Firing The Man
THANK YOU TO OUR 25,000+ LISTENERS! We are so thankful to be one of the TOP E-Commerce Podcasts delivering high-quality authentic content to you! Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA, Walmart WFS, and E-Commerce. Discover how you can create multiple income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love - whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world. Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures. During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned. This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from Ken and David you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
Firing The Man
The Truth About Making Money on Amazon with Andy Isom
Ready to scale your Amazon business? Click here to book a strategy call. https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon
Tired of hearing that Amazon FBA is “over”? We unpack why the opportunity didn’t die—it evolved—and how smart operators are winning by pairing founder-led insight with ruthless execution. Our guest, veteran seller and agency founder Andy Isom, takes us from his first experiments in the Jungle Scout era to the playbooks he uses today across dozens of live accounts. The big ideas: pick products you actually understand, design for shareability so people want to post what they buy, and respect logistics as a profit lever, not a back-office chore.
We break down the product criteria that still hold up—small, lightweight, and simple for beginners—and when to flip the script with oversized or “boring” items that live in quieter niches. Andy explains how Amazon’s algorithm increasingly rewards external traffic and brand search, why “me too” listings bleed on PPC, and how to choose between rank-first or profit-first ad frameworks. If you’ve ever felt stuck at break-even ACOS, you’ll hear clear ways to test, segment, and scale without gambling the whole account.
Looking for immediate upside? Build a seasonal portfolio. Seasonal SKUs consistently convert harder, advertise cheaper, and generate fast turns when timed well. We map how to stagger products across the calendar, forecast inventory to avoid painful fees, and use ocean freight, 3PL staging, and smarter placement settings to keep logistics costs in check. Along the way, Andy shares why he launched a boutique agency, the advantages of cross-account pattern recognition, and the mindset shifts that separate resilient brand builders from the crowd.
If you’re serious about Amazon in 2025—new seller or seven-figure operator—this conversation offers practical steps to protect margin, spark demand, and scale with precision. Enjoy the episode, then subscribe, share it with a friend who needs a better game plan, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.
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Ready to scale your Amazon business? Click here to book a strategy call. https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon
Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man Podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income stream in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs, David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
SPEAKER_02:Welcome to Firing the Man, the podcast for entrepreneurs, brand builders, and e-commerce operators ready to break free from hustle and build something that truly scales. I'm your host, David Schomer, and today's guest has mastered the Amazon trenches and surfaced with playbooks that real brand owners can use right now. Meet Andy Isom, an Amazon seller, e-commerce brand owner, and founder of the Weevos agency. He's also the voice behind the top-ranked podcast Built by Business, where he shares no fluff, actionable strategies from inside the trenches of brand building. Whether you're launching your first product or managing a seven-figure catalog, Andy dissects what really matters in Amazon FBA from navigating the A9 to A10 algorithm shift to fixing silent conversion killers, outsmarting complacency, and capitalizing on new PPC tools that most sellers haven't even launched. Today we'll go beyond generic e-commerce advice. We're digging into designing systems that maintain growth without burnout, optimizing for profitability over rankings, and scaling using precision, not guesswork. So whether you're a side hustle startup or a catalog builder scaling your portfolio, this episode will arm you with the type of blueprints you can put to work immediately. Let's fire it up with Andy Isom. Andy, welcome to the show. Thanks, David. I'm happy to be here. Absolutely. So to start things off, can you share with our audience a little bit about your background and path in the e-commerce world?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. So um, quick version of my story is I actually this is kind of the fun story. This is a story I think people like to hear. Is I was actually in college. I was sitting in a class. I can't remember what the class was. It was a business school class. I graduated with a business degree. But I remember this vividly, still to this day. It was it was 2015. I even remember the two kids that were sitting right next to me. I was sitting in the back row of class, having a lecture in one of our business classes, and these two kids next to me are looking at their laptop and they're looking at some like software tool thing. And all I can see is a bunch of toothbrushes, like toothbrush head replacements for like an electric toothbrush. I can see a whole bunch of those, and they see just a bunch of numbers, like dollar signs and you know, reviews. I was like, so I'm kind of like not paying attention to the teacher at this point, and I'm kind of just like looking over at their laptop, like, what are these guys doing? And finally, after class, like I had to ask them. I was like, hey, I'm so sorry. But like I was totally just peeping on what you guys were doing because they're not paying attention. They're like both like whispering to each other, like looking on the screen. It's like, what were you guys doing? They're