Fighting Amazon on Their Own Terms…and Winning

Can Amazon be beaten on their own terms? Chad Annis is one of the very first people to buy an Amazon business from Quiet Light. He’s also one of the first to demonstrate that you can do so successfully. Chad is joining us today from his RV where he is truly living the entrepreneurial dream, traveling all over the country, running his business, and never having to sit in a cubicle.

Chad is the Founder & CEO of Market Defence, a company specializing in cleaning up brands and making their Amazon presence truly profitable. After seeing a brand that he purchased a few years ago as passive side income – a top seller in the Amazon space – fall to the Amazon Direct machine, he took steps to learn how to fight the machine. He started developing a set of techniques to help brands out-Amazon Amazon. Chad proposes a team of experts who can get the brand and reputation on track simply by using Amazon’s rule system to their advantage.

Episode Highlights:

• Find yourself a group of people who know what they’re doing. They are all out there and they are good at what they do.
• It can take less than 90 days to get your business “clean” and from there it can be really profitable to be on Amazon.
• Market Defense comes in, cleans up a brand, tweaks the marketing, and gets the product catalog back into the control of the brand.
• Chad’s team of legal experts, ex-amazonians, and marketing experts have made his techniques so successful that fortune 50 companies are knocking on his door.
• When a brand gets above the 70k per month mark Amazon starts calling, wooing and convincing owners that sales will grow more once part of the Amazon retail model.
• Chad advises against selling first-party direct to Amazon retail as brands can lose control of catalog and pricing.
• If you want optimal control over your product, go 3rd party.
• When it comes to inventory in 3rd party, the brand has complete surveillance over when and how much of a product is made available to Amazon.
• Chad also shares his top tips for avoiding leaky products.
• People are afraid of the ever-changing e-commerce climate but those who have learned how to be nimble in that environment have a market advantage.

Transcript

Chad: Find yourself a group of people who know what they’re doing. They’re all out there. There’s a lot of Amazonians who come out of Amazon who are really good. They’re not cheap, but they’re really good at what they do. You’re gonna spend some money upfront in the first 60 to 90 days to get it clean or get it right. After that, it becomes extremely profitable to be on Amazon and under third party.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast with Joe Valley and Mark Daoust since 2007. Quiet Light Brokerage has been helping thousands of online entrepreneurs realize their dream of buying and selling online businesses and now we’re bringing all the knowledge our team has acquired straight to you. No matter your niche or industry, these lessons, tips, and strategies will help you build, grow, acquire, or sell your online businesses better. And now here’s Joe and Mark.

Joe: Hey Mark, how you doing today?

Mark: I’m doing great. How are you Joe?

Joe: I’m good, I’m good. I understand you had Chad Annis on the podcast.

Mark: Yeah. Chad is one of the very first people to buy an Amazon business from Quiet Light and one of the first to really show us that you can actually successfully buy and transfer ownership of an Amazon business. He was a bit of a trailblazer for us and he reached out to me a few weeks ago after listing to the podcast and said “hey, if you want to have somebody on, I’d be more than happy to join the podcast.” I said “let’s do it, lets talk.” We jumped on the call and it’s an interesting setup if you guys are listening to this through a podcast. I would recommend taking a look at the YouTube video because he’s doing this from his RV. He and his wife had been traveling in their RV for months. They’re basically permanent RVers and absolutely living the dream. The conversation was fascinating.

Joe: That doesn’t doubt me that he’s doing it from his RV. Chad, again Pioneer, he not only is being very, very success now at the Amazon business model but he’s crazy successful outside of Amazon altogether. To have him as a guest and share his experience and expertise just as an entrepreneur I think is fantastic.

Mark: Yeah. I think what people are going to like about this episode is this. When you think about going up against Amazon or when you think about selling any product on Amazon, most people do it with a bit of a weary eye towards Amazon. “Oh no, what happens if they shut me down” or “how am I gonna protect against competition” or “how am I gonna fight all of these different things.”

