Mina Elias is a multiple seven figure seller in the supplement industry, investor, Amazon PPC expert and founder of Trivium Group, an Amazon Advertising agency.
Episode brought to you by Trend & Finaloop.
Join 15k founders and marketers & get our pod highlights delivered directly to your inbox with the DTC Pod Newsletter! On this episode of DTC pod, Jordan & Victor join Blaine & Ramon to discuss everything about building a top tier CPG brand from the ground up.
In this episode of DTC POD, Mina joins Blaine to dive into the world of Amazon and what it takes to be successful as a brand on the platform. From setting up a seller account to optimizing listings and advertising strategies, we cover everything you need to know as you launch products on Amazon's marketplace. You're not going to want to miss this one.
We cover:
1. Setting up and navigating Amazon's seller central account.
2. Optimizing listings with SEO keywords and effective product images.
3. Using customer feedback and reviews to improve products and branding.
4. Understanding and navigating Amazon's complex advertising and marketing strategies.
5. Managing inventory and avoiding stockouts to maintain sales performance.
6. The importance of aggressive marketing and traffic generation on Amazon.
7. Strategic pricing and profitability considerations for success on Amazon.
Timestamps:
02:06 Mina's founding of Trivium, an Amazon advertising agency; 142 brands.
07:37 Strategies for success on Amazon; assessing product fit, competition.
18:14 Analyzing keywords, studying competitors, creating unique products for Amazon.
20:41 Amazon for research and testing; leveraging reviews, pricing competition.
26:09 Process of setting up a seller central account on Amazon.
30:20 Importance of optimizing listings, shipping strategies, avoiding stockouts.
44:22 Managing loss, improving conversion rate, increasing ad spend.
48:01 Let Amazon handle customer service; focus on feedback.
53:00 Amazon's marketing improvements; tailored promotions, retargeting campaigns.
54:42 Updates are noteworthy, especially for sellers.
Shownotes powered by Castmagic
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Past guests & brands on DTC Pod include Gilt, PopSugar, Glossier, MadeIN, Prose, Bala, P.volve, Ritual, Bite, Oura, Levels, General Mills, Mid Day Squares, Prose, Arrae, Olipop, Ghia, Rosaluna, Form, Uncle Studios & many more.
Check out our guide to all the best brands here.
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• #184 Jake Karls, Midday Squares - Turning Your Brand Into The Influencer With Content
• #205 Kasey Stewart: Suckerz- - Powering Your Launch With 300 Million Organic Views
• #219 JT Barnett: The TikTok Masterclass For Brands
• #223 Lauren Kleinman: The PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook
• #243 Kian Golzari - Source & Develop Products Like The World's Best Brands
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Mina Elias- CEO of Trivium
Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io
Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Castmagic
Mina Elias [00:02:06]:
Awesome, man. So, yeah, like you said, my name is Mina. I'm the founder of Trivium. We are an Amazon advertising agency. Amazon Marketing agency. Basically, we handle the entire Amazon sales channel for brands. Our goal is to basically drive more traffic on Amazon and improve conversion rate. So we'll talk a lot about the different factors that influence click through and conversion rate on Amazon. I'll talk about all of the ways that you can drive traffic on Amazon, both paid and organic. My background I came to America in 2011. I was born in Egypt, grew up in Dubai, came here for college, chemical engineering, graduated top of my class, got my Bachelor's, got my Master's, worked up the corporate ladder, worked in new product development and medtronic surgical devices. Did like project management, all this bullshit engineering stuff. Hated it. And I started fighting in 2013 doing MMA. I still do it. And I've been a huge fan of supplements ever since I saw supplements. And so I decided to start a supplement brand in 2018. Basically six months in, I created an electrolyte powder. I was on Keto and I wanted an electrolyte powder that had high sodium, high electrolytes, no sugar. I made it, tried it on myself, tried it on my friends. Everyone loved it. I decided to start the brand and I tried to get it in stores and gyms. Didn't work out. And I was at an MMA event and basically I lied to everyone and said that it's going to be on Amazon soon. And that's what got me into getting on Amazon. And so I did this massive deep dive into how to get my product on Amazon. And six months after so I got my product on Amazon and six months in, I was doing like four K a month in profits. And I got fired from my job and basically got thrown into the deep end of entrepreneurship. So I packed my shit and I went back to Egypt for four months to save money while I was reinvesting everything into the business. The brand launched on Amazon November of 2018. And then by January of 2020 or December 2019, I was doing a million dollars in run rate. So scaled it on Amazon and then COVID hit. I started getting on podcasts just like this, talking about all of the things that I learned and all the mistakes that I made. Because when I was learning, everyone gave me bad advice. And I'm like, I'm not going to give advice. I'm just literally going to give experience. Like, I tried this and this happened, I tried that and that happened. And this is basically a lot of what you're going to hear from me today is kind of like based on stuff that I've tried. And so I did the podcast. People loved it. It became crazy. And everyone's like, man, Mina Mina just hit me up and asked me for consultations, asked me to run their stuff. I didn't want to run anyone's brands or anything. Then an aggregator raised $100 million, hit me up and they're like, we need someone to train our in house ads team. We're not going to outsource this advertising stuff to anyone. Can you train our team? I'm like, sure thing. But they made me prove myself by running one of their brands first. And then like four months later they said, I beat out like six other agencies they hired and outperformed all of them. And they're like, yeah, train our team. And so from then, I'm like, dude, literally I need to be an agency. It's helping so many people, people constantly hitting me up. So 2021, I became an agency officially. And then now fast forward 2023. We manage about 142 brands. We have 77, 78 employees. The goal is to basically be like a strong strategic partner, figure everything out there is to know about Amazon, partner with good brands that are making good products and then scale them and make them have a lot more revenue on the sales channel. Amazon's like narnia. A lot of what you're going to hear me talk about is not going to make any sense. Like, why in the first 30, 45 days do you have to sell a lot of units, not profitably, even if it's not profitable, just so Amazon can rank you better. It's like all of these weird things and it's a game and you have to play by the rules. And so I'm going to share everything on this episode as much as I can in terms of all the nuances of Amazon, all that stuff. And hopefully it opens up a little bit of the black box that Amazon is.
