EP #368] [ENG] - How to leverage external traffic from meta to scale brands on Amazon - Sean Stone

EP #368] [ENG] - How to leverage external traffic from meta to scale brands on Amazon - Sean Stone 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 The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place where I relate to Amazon FBA, private label and ecommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of Ecomcy. And today we bring another special guest. His name is Sean Stone and he's the founder and CEO of Spillover Commerce, where they specialize in everything that has to do with, you know, working with Meta and Shopify brands. And I think The reason why Sean is going to be such a valuable guest for today is because we know as Amazon sellers, a lot of times we struggle to really understand how we do things beyond Amazon, when it comes to, for example, metas, when it comes to really understanding the spillover effect in terms of things that we go and do outside of Amazon. So I think that's what essentially today we're going to be talking all about with Sean, and I'm sure you're going to get a lot of insights when it comes to that. So, Sean, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. How are you doing? Speaker 1: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Speaker 2: Thank you, man. It's a pleasure. So for those that might not know you, just give us, you know, a more in-depth intro about yourself, your company, and then we can go from there. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. So hi, everyone. Nice to meet you. My name is Sean and I run an agency called Spillover Commerce. I've been advertising on Amazon full-time since 2017, but in 2025, so last year in Q1, I had a straw that broke the camel's back moment where I looked at Amazon's annual report and I realized that their ad business was growing three times faster than their retail business. And I thought that was a bit of a problem because that really in common terms just means that Amazon was taking more and more money. And that really what that meant was less and less money for small business owners and companies across America. And so hence, you know, I had an Amazon first agency at that point and we rebranded and kind of shifted our offering to be what we now call spillover commerce. Which is really like an Amazon ads agency where we focus on helping Amazon first brands expand off of Amazon as well to and then leverage that spillover effect to grow on Amazon at the same time. So that's who I am and what I do. And yeah, I'd love to get into it. Speaker 2: Awesome. I love it. Thank you for that intro. That was great. So I guess, I mean, based on your expertise, I think we can definitely jump straight into what I just gave a quick intro about, which is, you know, how we really, as Amazon sellers, can leverage everything that we do outside of Amazon, right? Like, I think a lot of times people get fixated on things that only have to do with Amazon, such as PPC, such as listing optimization, branding, and all of that. But the reality is that the marketplace is getting very, very complex and very also competitive. And a lot of people start to think outside the box, right? Especially your competitors. And if you do this as well, you're going to be left behind. I know a lot of the strategies that a lot of people are doing is external traffic with meta ads, right? So I guess give us an introduction first, why this is something brands should start looking into. More importantly, how are you seeing this helping brands scale on Amazon? Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I think. One thing that really jumped out at me when someone asked me like why should a brand think about this is the Marketplace Pulse report that came out recently, which is them saying that they did a study and the top 1.6% of brands on Amazon control about 50% of Amazon's GMV and When I went and took a look at a lot of the brands that they listed, they all kind of had like three common characteristics, which is they had a conversion rate advantage, they had a margin advantage, and they had an external traffic advantage. And so getting your conversion rate up, that often takes a lot of work. Getting your margin up, that is often a six to nine month project. But the beautiful thing about digital advertising is You can get that's an advantage you can manufacture in under a month you can be profitable from that and that's something that the top 1.6% of sellers are doing. You know just based on the report that we looked at and so. Just in general, like, why would you do this? I think part of why you do this is it lowers your ad costs. But a second reason why you do this is it gives you a lot more control and a lot more opportunity long term, because you're no longer completely dependent on Amazon when it comes to your revenues and your profits. I mean, we've seen this over and over and over again, where Some brand comes into the market and just completely wipes out all the competition because they're the only ones leveraging the external traffic strategy. So that's that's what we've been seeing. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm seeing the same to be honest. The brands are growing. The ones that are not even growing. The ones having the biggest exit multiples and all of that, they have this external factor. They are just not an Amazon brand. They have, Amazon of course is one of their biggest strengths, but they know how to be a brand beyond Amazon with their website, with the social media, social commerce. So it's definitely something that we're seeing especially Investors and overall consumers are looking more into when it comes to really coming down to make a decision which brand to purchase next. Now, I think a lot of the uncertainty when it comes to this, first of all, is a lot of people, first of all, don't understand how this works in the first place. So maybe we can briefly touch heart level. How we can drive traffic to Amazon and how this is even an option. And the second thing as well is the timeline associated with it, because some people, especially coming from an Amazon background, they think this is something that like PPC, you put some campaigns and within one week you have some traction, right? It's not like that, especially if it's in a traffic. So tell me more about that. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, of course. So one of the main things I think I want to explain the mechanism and what you need for the mechanism to work, right? Because I want people to understand this and because it's been really transformational for the companies that we've done it for. So the things you need, right, is you need Amazon product market fit. Which we typically define as like, are you top five in your category? Then you need meta market fit, which is proof that other people have already done this, where they are successfully able to advertise your products on meta. And then the final is platform specific offers. And this is the one that really, really intelligent brands that have come and talked to us still get wrong. Basically, And I'll explain the mechanism of exactly how the spillover happens in a second, but if you think about it like this, if you are a shopper on the internet and you get an ad for a product you really want and you see the product and you go to a product detail page or a landing page or something like that on a website, like on a Shopify website, and you look at this product and you're like, this looks amazing. I really want this. I want this right now. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to open up your Amazon account and see if you can get it up there because you're going to get it much faster. You'll get it in two-day shipping completely for free. If you don't like it, the returns process is already really easy. And I know this because I've watched my wife shop like that for years now. If you have a different product on the Shopify website than you do on the Amazon website, one, Amazon can't price compare you the same way and shoppers can't price compare you the same way. And two, they have to decide if they want the thing you're offering on your website or if they want the thing that's being offered on Amazon. And so if you have two different offers, you can kind of capture different You can capture different segments of the market. But if you sell the exact same thing on both platforms, you're going to spend all this money on meta ads and it's just going to all lead to sales on Amazon at a less efficient ratio. And that's actually the way that we recommend people do this to get kind of like the maximum outcome is you don't send any traffic from meta to your Amazon product detail pages. All you're doing is you're creating a Shopify ecosystem where you're sending ads from meta coming over to your Shopify product detail pages. And your goal is to, in the beginning, at least break even. Because if you can break even, you can be relatively certain and you can quite easily measure the spillover effect that comes over onto Amazon. Really what your goal is, is to just spend money to profitably acquire customers onto an asset you own. And so that's the reason why we recommend Shopify as like your second platform. If you're an Amazon first brand, Don't expand to two more platforms and don't go get on walmart.com or target.com. That's going to be a 10% uptick for double the complexity. For an asset, you're still renting. But if you build a Shopify website that's getting a lot of traction and a lot of inbound interest and people actually buying from you, you're building your own asset that you own. That's an email list you own, a customer list you own. These are things that buyers want when they're actually looking to come and buy your brand. If you think about that and you start thinking long term, like where does my brand need to be in three years if I want the exit multiple or if I want to do this or want to do that, then the option becomes entirely clear. I need to get onto Shopify. I need to find a traffic source. We primarily recommend meta ads, but you could also do TikTok ads or something like that. Again, TikTok Shop, really exciting opportunity. We think it should be your third platform though, because if it's not going to Shopify, you're once again just getting another asset you don't own. And TikTok Shop, sure, it seems great right now, but it could be just like Amazon in three years where they have a bunch of tyrannical rules, they stop paying you suddenly, like all the stuff that people complain about with Amazon. Yeah. That was a bit of a long answer and we didn't get into the timelines, but I want to kind of just pause there because I threw a lot at you and the audience. I want to make sure that you didn't have. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think first of all, like that's such a well-said example. I think something that happens even to me a lot when I'm also browsing online and let's say I'm looking to buy a potential product and then of course through Meta you can fully tailor that ad to the person that potentially is interested. Yeah, the first thing I do is go into Amazon, that's true, because I want to have that prime experience, next day delivery, same day delivery. Sometimes I have payment plans, sometimes I have everything signed up. I think one of the main reasons websites sometimes have low conversions because of all the thing of having to create an account, put your credit card and everything. When in an Amazon, I can buy now, I took care of that. So I am guilty of that. And I think the example you mentioned of having different products, I think that's perfect because you don't dilute the efforts. I have seen that, actually this, I forgot the name of this makeup brand, but I saw that they were doing something similar. I was doing an audit where on Amazon, they only have the very cheap kind of lipsticks, and that's it. But anything bigger than that, the bundles, the bigger kind of makeup, lineups and everything, you can only buy on the website, right? So they use Amazon as a lead magnet. They get all the kind of cheap leads and everything, and then they upsell them potentially on the website, right? So I guess that's some example you're giving. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a very, very well thought out approach. We call that platform-specific offers, but you can call that anything you want. Either way, that's a really, really intelligent way to use Amazon in your business's ecosystem. So kudos to whoever that brand is. I applaud them because Most brands don't want to go through the hassle of figuring out which products to sell where. And it's one of those things that makes a big, big difference once you start to implement it. So, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Even brands like Apple, by the way. I don't know if maybe you have seen Apple. Let's say you want to buy a MacBook. You can only buy the baselines. You cannot buy the all kind of build up. You have to go to the website. So I think it is something that more and more enterprise brands are doing. Like you can only buy the entry level things on Amazon. But if you're on the real brands kind of highlights in terms of the product, you have to go directly to the website. Speaker 1: You know where I got this idea. So my wife online shops like crazy. And to be honest, it's impressive because she finds deals like nobody else. It's actually, it's a skill that I am genuinely impressed with. But she gets it from her mom. My mother-in-law is an avid Costco shopper. And that's where I first got the idea for Basically, this whole like platform specific offers thing because every SKU at Costco is unique. You can't just buy, you can't price compare it anywhere else. That's part of the whole thing behind Costco. Speaker 2: It's only made for Costco, that version. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like I buy deodorant at Costco and you can't go onto Amazon and buy the same form factor there because it's only sold at Costco. So you can buy the same scents, but you can't buy the same scents of the same size in the same pack because it's only available at Costco. And it makes it so you can't really price compare the same way. It makes you want, like, if you want that, you have to buy it at Costco. And I thought that was such a clever idea. So, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I think now, once we have understand high level of course strategy, we can maybe start diving a bit into the technicality. So how will a brand go and get started with this? Because some people might think, Oh, but I don't have a Facebook account or Instagram that has followers. I have never done meta. Do you need like some nurturing periods for make this work? Like, what is your advice? Speaker 1: So, um, It is not easy. If this was easy, every Amazon seller would have started doing this back in March of 2025 when I realized that this was going to become a big thing. Or maybe it won't, but I genuinely think it's going to be a big thing that people are doing for a long time. How do you get started? Well, the first thing you should do is make sure you have the three things I brought up. So, Amazon product market fit. Almost everyone who listens to this will have this. Meta market fit. You can actually go onto the Facebook ads library and you can search your competitors brand names and see if they're selling products on there. Speaker 2: That's such a cool trick, by the way. Maybe you can explain how people can find it. But yeah, you can You can find everything what ad people is doing. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it's it's really powerful. It's just like facebook.com slash ads dash library, I think. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Or if you Google Facebook ads library, you don't need to change meta. It'll pop up right away. That's one. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And then just start searching competitive brands. Another thing you do is search adjacent brands. So like If you sell agave nectar, for example, and you're like, nobody else is doing that. But there are people who are advertising olive oil. I think a lot of times you can kind of take the same learnings and kind of apply them across. And then the final thing is platform-specific offers. And you might say, Sean, I'm not going to make a brand new SKU just to sell on my website. You don't have to do that. You just need to do, if you have two products, you can sell a bundle on your website that's not available on Amazon. And the bundling is an easy way to kind of start getting products for sale on your website that people don't, that don't exist on Amazon. Another thing you could do, What you can do is you can source a few hundred of something and sell it as part of a bundle only on your website. That's another way that you can kind of get started where you basically manufacture some kind of product or like free gift with purchase or buy to get one free. Like anything like that is something you can do in order to get started. Once you have those three things, right, the thing that a lot of Amazon sellers get tripped up once they have those three things is Facebook ads or meta ads because the main thing that is different is on meta and for Shopify sellers, meta really rewards your ability to create new visual assets constantly. I say visual assets because people say creatives and it gets kind of confusing quite quickly. But you need to have a bunch of different videos and a bunch of different photos that all kind of work for whatever product you're selling. And the good news is in today's day and age, you can use AI to make those and you can use AI to kind of get to your first round of videos and photos that you can use to start selling your products. But in the long term, what you probably want to do is find a way to get lots of different visual assets that you can test on Meta. And I'm talking like you might have I have 20, 30, 40, 50 visual assets that you make and you put them on Facebook ads and it might be until the 50th ad before you finally strike gold. But the thing that a lot of Amazon sellers aren't used to is they're so used to the linear nature of Amazon. I spend $1, I get $3 back. But on meta ads, a lot of the times you spend a dollar, get a dollar back for like, you know, the first 49 ads and then you spend a dollar and you get 50 back on the 50th ad and then you You can scale up and spend so much further because you're not constrained by the number of people searching a keyword on Amazon. And so, you know, it's a really, really powerful way to grow on Amazon and also start to kind of build non-Amazon demand that really will grow and continue to sustain your brand as an asset. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think to double down on this, like we're seeing similar things on Amazon in the sense that we are seeing how Amazon is investing a lot of money also on trying to divert the advertising nature from keyword to being behavior focused and interest focused with Amazon Marketing Cloud being a big thing now, right? So essentially it's becoming like a meta-equivalent but for Amazon now. And now with DSP, you can retarget these people even more powerful than ever before. So I think definitely we're seeing how the old way of advertising, which is keyword, is reaching a cap and based on how much you can do. And the next phase is definitely doing an interest focus. And I think that's where Meta excels. You know, you don't only have people that shop on Amazon, that people maybe have never shopped on Amazon in the first place, but they could potentially shop your product for the first time. Because they want to try it out. So I guess to start concluding is, you know, how do you start measuring success? Because we clearly can see that, you know, timeline, of course, take a bit longer because of the nature of the ads, how much split testing, how much content. Now, I guess I want to conclude into How do we make sure this actually is the right thing to do for Amazon brand? Like, what I'm trying to say is, do you track, for example, how your Amazon traffic improves, your sales, your ranking? Like, is there one metric you like to look at after all of this to see, okay, this is actually working? Speaker 1: So, there are a lot of metrics that we like to track. This is like, not to sound cliche, but like, the metric that we track and care the most about is profit. But basically, what we end up doing a lot of the time is custom reporting for the first 90 days where we are pulling your Facebook ad spend, your Shopify results, and then also pulling that product because usually we do this one product at a time. We start with your bestseller. We pull the profitability per product and we pull that all into a spreadsheet. And something that you'll be blown away to see is a lot of the times you'll start running these kinds of ads on a product and your Facebook ads will be, or your Shopify channel, if you measure it alone, will be losing you $5,000 a month. But you know, you're making $10,000 a month more on Amazon. And when you see that, you'll be aware that like, look, the spillover effect is happening. Spillover Commerce is doing this for you. Now, the one thing I will say is I'm not naive. I'm not blind. It's not a great use of capital to lose money building an Amazon or building a Shopify website. But what it does give you is a bit more of an escape plan from Amazon. And so that's kind of why we recommend that. And the reason why is because, look, you might be losing money, but if you're not losing or if you're losing money in one place, but making money in another place, you can eventually optimize yourself to be profitable in both. But if you can get that break even faster, it's going to just lead to more optionality for your brand as the world gets more and more