Why Having a Shopify or Similar Site in Addition to Amazon is Important
Many Amazon sellers don't have their own eCommerce sites, and according to Jason Boyce, this is a very risky move. Why? Because Amazon has control over their account and can suspend it or remove product listings without warning, and getting things fixed will not only be time-consuming, it will also be quite a challenge to do.
This is why Jason Boyce, CEO of Avenue Seven Media, encourages brand owners to work on building their brand name and creating a website away from Amazon and funneling their clients into that website. It’s one of the best business decisions an online entrepreneur can make and the path towards it can be incredibly rewarding.
In this episode of Sales Tax and More, Michael Fleming gets to interview Jason about the difference in selling on Amazon and Shopify, the importance of having a backup plan for your business, and why you should get excited about the upcoming Prosper Show this March 2020.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Michael introduces his guest, Jason Boyce
Jason shares his eCommerce background and how he ended up with Amazon
Why Jason started Avenue Seven Media
Why having your own website is a must for online entrepreneurs
The importance of building your brand and having a backup plan
The story of how Avenue Seven Media got its name
How to get in touch with Jason Boyce
Jason expresses his gratitude for how Sales Tax and More has helped him in his business
How to get a complimentary consultation with Mike care of Jason Boyce
What is the Prosper show?
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Jason's email: jason@avenue7media.com
Connect with Michael
Sponsor for This Episode
Sales Tax and More assists companies and their trusted advisors like CPAs with sales tax needs. They offer consulting and research, registrations, returns, and so much more. Over the years they have assisted thousands of sellers both foreign and domestic with their tax issues in the United States and in Canada.
Episode Transcript - Audio Version
[0:10] Intro: Welcome to Sales Tax and More, your go-to resource for all things state tax-related. Now, here's your host, Michael Fleming.
[0:26] Mike: Hi, Mike Fleming here founder, of Sales Tax and More and today's host of the Sales Tax and More Podcast where we talk about everyone's favorite topic, which is of course, sales tax. And while sales tax is everyone's favorite subject, we've decided that we're going to begin having guests, who are experts in their field, who can speak about subjects that we believe are of interest to our audience. And today we've got Jason Boyce and he's the founder of Avenue 7 Media, which is a product marketing agency. And Jason has extensive experience as an e-commerce retailer. He started back 18 years ago now, it was 2002. He's sold on multiple platforms, including Amazon. And over these last 18 years, he's built quite a number of brands. Very, very successful. He's been an Amazon 200 seller, a top 1000 e-commerce seller, according to Internet Retailer Magazine, and he's done this all by using a seven-step process. And, you know, I'm assuming that's how we've got the name Avenue 7 Media, Jason, but you know, we'll let you tell us that. But in 2014, you know, Jason is out there speaking to different you know, groups across the country, that's where we actually met. But at that point, he realized that he had a passion for helping people, for coaching people, mentoring people. And that's how Avenue 7 Media actually came about. So welcome, Jason.
[1:59] Jason: Thank you. Mike, it's always great to see you and thanks for that very warm introduction. I really appreciate it.
[2:04] Mike: Okay, thanks. You know, you were a great Amazon retailer and a lot of what Avenue 7 Media does has to do with Amazon, but because of the marketplace seller statutes out there, most Amazon sellers don't have any exposure to sales tax anymore. And by June, they'll probably have none, if they're only selling on a marketplace. But Shopify, that's not a marketplace. And, you know, while we may not have very many Amazon sellers out there, or have accountants who have Amazon sellers, lots and lots of Shopify sellers and accountants who have clients who sell on Shopify. We do a lot of work with Shopify sellers. So yeah, we've been speaking recently and you told me you're doing a lot of things in the Shopify market.
[3:06] Jason: We are, yeah.
[3:07] Mike: You want to share?
[3:08] Jason: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, yeah, yeah, you're right longtime seller. Actually, we were doing e-commerce direct to the consumer for basketball hoops. Basketball hoops was our first product line all the way back in 2002, and this, I'm aging, I'm dating myself here. So the first website we had was superduperhoops.com. And we drop shipped basketball hoops. We listed them for sale on a website. We paid a nickel a click, Mike, to drive traffic to a website called superduperhoops.com from a company called Overture. Overture, not a lot of people know this, but Overture was the precursor to AdWords. It was the first model of any real success that had a pay per click advertising model, and it later got bought by Yahoo. Yahoo then licensed the technology to Google. Google turned it into Google AdWords, and the rest was history. And so that's how long I've been doing this. I've been doing this so long that you know, pay per click wasn't even really a thing in a meaningful way with Google and Yahoo. And then we got a phone call from Amazon saying - Hey, we want you to sell your basketball hoops on Amazon. And we said - What are you talking about? You guys sell books, and DVDs, and media? That's how long ago this was, right?
[4:28] Mike: Absolutely. And you say you've been doing this 18 years. I'm looking at you, and I'm saying what? He started doing this when he's nine years old?
