Honest Ecommerce

Bonus Episode: The Amazon Advantage: Launching and Testing New Brands with Josh Hadley

Episode Summary

On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Josh Hadley. Josh is the Host of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast and CEO of an 8 figure Ecommerce brand. We talk about actionable ecommerce strategies, testing product ideas on Amazon, different skill sets for Amazon and Shopify, and so much more!

Episode Notes

Josh Hadley is not just the founder and CEO of an eight-figure e-commerce brand; he is also a leading voice in the e-commerce space as the host of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. 

His professional journey took off at American Airlines' Leadership Development Program, fresh from earning an MBA from the University of Utah. 

While maintaining his corporate career, Josh and his wife co-founded a custom wedding invitation business, leveraging their unique skill sets in the evenings. Recognizing an opportunity in the Amazon marketplace, they strategically pivoted their venture to create a stationery empire, growing their portfolio to over 1,300 products. 

Josh relishes the rewarding challenge of balancing business growth with family life in Dallas Texas. 

Raising three children while building a successful venture with his wife, he exemplifies the possibility of harmonizing personal fulfillment with professional success.

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

Resources:

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Episode Transcription

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, future Chase here. I am just giving you a quick heads up that I had my mic settings a little weird during this next recording. We did our best to tame it down. But you'll still notice it's not as good a quality as we normally bring to the table. And just wanted to apologize.

But we thought the content was amazing. And we still wanted to bring you this episode. Thank you so much. And I hope you enjoy the show. 

Josh Hadley

Amazon has created, in my opinion, a very inexpensive way for people to launch new brands and to test new ideas. 

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. 

Today, I've got an amazing guest. He is the host of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. He is the CEO of an 8-figure Ecommerce brand. Josh Hadley, welcome to the show.

Josh Hadley

Hey, Chase. Happy to be here. 

Chase Clymer

I'm excited to chat.

So first, at the top, we're going to obviously want to pitch the podcast. What are you guys discussing on the podcast? What are people going to listen and pick up on if they go and check it out, which everyone should? 

Josh Hadley

Yeah. So it's called the Ecomm Breakthrough. Ecomm with two Ms. It's meant for 7-figure Ecommerce business owners. And what I share on that podcast are actionable strategies to help scale your brand to 8 figures and beyond. 

One thing that I'm kind of known for is every single episode, I leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Each episode is about 45 minutes to an hour long. So we go into it, we deep dive into different topics and strategies. 

It's all about actionable content so that you're listening to something. It's something you could actually go do about it after you're done listening. So that's what it is. It's been a lot of fun. 

Chase Clymer

Oh yeah. Podcasting is a lot of fun. Now…

Take me back in time. How'd you end up in this wild world of Ecommerce? What was going on? 

Josh Hadley

Yeah. So I've always been the kid trying to sell candy or whatnot on the corner of the street all growing up. And so deep down, I've always known. I love business. I knew I was going to be an entrepreneur even though I didn't know what that word actually meant when I was younger. 

So fast forward to… When I went to college, I didn't know what I wanted to do other than I know I love business, and I want to lead and manage businesses, but there's no CEO courses in college. They have general business management, but I ended up deciding to study finance because I enjoyed numbers in terms of making money in the stock market. 

That's where I spent my time and then I subsequently did my MBA as well there at the University of Utah

Now, part of the reason I did that back to back is because one thing I got involved in in college was called the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge

So in that challenge, I kind of organized and ran the statewide business plan competition for all collegiate students in the state of Utah. So it was literally like Shark Tank style pitches. The winner would get like $40,000 to go start their brand sponsored by Zions Bank

Anyways, it was a fascinating environment. Just got my mind going on different business ideas. 

So I graduate college, graduate with my MBA, get a job offer with American Airlines in their MBA leadership development program. So that brought us from Utah down to Dallas where we're currently at. 

And during that summer, my wife was like, she graduated college at the same time, but in early childhood education.

And so for her, she was like, “Hey, do I need to go get a job? What do you want me to do? I've always loved art when I was younger, and I would love to experiment with this graphic design thing.” 

And so I was like, “Yeah, fine. This salary is more than enough for two people, so go do what you want for a little while.” 

So she starts custom designing some wedding invitations for some friends, and then those friends are like, “Oh my goodness, you're amazing at what you do. I'm going to refer you to this friend and this friend.” 

