The $100M Amazon Playbook (2025 Edition) | Jasim Eisa

The $100M Amazon Playbook (2025 Edition) | Jasim Eisa Speaker 3: Amazon brands don't fail because of bad products. They fail because they scale the wrong way. The tactics that worked five years ago, well, guess what? They don't work today. In this episode, you're going to learn the $100M Amazon Playbook that actually works in 2025 from a CEO that's helped build brands with his nine-figure agency. Our guest started his first business when he was 15 and ended up dropping out of college to keep building. Since then, he's scaled companies to over $70 million in revenue with a team of over 150 people. He is now the CEO of Vodera, where he and his team have helped brands sell more than $100 million in I'm on Amazon or on Amazon. So welcome Jasim Eisa. But before we get to Jasim, let's thank our sponsors. We can't do this without our sponsors. So I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Sellerboard. AZRank, Sophie Society, the Titan Network and the Connect Cash. And by the way, we're going to be seeing Dan Ashburn from Titan at our CMS Cigar and Whiskey event in Tampa in the next couple of weeks on November the 6th. So if you get a chance, check out Collective Mind Society and check out what that event's all about. It's going to be pretty cool. If you have any questions, comments, put them in the comment section. Sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and let's welcome Jasim. Unknown Speaker: Hello, hello, hello. Speaker 3: Hey, how are you? Speaker 1: I'm good, good. How are you? Thank you for having me on here and I'm glad to finally get this arranged and speak to you and your audience. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's great. So we got a lot of different things to talk about, but this is an interesting topic. So when I heard this is what we're gonna be talking about, I thought this is one that everybody's gonna be happy to hear about and please participate. So I know Simon, you're always participating, but if you have questions, make sure you ask because we've got an expert here that can help you out, especially on the scaling side. So probably the first thing I want to ask is something a little bit off topic. We'll still stick in the topic, but scaling. What are Amazon sellers missing? Why are they Why do a lot of them fail when they try to scale? Speaker 1: A big part of it has to do, I mean, what we're seeing very frequently when brands come approaching us is not working on a long-term strategic roadmap. They're kind of doing road patches and fixes. Like they hear, they go to, for example, YouTube, SEO is the most important thing. So then they just get the whole team focused on SEO. They might not even be doing the latest SEO stuff, which is another subsequent problem, like for example, keyword stuffing versus now intent-based SEO. And just continuously doing random things rather than kind of working out one thing at a time and checking the boxes and the appropriate sequence for scaling and for doing things is we found the biggest issue because you have to diagnose your situation and what's truly the constraint or roadblock for your growth. And then based on that, you have to address your situation because your SEO may be great, but your issue is visibility, for example. So you have to understand what's your true constraint and work strategically on it rather than kind of road patches and fixing is the biggest, biggest thing that we've seen, especially over the last years, many brands have approached us. Speaker 3: So can you give us a couple of examples of that? Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, sure. So for example, we were talking to a vitamin brand, right? Their listing was very much optimized. It was looking very good. And they kept on focusing on doing the video for their listing within the conversion rate. But once you took a listing, once you took a diagnosis of their listing and their PDP product detail page, we noticed that that wasn't their blocker. Their blocker was actually the main image and their click-through rate was the one that was down. So once looking at the various elements of their listing, it was noticed that basically, wasn't the blocker that they think they had. The video they did like four or five revisions and like, oh, we only got another sale. They were selling approximately, it was like on that parent ASIN, it was like 1.7 million. They spent like months and months and months redoing it. They got it to like 1.8, 1.85 million. But once they redid the main image, the click-through rate almost went up 30 or 40%. That increased the bottle neck or funnel. Now their whole listing is doing, it was like 2.6 or 2.7 million. Just obviously took maybe a few weeks to reflect that change, but that was a true constraint for them. Then once we addressed the click-through rate, we actually saw the other bottleneck was impressions. We're not ranking on single keyword campaigns. So working on the right sequence and the right strategic approach was one of the main things that we work on. We look at the data. We see where their true bottleneck is. Where are they lagging compared to like industry standard? Unknown Speaker: Is it their average order value? Speaker 1: Is their price is too low or do they not have subscriptions or is it? It's usually one of four components. We call them the four growth levers. So the first one is traffic and impressions. So are they getting seen enough? The second one right after that is click-through rate, the third one is conversion rate, and the fourth one is LTV which includes like average order value, subscriptions, and which of those four is a brand truly liking a lot based on the data or based on their weaknesses and addressing that one and then moving on to the next one to continually address the bottlenecks and I'm Norman Farrar. That's where we've seen a lot of issues lately. Speaker 3: I think a lot of sellers don't know how to increase their lifetime value. And one of the things that I've done with a lot of different brands, especially, I'll just give you an example that's happening within the last couple of months, is I've been working with a non-alcoholic spirit. And they were selling one bottle at a time, maybe two. And I put it into B2B. And I put it, they, they, they come in a case of six. So you got a case of six, 18, uh, 24. Sorry. I was three, six, 12, 24. And all of a sudden, our B2B business just kind of exploded. And now we're getting multiples of 6 or 24 where we never had this before, which increased our average order value. And if this is a business, we know they're going to come back for more. So that's one little thing that we've