The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Kyle: it’s an opportunity to definitely have a strategy to leverage the marketing engine that is Amazon when it comes to prime day, because they’ve done a great job of establishing it strongly with their, customers. And so to ignore it completely, I think is a mistake.
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[00:01:13] Michael: Hey folks. Welcome back to the new format of the e-commerce leader. We’ve got our usual trusty panel, Chris green, Carl Hayma, Jason Miles and myself, Michael VI. I’m in London, England, which is today hotter than Miami, Florida, which is crazy times.
[00:01:26] And we’ve just had prime day for the umpteenth time. It seems to me. And so we wanna discuss learnings from that and other reflections and thoughts. So folks let’s kick this off. , who wants to go first.
[00:01:38] Chris: Now we’re not taking turns anymore. What is jamming about? Okay. Jump prime, I just got an email I’ve been out most of the morning. I got an email invited to buy with prime. and we talked about bio prime before it’s insane. People are sleeping on it. But it’s hard to keep up with everything.
[00:01:56] Like I get it like prime day came and went. I don’t know how, what prime day number we’re up to. They did I felt like they did two in one year, one time, maybe. I generally make
[00:02:05] Kyle: wasn’t that the COVID thing they did, like this shifting weird thing where they combined a couple of them.
[00:02:10] Yeah. I thought there
[00:02:11] It
[00:02:11] Chris: was something extra. Normally for prime day. And I did by accident. First prime day, I put my KDP, my self-published books free on prime day. Cause I’m like, sure, why not? Let’s see what happens. I did it for one day. I got 7,000 downloads that I don’t normally get.
[00:02:24] But then prime day went on like for three days and it wasn’t free anymore. I was like, oh shoot. So the next prime day, I was like, I’m just gonna run it through the entire prime day and got tons and tons of downloads. And a lot of people would download stuff cuz it’s. But I did as a marketer, take those screenshots of my KDP account and be like, what’s up, look at all these downloads that my book must be awesome.
[00:02:41] And then people are like, Hey, that book must be awesome. So now I’m gonna buy it. So the marketer in me likes that kind of backend number that you can get. And if you have a good book that has like a good hook or called action at the beginning, because a lot of people are gonna get that free book, they might look at the first few pages.
[00:02:54] So make it interesting, or at least have some kind of call to action. Come to my website, scan this. Send me an email, something and used prime day for the extra exposure. It’s like free extra exposure. Amazon just made this day up. Hey, we need like an extra day to sell stuff. Let’s just make something called prime day, by the way, don’t put prime day in any publications because they will take it down.
[00:03:12] Ask me how I know that.
[00:03:14] Michael: Yeah, nice. I just pick up on the word free though, Chris. I think it is very interesting that a different product types give you a very different relationship to fry day, cuz for KDP it makes total sense. And by the way, I’ve got BI curious members of the mastermind that I run, who are a hundred percent physical products guys who are checking out the whole book, public seeing thing.
[00:03:32] , one of the reasons to do that is of course, because you can run things for free and it doesn’t cost you a ton of money. The people I know who do physical products, honestly, are less and less excited by primed each year because they have worked out that they lose more money by giving a ton of stuff away at a discount than they make up in any kind of volume in any meaningful way, in most cases.
[00:03:51] So it’s weirdly become less and less of a thing amongst the people. I know. I dunno if that’s just
[00:03:55] Chris: me, do I love. I love hearing stuff like that, because to me, that means they’re looking at the problem and they’re not seeing a solution. They’re not getting creative. They’re like, Hey, I sold more stuff like, yo, so this thing sucks.
[00:04:06] Cause I had to mark it down. What if you’re getting extra traffic and more customers and people who normally don’t buy from you are now buying from you. I’m like, like what’s the solution there, right? What can you do to get some kind of longer term value out of a customer, turn them into recurring revenue?
[00:04:20] Like what is it instead of. No, I sold more stuff, but I had to discount it. So I didn’t make any money. So I’m not gonna do it anymore. Amazon is offering free additional traffic, basically. Now I don’t know the exact play for every single seller, but there’s some plays to be made. And the sellers who say no, there’s no plays to be made, so I’m not gonna do it.
[00:04:36] In my opinion are just needlessly taking themselves outta the game, which for everybody else is good. All the customers are still there. They’re gonna buy something. It I’m not trying to dominate this conversation when it comes to prime day, I’m like, it’s so close to it. The first prime day, I think it was, they put the Alexa the little like hockey puck thing up for 20 bucks.
