Amazon FBA Success: Brand Building, Profit Margins, and AI Innovations With Neil

Mm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your host, Brett Dys. You please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting. Absolutely. Have a five star review. It really does help. With the rankings and let me know how I am doing. But this week we'll be talking about Amazon and all the selling that goes on Amazon, but mostly just for. Business and marketers to actually understand this because Amazon's one of those things where you cannot ignore ever anymore. But with me, I have Neil and he is the CEO and co-founder of Voltage Holding Company, specializing in launching consulting and selling, acquiring brands with a focus on the e-commerce channel, such as Amazon, FB, a multi-channel, more than 15 years of experience as a selling private label products on Amazon and his company. So welcome to the show, Neil.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Brett.

And the first question is, all my guests is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I'm a coffee drinker. I've got what's left in my afternoon coffee right here. So I'm a diehard, I grew up in the west coast where many of the coffee pop outs, occurred up in Oregon back in the days when, Seattle became a raging coffee zone and all the little coffee shops popped up on the west coast and pretty soon it was the coffee kiosks. And yeah, we all became addicted to coffee and I think that just spread out quite a bit from that edge of the.

It was, yeah, it was like Portland. It was Seattle and then it came to Portland and now it's just

gone all the way. Yeah. The first drive through kiosks that you could actually get coffee from, were in the Rogue Valley in Oregon and where I grew up, and so they've king Dutch Brothers came from there and all those other spread out. Now you have all the other ones in all the rest of the country. It's fascinating to have watched how that in the last 20 to 30 years have developed a coffee addiction in the United States. I do drink teas with my wife. I literally have a tea every evening that has a turmeric blend in it and stuff, or anti-inflammation. Which is good stuff.

Always good. I like both too. So I'm, I don't really discriminate unless it's terrible tea or terrible coffee than I do discriminate.

I'll discriminate a little more towards the coffee side than the tea. But my wife, she, and we have our four daughters here and they love to have tea parties and they bring in all their girls from the other co-ops and friends and they'll have 10, 20 girls over for a big tea party. And when it's a tea party, it's a literal, full on tea party with all the classic China and all the. Treats and everything they do and they'll have a whole afternoon of that when they do it.

Nice. And so I gave a brief some of your expertise. Can you listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Yeah. In specific context. Since 2011, I started playing around with Amazon 2012, I got really serious. I. About building brands and hit my first seven figures by 2014. From then on it was just brand repetition, brand market opening, new shares and then continuing to just build brand after brand. Have been doing that ever since then, just opening up, more space, more brands, more opportunity, more partnerships. And then in the exiting and acquisition space, now we're going out and acquiring competitors and competitive brands to build out, and spoke out the different wheels and different verticals. We've got Build up a portfolio. I. Of products and bases, and our goal is to get five additional brands in by the end of 2025. So as we go and grow we're talking about omnichannel e-commerce. Amazon. FBA, as you said, is definitely like back in the day, you had to have a website and a brochure, or you weren't legit. And then you now e-comm, you gotta have an Amazon channel added on to your full e-commerce, or you're just a single channel operator. You're not really a true brand yet. Until you open on those additional channels and really expand your market share and make that brand even wider and bigger. And that's definitely something that I would encourage all sellers to do. Don't just be, channel specific. Don't be an island to get out there and start capturing assets and acquiring in other channels.

It leads into my next question, like what are some of the common mistakes with. Amazon, FBA sellers making and how do you avoid, how do they avoid that?

