Selling on Amazon: Beyond the Basics With Will Haire

Will Haire is the Co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, a full-service Amazon and Walmart marketing agency. He has managed over half a billion dollars worth of sales on e-commerce marketplaces. Will specializes in helping brands dominate their categories.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:43] How Will Haire transitioned from an electrical engineer to an agency owner
[5:27] Will talks about helping a brand launch a product in a new category
[8:24] The dangers of disregarding Amazon’s Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) Policies
[15:02] What are the differences between Seller and Vendor Central?
[18:30] How to optimize product listings
[24:01] What not to include on your product listings
[28:16] Strategies for breaking stagnant sales on Amazon
[32:01] Amazon fees and pricing considerations
[43:13] Tackling sales stagnation through leadership
[47:10] Will demystifies Amazon’s barcodes
[52:56] How to structure your Amazon Ads budget
[1:00:23] Will’s military-focused upbringing — and how he manages stress during Prime Day

In this episode…

Many sellers understand the competitive and cutthroat nature of Amazon’s marketplace but may miss the more technical aspects like fees and pricing policies, making profitability and sales growth a recurring challenge. What tactics can you implement to maintain steady growth on the platform?

With deep insight into Amazon’s e-commerce marketplace, Will Haire has witnessed brands triumph and fail based on their knowledge of the platform’s nuances. For instance, if you don’t develop and enforce a firm Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) Policy, your brand may become vulnerable to unauthorized resellers, which decline sales significantly. To avoid sales decline or stagnation, Will proposes optimizing your product listings with quality photos, catchy titles, and compelling copy that includes key features, a description, and a brand story. You should also diversify your ad spend both on and off the platform to drive traffic to your listing and familiarize yourself with Amazon’s fees to structure your budget accordingly.

In this week’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Will Haire, the Co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, about optimizing sales on Amazon. Will explains Amazon’s fee structures and pricing requirements, the importance of building an audience, and the key differences between Vendor and Seller Central.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

"It just goes to show you, if you take that risk, there is something better out there."
"If you lower your price, more people are going to buy, but it isn’t enough to offset the different price points."
"Be proactive. Take chances. You don’t get any reward if you’re not taking any risk."
"True leaders, they stay cool. Nothing good ever came from you getting angry or worrying too much."
"I left a very comfortable lifestyle to pursue a more fulfilling lifestyle, and a lot of it is just taking risks."

Action Steps:

Optimize your main image and title: Invest in creating a compelling main image and concise title for your product listings to significantly impact click-through rates by attracting potential customers.
Implement a balanced advertising budget: Allocate approximately 80% of your advertising budget to PPC campaigns, 15% to programmatic advertising like DSP, and 5% to streaming TV.
Utilize Amazon's FNSKU for product updates: For brands launching and updating products on Amazon, use Amazon’s FNSKU instead of a generic UPC to maintain listing continuity.
Integrate off-Amazon advertising tactics: Consider using affiliate marketing and influencer partnerships to drive traffic from outside Amazon to your product listings.
Regularly assess and adjust pricing: Be mindful of Amazon's fair pricing policies and consider using tools to automate dynamic pricing adjustments.

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00

Music. Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey

William Harris 0:15

everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the up arrow podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Will Haire. Will is the co-founder of BellaVix, a full service marketplace marketing agency dedicated to direct to consumer retail brands aiming to aggressively grow sales on the world's largest marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. He's managed over half a billion dollars worth of sales on marketplaces, and I am excited to have him here to talk you through some of the outstanding things that he's doing. Will welcome to the show.

Will Haire 0:52

Will, thanks for having me. I think we're getting a lot of Wills today, but great introduction, and I'm excited to be here.

William Harris 0:57

So, yeah, okay, we were talking about this earlier. I like to play around with words a little bit. And there was a friend of it was friend of my brothers. His name was Andrew, but Drew is what he so he wrote a sentence where he said, Drew, Drew, Drew. Like, that's good. I wonder if I could do even more than that. So I wrote will, will, will, will, will, the will. And I'm not gonna explain it right now to anybody, if you want to ask me the comments, and I'll explain what it means, but it actually makes sense. It is a complete sentence, and it works. There you go. I think it's like seven wills in a row or something with a bug in between.

Will Haire 1:29

There's no such thing as too many wills. Take it from the two Wills on here.

William Harris 1:35

There you go. I do want to give a shout out and a thank you to Queen Lynn. I believe she's your podcast booking agent. She's the one who reached out and got us in touch, and I'm glad she did, because this is a topic we haven't really covered very much before. We're gonna be talking about going beyond the basics of Amazon. So queen, thank you very much for making this introduction. Thanks, Queen. I do wanna give our announcement to our sponsorship here. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website@elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com That's it onto the good stuff. Again, talking about going beyond the basics of Amazon. Before I do too deep into that, I want to kind of set the stage of who it is that you're talking to here. So from what I understand Will, you didn't have necessarily the normal path into starting an Amazon agency. You are a registered electrician engineer. Tell me a little bit about that in your transition to say, like, Hey, I'm gonna go from that into Amazon. Yeah,

Will Haire 2:43

yeah, great. We go throwback. So, yeah, I'm a licensed electrician and marine mechanics. I've done that. I've worked in the power industry for most of my 20s, to be honest with you, and I was able to step into that due to my military background, so I been doing electricity for a while, and still comes in handy, because my wife finds tons of house projects for me to do, so most of our lights are are custom and put in, and it's great. But due to my through the military, they have the military apprenticeship program, the MAP program, and I was able to log 8000 hours and leave the Navy with a license, which helped me land a job in the power industry. And I was able to do that. As I went and did the power industry, I worked full time and went to school full time, and when I graduated Quinnipiac University with an entrepreneurship degree, I worked at the power plant for maybe another 30 days before I quit a comfortable six figure job to go make minimum wage at a startup marketing agency, and I haven't regretted. It's been a hell of a journey. And I, you know, I'm passionate about digital marketing. I've always been really interested in business, and I'm always I'm interested in service. So it was a nice blend of being able to serve sellers, and then early on, it was service providers being able to help them grow their sales, which was really fulfilling. And on top of that, I got to learn, I got to learn a ton of stuff about marketing and SEO and so on and so forth. And that led me eventually, because I started doing e-commerce, and then I got into Amazon. I was the Amazon guy, and then did that for a while, bounced for a few agencies, and then I ended up starting my own. So it's been a hell of a journey, and I have no regrets. It's been been a lot of fun. Just goes to show, if you take that risk, there is something better out there. And I remember telling my my family, and my brother was like, you know, are you crazy? You know, what are you thinking? You're not, you're not 19. And that took me back, but look on, it was best decision ever,

William Harris 4:55

yeah, and I think that's one of the things that I love. I've I very rarely talk to a lot of. Entrepreneurs who set out on their entrepreneurial journey doing exactly what they planned they were going to do. And it was just like this smooth transition. It's usually coming out of completely, wildly different fields. And then there's something that they see, a need, a problem to be solved, and that's what ends up creating this. And you've had some good success with this. There was one you were telling me about of, I think, what was it? Q4 for instant brands, what was going on here? Like that you were able to do very well with.

Will Haire 5:27

Yeah, we, we crushed it. That was a fun account. Like, we had a war room, and, like, every two hours we were meeting with, like, all the heads of the company, and we're talking about advertising. So, like, it was awesome. And I spent an ungodly amount of money. I can't remember off the top of my head anymore, but specifically we launched a new product line. It was their air purifier line. It was like a little after covid, and they were trying to transition out of the kitchen space a little bit by offering products in these other categories. And one of the categories that we were focusing on as an agency was the air purifier. And ended up being a really good event for us. So we, you know, the product hit the market maybe like a month before prime prime day, summer Prime Day, and we were able to get get momentum. We got some reviews. They emailed their audience and like, Hey, check this out. And like any of these other like, really big brands, like, they have brand ambassadors. Like, if they're like, Hey, we came up with new product, buy it. There's a slew of customers that are like, I'm gonna buy it. Everything in my house is instant pot. And so the listings, you know, when I started advertising them and actually started pushing them for the holiday, they had a couple 100 reviews that were all relatively positive, and we had some great imagery. That's what's great about working with enterprise brands. Like the assets I had access to, I could tell them pretty much anything like, you know, can you put a clown in the background? I think it'll sell better, and they'll be like, clown it up and we'll go get the test it out. So it was, it was a great experience. And then we moved, I think, about $30 million in that that the two two day, Prime Day event. And it was using full funnel advertising tactics, so everything from Pay Per Click to streaming TV and everything in between. So it was a really fun project. And yeah, we got to spend a lot of money, which is always fun for advertising.