[00:04:55] And every single time we went to Amazon, it was on the front page. It was the banner ad. It was on every product page to the point where I honestly felt like eventually after seeing it so much, I was like, you know what, maybe I should get one of those but that’s strictly psychological. I didn’t need one.
[00:05:06] Yeah. But. When you see something enough times that can start triggering you know what, maybe I do need that thing that no earlier today, I know I did not need and actively not buy. And if you understand that about yourself, you can understand it by your customers just saying.
[00:05:20] Michael: Yeah. Maybe one solution is to do the sort of loss leader type thing, which I’ve certainly had, , clients do as a year round strategy.
[00:05:27] So maybe they need to come up with a more imaginative prime day loss leader type thing for exposure, as you say. Yeah. Interesting. I’m certainly out for learning it.
[00:05:36] Kyle: for sure. No, it was, it’s interesting. Like I’ve had this similar experience with prime day in terms of, they want at least historically have wanted more and more discounts, right?
[00:05:46] Like it’s pretty typical. Yeah. In years past to see a 20, 30% discount on your product, that was of the expected norm. However, this year was different. I would say that it, from a category perspective, the toys. Had the largest percentage discount as a category. And it only on average had a 15% discount.
[00:06:08] And if you look at other categories electronics was 6%. TVs were 3% computers rate percent. That’s far less of a discount than what we’ve seen in years past. So I thought that was interesting trend that the, a lot of the majority of these brands and seller. We’re saying, Hey, I’m happy to give a discount, but what’s not gonna be as big as one you’ve seen in the past.
[00:06:30] So I thought that was an interesting industry point. But yeah, I think it’s an opportunity to definitely have a strategy to leverage the marketing engine that is Amazon when it comes to prime day, because they’ve done a great job establishing it strongly with their with their buyers their customers.
[00:06:46] And so to ignore it completely, I think is a mistake. But to also go, unless you have the margins to support it, which definitely some brands do. And some brands, I know I was talking to some people and they were up, four X this prime day over last year, like they had a great outcome. So I think it depends on the category you’re in the margins that you have and really what your ultimate goal for prime day is.
[00:07:08] And in many cases, often prime day is a way just to liquidate. some slow moving products, which is totally valid. And you shouldn’t, that’s an extremely good use of it. Yeah. And I think, and in many cases that’s, Amazon’s use case for it. We gotta clean out all of our warehouse stuff to prepare for Q4.
[00:07:24] And this is the middle of the year to. And prep everything. It makes them money. Yes. They made it almost $12 billion, but at the same time, there’s a practicality to it in terms of clearing out warehouse base. And I think sellers should be leveraging it very similar way.
[00:07:37] Chris: Sellers need to remember Amazon is adjusting as they go.
[00:07:40] They made this up and they’re changing it. So what works this year might not work next year. And what for sure might work next year. No one’s ever thought of before. Do you guys remember the first prime day where Amazon just got roasted on Twitter and Instagram? Thanks for prime day, Amazon, I got 12% off a ream of paper like the products that were in the first prime day were like, who cares a pack of pens?
[00:08:01] Like what? That’s not like a special but Amazon learns from it. Amazon has historically tried things gone all in on things and be they’re willing to make mistakes and adjust along the way. And I think sellers who like, think selling’s gonna be the same this year and next year and 10 years from now are making big mistakes, because imagine what prime day’s gonna be in 10 years, nobody know.
[00:08:19] There might be amazing tools for sellers to just absolutely dominate, but they that’s what Amazon want. Back it up. What does Amazon want outta a prime day? Happy customer. Yeah. That’s what they want. Reverse engineer from there. Look at the rules that they put in the discounts, the minimum discounts, the minimum quantities.
[00:08:32] Doing physical products like what you’re talking about, Kyle’s so different compared to print on demand. You gotta commit inventory. They tell you, Hey, prime day is this date. We need your stuff in the warehouse by this. You’ve gotta commit the quantity and spending inventory dollars when it comes to print on demand.
[00:08:45] Like I say, I put my books for free or with the merch, my Amazon stuff. I heard about this from some my like larger merch friends. They contact them ahead of time and said, Hey, we like this design, we are gonna lock in a lower price. We need your approval to do this. And we are gonna promote it heavily on Amazon prime day.
