Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:01:46]
Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Everyone I am your host Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest Onn Manelson who is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of RevenueWize, an AI-based Amazon advertising platform.Prior to RevenueWize Onn founded MarketYze, a leading retail price optimization  solution working with leading retailers such as Best Buy, Staples, eBay, Sears which was acquired by Revionics. He currently focuses on helping brand and agencies maximize their potential with Amazon advertising in a simple yet powerful way. Welcome to the podcast on,

Onn
[00:02:33]
Thank you. Thanks Arlen for having me over.

Arlen
[00:02:36]
Not a problem. It’s a pleasure having you, and I’m really excited to talk to you today, your background and your, your experience and your bread and butters, Amazon advertising. And that’s really what we’re gonna be talking about today. How does, how do e-commerce businesses take advantage of promoting themselves across Amazon and these other marketplaces? Because the way we are right now in this current day and age where we’re kind of in, I guess, a little past the midway of 2021, things are still kind of crazy with respect to COVID the lockdowns that are still kind of popping up now across the world. A lot more people are spending more time online, and this is really propelling e-commerce sales. And so, you know, as an e-commerce business, everybody wants a piece of the action and, you know, Amazon is the, you know, is kind of the behemoth. And of course there’s other marketplaces that you’re gonna tell us about that people can take advantage of as well. But before we get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and, you know, specifically how you, you did get into what you’re doing today?

Onn
[00:03:42]
So it’s actually interesting. Cause after my previous company marketized got acquired, I remained withs for nearly three years prior to starting a new venture. What was actually the thought leading process was not to create a SaaS company and offer a service, but actually to develop technology that will be used in house for our own purposes. And part of that was speaking to a lot of marketplace sellers. So the idea was actually to put something together in the area of arbitrage. So we started speaking to sellers, Amazon sellers, eBay seller, early stage Walmart that opened up their marketplace to third party sellers and picking up information on how to go ahead and set this and build this in an effective way. We built a solution in about 12 months later, we pivoted after understanding that there’s a lot of potential, a lot of opportunity that is not being met in the space of Amazon advertising. That’s when we realized that we should start focusing, we should actually go after Amazon advertising and in this space, cuz considering that this has been Amazon’s profit center and Amazon is focusing heavily on advertising, right? So it’s an, it’s an area that’s continuously grow quarter after quarter and these are just hysterical numbers.

Arlen
[00:05:06]
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It, it is a really amazing kind of what’s happening these days with these platforms like Amazon and a lot of these other marketplaces. Yeah. I was telling you before we got started our business OmniSTAR interacted, we kicked things off back in the year, 2000. And at that time, none of this really existed. There was no Amazon at that time, there was no marketplaces. And so I, I was telling you that we worked with a lot of startup companies, a lot of companies to create custom e-commerce solutions and, and websites for businesses. And at that time really, there was just, I mean you had to sell it directly on your website. The, there was a few little small niche sites that you could, you know, use some advertising going. There was

Onn
[00:05:47]
Yahoo. Yeah,

Arlen
[00:05:48]
Exactly, exactly. Yahoo that you could, you could get listings there. And so they were somewhat of a marketplace, I guess you could say at that time more of a, kind of a, a general portal, but yeah, there weren’t a lot of option. Excuse me. And so these days, yeah, it, it it’s really, I think the main question many businesses have is just, okay, what’s gonna be the right marketplace for me. It’s it’s not about trying to find one it’s about finding the right one and you know, exploring, you know, those options. And so really wanna start off with is really what really are all of the promotional options available today. If you’re looking to a advertise across Amazon or any of the other major marketplaces.

Onn
[00:06:30]
Right? So, so let me just start off by mentioning that pretty much today on Amazon, if you go to Amazon’s marketplace, between 30 to 40% of real estate is promoted. Wow. So anywhere you look, whether these are search results, pages, product pages, pages are heavily promoted and, and Amazon itself uses an approach where it’s not very trivial. So it kind of like tries to hide the fact that it’s promoted. So it’s pretty much seamless to the shopper, but there are a lot of ads that are peering. One of the most popular ones are sponsored products, which are very similar to Google PPC. What you do is you just bid on keywords within the Amazon universe. So when a shopper searches for men’s polo shirt, you can basically bid for that term. And when you do that bidding, you can appear either at the top of the set of the results or in this middle of the page, at the bottom of the page.

