Spillover Commerce: Smarter Way to Scale Amazon Sales

Spillover Commerce: Smarter Way to Scale Amazon Sales Speaker 1: What's up, everyone? I'm Sean Stone, and I'm thrilled to be partnering with AMZScout today. Today, we're going to talk through spillover commerce, what it is, how smart brands are using it to spend once and profit twice, and then how to figure out if one of your competitors is actually using it against you. So if you already know what spillover commerce is, you can skip the slideshow portion. I'm gonna try to keep it really tight, but really the main thing we're trying to do is just focus on how to use AMZScout to reverse engineer your competitor's success. We're gonna go through two different examples of exactly how we do that today. So let's get started. Okay, spillover commerce. How smart brands spend once and profit twice. So, do any of these problems look familiar to you? Have any of these problems continued to get worse, you know, like 2022 onwards? Harder to profit, higher ad costs, fees keep going up. Single channel trap, you can't get off of Amazon. It's the only revenue source for 90 plus percent of your revenue and ranking new products seems incredibly hard. All you end up doing is doubling down on your existing products that you can rank and then just focus on spending even more there, making your other problems even worse. You're not alone. This is not unique to just one company in the Amazon space. This keeps happening. And it's because the winning technique has changed. If you are familiar with Olympic high jump, in 1986, everyone was doing the scissor kick. Then there is a new technique out in 1912. And then we started doing the straddle when we jumped over the bar in 1936. And then in 1968, Dick Fosbury came up with the Fosbury flop. And that was the new winning technique that people are still using to this day in Olympic high jump. And so We think that the same thing has happened on Amazon and we're calling that spillover commerce. So this is the graphic we use to describe it and really what it is is simple. We think that there is usually a brand will do a couple of things. They will have a demand generation platform or a demand generation place. Then they'll have that demand spillover to an asset that they own, and they'll focus on trying to make that as profitable as possible. But then something else they've realized is that the internet continues to get more and more concentrated. And so there's a larger and larger spillover effect onto other platforms that they don't own. Companies are using spillover commerce to weaponize this. So how this works for Amazon brands in particular in 2026, is traditionally it's meta ads over to their Shopify website, which they're then using to absolutely dominate on Amazon. If this sounds too good to be true, I'm about to show you two examples of companies absolutely doing this and killing the competition. So stick around. Okay, so yes, this is your Amazon escape plan. This is how you get off of Amazon dependency, start diversifying your profits, start diversifying where your business grows and how you get out of the Amazon trap, which is what we call what Amazon's done to Amazon first brands. Now, currently, sellers are doing a couple of things and it's not working. They try to optimize their Amazon listing even harder, trying to eke out these one percentage point gains. They hire more agencies. They increase their ad spend. And then they just try cloning their Amazon catalog and putting it on Shopify, then say, Shopify didn't work for me. Meta ads didn't work for me. Yeah, it's because you use the wrong playbook. We're here to show you what the right one is. So these are the phases of spillover commerce. Again, these documents will all be available either in the description, there'll be a link to this or it might be on the AMZScout newsletter. I'm not sure which, but yeah, just interact with this video and you'll be able to get these slides. So who does this not work for? It doesn't work for people who don't have any attraction. They're just looking for shortcuts and they're looking to replace Amazon. That's not what this is about at all. Who this does work for is sellers who are trying to or who already have strong product market fit, who already know how to think in systems and know that there are no hacks that are going to carry us through long term. So we need three things. We need Amazon product market fit, we need meta market fit, and we need platform specific offers. So there's a QR code that is in these slides. You can use this QR code to get a plan on how to escape your Amazon dependency. Again, these slides will be available afterwards. Okay, let's get into example number one. Example number one, we're going to talk about electric blankets. Now you'll notice a couple of things when you look at these search results, and I'm specifically choosing not to do the AMZScout Chrome extension, even though they do have a great Chrome extension. There are a bunch of people talking about the Chrome extension already. I feel like this is going to be a repetitive video if I do that. And so instead, what I want to do is I want to talk to you about the electric blankets. So you'll notice there's no Chrome extensions on Amazon right now, because I want this to be quick. So, Bed Sure heated blankets. They're the number one heated blanket in the search results. And they're also the most expensive in the top five. Usually, that's a sign that they're using spillover commerce. So let's pop them open in this next tab. And we, as a reminder, we need three things, Amazon product market fit, Meta market fit, and then platform specific offers. So we could use the AMZScout Chrome extension to figure out how many sales are making, but there's at least 10,000 products bought in the past month. So I think we've already passed the first hurdle of, okay, Is this product passing Amazon product market fit? I think yes, but now I want to get into how. So I'm going to go