With the pandemic offering no end at sight, e-commerce growth is still a hot topic among many entrepreneurs. With many businesses totally shifted or at least leveraged the online stage to avoid being left behind, the competition becomes a bit more challenging than ever. Sitting down with Elliot Begoun once again is Betsy McGinn of McGinn eComm, discussing which areas and metrics every entrepreneur should focus on when venturing into e-commerce, particularly in Amazon, without sacrificing prices or quality. She also explains how to achieve the proper balance between selling in your Amazon account and maintaining an efficient direct-to-consumer website, two distinctly different platforms that can lead to one strong win if managed the right way.

—

Listen to the podcast here

Leveraging The Unstoppable E-Commerce Growth With Betsy McGinn

My friend, my absolute Amazon guru, will share with us what’s going on since we last chatted with her and what are some of the new things that she’s seen in the eComm sphere, what are some new best practices emerging and most importantly, take those questions that are top of mind. Betsy, as always, thanks for doing this with me. Share with those who missed last time a little bit about you and then I’ll let you share what you’re hearing and seeing.

Thank you, Elliot. It’s always such a pleasure to join you and all of your audience. My name is Betsy McGinn and I have been working in eCommerce for several years. Several years ago, I wrote a book called The Amazon Roadmap: How Innovative Brands are Reinventing the Path to Market and I think so much of the brands that Elliot works with as those brands that are innovating the path to market. My co-author, Phil Segal and I worked with many brands and seen many brands that launched their future on Amazon and their own direct to consumer long before they ever stepped toe in a store. As a result, had great success that was largely under their control that they could then leverage into brick and mortar. When I started in eCommerce, I was working with Seventh Generation, launched that eCommerce business, which grew to a huge, outsized business for the company in the day when eCommerce was coming on the scene. That was about 2006.

Several years ago, I started my own company where I helped brands launch on Amazon, fix broken businesses on Amazon, optimize their business, do product and pack development projects. It was anything you can think of that has to do with Amazon and direct to consumer. 2020 has been impactful. I’m sure you’re all aware. We’ve seen major changes in every aspect of eCommerce, particularly related to the categories that we play in, natural products, natural food grocery. The growth of grocery online is no surprise to any of us, but what is interesting is to think about and talk about the stickiness of that trend. I was reading a report from Mark Hode’s that was talking about new consumers coming to eCommerce and existing consumers increasing their footprint on eCommerce. Sixty percent of new users to eCommerce for grocery are predicted to go back to some of their traditional behaviors of going back into the stores when we can more freely when we feel more comfortable. That still means that 40% of new users will be sticking around.

Mark Hode’s says that what that translates into is approximately 21% of grocery coming from online sales by the year 2025, which is not that long away, as we all know. That’s about $250 billion worth of sales. What I have been saying so much to all of the brands that I’ve been talking to over in 2020 is, it’s time to get going. If you haven’t stuck your toe in the water, whether it’s on your own website or with Amazon, it’s time. One of the things, Elliot, you and I’ve talked about before is also because of this big trend in 2020 is the ability for Amazon and others to deal with the increased capacity. Clearly, things have gotten trickier. We see glitches all the time on the platform, anything from accounts being deactivated for no good reason, barriers getting ungated in categories or getting listings live.

There is help out there and there is help that is affordable to small brands. That’s one of the great things I’ve seen evolve in the last several years. There aren’t those advisors that you have retainers of $10,000 a month that are out of scope for many of the brands that you and I work with, Elliot. Providers that can do troubleshooting on an ad hoc basis or help you manage your business on a monthly basis for reasonable retainers and commission relationships. I encourage more and more of the brands that I work with to get that help ongoing because I feel like it is becoming essential to success on Amazon. We, as entrepreneurs, don’t have the time to try to figure out what’s going wrong, dig into what’s going wrong and try to fix it when there are pros out there that have their heads in this business every single day. That’s one of the things I’ve seen as the complexity has increased in 2020.

Change has always been a big part of eComm and Amazon, but the speed in which that’s happening. I was looking at a report, in 2019, eComm in the US was $539 billion. They’re estimating 2020 to finish at $839 billion. That’s over a 40% increase in a substantial base business to begin within a single year. To your earlier point, that’s putting massive stress on the system, on the ability to fulfill and the ability to replenish. It’s also meaning that everybody is running to the center and trying to do it. Last time we talked in the midst of the early outbreak of the pandemic, there were so much pantry stocking going on, so much panic buying that the larger companies were tamping down their spend and their efforts on eComm because they were trying to keep up with supply. Looking to where we are now, at least from what I’ve seen and I may be wrong, that’s changed. They’re now back to spending. We see an increased cost in all of the ad spend and all of those things going on. As that swung back, what would you be suggesting or advising to some of these brands how they can get heard? How can they rise above the din of all of the people and all of the brands now that are playing in this crowded area, specifically on Amazon?