Onn
[00:07:25]
And there are different areas of placement. So that’s kind of like a co say that it’s a pretty much a copy paste of, of Google PPC, basically where you bid on keywords. Another option that you have is advertising on the product pages themselves. So once you get into an item page and you look at the, and you look at a product, you can also promote BA and target whether it’s your competitors, whether it’s similar product, whether it’s complimentary product, you can pretty much also display your product and have it appear on pages as well. And obviously it’s an auction. So it’s, it’s, you know, it’s a factor of bidding. And that was the one that Amazon basically started off with. That was the, the, that kind of like the pillar. And that’s where probably around 60 to 70% of a total ad budget comes from sponsor cost.

Onn
[00:08:19]
Amazon then realized that there are a lot of brands that are looking actually for brand recognition and brand awareness and not necessarily immediate conversion, coffee brands, apparel, and others that are looking to get some more awareness. And for that, they basically develop a different approach, which is called sponsored brands and for advertising on sponsored brands. First of all, you need to be part of Amazon’s brand registry. So any brand out there that’s a private label or other brand you can U in order to utilize this kind of advertising method, you need to have part of brand registry brand registry basically means that you have to have the brand under your trademark. See? So that’s something that sellers that are looking to go ahead and get into Amazon. They need to be aware that this is also part of the process that Amazon requires as part of third party brand.

Onn
[00:09:17]
You are gonna need to go ahead and set that up. And that allows you now to use additional methodologies of targeting. It allows you also to put banners up on top with your brand. And these are not necessarily ads that are generated directly to conversion, but more for awareness. So you have these that are appearing at the search result page. If you go to Amazon, you’re gonna see at the top, they’re typically banners that are appearing there with brand names on product pages. Let’s say that if you go and you look at Sony product, then you might see Toba and other brands you’re promoting your brand rather than the product and that to what it’s for last but not least. There’s now what we call sponsored display, where these are actually banners that are on the side of the results and allow you to play with graphics.

Onn
[01:10:10]
Okay. So Amazon up until recently, didn’t allow you to create your own ad with your own. So it’s kind of like it was a fixed and you had only one creative that was up sponsored display allows you to do some creative work and allows you to bring traffic off of Amazon. One of the things that Amazon are trying to do is newer in and bring in more traffic from externals sources and from other sources that are outside of Amazon sponsor display. You can go ahead and do that. So imagine that today, about 60% of shoppers, I think the number has gone up a little bit. They start their journey on Amazon. Okay. So they don’t go to Google. They don’t go to Walmart. They don’t go to any, they start at Amazon. So the fact that Amazon has such a sheer, a, a huge sheer volume of traffic makes it a source where everybody wants to appear on Amazon, because I see you’ve got so much traffic going on.

Onn
[01:11:12]
That’s the asset that Amazon goes ahead and breaks together with obviously a lot of other assets, but the fact that that’s where people come to buy, then that’s what makes it very, very powerful as opposed to probably some of the listeners have Shopify and have other platforms that they, they sell upon or Shopify wicks, or other platforms that they use. And the challenges around that is you need to bring your own traffic. You have a Shopify store or Magento, or what ever platform that you’re running. You now need to bring your own traffic. So what are your options to bring traffic? There’re Google there’s Facebook, and there are other sources, but there are billions of sessions coming in in traffic, on Amazon, which you basically are not getting if you’re not on the platform. And that’s why a lot of sellers use in a lot of brands use a multi-channel approach.

Onn
[01:11:58]
So you want to be on Amazon. You want to have your own Shopify store, because that way you’re not gonna necessarily pay Amazon certain fees, but you have to slowly build up your brand at Walmart, have a marketplace as well. So you can also go ahead now. And Walmart has today, several thousands of third party sellers, which are pretty much private label brands, which they’ve opened up on their marketplace. eBay have been, you know, kind of like, you know, been, not that popular. I mean, from a traffic perspective, eBay have gone down, you know, going back on the days that we discussed in the year 2000 others, where they were, they were pretty big, but they too have realized the power of advertising. So they’ve launched a promotional program as well, where you’re able to promote your items. And it seems like all other marketplaces are following. So, you know, if you’re doing arts and crafts and you’re doing Etsy, so you’re gonna see the same thing, how happening on Etsy, you’re gonna see sponsored products on Etsy. So it’s pretty much all marketplaces out. There have pretty much followed Amazon steps in that. And some traffic is coming in already. So they’re just monetizing off it. Although it’s not that they need to develop a product, they’re just monetizing the traffic,