Blaine Bolus [00:06:25]:
Yeah, and we're really excited to have you on the show today because I know our focus being D to C is a lot of times we take the ecommerce angle. We'll talk to them about how are you setting up your shop, how are you building out all your inventory, all the things of running a business. But at the end of the day, Amazon is one of the biggest marketplaces and channels that you can go to, to sell. And so for any brand after know kind of set up their strategy, whether it's direct to consumer first, whether it has a retail strategy as like a lot of brands play in Amazon territory, we haven't covered that as much. And I'd love to really dig in deeper to that. So why don't we today you said you have a background in supplements. So let's just take the perspective of a supplements brand and let's take the perspective of a brand that starts by selling D to C, right? So when is the time to go to Amazon? Is that a place that you're starting? What are you testing for in the direct channels before you want to open up Amazon? What kind of inventory do you need before you're ready to go to Amazon? Just walk me through the whole thing. If I'm a brand just getting started and let's say I'm selling Know, what's?
Mina Elias [00:07:37]:
My playbook perfect. So if you're a brand, you have to pick one of two strategies when you're going into Amazon. First of all, and I'm going to cover this is your brand even a fit for Amazon? And I'm going to walk you through how to evaluate if it is or it isn't. Now, if it is, you have one of two options. Option number one, you're going for a brand play, and it's basically know, I have a brand, I'm running paid ads, I'm doing TikTok, I'm doing all this stuff I don't really care about, figuring out and scaling Amazon. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to list my products on Amazon and I'm going to have good creatives, I'm going to have good reviews. I'm going to have all that stuff and I'll talk about what good means. And then from there, anyone who sees my ads goes on my D to C site, checks me out, likes me, but doesn't want to convert on Shopify or whatever, just goes to Amazon, converts there. And so you'll notice, like basically and you have to run branded ads because people will say, well, they're already looking for me by my brand name. Why should I spend money on ads? Because if you don't spend money on ads, the guy above you who has 700,000 reviews and is a better price is going to show up on your brand name. So you want to protect your branded placements, but basically they just want to convert. And you can start tracking like, okay, I got on Amazon, my total revenue was this much. Now my total revenue across both channels is this much. Even if you lose some on the D to C side to gain some on the Amazon, usually you'll gain a little bit more in total because people will convert more likely to convert better on Amazon. They just trust Amazon. They can return whenever they want, all of that good stuff. So that's option number one, right? Everyone should do this. There's very few exceptions, like if you're a designer, if you're very high price point and it doesn't make sense, very few exceptions to the rule. And I mean, hit me up and I'll tell you what I think. But most of the time, if you're spending money anywhere else, like Facebook, TikTok, whatever organic, people are going to look for you on Amazon. And if they do, they should find you and they should convert. Even if it's 50 conversions a month, it's 50 more than you. Why not, right? Just set it up. Now. Then there's the other strategy, the strategy that I go for, which is you're going in to compete now. You're going in and you're going to go balls to the wall. You're going to go really hard. You need to have inventory, you need to have creatives that convert people when they search for you, they need to pick yours. So before I get into that, because that's going to be more of like, what's the strategy, the aggressive strategy? Will your product succeed on Amazon? So first of all, Amazon is search based. So the only reason someone's going to come to Amazon is because they're searching for something. So the first thing is you look at your product and you say, what are the keywords that people who want my product, what are they typing? Popcorn bowl, sony camera lens, 15 millimeter lens, whatever. Gallon jug, water bottle. These are like all keywords, someone who's looking for something. So the first thing is you look at those keywords. You go into a software called Helium Ten. Helium Ten has a tool called Magnet that tells you the search volume of all the different keywords. So you type in your main keyword or whatever you think is. And then you look at all the related keywords, and you look at what the search volume is. If you have a search volume, like your top keyword, search volume, 10,000 searches or less, it's dangerous to list. On Amazon, it means there's not that much demand. If you're like Sub 5000, sub 3000, no one's looking. Essentially. Don't expect to make money when you get to the 30,000 searches a month range. Now you're starting to get into a little bit of the bigger markets. 50, 70,000, you're in big leagues. Those are like collagen, but obviously those are like 100K plus like collagen. Apple cider vinegar is like 150,000 searches a month. So that's kind of the range. First of all, make sure that people are searching for your product. That's step number one. Because if no one's searching, you're not going to go buy tires from Whole Food, right? So if I'm a tire company and I go put my tires in Whole Foods, you're not going to make any sales because no one's searching for tires in Whole Foods. It's the exact same thing on Amazon in Whole Foods that you walk in and you can see a bunch of stuff, right? In Amazon, you don't see a bunch of stuff. You walk in and you only walk the lane on the keyword that you type. So you type in electrolyte powder. You're only seeing electrolyte powder. So that's step number one. Is there search volume? If there's search volume to support your keywords, okay, that's step number one. Step number two is kind of the second step is like, what's the trending of those search volumes? So you can look at search volume history on Helium Ten as well. Is it trending up? Is it trending down if things are trending down? Okay, this is maybe a little bit concerning. What is it? Is it maybe something that was like a flashbang? Some of those products that explode and then they die? Like, what is the one? Elderberry gummies. Elderberry gummies are dead now, but they exploded when someone announced that elderberry gummies were good for immunity during COVID So make sure it's not one of those cases. Then from there, you start evaluating the landscape of the competition. So again using helium. Ten. And the reason I mentioned Helium Ten is because I use their tool, like 24/7. It's the tool I use, my team uses, everyone uses. There's other stuff like Jungle Scout, whatever. I'm not familiar with them. I just know helium. Ten. So there's a chrome extension. You download the Chrome extension, and there's a tool called X ray. You type in the search results. You find that main keyword that we talked about. So the keyword that is relevant to your product that has the highest search volume, you type it in, and then the search results show up. You click on X ray helium ten. You click on the Chrome extension, click on x ray. And then you start evaluating your competitors, the ones that are actually competing with you. You start evaluating a few things. First