like, oh, dude, it's this software tool, it's called Jungle Scout, and you can see like how many products are selling on Amazon. So like we're looking at a product that you know we might want to sell on Amazon, um, and we can see like how much money people are making selling this. And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. So then they're showing me, and it's they're sharing, they're gonna sell like, you know, generic brand of like oral B electric toothbrush head replacements. Like, you can sell$100,000 a month of these, you get them from China, right? You sell them for cheaper than the name brand, and you know, that's like what you do. And I was like, whoa, that is crazy. So I actually from that that was again like 2015, I'm still in college. I actually went home that day, looked up Jungle Scout. Um, at the time, this is what's crazy about Jungle Scout too. You could get a lifetime subscription for$50. So I got hooked up Lifetime Jungle Scout access for$50 because they're like startup new thing. And I started messing with it. And sorry, I'm I'm making, I said long story short, uh, but to kind of like, I guess now shorten the uh tail end here of the story, I dabbled in some project uh some products while I was still in college. I had just recently gotten married. I was so broke, I had no job in college. I don't know why I even went down this path. I'm ordering samples from China, getting a bill for$200 from UPS, and my wife was so mad at me. Oh my gosh. Because I didn't I didn't know like how to do all this. Like I didn't know that I shouldn't give a UPS account to a supplier. I I didn't realize like, oh, you should ask them for the shipping price up front. Because all I did is I'm like, yeah, oh, I'll set up a UFS account. Here's your account, here's my account number. And then they sent me a bill for 200 bucks. I was like, oh crap. Anyways, I had a lot of like learning the hard way early on, but in 2018, we uh I had a job at that point, had some money, and my wife and I and our friends, we uh actually very legitimately launched our first brand and then yeah, took off from there and been kind of in the uh Amazon e-commerce space since then.
SPEAKER_02:Outstanding, outstanding. And I so I must have got in on that the Jungle Scout Chrome extension. I think I might have paid 99 bucks for it, but it's it for a lifetime, and and like sitting here with my Chrome tab open, still looking at it, and it's uh it's outstanding. So that's that's really, really cool. Um, so tell us about some of you know, you you talked a little bit about the early days, kind of experimenting, but you know, with that first brand, what what did that look like and and um what did you do?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we started a pet brand again back in 2018. And I guess to kind of uh this is a story that I've I've told so many times over the years with people about like how did you come up with the product? How did you know how did you decide on that's that's what you wanted to sell? And I'm a big believer that I think a lot of the most successful brands are born more of, or I guess born more from an internal idea, problem, passion from the founder, and not as much from a tool telling you what you should sell. And having coached, I've coached dozens of people now uh privately, like one-on-one over the past five years. And I've seen that same sort of thing play out where my students, clients who are the most successful selling products online, Amazon mainly as being kind of a focus, the most successful are the people who, again, they like had an internal problem that they were trying to solve for themselves or a desire, a passion around a hobby or something. And then they dug deeper into that to figure out either what's a product that fit and aligned with that, or um, they had a product idea and they kind of dived a little bit deeper into like, okay, I have this idea, but how do I actually make this idea viable and profitable? Versus again, I've seen so, so, so, so many people fail in e-commerce, uh, Amazon in particular, by just purely relying on a tool, like a Jungle Scout or a Helium or whatever tool you want to use, where they say, I did I put in all my number criteria, and this is the product the tool tells me I should sell. I don't know anything about this, but because Jungle Scout says, Oh, I should sell hair wigs, I launch hair wigs, don't know anything about the customer, nothing about this, no, don't know what problem I need to solve, don't know how to price, you know, anything. And then they wonder why it fails. Um, many times because again, they'll fizzle out, lose interest, give up, not have the energy or emotion to the brand to like see it through to profitability. Um, so yeah, this was a product and a brand that we we had a dog. So my wife um was actually hand sewing dog bandanas for our dog and posting pictures on Instagram just because we liked sharing cute photos of our puppy. And people were DMing us saying, Where did you get that? And my wife's like, I made it. I literally sewed it. And and so people would ask, like, hey, can you make me one? She's like, Yeah, sure. Give me 20 bucks and uh I'll go to Joann's, buy fabric that you want and sew it. And we would literally like getting Ven mode, dropping it off on people's porches, and then kind of all the pieces connected, where again I had that history of Amazon dabbling in some stuff. So I'm always looking at it like, is this an opportunity? Is this an opportunity? And then uh we we partnered with our friends, saw, did some research, saw like, oh, there's an actual mark uh opportunity. And then we use the tools to find the gap that we needed to fill. So that's how we figured out like, all right, what what bundle should we sell? What price point? Where is the gap in this market that needs to be filled? And that's I think where like the power of the tools come into play is you kind of pair like your natural intuition knowledge around the category product with what the data's telling you, and you kind of find that sweet spot and and it worked.