One of the things that I to like recall from a young entrepreneur talking at an event I went to several years ago which is still relevant is, she was saying how she doesn’t need to buy those search terms that are going to be $10 a click, but that the crumbs at the bottom of the barrel are still enough for her brand to be successful. It’s hard to know what those crumbs are without help. Several years ago, I felt like you could manage campaigns yourself, manage them somewhat manually using the tools inside of Amazon’s portal, but I feel that’s an area where you need help because much has become automated and that automation is going to pay off in terms of the efficiency of your spend.

Another thing I like to recommend when considering what the tactics are that you can use inside Amazon’s portal is the sponsored product ads are the most successful for brands getting started for a couple of reasons. Do you know those beautiful banners that we see at the top of Amazon pages? Those are called sponsored brand ads, but very few consumers search for brands on Amazon. A lot of the search originates with search terms for characteristics and features, and therefore to be able to surface as a sponsored product using those terms is the best strategy.

I would spend 75% to 80% towards that. The other thing that’s cool about that is you’re getting this valuable real estate, whether somebody clicks on your ad or not. You only pay when somebody clicks on it. Having that valuable real estate upfront where people see you on the landing page is a great advantage to brand. I would stay away from discounting. Focusing on the big banner ads, the brand ads, because the most value you’re going to get out of the tools that Amazon offers is those sponsored product ads.

There’s a lot of metrics that people are trying to track on Amazon and on eCommerce in general, some of which are vanity metrics, it makes you feel good or people ask about it. In your opinion and your expertise, what matters? What numbers should entrepreneurs and brands and what should they be if they’re using somebody with deep expertise in Amazon to help them do this? What are the things that they should be watching together that are indicative that they’re spending their money wisely and that they’re on the right path to growing their Amazon business?

There’s a number of metrics, but the most important one is sales, because you could use a metric like the average cost of advertising spend. Let’s say that you’re spending $25 per $100 on getting that sale. That seems high, so you want to cut it down to $10. That’s great, but if you’re not getting the volume of sales from that lower ad spend per sale, then it’s not providing the value that you’re looking for in the end. It’s this fine balance of optimizing those ads so that your spend is efficient, but to not focus on one of those metrics to keep your ad spend per sale down if your actual gross sales are not growing. That’s where people get tripped up a lot on looking at ACoS or ROAS as their sole metric of how to manage their advertising.

The end game is you want to increase your sales, or maybe you want to increase your awareness and then that contradicts exactly what I said about not spending money on the brand ads. If you want to get awareness for your brand, that could be the best placement for you. It’s important to understand what your goals are, what your spend should be for advertising if you’re looking to attain a certain sales level within that category, and what does that look like for the category? There are some categories that are competitive like supplements and pet food. There are some that are less competitive and you could have a better ad spend for that category than your friend that sells a supplement. That’s where some of that expertise can come in to help you have realistic expectations about your product in your category and what to spend and how.

It’s also worth comparing mine can do damage. It doesn’t matter. I personally don’t like ACoS as a metrics. It’s their front and center, but the challenge I see with it is that it’s missing the organic sale, and it’s also missing the people that may have first purchased through one of your ads but now have become loyal purchasers. You can do your own math. It’s not something you’ll find in Amazon and TACoS, that would be your Total Advertising Cost of Sale. You take the total spend that you’re having against your total sales and what you would hope is that over time, that percentage is going down as your sales continued to grow because more and more of the folks that you’ve introduced to your brand through your ad spend are coming back to buy again and again. It’s important to understand what the objective is. I agree with you wholeheartedly that the number one most important metric is sales. A question that’s closely related that came in through our online community was around pricing and the relationship between pricing on Amazon, your own website and brick and mortar retail. Share some of what you see as best practices there if you would.