William Harris 7:30

Yeah, man, I love that. I speaking of Prime Day real quick to what is today, October 10. We're recording this on October 10. Aired a little bit later, but I'm actually surprised to see that you're still standing because we just got over, you know, a couple of Prime Day on Amazon there, so that was still going on.

Will Haire 7:50

Big deal today or Prime Day 2.0 and it's my team right now, so I'm lucky I get a break. I get to talk to you Will, and then go back into the trenches. Nice making sure we're moving products and clients are happy.

William Harris 8:03

I want to get into the tactics, but before I do, I want to also talk about like, what's a what's a cautious case? Maybe somebody that didn't follow what they were supposed to do, didn't listen to the advice that you're about to give us here today. In it, in it backfired on them. Do you have any examples of and you might not be able to name the company, and that's fine, if you can, awesome, but if you can't totally get that, yeah,

Will Haire 8:24

yeah, only because it's somewhat negative, I'm gonna leave the company out. But it was a beauty brand, a relatively large beauty brand. They're in brick and mortar retail, and what happened was, is that this brand was part of a private equity company, and they they were buying natural skin care lines, and they took on this, this brand that they purchased, and they were everything before we got it was under control. So whoever owned it before, like they follow best practices and things are going well. But in this particular case, this brand, this private equity company, like, they were really good at getting products in brick and mortar stores and, you know, moving them national. So, like, they're gonna help you go from, you know, 10 million, they're gonna get you to, you know, 2030 like they're gonna levy you up and a lot of that's like getting you online and into brick and mortar. One of the caveats about being in brick and mortar is like you got to control your map pricing, and you got to understand who is buying your product and if it leaks, you got to be able to catch it and like your MAP policy Minimum Advertised Price is only as strong as your ability to enforce map pricing. So in this case, when we got to their Amazon account, you know, we were, you know, we're doing like, $5 million a year, so maybe a quarter million dollars a month, like, we're moving some product. Things are going well. And, long story short, they didn't have any of these matte pieces in place. So they're just like, hey, these guys aren't taking advantage of wholesale. Let's just. Let's just sell it up. And they listed the product on a bunch of websites, and it's a little outside of what I do. But long story short, people started buying it, and then they started just dropping it into Amazon, even though there was like, caveats of like, don't sell them on Amazon. And so as a result, we started losing Buy Box. And because we started losing Buy Box, our ads stopped. And what our ad stopped like, Amazon's a pay to play platform, so if you're not investing on the platform, you're not going to see very many sales. And it got to the point where they had probably 15 to 20 resellers on every single listing. And then it introduced counterfeit products, because now some of these less honest sellers, know, like, hey, I can, I can knock off that packaging and fill it with garbage and and send it out. And it's they Amazon commingles the inventory. So, like, there's no way for us to figure out, like, who, where did this come from? Is it legit? You know, people could get sick, you know, it could be really dangerous. And so as a result, we saw a decline in sales. We saw a lot more resellers on the listing, and what hurt us is like, they didn't want to change it, because when the wholesale started buying in, they started making a lot more money. And they're like, yeah, it's not it's not worth it. And so eventually we ended up parting ways, because it just wasn't a good account for us, and we were really limited on the tactics that we could actually implement. But a questionnaire retail is like, if you're going to be selling wholesale, if you're going to be selling inside retail, make sure that you have MAP policy and you have some type of enforcement. I know after we left, they hired a third party company. I don't remember the name of it, but they specialize in putting good MAP policies in place, enforcing the MAP policies and also figuring out who's selling what. Because what we found in their case, it's like they would sell to a wholesaler, and then that wholesaler would sell to another wholesaler, and then, like, you could see it kind of got, got really grand to, like, where did this inventory come from? And we made recommendation to, like, Amazon transparency, like they have programs you can implement, but they didn't want to pay the fees associated with it. So, so it is what it is. Don't hit you don't hit home runs every time. But it was a good learning spirit for us in the team. And then seeing like the ramifications of improper MAP policy and what it does when you lose. But you know, we took a five or $6 million brand, and you know, when we left, it was probably about half the size, because only one or two products actually were winning the buy box, and they were not the top sellers. So that is what it is.

William Harris 12:41

Yeah, I think I like hearing stories like that, because it just helps to remind you, as the advertiser, as the business, that there's a lot of other pieces at play here. And it's very easy to sometimes point the finger, you know, maybe at the team that's managing ads, and say, hey, look what's going on. Like, we need to, you know, improve the performance. And like, I mean, there's, there's things that have to happen within the business that need to take place here too. Like, I can't fix your MAP policy. I need you to fix this. I need you to enforce your MAP policy. I need you to do these things too. There has to be this ability for, I like, the the War Room, like you said, for brands and vendors, you know, and contractors, to be able to, like, get all in the same page and say, like, here's what has to happen for us collectively to be successful, yeah.

Will Haire 13:22

Um, you hit it. Hit it too. I

William Harris 13:24

had to, like, stick into the tactics,

Will Haire 13:27

yeah, oh, just to chime in to kind of add to that. I mean, you're absolutely right. So the issue, and it's so much upstream from what you do, like, we only deal with the problems on our end. So by the time it gets to us, like, we're dealing with poor Mac policy that happens at distribution. And so like, to your point, without a war room, without good communication, it was like, you know, we can't help you unless you help us. Yeah. So

William Harris 13:52

as we dig into the tactics here, and like, some of this going beyond the basics, I want to call out that I have a background in Amazon. It's been a few years, though. So I might ask a question that seems like this, oh, that's a little bit dated, and that's fair. Feel free to call me out on it. But I was, I was with sell bright, so we did a lot on Amazon, we did a lot with eBay. We did a lot with the marketplaces. We were inventory management right basically across the different platforms. And before that, I actually was at an e-commerce Store, and we had several Amazon channels and several eBay stores. And so there's a lot that I have in my background that I'm going to be pulling out some stuff here from. We don't manage Amazon at Elumynt. We manage a lot of the other channels, especially on the DTC side of things. But one of the things that I hear come up from time to time that, let's just say, confuses brands that are maybe smaller, they're 5 million, ten million brands and and they're maybe making some of these changes. Is the what is it? Seller Central versus vendor Central? You know, which is best for them. How could you explain the differences? And where does it start to make sense? Is to be one or the other.

Will Haire 15:02

So 1p vendor Central and 3p Seller Central. So real quick, just to like summarize it, for anybody who's not familiar, on vendor Central, Amazon is going to own the entire customer experience. They're going to do purchase orders, they're going to buy product, and they're going to sell it on your behalf. You could still advertise. You could optimize the listings for SEO, but they're gonna control the, you know, the sale, the return, the client, customer service portion, like they're managing a lot of it. And this is really great for small teams where you have good margins. But the drawback is, like they have a policy, you can't realize actual profit, the crap policy, and that's something that kills a lot of brands. It's difficult to raise your pricing. You actually have to build the case to say, hey, all my expenses went up and this and that, and that's why I can't continue to sell you at this wholesale price, because we've worked with brands that like, 10 years on Amazon vendor, and they can't raise the prices, and they're like, why? And then we gotta go through the whole process, and even then, it's still a negotiation, whereas Seller Central, it's a 3p so you list the product, you fulfill the product, you can use Amazon FBA, you handle customer returns, you control pricing like you own that entire experience. And that's the advantage. And what I will say is that Amazon is pushing out a lot of One Piece vendors. It's an invite only program. So if you're not in it, and you haven't been invited, you're gonna be a 3p Welcome to Seller Central. Most sellers are on Seller Central, sure, and I forgot, but like, maybe the last two weeks, but they, we got, that's right, we got emails to a bunch of vendor accounts that were on the smaller size, let's just say, like, under $2 million a year. And Amazon was pretty much like, yeah, we're not gonna buy your stuff anymore. We're gonna sell through the inventory we have. I'm paraphrasing, of course, they write things a lot better than I talk, sure. And they, they were pretty much like we're not going to renew, create a 3p account, and you guys, you'll be good to go. So I do think that the 1p methodology, or whatever it's going to be more for larger brands, like, think your Nikes or L'Oreal. I think that they're going to continue to use, like a Vendor Central, whereas some of the smaller businesses, $2 million is pretty good. No, it's not, it's not nothing. I don't think that they're they're gonna start to get pushed out, which is okay, in my humble opinion, vendor Central is a pain. It has some advantages. You're gonna win Buy Box most, most often than not. Technically, there's no search engine advantage, but, like, we've run tests, like, there definitely is, like, I have, I have data from clients we work with that's like a vendor account. It just does a little better, but they got the antitrust thing, so who knows how long that'll last, but Seller Central just gives you a lot more control. And most brands at this point are on Seller Central. So that's like the biggest difference, and we can go to some of the caveats, but there's, there's a lot to consider.

