We continue our discussion about pay-per-click (PPC) and profitability. This time, we discuss further the different ways to control your Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACoS), as well as some practical tips to boost your sales, conversion rate, and ecommerce store traffic, among other important topics.
By the way, do you know that Amazon owes you money? We break down how you’ll get paid. David also shares why you should charge your PPC spent on a credit card.
Let’s continue our discussion on the intersection of PPC and profitability!
[00:01 – 04:44] Opening Segment
- What is a good goal for TACoS?
- Control your TACoS with these levers
- Organic sales
- PPC efficiency
[04:45 – 12:27] How to Boost Your Sales Efficiently
- Boosting your sales
- Ken’s favorite strategy that not a lot of people focus on
- Drive organic traffic to Amazon
- The ideal conversion rate according to Ken
- How to compute it the right way
- How conversion rates impact organic rates and PPC sales
- Increase your conversion rate with these tips from Ken
[12:28 – 19:48] Boosting Your Organic Traffic
- What you should realize about test pricing
- How to choose the right keyword to test
- FREE download on TACoS & Profitability
- Link below
- Here’s an easy way to increase your average order value
[19:49 – 27:01] David’s PPC Experience
- The percent ACos that can generate a profit
- Want some Amazon refunds? Check out Getida
- Promo code: FTM400
- David talks about the challenges of Amazon inventory restrictions
- Should you outsource PPC?
- David shares his experience
[27:02 – 34:27] The Myth to be Busted About Top-Line Revenue
- Why you should focus on the profitability of your business
- Do not focus on the top-line revenue and here’s why
- How this simple “change of payment method” can get you 3% off
[34:28 – 36:57] Closing Segment
- The top 3 items David and I recommend to you
- Connect with us. Links below
- Final words
Tweetable Quotes:
“Your business is an asset and it should be managed as an asset.” – Ken Wilson
“We’ve got a lot of products that are selling well but due to current inventory restrictions, we cannot replenish that inventory. And so, we’re slowing down PPC spent, [slowing] down sales, yes, but it’s just gonna make inventory management easier.” – David Schomer
Resources mentioned:
- Firing the Man previous episode: 76: Intersection of PPC & Profitability (PART 1)
- Firing the Man previous episode: 8: How to Get One Million Free Amazon Ads
- Helium10
——————————————————————————————
Do you have a similar experience? Send us a voice message and let’s see how we can help you!
Know more about TACoS and Profitability! Start here.
Email us –> support@firingtheman.com
David 0:00
Real quick before we get into the show, I wanted to share a new service called Getida that Ken and I have been using that has made us over $10,000 in Amazon reimbursements. The service requires no monthly subscription, and getida collects a small percentage of the money they recover for you. It takes less than five minutes to set up and works on all Amazon marketplaces. Go to getida.com GETIDA, and enter promo code FTM 400. That’s FTM for firing the man 400 to get your first $400 in reimbursements commission free, how much money does Amazon owe you?
Ken 0:41
top line revenue does not set the bar for the value of your business. Profits pay the bills and set the bar for the value of your business. Remember that.
David 0:52
I don’t think there’s a better time to tighten down PPC spend than right now, you know, we’ve got a lot of products that are selling well. But due to current inventory restrictions, we cannot replenish that inventory. And so will slowing down PPC spend slow down sales? Yes. But you know, it’s just gonna make inventory management easier.
Ken 1:12
You know, you can’t fit every brand into a box or every product into a box, you can have kind of a target, a goal. And you might have to adjust that as you go because you figure out, hey, this is not working or this is not possible, or we need to adjust this.
Intro 1:27
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 were capable of more than 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 Schomer and Ken Wilson.
David 1:52
Welcome everyone to the firing the man podcast. Today is part two of the deep dive on profitability and PPC. Ken and I started recording this podcast and it was very long winded really in depth on a lot of different topics. So if you haven’t checked out last week’s episode, check out that and then tune into part two of this.
