Emmanuel: Welcome back to the Eleyae System podcast. I'm Emmanuel Eleyae, your host, CEO of Eleyae Systems, where we build systems that build brands online and help Shopify sellers go from six figures a year to seven figures a year to seven figures a month without wasting a fortune on ad spend or working themselves to death to do it. And I'm joined today by Neil Twa today, who's gonna help us figure out why we should even bother or consider dealing with Amazon and putting a lot of focus and energy into that. I'm excited to talk to him today because a lot of us don't do that. We focus on our own proprietary products that we built, that is nothing else is like that on the market. And we sell it through our own store, but our own supply chain and do all that heavy lifting. And he's gonna help us explain. So Neil, why don't you kick us off with just kind of who you are and what you're all about.
Neil Twa: Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I'll try to leave out the details that are boring or that my mom finds interesting. And we'll get down to the nitty gritty here so we can get into the meat of this bone here.
Emmanuel: Thank you. Sounds great.
Neil Twa: So for those who are paying attention, obviously I know that you guys are more focused on DTC and the question you might have in your mind is why listen to somebody who's talking about Amazon. Um, they take our, you know, this, they steal our, that they close your account for this reason, I don't have control over that. I can't bring, you know, my certain assets. I can't get my emails. I can't get other things. Let me explain why I attack Amazon first and then move into DTC channels, whether it's TikTok, Shopify, retail, wholesale, or other channels of distribution and wholesale. The end result is, you know, we are an incubator at Voltage, meaning we pull up systems and processes, we plan, we focus, we validate products to brands. And then as we know that they take on traction and gain innovation in the marketplace over invention, which a lot of people think you have to do in the e-commerce world, you don't, you just innovate. Okay. Uh, then we understand that would being a 28% market share on the platform, larger than the next three in line, including Walmart, that there is 150 million buyers wanting to buy in 30 seconds or less. So it solves for me, one of the major problems with people who are trying to gain exposure to their brand. They're trying to gain more sales. And that is there are more people to sell and buy on that platform, which is a challenge for a lot of people who don't have a deep experience in say Facebook ads, Google ads, TikTok ad, or X now or any other place including even SEO or organic search term traffic, which can take a little bit of time to build up on your store. And there's a lot of technical optimizations that have to occur, usually in the DTC framework of getting your website, your conversions, your add to cart and everything together. And you got to deal with the pixels. And then, you know, I've had my Facebook account closed down for running ads too close to the sun. And so those problems exist on both platforms. So at the end of the day, you sort of have to make a choice as to which you feel your lowest barrier of entry and your fastest speed to revenue gets down to, because at the end of the day, without first sales, first revenue, don't actually have a business. So we got to start on the fundamentals of business, what I call the four pillars, another profit growth scale, and then exiting the company. And so by channel kind of thing, an omnichannel kind of thing at the end of the day, no matter where you start. But I just decided that it was easier and years ago when I got involved in this because I had a background in latent semantic search engines. I did that in the Armok research days when I spent time at IBM, where we were building knowledge systems and AI systems. And I know everybody's so uh, flabbergasted by AI today, but I used to see some of the things that I could tell you about we were doing in the past. Um, so just now starting to see that roll into the mainstream, but people forget that Amazon even components of the marketing engines of Facebook and Google are all AI driven now, right? So if we understand that, then we just understand these are certain tools and in marketing, certain tools. Why we all sell products from my world. We need to understand we first, we sell listings, we sell value. We sell the problem reaction and solution necessary to move that product to the customer as quickly as possible. And since there's so much traffic and buying power on Amazon, I start there because it solves one of the bigger problems, which is getting people to see your product. Eyeballs on the offer, big problem. And do it in such a way where I know how to get that traffic. And I've been able to teach people how to do it and spend more than a decade focused on building up the traffic in SEO engine. It becomes what I coined almost automated income with FBA. So as long as we understand where the traffic is coming from and how to get access to it, that's the biggest problem most people need to solve in order to give from growth to scale, right? So to give them growth to scale is obviously more traffic at higher conversion rates. It's just kind of a simple thing. In the world of e-commerce, it's find a product and sell a product. It just gets down to kind of what mechanics make sense for you. And a long time ago, the mechanics of the engine and SEO search engine and that stuff made sense because my background was there. And I saw Amazon being basically a product driven search engine unlike a Google, you know, at that point, which was info based products, this was physical e-commerce products. They took a, you know, info product engine and turned it into an e-commerce delivery. So at the end of the day, that's still what it is. And if we understand our role properly, we understand our role as marketers and solvers and solutions in the minds of the customers, we'd actually deliver products second. It's the second thing we actually do. The product just completes the transaction and makes it legit. So it really matters more about how you sell the product and market the product between different products than the actual product itself. So many people get hung up on, you know, does the product do a good job? Well, at the end of the day, it should do a good enough job that you get your four and five star reviews, whether it's on your Shopify platform, it's on Google or somewhere else, or whether it's on Amazon reviews that you get your good reviews, so we got to create a good product. It's almost a no, it's almost common sense these days. You have to create a good, good product. You can't just go in and sell me two products anymore and try to, you know, skirt the market or convince them of other things. They're getting much more powerful in their ability to become consumers with education and driven education. And we're getting less fooled by certain marketing tactics today as a society. So really you just gotta kind of go in with the point blank. Here's the product and how do we know that's changed so much? I mean, you can just look at it as a global culture. There's that lady that's pumping through like 14 million a day by just simply pulling the product up and naming it and then pushing the next product. Maybe some of you have seen that. Um, she's on a Chinese live stream and she just pushes the product. I don't know if you've seen that Emmanuel, but she's just literally live streaming from a warehouse with a digital screen behind her and they throw her a box, she shows the box, she names the price and she moves to the next product and it's just a pipeline. And she sold like $14 million in one day doing that.
Emmanuel: No, what is that? Let's dig into that. Is, are they her products or other people's products?
Neil Twa: So other people's products. She's just an influencer, right? And they're just shoving boxes in front of her. She names it, puts it in front of the camera, tells her what the prices and shoves that it's incredible. Right. It just proves one simple concept. People want to buy, they don't want to be sold. So marketers tend to indirect a consumer, even on Amazon, they spend too much time trying to sell the customer, not enough time, just making sure they, they reinforce the value statement to gain the reaction required so that they get the solution they want in two days or less, right? From any three PL on Shopify or whatever, or an Amazon's two day or less shipping from their warehouses through their fulfilled by Amazon channel, right? So for me, what I want to focus on is not the logistics, the conversions and the optimizations and other things, because there's a lot of mechanics in there that people get caught up in. There's little things that can fall apart. Amazon's a billion, billion dollar split tested machine. Then they do it continuously. So with that, then I focus less on the mechanics and I focus more on that problem reaction and solution. So for me, that's why I think it's important. I also know it's important because Omnichannel is now the way to go. Omnichannel was the way to go a year or two ago when I was speaking and many others were speaking about you need to get multi-channel platforms the same way you don't have a business until the first sale is made and generates that first revenue, do you not have a business? In e-commerce in the world, we've been talking for a while now about not having you know, multiple channels is not actually having a three-prong business model of, of continuity and being able to overcome those problems. If you're on DTC you need another channel. If you're on Amazon, you need another channel. You need a two or three channel opportunity. If you're on both of those, you should be on TikTok Shop right now. So you should have more than one point of connectivity. I particularly will talk about this in a little bit. Like TikTok Shop right now over Shopify, and I'm sure I'm gonna piss a lot of people off saying that, because it has a lot of organic traffic. It has a ton of organic traffic. And because it's a product management just in time system for social media that allows them basically to click from influencer to product, to shipping, it's reduced the barriers of people's ability to purchase quite dramatically, making it right now a product discovery platform and even a brand discovery platform. So if you're on, not expecting to spend a whole lot of time on TikTok shop, you should at least plant your flag there as quickly as possible and get your brand on there and get your products on there because somebody else is gonna do it before you and you know how first to market works, right? So if you don't have Amazon in the same way, there's found money over there from a giant organic engine, which we know from spending between 50 to 500,000 a month, an ad spend will say anywhere between 15 to 20%, okay, of that ad spend from Facebook, AdWords, et cetera, will spill over to Amazon, find the product, and buy someone else's if they can't find yours. So if they can find your product, you can glean 500 to a million dollars in sales if you're a multi-seven figure seller. I've got a couple brands that we've taken through in the last year and pulled them between 80 to 100,000 in a month by simply just making sure that they did the right things to put their brand in front of the customers on Amazon, to actually buy the products that they couldn't find that were theirs when they did all the media spend, right? And so we've captured back, you know, 15, 18% of those sales. Uh, they were lost to Amazon to other competitors that were paid for on a direct to marketing channel. So we need to understand why the Omni channel of Amazon's and powerful, because if they can't find it on TikTok shop, they go to Amazon. If they can't find it on Facebook, AdWords, or et cetera, then they don't know if you're true, then they're going to go over to Amazon and see if they can find you there. So it's becoming kind of the de facto standard of e-commerce, not necessarily the discovery or trending engine anymore. Like it was a few years ago. It's becoming more of the place to buy stuff because I know it's a comfortable place and I can navigate it and I know my refunds. I know my way around it. So that's kind of a long-winded answer to your question to a degree, but, but it's yeah, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
Emmanuel: Sure. A couple things I've, sorry, go ahead. No, a couple things I've pulled out of there, basically your buyers are there. It is a split-tested solution with billions in billions of split-testing. They know how to sell it, and it's omni-channel. If you're not there, you need to expand out to another channel to find your customers. Otherwise, your competitors will find you there.
