#477 – From Rocket Scientist To Amazon Seller: Vincenzo’s Story & Strategies

39 minute read

Published: July 26, 2023

Modified: May 10, 2024

In this episode, Vincenzo Toscano shares his inspiring journey, from being a literal rocket scientist to a successful Amazon seller and agency owner. Diving into the nitty-gritty, he discusses upcoming case studies with Helium 10 and explores the strongest Amazon marketplaces. Gain valuable insights as he unravels the differences between managing accounts in the US and EU, divulges his Amazon launch strategies, and reveals how to stay relevant on the platform. Listen in for Vincenzo’s top listing optimization tactics, utilizing Amazon’s Search Query Performance, effective product research methods, selling tips for Walmart, and a collection of both horror and success stories from his clients. Don’t miss this episode!

In episode 477 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Vincenzo discuss:

02:02 – Vincenzo’s Backstory
03:41 – Today’s Guest Is A Literal Rocket Scientist
05:11 – Selling On Amazon And Managing His Agency
06:47 – Talking About His Upcoming Case Studies With Helium 10
07:44 – What Are The Strongest Amazon Marketplaces?
08:43 – Differences In Managing An Amazon Account In US & EU
10:59 – Sharing Vincenzo’s Amazon Launch Strategies
15:06 – How To Know What Amazon Thinks Is Relevant For An ASIN
19:33 – Vincenzo’s Top Amazon Listing Optimization Strategies
21:48 – Utilizing Search Query Performance
23:56 – Vincenzo’s Product Research Methods
26:14 – Selling On Walmart Tips
31:19 – Horror Stories And Success Stories From Vincenzo’s Clients
33:50 – Find Ecomcy At The Seller Solutions Hub
34:31 – How To Contact Vincenzo Toscano
35:12 – Vincenzo’s 60-Second Tip

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a great story from somebody who went from being a rocket scientist to now running a large Amazon agency and running a lot of his own brands, and he’s gonna give us all of the latest strategies as far as PPC, Amazon Launch, and even Walmart. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Wanna keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce, and other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like Newegg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP, and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me/blog. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got somebody here who’s been helping serious sellers out there for years. Vincenzo. How’s my italian accent?

Vincenzo:

Thank you Bradley. How you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

How’s it going? You are actually in the UK right now?

Vincenzo:

Yes, I live in the UK in London, but I’m from Italy, as you can say, from my name.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. Yes. I think I told you this before, but my favorite or one of my favorites, you know Korean dramas. I watch tons of Korean dramas. Like I probably watch a hundred in the last few years, but one of the top five is one from Netflix and it’s called Vincenzo.

Vincenzo:

I know

Bradley Sutton:

About a Korean guy who was born in Italy.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, actually I got a team in Asia, and, and they told me, they always tell me, oh, this is happening right now in the, in the series and all that. And it’s like, it’s crazy that there’s this guy that’s very famous called Vincenzo, but yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Yep. But so you were born in Italy, in Naples, you had said?

Vincenzo:

Yes, I was born in Italy in Naples. When I was around three, my family moved for business purposes in Venezuela, South America. That’s why I just speak Spanish.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s why you speak Spanish, because I know you’ve come on a Spanish podcast before. Okay. Now things are coming into a picture here.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. I went to Venezuela, lived there 15 years, and then unfortunately with everything that happened with the country, I left the country. And from there I went to the US. I lived close to one year in New York. Then from New York. I went to Toronto another year or so. And then from there I, I chose the UK to pursue like my undergrad degree and my master’s, which is completely different for what I do, which is Whoa, whoa.

Bradley Sutton:

What did you what were you studying?

