As an Amazon seller, you're always looking for ways to grow your business, but scaling can be challenging. Most Amazon sellers are selling five or fewer products, which limits their earning potential. To truly break through the earning barriers and succeed on Amazon, you need to scale your business.
So, what does it mean to scale on Amazon? Scaling means expanding your product range, increasing your sales volume, and building a solid reputation in your niche. But scaling is not easy, and it requires a lot of effort, time, and resources.
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[00:00:00] Today we're talking about how to scale Amazon in 2023. I'm Nick. I'm Jayce. And welcome to the Demand Gen Daily Podcast. As always, please remember to like, follow, subscribe, leave us some questions, we answer them in episodes, in future episodes.
[00:00:25] And we're going to get into scaling Amazon in 2023. Jayce, what are your thoughts around this? Yeah, so let's define what it means to scale on Amazon. The vast majority of Amazon sellers are selling
[00:00:40] five or fewer Asins. That means five or fewer SKUs products. Amazon calls their SKUs Asins. And some people have one or two products that sell gangbusters, but products have a life cycle, right? So you might be doing really well for three years, five years, maybe even 10 years, but
[00:01:00] eventually demand for that product ebbs and flows. And you want other products in the pipeline to take over, you know, that sales volume as the demand for that product declines. Also there's just a big difference between selling $20,000 a month and selling
[00:01:19] $50,000 a month. There's a big barrier. The vast majority of sellers are selling less than $25,000 a month. And that may sound like a lot of money when you're first starting out, but
[00:01:28] keep in mind you're only taking home about a fourth of that, and then you have all the other additional expenses. So it's a lot of responsibility and headaches and stress for, you know, $8,000 a month or something like that. It's not the Hollywood end story that people often
[00:01:44] expect from Amazon. So to really break that barrier, you have to scale and you have to do so in a way that minimizes risks and costs to you. And that's really where I think it
[00:01:55] separates the wannabes from the doers in my opinion. There's a big gap there. So here's some of the skills that they are practicing. When you launch a product, the vast majority of sellers we've talked about before are emotionally attached to their project. They romanticize why
[00:02:12] the product is going to take off, but you don't know, right? As a former YouTuber, I can give you an educated best practices of which type of video is going to take off and become
[00:02:22] popular. But I have poured effort and detail into a video that I thought was going to take off because it was a great thumbnail, great title, great demand. It's a hot topic. And for whatever reason,
[00:02:32] just it doesn't do great. And then another one just takes off that I didn't put a lot of effort into you. And I didn't expect to get popular. And it just went viral can be educated,
[00:02:42] but I don't know. So the solution to that is to launch many more products, to launch as many products as you can. But some people are thinking, Jase, that sounds great,
[00:02:51] but that's a shit ton of money and time and resources and research and all that stuff. I can't launch 10 a year, you can, but there is a skill to it. What you want to do is minimize or do something
[00:03:02] I like to call micro testing. This is the process of launching new products in a way that minimizes your cost and risk. So assuming that you already have one or two products that are selling somewhat well, at least one enough to justify continue selling them,
[00:03:18] you want to scale down that micro niche or scale up that micro niche. So this is really easy for fabrics, let's say baby onesies, right? So instead, if you have a baby onesie that's
[00:03:29] selling decently well, don't then create a baby crib or a baby soother, you want to sell another onesie, but now it's with a different print or just with a different fabric. Okay, literally like
[00:03:42] the exact same print, only different sizes or the exact same fabric, but a different print. Very easy to scale that with some of the in-house brands we talked about before, where it was thermal wall insulated coffee cups, some were tall, some had a handle, some didn't.
[00:03:57] Some with different handle was the same mold just without the handle, right? That's it. So easy to scale up, very minimal risk. I know what the costs are. I know what the shipping
[00:04:08] weight is, pretty much everything's the same. And then I want to begin to test that. So it's much cheaper. I already have the relationship with the manufacturer. I don't have to test something out. There's less quality control issues because I'm scaling on something that already has some
[00:04:25] modicum of momentum or traction. It's not sexy, it's not romantic, but my God, it works. Right? The vast majority of sellers that I've known successful have scaled up a very narrowly defined micro niche and narrow because it's much more easy to own that.
