Double the Sales, Double the Success: Multichannel Mastery on Shopify and Amazon | #267 Adam Shaffer

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Claus Lauter: [00:00:00] This is episode 267 of the eCommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today I'm joined by Adam Shaffer, president of PhelpsUnited.com, and we discuss how to double sales and achieve success by implementing a multi channel strategy on Shopify and Amazon. So let's dive right into it. But before we get started, a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting today's episode.

Have you heard about PartnerHero? They're experts in support on the e commerce industry, known for their outstanding team building skills. Their main pillars, quality, people, and culture makes them a great fit for your company. Learn more on PartnerHero. com or click the link in the show notes. Are you feeling overwhelmed by marketing stress?

Say goodbye to pressure and meet your new secret weapon, a remote marketing assistant. Easily scale up your business, boost productivity, and reclaim your time. The Game Changer, get your own marketing wizard at half the cost. Visit smart ecommerce marketing. com and discover the magic. Check out the link in the show notes now.

This is the e commerce coffee break. A top rated [00:01:00] Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world. With your host Claus Lauter and get marketing advice you can't find on Google.

Welcome to the show. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today we want to talk about how to master a multi channel strategy with Shopify and Amazon so that you can double your sales and your success. With me, I have Adam Schaffer. He's the president of PhelpsUnited.

com, a leading e commerce accelerator, IT channel enabling platform and marketplace agency. Adam is a pioneer in direct marketing and digital e commerce. Of technology products and solutions to both consumer and commercial markets with over 30 years of industry experience and the unique ability to manage large organizations and startups.

He has been responsible for successfully managing and driving growth at some of the largest publicly traded it solution providers, and he's also the host of [00:02:00] the planet Amazon podcast. So let's welcome him to the show. Hi, Adam. How are you today? Hello 

Adam Shaffer: class. Thanks for the introduction. That was awesome.

I'm impressed with myself. That is great. Thank you. So thank you for having me on your show. Hopefully we'll get to have you on our show, Planet Amazon. So let's see what this goes. How do you want to begin our conversation today? Because I love talking about e commerce. Me too. 

Claus Lauter: So Shopify and Amazon. Is that a good match or not?

Let's dive right into it. 

Adam Shaffer: You're just getting right to the point. I get it. No small talk. So, you know, when we were talking earlier, I used to think that do you really want to be on Amazon with all the competition, all the price shopping? Do you want to keep your channel super clean and focus on your direct business with Shopify?

And I've changed my opinion from no, you don't to yes, you do. And I'll tell you why. I think, first of all, both platforms are great. Amazon is just huge, huge, huge. But I think what Shopify brings to the table is so much power for anybody. [00:03:00] So if you're a novice to an experienced e commerce professional, the Shopify platform works.

I mean, I used to manage. I don't know if you remember the company, it was called tiger direct. com, but it was probably one of the largest e commerce sellers on the planet. At one time, we were doing a couple of billion dollars in it equipment a month and it was huge, but the amount of it resources and work that we had to do to keep that site.

Up to date, going, working, and adding features. If somebody ever wanted to put a new payment method, like when PayPal first came out, or if you wanted to do a firm or anything like that, it was an act of Congress to try to get our IT department to focus and work on that and then test it. And it could take a year.

With Shopify, it's just, it's all there. It's all integrated. You got all these people working on your platform, and all you need to do is think about marketing and selling. So. I love the platform and I'm a big Shopify fan. If I had it back then, we would have saved a lot of money and a [00:04:00] lot of headaches, but why Amazon and why did the two work together?

Well, Amazon doesn't necessarily love competitors and Shopify also doesn't love competitors. So they try to stay away and they've tried to stay away from each other until the last year or so. And as time has gone on, I think they realized they could both coexist and help each other. We're on the Amazon platform.

It's very competitive, but there is a lot of traffic. So you got about 640 billion of merchandise being sold through that platform. It kind of want to be there, even though you have to pay your fees. If you have the right products, you want to be there. If you want to expand your marketplace, you want to be there, but does it affect your Shopify sales?

