Latest / Talk Commerce / Navigating the Amazon Marketplace with Carolyn Lowe
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:02.442) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Carolyn Lowe. She is the CEO and founder of ROI Swift, a Amazon agency. Carolyn, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and give us a passion you have. Carolyn Lowe (00:20.366) Sure. So thanks, Brent. It's great to be on with you and talking Amazon, one of my passions, but not my only passion. As I was telling you, I started my career, gosh, 25 years ago, moved from Boston to Austin. Dell recruited me to come down and work in their consumer marketing division. Some of your listeners might not have been born or they might have been babies, but 25 years ago, a of people are buying their first PC. So I've been in e-commerce for longer than I care to remember. then after Dell, went to a small mom and baby company. They were $3 million company, helped them 5X in a year. then they later got acquired by Wreck-It Benkiser. started ROI Swift in 2015 with a goal of trying to help 500 brands grow profitably. But my big passion outside of work is tennis. I'm an aspiring tennis player took it up two years ago Brent Peterson (01:20.67) Well, that's great. And you can play tennis year round in Austin. That's awesome. Although it might get a little hot in the summer, huh? Carolyn Lowe (01:25.046) You can. It does. It does. Yeah. We actually can't play in July and August. Unlike Minnesota. Brent Peterson (01:31.966) Yeah, right. Right, unlike Minnesota, we can't play in the wintertime. Although my son was on the high school tennis team and one of his springs, they couldn't get onto the court because we just continually had snow. So we should send that south on 35. Carolyn Lowe (01:48.544) my god. Carolyn Lowe (01:52.468) Yes, please. Brent Peterson (01:54.84) Carolyn before we get into content and I'm excited to talk about the brandings and Amazon and fun things like that, but I'm gonna tell you a joke All you have to do is give me a rating one through five. So here we go. I Ran into a lamp post yesterday. Luckily. I only sustained light injuries Carolyn Lowe (02:15.222) Hmm, I think I might give it a 3.5. Brent Peterson (02:18.684) Okay, thank you. That's awesome. I actually had an earlier interview. gave me the same exact rating and he was from Austin. Austin is such a hotbed for tech nowadays and it's exciting. It's exciting. I was just there for the Big Commerce Summit. Carolyn Lowe (02:31.37) It is, you know. Carolyn Lowe (02:35.65) That's right. Yeah, that was that was recent. We had a bunch of folks in town. And yeah, I wish I'd known you were in town. Funny story. My sister lives across from the comedian Steven Wright. And that joke reminded me of something that Steven Wright would say. Brent Peterson (02:49.82) Yes, maybe I think his humor and my humor are probably similar. Maybe I'm a little more upbeat. Carolyn Lowe (02:57.486) 100 % yes, yes. And you have much more intonation in your voice. Brent Peterson (03:01.916) Yeah, maybe I should work on the Stephen Rydish style. So, you said 2015 you started ROI Swift. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon started and being skeptical about it and I wish I would have bought shares way back then. So tell us about what led you to the Amazon path. Carolyn Lowe (03:27.559) It's interesting, Brent, I'm sure you talked to a lot of folks that are accidental entrepreneurs. I never meant to start a company. I was working for the mom and baby company and then they were also in Target and Walmart and they started making these $10 vitamins instead of these $40 better for you mom and baby products. So I was like, wow, you don't need an e-commerce person if you're selling $10 vitamins. I can't make you money on $10 vitamins online. so I started looking for a job. So I was sort of the accidental entrepreneur. But when I was at the mom and baby company, I was their team of sort of one for online and Amazon and e-commerce. So I did all their Facebook ads. I moved them from this old platform called 3D Cart to Shopify, moved them from MailChimp to Klaviyo. And then they had this fledgling little $10,000 a month Amazon business. And I said, this is a gold mine. I just sort of taught it to myself nine years ago and grew them to four or $500,000 a month from their little $10,000 a month. And I said, this is... really, this is a really huge opportunity and all these brands, they can't hire an expert. You know, when I was at Dell, I had a huge budget to hire like top tier MBAs and data analysts and all these other people. said, these five, 10, $20 million brands can't hire this big team. So I set out to start the agency to give brands like an expert help. There's so many snake oil salesmen out there. I hate to admit it and I hate to put myself in that, in that I'm in an industry where there are so many