There's the sexiness of volume on Amazon, which tends to lead people to play in the sub $20 space because it can look like really great revenues. It can be really great volume, and I've played in that space before and it's easier for beginners to get started to a degree. The problem is I refer to it as Amazon's mosh pit because in the sub $20. The Chinese sellers can get in there. All the beginner sellers are there. Saturation can happen a lot faster in that space. And you can have two, three, $5 in profit per unit. Which again, for me in the kind of business and brand level, we want to elevate isn't the right way for us to brand and elevate within our business model, maybe for other people. And what's your number is what your number is for us, it's not anything less than $12 in net profit per unit or we won't sell it. So that puts us in the tier two, tier three avatar of sellers in what we call the psychology. A buyer on Amazon as we incubate products and brands and determine their market share and opportunity. So we'll sell 50 to $200 in retail price point in order to achieve that kind of profitability. The first metric of real growth to be able to get from growth to scale is whether or not we are having profitable products that lead to profitable brands that turn a profitable business. So for new sellers, getting lower minimum or quantities getting started in the sub. $20 an inch is easier, but you've gotta turn a lot of volume to do that, and most people don't. Really appreciate the amount of volume, time, and movement, logistics, freight, manufacturing, cost of moving that kind of volume. And that really eats up what's left of a lot of your profits. And if you can't really figure out how to manage that extremely tight on the profit margins then it's very easy for you to quickly fall victim to the market. And so what we tend to do is look for that brandability, look for that higher barrier of entry, look at that larger profitability cost, and then build a bigger brand faster that way.

Has this been more recent? 'cause shipping costs have gone like crazy expensive all of a sudden. It hit pretty hard during the pandemic and it really hasn't. Ever fallen off on how crazy it is just to sh just to ship it through the, a sh like a, the sea. Not even like air shipping. 'cause air shipping is, has always been ridiculously expensive. Has this kind of been the phenomenon of the recent. Part of the of what's been going on

last six to seven years, I would say because the pandemic changed a lot of things, and that timeframe changed a lot of logistics. We went from having, full freight, 40 foot containers on the water for 4,800 to, $25,000. And that changed extremely dramatic. One of the reasons why we were able to get through it, our clients were able to get through it, is because of how much profit we have in our market share that we've grown in the profit. We were able to hold that and still maintain profitability while the, numbers went up great. A lot of people dropped out of that. A lot of arbitrage. Sellers can't make those numbers work. Even a lot of private label companies couldn't make it work. Now the numbers have gone up a little bit and they've increased just a little. There's been some trouble with the bandits and pirates out there. And the canal is causing problems, forcing some ships to go longer around the horn, taking, twice and two and three times longer. Up to six times longer to get back that product in motion. And so you've gotta consider those costs and time and market. And one of the best ways to get, insulate yourself from those kinds of challenges in this marketplace is to get higher profitability, build cash flow in a war chest and be able to, understand that if the costs go back to 25,000 foot 45,000 for a container for a 40 foot container, can you handle that? So we have now seen something very dramatic in the years we've been doing this. I've been through a couple recessions and now that. So I can see where the market can flux and change very dramatically, very quickly. And even the secondary component was the opportunity that beget because in 2020, the first three months, whereas 10 years of growth in three months, it just went straight vertical. I. Most systems operators, components three pls and Amazon itself couldn't handle that logistically. They went and bought up every warehouse they could get their hands on, and they even started a whole new division called a WD, Amazon Warehouse Distribution. Just deal with that, right? And put in additional controls to move that hypergrowth, which has given them the opportunity to stabilize and move products through a little better now and. Have additional capacities and stuff that we can get access to for larger brands faster. But it is a cost measure. It is definitely knowing your numbers and it is definitely being aware of market conditions that can negatively impact that supply chain. And of course, the cost factors and timeframe for that product to move to market. We are always watching it. We're always looking at the cost. We're watching it go up. We're moving in elasticity of supply and demand with the mark. And it's another thing about being beautiful in the. Owning your own company and having your own supply chain and control as you can move with it. Unlike other business models, retail, wholesale arbitrage, that kind of stuff, you're more at the liberty of other people's pricing and marketplaces. We can move and flex better with private label product brands. And if we have a certain price point and a demand, we can go with the market too. So that is there and it can come back. I don't necessarily see that happening in the same dramatic sense that it occurred before. I can be completely wrong. What I think is there other. Market conditions and possibilities, potential larger tariffs for certain locations around the world, that is gonna negatively impact. So I would say more, in, in my futuristic ball for a second here, the conditions that we're looking at are, what does it do if certain geopolitical things change and market conditions, shift us away from certain manufacturing locations around the world? How are we getting redundancy in tertiary manufacturing and supply chains in place with other countries to ensure that won't impact our business? The continuity of business at our level is very different when you're moving multiple 40 foot containers continuously versus someone who's just moving a few thousand or a few hundred units. So we have to look forward 3, 6, 9 months and say, okay, how are we moving shipping and logistics at large amounts? And that makes it a very different scope from my perspective than maybe just, the average seller.