SPEAKER_02:Outstanding, outstanding. I I I love that story, and and what a gritty, gritty way to start is is making your own products and selling them, and and that's outstanding. Is is that a brand that you still are running today? Awesome, awesome. So let's talk about Amazon as we sit here talking in 2025. Uh, you will hear a lot of people say, you know, the days of Amazon's glory days are behind us, and it's it's really hard to be successful on Amazon now. And so I'm curious, how how would you respond to those people?
SPEAKER_01:This is a question that I've been asked a lot over probably the past two years. I would say 20, like the end of 2023 is when the sentiment I feel like really started to come come to the forefront of like e-commerce is like Amazon FBA is dead, Amazon FBA is dead. I think, I think like almost every business opportunity that I've kind of dabbled in throughout my whole life has kind of gone through a similar type of, I don't know, curve where you know someone figures out a business opportunity like drop shipping. I I dabbled in drop shipping. I had a fishing, I sold fishing gear drop shipping through a Shopify store, AliExpress, I did the whole thing. Where you see like someone discovers a new leverage, a new opportunity like drop shipping. Um it's you know, the supply and demand where there's a lot of demand for people who are willing to buy products from a drop shipping site and there's not as much supply. So then obviously people hear about it, they see how easy it is, you get into it, and then you know, within a few years, the curve kind of starts to peak where the supply and demand kind of either levels out or flips and goes the other way, where there's too much supply and not enough demand. And that's when you've kind of hit that moment of like it's too saturated, it's dead, it's dying. Because it's to me, it's just a lot of supply and demand economics there. I also think there's a factor of kind of fatigue, like audience fatigue, where, and I mean, I'm I'm I'm in this world, right? I've sold courses on Amazon, I've done Amazon coaching, but the more the the more that the category, the business opportunity, grows, there's more people talking about it, more people selling courses, selling coaching, more people running ads on Instagram, on Facebook. And so I think just the general public over time kind of starts to get a bad taste in their mouth about it. I think that's kind of like the first initial phases is when you first see a Facebook ad about Amazon FBA like being this great opportunity in 2020, you're looking at it like, oh my gosh, this is an incredible opportunity. But once you're seeing Facebook ads in 2025 about Amazon FBA is amazing, everyone's like, oh my gosh, I'm so sick of these. Like, I've been seeing these ads for five years. Like, why are we still pushing this? Like, you know, so I think just that also kind of plays a factor in the dying, like the business model's dying is people are just getting sick of hearing about it. Uh, we like we're humans, like humans like new stuff. I mean, that's why we continually shop and buy new clothes. It's like we like what's new, what's new, what's new. And so we get just sick of hearing about Amazon FBA, sell on Amazon, sell on Amazon. So I do think that like those type of things have contributed to a you know, a negative view of selling on Amazon as an opportunity in 2025. But I think with like pretty much every business model, even since like I don't know, the beginning of time, farming, let's even say, is there still an opportunity to make money farming, being a farmer? Yes, absolutely. Is it very different than it was in the 1800s? Yes, for sure. So I think it's like, is the opportunity dead? No. But is it evolved? Is it different? Yes, definitely. And so if you're still thinking that, you know, Amazon FBA is the same opportunity it was in 2020, it's not. But can you still make a living from it and do really well and start now and be successful? Absolutely. But you're gonna have to approach it with a different strategy in the same way that like you're not gonna go out with a hand plow and start hand plowing corn and think that like you're gonna support your family with hand tools, garden or farming. You're gonna need equipment and you know, automation and all the things to make it an actual viable business for you.
