EP #296] [ENG] - Strategies to scale a brand beyond Amazon - Dusan Popovic

EP #296] [ENG] - Strategies to scale a brand beyond Amazon - Dusan Popovic Unknown Speaker: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 2: Hello guys, welcome to another episode of eCommerce Lab by eCommerce, the place of air related to Amazon FBA product level and eCommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, Founder and CEO of eCommerce, and today I bring you the same who is the Founder and CEO of ByteOut, which is one of the top agencies out there when it comes to supporting brands scale on places such as Shopify, which is something that Amazon sellers found All is very complex, you know, very daunting. How do I go beyond Amazon? How do I make sure my brand actually has, you know, an awareness and an operation beyond Amazon? That's what we're going to be talking with Dusan today, because this is a topic that I feel in 2025 is very hot because we know Amazon is getting more and more complex. It's getting very competitive. The fees are getting higher. I'm figuring out how to join to a place such as Shopify. It's going to be key because you need to understand, you know, complexities that usually you don't learn by operating a business on Amazon. So Dusan, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing, my friend? Speaker 1: Doing fine. Thank you so much for having me this lovely evening. By the way, you were saying something really interesting to me and I hear from a lot of sellers, but what I wanted to ask you, you mentioned higher fees, you mentioned the competition being pumped up, but did you hear anything else in terms of what's bothering the sellers? Speaker 2: Yes, I would say, I mean, the other thing that is bothering the sellers has been a huge thing is, of course, what is happening now with the tariffs in the States. Like a lot of people is being overwhelmed by that. In fact, as we were talking before going live, I was just in Indonesia, finding for solutions to small brand manufacturing from China to get around the situation of the tariffs. But that's a big conversation. The Omnichannel, which is part of what we're going to be talking today, how I go beyond Amazon, how to do maybe Walmart, TikTok, Shopify, all of that. And I will say the third thing. Which is also something that I find interesting. It's effectively people starting to understand that the days of only focusing on bringing a product with demand to marketplaces are pretty much over. And I see the conversation be shifted more towards how to actually build a proper brand from the perspective of the experience, the lifestyle of the brand, the avatar of the brand. What is the actual uniqueness of actually buying your product compared to a Chinese brand? So the conversation now is more goes beyond innovation from a product perspective to a brand perspective, which is something that usually in the past people wouldn't care that much when it comes to launching a product. So yeah, that's a little bit. What about you? What do you think? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like what you just mentioned is I'm thinking like one of the biggest issues or one of the biggest drivers that we see with Amazon sellers, which is driving off the platform, not off the platform, but to build alternative platforms and to go truly omnichannel, right? As you said, like, you know, tariffs are going to change things. Quite a bit. But I mean, Amazon is having so many sellers and so many beautiful products. And a lot of people are seeing the struggle, right? Because, of course, like manufacturing in China is one of the top things. And of course, if you can do it, somebody else can do that. And Chinese sellers are getting really, really good at selling on Amazon, right? One of the main reasons is It's simpler. It's much simpler than being a D2C brand or being a brand at all, right? Because you have people searching to buy the product at that exact time and the only decision they're making is which product will they actually buy. Price, in that sense, makes a huge difference if you're comparing apples to apples, like no brand, no nothing, no added value, right? So in terms of that, go on DTC. Let's say something that will make you a little bit differentiated. And this is something that Chinese sellers are still not really good at. So this is the opportunity to actually increase your value and increase your position when fighting all the sellers that are You know, coming from China, which is completely legit, of course. And, you know, it's good for the end customer in terms of the prices are going down and you have a lot of choice. But in terms of you being a brand who wants to be successful and actually make some money, it's getting tougher. So, yeah, this is definitely one of the things. And if you truly Become a brand, you go off the Amazon, you have a fighting chance. So yeah, that's one of the issues that we see. I agree. Yeah. Speaker 2: I think I would like to add to this as well is bringing the conversation a little bit closer to home in terms of having a brand beyond Amazon in terms of like Shopify, WooCommerce and all that, which is why you specialize on. I guess one of the things I like about that approach is that, of course, initially is much more complex than Amazon because you have to pretty much generate the traffic yourself. And there's other complexities that you should encounter, such as Having to have a website, having to figure out advertising that goes beyond keywords is more programmatic. But tell me from the perspective of your experience, what is usually the right moment of doing that job? Because the