Amazon’s Secrets Revealed with Jason Boyce

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Tony:	

Welcome. I'm your host Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and we are the number one show on the Voice America network. Today we're going to talk with Jason Boyce and learn about Amazon's secrets revealed. Now as you know, my interviews with the world's elite entrepreneurs are all about helping you launch your new business or take your business to the next level. Sometimes the penny drops with the right information for you to start something profitable yourself or help you do your job a whole lot better. I love to help you, and I love to hear how these world-class interviews are helping you. If you want to help me help more people, and help get my show to those that need to hear this in the world, please consider giving me a review. The easy way is to go to Apple podcasts, or go to ratethispodcast.com/tony. A kind five-star review helps grow and support the show.
	Today's show is about Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that. Jason is a seasoned entrepreneur and nationally recognized expert on Amazon. He is considered one of the world’s leading advocates for Amazon Third-Party Sellers. Here we go.
	Hi, Jason. Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. So great to have you on with us today.

Jason:	

So great to be here, Tony. Longtime listener, huge fan, and I'm honored to be here on your show today. Thank you for having me.

Tony:	

That is music to my ears to hear. Thank you so much. Thank you for all the kind words and your reviews and so forth. I'm very glad that you appreciate it. I do this show for free for all our entrepreneurs in the audience to hear, and small business owners. There's a lot of great, helpful information and today we're going to find out about Amazon's secrets and I want to know. There's so many of us that sell something or have a product, and we'd love to know the truth about Amazon, which we're going to talk about in a moment here. Talk about your book, The Amazon Jungle, and I'd like to follow your journey to success. Jason, how did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Jason:	

Oh boy. Okay. How much time do we have, Tony?

Tony:	

We have a couple of days. 

Jason:	

We need a couple of days. I'll try to keep it compact. I'll try to keep it within a day. So yeah, I was somebody who really struggled in college with education. I did great in high school, but I learned after basically flunking out of Pepperdine University, that I had some learning differences and some learning disabilities. I didn't find them until late in life. And so, I did some things like vision therapy, and I went to a lot of therapy and it took me a long time to graduate from college. It took me eight years to get my four-year degree. I don't know if you've seen the movie, Tommy Boy, the movie talking about where he says a lot of people take eight years to graduate from college. And then his friend says, yeah, they're called doctors. Well, I'm not a doctor, but it took me that long to graduate from college, and I was very sort of hyperactive and ADD as well. And I just had a ton of energy when I graduated from college and I knew. I had a business degree. I was about to graduate with my business degree and I was walking through the campus at Cal State Northridge where they were kind enough to accept me after getting kicked out of Pepperdine. And I was about to finish my business degree and I just couldn't. Tony, I couldn't imagine going and sitting in an office at that point. I just had too much energy.
	So I'm walking around campus and near the career center is a cover of Inc. Magazine, and on the cover of that magazine is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps in his dress blue uniform, and the article says the best management training program in America. So I grabbed that thing. I bought the article. I read the article. The next day, I was down talking to the Marine recruiter about how I could get into that management training program. Joined the Marines within weeks of graduating with my business degree and I spent four years as a commissioned officer in the Marines, learning how to... well, do everything. I mean, they just retrain you on your entire being and I learned so many great life lessons.
	Spent four years in the Marine Corps and I was about three weeks from getting out of the Marine Corps. I came home, was sitting down the dinner table with my brothers and family, and my brother Ari said, Hey, I'm starting an e-commerce business. I know you're getting out of the Marines. Would you like to join with me? I had just read Robert Kiyosaki's book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and I was all in with the idea of being an entrepreneur. I was just leaving the Marine Corps. I had so much confidence. I had great management experience. I felt like, yes. I told him I'll be out in three weeks. I'd be happy to join. And we started a company called SuperDuperHoops.com. We grew up here in the LA area, are huge Laker fans. We liked to play basketball at the local park and in the driveway, so we couldn't think of a better business to start than SuperDuperHoops.
	My brother was waiting tables at a restaurant and one of his friends quit his job and he asked his friend, why did you quit your job? And he says, well, I'm starting an e-commerce business, and so he shared with Ari some of the secrets, and he was introduced Tony, to a company called Overture in Pasadena, California. They had a small office. Overture invented pay-per-click advertising, PPC ads, and so we made a connection with them in Pasadena. We went down to their office to learn about how we could get on the first page of search results. And back then, we're talking 2002. I got to the Marines in '02, launched SuperDuperHoops about three weeks later, and we would go down and sit down with the folks at Overture and say, how can we get our e-commerce store selling basketball hoops on the first page of search results? And they showed us how to do it.
	It was a nickel-a-click. It was insanely inexpensive and back then it wasn't just Google and Bing. It was six or seven. It was Alta Vista. Google was there, but they weren't as big as they are now, and we were all over those search engines. We went from doing basically $100,000 in our first year to a million the next year in revenue, because we had this search game figured out. A year later, as a result of our success on organic search, and by the way, Tony, you probably know this. Someone's probably been on your show before and talked about this, but Overture was bought by Yahoo and later that pay-per-click advertising technology was licensed by Google. Google perfected it; turned it into Ad Words and then of course the rest is history.
	And so we're paying a nickel-a-click. We're all over the search results pages and someone at Amazon picks up the telephone if you can imagine, calls us and says, Hey, we see you guys are all over the search engines. We want you to sell your basketball hoops on Amazon. And I said, what are you talking about? I mean, you guys sell books, VHS tapes and DVDs. What do you mean you're selling basketball hoops? And they had spun up this online marketplace like eBay. Back then, Amazon wanted ... their greatest hope was to be like eBay. They were just teeny tiny. This one guy was in charge of the entire sports and outdoors category, and he was cold calling folks that he saw with good search results on the internet. And he said, yeah, we want you to sell your hoops on Amazon. And we said, sure, why not? I mean, Amazon seems like a big company, and we'd like to have SuperDuperHoops connected with that name.
	It was sort of the early days of Amazon, Tony. We built that business up. We went from a million to 2 million, then 4 million. Every year we were doubling in revenue, and all we had to do was pay 15% of every sale to Amazon in exchange for all this great traffic, and they had one of the biggest affiliate advertising networks on the internet. That's how they got a lot of their initial traffic. And then of course, nobody raised money in the public markets like Amazon could, convincing their investors to lose money for a decade plus before they started making money, and we rode their coattails, doubling year after year. We ran that business online for about 17 years. We became a top 200 seller and we had three different iterations, business model changes that we had to make as Amazon went from almost nowhere in online retail to everywhere, really owning the online retail market and I'd like to share with those with you. Because when Rick and I sat down to write the book, The Amazon Jungle, I started off by writing, I'm just going to tell people how they can become an eight-figure seller, a nine-figure seller on Amazon and it's going to be fun. It's going to be easy.
	And then as I sat down to write the book, all of these hard stories started coming up, Tony and I sat down with Rick and you know Rick. Rick's been a guest on your show, who's just one of the kindest, high integrity people out there in the marketing business, a legend in his own right. And he said, you should tell the story. You should be honest with the folks that you're writing this book to. And the real truth here is that Amazon isn't your friend. They're not your partner. They're not going to hold your hand. They're not going to make things easy for you. And I'm going to give you three different examples of what I mean. As you listen to these examples, your listeners will probably say, I'm not going anywhere near Amazon, but just trust me. Just trust me.