Arlen
[01:13:11]
They traffic. Yeah. It makes a lot, a lot of sense. It, and you know, as Amazon being the leader, it seems like everybody else is falling in line under it. And you mentioned some, some kind of key things there with them now trying to monetize their traffic that they’re bringing. Because, you know, I know from my own personal experience, I’m on Amazon. I don’t know how many times a week I’m, I’m constantly ordering stuff. Cuz I I’m, I’m all about, you know, maximizing my of time, you know, if I can just pop on Amazon and order something as opposed to going to a store, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do it. And so I’m, I’m always on Amazon and, and I do think my mindset is similar to what others have is where they’re first gonna go to Amazon, no matter what it is. And they’re gonna look for it at Amazon. So that always, it seems like it’s now a starting point of things. E-commerce because number one, you know, they’ve done a, a tremendous job of really marketing and managing their whole Amazon prime and the two and the one day shipping and the same day shipping, you know, we have here in the us and in other places in the world as well. And so people know that and they, they start thinking about the, the ability to return items. They start thinking about the whole process and they’re like, okay,

Onn
[01:14:22]
It’s just so convenient. Yeah. The level of convenience. And the fact is that Amazon is able to give you that security,

Arlen
[01:14:32]
Right?

Onn
[01:14:32]
That when you acquire you purchase a product, turn it, no questions asked the logistics that is around it. You’re gonna have it the same day, the next day. It’s just so convenient. So they’ve created such an experience that it’s really, really, really hard for others to follow. Cuz at the end of the day, Amazon today are a logistics company, more than a retailer. It’s all about fulfillment and they’ve proved it. And that’s why we’re seeing how Amazon is picked up more and more. And it continues growing, which is say, Hey, how, how, how, where can it you growing to, and it’s continuing to grow and grow.

Arlen
[01:15:15]
Yeah, that that’s so true. And yeah, you’re really right about it. That there are a logistics company more than anything because in order to pull off what they do the same day shipping next day, all of that, it’s you, the logistics have to be on point for sure. Now, you know, you mentioned, and earlier that of course, a lot of the business owners that are listening have their own direct to consumer sites, whether they are, have a platform on Shopify Ws or any other other platforms and they’re selling directly to the, their end customer. And of course that’s all recommended. You have to really maximize the different channels that you’re reaching your customers. One of the questions that I have now though, is when you start bringing in all of these other marketplaces in the mix, it does require a fair amount of, I guess you could say logistics on the side of the e-commerce business to manage orders from these different platforms and all that it takes to fulfill them and your experience, what are some tools or resource is that a business can use to help them manage when they’re, cross-selling where they’re selling across all of these different platforms and marketplaces.

Onn
[01:16:22]
There are actually a lot of companies that, that came to, to, to, to deal specifically with that. I think that the most known company in that space is channel advisor were pretty much, they take up and they aggregate your feeds across all marketplaces and they manage your inventory in one place. So basically you have an inventory where if you sold on Walmart, you need to know and you need to notify Amazon the level of inventory and things of that sort. So there are a lot of solutions that were born around that, but the one that’s most known as channel advisor, basically that knows how to do these kind of levels of aggregation.

Arlen
[01:16:59]
Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. That’s that’s a good one. Yeah. Cause I think what a lot of businesses they may struggle with are, are wondering about is especially during peak times of the year, such as the holidays or depending own type of business that you have, there could be, there’s always kind of the seasonality of a business where they normally expect higher sales during certain times of the year, certain quarters of the year. And so yeah, it can be difficult even just to manage your own sales during these, you know, ups and these downs in the business. And so yeah, it definitely makes sense to have a solution. So a lot of

Onn
[01:17:35]
They can hold basically two levels of inventory. The thing is that if you wanna ship and you want to get, and you wanna maximize your potential, you’re probably gonna go with Amazon FBA with fulfilled by Amazon. And that’s where basically you need to go ahead and ship your inventory to Amazon itself, right? So now if you have a, if you’re selling on Walmart or you’re selling on another marketplace, even target and best buy have marketplaces on allow, third party shows to join, then it depends on when you’re, whether you’re doing the fulfillment yourself, meaning that you have a third party warehouse where you hold your inventory and you’re doing that fulfillment. Or you can actually continue using Amazon for orders coming in from other places. But it just, you need to check it from it from a cost perspective, cuz Amazon obviously charges for that. So you need to see how competitive that is. And that’s the case we see that are basically selling on their own website, but they’re fulfilling from Amazon. So they’re using Amazon fulfillment in order to go ahead and get that and fulfill it for their shoppers just because, okay, it’s so effective and it’s so convenient. Again, it’s more of a cost price and you need to take that into consideration and see what the costs are and what makes more sense financial wise. Okay.