people who don't know what they're doing. So I'm just sort of, that's my Robin Hood story. Brent Peterson (05:08.66) That's great, yeah, snake oil, it always reminds me of SEO experts and how it seems like it's smoke and mirrors and people don't always go back to data to make sure that whatever's happening is gonna happen, right? Carolyn Lowe (05:23.47) completely. Yeah, I we keep a few vetted, really good partners. And I think I've found like, two of the best people in SEO that are not snake oil sales. But like you said, there's hundreds of 1000s of them out there. And how do you weed out the good from the bad, you know? Brent Peterson (05:39.352) When it comes to Amazon is there things that all the brands should be should every brand be on Amazon and I think like all the majors have an Amazon store nowadays Is there is there kind of a rule or is there a rule of thumb and how how you should approach that? Carolyn Lowe (05:56.748) Yeah, that's a great question. know, people say, should I will it cannibalize my sales and my answer is always we worked with this. Well, my answer is always. If you have to be, then yes. So for example, we worked with this. ran, we used to do, in addition, used to do paid search and paid social. And then with iOS and privacy, we recently, you know, wound that down. We realized Amazon was 70%. It was way easier than dealing with Meta and Google. you know, Amazon is the devil we know, you know, and things are always happening on the SEO and SEM side. So there's a great boot brand we worked with. ran all their Facebook Facebook and Instagram called to Covas. were two guys in a wee work and the founder said, I want to be on Amazon. I said, no, you don't. You don't need to be on Amazon. You only sell through your website. No one can get a hold of your product. So if you have very tight control on your distribution, why give up that customer? Why give up 15 to 17 % to Amazon? Right. And have to pay to play. If you're in retail or you're sold through retail partners or other online partners, you're going to end up on Amazon anyway, so you might as well make it the best experience. You should own that customer. You shouldn't give it to your wholesalers. So I'd say unless you are very tight on your distribution, you're only sold to your own website or your own stores, you pretty much should be on Amazon. Brent Peterson (07:29.348) In terms of Amazon and you mentioned 15 to 17 percent, is there a threshold in which your product doesn't make sense to go on Amazon? Especially if, let's just say you own the brand. I realize there's commodities out there where it doesn't make any sense. But if it's your brand, but you have a tight margin, does it just make sense not to do it? Carolyn Lowe (07:40.256) Yes, so. Carolyn Lowe (07:51.982) Yeah. And if you do have a tight margin, then I would say do one of two things, renegotiate with your suppliers or raise your prices. mean, Dell didn't make sense because it was hardware and our margins were less than 20%. But for most other brands that we work with, their margins are anywhere from 60 to 80%. So you take that 60%, say your cogs are 30%. So then you're at 70 % margin. Say your Opex is 10%. You're at 60%. You give Amazon 15 plus about 10 % to do the next day shipping, second day shipping. So then you're at, I mean, that's a pretty, still a pretty healthy margin of 35%. And then maybe you spend about 10 to 15 % on advertising. So you're still at a 25 % EBITDA, even with Amazon. So. Brent Peterson (08:43.035) And does Amazon help the supply chain part of it, especially if you're using FBA? Carolyn Lowe (08:48.722) They do. They do. you know, there's no way that you can send a, you know, a package, two day delivery or next day delivery for $5.25. Like it's, I can't even mail a letter for that these days, you know, so. Brent Peterson (09:04.128) Yeah, it's amazing. They have really disrupted the market and especially the shipping market. Do you think that it's kind of coming back where people aren't out? And I'll be honest to you, I get Amazon Prime, but I don't always get it in three to two days. Sometimes they say this is delayed by whatever. I don't know if there's a real, is there going to come like, is it going to be kind of a soft two to three days? Or you think it's going to be a hard two days all the time? Carolyn Lowe (09:31.272) You know, it's interesting because I was just talking about that with our vice president of operations. We were talking to a great outdoor brand based in Ireland this morning, early this morning, because it was Ireland. And we sort of said the same thing, you know, things are coming in, but even though they're in stock, they can't get them there in two to three days. So what Amazon has recently done is they've instituted all these new fees, like a low inventory. So if you don't have enough inventory, they'll charge you more because it's going