Neil Twa: Yep. That's right. They will because Amazon is a top ranking domain authority for anybody who understands a little bit of basics in the SEO world, which you should, if you're on Shopify channel, you should understand how to get traffic organically. So with Amazon being the same domain authority or as high as Google, they will rank your products for you. Once you reach a certain levels of sales in Amazon, your product listings will show up for top search keywords in Google. Okay. So you'll plant your flag over there without having to even understand how search engine optimization works. take that and pick up those top keywords, you start to see ranking and move them over to YouTube and start making videos around those top keywords, all right? Or start marketing AdWords towards those targeted keywords that are search terms or customer terms that are highly targeted. Now you're on the three top search engines for organic rankings across the interwebs, right? Do that well and you're creating a juggernaut of backlinks and targeted keyword traffic for basically funneling through Amazon. And Later on, it actually makes it easier for them to discover your Shopify or TikTok shop if you go the other direction. So I'm encouraging people who are on Amazon, go the other direction too. All of my clients and stuff have to go the other direction. I happen to be taking them to a TikTok shop this year after three months in literally beta testing and going out into the market, the first brand, Guru Nanda just crashed through a million units moved. So they moved an enormous amount of product in the last four months. And it's very important to understand the power and that engine that that's creating and be able to take your opportunities to go do it too. And then because it is an SEO search engine traffic, there's obviously the viral component of TikTok ads. You need to be getting your store on Shopify. It's really not hard to do from Shopify. There's literally an integration button with TikTok to go over and just boop, you know, put all your product and listings into TikTok shop and get it set up and plant your flag. It's not complicated.
Emmanuel: Good. And one of the things we'll get into that in a second, but I definitely want to hit on something you said that was powerful. You're in the top three search engines for SEO for your brand. Because I get a lot of questions around SEO. How do I SEO? SEO, what you just described is kind of the modern form of SEO. And I know you've been a player for a while and SEO has gone through a lot of iterations and changes. It's not what it used to be. Come up with a content farm, throw a bunch of blog posts up and boom, you rank. So what you said was yeah.
Neil Twa: A lot of them. A lot of it. Get off the blog networks and do all that other nonsense. If you're going to stay organic and get past it, you'll Google's panda updates and all this other nonsense that's happened over the last decade or 12 years or so. Um, the.
Emmanuel: Would you say that is a faster way to skyrocket up the rankings to get to that? That's a, I'm not aware of this skyrocketing, but if a way to do SEO in a simpler fashion for a brand versus like the, the old school technical SEO type people where you're putting out great content on these platforms that is ranking, is this a, what were those top three again?
Neil Twa: So if I'm on Amazon, okay, and I'm hyper-targeted relevancy between customer, my product, my image, my price point, my description, and my conversion rates, okay, what are on Amazon called unit session rates in the conversion world, that's a conversion rate, right? So at the end of the day, if I have those high variables, Amazon's going to rank me in Google because of the domain authority that my listings, even my reviews, and even the questions people ask on my listing get ranked inside of Google. They get picked up really fast and they get ranked for the keywords that are targeted for my buyers. Okay. Um, Google is working very closely with Amazon. In fact, Amazon buys a ton of AdWords traffic. Uh, as of the last quarter, Google, uh, is kind of allowing more Amazon interaction, which means that they've actually become one of the largest buyers of YouTube ads. Uh, now, so Amazon's marketing your products for you when you do this correctly. So not only can you get the benefit of their SEO traffic across Google, it can even bounce over to YouTube and do a great job and they'll start picking up the marketing for you. So they helped me become a marketing engine beyond even what I can do, which empowers SEO and pay traffic and other things, even email marketing and things they'll do. So with that engine, I don't have to be an expert in SEO. I just know that if I focused on what is good SEO inside of Amazon, that will translate backwards into other platforms. And after, you know, 11 years of doing this, As you said, it has changed dramatically over the years, how impactful that can be. Because Amazon has turned into a very giant, trustworthy product engine and a research engine for product purchasing. And again, with 28% of the market share, they've become the trusted behemoth. If you're not on them or taking advantage of them, you need to get on them. It's found money and this year is an opportunity for you to really open that other channel, diversify your business and catch the additional traffic that you're missing that simply isn't finding your product and brand and you paid for it already. And now they're buying someone else's product. Right. That it's just stupid not to do that.
Emmanuel: Right. And so, so I'm sold. You got me. Like even that alone is a major reason. The amount of money Amazon's putting into maximizing discoverability for products is huge. And so I just need to put my brand in. But there's a risk that I don't do it correctly. Right. Correct.
Neil Twa: Oh, it's huge. It's huge. There's always a risk you don't do anything correctly and doing nothing at all is your ultimate opportunity cost. Doing it somewhat better than nothing and even failing up is better than doing nothing at all at the end of the day.
Emmanuel: True. And how would you recommend if I want to do it correctly, if I want to get the best opportunity to succeed when I go on Amazon or when I refocus and put my energy into Amazon, what are your thoughts or how do you advise people on how to make sure you're getting the most out of your Amazon presence? Yep.
Neil Twa: Take your top sellers, right? And look at them backwards into Amazon and do some quick product research on Amazon and determine who's the competition and who are the sellers of those brands, products already on Amazon. Most likely they already exist. So step one is to do your competitor analysis for existing products you have there on the top on your DTC brand now, and ensure that you've got price point matching, information matching, data matching capabilities but on a number of tool sets or just do it visually by going in and researching it to determine where those price points are, where the product points are, and making sure you've got competitive opportunity in the market. It's actually good to have competitive opportunity. If you have some top sellers on Shopify, or your DC brand, and you go over to Amazon and they're not there, well, Amazon can sort of help you become a brand discovery platform. You're just gonna have, it's gonna take a little longer, okay, to become the competition that drives competition through that marketplace, if competition doesn't already exist on the platform. It's kind of the opposite thinking of what a lot of people think you should actually do. What I don't want is saturation. So if I move my top product ideas over to Amazon and I find, okay, this kind of looks like saturation, I did a search, uh, let's just say high level for a battery bank or okay, and I find all these products on the first page that look almost exactly like they're lower price points, really hard to tell the difference in the value. I'm probably in a saturation situation with that product, which means I'd need to innovate it or move another product that is less saturated in the market. If it's more competition driven or higher competition, that's actually a good factor. And of course, second to that, I got to go buy the numbers. I got to make sure that if I do have that opportunity and competition or even the high competition is there and I can rank myself in position with them because opportunity is there and customers are buying it very important, then I have to make sure the numbers work. I need to make sure that I understand FBA fee cost, shipping costs, your warehousing products within Amazon's opportunity to move those products in. So you need to know your numbers correctly. Uh, your fees, your turnover fees, your return fees for defects, your PPC marketing fees, you have to make sure that you really understand what does it cost to sell a unit of product on Amazon's platform. Okay. The average fee across most of the brand's platform is about 15%. It can be higher. It can be a little bit lower in other places, but those products are typically lower in price points, so I would also not recommend anybody sell anything less than $50 on Amazon anymore. Okay. There is a lot of volume movement. There's a lot of gurus talking about revenues, but there's not a whole lot of profitability. We talk about products 50 to 150 in retail price point on Amazon. Now they were actually the top sold products in 2023 fourth quarter. If you go look it up, I know people's brains again, think the more volume you move, the more money you're going to make. And that's actually a fallacy. Okay. It's not only a logical fallacy in business, but it actually doesn't work in the fundamentals and the numbers and you can prove that by doing it and then go discover your PNL is upside down. So we actually move products that are 50 to 150. So our net profits, okay, what we actually keep, what falls out the bottom when all those fees have been, and if you're in a marketing situation on direct to consumer and you don't understand any of the language I'm saying right now, you need to get those fundamentals down, okay? You need to know what it costs you to move one unit of your product through your Shopify channel, customer ads, you know, and cost of goods and shipping costs to last mile to the customer. You got to do the same thing and run those same numbers on Amazon. It's very important you do that to ensure your profitability so that you can market. Amazon has its 15% fee. It also has, what we have is about a 15% fee built into our PPC costs. So people say, well, you know, Amazon takes these fees and it's really costly to sell. But if you have to acquire a customer in today's world with CPMs the way they are on most marketing channels nowadays, if you can't acquire a customer, as Dan Kennedy says, you don't have a business. So you're going to have to acquire those customers on Amazon too. Okay. And that is both a cost, but it's also an opportunity cost when done correctly to move yourself above the other brands and become a serious competitor. So when you know the numbers and you know you can run PPC on Amazon correctly to acquire those customers, you can do it profitably, but understand in any brand building situation, I think you know this, Emmanuel, you need more than one product. A hero product isn't gonna really cut it anywhere, okay? You need a brand that's multiple products selling across multiple SKUs, rounding out all of the. Again, problem reaction and solutions your customers want and need from you could be gear, accessories, add-ons, more of the same product. You need to be in a position in Amazon where you add more SKUs into that system. By doing that, you widen the base of your pyramid of search engine growth and brand growth that attracts more people into millions of page one keywords. It's very important you understand it's a search driven engine. Okay, if you have one product and a few set of keywords, you can't expect to make eight figures on Amazon. It's not how it works, okay? You would need other outside influence, traffic, marketing, social media, et cetera, to even pull something like that off. But you can do it on Amazon if you widen the base of your product scope. If you pull up more page ones, more keywords. So for those of you who are looking at moving some products from that DTC world over to Amazon, you wanna put as many SKUs as you can that you know are selling from your current portfolio on Amazon. Round that brand out very quickly with as many SKUs as you can. that will simply give you the opportunity to have more search engine traffic. That make sense? Yeah, so from there then brand discovery is part of what will happen for you in that process of Amazon figuring out where to put you and where your ranking comes in. And as your BSR or bestseller ranking on Amazon goes down from the 100,000s and down to the 50,000 and down to the 10,000, you are now not only being discovered, but people are buying your product more and more, which means they're seeing more and more of your other products. It's very important to understand that because If you're in the DTC world and it probably tell you something you already know, then you need a customer lifetime value metric, you need to understand what your average order value is. And you need to understand what it takes for you to achieve those numbers at higher value so you can spend more money on marketing and then you can spend more, you know, in the backend of Klaviyo and SMS and whatever else you're using. Uh, direct mail is great by the way, if people aren't doing direct mail a day, you gotta get more on direct mail, especially in the 18 to 35 year old group, they're the largest one.
