The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Kyle: some of the big feedback that sellers were giving Amazon regarding actually sending traffic to Amazon as a platform was the fact that they could send traffic to a landing page or a funnel or a store. And not have to pay the 15% referral fee
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[00:01:13] Michael: Ladles and jelly spoons. Welcome back to the eCommerce leader. We’re in our hot take show here with, my fellow, conspirators in the eCommerce game here. We’re not really conspirators. Don’t start running as hate mail. Jason Miles, Kyle Heer, Chris Green over in United States of America, and I’m over here in England and we’re still standing despite the efforts of the British government.
[00:01:33] So here we are. We’re gonna talk about some takeaways from. Kyle’s been exploring on behalf of us. He’s been suffering, going to an Amazon conference so you don’t have to. And he’s giving you this takeaways of what Amazon’s doing, expanding its offering for sellers on and off the Amazon platform.
[00:01:50] Some interesting stuff, which we’re gonna take and investigate how that can help you to grow your eCommerce business. So Kyle, you are the man on the ground. Tell us what Amazon’s been doing. What have they been up?
[00:02:03] Kyle: They had a bunch of really fascinating, interesting announcements, at this event at Accelerate and, just recently wrapped up the, the big sort of buzz around the Amazon world is on a couple of different fronts.
[00:02:17] One being, their, the email marketing that they have a free email marketing tool. That’s still in beta, that they call tailored audiences. And before it really was, you could email anybody who followed your brand, right? So I don’t know if you’ve ever seen in like the app or on your Amazon store, you have the ability on anybody’s storefront page.
[00:02:41] Any brand you can click follow and you can follow that. Now obviously unless you’re investing time and creating content, for it, it’s not, a lot of brands aren’t really maximizing taking advantage of it. Amazon said, Hey, if once you have followers, not only will they see your content on the Amazon app, but now you can send them emails.
[00:03:00] So they rolled that out. And then over through Accelerate they expanded on that and said that they wanted to, not only give more direct control to reach, sending out news and deals, but also more data around it. So open rates and click through rates. And, but now you can actually message your repeat customer.
[00:03:21] As a segment with your emails, your highest spending customers and recent customers. So it’s not just people who follow your brand. You can actually segment that down and hopefully add more, lifetime value was the goal that they were asking for. It’s like customers are saying, Hey, Amazon, we need to be able to increase our lifetime value and you need to give us tools to do that.
[00:03:41] And so Amazon’s looking at email marketing obviously, cuz email marketing is still the greatest channel known to all marketing. And so it’s interesting. So they’re really trying to expand that lifetime value. Marketing angles for sellers. And I think directly compete against, the Shopifys the world.
[00:03:56] A lot of the stuff that we’re gonna, I think we’re gonna talk about is this direct head-to-head competition and I think it’ll be really interesting.
[00:04:03] Jason: That’s really interesting. That
[00:04:05] Michael: is very interesting. So before we get into one specific topic, obviously email marketing in itself, as you say, big topic.
[00:04:12] What were the other big sort of innovations? Growing on recent innovations that were
[00:04:16] Kyle: announced. Yeah. They added a bunch of other stuff. Some stuff wasn’t that nearly as exciting. But one of the big things that I thought was really interesting was the expansion of, the Buy with Prime.
[00:04:28] So they rolled out Buy With Prime, I think a couple months ago. And allowed you to be able to, add the Buy with Prime button, on your direct consumer sites. But now what they’re doing is basically expanding beyond. And they got feedback in that program, the direct consumers, and they struggled with driving traffic and converting shoppers.
[00:04:48] And so what they are allowing to do now is now you can actually advertise. So check this out. This is the new expansion of this. And this is still in beta for some people as well. So it may not be fully available to every seller. Yeah. But it should be, I think, available to everybody by, by early next year.
[00:05:04] But what they’re gonna do, so you. Put the Buy with Prime capability on your Shopify store or whatever direct consumer site you had, and then people could check out and have the same prime benefits buying products on your site. Now, the extension of that is what they’re saying is now you can actually showcase your direct consumer products on Amazon.
[00:05:27] Via a new brand store page. So you could actually take your, the products that were on your Shopify store, that you weren’t necessarily selling on Amazon as a channel and have a a page on Amazon that you could then direct Amazon’s shoppers to using sponsored brand ads. So what they’re saying is that you could actually take your, take the products that you don’t want to have available or selling through Amazon as a channel, stick ’em on a page on your storefront, and then drive a sponsored brand traffic because Amazon wants to make more advertising money.