Vincenzo:

So, I studied aerospace engineering and I specialize in everything in terms of control systems and computer science behind turbines.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So then did you ever work in that after you got your degrees?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so actually I, I used to work for Roll Royce. You know, roll Royce is very well known for cars, but actually their biggest one of the biggest revenue streams is making turbines for airplanes. And they had a, a manufacture ca facility here in Darby, which Darby the easiest way to find Darby in the uk. If you put a finger in the middle of the UK, that Zaby is the most centric city in the whole uk. And I was working there, I worked there for two years. Yeah,

Bradley Sutton:

That’s kind of like being a rocket scientist in turbine there.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. Okay. We could say that. Yeah.. So then,

Bradley Sutton:

You know, I’m sure that’s a good paying job. Yeah. What then inspired? Like, were, did you start doing stuff on the side while you were working there, like getting into e-commerce, or, or how did this this happen?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so the thing is, I love engineering. I love everything when it comes to space, all that kind of stuff. But the thing is, because I come from a family that is very business oriented it reached a point that, you know, it was getting that I wanted more freedom in terms of location, in terms of time in terms of how much money I could do. And I remember looking online, that was around, around 2017 or so, you know, ways of doing money online. And that’s how I came into contact with Amazon. And then from there, I started using my part of my salary as an engineer mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to basically just try things on Amazon, sell products and so on. And from there I started selling multiple products. I, I did brands and everything and that.

Bradley Sutton:

Which marketplace did you open up in?

Vincenzo:

So I started first in the uk, the next one into Europe, and then also us. Yeah. Yeah. What, what was

Bradley Sutton:

The first product you sold?

Vincenzo:

So the first product, which then it was became very saturated. It was, you know, these elastic bands to do like exercise. Oh yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Uhhuh <affirmative>

Vincenzo:

Yeah, super saturated. And I will never advise <laugh> anybody here in this podcast to do the product. But, you know that time it wasn’t that saturated. That’s was one of the first products. And from there, you know I started selling products and eventually I was making more money by selling the, actually my engineering job. And from there, you know, that was also the period when all these Amazon events conferences were becoming a thing in, in Europe and the USA, so

Bradley Sutton:

What year are we talking about right now when you’re selling? So we’re

Vincenzo:

Talking 2018, around that 2018.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Vincenzo:

Cool. And then from there, I started going to events or so, and then I realized, you know, actually I could also make money basically supporting brands and also business owners, because I realized there were a, a lot of people going to these conferences. They had an amazing product, amazing brand, which is difficult to do. They did the most difficult part, but they did not really know how to operate. Right. And, and from my experience of being a seller, then I say, oh, actually there’s a another opportunity here. And that’s how I also found that a comse where we’re basically a full Amazon and now actually also Walmart, a full brand management agency. So yeah, it’s been a journey <laugh>.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, have you all throughout this time, did you keep your own private label accounts going and still selling yourself, or you just switched a hundred percent to just doing the agency?

Vincenzo:

Yes. I keep selling, actually. I also doing a little bit of the wholesale approach as well, working with some direct manufacturers. And something I also very excited about which I’m, I’m on the work of doing, I also gonna explore the vendor work, so I’m working with some partners to also do the vendor program, like with some brands we’re working, bringing from overseas. So yeah, I’m still a seller, but I will say where I’m spending most of the time, to be honest, is with agency. We’ve been growing quite fast last couple of months, and now I’m more focused on building the teams, all the processes, and making sure we’re basically giving the best service and resource to our clients that trust us, you know? Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, from when you started on Amazon, you know, 2017, 2018, around there, did you start using Helium 10 from day one, or, or you started later in your career?

Vincenzo:

So I remember when I started, my first actually tool was viral launch from my close friend Casey Gauss. Yeah, Viral Launch started with that. And then I remember after, you know, listening to Manny Coats with AM/PM Podcast. Which was basically the biggest podcast at the time. And still right now, one of the biggest. Manny Announced that, you know, the, he was bringing Helium 10 and start playing with it. And to be honest, since then, I switched completely to Helium 10. And that’s the tool I use for all my businesses and also for our clients. And, and in fact, we’re actually working with Helium 10 to do some interesting case studies looking forward to that. But yes, we’ve been using Helium 10 for everything from every second.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Cool. Now in your experience selling where, what marketplaces have been the s strong, you know, you, you obviously started in the UK, but what marketplace would you say is strongest for you now?