done to increase lifetime value, but also subscribe and save is a great way. Are there any other ways that you've seen to help increase, to add to the lifetime value? Speaker 1: No, that's actually, I wanted to applaud you for bringing up a great point. When people think of lifetime value, They think at a very surface level that is just subscription and a lot of people say I don't have a consumable product. So there's no point but average order value is actually part of lifetime values you mentioned. So increasing your prices or doing multi-pack discounts. One of the strategies that we use and we want you to video describing the full thing, but it's basically putting two coupons that are non-stockable. So there's a coupon if you order one, but then there's a multi-pack coupon. So if you buy two you get a 10% discount. If you buy three you get a 15% discount. But then also making sure that your item is activated so if it's a business legible product, making sure you have business pricing turned on and you have I think the minimum threshold is 5% for three products. And then Amazon business, the business page will automatically and freely promote your product as For the Amazon business, so that's just talking about average order value. For the average order value section of lifetime value, the subscription part, one thing that we've done a lot, and I have an example that's really good, is we had a product that was targeting a customer avatar of maybe older people. So initially it was $50, and we had a subscribe and save coupon, and subscribe and save coupon are non-negotiable for consumer products for us. So we had it initially at 10%. So I think we were getting an average of 20% of people that went to the page, they were subscribing. But what I did is I told the team, like, listen, we should actually, instead of 10%, let's try a $5 coupon. It's the same dollar amount, but instead of a percentage, it's a dollar amount. So we tried a $5 coupon and actually we had 30% of people subscribe. So a 50% increase of subscribers, even though the dollar amount of subscribing was still the same from 10% to $5, but it was simpler. For that customer avatar, it was easier. And the other way around is actually also works where Sometimes a percentage is better than a dollar amount and sometimes you have to test the percentage. Is 10% better than 15% better than 20% in terms of overall lifetime value, CAC to LTV. And that's another thing is testing out the subscription amount for a subscribe and save has been crucial. Something we've been focused on very, very heavily for we have a pet food that we're trying it on and also trying out a supplement actually right now, either changing from percentage to dollar or changing the dollar amount, even if it's costing some more to get a coupon, Are we getting more and is the lifetime value incrementally significant on that aspect of things? Speaker 3: Want more unfiltered tips from top eCommerce experts? Well, hit subscribe and you'll never miss a Lunch With Norm episode. I think the stat I heard, actually we had somebody on the podcast, it was Ritu Java just the other day and she was talking about digital coupons, okay, not stackable, just the digital ones that are instant and only, I think she said 33% are actually used, which is the first thing I look at is I click that coupon. But she was saying that, yes, it's very rarely used. But what's even less used are what you were describing earlier are the stackables. People don't realize that they have to apply them. And so they go to the checkout with three products or six products. Something else from your catalog, but they don't apply the coupon. So I don't know what the percentage is, but I know it's minor. So you don't have to fear that. And one of the other things, this is just from my own experience, I just want to tell sellers, don't shoot yourself in the foot. Because if you give away like these digital coupons, or if you stack them together, you got to make sure you make money. It's so important and I've seen where people are giving away 20, 25% on these coupons and it's, do you really know your numbers? Are your margins really that great? A trick that I do is I try to get the highest at 10%. So I'll go in and I'll just put a couple of points on for like, let's say two bottles. I'm not talking about in the business. But let's say if I'm building up a coupon stack, it might be like 2 or 3 to 5, then to 10. And I'm only giving away a little bit because people just want that discount anyways. I don't know about you, but what the Amazon fees are right now are so high. I've heard this. I thought they were in around the 50-55%, but just recently I heard it's capped over 60%. For Amazon. So you gotta know your numbers to make sure that you're actually making it. What do you think about that 60% figure? Speaker 1: So 60% of what, sorry? Speaker 3: Oh, Amazon fees. When you take everything into consideration. Speaker 1: Like you mean with advertising and everything? Speaker 3: Everything, yeah. Speaker 1: Yes, I think that would actually, that number does sound familiar. The issues I actually do agree with you a lot is that a lot of brands do not know their numbers. There's so many fees. Just the other day, we had a clothing and apparel brand. So clothing and apparel, their return rate is very much higher. So it's like 12% to 18%. They knew that the returns, obviously, they're getting refunded their returns. They're not getting the sale for them. What they didn't know is that there's a return processing fee. That's two to three bucks per item. And there's so many fees within Amazon, unlike maybe 10 years ago, where it was just like a pick and pack fee and a referral fee. Yeah, it was very simple. Now, there's AWD fees, there's inbound placement fees. Actually, they just doubled both of those. Inbound placement fees almost tripled just a week or two ago, so that's going to make a difference for shipping. And AWD, West Coast, went up 60%. But besides the point is, yes, you're on the dot, that knowing your numbers is an amazing starting point because then you know what you can afford for coupons because a lot of sellers think, oh, I just have a cash flow issue, I'm growing. No, you don't have a cash flow issue. I'm sorry to tell you, it's actually a profit issue. And they just think it's cash flow. I'm just going to lend more and lend more until they realize their belly up. So understanding your profitability and your unit economics is crucial. There are so many fees that are just hidden and even like reimbursements and recoveries. We just did an analysis. We did a study with our brands and a lot of people that are adjacent to us and we found that that