The real metric is lifetime value of that customer. We realized that heavily at Seventh Generation because of the types of products that we sold. If it was diapers or laundry detergent, these are people that are going to be with you hopefully for years and years. Getting that initial sale, you don’t want to be short-sighted in spending against it, knowing that this could be a subscription customer in particular on Amazon and have that lifetime value. Pricing and profitability are something that I’m talking about in a big way right now in relation to Amazon because there are quite a few misconceptions about how to price online and how to price for Amazon. The biggest misconception is that I have to be low priced on Amazon to be successful.

It is only one of many metrics but looking at surveys that have been done about why people shop on Amazon, the top two reasons are selection and quick delivery, then comes in fair pricing, not the best pricing, but good pricing. Where I see brands often hurt themselves is that they think they have to have the lowest pricing and then suddenly they realize that they have an unprofitable business. One reason is that there are different inputs into your profitability online than there are in the store. What I encourage brands to do is that profitability equation before they even consider setting their pricing. I encourage you to set it slightly higher than you would at retail, even on your site, not just Amazon, because if you want to bring your price down, it’s a real time change to make. It’s easier to bring a price down than to take a price up. We all know that’s the standard rule.

Some of the best practices that I talk about all the time are, can you have a different pack for your website or for Amazon so that it doesn’t go head-to-head competing with what you have on the shelf? It is typically not the best idea to take that item that you have on the shelf selling for $599 and try to sell that single unit on Amazon. That’s where profitability is going to hurt you. When you think about what it takes to get that product in the hands of the consumer, the least you could have even imagined for shipping is probably $4, all of a sudden, you can see your own profitable. The best practices on Amazon or even your own site are typically multipacks. That’s what consumers are used to buying.

You’re not bucking the way that consumers think about purchasing product online by doing a multipack and especially a variety pack. Variety packs are big sellers online. You price it and you think, “I’ve done my job. It’s profitable, I’m making money,” but all of a sudden, you see third-party sellers popping up on Amazon selling your product. How does that happen? The simple answer to that is you sell to a distributor, there are plenty out there, UNFI, KeHE, and they sell to their retailers, their customers, not at a 40% margin, it might be cost plus 15% or cost plus 20%. When you then turn around and give them an off-invoice discount of 15% or 20%, all of a sudden, you’ve put their customers in a position to buy the product and be able to afford to turn around and resell it on Amazon.

This whole pricing equation has to do with not just how you’re going to do it online, but what is your whole market strategy? Could you, in fact then with UNFI or KeHE, do a 5% off-invoice discounts? You give them something, but then do the rest of it as a scan or a manufacturer chargeback. It’s reflecting product that goes over the register versus an off-invoice discount that enables people to have a deep discount and resell online. It’s important to think about the whole idea of the strategy and not just, “How am I going to price it for Amazon or my website? How are you going to price it across the market so those channels do not impact one another in a negative way?”

A couple of things I’ll add onto that, one is a few episodes ago, we had Saj Khan on. He’s the VP of Grocery for Nugget Markets. One of the things he said is, “I don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage to your online business. I want to be at least at parity, if not slightly advantageous to that because the people who come to my stores are having to come in, they’re having to do that. They’re not getting it delivered to their doorstep, so they don’t expect to pay more in my stores, and they don’t expect to pay less online.” He’s spot on, setting some premium. I’m a definite proponent of, “Aim high and then adjust down.” When it comes to things UNFI and KeHE, it’s all part of strategy and the way this industry, the way this business makes that difficult for all of you.

KeHE and UNFI, they’re not going to publish your promotion unless you’re at a 15% ROI. The real question is, how many published promotions do you need to have and how many of them can you do with retailers at a strong MCB or scan? Some of the distributors require you to support their promotional activity at a certain cadence in order to get access to other elements of their program. It’s not easy, but you have to look at this holistically. You have to look at how every decision you make in one channel impacts the way you show up in another and try to identify the unintended consequences of that.

I know Betsy, you’ve seen these hundreds of times as have I, when founders look up and go, “What happened? My pricing is all over the place and I’ve lost control.” It takes starting with eyes wide open. I want to get to a few questions that we have in the chat box. The first question is from Emily. She said, “Thank you so much for this great session, Betsy. Do you have any advice on finding and vetting the right partners to help a small brand for both fulfillment if outside of Amazon, FBA and advertising?”

Like anything else, the best is to get recommendations from your peers, from people like Elliot and me to give you a sense. There are about six different partners that I work with for managing Amazon business. They range from starting retainer of $1,200 in these skills to up to $5,000 in these sorts of skills. I feel like for every client I work with, there may be 2 of that 6 that are a good fit for them based on what their needs are, the size of their business, how many ASINs they have, all of those criteria. I would never recommend the one that’s $5,000 to a brand-new brand, for example. That to me is how you figure out who are good fits and then interview them yourselves.

