Matt serves as executive chairman and is one of the co-founders of Amazing.com and the Amazing Selling Machine course that has taught tens of thousands of students how to run a successful Amazon business. With more than a decade of ecommerce experience and with multiple million-dollar companies, Matt loves sharing his success and strategies with other entrepreneurs.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn…. 

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley converses with Matt Clark, a seasoned e-commerce expert and executive chairman of Amazing.com. They discuss the challenges and strategies for Amazon sellers, emphasizing the need to diversify and create independent sales channels. Matt advises starting with a Shopify store, focusing on optimizing top-selling products, and leveraging Google ads using Amazon keyword data. He also suggests maximizing average order value and learning from successful competitors. Matt shares personal insights, including the influence of Jack Canfield's "Success Principles" and his admiration for Ezra Firestone's work in e-commerce.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Action item #1: Expanding Beyond Amazon. Matt recommends starting with setting up a Shopify store. This serves as your brand's website, a crucial asset for capturing leads and customer information,

Action item #2: Leveraging Advertising and Traffic Sources. Matt's strategy is to start with Google PPC ads, using keyword data from Amazon to target potential customers. He then prioritizes Facebook ads for their effectiveness and reach. 

Action item #3: Increasing Average Order Value.  focus on increasing average order value through complementary products, and subscriptions.

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures. I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years. I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks. If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Josh (00:00:35)** ((-)) - - Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Norm Ferrar How We're Ty and Steve Simonsson. Today I'm speaking with Matt Clark, the executive chairman of Amazing Dotcom and the creator of The Amazing Selling Machine. And we're going to be talking a lot about how you can make sure your brand is still relevant and thriving even ten years from now. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond.

Josh (00:01:10)** ((-)) - - Listen, Matt, I started my business back in 2015 and I grew it to an eight figure brand in seven years, but it took me a lot longer than I think it really needed to. I made a lot of mistakes along the way that made that path a little bit harder than it really needed to be. I had cash flow issues. There were times where I had to invest my own money back into the business in order to make payroll. There were bad hiring decisions that I made. There were bad advertising decisions that I made, and I wish I would have had a mentor along the way that would have been able to help me overcome those stumbling blocks and grow a lot faster. So to our listeners, those of you who have hit similar plateaus and want to know the next steps to take your brand to the next level, go to EcommBreakthrough.Com. That's Ecomm with two M's to learn more. And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I'm giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost.

Josh (00:02:08)** ((-)) - - All you need to do is email me at Josh at EcommBreakthrough.Com and in your subject line say strategy audit and then plead your case as to why I should choose you and your business to work with for this month. But today I am super excited to introduce you all to Matt Clark. Matt serves as the Executive Chairman and is one of the co-founders of The Amazing Selling Machine. It is the course that is taught tens of thousands of students how to run successful Amazon businesses, totaling over $9 billion in sales. He's also sold over $350 million online and currently owns a top 100 fastest growing e-commerce brand. Matt has been featured in Forbes, CNBC, entrepreneur, and Success magazine. With more than a decade of e-commerce experience and with multiple million dollar companies, Matt loves sharing his success and strategies with other entrepreneurs. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Matt Clark.

Matt (00:03:06)** ((-)) - - Hey Josh, thanks for having me on.

Josh (00:03:08)** ((-)) - - Matt. Super excited to have you on the show because I know and everybody else knows you are the OG when it comes to, you know, Amazon and that amazing selling machine, which truly was kind of like the number one course that that welcomed or initiated this era of, you know, millions of sellers on Amazon.

Josh (00:03:29)** ((-)) - - Matt, I would love to hear, you know, how did you originally get into e-commerce to begin with before you even started The Amazing Selling Machine?

Matt (00:03:38)** ((-)) - - Yeah, sure. So I,, I mean, I had two parents that always kind of own their own businesses. So me owning a business was like the way to go from early from early on. But then in college, I was reading, you know, about Bill gates and whoever else. But then I was like hearing about these people that were making, like $1 billion in income, like, not like their stock price going up, but in actual like cash income in a single year in the finance world, you know, people running hedge funds and that kind of thing. And I had a really good finance professor at the time. And so I got into finance. I was like, this seems like a great deal to make $1 billion in income in a year., and so then I ended up kind of double majoring in entrepreneurship and finance and decided I had this idea because the people in the entrepreneurship program, they're always one and one guy in particular that kind of ran the program.

Matt (00:04:24)** ((-)) - - He was like, you should go work for a company for 3 to 5 years and then use that information to start your own business. So I was like, okay, that seems like a good path. And so I plan to do that in the finance world. So I went to go work out of college in an investment banking job, kind of in the energy trading division. And, then I realized I was just miserable. Like, I'm not going to make it 3 to 5 years. Like I'm seeing these people that are around me super smart from, you know, Wharton, from Harvard, from all these great schools, very smart people. They understand business, but they're never going to leave. Like they're just going to be there forever, kind of complaining about their jobs and making good money. But,, I was like, this is not the life for me. And I my motivation went from super high because I was like, planning on doing my own thing. To like basically nothing doing everything at that job other than working, because I just, I don't know, for whatever reason, not wired to work for somebody else.

Matt (00:05:11)** ((-)) - - And so then I was like, okay, I gotta get out of here. I got to go start some sort of business. So, I didn't make it 3 to 5 years. I made it seven months, and then I left. And then, my dad, he had owned some,, kind of medical clinics. They were very early on into doing, like, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, which now with, like, Joe Rogan and all that is, like, super popular, you know, testosterone replacement therapy, especially as guys get older, your testosterone drops. So he had clinics that were basically doing that for 20 years. And so I was like, okay, you know, still a small ish business. I was like, I'll see if I can help him on marketing or finance or things that I like. And so what I realized after like a month working with him in Austin, I went from Houston to Austin, is that there were some products there, some health supplements that were super high quality,, big research teams, but they were essentially, you know, off the shelf supplements, not prescription required or anything.

Matt (00:06:01)** ((-)) - - But the model of those company was to have sales teams that went around to doctor's offices and basically convince these doctors to sell their products for them. And I was like, this is stupid. I was like, what if a patient comes in, they like the product. They don't have to go back to the doctor's office to pick up another bottle of supplements. They just want to buy them online. So I was like, I'll try to figure out how to sell them online. And so kind of fumbled my way through figuring out how do I create an e-commerce store, how do I get inventory, how do I ship the stuff out? Like all from like day one? There wasn't really any good courses or any of that kind of stuff back then. I was reading the blogs like the best I could find was like literally going to little local Google Ads seminars. Like that's literally the best thing I could find at the time. Went to some meetup groups. They were useless like so I had to figure all this stuff out on my own.

Matt (00:06:45)** ((-)) - - But I figured it out and sort of created one store. Then I had 30 stores, and then I found a big distributor that had like 90 different brands. So then I had 11,000 products. Then a couple of years late, a couple years later, I discovered the Amazon thing and then kind of went from there.

Josh (00:07:00)** ((-)) - - I love that, I love that, you know, kind of,, the invention of the business, so to speak, came out of kind of like necessity. And you always kind of having that entrepreneurial mindset, right, seeing a problem in the world and then, you know, taking action on it. So I love that. And that's and it's true. Like back then there was not a lot of courses. And that's why the amazing Selling Machine became so big is because like it was kind of the first of its kind., e-commerce again, if we really think about it, e-commerce is still in its infancy, right? It's still really is, it's the early innings.

Josh (00:07:37)** ((-)) - - So, Matt, I guess walk me through how did the Amazing Selling Machine get started then?