It could, if you do it wrong, but it can augment your Shopify direct sales, if you do it right. And let me try to explain. So I don't confuse you all. First of all, Shopify integrates with Amazon. So if you want to manage your Amazon listings, you could [00:05:00] actually do it loading your products into Shopify. So they work nicely together.

Also. Back in the day, Amazon used to make you have catalog parity, meaning that if you sell it on your site, you have to also sell it on the Amazon site. Well, that's changed. So you could have a different assortment on your site than you do on the Amazon site. So if you're a clothing brand, or if you're even an electronics brand, pick any category, you could have your full assortment.

Tell your brand story, have a connection with your customer base, but maybe put the top five products on Amazon or a few other products. You don't have to have the whole assortment there. Maybe you want to have certain colors on Amazon and you want to have unique colors on your own. So you don't have to be.

In parody. Why could that be good? Well, if people buy your product and find you on Amazon, they're going to be interested in your brand. If you have a good [00:06:00] brand, if you have a quality product, they're going to go to your Shopify site and they don't know they're going to your Shopify site. They're looking up your URL, but they want to learn more about this brand that they found on Amazon, and they're going to start to learn more about you.

Or. Maybe they will go to your site first and try to buy something from Amazon because it's easier for them because they have an account set up because they know that Amazon will get into them faster because it's free delivery if they have Prime. So maybe they will go there and buy something from Amazon, but you now have somebody that's.

Interesting in your product, maybe they're going to buy it again from you. And if it's a subscription type of product, maybe they will continue to buy from Amazon. Maybe they'll buy it from you, or maybe they'll buy it even from another reseller. So I think when it comes to acquiring new customers, Amazon now helps because you're going to get certain amount of traffic that goes to Amazon, that's Shopify.

So for me. It's prospecting, I'm going to get new customers. If they buy from Amazon, a percentage of them are going to come find me [00:07:00] and learn more about my brand. And now I got them. If they sign up for a newsletter, I can introduce new products to them. I could talk to them. And when they do buy on your Shopify website.

You own them when they buy an Amazon's website, you don't really own them. Maybe you rent them for a few minutes. If you want, you can spend some money on advertising to advertise to Amazon. But once they buy through you, you kind of own them. So it really comes down to the product, the product assortment.

If you're a one product company, you got to make that decision. Do I want it on Amazon? But if you have multiple products, multiple colors, it's a really good idea. So that's part one. I think it's a great way for you. To be able to grow your business by leveraging Amazon's traffic and having a bunch of it migrate back to you, and you don't have to have every you or ASIN on Amazon.

So that's one. Number two, inventory. Amazon is actually one of the best logistics company, if not the best logistics company on the [00:08:00] planet, and you can now keep your products up at FBA. So low cost storage. Lower costs than most real estate would cost, you know, in the U S and they'll pick, pack and ship your products for you.

If somebody buys it on your Shopify site and they'll ship it in a Brown box, not an Amazon box. So now you don't have to have inventory here, inventory there. You can keep it up at Amazon and they will be your 3PL. That's pretty cool because through shipping rates are so much better than most of the shipping rates that most get.

I mean, sometimes if you ship USPS is very, very small, maybe you could. Beat them, but you're going to get fast delivery, Amazon speed, and you have everything stocked up there. So you could sell on Amazon with that same inventory that you're selling on your Shopify site. That's incredibly convenient. And now you don't have to pick and pack the stuff in your own warehouse if they're having and holding the SKU.

Either you sell the SKU on Amazon or not, you could stock it up there. [00:09:00] So that's, I think also a misnomer. Do I have to sell it? No, you don't. You could keep it up there. You could sell some on Amazon, some not Amazon, none on Amazon, but they'll do your 3PL fulfillment. So that to me is a huge, huge benefit.

Now, the next thing that Amazon has added recently is buy with Prime. So they have a payment method where you could. A Shopify customer, it's a plugin where you could plug in as a payment method by with Prime. So you could buy using your Amazon account and get it shipped Prime speed through Amazon. So, so many.

