exactly what I had a feeling customers were doing. So then she goes through Amazon, sees the reviews are relatively the same, and that the price on Amazon, as well as on their website, is the exact same. She didn't need to get it in two days. So she went back to the website. Actually, I take that back. She actually Googled them for whatever reason, because she couldn't spell the brand name right for whatever it was. They showed up as an ad. She clicks on the ad, which drove me crazy, because now attribution is out the window. She gets back to the website, goes to the product page, then she goes back to her email, gets the coupon code, purchases the product. So she hit Instagram, the website, email, the pop up, Amazon and Google ads all in one purchase. So if there's a marketer, I thought about getting divorced. I was like, What are you doing? I can't track that. I have no idea who should get credit for this. So that's when I started realizing, okay, things have to be cohesive across the board. Again, different podcast. But so I realized, like, okay, she went to Amazon, learned about the product, and then went back to their website because she knew she'd get the discount. I wonder how many people are actually shopping on Amazon, then leaving and going to the website. That was kind of tough to judge, but what I could tell was that she went from the website to Amazon. And so I started creating a button. We just referred to it as like the available on Amazon button. So directly under the Buy Now button on a on a regular DTC site, we would put a custom button that said, available on Amazon, and we would link it straight to Amazon's website back then, they didn't have the attribution code, so you didn't get 10% we just did it. And the thing I liked about it was, when she went to Amazon to search for them she had, while she did search for their brand name, several competitors showed up in the ads. Several, you know, people with higher BSR showed up. So like, they were all at the top. And so I'm like, okay, you just had to go to a platform with a search engine that's going to show all of my competition. I want to have you go straight to the product right standard marketing best practice reduce the amount of clicks. So we added this available on Amazon button and linked it to the listing. And what we used to do is we'd actually have a Google Tag Manager on it that would track how many people are clicking this thing. We would track it in Google Analytics, etc, over time they came out the Amazon attribution code. So now I was it was a lot easier to talk to brands about it, because they would get 10% off, but at the same time, I could also now count how many people are actually converting. And so what we would do is we would take, like, the total amount of clicks that actually people clicked on the button, and then we took the total amount of conversions over a certain period, and we would divide the two and basically come up with a click value. So every time someone clicked on that, we assumed that, you know, X percent of them would convert. So x, you know, certain clicks were worth X amount. So what I could do is I could actually feed that data back to like Google, or, at the time Facebook ads and actually teach it to optimize based on people that were more likely to bring me value, and so it was people that were more likely to click on the Amazon button or people that are more likely to purchase on the website. So this worked really well. A lot of brands. It worked out nicely. The issue was, and still is, you don't get to keep the data that those people, the actual conversions, don't talk back to those platforms, so Amazon's not telling Google or meta that they actually converted, and Amazon still has their super garbage fees, and then you also have competition all over your listings, so there's a ton of cons with it, but it did allow us to improve the overall website, and for those brands that really put CRO first and made sure their website was in a good position, as well as their listings, they saw huge improvements, not only from an overall conversion rate standpoint on their website, because in my theory, the Amazon branding really helped improve the overall, like, I guess, like the overall social proof, the average consumer has no idea that. You know how, how easy it is to sell on Amazon, things like that. So if see people see that, oh, you also sell on Amazon, you must be more reputable. And so my theory was, that's why people were converting. But same thing where we actually saw significant improvements in BSR, so overall organic ratings on Amazon were improving because we're driving off Amazon traffic. So it was awesome. So it was kind of a have your cake and eat it too thing, but Amazon's still getting their cut. So loved it. So we kept doing that. Did that more and more. Then what happened was 2023 finally got wind of Amazon coming out of the functionality that was relatively similar, and so I was able to, after a lot of digging, get in contact with them. And so Amazon releases the Buy with prime functionality. I'm a big fan of it. I like it. Lot of people have problems with it. I totally understand. Makes a lot of sense.