Me, being the entrepreneur, I was like, “This is a business. This is a business idea.” So literally like two months into working at American Airlines, we decided to start this custom wedding invitation business. So we got it to a point. 

I created some Facebook ad funnels and this was back in 2014, 2015, so Facebook ads were a whole different ballgame back then, but I remember I went through a course, learned it, and I was like, “All right, let's throw some spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks.” 

Sure enough, one of my first ads on Facebook worked and it was like shooting fish in a barrel. We ultimately built it up to where it was like a six-month waiting list just to work with my wife and have her custom design these wedding invitations for clients. 

However, we had our first child in 2015.

And it was at that point, we're like, “Okay, this isn't sustainable for us.” My wife was just working all hours of the day. And literally, like the only way we could make more money is to have her work with more clients, but she was already at max capacity. So it presented a scalability issue at that point. 

And at the time, I had already been paying attention to a lot of courses that were preaching about, “Hey, make millions of dollars selling on Amazon.”

And I had experimented with a few, created a few products, etc. None of them really took off, but it gave me an essential background and framework, which then like this pivot with our wedding invitation business into what we're doing now was instrumental. 

The lesson from that story is like, I don't see all of those steps as failures. “Oh, I tried to launch this product and they didn't take off,” Failure. No, I see that as like, my favorite analogy is this: It's like you're fishing, right? And you have no idea where the fish are. And you also don't know what type of bait those fish are gonna be eating for the day, right? 

And so all I was doing this entire time is I've always been, I can't tell you the number of business ideas that I've tried to launch. And that's for another episode, but I just kept casting, right? Casting something out, letting it sit, see what would happen.

And so lo and behold, we have the scalability issue, but one thing that people talked about having these wedding clients would come back to us and they would say, “Hey, can you design some recipe cards for my bridal shower?” I was like, “We can, but you're not going to pay as much money for these recipe cards as you did for your wedding invitations.” 

So at that point, I was like, “But what if we mass produced our top three designs from these wedding invitations, turned them into recipe cards, and let people buy them?” 

So that's where the ideas merged. I threw them up on Amazon and we sold out within the first couple months. And I was like, “Holy smokes. We're off to the races.” So we immediately pivoted the business and turned off the Facebook ads and immediately pivoted into Amazon.

That was the fall of 2016. So all of 2017, we're all in on Amazon. We did a million dollars our first year on Amazon.

And then we have since scaled it. We've had to do a couple of pivots in between now and then. But that's the genesis of our business. 

Chase Clymer

No, absolutely. That's an amazing story. And I like that you were honest and you've tried a million things. And some worked and some didn't. 

And it's this... I think that analysis paralysis and not trying things and being scared of failure is why a lot of entrepreneurs don't take that next step. 

And it's becoming comfortable with failure and failing fast and just being okay with it. Like, “Well, we tried it. That didn't work. What did we learn?” 

Josh Hadley

100%. At the end of the day, it's all about reps, right? And you look at… another good analogy is baseball and the batters, right? 0.25 batting average is average, right? You get into the threes and heaven forbid, 0.4, like you're an exceptional batter. But that means, “Guess what? You're striking out or not getting on base the majority of the time, right?” 

Chase Clymer

Exactly. 

Josh Hadley

But you're going to have some home runs within there. But here's the thing. Just get up to the plate, swing, swing, swing, swing, swing, and always be taking chances and then double down when something has legs under it. 

And you're like, “Ooh, this thing's actually starting to move.” And that's been like, I mean, that's the summation of my entire journey. I tried to do a software SaaS business, right? I tried creating a fashion Ecommerce brand. Obviously, we're not talking about that. So that didn't work. 

Try doing a couple different products on Amazon, selling textbooks, etc. All of these things gave me experience that then led to... As I kept taking reps, as soon as something worked, I went all in on it. And then we've been able to scale it. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And it's you... With all those reps, you start to see those leading indications of, “There's something here”, and without just putting in the work and figuring out and trying stuff, you don't even get that almost entrepreneurial fifth sense of like, “Well, it was way easier to make this $1,000 than those other dozen times. How do we expand upon this?” 

Something that we haven't really covered on the show much because Honest Ecommerce, generally, we’re talking about your own brand and building that out on Shopify. And there's obviously like... Or something like Shopify. I'm just a Shopify fanboy. 

That's a completely different monster than harnessing the giant that is Amazon and their customer base. So I guess first, could you walk me through the pros and cons, if you want to be more honest, of building a business using the tools that Amazon gives you? 