The other thing that I see happening a lot in this world right now is there was a time when contracts for working with agencies were twelve months. It makes total sense to me because on Amazon, unlike any other part of your business, it could take six months for that agency to see any sales where they’re going to get commission and start making some money from your brand. What I see more and more are agencies that are willing to do ad hoc fix it projects on an hourly basis or contracts that are 90 days and then you can decide to re-up then. To me, that is a great advantage for small brands getting started because you can test and learn from these different people that you work with but not be locked in. I encourage those conversations to see who your colleagues or friends are working with, how it’s going for them and then check out other people like me, Elliot, Waven and others that might have resources that would meet your needs.

Tap into our Hawaiian Yentl, which is Waven, he’s a fantastic connector, but beyond that, one of the great things is look for the brands that you feel are doing what you want to do on Amazon. The ones that are showing up in the way you want to show up or getting the buzz that you want to get. If you don’t know them, get on LinkedIn, find out who they are, reach out to them and ask who that is. The one thing too that is beneficial for everyone reading is that there are some fantastic, fabulous service providers in this space, many of them, but there are many more that we don’t know. Sometimes there’s a benefit of not following what everybody else is following because you’re going to run similar playbooks.

Be okay with experimenting. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be in our space. Maybe we better serve tapping into an audience that’s different. Explore. Everything Betsy said, plus I’d lay around who you aspire. There are a couple of ways you can look at R&D, the traditional way is research and development, the entrepreneurial way is rip off and duplicate. You go after those that you want to emulate and jump to the front of the line by getting the right providers. The other thing that I would say is important, regardless of who you look to bring on as a provider is immediately level success and expectation. What I see happen too often is that the entrepreneur has one definition of success and the service provider, another, and measured by not only revenue, but the ramp that revenue is coming and the spend. Before you ever engage, have that conversation, a 30, 60, 90-day expectation and maybe a little bit longer.

Looking, “What should we be expecting to see in terms of numbers? What should we be expecting to provide you in terms of tools or dollars or investments? What’s our communication going to be like? What are we going to be watching that’s going to tell us that we’re moving in the right direction? What do we do if we see things aren’t going in the right direction?” Have that conversation now while the tension is low and while the desire to work it through exist versus when you’re in the heat of the moment and you’re not satisfied with where you’re going, and you start questioning. It rarely works out as well. It does start for those we work with.

We use that growth hypothesis. We sit down with those service providers and say, “In our hypothesis, this is where we anticipate being each of the next five years, and this is what we anticipate investing to get there.” Some of the things that we’re thinking about doing, “Do you think this is reasonable? Are we missing something? Can you get us there? Do you need more? Do you need less? Do you think our sales numbers need to be increased or decreased?” That conversation alone usually leads to a better sense in a deeper way if they’re the right provider because ultimately, you want someone who believes in you and believes in the brand and is excited by it and gets it. You don’t want somebody who says, “This is okay. I can run our playbook and get you to why.” You want somebody to say, “Emily, Wayward Spirit is super cool. I can’t wait to dive in and help you grow this business.”

That’s particularly important with eCommerce because so much of your destiny is self-directed by the advertising, how you position your product or content. I’ve seen brands languish at $800 a month because they didn’t invest in those things. I’ve seen brands come out of the gate doing $50,000 in their first month. There isn’t a standard metric for what it’s going to look like in eCommerce. That’s why you’ve got to have that upfront conversation, because it’s not like going into a store where all of a sudden, you’re in $1,000 targets, and you can count on selling five units a week per door and make that calculation. You need to get a good sense from your service provider of what their expectations are versus yours because they could be in very different places. It’s because you haven’t talked about it.

Switching to another question, this one is from Smarty, “I’ve been selling refrigerated drinks on Amazon. Shipping was more expensive than the product. We are changing our product to shelf stable. As we work out the logistics, what should we be thinking of in terms of box, size, weight etc.?” He has a follow-up question which is, “What’s the best way to research shipping pricing for shelf stable?”

When you’re talking about that, are you talking about from your own site or from Amazon?

Probably both, but specifically Amazon as well.