of all, evaluate the reviews that they have versus the revenue that they're making. If you start noticing that all your competition has 10 00 20 00 30 00 reviews and making like ten K a month in revenue, you're like, damn, you're going to go out there, get 1000 reviews so you can make $10,000 in revenue? It doesn't seem like the return is there, right? But when you start seeing like, 1000, 2000 reviews making 80,000, 100,000, 150,000 in revenue, then you're like, okay, I'm onto it. And obviously everything's a spectrum. And that's where you're like, am I willing to go in this market or not? Just based on how you feel, you look at the reviews, you look at your competition, and you see how are they selling versus how many reviews that they have. If the market's decent. Like, people who have decent reviews also are making decent money, by the way, also you can use that almost like, as a predictor of your sales. Like, if I get 500 reviews, I'm probably going to make in the range of what the people who have 500 reviews are doing. You might be 1020, 30, 40% better if you hire me. You might be better if you have really good advertising and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, you're going to be in that range. So look at them as sort of a guide. Now, once you've evaluated that, the next thing you're looking at is, will you survive on the shelf? Basically, I'm typing in a keyword electrolyte powder. I go and I look and I see key Nutrients sells for 29 99. Liquid IV sells for 27 99. MMA Nutrition sells for 28 99. My product is 48 99. It might not work. You know what I mean? It might not work. And there's a good chance that it won't work because it's not like I'm showing you an ad on Facebook, pattern Interrupt. I'm showing you an ad on Instagram. A TikToker posted a video. I'm like, what's this brand? You look for it and you're learning more. And I'm like, okay, cool. I'm willing to spend $48 on the supplement. It's like everything's in perspective because you have competition right next to you. And so when you launch, you're going to have 100 reviews maybe in a couple of months. How are you going to stand out when you're $48 and all of your competition is 30? So that's something to consider if you have a pricing problem. I mean, Amazon customers are very price sensitive, so that's the next step. Now, once you've checked all the boxes, yes, there is search volume. Yes, people with decent reviews are making decent revenue. Yes, my price is in the range, within the range. It's not like outrageously high. Then you're like, okay, I'm a fit for Amazon and I'm ready to go in and compete. If you don't fit the boxes, then you might as well go for the brand play. You can always try to make a run at it but just have manager expectations. You're going in, you're like, this might not work and then you kind of default to the branded if it doesn't work.
Blaine Bolus [00:16:22]:
So I'm really interested in a lot of these different topics because I think you touched on a whole bunch. But specifically talking about two things. One, keywords, so like understanding intent for how things line up. And two, branded which might be like have a pricing premium and selling to customers who are buying in a marketplace that is going to lead itself towards the product that maybe has the best pricing and the best reviews and maybe if you're priced higher, maybe it's not as good of a fit. So my question on the side of the first pardon in terms of establishing the keywords, right? Imagine we're just starting a brand, okay. There are ways to do it. You can be targeting ingredients, you can be targeting the pain point that it may solve. And you're trying to balance and evaluate all these different things. So how do you think about it when you're first starting up with a brand? If you're going into the supplement space, are you going after the pain point that it attacks? Are you going after the ingredients that it has? How are you formulating the beginning of your brand to position yourself potentially for a strong Amazon play?
Mina Elias [00:17:29]:
Yeah, so you have no choice in the keywords, right? The keywords are the keywords. It's not like where you're like, I'm going to go after pain points because.
Blaine Bolus [00:17:39]:
Whatever is being no, I get and Mina, to clarify, I'm saying assuming I'm starting a supplement brand just from the beginning, right? So I might go to Amazon and say like oh, these certain things have really should I build my brand into what you're seeing in terms of keyword opportunity in Amazon or should I just build my brand and then I guess in the description maybe target the keywords or maybe in the product feature some of the ingredients that maybe it has. Does that kind of make sense?
Mina Elias [00:18:14]:
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so the way that I would build it is this. First I would go and look at the keywords right now that are being searched on Amazon. Amazon in Amazon, to have a successful product, you need to solve a problem better than everyone else. So you type in the main keywords around whatever category you feel interested in. Then you look at the search results and then you look at how each person is solving the problem. And then you see how can you solve the problem better than everyone else. So you look at how they're solving the problems, you go into their products, you see what are highlighting, you see what their positive reviews are and what people are saying, like, I like this product because of its flavor. I like this product because of its dosage, whatever it is. And then you look at the negative stuff, I don't like this product because it's too sweet. And so you kind of gather all of the negatives and you're like, these are everything that I can have a better solution based on. You gather all the positives, you're like, these are all things I can make a better solution. And then you also do a little bit of reading the market and saying, okay, someone who's buying an electrolyte powder, who are the people buying electrode powder? So maybe people that are in sports, people are trying to stay fit. You put out a couple of feelers, you're like, why are you buying different products? You start getting from people why they're choosing things or what they wish they had. And then once you have all of that data, someone who types in the keyword is going to come and they're going to see your product and it's going to solve the problem better than everyone else's solution. And that's the way that if I were to formulate it for Amazon, that's how I would do it. When it comes to D to C, you have an ideal client profile and you're building everything around them. When it comes to Amazon, it's almost like a bodybuilding competition. It doesn't really matter. It's more like, how can I look bigger and leaner than everyone who's around me? And that's kind of like the way to look at it more than how can I be ideal for a certain target audience? So it's a little bit different. Now this is the D to C podcast, so I assume everyone here who's doing D to C don't think, okay, I'm going to change my brand. But there's always an opportunity to do an Amazon release. Like you can have your original product listed on Amazon with your brand name and then have an Amazon specific skew that might not make sense when you're going on D to C. But you're like, I know that the competition is priced this way and they have this and they have that. I'm going to formulate or make whatever my product is a little bit better and different specifically for the Amazon shopper.
