Latest / Talk Commerce / Selling on Amazon While Matching Your D2C Sales with Hristo Arakliev of Hyperzon
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:00.823) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Hristo Arakliev from Hyperzon. Hristo, go ahead, do a much better introduction. I've already butchered your last name. You wouldn't let me say it, tell us your, yeah, give us your full name and what you're doing day to day and maybe one of your passions in life. Hristo (00:10.318) Thank you for that Brent, thank you. Hristo (00:19.254) Absolutely. Hristo Arakliev my company is called Hyperzon and we help cool brands succeed on Amazon by basically matching their D2C sales. So if they're already crushing it, we make sure they crush it on Amazon as well. One of my day-to-day passions, I'd say tennis and extreme sports and music, of course. Brent Peterson (00:46.903) Nice. What would you rank as an extreme sport? Hristo (00:51.246) kite surfing, snow kiting paragliding and some parkour Brent Peterson (01:00.311) Wow, parkour, cool. My daughter lives in the northern part of the United States and they have just big flat landscapes and I've seen snow kites going across the prairie and then jumping over fences and stuff. yeah, that's far beyond what I ever want to do. My extreme sport would be long distance running, but it's not as extreme as what you're doing. That's awesome. Hristo (01:15.413) Amazing. Hristo (01:24.834) They're pretty extreme for the body, it's heavy on the body for sure, so gotta be, gotta be prepped. Brent Peterson (01:27.961) Yeah. Good. All right. So, Hristo before we get started, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. I'm just going to tell you a joke and just give me a rating 8 through 13. Here we go. I got an email the other day telling me how to read maps backwards. It turns out it was just spam. Hristo (01:39.426) What's that? Hristo (01:49.486) Okay, okay Twelve give you twelve. Yeah Brent Peterson (01:55.285) All right, good, yeah. Thank you, all right. Okay, so Amazon, tell us, I love the idea of trying to measure between the two. And I think a lot of sellers either look at one or the other. They look at one channel and not another channel and they don't see how they can reflect. Give us a little background on the Amazon channels and trying to get the sellers to have the same sort of... response is what they do in their direct channel. Hristo (02:26.272) Okay, absolutely. Well, you know, even so many years after it started, Amazon still dominates the e-commerce by being the largest marketplace in the e-commerce space. And no matter how much some brands, D2C owners would like to ignore it, at some point they cannot ignore it because there's just so many people, so many people on Amazon. And I've seen it time and time again that there is a very good synergy between D2C and Amazon and other channels. And most of the times your sales don't like double, but they will quadruple and more if you use all of these channels the right way. The reason being just people see your products and, you know, more spots and they start perceiving you as a much bigger brand that they can actually trust. As right now, you know, the space is crowded by all kinds of brands and you really need to stand out. And first step standing out is visibility. If you don't have enough visibility, no matter how great of a brand or product you've created, people are not gonna end up buying you. I have so many times, like brand owners come to me and they're like, I've created the perfect product. They like have zero sales yet, but they believe that this product is gonna crush the market. I'm like, and they're like, I've done my parts. Now it's your turn, you know, kind of, and I'm like, how can I tell you that you're just getting started? It's all about marketing at the end of the day. I've seen so many times great products fail and mediocre products succeed just because of great marketing efforts. I mean, it's, it doesn't come down to just great products these days. Brent Peterson (04:13.495) Yeah, a great example is Magento and Shopify, right? That's sort of a partial joke, but yeah. Hristo (04:16.946) Yeah, that it is a good example. Yeah It is it is true in a sense. Yeah, but magenta is kind of Made from developers for I don't know developers in a sense. It's a bit more Complicated where you know Shopify, of course, it's It's definitely not a better platform, but it's easier to use. So this is why Brent Peterson (04:35.522) Yes. Hristo (04:43.402) It's people, you know, lean more towards it. That's, that's the truth. Brent Peterson (04:47.321) Yeah, yeah. mean, so I, you know, just to kind of lean into that, the idea that it's easy is a great marketing campaign that Shopify has continually done for the last, you know, 10 to 15 years. And I think you're, you really hit it. You've hit the nail there about the fact that the marketing always wins over a great product and you could have the worst product and the best marketing and your product is still going to sell. I suppose if it's a horrible product, it's eventually going to die, but Hristo (04:55.19) It is. Hristo (05:09.184) Always. Brent Peterson (05:14.401) Yeah, give us a little idea how you've then employed some AI to help do this. Tell us how you use AI to help with this. Hristo (05:26.719) How to use AI to specifically help with this? Right now, know, AI is everywhere. It's just crazy how it managed for a year and a half, two years to become just from, you know, I'm chatting with this bot here and it's so much fun to actually implementing it in all parts of the business. And right now, I would say that Amazon is still going a little bit backwards when it comes to AI, but we're definitely using it, you know, sorts of ways, faster A-B testing, faster everything. People