Matt (00:07:42)** ((-)) - - Yeah. So when I first started, like I had had my e-commerce thing going on for like maybe two years, and then I was back then doing a lot of SEO., but I realized no matter what I did with SEO, even exact match keyword domains, which was like a thing back then,, Amazon just kept beating me, and I was like, this is super annoying. I was like, how do you sell on Amazon? So I started, you know, probably googling around, reading their help articles, figured out how to sell on Amazon., but then I realized nobody was doing actually marketing on Amazon. Like, it was just. Like not even the basic SEO stuff. It was literally, in most cases, people were taking their e-commerce store using like a feed tool, feeding products to Amazon, but not touching anything else. They make some sales on Amazon. It's kind of like a bonus to their business.

Matt (00:08:27)** ((-)) - - There was no like actual marketing happening on Amazon. And so I kind of realized, hey, I've been doing this SEO thing for a little bit. What happens if I put my keywords in my title all of a sudden, bam, I'm ranking like number one? Now the sales volume was lower back then, but with the top 100 product, you could still be doing well and it wasn't that hard. And so I realized that then I was like, okay, what happens if you put like a bonus PDF with a product? Bam, everyone buys your product. What happens if you go and,, have a friend write a review on your product? Bam! The review sticks never gets removed. And I was like, this is all insane. I was like, you can do whatever you want. It was like the Wild West back then. And so after figuring that out, I ramped my sales up to maybe like 100 grand a month on Amazon. But I was like, there are millions of products here that I'm never going to sell.

Matt (00:09:11)** ((-)) - - And I was also kind of getting tired. I was like, I went from the kind of trading job where you're in like a, you know, a room that's just wide open and you're with like hundreds of other people. It's kind of chaotic but very high energy sort of environment. So literally sitting in my laptop in my apartment for, you know, 12 hours a day by myself. And I was like, man, I'd be nice to be out there, like meeting people, maybe trying to help people with what I've learned. And so I kind of had that idea in my head., and then I ended up joining a mastermind group and met a guy, and I was I kind of,, volunteered to teach the people in the whole mastermind group how to do what I was doing on Amazon because they were interested, just kind of general learning stuff every month. And then I was getting feedback from a little pod that I was within, within the larger mastermind. I was like, hey guys, I'm gonna be doing this webinar for this bigger group.

Matt (00:09:58)** ((-)) - - I've never done a webinar, like, what do you think? And some feedback. And one of the guys in that group, he had been teaching affiliate marketing, selling affiliate software for, I don't know, five years plus at that point and all the relationships bigger list. He's like, hey, he's like, I've got a list of like a quarter million people that I think would love to learn how you're doing this Amazon stuff. Would you want to create a course? And I was like, sure. I was like, that sounds great. And so his name was Jason Katzenbach. And so we partnered up and then,, you know, he had the list. He knew how to do launches. He knew all the affiliates. I was just the guy who knew Amazon stuff. And so I basically took all that stuff, put it in this course, and it was kind of like, you know, like a lot of things, it's like anytime you have, I think big quick success, it's usually a combination of like doing some good execution.

Matt (00:10:44)** ((-)) - - Also some like good luck on your side, like at the time on the Amazon, like it was so new and it was so easy for people to win. That was like the luck part. I couldn't have planned for that., but we did do some good things on the execution side, aside from the resources and experience he already had. But I always thought when I was like learning entrepreneurship in college that I was like constantly in the back of my head for some reason, like, how would I teach this stuff differently? How would I teach this stuff differently?, and to me, it wasn't actionable enough. Like, I still had a great experience in the program, but it was never like, hey, do this, then do this, do this, and then you're going to get this result. And so when it came time to create my course, that was the only way I could think about it was like, okay, the end result is people build a successful business. How do I back into that for people like, I'm not just going to teach him a bunch of stuff because I'd been through courses like that that were good information, but you learn a bunch of stuff, but you don't really do anything.

Matt (00:11:34)** ((-)) - - And to me it was 100% just like, how do I get from point A to point B and the least number of steps possible? And so that was like part of the good execution part. That also allowed it to kind of separate itself from anything else at the time and also produce better results, which kind of had like a flywheel effect. It's like better results for them. They referred more people., it got more affiliates excited because affiliates, people were getting better results. And that's why the whole machine kind of exploded at that point. But,, yeah, that's how we ended up creating it.

Josh (00:12:03)** ((-)) - - , I love that, Matt. And one thing I want to kind of like point out here is that you joined a mastermind group. What do you know or remember what mastermind group it was?

Matt (00:12:13)** ((-)) - - , yeah, it was the Mavericks created by,,, Janek Silver, who was like an OG kind of internet marketing guy.

Josh (00:12:20)** ((-)) - - Yeah. I think that, you know, the downside is everybody throws the the mastermind term around very loosely nowadays.

Josh (00:12:28)** ((-)) - - I feel like,, so, like, what is a true mastermind, right? I, I was a part of a war room with, like, Ryan Dice, Roland Frazier, Perry Belcher, all of those guys, right? That, in my opinion, like that was a true mastermind group, right? Because they had guys that were doing far more in the millions of dollars a year, right? Hundreds of millions in very different industries. And you would bring everybody together and collectively, like you're sharing wisdom across different industries, which I think is amazing. But I think from your story, what I point out is, like, you had this specialty, you were looking to serve people that were just in your mastermind group, right? And then along comes other people that are like, dude, you should do more with this, right? Then share some wisdom of like, I've got a list I think we could monitor. Ties this and you partner up. And so I think that you know it's success is really when opportunity meets preparation.

Josh (00:13:22)** ((-)) - - Right. You were prepared because you were you're ready to serve people. You are already there doing it. And then it just became a natural fit., and so I think that's just such an important principle that people do just like keep doing good in the world, keep looking to serve others, even if you're even if it's an e-commerce business, right? Keep creating the best product you can. You never know when some maybe big influencer just stumbles upon your product and starts promoting it themselves, even without some formal partnership to begin with. Right? And so there's just so many, I think, principles that you can take away from that. But Matt, another thing I want to call out here is that you started your business off of Amazon to begin with. Right? And so you are generating your traffic. It sounds like majority of it from Google and PPC on Google.

Matt (00:14:12)** ((-)) - - , pretty much. Yeah. So the first one was SEO. That was back when you could run all these crazy pieces of software and like, literally press something and it's doing all this crazy stuff on your computer, building links and whatever else.

Matt (00:14:22)** ((-)) - - And all of a sudden you rank for stuff. And so that was kind of how I got started as a first traffic source., then it was Google AdWords., and so, yeah, so there was Google AdWords and then kind of went from then Amazon basically.

Josh (00:14:35)** ((-)) - - Okay. Makes a lot of sense now, you and I talked about this before we hit the record button, but we talked about, you know, where where's the puck going in e-commerce. And what would be the message that you would want to share with other Amazon business owners that have crossed seven, seven figures in sales? What should they be focused on next, and how do they build a brand that is going to thrive and survive for the next 5 to 10 years? So, Matt, that would be my question. I ask you here again, what's your advice for people that have hit seven figures in sales on Amazon? What are the where should they go next?

Matt (00:15:13)** ((-)) - - Yeah. So in my opinion, it's kind of crazy to put all your eggs in the Amazon basket.

Matt (00:15:18)** ((-)) - - , I know people that sell 75 to 100 million a year on Amazon., they know the machine better than anybody else. That's their business., they're not necessarily building the most valuable individual brands, but they know the machine. And but either way, I think it's kind of a dicey position to be in, and it's not the way to build the most valuable company, I believe,, because I believe if you're following the model of building an actual consumer brand, you're not doing like dropshipping or reselling other people's products or something, which I'm less familiar with at this point. But if you're building an actual consumer brand like that, is the asset, like Amazon is just a sales channel. And we all know if anybody's gotten to seven figures on Amazon, they've kind of seen this happening., but Amazon has become more expensive mainly because of the ad side, because, you know, Josh and I were talking about is that when we first started teaching people how to sell on Amazon, there was no ad platform.