First of all Chad is smart, but what Chad has done is he looked at all the rules of Amazon, he’s looked at the Terms of Service and he’s realized these rules, yeah they could hurt at some point, but they’re both a shield and also a sword. He fights Amazon on certain things and he’s winning in a lot of these regards as well. He’s able to use their Terms and Conditions to protect his business and to grow his business on Amazon. He’s now taken it so far where Fortune 50 companies are hiring him to help clean up their brand on Amazon. It’s a fascinating conversation because most people I talk to when it comes to Amazon they think “well if Amazon were ever to come after me, I’d just go away” and he said “oh no, forget that. I’m gonna go and fight them because they laid out the ground rules clearly. We’re gonna use their system to our advantage.” That’s exactly what he’s doing.

Joe: Lets just jump right to it. There’s not much I can add to that because that right alone is fascinating. Let’s go and see what he has to say.

Mark: Alright. Here we go. Alright hey Chad, thanks for coming on the show. I see that you’re in an RV and you’re traveling around the country right now.

Chad Yes. Yes. It’s part of the advantage of being in the ecomm world where you can, as long as you’ve got a good connection, you live a lifestyle that you want versus showing up in a suit and a tie and in a cubicle. Nobody wants to do that. But thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Mark: Yeah. You’re truly living the entrepreneur lifestyle and as you know Chad and I know a lot of our listeners know, we often have our guests introduce themselves and tell a little bit about themselves. But I’m gonna actually have a little preamble here because, Chad, you bought a business from us a few years ago. We won’t talk about the business itself too much or give away too many details. But you bought a business from us a few years ago and you were one of the first people that we worked with that was successfully transferring to Amazon stores and going after that type of business and not being afraid to really figure out the problems behind doing that. I think that sets up a good theme for what we’re gonna be talking about. First of all, thanks for that, because it really –

Chad Yeah.

Mark: … did opened up a lot of things in the industry for a lot of people, but also it’s gonna setup a theme for this discussion.

Chad Sure.

Mark: Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself now. I’ll shut up and let you talk a little bit.

Chad My name is Chad Annis. I’m the Founder and CEO of a company called Market Defense. It used to a top 2/10th, 1/10th of one percent reseller in the Amazon space in prestige beauty mostly. It was the traditional 3P seller. 7 to 8 million a year in business with Amazon. We had a good dot com. I bought the business really for lifestyle, passive income. Do a little bit of work with it but it had been around for a few years anyway.

Went to the largest trade show in the country. Ended up doing a lot of good business. At the end of that I noticed that there were four people from Amazon walking around going “go direct”, handing out cards “go direct, go direct.”

I didn’t think anything of it at the time but about 90 days after that the height of me going “hey, this is going well. I’m getting a lot of business”, we started seeing some decline and by the end of that 90 days I had lost 41 percent of my business to Amazon direct.

So I had a couple of choices. I could fold it up, sell it for half of what I had paid for it, because it was gone and I couldn’t fight Amazon and who can, or I can figure out why Amazon was winning and we were losing. I set about finding some of the better people in the industry, because I was smart to know what I didn’t know. I hired under consultancy, pretty modest amounts of money initially, some of the better people of the names I could top. Everyone would probably know two or three of them. I got not only an education from them but their Rolodex and some help and whatever I could do for them, I would do for them. We started a friendship I guess and I sought out the kind of people that feel like Amazon is being too heavy handed. It takes a certain type of person to want to partner with you. I ended up developing a set of techniques where we basically out-Amazoned Amazon with brands.

Most of the brands we dealt with were prestige luxury brands who didn’t want to see their products discounted, didn’t want to see their product with 70, 80, 90 resellers on it, winding the buy box all the way down to two percent margins and whoever can outlast or win the cheapest amount of business wins. We developed a program where we go in and we clean up a brand’s presence on Amazon.