Andrew Maff 16:44
There's still a fee, right? It's and what is FBA? Fees are now 30, 35% something like that. Buy with prime. It's like a 3% commission, although, if you're super nice to them, they'll waive it sometimes for like, six months, which, by the way, if you're listening to this and you want to try it, I have a rep. I can get him to do it. I hope you didn't hear that, but you it's nice. It works. You get to keep all the data. That's my favorite thing, right? I'm a marketer. I want the data. Give me customer names, give me emails, give me addresses, give me everything. I want to be able to use that data to sell them more shit or to sell their friends shit. That's what I'm trying to do. So loved it. Really leaned in on it. Nice thing too. You can pull over your reviews from Amazon, so that helps improve the overall conversion rate. But basically, it's a it's a great way to kind of improve the conversion rate and build out the omnichannel side, either way, whether use the buy prime button or use available on Amazon button or whatever. The one thing that I realized that this was the strongest way to use this type of stuff was I can now segment out an audience of people that are more likely to shop on Amazon, and I want to provide the best experience possible for my customers. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to segment them out, and I'm going to give them specific wording or specific offers or send them to specific places that's more relevant to Amazon. So for example, it's fantastic for product launches. As you all know, if you launch a new product on Amazon, you've got like a 30 to 60 day, some odd honeymoon period where they give you a little bit of a better ranking, to give you a fighting chance, and then eventually you die off. So you've got about a month or two to really get some orders in, get things moving so that you can stay up in the rankings. And so what we would do is we would actually take all this data and drive traffic straight to Amazon, give them an incentive of some type to get them to purchase this new product on Amazon and leave a review. And we would actually start to see organic rankings start to really improve and move a lot faster on Amazon. And then we would just pivot that traffic back to the website, because your profit is going to be better on there anyway. So by starting to do that, we actually are able to now use some of the data that we've gained to improve the Amazon business, not just focus on how I can diversify off of it. But then last year, so it was September, what is this? 2520 24 at accelerate, Amazon announced that they are now allowing you to use Amazon DSP to drive traffic back to your website if you're using their buy with prime functionality. A lot of people don't like the fact that Amazon still gets your data out of buy with prime I mean, tough. Welcome to the job. I don't know what to tell you. Amazon's gonna get that data anyway, they're not coming after you. If you're, like, a 50 to $100 million a year business, and you've got some really crazy, differentiated product that they think they could rip off maybe, but if you're doing, like, if you're doing six seven figures, Amazon doesn't care, like, they're not coming after you're gonna be fine. So I still suggest do it and ignore that problem anyway. So now that they've now allowed you to run DSP ads back from your website, it opens up like so much. So think about if you sell a product that you subscriptions, right? You sell a product you would love to get people to subscribe to. Amazon is an amazing customer acquisition channel horrible at building a brand. You have no control over upselling. You have no control over cross selling. You can't reach your customers. Getting the subscribe to stuff is a nightmare because it's really just a small button that really doesn't talk about any of the benefits. You have no control really, over fulfillment most of the time. So like, if you want to do some like value, add nice thing in a subscription box, you can't do that. It's really just about convenience and not about value. So not a fan. So what you can do is you can use Amazon as a customer acquisition channel and then start to run ads to these people to incentivize them to come back to your website to subscribe there, or they purchased one thing. Maybe you have something that could upsell them really nicely, or something like that, and send them back to the website to upsell to purchase it. There a ton of different things. Of course, if you're familiar with DSP, you know all the benefits that it has. You've also got the ability to retarget people that have visited the listing and didn't convert, people that visited your competitors and didn't convert you can just do random audiences and run ads. It opens up significantly more opportunity to actually take Amazon's data back from them to benefit your own business. One of the craziest statistics I ever heard, and this was right after, I think it was probably like the year after, like, all the aggregators tanked, so like, rip thrasio, like that kind of thing.