Tony:	

Bezos is going to call me and say, Hey, take it off. Since I've already interrupted just a little bit, I've been reading the Amazon Jungle, and my eyes just like opened. My mouth ... What is that expression? Your mouth hits the floor? No, my jaw opens. I'm Italian. Okay. I get the influence of both. My jaw hit the floor and I'm like, what the ... ? Guys, you gotta read this. And by the way, just so that you have the full title in the audience, it's called The Amazon Jungle, and the subtitle is The Truth About Amazon. The Seller's Survival Guide for Thriving on the World's Most Perilous E-Commerce Marketplace and it's by Jason Boyce, Jason R. Boyce and Rick Cesari. If you know Sonicare and the George Foreman Grill and OxiClean, and what's the camera? The Go?

Jason:	

The GoPro. Yeah.

Tony:	

The GoPro. I had half of it right.

Jason:	

You got it.

Tony:	

He's behind all of these. And for these guys to team up and write this book, it's such an eye-opener, not a mind opener. It opens your mind too. It's a mind opener and an eye-opener, and it is absolutely incredible to just go through. So I welcome you, and guess what, guys? You can get it on Amazon. It's still allowed.

Jason:	

So far, they just haven't taken it down, Tony.

Tony:	

So far. So hurry, run. Don't walk.

Jason:	

And if after you hear our stories here today, you don't want to buy it on Amazon, it's also available on Barnes and Noble, and Books-A-Million just in case.

Tony:	

Good for you. Good for you.
	This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:	

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You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. We'd love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@tonydurso.com. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:	

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Jason is the Founder and CEO of Avenue 7 Media, LLC, a seller management group that harnesses the power of Amazon for direct-to-consumer product brands. All right. And now back to the chat with Jason.