Matt (00:16:16)** ((-)) - - Like if you were able to get something to rank organically, you got all those sales essentially for free, other than paying their Amazon 15%, which hasn't changed a lot. But now there's almost like this toll of the ad side that just eats up a lot of people's margins., and that was not even a thing I think, until maybe, I don't know, 2015 or something like that is when we started seeing that and pushing forward and stuff., and then like every ad platform, it tends to just get more expensive and more crowded over time., so that's kind of been problematic. I mean, Amazon is also like actively gone out and recruited Chinese sellers, which makes sense for Amazon because, you know, sometimes they're living way over in China. They're less concerned about legal risks and whatnot., but at the end of the day, Amazon puts up with that because it brings lower prices to consumers. And so if you're selling a blue yoga mat from the same manufacturer and you're marking it up 50%, whereas the manufacturer is willing to sell it for like a 5% markup, but it's the exact same product that's better for Amazon's customers because they get the exact same product for cheaper.

Matt (00:17:18)** ((-)) - - So it makes sense to have all that going on. But you, you know, potentially not being in China, you're having to deal with price compression. And, you know, sometimes though, Amazon eventually routes the stuff out. People doing weird things with listings, negative reviews,, voting up bad reviews, like all that kind of stuff that happens, literally taking over listings., so you have to deal with all that stuff where you don't have a lot of control over it. And so to me, it's like what you really want to do is build a valuable consumer brand. Now, I don't recommend you just immediately going and like throwing away all your Amazon stuff, because if that's the thing that's working and that's the thing you know how to do, like keep it going by all means. But at the same time, start kind of like hedging your bets and thinking like, how do I build like an actual valuable consumer brand? Which to me is usually going to mean starting with like starting to build,, a sales channel that you control outside of Amazon.

Josh (00:18:09)** ((-)) - - Yeah. I think those everything that you just touched upon, I. I think is all of the pain points that everybody is experiencing on Amazon right now, right. Yeah. You have a threat from overseas competitors driving down prices. Then you have margin compression with FBA fees increasing, advertising, CPCs only going up. And guess what? There's no end in sight for all of those things. FBA fees are not going to go back down. CPCs for PPC are not going to go back down right. And there's going to be more overseas competitors, right. You've got the threat of Sheehan and TMU now, right, that are again trying to appeal to the customer with really cheap, really low prices. And Amazon's again, trying to court more of those same sellers on those other platforms to come on to Amazon. So there is no end in sight with the margin compression on Amazon. But I would also say that, you know, it doesn't mean that we run away from Amazon and that Amazon doesn't work right.

Josh (00:19:11)** ((-)) - - But I think it is important to know that, at least from my perspective, the next 5 to 10 years of what Amazon looks like, the people that are winning are able to drive their own traffic to their listings, and they're driving traffic in to other different channels as well, right? They're probably driving it to their own e-commerce store. They have influencer partnerships or affiliates, right. And naturally, some of that's going to bleed over to Amazon, even if you're not immediately directing it over to Amazon. Right. And it will create that flywheel., so, Matt, I guess my question would be, let's say you've got a seven figure seller on Amazon that doesn't know the first thing about opening up a Shopify site or selling into different marketplaces or anything like that, like, what is the next best lever for them to pull in their business? To say, hey, you know, this, this juice is worth the squeeze because there's a lot of things like going overseas, you know, expanding internationally.

Josh (00:20:15)** ((-)) - - That's a lot of work. Yeah. So is opening up your own Shopify site. Everything requires work. So out of all the various options, what's the easiest what's the best path forward?

Josh (00:20:26)** ((-)) - - Yeah. So I think the first place to start, I mean, assuming you own your own brand and that's the main way you're driving sales on Amazon because you own a brand and you've got products under that brand. So that kind of typical setup, I think the first step is to set up your Shopify store., and if it's not already, it essentially just becomes your brand's website, which is a useful asset to have,, to capture leads, capture customers, capture email, capture,, people's information so you can remarket to them. But also, if you ever want to go sell your business, they're going to be like, where's your website? So you're going to need a website. So it's kind of an easy win there is. It just becomes your website and you can connect the fulfillment to Amazon.

Matt (00:20:59)** ((-)) - - So you don't need any extra fulfillment system. Don't need to overcomplicate that part., then you just need to route your customer service from there to your whoever's handling customer service now. So that basic setup,, and then add most, if not all of your products to your Shopify store and then get it nicely designed, have a template if you're doing, you know, seven figures plus on Amazon, you've got the margin to spend, say, five grand to have a theme customized for your brand. So it looks super high level if you're starting from scratch, you don't necessarily need that, but if you're that level, you might as well invest the money. So then it's like, okay, you've got the basic setup on Shopify now, how do you actually start driving traffic beyond what's kind of just naturally bleeding over from Amazon?, I think usually the best first way is to take your top selling product on Amazon., and then really optimize that product page,, on Shopify. And I don't think at this stage, for most people, you even have to complicate things by using an external kind of landing page.

Matt (00:22:01)** ((-)) - - I would just take your product page and there's people that I know that do more revenue than we do. We do an ecommerce business. Something like last year we did like 37 million in sales., there's people that I know that do double what we do. We send most of our cold traffic to landing pages. Some people that do more revenue than we do send most of their traffic to their product pages, so we know it works. It's just not the model that we've used, but it's not like it doesn't work. And so it's simpler to,, so I would take your top product and really optimize that one product page, kind of like a long form sales letter., and it's not that difficult to do. I think usually the kind of hack to figure out what to include on there is if you can find somebody in your space that, you know, one way or another,, is driving a lot of sales on Shopify, then just model your product page after theirs. If you go to Facebook ad library, you can search for their brand.

Matt (00:22:55)** ((-)) - - You can find out the ads that they're running and where they're sending people. And so that's a good source. If you find,, there's tools. I'm drawing a blank right now because it's only like semi accurate. Do you remember the name of the tool that's like allows you to pull Shopify sales? It's got some,.

Josh (00:23:11)** ((-)) - - I know we talked about it in one of the tribe events. Right. But at chop.

Matt (00:23:16)** ((-)) - - Hunter or.

Josh (00:23:16)** ((-)) - - Something? Yeah, it skips my mind right now as well.

Matt (00:23:19)** ((-)) - - So anyway, so there's, so there's tools like that, but if you literally just look at their product page and you see they've got thousands of reviews, that's a good just like just like Amazon, if you see they have thousands of reviews, somebody has bought that product. And so then you're like okay, they're driving decent sales for this thing. So it kind of hack is to find somebody in your space that's crushing it on Shopify and then model your product page after theirs. But if you don't have that as an option, the other option is to use a framework that I like is by a copywriter, Rae Edwards.

Matt (00:23:45)** ((-)) - - It's called a pastor framework, as in, you know, preacher pastor framework, but it's just an acronym that stands for the main boxes to tick in terms of copywriting stuff, because, I mean, I've read a million different copywriting books, written all kinds of copy., and he covers all the basic elements, like focusing on the problem, really kind of digging the knife in with the problem so people feel the pain,, giving people the solution, which is your product, then talking about his transformation, which in our e-commerce equivalent would be like either your personal story or just a tons of reviews and testimonials,, then making people an offer with a good guarantee and then asking them for a response, which is like, hey, go buy this thing. And so if you cover all those basic elements on your product page, you're probably going to have like 80% of what it takes to convert as well as you possibly can. And then from there,, I would recommend using a tool such as like zipify one click upsell.