[00:09:01] And. Heck. Yeah. But they need approval for it, because it’s a little different than seller central, how you set prices and all that stuff. But like the fact that they’re even looking down the road all the way to, okay, what can we do for merch by Amazon sellers for prime day? What can we do for KDP writers on prime day?
[00:09:16] What can we do for seller central sellers on prime day? Give them the tools to provide an amazing option and an opportunity to be happy or get happy customers like they’re. Like it may not be actively on our side, but we are definitely beneficiaries of what they are they’re doing as long as we play by the role of let’s make sure Amazon’s customers have a great experience.
[00:09:36] And if you do that, you’re gonna have a good time on Amazon.
[00:09:38] Kyle: Yeah. Sure. Jason, did you get good deals? For prime day?
[00:09:42] Chris: No.
[00:09:44] Jason: Although , I bought about $2,000 worth of stuff, like three days before prime day. And then I was like, oh my gosh, what am I an idiot anyway.
[00:09:53] Kyle: And all of those sellers. Thank you.
[00:09:56] Michael: Yeah, my guys are the ones. Thank you.
[00:09:58] Kyle: Yes. Those sellers appreciate your generosity now.
[00:10:01] Jason: Yeah. I’m also highly upset with myself that I didn’t do anything that Chris described on the author side of things, which is. Bro. Why didn’t you tell me that the week before prime day? Yeah, that’s an amazing author strategy, but let me just make one point.
[00:10:16] I don’t really care. What’s listed on Amazon on prime day. This year, I really reflected on just the meta idea itself. Have a prime day. And I thought about it and went back to some of our consulting clients and even in our own business and say, how do we have our own prime day for our VIPs, for our, recurring member that pay us money?
[00:10:41] How do we have special products? Special deals and a short duration of time where they get something amazing offered to them. And we do our own prime day. And to me, that’s the takeaway this year is I’m tired of hearing about Amazon’s prime day. I’m ready to hear about my own prime day. J day. I don’t know what we’re gonna call it.
[00:11:01] We’re gonna have some kind of day where we have our own deals. And to me, that’s really the takeaway for anybody who has a Shopify site. I would just say, just forget about Amazon prime day. Make your own day and set it up on your site and think through what you could offer. That’s super special. Get people to show up and sell a ton of stuff to ’em.
[00:11:20] And that’s the plan that I wanna work out the next few months for our websites and with our
[00:11:23] Chris: clients. Yeah. Jason, I love that. You said that I’ve had the idea of doing like all my courses or books are free on my birthday. So I sell books. I sell courses. Some of ’em are low price. Some of ’em are high.
[00:11:34] And I would say as, almost as a lead magnet, like on the website, Hey, if you can’t afford my stuff, no problem. Look, I’ve got low price point stuff, get you started. I’ve got there’s. Here’s what I recommend for groups to ask questions. And if you can wait on my birthday, I will make literally every single thing free.
[00:11:50] Everybody’s gonna sign up for that. And it’s once a year. And if you miss it, be like, Hey, sorry, you missed it. Come along next year. Yeah. Cause you’re selling information. Like the number of people are gonna buy anyway, they’re gonna respect the fact that, Hey, you’re trying to help people out who maybe can’t afford some of your stuff.
[00:12:01] Or they like say they’re like super stingy and you know what? I will wait eight months to get this $9 book for free. Not a problem. Wait, nine months. Yeah, it will be free. And then I have Chris Greenday it’s my birthday guys. And the gifts are for you, blah, blah, blah. That the script writes itself, right?
[00:12:15] Yep. We get away everything for free and it is still all done print on demand auto delivered through Amazon. Like you, to me, coupon codes, like it’s so easy. You get so much good will out of it. Yeah. And like people, oh, don’t want everything for free. They’re more than happy to be like, yeah, I know it used to be free, but I, this looks like a really good thing.
[00:12:30] They can solve a problem for me, so totally gonna buy it. Of course. I wanna support the person who created it. I think people worry too much about if make everything free one day, everybody’s gonna not buy all year long and go no, they’re not, that’s a, I’m prove me wrong. Show me everybody.
[00:12:43] Who’s I’m not gonna buy anything from Jason Miles store because it’s gonna be free 11 months from give me a break. And for those people, great. Give it to ’em for free. Like it’s, there’s so many ways to keep customers happy and surprise them. But Jason, you’re absolutely right.