William Harris 18:05

I think that's good, and I think that covers the gist. So that way most people who are listening should be able to tell if they want to go deeper on that, I think they could. I would say the majority of the people who are listening on my side of things are probably going to want to say, let's dig deeper into, for instance, product listing optimization. Nice, um, what? What are some of the examples that you have of things that are absolute necessities on product listing optimization? Beautiful,

Will Haire 18:30

to kick it off, images, and, more specifically, the main image. So, like a lot of times, if we're running split test, we'll test the image before we test anything else, because the image gets people to your product detail page, and then once they're on the Detail page, name of the games conversions. So, like, a mistake I find a lot of sellers make is like, they get very keyword focused, and they're maybe not as focused on, like the visual assets, and they're like, let me just throw a bunch of crap in the title. Let me load up the bullets with stuff that's not necessary, and let me just, like, try to rank for everything, and what happens is that you don't really rank well for anything, and therefore you're like, you just, you don't move the needle. So, like, when I look at listing optimization, I put into two buckets. First, it's like, How well am I getting traffic to my page? And that's going to be my main image, and that's going to be my title. And, you know, reviews play into that stuff too, but you can't control that as much as you can your title and your hero image. And we could test that using manager experiments, and you could split test variations. I've seen something as silly as like, a product is facing, you know, left, and then they notice that everyone on the search page is facing left, so they make theirs face right, and it's enough to get extra clicks and drive sales. So it's like, it doesn't have to be like, and Amazon has guidelines into like, what a good hero image should be, white background, nothing too crazy. And the title should only have like, two root key. Words at most that you want to go after and then focus on like, the benefits of like, the unique like, what? What's different about this product? Then, once they're on the product detail page, it's all about conversion rates. So like, what I find a lot of people do with their bullets is like, they they're stuffing keywords when they should be selling. At this point, it's like, Sure, what's the unique selling proposition? What? What do you guys do differently? What are some of the features associated with this? And then tie it all together with a plus content, which is the visual content that shows up where the description should be slightly lower on the page, and you're able to showcase the brand story. You could cross sell other products. You could talk about your brand. You could talk about how the product's made. You could talk about the ingredients, you know, depending on the category, the world's your oyster. And you could split test each of those features to figure out what what's going to drive my conversion rate. Normally, bullets have the biggest impact, followed by a plus content. And I don't Amazon has just gave us the ability to do multi variant testing. I'm not a big fan of multi variant testing, because it's hard to know what went well and what didn't. So I old fashioned. We do split testing. And for those of your listeners who are like, you know, I got good sales. I don't want to test on the live site. We have a partnership with PickFu, and they have the ability for us to showcase images and have, you know, like we're looking for an audience of this, this and this, pet owners under the age of 30 or whatever. And they'll get a group of them together to do, to analyze our images and do what we, you know, help us with split testing prior to actually putting it on the site.

William Harris 21:39

And I think that's good. I want to call out one of my issues with a lot of AB testing. And I'm, I'm with you on multivariate testing. I think that it ends up usually creating a lot more noise than a lot of people are capable of being able to interpret from the data's perspective, right? And so they end up making the wrong choices based on that. But let's say PickFu. I'm, I'm not against it. What I see happen is, let's imagine that one, one of the options ends up option. He ends up doing better on PickFu. That's still not the same thing as the person who actually had to take out the money and hand it over. Yeah. So now let's say that you go ahead and take it, you know, to the person who is actually going to hand over the money. That's still not necessarily the person who is going to be the long term customer. And so what I see a lot of people get short sighted with AB testing in general, is they'll look for what has the lowest cost to acquire a customer, or something along those lines, without thinking about the LTV of the customers that they're capturing. And so yeah, the PickFu might say that option A people prefer better when you put it to money, it still might show that people are buying a more than B, but when you look at the ones that end up, let's say, over the course of 12 months, continue to come back. It was actually option B drove the higher value customer. So I do want to call out that when I like to look at AB testing, I think that it's good go as top of funnel as you can. If you don't have to spend the money on the real page, do the PickFu fine, then you really need to still probably run the test to validate unless it was so wildly different, run the test to validate it at the that you know first purchase. But then, if you can, and if it's material enough for you, if you find that there are certain customers who are definitely better customers, there's differences in your cohorts, find a way to run that test for a long enough cycle to where you can see which one ends up driving the right long term customers.

Will Haire 23:28

That's a really solid point. Well, absolutely at the end of the day too. PickFu is great. It's a good tool, and we do use it, but I mean actual customers are on Amazon, so it doesn't hurt to definitely test it out, and what you said about lifetime value, like, yes, that the short term and long term customers are going to be different, and being able to test that has its advantages. What

William Harris 23:51

are the things that people are doing with their product listings that you would say, please stop doing this. You are ruining your performance. Yeah,

Will Haire 24:01

a couple low hanging fruit that I bring up emojis in the bullets. It's against Amazon's Terms of Service, and they will wait right before a holiday to shut your listings down. But really, it's like

William Harris 24:14

they will. It's a little much,

Will Haire 24:16

you know? What's with all the emojis? Just use a bullet. We like to do the first, like, you know, first couple words in all capitalization. So, like, for skim readers, they could just like, oh, okay, it's organic. It's made in the USA. It has a guarantee, like, those would be the capitalized words. And then, you know, we break the bullets out a little, a little longer, and it's within Amazon Terms of Service, so they're not gonna be closing us down anytime soon. The other thing is, with main images, so, like, there's a whole science behind, like, manipulating images, like, you know, you may order a bottle of Windex, and it's like, you know, it'll say when you are buying it on the the on Amazon, like 30% And more, and it's got, like, a sticker that looks like it's a part of the bottle, and when you get the bottle, there's no sticker on there. So that's an example, like smart photoshopping, because you're able to show value. Amazon's not really going to know if it's like in the product or not. For supplements, like, if it's chocolate or vanilla, you'll see, like, a candy bar. It's always attached to the container. I'm showing you pictures, as if your audience will be able to see this. Making pictures, I'm making a box with my hand, as if I'm imitating a small supplement bottle with a small piece of chocolate. And that's all well and dandy, and we know that it works. But what gets people in trouble is when they start putting like emblems away from the product. So the main hero image should be only what comes in the package. So, like, if I get this, you know, is it just a container, nothing fancy, you know, that's what's supposed to be on there. And what we've seen like, we saw like a beauty brand that we work with, they put an emblem as seen in vogue, but it was like in the top corner, and completely away from the products. And as a result, you know, we had it for like, an entire year, and then right before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, as Amazon's algorithm, caught it, and they're like, Hey, you're not supposed to have emblems. It doesn't come in the packaging. And they shut down our listings. And of course, we couldn't get them back live, because it was the holiday, and their customer service is like, we can't do anything till Tuesday. It is what it is. So because we had that emblem on, and while it may have helped with sales throughout the year, we missed out on one of the biggest sales days because that emblem was on there, we violated Amazon's Terms of Service. And like said, of course, they wait to let and like that was not a good customer experience, or client was obviously upset for the missed opportunity in sales, and we had it like Lightning Deals and stuff. So it ended up being a big, a big mess. But what we learned is, like, and a lot of brands will do this, is like, make sure you understand the terms of service, yeah, like, get cute with it. You want your listing to stand out, but you got to understand the ramifications if you're getting too cute, or you're doing something against Terms of Service, what it might mean for you and your business. So, you know, the bullets drive me crazy. And then main images that are not on a white background, or they're they got stuff all over the place that doesn't belong. Amazon usually catches them pretty quick, but sometimes they don't, you'd be surprised,