buying off a direct mail right now. So if you push that forward, you've got to have that other value, that lifetime value, that customer lifetime value. And here's the thing, I base it on Amazon. And if you're going to get started, the next bullet point on the list is that you need to understand Amazon, its own metrics for its 150 million plus prime members is $1,000 on average over a 12 month period for each of those customers. Okay, do the math on that. If I'm selling a hundred dollar product, you need to sell it 10 times to those people, to one person to get that done. You see the problem with the Hero product? But if I have additional products that value that out so that they could buy my products or even subscribe and save additional product purchases over time, maybe every three months or maybe even every month, then I'm going to get closer to that 1000 CLTV and it should be targeted at 12 months. When you understand what you're getting into, when you understand first sale and customer acquisition to second, third, fourth, and fifth to equal $1,000 in customer lifetime value over 12 months. You now understand why you need a multiple brand, a multiple product brand strategy, say that correctly. So you have a lot of products widening that base, giving you the opportunity that this one person buys one product from you. They could buy up to 10 other variations, shapes, size, colors, gears, accessory, equal to $1,000 in 12 months. That's your opportunity. When you understand that, you really understand how to become the top 1% on Amazon. Okay, most sellers will go into with three to five SKUs. They find their one hero SKU and they kind of hang out in that for a long time. That's not how we work. We work on growth and scale. I've got some case studies that prove that some of my sellers have gone to class, uh, 5 million a month and nine months, okay, pushing this scale through this system and it has huge volume and run 7,800 units a minute on average last year. So there is a lot of product moving through this system. Right. So I, hopefully I'm answering your question and adding some bulletin in context to that for you.
Emmanuel: Yeah, some follow-ups on that. For $1,000 on average for each customer for every 12 months, is that on your listing? Is that on your seller account? Is that on your brand?
Neil Twa: It's on your seller account per customer. And you know that you could track them backwards through additional price points as they buy additional units from you. As you see them order different units, you can see them order one, you can see them order two, you can see them order the next product you got and the next product, and you kind of see how that customer's value is coming in for you.
Emmanuel: And is that a metric that's trackable that you can see in Amazon somewhere in your reports?
Neil Twa: Amazon doesn't have that particular metric defined yet, but just in the last month, they've opened what they call product opportunity explore, which is a huge data warehouse now that are finally revealing to us. It's been more than 10 years and they finally have started to give us opportunities for seeing where the brand market share product differentiation in the product opportunity explore, which is part of the seller dashboard. So we have to sign up to the pro seller dashboard, which is like 49 bucks a month. And in there, you'll get what's called the product opportunity explorer. It's a tool we use in combination with our green light process, our dashboard, our internal software system, to go out and look at where certain products are researched with market share, who are the top leaders and where are they currently setting with products and where they're at inside of Amazon's big filing system so that we know how to strategically come and slipstream into them. You know, like I was joking with you earlier, we're number two. I want to come in and be number two. I want them to take the arrows. And then before they realize that I'm going to just draft off of them and bam, I'm going to go around them and there's going to be no stopping me. So it just matters when that happens. Could be 90 days, could be 90 months. It's gonna happen at some point the longer we're in business competing with them. Three to five years on average in any business model is really what we should be looking at. I know like people went three to five months and three to five minutes, but real business is done in three to five years.
Emmanuel: And so if I'm someone listening to the podcast and I don't have that right now, how would I calculate this for myself to see if I'm close to that $1,000 on average for each customer for the total?
Neil Twa: So in simple terms, you'd go into your seller dashboard, you'd go down inside of Amazon's system and you'd look at the per skew purchases of a product and you can see the different customers and it will show you how many different products they've ordered from you. It's a slightly different metric, you might get a VA to help you out, you can export all that data and then go put it in the Excel and pivot tables for some of you geeks. You could throw it up to AI and ask it to help you with it and help you data compile that because AI is doing all that stuff now. But its system itself won't tell you that metric. You have to go compile that data for you.
Emmanuel: Great. And let's assume I do that. And let's say I hear this podcast, I listen to Neil's advice, I go attack that metric. And next year I've moved from 500 to $1,500 per customer per every 12 months. Where will I see the impact? How do I know, how does that help me? Where will I see the results of that progress? Is that my bestseller rankings? Is that my, what is the impact of improving that metric?
Neil Twa: Bottom line in your business because number one if you're doing it profitably Okay, and you're ensuring that every unit you sell has profit you will increase the profitability of your business Because once you acquire a customer in that system and they come back and buy something else from you It's a full organic sale I didn't pay for them to buy that second product or third product or fourth product if they are tied to my brand and they're Inside the system and the system is now showing them the product more. It's tracking them around the internet. It's giving them email It's bringing them back to my brand. I'm not paying for those additional purchases So what it's bringing to me is full price, full profit purchases for all those additional purchases that they made after the first time I acquired them. Similar to your world of direct marketing behind, you know, sales of SMS, Klaviyo's follow-up system, email, follow-up, direct mail, or anything else you do to reach that customer after you've already got them acquired in the system. You have to know those numbers because if you got a $29.99 product on your Shopify store and it takes you $69 to acquire that customer and you're like, crap, I can't keep doing that because it's not profitable. and you've ever said that, then you're missing the rest of this conversation we're having right now. The main point and the main thing to concern yourself with is, could I acquire a customer? And if the answer is yes, then it is now, how do I make them profitable over a longer time? And that is the answer to your question is more profit over a longer time from more interactions with them, equatable up to $1,000 in purchase price from my brand over a year period and not somebody else's.
Emmanuel: Got it. And you had mentioned though that that's how folks get into the top 1% of Amazon. So that's what I was wondering is that that's a metric Amazon is looking at. So it sounded like almost some insider sauce.
Neil Twa: It's looking at the metrics of sales volume. Yeah, it's looking at your volume. So there's gating between 10 to 25,000, they gate you and then 20 to 50 and 75,000, they gate you different in terms of growth and scale. And once you get about 100,000 a month in revenues on Amazon, it kind of unlocks the unlimited opportunity of Amazon because now you've gone way past the 50% of normal Amazon sellers and you're in the top 50% or higher once you do that. So at that point, Amazon's algorithmic system is now going to see you as a huge, a valued brand because you're generating way more sales than everybody else, even if it's revenue. Okay. That's what they're focused on, but make no mistake, the amount of data they have, the analytic engines are pushing behind this. If you say Amazon doesn't know what your cost of goods is within relative percentage, like 5%, you're wrong. They know the cost of goods for almost every product on that system is launched. And because of that, they know which products are making them the most money which have the most value, which are driving the most sales, and they're going to give preference on that system for rankability and propagation and growth. I can tell you that from my own experience. So once you reach a certain point, Amazon's going to push you harder and bigger for those reasons.
Emmanuel: Interesting. So let's recap for folks wondering how to do it correctly. You mentioned do the competitive research, know your numbers, $50 to $150 price point, advertise on PBC, make sure you have the margin for that, and then expand, land and expand. Multiple products for brand discovery. Now here's the question, what if, like a lot of us, and I wanna dovetail our segue into the arrows in the back, being the first movement, what if we don't have competitors? Because the first part of your process on doing it correctly was doing competitive research.