uncertain. Speaker 2: Cool. So I guess to conclude here is, is there any criteria you think you put in front of sellers to consider if this is the right thing to pursue or not? Because as we are already discussing, you know, it takes some level of setup, some level of timelines and the foremost, like this means they will require some level of commitment. So do you think this is for a brand started from zero or is a brand already established? What is usually your guidance when it comes to this for all the listeners and the ones that are watching today? Speaker 1: Yeah, so we generally recommend this for at least mid-sized Amazon first brands. If you're doing less than a million dollars a year on Amazon, you shouldn't do this. You should focus on growing your Amazon business. If you're one to two million, you should definitely think about it. And two million dollar plus is definitely like where you, you know, You're now at the size where you have a business that is big enough that you could really get hurt by one of your competitors doing this to you. Quick side note, I recently had a meeting with a guy that I had met in 2020. He was doing about 5 million a year on Amazon selling like sports gear, like weightlifting equipment and stuff like that. $5 million a year in 2020 and I think you did the same in 2021. And this year, he's going to do less than a million dollars a year in 2026. And we opened up his product detail pages and his competitors' product detail pages. And in 10 minutes, I could show them, here's the exact ad they're using to make a ton of sales on Meta. Here's the exact ad they're using to make a ton of sales on TikTok. What is this brand doing to beat you? It's just external traffic. Like they're just running a ton of external traffic and you're not. And that's why you went from doing $5 million a year to a million dollars a year because, you know, the Amazon game has changed. Something else I realized is like, look, this space is so full of people giving great advice and then I'm gonna charge you an arm and a leg to do anything else or you need to talk to me and do my seven step system. So we actually made a digital scorecard where you can go through and answer the same 15 questions that I would ask you on a discovery call. But you could do it without talking to me or anyone else. It's completely free and you'll get instant results with an actual cost estimate of what we think it's going to cost you to do this. So as a follow-up to this call, we can put that in the description maybe or my website and find it. Where we talk about like, yeah, the Shopify or yeah, what we think it would take to get you on Shopify, because I think that would be really helpful for a lot of brands. Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just going to ask you that in case you know somebody watching and hearing this episode, I guess they can go to your website, which we're going to make sure we put down below in the comments and also what you just mentioned. And I think other than that, Sean, any last advice or tip you want to give for people, especially in 2026 when it comes to scaling? Speaker 1: Yeah, look. Don't take my word for it. Go take a look at your bestseller in your category and go look at their meta and TikTok presence and see if I'm right, you know, because It's actually something that happened to, first we realized this was happening, then a company did this to us. We lost our bestseller badge to a company that was selling, so we were selling a three-pack for $19.99. They came in and started selling a two-pack for $29.99. And I was losing my mind. I don't have any hair, but I was pulling my hair out. What is this company doing to us? Like, how are they beating us so badly? You know, this was like April of last year, 2025. And I'm just saying, like, how are they beating us? And then I said, OK, let's just see. I opened Facebook ads library and they had like 70 different Facebook ads going. And I was just like, OK, well, Yeah, we got hit with spillover commerce. And so like, look, maybe no one's doing this in your account or in your niche right now. But really, that's an opportunity. Yeah, it's coming. Somebody is going to do this and it's going to happen sooner than you think. So please consider it. Go look at I'm trying to think of a good category. Weightlifting straps. There's a company called, the best seller in weightlifting straps is A company that has a gigantic TikTok presence and a gigantic Facebook ads presence and five years ago that brand didn't exist and now they're the best seller on Amazon. So that's a great example. It's an example where like I don't work with that company or anyone in that space. It's just like a person I'm kind of friends with where I described exactly How that problem arose. And so go look it up because it is dramatic. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That's good, Sean. I appreciate the answer. So thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure. I'm definitely looking forward to meeting you soon. Potentially upcoming events and go from there. Yeah. It's been a pleasure to have you, man. Thank you. Have a good one. Take care. See you. Bye bye. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That will make it easier for others to find out about the show and benefit from it. Want more? Visit our website at www.ecomcy.com where you can get your first consultation for free or find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at EcomCy.