Jason:	

And so we knew. My brothers and I, it was a family business, 17 years. We sat down at the table and we said, look, we know that this is going to happen. We know that Amazon is going to open up the marketplace, and then eventually they're a retailer. They're going to go out and buy these products out from under us and probably kill our business. So we knew; we were prepared. We went into it eyes wide open. I'm going to use an example of Spalding.
	At one point in our past, my brothers and I were the number one online retailer for Spalding products for about five years in a row. We did so much business selling Spalding goods that they sent us 4 all-expense paid trips to the NBA All-Star game every year for four or five years in a row. that just gives you an idea. I mean, they put us up in the Ritz with the NBA players. It was amazing. And Amazon was a big part of that. And we were the ones that did a lot of the initial listings for Spalding product on Amazon. And our business was growing like crazy. Spalding loved us. We were happy. Amazon loved us. And then all of a sudden, we woke up one day and we're like, where are Spalding sales? And that's when we had a rude awakening. We learned about this concept called the Buy Box. The Amazon Buy Box is a software system. The patent just ran out, Tony. It was a patented system that allows anyone to sell the exact same product on the same listing. And if you've ever bought on Amazon, you can see See other sellers somewhere on the details page. If you click on that, you can see how many other people are selling it.
	Now we had other competitors after year 2, 3 or 4 of selling on Amazon, but what really surprised us on that morning we woke up and we started to see our sales disappear was that we saw this 'ships from and sold by Amazon'. The product listing that we worked on, that we made famous, that we got ranked on the amazon.com platform, and Amazon came in and kneecapped us and were selling the same thing for 20 to 30% less than we could even afford.

Tony:	

Oh, my goodness! We're talking about Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce, and you can find him at avenue7media.com. Now I'm going to spell that. Avenue. That's AVENUE, the number 7 and the word media. avenue7media.com.

Jason:	

So, we sat down at the drawing board and we said, we knew this day was coming. Now we need to work on Plan 2 or Plan B. So then we went back to Spalding and we said, look, you guys like us, we like you. We want you based on the information that we're learning from our customers, if you change these five or six products, you change the color of this one. You add this feature to that one. We'd like to purchase from you exclusive products with our own UPC code. And that's how the Buy Box would work. If you had a different UPC code that no one could attach to, you could be the only seller in the Buy Box. So, we thought, okay, we're going to keep selling Spalding, but we're only selling our exclusive products. And then we did great.
	We actually did more business than we did after the first phase. Really hit it out of the park. Got more invites to the NBA All-Star games on Spalding's dime. And then we woke up one morning and all of a sudden, we get a phone call from our Spalding rep who's basically in tears. And he says, Jason, we're so sorry. Amazon called my boss and said, if you don't sell us the same products that you're selling to the SuperDuper guys, we're going to stop buying everything from Spalding, so they really strong armed him. And so, then we lost our exclusives and we had these soft agreements, but you never want to be in court when you're a small business owner, because it's a good way to go out of business. And we decided not to fight them. And we said, okay, so that's number two.
	So the next thing we decided to do, the third iteration was we decided to create our own private label product, and we created a product brand called Harvel. It's since been sold and rebranded under a different name, but Harvel was our private label brand. And we thought, well, you know what? The only place they're going to be able to get the Harvel brand is from us and we're not going to sell them because we know we can do better as a third-party seller what we're selling on Amazon rather than selling to Amazon. And so that business just took off. At the time we left that business, we were growing 178%, 180% year over year.
	It was doing really well, but that final sort of straw that broke the camel's back with us and Amazon was that we had a very unique and different looking design compared to all the other products that were in our home rec and sporting goods, and gym and fitness. We had gender-neutral colors. We had very specific colors. We did a lot of research. We had great design teams to put together our products, and all of a sudden one holiday season just before our exit, we start to see that Amazon with their own brand, which was called Rally & Roar at the time - they have hundreds of their own brands, by the way, Tony - looked very eerily similar to our Harvel product, and we were like, here they go again. It's the third time. And at that point, my brothers and I, we decided we had a great run. We had 17 years. We became a top 200 seller, a top 1000 e-commerce seller, and it was time for us to just be brothers again, instead of partners. Let's move on. And that's when I started my agency Avenue7 Media.

Tony:	