SPEAKER_02:I I very much agree with you. And uh I I think there are there are I do, I know there are millionaires made on Amazon every single day. And uh and that has not stopped. And it they in terms of market share, it's still the go-to place for for people shopping online. And if you think of it as a mall, it's the biggest mall in the world. There's a lot of people going to that mall every single day. And when you try to visualize the traffic on Amazon as as people going into a mall, it's it's hard to even comprehend, right? And so um what are let's talk about, and this is this is to the new Amazon seller, this is to the experienced Amazon seller. Uh, what are some characteristics of products that you've seen do well or tend to do well? And that this may be the the economics of the product where we're looking at landed cost to sale price. Um, this may be the size of the product or or maybe a price point. Um, but what what seems to do well these days?
SPEAKER_01:That's a I love that question. Man, that's such a juicy question. I feel like we could talk for four hours on this question, but uh a motto that I have lived by. The people who listen to my podcast, they know this. They've heard me literally say this probably a hundred times in five years, is small, lightweight, and simple. Like I have preached that for five years. I would say small and lightweight from like the perspective of profitability is still like a huge, huge winning factor. Uh shipping can eat up a ton of your cost, as people learn when they first launch products, especially if you're sorting or sourcing from China, right? So having something that's small and lightweight, huge advantage. And then obviously, if it's a product that you can source for reasonably low cost and mark it up for a decent price. Like, I still think the sweet spot for a lot of products on Amazon is still in the$20 to$50 range. I mean, they're impulse byproducts, there's tons of products that kind of fit in that category. It's low risk investment. So if it fails, you can test something else. Versus, you know, if you're selling$300 products, you might have to spend$20,$30 grand on inventory, where if it flops, you're done. Like there goes all your cash that you were going to test with, and now you're done. Whereas, whereas again, if you can get a product made for a dollar, two dollars, sell it for$20, and it's small, lightweight, where your FBA fees are gonna be lower, shipping's gonna be lower, it gives you a lot of margin to play with, a lot of margin for marketing, for advertising. And as you know, like advertising costs go up over time. So, and fees increase over time too, which kind of sucks, right? But the more margin you give yourself in the beginning to play with, the more longevity you're gonna have with that product as competition comes for you, PPC, like all the things we just said. So, from like a data perspective, yeah, I'm a huge fan of small, lightweight, and simple.$20 to$50, good profit margin, give yourself a place to start. But something like from a maybe uh product research perspective, I I'm kind of finding myself I don't want to say ditching the tools because I still use the tools. I still use all the tools, Smart Scout, the Heliums, the Jungle Scouts, all those tools in doing like product research and things. But something that I've taught or talked a lot about over this past year is look for products that are built for social media. I think the old Amazon, I'm curious what your thoughts on this are. I think the old Amazon, meaning like the pre-COVID era, the 2015 to 2020 era of Amazon, was white labeling generic products, right? It was iPhone charging cables that were not Apple brand, it was coat hangers, it was just like random stuff like that, where people could come to Amazon and get a cheaper version without spending$15 on the iPhone or the Apple brand. I think now the the 2025, you could even say like the 2023 to 2025 plus Amazon is not those types of products where you're using the research tools and identifying coat hangers, but it's more of like really looking at social media and figuring out what are products that people want to post about on social media. If someone wants to post about without you paying them, I think is the biggest key. If someone wants to take pictures or videos of the products that they've purchased simply because they want to share it with their friends or followers or whatever, and show how cool they are because they bought this new thing, that's a winning product. That's a product that's gonna have huge legs. The new algorithm on Amazon heavily favors external traffic. So any sort of buzz you can generate with your brand name on social media, on Google or whatever, it's gonna give you a huge advantage. So that's what I tell people. Ask yourself the question is this a product people would be excited to post about on social media? And if it's like no, they're not gonna post about co-hangers, they're not gonna post about picture frames or whatever, you know, generic stuff, then don't sell it. Because the Chinese will beat you.