[4:33] Jason: Ah, you're kind. You’re super kind. Yeah, look, I put those filters on our zoom call, right, so that's why I look a little younger than I am. But yeah, it was, it was a lot of fun. And we started, we were one of two of the first sellers on Amazon selling in the sports and outdoor category. There was one guy he picked up a phone and called us and asked us to sell on Amazon, and that's how long I've been doing this. And we had, you know, obviously, we had a lot of success on Amazon. Made a lot of mistakes, learn from them. And you know, to your point, I learned, you know, several years ago, when I had the good fortune of being able to speak at shows like Internet Retailer, like we've done together, like we did last year, and The Prosper Show. You know, as often happens when you speak at one of those shows, people come up afterwards and say - Hey, you know, I really enjoyed your talk, and can you answer this question? And I would say - Oh, yeah, I had that problem like three years ago, try this, or I had that problem last month, try that. And it just, it was like, hit me like a thunderbolt that I really enjoyed helping others more than, you know, managing my own inventory. And so, I started Avenue 7 Media, pushing almost two years now, even though I've been helping other sellers for much longer than that. And we launched it as an Amazon fully managed service business and Amazon marketing agency. But what I noticed, Mike, was a lot of folks, I had a lot of inventors. I had a lot of folks with a brand new startup brand and they're plan was to launch on Amazon first. Because that's where the eyeballs are. Right? Amazon has half of the online market share in the United States, half a billion products listed it, you know, it basically won the e-commerce game. And, and so what I noticed after working with some of the sellers, we'd get them launched on Amazon and then, and then there was nothing else. There's no website or anything, I would say - Hey, have you thought about having your own website? And they say - well, why do I want to do that? Because, you know, Amazon handles my fulfillment and all this and I said - Well, you know, Amazon, if it hasn't happened yet, and it will, Amazon can suspend your account. Amazon can remove your listing from your number one selling item without notice. And then even though you give them a perfectly reasonable rational answer for why your product should be relisted, with backing evidence, they'll say - Sorry, too bad, so sad. So I said, You've got to have an e-commerce site. And then, the other thing that I share with a lot of our clients that we've done Shopify sites for, and big commerce sites for is, there was a point in my previous business where we stopped pay per click advertising, because remember that click click click when I started, it was like $5 a click, and it just wasn't profitable. And so we stopped paying to drive traffic to our website. But we were getting, you know, anywhere from 10,000 visits to 20,000 visits in a given month, unique visitors, and half of that traffic was coming from people typing in our company name, which, as you remember, was hard to say and hard to spell. And we weren't paying for any advertising. So we're like, wait a minute, we're getting a lot of traffic from people. Where are they finding out about us? And it was long before I started speaking at events and you know, been in the press and all that stuff. So what we sort of surmised was people were seeing our products for sale, seeing our seller account, which was our, our, you know, website name, dazadi - D, A, Z, A, D, I, right? It's hard to say hard to spell.
[7:57] Mike: Absolutely.
[7:58] Jason: And um, you know, they were typing in the search bar and coming to our website. So then we started to employ, you know, we do an email modal, like a pop up that said, you know, the bounce rate was really high. So then we created an email modal on the homepage. So people would type in, they would, they would have this great offer, we would offer them 10% off if they enter their email and purchase right now. And so that incentivize them, once they got to the website, to stay there. And then, Amazon became a customer acquisition channel for us because when someone buys on our own website, you own that customer. And you know better than anybody, if you get the sale on Amazon, that's not your customer. And, and it's near impossible to make them your customers if they don't come to your site. So that's why we recommend it.
[8:45] Mike: Yeah, and Amazon, you know, they’re so big, if you're going to be an e-commerce retailer, you really have to have a presence on Amazon. But there's, every seller I've ever talked to, has that love-hate relationship. And there are all sorts of stories like those that you're meantioning, where Amazon is shutting down either permanently or temporarily and, you know, sometimes it's for good reason, sometimes it's for no reason at all, sometimes it’s a mistaken identity. I mean, all sorts of horror stories out there. So yeah, yeah, this sounds like a, you know, a great way to have a backup plan.