Vincenzo:

So I would say the strongest are for sure the US and the uk. Those are the strongest. And I think if you talk to a lot of sellers, that’s u usually the norm because, you know, those are some of the biggest markets. Germany is also an interesting one. I’ve been seen traction, but honestly the US and UK are the, are are the ones we’ve seen the most activity, and also with some of our clients the same.

Bradley Sutton:

H how do some of your strategies differ? Because, you know I mean fortunately for people selling USA unfortunately for those in Europe, there’s a lot of features like in Seller Central, you know, that, that US has available, but that either Europe doesn’t have, you know, like I don’t think Europe has virtual bundles, right? That’s right.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. Yeah. So like the things though.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some of the big, the, the biggest differences you say because of things like that where your operations, you know, whether it’s your account or your client’s account where it, there, there’s some huge differences in how you operate an Amazon U s A account versus an Amazon Europe account.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so I would say one of the, the, the big benefits of operating in the US and also in in Europe is that a lot of the strategies that right now we’re implementing, let’s say in the us, they haven’t arrived yet in terms of either in the form of knowledge to content or in the form of actually, you know tools through the Amazon platform itself. So the nice thing is that when things are happening in the us usually Europe is six months to one year behind in some of these things. And we can prepare our clients for that and make sure that as soon as they become available in Europe, we’re the first one to, to take advantage of some of those tools. So I think in terms of strategies, of course the US is a, is another animal altogether.

Vincenzo:

I mean, the US is much more a professional marketplace in terms of the players that actually selling there is much more complex. We see all these huge in, in influx of money that came during the basically aggregator space. And we have all these big companies with hundreds of employees, basically 24/7 when it comes to Amazon. And the US is, is definitely a very tough market would say right now to, to start selling from zero. Where in the Europe, that’s not the case. Actually, in Europe, we’re seeing much easier for some of our clients to penetrate certain niches than the US And that’s actually been a key for a lot of our clients and the way we actually structure the strategy, because what we’re doing with a lot of our clients is the ones that are struggling to the us, we’ve been bringing them to Europe, and we actually opened all the Pan-European program and so on. And with that approach of diversification and actually finding these on top areas, they’ve been seeing a better resource that actually only focusing in the US. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay. Now you know, one of the, I was just looking at, at your listing on the hub.helium10.com, you know, that’s, that’s where we have like agencies and, and people who are part of our network and, and you guys are actually one of the very few Helium 10 certified agencies in the world. That’s right. I was, I was looking at your, your, your page on there and it says, you know, one of your specialties is Amazon launch. That’s right. So what are some of your, you know, launch strategy are, are you pretty much using PPC for launch? Are you relying on outside traffic? What’s, you know, I, we, we could spend a whole episode talking about this, but what are some of the, the highlights of your launch strategy?

Vincenzo:

Yeah. Something that’s been working very well for us is using brand analytics data to basically understand which are the main cues we need to focus towards launching. I’m gonna give you a very simple example for this. So the issue when it comes to launchings, that people sometimes thinks it’s all about generating sales at all costs and negative for X amount of time until you get potentially rank organically on certain keywords. But we have identified that lately Amazon has been very heavily focused when it comes to ranking in conversion rate, right? So what we’ve been doing when it comes to launch is that, first of all, we need to of course identify the top 10 keywords that bring the most revenue to our competitors. And you can easily do that with Helium 10 by doing a reverse ASIN with Cerebro.

Vincenzo:

We find which are the key, where these competitors are ranking on page one, because we know that 70 to 80% of revenue comes from those keywords. Once we identify those 10 keywords, we then also by using a brand analytics, we wanna identify what is the average for example, conversion rate of our competitors on some of these keywords. And once we understand the conversion rate, that’s when we start strategizing the, the launch phase. Because something that we usually do when it comes to PPC, and then I’m gonna come back, why the conversion rate is very important, is that we only start with exact match campaigns and we only start with the top 10 keywords. The reason for that is because when it comes to launch, and I see this a lot of people when it comes to content and events, and a lot of people are actually migrating towards this strategy is the idea of actually launching phrase broad automatic and all these broad campaigns from day on is actually not efficient.