[00:06:00] To those pages. So I thought it was interesting. The other thing that they added to that was, co-branded Prime Buy with Prime Social Media ads, which are funded and managed by Amazon. So they’re, Amazon’s gonna pay for some of your buy with Prime social, like your Facebook and Instagram, to reach more, but driving products to your direct consumer site.
[00:06:20] So Amazon will partner with, some of these brands to actually pay for the. To, to promote it cuz they’re trying to get more visibility in it. So those were a couple of the bigger announcements related to that. . The other thing I thought was personally interesting was they expanded some additional toolkits for managing experiments for your listings, where you can actually do ad split tests on your titles and your descriptions and all those other content that they’ve pushed and expanded into out.
[00:06:46] Cause before then, we and the Amazon seller community, we’d used other tools outside of Amazon to run split tests and now Amazon’s basically incorporated that. To what they’re doing and offering as a free tool. So you can try to con increase your conversion rate and be able to split that.
[00:07:01] Plus they have some, AI recommendation engines that they’re putting out there to give you more recommendations to actually run to improve your conversion rate.
[00:07:13] So yeah, those are the biggest things. There’s definitely, there’s a whole bunch of others, like smaller stuff. I guess the other thing I thought was interest. Was the announcement of, I think they called it vco, V E Q O. And that is a multi-channel shipping solution. So essentially Amazon bought the, that comp, this company, earlier this year, and it’s like a ship station, essentially, or shipping easy.
[00:07:38] And then, but what you’re doing is that Amazon is getting their pricing. For, that solution. So you have cross it, it works for Amazon, Shopify, et seeds. It’s like a ship station, but you get to take advantage of some of Amazon’s, pricing discounts with those, through those sellers. So I thought that was an interesting announcement.
[00:07:56] A little bit subtle, but definitely for multi-channel sellers, it really could make a difference if you can save some money using Amazon shipping.
[00:08:04] Michael: Wow. So it’s a lot take on board here. This sounds like multiple different episodes I guess, but it could be. It could be, couldn’t it? So let’s try and not this around the table.
[00:08:12] We’ve gotta make sense of this for the port eCommerce seller out there, bombard with information. Guys, what do we think is important at this and how are we gonna make use of that, either a c seller? I guess most of the stuff sounds like you focuses on D to C seller specifically.
[00:08:24] Actually, that’s one thing that strikes me. What are our thoughts on this? How do we actually make use of. What difference does it make?
[00:08:30] Jason: Yeah, I’ll go first. I think the email marketing thing is very interesting. Obviously that’s been a huge complaint for so long that you just don’t have the data. By the data we mean the ability to communicate with your customers.
[00:08:44] And so I think that is a game changer. Now as it happens. We know that most e-commerce sellers, cuz we’ve worked with a ton of them, you ask them, do you do faithful email market? Do you do a weekly newsletter or, do you do some kind of regimented, indoctrination sequence or something like that?
[00:09:01] Many times they’ll say, I’ve been mean, and to get that set up, but I just haven’t got there yet. You know how many Amazon sellers will take advantage of this? Probably the lean, mean selling machine. The ones that have already rigged up their own way to build a list and to have email marketing happening through Clavio or, Mail Champ or Constant Contact.
[00:09:19] But nonetheless, this gives them another, broadcast channel to, connect with their, their ideal Amazon customers or existing customers. I think that’s fantastic. I see no downside in that at all. I guess they might be policing what you can do on those lists. I’d imagine if you put in an.
[00:09:36] Be sure to get latest copy of my new thing on my own Shopify website. They’ll be clamping down on those types of messages real fast, I’m sure. I’m sure. So it won’t be, do whatever you want in your newsletter, like you can when you have Clavio or MailChimp. But, nonetheless, it’s a step in the right direction in my view.
[00:09:55] Kyle: Yeah, it’s
[00:09:56] Michael: interesting, I’ve gotta say is a, an Amazon seller for a while that it feels like Amazon’s gone through ways with offering us, the ability to contact their customers through emails or emails like messaging within the Amazon system. So it seems to have gone from. Reasonably open.
[00:10:10] I remember, like I, I phoned up some of my early customers in 2015 cuz I heard on a podcast that you could do that and it was quite insightful. But I’m it’s hard to imagine being able to do that now. All the way through to basically all the email tools, the external tools that, that worked basically shut down or were hard to get anything delivered back to opening it back up.