Which is interesting 'cause we're actually at that time of maybe some geopolitical changes because of right now, this recording, we haven't really elected a new president and the presidential election is eventually looming.

Yeah. A lot of volatility. Yeah, a lot of volatility in the possibilities there.

And you talked about like your price point being like 52, 200, but is that spec, is that specific to different industries? Because for example, if I'm buying like a USB cable, I don't wanna spend $200 on a USB cable. So is that specific to different industries? Figure out what is your price profitability? Maybe it is the sub $20 just because a cable is a cable and it's a throwaway thing. You don't want, like if I'm spending $200 on a cable, I'm like this better. This cable better last me like 50 years.

They are there. People that spend $200 on a cable is the first question. And the answer is yes. They're called audio files. So if you know how to speak to somebody who sees that level, there's a guitar and then there's a Stradivarius, there is, there are ways to look at things. There's a Yamaha and then there's a grand piano. So there's always another market at another level for something that can be sold. The thought process or the limiting mindset belief, or even maybe scarcity thinking, we'll say I can't sell a 200 k a dollar cable to somebody. I need to sell the $20 cable. That's not actually true, right? Ferrari does no advertising for their products, and they sell really high-end cars. So in actuality, you're bringing a limiting belief to the table. Not you, like you, Brett. It's like we are bringing that. So the end result is. Again, the volume and nature of revenue or the amount of units you move because the product is below a certain point, is all vanity metrics in my world. Okay? That may be somebody else's number, somebody else's gig, and that's completely fine. Everybody runs their business a little different for the way that we run business. It's not okay. I would rather move 200 units of a $200 cable every month and turn a seven or $10,000 revenue stream out of that, and then go get 10 more of those. Then I would have one product that turns out 10,000 units a month at a dollar or $3 in profit per unit, which is where those cables are gonna fall. After all landed cost of goods and advertising and fees and everything stacks up on top of it, including returns and shipping and logistics and everything. So I don't find that to be as sexy for me because you still have to be very, hardcore on the logistics and freight and all this other profit squeeze margins. That I prefer not to deal with. I would prefer to deal with the 200, units moved a month of a $200 product that makes me maybe a hundred dollars in profit per unit, and that's a lot more sexy 'cause I know I can go get 10 more of those and I can actually widen my base, lower my risk, increase my opportunity costs, and reach more of an audience for those kinds of cables. Attach my entire brand to an audio file side of it, right? So just in that thought process, this is how I think when we're talking about cables, everything else below that is commodity. Everything else by that section could be overtaken by a manufacturer at some point. They all look the same. They all look like 10 foot iPhone recorded cables. And so it's now you've saturated the market and lowered the price and everything is based on the amount of reviews and the price of the product, and I don't wanna compete at that level.

And does this all go back to like branding and the brand trust? Because like you said, if you wanna sell that premium price point, you, you referenced Yeah, you've referenced Ferrari and Ferrari. People know who Ferrari is, have been around. For a very long time. Time and so they know

took time to create.

Yeah. So they know that base people know what they're getting When they're getting Ferrari, they're gonna get a high-end car that is super fast or should be super fast.