Ken 2:13
Okay, so switching gears a little bit here, we’re going to talk about tacos first. And David, you know, kind of defined tacos earlier on. And yeah, the slide I’m looking at here has a picture of five tacos. And actually it’s making me hungry. I love tacos. But anyway, so what is a good goal for tacos? So we say, okay, hey, this is what tacos is, what is a good goal? What should we aim for? And so, you know, David and I, we kind of have our target tacos range around 10%, you know, plus or minus two as we’re dialing things in. And, you know, if you have a new product launch, if your products are seasonal, this is gonna go up and down a little bit. But 10% is kind of, it’s kind of what we target for tacos. And just to give you I’m a numbers guy, I’m a visual. And so just at a high level, if you had $100,000, in total sales, you have $40,000 in ad revenue at a 25%. Akos, that would be $10,000 in ad spend. And then $60,000 in organic revenue, that would be a tacos of 10%. So just at a high level, so you can kind of visualize that. And based on an average price of a $20 product with a decent margin, a standard margin, you would have between 12 and $15,000 in profit for the visual for the high level that that kind of breaks it down into the numbers.
David 3:34
Absolutely. Yeah, what I’ll say is, you know, we have a company wide goal right now of tacos at 10%. And that stretches across, you know, several different brands, you know, I’m thinking of one that’s very seasonal. One that is lower price point one that’s higher price point. And, you know, I say that it is not a one size fits all, you got to measure it, and you got to look at it on a monthly basis. But I will say is that general starting point of 10%, has been a good fit for all of the companies that we’re managing right now.
Ken 4:04
Yeah, no, that’s excellent input. And, you know, you can’t fit every brand into a box or every product into a box, you can have kind of a target a goal. And you might have to adjust it as you go. because you figure out, hey, this is not working, or this is not possible, or we need to adjust this. No, that’s great. So moving on, how do we control tacos, there’s a couple different levers that we can pull, you can increase organic sales, and you can improve your PPC efficiency, which is measured in Akos, basically you’re spending less money and you’re increasing your sales with PPC efficiency. So those are the two levers that you can control tacos with two of the levers you can control tacos with. So how do we increase organic sales? several ways. We’re gonna go over a couple of them that are that I believe should be kind of at the top of the list. And my favorite is to increase your conversion rate because I think increasing conversion rate is like a sleeper, I think not a lot of people focus on it. And I think it has more impact than almost anything you do in your business. You know, it’s that 80 20 rule, 80% you’re going to get by increasing your conversion rate. And, and so I think the more time you can spend on that. it is my favorite one is the one that I like to look at the most and pull levers on in conversion rate on Amazon, you know, the target should be 15 to 20%. If you’re below 10%, you’ve got a conversion rate issue. If you’re, you know, if you’re above 20, you’re probably okay, you can always increase it, if you haven’t been focusing on it, I would definitely try to increase it, but your target range, you know, 15 to 20% is what you should be aiming for minimum. The second one here is to increase organic sales. Yeah, keyword ranking. And this one here is, this one is a bit tricky, because I think you can get sucked into a lot of shiny object syndrome, a lot of these services, a lot of different ways to rank keywords that can annihilate your profits. So this one here, monitor your keyword ranking. And we’ll get into more ways to pull levers on keyword ranking. But keyword ranking if you’re organically ranked really high with a keyword, you’re going to get organic sales, which is going to, you know, pull the lever on tacos. The last one here that we’re going to cover is driving organic traffic to Amazon, you know, if you can send organic traffic to Amazon, you’re going to get more organic sales, that means you’re not paying for traffic to go to Amazon, it’s organic, or free. So what is conversion rate where to find it. So we discussed, you know, the target conversion rate 15 to 20% should be your goal. And where to find that on Amazon and Seller Central is you go to reports, business reports, and unit session percentage, that is going to be your conversion rate. And that, you know, if you’re at your desktop right now go pull those look at them and see what you got. Pull the reporting if you got lots of products, and you know this is the number that you want to focus on. Again, it’s reports business reports, and unit session percentage is where you’re going to find your conversion rate for your ASINS. So talk about you know, like I said, I’m a visual learner, I like to talk about numbers and kind of look at things from a high level. So I have an example here, you know, why is conversion rate so crucial? Let’s say listing a is a $20 product, your profit margin $7, you get 100 visitors to the listing with a 5% conversion rate, so you have total sales of $100 with a profit of $35. Not bad, right? If you have a conversion rate of 10%. If you tweak it, pull some levers get your conversion rate from 5% to 10%, those same 100 visitors, you’re going to have a total sales of $200 and $70 in profit. So you are going to double your profit, just by increasing your conversion rate, you’re doing nothing else, the same 100 visitors doubling your profit. That’s why I really, really like conversion rate and think it’s you know, it’s a sleeper,