Customers don't want to have to set up a new account. Think of it as like a wallet. So they just click the button. Amazon takes care of it. You get paid and it's done. So we're seeing more and more, um, uptake on the buy with prime. It didn't take off immediately, but it's now picking up. And I think part of it is the trust factor is Amazon trying to steal your customers or not.[00:10:00] 

I think Amazon wants to own the world, but I think that you could coexist with them and they can help you grow your business on your Shopify site while you're growing it on Amazon. So those are my big three things. I think it's great for managing ASINs and getting extra customers at a low cost. I think it's great for logistics because you don't have to keep the products in your own warehouse anymore.

And I think that it adds another. A way that people could pay for your products using buy with prime and buying with prime gives people a lot of confidence. They're going to get it fast. What do you think, Claus? 

Claus Lauter: And now a quick break to thank the sponsors of today's episode. As a prominent player in the e commerce support arena, Partner Hero specializes in delivering personalized customer experience solutions.

With a clear focus on helping you not just meet but exceed your goals and requirements, they have Become experts in e-commerce support. Their commitment to tailoring solutions to your unique needs ensures that your support experience is nothing short of exceptional. Partner Hero is more than a CX company.

[00:11:00] There are your partner in success. Visit their website and learn more on partner hero.com. Are you feeling overwhelmed by marketing stress? Say goodbye to pressure and meet your new secret weapon, a remote marketing assistant. Easily scale up your business, boost productivity, and reclaim your time. The game changer?

Get your own marketing wizard at half the cost. Visit smart ecommerce marketing. com and discover the magic. Check out the link in the show notes now. Yeah, I think Shopify and Amazon It's a good marriage. Two years ago, my mindset was slightly different than it is now because, um, there were more competitors and you needed to make a decision where you want to go.

I think now there's, it's a no brainer that you need to use as a merchant, as a online seller, both channels, you just mentioned all the three pillars or the three levels or areas of advantages that this brings with it. And I think the big thing is that you can win. Strategies might be slightly different.

What you do marketing wise, sales wise on Shopify, then on Amazon, [00:12:00] obviously Amazon has his own advertisement system. And you mentioned the data is a little bit limited what you get out of it. But if you do it the right way with the right strategy, it's a bit of a win win situation for you because you can build your customer base.

As I said, people start Googling you and, but the trust factor and the traffic is mainly on, on Amazon. To begin with specifically as a new brand, you have to build up your brand, your name before people starting trusting you with the approval process and everything that comes with it on Amazon people. We usually trust the brands that are selling on Amazon.

So huge advantage 

Adam Shaffer: there. Whether they trust the brands or not, they trust Amazon. So they know whatever they buy, Amazon's not going to leave them in the lurch. So Amazon will take care of them. If you're a new brand and you're on Amazon only, creating a Shopify site is a great incremental extension because then you start to have a better relationship with your customers, but they will Google you.

In fact, before they buy it, they might look you up. So you need to have a really good site to be able [00:13:00] to really market your product. Yeah. You have great content on Amazon, but still people want to look at the brand sometimes when they go to their store and their Shopify store and they look them up and they can learn a lot.

Plus you have a lot more real estate on your own website and you could do a lot there, but I think starting on Amazon and then starting your own Shopify site thereafter, it's not a bad strategy. And there's plenty of built on Amazon brands. That one to diversify a little bit more and have a deeper relationship with their customers.

But then there's plenty of Shopify customers that haven't been scared to, and find every reason not to do Amazon. And I think try it, do it in a limited fashion. So you feel good about it and then it'll grow it. And then what's interesting now is. Amazon does want to get the business, right? So they're trying to give you even incented discounts.

If you advertise on Google and you push the traffic to them so you can get 8%, 10 percent back. So [00:14:00] normally a Shopify customer would advertise on Google and have it go to their own site because they don't have to pay the Amazon commissions or the fees. But you got to do the test and see if I advertise on Google and I push them to my page on Amazon.