[00:12:54] You can make your. anything you want. So instead of competing on Hey, it’s Christmas, let’s compete with every other freaking seller on the planet. Yeah, no. Have your own day in August, right? Wherever’s not expect, it’s so much easier to break through the noise in August, instead of December 25th, here’s my Halloween special on Halloween.
[00:13:09] Nobody’s listening, dude. They deleted all the other Halloween marketing emails. Be different. Stand out. Like it’s not that hard, but nobody wants to try something that might not work. Cause they’re scared.
[00:13:18] Michael: I really like the idea of, I, I know that Andre chap and the email marketing guru he is not very guru.
[00:13:23] Like it’s all about exceptionally competent trainer in email marketing does a birthday offer. And I think he offers his course at 75% off or something like that. It’s not free. So yeah, you can play with price points, for a book might well be free. And then a, a course might be, 50% or 75%. I think that’s really great.
[00:13:38] And I, to your point, there’s almost no point in competing with everyone else. This is the other problem I have with prime day. I’m not anti it. And if there’s a ton of extra traffic, you can leverage and it makes sense for your business then of course you should. But do I, I’m much more attracted to this idea of having a time when.
[00:13:53] It’s completely different talking chap on Zig when they Zach, when everyone else is off on holiday and you are at home selling stuff, you go, we’re gonna have an August holiday. We’re gonna have a, like a week of, people throwing beach balls to each other on a crazy video series. And then a bunch of fun discounts, different one every day or whatever.
[00:14:08] There’s a ton of things. As you say, Chris, it’s limits down your imagination really. That sounds much more fun as well
[00:14:13] Chris: somehow. Oh I would not have fun marketing, but I think what we’re seeing now is I would not call Amazon prime day a red ocean yet. It’s getting redder. More red is red or a word.
[00:14:24] But it’s still, in my opinion is so early, like the number of active sellers who are really taking advantage and really have dialed in a proper strategy for prime day is still in the absolute minority. In my opinion, of course, I don’t know the numbers. It will get more red. And it’s as everybody competes in the same place, and that’s what like dudes, a blue ocean over here where you can like, literally find your customers on Instagram and offer them a deal outside of prime day and Christmas.
[00:14:43] So it’s like always keeping your eye open for that blue ocean and not always being. The Amazon ocean is too good to leave. But be aware of when it’s red, when it gets too red, you don’t wanna play somewhere else. And if nobody knows what I’m talking about, go get the blue ocean strategy book.
[00:14:57] It’s on Amazon. It’s not expensive. Yeah. Great book,
[00:15:01] Michael: Kylie, you a person that dives heavily personally into prime day discount.
[00:15:06] Kyle: Or do you know what he, I say buyer or as a seller? Yeah. No. And only because I found it to be when you, when I crunched the numbers from a pure sales velocity perspective, yes.
[00:15:21] I would get more sales, but I would be not making any money. Now there’s an argument to be made in terms. Visibility attracting new customers, but, I don’t I, there’s still some to that. And, but I think that there’s ways as opposed to the normal. So when I think of prime day marketing as an Amazon seller, there’s a few things that you end up doing, right?
[00:15:44] You end up being going through the lightning deal program. That’s the main driver that Amazon really pushes you to. And it’s worked great. Like I’ve made a lot of money using lightning deals strictly on prime day. But what has occurred is that Amazon. Narrow more and rightly cuz they can narrowed the scope of the sellers.
[00:16:04] They want to participate in those programs, because there’s only limited capacity. And so what they’ve done is they’ve just attached to higher and higher price point to actually just be enrolled in these lightning deals. Which is basically like a deal of the day type scenario to where I used to be.
[00:16:21] And then it was like a hundred bucks or 200 bucks. And now on prime day, it’s like $800, $750, $600. And that’s just to run the deal that then you had to take your 10, 15% discount on top of it. And that’s per skew, right? So it’s like $600 per skew and you start factoring in. Okay how many units can you do?
[00:16:42] And if you have a big inventory and you run a huge run rate, then yeah, I think you can totally make sense. And you have your margin support. It makes total sense to run it. But if you’re running on tighter margins, you just have to be more aware. And I think that’s really the starting point of any marketing, whether that’s Q4, whether that’s prime day, you gotta know your margins begin with and what’s gonna work for your particular customer.
[00:17:03] The other thing is I, my products are in the art space, right? So it’s not the biggest prime day category that gets all the love and attention as well. So that’s the other piece of it. I have far more success in Q4 overall, just because people are more buying it forward for gifts for, family members or whatever.