One of the things if you’re already working with Amazon, even if your product is not shelf stable at this point, there’s a lot of information in Seller Central about size and pallet requirements. It’s important to know. I’ll tell you a story that I use a million times. A friend and colleague of mine introduced a snap product and the largest dimension on anyone’s side of a case for Amazon before it moves into oversize is 25 inches. His case is 25.5 inches. That 0.5 inch has pushed him into a shipping category that he could have easily avoided had he known that information. It’s super important to know what those dimensions are, what the weights are.

A great tool that Amazon has that I found to be quite accurate is their FBA Calculator, which you can find online. You can reach out to me if it looks more complicated than you anticipated and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s a great way to figure out what those fees will be like your FBA fulfillment fee and your monthly storage fee. Even if you’re not live on Amazon, if you find a product that is similar to yours, you can input it into the calculator to get an idea of what that will look like. There’s great upfront work that you can do before you make those final decisions, which is important and will be lifesavers for you in the end.

It’s important to do what you’re doing right now. The first thing is asking these questions beforehand, and not designing it around what your co-man wants to do but thinking about the channels of selling and what’s the right setup for it and you can do the calculator on there. Also, talking to 3PLs and understanding for the business that you’re doing off your website what their kitting costs are, what their peak costs are, so that you can design and think smartly about it. Another question for you in terms of what’s happening, this is interesting to me, is the relationship and how it’s changing or evolving between your own Shopify or WooCommerce website and Amazon, and how do you decide where to put more of your emphasis?

I joke about this all the time, because if you had asked me this question several years ago, I would have said, “Always choose Amazon. It’s going to be your volume play. It’s where people go to fill their baskets. It’s where there are 126 million loyal Prime members that go there to shop and not to browse, have a high conversion rate.” People are not going to come to your website to buy a bag of potato chips, but in 2020, people have been going to websites to buy a bag of potato chips. What I see is the right balance of business is between Amazon and your own direct to consumer website. To have them both in play is important. The problem for young entrepreneurs is resources. Can you afford to do both of them at once because both of them still require time, attention, content development, advertising, consumer acquisition, responding to reviews, all of those things?

If you don’t feel like you have the time or resources, do one, get it nailed within a six-month period and then move on to the other so that you are doing them simultaneously at some point. The beauty of your website serves a different function than Amazon. Many people that come to your website come there for brand love. They want to engage with you as the brand. They want to find out more about you. They want to know what special things you’re doing. They might even want to get recipes. I see that with one of the brands I’ve worked with a lot, which is Miyoko’s.

People love that brand, their direct to consumer business reflects that because people want to engage with them. What I find is that those two different channels of eCommerce serve two different needs, and that’s why they’re important to have. Clearly, the conversion on Amazon is going to be higher than your website. That’s still a struggle. It’s still about 2.5% conversion on your own direct-to-consumer website, which means you have to get out there and do social media or whatever tactics that might take to get people there. The benefits of getting that established and making it an essential part of your channel strategy is important.

In the perfect world, you’d do both evenly, but we all know that very few of us live in that perfect world. In fact, if any of you do, can you send me the directions because I’d love to meet you there? Here are a couple of things that I would recommend in addition to it, first of all, start with empathy towards your consumer and think about where is it that they’re going to want to transact more. If you skew a bit older, if you skew with people who are maybe less rabid and evangelical about your product, then Amazon probably makes sense. If it’s more tactical and less emotional, it’s easier for them to transact business because they’re doing with lots of other brands on Amazon.

If your primary consumer skews younger, if they tend to be evangelical, they want to be made to feel like they’re part of an exclusive tribe, and putting more emphasis on your website is going to serve you better. Don’t do it like an Amazon storefront, leverage cool things that you can do. Whether it’s loyalty programs or Early Adopter, Tastemaker or whatever you want to call it, programs where they get released new products and information inside their club, give them opportunities to refer friends, make them feel treasure like they are.

The other thing I’ll point out is the fundamental difference between the two, Betsy, if you disagree, please do so. The fundamental difference between Amazon and your own website is Amazon is a search engine, it’s search driven. It’s where a lot of search activity starts, 60% of all search starts on Amazon now. People looking for things, trying to discover things, not necessarily your brand itself, but products like yours or solutions like yours are likely to go to Amazon. Your website with your activation plan around it, be it paid social, PR, or influencer allows you to reach out to your targeted consumers as they live their lives and their lifestyle. Let them know that you’re there and fit their lifestyle or fit their needs. It’s more you going to them and talking and not them searching. In that perfect world, having both those tentacles at work will serve your brand well, but if you are, like so many, starved for resources, both human and capital, then deciding which of the two you’re better prepared to activate and where you’re likely to find a more motivated consumer is the place that I would put the energy.