alone is 2% to 3% of your sales. So for example, we're on pace to sell $80M to $100M this year. 2% to 3%, that's around, let's say, $2M. And a lot of people don't understand what's recovery, reimbursements, having clawbacks. So just understanding the entire picture of the inventory that's lost from different fees to chargebacks to A to Z claims, there's just so much things going on and having that visibility so you know what you can afford. As you said, Norm, for coupons, it's absolutely, absolutely crucial and one of the biggest things that we start with. Speaker 3: Make sure this is just something, again, that's come up over the last three months with one of our clients is that we started to notice that there was a lot of refunds and then we looked at the excuses and that's what got me to see that this was a competitor scam. So what ended up happening is we weren't getting bad reviews. But all of a sudden, over a three month period, I think, I don't know if Keone is listening right now. She's the one that handles this. But we had around 50 or 60 returns. And the return reason, address undeliverable. So we were trying to reach out and try to find out what was going on. But all that happened were these prime buyers that would put their name, their city and their state. And that was it. So what ended up happening is we got all these returns and all of a sudden our return rate looked like it was extremely high. So we've been battling with Amazon over the last two or three months about kind of reversing or helping us out with this. Now, so far it hasn't affected us. Speaker 1: So do you guys get that frequently returned badge on the PDP? Speaker 3: That's what I was worried about. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: So we've been opening up the case. Actually, we've been talking to them about once a week about it because that's the last thing you want. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: And this is it's a popular item, but there was way too many returns, way too many. Like, I think it was five or six percent. So it was high. Let's go back a bit and I want to talk about some of the massive opportunities that Amazon has right now. Okay, it still does. And Simon, I know what you're going to say. I think you already said it down below, but Amazon has a massive opportunity. But why is it so painful for most brands to really do anything to succeed? Speaker 1: I think a lot of it has to do with implementing a lot of the old strategies and expecting them to work today. For example, TikTok shop right now, they're like just to kind of bring up additional marketplaces. You're putting up a lot of times listings and they're just selling whatever it is. And that's how Amazon was around eight to 10 years ago. Whereas the people that I'm seeing succeed today, they're really, really good. I would say their primary skill is product development. They truly understand that they don't just put up junk and expect it to buy, especially now with the importance of reviews and ratings. And that's where I've seen like one of the brands they work with is Literally, they put out a new product, they had a patent on it, and this was an exceptional case, but they were selling, for example, I think it was like a thousand units within the second or third month of something from scratch because it was... They captured the right demand. They did the keyword research analysis. They had someone visit the factory for an audit analysis, make sure the product was high quality. But the point is they spent a lot of time on product development. That's what we're seeing succeed a lot is people focus actually on building a brand rather than just throwing up a Me Too listing, which can work in still some niches particularly. But it's going to be very competitive, less margin. If you truly, when I'm looking at the brands that are doing like 20% margin, they are doing a product that's truly valuable and truly, let's say, high quality to be able to capture the market share. And then once they do that, they complement it with the marketplace mastery, whether that's making sure that they're implementing tactics that work today, for example, intent-based keyword rather than like just stuffing the title with the same word over and over and over again. I used to work a long time ago and making sure that they're building it for other marketplaces and building it for retail and having that overall aligned brand strategy rather than just kind of a one-off. I'm here to talk to you today about a new Me Too product and just a bunch of random products that is very tough to work, especially when you're dealing with people that have thousands of reviews and ratings. That's at least what I'm seeing today. I don't know if, Norm, you're seeing something similar, but that's very common for us and what we've observed. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm just going to bring this up. We had a guy on Marketing Misfits yesterday. For a couple of months, but his name is Steve Larson, incredible, incredibly smart marketer. But here's something that I can tell sellers, especially if you're looking for new product opportunity. He's come up with a phrase, Red Ocean, Blue Offer. And I'll give you an example of this. He loves competitive, super competitive, more competitive, the better. But what he does is he digs into those competitive niches and he finds that niche, that sub-niche. So I'll give you an example. Tim Jordan and I did this years ago on our private label, Legion. And this is something that we just started talking about, but it's perfect for today's environment. So on the call, people were asking us about product opportunity. We said, yeah, you go into either Amazon or you can go in to, oh, just sorry, I lost my train of thought. Anyway, you'll find the product on Amazon is very competitive. We found a tortilla press and then the tortilla press, there was just everybody and his mother was selling it. It was all bottom feeders. Nobody was making any money on it and they were $39.99. They were just the typical metal press. Then we looked at it and we said, look, why don't you look into Alibaba or onto Pinterest or over on Etsy. And we found that people were doing wooden tortilla presses. And then Tim said, well, what would even be better is if we found one in Latin America instead of in China. So this is while we're on the call. And we found a guy in Guatemala that would do it. Well, all of a sudden, We took a look at this and it went from a $39 product, which was metal, and ours was cheaper to buy, but we could sell it for $99. It was a huge, so you've got your Red Ocean, Blue Oxford. That's something that people can take a look at. That