Arlen
[01:18:52]
That’s interesting. Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve heard of that where people are selling on their own website, but just using Amazon’s strictly as a fulfillment house, but it makes a lot of sense because you know, they, their whole supply chain and everything on their backend is, is like no other. And so of course, like you said, you got way out the cost of using that versus, you know, fulfilling it on your own. Of course, you know, you’re gonna be paying them for that, but you gotta look at the fact that that’s definitely a lot less, you have to worry about and you know, you can be kind of rest assured that the products are gonna go out. They’re gonna go out on time. If there’s any issues with the return, you know, that can be managed as well, quite effectively. So makes a lot of sense. One of the things I was wondering now is that, of course you mentioned Amazon and, and, and Walmart of course is a similar marketplace, but we’re kind of in a space where those are really, I guess you could say the giants in this whole e-commerce marketplace arena. Do you think there are any room for any other marketplaces to kind of crack a space in this? Or are we, are we at the point where they are, they dominating the marketplace too much at this point?

Onn
[02:20:03]
I don’t think that there’s ever enough in this space, cuz at the end of the day, it’s the experience that people are able to provide. My daughter is 12 years old and I think it was about six months ago that she came across a site called Shean, you know, this has become so popular. It’s just crazy. So it’s a marketplace for apparel, for women and teens. And it just, you know, I’d say, you know, why would we need, and you know, there’s so many websites and marketplaces out there, why would need that? And suddenly you see that this has come up. It’s a question of experience. There depends on the verticals. Look at Etsy. They went into a very, very niche arts and craft and things of, you know, that. So I think that there are areas where Amazon are unable are still not in and are unable to grow and have shown that there is opportunity.

Onn
[02:20:54]
Okay. The interesting thing is that more and more of the large retailers are going into the space so best buy today, offer third party sellers to go ahead and offer products on their website as part of best buy marketplace. So if you’re selling devices, let’s say that you’re doing mobile phone guards, then you can go ahead and you can market them on best buy. The same goes for target. More and more retailers that are pretty large are opening their digital commerce to third parties because they underst stand that at the end of the day, shoppers are looking to have as much more of a spread on products and as much more inventory in their cases where these are things that they’re just not offering, they’re following that model. And you’re seeing that more and more coming up. Obviously it’s gonna be hard to compete with Amazon. Sure. But still there is room in, there are verticals at Amazon, Amazon on the business side, B2B side are still not strong at all. You know, automotive, there are so many areas where Amazon is, you know, and so is Walmart. So there is space to go ahead. We’re gonna see more players.

Arlen
[02:21:59]
Okay. Well, that’s definitely good to hear that there’s still room for some other players, you know, all these kind of niche sites that have their own kind of community or, or following in their platform where, you know, the items that these other niche sites are selling may be harder to find on the Amazons and then the Walmart. So definitely, yeah. Good to hear that we’re not everybody else is not locked out just yet. So that’s not

Onn
[02:22:24]
Yet, yet. Not yet.

Arlen
[02:22:26]
Yeah, not yet. Well, well on as we get ready to wrap things up, I’m, I’m a huge advocate of kind of looking at case studies of other companies that have been successful with, you know, any of these strategies. So, so in your experience, are there any particular companies that you’ve either worked with or, you know about in general that have utilized promoting on Amazon or these other marketplaces and have been really successful? And what specifically did they do? Because as you mentioned, there’s kind of a whole litany of, of things that you can do these days when you’re promoting yourself across these platforms. So is there any business that you can on?

Onn
[02:22:58]
Right. I think that the question that, that sellers and, and people that are selling on marketplaces need to ask themselves at the end of the day, as you go ahead and you have to deal with more and more things, are these things that you want to go ahead and address yourself? Or is this something that you can outsource? Those are the questions, cuz at the end of the day, you need to be efficient and you want to focus on results and things that generate growth for your business. And you cannot be an expert in a lot of these brands. They’re, you know, we’re not talking about night, we’re not talking about Adidas. We’re talking about smaller brands. They have a certain limit in resources at the end of the day. And just like, if you want to go ahead and you wanna advertise your website today, whether it’s an e-commerce site or not on Google, you’re probably not gonna do it yourself.

Onn
[02:23:50]
If you want to do Google or Facebook advertising, then most likely you’re gonna turn to an agency or to some sort of third party to go ahead and do it for you on Amazon, Walmart and other other marketplaces, you still can do things and manage them on your own. I see you have the option to use different tools that have been developed and there’s a big ecosystem for different tools and different solutions. What differentiates between the solutions are the level of automation and the level of engagement that you need. So we work with brands that they’re looking to fully automate and they want to have as frictionless as possible experience. So they wanna base everything on AI versus agencies that we work with. They want to have control and they don’t wanna just have a plug and play solution of let the algorithm run. Cuz there are different areas and different aspects that algorithms have some sort of limitation and they want to have control.