There are a couple of metrics that are interesting that are important to remember when you’re making these decisions, reviews, you’re talking about Amazon being a search engine. The people that go to Amazon to shop for product, 92% of the time they read reviews which tells you more about how people are shopping. If people are looking for more big-ticket items, they go there to read reviews, even if they’re going to buy them in a store. You have to think about how you want to be discovered and what that looks like against your budgeting. One of the things I love what Elliot said about lifestyle, for example, Instagram ads that I’m served based on what I follow, they are right on. They are usually beautiful and hip, they’re like the brands that you are. Maybe that is one of the places that you want to think about is, “Where’s the best social media place for me to sit?” There are tools that you can use for your own site that hone in on those targets that you want, and it doesn’t mean that you have to break the bank. It means you have to find the right tools for you.

I’m a growth hacker. I say this all the time. I love experimentation. We were talking about this in our eTardigrade Program workshop, and I wrote about it, that is the best founders I know. The entrepreneurs that seem to succeed are not the ones who are trying to meet consumers where they are but are trying to leapfrog them and be where they’re headed, be there when they get there. eComm allows you to test those theories because in this space, we celebrate the unicorn. The unicorn is often the brand that made that bat and where they’re going and went all in. If they’re right, they’re right in a big way. If they’re wrong, we never hear about them because they probably died.

The resilient, nimble capital-efficient way to approach that is to think about where are the possible places. If you see the consumers on a road and there are a few forks in the road and you can test the destination of each of those forks, eComm by changing up what kind of messaging you put, where your ads are targeted, what you’re doing, there’s a lot of ability to test. There are a lot of ways you can geotarget that test and have control groups, control markets to see if one does better. Don’t be afraid to be a mad scientist in your approach, especially while you’re an earlier stage brand, because it will serve you well and you can make them more educated bets about where that consumer’s heading and be there to greet them with that warm virtual hug. Betsy, Tanya has a question, “With all the rapid changes over 2020, are there strategies in your book that have changed, or has it become outdated, or is it still the base logic that works?”

Phil and I have been talking about a new edition. When we were reviewing that in December 2020 about whether to push it and get it done in the next few weeks, we both realized that so much of what we wrote in the book is relevant. We wanted it to be that way, that it was a good basis for being successful on Amazon and not necessarily follow trends, but solid foundation of doing business. Ultimately, not that much has changed in my book, and we didn’t feel this necessity to do the revision that I was thinking we would. I would however like to add some chapters, I’d like to add one on direct-to-consumer and talk about that a bit more with how things have changed. There hasn’t been much change within the ad and marketing piece that Phil wrote extensively about.

There are things that are changing at Amazon I’d like to write about. A couple of things that I want to assure all of you there on the right track with is, they have typically been on track to increase their infrastructure probably by about 15% a year. Their warehousing and delivery capability has increased 50% in 2020 and continues to be on that trajectory because they are trying to meet the needs of all these new brands and new sellers that are coming to their site. They are also trying to address something that we as entrepreneurs in the natural products industry care about, which is carbon footprint. They have bought some of the first electric vehicles and they have an order in for 100,000 more electric delivery vehicles. You have seen a lot of the delivery has gone out of the post office and UPS’s and FedEx’s hands and into Amazon’s hands directly.

There’s a lot of change in that way in terms of how Shopify and Amazon are changing to meet the needs of you as their customers and their own consumers. In terms of strategy on Amazon, you’ve got to look at your product, your pricing, your profitability, your content, which I call placement, your promotions and understanding the platform. That’s what that book digs into. The seventh P I would like to add to that is something we’ve already talked about a lot, which is People, how are you going to manage that business? Who are the best partners for you to have? You do need help as this has gotten more complex. I don’t say that to discourage you. There are people that do go it alone. At a trade show, remember those way back when? I went up to HighKey and I said, “Who helps you with your business?” They have done such a fabulous job on Amazon. They’re like, “We do it ourselves.” There are people that have cracked the code, but largely, there’s great help out there and you should get it so that it doesn’t slow down your trajectory to be successful.