Matt (00:24:39)** ((-)) - - , there's other tools out there that kind of do similar things, but I like their tool and that'll allow you to increase your average order value, which is incredibly important on Shopify because you imagine, like Amazon versus Shopify, there's going to be traffic going to both. Amazon's going to convert higher because it's Amazon. People already have their credit card numbers store. They're already buying other stuff. Conversion rates are always going to be higher on Amazon. But your average order value kind of sucks on Amazon compared to your Shopify store, because you can get people to buy bundles more easily. You can say, hey, if you just bought, you know, this iPhone case, like I also have another one, another color I can sell you., or I have an iPad case or something. You can get people to buy more stuff all at once, and it's all your own business. Versus Amazon kind of doesn't do that very well. But then they're also pitching everyone else's products so you can have an average order value like us.

Matt (00:25:30)** ((-)) - - That's 2 to 3 times higher on Shopify. That's how you make up for the lower conversion rate. So long story short, you implement something like zipify one click upsell, add all the order bumps and upsells in place. Then you've got a good optimized product page. You've got a higher average order value. Then start running. Google AdWords is usually going to be the easiest way because you're already driving keyword based traffic on Amazon. Start just doing the same thing with Google AdWords to your product page on Shopify. That's going to be the easiest way to get started. Now, what you do after that is going to be,, kind of either rinsing, repeating that thing, or starting to think, if I only had a Shopify store, how would I drive sales? What products would I sell? Because it may be the case that you need a slightly more unique product if you're just selling like the 52nd, you know, blue yoga mat on Amazon, you happen to be ranking well or have a lot of reviews, and that's why you're doing well.

Matt (00:26:25)** ((-)) - - That may not work great for like Facebook ad traffic, display based traffic on Shopify., so at that point you may want to start thinking about different products.

Josh (00:26:33)** ((-)) - - I love that, Matt, so much to unpack there., but you gave a very straightforward answer., so I'm going to kind of regurgitate everything that you just talked about to help simplify this for everybody, because I think a lot of the misconception that people have is that they need to create their Shopify store, and then they need to turn on all of their products. Right? And just go to town. Right. It's like create a Facebook ad and just send it to your store. And it's like, no, no, no, no, that is that is not how the successful brands do it off of Amazon.

Matt (00:27:09)** ((-)) - - , you're almost guaranteed to lose money doing that.

Josh (00:27:11)** ((-)) - - Yeah, 100%. And I think you do hear a lot of people like, oh, I couldn't make Facebook ads work right now, the way you make Facebook ads work is that you've got to send them to a dedicated landing page or product page, which Matt talked about.

Josh (00:27:30)** ((-)) - - And then it's got to be like almost like a long form sales letter. Okay. And you could even have, you know, Matt, have you dealt with many like tripwires initially?, because I know that's one of the things that's one of the tactics is like, give somebody a lower tripwire to begin with and then upsell them along the way. Have you experimented with that?

Matt (00:27:51)** ((-)) - - Not as much, I think., when it comes to Facebook ads, what you really want to be able to do is feed Facebook ads,, real sales data. And so depending on what we're talking about at tripwire, like a low price product where people buy something or literally like a PDF or something on the PDF side, what I've seen every. Time I've run any sort of lead based ads, whether it's literally a lead ad or conversion based on giving the email address, is that it's all garbage. Like, I've done that kind of stuff where I'd get 500 email addresses and produce zero sales from it. And so what seems to work the best, in my experience, is giving making people actually buy something, because then they had to literally pull out a credit card.

Matt (00:28:33)** ((-)) - - , and that seems to work a lot better on the Facebook side. So I would almost always go straight after the sale from Facebook ads, depending on the price of your product. Like, I don't know what it is, but in most cases I would go straight after the sale and that's how I think it's going to work the best. Now, you could just to improve performance incrementally. Those probably is not going to be what makes or breaks. It is that if somebody hits your landing page or product page they don't want to buy, they go to leave. You have a pop up that says, hey, give me your email address and I'll give you a coupon or some bonus or whatever. Like, that's totally fine. Build your email list. Some of those people are going to buy, but I think 8,090% of your result is going to come from actually trying to sell them something up front. And people either buy or don't buy that thing.

Josh (00:29:13)** ((-)) - - Okay. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

Josh (00:29:16)** ((-)) - - So with that being said, you've driven them to a landing page. You're having them buy your product. But the trick here and I think a lot of people skip this is the upsell. You have got to increase that average order value. And imagine what selling on Amazon would be like if we could only own that like piece. That's like, you bought this, what about this and this, right? Imagine what our AOV could look like on Amazon. Maybe we eventually get to that point. Maybe not, but you can on your own, on your own storefront. And that's what's most important, because, Matt, from what I'm hearing industry wide on e-commerce, the average kayak, right, customer acquisition cost from Facebook or other traffic sources is around $75. So you're going to spend about $75 before somebody even purchased something. So, Matt, true. False. What are you seeing?

Matt (00:30:13)** ((-)) - - I mean, like anything that's going to depend on a lot of things, but I think that's a in the ballpark kind of rule of thumb.

Matt (00:30:19)** ((-)) - - I mean, our customer acquisition costs. And because, I mean, it's going to be imagine like because one of the things we talked about before we started recording was,, the bigger the audience for Facebook, you can give it from what I'm seeing right now, the better your results. In the past, there was all this interest based targeting and that sort of thing. Now, from people that I know, including ourselves and others that run a ton of volume on Facebook, the best results are just saying give it Facebook, the broadest audience possible, no language targeting, no age targeting., if you're selling e-commerce, you're probably going to have country restrictions. Like if you can only do it in the US because that's all you can fulfill to like, that's fine, but let it literally target the entire US., no other restrictions whatsoever. And so when you do that,, at first it'll be a little bit messy, maybe the first few days or first week or so, because Facebook is trying to figure out who's actually going to buy this thing.

Matt (00:31:10)** ((-)) - - And assuming you're able to generate some conversion because you're selling a product that's got a big enough audience, you've done a good job on the conversion side, like I mentioned, either modeling somebody else or using that past or framework, like assuming you've done those things and you can get some sales., at first Facebook is going to be like, who the heck is actually going to buy this thing? Then it's going to figure out who can buy this thing. And then after that, it's going to be like, okay,, you keep increasing your advertising budget. We've got to keep broadening the market. Like if we found, you know, moms that live in sunny areas that are 27 years old, like, that's your bread and butter, but all of a sudden you're like, hey, I want to spend $2,000 a day. They're like, well, we're running out of those, so we got to go find other people. Then your customer acquisition cost goes up. So generally that's how it works.

Matt (00:31:56)** ((-)) - - I mean, our customer acquisition costs, when we first started scaling,, was like $40. Today it's like $100. So that $75 number you gave is like within that range. But now we spend seven, $800,000 a month on Facebook ads. So it's got to find a lot of people and so our customer acquisition has cost has gone up. But now we have a really dialed in lifetime value so that we know that's still profitable for us long term. But in general what you're saying is correct.

Josh (00:32:24)** ((-)) - - Awesome. No. And I think that background that you just provided, I think is so essential for people to understand, like why there is so much variableness with this. And definitely as you increase your budgets, your kayak is, you know, ideally you're like, great, I'm getting them for $40 a day or $40 a customer, right? When you open up the floodgates and give Facebook more budget, there's not more of that that they can go replicate. And so to your point, like the customer acquisition cost will increase.

Josh (00:32:54)** ((-)) - - So the point of all of this being you've got to you know, not many people, I would argue on Amazon are selling products that cost more than $100. Right, right. So then you have to ask yourself, crap, if I sell a $25 product and I'm. $75 just to acquire the customer. Like, what am I going to do, go drive myself into bankruptcy? Right. So the answer is no. You've got to start getting creative with like, what are the other products and bundles that you could then implement? Or I think the sweet spot and Matt, you have experience with this is turning it into a subscription based business or a membership business where they're on auto bill every single month. And then you start looking at that lifetime value of the customer. Right. And maybe you are willing to maybe make a loss at the beginning, right? Because you know, they're going to stick around for a year. Ultimately, they'll pay you $500 when all is said and done, but you're going to get that $500 over the course of 12 months.