reason why I always recommend my clients to do that job as early on is because you own the customer. You're going to be able to have access to their emails, phone numbers, address, and that's something that can be very meaningful when it comes to scaling a brand very fast. But sometimes clients and entrepreneurs overall are preferable to do this job very soon because of the resources it takes. So what is your take on that when it comes to... Speaker 1: This is a really good question to be asking. Of course, It's not a one solution fits all. It never will be. But what you just said is like, you know, you do not have that direct channel to the customer, right? So you have it a little bit with reviews. You can do a little bit of trickery and you could maybe give us an advice or two, what you saw in the wild of getting those emails by offering like, you know, extended warranties or stuff like that. You can get it off of Amazon, but not too much from what I know. And you know much more about Amazon than me, obviously. So in terms of actually getting Like that second leg which is outside of Amazon, what we generally say is like that first leg needs to be stable. So if you're just starting off on Amazon, if you're just learning, if you're constantly battling a hundred things and you're not really feeling in place, you're not even earning money, This will be a bad time to start something new. So you need to be stable. You need to understand what products are actually selling. You need to understand the whole, let's say, competition landscape. And of course, You'll be understanding, you know, what marketing messages actually work with your customer base. Then, and only then, do we actually advise people to move from Amazon into Open Letter Channel. So this is one thing. Another thing is it's expensive to get You know, customers to buy from you. You know, it's not like you open up the store and they just keep coming. It's like in the wilderness of the internet, like you need to fight for that customer. But the thing is, if you're smart, once you capture that customer, you will be with that customer for a longer period of time, right? And why I say this, it's important to have something to sell to them, not just once, but multiple times. So if you're selling something, which is a unique product, which you buy only once and you don't have upsells or cross sells. And so it's not perishable or a product that you consume. So the customer comes back and And like a month or three months, you're probably not well aligned to just jump into D2C. You're probably better off maybe starting with TikTok shops. So we see a lot of customers try to do that. We help them with that as well with partners. But you just got to be smart about what happens once you go outside of the Amazon. Do you have the answer and do you have the math? Do you have the economics of being out there so you can? Test out the waters. You can see how much a click will cost you. You can do that math before jumping in, but you got to have the whole picture right there before you actually make the shift. If it doesn't pan out, just don't start. You got to partner with somebody maybe even. So you don't have to be sourcing is selling all the products. If you go to see you can partner with people you can do. Like affiliate deals, even that. But yeah, of course, there are many options. Speaker 2: Yeah, in fact, I wanted to add that in one of the reasons I like the reasoning you just gave in terms of when to do the job is I feel usually one of the things that kill businesses early on is cash flow, right? And if we understand that, that's usually the thing that is going to allow you to scale the business forward. We find from experience that marketplaces are going to be the easier avenue to get cash flow going as soon as possible because of the influx of extra traffic that they're giving you. If you have a good product, it's easier to get the ball rolling and get some cash flow through the door, which is usually maybe not the case when you try to do your own website, right? So pretty much if you don't invest a single dollar, traffic is not going to come to you organically, which That to some extent can happen with marketplaces. So yes, I agree. Like using marketplaces to get that initial foundation, we can call it somehow. And once you have figured out who is your avatar, what is your brand actually aiming to achieve, and have some clear guidelines of where you want to scale your advertising and product lineup and everything, I think D2C is definitely a good avenue to expand that experience that I guess traditional marketplaces are not going to allow you to achieve in the first place. Speaker 1: If I may ask you a question. So we've seen a couple of sellers come into us and asking us not how to build a shop, but how to build just a landing page, a website, which doesn't sell anything, but it helps them start creating that brand, right? Start producing content, which is, you know, on the website that the customer owns. And this is sort of new for us, but What I want to understand better is what is, would a regular seller on Amazon be better off thinking about this as a first step and then jumping into D2C? What is your perspective on that? If you talk on this subject. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would say it also comes down a lot of times to the nature of the product. And the reason for that is because we have products that they are very friendly from the perspective of social commerce, which is TikTok. So in those instances, I usually say if the product is very friendly to the camera in terms of unboxing, lifestyle and things like that, usually starting on socials and a place such as TikTok can be a huge advantage because that sometimes a missing element that Amazon is not going to allow you to transmit because on Amazon usually people don't go to consume content, they go for shopping. But if your product is the type of product that people have to consume content to make the decision of buying the product in the first place, therefore TikTok is a better avenue to get the ball rolling and create that awareness and that exposure to your brand. So that's why The conversation always has to be tied to, okay, what is actually the type of product you're selling and what is potentially the avenue where most of your clients are going to be into, right? But as a rule of thumb, I recommend that for most people listening this, definitely Amazon is going to be the place to be able to get started the fastest with the lowest amount of budget. And then my next step is usually going into Shopify, WooCommerce on my website, because as soon as I get the ball rolling in terms of some initial sales and some traction on Amazon, That's usually a good indication that I'm able to achieve that be on Amazon if I'm also doing the right things in terms of ACO, advertising, which is what I want to bring next to the conversation because I feel the only disadvantage starting with Amazon It's that you also get used to instant gratification in the sense that Amazon is very fast to giving you sometimes sales and results because of how fast things move in terms of traffic and the platform is built for conversion, which is usually not the case with our own website. You have to figure out how to actually build your website for conversion and bring the traffic in the first place. So having that cheap And change is difficult, especially conversion on a website. You know, like a website has a conversion of three to five percent. It's already a unicorn compared to almost on the average of 15, 20 percent. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And you're lucky. Like, you know, you did a good job if you have that three to five percent conversion rate. That's that's that's really good. Speaker 2: So tell us a bit about that. What is your take on that? Like how how you do that? That mindset change, I guess. Speaker 1: It's quite difficult to a point because as you see on Amazon, things are a little bit different. People are prepared to buy. They came there with a purchase intent. But also things are to a point similar. On Amazon, you have organic. On Amazon, you have paid. So these are the two, let's say, main channels, if you're DTC, right? So in the essence, like the logic behind it is very similar. So people who sell on Amazon already have a good understanding how things work. But it could also be like a two, you know, It could be a bad thing in a sense that you're overly confident that you know how things work outside of Amazon using the same logic, right? And all the platforms that you might be using, we're talking about Meta and Google at the first place to drive that traffic fast. They work a bit differently than Amazon, right? So you have the whole IDA model of capturing attention. And it's much harder to get to that customer and make them willing to buy. So you got to go through like many, many iterations and many touch points with the client. In order for him to actually buy in the end and your intention could be either buy or capture the email so you can actually retarget that customer and sell whatever you're selling at a later point and repeatedly, of course. So from that perspective, it's quite different, but in the essence, it has a lot of similarities. So if you are open-minded, To work with people who have experience in that field, you'll be fine. If you're thinking like, oh, I know this, can you try it on your own? A lot of people who do that end up wasting a lot of money in the beginning because it looks similar, but it's not. You know what they say in Thailand. Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I know, I know. Speaker 1: Anyhow, starting with the marketing strategy before building anything is a must and this is what we always advise our clients to do. Think about how you're going to sell things, not how the website will be looking and how it's connected, what categories you have and everything. That comes later. Another thing to mention is let's say the average order value because on Amazon people are coming to maybe buy one product and it's very hard for you to control what you're offering. You can have bundles and stuff like that, but you're limited to what you can do. But on your shop, you're in charge of the whole experience, right? So you can You can make that offer the way you imagine it to be, right? And the technology allows you to do much more when you confound it to Amazon. You get what Amazon gives you. In here, your imagination can be running wild. You can even go VR, AR, 3D configurators. You can really make that buying journey an experience for your customer. Speaker 2: That's cool. Now, in terms of timelines, let's bring a little bit of that to the table because Again, as I was mentioning, usually people when it comes to doing operation on Amazon, they get used to half a space. Sometimes things can be on the platform. Now, usually when it comes to building your own D2C, things can be a little bit slow for the nature of it. You have to, you know, build effectively, optimize the website. You need to figure out all the type of advertising. Things that by nature take time. SEO. So usually from your experience, like when it comes to building a D2C presence, like what is usually the timeline that you give