over here into the URL. I'm just going to copy this ASIN and I'm going to come over to the ASIN lookup tool here. So I'm going to come over here and go to the ASIN lookup. So I'll click keywords and then over here on this one, I'm going to do reverse ASIN lookup 2.0. So I'm going to put in my ASIN right here. And now they're gonna find keywords for me. So we're gonna sit here and wait. And now you'll notice heating blanket, electric blanket, all these keywords with a ton of high search volume, very high estimated search volume. Now these products are a little bit more popular in the winter than the summer, but just in general, this is a very good product. And so we start to, and as you can see, this would be a very hard keyword to rank on. So in general, they're saying that they're eighth on heating blanket, they're third on electric blanket queen, They're second on gifts for seniors. Wow, that is challenging to rank on in our experience. And then yeah, gifts for grandpa, heated blanket throw. So they've got a lot of good keywords to be spending money on. And so We definitely know they have Amazon product market fit. And it seems like they also have really, really intelligent Amazon PPC chops as well, because they're advertising on all the biggest keywords. They're focusing on all the ones where they have good ranking, all that kind of stuff. If you look at their estimated monthly search volume, already they're doing something right. And that usually is a sign that they have good Amazon chops. But they are doing one thing that doesn't really make sense to me. If they were a Amazon-only business and a business that was really just concerned about dominating on Amazon, they would not have this high of a price on their best-selling product. This price is too high. $49.99? Are you not afraid of all these guys who are much lower than you? Well, they're not and I'm about to tell you why. So we're going to jump over here to the next phase. We're going to close this out and close this out because we now know that Bedsure is probably implementing spillover commerce. So if we look here and you search Bedsure on Amazon, Absolutely, look at this. They've got three different best-selling products. They're using Spillover Commerce to really do something pretty aggressive here. We know for sure that they are implementing Spillover Commerce, but the best way to be sure of it is to first come over here, go to their tools, and then go to keyword search. But then this time, instead of toggling over to this, we're just going to go to this keyword search right here. Now, we're already there. So now we're going to search Bedshire. And you'll notice Bedshire blanket, Bedshire gentle soft blanket, Bedshire cat house, Bedshire comforter. Look at all this search volume. And if you look at this over time, obviously, they're spending a lot of money in January 2025. But they're clearly spending a lot of money every single month On some other traffic source that's generating demand for them and having that spillover back onto Amazon. And that's the second thing that you can do with AMZScout is you can look up competitors brand names and see, okay, are they spending money on some other platform and generating excess demand onto Amazon? The short answer for Venture is yes. So we come over here to Facebook ads library. And we search up the brand Badger. And as you can see, they are spending a ton of money on all the most important products that they sell and sending them back to their website. So that is the second thing they're doing, is they're spending money on meta ads. And we now know they have meta market fit on top of Amazon product market fit. Quick side note, how you get here is you go Facebook, ads library, then you click this, then you want to look at all ads, you have to select this or it won't show up, and then you search the brand name. So if you search Bedsure, Bedsure Home, the one with all the followers, yeah, so that's how you get here, just so you know. Okay, so the final thing we need to do, and actually I'm just going to do it from Google, is we need to validate that they have platform specific offers. So we're going to look that up right now. So one of the easiest ways to figure out if they have platform specific offers My goal is to see if they offer bundles, for example, if they have products that aren't currently available on Amazon and are they sending traffic to those. So first of all, they have bundles. So that's the first thing that they passed on. They definitely have bundles and that is something that will absolutely start converting because you can send people who really care about having a like saving total dollars. To your Shopify website and then you can send people who are not totally sure about you to your Amazon website or sorry to your Amazon listings. And kind of leverage spillover to do exactly that. So if we click into some of these, like right now we're filtering and sorting by most impressions to least impressions. So this is their best list or their best Facebook ad according to, you know, it doesn't matter what, this is their best Facebook listing and it sends surprise, surprise to their bundles page. So they're advertising products that you can't necessarily get on Amazon. Sure, you can get each of these products. And like on their own, but can you get them as a bundle? Probably not. And so that's the third thing they're doing to really generate excess demand. And that's one of those things that's incredibly powerful that spillover commerce allows you to do. So, that is what BedSure is doing and that's how we use AMZScout to figure out what they're doing. Okay, let's get into the second example and this is another great example. So, for example number two, we're going to stick with the home example because in the past I've used lots of other examples and people have said, well, those products aren't like for like, but weighted blankets are some of the most undifferentiated products you can possibly sell on