Blaine Bolus [00:20:41]:
Okay, this is really cool and really interesting. The thing I really liked that you said was using Amazon itself and doing the research as you're formulating your brand specifically in the customer reviews, in what are the brands doing well? What are they doing not so well? How do you build that into your product? So I think for anyone listening, I think using Amazon as even a testing ground for you to start coming up with that messaging is a really awesome idea. And then also to your point, Mina, you're able to use that to come up with the copy and the pain points that you can address and even bake that step into your product as you go into product development. The next thing I want to talk about, which you kind of already addressed a little bit, was, you know, if you are super D to C centric that you might want to think about a specific product release. Earlier in the episode, you mentioned how just the fact that you're on Amazon is a good thing because like you said, people are used to buying things on Amazon. I buy things on Amazon all the time. I have the app on my phone. I have it on my computer. I know it's going to show up tomorrow morning. I'm all on board the Amazon train. So as a shopper, in terms of a shopping customer experience, I'd rather a lot of the times just purchase through Amazon than have to go set up a new account. Even if a brand has shopify pay and all this, sort of like, I want Amazon handing my delivery. I know the box I'm going to get. I know it's going to show up. I don't have to worry if it comes damaged or anything like that. So my next question as it pertains to for branded plays who want to be on Amazon, right, how do you navigate that pricing hurdle? Because like you were saying, if you're priced and you're more expensive because you're doing all these different things and all these other brands who are maybe just like bare bones and like you're saying, just competing on pure pricing and efficiency and all this sort of stuff, but you're making the branded play. You want to be on Amazon because it's good for your shoppers, but you don't want to put something on Amazon where it looks so ridiculous. Your competition is way cheaper. Everyone goes to your competitor. So how do you balance, right? Is it worth it? Or do you always have to go create your own Amazon specific product? Or if you're in the situation where you've decided you're making the branded play, you want to be on Amazon and, you know, maybe you're not going to stack up. So like, how do you navigate it's fine.
Mina Elias [00:23:02]:
When you're going for the branded play, you're literally going for someone sees you on TikTok, Facebook, whatever, and your name is MMA Nutrition, and they're going to go and they're going to type in MMA Nutrition on Amazon. They're going to see your Headline Search ad. They're going to see your Sponsor products ad, they're going to see your organic search result. They're going to click on you, and then they're going to convert there. I wouldn't worry too much about competition because it is what it is. When it's a branded play, literally, you're like, okay, this is kind of like a Hail Mary. You saw me. You didn't convert on D to C. I hope you convert on Amazon. I wouldn't worry too much about competition when you're going for the I'm just trying to capture brand demand on Amazon so I wouldn't worry too much about competition. If you wanted to go the I want to create an Amazon specific product route, that's fine. I mean, you'll have your branded, so when people search for you, they're going to find you. But then your Amazon specific SKU, that one is going to be the forefront of all of your marketing. Because when you do all of your paid ads, that's the SKU that you're going to advertise. You're not going to advertise the other one. Now if people do come in to your listing through that SKU and they end up seeing the other variation and they decide to buy it, okay, cool, that's a bonus. But if you're going after the aggressive compete on Amazon Play, you're going to have that Amazon specific product. Or if you're lucky, which there's a lot of brands who are D to C but also work on Amazon and they can compete. And at the end of the day, by the way, how much you solve the problem better than everyone else is going to dictate. Because when I launched an electrolyte powder, I was the only sugar free electrolyte powder. Now there's a lot, but I was the first one. And so if you were Keto, my product was the only product. Everyone else wasn't a fit. They had 5 grams of sugar. They had 3 grams of sugar, whatever it may be. And so if your product can be like that, if it can have a clear distinction and honestly, even if you're a D to C brand, right, the goal should be that you're creating the solution better than everyone else. So the more that you can have that on Amazon, the more likely you are to be tolerated for your higher pricing, for example.
Blaine Bolus [00:25:22]:
Yeah, that makes a bunch of sense, especially if you are trying to make the brand at, you know, they're looking for your brand, they can come to Amazon, they can buy you there, and you're just providing more ways for the consumer to shop. So my next question is, why don't you walk us through a little bit of the landscape for someone who's trying to get set up on Amazon, right? Like, what do you need to prepare for from the logistics side of, say, you know, okay, we know we need a landing page that we're going to be built in, but what do we need to do from an X's and O's perspective to make sure we're ready to sell on Amazon? From maybe either a contractual perspective, from an inventory perspective, like, where are we shipping our product? Where are we shipping it to? How long does this process know? How should we be planning for it as we think about launching on this channel?