Josh Hadley

Yeah. I think the grass is always greener, right? Those that have Shopify brands, I'm jealous of you and that you've found a way to drive your own traffic and not have to deal with Amazon. 

And then likewise, I mean, there are pros that come with Amazon and we're looking at, for our own brand, looking to kind of branch out and go more D2C now as well. 

With that being said, you know, Amazon brings tons of customers, right? And in Ecommerce, Amazon is king. That's where most people even start searching for a product even before they'll go to it on Google. And so that's kind of where a lot of people natively love to shop. They have a lot of trust built in with Amazon. So you've got a very active buyer pool. 

And in addition to that, they have for their ad platform and these people that are on Amazon, they are at the very bottom of the funnel.

They are there on Amazon because the buyer intent is extremely high. It's a shopping platform. They are specifically looking to buy something. So those are all the pros of Amazon.

Now the cons of Amazon. You don't get the customer shipping information. Unless you're doing, you know, you can fulfill it yourself and if you do that, but you're not gonna have the prime badge if you just do your own fulfillment. So there are drawbacks that way. 

But you're not going to get the customer's contact information, their email. There are ways around it. But in general, the rule is no, you're not going to get that information. 

Chase Clymer

It's Amazon's customer. It's not Josh's customer. 

Josh Hadley

Yeah, exactly. And then different people have different opinions on what you can and include in the package and whatnot. But with that being said, in terms of marketing material, going back to your website. 

The other thing with Amazon, a con, is like Amazon knows they've got a grasp on the entire Ecommerce industry in the US. And so all they do every single year is they just raise their seller fees, raise the FBA fees fulfilled by Amazon, and that makes it more complicated. 

And so what we see right now in the Amazon space is just drastic margin compression. I think that Amazon is heavily courting all of these Chinese brands right now because they're trying to compete with, like, Temu and Shein and all of that. And so they're like, we just need cheap crap. 

And so anyways, if I were in Amazon's leadership, I'd be like, “Do you really want to be a competitor to Temu? Because people that go to Temu expect garbage. Do you want Amazon to be the next Wish down the road 10 years from now?

But I don't think you'll necessarily get there, but that's who you're competing against, right? It's just cheap, cheap crap. And so people, it's just a lot of margin compression. It's a race to the bottom more often than not. 

However, if you have a designed or patented product, Amazon can be a great place because there are certain customers that will only buy on Amazon. And obviously there's a segment of customers that will not buy on Amazon. 

And then the last, I guess, pro that I would say is, and this has been our biggest benefit, is Amazon's FBA system. Being able to ship, we have over 1,400 different SKUs, being able to ship everything into Amazon. Now Amazon's increasing fees and they don't want you to send in too much, not too little. So that in and of itself is becoming more complex than it ever has been. 

But the reality of the shipping, the fulfillment fees that you get from Amazon, that's extremely hard for even another big 3PL to replicate those low costs, of being able to ship to a customer and also being able to pick, pack and fulfill it. 

Amazon has scaled their operations and I would argue it's really hard to find anywhere else to fulfill it cheaper than through Amazon. So at the end of the day, Amazon's probably walking away with 45% of the entire product of the revenue. So of the revenue share, you're going to be lucky to come out with a gross profit margin of... A healthy one is 40%. 40% to 50% is healthy in the Amazon space. 

Chase Clymer

Wow. I mean, there was so much there. 

And I think that merchants need to understand... They're like, “Well, I can just ship these things myself.” And it's like, you can ship a dozen things a day by yourself. You can't ship at the velocity to which you have a million dollar business, even beyond that. There's no way to do that yourself. 

And I think that you hit the nail on the head. You're never going to find a cheaper 3PL than using Amazon. It's just annoying that you're also paying Amazon for that fee. Because if you break it apart, and then you've got your seller's fees, and then against the 3PL, it's a little easier, I guess, to swallow that percentage.

But yeah, there's just so much power to it. 

One thing that I always thought was interesting, and I even tell people, and I'm sure that you've got some insights on this is when you're testing an idea, doing that, not using Amazon's collective customer base. If you're going to build it out of, say, a Shopify store, and then you have to build a funnel, and then you have to drive the traffic and all this stuff, just to test an idea, I almost say, “Make a fake brand and just text the product and the copy on Amazon and see if you've got a winner”, Just because... I don't know. Is that a strategy that people are employing much? 