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yeah. I you you would ask like my thoughts on it, and I I and you you talk you've talked about tools a little bit, and I my relationship with tools have also changed. I use them more as a sanity check uh at the back end of my research process as opposed to on the front end. And I I'll give you a good example. Uh imagine that you're holding a can a six-inch candlestick in your hand. Okay, you light it, there's a flame, and wax is dripping down. There is a little cardboard circle that would sit at the base of that so you don't get wax on your hand. Can you picture what I'm talking about? So I was using this was six or seven years ago. I was using Jungle Scout and I saw this huge surge in traffic for these. I went out and sourced 5,000 of them and went to start selling them a couple months later after I had finally got inventory. And I thought this was going to be my million-dollar idea. As it turns out, most churches do an Easter vigil where they hand out candles to everybody and they need these wafers to stick around their candles. And so at that point, I was searching on like the Tuesday before Easter Sunday. And so I still have probably 4,950 of those in my warehouse. And that's a great example of the metrics looked great, the margins looked great, but there was something I wasn't considering. And so uh I in so that that would kind of be my my first to address that that first point on tools. Um, I think the Me Too products are tough. They're really, really tough. And I I fully agree with you on posting on social media. I think driving traffic on PPC alone, uh, you tend to break even a lot or even be underwater. And and so uh I, on the other hand, prefer products over$50, between like$50 and$100. I like boring products, which is the opposite of what you're saying, but I've had some successes there, um, and oversized. And and that is just because it's not as saturated. Now, uh, if you hit it wrong, um, your long-term storage fees based on cubic feet are going to be way higher. Uh and so that I would say that those larger products tend to carry a little bit higher risk. Um, but I have found that look that they're a little bit less competitive. And so um, but uh your point on external traffic, I I I fully agree with. And I think you if you see the the brains that are crushing it on Amazon, they have an external source of traffic out outside of PPC. And and so um, but yeah, really, really good answer there. Um I do want to.
SPEAKER_01:Can I can I touch on the oversized thing? Please actually I like that you said that. I think too, to maybe clarify for for those for for you who might be listening to this, you have to be very self-aware. I think that's something too that I've learned coaching people personally is if you're not really self-aware of your skill set with e-commerce, product development, marketing, then you can get yourself into a lot of trouble. So again, I think like the the small, lightweight, and simple, you know,$20,$50, low cost of manufacture, good margin, that protects a lot of people who may not know what their skill set is yet, or they just really want to try. Because I'm the type of person too that's like I don't want to tell people, like I hate to tell people like, hey, you just you do not have the skill set for this. Because I've done so many calls with people. Like when I was doing high-ticket private coaching, I would do calls with people before, you know, I onboarded them as a client, and I talk to them, what's your experience? And I talk to a lot of people who, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, there is no chance this person is going to be successful with this. They just they just don't comprehend business and products and that you have to have a sense for like what looks good, how to differentiate, like things like that. But again, I hate being that guy who like tells people, don't go for it, like, don't go for your dreams, like go try it, learn, you'll get better. So that's kind of like my philosophy of like those type of people. However, I've had a lot of conversations with existing brand owners or people who are very skilled that you know, like, hey, you have a knack for this. An oversized product is something that I've recommended to quite a few people over the last few years. Is you know how this works, you know how supply chain shipping, logistics, um, all that stuff, storage fees, like you know how all this functions in the space. Now it's time to start looking where no one else is looking. So I think you said it really good. Like a lot of people look$20 to$50. That's a very common thing. A lot of people teach that. So it's kind of like the zig where everyone's zagging, zag where everyone's zigging, whatever concept. It's like, all right, I'm gonna do the opposite. I'll do 50 to 100, I'm gonna do oversize, I'm gonna do boring. Like it's the stuff that like people now start to overlook. Um, because most people are afraid of that. It's more risky. But if you have the skill set, it can be a huge opportunity. So I like that. I like that you said that.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, absolutely. And I and I agree with you. We're we're in agreement on this topic. So uh we we've talked a little bit about advertising, and I'd like to dive in there. So one observation that I've had is if you have a product that's selling for$20, say your landed cost is$10 and your referral fee, FBA fee is five bucks for simplicity. So you've got a$5 profit margin on a$20 product before your PPC spend. What I have found is when you start bidding on your primary keywords, you you tend to have about$5 in in PPC spend to convert a sale. And you're at break-even. And it it's the the uh capitalism and in the markets of supply and demand for keywords kind of force it to an equilibrium. And and so what you know, as we're talking in 2025, what's your view on on PPC and and doing PPC in a profitable way?