David 8:01
you know, the thing I loved about this example is to get you from that $35 in profit to $70 in profit, it costs you nothing. So for instance, like this change could have been triggered by someone goes to your listing, they have a question about sizing, they don’t find it in the first 10 seconds. So they move on to the next one. If you were to move an image from say, like the eighth position to the second position, it has a sizing chart that’s more helpful to your shopper or to your customer, you know, that could increase conversion rate, right? I mean, I know like there are some times that I’m shopping and I just give up. It’s like, I don’t have the 30 seconds I’m just gonna look at the next one. In fact, I did this on a space heater the other day. And so anyway, great example. And you know, we talk a lot about PPC spend. Little changes like this, they don’t cost anything and really deliver value to the bottom line.
Ken 8:55
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, that’s my last note here. You know, conversion rate impacts organic, as well as PPC sales. So just by you know, increasing your conversion rate, your PPC is just naturally going to get, you know, more efficient, because you’re gonna convert more. So same thing, organic and PPC. So conversion rate will impact both. So that’s why it’s at the top of my list. Now let’s get into, you know, how can you increase your conversion rates? We’re going to go over a couple of them here, kind of some easy ones, you know, and most of these are free, you know, some of the top ones that I think move the needle the most and Amazon they have this new, it’s actually pretty new, it’s called Amazon experiments, it’s under Amazon experiments, its brands and manage experiments, you have to be brand registered, if you’re not, go get brand registered, you’re going to get a lot of benefits from that. So you can split test main images, and that is probably one of the top ones I would recommend doing. like David just mentioned, you know, as he was shopping for a space heater, you know, he was looking around at all these and he kind of just gave up. So you know, if that space heater, if that main image, you know, kind of had whatever he was looking for, or you know, versus whatever it had, maybe he would have converted into a sale. And so, you know, split test those main images, you know, if you have main image, you know, if you have high quality photography, or if you’re ordering, if you’re going to launch a new product, just toss in another, a leading image, you know, just get two or three as you’re ordering a package of your photos, and then you can kind of split test them as you go. It’s not a lot of money. And if you think about it, if you can double your profits, just by ordering an extra one or two images, it’s worth it. And on Amazon, it’s free to split test them, you know, prior to that, you had to use bunch of services or do it manually, and it was, you know, kind of a pain in the ass. But Amazon has this new experiments now. Split testing your A plus content, another perk from Brand Registry, it’s under brands, manage experiments, you know, your A plus content, that is a free thing offered to brand registered sellers, you go in and you know, this is, A plus is crucial, like it has a lot of space on product detail page, you know, you have a lot of real estate there to kind of cover your product, you know, what are the benefits, you know, how is this going to solve the customer’s problem, you know, it’s a lot of real estate. So you can split test a plus content for conversions. Next one on the list is, if you don’t have video, on your product listing, go get a video and add it to your product listing, it will immediately increase your conversion rate. You know, I’ve heard anywhere from five to 10%, obviously it’s different on all products. But this is huge. If you do not have video on your product listings, get a video, put it on there, it’s going to help you out, it’s going to pay for itself too. And the last one here is contest your pricing. And I know this is something that it’s you know, it’s kind of like people have a fear of like whether raising your prices or lowering your prices, you know, like, the only way to know is to test it, you know, test it over a 30 day period, make sure it’s not seasonal, you know, raise your price, test it over 30 days, you know, your sales might go down, but what about your profit, you know, this goes back to knowing your numbers, you know, if you can raise your price, you know, and make more profit, you’re definitely gonna want to do that.