Yeah. Just know that in the time in which they had to manufacture those and make 'em all by hand. And then move that marketing forward. In 50, 70, 80 years that company's been online, we've watched the internet come online. We've watched social commerce come down. We've watched live streams that in three hours have made $5 million recently breaking records on social commerce platforms. So the ability for me to take a product base and make a premium brand and send it into the premium brand world for in the three to five years, we can do that means I can meet now criteria that 30 or 50 years ago you couldn't meet. So it is. Doable. And again, anybody who says it's not is still thinking in a limiting, limiting scarcity mindset, belief. We've seen it, we've done it, we've watched our clients do it. So it just gets down to how you present that brand where you know the time in the market that's allowing it to occur and mature. And giving yourself the time and energy and marketing to really dial in that audience and build that more premium level brand of expectation. And then really get your numbers right and your supply chain right, and most importantly, get the narrative right. It is the offer, not the mechanism that we're talking about. Amazon. TikTok, shop, Shopify. These are all mechanisms. Everybody wants to argue about the value of the mechanism. I don't care. What I care about is does my audience conversation? Does the person who want that, am I capturing that demand? Am I answering their questions? And then they will come and find us. They'll search us out. They will look for us. They will wanna buy from us, then they wanna buy more from us. So as I widen that base of products, while people are coming in and saying I'm gonna do two or three or five products so I can hit seven figures a year, I'm looking at it at 7, 10, 12, 15 products to make a stable platform of a brand portfolio. Okay? That in my world, if I just based it on one platform's metrics, Amazon. It's 200 something million. Prime members who spend an average of a thousand dollars a year, their customer lifetime value metric is 12 months 1000. So by their own admission, I want to follow along with that, okay? Which means that I either gotta sell one product in one year to one customer for a thousand dollars or. You see the numbers go backwards. I need to sell a hundred dollars product 10 times, or I need to sell a number of other products that are at a hundred to one person 10 times or two or five, depending upon bundles and material, pricing and bundling to get them to spend $1,000 with my brand in a year instead of with somebody else. That's the real metric most Amazon sellers are not focused on. And therefore, when I think about it as an omni-channel, multi-branded, elevated strategy, I'm thinking about all the channels in which I will approach that customer after I've incubated it on Amazon and capture that demand. I'm gonna look at backwards. How can I acquire a customer through meta Facebook, TikTok shops, et cetera, even if it's a hundred dollars product and it costs me $200 to acquire them. But I know. That they'll buy three to five to $700 or more with me when I do that. If I'm willing to do that as a business owner, I'm now willing to do something others are not. Acquire the customer at whatever cost is possible to acquire them at as I go through time, of course, I want to lower that cost per acquisition, that CPA, but I know I'll do it in branding and time in market, and so I'm willing to go 2, 3, 4, 5 years. In a brand new brand to allow that to occur. And I still think a lot of people, maybe some of you listening to this right now, are thinking in three to five minutes, or three to five months, because that's more desperate. That's more, I need it now. I don't need it later. Now I've been there and I've had a family and I've had low, income levels and I've struggled to make that occur. And I remember what that looks like, and I'm in a very different position now, and partly is because I was willing to wait longer and do more, and I didn't have to be the smartest person. In doing it. I just had to do the work and wait longer and be more patient than everybody else was. That's a business mindset issue at that point.

You said this is patient more the key in this because we're always like, I gotta do this now. I gotta get this sale now. I gotta do this now.

Fomo fomo. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. It's patience, tenacity, perseverance, and the willingness to do things others are not doing. To look as Jim Collins says, and good to great at the squiggly, ugly, nasty things under the rock. See them pragmatically for what they are, and then go put in the work and simply do what others are not willing to do for a longer period of time. It is such a low barrier of entry for success now with the internet. There are just so many different ways to make money. I chose physical products because I liked the virtual aspect of a marketing and creation demand and demand capture platforms that are out there now as I watched it come online. In the last 17 years since I've been in business for myself and watching that, go into social commerce, which is extremely fascinating to look at how that's expanding and rapid succession. And then the physical product movement for me made more sense than just a purely digital marketplace because I have a physical, tangible inventory asset where I take my fiat capital and put it into a physical product where 10 times what I bought it for maybe 50 times what I bought it for. I'm now transferring. Digital and other, fiat currency and stuff into a physical hard asset that can be translated between two people. A transactional outcome. People still think I'm talking about the products. I'm not actually talking directive response marketing. Okay? That happens to fulfill the transaction through a physical product median, which means that I can get positive reviews or negative reviews. So of course, step two, and that is making a great product, actually building a great product that people wanted. Fulfills that transaction when two days later when they get the box and they open it and they use it, and they're like, it doesn't break in five minutes, and it fulfills their hopes and dreams and goals and aspirations of jumping higher and running faster and fixing their kids and putting a backpack on or protecting the water from the outdoors. They're gonna get a good experience and wanna leave me a good review or in, in other case not leave me a bad review because they enjoyed it and they still want to go back and see what else, what else can I buy from this company, which I'm attached to it emotionally. That's where brand and brand affinity really come in the long term. That's why there's a hundred dollars person, Walmart, and a thousand dollars person Prada, and I want to go after the a thousand dollars person in Prada, okay? Even at number two, selling it at 800, I'm still gonna be winning.