Mina Elias [00:26:09]:
Perfect. So first of all, set up the seller central account usually is a little bit of a pain in the. Ass. You open up the account. You fill in the information. They will then send you a card in the mail that has a code. You get that card in the mail, you open up the code. You enter the code. Then they either let you sell or they ask you to do a zoom meeting. Then you do a zoom meeting. Then you're fine. They open up the account for you. Then from there, you put in your tax information, bank information, all that stuff. All typical selling sort of information. Then from there, you want to list your products on Amazon to list the product. First of all, there's something called gated categories. Like Supplements is a gated category, and I'll touch on that quickly. But you want to create a listing. So you go in. In the menu, you click inventory, add a product, you go in, you add your own product. There's a few things you're going to need. The first thing is basically the frame or the foundation of the listing, which is you're going to need one main image at least the price, the UPC code, SKU, name, weight, dimensions, price. Very basic stuff, right? If you're a supplement, maybe put the ingredients, you're going to put the basic stuff. Then you're going to have to put a title on bullet points as well. Then you're going to probably need to go back and then fill in the SEO. So first you build the listing. Once you build the listing, if you are a gated category, they're going to ask you to submit some paperwork. So for supplements, you're going to need a certificate of analysis from a certified laboratory or something. And you're going to need real live images of your product. So they're going to be like, show us your product. Take pictures with your phone. They have to be real, and they have to show all the sides of the label, including the UPC code. So once you submit those documents, usually they take a few days and they accept them. By the way, they can reject them, and they can reject them four or five times. And you just keep submitting until you get it right. This is a very common thing. So once you submit that and you're through, you can start listing on Amazon. The next thing is you want to have your images and your SEO. So in terms of SEO, it's pretty simple. You need title, you need bullet points, you need back end search terms. Title is basically going to be your main title. You want to build it with SEO in mind. You can use tools like Helium, Ten, and DataDive. Basically what DataDive will do is you can take your top ten competitors titles. It'll give you an SEO value, and then you can write your title and it'll tell you when you beat their title, SEO value. So a very nice way to kind of see that you're better than the competition you're going to write your title so that it has the main keyword first and then as many main keywords as possible while it's still readable bullet points. The way that I like to structure it is the first kind of sentence promotes long lasting energy. That's going to be like usually all caps. That's what people are going to read. The rest of it is going to be a simple sentence with a lot of SEO keywords. I wouldn't worry too much about the copywriting because people rarely read bullet points. I'm assuming you can agree with that. You rarely read the bullet points, right?
Mina Elias [00:30:20]:
Exactly. And so I'll write the bullet points and then again, the back end search terms is any keywords that I couldn't capture in title and bullet points, I'll put them there. Now I have the SEO done. Then I work on the images. So the images are going to consist of your main image and then the rest of your images. So for the main image, basically what you want to do. There's a few software that do this that can help you through data. But when I type in the keyword like Electrolyte Powder, I'm going to look at the search results and my main image has to be more attractive and more enticing. For people who are looking for Electrolyte powder to click on my listing, there's a few strategies there. It has to be a white background image, but you can have your product there and you can have a box with your product. Now you don't always have to actually physically have the box or in your product. You have some real estate on the label or whatever. You can always manipulate the 3D rendering to have words and text and logos that jump out, that talk about the benefit of the product and are more attractive than your competitors. So if it's an electrolyte powder and the main benefits are zero sugar, zero carbs, 100 servings like fast absorption, great taste. How can I show that on the label? Like when my label kind of just has the brand name and it says Electrolyte Powder. So instead I'll just manipulate the label, right? I mean, this is not fully like, white, right? This is a little bit gray. But you manipulate the label, it doesn't look like exactly what's going to come in the mail, but it's not too different. But it's different enough that when someone sees it, they're like, oh, this is zero sugar. This is the made in the USA. This is this, this is that. They end up clicking on yours. So you can use websites like Intellivi, I-N-T-E-L-L-I-V-Y or Picfu. Pickfu.com both of those. You can go in, you can put your competitors main images, and you can put yours, and you can see which ones people are more likely to click on. And if they're more likely to click on one versus the other, you can start figuring out why until yours is the most likely to be clicked on. So that's how I build the main image. Rest of the images assume that your shopper is going to only look at the images. So they're going to go in and they're going to scroll through the images. So I just talked to someone today. They had mushroom gummies. And their images are their bottle, the side of the bottle, the back of the bottle, their bottle on like a little stand with a bunch of fruits around it. And I'm like, okay, in the first five images, I have literally no idea why I should buy your product. And so the way that that would be better is, okay, second image is immediately, here is the product and here's some benefits and why this is a better product. The third one maybe like, supplement facts with a bunch of badges. And maybe on the side it said featured in Forbes like this, that whatever, health, Men's Health, Insider, whatever, stuff like that, right? And the one after it could be, here's our product cut in half. The other half is like a grayed out competition product. And it's like, us, we have this, this, them, they don't have this, don't have this, don't have this sort of thing. So every single time I go through an image, I'm like, okay, I understand why this is an amazing product. I understand why, yeah, this fits my needs. Yes, this fits my needs. You know what I mean? So that's how I would structure the main images. Then you want like a few videos as well on the listing. And basically that's going to be what you need to build the listing and be ready to go live on Amazon. Now, set your start date, like your start date, your offer, start date, whatever, to like six months in advance, one year in advance. You want to make sure it doesn't turn on on its own. The next step is you're going to go in, you're going to create a shipping plan. Amazon has Ups partner shipping. Basically you send units very cheap, like ten cents a unit. And so I go in, I create a shipping plan, which basically tells me how many units per box, what's the dimensions of the box, what's the weight of the box. I pay for the shipping, I send it to my three PL or warehouse, whatever. They slap the boxes, they start sending it to Amazon. There used to be 1000 unit restriction when you're starting. Now I think it's completely gone. So you can send as many as you want. How much should you