William Harris 27:21

yeah, and it sucks when things like that happen. The thing that I'll call out that I appreciate, because you were very honest about that, I like that, is that you are doing things though, and you know, you have to find the right client to appreciate that. But there are clients who want to push the envelope. They're like, how far can we push this to still be where we need to be. And if, if you don't break a few things, then you just weren't moving fast enough. And we actually talked about that on our website, that there are some times when, if nothing's broken, you you likely haven't pushed the envelope. You're You're too vanilla. That's not going to cut through the noise either. And you have to find that, that threshold where you're just right where you need to be. So along those lines, what's that thing now, what's the thing that you would say is, like, this, is that juicy tidbit that if you've got the opportunity to do this or implement this, or do this, this is, this is likely going to make a noticeable difference in what you're doing right now?

Will Haire 28:16

Hmm, that's a really great question. So I'm going to tie it to advertising, mainly because of my background, but it makes the most sense. So a lot of sellers, especially a lot of sellers who hit, like, some type of sales stagnation, and generally, I see this like, if you're doing about 80 to 100k a month, even sometimes 60k give or take, you'll eventually hit a path where you're like, we can't grow. And a lot of times what we find when we start working with those brands is that they're just focusing on the bottom of the funnel. They're not doing anything to build their audience. They're not doing anything outside of the box. They're just doing pay per click. They're playing it safe, and they're just focusing. But what's happening is like competitors are noticing, like, hey, this widget sounds really good. I can make this widget, so I'll make my own and then they throw their widget up, your cost per click start going up, your conversion rate starts to go down, and more brands enter the market. And you know that it's just the nature of the beast. What we found is that brands who are building audiences. We do this through DSP, we do affiliate marketing, and we'll do streaming TV. Will were able to break sales stagnation. Those advertising tactics are CPM models, and they generally aren't going to have great ROAs, but there's like a Kantar experiment that Amazon ran, and it helped them build the Better Together philosophy, which is how pay per click and DSP work together to grow brands. And there's data in there, like, and it's true, like, a brand that invested like, they're doing pay per click, and they're doing sponsor brand video, and they're doing DSP, is gonna see a 54% year over year growth. And I remember the numbers for sure. So if anybody looks up the report, I'm wrong. I'm sorry, but I think it was about 54% Percent versus somebody who just does like sponsored products and sponsored brands like 20% and then for people who don't do anything, it's like, zero or whatever it is. And so like it's true, and like brands have come to us and they're like, we can't get past this threshold, and just by we do the bottom up approach too. So I'm not talking like we're doing commercials and we're targeting everybody. It's like, No, we're sure we're conquesting. We're going after competitors. We're going after people who viewed your product, a competitor's product, but didn't make a purchase. And then we're working our way up the funnel, contextual targeting and all that fun stuff. And while it takes a little longer, it does drive growth, and we're able to get through sales stagnation periods to getting brands to 567, ten million a year in revenue, and a lot of it's because they were playing it safe to your point. They were going a little vanilla. We we added some flavor into that.

William Harris 30:51

And that's so true in the DTC side of things outside of the Amazon what we see as well is, you know, brands that are investing in that brand and awareness. And when I say brand, I don't mean necessarily your brand search terms, and I don't mean necessarily like your highly polished branded video I just mean like you're investing in creating this, this persona that people love and want to be a part of the brands that are doing that see significantly better return over the longer period of time. They see higher LTVs as a result, people are coming back more. You know, there's a lot more that you could are willing to spend. More people don't need the coupon code to spend. You know, there's all these things that start adding up over time for the brand that allows this snowball to really kind of take effect. Nailed it. I want to talk a little bit about Amazon fees. There was something that you were saying, what brands need to know about pricing and profitability that I think was good. I want to let you start there, because I got some things. I don't want to jump in here with what Chad Rubin has said, which Chad was on the show here as well, CEO of Profasee, for those who aren't familiar with it, but take me through what brands need to understand from a profitability standpoint. Yeah,

Will Haire 32:01

I like to use rough numbers, and we can get into details, but you need to understand that, give or take, Amazon's taken 35% of whatever the sales price is. And I'm always surprised to find out how many brands don't actually know their final costs going to get everything over to Amazon. So you got to think it's like product manufactured, cost of goods sold. Sure, the freight fees, getting it over to fulfillment centers, there's a cost associated with that once you're in and like, you could do fulfilled by merchant, and you could save yourself 15 to 20% because you won't pay the pick and pack fees. But I understand, like, there is probably half the people on Amazon. That's like, shipping is most important. So if you're shipping it out of your warehouse and it's gonna take five to seven days, you're just gonna be losing out on that opportunity. But there's the pick and pack fee, there's a referral fee, there's storage fees, and the storage fees, they changed, I believe as of this year, might have been last year, but I'm pretty sure it's this year where every 90 days rolling, the fees start increasing. So like, I think in 2020 or 2021 Amazon was pretty much in the warehousing business. And lots of companies would start their business on Amazon, and they would buy 5000 units, and they just send it in, and a lot of times those units weren't selling. And so Amazon ended up with just like, Yeah, you know, a metropolis of crap that get, like, picture, like, a set, like a seller's garage. I have stuff in my garage I wasn't able to sell. That's like, you know, five years old, and I don't have the heart to throw it out, but they're all up there. And, like, that's what it became. And so as a result, Amazon's, like, the shifting as of about two years ago, Amazon wants to be the world's logistics company. They have the merchant channel fulfillment program. They have the Buy with Prime program. And they're they're now have like, partnership with the Google that if they're using MCF, you can see delivery dates, partnerships with tick tock, with Pinterest, like they are struck. They want to be the and in order for them to be the world's fulfillment center. They got to get all those products out. So that's where we started seeing the implementation of higher storage fees, period placement fees. So if I send one box, one pallet with all my units, to one fulfillment center, they're going to break that up for me. In the past, they would break it up and send it out to like 10 fulfillment centers, no cost to me. Now they're charging me. So like, there is a free way where if you break it up yourself and send it to all these different fulfillment centers, you're going to be spending less than fees, which is great, versus just the one. So like you could see that there's all these fees associated with logistics that are implementing, trying to think, if there's any other fees I'm missing, then you have your advertising fees, whatever you're spending and advertising, it's a pay to play platform, so you should be spending something in order to get eyeballs on your listings. So a lot of these, they just eat at your margins. So if you don't have, you know, if you don't have a high margin product, that's really tough for like. Low priced products. And even Amazon, they have the small and light program that went away, like, if you're qualified, you're just automatically put in it. They have the same version of that. But even then, it's still like, it's really tight margins, it's difficult to advertise, even like cost per clicks. Like, the average cost per click across Amazon is, like 79 cents, and it's still cheaper than, like, meta and Google, which I think are above $1 but 79 cents is pretty generic. Like, there are categories where, you know, you don't see a click for under $5 there's some supplemented beauty categories that are just very expensive to advertise. So those are all, forgive me if I'm going off on a tangent, those are most of the fees that come to mind that sellers should have a good rap on to understand what their profitability is on Amazon. And