could be in the supplement area, the pet area, the baby area. All these very competitive niches. But if you can go drill down, find a competitive niche, and then start looking for that, aha, you know, that's one area that I'm telling people that this is one area that they can do product, find product opportunity. And you can do that by putting that information or putting your competitors information, writing a little prompt in ChatGPT. And you wouldn't believe some of the information you can get out of that right now. Speaker 1: No, that's actually a great story because again, you focus on the product development, you try to differentiate on your offer even if it wasn't on the specific product, your offer looked different. And that intrigued people like, oh, this is very different. Let me see what that is. And even the pricing strategy, even though you're priced more, that also be like, oh, there has to be a reason they're priced at 100 bucks. Why are the people at 40 bucks? That's even differentiation strategy, ironically, in of itself. So there's a lot of right things that you did to get to that situation. But if you had just been lazy and like, oh, let me just put another one of these $40 ones. Why would they buy you when there's another guy with more proven results than you're listing? Speaker 3: If you want to go even deeper into Amazon ads, we had Rita Java on the show recently and she broke down exactly what's working right now with Amazon ads. Watch the full episode right here. And when somebody's cooking, for the most part, they want a quality product. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: So sometimes they're looking at a higher price. But even though we got it at a lower price, it was great. So now that market is saturated. Yeah, right. For some reason, right after we said that. But let's talk a bit before we get to the bottom of the hour about your $100M Playbook. So what are some key lessons that we can start with and then we'll go to break? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, sure. So basically what the concept is, we've been doing this for approximately a decade. What we've tried to summarize a lot of our learnings into what we call like the 4x4 system. So basically we have like four pillars and then we have the four growth levers that we build on top of it, especially at different This is not relevant to all brands because they have to be at a certain stage. The stage that we deal with is usually above a million dollars. But the four pillars we're looking at, the first one is brand control. How do you make sure that you control your various brands, whether that's on Target+, Walmart Seller Center, Amazon Seller Central, and then retail, making sure that there's no hijackers on the listing. And that's some of the stuff that we've helped brands with and that we always look at transparency codes, making sure that you have differentiation. The second pillar is basically operational stability. Make sure that you're always in stock because if you're not in stock, then nothing else matters. So how do we make sure that not only are you in stock, but you're also one day delivery to all 48 US states. And there's a lot of tools to help with this. SmartScale has a heat map, not affiliated with them or anything, but they have like a heat map that shows like how to make sure that your product is all 48 US states. You're at least a one day delivery window and you're shipping it across all the states. So that's where you get operational stability. The third one is strategic alignment. So making sure that the strategy is aligned with like, if you're pushing out a new product in Walmart, Walmart packaging has to be different than Amazon. Amazon has to be condensed. And very good, but Walmart has to look pretty for the shelf, for example, or Target. So, making sure that you have the alignment across all marketplaces and across retail. And the fourth pillar is real-time growth intelligence. So, you're using the tactics that work today. The most famous example, I say this again and again because you see it so frequently, is SEO. Another one, for example, is PPC. Back in the day, auto campaigns worked really good because there wasn't competition. Now, you have to focus on single keyword campaigns. So, making sure that you're using even branded search, non-branded search. For example, today a tactic that's really working really well is driving external traffic outside of Amazon to Amazon. So, like TikTok traffic to Amazon. Amazon considers TikTok a competitor. So, when they see you're driving that traffic, even if customers don't buy, They're gonna rank you higher in their algorithm because they know that you're doing activity and that's real-time growth intelligence is tactics that work today. And then we have the four levers that layer on top of that, which I mentioned a little bit earlier, which is traffic, CTR, CVR, and LTV, making sure that you understand where your bottleneck is in there. But once you have the four pillars, you can just press on the levers to grow your sales. And that's kind of the way that we look at the playbook is making sure that we install that and obviously have more in-depth articles on this. But this is kind of a high-level overview and we could jump in deeper in any of those concepts. But that's the thing that we see that we kind of implement for brands that we've seen that has been successful. Speaker 3: Okay, perfect. So we are at the bottom of the hour. And at the bottom of the hour, we do something a little bit different. We ask our guest to talk a little bit about a prize that we're going to give away at the top of the hour. It's called the Wheel of Kelsey. So if this is the first time that you're watching the podcast, it's hashtag WheelOfKelsey, tag two people, you'll get a second entry. Or on Monday, you can go to the newsletter and enter through the newsletter as well. So you've got three ways of entering. Hashtag WheelOfKelsey, tag two people or go through the newsletter. So today, What is the prize? Speaker 1: So the prize is one of the things that like we actually it's related to mentioning the profit analysis audit. So one brand out of this, as long as they're meeting thresholds, we're going to do a full analysis for free of what their current numbers are and doing a unit economic analysis and suggesting improvements of where they have discrepancies or inefficiency, just whether that's in supply chain or whether it's in PPC. Basically, focused on margin and doing a margin analysis on where they currently stand and where we see high levels of improvement of free obviously. And an audit that we do for our own brands, we're going to offer that to your