For those trying to start out doing this, how do you get those positive reviews? Because I think the hardest part is grabbing those positive reviews and those, 'cause if people are mad at your product, they're gonna show it by giving you a bad review. 'cause people are mad and they tend to act more frequently than people that are happy with your product. They'll just go away and forget about ever reviewing your product.

So on product, there's about 10 to max, 20% chance that someone in buying a product from you is going to leave you review. So just take that number times a thousand units sold. Okay? That's a realistic aspect of a review process. Whether you're not, you get a one star or a five star. The end result is if I'm gonna build a great product, then I want to take the time in step two to ensure the product is good. So we're gonna innovate not in in, excuse me. Innovate. Yeah, not invent. I'd say that, right? So we're not inventing things. I think a lot of people spend too much time in r and d and not enough time thinking about the perception of value with the person who's buying that product and their outcome. If you do that well enough and they get a product and it is a good product, but not yet a great product, but it receives. The value of their outcome, they understand the value of its worth and they have used it or built it or made something with it, or, ran faster with it. They're going to see the past, the imperfections of that product, right? They're going to see past the imperfections and when you get them, you got them emotionally. Of course, you can continue to innovate and evolve the quality of the products as you should. To engage, hire reviews, and hire, talked about in the audience conversation aspect, the online, the social commerce and the tagging. Create a good product. That's really step two. First, though, prove you can sell the product. Sales fix is everything. Once you prove you can sell the product, you can innovate the product and continue to improve the product as you go along by simply giving the market more of what's it, what it wants. And by continuing to improve that product based on what the market wants to ensure the quality is high, reviews will then come naturally and organically from that. I still think, again, the idea is that we have to force reviews. I have $180 products selling a hundred times a day on five reviews. Because we did the job upfront of sharpening the acts for four hours before we spent one hour cutting the tree down. And again, I think that's pa patience, perseverance, following the right process, ensuring you understand who they are, what they want, and what value they're going to get it. And you translate it back through images, visuals, videos, and the written copy. And then you could really get down to what we say in our company and sell anything to anybody in a box.

For the most part, besides the innovation it seems like the marketing side is the content of making sure that you have FAQs, that you have, how you have tutorial videos, or you have influencers making tutorial videos or somebody making something for you so you can show it. So people are like, oh, that's how you do this.

High perceived visual value. Absolutely. And we've changed certain things at times from, okay. Just a simple example of a product that was selling. Okay. But then it started selling really great. It came down to a two word change in the title. Okay. Instead of saying heavy duty, which left it a little bit more ambiguous, what's my version of heavy duty? What's your version of heavy duty to heavy duty up to 300 pounds and all of a sudden start flying off the shelves? So just getting in and understanding what's the value, what's the question, and getting an answer quickly can turn into a high perceived value. Now, of course, you've got to deliver the heavy duty product that will hold somebody up to 300 pounds and not break on them. If you meet that criteria, they're going to be happy with your product. I think people tend to go to seminars and groups and live events and all this stuff looking for all these really cool growth hacks and means, and they're not actually focused on the fundamentals. Learn the customer avatar, produce a product, manufacture the product and give them what they want. Don't overcomplicate that with funny ideas and off Amazon nonsense. At first, you can run a brand up to eight figures on Amazon alone before you start opening additional channels without any outside Amazon influence. It's an algorithm. It's a self flowed system. Yes, it will positively look at the impact of social commerce and other links and brand referral traffic coming on board. It will not positively impact your ranking if you're not already in the line on the system itself with the demand that's coming through in 30 seconds or less looking for that product. You just get that right first. Once you get that right and you dial in that organic, okay, go listen to my High Voltage Business Builders podcast on the last episode with David Leblanc, where he has a half a million dollars a month with 90% organic traffic. It's doable. It's provable. Okay, and he's not even at full capacity on his PPC campaigns. We discussed that and it's hey, he's at 6% ACOs. He's at only 25% tacos. He can invert that, change it just a little bit, and pull out an extra two 50 a month if he just starts dialing up his PPC campaigns. Okay. Which he knows he's gonna be doing next. So again, these are things that I think go against the GR goal, against the conversation. Go against the Hopium mindset, lottery guru, YouTube, wonder Boys, and really get down to the fundamentals of the business, knowing your audience and giving 'em what they want.