Tanya, one of the weird things about life is that the faster things change, the more the core stays the same or becomes more apparent. I was thinking about that in a conversation I was having around nutrition. Everybody’s looking for what’s new in nutrition, but what’s new is what’s old. If you go back to the way people were eating three generations ago, that’s probably a pretty good thing. The key is to look at what’s fundamentally true and that’s not changing. Those things that are evolving have less to do with the actual strategy and more to do with consumer behavior. That’s the fun part. That’s the tough part, is trying to predict and think about what’s going to happen in that consumer behavior and where they’re going to be.

The one thing about online and Amazon and, Betsy, feedback here is fine, but this is a mistake I see often, we work too hard to try to market to the masses. That’s difficult because everyone reading this is not going to be able to outspend Nestle, Unilever or anybody else. Marketing to the masses, in some respects, is a fool’s errand. What you need to do is go as narrow as you can. It seems somewhat counterintuitive when you start trying to toss out a bunch of consumers that you’re not going to work on targeting, and you’re going to get as detailed, as specific, and as narrow as you can.

If you do that and you can resonate with that tribe, because of the sheer enormity of the market and the number of people who are on Amazon with 162 million Prime members, if your slice of the pie is tiny, it’s still a damn big pie and you’re not competing with everybody else. Getting as narrow, as niche, as specific, as targeted as you can and not trying to fish with a big net but trying to do spearfishing instead is going to suit you well. Betsy, I’m going to let you bring it home with some tips, ideas and any last bits of wisdom, and how folks can reach out to you, where they can find your book, please share.

My final parting word would be to get in the game, don’t delay, but also to do that upfront work. Whether it’s reading my book, which gives you the framework that you should be thinking about or getting some help with partners, it’s time, don’t wait. There’s so much opportunity out there and it’s not going to change. It’s going to continue to evolve in this direction for eCommerce even as we get through this pandemic and back to some new normal, and that’s especially true for groceries. Don’t wait, there’s help out there, even your colleagues that are willing to give a hand and help you get started with this. I encourage you to get going. Reach out to me if you have questions, I’m happy to answer them.

I know this is a very elementary way to say but I can’t express it enough if you look at different brands on Amazon that are doing well, your content is important. You would know more than send someone to the grocery shelf to look at a product with a crappy label than you should on Amazon with mediocre content. You shouldn’t spend a dime on marketing until you have good content because you are using that marketing to send people to your shelf, your content. Try to get all of those pieces right before you start spending money against growing that business. It doesn’t mean they need to be perfect. That’s a great thing about Amazon, you can always revise and change things real time, but get the basics right so that you can be successful and you’re not fixing your business later, rather than just helping it grow.

Take Betsy up by reaching out to her. She’s amazingly generous with her time. She is 1 of the 2 people in the industry that gives and gives fully. Spending a bit of time tapping into her expertise and knowledge is worth every minute tenfold. I meant what I said at the very beginning that I look to Betsy as my guru. When I have questions and I’m trying to better advice those that I serve around Amazon and eCommerce, the first person I go to is Betsy. She usually takes my call. Not always anymore, sometimes she’ll hang up on me. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I’m glad you were able to be here. For those of you who are part of our program, either the Tardigrade or eTardigrade, Betsy is one the advisors in our community. You can always find her there. I’ll make sure you’ll get her contact information. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Take care.

Thank you. Bye.

Important Links

• Betsy McGinn

• The Amazon Roadmap: How Innovative Brands are Reinventing the Path to Market

• Saj Khan – Previous episode

• Nugget Markets

• eTardigrade Program

About Betsy McGinn

As Seventh Generation’s first eCommerce channel director, Betsy pioneered the company’s innovative eComm strategy, creating a thriving, multi-million dollar partnership with Amazon.

Since founding McGinn eComm in 2014, Betsy has worked with hundreds of clients from the natural products industry to successfully launch, optimize, and recalibrate their brands online. From product development and profitability analysis to alignment of their multi-functional teams, McGinn eComm guides clients through every step of this complex channel, helping to ensure a profitable eCommerce business.

The author of “eCommerce…The New Frontier” (Natural Products Field Manual, by Bob Burke), Betsy is a regular speaker at workshops and conferences, including Natural Products Expo East and West, Specialty Food Association events, BevNet and Project Nosh, The Hirshberg Entrepreneurship Institute series, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and TIQ Australia.

Betsy holds a B.A. in journalism from Duquesne University, and an M.B.A in marketing from Temple University.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! tigbrands.com/tig-talks/