see it as a substitute somehow for for sellers and e-com brands, but I'd say it's more of an add-on and it's meant to do all of these tasks that you dread to do, just don't want to do it. And this leaves you more space for strategy in general. rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of things that you don't really enjoy. It generally saves so much time. And if I have to talk about a few cool AI ideas that I would like to see implemented on Amazon is, for example, AI storefronts that rearrange in real time. showing bundle videos or review based on intents and what people are actually looking for rather than being fixed or AI pre-tests 50 thumbnails, let's say, before you spend even a single dollar on PPC. This would be pretty cool. Or even also invite top buyers to private Slack or Discord channels, let's and AI generates weekly product challenges and other content that... Hristo (07:25.998) keeps the community going and interested. You can do so much more with AI these days. Brent Peterson (07:32.417) Yeah, do you think that the advantages are more than just a content generation, but also some of the analysis that's happening in the backend and maybe tools that are being released almost daily that help you understand how your products are selling compared to your competitors or other products that you have in your tool, I mean, not in your toolbox, in your store? Hristo (07:58.7) Yes, for comparisons, sure, giving you some stats for sure. I would leave the analysis still more to the humans in a sense, but it could definitely help you pinpoint stuff and just read through huge amounts of data and, you know, give you just the quintessential part so you can make your own analysis at the end of the day. But yeah, it can save time. lot. Brent Peterson (08:28.995) Where do you see the biggest mistake that merchants are making when they put things onto Amazon and they put things on their D2C and then even other channels like TikTok Shop or Instagram? What kind of mistakes do see that merchants are making right now? Hristo (08:45.55) One of the mistakes is going hard on multiple channels at the same time. I think it's an overall great strategy, but I think you have to focus on one channel at a time. So if right now meta ads are working for you, okay, make the best of it, triple your revenue. You know what's working, make it even better. And only then when you're sure that you've made the most of a single channel that you've been pointed, it works. In the beginning, you can test a few channels, but if there is one that sticks and you can grow exponentially on it, you'd rather do it. Because I see people, they wanna be here and there and here and there, and they dilute their attention, they dilute their investments, and at the end of the day, none of these channels is working because they leave it just to someone else to run on the background and they cannot really focus. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes I see. You need to be everywhere, absolutely, but just one channel at a time. Brent Peterson (09:55.161) How does the advertising part of that factor in for Amazon? Should you put most of your advertising into advertising using in Amazon itself or do you drive traffic to Amazon using some of your ads? Hristo (10:10.668) It's a great question. It's a combination of stuff, but I'd rather let the spillover happen naturally, meaning drive traffic to your website, not to Amazon. And there is going to always be some spillover to Amazon, usually between 10 and 13 % of the traffic is going to spill over to Amazon naturally so that you don't drive it directly to Amazon. This works the best because... Amazon loves outside traffic, but the people that have you've already pitched your products to they will most likely end up buying your product but on Amazon just because they're Amazon users, they prefer the platform, they want to they use prime and they don't want to get scammed. So they're going to use Amazon. But if you start driving traffic directly to Amazon, the following thing happens. Even if you're very successful with driving the traffic itself to Amazon. Amazon does not like to see a lot of bounce meaning that if you send tons of traffic and these people don't end up buying your product at the end of the day Amazon's not gonna like that. They're gonna be also all of these people landed on your listing and they didn't end up buying so it might prefer showing some competitors even if you have tons of traffic to your listing compared to your listing just because the percentage of conversion Compared to if you just leave it to happen naturally by driving lots of traffic to your website these people that Lending on Amazon they're probably gonna end up buying your product. This means that once you get on Amazon, you'd rather stick to Amazon PPC and I'd like to stress on something Amazon PPC is not Something that's going to solve all of your problems there's Lots that could be done on the organic side of Amazon because Amazon works very similarly to Google. I'd say it's keyword driven. So there are so many things that people ignore that could be done on that side of things. Most people focus on PPC because they believe Amazon is a channel similar to what they're already familiar with with meta ads and Instagram and even Google ads. But it's more like Google SEO in a sense. Brent Peterson (12:35.287) Yeah, how does the newer answer engine things factor into this? I suppose Alexa would automatically find things on Amazon more than it would find things not on Amazon. So does it help to, and I guess second part of that question, is Amazon already formatting your ad on Amazon in a way that the answer engines pick up, but maybe not the... Hristo (12:51.821) Of course. Brent Peterson (13:03.157) LLMs. mean, I think there's this thing