Will my conversion rates be a lot higher because they trust buying from Amazon. They have their account already set up and maybe they don't have their account already set up with me. It's a pain in the neck. I don't want to put my information in. Who are these guys? So I would test the advertising to, I would test my Google advertising, put some to Amazon, put some to my Shopify, see what has the better conversion rates.

And you see, even with the fee, if they're going to give you a 10 percent discount or rebate, it could very well be worth it. So play them off each other, make it work. 

Claus Lauter: Oh, it's a bit of a sneaky strategy. We, as a marketeer, I always would try to get hold of the customer or of the prospect email address in the first place that gives me the chance to grow on that basis.

My business was. [00:15:00] returning customers, doing all the email marketing, retargeting and whatsoever, then sending them directly to Amazon, where they sort of disappear in a black hole and that I don't get anything out of it. I might get the first sale, but I might have more difficult to get the second and third sale out of it.

So again, that's something what you said, test it out, see what works better, potentially do both depending on your marketing spends. It might be a way to do both of these things to convert customers faster. Now. With your experience, where do you see Shopify merchants wanting to go into Amazon? Where do they struggle the most when they get started?

Adam Shaffer: I think just Amazon is a complicated marketplace. And that's what we do is we help brands market and sell and deal with all the logistics because Amazon is very big. You're not going to get much personal help. It's kind of a black hole. The rules change. Every day, they don't actually advertise what rules are changing or what's not.

A lot of it's just doing it every day. And the experience of doing it, [00:16:00] understanding how to write cases. So I think start slow, start with a few products. Don't put hundreds and hundreds of. If SKUs or ASINs up right away and learn the platform, there's plenty of videos. There's plenty of companies like ours that can help.

Of course, we're the best, but there's people that can help you and join communities. Shopify has communities, Amazon has communities. Join and you can ask people because once you get a lot of people trying a bunch of different things, people find out the answers and they'll share their information, although we're very competitive, it seems it's.

Everybody likes to help each other. Everybody wants to solve them on Amazon. So even the fiercest competitors share information because it's almost like, do you want good for me? And I'll do one good for you kind of thing. So I recommend that, but I do think it's different because once you start selling on Amazon, You got to understand and track the information.

Sometimes if they don't like your ASIN, something will happen and it'll come off or [00:17:00] somebody goes onto your ASIN and messes with it. So you need to get what they call brand registry to try and protect your content. So you need to learn a little bit before you go on there. So really anything. Initially get some help to get your products on Amazon, even though you could manage it through Shopify, you want to get your content, right?

You want to get your advertising strategy, right? And you want to understand what happens once you're on there. How do you start building momentum? Plus you need to get reviews. And so Amazon has a few programs that you can join and they'll help you get reviews. You always need a lot more than they're going to help you get.

So the reviews are a big deal on Amazon. But again, I think. That traffic, you're going to find out once you go on Amazon, people are going to find you and they're going to trip over to your site. Like, you know, again, I don't think I advertise that to the Amazon folks. I'm sure they know that, but a percentage of the people are going to come over because they want to learn about the brand.

I want to learn about the brand. I want to learn what other cool things [00:18:00] that they do. And also if it's some type of product that you really felt passionate about, there's usually a community. And the only way to join that community is go to the website. And get their newsletter and go to their blog and read more about it.

So I don't care if it's biking equipment, a headlight and a taillight. I just recently bought for my bike and now I'm going to the website for this company all the time. I bought it on Amazon, but I now go to the brand's website because they actually have a blog and I learn about other things that other people are doing and meetups and things like that.

So. It's really interesting how the brand, once you get connected to a brand, even if you didn't know who the brand was, you want to spend more time with that brand and learn about that brand as long as the product is good, which is really important. Don't try to market a junky product. I guess it's pretty obvious.

Your 

Claus Lauter: example just gave a perfect idea how such a synergy effect can work. Finding a product, wanting to learn more about the product and find a blog, find documentation, find other products on the brand's website, on the [00:19:00] Shopify store, whatsoever, directly. Now, Shopify is growing by the day and has a million different features by now, as Amazon does.