Vincenzo:

Because first of all, when you’re launching a product for the first time Amazon has no data at all or doesn’t have any real relevancy history attached between certain keywords of the category and your product and what happens. And in fact, you can do this test by going to Amazon when you launch a new listing, if you go and create, for example, a campaign on, on for phrase a, abroad a and look for even suggested keywords, you’re gonna see the tab is empty. Right? The reason why Amazon cannot even suggest a cure in the first place because it has no history. So why would you give free basically a window to Amazon to spend your money around? By

Bradley Sutton:

The way, do you know how to do that? How to check that in Helium 10?

Vincenzo:

In what sense? The keywords?

Bradley Sutton:

No, the what a, the Amazon thinks is relevant to your listing for advertising. I’m gonna drop a knowledge bomb on those. It’ll give you a chance first. Drop

Vincenzo:

It. Alright, so

Bradley Sutton:

You put your, you put your ACE in once it’s done, once you have it active you, or even if it’s not active, you can do this. You throw it into cerebral and most people, you know, 99% of people who use Cerebro That’s right. They’re doing it in order to just see, hey, like, I just wanna see where it’s ranking organically or sponsor whatever. That there’s nothing that’s a hundred percent right. You know, that that’s what you should be doing. But fil when you have a brand new listing, it’s not gonna show anything for organic and sponsored. That’s right. ’cause It’s just new. So you filter it for Amazon recommended, and then sort it by the rank Amazon recommended rank, and the one that’s number one, we’re actually pulling that from the Amazon API. In the advertising API of what score it gives that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

So then if you have trouble like, like getting impressions, it’s like, like you just said, it’s probably because Amazon doesn’t think you’re relevant. And so if you wanna know what Amazon thinks of your new listing put into Cerebro, we’re pulling from that Amazon advertising a p i, and then you could see look for rank 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, because that those are the highest keywords. And I, I did that I was launching this you know, one, one of these socks as one of these tests, and it’s about bringing me like coffee, right? And so because it’s a sock, like I couldn’t get anything for like coffee keywords in advertising, even though it was a, I mean, a hundred percent like the number one keyword for this is bring me coffee socks or something. So I threw it into Cerebro and I was like, there was nothing about coffee. It was just all like, just regular socks or men’s socks and so that’s how you can tell what Amazon thinks is relevant. Alright, go ahead.

Vincenzo:

It’s very interesting. And actually to also add on top of that tip, we also need to ensure, of course, to that work efficiently to make sure you have a very, very well optimized listing. Because if you didn’t do a very well optimization in terms of the keywords you put on the listing, or even choose the right sub category, which is a huge mistake we see all the time, then you could, Amazon will collect your, recommend the wrong keywords because you don’t have their right to categories or the right keywords in the list in the first place. But now going back to the PPC, yes. We do only m match a campaign keywords because we wanna make sure we force basically the system to build the relevancy between which are your top keywords and, and to Amazon. So Amazon understand and create that history link. And while we’re doing these very aggressive Excel match campaigns, we keep a very close eye on the conversion rate.

Bradley Sutton:

When you say very aggressive, like what is that like? Are you trying to make a bid that’s gonna get you only a top of search? Okay, cool. x

Vincenzo:

Yeah. And while we do as well to basically in our conversion rate, we cover a very aggressive coupon. So we do like a 30, 40% coupon because we need to understand that when the listeners see new and you have no reviews, you basically need to find a way to make it a no-brainer, a deal that somebody will say, okay, this product has, one doesn’t reviews, this one has zero, but what do I prefer to spend $50 or spend $20 on something very similar? Right? So that’s the thought process you need to do as a brand owner. And that’s what we do. And by making a very aggressive price reduction, then we keep very close AI owner conversion because then by using brand analytics, and we do this on a weekly basis, we wanna make sure that our conversion rate on a specific keyword is very similar to what the top sellers are doing those keywords, because that’s how Amazon understand, okay, these products actually a catching up or having similar performance at the top sellers and actually deserve a spot on the first page.