Amazon. The only thing that's different is the weight of the blanket, the color of the blanket and cost per pound of weight. And so if you look here, there are a bunch of products that are doing quite well. And I looked into all these and they're all kind of using that Amazon first playbook. As far as I could tell, none of these were running excessive advertising outside of the platform and they're all kind of using low cost, cost per pound, like really trying to lean in to the maximum value possible and try to out-convert their competition. And then number six is Bare Home, an American company, which appears to be from Minnesota. I'm from just on top of Minnesota in Ontario. So always nice to shoot out or shout out some people who are from my local neck of the woods. But yeah, Bare Home is the sixth bestseller on Amazon of weighted blankets. And if you pop open their listing, they shouldn't be. And I don't mean this to be rude to them, but they are getting in a lot of trouble with Amazon due to the frequently returned badge. This can be a kiss of death for a lot of companies. And what's even crazier is Amazon started doing this thing where they start showing you similar blankets that customers keep. And they start recommending your competitors before you can even buy, which is incredibly rude because I'm sure this company is doing everything they possibly can to do a great job. They even have the exact size in the second main image or second image. They're definitely not doing anything. They're just unfortunately getting hit with a lot of returns and there's not a lot you can do about that. But they are doing something that everyone else isn't doing, which is using spillover commerce to generate excess demand. And so if we click here and we go and grab their ASIN, we'll be able to go into AMZScout and look at where they're generating demand to make sure we know for sure that they actually do have Amazon product market fit. So we're going to click here, reverse ASIN lookup and surprise, surprise, they're doing quite well on things like weighted blankets, weighted blankets for dogs and all those kinds of things are really their ideal keywords. They're also really leaning into targeted ad spend. So they're not going after a lot of their competitors ad spend and things like that. Heated weighted blankets, they're kind of just really diving deep. Into which products make the most sense for the keywords that they want to advertise on. Best summer weighted blanket, that's a pretty good keyword. So yeah, they're really not doing anything too sketchy. They're just focused on doing the right thing. And so that to me speaks volumes because they, you know, they've got this frequently returned badge on multiple blankets and they're still up in top six. To me, that says something. And usually when I see something like that, the next thing I'm looking at is, okay, well, is it something they're doing outside of the Amazon platform? And the short answer is yes. Sorry to ruin the surprise, everyone. But yeah, they're clearly spending money on Facebook ads. And that spend is actually growing. And it's probably one of the reasons why they've been able to maintain sixth place while all the competition is just You know, spending more money trying to do everything they possibly can to do less for more. It's one of those like race to the bottom markets because there's really not a lot you can do to differentiate aside from maybe things like spillover commerce where you offer a better customer experience. So let's focus on that. So the first thing we need to figure out now that we know that they definitely have Amazon product market fit, Let's look up MetamarketFit. And surprise, surprise, they have 52 different ads running for their brand and they're doing quite well. So yeah, Bare Home is absolutely crushing it. These are great looking ads. They're really selling the brand. They're selling the vision. And one of the things that obviously makes a lot of sense is if we, trying to see which one. Oh yeah, they do mattresses now. I mean, yeah, this is their top performing blanket ad. And of course, they've got a micro plush ad, which makes a lot of sense, but they have lots of different ads going to lots of different things on their Shopify store. Pop this open. Yeah, they're really pushing the microfiber blanket, which is a little surprising because I would or the micro plush blanket, excuse me. But if we click in here and look at their actual website, I mean, They have all kinds of different things. They've got bundles, they've got sales site wide. So they're already doing something at least kind of in that spillover commerce realm where they're trying to sell bundles instead of just selling you one individual item. That is a great move for spillover commerce because shoppers can save by buying from this website. And then another thing that they're doing that I think is quite good is they are really advertising some of their top products and some of their smallest products to really just We focus on, okay, this is a great product. We're trying to sell it. We're at a queen. We only have king and twin size left, but this is a great product that a lot of people want. And so it's very clearly part of what's driving all of this search for bare home fitted sheet, bare home fleece sheets, like all these different products are getting a ton of search volume. From Bare Homes Facebook advertising. Obviously we love AMZScout and we're able to use AMZScout to start to get some of this competitive information about our competition and use it to figure out if they are in fact using spillover commerce. So I hope that this has been incredibly valuable and incredibly helpful. We work quite hard here. And if you want to learn more, we have a YouTube channel called Sean Stone Spillover Commerce. You can also find us at spillovercommerce.com. And if you want these slides or anything else, hit the links in the description below. Thank you so much and until next time.