Onn
[02:24:50]
So at the end of the day, I think it depends on different factors of what the brand is looking for, how big they are, what their objective in their goal is. Are they looking to grow the business? Are they looking to for more profit aspect and what they are from that standpoint, their strategies and based off of that, they can decide what is the best fit from a solution perspective, a lot of brands that get to a certain size, they want to go ahead and they want to outsource it and they want to set it out basically to somebody that has the level of professionalism versus some brands that want to keep it basically inhouse. And they hire somebody in house to go ahead and do that kind of work for them. So it’s kind of like a mix, but it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Arlen
[02:25:35]
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It’s just like anything, any type of marketing strategy, you gotta determine what the goals are first. And then from there you’ll be able to see what’s gonna be the best route for you to go in because there’s so many options, you know, it doesn’t make sense to just jump in there and think, okay, I’m gonna do the sponsored listings on, on Amazon sponsored product.

Onn
[02:25:55]
Everything needs to be in line with your strategy. Everything needs to be defined and out of your strategy because that’s the only way to go. If you start just throwing out and shooting to all directions, you’re not gonna achieve optimal results.

Arlen
[02:26:08]
Yeah, for sure. Sure. And you’re gonna burn a lot of cash in the burn,

Onn
[02:26:11]
A lot of cash and she brands burning a lot of cash.

Arlen
[02:26:15]
Yeah, for sure. Well, on, that’s definitely a pleasure having you. I, I’ve definitely learned a lot today on the podcast about Amazon and all these different marketplaces. And I guess the, the key takeaway today is that the barrier to, if you’re looking to promote yourself, it’s, it’s, it’s still available for any brand. If you want to get on any of these marketplaces, it’s, it’s definitely doable and you, you highlighted some great options that are out there. And it’s good to see that all of, a lot of these other huge sites are kind of following suit and creating their own marketplaces, like the best buy as well. And these other larger websites and target. And you know, I think the trend is really just going to continue as the years move on. We’re gonna see the opportunity for eCommerce sellers to broaden their reach, you know, like, you know, like never before for sure.

Onn
[02:27:07]
Right.

Arlen
[02:27:08]
Well, you know, lastly, before we let you go, I always like to kind of switch gears here so our audience can get to know you a little bit better on if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think our listeners and viewers would be interested to know about yourself.

Onn
[02:27:22]
Well, a fun fact, I’d say that one of the things that I, I strongly believe in is having a, a work life balance basically. Okay. Balancing up. One of the things that I love to do is surfing. And a few years ago I picked it up again and I went surfing I’m, I’m one of the older guys in the water at the beach sitting on my board, but I must admit that that’s just, you know, so relaxing. So one of the things that I always recommend to people find that thing that gives you that, you know, that additional sense and that additional balance and don’t give up on these things. Yeah. So that’s just something so small about me, that fun fact about me.

Arlen
[02:28:08]
Okay, great. Well, yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. Yeah. I actually talked to somebody else not too long ago. That was on the podcast. That’s really big into surfing. He’s in the Southern California area. Right. And I, I told him, yeah, I’m in Orlando and I’ve always wanted to take some surfing lessons. So at some point I wanted, I wanna do it myself. I’ve watched from a far and I’m like, all right. I, I think I’m gonna do it at one point. I, I came across that.

Onn
[02:28:29]
Yeah, you should. I mean, it’s not, you know, just, just sitting out there on the waves on your board and, and, you know, grabbing a wave too. Even if you not, you don’t have to be, you know, a top pro surfer. It just fun. A lot of fun. Yeah.

Arlen
[02:28:42]
That’s awesome. Well, well thank you for sharing that on. I definitely appreciate at that. And you know, lastly, before we do let you go, if you don’t mind letting our listeners, if you don’t mind letting our listeners know how they can get in touch with you and reach you, if they wanna pick your brain anymore about Amazon or selling

Onn
[02:28:59]
A marketplace, best ways to just come to our website, to revenue wise.com. There’s a lot of material up there. We publish a lot of content tutorials and things around that that are kind of like more zoomed in about what we’ve discussed today. And they can find a lot of information there and if they, you know, happy to come in and contact us.

Arlen
[02:29:18]
Okay, great. Well thank you on for sharing that you definitely encourage our listeners to reach out to you on thanks

Onn
[02:29:24]
For me over. It’s been great.

Arlen
[02:29:26]
No pro problem. It’s been awesome having you on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Onn
[02:29:31]
Thank you.

speaker 1
[02:29:33]
Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. 

Podcast Guest Info

Onn Manelson
Founder of RevenueWize