David 12:27
You know, Ken, one thing I want to point out before we move on is how you phrase that is test pricing. And I have been guilty of this where I’ll say, you know, I’m selling this for 14.99, I’m going to try out 17.99. And so I’ll change it, I won’t document it anywhere, I won’t look at conversion rate. And then I never really know if it works. And I think as your product catalog grows, it’s easier to make these like finger in the wind adjustments. And without measuring it, you really don’t know. And so anyway, the example of 30 days, I mean, that’s perfect. You know, we’re doing that right now is we’re doing, you know, modifications and a 30 day look back and we’re looking at conversion rate and profitability and really, really important.
Ken 13:13
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re gonna dive into those four a little bit deeper here. So keyword ranking, to boost organic sales, find your two or three money keywords to test, you know, download your reports, and look for keywords that you have a high conversion rate for your product, jump on like helium 10. And look at that keyword, find the keywords that have low competition or lower competition, and with a decent search volume, if your products converting Well, if there’s lower competition for that keyword, and it’s got a decent search volume, it is a good keyword to test for ranking. And so what you would want to do manually trying to you know, trying to rank this one manually with PPC, you isolate the keyword into a separate sponsored product manual exact campaign. And you just increase your bids, monitor, adjust the placement, Id modifiers, you know, you get top of search product detail page rest of search. So you know, you can kind of tweak it a little bit there to find what’s going to get the cheapest sale on those placements. And then just track your organic ranking, you know, for 30 days and see, are those PPC sales, are they moving the needle on the organic ranking of that keyword, you know, and this again, this goes back to you know, you need to know your numbers because you know your breakeven cost. And even you know if you know your numbers, and if you’re testing this, and if you see the needle move on organic ranking, you might want to increase and see if the needle moves again and again. And then you want to you know, measure your organic sales and your PPC sales and kind of, it’s kind of a sweet science and find that sweet spot where Hey, we have a lever here we can pull on PPC, organically rank the keyword and if this is successful for you, then you can rinse and repeat it with new keywords.
All right, we’re gonna deep dive into driving organic traffic to Amazon. Number one, Amazon posts. If you’re not familiar with this, this is a, you know, Amazon came out with this, I think it was probably 12 to 18 months ago. So it’s a fairly older program, it’s free, you have to have Brand Registry. And we’ve got a link here in the slide deck. Again, you can go get the slide deck from firingtheman.com\tacos, we have a link here. And also we did a deep dive on a podcast, I think it was episode eight, if you go to firingtheman.com\eight we have a really in depth podcast on posts, but they’re essentially, you know, social media posts on Amazon that are free. And you know, they put your posts on other listings. And you know, just taking up real estate, free advertising is kind of how I look at it. The next one on the list is email, you know, if you have an email list, you know, you cannot drive traffic directly from an email to a product detail page on Amazon. But you can take them to a storefront or a landing page. So you know, if you have a sale, if this is part of your you know, your business strategy is to drive your email list to your Amazon listings for Amazon sales, this is a good way to drive organic traffic. Social media, you know, this kind of goes with the Amazon posts, you know, you can repurpose anything on social media, on Amazon posts, so really low hanging fruit there. So your social media, your Facebook, your Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Tiktok, whatever you have, content, you know, throw content out there, link them up, promote your products, get that organic traffic over to your Amazon storefront. It’s free organic traffic. And also, you know, it could help with rankings, Amazon sees, hey, you’re you’re driving external traffic to your storefront, you know, from all of these different channels. And again, you can repurpose those on Amazon post. So