What does that mean? We manage the account, we help market the account, but most importantly we get their catalog back under their control. So they own their own catalog through brand registry. They own their own catalog through some legal ways that are proven that you just can’t take a persons, a brands image or name and market on top of it, and say we are as good as X or as good as Y, and then we do some legal work. What I found was no one wanted to partner with me if I said “hey, pay me a fee.” I tried that for a few months and nobody really wanted to do that. I thought to myself in for a penny, in for a pound. Why don’t I clean the brand up myself. Pay for the brands cleanup, in exchange for a two or three year contract. That got everyone’s attention because they knew we were aligned.
Now my sales funnel’s completely full. I can’t get to the amount of business that I’ve got now. I’ve got other people in the industry who are logistics people, pure marketing people, coming to me going “oh my gosh, you guys are doing some phenomenal work. How do you get them cleaned up?” The average brand for us wins 90 to 95 percent of the buy box on their own catalog at full price. Needless to say our brands love us. We give them back all the control on Amazon. Amazon tends not to like us very much, but because their Terms of Service are what they are they try to use it as a sword, we use it as a shield, and sometimes we use it as a shield, and they use it as a sword. We play that game back and forth. I’ve got a good team. It’s got some legal in it. It’s got some ex-Amazonians in it. We’re doing some good business.

Mark: Alright. I want to unpack a little bit of this here for people here and go all the way back to after you bought the business, again in the health and beauty space. It was a fairly significant business. We’ve talked about it before. I know you and I have talked at [inaudible 00:08:51] show and a few other shows before and talked about how Amazon can be friend and foe at the same time. Tell me a little bit about the going direct. What is Amazon doing here that caused you to lose 40 percent of your sales and what are some of the tell tale signs that somebody might be in danger of having the same thing happen to them.

Chad What we discovered is most people who get to some scale, 30, 40, 50,000 a month in business on Amazon and up are not really on Amazon’s radar. Until they get to 80 to 100,000 a month in Amazon sales, total sales, do they start getting [inaudible 00:09:29] by Amazon. Some less, some more. Around that 70, 80, 90,000 mark you should start expecting to get emails and phone calls from an Amazon rep saying “hey, why don’t you come to vendor central.” Here’s what we’ve discovered too. They make it sound incredibly lucrative. We’ll take care of all your gating problems. We’ll take care of your math issues. We’ll do all of this and that.

When you read their 18-20 page vendor central contract it doesn’t say what they said. The other issue and all you have to do is ask a rep or anyone who comes to you and says “hey, we’d like to maybe talk to you about going direct”, is “will you maintain full pricing on my brand” and they will do the ubbida, ubbida, ubbida. There’s one tell tale sign. Number two, will you limit the sales of our product to just the shores of the United States? There are some beauty brands that have prescription stuff in them and they’ll get into some legal trouble if it ends up in Germany. Amazon won’t do that. There’s a few other tell tale signs. That’s just a quick, down and dirty, if you’re in the beauty space.

If you’re in the electronic space you ask them what are you going to do for me without me paying for it to get me in the top two rows of search terms? Do I own my own search terms? For instance, we have a brand called Beautyblender and Beautyblender is a twenty dollar makeup sponge and it’s the number one product in its category. It does over $200,000 dollars a month in business on average on Amazon and we owe 95 percent of that buybox for that. They constantly have knockoffs going in and using their name or better than Beautyblender. You ask Amazon “can you knock all that off?” When you start digging and peeling away the layers and asking questions, which is what a good entrepreneur should do and not just get the pixy dust sprinkled in your eyes about “oh I’m getting Amazon attention and they’re saying this and they’re saying that.” Don’t listen to what they say. Listen to what they do.

I have a Fortune 50 company we’re in talks with right now who have spent the last year vetting Amazon and four lawyers within that group told me directly Amazon did not put in their contract what they told us. Why? Amazon loves to have these verticals, four or five different verticals where the sales group is not the management group is not the legal group, and each one of those cannot pull a lever inside their system. You would think that the person who’s calling you who’s your rep would say “yeah, I’ll get that handled for you.” They’ll literally say to you “well, that’s a legal issue. I can’t handle it” or “that’s a ticket issue or complaint issue. I can’t handle that.” You’ve got a pure sales person who just wants your brand so that they can grab that margin, who literally doesn’t have any authority inside the Amazon system to affect a ticket, to affect a change and they do that on purpose. I’ve seen it way too many times for it not to be so.
They also do things like move people around in a category. If you establish some sort of relationship with a category manager or someone, within nine months to a year they intentionally move them around so that they don’t have these tight relationships. So Amazon’s stated goal of being the everything store to everyone at the lowest prices continues to be their goal. I hope that answers the question.

