When Should FBA Sellers Start Building Ecommerce Stores Off Amazon – ALL11

Matt: Let’s sell some stuff. What do you want to talk about today,
Rus?

Rus: I want to talk about selling
stuff off Amazon.

Matt: Why would you do
that?

Rus: I don’t know. It’s crazy. We
all know that one of the massive benefits of selling on Amazon is
you’re targeting an audience of buyers. They’re on Amazon because they
want to buy – which is why we’re doing it.

But it’s best to have as many sales funnels as possible and
as many sales opportunities as you can. If something happens on Amazon
and your sales tank for any reason – maybe a flurry of bad reviews or
someone else comes in and dominates the…

Matt: Or you get
patented.

Rus: Exactly. Someone dominates
the PPC campaigns and you’re just hemorrhaging money trying to catch
up. Moving off Amazon and onto your own branded domain is not a sales
vector basically that you can push.

What I’m doing whenever I launch new products or a new brand
is – Obviously, I’m registering a domain with the brand name in it and
then just creating a one-page lander. A very simple website with
similar sales copy to the Amazon page, but obviously, you’re not under
Amazon’s thumb.

So you can flush it out with as much detail as you want –
YouTube videos and how to use the product, downloadable PDF’s if there
are instruction manuals etcetera, etcetera. And just pulling up with
as much automated copy as possible. And then having a big
“exclusively
available” on Amazon button at the
bottom that links back to your product using a Super URL of course, so
it comes up as if it was a search result.

To begin with, just for social proof. If you’re launching a
new product, sometimes people will search for it on Google just to see
what other information is around – Have any other websites reviewed
it? Is the company selling a legitimate company? So it doesn’t take
too long to do and it’s really cheap. It’s just $10 for a domain name
and then hosting and then just a one-page lander.

Matt: A four hour work
week.

Rus: Yup. Then have Google
Analytics on it so you can actually see whether it’s gaining
attraction and whether it’s getting visitors. Then if your brand does
take off on Amazon and you’re noticing the website is getting a lot of
visitors, then you’ve got the opportunity to turn it into its own
complete E-Commerce site – moving it from your one-page lander onto a
platform like Shopify or maybe Volusion (I personally use Shopify) and
then building an E-Commerce site around it.

One of the nice things about Shopify is you can back your
store by Amazon FBA so it just uses the same stock you’ve got on
Amazon anyway – using something like PayPal or Stripe for payment
gateway. And then boom! You’ve gone from having a product in Amazon to
having an online presence for your brands that is mostly
informational. And then now you’re at the next level.

After you’ve proven your concept, you’ve got a complete
E-Commerce store that you can do what you like with. You can start
running content marketing campaigns to bring people in. You can run
Google and Facebook pay-per-click adverts, etcetera, etcetera. You’ve
got way more avenues to market it and explain the benefits of your
product to your intended audience. And that drive sales being
honest.

Matt: And remarket to existing
customers.

Rus: Yeah.

Matt: That’s one of the things.
When you’re building a business, getting the customer is the hardest
part. Most people are more likely to come back and buy from you –
Amazon or otherwise.

Rus: Yup.

Matt: What are you doing to try to
get people off of Amazon onto a Shopify site?

Rus: Well at the moment, I’m very
big on review targeting. So when I’m creating these one-page landers,
I’ll throw up the Google AdWords retargeting pixel and the Facebook
retargeting pixel even if the product doesn’t take off.

You want to collect those pixels and all the visitors to your
site. Just in case in a month time down the line, when it’s worth
creating a Shopify, you’ve already got an existing audience that you
can remarket to.

Matt: So hold on for a sec, Rus.
So some people might not know what retargeting is. So for people that
are getting into it.

Rus: Okay. The concept of
retargeting is – You have a pixel on your website that basically
tracks all the visitors that come to it. So Google have their own
retargeting network and Facebook have their retargeting network and
you can use that to build audience profiles.

So inside Google AdWords, you can say – “Create an audience profile of everyone that’s viewed this
pixel on www.rus’sspatulas.com.”
And now, every single person that visits that website will be stored
in Google’s profile. And the exact same thing works with Facebook. So
you put the Facebook targeting re-pixel off and then Facebook will
build up a profile of your visitors.

The benefit to doing that is when it comes to pay-per-click
advertising, you can just log into Facebook or Google, create you
advert and then say – “Okay. Everyone that’s
been to my website in the last 30 days, (that’s been tracked by your
re-targeting pixel) I want you to show this advert to them.”
And then bam! The advert will follow them
around as they browse.

And you’re targeting an audience which you know has a direct
interest in your product. You can do crazy things with Google and Facebook. Like on
Facebook, you could target people in Venice, Italy that like cats and
try and sell them your fine cat leatherwear, or you can just go
straight to the punch. “People that have
viewed my website I want to target to.”
Really specific and should get higher conversion
rates. So that’s the concept behind
retargeting. It’s not too difficult to setup, but it’s really
effective.