you just go back and get whatever you’ve posted on, you know, Facebook, Instagram, your other social channels. Repurpose that on Amazon posts. Next one, contest paid ads, if your margins on your products allow for that, if you have a decent margin, you know, Amazon has a program called attribution. And what that is, is it is a unique link. And so you know, you go to Amazon attribution, you sign up for this, you get a you know, you get a unique link. And then let’s say you’re going to run Facebook ads or Google ads to your storefront, you use that unique link on your Google Ad your Facebook ad, and you can track your sales and find out, hey, are these profitable? You know, if you pay, you know, $2 a click from Google and you get you know, 200 clicks, and you go to Amazon, you look and say Yep, okay, I got 200 visitors here and we converted, you know, 25 of them into sales, you can do the math and figure out is that profitable or not? If it is, scale it, if it’s not try something else. But there’s another way you can drive organic traffic, well, you can drive traffic. And if it’s profitable, scale it up. Here’s one here, this is something that David and I have been working on, it’s kind of a bonus one here, virtual bundles. And this is something new, it’s newer on Amazon, a few months old, you have to be brand registered, you can find it under brands, virtual bundles. And what it is, it’s an easy way to increase your average order value. So if you have products that are complimentary, and my example here is if you have a leprechaun loincloth you sell, you have a leprechaun hat, and you have a pot of gold that you sell, you know, you combine those into a virtual bundle, because if someone’s you know, if they’re looking for a leprechaun loincloth, they’re likely going to want a leprechaun hat and a pot of gold, like who wouldn’t want those three. So you combine them together, and now you change your cart value from 20 bucks to 62 bucks with that virtual bundle didn’t cost you anything, and you increase your organic sales. You don’t have to bundle these products together, you ship them in single asins, and Amazon combines them and ships them out to the customer. So kind of a bonus one there. Test it, see if it works. It’s working for us, it’s moving the needle. And the last thing I would say here is anytime you’re driving traffic to Amazon drive the traffic to a storefront landing page. And the reason for this is you know, you’re gonna weed out the tire kickers and help your conversion rate on product listings. You know, if you send cold traffic to a product listing that like just randomly popped up and said, Oh, hey, go check this out, they click over there and look at it, they have no intent to purchase it. You’re going to decrease your conversion rate, you’re going to hurt your listing. So you have to have that intermediate landing page to kind of weed everything out and then if they look at it and are like okay, yeah, I’m interested in buying this, click on that then go and convert. So driving to a landing page on a storefront. How to improve PPC efficiency. I touched on this a little bit earlier. So like David mentioned, kind of in that dialed in phase, you know finding those longtail keywords that have low AKOS, Like 7% AKOS, those are sweet. I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that if you can find a keyword, you know, you’re converting at 7% Akos, it’s profit, it’s going to move the needle, it’s going to improve your PPC efficiency. Another one here is test new Amazon sponsored ad features. They always are, you know, Amazon is increasing, it’s becoming an increasingly pay to play. And they’re releasing new ad features all the time, you know, when video ads came out, you know, it was like, first in whoever got their video ads in there, they were converting really well, not as much anymore, but they still convert new targeting types. You know, I think there was just a new one they did, they just released it was like, you know, customers who previously purchased this, you can retarget them, you know, just test all these new ad features, see what works, see what doesn’t, you might find something you know, if you’re an early adopter, you’re gonna find something before you know everyone else. If you test it, and it works. Lastly, here is monitor AKOS and implement adjustments frequently, you know, use tools, use your automation use AI, but just be on top of it. PPC is not a set it and forget it, it has to be constantly monitored and tweaked for efficiency.