send? So, first of all, keep in mind that once you send inventory to Amazon, it'll take three weeks on average to be fully available. Now it's going to hit Amazon probably the next day. And Amazon is going to tell you it's an FC transfer, which means it's moving it around the entire country so that everyone can get it free. Today shipping, one day shipping, whatever you don't want to start. If it's an FC transfer, you want to wait until they're all available. Because if someone goes in, sees your listing and it says, we'll ship August 13, today's August Eigth, or we'll ship August twelveTH, complete turn off conversion rate tanks. So you want to wait till everything's available, then you can bring the start date back and start. How much should I send? Kind of work backwards from how much you think you could sell. So, first of all, there's a few things. How much are you going to spend? If you're going to spend like $30,000, maybe assume like 1.5 to two X row, as in your 1st 30 days. So let's say you do hit a two X row, as that's $60,000. You have a $30 product, that's 2000 units. So you should have at least 2000 units. And as soon as you start hitting numbers, you should replenish immediately. The other way to look at it is, okay, my competition with 100 reviews is selling about $7,000 a month in revenue. That's about 800 units. So 800 units. So for me, I'm going to send in maybe 1600 units for two months worth, right? It all depends on your supply chain. If you are like, I'm going to make an order from China and they're going to come in and go to Amazon. It's going to take 60 days. You should have at least 120 days worth of stock. And then when it hits 60 days, or when it hits like 90 days, you create an order. So by the time you're at 60 days or 30 days, you have another 60 days of stock. You always have to be stocked. Now if you ever run out of stock on Amazon, it will severely hurt your performance. Severely, severely. More than anything, I've run out of stock. And literally there's days you kind of look out the window and you're like, Why? It's almost like you basically got caught cheating. Essentially, that's like the feeling you're going to get because you're going to run out of stock. You're going to go back, and you're going to have these beautiful days, super high units being sold. And then all of a sudden, you run out of stock. You come back, you spend money, you do this, you do that. Whatever you do, you're not even able to get to, like, half of the numbers you were at before. And it's the most painful thing ever. So just trust me and never run out of stock, no matter what. Easier said than done. I've run out of stock, like, seven times, so definitely easier said than done. Yeah. Then from there, once you know how much you're going to send inventory into Amazon, then you go into your aggressive marketing strategy. There's going to be mainly two components, right? One component is traffic. The other component is getting reviews. Your conversion rate optimization is part of the strategy on Amazon. But if you did a good job with SEO, did a good job with the images initially, you're not going to need that much conversion rate optimization besides getting more reviews. So I'll talk about reviews first. Amazon prohibits you from incentivizing anyone to leave your review. That being said, everyone on Amazon incentivizes for reviews, almost everyone. It's kind of like this common gray hat thing that everyone does. One way to kind of launch with good reviews is to launch a small variation that is a sample size that will be a child variation. You'll send like, 300 units, and then you'll start basically getting people to buy one a day or whatever and leave a review. And so by trickling in one review a day, it's not really detected by Amazon. And you can basically hit like, let's say 100 or 200 reviews. Once you hit 200 reviews, you can then add your main actual product as a second child variation. And then when you do launch it, you're launching aggressively with advertising. But then immediately people are saying that you have 200, 305 star reviews. So your conversion rate works. If you can do this, it's fine. I didn't do it when I started. I didn't know that this was a strategy. And it's going to be painful. Your conversion rate is going to be low. Initially, you're going to have very low ROAS. But as you improve your reviews, your ROAS is going to improve. Your profit is going to get better, all that stuff. Now, obviously, the strategy helps you kind of start a little bit better. Okay. Driving traffic. So driving traffic on Amazon. This is the final piece. And then I'll take a break so you can ask me some questions. So driving traffic on Amazon, you want to start really aggressive. I like to start $300 a day in ad spend in the first 30 to 45 days. On Amazon, there's something called the honeymoon phase. Basically what this honeymoon phase is, is 30 to 45 days tops that Amazon evaluates. Are you a good product or a bad product? So initially they show you unfairly, like very high, like main keywords, where everyone is like thousands of reviews, old OG sellers. You show up and you're like, how the hell am I showing up there? Amazon's giving you a chance to prove yourself. So if you show them that you have a very high sales velocity, that's the number they care about the most is sales velocity. If you're selling a very large number of units, amazon's going to think that you're a good product. Now, even if this is not profitable, even if you're selling it at a loss, even if you're spending $20,000 on ads and you're selling $30,000 in sales, it doesn't matter because Amazon seeing that large amount of units being sold and they're like, this is great, this is awesome, this is a very good product. We're going to show it up higher in the organic ranking. And that's the main thing, right? Because you don't want to keep paying for sessions and traffic. Yeah, you want to pay for traffic to get some traffic, but then you also want Amazon to give you the free traffic, the traffic that everyone loves, that everyone says, amazon is such an incredible platform. There's 100 million prime users and they're like, yeah, I want a piece of that action, the free action. So in terms of pay per click advertising, pretty simple. To start, you go in again, you can use Helium ten, take your top ten competitors. You do something called cerebral reverse asin. Lookup, cerebral is the tool. Basically what you're going to do is you're going to identify all of the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and they're advertising for. Then what you can do is you can go in, add some filters, show the intersection of those keywords, like how many of those competitors are ranking for those keywords. You can look at show me keywords above 500 searches or more. Show me keywords that my competition is no more than position like 50. So if it's like position 55, 60, that might not be that relevant. Then you get your cream of the crop, like 100, 200 keywords. Take those keywords and you start launching them in campaigns. Campaign structure pretty simple. One campaign, one ad group. Don't do more than one ad group. The budget will split unevenly. Unfortunately, we can't set ad group level budgets and then no more than five keywords. Your main keywords should be on their own so they can get a lot of budget. Other keywords, you can have five keywords. Try all the match types. So broad phrase and exact and auto and product targeting. Whatever the goal here is, you're phishing. You're purely phishing. Putting keywords out there, looking at what works, if it works, you're going to scale it. If it doesn't work, you're going to pull it back. And obviously, as your conversion rate improves, everything will start working better. But I'll take a break there. I know you have a bunch of questions.