Neil Twa: Yep. Multiple products in your brand selling.
Emmanuel: What if we have competitors and also we don't have, we have the budget, we have the price point, but there's not a lot of search volume, so advertising on PPC isn't gonna help either. So how do we succeed on Amazon in that environment where this is a brand new to market product and it's listed properly, but no one's searching for it.
Neil Twa: Yeah, it's listed properly, but there's no search volume. So that's where your challenge comes. And that's where that competition, high competition. And thank you for bringing that specific, you know, specificity out. It's search volume. If I look at those keywords and I realize there's not a lot of search volume. If I do the search for, I don't know, bamboo sheets made from Taiwan, I'm making something off of the fly and I see that there's only like 50 sellers. Okay. And there's really low volume with sellers, nothing above 500 or a thousand are returned in terms of the listings. And I do a keyword search then I'm going to be in a situation where it's not just discovery of my brand. That's also a problem, an arrow in the back. It's that the people aren't particularly looking for that product. The demand is going to be low. So how do you overcome demand is kind of the question I guess you're asking. And that would be, you need some bridge. You need a bridge between them and Amazon to educate them. Right. Because Amazon is not an educational platform, not on its.com. And that's where a lot of people make mistakes. Right. So we have audience conversations in the direct to consumer world because we need to have that conversation and convince them and get them to believe about the product or service or something new that they haven't heard about. It's a little more invention, even if the product exists in somebody else's account, because your Shopify store is kind of hidden in the world of billions of listings and systems, whereas Amazon's a public facing marketplace. And it's a lot easier to quickly identify all the other competitors that are in your space. And they're typically only five to seven of them that you will ever totally and truly compete with on Amazon five to seven. So when you have that opportunity, you know who you can take on and you know who you can crush. I don't have to have the audience conversation. Why should I go buy a bamboo sheet from Taiwan? Someone's already had that conversation. They've already had that research. They've already had that. They went to Amazon because they wanted to buy one of those and they're looking for the right one to get. So to bridge that gap, you're going to need something there, a YouTube channel, a website, some other information, collateral content that will bridge that conversation in education and then land them on Amazon for your product for purchasing.
Emmanuel: Interesting. So if you don't have that and you're starting off on Shopify or even not even starting off Shopify either, you're first to market product. Yeah. How do you succeed on Amazon?
Neil Twa: Yep. They're starting on the OQ. So it's product discoverability. What the hell do I sell, right? And who am I gonna sell it to? So when it comes down to the data, the BSR, if you already have a product versus discoverability, yeah.
Emmanuel: Sorry, if you have a product already, I'm so sorry. I should have specified that. You already have a product. Yeah, you've made a product that's first to market. There's no competition. There's not 30 to 50 out there. You don't have any competitors and there's no such volume. Perfect. Okay, can you explain why?
Neil Twa: You're not going to start on Amazon. Well, because Amazon again, it's not a brand discovery platform. If you have a brand new product, an innovative idea, if you are bringing a Instapot to market, but you know, there's a huge market for crock pots and there's no Instapot yet, take it to a brand discovery platform. Okay. Which would be something like YouTube or TikTok shops. Those are more brand discovery platforms from there, make people aware of what it is, let them see the value of it. And then when you put it on Amazon, anybody that spills over is going to find it on Amazon and it will start to rank up and as more competitors will enter the market, no matter what you do, even if you invent something, competition is going to come into the market and find other ways to innovate and patent around your design. Have patents, know how that works. But that's also your opportunity to be the leader. So don't be worried about that. Like people are so worried. What if I built something and there's competition? That's the wrong problem to focus on. Innovation will fix that problem every day, as long as you keep innovating. But what will happen is the market will continue to grow and the people will become more aware and then Amazon will become a stronger presence for you. As more people build Instapots and variations of that, that will simply increase the visibility search terms and awareness of that product. By the time they get to Air Fryers, which is kind of the next innovation of a Instapot or your grandma's crockpot, okay, then you're gonna just have more opportunity. Instapot is a billion dollar company, right? AirFryers are becoming a billion dollar company. So don't think in limiting or scarcity beliefs in that way. But just know that if you're coming with a net new product you've defined that's innovative and not in the market, Amazon is not the place to land. You're gonna land in more of an educational, direct to consumer format first, and then later on back into Amazon.
Emmanuel: And that's more of what you describe, TikTok Shop and YouTube.
Neil Twa: In discovery platforms, right? Something like a YouTube video that discovers that product and people get a little education, understand what it is, or they go and they're discovering it on TikTok because it shows up and like, Hey, I never seen that before. That's pretty cool. I want to check it out. There's a lot of brand discovery happening in that marketplace.
Emmanuel: And what would that discovery link to at that point? Because we're not on Amazon at this point. What are we linking to close this out?
Neil Twa: So yeah, if you're discovering over there, innovating, then you're probably hitting a Shopify store, you're hitting a website, WooCommerce or something, or maybe even setting up your TikTok shop, okay? And having your TikTok shop be the place they land to purchase that product and have it delivered. But one way or another, you're on those platforms to start off with. Should you look at Amazon at some point? Absolutely, because you need that pillar. You need another pillar on the platform. And when you're thinking about where do people go buy, Amazon is where they go buy. So make sure that you do establish that at some point, even if there's not any competition yet, and you're the first one in there brand discovery will pull him over later.
Emmanuel: And can we talk about two burning things, especially since we're in this discovery environment, even with Amazon, we can bring Amazon back into the conversation, TikTok Shop. You brought that up a couple of times. I'd love to know more. You guys are doing a lot with figuring out TikTok Shop and figuring out what's going on, as well as a direct mail, which is applicable whether you're on Shopify or Amazon. These are just channels that are working well. Yeah. Do you mind to give us the overview of kind of how you're experiencing this and how we can benefit from these two channels?
Neil Twa: Yes. Correct. They're just channels of reaching customer with marketing for sales. Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, you know, TikTok has been out there. I know a lot of people, you could say the word TikTok in today's world. In many ways you could start a fight. Just like if I say, you know, all Android suck and all Apple guys are fanboys. I mean, all of a sudden it's like, you know, people are like on each other, like white on rice, right? You can say TikTok's dropping. There's a lot of people who are like, well, it's communist, it's Chinese, it's bad. We don't want it. It's hurting our kids. And in many ways they're right. Cause I don't let any of my kids on social media. I've got four girls. I'm on social media for reasons I don't have to get into, but I just don't want my girls on social media. So the end of the day is there are positive and negatives to anything. I can get a hammer from my particular hammer place that I love and go out and start working on my shop and smash my thumb with the hammer. I mean, it's just a tool and you can hurt yourself with it. So be careful. So at the end of the day, if you go out there, you know, decide which one's for you and which is not for you. If you choose to go to TikTok shop today, you don't understand. It's just a huge platform with a lot of traffic running right now, growing brand discovery. So for a lot of people who are moving from different channels of growth, either established DTC channels that need to consider Amazon or Amazon who need to consider DTC, um, it is another search engine opportunity. There's a lot of search engine traffic. It is an ecosystem of traffic and eyeballs coming to videos and even offers. And that adds a, you know, a way for people who are, who are novice or to medium expertise, if you will, uh, you know, with paid ads and traffic that they may be having challenges with. It creates more of an organic SEO based opportunity too, that creates what I call the most almost augmented income. So I don't have to keep pushing, I don't have to worry so much as ads account are being shut down because your Amazon PPC accounts don't get shut down. So at the end of the day, I have organic traffic and growth off of my time, energy and attention to focus on, where I'm not worried my entire business literally stops in 30 days or less if suddenly my ads account shut down. So you don't have those kinds of problems. When you build up the affiliate side, It's called TikTok shop creator. And you go out and get affiliates on that platform to promote your products for a commission based. Okay. Anywhere between 10 to 30 or 40% commissions, you're incentivizing them to go create content on your behalf. And that's very powerful nowadays. To have user generated content powering your system. I suspect you probably talked about it at some point in this podcast. Very powerful. It's also very costly if you do it wrong. And it can also be troublesome if you go out and try to get UGC creators or get in front of them and find out they, you know, while I got a 10,000 person audience and got 50 clicks. It sucks. So with TikTok's creator system, it's built in a lot of fail safes that we've been able to see how many followers, how much gross volume have they done, how many units have they moved, and I wanna approach them on a deal to promote my product. I know I'm going after a creator that has provable results on that platform. So if I introduce them to my product and say, here's a free sample, please go promote my product, I have a much heftier confidence that they're gonna be able to deliver. And giving them a free sample is all you need to do. So if you open the TikTok shop and you go into the affiliate center and just start sending out messages every day to people that you want to promote your product, you're going to have to send a lot of them to get their attention. But as soon as you do that starts that organic engine of them building products and then more affiliates will see it because they're little TikTok shop creator marketplace literally shows you how many units they moved, uh, how well the product is moving, how many people are making videos for it, and that drives other creators, okay, more attraction marketing to come to your product and want to get sampled in or just put it in their showcase is what it's referred to on the TikTok shop and on their TikTok portfolios and be able to, you know, get your product out there in the marketplace. So other people will be attracted to it and make more videos. It can go extremely fast. As I mentioned earlier for that one platform product base called Guru Nanda, you know, they just broke the million units moved in four months, which you can see the volume of that opportunity is huge. And it will continue to grow because more and more people are creating content. It becomes a really big engine. Right.