Matt: It’s beautifully effective.
And the best part about this is typically, people – they need to
experience a brand; they need to experience a product more than once
before they’re ready to buy.

Rus: Oh yeah.

Matt: The more times that someone
is exposed to something, the more likely they are to buy. And while it
sounds creepy, dirty and internet markety, it absolutely works with
retargeting. I’m getting into this now with AdRoll, with my Shopify
site. But throw those pixels up on ahead of time like Rus is saying
and I think you’ll be happy with the results.

Rus: Definitely. I’ve been
reading a fantastic book recently, called – “The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access 100
Million People in 10 Minutes.”
It’s by a guy called Perry Marshall. He is a marketing genius. I
definitely recommend anyone who’s going into pay-per-click to check
that out.

But he makes some very good points if you are going to go
into the retargeting direction. Because the adverts will follow people
around, you don’t want to freak them out. You just want to make it
look like it’s a random coincidence that they’re now seeing adverts.
You don’t want to say – “Hey. We’ve been
following you and stalking you around the
internet.” That will kill your
conversions quite quickly.

Matt: It’s quite good though – if
you’re trying to date a pretty girl and you show up at the same place,
at the same time. “Imagine the
coincidence?”

Rus: That can work.

Matt: “By the way, I paid to see
you here.”

Rus: If you’re one of those nice
guys. Yeah. Ha-ha!

Matt: The Brad Pitt nice
guys.

Rus: Yup. So you can start doing
that with just a one-page lander before you move on to bigger and
better things.

And then going back to the benefits of doing this – You’ve
got much more control over your sales page. You don’t have to follow
Amazon’s guidelines. You’re not limited to a title – four or five
bullet points in a description. You can do what you
want.

So that will help boost confidence in your product and boost
also conversions. And if anything does go wrong with Amazon, it’s cool
– because hopefully, you’ve got a very profitable Amazon sales vector
going on – helping you make even more money.

Matt: Gosh, Rus. You talk to
fancy. A sales vector.

Rus: Ha-ha!

Matt: Basically, guys – it’s
somewhere else. You’ve got two businesses instead of one. It’s a way
to protect yourself.

Rus: Exactly that.

Matt: And that’s what Amazon
entrepreneurs are looking at. We know that FBA is a killer channel to
get started. You can scale up incredibly quickly and start making
profits. But at the same time, entrepreneurs typically don’t like to
be under anyone’s thumb. No one wants to have an SEO update, a Google
update, an Amazon update get kicked off the platform.

One of our Amazooka best beta testers actually just got
kicked out of Amazon UK apparently. Poor guy. Can’t even use the
software now.

Rus: Oh, wow!

Matt: Yeah. He was messaging me
about it on Facebook. And that’s the thing. If you’re going with
Amazon, they can be ruthless. It’s their rule so you’re playing in
their game. If you can start your own playground, you get to have the
rules. That’s why I’m working on building up Shopify.

So Rus, let’s get into this a little bit. How about you help
me with my business? What do you do to grow traffic to your Shopify
store? How are you getting people there? – Because I am struggling
with that.

Rus: One of the things I love
about E-Commerce is you can just buy it. So I’m very big on Google PPC
mostly – just hammering up the adverts, doing continuous A/B testing,
sorting out the advert groups in order to increase click through
rates.

Matt: What’s a good click through
rate? That’s something I’m struggling with right now. Obviously, it’s
going to depend on the products and the category, but in
general.

Rus: Yeah. I have
absolutely no idea. We should edit out that question.

Matt: Oh, no. We don’t edit it
out. That’s how it works. We go live.

Rus: Ha-ha!

Matt: Okay. So I want to get
traffic. Are you going AdWords or you’re going PLA’s, you’re doing
everything?

Rus: Yeah. Google PLA’s at the
moment and AdWords. But I’m personally going with Google rather than
Facebook. I’ve had bad luck with Facebook in the past. It’s not my
specialty. I’d rather be really good with one thing and I’m terrible
at everything. So I’m just focusing on Google pay-per-click. Have they
renamed it? Is it still called PLA? But yeah, the Google product
listings…

Matt: Whatever it’s called at this
point. Google likes to change the names on things.

Rus: Yeah. There’s a really good
plugin you can get for your Shopify store. It’s free. It just takes
all your products and creates a Google feed that you can get instant
merch in the center. And then that will just spam all your products
into the Google product listing and advertising space and then you’re
in.

Matt: And then you
win.

Rus: Yup. Obviously, try and
spend less on adverts than your margins on your product to make it
profitable. But reiterating…