Vincenzo:

This is very important. And the reason why I keep emphasizing this is because I see a lot of people only focusing on sales and sales at all costs, but what’s the point of having all the cells that you want by being on the negative X amount of thousands of dollars? If your conversion rate is very bad, then you build a very bad history for your product, and it’s gonna be very difficult for you to then build that organic ranking back again. So that’s the per first part of the launching. The second thing that we do is we bring some kind of external traffic into the formula, right? So the way we do this is first a factor we we’ve been playing around is with influencer marketing. So usually we try to build like a group of five to 10 influencers that very basically have a very warm audience around that specific product.

Vincenzo:

And we try to come into some kind of agreement when it comes to bringing the extra traffic, especially if we have the brand referral bonus, because with the brand river referral bonds, we get up to 10%, which most of these influencers, if you use only the Amazon influencer product, they get two, 3% at max, and you can do a very nice setup where they make more money, and at the same time they rewire you with that external traffic. And by having a very warm audience, which by the way, what we do in between to filter the traffic we do a landing page, is to make sure that the traffic that comes from external converts very haly. And again, we spike that conversion rate. And Amazon also sees that as a way to rank your product higher. So by combining very aggressive PPC on very relevant queues, making sure you’re converting very high on those queues by being very aggressive with pricing, then con using external traffic, which is external traffic. I gave the example of influencer, but you can also do an email list, you can do even a Google advertisement. There are so many other ways, it depends on your niche, of course. I think those are usually the two approaches most people should be doing nowadays to rank your product higher organically as soon as possible. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, you know, you talk a lot about conversion rate you know, during launch and after. And obviously the one that, you know, spikes in the first part is, is just having that super low price. You know, where makes a no brainer, but then obviously, you know, you could have that low price and if you have a garbage listing, your conversion rate’s gonna be low, and at the same time you raise the price to regular, you know, potentially your conversion rate could go down. So like what kind of listing optimization things are you doing to try and make sure that your conversion rate always stays pretty high, even at a regular price?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, something that we do a lot is we use the tool within Amazon to do split testing, and we play a lot mainly with the, with the main image. That’s the thing that we seen spike in the most, the conversion rate. And thankfully with AI, it is very easy now to come up with new images in a matter of seconds, right? Just by having the right prompts and using many tools out there. So what we do is basically we always keeps during the launch phase when it comes to let’s say we have a very aggressive pricing, and then slowly we are gonna start increasing the price because of course we wanna start getting the profitability, we start doing a little split testing with the main image and the title, which are usually the things that we see affecting the most, at least the initial results page, which is what people see the most.

Vincenzo:

And we do, usually the split testing could last usually between a window of one week to two weeks, periods. And we test different angles, different shadowing, size of the pro main image with the packaging, sometimes even the, the the, the contrast of the colors. And these are things that we keep testing on a week or two weeks period to see if the conversion rate spikes or doesn’t spike. And then that’s how we keep doing split testing. Then after we actually have found the best like image, because it reaches a point after doing a lot of split testing that you’re not gonna have a lot of fluctuation on your results, then you start testing other things such as the title, then you can even do split testing within the listing itself, and always keep an eye that your conversion rate is close to the standard of what your competitors are doing. Because if you keep their conversion rate within those standards, your organic ranking is gonna stay stable right. Than what most people have seen, which is they go to first page because they do all these hundreds of sales to maybe rebates, which is not allowed or external traffic and so on. But once they stick on first page, they don’t stick the landing because of what they don’t have the conversion rate, which is very important. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So to look at your competitor’s conversion, are you talking about like at the keyword level? So then are you looking at search query performance? So look at your competitors conversion rate. Okay.

Vincenzo:

That’s right.

Bradley Sutton:

How else are you using search query performance? You’ve mentioned a couple times, you know, now. Is there any other ways that you’re, it’s in your, your kind of SOP to manage the effectiveness of a listing?

Vincenzo:

Sure. Another thing that we have a close eye is the basket analysis. So we usually like to understand if people after buying a certain product are buying other accessories or things like that, because then if we identify a strong pattern when it comes to the basket analysis, what we can do with that is basically we can say, okay, these certain competitors keep getting a, a purchase in the same transaction. Let’s actually do some pro targeting, heavy pro targeting on this product because there’s definitely a link there and we can leverage that. And usually if you identify the right you know, matching between data, we have found a good use of that data. Another thing that you can use brand analytics tool is to also understand how your conversion rate throughout the, the funnel improves right from the impression to the actual add to card to the actual purchase.