As a small and medium enterprise, the last thing is spending too much time on having more and more to learn. So, Maybe you can give me an idea about the comparison. If I want to start with Amazon, the timeline, how much time does it take me compared to working with an expert like yours, taking over and doing the same 

Adam Shaffer: thing?

If you're a novice and you're coming onto Amazon for the first time, even if you're computer literate, it really isn't to do with being computer literate. It's to do with navigating Amazon. Their UI is reasonably easy to understand. Before you learn all the tricks. And there's always more learn, but the big ones, it takes about a year for you to actually understand what can happen because it might be a year before you completely reconcile your account and realize, my God, what happened to all this stuff?

So in six to 12 months, you start to learn all the [00:20:00] different things that could go wrong and go right with your product. So I think getting somebody at the beginning is going to help you. It could be that you want them to help you forever, but at least you should get them for six to eight months to get you established on Amazon.

And then, you know, when it comes to Shopify, there are other companies that help there too, but I think it's a little more straightforward. You don't have the same race with Amazon. Once you start. In the Amazon world, answer questions within a certain amount of time. You need to make sure that you're answering customers.

If there's a logistics problem, you've got to solve it immediately. So you don't really have time. Everything's on the meter. If you don't respond, Amazon is watching and you'll get some demerits and ultimately you'll get kicked off the platform. So you got to be a good citizen on Amazon and comply with the rules.

Claus Lauter: I was using Amazon about three, four years ago and relatively quickly, I made the decision to find somebody helping me there as an [00:21:00] entrepreneur. I stick to trying to understand the process as quick as possible and then find somebody who's better than me. But at least once I have the basics done myself, I can talk to somebody basically on eye level and they know that they can talk to me on the same level.

Now you're helping. eCommerce merchants getting on Amazon and doing everything that we just talked about. How does that work? What's the onboarding process? What kind of timeline is it? Give me a bit of an 

Adam Shaffer: idea. We work with brands, so if a brand is reasonably new, there's a lot of heavy lifting that goes on because you have to create the content from scratch.

You have to get the views, so the onboarding process takes a bit longer and getting it traffic could be expensive and take a while. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that because , there's about 2 million sellers on Amazon. It's a process that you have to be patient with. And it takes time. So the onboarding could be a bit of time because you have to share a lot of information back and forth [00:22:00] with a company like us.

If you're an established brand and you know, established brands have other reasons for working with us, they're already selling on Amazon, but they're either selling to Amazon and they want to not put all their eggs in one basket with Amazon, and they want to get somebody to maybe manage some of their agents for them aside from Amazon.

Or. Their channel is so complicated that there's many sellers selling their products and they're selling it at lower prices than they really like them to be selling it at. They're bringing it in from overseas and they're selling it here where they shouldn't be. And so they need a company to go in and help them call it, clean up their channel and help them with brand protection.

So it's a lot more fun to work with the brand that's already selling on Amazon and has some momentum because that heavy lifting of starting up. Their stuff from scratch is not there. The complicated part is getting some of these bad actors off the skew. So the onboarding is they would come to us. We would analyze [00:23:00] their ASINs.

We would see how much is it going to cost for us to be able to market their products and sell it on Amazon, because in our model with established brands, we buy and sell their products for them on Amazon. So we are their 3P seller. And so as long as we could make an arrangement where we could make some margin by selling their products on Amazon, we completely overnight streamline their process of having to reconcile their account, having to put in cases, having to do any of the advertising, having to update any of the content.

We do it all for them and we buy and sell it. So really it's a matter of let's analyze your ASINs. Let's understand and come up with a fair price that we would pay. If we can make some margin on this, then we're good to go. And it's as simple as that. Once we get going, we place a purchase order and we meet with them once a week or every other week, however often they want to meet, we strategize with them, [00:24:00] but all on the marketing building, and we're making sure they never run out of stock.