to cost them more to say, maybe get it from Idaho to Austin. If you have enough inventory where they can distribute it, then you don't pay these extra fees. So they're sort of passing along these extra shipping fees to the brands, and then they're also doing the same thing to the customer. It also depends on where you live. Here in Austin, I... I tore my calf yesterday, so I'm in a lot of pain. And one of our brands that we work with, it's an amazing company. I won't tell the name, I don't know if I can say their name, but on your show, they're OK. But it's great compression sleeves for ankles, wrists, you name it. So I ordered a calf sleeve yesterday on Amazon on the big deal day. And it'll be here today by three. So I think in certain markets, like in Austin, we have same day delivery. I think in other markets, yeah, you're going to be waiting two to three to four days in some cases. Brent Peterson (10:59.07) Yeah, do you think the rural economy is going to be hindered by that? Like, you know, my dad lives in Montana and it's hard often to get it to there. And we winter in Hawaii and two days isn't really a thing. Although I think they're building a distribution center in Kona, but regardless of that, I think there's places in the US where two days maybe isn't even possible. Carolyn Lowe (11:26.082) That's true. That's true. And you'll see that, you know, where my sister's ski house is in New Hampshire, you know, I can't, I can't get prime on a lot of, a lot of things. And so I think they're sort of, think our whole shipping and logistics department is amazing. You know, they've just figure this out, they've taken every bit of cost out that they can because as you know, shipping prices aren't going down, right? Like, every time you go to FedEx or UPS every year, you're paying more for that. So I think that's one of the big challenges and I think one of the big reasons they bought Whole Foods a few years back was they said, our model doesn't work for grocery. So they had to buy Whole Foods. And now they're saying, OK, great. You can shop online on Amazon, get your groceries. You can do pickup. It just wasn't cost effective for them to ship groceries. And there's no way cost effectively to ship frozen. I know a lot of frozen brands who have tried to work with us. And was like, it's just not cost effective to ship frozen. You've got to deal with retail. Brent Peterson (12:33.92) Yeah, I didn't mean to get a sidetracked on the shipping part of it. If you're a brand, is there certain things you should avoid on Amazon? Like give me the top three that you should avoid. Carolyn Lowe (12:45.112) So top three things to avoid. If your product is less than $15, you're likely not making any money after fees and shipping. So our biggest thing we see is people try and take their existing products and put them on Amazon and that works in some case, but if it's less than 15, you know, make it a two pack because if you sell two of them, you're going to get charged their fee on each individual item. So I'll give you a great example of say it's, you know, the minimum shipping we see now is around $4 and 70 cents. So if your items $15 and you have a 15 % fee and then you have a, you know, a $4 and 75 cent shipping costs, at the end of the day, you're making pennies, right? So make that a two pack, make that $30. What people don't know most is that those extra, like the first two pounds are the most expensive. And then after that, it gets incrementally cheaper. So you might only add 30 cents for the third pound and 20 cents for the fourth pound. So really know your skew economics. And the other big thing is just understand your market. Big mistakes I see is, well, this other brand is selling $2 million a year on Amazon. It's like, understand your category and understand that if your product needs a lot of education and it's a disruptor, it will be difficult on Amazon. So 60 to 70 % of Amazon's searches are non-branded. so, you know, they're looking for a insulated outdoor tent. they might not be looking for a brand. So that's where you can really capitalize on that. But I would say don't go into Amazon thinking you're going to sell a million dollars a month without understanding the market. And there's tools out there to help you understand the market. Brent Peterson (14:42.388) Yeah, that's an interesting what you said about searching for a non-brand. How do you, is there ways that you can capitalize on Amazon without having to spend a lot of ad money on Amazon? Carolyn Lowe (14:54.43) Yes. Yes. So just like a website, right, Brent, it comes down to sessions and conversion, right? Like how much traffic do you have and what's your conversion rate? Pretty, it's, there's a lot of other things like, do you have subscriptions? But at the end of the day, I like to focus on the two biggest drivers, right? Is how much traffic are you getting and what's