Emmanuel: And that was a person who said did 14 million in a day, Guru Nanda.
Neil Twa: They did, no, that was different. Excuse me, on the platform, the first seller to reach 1 million units sold is Guru Nanda on the platform for TikTok Shop. The one I was referring to was just a live stream UGC creator who was the first to make something like 14 million in one day, just pumping products every few seconds through her video live that was running like all day long. It just, it just shows you the power of creativity in this world. You're the creators, I believe business, we called it, uh, or one of the online mags, I forget which one called it the year of the creator. So really UGC content is extremely powerful. TikTok gives you that opportunity. You can do it on Amazon influencer side as well. And you can use those videos in sponsored brands. So I'll take videos from my shop creators and move them to Amazon and test them over there too. On the sponsored brands platform, which is inside of Amazon's PPC engine. So I can cross a lot of that content across my platform, and creates that search engine, engine that gives you that opportunity. What I wrote the book on there, almost automated didn't come with FBA is setting up those mechanisms where I don't have to be pushing every day. I don't have to be monitoring my ads account every day to make sure that the engine's working.
Emmanuel: Yeah, if I summarize interestingly enough, what it sounds like is happening is they're almost gamifying selling your products and making affiliate marketing cool, in a way, to creators. Yeah.
Neil Twa: They are. Yeah. They're making affiliate marketing. Cool. So we created a little thing on a part of our playbook for the voltage, what we call our five by five playbook. We created a sub playbook just for TikTok that we're rolling out right now called the simple profit playbook. It's basically a, a playbook for those who just want to be creators, but it will back into the opportunity for you to become a brand creator, like make a bigger brand out of your name or even develop your own products and drop ship them through the TikTok platform. We're moving to that next. And so that's basically a way for people to learn how to become a great creator, get started, build up their first revenue, start to build up their first shops. My big hairy goal audacious goal here, my b-hack is to pull enough of those influencers in that I now have influencers from my brands that I can literally just reach out to and say, Hey guys, I am launching this product or I need additional creators for this. Please give me, you know, 20 videos, 20 creators who's in raise your hand. And I'll be able to basically create my own creator central by showing them exactly what I've done. I've been a creator. I'm making about 1400 bucks a month on literally passive income. Just making a few videos, talking about other people's products, uh, in the creator marketplace, um, which has been just stupid, easy to do and have shown quite a few people in my, uh, client base, how to do that too, who've gone off and made sales, and then we're elevating that conversation now into shops. Cause I have a shop, I've got brands on it. I'm reaching out to affiliates and handing out samples and growing that brand And so I'm teaching them basically how to do that next to open an additional channel outside of Amazon so they can gain that organic SEO traffic.
Emmanuel: Which I find interesting. So that big Harry Audacious goal, which is awesome by the way, well done. And for those of you that haven't picked up the book, make sure you go get that. We'll link to that in the show notes for both of them. But it speaks to some of the things that I wonder about with TikTok Shop and the Creator Network. Is it, why not just use the Creator Network? Why are you angling to build your own? Are there challenges? Is there some downside to it?
Neil Twa: Well, the Creator Network isn't for everybody. Not everybody loves getting on a camera. You know, really the 18 to 35 year olds today feel extremely comfortable getting on camera and putting their face out there and sharing a lot of other people don't. Not to say that, you know, 47 year old guys won't get on a camera or, you know, or just shoot it over and talk with their voice if they want to. The end result is the Creator world is kind of being geared out of a specific group of people who are very interested in becoming influential and making money and living the lifestyle, you know, no websites, no funnels no product no inventory. No, whatever. They just promote products. They come up with funny ideas. They shoot a camera video They upload it they make money There was an 18 year old in the group that I'm in that basically went out and promoted this little product and in five days He made a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, right? He just literally a camera video backyard part of it had his dog He only showed his face for like ten seconds Maybe six seconds and then talked about the product and where to go get it and that was the whole video I mean, what did we just see out of the Super Bowl, right? With, uh, what's his name? Kanye or we call him Zena or Ye. I'm sorry. I forget which name I'm not that cool. The long story short is he shot a video in a car and may like, what did he make? 14 million, 7 million, 10 million. I forget the numbers exactly, but he literally just shot a video in his car and up and that was the commercial for the super bowl. So I think so many people over think this idea, they think Hollywood, they think movie, big flashy, big scenes, this kind of stuff. And do I put captions? Do I put music? Do we do all that stuff? I'm like, no, man, just go for it. Just turn the camera on and talk to people. Just find that hook. And so that creator side can grow up, you know, extremely fast. If people elevate through that, they could start their own shops, make it pod, maybe eventually order their own product, build a brand. Not everybody's going to want to do that, but the creator side is something you can grow and build that doesn't require that. But yeah, my, my big area, just goal is teach as many 18 to 35 year old creators how to become excellent creators or to make them better creators. So that my group of people and who are building Amazon and TikTok shops can use them inside of my network, inside of voltage to build up their own content base.
Emmanuel: I see. So you want to basically do something in parallel with the audience network, basically encouraging people to utilize this new platform in this way. Right.
Neil Twa: That's right. Absolutely, because why? It benefits everybody. I'll show them multiple streams of income. I'll show them how to become a creator and become a brand owner if they want and become bigger in their brand if they want to become a bigger marketplace brand just in the creator side or if they want to open shops and go out and sell more products and become the product and brand owner. Right. They can go that direction as well.
Emmanuel: Very good goal. So tying it back to Shopify sellers who are not on Amazon is how would we leverage this to help our brands.
Neil Twa: Yeah, couple of different ways, right? Obviously getting on Amazon means you've got to start the right way. And I would suggest if anybody's listening to this, you definitely want to make sure that if you're on, you know, six, seven figure path on Shopify, you have a business, you have an LLC, you've got a registration, I'm sure you've talked about this before, make sure you run a real business, which means all that asset can transfer to Amazon. So when you go to set up your seller central account, make sure that you're signing up as a business, make sure you're setting up as the professional account. Make sure that you are going through the brand registration process with all those assets, using trademark as well. Make sure that has brand and trademark on it. You don't need to go as far as a utility or design patent, not unless you find that there's something really holistically unique in there, and you should get those products up on Amazon. Now remember, you're selling listings to people, not products. Amazon's selling products to people. So if you know you've got your product well in hand on the Shopify side, really focus on building a good listing, building good keywords, building good visuals, making the images really appropriate for the psychology of the buyer on Amazon, which is different than the psychology of the buyer on the direct to consumer. And that's where I see some people fail. I had a client come in last year. He had done, he's doing about 30 million on the DTC side. He did all of 16,000 on Amazon the year prior to that, total of $16,000. So they were not able to conscientiously move the conversation correctly to the Amazon's buyer psychology which is very different than someone buying on a direct or consumer storefront. And a lot of people don't understand that. They just think if I build it, they will come. We've all watched the Kevin Costner show too many times. You know, if I just put it on Amazon, I'll make money. How easy, how hard can this be? It's a very different channel. After 10 plus years of being on that channel, it is a different beast to ride all together and requires certain inner complexities that just come with experience, not brand new people. Now go do it, get started, put your listings up, put your best foot forward, focus on your keywords and your keyword optimization. And remember to just in simple terms, know that you don't have to educate the Amazon consumer. You simply have to get close to their problem reaction and solution as fast as possible so that they will add that to their cart. Okay, so don't become the direct marketer who's trying to convince people to buy your product on Amazon. I see that happening too many times. So that's one of the things you should do. Okay, if you want to make a quick jump to because it's not difficult to do. then go to the seller central side of TikTok. Okay, they have a seller TikTok platform called TikTok Shop. In your Shopify, all right, down inside of the integration sections and in the add-ons, you can literally add TikTok to it. And you can literally port your listings and stuff and connect it with TikTok. You can even reverse fulfill it. If you're on a POD provider integration inside of your Shopify, then any TikToks from orders that would be, you know, drop shipped or purchased through the TikTok shop, can we be reversed back through Shopify and deliver that way. So you can actually set that up relatively easy. So I would recommend you also put your business on TikTok shop from the very beginning. Don't sign up as yourself. Don't sign up as an individual, for individual, go through the process, sign up as a business, do it the right way from the very beginning, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble later on. And go ahead and just imperfectly start those stores up. Right. If you are looking for more detailed and more information, I'm sure we'll have it in the show notes if you need some more information on how we do that. But just get imperfect action, something perfect happens along the way. So it's better to do something than nothing. Ha ha.
Emmanuel: And those TikTok shops, I have heard some horror stories and we've helped a couple clients through this and setting them up. I mean, literally you're sending in your passport photos. It's a lot of stuff they want.
Neil Twa: They want to prove that you are a legitimate business owner. And as long as you can do that, it's a lot easier to do.