SPEAKER_01:This is a really good question. So in 2023, October 2023, uh I kind of made the shift in in my own like personal business endeavors with e-commerce education, and I switched from doing mostly, uh primarily, I guess, consulting and coaching to services. So I launched an agency October of 2023, and I've been basically doing that essentially full focus now. Moved away from coaching, you know, finished up some of my coaching agreements with students this past summer. But now I've been a lot more focused on PPC. And it's been really eye-opening to now manage a bunch of clients and do their PPC. I mean, with my team, obviously. My team's doing a lot of the day-to-day, but I mean, I actually just had two meetings this morning. Tuesday, I do a lot of meetings with my managers and whatnot to go over all of our accounts. So I already had two hours of meetings before our uh our podcast today talking about all of our accounts, strategies, and everything. And when it comes to PPC, it's very interesting how different strategies work or don't work for different products and brands. So, like some brands and products, I should say products in particular, you can go with like a very aggressive PPC ranking strategy, where you know, we're gonna bid heavily on exact match keywords, we're gonna push for ranking signals on Amazon, and then once we, you know, as we gain ranking, then the organic sales kind of pick up the slack, and that ends up pushing us to profitability, even if our ranking is you know far from profitable uh on those conversions. Um, but other brands that just simply doesn't work. Like you just can't do that. You you can't afford to do that, uh, or it's way, way, way too long term of a game, or they're just I don't know, depending on the offer, the price, like there's so many factors here. But I guess that's kind of like my my takeaway and insight over the past two years is you have to find the right PPC strategy for your product. Because if not, like if you if you try to do PPC for profitability too soon, like okay, I only have 25% margin to work with, and so I'm only gonna focus PPC on you know long tail, profitable keywords, low bids, you'll never get off the ground. You'll be stuck in like no man's land of one or two sales a day. So it's PPC is much more complex, I would say, now than obviously five years ago, but there's not really like a one strategy fits all. It's kind of like having a deep understanding. And I would say this is a huge benefit of working um with a team, like working with um an agency, a contractor, whoever, someone who has a lot of insight into a lot of different products in a lot of different categories, they're gonna know or at least have some good idea of like, hey, for this product, this is a strategy that we should test based on all these other data points that we've experienced with other brands. Otherwise, when you're you know on your own little island launching products and running PPC, you're kind of at the mercy of YouTube University trying stuff, spending lots of money, and then uh hopefully, hopefully it working out someday.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. I I think that that's probably one of the first things you ought to get off your plate as an Amazon business owner is PPC. And and whether it's an agency or or somebody that you hire. I I like when when I'm working with somebody who has visibility into several accounts. Um because when when you're self-managing, it's like, am I doing well? I don't know. I'm doing better than last month, but uh I uh it's really helpful. And that's where agencies come in. They say, Oh, you know, okay, we we managed 20 accounts and and this is what we're seeing on all of these other accounts. And and um the the cost of experimenting tends to come down uh because the likelihood of um you know that they've tried out a particular strategy on another account and can bring that knowledge to your account is is really, really helpful. And so um let's this has been great, and we're going deep on on Amazon. And I uh as an Amazon seller, I'm really, really enjoying this conversation. Um what's some low-hanging fruit for people who are having okay results on Amazon but but really want to step up their game? What's some low-hanging fruit for uh scaling an Amazon account?