William Harris 35:47

I think that's the key when we look at this for brands that we work with, again, we don't manage the Amazon, but we like to have access to Amazon to understand what's going on. So that way, let's say that you've got an extra $10,000 that you want to put in towards ads. How do we help make sure that you're making the best, wisest choice for where that next $10,000 can go? And sometimes that's going to be Amazon, sometimes it's going to be your website. And there's a number of factors that can go into that, but one of the things that you need to understand is, how profitable Are you already per unit of each of every $100 you know that you make on Amazon, or every $100 that you're making on on your DTC site, or every $100 you're making in wholesale, what is, what are those numbers look like by those different channels, then you have the ability to make a more educated decision on where to put that money. Where does it come into from, let's say, a pricing standpoint, if you're looking at figuring out, okay, these fees are eating in you know, maybe I could just bump up my price a little bit. Where's that threshold for being able to make a decision? As far as, okay, I could just increase my price, and now those fees maybe aren't as impactful to my business, and I can actually sustain the business versus, you know, I'm losing money on every sale. That's a really great

Will Haire 36:59

question, and I'll share some stories with you. So with regards to pricing, you have to be careful how you do pricing. So first, Amazon has the fair pricing policy, and essentially, when you agree to list the product on Amazon, you agree to keep it at the lowest price for most major retailers. So Like honestly, you could take your product, you can list it on eBay for half the cost. No big deal. But if you take that same product and you put it on Walmart, they're gonna suppress your listing, or they're gonna take away the buy box. So if I land on your listing, it's, I think the button says, like, see sellers, or see other sellers, or whatever, and then I click onto that to add to cart. But there's extra steps, so most people just bounce. So you have to make sure you're adhering to Amazon's Fair, fair pricing policies. If you're going to raise your prices on Amazon, you're gonna have to raise it on your website and any other third party marketplace. Also, they were always worried about price gouging. So you can't just raise your price $10 like Amazon will just shut your listing down because they think you're you're trying to pull something Sure. This is where, like, Chad Rubin's product comes really in, fits in really well, Profasee, because, like, based on demand, your inventory levels and his technology, you're able to incrementally adjust prices. So, you know, like, here's the low threshold, here's the high threshold, and, like, it'll move it on its own based on what it knows. And that works really well, because we're only talking at most a couple of dollars where, you know, where it might be. And so we managed a supplement brand, you know, the supplement brand not too long ago. And what happens is that we were running it for, you know, like a price was like $30 we were testing pricing elasticity, and so he wanted to reduce his pricing down from 3999 for argument's sake, down to 2999 and we wanted to see, like, if we made this change, would sales volume increase enough that it would offset the $10 hit that we were Taking. And we didn't want to run a coupon. We wanted to see, like, if this was the actual listed price, would this work? And we're like, so we ran it and and it the volume. We saw an uptick in volume because, of course, we lower your price, more people are gonna buy. But it wasn't enough to offset the different price point. And so you run an agency so you might get this will, but our client was a bit impatient, and right when the testing ended, he just took the price and made it $39 again, and he didn't even tell anybody. So like, when my team came in and they were checking stuff, they're like, Hey, why is our top selling product, you know, suspended right now. And we're like, wait, what? And then they go in, and we're like, who raised the $10 like, you can't do that. Who? Who's responsible? And everybody's like, not me. And then we, you know, the client's like, what happened? Sales are down. And we're like, somebody adjusted pricing. And he's like, oh, oh, oops. That was me. And. And we stood together, and then we had to go, you know, lower the price again, and then incrementally work it up where, I think, like, every I remember every seven days, or I don't remember the period, people work for me way smarter, no, but there's like, you can incrementally work it up over a longer period of time. So I think cumulatively, it took us, like, three weeks maybe to work it up to $10 or where three weeks probably too long. Took a couple weeks to work it back up, but then we got it to the full pricing the right way, and we didn't have any more issues. But that's some things to consider around pricing, pricing your items and like, what to do if you're Yeah,

William Harris 40:36

I appreciate that. I appreciate your story there? I've got one that I think is maybe even a little bit more, maybe on those same lines, maybe even a little bit worse. We had a client accidentally delete their entire inventory file from Amazon, eBay, their website on Christmas morning. Oh, so I got a call one time on Christmas morning. We don't know what we did. We need it fixed. And I'm like, first of all, they had young kids. I'm like, Why are you messing around with your stuff? On Christmas morning, nobody's buying your stuff today. Give it a give it a break. Just go spend time with your kids. But I will give these guys credit, wildly smart. They also developed a, what I want to say, like an algorithm for a velocity based algorithm for pricing. And so they had limited inventory of certain things, and they had things that you'd have to move. And a good example that I could think of would be like, let's say that you were a butcher and you're selling, you know, the different cuts from a cow, but you've got one cow, you've only got so many of these different pieces, so much ground beef, so many T bones. You've only got so many of these things, and you want to ideally move the whole thing at the same velocity. Otherwise, you sold through all your T bones, but you've got all this ground beef left, or whatever that might be, right? So they had a really good pricing thing that they set up, which would allow them to try to control it, so that way it's constantly moving that whole unit of a cow, if you would, they didn't sell meat. I'm just using this as an example at the same time. So that way it's like, Hey, if you sold through the T bones really fast on this next cow, it's going to raise the price of T bones to slow down that sale, and it's going to maybe lower the price of ground beef a little bit. So that way you're selling through that a little bit faster. It was a very interesting algorithm. But to your point, you can only do so many of those changes so quickly. But if you do have something that has, you know, variable inventory like this, not a bad idea to see if you can implement something along those lines, too. That's

Will Haire 42:34

pretty crazy, too. I love the butcher analogy, too. It's getting close after this, it's starting to get close to the dinner time. So I welcome more food analogies that come my way.

William Harris 42:48

Absolutely. I wanted to talk to you about like, what are some of the other roadblocks that you see you mentioned? You know, one way to get over stalled growth is you actually have to start investing in the brand a little bit. What are some other things that you see where people just get stuck and they're not able to get past these certain blocks? What are the things that help to unblock them outside of investing in brand, for instance,

Will Haire 43:13

some of it, I think, and I hope this isn't, this isn't taken out of context, but I think especially with owner led businesses, is sometimes they just need to step out of their own way. So that does sound too crazy, and this doesn't apply to all businesses. Obviously, the bigger the business, it's a different type of headache. But what I find, I would say, like, maybe 50% of the brands we manage, maybe a little less they it's, it's somehow owner LED. So like, they do have a team, they have different people, but like, we're talking with the owner of the business, and they're generally, like, under 5 million, from a revenue perspective, at least on Amazon. I don't always know what they do off of Amazon, and what I find is, like, they get really dug into the brand, or they don't want to change things, or they're not as open to hearing different perspectives. So like, they hired us, for example, to be the experts, and like we come in with case studies, and we start changing things and and we're building confidence, but sometimes they're not feeling it the same way. Or like they they they hired us to do it their way, and that ends up causing a lot of issues, because, like we do, but Jewish, for a while, I moved over half a billion dollars in products since we started the company in 2018 like, this isn't our first rodeo. So we kind of, you know, we don't get it right every time. You know, I wish we did, but most of the time, like, there's certain things you could do that, like, are going to get results. And we know what they are. We also know, like, what takes time and what you should start understanding what the long term goals are, and what we find with customers who don't have that confidence in us, or they're they want it done this way because they're following some guy online. And. Um, they tend to make it harder, and they shoot themselves in the foot. And I think the best owners put people who have the capacity and the experience in the right places, and they let their team, they manage results and not the process. And I find that a lot of smaller businesses try to manage the process versus managing the results.

William Harris 45:20

I think that it's received well, you know what you just said? I'd imagine that it is, and to go along with what you're saying, it reminds me very much of an episode of the podcast here with Chris Carey. And he started a company called ma performance, modern automotive performance, and they did very, very well, and he was stuck around the 10 million mark and couldn't break the couldn't break through this threshold. And the thing that helped him to soar and eventually sell the business was implementing traction EOS on our operating system, and it completely opened the door for him. And it was exactly to your point where, let's just say, well intentioned founders, and oftentimes, as a founder, you know you've got the right ideas, you've got the right mindset, and even the way that you want to go about it is not necessarily wrong. You become a bottleneck in implementing something like EOS helps you to be able to enable people, your team, your vendors, your contractors, et cetera, to make the decisions that you want them to make, maybe not even in the same way that you would have done, but in a way that aligns with the goal and the purpose and the vision and where you're trying to go, and that just allows the boat, if you would, to just move so much faster.