This is an absolutely amazing story. And, you know, it seems like it's just the buck and whatever buck they can get is how it seems because all of the business practices go down that road. I mean, they had an agreement with Toys ”R”Us for I think it was $10 million a year to be an exclusive. That only lasted what? Two, three years and then they started selling toys. Hey, I got this out of this book, guys in the audience called The Amazon Jungle, by the way. I know I'm telling Jason's story, but it's just a good story so I'm telling it. But the thing is guys, while Amazon started selling other toys, they broke that contract, but it took 10 years for that to settle and Amazon made so much money. It was a no-brainer. So this is almost kind of like ruthless business. And not that we want to disillusion everyone, but there is and are some secrets, and there's an amazing strategy because remember, Jason Boyce has teamed up with Rick Cesari and I'm not going to mention it, what they do. We'll, we'll see where we get.
	But I want to explain just a little bit something on how real this is. I have several friends - I've got more than one. I've got several friends, my Italian joke, and they sell on Amazon and they're having a hard time and I'll give you one fast story. Case in point to give it to the audience, not to disillusion you even further, but to show you that we have something just ahead that's going to explain how to actually be in charge of this. I'll just tell you the story.
	So I have a friend who was selling a fitness item on Amazon a few years ago, and he was making 5 sales a month. Not good, and he needed some serious help so I helped him. I know a little bit about marketing and I coached him and in about, I would say one to two months, Jason, we got him up to 12 product sales a day. We've just started. I mean, that's pretty good. So now if you guys in the audience, imagine you're selling something 30-odd plus bucks, you're doing a dozen of those a day. You all are raising your hand. You're going, Hey, that's great. I'll do that. Cause you're like you're hitting five digits a month in sales. That's okay to start. That's acceptable. Well, in just another month or two, that fast, he got hammered with warehouse fees and other things being switched and other businesses getting the top billing and so forth. That's all discussed in this book and more, and it took him right out of business. It was that fast and the stuff moves at the speed of light. So if you sell anything on Amazon, or if you're thinking about selling anything on Amazon, get this book. There are some great strategies, despite what's going on. It's because Jason has all this experience on it that he's actually able to see how to go around and surpass it. And I think some of the strategies Amazon can't deal with, but I'm going to let you talk about that. How do we avoid the common pitfalls of being a third-party seller?

Jason:	

Great question. Again, we need two more days to discuss all of those, Tony, but look. The first mistake I would say that sellers make is they think that Amazon's going to be their friend. That's why we talk about going into this, eyes wide open. They are not your friend. They're not going to help you. They're just not. Jeff Bezos used to walk around Amazon headquarters saying the letters, OPW, other people's work. That's part of how they have scaled this business. They're not going to do it for you. Whether you sell to Amazon as a one P seller through a V as a vendor where you give them a wholesale where they mark it up, or what I recommend in the book, the strategy, the safest strategy to sell as a third-party seller where you're selling on Amazon. No matter which avenue you take, you can't expect Amazon to lift a finger to help you with merchandising, messaging, graphic design, nothing. They don't care. It's OPW. It's all about other people's work. You must know if you already have a product and you have these relationships with the brick-and-mortar retail stores, give them a wholesale price. They mark it up and they do the merchandising. You may provide them some assets and some details about your product to help them sell it, but they are merchandisers. Amazon are not merchandisers, especially for products not named Kindle, Echo, Ring. Those are the products they have really great merchandising team. Everything else in the marketplace, they do not.
	Also, Amazon retail has about 15 million products, but there's half a billion products listed on Amazon Marketplace. Third-party sellers do 60% of the sales, roughly 60% of the sales that go through amazon.com. The rest are Amazon retail. And so, go into this, eyes wide open. Know that you are going to have to work your tail off really, really hard, and they're not going to help you. So that's the first thing. Now after you do that, depending on where you're at and our clients ranged from direct response TV folks, Rick's friends to Instagram sellers who've had a lot of success selling products there, to Google PPC sellers, to brand new entrepreneurs who haven't even discovered a product. And we share some stories in the book about how to come up with a product.
	Once you identify a product that you think you want to sell on Amazon, the very next step is to go to Amazon and make sure that Amazon shoppers are interested in that product because you're going to invest time. You're going to invest treasure, and you want to make sure that there are a lot of shoppers that are already out there looking to buy the product that you want to sell. We used to use this 999-checkout trick, and just real briefly, if you go to amazon.com, you pick the competitor who's selling your product. You want to get an idea of how much they're selling every month. You put that product in the checkout, you enter 999 units, and you add it to your cart. Amazon will kick back a message and say, sorry, we don't have 999, but it will populate the amount of inventory in there today. And let's say that inventory number comes back at 200 units. Record that in your spreadsheet. Come back to Amazon tomorrow. This is what we used to do Tony, in the old days. We did it on a spreadsheet. The next thing that you do is you do the exact same thing around the same time tomorrow. Type in your competitive product. You put 999 units, add to cart, and they'll say, no, sorry. We don't have 999 today. We have 180. So now you can do a little math.

Tony:	

What great intel!

Jason:	

Yeah. And you can do a little math and you can realize, okay, looks like in a 24-hour period, they've sold 20 units. Now you do that five or six days of the week and you can extrapolate on average how many they're selling each month. Multiply that by the retail value. Now you know. Now you know, for free, if the product that you want to sell on Amazon has legs.
Speaker 2:	This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:	

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Announcer:	

You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. We'd love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@tonydurso.com. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:	

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. All right. And now back to the chat with Jason.