yourself to actually figure out if D2C is the right place to be or not for you? I know this is very dependent on a lot of factors, but I'm sure maybe there's some high-level guidelines. Speaker 1: I think if you do your preparation well enough, you won't even have that question being asked, is this a good place for me or not? Because you will know even before starting. It's just like What it's the devil is in the details here, right? So the execution matters a lot, you know, the budgets that you have, the people you work with matter a lot, specifically in the marketing space, you You need to invest a lot of time in working with your partner and figuring out that partner is a good fit for you. Because there's a lot of people who just took a course in meta ads and they will present themselves as being masters of that. And you might be lucky. Maybe a beginner will be really successful with you. You never know. But in general, you want to be working with marketing teams that have a track record and who know what they're doing right. So in terms of timelines, usually if you're not very aggressive, like six months to a year is the timeline to get that business up and running to a point where you're usually satisfied with what you get. I don't want to give any numbers because it can vary drastically. I don't want anybody to hold my word. Six to 12 months, it's a realistic period to have that channel work for you. Speaker 2: Nice. Cool. Now, another thing I would like to bring to the table is Usually, if you see some correlation to depending on the type of product, like D2C might be more impactful than others. I'm just going to give an example. Is there some correlation you have seen that maybe brands have to do with supplements tend to do better at D2C than brands have to do with baby products? Is there some kind of data that can support something like that? Or realistically, you have seen any kind of product being successful? Speaker 1: Oh, you can see any types of product being successful. Like the products that are more sticky and where you can build more brand. Let's just stay at that point of generalization. These are the products where you're better off trying to get the customer outside of Amazon, right? Because if you try to build that brand loyalty and you succeed in that and people continue purchasing from you over and over and over again, this is where it matters being outside and in the DTC world, right? Because the margins are much higher. And you're not spending money constantly on getting new customers. You're using your existing customer, right, for a long period of time. So if If your product or not just one product, if the whole line of products, if your business is aimed for that, you should be running towards D to C like as fast as you can. Of course, you got to understand who the competition is, but usually, and maybe you can give me some insights there as well. It's like if you have a highly competitive niche market on Amazon, how likely is it to get the same results in DTC, right? So I don't have enough experience. I didn't see as many cases of Amazon being completely, completely overwhelmed and there's nothing happening in DTC. Until now, I haven't seen that. Speaker 2: Yeah. So I mean, What we definitely see is that depending on the type of product, D2C is going to be a more complex route for you than others. Like very quickly, quick example is Suplement. Like Suplement, for example, if you try to do the D2C route, things will be very difficult because the thing is D2C brands Supplement brands in the D2C space are heavily dependent on things such as the lifetime value and recurring purchase behavior. And therefore, if you don't have a very strict strategy in terms of re-engaging with them through email marketing, retargeting in terms of traditional ads, social media, influencer marketing, The loyalty is very low on this kind of niches. The same with food, a relatable item. So anything that's replenishable, like D2C tends to be very complex because essentially once you bring into your website, it's not like Amazon that usually a person that would buy like vitamin C from you, even if they don't buy vitamin C from you, again, On Amazon, they're still always on the platform, Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. And the probability of re-engaging with them is higher than somebody that comes to your random website. And it's going to be very difficult for them to come naturally again with that website if they're not looking to purchase, if you see what I mean. So that's where we see the complexity being a bit an interesting topic. It's like, what is the nature of your product? If your product is a one time purchase, usually the road is easier compared to repeat purchase behavior. I don't know if you agree on that. Speaker 1: It's an interesting topic. We have like experiences which are a little bit different in terms of When you're on Amazon and you're buying a thing just once, Amazon gives you the safety of that purchase. So, you know, whatever happens, you have Amazon being there and you can have a complaint and, you know, return the product, whatever happens. But on the DTC side, like one of the three key things that you need to communicate on that website Trustability, right? And you need to persuade the person who never saw you before that your brand and your webshop or website should be trusted and you should be trusted, right? And you have all the tools in the world that what technology can give you to persuade them, but it's still a really hard job. Versus Amazon where like, okay, I like the product, the price is good, I click and buy. So that's a huge