[00:17:21] Prime day now, but I do think that there’s still opportunity to leverage prime day in your external marketing in your list, building into what Chris was talking about. If you are offering digital products or any sort of. Top of funnel marketing or a loss leader. If you have a product that you’re willing to try and move to gain new customers, I think that there’s a ton of opportunities still to leverage that.
[00:17:44] I think you just have to be smart about how you approach it. The only thing I would say is Amazon is great at offering, coming up with new programs and offers like lightning deals and all these different things for things. But they, one caveat you have to keep in mind is Amazon’s doing this.
[00:17:57] For you, but more so for them. So just realize that when they’re doing it, it’s, gonna benefit first, their customers, second them, and then third us the seller. Now obviously they do things for sellers. So a lot of things for sellers that are great and are a huge advantage, there are definitely programs in which they’re gonna try and market you into as a seller.
[00:18:16] And you just have to understand whether or not it’s gonna actually apply to your business or not. I. I’ve done a bunch of Amazon programs in the past where I’m like, it sounds great. Let’s give it a shot and then you get through it. And you’re like, this was awful and didn’t work at all.
[00:18:30] But I appreciate you experimenting with me on it. And, we experiment together and it was a complete other failure, but and so I’m happy to test that, but you just have to be aware. Know your margins and have a plan, but don’t have a plan that’s necessarily only dependent on what the Amazon’s offering you for prime day promotions.
[00:18:48] You can think outside the box, you can feel a little more creative. And I think that’s the biggest takeaway for me,
[00:18:54] Michael: Jason, I’m conscious that we haven’t heard from you. , any other thoughts on this one?
[00:18:58] Chris: Jason’s heavy and digital product. Yeah. And I kinda like the fact that we’re all got our toes in like a whole bunch of.
[00:19:04] Kinds of products. Yeah. Because there’s gonna be different strategies, like not just different strategies for different sellers or different price points or different products, but everything, different business models. Yeah. And there’s no perfect strategy. There’s no perfect list. I made a, this is, I’ll tell the brief story about the prime.
[00:19:18] I called. I made a prime day playbook and it was up for a few months and Amazon took it down. And I get it. I don’t fuss when they take stuff down and I probably wouldn’t do it. I think I even used their logo in the title. that’s slightly pushed they might have I’m a permission over, over forgiveness, Orion, whatever it is.
[00:19:37] Yeah. But I put up with strategies of Hey prime. This is like when prime day first came out, it’s here are some strategies that I would follow. I don’t even remember what was in it, to be honest. It was several years ago now. But I like the fact that Amazon is continuing to create and try new things.
[00:19:51] Amazon could certainly pull the plug on prime. They could disappear. Sure. Or they could make it in house only. Yeah. Or who knows, but while it’s there take advantage of it, but put appropriate time and resources towards it and be like, Hey, this makes the most sense. Or you know what, this we’ve done that much.
[00:20:08] It’s not really working for us. So we’re gonna do something else. Like it’s okay. And I think people get overwhelmed with what should I do? What’s the optimal thing I heard someone else did that we should do that. Can we go back in time? No, you can’t go back in time. Like not yet. I don’t know.
[00:20:19] Wait, just go forward in time. Can’t go backward in. But at 1230. I think you got a hard stop there.
[00:20:26] Michael: I’ve got a bounce, but, it’s been interesting to talk it through. I’m gonna just final thought for me is really the difference. As you said, between the way that you can look at things as a digital products that as opposed to physical products and the hard cost of physical products being such a barrier, and unless you’ve got really generous margins to your point card, but But that doesn’t have to be that hard division.
[00:20:44] I’m always begging, trying to do Jason’s work really because, he’s the man trying to persuade all the physical products, space, sellers to add as digital to the mix. And I’m always begging my guys to do that. And the beginning to get the idea of books, being a great idea.
[00:20:57] Which I’m delighted by, because I just feel like gives you that leeway to do all the imaginative stuff that you were saying, Chris, because you haven’t got that, you got near zero marginal cost with the digital and that just frees you up to be more imaginative in your marketing. And, , that feels very healthy.
[00:21:12] The counter balance to the same old that we can fall into selling on Amazon. Yeah, it’s interesting how, for me, that plays into it from today’s discussion, I’m gonna bounce. I’m gonna leave you guys to, , discuss. The wonderful things that I’m gonna miss.
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