Jason:	

Now, I'm going to share with your audience here, Tony. There are some other software systems out there that have some great Chrome extensions that does this math for you. So, you just download the Chrome extension, plug it in, and it'll tell you no matter what product you click on an Amazon. One of them is called Jungle Scout™. They've been around a long time and another one, a newcomer is Helium 10. So those two software systems are great tools to add to your Chrome browser while you're determining if there's a market for your product on Amazon.
	I got to tell you another story, Tony. You know, we sold the home rec in the home rec space as one of our categories. So air hockey tables, billiard tables, foosball tables, fun stuff for the house. And I had this bright idea. I call it Jason's BI - Jason's Bright Idea - to come up with, to develop this new product. We sold these lower end tables, about three or four feet, and they're not pieces of furniture. So I deduced mom doesn't want this thing out in their room. When they're done playing it, I think she wants to fold up the legs and put it under the table. So I developed a product and I talk about in detail in the book. I developed a product that has folding legs. I'm like, this is brilliant. I'm a genius. I'm like Steve jobs, right? I've just come up with this great new product to sell on Amazon. So I developed this thing, I ordered this thing. We bring in, I don't know how many hundreds, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of product into our warehouse. Put it up on Amazon. This is going to be the next hot product, and we just heard crickets, Tony. Nothing sold.
	And so here's a situation where I had a bright idea, what I thought was a good idea. I put a lot of time and treasure, bought inventory, brought it in and it just didn't sell. Nobody cared. They didn't want it. And so at that point, I thought to myself, there's got to be a better way of picking products that work on Amazon. So that's where we came up with this 999-cart trick to determine what Amazon is. Amazon is about the final click. Amazon is not a place yet. They're trying to do this. It's not a place yet where shoppers go to discover new products. Nine times out of ten, someone comes to amazon.com, they saw an ad on Facebook, they saw an ad on television and they saw it somewhere else. They're coming to Amazon to see where they can find it and buy it.
	So I learned this the hard way about Amazon. Don't try to create a market on Amazon. If you want to create a market and you want to educate the public on a new product, call our friend, Rick Cesari and have him do a direct TV campaign that educates the public on why they need this thing they didn't know that they needed.

Tony:	

That's a great idea. Everyone, call Rick and you'll find his contact information in the book, The Amazon Jungle, I'm sure.

Jason:	

Absolutely. His email is in there and he would love to hear from you.

Tony:	

And you know, what you said is so amazingly true. They started off just selling books and it's like what? They're selling all these products. When I think of Amazon today, sort of like a market opinion, a market survey, I think of like a Walmart. They're always trying to get the lowest price, so the consumers go to them no matter what they have to do. And I am amazed that I would look for products. I've bought multiple products over time, and I won't mention what they are, but just for giggles or whatever, I would go to Amazon. They would have the same thing for lower. It's like, how do they do this? Now we understand the Walmart concept because they really push it hard. They're having the lowest prices and they do. Their prices are crazy low and Amazon has taken the thing. I remember when they first came up. Their model was to get as big as fast as possible, and all their money for years were put back into the company. They were in the red for years, but they grew like weeds. And now we think they're one of the largest companies in the country, if not the world. How big are these guys?

Jason:	

Oh, that's a great question. Tony. Amazon is bigger than they lead on. Now what do I mean by that? If you look at Amazon's 10K, the required documents for a public company to submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission every quarter and every year, their revenue looks to be around 230 million ... sorry, billion dollars, which is a big number. But if you look at Walmart, they're at $530 billion, but that's not the whole story from Amazon. Amazon knows they're huge. They're category dominant in dozens and dozens of categories. Not in automobiles. They're not great in grocery, but they're catching up. But if you look at the toy space, they own the market. Now, Amazon's got another metric that eBay's been sharing forever called Gross Merchandise Value. Amazon never shares that so no one really knows Tony, how much Gross Merchandise Value, what the total goods purchased through amazon.com is, and Amazon doesn't share it with you.

Tony:	

Are you serious? We don't know their total value?

Jason:	

We don't know. We don't know. House Judiciary Committee is investigating them. I've spoken to them. I've been cited in their most recent report. I said, we have to start by asking Amazon to be honest with us about how much business is going through .com. Nobody knows except them. Now, if you extrapolate out from some line items on their profit and loss statement, and you know, I've talked to a few analysts out there. The estimate for this year is that there'll be about $400 billion worth of goods sold on amazon.com this year, but that's not what you're going to see when you look at the CNBC quarterly reporting. They're not going to share that number because they don't want the world to know just how big that they are.
	I'll give you another metric that'll blow your mind, tony. If you look at the online market share in the United States, Amazon is estimated to have at least 50% of the online market share. For every dollar spent online in America, 50 cents of that sales going to Amazon, but that's not even the most staggering number, Tony. Second place is Walmart. You know what their online market share? 5%! 50% Amazon, 5% Walmart.