SPEAKER_01:This is probably the best advice I'm gonna give today. And I I think people who actually take this to heart are going to crush it. I literally just had this conversation with um my agency partner this morning. Seasonal products. I I'm telling you, if you if you're listening and you're thinking about starting, like you have no brand, no products, seasonal products, or if you're existing and selling and you're looking to expand, your next product needs to be a seasonal product. I think the issue is we want this to be stable income. Right? We want it to be like predictable, where it's like I'm gonna sell 10 units a day 12 months out of the year, and I'm gonna know exactly all my numbers, and every month my you know, PL is gonna be super clean. I'm gonna know every month I'm gonna make$2,000 profit. We like that. That makes us feel good, it makes us feel like we have a full-time job and I know where my money is gonna come from. But if you're looking for low-hanging fruit where you can come in and crush it in thousands of different products, be willing to take some bets on seasonal products. Seasonal meaning, right? Just for those listening, just to I guess clarify, seasonal products, products that have, you know, a window of sales opportunity, but during that window, it's extremely strong. I mean, you were talking about it with the candle thing, right? Where it might be a product where it's springtime. It's, I mean, obviously the holidays are big ones, like Christmas related products, Thanksgiving, holidays, Halloween, back to school, summer, winter products, but products like that, where they're not an evergreen year-round type of product, but they're one where demand goes super high during a certain time of year. And I've seen from my own brand and products, and I over 120 SKUs of my own brand, seasonal, always crush, and they're always the most profitable, they're always the easiest to advertise. And then even with all my clients, they have a seasonal product, their seasonal product always crushes. So stack seasonal skews. Instead of, in my opinion, instead of investing, like I'm gonna launch five products that are evergreen, they're gonna sell year-round. I would sell five products. And if you want to be consistent year-round, sell a product in, you know, Q1 that does really well at the beginning of the year. Find a product for spring, find one for summer, and stack seasonal skews throughout the year. You do have to be better, like with management, right? You got to time the inventory, you gotta time, you gotta time stuff really well. Because if you do research right now and you see, oh my gosh, it's uh what is it? September Labor Day, beginning of September, right? And you see like a trend, like something is really popping off right now, you're like, sweet, I'm gonna sell that. Like, surprise, that only sells in September and October. So next April, when you get the inventory, you're gonna be like, crap, this sucks. So you kind of got to time it, but if you can. That's the best low-hanging fruit seasonal products, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_02:I think that's great advice. And I'll just add in a quick personal story. The the most profitable Amazon account that I have personally ever laid eyes on uh was a it was an eight-figure brand that sold Halloween customs, and they crushed it. And what was really interesting, and I never thought about this, was that they said, you know, we we work really, really hard, you know, in October on fulfillment, um, and obviously three to four months prior on sourcing, but they said they're it's an easier brand to run because you know, November, December, January, we're we're on vacation. And and I and I saw their helium 10 account, and I can like personally testify like super profitable, low CPC, just I I think that's outstanding advice uh for experienced Amazon sellers or for somebody getting started out. So um it's very, very good. One of the things that you hear a lot of people complain about is Amazon fees. And I would say to to the current Amazon sellers, what are some things that they need to be aware of? Um perhaps helpful reports or um areas where they can dig in and see what exactly am I being charged for, and then make decisions on managing those uh those fees.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, two, I mean the the fees definitely have changed over the past five years pretty dramatically. I would say uh if I could kind of almost like bundle all of fees uh and uh uh operations into a bucket of extreme importance, I would say logistics. I would say like shipping logistics is extremely important nowadays. Um because if you think about most of the fees, most of the fees are related to that. So like inbound placement fee. That's related to shipping your product into Amazon warehouses. Are you gonna send everything to one? Are you gonna split it up into five? Um utilization rate kind of. I mean, that it I know that's more of like a sales type of metric, but it's sales based on inventory. So, like, how quickly are you selling through your inventory that you have? Uh, you know, you've got your inventory surcharge, your long-term storage fees, how whatever you want to name those. Um, so it all kind of comes down to like how efficient are you being with your shipping, your logistics. And also we've got tariffs now. So we've got the new tariff thing. A lot of people were using different de minimis loopholes and things like that. So a lot of that's kind of out the window. So you got tariffs that you got to be really focused on. And so you just can't afford to be lazy with your shipping. I'm someone, I've preached this. If you go listen to 2020 original Andy