difference that we see. So in terms of if you like skip that obstacle, if you persuade that person that you're trustable, and if you deliver on time and everything is fine, and if you have like these delightful details, Um, you can re-engage that person, um, through email, through SMS, um, through even different channels, retargeting, of course. And if he had a good, um, experience with you, he's more likely to, to come and purchase from you again. And because you're, you're making it very convenient, um, you can always like If you're seeing that, you know, they're not reacting to you like, oh, you can, you can just make another purchase again. You can always offer like a discount, a special, you know, special terms of purchase. You can have a loyalty program specific to you. We have this FOMO of people, you know, wanting to buy from you further and further so they get better discounts and everything. So, you know, you can build on top of that, which, you know, you don't have those tools available. But it's difficult. I mean, you know, everybody will be trying to do that, right? If you don't do it correctly, you're just wasting a lot of time. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. So something I would like to mention on top of that is that it's true that at the beginning maybe getting the traction is going to take a little bit longer because of what you mentioned that you have to bring people to the website and engage with you and everything, but definitely when I see a successful brand making it on D2C compared to a brand making it on Amazon, usually the difference is night and day in terms of the profitability, the loyalty. The ease of scale, the multiples they get when they exit the business. So it's harder, but usually the end goal and the reward is much better on D2C 100%. I see it all the time. Speaker 1: Could I ask you something? In terms of selling products on Amazon and going D2C, like many merchants or many sellers, We'll be aiming at this strategy of not really selling everything on both platforms but being really strategic. What would your advice be in terms of which products would you be having on Amazon and what do you put on your own shop? Speaker 2: Yeah, so usually what we see is that there's actually some clients that what they decide to do is given the Amazon is more a platform where the price point is more sensitive and usually it's more an impulse buy compared to a traditional D2C place. Usually what we do is on Amazon we only put a cheaper offer on our cheapest product. As a lead magnet to make people discover brand ecosystem and a more premium medium kind of lineup you can only buy on the website. So we use that to acquire customers with Amazon and then to upsell them on more premium complete experiences on the website. So that's usually a very smart way to combine both things. Or the opposite also applies, like maybe you have all your products on Amazon on D2C, buying D2C, you're buying D2C, you have a unique kind of packaging, experience, a bonus, so incentives people over time to transition to your website where you can be more profitable. Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. Do you have any specific tricks that you saw people do in terms of a specific bundle or using colors which are not in stock on Amazon but they are in stock? Speaker 2: Yeah, similar to that as well. Like you create that kind of urgency or special edition availability on your website and that's something that we see works very well because many people want a color that's very trendy because social media and everything but you can only buy that on the website, right? So that essentially makes people to go to the website and engage at a different level and then you can make them your customer, you know. So very useful. Speaker 1: But what is the line that Amazon doesn't let you cross? Speaker 2: I mean at the end of the day the lines, Sometimes can be great. So it's depending on just so much of how risk adverse you are when it comes to that. Speaker 1: Right, right, right. Speaker 2: But yeah, there are certain things that you can do. You can reach out to them, ask for a review, you can ask them, you can point them to your website and things like that. But if you're clever and you know how to do your branding and everything's always on with the perspective, adding value to the customer first, and then the branding by nature will point people to different avenues or experiences that sometimes can copy on Amazon without looking like a peach. Or like an intentional thing, you're sure you're going to be okay, right? So yeah. Speaker 1: Cool. Speaker 2: So I think it's been a pleasure to have you on the show Dusan. So thank you so much. I know we're only scratching the surface. There's so many more things, but I'm sure maybe people want to reach out to you, work with you guys and explore this universe in more depth. So tell us how people can find you and work with you. Speaker 1: Right, they can reach us at byteout.com or just write to office at or ecommerce at byteout.com. I don't know if you can. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to put it down in the description. Speaker 1: Yeah. And, you know, for anybody coming from this podcast, we can offer like a 20% discount on setting up their own DTC brand and just to help them, you know, start the journey. Speaker 2: Awesome Dusan. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Hopefully see you soon at some upcoming events. Have a great day. Speaker 1: Talk to you soon. Speaker 2: Bye. Thank you. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. 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