[00:10:28] So I’m always just trying to wonder, I’m not so much suspicious as wondering what’s in it for them, why Amazon doing. What have you got? Any thoughts on what Amazon’s trying to achieve with this stuff?
[00:10:40] Chris: Definitive, I think it’s pr. It’s gotta be some kind of pressure. Like I’m amazed as someone who’s been like following Amazon for so long, amazed and fascinated that all of a sudden Amazon’s gonna say, Oh yes, we will actually give you up this stuff.
[00:10:54] Because this was the biggest thing about Amazon would lot of, if anybody had anything negative to say about selling that Amazon, it was like, Amazon’s customers, I don’t get the customer data. I. Remarket to my customers. I can’t, it does. I don’t get all those other things that I get if I go direct to a consumer.
[00:11:08] But the Amazon customer gets the prime experience, and as someone who’s been prime since the very first month, Prime was announced. Ever. I I was like, this is obvious. I’m gonna use Amazon Prime. I want that free two day shipping. Now it’s like practically same day shipping to where I’m not gonna buy anything of, It’s not the prime experience.
[00:11:23] So if you map these two things out, you got Shopify, which bought Deliver, which is like their delivery’s, the prime of Shopify. Then you got Amazon with Prime, but then with Shopify you get the email. And with Amazon you don’t. So as a seller, looking at both of these channels to.
[00:11:36] Wait a minute, Shopify is all of a sudden becoming a little more attractive over here. So you might, they say to Amazon, Why would I sell on Amazon if I can get, if the liver experience is close enough to the prime experience, maybe I’m just gonna go all in on Shopify. So it’s, it has to be immense pressure.
[00:11:52] Probably a combination of sellers demanding it and they see what Shopify’s doing and they’re like, Shoot that. That is a good move for sellers to be using Shopify deliver and email marketing, which we’re literally not offering. We’re intentionally, actively not offering. So to change their tune and give up customer information, it’s.
[00:12:12] It’s a big opportunity. Yeah. As someone who has buy with Prime on their site already, I love it. It’s like this is what everybody’s looking for. Because, and in some, I think a lot of sellers maybe don’t understand as well as I would say that I do, you have to give that prime experience. That’s why customers are buying on Amazon.
[00:12:28] The fast shipping, the confidence, the tracking, the free returns, the, just all of that stuff. The confidence in the purchase that they’re not necessarily getting from a Shopify site or from any. Online retailer, which makes ’em go to Amazon and say, Look, if it’s not Prime, I’m not gonna buy it. Now that you can get that experience on your own website and the cu seller’s customer data, very attractive
[00:12:48] Jason: offer.
[00:12:49] Yeah, and I’ll just say that on the Shopify side, you’ll, you probably remember that, Shopify email solution system used to be basically to be, married technically to MailChimp. You had to use, mail. In the early days of Shopify, if you wanted to have it stitched together with your Shopify store, we moved from constant contact to MailChimp for that reason.
[00:13:10] In 2015 or so, before that, from 2013 to 15, we had cobbled together Constant Contact and Shopify. But those guys had a big divorce a couple years ago. And now they, now Shopify is rolling out its own email system. , and integrated that into the back, into their system. And so in my view, this is clearly Amazon responding to that, leveling up of the Shopify system.
[00:13:32] It’s a defensive measure
[00:13:33] Kyle: in my mind for sure. You can see some of the pressures that Amazon is recognized over the last few years. You’ve seen the, the Walmart, they’re very keen on what Walmart’s doing. I think you’ve seen some of the social media selling.
[00:13:46] The live selling and Amazon making a pivot into having more live commerce occurring, but selling happening on the social platforms. That’s another avenue that the Facebook of the world can try to dry revenue through if they can actually create eCommerce transactions occurring on their platform.
[00:14:03] Which I thought was interesting that Amazon said they wanna partner with you as a brand and actually pay and manage the Facebook and Instagram advertising to promote your products on your. With the Buy with Prime. So it’s almost like a co-branded, co-marketing. They want to actually try and take, make sure they’re established in that market.
[00:14:23] And, and then I also think, obviously Shopify, I think Shopify has become a huge threat to them over the last 2, 3, 4 or five years. The growth and seen as a competition to actually take customers and take sales away and. A lot of the stuff you’re seeing, I think is in response to what they’re doing.