your conversion rate? Amazon is exactly the same. So the leverage you can pull to affect sessions is to really optimize your product page, both that whole backend SEO, making sure like every single one of those backend fields and keywords and everything else is filled out, just like you have SEO on your website, you have SEO on your product page, that will help you show up organically. And then of course, you can use ads to drive to that page. But we always look at like, you know, you don't want to send good traffic to a bad web page. So if your conversion rate is, say below 10 or 15 % on Amazon, we want to focus on improving the product page. So doing all that organic stuff and doing all those organic changes like improving the titles, the bullets, the images, the content, that increases conversion rate. And we've seen it time and time again where sometimes we've seen three and four X increases in conversion rate. don't spend. any more money on ads until you've got the best product page. So a lot of people put up a product page and then start spending money. And they're like, my ads aren't working. I was like, no, you need to go back. You might have six images in your listing, but they're not the six right images. They're not the ones that differentiate your product from all the other noise out there. Brent Peterson (16:36.649) How important is video? Carolyn Lowe (16:41.632) It's becoming more and more important. And I'll tell you that there's certain ad placements that are only video. So you can have a sponsored video. So as you're scrolling through all the different tents, there's a video playing of your tent and you get the chance to explain why your insulated tent is way better than this, you know, cheap one, you could buy it Dix or Academy. So video is really important, especially if you're not a commodity brand, right? If you, if you really have some key differentiators in your product. And the big thing people forget is they take their regular videos and they just throw them up on Amazon. Well, everybody has their the sound is automatically off. So making sure that your logo is on there the whole time and making sure that you have text overlay on there the whole time. So if people are, you know, sitting at their office and watching scrolling Amazon, know, their cube mates aren't going to hear that they're, you know, trolling the internet for a new tent. Brent Peterson (17:44.842) I get the feeling you're going to do some winter camping coming up. Carolyn Lowe (17:49.183) I talked to a camping brand this morning so they're on my mind. Brent Peterson (17:52.602) Okay, maybe northern New Hampshire this winter. What about we in the green room, we talked about the the sale that just happened. Do you think that and I've talked to lot of people about how maybe there's there's just this over sales thing, but Amazon is kind of disruptor, right? They're kind of pushing the boundaries on when sales can and shouldn't happen. Do you think that the these prime days or whatever they call them? Carolyn Lowe (17:56.04) Maybe. Brent Peterson (18:21.972) are gonna be more frequent and do you think they drive, I guess I know they drive a ton of traffic because people wait, but does it hurt the brand sometime because somebody's just waiting for that sale day? Carolyn Lowe (18:34.143) always, I mean, we had that at Dell, you know, once we sort of we called it the promo crack, once you got on it, you couldn't get off of it, you know, people would not buy when it wasn't a promo anymore. And I think that that's true for some of those discretionary purchases, right? Like, hey, we'll go back to tents. Hey, I'd like a new tent, but I'm going to wait for prime day and see if there's any deals, right? And so, but if you're like, hey, you know, I need a new mouse or I need some new headphones. You're not going to wait for a big deal day. So we do see that a little bit. And I do think that the retailers started at first when they started doing Christmas in July. And July is typically a fairly, you know, fairly down month in a lot of in a lot of verticals. So I think Amazon sort of followed suit and said, hey, listen, just like everybody else, right? They had those peaks and valleys, but they have those warehouses full time. They have those people full time. They have a lot of fixed costs too, right? So they're like, how do we even out these peaks and valleys and make take one of our down months and make it a, you know, make it not so flat. Brent Peterson (19:43.348) We it's October 10th on this recording and we have a little more than a month before Black Friday Cyber Monday. Is it too late for somebody to get on to Amazon and and try to try it for those big days? Carolyn Lowe (19:56.162) Yeah, good question. they usually have sort of a lockdown period and things take longer to receive right around now. So there's usually a cutoff, you know, about when