David 21:09
Sorry to interrupt the episode, you may have heard Ken and I talking recently about a new tool that we’re using for Amazon refunds. Now I have used other refund tools like this. However, I can tell you in the first seven days, they scrubbed it, the back end of my Amazon account going back 18 months, and found $5,000 of refunds. And the nice thing about this is, it’s my money, Amazon made a mistake, and they are just auditing my account. The other thing I really like about this tool is there is no monthly fee, they only charge a commission if they are successful in getting you your money. Go to getida.com GETIDA and enter promo code FTM for firing the man FTM 400. This is an awesome tool. I can’t say enough good things about it. Now back to the episode.
Ken 22:01
High fiving David now.
David 22:03
That’s right. You know, one thing that I want to circle back on is less PPC spend tends to lead to some benefits, right? So in the case study in phase one, when we were doing monthly revenue of say $10,000, you know, when we 5x that on the revenue side of things. So from 10,000 to 50,000 ad spend only increased by about 2x. And so I think that you’ll see that general trend, right? There’s only so many keywords you can bid on. And there’s only so many good keywords that you can bid on. And so anyway, I am an advocate of less PPC spend. And so, you know, one thing I think is worth noting, is for any active Amazon sellers that are living in this right now, inventory has been a nightmare in 2021. You know, it started back in May, when we couldn’t send things in, now we’re going through inventory restrictions, and we’re being held to this ipi score, and it just has been very challenging. And so, you know, I don’t think there’s a better time to tighten down PPC spend than right now, you know, we’ve got a lot of products that are selling well, but due to current inventory restrictions, we cannot replenish that inventory. And so will slowing down PPC spend slow down sales, yes. But you know, it’s just gonna make inventory management easier. And so, you know, again, there’s also been supply chain disruptions, you know, with the pandemic, and so it’s made getting inventory more challenging. And so anyway, I think as you’re listening to this, if you’ve been less than satisfied with your PPC performance, I would advocate kind of a slash and burn approach to where you’re really trying to decrease AKOS. Yes, your sales are going to go down. No, it’s not exciting to open the Amazon seller app and see that monthly sales, you know, trailing 30 day sales is down 20%. But when that p&l shows up, and the net income is higher, that’s the name of the game.
Ken 24:01
Absolutely.
David 24:01
You know, I also want to talk about thoughts on outsourcing PPC. So I’ve hired and fired more PPC managers than any other position in my company, have went through two agencies I’ve had two VA’s do it. I use selex back in the day, and I’ve learned some lessons from all of that. And so, you know, as Ken mentioned, PPC is not a set it and forget it thing. And so if you are going to, you know be actively managed in it, it’s gonna take a significant amount of time every week, in my opinion to do it well. And so I do for one of our brands outsource it, we do manage some of them internally. But one lesson that I’ve learned on outsourcing PPC is having weekly meetings, at least, talking to them about Akos tacos, and you know, trying to get their goals aligned with your goals. And you know, that leads me to my next point is I show my PPC manager my p&l and the p&l is you know, that’s a report card for the business. And some people are kind of private about this. To me, it doesn’t matter. I’m not afraid to share it with him, right? Obviously, it’s confidential. But you know, when we look at net income, month to month, and then we look at akos, and tacos, it really paints the picture of, for this business Akos needs to be between 22 and 25%. I mean, tacos needs to be hovering around 10%. And so you know that’s been another thing, just a valuable lesson learned. And then I would say the last thing is, if you have a PPC manager, and you’re thinking about switching to another one, and I’ve went through this with every switch, the new manager always says, Oh, yeah, I need to overhaul your campaign structure. Yes, you’ve been running ads for two years. But I’m going to disregard all of those campaigns. And I’m going to do it my way. And we’re going to run auto campaigns, and it’s going to take three months to get dialed in. And that’s a frustrating point when you switch, and I always feel like, Listen, can you just, you know, utilize some of the current data that we have and use the current campaign structure? And so if you’re interviewing a PPC manager, that would be something I would ask them is, do you need to overhaul my campaign structure? Are we starting from scratch? Or can we leverage old data that will be valuable in the future?