[00:14:39] One of them being particularly one of the, some of the big feedback that sellers were giving Amazon regarding actually sending traffic to Amazon as a platform was the fact that they could send traffic to a landing page or a funnel or a store. And not have to pay the 15% referral fee, right? Like any transaction that occurs on Amazon, you pay at least 15%, sometimes a little bit less, a couple categories, it’s a little different, but usually, generally it’s 15%.
[00:15:06] And Amazon said, Okay, we hear you. What can we do about it? So what they did was they rolled out the brand referral bonus. So if you’re. A brand registered seller, and you turn on your brand referral bonus when you use your Amazon attribution, which is a link tracking, and you send traffic from Google or Facebook or TikTok or YouTube or wherever you’re sending traffic from and it converts and it makes a sale to your product, then Amazon will actually credit back up to 10% of that referral bonus back to.
[00:15:38] as basically as an incentive for you to send that traffic. So instead of running it to a a landing page or your Shopify store, they’re like, Oh no, you can still send it here and make money and we, you won’t be penalized for it. So I thought that was a smart move and I think you’re gonna continue to see that response of saying, Hey, how can we, put a hedge around our business as being the leader in e-commerce and prevent the Shopifys and the Walmarts, from taking some of that.
[00:16:02] It’s very
[00:16:02] Michael: interesting. I think the, the other thing that strikes me is that it’s consolidating some of the ecosystem that is built up around Amazon where lots of people, including ourselves, so like we are part of the ecosystem that benefits from people selling on Amazon, but Amazon not necessarily in the past.
[00:16:16] I’m being very good at serving those people either with good advice or. Good tools and services. So the fact for example, that the, AB testing is now available in house as opposed to you using something externally. I think it’s, in some ways it was this of logical thing. Buying VQ to, to get multichannel, fulfillment they offers the, I guess it’s more of an opportunity than a threat I would see in some ways cuz I, I don’t see any little ab testing thing being a big threat to Amazon, but it’s certainly a missed opportunity.
[00:16:41] Yeah, the other thing that strikes me though is, The, I think Amazon also has spare capacity that’s gonna do something with them. And the positive version of that with aws. The reason aws, was born was because they had spare computing and capacity, which I guess was easily repurposed.
[00:16:56] I guess what they have now is having been under a. Having, not having enough fulfillment capacity in warehousing space, et cetera, during the pandemic, they then overstocked on it. They probably got too much staff, too much warehousing, too much fulfillment capacity relative to demand now, and especially if we’re going into a downturn of some description or recession or whatever, I think they’ve got that capacity they’ve gotta use and they’ve put a lot of money on it.
[00:17:18] Even if they fire, have the stuff, they put the systems in place, they hired the staff, which cost them money. So I suspect there’s also a pass to utilization play there as well. , all of which I think it’s important to look at because I’ve gotta see where’s Amazon, why are they doing it tells me, Hey, how long is it gonna last
[00:17:33] Because they have a habit of giving and taking away. The Lord give it and the Lord take it away. And so does Amazon in my experience. And the other one is, how does it align with their strategy? Cuz I don’t want to be getting over reliant as a, an Amazon seller, I guess in my experience, on something that’s just a tactical play that they’re gonna take away.
[00:17:47] So what are your thoughts on that? How long is this stuff gonna last, do you think? And how permanent are these?
[00:17:55] Kyle: Yeah, I think it’ll really depend on what the market tells them. I do think they have to be, I would agree with you that over the course of time, you’ve seen in this ebb and flow. Sometimes Amazon’s Yes, we’re all pro seller and we want the marketplace. And then other times it’s no, we only wanna work with large brands.
[00:18:14] We don’t wanna work with smaller sellers. And to some extent I think that will continue to be the trend, but it’s now we’re not seller focused. We’re, we just wanna work with the big boys. And then you see it swing back around. So I think. I think some of this stuff will definitely stay.
[00:18:28] I think they need to stay relevant and competitive. And I think part of it too is they recognize that the 2 million sellers active, sellers on their platform do still provide a ton of revenue and value to the overall customer experience. and I think what they’re trying to realize and what they have said that they’re doing is sinking in more investment to support them because they know it’s a valuable com part component of their entire system.
[00:18:55] And I think instead of sellers feeling like, Ah, we’re just the last person thought about and really not cared about. They’re actually saying, no, we’re actually investing, millions and millions of dollars into the tools, into the programs to actually think of you more as a partner for the long haul instead of just as another commodity in our system.