Blaine Bolus [00:41:47]:
Probably no, that's amazing. I think in terms of the things I'm most interested in are, one, you gave us, like, a really solid framework to build out with the landing page and get set up, get the listing set up with all the information you're going to need. How are you going to attract right people? And then as well, how do you go into launch and make sure that you have the right assets in place? How are you attracting the right keywords, and how are you driving traffic in those 1st, 30 to 45 days to make sure Amazon knows you're a serious seller so you can kind of carry that momentum into organic traffic as things go on. So my next question is, if you had to evaluate all this process that you just described. Let's say I've just got my first production run done. I've met with my manufacturer, he shipped me my supplement. I'm like, okay, now I want to list on Amazon. How long does that whole process take before I can be selling on Amazon that you had just described?
Mina Elias [00:42:47]:
I would say one month to get the Seller central account. Usually it's like, kind of annoying back and forth, right? And you wait for the code to come in the mail and then probably 30 days flat. You can have listings set up if your images already should be being worked on, your A plus content should be worked on. You can do all of your keyword research while you're waiting. So you could probably launch in like a week flat. But I say a month because you're going to build the listing, and then you're going to send the inventory as soon as you build the listing. And that should check in in about three weeks. So let's say a week to build the listing, three weeks for check in. You'll be live on the 60th day.
Blaine Bolus [00:43:22]:
That's epic. That's amazing to know that you're able to get things set up, that if you're diligent, you've got it. And this is a platform you want to pursue. It's not the craziest thing in the world. There's a lot of people that sell on Amazon, so you're able to get things stood up right now. So my next question is, once you're live right, you said you want to be spending a little bit on, like obviously there's different spend for different keyword levels and for different industries. I know you ballpark it and benchmark it at a certain threshold, but are you trying to benchmark that to volume to your competitors? I guess. What's the strategy there between how does Amazon know you're a great supplement, right? Because being a great supplement for something like Gut Health, where if there's a whole bunch of searches around that it might be different than what you might need to rank for a more niche sort of supplement. You know what I mean?
Mina Elias [00:44:22]:
Yeah. So honestly, we can talk about that, right. But the reality is we should talk about how much can you lose? Because that's what's going to dictate the way that we just did this with a brand called Zila. I think they're like David Dobrik's. Brand My friend Sean runs the brand, and basically, I asked him, we were hanging out, and I'm like, how much can you afford to lose every single month in net profit? And he's like, probably like to launch 2000. So net negative 2000. So I said, okay. Cool. I'm going to keep pushing ad spend and pursuing more and more keywords and spending more, showing up higher until I get that negative $70 a day or negative 2000 a month. And then once I'm there, I'm going to hold it. And obviously, as my reviews improve, my conversion rate improves. And then that means that for the same ad spend, I'm making more sales, which means my negative profit comes a little bit closer to break even, which means I can push harder and spend more money. And that's really what should guide you, because I could tell you, yeah, ideally, like $13,500. And then you're like, okay, cool. Now I'm at a $13,000 loss. I can't afford this. So it really doesn't matter what's ideal in my eyes. It's all dependent on how much of a loss can you handle. And then you want to always maintain that loss, at least in the first 3456 months. If you can keep losing the 2000, push the pace as much as you can on ads. As soon as you feel like you're hitting a plateau, now you're getting more than negative, like 2200, whatever. You really push hard on the conversion rate. Conversion rate improves that negative 2000 for the same ad, advertising becomes a little bit better. Now you push a little bit harder. Now you're spending 12,000, and then now you're spending 15,000. And you keep repeating the process. And a lot of people ask me, like, okay, how long do I maintain this high ad spend before I drop? And I'm like, never. You never drop. You always go higher with the ad spend. You just want the gap to be bigger. I have a friend I don't know. Do you know Colin McGuire? Like, from Booming? No. So they do close to, like, 100 million in their portfolio of brands. But he's like a lot of people ask him, he's like, how do you hit 10 million? And he's like, well, we spend 3 million on ads. And I'm like, that's so true, man. It makes so much sense. If you're not going to spend that much money, you're never really going to get to that revenue. And so that's like, what I tell people. You're never going to scale down, you're only going to push harder. And the thing that allows you to push harder is your conversion rate.
Blaine Bolus [00:46:53]:
No, I love that. I think that's the right way to think about it, too, because like you're saying, you're trying to get to that critical escape velocity almost. And with ads, in the beginning, you're building up. You're getting your first sales, you're getting your first customers, you're getting your first reviews. You're signaling to Amazon that, hey, I'm here to play. And through that, you're able to build the organic flywheel of what a brand needs to really take off whatever platform it is. And through that, every product that you're sending, you're actually getting your product now in a customer's hand, and they can be an advocate for you, and you can spread through other channels like word of mouth and referral and all this other stuff. So I think the way you're thinking about it is the right way. The next question that I wanted to ask, and this is more about just general things that it takes to be an Amazon seller. What other things are you responsible for as an Amazon seller? Right. Imagine there's a return or there's a dispute about a product or a package is late or isn't delivered. Obviously, Amazon has the infrastructure to handle it, but how do you, as a brand deal with that?
Mina Elias [00:48:01]:
Yeah, so you don't really deal with any of that stuff. They handle all of that stuff, but it doesn't mean that you should kind of be blind to it. On my analytics dashboard, we track refunds. There's a couple other places on Amazon, you look at negative customer experience, you look at buyer messages, which, by the way, are pretty rare. They don't come in a mean a lot of people on shopify tell me their first hire is like a customer service representative. And I'm like, I get like two messages a month. I don't know what you're talking about. So that's how it is on Amazon. But you want to read into that and you want to identify why people are returning your product because you want to be on the forefront of that. A lot of my friends, what they do is they'll have insert cards and things like that that basically prompt people to message them first if they have any issues with the product, and they actively get that feedback. Sometimes you're going to get returns, you're not going to know why. And it could be that someone buys your product, they try it, they didn't like it, they send it back. It is what it is. It's inevitable that it's going to happen. It's not something to be stressed about. But if you're constantly reading that feedback, looking at negative customer experience, and have some sort of proactive measure of preventing negative, especially negative reviews, because negative reviews really hurt when they come in. So if you have those practices in place, you should be totally fine honestly, selling on Amazon in terms of, like, that perspective is very easy. All you have to do, you stay stocked, you do the advertising, improve conversion rates. You don't have to deal with all of the customer returns or the messages or the emails or all that stuff. Amazon handles everything. Amazon handles all the shipping. If you're fulfilled by Amazon, which I highly recommend, love that.