Emmanuel: Okay, and you don't think it's excessive? What the rest of them?
Neil Twa: No, Amazon does the same thing. I mean, why they're doing that is because marketers like us 10 and 12 years ago went in and jammed up all the systems. When we went and flooded those things with all these other types of, you know, hooks and workarounds and, you know, people try to drop ship and stuff on Amazon and that doesn't work very well and get you closed down. People try to run that retail arbitrage game or that wholesale arbitrage game. And it doesn't work terribly well and can't be extremely profitable on scale. And only a very few people I know do wholesale profitably on scale. Most of them don't do it correctly and retail arbitrage and that kind of stuff on Amazon is pretty much dead. So don't even try to start that or just get shut down. So you really have to be building as a business and proving that you're a real business from the very beginning in order to get the systems online and keep them online, which is just as important, right?
Emmanuel: Yeah, this is exciting. Because what I'm hearing from you that's new and exciting is we've heard a lot about TikTok shops. That's very exciting. That's trendy. But this idea of tying that to the creator marketplace where they're gamifying for creators who can sell the most products, that really makes it make a lot more sense. Didn't realize that.
Neil Twa: Well, I mean, we're all out there getting UGC content in some ways. Maybe you're trying to generate it through your list by followups and tools where you're trying to get them to leave you videos or you're out, you know, marketing to people and saying, Hey, you bought my product through email or whatever. Come, come give us a review. Come give us information. Or you're out on incense and.pro or you're over on join brands.com and you're trying to pull UGC content together. Right. Um, they've built the creator platform on scale. That's one of the cool things about it. Right. And you can go out and then hit up all these people as affiliates for your product. So don't overcomplicate this. If you get your products on the shop, your next stop is the affiliate marketing center. And your next stop is open collaboration so that people can request samples of your products. Okay. Target the right metrics of people who have sales and certain followers. So you're not just giving samples to some guy who's never made any sales and has five followers and you know, the content will creep in and as you add some additional content yourself and you invite more and more people to come be a part of your affiliate, that kind of kicks that engine off. All right. Getting more people to get out there. They see the sales coming through the marketplace. They say, Hey, this thing's starting to trend up. People are making sales. I'm going to add this to my showcase. I'm going to create some videos and see if I can make, you know, six bucks or 10 bucks off of this every sale. And they're going to become the affiliate side of that engine. And once that gears up and starts, it becomes like an avalanche.
Emmanuel: Do you, how strongly do you feel about the creator marketplace and this affiliate side of things? I do recommend I've heard a lot of people just simply saying TikTok shop only. Just set up a TikTok shop and you're good to go. Is that it's TikTok shop enough?
Neil Twa: Well, TikTok shop by itself is no different than a Shopify platform with no traffic. They is not, it's not just putting it online and adding your products will mean that people can actually see you and do something with it. You have to instigate the engine of marketing behind it. Okay. And the fastest way to do it is affiliate marketing inside the center within TikTok shop, right? Otherwise you've got to go do paid ads from TikTok, or you've got to build up your brand and creator accounts by posting videos about your products, et cetera, or the benefits of your products, mostly not just sell the product and build up your own TikTok portfolio crater to get more traffic to your listings. It's kind of the same deal, right? And you have that organic engine working in the long-term. So there's no like push button, whatever, even though we know there's traffic that can push button. You should really start that affiliate campaign, really get that engine organically moving in the system with search terms and keywords and people making more videos and wanting to make more videos of your product, and then amplify what's working with the TikTok ads, right? Later on, you can go in and you can literally go through the seller central and create a campaign, sign up for the Tik Tok shop, and then just click right across similar to the way you can do it in Shopify into a campaign that promotes your product to the 18 to 24 year old demographic of females who are looking for health products and you sell health products and you know, you can add that traffic source because Tik Tok has a, has a great advertising platform and engine in there as well. And very similar sort of to the, uh, aspects of the, uh, Facebook meta AI engine for growth. TikTok is following very similar types of patterns for not touching in a certain amount of days. You've got to have a certain learning curve. Uh, increase your prices. And as you see sales come through, uh, similar type of algo in terms of growing and scaling new campaigns and ad sets, TikTok ads are very much the same. I spent about 250,000 ads last year.
Emmanuel: Nice. And was it profitable?
Neil Twa: Yes, it was.
Emmanuel: Okay. Profitable to what degree? Cause people are always like, I want a six ROIs, I want a seven ROIs. I don't see that much anyway.
Neil Twa: I actually used it on our consulting division first before I started on the products, because I thought what's the most difficult thing for me to prove that TikTok actually works on. Cause I've, I know it's going to be shooting fish in a barrel on the, on the product side, once you develop that product side well, and it drove, drove a couple million in sales.
Emmanuel: I'd say that's higher than one or two ROIs. Yeah.
Neil Twa: I was super happy with it up until they shut me down because I was speaking about Amazon. And when they opened the TikTok shops, they killed the brand referral links for anybody who was trying to referral traffic to Amazon from TikTok, which was a really good deal up until that point. And then when they launched TikTok shop, they pretty much just hammered my account and shut me down for paid ads on anything Amazon related because they opened TikTok shop as a competitor. Yeah.
Emmanuel: Yeah, that makes sense. So then as we start to wrap up here, so do you have a sense of like, if people are going in and doing the right things, what types of returns they should see? Do you have a ballpark or is it one of those answers? It depends.
Neil Twa: It is a variable as much as you would expect it to be. Obviously keep it low because they have a seller health account within the TickSock just like Amazon and they don't have that on Shopify to a degree. You have your own problems with your accounts that people refund and your merchant accounts get shut down and that's one of the problems of that. Right. Um, it's a different thing when you're on a platform that's measuring metrics inside the platform against other sellers, which is very different than Shopify. So in that way, you have to maintain certain metrics, return metrics, seller metrics to keep your dashboard green, both on Amazon and the TikTok shop. So you have to be aware of those metrics and keep them good. So you can't have high return rates for your products where you'll be throttled or suspended.
Emmanuel: Makes sense. And so are you allowed to use the affiliate content that was made in your TikTok ads and run that creative? You are. Yep.
Neil Twa: Absolutely, that's one of the benefits. There's something called Spark ads. Yep, so in TikTok, once you go to run those ads and you have a UGC creator and affiliate, you see they're doing well, you can ask them if they haven't already given it to you for their Spark code for that asset that's setting in their account. They'll get a benefit of more followers and traction if you promote it, but you get the benefit of using that Spark ad in a direct-to-consumer ad. So if it's doing well. Yeah, you just promote it, get the spark ad, you promote it to your product and your shop account, but it's basically the same asset setting on their profile.
Emmanuel: Yep. And two clarifying points. Do they charge you extra for that? And is it, does it expire? I heard those are 30, 60, 90 day only term federal.
Neil Twa: 365 day spark codes now and they don't charge you for that. So if you gave an affiliate a product for free sample and they create a video that goes off and does a hundred sales and you're like, I'm going to go boost that on a TikTok shop. Hey, can I get your spark creator code? You get the code, you place it and get a permission to do it inside your TikTok. I know I'm leaving a lot of the details out, but in essence, you, you get approval to do that. You go over, you create a new campaign, you run the ad against their creator on their profile in TikTok, but it directs to your store. Right, they get the benefit of the followers, you get the benefit of the product purchases.
Emmanuel: Nice. Love it. And can you use that content outside of TikTok? Or is it only on TikTok?
Neil Twa: You have to look at the permission base, but you can. As long as it's given on a public platform for your particular brand, then we've been able to download that. There's just ways you have to get removal of certain watermarks and stuff before you send it anywhere else.
Emmanuel: Okay. Got it. And then this channel, we explored this one very in detail. Thank you for that. Direct mail is something else that you said is coming up. We've heard about that. What is it? Postpilot. There's a couple of different brands that are really trying to integrate that in with like Clavio and your post purchase workflows. How are you using direct mail to succeed?
Neil Twa: So direct mail is just one of those things that, you can pull people back to Amazon by getting a, you can do a crossover from info databases that exist online. You can't take it directly from Amazon or market directly to Amazon. So that's one of the problems with Amazon's system, really at the end of the day. So why I call it an incubation system is that you should have other tiers to create opportunities to do direct mailing to customers that started on Amazon and maybe followed you to another store, another shop where you can like Shopify pull down and get their full customer information. That's also an asset used to create a larger saleable asset in your e-commerce because now you've got an asset of customer database, which is important for the exit. But on Amazon, you could pull up to 40% of your sales using cross-channel systems and softwares to pull that together. One of them is called PostPurchase Pro that will look at info and databases and pull that data together and then give you information so you can direct mail them. Now it's a very caution move, I will say because you need to make sure that you are doing it in permission-based marketing. It's not like I would just blink at a list of people in a certain zip code and say, here's my product, go to my Shopify store. That'd be very different if Amazon or the customer got into a realization you were doing that and didn't like it, it could jeopardize your seller account. So you would have to do it in such a way where it was more permission-based marketing to take it from Amazon and do the direct mailing. So there's a couple of techniques we use in order to do that. But again, this is one of the things about moving into omni-channels, which is always important to understand. I will continue to say that I'm a pro component of doing Amazon the right way and have for many years and know the scale and capacity of that system, but you must move to additional systems to gain multiple values, additional value points in your business. And because we do acquire and exit companies in voltage as well, we're looking for certain assets. So I'm basically telling you as a buyer, what I would need you to do. I would need you to show me multiple channels beyond a single channel. I would need you to show me that you have some subscribe and save on Amazon building additional customer revenue and that you have a Shopify or TikTok shop that's generating additional sales, even at small percentages, but is showing the upside potential of that brand sale ability. And then your multiple of evaluation against your profit or your seller discretionary earnings are going to be higher when we see those different channels opening up and your opportunity as a seller is to build a business. That's an exit. We say in our company, you know, work for three to five years, like no one else does is that and you know after three to five years you can live like nobody else does and that means actually building a business with The end in mind so our entire business philosophy is built to exit Alright, so in that way omni-channel multi-channel higher revenues profits are going to be my exit opportunity and done correctly You can have generational wealth exits I've got a client right now who's gonna set on around 15 million and exit For a business been online for about five years and it's predominantly Amazon sales right now And he's opening additional channels to increase the valuation.