Vincenzo:

So if usually throughout the whole channel you see that you’re having some kind of downwards in terms of conversion, like people add to card, but then for some reason then they’re not making a purchase, that’s usually a red flag because if they went all all the way to the funnel and then they’re actually converting approaches, it could be an issue of pricing usually. So then we start playing with pricing. But if the opposite happens, like throughout the whole funnel, impressions are relatively low, then actually from those impression, they conversion become higher in terms of add to cart. And from the add to cart, the purchase conversions much higher. That means the issues that we’re not pumping enough traffic into this listing in the first place. So that’s when we decide actually we need to put more money and scale our advertisement. So that’s usually some of the sort of process we do with brand analytics. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, for your own brands or for your customers brands who come to you and say, Hey, we’d like to, you know, launch some new products. How are you doing, you know, what are some of your product research methods? Like how are you finding, you know, product line extensions or new opportunities whether it’s a brand new brand or, or, or looking at a brand where, hey, you know, we want to add a couple of SKEWs. What are some of your methods for finding opportunity?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so one of the things well, Helium 10 of course, we using Black Box for that. So you can find amazing ideas there when it comes to accessories throughout the whole catalog tool that Black Box gives you in terms of funding competitors, so accessories and things like that. That’s one way of doing it. The second way that we do it is basically by using brand analytics. Just to make a quick point on this again, which is using the, the basket analysis and see if there’s some kind of accessory that people keep buying with your product. Like let’s say you’re selling vitamin, vitamin C and then you see every single person that buy vitamin C buys magnesium. This a correlation there, so maybe you’re missing magnesium, your supplement lineup, let’s try a magnesium. And then when we launch magnesium, we use, for example, sponsor display, a type of target advertisement, and we retarget vitamin sync clients because we have seen from data that people that buy vitamin C realistically could buy also magnesium.

Vincenzo:

So that’s usually a top process that we can also do. Then the third thing that we can use, we actually will be doing that a lot, and I’m gonna be speaking on a conference next week about this, is using AI. AI has been amazing for this because usually what we can do with AI as well is for example, one simple way of doing this, you can now with AI analyze the reviews of a specific niche, and you can tell, let’s say this AI, tell me what the top things people love about this niche, things that people hate about this niche, a specific product and things that people potentially would like to see on a product. Then with those ideas, you could try to come up with a new variation and maybe a new functionality, a new feature that is lacking on the market. And that’s usually been working very well because then once you have some ideas drafted that AI throws at you, then you could even keep using AI to give you ideas in terms of how you can even start the manufacturing process, the launch process, how you could do the branding. AI is been amazing for them.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. What’s a Walmart strategy you can say? You know, a lot of people are reluctant, maybe, you know, sometimes to sell at Walmart but you know, Carrie even has some products that she sells more on Walmart than she does on Amazon. Of course, that’s more the exception, not the rule. But regardless of if a product is a home run or not, I’m sure you have, you know, a couple go-to strategies maybe you’re using for Walmart.

Vincenzo:

Yeah. So when it comes to Walmart, totally agree with you. So not all the products are, are working on Amazon will work on, on Walmart in the first place. So something that you need to do is first do a market analysis on Walmart as well. And thankfully, you know, Helium 10 has amazing tools when it comes to Walmart as well. So you can analyze the search volume of certain keywords, you can see where the relative revenue that some of your competitors potential competitors are doing Walmart. And then from there you can make a basically a strategy and an educated, basically projectional if it’s gonna be a good market or not for you. What I will say about Walmart, and this is something I’m very excited because you know, in the last couple of months we became official partners with them.