Josh Hadley

Yeah, 100%. And Amazon... So the number one growth lever for Amazon sellers is just launching new products. And it's a numbers game. And the nice part about Amazon is they're going to share with you all the data. So they're going to share with you... This is how much search volume is going on for these particular keywords. And by the way, here's the average conversion rate, okay? 

So what's really great is if you can create a product, put it up on Amazon, and within the first like 30 days, like 30 days is more than sufficient, maybe even two weeks, you'll know whether you have a winner or not. 

Because if your conversion rate is beating the market leader or the market average conversion rate there for that specific category on Amazon, you've got some room to run here. A, you're going to start being ranked organically on Amazon, but it just creates this whole flywheel. 

But in my opinion, Amazon has created, in my opinion, a very inexpensive way for people to launch new brands and to test new ideas. It's never been cheaper than it is today to launch a brand new product.

I mean, you think about it. You go back in time and if you want to get into retail stores, you're paying slotting fees, you're having to go in with a bunch of capital, you're not getting paid on that order for x amount of days. And so that's very challenging. 

Chase Clymer

I saw something on the internet the other day. It was a net 365 deal to get into a giant auto parts conglomerate nationwide. 

Josh Hadley

That's brutal. 

Chase Clymer

So you're sending them a year's worth of product to stock 300 locations and you're not going to get paid for a year. Most small businesses probably don't have the capital to float that deal. 

Josh Hadley

Heck no. Amazon is quick wins. It can be quick wins, but it's also very competitive because of that. 

Chase Clymer

If you found a winner on Amazon, obviously you could just double down on Amazon. It's already working. You figured it out. 

But do you think at that point, it might be worthwhile to take a step back and be like, Do I want to build this off Amazon? We know that the market will buy here on Amazon and there are customers here. But finding them elsewhere? Or is that just like an esoteric conversation to have with yourself? 

Josh Hadley

No, honestly, it's probably one of the best strategies that you could do. So here's what I would recommend. Start on Amazon. And for those of you who know how to create funnels and you're really good at marketing and driving your own traffic, keep doing that. But don't send it to Amazon because here's what's going to happen.

And I had Brett Curry, he's from the OMG agency, I had him on my podcast and he shared a very fascinating fact and I'll kind of elaborate further here. So if you're running like a Facebook ad to a funnel, and you're profitable in that funnel and it makes sense, you're gonna keep it going, that's great. 

Keep it going and A, you've got customers that you could then follow up with, you could then provide them up sales, you have more control over that customer. Try to get them on your recurring subscriptions, whatever you're trying to do. 

Now, here's the sweet spot of being on Amazon while you're also running these funnels. There are, like I said, people that will not trust a funnel. They will not trust buying something from a Facebook ad. So what do they do? And Brett Curry, again, talked about this.

He argued that as high as 50% of people will stop and they will search Amazon for that specific product. And I can tell you. 

Chase Clymer

I've done this before. 

Josh Hadley

I do the exact thing myself. 

Chase Clymer

When I know it's a cheap piece of crap though, I'm like, “I'm not paying $27 for that. I know it's $12. Let me see what it is on Amazon.” 

Josh Hadley

Yeah, they'll stop. They'll go to Amazon. So if you could then, you know, again, you've got to have price parity, obviously. You've got to figure out a clever way of how you're going to build that bundle to offset the ad costs. 

But anyways, you're going to then be driving external traffic to Amazon and here's the secret: These customers are searching on Amazon. They're finding your product on Amazon, and then they're buying your product on Amazon. It's called the search, find, buy method. That is the most powerful method on Amazon to rank your product organically. 

And you, without manipulating search results, you're getting organic search, find and buy because you're running this Facebook ad, people stop, they go to Amazon, they search it, they find it, they buy it. That's massive. 

Whereas I would argue 90% of Amazon sellers, they don't have anything like that going on. All they do is just focus on Amazon. 

Chase Clymer

There's an entrepreneur that I follow, Zach Stuck, I believe is his name. He runs Homestead Studio. And they are a paid agency. But I know he has since focused more on... they bought a few brands to do it themselves because they know how to do it. And he shares a lot of awesome stuff. His Twitter account is great. And I'll make sure to link to it. 

But one thing that he said the other day was they tracked when they were spending and when they weren't spending on Facebook, and these ads are pointed right at their product on their... They have Shopify stores. 