It almost seems like going back to the fundamentals of business, but also marketing like you said, if it's a vague statement. You may know what you're saying, but someone may not actually know what you're typing either because the written word is very subjective to whoever is reading it.

And what do really good copywriters do? They spend a lot of time learning about who they're gonna sell to, and then they speak directly into those questions in their minds as though it's you knew everything I was going to say before I said it, and I want what? You have to find out if it fulfills what I'm going for, what's in it for me. Get that right and then the rest of this mechanism over here, which Amazon literally takes care of you in almost a done for you FBA fashion. We'll handle the rest of that, right? Don't deliver a crappy product in a crappy box and expect a good review. Don't take five minutes on a listing copy and your images inspect. Expect to sell seven figures out of it. You simply, that was 20 years ago. It doesn't work that way anymore. People are extremely sophisticated. The system is growing extremely fast. Amazon is moving at 8,600 units a minute. Okay? It's 5% of all retail. It is 49% of all online sales you are gonna play in this system. You better do it right, or it really just brings the wholesaler account down, brings the ASINs down, brings your entire property opportunity down in this, what is a closed system of Amazon's organic ranking and growth inside of it. There's a lot of opportunity and market share to do it right.

Yeah, it reminds me of podcasting. If you get the audio wrong, no one's gonna listen to you because you didn't get the audio right. It's terrible audio quality. And everybody's I can't listen to this because there's too many pops and semblances

whistles and blowing and Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And explosives and all that other stuff that we're like, ah, we don't want this.

Yeah. Or they just don't like coffee. And then we have to just reject them. 'cause that, who does it seriously?

I always say if you like water, it's close enough to coffee.

Yeah. And if you drink decaf, that's like drinking dirty water. So please don't come out me with your decaf.

I don't drink decaf. I drink regular coffee.

That's what I'm talking about. What's the hair on the chest and the hair on your face? I'm like, clearly you drink, caffeinated coffee. Yeah.

And black too. Like completely black. It, there's

and black. See, now you're really getting it done. Yeah. I'll have a beard by the time this call is over.

What are some of the trends coming up on the horizons? I know we talked about the traditional things, but there are probably some new things that sellers may want to know what to do next.