Vincenzo:

One of the only agencies top only 20 agencies are working directly with them, and we’re one of them. And because we’re having a lot of meetings with them and things in the backend, something that I feel people is missing where is, I understand that we come from the Amazon space and, and everybody is always in law with the seven figures, eight figures and all that kind of stuff. And because they don’t see that now on warmer, sometimes they, they step backwards and, and they don’t do it is warmer right now because of, of the patterns I’m seeing, the numbers I’m seeing and everything is like 2014-2015 Amazon, right? And I feel like maybe you’re not gonna do the same amount of money that you do on Amazon. And maybe you, you could imagine that yes, you’re gonna dilute your efforts by going to Walmart, but I can definitely guarantee you that Walmart, if you jump right now, you’re gonna have the early move advantage.

Vincenzo:

We’re talking about some of our clients that are paying two to $3, some C P A C P C on Amazon when bring it to Walmart, we’re paying sometimes 50, 70 cents, right? That’s a huge difference. The competition is much lower. And because we already have that, you know, brand Amazon brand that, you know, the Amazon brand is like a survival brand. We know all these tricks are already about P P C, how to some kind of media and all that. And Walmart is only in baby steps compared to Amazon. If you bring that experience and you bring that especially a very good product, I think you’re really set for success because Walmart doing amazing things in the backend, very excited things are coming, and I think it’s really the, the only one I see right now in the market that can compete with Amazon. So definitely give it a try for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so what I wanna do now is, you know, as an agency, you know, you, you have so much experience with, with a a, a lot of sellers, so I’m gonna do one, one negative, and then we’re gonna go one positive, but the negative, you know, you don’t have to mention any names or, you know, throw anybody under the buzz here. What, what is the craziest, stupidest thing that you have seen one of your clients was doing? Like, like, you know, ’cause that always happens. You, you onboard a client and you gotta take a look at their account and see what their strategies have been. And you know, you gotta, yeah. I mean, otherwise you wouldn’t have a job if they were doing everything perfectly. There’s nothing, there’s no reason to hire somebody like Ecomcy, but what is the abs the most face palm event where you’re just like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe these guys were, were doing this. Like, they have never negative matched PPC keyword.. Just something crazy. Can you, is is there anything you can think of like a, a funny story that, that you noticed when you took on a, a client?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, there are many, but I, I mean, for example, one I can think on top of my mind is this guy that he was doing pretty decent. This, this guy was a, like a, a seven figure seller. And, when we went inside his PPC, I mean, usually when you’re doing seven figures, you expect people should have figured out how to do PPC, right? And we go inside and this guy had campaigns, manual campaigns, like this guy had a campaign with around 500 keywords on it, and the 500 keywords were all mixed between exact phrase and broth. So that he had the, he had the same key or exact phrase, and bro in the same campaign, and he didn’t have any negative match. So it was like a carnival all the, all over the place. What madness and, and yes, that, that’s a very is example.

Vincenzo:

I can think. Another one is like this sort guy also a very good product and, and branding. And they were doing also nice revenue only doing automatic targeting. They, and this, they’ve been doing fine selling since 2015. They only had automatic campaigns that never Tesla, like product targeting, sponsor brands sponsored display. We have seen even people without using anything in the backend, no search terms or having their own aria. I mean, these are yeah, crazy things like this all the time. And, and it’s, it’s crazy because when these people come to you and you see their revenue, you say how you, you came, you made it this far with all these mistakes and it’s crazy. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Interesting, interesting. All right, let’s flip it to that. Instead of the horror stories, what is some cool success stories? You know, like, you know, somebody, you, you know, you were able to help them with some strategies and they were able to, to double their sales or, or they just try this one thing and you know, they brought in all this, you know, new traffic or, or some, some kind of cool story that you can now share.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, of course. So we have this supplement brand that came to us. And when they came to us, they were doing like half a million or so in revenue. So they were not very big. And the thing is, this was like a, a client that bought the brand during the aggregator crazy period, right? There was a person that he had no clue about Amazon. They just bought this because his accountant say, oh, Amazon businesses are now hot. You, you should buy one. Okay? And the bought this Amazon brand, they had no clue about Amazon. They came to us like, we just spent all this huge amount of money on buying this brand, and we have no clue. We came in and we had to redo everything from scratch because all the listings were breaking compliance, doing claims that were in, right?