But they were also comparatively looking at the numbers on Amazon. And there is an uptick. You can see it in the numbers. And the correlation is there. And they're like, “Not only are we seeing the ROI from Facebook to Shopify, and that's extremely quantifiable with a Pixel, we're seeing this other lift here that we could start to attribute. 

And so if you look at a more complex method like marketing efficiency ratio comparing total sales across all channels versus total spend across all channels, you'll see some potentially better numbers and better margins.” 

Josh Hadley

Yeah. 100%. And Brett Curry shared this on my podcast. A lot of those people that used to do a lot of the infomercials, they'll still do the infomercials. But instead of getting a lot of their orders from people calling in, or from people placing the money check order in the mail or whatever... 

Chase Clymer

Available now on Amazon.

Josh Hadley

More than 50% of the orders are coming on Amazon from those late night infomercials now. So if those infomercial guys know that, “Okay, the halo effect is Amazon”, we don't have to say Amazon. They don't say Amazon. In fact, but people are going there. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I think it's just... People assume it's on Amazon. And so they're going to just grab their phone and search it. You got a memorable product name or brand name, just type that right in. See what comes up. 

Josh Hadley

Yep. 100%. This has been a fantastic conversation. 

Chase Clymer

Now, if I was to go out and I think that Amazon would be a better route for me as an entrepreneur, and I wanted to start a business on Amazon, we already talked about how testing is fantastic. What are some other things that I should keep in mind? 

Josh Hadley

Yeah, I think that as you get started on Amazon, again, there's a whole method to the madness on Amazon, right? It's all keyword driven and SEO focused. And who knows what AI is going to do to their search algorithm? I don't know. 

But keywords are essential. Amazon advertising is an essential component as well. So you're going to have to figure out… It's basically PPC. So if you're doing / at all, I mean, Google PPC is a lot more complex than Amazon is. Amazon's probably a few years behind what Google's PPC setup looks like. So, getting really good at that is also a really big component of that. 

And so there are a few courses and people that I would recommend that you follow. One would be Brandon Young. He has a course, it's like a college level course for selling on Amazon. And there's a lot of gurus out there that preach, I'll teach you how to sell on Amazon and make a million bucks and you just sit at the beach. 

And Amazon is not a passive income business. So let me just say that. This is active management on a daily basis. 

Chase Clymer

Gurus are the reason I started this podcast. It's called Honest Ecommerce for that reason. I've been in Ecommerce almost 10 years now, and if it was that easy, why am I interviewing you right now? I should be on a beach. I wouldn’t wear my tie. Where's my million dollars? 

Josh Hadley

Yep. Exactly. So Amazon's not the silver bullet by any means. It's a whole other channel, but it is a massive channel. And if you can get that flywheel going, it can certainly be well worth your time. 

So recommendations people to follow would be Brandon Young. He has a course called Seller Systems. By far one of the best out there. And then Helium 10. That's like the biggest software tool that a lot of Amazon sellers use.

This will allow you, it's a free Chrome extension. to go in there and you can see all the sales for all the competitors. How much money are they making on a monthly basis? How many sales are they doing on a monthly basis? What's their best selling product, et cetera? Where are they based out of? China or the US?

So there's a ton of tools that you can find and also learn the keyword, the keyword data, like what keywords are they using in their listings.

So all of that's there. And then Helium 10 has a course called Freedom Ticket. And I actually teach one of the modules in that course about how to scale your team and hire really good talent management level staff overseas is kind of my area of specialty. 

So that one's a really good basic building block if you're interested in getting started on Amazon. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely.

You said Amazon really lends itself to products that... Or PPC. So elaborating from that in my brain, if you got a product idea where you're almost inventing a new category, or it seems almost difficult to explain, or there isn't anything else out there that does that, would... To me, it seems like that maybe Amazon wouldn't really work out the best for you if people aren't already searching for something like that.

Josh Hadley

Well, typically so, they're probably searching for some type of problem or solution, right? There's got to be some alternatives. Some of our best product launches have been products that have never been on Amazon before. So that would be my secret tip for your listeners. if you have a product that does really well on Etsy, and there's not like, you're like, “There's nobody like this on Amazon”, that's a really good indication that your product could succeed on Amazon. 

Now, what you need to do is you could go do the keyword level research, but again, if you're having success with your product and you don't see something on Amazon, I think it is always worth the test because, you know, Amazon's not really serving up a lot of like keyword data if there's nobody really converting from that keyword data, right? 