Always, AI is on the forefront of everything, but real AI hasn't come yet. What you're watching is tip of the iceberg ai that is just one level beyond machine language learning. When I was at IBM, we were working on machine language learning, artificial and large language models outta the Watson machine where we borrowed time and armonk up in New York when I was working there on knowledge management and latent semantic search engines. Lo and behold, I see Amazon, which is just a large machine language, latent semantic engine. I figured out how they were ranking products long ago and it became like shooting fish in a barrel. For me, that's changed as the market has changed, and one thing that hasn't changed though is the underneath hood of these AI systems has not changed for a while. I. But there are radical, fundamental things occurring as more data is being fed to these large language models. These LLMs, as they are getting more and more data and chewing through that and be getting better at making data-driven decision decisions, they're moving from a reactive to a proactive state. I. Okay, they're moving from a, Hey, I saw you frequently bought this, so maybe you'd like that to, I see you're this, you might be pregnant, you're a woman. You like soccer, you've got this other thing. You like cooking. Oh, by the way, here are predictive things we think you're going to like at the highest level of possibility, and to only show you those things. Think about it like minority Report coming, right? With all platforms and advertising, that's where we're headed. They're gonna know us better than we know ourselves. And they're gonna see us and they're gonna see increases in that. And Amazon's moving that way. And many of the algorithms are now moving that way. TikTok shop is moving that way through. Its viral, and online live events now that are seeing way more traction than just video uploads due to the amount of social commerce that can move through them at the speed of literally the ability for people to click a button. You're just seeing like hundreds of sales a second, which is insane. And they can now have the capacity to maintain that. They have the platform, the technology, and the systems backed by AI that are moving faster and faster to allow that kind of stuff to even occur. So this is shifting in such radical ways. I. That I don't, we're gonna watch live streams that do $10 million in an hour. Not long in the future, maybe a year or two. Okay? It's just gonna be a social commerce engine. That is incredible. If you're using it, programming it, you're gonna be on top of it. AI is not going to replace people. That's a myth. People who understand AI and program it and use it in their businesses are going to outmaneuver other people. Okay. For example, if you're gonna compete with my brand on Amazon or my brands, actually, then we use AI driven large language, PPC decision models. That combine all this data and then make reactions at a machine to machine level. There's no way you're gonna compete with us at a human level. If you're gonna try to compete with us on the PPC campaigns, we're going after, you're competing with machines. You have to understand that, which means you've gotta get really good at it if you're gonna stay in this game. So one of the things that's also changing in these social and demand capture platforms like Amazon. Is they've come up with new mechanisms. One of them's called Cosmo. It's coming very soon. They've already rolled out the first 10% of it back in February, 2024, and it proved a $4.9 billion increase on only 10%. Okay? It's doing predictive alignment. It increased the conversions by 0.7%. Which was a huge change. Okay. And it started producing amazing results. They're gonna be rolling that out more and more, which means some of that fundamental that's occurred there for the last 10 years. It's about to shift radically in the coming two years, which will churn Amazon by 2026 into a direct marketing and advertising engine. I. No longer a product distribution engine or an AWS hosting of data, it is going to turn into a marketing and advertising engine. If you know that now, and you're listening to this podcast, you should spend the next two years making sure that you're on top of that. Because it's coming whether you like it or not, so take advantage of it. How to do that? Ensure you understand what's occurring. Keep your listings up to date. Be on top of the things with ai. Here's a real quick pro tip. For those who are currently selling and listening to this podcast, take your images, download them from Amazon as they set right now, go over and upload them to chat GTP and ask it what it sees. Okay? What do you see in this image if it does not describe the image and environment to you correctly? Fix it 'cause your images are broken. And as Cosmo rolls out, it's going to start deking old listings that have set there historically because of the amount of reviews and time in market. And they're gonna start getting de ranked. And if you aren't paying attention to that, 'cause you're like, Hey, I'm sitting in the top spot, been here for two years, no one's gonna knock me off. Guess what? You're gonna have a big problem if you don't start paying attention to these changes and actually getting in there and adapting to the coming changes. It will not be keyword driven anymore, okay? It's gonna be more responsive, intuitive to the demand of the people that are around it, all the way down to what they're watching on freebie and Twitch and Amazon Prime. Okay? So this is gonna be a big indicator of changes that are coming in the next year. You should be prepping for it.

And so should, besides Cosmos, should they know chat GBT as well? There's llama from Meta, there's Perplexity, there's Claude, there's Gemini, there's Gronk. Should they,