audience, Norm. Speaker 3: All right. Fantastic. And I think there's something for everybody, isn't there? Yes. Speaker 1: So in addition to that, obviously, anyone that wants to jump in, go to our website, just jump in here, schedule a strategy call. You can talk to myself or any of our team on your brand. Any questions that you have, make sure to write in the what would you like to discuss. That you came in from the Norm podcast and you wanted to discuss a specific issue and then if it's marketing or supply chain, I can have someone from that team jump on with you. 15-30 minutes free consultation on your specific problem and we can hopefully arrange for that once you guys come in. Just make sure, like I said, to mention that in the what would you like to discuss section and we'll have someone from our team kind of walk you through that issue and see what we can do. Speaker 3: Alright, it's always like free consults. Okay, so Kels, can you take us to a sponsor and we'll be right back. Did you know Amazon profit is more than revenue minus ads? Sellerboard calculates your true profitability, factoring in every fee, return, shipping cost, and even cost of goods using FIFO logic. That's first in, first out logic. Plus, they automate your PPC, forecast inventory and avoid stockouts, reclaim money with Amazon reimbursements, set FBM shipping by period, and track Walmart profits with the same dashboard. And you don't even have to have an Amazon account. You can try it for free for two months. Sellerboard. Know your numbers, scale your business. All right, let's go back to those four pillars that you were talking about, and let's dig a little bit deeper into each one. Can we go through each one? Now, the branding side you did give an example for, but could you just go a little bit deeper on each of these pillars? Speaker 1: Sure. So the first one was brand control and equity protection. So this is where it's actually very crucial, and I'll give an issue of what we ran into. 1. Brand Control and Equity Protection This is not a serious issue if your brand is like honestly less than a million dollars. You're not going to have people try to jump on your listings. But the bigger you get, the more attractive you become to resellers. And where resellers are going to try to jump in, they're going to go to your website. They're going to say, I have a retail order. They're maybe even going to say it's for an international distributor or it's for something along those lines. But it's actually they're just going to buy that order. They're going to sell it back on Amazon. So you have to make sure that even when you're selling to retails like Walmart and Target, are they abiding by MAP and are they not pricing it lower for resellers to jump in and to just sell the item? So that's one, making sure that your MAP is aligned, that you're not going to have resellers jumping back into your listings and that you have full control of your brand. Like one thing that we do is we immediately get brands onto Target. Even though the target is not going to generate much in terms of revenue, maybe it's going to generate a couple of points, but what it is going to help with is basically not letting someone else claim your brand on target before you because then you have to go through a month-long process to show that you own instead of them and they might ruin your listings and ruin your, it might not look good across different marketplaces. That's where you go into brand equity control and brand protection basically. The second one is operational stability. So this is where you're getting into basically making sure that your product is available in stock always within the fastest time possible. So one of the parts that we consider is simply FBA instead of MFN to make sure that merchant fulfilled to make sure that it's always arriving to customers and fast in time. The third one is strategic ownership and alignment. So making sure that your entire team is aligned on what the brand goal for your brand is. So making sure that Walmart is aligned with Amazon because If Walmart is priced a couple pennies even less than Amazon, your Amazon listing is going to get suppressed featured offer, suppressed fly box and then you have to work for that. You might lose sales for that period of time where they go to a competitor and if it's an LTV, it's a consumable product and they subscribe to your competitor, good luck getting those sales back because then you're going to have to work backwards and win over that customer again. And then last but not least is real-time growth intelligence, making sure that you're applying things that work today, the latest stuff. So for example, implementing Rufo's intent-based questions or implementing Cosmos. Take that into consideration with your SEO. Another one is, for example, using the new image stack. So you have more image slots or more video slots. Making sure you take advantage of those. Another one is a lot of people focus on bullet points, but in reality, bullet points, they're no longer as relevant. Even when you look at the mobile, you can see the bullet points are all the way at the bottom. Amazon puts them at the bottom for a reason, because they're not that significant to the customer purchase journey. And so but yeah I see people emphasizing bullet points because they think that they still rank in the algorithm when actually they don't. They did maybe a couple years ago but today they don't. And then once we get those four pillars right, Then we can look at the four growth levers which is traffic, CTR, CVR, and LTV. One of the reasons I say that is what's the point of growing your brand if your brand is hijacked, there's resellers, you don't own the buy box, or what's the point of doing all this kind of stuff if for example you're not in stock, you're not going to spend money on ads, you're not going to improve your click-through rate, your main image, you have a bigger issue, you have to get in stock. So once you have the healthy foundation in there, then you focus on the four growth levers, which is traffic, basically making sure that you're seen by your customers, you're doing PPC on the right keywords, click-through rate, making sure your main image and your title, which is the two biggest factors, are on point, they're aligned with your product, and then you have conversion rate, which is making sure that the rest of your image stack, the rest of your listing, you have a coupon on there to increase conversion rate, to increase click-through rate, It's optimized and then you're optimizing your LTV. And again, I have material specifically for each of these sections on my YouTube channel. If you guys just type in Jasim Eisa and I have a video going through this more in depth, but that is basically the primary concept of the playbook that we implement and the primary steps that we go through. Obviously, I don't want to kind of go through all of it right now. It's going to take much longer. We have like almost a 60 or 70 page PDF that we kind of has all these concepts. But this is just a high-level overview of the way that we look at things in the process and sequencing that we think is important for brand success. Speaker 3: All right. Would you be able to get Kelsey a link to that PDF? Not right now, just later. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: One of the questions now, you've got all that information. Like you said, it's a 60-page document. It's not just a little bit of information. How does an Amazon seller try to build this brand without, it could be a huge headache. When you look at 60 pages, you go, where do I even start? How do brands grow without the headaches? Speaker 1: Obviously, you have to understand where your issue is. If you don't have hijackers on your listing, then your brand is already controlled. I have also approximately 70 to 80 YouTube videos around this topic or similar topics that discuss a lot of these. Each one is like 10 to 15 minutes long. I share exactly what we do and they're all free, of course, but the point is that I don't want people going to solve something, solving a problem they don't have. That's why I mentioned, for example, If your brand is controlled and you don't have any hijackers in your listing, then you shouldn't be trying to read that section that's maybe 10 pages long or watching YouTube videos on that. You already have the issue solved. You don't have hijackers. But maybe you're not in stock or you continuously run out of stock. Then you should address that. So you should see which of those four pillars are you missing, if any. Some people are doing all of them well. For example, they're using the latest strategies, making sure that they're using the latest strategies. They're aligned between their different marketplaces. Like if you don't have any different marketplaces, you're just on Amazon, then you don't have to worry about that point at all. So make sure that you're worrying about the point that you actually have and you're addressing that because again, just like we mentioned earlier in this episode, you want to be addressing issues that you actually have. And then we get to the growth levers. That's where you look at your bottleneck. You look at your click-through rate. We have a lot of data. We have 20,000 SKUs, and that's where we sold a lot of it to. So we know what the industry benchmark is. But even if you don't have that, I'm sure, Norm, you have a lot of referrals. You can ask Norm what the industry for your specific item is, and you can compare your click-through rate to your peers or your competitors. We have internal softwares that do it, but I'm sure there's external ones that do that, maybe Datadive or whatever. Or Norm, you might have some references specifically. And you can see if you're on pace with the competitors, then you shouldn't look at that one, but look at the ones that maybe you're behind competitors on, whether that's CVR or impressions or click-through rate or LTV. Like if your price is lower than all of your competitors, then why don't you have that premium positioning? That's part of the LTV. So look at the four by four and see where you're specifically lacking and address that. Have all your team put their hands on addressing that specific constraint. To widen it and to not have it be constrained to address it. I hope that kind of makes sense, Norman. I'm not, I'm kind of going to it more specifically, but maybe we can drill down if you feel like I didn't cover anything appropriate. Speaker 3: I mean, that was a great explanation. But again, going to brands, and I think we covered some of this, but for brands, especially newer brands, what are they getting wrong? And what's a quick fix? Speaker 1: There's getting the basics right, making sure that your image stack is there, there's making sure that you kind of hit all the check boxes of making sure that your title is right, your premium A plus content is on there. I would say the biggest thing is kind of expecting that you're going to get traffic. A lot of now is the expectation that you're going to get sales without anything. Especially now Amazon is a pay to play. We very often see on launches that you're going to have to pay a lot of PPC. You're making sure that you're targeting the right keyword and you're having conversion rate for it. That would I say the number one concept for a new product launch is let's say there's a specific keyword. Let's say for example this is a mug. It's a Hydro Flask. Let's say they want to win a specific keyword of office mugs. They're going to target that. They're going to see who the main competitors are and win that keyword and make sure that they're looking at the SQP data, search query performance, and they're optimizing for that competitors. And then once they do that, they jump into the next keyword. And they also do SKC single keyword campaigns for that specific. So office monks, and then they jump into the next one. I would say the focus is the biggest thing they're lacking is winning one keyword at a time and optimizing for that keyword. And then once you rank organically, you can jump onto the next keyword group and continue that, continue ranking organically for a bunch of keywords, rather than just having a generic strategy being more focused on a specific keyword and improving the traffic click-through rate. Because office mugs, then you're going to have to put a picture of this on an office, right? And you're going to have to use the videos for that. Once you rank and Amazon sees that they put relevancy, they call the relevancy web for that certain aspect. Then you can jump out to the next stuff and you register into Amazon system as part related to an office mug. Then you can maybe jump into a work mug or a workout mug. Even if it's the same product, you're at least registered in the back end of Amazon. You continue jumping to other stuff. So I hope that covers it further. We don't deal a lot with maybe newer launching brands, so that's some of the experience that we've had. We mostly deal with brands doing at least $2M a year, but that's something that when we do product launches for these established brands is one of the strategies that we use. We're heading one keyword at a time. Speaker 3: That $100M, is that your agency-wide or is that a brand that you have? Are you a wholesaler? Speaker 1: So we have three brands of our