Matt (00:33:56)** ((-)) - - , yeah.

Matt (00:33:56)** ((-)) - - Thank you. So sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Subscription is fantastic. Like we wake up every day to, like, I don't know, $50,000 in subscriptions, like, by 7 a.m.. Like, it's an amazing position to be in. I think what I've learned, talking with a lot of people, they almost use that as like an unnecessary kind of barrier for themselves. They're like, oh, my products can be subscription. I'm like, okay, like what percent of Apple's revenue is subscription? Not a lot. But there are $3 trillion company because they know that if they get you into their ecosphere of like buying an iPhone, then you're gonna be like,, maybe I want the next iPhone,? Maybe I want the, you know, iPad that easily ties. And then I have my iMac and I need another iMac. And so they know their lifetime value is extremely high, even though it's not really subscription based. It's based on upgrades and complimentary products. And I remember I looked this up at one point, like the statistic I saw is that,, for a lot of people, the average order value, the first order is something like 68% of lifetime value.

Matt (00:35:00)** ((-)) - - And so even if you have subscription and whatever, so that means like like we were kind of alluding to that. The whole game is getting your average order value up as high as possible, which is really a function of your total lifetime value. But most people are not going to come back and buy again. Even if you sell great products, even if you do a good job, maybe it's like 25%. So you got to get people to buy as much as humanly possible up front. And then having subscription is fantastic. That'll help increase lifetime value. But the biggest component to lifetime value is likely the first order a customer ever makes. And so that's like a shift that I think people have to make. Because like you were saying that if you're selling like a $25 product or something and your bare minimum cost to acquire a customer with ads is like $40, then you've probably got to sell maybe at least three units up front to break even after product cost. Shipping costs, like assuming like a, you know, say 50 to 60% gross margin, that's like your breakeven.

Matt (00:35:55)** ((-)) - - So that is the whole game. So it's like, how do you get people to buy at least three units upfront? It's like another good kind of rule of thumb., but then yeah, if you can get on a subscription and all that stuff after like fantastic.

Josh (00:36:06)** ((-)) - - Yep. Yeah. You hit the nail right on the head., it build everything on that up front. Right. And you've got to test out multiple offers. And man, I guess that would be my question is like how did you test out like what is the right offer? How do we increase the average order value. Did this require a lot of refinement on your end, or did you guys stumble upon, you know, success and luck right out of the gate?

Matt (00:36:31)** ((-)) - - , so I think and what we did was kind of the order of priority is like, because you're basically putting an ad in front of a bunch of people that aren't looking for it. And so you've got to kind of figure out, like, what is this appeal? This is kind of like how old school copywriters would call it.

Matt (00:36:47)** ((-)) - - What is the appeal? We would sometimes call it the hook that is gonna get as many of these possible people interested in actually want to buy something. So I think figuring that kind of broad thing out first is kind of what you're shooting for. And so that's kind of creating some ads that tie in with like a really like the headline and maybe lead in part of a landing page. And so like those kind of need to match. But it's like maybe you test five of those and you're like,, you know, we were doing this and we ended up because I think it's the wrong product, but we were kind of getting some decent results testing this with,, Mike McCleary. I think you believe you have had him on the podcast with a flashlight that he has. And so we're like, it's this big, giant flashlight that's super bright. And so it's kind of like, okay, what's going to get a lot of people interested? A lot of people have flashlights, like, why not buy this one? And so it's like, oh, is it because it's super bright?, oh, is it because it's super durable? Or oh, is it because like, if you're using this and you're walking your dog at night that somebody comes and tries to jump you, you could hit him with this thing self-defense kind of angle.

Matt (00:37:44)** ((-)) - - So we had these ideas, but we don't know what's going to make it,, appeal to as many people as possible, drive the most number of conversions for the least cost. And so we kind of threw those against the wall. And the self-defense one is actually the one. That one. It's Mike's business. He thought it was going to be the brightness angle. That was not what one. And so that's kind of step one of the process is what is the broad appeal. And it's like we're all just kind of guessing. Like I would come up with 5 to 10 different ideas, whether it's you or your. Team or family member, whoever, that's kind of helping you do this and then narrow it down to a handful of angles and then test them, throw them against the wall, see what happens. So to me, that's like the number one thing to figure out is like, what is this broad angle that's going to get people interested in this product., and then the second part is kind of what you're talking about is like testing the offer.

Matt (00:38:29)** ((-)) - - So then you're like, okay, at least we're getting people to buy something. I would start with like a really aggressive discount just so you can get some conversions coming in. And then it's like, okay, what offer is going to give us the highest,, return on ad spend basically, like how much revenue are we producing for every dollar in ad spend, which is a function of conversion rate and average order value, because you imagine that if you forced people to buy, say, you're selling yoga mats, the only way you can buy our yoga mat is if you buy a thousand yoga mats up front. Your conversion rate is going to be through the roof., your average order value is going to be through the roof, but your conversion rate is going to be terrible. The inverse is like, hey, get this $100 yoga mat for $0.99. Your conversion rate is going to be through the roof, but your average order value is going to be terrible and you're going to run out of money.

Matt (00:39:15)** ((-)) - - And so it's like balancing those two things high average order value, high conversion rate. Like what's the offer that kind of makes the most sense there. And so for us, we ran through lots of different tests for this. Once we figured out the core angle we got people to buy, we're like, how do we get the most amount of money out of our ad spend? And so we tested, you know, the typical model that we were following was like from the supplement world of direct marketing. They on the pricing page, they'll have one bottle, three bottles, six bottles, bigger discount when you buy three bigger discount when you buy six. So that was a model that we kind of started with. And then we tested every variation we could possibly come up with. Myself, our advertiser Charles,, you know what happens if we offer like one for 8 or 2 for eight? What happens if we offer a really big discount on the six? Not that good of a discount on the three.

Matt (00:40:01)** ((-)) - - , what ended up working for us after running through, like, literally it's nothing. It's not like us being marketing geniuses. It was literally just what else can we try here?, what ended up working best for us was getting rid of the one bag option, because it was kind of terrible from like a cost standpoint, because we ship out one bag, then we got to pay for shipping., it didn't really work that good. So we got rid of that and we just charged,, just offer three and six with the same exact discount across the board, both kind of positioned as like 50% off. That doesn't mean that's going to work for everybody. But we ran through all those different variations, kept throwing them against the wall. And then that was the one that worked the best. And we haven't really been able to beat it since. And so once all that work was done in the first year, maybe a year and a half like after that, we kept trying because I want some point.

Matt (00:40:46)** ((-)) - - We just got focused on other things because we're kind of like we kept trying stuff. It wasn't improving. It wasn't improving. We were like, okay, we're going to spend our time somewhere else. So then we basically stuck with essentially the same landing page, essentially the same offer, and then that was good enough. And then we just kind of scaled and started focusing on optimizing other areas of the business.

Josh (00:41:03)** ((-)) - - Fascinating. All right, Matt, so let me try to digest everything you just talked about when you guys were testing out different offers. Okay. And trying to find the right angle. Were these through Facebook ads that you were generating the traffic from.

Matt (00:41:18)** ((-)) - - All Facebook ads.

Josh (00:41:19)** ((-)) - - All Facebook ads? Okay. So you were trying videos? I would I would assume.

Matt (00:41:25)** ((-)) - - , no,, the first ad,, because because for the first maybe three months or so, like I was running the Facebook ads myself. I don't claim to be like a great Facebook ads expert. Like, I just kind of get,, it's not what I like to do to dig in the weeds of, like, all that, the minutia of that.