There’s some specifics with things like 1P you get 60 to 90 day terms, net 30/2 percent. I’ve never seen Amazon in my experience and I’m not saying it’s not true, pay in the 60 days. They always take a few extra days. That’s a negative. They have pretty onerous clauses that say you allow us to order whatever we want, you give us very long terms, but if the product doesn’t sell you have to pay for it to be returned to your dock at your expense. That’s called RTV, forced RTV’s. Those are the things that a brand, if it’s led by a true sales guy gets very excited about, but when you look at it from a business perspective you could end up getting a large 100, $200,000 dollar purchase order, they sell through $50,000 dollars worth in 90 days and you end up with a $150,000 dollars worth of product back on your dock. A lot of effort went into those PO’s. 1P gives Amazon control. 3P gives the brand control. There’s a whole set of tools that the 3P folks have that 1P don’t have.

Mark: And 1P 3P being?

Chad 1P is vendor central selling directly to Amazon itself, either through retail or wholesale. 3P being what I bought, which was a third-party reseller account, where you go in and you duke it out in the buy box with other people who may or may not have that same skew and as everyone knows, it’s a chase to the bottom in a lot of those cases where mature, well-known brand … pick a brand … I’ll just use Nike for instance … it becomes more about how you can negotiate better pricing with your supplier to literally got to beat them up for the last penny. Then you give up all those pennies because Amazon ends up 15 percent referral fee and depending upon the price of the product, a 5 to 15 percent FBA fee. They get to eat 25 percent minimum on every dollar, whereas you may end up with 3, 4, 5 percent. That didn’t seem right to me and we’ve flipped that completely where the brands are actually making more money through 3P than they were through 1P.

Mark: Okay. Very good. Right. Again, we’ve covered a lot of ground with this so far. I had an Amazon lawyer on a few episodes ago and some of the feedback that we got back from that show was “wow, this is scary stuff.” Because there’s terms, it’s confusing legal work.

Chad Yeah.

Mark: The prospect of somebody, even somebody doing 80 to 100 K per month. That’s a decent amount of revenue to be doing per month.

Chad Sure.

Mark: The prospect of fighting Amazon seems so incredibly daunting to them. You seem to be looking at that in a different way and trying to say that the terms that Amazon has built up, it can be weapons for you and also protect you as well from some of the more onerous actions that Amazon is taking.

Chad What I’ve learned is resilience and persistence wins the day. We don’t do anything super spectacular. I’ve got a couple of secret weapons that I leverage. If I were to tell you all the IP behind those secret weapons it would seem like “well, that’s kind of a non-climactic thing.” It’s the combination of the software we use, the people that we use and the tactics that we use and really the number one thing is persistence.
You have to beat Amazon at Amazon’s game. They are relentless. You have to be more relentless. If you believe in your brand, if you believe that your brand has equity and you want to build that equity, Amazon’s the larges online channel there is. Period. Name me a 120, 130 billion dollar business that’ll grow 20-30 percent this year. Amazon will do that. You can literally get 20 percent growth with Amazon this year without really doing a whole lot. Let it grow on its own. How do you get into that system and control it? Number one, you got to be a third-party reseller, which is why Quiet Light is such a great place to go, because I know you guys sell brands and do a lot of 1P and that’s good, right. If you’ve got extremely high margins, 1P may make sense. If you’ve got a small crew, you’ve got the good brand, Amazon wants to take it on and they do all the work and you’re willing to give up those amounts of margin. Fine! It’s your choice. There’s a lot of brands who don’t have that sort of margin, who want to control their pricing.