Ken 26:22
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the most crucial points that you made was talking with the, you know, if you’re outsourcing it, talking with them about making sure their interests are aligned with yours, in terms of adspend and profitability. Like, you know, if they’re charging based off of percentage of adspend, which I know a lot of agencies do. And that’s not aligned with profitability. And so, you know, making sure that your interests are aligned, you know, sharing the p&l with them. That’s huge. And just bringing that out, so they’re not misaligned and they’re just kind of going to the moon with PPC sales. So I think that’s helpful. All right, moving along. Next topic we’re going to talk about and it is probably one of the most crucial topics to talk about is profitability, and why is profitability important. You know, your business is an asset, and it should be managed as an asset. You know, the rough valuation of an Amazon business with a million dollars in sales and a 10% net profit of $100,000, the valuation would, today would be about 350 to 400k. Now, this is an example that I really like to kind of bring to light about, you know why you should focus on profitability, the rough valuation of the same Amazon business with a million dollars in sales and a 20% net profit of $200,000 is 700 to $800,000. That’s double, just from focusing on profitability. Huge. Alright, now, how do we increase profitability? Know your numbers, decrease your expenses, increase your pricing, focus on tacos, do not focus on top line revenue. That’s a trap, common trap to fall in. I have fallen in that trap, drive organic sales, and recover money from Amazon, one of my favorite ones. So let’s talk about know your numbers. Knowing your numbers is crucial. We’ve talked about this two or three times throughout this show. It is crucial to the success of your business. I would start there hands down, you know, David, he went full out CPA nerd created this calculator. It’s a free download, go to firingtheman.com\calculator, free resource go grab that it’s huge, free stuff is great. One quick story share, the bookkeeper that David and I work with, you know, she’s been in this business for over 20 years. And the first six months I was working with her. I asked her questions here and there and she shared with me She said, you know, this is something I want to share with you it’s very impactful. And she said I can’t tell you the amount of e commerce sellers not just Amazon but e commerce in general that pound their chest about selling, you know, oh, I sell, you know, six figures or I sell seven figures. She said when you peel back the curtain and look at the books and the p&l ‘s they don’t lie, p&l’s don’t lie, the books don’t lie. And she said there is a very very alarming number of sellers who are losing money. She said it’s staggering. She told me a story about this seller that a particular year he had sold over $3 million and when he got his books for the end of the year, he lost almost half a million dollars and was in debt and was at the end of his rope and this is crucial. So focus know your numbers don’t fall into the traps. Decreasing expenses. This is something that you know I have shiny object syndrome David will tell you that if you’re looking at the slide deck here, you know we’ve got the Lambo with the big red X in it, hold off, hold off, review your p&l statements monthly, take a look at your books, your expenses and remove any shiny objects. You know I have shiny object syndrome I always have You know, I see software you know, I get put into a trap by all these marketers, oh, this software is going to do this, this software is gonna do that oh this service this whatever, watch out for that, go through your books every month, look at the line items and say okay, is this adding value to my business? If it’s not get it out of there. Next one here is some synergies between software. If you have multiple software’s, if you’re an advanced seller, if you’re just starting out, you likely have software’s that overlap, they have overlapping features and benefits. See if you can combine them into one and remove the other one that goes directly to profits. And then something we’ve talked about earlier on, decrease your wasted ad spend, you know, if you’re selling breakeven on a keyword, and you have other keywords that are at 7% 10% 11%, stop selling at breakeven and go find longtail keywords where you can be profitable, you know, lots of ways to decrease ad spend, that’s just one. Increase your pricing. We talked about this earlier, you know, increase your pricing and monitor for profitability, you know, you have a $20 product $5 profit per sale, you have 10 sales $50 in profit. If you raise the price on that to $25. You make $9 profit per sale, your sales could go down, you know what if your sales went down from 10 sales to seven sales, you would still have $63 in profit. $13 more than that one. So raising your prices can bring you more profit, but you have to test it out. Alright, moving on. Focus on tacos, we covered