own, and then we have approximately 20 other brands that we partnered with that we act as their exclusive distributor on Amazon. So basically we buy their inventory, we sell it through our Vodera account, and we manage everything, supply chain, compliance, ads, and then between everything, Our brands and partner brands, we're doing approximately $80 to $100 million per year basically. And we also buy brands as well. So yes. Speaker 3: All right. And it is a private label. You're not doing wholesale. Speaker 1: So yes. So our own brand is a private label. Then when we do sign up with other brands, let's say Hydro Flask, we basically sign as their exclusive distributor for Amazon for like a year or two years or three years. And then depending on the details of the contract, that's kind of the arrangement that we work out with different brands. Speaker 3: All right. So the reason I'm asking that, because it'd be a completely different answer if it was specifically wholesale compared to private label. Speaker 1: Well, yeah, no, no, not we basically responsible for managing everything end to end for our brands and our partner brands. So approximately 20-25 brands between everything. Speaker 3: Okay, so here's the question. Can you give me, out of your playbook, can you give me some of the key lessons from you building up to that $100M on Amazon and what you've implemented? So I would love to hear how you've done this and how we can, if you're a smaller brand, follow some of these lessons. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll give you. Speaker 3: By the way, I know you gave us the four pillars. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: What are some things that you've learned? Speaker 1: No, I'll give you like just a real life example from a smaller brand we have. It's a baby brand. So we had a baby play mat, for example. So we noticed the first thing that we did, we had to make sure there was enough margin. So this is the new launch. So that's where we run the unit economics before we launched. Like what's the market selling price? So it was around $45. So we knew that if we have to accommodate for 20% tacos, 20% of advertising, we had to calculate all fees. We had to get this for at least six or seven bucks to be profitable and make at least 15% margin. So that's where we ran the math. We found a supplier that gave it to us from six or seven bucks. We did this even the simple way, just through Alibaba. And we found a supplier there that did this for us. But what we differentiated on was we did designs. And we tested our designs through, there's a lot of softwares, but there's Pickful, Intellivi, Productpinion, those are the famous ones. And we did a lot of design testing on designs. We put our competitor's main image and we put ours. And we had to achieve statistical significance. So at least 80% of the people we polled in that customer range chose our product over someone else. So once we saw that we had a winning design, right, we put that on Amazon. We've noticed that we started and we targeted a specific keyword as extra large home baby playmat. So it had like 10,000 search volume or something along those lines. So we targeted it. We knew we were going to win because customers liked ours more from the testing we did previously. Then we started choosing ours and what we did is we added variations. We added different variations, same thing. We tested the design, made sure that's where product development comes in. We made sure that customers actually loved ours more and we did the testing and analysis. But even then, we still ran into trouble. For example, we have a 4.1 star rating on it. We're using AI to analyze the reviews. We have around 200 reviews on it. And one of the things you're noticing is thickness. So we went back to the supplier, listen, we're going to pay 20 cents extra, but we want thickness, I think instead of a quarter of an inch, we want it to be half of an inch. And we did that improvement. And then after we saw that improvement, we saw the rating go down from 4.1 to 4.3, which is a huge difference because now on the Amazon search page, it shows us from four stars to four and a half stars because Amazon kind of rounds up and we saw more click-through rate and we saw more conversion once you got that improved. So then after we tackled that, the next thing we're tackling is actually the fees. We're trying to get it to a little bit of a smaller box. We have a breaking point for the fees. Right now, it's oversized. We can get it into standard size. That's where we're attacking one thing at a time and we're stacking the results to grow it. Right now, for example, for that product, it's just been a year and a half. The whole listing was obviously doing zero in the beginning to now doing 50. Then we're doing 150. Today, we're doing approximately 350. Or 400 sales between all the units on that specific listing. And we have like six variations, all of them tested for better design. Even the quality is getting better now that we're improving thickness because our competitors are 4.1. So that's kind of a real life example of how we kind of measure the bottleneck and we just address it to continue moving on to the next thing. So I hope that makes sense. Speaker 3: Yeah, it does and you touched on something that is very important too. When you're changing up things, don't change it up all at once. You want to but you know some mistakes that I've made in the past is that you're anxious and you put everything on and then something fails and now you got to figure out what it was. And also tracking, tracking what you change and how you change it. Just make notes or put it on a spreadsheet or do something just so you know what to do to go back in case something does happen and you tank. But Kels, let's go over to some questions and then we'll go over to the wheel. Speaker 2: All right, we've got some great questions coming in here. From Bartnett, so for how long should we push the keyword office mug before switching to work mugs? Speaker 1: So, that's where we use, there's a lot of different platforms with Datarove as an example, Datadive does this. There's a lot of different softwares where you can track your organic ranking for that keyword. So, I'm going to continue pushing the office mugs until I'm ranked top 3 or 5 and obviously my conversion rate I have to have a good offer. I'm not going to rank if my conversion rate is not high. And then once I do rank top three, then I remove the focus on there because Amazon registered me as high quality and then I focus on the next one. So usually, it's around three to four weeks as long as your offer is actually legit. As you said, red ocean, blue