they'll take any more inventory because You know, they want to go from receiving product to shipping product. So, you know, kind of, if you haven't started now, you're, you're, kind of late to the game. and it takes a little, you know, it takes a little bit and then it's going to take a few weeks to get to your inventory in and receive, you know, even if it gets there in five days, it might take them a week or two to receive it. So if you're not there yet, I would say start now. or, know, people may wait a little bit, so you could. do manufacturer fulfill because it's Black Friday, Cyber Monday. A lot of these folks don't need it for two to three weeks. So if you're doing a good deal and you don't need to rely on Amazon shipping, could, you could get on and do your own fulfillment. Usually we see Fulfilled by Amazon and Prime, we see anywhere from a 30 to 80 % increase in conversion rate. So you can get on. It's also more expensive during the peak months. They institute a surcharge on warehouse storage space. Brent Peterson (21:14.396) wow, and I would imagine then the ad costs are also higher during that period for just to get your ads placed and you're competing against so many other people. Carolyn Lowe (21:24.108) Yeah, think bids and budgets go up just like you see with Meta and Google, right? It gets more expensive the more people that are advertising. Brent Peterson (21:34.272) Carolyn, what would, if you had some advice to give somebody that they don't have to get on in October, but they would like to start looking at Amazon as a sales channel, what would that, what would be the number one thing they should start with? Carolyn Lowe (21:51.148) you know, given my background at Dell, I would say that they start with running a P &L and understanding all the costs with Amazon, understanding their margins, understanding which products they should sell, almost having like an Amazon first mindset. So what, what are my economics going in? What could I afford to spend? What does the category look like? You know, someone came to us and they were doing 50,000 a month and we turned them away, you know, we were furrow out 30 % of the business that comes to us, the number one person in the category was only doing like 70,000 a month. And so there was not a ton of upside. I said, you know, can do, here's what you could expect with your current. product category, you may want to go out and make these additional product line extensions that have more opportunity. just, you know, people hear, this person's making 10 million a year on Amazon. That's not the case in every category and every product. you know, sort of know your economics going in before you start. Brent Peterson (22:56.608) Yeah, and there's a lot of people that are saying, you know, they can help you get onto Amazon and maybe if you even don't have a product, they help you find a product to sell. And I would imagine I would be skeptical about that model where you're not necessarily a seller, you're just trying to do a, you know, part-time business. That seems like kind of a sketchy idea. Carolyn Lowe (23:19.978) It does. It does. Yeah. I mean, I'm always about building a brand. We don't work with anybody who's not a true brand. You know, we don't work with resellers or anyone like that. So that's that's how I would say don't try and build a brand off of that. Brent Peterson (23:38.867) Caroline, Carolyn, I'm sorry. I have a Carolyn friend, but anyways, and my daughter's name is Madeline, not Madeline. I apologize for getting your name wrong. We have a few minutes left. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they like. What would you like to plug today? Carolyn Lowe (24:01.404) So, so many things. There's so many charities I'm involved with, but there's so many things that I would love to give some... some more recognition too, but, given that we're professionally, we're in the business of helping people. I'll do the shameless plug for, for ROI swift. And if you want to, if you want to talk to us, we're happy to have a conversation. We're happy to talk to you about your business. We're happy to put you in the right direction. have some resources at Amazon HQ one and HQ two. If you're a new brand, they can help you get on Amazon the right way without going through, you know, some of these, sort of shady type people where you know you can't trust them. So we're in business of helping people. You can find us at roiswift.com and we're happy to chat Amazon with any brands. Brent Peterson (24:52.62) And where would they find you? Carolyn Lowe (24:55.648) Easiest way you can find me, Carolyn Lowe on LinkedIn, or you can find us on www.roiswift.com. Brent Peterson (25:04.319) Perfect, I'll make sure those get into the show notes. Carolyn Lowe is the CEO and founder of ROI Swift. Thank you so much for being here today. Carolyn Lowe (25:12.974) Thank you for having me, Brent.