this, we touched on a little bit earlier, increase your organic sales, improve PPC efficiency. Those are your two levers. This is crucial do not focus on your top line revenue. This is the trap we talked about earlier. It is an ego. You know there’s chest pounding and ego Oh, I’m an eight figure seller, I’m a seven figure seller, a six figure whatever it is top line revenue, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s profits. top line revenue does not pay the bills. top line revenue does not set the bar for the value of your business. Profits pay the bills and set the bar for the value of your business. Remember that. Driving organic sales, we covered that one in depth earlier, moving on here. So recovering money from Amazon, this is something that you know, I thought I was doing a great job for a really long time I was using just a service that came along with one of the software’s that I had. And I didn’t think much of it, I discovered this service getida and it’s been pretty amazing. Getida specialized in recovering money from Amazon, every dollar you recover from Amazon goes directly to your bottom line, net income and Amazon is a massive company and they do not audit your account. They’re holding your money. Getida takes five minutes to set up. You have an account rep assigned to your account filing cases on your behalf, going back to Amazon battling for your money and getida only charges you a fee after they recover money for your account. It’s a win win. David and I have been using getida for about six months and we’ve recovered over $20,000 on top of what we would have prior. We have a disclaimer you know we have an affiliate link with Getida for firing the man podcast, it’s gonna get you your first $400 in refunds for free. There’s a link in the slide deck. You can use coupon code FTM 400 on getida’s website.
David 33:21
All right. Well, one last pro tip that I’m going to leave you with to wrap out this episode. And as the kids are saying these days, if you know, you know. Typically when you set up your Amazon account, they aren’t going to deduct your PPC charges from the payments that they make you. However, if you go into account info charge methods for advertising and change payment method, that is going to allow you to put a credit card in there and really no impact on how PPC functions. However, we have found it is called the chase Inc business preferred and they give you 3% back on all search engine advertising. And yes, that does mean Amazon PPC and so you know, we talked about the difference between say an akos of 28% and 25%. Well, hey, there’s your 3% discount. And so, in my opinion if you’re not using a tool like this, you’re leaving money on the table. And so in this slide deck we have a link to this specific card. And if you do click on that link, you’re going to help Ken pay his electricity bill or buy me a bonsai tree for the studio.
Ken 34:26
Excellent. So to wrap up the episode here if you only have time, there was a lot of content in this episode, if you only have time just to do a couple of these. The top three items that David and I would recommend is number one, tacos. Go find what your tacos percentage is and focus on improving it. Number two, sign up for getida get your money back from Amazon. They owe you money trust me it takes five minutes and it’s going to deliver profits for the duration of your Amazon selling account. Again that’s coupon code FTM 400 is going to get your first $400 in reimbursements for free. Lastly David just covered, you know charge your PPC spend on a credit card that’s going to make you money. Gonna go to your bottom line, we have a referral code in the slide deck again you can get this entire slide deck firingtheman.com\tacos.
David 35:14
Absolutely. All right. Thanks everyone for tuning in this week and we’ll see you next time. Thank you everyone for tuning in to today’s firing the man podcast. If you liked this episode, head on over to firingtheman.com and check out our resource library for exclusive firing the man discounts on popular e commerce subscription services. That is firingtheman.com\resource. You can also find a comprehensive library of over 50 books that Ken and I have read in the last few years that have made a meaningful impact on our business. For that, head on over to www.firingtheman.com/library. Lastly, check us out on social media at firing the man and on YouTube at firing the man for exclusive content. This is David shomer
Ken 35:59
and Ken Wilson. We’re out
David 36:16
before you go we wanted to share a new service that Ken and I have been using called getida that has made us over $10,000 in Amazon reimbursements. The service requires no monthly subscription in getida collects a small percentage of the money they recover for you. It takes less than five minutes to set up and works on all Amazon marketplaces. Go to getida.com GETIDA.com and enter promo code FTM 400. That’s FTM for firing the man 400 to get your first $400 in reimbursements commission free. How much money does Amazon owe you?
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