Here’s an example, in our industry, in the beauty and health industry, 85-90 percent at the high and 90-95 percent at the low end, of the brands business comes from brick and mortar. That leave 5 to maybe 15 percent of their business is on Amazon. Yet we hear all the time “I got an appointment with Macy’s. I’ve got an appointment with Neiman Marcus. I’ve got an appointment with CBS. Name the brick and mortar. They go in and the first thing that that buyer says to them is “how come your Amazon presence is so bad? How come it’s discounted? How can you ask us to sell this item that’s maybe a $50 item for $50 dollars when it’s on Amazon for $35?”

These are real life, real world issues where a brand has gotten, maybe some critical mass, got some great attention, and instead of just handing over their brand to Amazon and say I can’t fight Amazon, there is an option. We’re an option. There’s a couple of other people that do what we do. We just took on a small brand that doesn’t even have $5,000 dollars a month in sales, but I like them enough that for a very small fee I’m keeping Amazon off of them and keeping all the diverters and discounters off so that they have a chance to grow that channel. We have other strategies that we can do. Yes, it’s mostly resilience or persistence. Find yourself a group of people who know what they’re doing. They’re all out there. There’s a lot of Amazonian’s who come out of Amazon who are really good. They’re not cheap but they’re really good at what they do and you’re gonna spend some money upfront in the first 60 to 90 days to get it clean or get it right. After that it becomes extremely profitable to be on Amazon and under third-party.

Mark: Under third-party. Okay. That’s fantastic. At what price point do you think it really makes sense for people to be looking at moving over to 3P system?

Chad [crosstalk 00:19:05]

Mark: You just threw on somebody at $5,000 a month but.

Chad No, from the beginning we’re taking brands that do $400,000 a month in sales and giving and setting up their own account. If we had done that with that brand at $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, it would be a lot easier to keep them clean.

My point is start third-party, learn, hire someone who knows Amazon who can file those tickets and can get you under brand registry, and do all the things to lock your brand down on Amazon, and then be very careful about who you distribute to. The biggest mistake I see a [inaudible 00:19:35] brand make is that they get over their ski’s a bit in wanting to get the sales from a large brick and mortar group or from a large retailer, and they too broad too fast and they can’t control their distribution and it’s inevitable that quote on quote “things fall off the truck” or a retailers cousins brothers sister ends up setting up an Amazon account and then all of a sudden you’ve got this great business in the brick and mortar side, but now all this product’s leaking out to Amazon. Why? Because it’s the largest online channel there is. People love it. Now you’ve got a product at $40 or $50 dollars in the store on Amazon shelves for $30 or $40 and your brick and mortar’s come back to you in 60 days and go “I can’t do this. What are you doing? Control it.” That’s what we do. We help them do that.
Mark: Yeah. I want to make a point here and just kind of pull this out because I think some people get scared about Amazon or they think or it’s an instable platform and there’s money to be made there but it’s unstable at its core. In traditional business world, in the regular business world we understand that there are hurdles and obstacles that need to be overcome in order to build a defensible business. Amazon is no different than that. There’s a ton of opportunity with it and when we hear all these things about how do you do this, how do you do that, how do you protect against competition on Amazon. It’s just a different playing field.

I think some people get so enamored by the fast growth of Amazon. You see it. You see a company just put a couple products up on Amazon and then within a year they’re pulling mid-six figures in revenues. Within a couple years they’re pulling seven figures of revenue and it’s that’s skyrocketing path. That part was easy. They get almost complacent about setting up the defenses early on. It’s just like anything else, you have to set up those defenses early on. Let’s talk a little bit about controlling that market place. What are some tips that you could … I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about people that are reselling product, that leaky products and people that might be having the problem of leaky products finding their way on Amazon. Also, the copycat products. People who have a brand, they’ve built something up, and now all of a sudden cheap copycat, but similar, at least similar enough products are flooding the market that aren’t as good as what you have, but they’re absolutely crushing your revenue. Let’s start first about leaky products and no, I don’t want you to give away all your secrets here, but give a couple of nuggets. What can people start –
Chad Yeah.