Vincenzo:

So we didn’t had to do all the images, listings, reapply for some of of, of their categories. On top of that, what we did is because they were doing only USA, we actually have them to expand to, to Europe as well. And now we actually also bring it into Walmart on a span of around, yeah, close to three years. They went from doing, as I say, close to half a million. Now they’re close to hitting 4 million in revenue because of all these crazy things that we did from scratch for them. So this is, this is literally the power of doing things right, because yep, these guys had no clue about Amazon. And we came in and we basically re remade the brand from scratch. And I think just to make an emphasis on this case study, one of the things that brought the bonds revenue for this brand was actually doing the international expansion.

Vincenzo:

This something, I know people is scared about that because of taxes, because of the languages and all that, but please, guys, if you’re the type of seller that you’re already controlling, 70% of a specific niche, even 60%, don’t lose sleep of getting the extra 10 to 20%. Use the extra, actual extra budget and effort to expand into other marketplaces. Because I feel Amazon, the easiest way to scale are two ways, either new marketplaces or more product. I feel they always this, this sort process for some cells that, oh, is I haven’t reached my potential because I haven’t found the perfect bit or the perfect keyword or the perfect placement. Sometimes the reality is that you reach certain level that, that sit on specific niche and, and the best way to keep growing, just diversify. Don’t, don’t lose sleep on, on having the perfect tacos, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that’s my advice. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

I like perfect tacos, but I’m talking about the ones that I, that I eat

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways before we get into your, your final tip, your final strategy of the day I just want to show people like how they can, how they can reach out to you. So guys, just, you know, go to hub.helium10.com and then type in the search Ecomcy and make sure you’re signed into Helium 10 when you do it. Because I didn’t even realize this until I saw this. If you’re signed into Helium 10, you can actually qualify here for a 10% off discount with them and a free consultation. That’s right. But other than here, how can people find you like on the interwebs, you know, maybe and also your, your podcast too.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, sure. So the agency, if you look for Ecomcy in all the social media platforms, you’re gonna find us. My name Vincenzo Toscano on all the social media. I’m very active, ma mainly on LinkedIn, doing a lot of content there. And the podcast, if you’re interested, is the e-commerce lab. And we also do like two episodes per week, also bring experts from the field to talk Amazon related stuff and e-commerce. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so now let’s close it off with your 60-second tip or 60-second strategy. What is something that you haven’t, you know, you’ve been given a strategies the whole day, but what is something you haven’t mentioned that that’s kind of like a quick hitting one that you think people can, can learn from?

Vincenzo:

Yeah, so when I, when it comes to strategy something that we’ve seen a a lot, I know maybe you have heard this tip before, but it’s focused on the second language of the country you’re selling on. So, for example something we having a lot of success lately with our US brands is using Spanish cures in Canada, we’re using French related cures. For example, in Germany there’s a big population of, of Turkish people Polish and all of that. So there’s a huge potential of using second secondary languages on all these markets. And on top of that, what I would advise as well as an extra plus tip on, on top of this tip in the US for example, you can request your translation to be updated the Spanish one because some of the translation that have been done if the listen is old is it was done with the old translation engine that Amazon had, the backend. So you can actually request Amazon to redo your translation. And this sometimes can help you a lot to reindex for some Spanish queue that you’re not indexing the first time and actually be more relevant for Spanish related keywords. So that would be my tip. Yeah. Cool.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, well thank you so much for coming on here and you know, it was fun to come on your podcast. Now, now we, we’ve been on each other, so I’m sure we’ll, we’ll do it again sometime next year and yeah. And I’m excited to see about this case study you’ve been working on with, with the other team and, and we’ll definitely let everybody know when when that’s ready as well.

Vincenzo:

Yeah, it should be very interesting. And thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. And until the next one. Yeah. Alright.

Bradley Sutton:

I hope to see you maybe in Italy if you, if you’re gonna come Yeah, when I go to this event in September, so let’s meet it in Milan. Alright, we’ll see you then.

Vincenzo:

See you.

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