So to me, established brands are a bit more fun. New brands are much more challenging. There's a lot of costs because you have to make some noise. So there's definitely organic stuff you could do, but you're going to have to spend money on advertising. And that's where it gets a little, you know, how much can I spend?

I'm a brand new brand. I don't have that much money. Well. It's going to be a much longer growth path. If you don't try to invest. 

Claus Lauter: What was your perfect customer? What kind of industry niche size? 

Adam Shaffer: We came from the technology industry. So we knew a lot of the brands already and we knew what issues and problems they had.

But once you could do technology, because the products change quite often, you could do almost any category. So right now we're into 14 different categories and it's from technology products to clothing, to cosmetics, to. Pet food, coffee, and it doesn't matter. As long as you can make the math work, the [00:25:00] game on Amazon is the same.

It's really good to understand who your competitors are. So you really do study the categories, but the process of Amazon is very much the same. So technology is tough because it's low, low, low gross margin. But the perfect products on Amazon are products that have a lot of velocity and are small. Or have high average selling price and are small.

Anything that's small is a lot more fun than anything that's big. And that's where a lot of brands get into trouble because once you start trying to ship 30 pound bags of dog food or 40 pound bags of dog food on Amazon, the shipping is more than the cost. Like it's shocking. So the perfect product on Amazon is small and light, high average selling price.

The math works a lot better that way for everybody. 

Claus Lauter: Yes. I can imagine selling furnitures on Amazon is probably not the best idea. But they 

Adam Shaffer: do. And I think you can see there's a heavy bag, not that I use the heavy bag, my daughter does. And I bought it from Amazon. I got it the [00:26:00] next day. It weighs a hundred pounds.

I don't know how they did it. I have no idea. I think it was 99. I think it would cost 99 to deliver it. Maybe more, probably cost more than a hundred. So I don't get some of it, but maybe there was a local store that was selling on Amazon and they just drop it off. It's probably what happened, but it's always better when it's small, small and light, but there's plenty of furniture that does well on Amazon.

There's plenty of big products that do well on Amazon, but I think as time goes on and freight becomes a much bigger percentage of the total sale, it's hard. 

Claus Lauter: Makes perfect sense. Adam, before we come to the end of our coffee break today, is there anything that you want to share with us that we haven't covered yet?

Adam Shaffer: If you're into e commerce And you're not trying to grow your brand within different marketplaces. You should really look at it because there's ways to protect your brand, protect your price and build your brand by participating, not just on Amazon, not just on Shopify, but you should be doing it a in other countries where you [00:27:00] can, where it makes sense and you should be doing it on different marketplaces.

And there are plenty. It gets complicated, so it's good to have partners, but you know, Walmart is quite big, nowhere near as big as Amazon is, but it's for certain products it's worth doing. So I would look at it all. But if you're doing the US and you're doing Shopify, I would leverage Amazon and do at least Canada and Mexico, because you could do that pretty seamlessly without even having to put products in those countries, but you could market to those countries through their SBA mechanism.

So I think. Look at other marketplaces, ways to grow your business and think of cool, creative ways to protect your branding, get customers to come back to your site so you can have a conversation with them, so you can have a relationship with them. And I think by doing both, you're going to get the leakage.

Adam, that was a 

Claus Lauter: masterclass in how to double your revenue by using more than one channel. Thanks for that. Where can people find out [00:28:00] more 

Adam Shaffer: about you guys? Well, they could go to phelpsunited. com, P H E L P S. And you can hit me on LinkedIn at Adam Schaefer and find me on LinkedIn. I'm there and I respond.

So please look us up, say hello. And if you have questions, let us know. We'll answer 

Claus Lauter: them. I will put the links in the show notes as always. Then you just one click away. Thank you very much, Claus. Thanks so much for your time today and hope to talk to you soon. Thank you. Hey, Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast.

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Say goodbye to pressure and meet your new secret weapon, a remote marketing assistant. Easily scale up your business, boost productivity and reclaim your time. The game changer? Get your own marketing wizard at half the cost. Visit smart ecommerce marketing. com and discover the magic. Check out the link in the show notes now.

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