Tony:	

Jason, why don't they want people to know how big they are? There's a strategy in this? Why the lies?

Jason:	

Absolutely. They've kept this information really close to the vest for a very long time. You know, they had a grownup CEO. I think Mr. Bezos is spending more time in Texas on his rocket company right now than the amazon.com, but he's always been this way. He has been very smart about keeping things close to the vest, but more recently, Tony, they're huge and they're being investigated for antitrust. The US House of Representatives, both Democrats and Republicans, this is one thing they can agree on. They both think that Amazon and several of these big tech companies have reached monopoly status so they're being investigated. The EU just recently reported that they're filing an antitrust case against Amazon in Europe, and it's just a matter of time before it happens here in the United States. So Amazon doesn't want to share all those numbers with you. They don't want the world to know just how big they are.

Tony:	

Jason, I'm astounded and I have so many questions and this interview is just running so fast. I want to give some great tips and some great information to our audience. Perhaps one of the first things we could do is talk about, can they have a competitive edge as a third-party seller? And perhaps briefly define that for some people that may not know the first party and the third party, and let's see if we can give them some help.

Jason:	

Oh, absolutely. Despite all of the things that I say about Amazon that aren't always positive, I have several bones to pick with Amazon always because I've been on that platform nearly 20 years, one way or another. I still believe you have to be there. If you have a product, you have to be on Amazon because that's where the buying public is. And you know our premise of our book, Tony, Amazon are jerks. They're not your friend, but you got to be there because that's where half of the online buying public is. But if you're going to be there, this is the way to do it. And remember those three iterations we went through when I was a seller. We resold, that's not the strategy. Don't be a reseller on Amazon. It's thankless. You'll cry yourself to bed every night if you do that strategy.
	Exclusives are good. However, unless you have a big legal war fund to protect your exclusivity contracts with other retailers - I mean, with other wholesalers - it's a tough strategy to protect. The best way to be there is to design, develop and create your own brand as a third-party seller. Now what do I mean by third-party seller? The best way that I can describe this, Tony is there's 1 P and there's 3 P. 1 P is the traditional retail relationship. I used to sell to Walmart. I used to sell to Target. I sold to a lot of these big five sporting goods. And so, what we would do is we would come up with a wholesale price. We would offer our products to a human buyer at those retail chains. The human buyer would make a decision on how much they were going to buy. They would buy it from us at a wholesale. They would mark it up for the retail, traditional retail relationship.
	Amazon still has that. It's called 1 P, although it's still very different from the old days. There are no humans. There's rarely a human that you'll speak to at Amazon. You're usually talking to an artificial intelligence buying system and they don't do any merchandising for you. It's OTW, right? Other people's work. So that's one way to do it. I don't recommend selling to Amazon in a 1 P relationship. They'll lower the retail price on you even if you have a minimum advertised price policy. They'll run out of stock. They just don't do the work. They expect the vendors to do the work. So I say, if you're going to be on Amazon, the best way to do it is to sell on Amazon. This is where you design and develop your own product, your own brand. You protect that brand with a registered trademark and brand registry on Amazon. You own title of that inventory. Even if you're using Amazon as a fulfillment house, you still own the title of that inventory and that way you can control the listing. It allows you to control the retail price. It allows you to control the listing, the images of your product, brand messaging so that you can put your brand in the best possible light on Amazon. It allows you to upload video. It allows you to do advertising and drive traffic to your listing. It's a much happier existence if you're a third-party seller, Tony, or if you're a 1 P. I've done them all, I've them both and I'll never go back to selling 1 P again. If I were a seller today, I would never go back to doing that.

Tony:	

For those that are successful - let's called them top sellers - that strategy is their own product, their own brand, their own everything that they then sell on Amazon. That like one of the common things?

Jason:	

Yeah, that's correct. I would say the vast majority of the top 200 sellers on Amazon today, which account for a huge amount of revenue on Amazon, by the way, something like 90-something percent of the revenue. The vast majority of those sellers that are having success are third-party sellers. They've got their own brand. They're putting their best foot forward. They hold all the brand assets. They're managing the account. They're under no illusion that Amazon is going to lift a finger to help them. Maybe they have hired an agency like Avenue7 Media, or they have their own internal teams and they have figured this out over lots and lots of pain and suffering and trial and error, and those are the folks that have the biggest success on amazon.com today.