with perplexity in Amazon right now. There's a dispute, right? So is there a difference on how you would want to get discovered? Hristo (13:14.254) To an extent, to an extent, yeah. The last year, know, Amazon has been very stagnant for the past 20 years even. Only in the past couple of years, they finally started to implement some new things and they're popping out every couple of months. So yeah, they're definitely running more towards optimization on a personal level and people see different things. But when it comes to Alexa, it definitely recommends. mostly Amazon stuff, as you can expect from any tool that was created by the company itself. Brent Peterson (13:56.057) But if you're using something like Comet or something, the new browser, even the new browser from ChatGPT, those browsers are probably going to naturally find things that aren't in the Amazon store, especially if Amazon is trying to block some of the scraping that's happening. So do you recommend optimizing your ads or your PDP pages on your regular website for the LLMs? Hristo (14:19.534) I do, for sure. Yeah, I mean, right now statistics show that Google have lost only 1 % of search, but this is going to change in the next two, three, five years. People are going to move more and more to ChatGPT's browser and ChatGPT in general and other AI search engines. So if Google don't adapt, which I'm sure they will, they'll still... lose a portion of that traffic. So it actually makes sense to optimize for all of these search engines. For example, I received a call the other day from a guy that stumbled upon us by explaining to ChatGPT what he expects from an Amazon agency and ChatGPT popped up our name. I was like, okay, that's cool. We didn't even optimize for it and it's already happening. Brent Peterson (15:15.073) Yeah, that's a, have the same thing that happened, excuse me, recently with another client where they've been discovered now by ChatGPT and I think that's gonna happen more and more. From the Amazon side, as we're going into the holidays, what do you recommend people do right now? Should they kind of amp up on the Amazon side in some spending to get ready for Black Friday? Hristo (15:26.307) Mm. Hristo (15:40.632) Well, if they are already on Amazon, of course, if they're not on Amazon, they should wait until at least January because right now they cannot even send their products in, know, it's just crazy. Every year you should send your products earlier and earlier. I think this year it was mid-September or something absolutely ridiculous like that. So if you send your products after a certain date in September, imagine, they're not going to come before Christmas holidays, which is it's insane every year's every year is worse and worse and worse and worse. So you got to prep on time, but it's worth it in the end of the day. Brent Peterson (16:22.327) Yeah, and I guess specifically, I was talking about ad spend and I know that ad spend goes way up during the holidays and is it worth it because I know Amazon also gets more volume. Is it worth it to compete against all the other people and then pay the extra for the extra volume? Or do you think naturally, like I think you kind of let off with trying to do things more organic on Amazon. Does it make sense to do things organically to just to get those sales? Hristo (16:28.623) yeah. Hristo (16:47.466) It really depends on how popular you are as a brand. I would say that if you're really popular as a brand, you should set your ads in a way that other brands make the spend before you. And then you start hitting it hard. You can actually arrange that so that you sell in specific parts of the day. So we've done that in the past when we were paying five bucks per click on our own branded keyword, which was ridiculous. And what we ended up doing is letting all of these people get our branded traffic. But then we were advertising under their listings. So what happens is because they were like copycats. And what happened is if somebody really wants to get the actual real product, genuine, cool, maybe a little bit more expensive. they always end up buying our product because they land on their listing, they see it's a cheap knockoff, and then they see our ad, go to our listing and buy the product compared to competing directly for your brand keywords, which was not worth it at the time. And on the other hand, if you are a smaller brand, it might be worth it to hit it heavy with marketing and try to steal these other big brands' sales. It is what it is. Brent Peterson (18:13.689) That's awesome. So we have a few minutes left. We're going through the timeline crazy. As we close out the podcast, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug or promote your product any way you'd like. I would like to plug today. Hristo (18:26.39) Absolutely. Well, basically, if you are a cool D2C brand that is crushing it on your dot com sites, and you've always wanted to see what it is like to do the same amount of sales on Amazon, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram or visit our website, hyperzon.io, and I'll be more than happy to assist you with whatever you can so that you can double your sales in a few months. Brent Peterson (18:55.747) That's awesome and how do people get in touch with you directly? Hristo (18:59.63) My Instagram or LinkedIn, they can find me on LinkedIn, Hristo Arakliev I guess you're gonna put that in your podcast data. And my handle on Instagram is @chrisaraventures So they're welcome to follow me there. Brent Peterson (19:07.757) Yeah, I'll put in the shorts. Yeah. Brent Peterson (19:17.293) Great, yeah, and I will get all those things on the show notes. So thank you so much, Hristo It's been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Hristo (19:24.494) Thank you, Brent. Thank you.