Mark: … looking at if they’re having that leaky product issue?

Chad Listen. I’m happy to give a lot of advice for free because it cost me several hundred thousand dollars to get to where I’m at, and I do not want to see people have to go down that path again.

Number one, be a third-party reseller. Do not sell to Amazon. The moment you do that, in their contract they state that you give the rights to your intellectual property, trademark, content, image in perpetuity. If they find it after you’ve stopped your relationship with them in gray market, they have the right to just put it up on their own website without your permission. That’s number one. Don’t do that. Be a third-party reseller.

Number two, brand registry 2.0 is probably your number one thing you want to do. Go in, register as your own brand. A lot of people don’t even know that they’ve got a brand registry. You go in, and you set up your images. You set up you IP, your trademark number. All of that gets done inside of Amazon. It takes about an hour if you’ve never done it before. Fifteen minutes if you’ve done it many times. Then go to work either hiring or doing it yourself, someone who knows how to do what’s called A plus listings. Why? Your image is a part of, and your name is a part of your trademark, and your IP. If you don’t have that locked down in the legal system … to your point, if you just put a product together, and you haven’t got a patent pending, or you don’t have a utility patent, or you don’t have a trademark or just the basic stuff a business needs, you’re dead on Amazon. You are literally gonna get the wolves coming in and going “look at the volume of that product and then oh, there’s no trademark or IP on it, I’m gonna knock it off” and in 60 days they can have product made and in the states ready to knock your product off. I don’t care if it’s a spatula, a pillow, an Iphone case, whatever you want to call it.

So third-party reseller, brand registry, make sure your IP is locked down, and then go to work learning how to put a ticket together in the Amazon system and say to Amazon “this guy over here is taking my image and using it on his listing.” Alright. If you’re a small guy it doesn’t take that long to learn that, and you just have to be relentless. You will get your first ticket denied. It’s like the social security administration. Just get your first cheque, request denied. You have to do it a second and a third time. Make notes of when, what time of day, what kind of wording was used, and there are examples in the marketplace of what this does.

The problem is what we learn, and the reason I have some very sophisticated in this phase, is that Amazon changes their Terms of Service and how they interpret them every three or four months to their benefit. A year ago what was orange is now red and tomorrow it’ll be blue because it suits Amazon to be that way. We have to be very nimble and scrappy about how we do this. Don’t get frustrated by the fact that I’m putting a ticket in for an image claim that’s my image, and it worked two weeks ago or two months ago and it doesn’t work now, you just have to figure out how to do it or hire yourself some people. If you’re small you’re just gonna have to do it yourself. Those are some really basic things that get you about 75 percent of the way you need to go.
The other part of it becomes control your distribution. Put into your contracts with the people you sell to outside of Amazon, you cannot sell on Amazon without my permission or any other online channel. If I catch you doing it, you have a one-strike or two-strike out policy. Don’t listen to these guys say “oh I won’t do it anymore” and they just change their name, and they keep doing it. Right. You’re chasing a whac-a-mole from Des Moines, Iowa PO box to a Tuscan, Arizona. It just becomes a nightmare. So distribution.

Put on your purchase orders … here’s a powerful one … put on all of your purchase orders to anyone that you sell to, not for sale on any online channels, especially Amazon, or something to that point, because a purchase order is a contractual legal document and if you confirm the purchase order with that customer, and you always want to confirm it, and you put on there not for resale on Amazon or any other online channel and then you find out that they put it on, they’re in violation, Amazon sees that, and they take them down. Now again, that doesn’t work all the time. It works most of the time. Make a material difference in your packaging. Make a material difference in the way you send your product up to Amazon. Put a sticker on it. Change the color. Change the size if you have that sort of capability.