[00:19:12] And I think if they can get that messaging right, I, and actually execute on it, they’ll, it’ll be to their
[00:19:17] Jason: benefit not to be unkind to them, but if you think about the Kindle market versus the third party seller market. You’ll seek very quickly that if Amazon has a hundred percent dominance, lockdown, they’ll invest nothing.
[00:19:33] Yeah. Kindle. Kindle gets nothing new. Kindle is not invested into, in my view, Chris might be, have a different point of view, but I just, I don’t think that they’re passionate about improving the Kindle experience for anybody. Whereas the third party marketplace, clearly Walmart and shop. And me Libray and offer up and all the apps that you can Posh, mark, Real, Real, all of those are forces that they see as competitive threats that are pushing them to innovate for the third party sellers.
[00:20:03] And that’s good for third party sellers. At the end of the day, absolutely. I hope
[00:20:07] Chris: authors get some of the tools I could imagine they do the follow thing. That’d be pretty easy. You already have an author page with a follow
[00:20:12] Jason: button. There’s been, there’s follow button on my author page for a long time, but I never know I could email those people.
[00:20:17] So can you email those people? That would be amazing.
[00:20:20] Chris: You can’t email them. I probably have one of the more followed author papers on all of Amazon. Yeah, but not for the reasons that you think they used. You remember Amazon giveaway?
[00:20:30] Jason: Yeah. . Yep.
[00:20:31] Chris: Yeah, they used have Amazon giveaway. They got rid of it, but you could give away literally anything on the Amazon website just had to be prime eligible.
[00:20:37] It might have had to be sold by Amazon. But the numbers never worked in terms of actually assigning a winner. So if you had like a $500 item, like a placed four bundle, they’d be like, Okay, one out of 90,000 people that enter your contest will win it. And I, And you say, Look, to enter this contest, you have to follow my Amazon author page, which.
[00:20:56] Ran very unique random thing that they put on there, but they did. I was like, Sure, if I get 90,000 people to follow my Amazon author page, I’ll buy this 500. But it never makes
[00:21:05] Jason: realized into it. Never
[00:21:07] Chris: got anywhere to 90,000, no. Not even that. So I got, I would get 28,000 new followers and not have to give away the PlayStation because it didn’t get to the threshold of 90.
[00:21:17] So I’d just do that over and over again, and people. Entering, but I never gave out one price, even though I would have if I had to. So I’d pay for it and I’d get it all back. But those follows are still. So if they bring it to Seller Central, I’m hoping they’ll bring it to Author Central where all of a sudden I can actually send an intentional update about a new book or new publication instead of like the automated, if I upload and connect one, then Amazon is supposed to send out, maybe alert to my followers.
[00:21:44] Yeah, it sounds like the infrastructure is potentially there, even though the authors will probably get it, down the road.
[00:21:49] Wrapup: Hey there. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the eCommerce Leader. Hope you’ve enjoyed our takeaways from the latest Amazon updates out there. Particularly as regards people who are selling off Amazon or traditionally seniors off Amazon, DTC direct consumer sites. So in fact, maybe that old distinction is something that Amazon is trying to blur, so quite interesting times for those who sell on Amazon and those who.
[00:22:13] Off Amazon, if that’s even a thing anymore. Hope you find this interesting and insightful, certainly that we are planning to take advantage of this amongst the panel members in quite a big way. As you can hear, Chris I think is particularly bullish about that Buy With Prime things. So if this is something you want to find out more about, then if you can pop over to the eCommerce leader.com, you’ll find our show notes as ever.
[00:22:36] the eCommerce leader.com and you can therefore find their links to Jason and Kyle and Chris and myself, Michael Zi and also The information is out there on the podcast, so if you want more of the show delivered to your podcast player of choice, then don’t forget to subscribe on whatever platform you’re on that you prefer.
[00:22:58] And if you are on Spotify or on Apple Podcast, we’d love it. If you could give us your biased and best review, or at least a rating at a five stars, that would be really helpful to, let other people know what’s out there and that we can help them. Thank you so much for listening, and look forward to speaking to you and see you in the next.
[00:23:15] OUTRO: That was the eCommerce Leader podcast with Michael Veazey in London, England, in Jason Miles in Seattle, Washington. If you liked this content, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on your podcast app for free resources, including PDFs and videos on topics like traffic products and sales channels. Just go to www.theecommerceleader.com.
[00:23:40] No hyphens, just as it sound. Thanks so much for listening.