Emmanuel: Got it. Wonderful. And I loved how you said that with the direct mail post purchase, probably you pull down the addresses, you can get that from your seller central account, but there's a permission based marketing way of doing it. What was the way you do it in a permission based marketing way to instead of just blanketing them.
Neil Twa: So if I contact a customer, I can't just be like, here, hey, I saw you bought a product, buy another one. It has to be, you know, I saw you bought this product and I would love for you to check out my other products. It has to be very benign. It has to be non-pushy. It has to be informal. You have to reinforce the value the customer got, okay? And one of the ways you can do that is by direct linking them to some additional assets, some additional value. Hey, I saw you bought that. I'm the customer, I'm the brand that you bought it from on Amazon and it's just a way of saying thanks. Okay, consider it an irresistible offer, as we know about, and say, here's some additional value for you for free. Just wanna, here's an additional, if you didn't get the download that had the PDF for how to use this product, here's the manual. It could be just as simple as that. All you're doing is adding additional value, reinforcing your brand, you're not even specifically saying, here's a code, go buy something. In this world, you're basically reinforcing the connectivity of your branded marketplace because they must say, great, man, that company had great customers report, they sent me additional information, they'll go back to Amazon, it'll be in their cart, they'll see it again, and there's an opportunity for them to purchase again. So it's again, different psychology of buyer, different outcome, and of course, staying within the platform's terms of service is important.
Emmanuel: Great. And if I want to dig deeper into that, the TikTok shop stuff, where would I dig in? Is it stuff in your book?
Neil Twa: So it's not in my book because that's focused predominantly on building that first market channel to Amazon, which is important for us to do it in the way that we do it, which is different than others, but that's how we do it. And that's building up that system so that I can have a lifestyle driven business while still generating millions of sales and not doing it with employees or building warehouses or all those complexities that hinder my ability or economies of scale. So I've done that in the past, had 12 employees, had the 20,000 square foot of warehouse, that was a wrong way to do it. So we kind of innovated in our business so that we can set up systems, technologies, et cetera, that allow me to work on 50 acres in the country, homeschool my girls, I got a homestead, I hang around, I don't have to work 100 hours a week, and I still have the business running in all of its automation formats. So for the TikTok side of the house, if you go to, there'll be a link in below, voltagedm.com forward slash simple profit playbook, I'll tell you what it means to become a creator to kind of kick off the creator engine. If your juices are flowing in the creative world and you've got you know, they want to create videos and you want to make affiliate income through that videos and maybe later on you want to do something different in the brand space, that'll get your creator juices flowing. That'll show you how I'm making a hundred bucks a day. Just making stupid little videos on TikTok creators with product I don't even own. And if your juices are flowing for the creator world, that's maybe is where you want to go check that out.
Emmanuel: Great, and now we didn't dig deep into this, but your background, how did you get so good at all this?
Neil Twa: Yeah, school of hard knocks, brother. There was no marketing degree. I'm 30 hours shy of my business marketing degree. I left IBM in 2007 and started my first company. So that was about 18 years ago. And basically you're talking about 18 years of experience, all kind of culminated in one hour. It's just been a lot of hard knocks. I've gone bankrupt once. So I know what that looks like. I've pulled back from all of that and been able to make millions. I've been able to help other people millions of dollars by switching up the way I did things, always given first and then supporting people second is a big factor in that learning curve. And then just being the guy who's the first man on the beach a lot. I test a lot of things. I'm always in my lab. I'm always playing. I'm always pushing the boundaries of things to see what works and just continuing to be a practitioner of learning.
Emmanuel: And here's a question I'd love to ask our guests to come on. Are you a success?
Neil Twa: My mom thinks so. My daughters think I'm their hero. I'd love to keep that for as long as possible. In that way, do I feel like I'm a success? Yes, I guess. It's a hard question to not sound prideful or arrogant under. At the end of the day, I would say my success is based like this. I've traveled from my family in the last 18 years, maybe less than 10 times, and it's been no longer than a couple of days. I do family time, I've been to all of their events, I prioritize the way that we do life, we've homeschooled them, we are a big component of pouring into the family and installing those values from the core. And so my success has been then just being able to stay in that position and stay focused on my family. And that gives me the ability to be in this way with the business and drive the business that drives the lifestyle that allows me to stay as that primary focus and objective. So in that way, that's been successful.
Emmanuel: I love that. Such a good answer. And I asked that question point blank that way on purpose, because in our community, and you've seen this a lot too, we fight a lot with imposter syndrome and people feeling not good enough or that there's another mountain to climb. And there's more and more and more. You know, we take a lot of that corporate grind into our entrepreneurial world. That's what we're trying to escape. How do you mentor your folks that you are that are in your community against that imposter syndrome and that drive to fight against, you know, more and more and more to not doing the things you'd said, like spending time with family?
Neil Twa: That's right, don't relax. Yeah. It is, gosh, dude, it really is hard. And one of the ways I try to instill that or in, I try to build it into the community is by creating an invitation only system and not building a wide platform of people that do what we do. I know it sounds kind of counterintuitive to the world of growth and growth and growth, but my portfolios company that I started in 2019 was to be an Amazon aggregator, we raised almost a hundred million in two years. And with that capital, I was going to go out and buy 52 companies. We had them on deck. We had it scheduled up. We were ready to take the money. We were ready to go. The market shifted. It pivoted. We realized that this was going to be the wrong move. Businesses were being priced way too high. So we pulled out of it. Well, 18 months later, you know, one of the largest aggregators in the Amazon space is going bankrupt. Multiples have gone bankrupt. The consolidation and capitulation of that market is going where we had predicted it was going to go. And so we pulled out of all that. But in that process, I recognize one other thing about myself as I was pushing forward to do all that and keep going. You get driven into certain things and you go so far and then you stop and you're like, why am I even doing that? Like, what was the point? And the minute you realize that it's not the right thing, you pivot, okay? You pivot. And so much of that has to do with realizing that there is abundance out there. And this was a test abundance. And then realizing, do I really need it? Do I wanna shift? Do I wanna get on a plane a couple of times a month? Or I wanna be beholden to all those activities and things? Or is that gonna create more scarcity and limiting belief in what appears to be abundance. And that's a catch 22 we get so much in this marketing space and people don't realize how did they get caught up in that. They think it's abundance because it looks big, but in actuality, there may be a limiting or hidden scarcity to it that is going to affect them negatively. It's gonna backfire into their business. It's gonna go back into their home life. It's gonna cause them to work 80 hours a week to overcome it and be stressful. And I was like, I'm shutting all that down. Like I'm shutting it all down, right? I don't want any of it. And so these are just learning lessons. So I try to instill that backwards into my clients by saying, you know, you are where you are at the right time. Stop comparing yourself to others. Stop trying to gain, you know, certain things out of fear and scarcity, even in limiting beliefs. You don't know you're extolling or you don't understand what they are because you're just caught in the habit of saying it or doing it and you don't realize that it is coming off as that way. And so I'm usually pretty brutal with them. And most of the time I try to catch them before they even join our program and I don't let them join because it's not the right time. So I invite them in and I do an interview process. I do what's called a disc assessment profile to determine where their mind and heart is in the business world, not the feeling world, which is the Myers-Briggs, INFTJ and all that crap. And I really try to assess them as best as possible to keep them on the right path of their opportunity and their growth first, and then moving them through any boundaries of challenges they have in business for growth to push them to be successful. Because in the way we do it, it's actually performance bonus. And in the end, I wanna buy their company, so I have to make them successful. So I can only do that with a limited amount of people. And so I interview them and I make sure I try to remove that every once in a while it pops up and every once In a while we have to deal with it and quite honestly, I'm usually pretty brutal about it I'm usually pretty straight in their face and I usually tell them things they don't like to hear And I do it out of love and kindness is not as much as possible But it usually goes like this Emmanuel and I'll leave you with this If you don't if you tried to build a car you drove the car and you're in the car and you get a flat tire because Something goes wrong and then you go out to change the flat tire and find out that well the spare is flat And then you go to realize, well, the jack wasn't even there. Anyways, do you just lock the car and walk away from it? You just burn the whole thing down because you have so many people that do that. Right. They're just like, that's it. I'm done. There's no, I can't do this anymore. And it's like, you left a perfectly good car there because you had a flat tire and you ran into a couple of problems. And I see people doing that in business. Right. And the end of the day, longevity wins at the end of the day. Opportunity comes from experience and luck comes from the longer you're in business. So the more perseverance and tenacity you have, the longer and more opportunity you're gonna have. In today's world, folks, you don't have to do a whole lot more to get past the next guy in this world right now. If you just execute even and perfectly, you're already winning above a whole majority of people who aren't even willing to try.