They're gonna… A really good example of this is if you have a word that has to be auto corrected, Amazon will auto correct it if there's just not a lot of searches and they'll just spin it to a completely different search term. 

So that's another hack. If you can find something that is being auto corrected, it's gonna require you a lot of work to actually reverse that on Amazon. And it just comes with time, but it can be really good opportunities for you on Amazon. 

So yes, at the end of the day, with Amazon, you can test quickly. You can test very cheaply too. Cause all you have to do is you could send in as little as one unit into Amazon FBA. You'll get the prime badge, okay? And then you could start running ads on it. And when you start running ads, you're going to see like the click through rate.

The CTR, the click-through rate is going to be one of your most telling signs. If you have a click-through rate that is greater than 0.4% on Amazon PPC, it means that customers are resonating really well with your product. 

Because 0.4% is kind of like the median click-through rate, anything below that. And every category is definitely different, but let's imagine… because some of my products have 1% or greater click-through rates. We know we're crushing it in those spaces because that click-through rate is so high. 

So again, there's so much data that you can quickly know whether you have a winner or loser on Amazon. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing stuff. 

Here's another question I have. Or maybe I'm looking for validation here. It's like the skill set that you have in running your Amazon business and helping others with Amazon. While there are some parallels to what I do with a direct consumer side and an owned experience in Shopify, I would never say I have... 

I couldn't help anyone do anything on Amazon, to be honest. The skill set is just so different to me. And oftentimes, when I meet brands, they're looking for a unicorn, someone that can do both. And I argue, I don't think you're gonna find that person. 

Josh Hadley

Yeah. I think it's really challenging. I think they are completely different skill sets, right? I know, especially if you're referencing an agency. In agency, I do think it is a unicorn that can do it all.  And there are some that plead to be, that it's like, “We can help you scale your D2C website and then we'll also help you scale Amazon.” I would say they're going to be watered down in one of those areas.

They might have hired somebody that previously had an Amazon brand and he's running their Amazon brand strategy now, but they're probably not like deep experts. 

I know, for example, like there's a lot of nuances in Amazon and the keyword strategy and especially with PPC strategies, there are immense intricacies with how you can advertise on Amazon.

And then on the flip side, I know that the skill set and talent for working with an agency that's just D2C and sending traffic to a funnel, it's like, you've just gotta have a really good eye for good creative. You're super quick at testing and you're constantly coming up with new ideas for that creative. Like Facebook ads. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And there's also... Yeah. There's like the whole...you have full control over the look and feel of the experience, which is... Sometimes... Because Amazon takes that all... 

Josh Hadley

CRO optimization. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Amazon takes it all away from you and you don't have any control. So you don't have any... You're not building any of the skill sets in UX and the customer journey and that stuff. And so... 

Josh Hadley

Zero. 

Chase Clymer

We have multiple times helped Amazon brands that are...They want to expand their... They approach us in a million different ways, but it always comes out of this, “Amazon is going to fuck us someday. We need to build this over here too.” 

And so we help them do that. And we always tell them,”This is not going to take off like it took off on Amazon for you. But we're going to build it the right way the first time so it can take off when you start to invest in the other elements, which is the paid ads.” How are you sending traffic there? We can build the most beautiful store ever. But if it's in the middle of the desert, nobody's gonna buy anything. How are we sending foot traffic to this thing? 

Yeah, I think that the unicorns... Unicorns don't exist. You're gonna need to hire people with certain skill sets to do certain things. And I see that with some of the larger businesses we work with. They'll have like... It'd be like a head of Ecommerce and a head of Amazon. They're like two distinct different roles. 

Josh Hadley

Yeah, I'm not at that point. My team is all centered around Amazon for sure right now. 

But I would argue that the D2C... Well, and actually, I already have somebody on my marketing team that is more D2C funnel focused right now. But they're very different skill sets. Not two in the same whatsoever. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely, Josh. Alright. 

So if I have been listening to this podcast, and I'm enjoying what you're saying, obviously, I'm going to go and subscribe to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. That’s Ecomm with two Ms. But where else can I get a hold of you or get in touch or just learn from you? 

Josh Hadley

Yeah. So you could reach out to me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com. If anybody's interested, they want to pick my brain about Amazon, you're welcome to reach out to me there. 

And then also on LinkedIn, just Josh Hadley, you'll find me there. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Josh Hadley

It was a pleasure, Chase. Thanks again. 

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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