ton of them there? There's a lot of them coming. So really it just gets down to the platform that you're on. Is where you should first look at it and say, what's changing? What's adapting, what's moving? If I'm a direct response marketer on Shopify using Meta and Google, I really need to know where is the algorithm changing? How is it looking at social commerce? If I'm on TikTok shops, I really need to take a really good look at the way live streams are working right now for reach and connectivity, and really be powering through how do we create live streams that sell and engage and are fun. Then if it's Amazon, you really gotta be looking at the way the keywords are shifting. The latent semantic portion of this is gonna leave and it's gonna move forward to the fact that keywords really don't matter as much. At the next stages of this what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a, an incorporation of the way that the engine and behavior of the user looks. To the engine itself, it might have some prompts and things that are gonna generate an output of that from the summary to the listing itself, to what keywords it actually thinks are aligned with the intent of the buyer, and then it's going to produce that listing, right? And so some of the controls and mechanisms are gonna start to move away from you if you don't have. Certain, filtering and things in place with images, graphics, copy, et cetera, to ensure that it sees you in the right way. Just like the image, upload the chat. Gtp, you don't really need to know a lot of sophistication about chat gtp. You log in, you look at it, you ask it questions and then, give it your image, upload it, and just ask it. What does it see? What do you see in this image? The output of that is going to be that, there's gonna be some human feedback, training, the differences and what it didn't learn, but it's only gonna get smarter, faster, and faster. The output of that is that the intent is really what it gets down to. It's gonna come down to all intent based information, and part of that being driven is on search queries, vocal search queries. Now, okay, things like asking, Siri about a product or asking, Alexa about a product it's gonna know that, for example, if you're a pregnant woman. Who he is had mentioned anywhere that your feet hurt, it's gonna come and predict that you might need shoes and it might predict certain shoes for just pregnant women. And you're gonna be like, my feet hurt. I'm pregnant. And the next time you pop up on Amazon or an advertisement comes up on freebie, it's gonna be like, Hey, these are the best, most comfortable shoes for pregnant women. You're gonna be like, what? That's awesome. Pregnant women's shoes. Yeah, it's gonna get really smart. It's gonna move extremely fast if you're on the other side of that. It's gonna be extremely powerful. Search is growing on mobile by 27%, so it's gonna be huge. And 50% of all adults use search every day on the voice side. So how people talk and linguistics are gonna translate into how your products and intent to show back to say, a pregnant woman who you are trying to sell the most comfortable pregnant shoes to.

Let's just help. Alexa actually gets smarter because I still prefer Google Assistant.

Yeah they're all a little frustrating. Apple is pulling in its own Apple Assist soon. You're gonna see some branding like that across there where they're actually not gonna be chat GT P, they're gonna be gtps for the specific products and services. That we're using Alexa, et cetera. 33% of all homes have Alexa in them now, which means a lot of people are just saying, Hey, Alexa, reorder my shoes. Or Hey, Alexa, reorder my cereal. Or Hey Alexa, what's the best kind of shoes for a, man who wants to run and has a size 12 is really gonna be using a lot of in intentional data that is gonna change the way people search and get products.

All right. And people are listening to this episode and wondering, where can they find you online to learn more about how to sell better on Amazon?

My podcast for one high Voltage Business Builders podcast, go check us out. We're a globally top 5% ranked podcast. You can see us on all the channels, YouTube, apple, Spotify, et cetera. Interview people, interview case studies, talk about business growth, real estate financing, wealth without Wall Street, fundamentals of business and finance, as well as anything E-com and all things Amazon as well. And you can go to voltage dm.com. You can find that podcast. You can see my book. You can see some free trainings and information. If you feel so led reach out. We are a growth consultancy. It is an imitation only group. We're not a course program or any of that other nonsense. We are building, buying, exiting, and acquiring companies, and we teach clients how to come along for the ride or DTC brands, how to get on Amazon or how to build an omni omnichannel strategy. And then we look to acquire 'em later on. So as an acquisition and incubator we want to build up great clients and brands because I'm looking for them to buy.

All right. Any final thoughts for listeners?

Your opportunity begins at the end of your excuses. So if you listen to this today and you plan on taking no action, you're there, is your opportunity cost? If you're planning on doing something or learning more today, hopefully you will go out and actually do it. Execution leads to knowledge, which leads to wisdom. You can't just jump to knowledge. And expect to do the right things, and you certainly won't lead to wi wisdom if you don't execute. So get out and execute something today that helps move the ball forward, hopefully towards profitability. That's my goal for you today.

Alright. Thank you Neil, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Room and sharing knowledge on Amazon FBA and AI and everything else.

Thanks for having me on, Brett. I appreciate it brother,

and thank you for listening. As always, we subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. You have a five star review, really just help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm join doing, and join me next week as I talk to the great thought leader in the PR and marketing industry. All right, guys. Stay safe. Good to understanding your Amazon FBA. Learn how to make it even better. Be patient and persistent at the same time, and see you next week later.