offer. So as long as you have that special offer, you should be able to rank in the top three and then you can move into the next one within three to four weeks as long as, again, your product has to be good. It can't be crap. No matter how much SKC you do, you won't rank in the top three. So that's usually how long it takes and that's usually the mix that we're seeing for a lot of stuff. Speaker 3: All right, next question, Kels. Speaker 2: All right, these two I think are a bit intertwined from Simon, so I'll read them both first. The four column and foundation strategy is great. It should be implemented by Amazon, DDC, wholesale or service-based businesses. It takes time and investment. How do little guys and startups achieve this? And do you think new brands should start off Amazon and build a real brand for two or three years and then jump to Amazon? Speaker 1: So let's do one at a time maybe. How do little brands apply this? So that's where, like we mentioned, we shouldn't overwhelm a lot of people. You have to understand that If you didn't launch a product, then you don't have to worry about brand equity. You don't have a brand anyway. So you have to focus on making sure you get the product right. You're doing testing. You're making sure that your product is, there's a need for it. You're reading the reviews of other competitors. Do they have, what's their one star, two star and three star reviews? Usually we like to read three stars the most. We found that they're the most objective. Sometimes one star, they're just pissed and they leave like a couple words, but look at those reviews, see what you can do and make sure that you incorporate those into your product and you're launching a good product. You have to look at where you are. Are you being seen or not being seen? If you're not being seen, then you're issues with traffic. So you have to look at PPC. If you're being seen but no one's clicking, then you're issues with click-through rate. So make sure that you improve your main image and title. If you're being clicked through rate but you're not buying, then you're issues with conversion rate. Are your other images good? So just one component at a time and seeing what that looks like basically. And then the other part is building a real brand. And should we start on Amazon? So if you're starting from scratch, you have to have a proposition for starting on Amazon. I think there has to be some TikTok shop incorporated into the strategy, just because of how cheap things are there. Before 2020, for example, it was Meta because Meta and iOS, iOS didn't have restrictions for privacy. You could do Meta ads very cheaply and get a lot of that traffic there. But now I would say incorporating TikTok shop into your strategy, making sure that your product is a scroll stopper. Now everyone's used to Reels, having that design, using PICFU and Tel Aviv to make sure your main image pops and streams at you. At Thrasio, did this with Angry Orange. I'm talking to them about a few other things, but where they had, they changed the design of the item where it's like a bright orange item, where it's like it pops out of the screen. So making sure that you have that scroll stopper, making sure that you're building that one product and then if it goes well, you can kind of continue to iterate products based on that need. And I would say for the launching, obviously Amazon and TikTok shop, complimenting each other would be, and TikTok influencers and all that kind of stuff is appropriate strategy that I'm seeing a lot of people use and external traffic to Amazon is something that I'm seeing frequently. Speaker 3: All right, last question. Or no, I guess that was it. Speaker 2: Yep, that's it. Speaker 3: All right. So before we get over to the wheel, how can people get a hold of you? Speaker 1: So I'm posting frequently on, I would say LinkedIn and YouTube. If you just search, I'll give them to Kelsey as well to put them in the description, but just search Jasim Eisa. I try to post at least one video a week, a couple of LinkedIn posts a week, but that's where I'm most active. And then obviously you can come check out our website if you want to talk to our team as well about your brands. Speaker 3: Alright, so yeah, Kelsey's just posting the links in the comments section, so check it out. You know, if you've been listening to the podcast, Jasim, I think he knows what he's talking about. Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much for your time. You're a very well-established Norm. I hope to meet you in person. I heard really great things about you, so hopefully you get the chance to meet in person. Thank you for hosting me again. Speaker 3: Thanks and so stay here. We're going to go over to the wheel and then we'll come right back. Are you an Amazon seller that checked out your listing and said it should be doing better? What am I doing wrong? There's got to be a better way. Well, guess what? There probably is. You just haven't had someone tell you exactly what's working and what's not. Flat World Network is for frustrated Amazon sellers. We'll take a look at your listing, your rank, your PPC, your traffic, and guess what? We're going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about your listing. And if you're interested, we'll even fix it for you. So if you're serious about scaling, go to flatworldnetwork.com and book your free audit today. Unknown Speaker: All right. Speaker 2: Right. So this is for Ritu Java's giveaway last week. So thank you everyone for entering. Let me shuffle these up. And if you are the winner, please email me k at lunch with norm.com and it looks like Bartnett is the winner. So congratulations Bartnett. Please email me k at lunch with norm.com. I know you were in the chat today, so hopefully you see this and yeah, congratulations. Speaker 3: This is it. Jasim, thanks for coming on. It was awesome. Speaker 1: Thank you. Likewise. Thank you for hosting. I hope to see you around soon, buddy. Speaker 3: All right. Yeah. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 3: All right, everybody. So thanks for listening to the podcast today. Like I said at the very beginning, not only for our sponsors, but for everybody, we couldn't do this podcast without you. So if you're looking to see an edited version of the podcast today, check us out. We launch every Monday. I always get mixed up between marketing misfits and this podcast, but I think it's every Monday we launch an edited version. Plus, we also have a few clips that are under three minutes. And we have our TikTok channel. So you can check it out all under Lunch With Norm. All right. That's it for today. And, uh, we'll see you next week.