Blaine Bolus [00:49:45]:
And then, you know, just as we wrap up here, I want to dig in a little bit more into the agency, right? Like, you guys are managing a ton of clients, taking these processes that you talked to me about, that you've run yourself and be able to apply that to brands that work with you. So what does an engagement look like working with you guys? Right? Like, if I'm a brand, let's know. Like I said, I'm starting a supplement brand. I want to come to you guys and I'm like, hey, Mina, I'm looking to start selling on Amazon. How does it work? What does an engagement look like? What are you guys doing for them? How are you prepping for it?
Mina Elias [00:50:18]:
Yeah, just tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, that's mean, you know, we have a conversation. We see if it's going to be a good fit. If we can help your brand on Amazon, as soon as we sign an agreement, we move everything over to Slack. Slack becomes our main point of communication. You basically inherit the team as if it's kind of like your own team. From there, we meet about goals, targets, how much you can spend. We lay out everything that needs to be worked on, like what images are going to improve, what SEO is going to change, all of that stuff. Then from there, I think the main target is like, how much are you willing to spend and what our goals are. Then from there, we start running the advertising. We have a list of things that we're going to improve in terms of conversion rate. Reporting is daily, so you get a daily update on your performance on Amazon. If you have any questions, we answer them. Then weekly is where you get the week on week update. Here's what happened last week. Here's why it happened. Here's the plan of action. Here's what we're going to update, change, improve, optimize, et cetera, this week. And that's it. Man. It's really kind of like as if it's your own team. Because it is my own team. It's like my brand's team. And I've structured it that way so that everyone feels the same way that I feel.
Blaine Bolus [00:51:32]:
That's awesome. And what stage are people coming and working with you? I know you have a whole broad range of clients, so if you just had to characterize who's your ideal customer? Is it someone who's just starting out? Is it someone who's been selling and is looking to optimize? Is a little bit of both. Like, yeah. Who do you like to work with?
Mina Elias [00:51:49]:
It's definitely more seasoned brands. So brands who are anywhere between one to 10 million on Amazon or maybe four to 30 million off of Amazon trying to expand to Amazon. We really like direct to consumer sorry, not direct to consumer. CPG brands supplements health. Like, half of our portfolio is supplement brands. Like health and supplement brands. I come from that background. I really enjoy working on those brands. But yeah, that's pretty much the ideal client. Now, we're also not huge fans of a really big catalog, so we prefer brands that are like, they come in, they have four or five products that are heavy hitters, and we're going to scale them. Not that we can accommodate bigger catalogs. It's just like that's kind of our preference. Really.
Blaine Bolus [00:52:40]:
Sweet spot. And other than that, is there anything that you're seeing from Amazon if we're thinking about this in terms of the next year or right. Like, are there any trends that you're seeing on Amazon that either get you excited or that you're thinking about operationally, that you're trying to prepare for or anything like that?
Mina Elias [00:53:00]:
Yeah, I think Amazon is getting very sophisticated with its marketing. Not only are they making improvements, so Amazon reached out to me like a week ago because they're updating their bulk sheets, and I work very heavily in their bulk sheets for advertising, like uploading their CSVs and stuff like that. And so they're really making enhancements for people to be able to make a lot more changes. They're rolling out things like brand tailored promotions. So basically, you can send an email from Amazon as a coupon to anyone who abandoned your cart, to anyone who has purchased from you more than once, to anyone who has purchased the most recent 5% of purchasers on Amazon for your product. So there's a bunch of different segments. So they're getting better and better. And I think that there is going to be a point where you can start running retargeting campaigns in terms of email and things like that. I think Amazon's going to find a way to do it where it's not too invasive, and I think they're getting more sophisticated. So right now, it's very hard to do, like, retargeting on Amazon, things like that, like audience based advertising, unless you're doing Amazon DSP. And so I think it's going to get to a point where you're going to get a lot more sophisticated when it comes to retargeting. You're going to get better about targeting. Maybe you start targeting people who have clicked on your listings multiple times and you say, like, if someone's clicked on my product more than once, show up higher, et cetera, et cetera. They have the data, they're slowly going to release it to us and allow us to use it so we can better target people and get them to convert more.
Blaine Bolus [00:54:42]:
Sweet no, those are some really interesting updates to keep an eye on. I think that kind of stuff, when you're able to get into retargeting and audiences, especially from Amazon, that's really compelling from a seller's point of view. But anyways, we wrap up here. Mina, how can we get in touch with you? Where can we find you? Are you on LinkedIn? Are you on Twitter? Why don't you shout out your own personal socials as well as the agency?
Mina Elias [00:55:05]:
Yeah, perfect. So my social so LinkedIn is M-I-N-A space. Elias. Mina Elias. Instagram is at the Mina Elias. You can hit me up, probably on Instagram or LinkedIn. I can message you. My email is mina@triviumco.com and then the website is triviumco.com. So Triviumco.com, you go check us out. Get a free audit. We offer like audits and consultations for free, so take advantage of sweet.
Blaine Bolus [00:55:32]:
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Mina.
Mina Elias [00:55:34]:
My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me.