Will Haire 46:34

Well said, we're EOS shop too. Oh, I think I might have traction up here somewhere.

William Harris 46:41

I well, I saw you have, you have I was just gonna say, you have it back there.

Will Haire 46:45

I got it right here. Traction. Yeah, I gotta, like, a lot of Mike Michalowicz Profit First. What

William Harris 46:52

else should we know? Like, are there any other weird things? I mean, you and I talking earlier, we talking about some of the differences with the different barcodes. But like, if there's something else on Amazon that you're like, hey, we really need to cover this. Or this really isn't a good topic. We didn't cover Amazon. Well, if we don't talk about this topic, what would that be?

Will Haire 47:10

Actually, advertising? Of course, we may have talked a lot about it, but barcodes is actually something, especially for launch brands. We get a lot of questions on if I could address that real quick, talk about the difference between FNSKU. Let's do the GS one certified barcode, and then we can. We could take that wherever you want. Well, awesome. Let's do it. So if you're so first of all, Amazon recognizes GS one barcode. So if you are listing a product, you're gonna put a UPC on it. Make sure you're buying it directly from GS one. I had this pet brand. The lady was so much fun to work with. She was super nice, but she she took shortcuts, man, a lot. She was like, always cutting corners. And we're like, why she bought her barcodes from eBay, and I'm and she spent as much as she, oh, no, going to GS one. So she's like, giving us these barcodes. We're listing them on new products. And, like, one of the products kept showed up as, like, Looney Tunes, and some of these, like, weird, like, just, you know, an iron and random stuff. Like, where'd you get these? What's going on with these? She told us she got it from eBay, and she was buying, she wasn't buying good codes. She was buying stuff that already existed. It was indexed in Amazon, and once that UPC is assigned to a product on Amazon, it's garbage man, unless you're gonna sell that iron or whatever you're gonna be selling. So I tell all my sellers, it's just register, get a GS, one barcode. You gotta buy them in like bundles. But once you have them, you own them, and nobody can take them away from you. You could sell them with your brand. It makes you more sticky. So that's a big one. So don't buy your barcodes on on eBay or anywhere else. And the second thing, so So twofold is like, if we're working with the brand, and they sell in brick and mortar retail, for example, and they have a UPC, and we're finding, like, I don't know, products leaking onto Amazon, or, like, whatever else you can use, something called an FNSKU, you can use this period so, like, you don't even need to buy a UPC. If you're like, Hey, I'm just, I'm gonna launch a brand and I'm gonna go on Amazon. I'm just gonna sell them on Amazon. Great. When you initially set up the product, you could set up something called the FNSKU, and essentially it's the equivalent of an Amazon UPC, and it has, like, literally the ASA number, like B zero, like, whatever that is, that is gonna be your code. And so what you could do is you can, you know, launch your brand. You can use these UPCS. You still gotta stick around so, like, one way or another, you gotta print it out and get print it out and get it on there. And it's a great workaround to not have to deal with that. And when you're ready for your website, or you get into brick and mortar, you could do it there. But we work with plenty of brands that just use the FNSKU and they sell it on their website and whatever else. And it works good. And it's also great for, like, larger brands. If you don't want to do the Amazon transparency program where they they send you like a unique QR code for all your products so the shopper knows they're not fake. You could just use like an FNSKU and list the product directly on Amazon through that, and then the UPC version can exist. The sellers can list it all they want, but you know, you have the FNSKU version, so it should be good to go. You should be able to sell it without any issues. So that's the big difference. So up, no matter what you need, a UPC, a GTIN or a FNSKU. FNSKU is probably the easiest, because you do it right on Amazon. You can print it out, label all your products, or have your three PL do it and then the right way, and eventually you'll you'll get there is when you grow your brand and you're starting to get more sales, eventually you'll need a GS, one UPC, and the UPC makes you as official as can be. And you know, nothing can you can change out your UPCs or anything like that. So once you have that product, we've also seen, oh man, I can go off fnsk. Use work too with product updates. So, like we were working with a maternity brand, and they sell, they sell baby strollers, and so they have this one baby stroller that sells really well, but they update it every year. And when they update it, because it goes into brick and mortar retail, they get a new UPC code. If I change the UPC code on Amazon, it's a new listing. So like, all the reviews, all that stuff gone, you know, that could go away. You could do some pair of children's stuff, but it needs to make sense, and so we'll work around for this brand. Was like, we're just going to send in all the Amazon products with FNSKU use, and as the updated versions come, we will slightly tweak the information on the listing, but it's all tied to that FNSKU. So now we have an evergreen listing that's continuing to acquire reviews. It continues to get updated, and they let their customers know when it's updated. And so that's like an advantage of FNSKU. So there's lots of things you could do with barcodes that a lot of people don't think about, and there's like, all these weird, random situations that you're like, oh, let's use an FNSKU for that, or, nope, we definitely need a GS one barcode for that. So those that is my experience with it, and hopefully your listeners find it helpful.

William Harris 52:16

That's a brilliant workaround, and I haven't seen that with the FNSKU. I like that. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's chat ads then, because we haven't, you're right. We haven't gone too deep into that. But as you said a couple of times here, Amazon is a pay to play platform. And those who have thought that for a few years, I think everybody's on board with this. Now. I'm always amazed some people who still aren't on board with it, but the whole top page, you know, like above the fold on Amazon. It's, it's ads you're not getting on the above the fold, pretty much for anything anymore, without paying to be there. So what are the what are the things that we need to know that are beyond the basics of advertising on Amazon?

Will Haire 52:56

Beautiful. So first I like to talk about budgets. I think that's the easiest. So if we're working together, for example, and really basically pay per clicks, gonna be the bottom of the funnel. They're searching, I'm showing my ads when people are searching. Relevancy is really important. And, you know, it's, it's intent based. So like, if you're on Amazon and you're buying something under $100 you're at the bottom of the funnel. You want your ads to show up, you're gonna get great ROAs, you know, basically outside of retail readiness and all that stuff. So the first thing when we look at brands that are already selling on Amazon is we try to put 80% of the budget towards pay per click, because it's gonna give us the best ROAs. We're gonna take 15% of the budget and we're gonna put it towards programmatic, and we're going to start with retargeting and conquesting, and then we take 5% of the budget, we put it towards streaming TV, and that's like, our basic structure to get set. Then, depending on how aggressive somebody wants to be, we'll kind of adjust these so, like, if I have, if I'm working with a brand, and they're like, hey, we want to build our audience. We want more people to come to our site. We want to catch more people who are in market. Then I might do, like, a 30% DSP budget. I might not do any streaming TV, and then 70% towards pay per click, or we're 60% and 40 so, like a lot of it depends on what the goals are. If I have a brand that's like, and we get these at the end of day, they're like, We don't care. We make a ton of money on our website. We just need Amazon to be profitable. In that case, it might be 100% of the budget on pay per click, and we might just be playing, you know, might be a lot of branded and a lot of category specific keywords, and then then they're happy. So, like, first, you gotta understand your goals, and then, based on your goals, you gotta understand, like, where's the best place to allocate these budgets that's gonna maximize my return while still accomplishing something, awareness, more traffic, like, whatever those those KPIs are that I'm monitoring.

William Harris 54:57

What about off Amazon? Advertising? Are you guys doing anything, or do you see brands doing a lot where they're, you know, taking stuff from YouTube, Facebook, meta ads, things like that, to send to Amazon?