I some episodes, I'm like, I love Air Express. I'm like, Air Express shipping from China. Yes, I love it. It's fantastic. DDP, the whole thing. You cannot ship Air Express anymore unless you're shipping like, I don't know, like envelopes, like something really small, right? You're shipping boat. Like you're shipping boat now. That's the way to you gotta find ways to be efficient with your shipping and logistics. That's where you're gonna like either absolutely hurt with fees or find ways to actually be profitable. How much inventory, how much are you sending to Amazon? How long is it sitting at Amazon? What shipping methods are you using? Man, all those fees and costs really are centered around like the shipping logistics thing, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Absolutely. I I agree with that. I definitely agree with that. So uh let's let's talk about uh Weavos agency and what type of clients that you serve.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So again, in 2023, I kind of made the shift from coaching, consulting. I still do um a decent amount of coaching and consulting, but my focus now is more on providing services. I kind of saw a lot of my students, honestly, like I didn't really have plans of like, oh, here's my evolution of coaching to agency. No, it was more like I had coached so many people in 2020, 20 to 2023 that now a lot of my students were like, Andy, like I'm growing, I'm doing good, I've got 50 SKUs now or whatever. I need help managing this. Like, I can't manage this myself anymore. So people kept asking me. I used to send a ton of referrals to other agencies. Um, but I would I would get feedback of people having bad experiences. And they would send me like reports and be like, Andy, like my agency is doing this, I don't know what they're doing. And I would tell them, I'd be like, tell your account manager to do this. They'd go and then they come back back. I told them they did it, and look, it worked. I'm like, duh, like surprise. So I kind of had the aha of like, gosh, I should probably just be doing this myself. Like, why am I why am I sending people to agencies and they're having bad experiences? So I launched my own agency, and uh most of my clients, honestly, are former students of mine, podcast listeners over the years. Uh, I don't do it much, I mean, I don't run paid ads. I'm not like advertising my agency. It's more just inbound, organic, you know, people who come through my door and and I kind of choose. I mean, I'm a boutique agency, you could say. I'm very involved with all my clients personally. So I can't have 400 clients like some agencies. I think I have how many do I have? I have like 14, I think, right now, full Amazon account management clients. Um, so yeah, I can afford to be a little bit more picky on like who I want to work with. Is this an exciting, you know, product that I feel like has potential? And um yeah, like I said, it's been really, really fun and insightful to see behind the curtain of so many different products and brands and and things now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Well, very good. Very good. This has been an outstanding interview, and I think we could probably sit and talk shop about Amazon for several hours. Uh, but before we end, we have something called the fire round. It's four questions we ask every guest at the end of the episode. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right. What is your favorite book?
SPEAKER_01:How to win friends and influence people. It's a good one. What are your hobbies? Right now, crazy. I have obviously lots of hobbies. Right now, my crazy random hobby that I'm obsessed with is my lawn. Mowing my lawn, taking care of my lawn. I mowed a putting green into my front yard. That's how crazy I am. That's what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_02:I I have a feeling our Instagram algorithm might serve us similar content uh as a fellow lawn man. So uh what is one thing you do not miss about working for the man?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I feel like for me, like the most freeing thing was um obviously not being told what to do, like being in control of what I do and what I work on that excites me. Um but I think too, like being able to choose who you work with. That's a huge benefit. Like you get to have the say in like uh who who do you want to hire? Who do you want to partner with, who do you want to work with, instead of kind of being forced to work with people that you may not really get along with, but it's like sucks to be you, you gotta get along with them.
SPEAKER_02:What is what do you think sets apart successful e-commerce entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail, or never get started?
SPEAKER_01:Ooh, this is a good one. I mean, I feel like this is maybe the obvious answer, but uh being willing to take risks. I think like risk taking goes hand in hand with entrepreneurship. So you gotta build up a tolerance for taking risk and being okay if it doesn't work. Because when it does work, you're gonna be super, super glad that you did take the risk. Very nice.
SPEAKER_02:Andy, this has been a great episode. If people are interested in getting in touch with you or working with your agency, what's the best way?
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. I appreciate that. Um, you can just hit up my website, it's just andyisome.com. I've got a lot of links on there just to my personal content website or uh agency website, I should say, stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02:So outstanding. Well, thank you so much for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch.
SPEAKER_01:Yep, absolutely.