Matt (00:41:44)** ((-)) - - But I'm good on the copywriting side and whatnot. So I was good at throwing stuff against the wall. Then I had a guy that I knew that was running a Facebook ad agency, and it wasn't at the volume yet, for it made sense for him to run, but he kind of saw the potential. So I was popping him questions and whatnot, and he was kind of guiding me along the way a little bit, until eventually got to the point where he could take over and then ran from it,, ran with it from there. But to get to like the first 20 or 30 grand a month, an ad spend,, it was literally me just creating stuff, and it was almost all static images at first. It doesn't mean like, that's like the secret of success, because for us, over time it's changed. It's like sometimes we'll run static images. They work way better. Two months later, videos work way better. Two months later, static images work way better. Like who knows? We're always throwing creatives at the wall.

Matt (00:42:28)** ((-)) - - But the first creative that I ever made, and then we kind of got nervous and stopped using it was like showing the acidity of different coffees. And so we literally had like our logo, Starbucks logo, like positioned on this chart. And then we're like, maybe this isn't such a good idea. So we got rid of that and started running other kind of things., but it was pretty much all static images at first.

Josh (00:42:48)** ((-)) - - Fascinating. Okay, so you took those and then you are driving them to your landing page? Yes. Right. And then you were refining how did you identify which which angle you were going to use to begin with? Right. I guess is my question like the one that got the most clicks at the lowest cost?

Matt (00:43:07)** ((-)) - - , yeah, basically the lowest cost per acquisition with. Facebook ads., at the time, if I remember the structure. We would have it in like one campaign and create an ad set with a single ad. And the only difference in there was maybe the ad to match the landing page and the landing page it actually sent people to.

Matt (00:43:26)** ((-)) - - So if you imagine like ads, that one would be like angle one ads, that dude would be angle two ads at three be angle three,, three. But it was all the same audience for each one. And then that's kind of how we tested it. We tested it. We almost did our split testing, like with Facebook ads.

Josh (00:43:41)** ((-)) - - Okay. All right. So they're going all to the same landing page. You're seeing which ad converts better.

Matt (00:43:47)** ((-)) - - Yeah. Sometimes sometimes the the landing page in most cases would be different, but it would just be a clone of the landing page. But then we would maybe only change like the headline in the first paragraph or something just to match that big angle. Yeah.

Josh (00:43:59)** ((-)) - - Okay. That makes a lot of sense. All right. Then you're then once you kind of dial that in, then you said you focused on the core offer. Yes. After that. True. Right. And you're like okay, this week you started with the single bag offering for the coffee, right? Then you're like, okay, we got some conversions.

Josh (00:44:17)** ((-)) - - But then you started optimizing more conversions to say, what if we did three bags or six bags? Is that correct?

Matt (00:44:23)** ((-)) - - Yeah. So I believe we started with kind of one, three, six. Like you can buy one bag and then maybe three bags was like 25% off and the six bags was like 50% off or something like that. So that's kind of how we started. And then we started testing like different discount percentages., and then I don't necessarily remember the order of priority, but I've looked at the sheet like years later that showed all the variations we tested. Then we tested like, you know, 40% off across the board, 30% off, you know, all kinds of different numbers, quantities of bags. We tried bundling some different roasts. We sell coffee, roast together., we tried all those variations we could possibly think of, and then we just kind of like, after, I don't know, maybe 3 to 4 months of testing, kind of settled on, like, you gotta buy three bags or you got to buy six bags.

Matt (00:45:08)** ((-)) - - Minimum is three bags. That's how you get the discount. And then literally the same discount on both, which,, kind of almost like I don't know who knows, but like, it's maybe kind of like what they would call a decoy offer because somebody's like, oh, like the six bags is 50% off, but the three bags is also 50% off. Like, why the heck would I choose the six bags? I get the same discount on the three bags. So then maybe the conversion rate on that offer is higher. Like who knows? We threw all the stuff against the wall and that's how it worked best.

Josh (00:45:35)** ((-)) - - Awesome. So it took a lot of testing. How long did all of this take until you felt like we've got this dialed in. Facebook ads are doing well. The core offer is doing well.

Matt (00:45:45)** ((-)) - - Yeah, I think until we started feeling like we were getting really like I mean, we went from basically like 17 grand a month,, in January the 1st year to almost $600,000 a month.

Matt (00:45:56)** ((-)) - - This is all Shopify by the end of that year. And so we were scaling pretty quickly., and then I would say after the first year, maybe a year and a half, we were kind of running out of ideas and getting really diminishing returns on testing more stuff like, we couldn't we couldn't be what we had., maybe not a bad idea. Like, who knows? That could have been the better focus. Just keep dialing that in. But at some point you're kind of like so exhausted of doing this, you're like, I don't want to touch this anymore. I'm gonna focus on other areas of the business, like how do we build subscription or how do we start expanding on Amazon and all those kind of things. So that's what we did. So I would say after a year, year and a half, there wasn't a lot of other juice to squeeze there other than just keep working on the creative side of Facebook. And that's how we scaled after that.

Josh (00:46:36)** ((-)) - - Fascinating. Okay.

Josh (00:46:38)** ((-)) - - So for somebody that's just starting out again, they're successful on Amazon. How much do you think they need to invest or like set aside in terms of an ad budget because they're surely not going to be profitable out of the gate? Sure. So how much time should they earmark for something like this, and how much money should they be playing around with.

Matt (00:47:00)** ((-)) - - Time wise to get something going?, if you're following that approach, I would say like 3 to 6 months to, like, really pick up traction. Money wise, it shouldn't be a lot like you're getting the conversion data immediately if you spend more, if you're selling like a $25 product and you spend more than like a couple hundred bucks and you haven't gotten a sale, like, don't keep spending more money, like change something,, there's a whole kind of order of priority in terms of what's happening. Like, are you not getting any conversions like that's problem one, are you getting conversions? But your average order value isn't high enough.

Matt (00:47:34)** ((-)) - - You know, that's kind of problem number two. And then it kind of maybe there's some other issues, but it's kind of sorting out what's actually happening. But where I see people making mistakes is they'll hire some agency which most, in my opinion, are terrible. And so you hire some agency and then the agency is like, okay, you got to pay us five grand and then you're going to have to pay us a minimum of, you know, maybe the five grand per month or whatever. And then we're just going to test a bunch of stuff, spend a bunch of your money, and then after like six months, you realize, like, this is done. Nothing for you., whereas, like, if you're spending your own money running your own Facebook ads, which nowadays is like, not that complicated, then if you spend like a couple hundred bucks, you don't make a sale. Quit spending money. If you're spending a couple grand. The only reason you're spending a couple of grand easy to either because you've run a lot of iterative tests or because you're actually getting decent results, and because we're selling stuff.

Matt (00:48:21)** ((-)) - - This isn't just like a billboard or something. You're making gross profit back from your product sales. So it shouldn't be like a massive cost. Otherwise, you should have never scaled up. If you've scaled up to the point where you can lose a lot of money, then that means it should be working. Otherwise it didn't work. Which is the bigger problem is that it just doesn't convert. And so maybe that's like your conversion rate stuff is just terrible and you need input from somebody who's better at that or, you just have the wrong product or something and which is fine. And so then you start the process over again with a different product. But none of that should cost a lot of money. It just can take time.

Josh (00:48:56)** ((-)) - - Okay. Awesome. Great perspective on that. And man, I think the other thing, one final thing I want to dive into before we wrap things up here is traffic sources., and one thing I want to preface that by saying is that, you know, we had Brett Curry on the podcast as well from OMG Commerce, right? Yeah.