One of the more sophisticated things that some of our larger brands are doing is they are investing in going through prep-facilities, distribution facilities, 3PL’s, that have the capability of ultraviolet inking every one of their number one or number two skews. You don’t have to ink every single one of your skews, but because the volume tends to be in the number one or number two skew, that’s where the diverters will go. They don’t want your tenth skew because there’s no volume there. There’s not enough there. Those distribution channels will, if they’re sophisticated enough will serialize basically your packaging, so you do test buys and then you find out “oh I sold that to Joe. Joe’s telling me he’s not selling to Amazon. Somehow Joe’s product that I’m selling to him is getting onto Amazon.” I could go on, but those are some five or six of the highest level things. It’s all in the execution Mark, right.

I can tell you I love this analogy … we can learn about Tiger Woods golf swing, what he wears, what he hits, how he works out, how many balls he [inaudible 00:27:32], but unless you can hit the ball like Tiger Woods, knowing everything there is to know about something is only like half the battle. Being able to execute and learning how to execute well, there’s the other half of the battle.

Mark: I mean that’s business 101 too. Everyone can have great ideas. It’s figuring out how to execute those ideas. I think there’s an opportunity here for people that are hearing this as well. Something stood out to me in the past three years. I was talking to an Amazon seller and we were talking about the difficulties of the marketplace or how difficult it was to compete with the changing environment and he immediately without even pausing said “I love it. I absolutely love the changing environment.” “But why? I mean it costs you money.” He said “because I’m gonna take the time and figure it out and I know my competitors aren’t.”
Chad It’s gonna have more good advantage immediately because he’s mentally decided that I want to play in this space. It’s the people that, the traditional brands that we deal with that think they’re gonna go and have ten year and fifteen year relationships that are just blown away by the fact that if you’re not nimble in this space, you’re dead.

Mark: Yeah. Let me ask you just a … I’m gonna wrap up with a very simple question here. Can Amazon be beat on their own terms when they’re –

Chad Absolutely.

Mark: … competing against you?

Chad We are out-Amazoning Amazon every single day. Even on the marketing side we are seeing for our brands, once you clean them up and get their buy box back in their control and their catalog in their control … think about it, if you put marketing dollars into Amazon and you don’t own your own catalog or buy box, what are you doing? You’re giving your gray marketers and diverters advertising money for their buy box. First, get your own buy box, your own catalog control.
We’re seeing 30 percent year over year growth when we do the marketing in the advanced way outside of the Amazon system. Back to the 1P, Amazon will drain you dry with Adspent. They just love taking your money. It’s a way for them to bump what margin they didn’t get out of you upfront. On a third-party platform you can spend as little as $300-$400 dollars a month and see major ROI on that. I’m the end all, be all to the Amazon world. I just know this space well enough that we’ve made enough mistakes that I know what not to do. When I do something it tends to be a little more high probability that it’s gonna work out.

Mark: Awesome. Alright. If people want to contact you with any questions and everything, what’s the best way to contact you?

Chad [email protected]. I have a website we just put up. It needs to be polished a bit but it’s there. It’s pretty good. Marketdefense.com. I will ask a few questions and if I can help anybody I’m happy to. I don’t want to get inundated obviously with becoming the guru for everyone. That’s your job right.

Mark: I hope not.

Chad But I’m happy to answer basic questions and be a resource for people. [email protected] is my email.

Mark: And we’ll link to that in our show notes on the Quiet Light Brokerage website. If you want to find that directly go over to Quiet Light Brokerage and click on podcast. Chad, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Chad [crosstalk 00:30:39].

Mark: It’s super fascinating stuff and –

Chad Yeah.

Mark: … I fear that with Amazon we’re gonna have a lot of people who hear this and think that’s too much work and they’re gonna take the easy money. I guess good for them, but for those that are listening and saying there’s an opportunity here, this is gonna be a super valuable episode. I hope people are listening and hearing that opportunity. Thanks. Thank you very much.

Chad We should do it again whenever you want. Thanks.

Mark: Sounds good.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to another episode of the Quiet Light podcast. For more resources from this episode head over to quietlight.com. If you’re enjoying the show please leave a rating and review in Itunes. This helps share the messages from the show with more business owners like you.

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