Andrew Maff 21:20
The statistic was, if you're a $10 million a year or more seller on Amazon in your FBA business, and someone goes to acquire you, you, on average, will exit for about a two to 3x EBITDA. So what they're buying right is obviously your projected profit. They're buying your process from you, leftover inventory and whatever you've got sitting around, relationships with manufacturers, the basic stuff, and that's like it right? Like there really isn't anything else to buy from you, because that's kind of all you have Amazon has everything else. If you are exactly the same amount. So you're a $10 million a year seller, but you have a DTC business, and you have some a good chunk of that revenues coming for it doesn't have to be all from the revenue, but it could be like a 60/40, split or something. You actually can exit closer to most, average, between a three to five. Some get up to a four to six. That's a doubling of your almost a doubling of your valuation, just because you diversified, and you also weren't so reliant on a single channel, and the reasoning behind that is because of the data, right? It all still comes down to the data. So you've got an email list, you've got social media followers, you have organic traffic coming to your website, you have all of this data that a company could acquire you and leverage that data to cross sell your customers other things. So it opens up your buyer pool, and it opens up more assets that you're building for your business. The other side of it is one of the craziest statistics I heard was not including 2025 so this was 2020, through 2024, year over year on average, FBA fees increased by 10%. CPCs have increased in average by 8% and competition has averaged an increase by 6% the reason I know these numbers like off top my head, I had to do a presentation at Prosper this year, and obviously I prepped for the presentation, got all ready. But the reason it stuck in my head, no one told me that I was gonna have to do this presentation, telling people that they should like not be so reliant on Amazon, next to Amazon's booth. So I'm doing this presentation with like 100 something people in front of me, and right next to me is like all Amazon representatives listening to me tell them, like your platform is eating people alive and they should leave. So, like, hilarious, but I had a guy who worked at Amazon come up to me after and I the number seems astronomical, so I take it kind of with a grain of salt. But he told me, in 2024, 73% of Amazon US sales came from international sellers. They could be sellers that are 100% overseas, or they could be sellers that have an entity in the United States but are overseas. That's insane, even if it's not that high, just because that just doesn't that just can't be right, even if it's half of that, it's still really high. So what's happening is, Amazon's fees, right? FBA, CPCs, they're all going up. But then competition from international sellers is coming in, and they're all doing the race to the bottom thing. They're offering cheap products with cheap costs, and so you can't really increase your product price. So the problem is, is your margins are just getting squeezed. So you're putting all this effort into Amazon to basically kick out a single digit profit margin, which, like no one's ever finished a year with a single digit product profit margin and been thrilled unless you were unprofitable for like, years on it. So that's where it becomes really interesting, and you just can't be so reliant on it. So what ends up happening is you have to differentiate, or you have to find a way to build the brand from an off Amazon perspective. So even if people do still go to Amazon to shop with you, you're not fighting for these broad keywords that are obnoxiously high CPCs that you clearly can't convert at a tolerable enough level to actually make a profit, right? Like, if you think of what is it, the average conversion rate on Amazon listings, I want to say, is like anywhere between 20 to 40% I think it is. And so you have one in every five people that visit your website are converting or visit your listing, that's insane. Like DTC you're if you're hitting a 2% you're on average, right? So that's amazing. But CPCs get so high and you have to bring your product cost down so low that it's like, it's just not doing it for you, and then you have to pay to reacquire that customer every single time, right? Like, you can't email them and remind them to purchase again, or like, let them know about new products or something, you got to start all over again. It's extremely expensive. I truly believe that Amazon is an amazing customer acquisition channel. I think if brands look at it as a great way to leverage Amazon's data and get in front of their customer base, introduce a product to them that they were already searching for, and then do everything in their power to earn that data back and get the people back to their website. It could be a game changer. Stop looking at, you know, Meta, Google and Tiktok as your customer acquisition channels. Look at Amazon as your customer acquisition channel. Look at a sale on Amazon, as if you're paying for a single customer. All of a sudden, your CP, your CACs are are actually net positive, but then you're just using additional data to try to drive people back to your website to earn to get them to keep purchasing again and again. There's just so many clear examples of customers starting to do more and more due diligence, and also really starting to become complete, I don't say complacent, but comfortable with the platforms that they like to shop on, right? Like, if you are enjoy a certain brand, you become used to their website, so you don't mind going back and forth and purchasing again and again and again, but getting that first purchase is the most is the hardest thing for any new brand on Amazon that's not the case, because they're so familiar with shopping on Amazon that purchasing a new product for them is easy.