Emmanuel: Yeah. And so if I'm somebody, thank you for that. If I'm somebody who's not necessarily focused on Amazon, huge on Amazon, building my shop by business, I've gotten it up seven figures or so, and I'm interested in what you had to say, cause I'm sold, you got me. I'm hooked on voltage and what you got going on. I'm getting the book and all those different things. Why would I join your community? Why should I do it if you got me already? Okay.
Neil Twa: Well, the first question is what I let you. I know that sounds, and I have to put a stop. The end result is that you would want to join because you want to understand that the simple part of this is that it's who you know that gets you there and it's what you know that keeps you there. Okay, you don't grow above the five people who you're currently standing with. That's literally how it works. So if you need to get above where you are and it's not about growth and hustle, hustle mindset, I don't get up at 4 a.m. I don't do the ice bath crap. Okay. I usually wake up around eight to nine o'clock. I spend time with my family and then I do business. It's about purpose and lifestyle driven aspects. Okay. And if you understand that you're going to stay in my community, you're going to understand where we're going. Yes, we're driven. Yes, we love business. Yes, we understand profit and growth and scale, but at the same time, we also are balancing out what it is to do this kinds of business and the opportunity it provides you and your family to focus on the things that matter. And that's where this community is there. So I would actually wanna know that you align with those beliefs and structures beyond the business, that we have more in common than just the desire to grow and make money. Those things can fail the same way that you might just purposely go out and say, well, I wanna get a lady and I don't really want that kind and she has to be this beautiful for the rest of her life. And it's like, no, that's unrealistic. It's not long-term. It doesn't have value. It will eventually collapse on itself. And in business, I want to do that too, because I'm typically seeing my clients go out three to five years with us before we exit or acquire their business. So I need to know there's longevity and purpose. And then that way we make a community of people who follow that process, who are the next people who are leveling up, who are in that process of six, seven, multiple eight figure businesses. And then that area you want to focus on, if it's Amazon, that's what that's the next five people you want to be in line with. If you want to make that kind of money, then that's where you got to go.
Emmanuel: Okay, second to last question, what is it that you're offering? What is, how do people work with it?
Neil Twa: Well, first they interview me or I interview them, it goes both ways. So they're gonna connect with me first. If you go to my funnel, if you talk to me, if you go Google me online, I got a short last name, it is Twa, it's not an accolade, or PhD or MBA or anything like that crap, it actually is TWA, no, I'm not a small Asian guy, got Norwegian, there's this sense of Vikings and six foot five. But the end result is if you go over there and check that out, there's a video you'll see that goes over our business profile, you'll be able to connect with me personally on a text message, you'll message me, we have a conversation, if you feel it's a good fit initially, then we'll set up a no pressure discovery call. We'll go through the call, you'll take the disc profile, you'll actually apply to be a part of what we're doing. And that would be either a client relationship, maybe I'm on DTC and I'm doing really well, and I wanna get on Amazon and I need your help to consult with that, or I want to start and be the seller and I wanna go execute and I want you to help train me. It is a 12-month engagement, it's $35,000 to work with us. I don't believe that we pay for all that upfront, so I got a performance bonus structure built in. We're gonna go to 100K in net profits, okay, in the first 12 months after revenue starts or I eat 10K of that, guaranteed. So I hold back 10K and I'm saying, there's a performance goal, you're not gonna pay for it if we don't hit that metric together within our done with you aspect. We're gonna go in, we're gonna tap, we're gonna have timelines, we're gonna work together, we're gonna go after that net if it's brand new, we're gonna go for that net. If it's an existing company, we'll mark a date from the time we start and our activities together should generate more than 100K of net profits in that timeframe. Then that performance goal kicks in. So the remaining 25K of that fee, While I give you 12 months, I actually give you seven months of it for free. I only make you pay for five. So you pay for 5k a month over five months. And that's a primary set of our consulting, but we actually work with you over 12 months. So I have it structured in such a way where it's pulled out. If we agree to work together, there's an installment plan of a good faith. Uh, that's done in that way. And we're going to work together. A lot of that work is going to be done in the first five months to turn around, grow, or scale something that you've got control over or want to gain control over. And then we're going to spend 12 months together in a one-on-one format, ensuring that all of those things are executed under our strategy correctly for that specific growth and gain. Once you're in my network, there's a potential opportunity for what's called first rights of refusal, which means that if the business goes out to market, you give us the first right to look at it. We may want to acquire it, we may want to broker it. One way or another, we've got network, we've got capital, we've got people who want to buy companies. And we can also be the exit path for those who are wanting to grow and go. So if you get inside that program, those are things that are going to work. If later on we decide there's a business we want to buy or things we want to do together, I'm doing all kinds of deals with people inside of that private.
Emmanuel: And is this only for people with strong Amazon businesses or with Shopify businesses as well that you're helping sell?
Neil Twa: So it kind of combines both, right? So it would be somebody who wants to get started on Amazon, but wants to go hard and fast, build a business, not a side hustle or a hobby business. If they're on the DTC world of Shopify and they want to then take on the Amazon channel, it could be for you too. We're going to train, we're going to teach you, we will teach your people how to get that done correctly. If you qualify, and right now I have a waiting list, there's an account management services built into the Voltage Business Builders platform. You can only be eligible for it if you're inside of our business builders group. At that point, I have a waiting list right now. We can take over full channel management on the Amazon side. So if you're a DTC brand like the one I mentioned earlier, who's doing about three million on the DTC side, we've taken over full management because they have very good brand access to expertise on their side, emails, and the movement of the product. And then we help them turn up the Amazon channel from the very beginning and manage the full services of that channel for growth. And we are going to grow, so they're gonna have to move fast with us.
Emmanuel: Got it. And final question that I didn't get to as we were talking is we talked about land and expand. It's like if you're a healthcare brand and you go onto Amazon and you wanna find complimentary products, how do you evaluate what the demand for another product, you found a product and you're like, oh, this one I know is gonna work well with my product, but do I know that there's enough demand to make it a seven figure product or a six figure product?
Neil Twa: Yeah. Right. So if you can find like three to five competitors, maybe up to seven that are doing that have products somewhere in the range of 50 to 100 K B.S.R., then you're going to find product competition that's not necessarily saturated. That's a good first level metric. And you're like, Neil, why do I not go after the brand that's got a three B.S.R. Because it's going to take you a long time to catch that guy. And that's going to be a hard upsell. And if you're in the supplement world, it's going to take you a lot of capital to do that. Okay, so your opportunity is where's the lower hanging fruit and it's typically in the 50 to 100K BSR. Products are selling great if they're selling other branded products that are of what is called a lower BSR, basically they're closer to one, anything lower than 50,000, then you're gonna have the opportunity to overtake them in time. You're gonna be able to pull your products, pull your brand together, you know there's competition, but you know there's not saturation. Really the other factor is making sure you have more than $12 in net profit per year. If you have that goal, then you have the ability to make sure the fees are covered correctly and have money to spend on PPC while acquiring, you know, correctly and profitably inside of Amazon's system. If you have a product coming across and you, and the other things are defined and you say, but Neil, I can't find a product in my space with my particular product that has, you know, more than $12 in profit, and I only see things that are around estimated to be three to five. I'm going to tell you, you have a much higher battle to fight, right? You're going to have to elevate those products.
into the competitive markets, you're going to have to maybe innovate them just a little bit to match up at the competition on Amazon, which may not be very difficult. Okay, it sounds like it'd be really difficult, but actually if you've got an existing product, it's not terribly difficult to innovate them to a higher price point of value. Okay, move them into that 50 to 150 retail range and ensure that the profitability goes along with it and that it pencils in green light. And with that's the case, now you can probably acquire and run on that channel.
Emmanuel: Thank you so much. Neil Twa everybody. Thank you. Where can people find you?
Neil Twa: Voltagedm.com. Voltage Digital Marketing .com is where you can go check out the information, check out what we're doing on all these different things we discussed today or just go check me out on all the social medias. I'm out there. You could just Google my name, Neil Twa, not hard to find. I don't hide on the internet and pick a channel to connect with me on.
Emmanuel: Sounds good. Thank you so much, Neil.
Neil Twa Thank you for your time. Great questions by the way, you're a great host.
Emmanuel: I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
Neil Twa: Thank you for your time.