Tony:	

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:	

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	It's why brands across the globe like TransferWise, Klarna, Revolt, Farfetch, and Grab trust Checkout. Learn more at checkout.com/durso  where you can download their free white paper report, Black boxes and paradoxes: the cost of discontinued payments, to get forward thinking advice around how to build a strong payments mandate across your business, innovate and keep pace within a fast moving digital and consumer context. That's checkout.com/durso. checkout.com/durso. I'll spell that checkout is CHECKOUT. checkout.com/durso. All right, everyone, please download that report, check it up and tell me what you think of it. checkout.com/durso

Announcer:	

You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. We'd love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@tonydurso.com. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:	

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this and share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Over a decade and a half of real-world trial and error, Boyce developed his 7-Step Method that established his company as a Top 200 Amazon Seller and a top 1,000 e-commerce seller, according to Internet Retailer Magazine. And now back to the chat with Jason.
	Jason, I have so many more questions. I think we need to add another week to this interview.

Jason:	

Let's do it.

Tony:	

I want to talk about the book. I also want to help our audience entrepreneurs and small business owners. I know people that they're hurting, trying to sell things on Amazon. It's the best and the most politically correct way I can say it and I want to give them tips and help and you have a company Avenue7 Media.com. Is there a threshold or a type of company that you can help, aside from the fact that you have a lot of great information in your book, the Amazon Jungle, but let's reach out to some of the small business owners? What stress can you take off of them as well?

Jason:	

Well, thank you for asking that question. So, in terms of threshold, if you've got a business and you're in the $100,000 a year in annual revenue, we could be a good fit for you. And the way I like to describe our business, Tony is we're a fully outsourced provider for your Amazon profitable sales. We have seven different departments, everything from search engine optimization experts, copywriters who understand Rick's direct response marketing tactics that he taught me so many years ago. We have graphic designers, video editors. We have ad specialists. We have customer service; we'll manage the customer service for you, review management, all within Amazon terms of service so we don't get our clients suspended, which is a big thing. You can't mess around with the reviews. That's the one thing that's sort of the third rail there. Do not touch the third rail. Do not mess with reviews on Amazon, because it's a sure-fire way to have all that hard work vanished and disappeared on you by Amazon. And we'll handle it all for you. You know, the reason why I have an agency, Tony is this. I love the small business owner. I was a small business owner. They're my people, right? And I don't like that Amazon is a bully, and I love to be the champion for my clients. I love fighting Amazon, not only directly, but I like talking about the things that they're doing to hurt small business in the press. I like to make people aware of it and so that's what gets me up in the morning, Tony. I love helping these small business owners. On average, we will double your revenue on Amazon. We've had some wild success stories even beyond that, that we had to extrapolate out of those numbers. But that's what we do.
	As a solopreneur, you can start and do these things yourself, but you'll reach a threshold where you will need to add and train staff. You will almost need, if you get to the point where you're a seven or eight figure seller a year on Amazon, you need as many people to manage your Amazon business as you do to manage your e-commerce store, and I rattled off all of those different departments. So you can do it yourself and you can read the book and get some great tips to get you flying on Amazon, or you could give us a call and we'd be happy to help you get your business rolling.
	Again, Tony, I keep coming back to this. As much as I poke Amazon in the eye for not doing right by the small business owners, it's still the only game online in the United States. It's the only game in town. You could sell on Walmart. You'll put in as much work to get your Walmart listings going. It's only 5%. You're going to get less than 10% of the sales that you'll on Amazon if you have equal success on both platforms. I look forward to the day when Walmart closes that gap more, but it's just hasn't happened yet.

Tony:	

You have to learn how to work with the bully, but you need the bully because of the market share and the dominance. And really quickly here, we have authors in our audience, which is a little bit different. It wasn't something I was planning to go over, but I'd love to reach out. Do you have any tips or strategies for them on selling on Amazon? Have you learned anything great that you could share with us?

Jason:	

Oh my gosh. In terms of selling books on Amazon. Well, you know, this is really funny, Tony, because in the book I swear, and I tell people, please don't sell to Amazon. And so my publisher, Morgan James Publisher, guess what they have? They got a vendor central account. And so my book is being sold on Amazon through 1 P, which I tell in the book everyone never to do, so I'm not eating my own dog food here, Tony. We're still trying to figure out how to become a third-party seller for books. We were thinking about setting up our own third-party account so we can manage our ads and do the things, but there's some chapters in the book about search engine optimization, and I'm going to give a great tip to your authors out there if they are third party sellers, is identify the keywords that you believe are most relevant to your book, do searches on those. See if the books that are showing up in search results match what your thesis is on your book. If they are, get a list of keywords - it could be a dozen, it could be 3 dozen - get a list of those keywords and find a way to duplicate those keywords in two fields of your listing product - title, description, bullet points, search terms in the background or subject matter.
	If you can duplicate, you know, let's say in how to sell on Amazon, that's a high-volume keyword for my book. If you go to how to sell on Amazon on Amazon, you'll see Amazon Jungle pops up. That's because I've got it the bullet point once and then I think I have it in the search terms in the back end as well so we duplicated that keyword. That will help the algorithm. And as people search for those things, they find your book and they buy it, Amazon search algorithm will reward those authors with better search results and that's the name of the game.
	Main Street is page one search results, Tony. That's Main Street. If you can get above the fold - well above the fold is all ads now - just below above the fold section on the first page of search results for the high-volume keywords, it's like being on Main Street, all four corners. It's that powerful.