Josh (00:49:16)** ((-)) - - So he talked about one of the things that he's seen with a lot of his clients is that yes, they're running advertisements. Right. Boom. By Cindy Joseph is a good example. Right. They're running ads on Facebook and things like that. And they're going to directly to a sales funnel. What they noticed is that almost 33 to 50% of people were just like, not even clicking through from the ad, but just going straight to Amazon. He also shared the analogy of the people that run the late night infomercials on TV, right? That's like, hey, call this number and buy this thing, right? They are saying that they are estimating 50% of their sales to come from Amazon, not the website that's provided in that infomercial, not the number that's provided in that infomercial anymore. And so I think the long story short of this is that Brett talked about like he noticed. And you can track this the only way that you could actually track, you know, data from a Facebook ad to Amazon,, is going to be like, are you seeing an increase in your brand searches? Right? So I guess that would be my question to you.

Josh (00:50:31)** ((-)) - - You are doing that. You have your products on Amazon., are you seeing an increase in brand searches from just doing regular advertising? Still trying to be profitable on that landing page?

Matt (00:50:43)** ((-)) - - Yeah. Definitely helps. I mean, I love Brett, he's a friend and,, very successful. He does great guy. He also owns an agency. And so it's going to be in his best interest to say that, hey, if you just run a bunch of ads, trust us, it'll like lift everything else up and there's probably truth to what he's saying. But to me, that's like not the strategy, that if you're spending your own money scaling your own business, especially at the earlier stages with this whole approach that you should be relying on. For me, it's like, I want to see the sales coming in like day one, like when we've looked at this stuff before, like we've run data because like, every agency is going to tell you like, oh, just trust us.

Matt (00:51:15)** ((-)) - - Like you didn't get any sales yesterday from your ad spend. But over the next 3 to 6 months, they're for sure going to come in. It's like, yeah, and you're probably going to be gone by then. And so,, when we've looked at this before, it was like 80 plus percent of the sales. Like if you're selling a low ticket product, like if you're selling something that's like thousands of dollars, there's going to be a longer purchase cycle. Like, this is not a big leap of the imagination to understand that. But if you're selling an inexpensive product, say, less than $50, like most people are going to either buy it right now, you're not going to buy it at all. Like they're not going to do a ton of research trying to figure out what $40, you know, iPhone case to buy or something. And so for us, when I looked at it before, it was like 80% of the sales were happening on day one or they weren't happening at all.

Matt (00:51:55)** ((-)) - - There was some trailing effect. And so, like, that's what I think you should be banking on is like, are you making the sales on day one? Because if not, like you're just spending money kind of blindly. Yeah. If you hold yourself to that stricter discipline, I think you'll realize the benefits that you're talking about better with the bleed off on Amazon, because then you can confidently scale your Facebook ad spend from five grand a month to 20 grand a month to 50 grand to 100 grand, or 200 grand to 300 grand, because you're actually making your money on day one, and then you are going to get that bleed off effect on Amazon and everywhere else. And even just people coming back to your store and buying it from your home page and all that stuff, which is great, which may not be picked up in Facebook ads, but I would hold yourself to a stricter discipline of like, this ad's got to pay for itself on day one. If not, we don't scale it.

Matt (00:52:41)** ((-)) - - If you do that, then everything else is a bonus. And so that's kind of how I look at it, knowing that what Brett is saying is true, that we do. That's how we grew Amazon from zero to like 150 grand a month in like the first couple months of even doing anything on Amazon was because we were already getting all that brand traffic. Okay. But I don't think we would have gotten to that point if we weren't really disciplined with our cost side on the ads.

Josh (00:53:04)** ((-)) - - So it's the icing on the cake, I think. So make sure you're profitable up front right from that customer acquisition cost and what your AOV is. Yeah., don't bleed yourself dry., and I think that the warning of agencies I think was, was really well noted as well because we've, we've seen similar results. Yeah. Now, Matt, one last thing then in regards to these traffic sources, where should people start? You mentioned, number one, maybe Google ads because you have like PPC ads because you already have the Amazon obviously like keyword data.

Josh (00:53:40)** ((-)) - - When do you start implementing Facebook? Instagram? What about TikTok? What about other advertising channels could you walk us through? Like, this is where I would start and these would be the next ones I go to.

Matt (00:53:53)** ((-)) - - Yeah. So I would think in order of priority I would for most Amazon sellers, I would start with Google Ads because you're already running keyword traffic on Amazon. That's an easy kind of leap to Shopify. Instead of sending keyword traffic from Amazon to Amazon, you're sending it from Google to Shopify. Otherwise, because you already got a bunch of keyword data and stuff like that. And so that's where I would start. But your growth is going to be very capped, because you only can target people that are actually looking for those keywords. In most cases, unless you start getting into more complicated advertising ways on Google. And so but I would start there because it's an easy way to get your feet wet. You start seeing some conversions on Shopify, you're building your customer list, all that good stuff.

Matt (00:54:30)** ((-)) - - Then I would take whatever product, likely your best seller, but whichever one you think can sell well if it's not already your best seller that has the biggest market possible,, and ideally has some sort of unique angle about it, either a unique story or something. I mean, like the example I always like to give is like Black Rifle coffee. Their product is not really unique, like they're selling, and they don't even necessarily claim that it is. It's whatever coffee beans from wherever in the world, like a million other people. But their story is unique., their branding is unique. They're going after a very specific what I believe they kind of found was an underserved market in the coffee world, rather than a bunch of like, you know, hipsters sort of living in Austin. They were going after, like, hey, you know, men's men, military guys, people that, you know, patriots, that kind of thing. They drink coffee to. Let's create a brand for them.

Matt (00:55:21)** ((-)) - - And it worked well., but the story is unique, not necessarily the product. And so it's kind of like a little bit nuanced, but whatever you think, you either have the best unique product or unique story about it. That's what you can take over to Facebook ads. Then I would 100% go to Facebook. Second,, paid ads is you're going to learn faster. We've started pushing a decent amount and built like a team for SEO, and we're seeing good results. But that was like way down the line for us. And even to this day,, Facebook ads is still probably like at least 70% of our ad spend. And we've tried pushing everywhere else. It's just the most proven, the easiest. There's literally half of the entire world's population on there. There's no reason not to start there. Like, sure, you may be able to find some wins on TikTok and whatever else. And to me, when you're advertising on Facebook, it just includes Instagram by default. So I would leave that on there.

Matt (00:56:09)** ((-)) - - , so that's what I would do.

Josh (00:56:12)** ((-)) - - Awesome. Matt, this has been a wealth of information., I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Matt. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I am missing something. So action item number one is, if you've crossed the seven figure mark and Shopify is on your radar and you want to kind of build out and create a true brand, going the Shopify route, I would first focus on your best selling products, maybe take your top 2 to 3, right, and focus on those, because if you have a large catalog like myself with over 1400 different SKUs, like you are not going to be able to do that and you're not going to run ads like that. That complexity is beyond comprehension. But if you take your best selling products and you're like, I'm going to do one. Thing and focus on that. I'm going to build one web page, right? I'm going to build one product landing page.

Josh (00:57:10)** ((-)) - - It's going to be a long form sales letter on there. That's going to be your best and easiest start. So that's action item number one. Action item number two is identifying those traffic sources that you want to play in. And Matt, just,, sum this up minutes ago by saying, hey, you've already got all the keyword data. Start on Google Ads PPC, right? Run those same type of ads that you're running on Amazon PPC, but on Google going directly to that landing page or product page that you just created for your one best selling product. Okay. And then third final action item is that you've got to maximize that average order value. And I think this is where the fun part comes in. And I think this is where the mental shift can happen in a lot of people's minds. You can start to think more like a brand when you start to think, oh, well, if people buy this, what else do they or should they be buying along with this? Is it more of the same product or is it a complementary product, or is it turning that one product they're buying into a subscription? Then that's going to be able to unlock in your mind, maybe other products that you should start offering on Amazon if you're not already, or turning your business to be more subscription or membership focused or adding, you know, trying to turn things into purchasing more upfront and maybe you're targeting a different customer.