Will Haire 55:10

Yeah, so we're really limited on that. We're just starting to get into Tiktok, and we've done some like experiments with Google and meta. What I will say, it's more expensive. It's harder to convert a customer, taking them from like Facebook to like, it's hard to take them from one place to another in hopes that they make a purchase. Uh, attributions okay at best, like, it's getting better, but it's like, like with Google or even metal, like, you can't actually audit itself to get better, because it doesn't have that sales data at the end. Like, once you send it to Amazon, sure, according to that it's just gone. But like, we know the halo effect does work, and we're able to monitor it. It's just doing it smartly. So, like, ways we've seen that work really well is just being super granular, and, like, each campaign has a unique identifier, and then a lot of it's kind of manual. And the other thing that we've been pushing, we've been doing a lot of affiliate marketing. Specifically, we're working with a software company called lavanta, and they they hone in on the Amazon audience, and we like it a lot. It's a great way to get reviews legitimately. Like, we don't ask them for reviews. They just happen to leave reviews, which is great, but essentially, you can work with influencers and news outlets, and you could say, like, here's my product, here's the commission. You don't necessarily have to give samples, although samples will get better influencers and they will, they'll sell your product, and it's performance based. Like, they don't get paid until they sell the product. So it's kind of nice. And with some of the articles, like, you know, CNN publishes it, or Mashable, it's like, you know, top top 10 Amazon Prime Day deals, or whatever, you know, getting listed on that makes a difference. And they do advertise those types of things. So we've seen that be pretty effective. It doesn't drive sales strongly. I should say that the affiliate marketing does do sales pretty well. It doesn't do volume very well. So like, especially, like the Creator connections directly through Amazon, and some of the stuff we do on levanta, like, we're able to get the right influencer to buy in, and they're able to drive, you know, three, 4x results, which have been great. But the drawback is like, we can't get the volume. Like, it's not, you know, like Google or Amazon. It's like, I could just pay more and I'll get more. Where we're finding there's limitations in some of these softwares and like, there's a point of diminishing returns where you're just getting outside of your audience that makes sense, and then you're not it's just not worth it. So I'd say that's a challenge with it. So tracking is a challenge and getting the volume on the affiliate side, but the off Amazon stuff is effective. It's just not as effective as obviously, catching people in market on amazon shopping

William Harris 58:10

totally well. And I think the thing that I like about what you're saying is, while it might not have the volume from the affiliate or some of the other things that you do, all of those things, just build up the strength. And I think about this, like, let's just say strength training, for instance. Like, okay, you might get a lot more volume of weight doing a bench press, but you're not training the little nuanced shoulder girdle in the way that it needs to be. So this is falling really flat for anybody that doesn't weight train or anything like that, right? But the idea here is that, like, there's going to be a limiting factor to how, how well your your overall shoulder mobility and strength is going to be if you're not also doing these other smaller exercises that are building up the shoulder girdle in these other ways, to where that can unlock new growth for you in your bench press, or something like that. Same thing probably is true form from a business perspective, where your business while, yeah, the volume is going to be in advertising directly on Amazon. These other things can help feed different pieces, so that way. Now even your Amazon advertising is more effective because they've already seen it in this other article. They saw it from this influencer. Now, when they see your ad on Amazon, you know, maybe they were only going to click at a, you know, 20% rate. Now they're clicking at a 25% rate, like whatever that might have been. There's just, it's making everything else work that much more efficiently for you as well.

Will Haire 59:31

Now that and then Amazon has the last click attribution, so it's your point. They saw an affiliate ad, they even saw a DSP ad, but they go on Amazon, they search it, or they click on an ad and make a purchase. The ad that they clicked on last gets all the credit. So it's one of the drawbacks,

William Harris 59:49

right? I'm against last click in general. So that's one of those things that we still need Amazon to fix. A little bit more for us, I want to transition into the who is Will Haire, I always like getting into the personal side of the people that I have as guests on the podcast, because I think that I'm a human being, and we could talk about business all we want, but there's still like completely different sides to who we are. And I just think it's fun. You come from a military family. How has that shaped you to be the person that you are? Yeah?

Will Haire 1:00:23

Great question. Yeah, I've been pretty blessed. My father, my grandfather, all the way back, my brothers, three out of my four brothers, two, navy, one Air Force. We judged the Air Force guy a lot, but it's been really good, and it shaped in a ton of ways like the military, you know, right out of two weeks out of high school, I was in boot camp and, you know, discipline, I got a global perspective. You know, part of my time in the military we we were on a flagship, so we were on the admiral ship, and our purpose was to go around to less fortunate companies and show goodwill. We painted schools, we handed out notebooks, like, we did a lot of humanitarian work. And it was during the Bush era, the Gulf Wars, to like we were getting a lot of flak, like, all over Europe and stuff like war money for oil, like it was a big thing, and America was not looking too good in that situation. So a lot of what our job was was to be the good guys and show we do really great things. And we that took me all over Africa and parts of the Mediterranean, and it was a good experience. And the military has taught me that it's taught, like a to be really grateful. Like, being poor in America is a lot different than being poor in like Sierra Leone, Africa. You know what I mean? Like, it's it's crazy, the drastic differences in standard of living. And I'm grateful to have those experiences to help me understand, like, what other people go through and some of the challenges that they experience, and that's out of their control. Like, you don't control where you're born and you know, where you feel on fit in and in society. So so the military has been really good for me from that perspective, discipline, even now, I still wake up super early. I I do a workout routine. I I'm a big supporter of anything military oriented. So it's been been life changing. I

William Harris 1:02:30

that mentality, I think is huge, and I appreciate you. Thank you for your service and your whole family. That's a really big thing. You know, we were talking about, how do you stay level headed through the stress Prime Day? Like, there's all kinds of things, right? Or somebody cranking up the price $10 and now you've lost the buy box, but like, there's all these ways you have to, you have to stay level headed through all of this stuff. And you talked about, it's like, yeah, you know, working out, or things like that. Like, what are the other things that you're that you do, you try to manage the chaos.

Will Haire 1:03:04

Yeah, great question. Being an agency owner, there lots of chaos going on. It's never a dull moment. But I'm big into stoicism and meditation. I do a lot of reading, and if you ever read, what Seven Habits of Highly Effective People like, I tell this to people all the time, you have this fear of influence. It's like, if I can't influence it, I'm not going to worry about it. And so a lot of times, like, things will happen, and it's not it's like, you know, like Mark Twain says that my worst days never actually happened, because, like, you just worry yourself, and you cause yourself a lot of stress. And so I've learned just to kind of take it as it comes. Also, like The Obstacle Is the Way. Like, when something really tragic happens, or we have to do something really difficult, I'm actually grateful for it, not necessarily as we're going through it, but after the fact, because, like, it always leads to more growth. And what I found is like, if you're it's like true leaders, like they stay cool, like, if you look at some of the best coaches, like they don't get overly emotional and, like, I learned this later in life, like you never get um, nothing ever good came from you getting angry or you worrying too much. You're just, like, taking years off your life where you're not making yourself look good. So I just try to to be very mindful of that as we're going through it. And it takes work, like I'm not perfect at it. I don't know who is, you know, that's the human condition, right? But it does help me level things out quicker, because I practice it and I get better at it, because things can go zero to 90 pretty quick, and not panicking and trying to be a good leader definitely helps with starting with like, a cool and level headed mindset. Totally

William Harris 1:04:55

you reminded me, I really like the book Obstacle Is the Way as well, and just the idea. Of being thankful for those things, those challenges that are in your life. I think it's Alex or Mozi who said something along these lines that I really appreciated, which is, you want your kids to be patient, but you don't want them to go through things that make them patient. You want your kids to be strong, but you don't want them to go through things that make them strong. And when you flip that for yourself too, it's like you want to have those characteristics, you might have to go through the things that give you those characteristics. Like, that's part of the deal. And nobody's ever I'm gonna sound like such a gym, bro, and I'm not. I do like to work out, but I'm, I'm not like a gym, bro, but, but going back to that same thing, if you all of a sudden have, you know, weight on your shoulders that you're squatting, you're not like, oh, this weight. Like, I can't believe this weight is here. You put the weight there on purpose. You gave yourself that obstacle because of the strength that you're going to get a result as a result of that. And so similarly, I try to look at that with every situation that comes up that it's like, if it's an easy situation, great. Thank you for that. If it's a difficult situation, great. Thank you for that, because I'm got now getting that opportunity to develop the character that is able to, you know, tackle those types of situations. Now, beautifully

Will Haire 1:06:09

said, well, beautifully said, I whatever you just said, copy that for my last part.

William Harris 1:06:17

Yeah, uh, okay, um, what's a what's a quote that you live by? Is there a quote that you feel like, this is something you maybe have in your office, or, you know, you've got it on your phone, or whatever you're like, I really like to live by this quote. Man, I

Will Haire 1:06:32

my team could probably repeat it to you, because I say it all the time, easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It might be an entrepreneurial mindset too, but like, I am not about asking for permission, unless it's like, something crazy. So it's all about and what it teaches you, too is like, be proactive, take chances. Like, you don't get any reward if you're not taking any risk, push the boundaries. And I think that's what makes a good agency, and I think that's what makes just a good, functional human being.