Tony:	

Well, there you go. Authors in the audience, get The Amazon Jungle and learn this strategy. So much information here. We've given it to you at high velocity here, because there's only so much time to discuss it. One last question as we do have a lot of entrepreneurs, and you've mentioned a couple of good resources, anything else that you'd like to share with our audience? Any resources or anything else in closing?

Jason:	

Well, if you're trying to find a product to sell, I really highly recommend Jungle Scout™ and Helium 10. Helium 10 has a lot of great tools that you can use for success on your Amazon business. My agency uses a company called Teikametrics, TEIKAMETRICS. Teikametrics is an AI based ad management software that really saves our clients’ money with their ad spend, and our team really knows how to work that software. So, if you want to run ads, reach out to the folks at Teikametrics. I think in my opinion, it's the gold standard in terms of Amazon ad software. Look up Rick Cesari. Rick Cesari has got a lot of books. Video Persuasion was the book before he launched with me, The Amazon Jungle. Read Rick's books on billion-dollar brands. Use his techniques.
	He taught me this, I don't know how many years ago it was Tony, but I'll never forget it. He said, “Jason, features tell, benefits sell”. With your Amazon listings, identify what's in it for the customer that puts their credit card and hits buy, right? They want to know what's in it for them. They don't want to really get into the weeds and the features. Those are important. Focus on the benefits of your product. And if you read some of Rick's books on persuasion marketing, video persuasion, you'll be off to the races and you'll be far ahead of the rest of the competitors that are out there. I still see a lot of really bad stuff on Amazon. There's a lot of opportunity there still.

Tony:	

Once again, we talked about Amazon's secrets revealed with Jason Boyce. And boy, did he give us a lot of tips, rapid fire. You're going to have to listen to this interview again, and you can find Jason at avenue7media.com. Check them out. If your business is doing over $100,000, he said he can double that. Hey, he said it! I didn't say it. I'm just repeating what he said, and he can double your business volume. He could do a lot more if you're selling on Amazon. If you're not selling on Amazon, you need to sell on Amazon because you have to get close with the bully. Jason, this was an amazing interview and I am definitely going to have to have you back on. There's more to learn.

Jason:	

Absolutely.

Tony:	

And you're so willing to teach us so we're going to have you back on another time. Thank you so much. Really, truly deeply appreciated on behalf of the audience and everyone. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today.

Jason:	

Tony, thank you so much. Again, it's my distinct honor to be on your show. Long time listener. For you, sellers and your listeners out there, give Tony the review he deserves. Give him that five-star. It would be my honor to come back, Tony. You're one of the good guys. Thanks for all the great work you do on behalf of small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Tony:	

You're making me blush. The honor is mine, Jason. Thank you so much. Hey, fellow entrepreneurs, thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I'm sure this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. We learned some great points about Amazon secrets revealed with Jason Boyce. I don't think I've heard before that someone couldn't make it in college because they had too much energy. Another case of serendipity perhaps? And Jason joined the best management training program in America through the Marine Corps. That seemed to deal just right with his energy level, as after completing his service, he went on to help build a multi-million-dollar family business, becoming the top 200 Amazon seller and a top 1000 e-commerce seller. This man knows that stuff! Meet Jason Boyce, co-author along with Rick Cesari of The Amazon Jungle.
	With an astounding 50% of the market and growing, there's not one person who doesn't know of Amazon and hasn't shopped with them. They are so big they're hiding their size, but they got this big by using your work - OPW - other people's work to speed them along the way. And now as a big giant, they are a big bully that you can seem to live without. They are not your friend. As soon as they see you doing big numbers by selling with them, you can expect them to copy and duplicate everything you do and offer the same products for less, but it's not all bad. There are key strategies that you can use to deal with this wild bull because they are helpful with their huge market share, as long as you proceed with caution and some good strategies in place. Listen to this interview again and read The Amazon Jungle to get insight on possible strategies and how you can play the game with the big boys and stay as protected as possible. And make sure you remember that 999 trick to gauge daily product sales of competitors on Amazon.
	There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Did this interview give you any ideas for your business? Did it stimulate you to take some new action? Please share and grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with a decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you along the process. The eBook is at tonydurso.com/books. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. I wrote it up so that you can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. And once again, please consider supporting the show with a nice review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/tony. Thanks guys and remember: just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show.

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