Josh (00:58:38)** ((-)) - - , I know for us, as we've kind of built out our brand, I think originally it was like, go find the niches on Amazon, go find where there's an underserved keyword or market, not good products. Right. And you go dominate that and then you go dominate another niche. And that's how we ended up with 1400 different SKUs, right. But as we focus on growing the brand, it is now more what should people buy when they buy this? What else do they pair it with? And how do we turn this into more repeat customers?, and so anyways, I think that that helps propel people forward. So those are my three action items, Matt. Anything else that you would add to that that I skipped over?

Matt (00:59:19)** ((-)) - - Yeah. No, I think that's a great summary., when it comes to increasing average order value, a good practice and it also makes people's lives simpler is like usually the easiest thing to do is just to sell people more of what they already bought.

Matt (00:59:32)** ((-)) - - Like in Mike's case, when we were testing the flashlight thing, we were getting all kinds of people to buy three of those flashlights up front because it's kind of like, oh, but it's not like, you know, coffee where it's consumable, but it doesn't matter. It's like people want a flashlight in their kitchen. They want one in their garage. They want one in their car. They want one in the office. Like people have multiple flashlights. It's okay. Even mattresses. You can sell people multiple mattresses because they got multiple bedrooms. So that's usually going to be the easiest thing and it doesn't require any other products. I think like the Holy grail of consumer brands is like Red bull in the early stages, doing a billion, billion dollars a year in sales with one skew. That's what I think we're after. That's your life is much simpler. I think you, Josh, are much better and more naturally inclined for,, creating good processes and that kind of thing than I am. So maybe it's kind of me dealing with my own deficiencies.

Matt (01:00:17)** ((-)) - - I would lose my mind if I was selling 1400 different products, lots of different potential suppliers, SKUs. You have to manage pages, products, listings, all that kind of stuff., so we haven't gotten to the kind of holy grail, but I think a nice kind of extreme example is like, how do you achieve all your goals with just one product? Like, I think that would be nice., even if it's like an unrealistic ideal.

Josh (01:00:40)** ((-)) - - Yeah.. Well said. I'll take that. I'll trade it in my 1400 SKUs for one all day long. Matt. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Matt, now, I love to ask each guest the following three questions to wrap things up here. So number one, what's been the most influential book that you've read and why?

Matt (01:00:57)** ((-)) - - I think probably,, Success Principles by Jack Canfield., it's not a book that's going to be on like the top of the self-development charts these days. But for me it was like so instrumental because,, I've gotten a lot of trouble and stuff when I was younger, but I had these goals, and then I kind of read this book and very early on in college, and I was like, oh my God, I couldn't read more than five pages without having some big epiphany about my life because I was like, okay, I want these things, but how do I actually go get them? So it was almost like, you know, whatever.

Matt (01:01:27)** ((-)) - - A couple hundred pages of like self-development 101. So it's like, is he the world's greatest, like self-development book ever written? I don't know, but to me it was like the most impactful because it was like right place, right time, right information. And it was kind of like drinking from a firehose to get all of those basic tips and advice, which sometimes can sound kind of corny and stuff, but I think it's like. It's what you need if you haven't been through that kind of stuff., so that was probably the most important book.

Josh (01:01:54)** ((-)) - - Awesome. Love it. I have not read that one. Adding it to the list. All right. Next question. What is a new productivity tool or software tool that you've recently discovered that you think is going to be a game changer?

Matt (01:02:08)** ((-)) - - Yes, I use the least number of these possible. I don't use any Trello. I refuse to use slack, even though our entire company used slack. Like I literally didn't have an account anymore until recently, because there's this guy that I've been doing a partnership with that only uses slack.

Matt (01:02:24)** ((-)) - - So the only way I could talk he refused to get on a zoom call. He's like more extreme than me. But on the other end, and the only way I could get on a zoom call or talk to him is if I use slack. So because of him, I'm using freaking slack again. But so I would say like the tool, which is kind of more of like a lesson is your calendar. And I would have aim for zero things on your calendar., that is my goal because I read a ton about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. And, you know, Warren Buffett was known. He runs a, you know, what is it, $900 billion company now? And then there's been some, like, anecdotes about him, you know, showing his calendar like Bill gates and then like, you look on his calendar, this guy's running at the time, you know, $400 billion company. And literally it would be like the entire week would just say Tuesday and then have big letters that say haircut day.

Matt (01:03:11)** ((-)) - - And like, that would be it on his calendar for $400 billion company., I think that's possible. I think if you just kind of solve stuff as it comes up and then aim to have zero stuff on your calendar, I think you don't need all these other tools and whatnot. That's my opinion. Very extreme. Some other people, like he was talking about Bill gates at the time, you know, like Elon Musk, I've heard as like 15 minute increments with everything on the calendar. But I've tried going both ways. That drives me absolutely insane. And I think you can build as big as business if you want, and potentially have more like peace of mind by having zero things on your calendar.

Josh (01:03:43)** ((-)) - - I love that, love that opinion, love that standpoint. I think it unlocks a lot of creativity too. And not getting caught, you know, caught up with the thick of thin things, which is spending all day in email and then looking back and be like, I never really moved the needle,, today.

Matt (01:03:59)** ((-)) - - So yeah. And then jumping on a bunch of I find a lot of people, they jump on a bunch of meetings because it kind of feels like work. Yeah., and sometimes it can actually be more crazy as it sounds more pleasurable than like having to sit and actually think about hard stuff. If you can just chit chat with some people about some, like, lightweight stuff for like 30 minutes, you're like, oh, I did some work, but it's like, did you really move the needle? Like, probably not. And so I think there's that kind of thing you have to sort through.

Josh (01:04:24)** ((-)) - - 100% agree 100%. All right, Matt, final question here. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Matt (01:04:34)** ((-)) - - , I would 100% say Ezra Firestone,, if he created the zippy one click upsell. He's been a good friend for many years. He's always delivered when we needed to him for partnerships, bonuses, speaking at our events like he's truly like a like a great guy.

Matt (01:04:49)** ((-)) - - And it's just continuous year after year. I've been crushing the e-commerce space. He loves teaching the stuff he's gifted at teaching it, but it also doesn't. I mean, he exited one of his businesses,, I think partially for a good amount of money. So he's kind of been through that whole process even after scaling it a ton, runs a big team, but still finds time to like, teach and give back and all that. So it's like if you want to learn, especially Shopify stuff, I would for sure go check out anything Ezra has.

Josh (01:05:13)** ((-)) - - Yeah, Ezra is a master of Shopify and well known in the e-commerce space, so I would recommend him as well. Yeah, Matt, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing your,, your wealth of experience and decade of decades of e-commerce knowledge with us all. Matt, where could other people go to learn more about you to follow along? You also talked about masterminds being important. I know you're involved. Where could people follow along and rub shoulders with you more?

Matt (01:05:45)** ((-)) - - Yeah, I think the best way, is probably just to go to my personal website, which is just Matt a Clark dot com middle name Alexander, because everything Matt Clark has taken.

Matt (01:05:54)** ((-)) - - So Matt a clark.com, you'll find some blog posts that I've written. You can opt in for the email list and like if you opt in to the email list. I know people don't like to do that. I don't like to do that. But it's like literally unsubscribe if I send something, you know, like it doesn't matter. But that's the best way to kind of probably stay updated. That'll be like less platform specific.

Josh (01:06:11)** ((-)) - - Awesome. Matt, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure.

Matt (01:06:15)** ((-)) - - Yeah. Thanks, Josh.