[00:04:42] So that's the product launching side or product selection side. Once you get on Amazon and you have multiple baby onesies, for example, your ability to build domain authority within that product category is boosted, right? It's easier to win and rank in the top
[00:04:59] 10 when you have five baby onesies rather than when you just have one, right? So if you're doing all your keyword research and your keyword prioritization intelligently, you should have multiple products ranking for the same keyword because Amazon's algorithm recognizes you. Hey, when it comes
[00:05:16] to baby onesies, you're the guy, you're the woman. It applies to any platform on YouTube when I was doing Android authority. Battery management was a massive geek issue. So we had one video takeoff.
[00:05:28] Now we got to make 10 because we want to build domain authority and own that keyword. Same thing for Amazon's algorithm, essentially a search engine, right? That's the second thing. The third thing is that when you have one listing that's covering the same product category,
[00:05:43] you're much more likely to be a recommended sponsored listing below the fold of that listing. So if you go to Jace's baby onesies and I've done my proper product launch and scaling in baby onesies and you scroll down below the fold, you're going to see recommended products other
[00:06:00] Jace's baby onesies. Very powerful when one listing cross promotes another listing. So if you have one listing that has momentum, you want to have different versions of that so that it becomes the recommended product below, right? It works guys. If you look in product categories in the top
[00:06:18] sellers, it's utopia is a wonderful example. They absolutely own the bed sheet category, right? They sell $4 million a month in bed sheets. It's insane, right? They have same fabric, different color, endless amounts of time, right? Queen, king, single-time, it just goes on.
[00:06:36] It's the same goddamn sheet. They just have seven, eight, nine different variations of it and they're able to maximize their revenue that way. That's really the beginnings of how you scale on Amazon. So like one of the things I think can't be understood is that we seal
[00:06:55] this all the time with clients is that people skip a lot of steps to like that sexy thing, right? Jason, like your unit today's topic you're talking a lot about, hey, do the basics,
[00:07:07] do these incremental steps, do them methodically test. What we've seen and if you've checked out the series of Amazon videos that we've done here in the podcast, like these topics seem simple but what I've seen over and over, whether it's on Amazon, whether it's on Google
[00:07:25] pay per click, whether it's on Facebook, pay per click, whatever, TikTok, etc. There's no substitute for fundamentals. 95% of the time when we audit a brand new client, potential client or anyone else, we always see errors being made at the fundamental level
[00:07:44] and if you want to build a really tall building, the foundation has to be nearly perfect and the foundation is built up of these fundamentals. People are like why can't I build this 20 story
[00:07:55] building? And the answer is the foundation's tilted so whenever you get to the 10th floor, the building starts to crumble on itself, right? And everyone's looking for that magic bullet super sexy idea and the truth of the matter is getting to a couple hundred grand a month
[00:08:14] is done primarily through fundamentals, the right research, the right timing, speaking to the right target audience. Like we see people talk to the wrong target audience all the time, even in 2023 and I don't think this is going to go away anytime soon. Sometimes it's because we go snow
[00:08:29] blind like we're just like staring at ourselves for too long. We need that third party opinion. I'm really going to basically say try to bring somebody else in. It doesn't need to be like an
[00:08:38] agency. It could just be like a friend that also does this and ask them, hey, like peer review your stuff. Yeah. Working in a silo like is a great way to not like get lost in the mates.
[00:08:49] Yeah, I'm glad you said that because the call Ricky and I had last week with the lead we've talked about recently, these are very smart accomplished business people, right? They've launched a successful brand, but they're failing to scale beyond the plateau they're at because
[00:09:05] there's some obvious blind spots that after a 30 minute call it was clear Ricky and I what the issue was. But for him, he thought he understood his audience when clearly your content is proving that you don't because it's not resonating and it's not driving revenue, right? That's
[00:09:20] the primary what it is because when we say you have to master the basics, it sounds like if you haven't, then you're not very smart. You're not a successful business person, blah,
[00:09:29] blah, blah. It's like, no, we just were humans. We all have blind spots. Like you've got there is success in the example I know you're talking about. Like these people are doing like a couple
[00:09:37] hundred grand and the basics are still not covered off. So I think that the point overall is really even if you're at a couple hundred grand like reexamining the fundamentals and basics
[00:09:46] is always step one and all this has to come back to step one before you start building off of that more and more every single day. Otherwise the building won't bear its own weight.
[00:09:56] Agreed. Until next time, everybody, we have one at least one more episode of all of these Amazon topics. If you're a beginner, please be able to look out for that. See you next time.