William Harris 1:07:02

Yeah, I love it even a little bit quotes. Oh, man, so many quotes. That's a good question. Nobody's ever thrown it back on me. I'm on the spot here. Um, that's a good one. I'm gonna fail here right now, definitely I have a lot of quotes. I'd say that if I'm going to go to like one that my kids probably hear me say more often than anything else. It's Proverbs, 16, nine. In a man's heart, he plans his paths, but the Lord directs his steps. And the reason why I love this one is because you still need to make your plans, but recognize that, like those steps might be directed elsewhere. And it's, it's, it's important to plan, but it's important to be able to recognize where those steps might be directed to.

Will Haire 1:07:51

I like that. I like that a lot too, and nice to try it to your higher power. I appreciate that.

William Harris 1:07:59

Yeah, yeah, um, I gotta ask you then to show and tell, because we talked about this before. Is there something that you like to show off a little bit when, when you have an opportunity to, yeah,

Will Haire 1:08:12

absolutely, I'm gonna show it right here. So I'll give you some preface, though. We if you come into my office, I have, like, a bookshelf, and on that bookshelf, I have a ton of ninja turtle stuff. I am, yeah? I mean, I was a Ninja Turtle kid, and then as an adult, I came back into it, and I'm actually meeting Kevin Eastman at Comic Con here in November. So really excited. Yeah, original creator, I'm gonna have him sign a whole bunch of stuff. So I can't wait. But I met Ben Bishop, which is one of his animators, and he helped animate the last Ronin. So I got, I got some swag here, but I got, like, the last Ronin, which I'm showing here, and it's, it's autographed by Ben Bishop. And then, of course, I got the the book that goes with it, and he was gracious enough to sign the inside of that, draw me, draw my old little ninja turtle. And, you know, people could judge, it's all right. I just always stick to like nerds rule the world. Then we all got our nerdy side.

William Harris 1:09:16

I love it. Do you remember the Ninja Turtle pies?

Will Haire 1:09:19

No, what are the Ninja Turtle pies? You talk about pizza pies?

William Harris 1:09:24

Oh, maybe that was just like a it was, maybe it was just, like a Midwest thing, but hostess had a Ninja Turtle pie. And it was like one of those hostess pies where they had, sometimes have, like, cherry filling, or whatever. This was, like custard filling, but it was had Ninja Turtles. There's a buddy of mine. I'm from Ohio originally, and he's from Ohio, Michael, Michael Charles Coates. He's got a whole Instagram dedicated to all the different original Ninja Turtles pies and like the packaging and all the stuff that went with that. That is so

Will Haire 1:09:53

cool. There's a whole ninja turtle fan club out there. So I'm sure your friend's YouTube channel is killing it.

William Harris 1:10:02

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I grew up on the Ninja Turtles as well. So I love that you have those, those actually like taking it to the level of getting signed. I think that's a lot of fun.

Will Haire 1:10:10

I took my kids with me too. Mainly, I thought, I'm like, you can make a living doing anything. I'm like, This guy draws and colors pictures for a living. And then he talked about how we got into animation. My kids were, like, just blown away that you can make money just drawing pictures. Like, not that simple, but yeah, pretty much.

William Harris 1:10:29

How old are your kids?

Will Haire 1:10:30

Seven and five. So they're still young and very impressionable.

William Harris 1:10:34

I love it. I've got a 1411, and almost nine. Should be nine here. Like

Will Haire 1:10:43

a teenage you transition, they

William Harris 1:10:45

were, oh my gosh, it's wild. It's a different environment. But there was, there was something that happened. This was just like, maybe a couple days ago, and I quoted Raphael in the first original Turtles movie, where Mikey, like, is, like, crunching a candy bar, right? And he's like, Hey, Mikey, can you chew a little louder, right? And then they're like, somebody was chewing loud, or whatever. And I said that, they're like, What? All right, I gotta show you. I gotta show you where this is from. But

Will Haire 1:11:14

that is pretty funny. Like, but

William Harris 1:11:23

I appreciate it. Um, all right, what about I like to look at how people are improving their personal lives. So obviously, you're you're very methodical about approving your business and improving your clients businesses. Are there things that you are methodical about or consciously trying to improve in your personal life, whether this is relationships, health, sleep, whatever that might be,

Will Haire 1:11:46

yeah, really great question. I'll honestly say spirituality is something that I've been getting deeper into, I would say, maybe over the last five or six years. So I'm raised Roman Catholic. And you know, when I joined the service, I kind of fell away, stopped doing the church thing as much, and then obviously, being a young man, I wife, got married, got kids, and then, you know, what I found was I felt a little lost, to be honest with you, like I didn't have as much purpose. And spirituality is different for everybody. I refer to my God as my higher power totally. But since I rediscovered the Lord and its greatness, like it's helped me. It's helped me manage things better. And you kind of brought it up in your quote, which I'm really glad I asked you. It's like, what I what I took away is like my higher power is constantly testing me to help build me to the person that I'm meant to be. So when things don't go my way, and that was like a big thing, like ego and spirituality has helped with ego. It's like I needed to control everything, almost like the the client I told you, who is like the worst client or who has issues, it's like they don't let go. And so what I've learned, I've learned to let go. I've learned to trust people I say to Serenity, prayer and the Our Father pretty often. And it's like it's my way of reminding myself that I'm here for a reason, and God is not putting me on a path that I'm not meant to go down. And when I'm presented with these obstacles, it's the obstacles away. This is the journey I'm meant to do this, and it's helped in a lot of other aspects. It's strengthened my marriage. It's helped with the values we want to implement in our family. And for me, a lot of it is just being conscious of it when stepping away for, you know, probably 1015, years, like however long I stepped away for coming back to it and being conscious of the lessons and stuff is something I'm working on and continuing to approve.

William Harris 1:13:54

That's beautiful. It's one of those ones that's hard to quantify. It's very easy to quantify whether you're getting more sleep. It's very easy to quantify if you're getting your workout in. It's hard to quantify if your spirit is right with God. That's a very difficult one. Know if you're you're you know if you're doing the right thing, saying the right things. And I think that's part of the problem, is sometimes we think that you gotta be doing the right things or saying the right things, and a lot of times it is kind of to your point. It is letting go and allowing God to be God, and you to be you, and having that relationship there. Well, it's been absolutely amazing talking to you. If there was one more piece of advice that you would want to give to somebody, and this could be any advice, anything that you want to share just like this is your last opportunity to say something to anybody who's listening. What would you want to share with them?

Will Haire 1:14:46

Anybody who's not an entrepreneur, but considering it, just take the chance pull the band aid off jump. I left a very comfortable lifestyle to a more fulfilled lifestyle that I do now, and a lot of it is just taking. Risk when I originally left to start my business, you know, I had two kids, one just born, and everybody's like, You're crazy, but it was the best decision I ever made. So the people who don't think you could do it, or they say those things, they care about you, and maybe they just don't visualize it for the self, but like, your parents are perfect example, they don't want to see you get hurt to what you brought up before, like they want you to get stronger without having to do the activities that make you stronger. And I'm telling everybody out there, if you have a passion and you feel like this is my destiny, just do it. Take the risk, and I guarantee it'll work out.

William Harris 1:15:39

I love that, if people want to work with you or follow you, what's the best way for them to connect?

Will Haire 1:15:44

Yeah, the website's bellavix.com so you can check me out there, and I'm Will Haire like on your head with an E. Check me out on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. I post every day. So if you had any questions, reach out. I'm happy to share any of my knowledge to help you guys on your journey and Will thanks for having me. This was really great, and I appreciate being invited to your show and have such an in depth, fun conversation. Yeah,

William Harris 1:16:08

likewise, really appreciate you sharing your time and your wisdom with us. Hope you have a great day, and I hope everybody else who tuned in you enjoy your day as well.

Outro 1:16:16

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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