Andrew Maff 27:30
I keep saying that, especially since the iOS change digital marketing is it's turning into traditional marketing. And what I when I say traditional which for everyone out there who's not even familiar with what that means, like, TV, radio, billboards, that type of thing. Back then, and when I say back then, they're still doing them. But like, if you're in traditional marketing and you're doing, you know, that type of marketing where you're doing TV and radio and billboards and newspapers and whatever that direct mail, that type of shit, like, you cannot paint the picture of the ROI Right? Like I'm not getting on a client call and telling them, Hey, you spent 5k on this billboard, here's what you made from it. It's not possible. It's all about CPMs. How many eyeballs did you get? How much did you spend? How much are you making? And I think that brands need to start looking at their entire business holistically. How much at what was your advertising spend on Amazon, Meta, Google, Tiktok, Walmart, all of them, combine it all together and then look at your revenue holistically. If you sell on Amazon, you do that same thing already, right? Like you're doing tacos. You're looking at your advertising spend, but then you're looking at your overall sales, because you know that the advertising has an effect on your organic ranking on Amazon. Well, guess what? So does Google ads, so does Facebook. The more and more traffic you drive to your website, the more trigger points that Google's gonna have, the more your organic ranking on Google's gonna go up. So your SEO is gonna look great. I'll bet you $500 that if you cut out your advertising, you will see your organic traffic start to tank after like, a month. So it's all the exact same thing. It's just a matter of how you choose to look at the business and looking at them siloed as like, here's my Amazon business, here's my Walmart business, here's my DTC business. Doesn't make any sense. You have to look at everything completely holistically so that you can truly understand that all the marketing you're doing on every channel is affecting all of your other channels. And that's not just DTC, that's Amazon, that's Walmart, that's target, anywhere that you're available. When someone sees your brand, they're now familiar with it eventually, over time, and then they may shop with you elsewhere when they see you again.

Andrew Maff 27:51
So it's like, I have a podcast that's, that's part of 1974 holdings. But yeah, one ink seven is all tattoo related stuff. Electrum supply, Electrum Inc, Electrum print, like you said,

Andrew Maff 02:38
Interesting. So why? Why'd split them out? Why'd you do supply versus ink first print?

Andrew Maff 29:55
So it's, it's not, it's also something that you it can't be black and white, right? It's not that easy, because then you do need to look at it on an omni channel basis. Where are you at least getting your most profit? How can you try to force as much traffic that way, or at least incentivize traffic to go that way? And then at the same time, from a marketing perspective, then you've got to break it down even further, but that's when you start to look at Amazon is really nothing more than a search engine. Google is obviously a search engine. Microsoft is an amazing search engine that a lot of people are sleeping on, because it converts fantastically. Meta is more educational most of the time it's top of funnel stuff, and then you throw in a middle of funnel, but it's still educational. You're still educating the audience to eventually convert, and incentivize them to convert. Tiktok is the same way. So you've got to factor in like your ROAS on Meta is not going to be the same because you're introducing it to new people most of the time, unless you're doing retargeting.

Andrew Maff 30:47
Amazon, it's very different. They're already actively looking for you, and they're on a platform that's meant for shopping, and they're on a platform that everyone's familiar with shopping on, so they're obviously going to convert higher. So if you actually leverage that information and start to focus on how you can get that data to help you elsewhere. It's a game changer. And I'm not like I had a guy refer to himself as a visionary like five times today, so I'm not going to use that term. But I'm not the only one talking about this. Look at every fortune, 100 CBG brand, any any brand, not even just CBG, like, look at all of them. They all sell on a ton of different marketplaces. They all know that a lot of their DTC traffic, they're going to send it to their website, but they're aware that people are going to hop so they also look at how they can do more broad strokes and just let people know, like, Hey, we're available here. We're available there. Some of them have where you can shop in certain locations. I'll bet you money that they're not driving Meta ads traffic to their website that has a locations page on it, and then trying to factor in how many individual people actually walked into that single Sephora, like there's no way. Really, what they're doing is they're going, here's how much marketing dollars we spent, here's the clearly attributed revenue from it, and here's the overall attributed revenue from it, and then here's the gray area we think, where it probably is a little bit more feasible.

Andrew Maff 32:08
As long as you come up with your own formula and stick to it, that's all that matters. And then you can adjust and pivot your goals. But I know I ranted, this is probably one of my longest episodes in a long time, and leave it to me to do it on my own to just rant for 30 minutes, but that is why I truly believe brands have to diversify. Amazon is an extremely finicky platform, they can pull the rug out for me from any moment, consumers are absolutely doing their own due diligence and will shop wherever the hell they want, and you cannot control it. So you have to get ahead of that, and you can't just keep thinking that Amazon is going to be there all the time for you. Amazon's going to get more expensive, and there's going to get more and more competition. So if you wanna be here 5-10, years from now, you have to look at what else you can be doing to not only be less reliant on Amazon, but also how you can improve your Amazon business so that you can be on that platform for even longer.

Andrew Maff 33:08
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. As usual. Thank you all for joining me today. Do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe, please. Doesn't hurt, and as typical we'll see you all next time. Appreciate it. Have a good one!

Narrator 33:26
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