[9:20] Jason: You have to. Yeah, you really have to have a backup plan. And, and so, you know, we, we recommend, here's another thing about Amazon. In fact, I just read this morning in New York Times article about all these weird names. It's like XYZ brand, or PDQ brand, or all these odd names, and you know, the Chinese factories are spinning up these brands, filing a trademark for a nonsensical name, and then using that to have brand registry on Amazon. So it is possible to have a no name, weird brand, not to build a brand, but I always recommend, especially if you're a US seller, you've got to build a brand. So you have to tell your story, you have to have a brand that makes sense, because having such one and doing so, in telling your story in a meaningful way on your own website as well as on Amazon is going to differentiate you from the China, sort of, knockoff stuff that gets flooded into the Amazon market and online. And, and so you know, it's sort of like the moat you’re building your brand, and having your own website and, and doing you know, these are the things that I recommend, Mike. We build the website, we have, you know, by then, and I, I'm not a brand builder, but I recommend to outside service providers who can take a company's idea, their story, turn it into poetry into a visual brand and create that brand deck, right. Then we take that brand deck, we'll build a Shopify website. We also refer out search engine optimization, or SEO, is still very relevant. We refer out, have some coders do the SEO for a website. But here's the thing. Having a content strategy, you have a great content strategy for your business. I see your blog posts and your posts on LinkedIn all the time. Having a content strategy to talk about the brand, talk about the customer, and the customer’s needs is really useful. But one of the still, to this day, the most effective, least sexy marketing tools once you have your website is email marketing. And everyone's like, wait, email marketing is dead. No, it is not dead. And again, you capture that customer email from the email mode, or you get them when you get a sale on your Shopify site. That customer is now yours. And if you can offer them, you know, email sequences and relevant content two or three times a month, you hold on to that customer and they'll come back and buy from you again. And now, you know, and I've also gone through a sale process or two, right so, if you have email contacts from your website, that you have developed, and that number is growing, and the number of sales that you're getting from each email is large, your business is valued at a much higher rate than if you're just an Amazon business. So, a lot of the entrepreneurs I talk to, they don't want to be around five years now they, want to build this thing up, and they want to sell it. So having both the Shopify or big commerce website, and Amazon presence really increases valuations significantly when you go to the exit.
[12:30] Mike: Yeah, yeah. Because if you're looking for the future, who knows? I mean, Amazon is consolidating, consolidating, who knows what their business model is going to look like, you know, five years down the road. So you have these alternatives you got more control and in you know, a good email database, where people have opted in, and they've been buying from you, that in and of itself, creates value. So yeah, put that together with the whale, whale site, the website. Yeah, English.
[12:59] Jason: Well, you're lucky if it's a whale site. It’s whale, it’s huge.
[13:05] Mike: Absolutely. So, alright, I love what I'm hearing. So, how do people get ahold of you? How do people you know, reach out and, oh before we go there. How’d the name for Avenue 7 Media come?
[13:21] Jason: Oh right, yeah, okay so look, I have to admit my wife helped me come up with a name. Seven is her lucky number, like a lot of people. And so we just, you know, over dinner one night decided Avenue 7 was going to be it, because it sounded, you know, marketing. And then after I came up with a name, I learned that Amazon headquarters, remember we were an Amazon first business, marketing at Amazon headquarters is actually on Seventh Avenue, so sort of a lucky connection. And then, of course, you know, the seven-step method that we use to help our clients succeed is also a part of that branding story as well. I have to admit though Mike, I help my customers build great email sequences that work, and I haven't even built my own for my own business because we get, you know, from great referrals from you and friends that we've met over the years. I've got more business than I can handle and I haven't even focused on my own marketing plan. So I should, you know, eat my own dog food here, I think.
[14:17] Mike: So, if someone did want to learn more, how do they reach out? And what's that look like?
[14:23] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Well they can reach out to my website, avenue, the word spelled out, the number seven, media dot com. They can message me there. My email is Jason at Avenue, spelled out, the number seven, media dot com. I'm also on LinkedIn, you can reach out, I post content on articles that are relevant to some of the tech companies, mostly Amazon but also Shopify and others. And I'm on I'm on Twitter as well, so, you can reach out to me any of those ways and I would love to talk to you about your brand and helping you both on Amazon and on your own website.
[14:58] Mike: Okay, great. Now, we're both going to be at Prosper. I'm going to be speaking about, you know, how companies, FBA sellers in particular, what they should be doing two years post Wayfair. And we're going to introduce the concept of income tax. So I think that's going to be the next big battle for a lot of these FBAs out there.
[15:21] Jason: Oh, yeah. So I just, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there, Mike. I just want to tell you how much I appreciate when we use your services that my previous business, how helpful it was to navigate not just the sales tax, but again, the state income tax stuff. It was a nightmare for us. We thought we could do it, we thought we'd use the software and it would be so easy. It was just a bloody nightmare. And so, one of the happiest days of my life is when we sign up for your services, and you just took care of everything. So thank you for that. I will be in the crowd at the Prosper show, learning as always from you about what's the latest and greatest and how to how to succeed.
[15:59] Mike: I appreciate it. And I want to share with everyone that, generally if someone calls up and wants to do a consultation with me it's to $350 fee for a half-hour.
[16:10] Jason: Worth every penny.
[16:11] Mike: Yeah, we're, so much so the Jason is actually sponsoring and we want to thank you, Jason, for anyone who wants to meet with me in person, I'm going to be out in Vegas, I think three and a half days. So, anyone who wants to schedule a meeting while I'm there, thanks to Jason and Avenue 7 Media, it's going to be complimentary. So that's a great value and y'all can all thank Jason for that. But Jason, what, why don't you share what the Prosper show is really all about and maybe.
[16:43] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, you know, our mutual dear friend, James Thompson, is sort of the godfather of the Amazon seller. I've named him right, I’ve coined that, right, because it's apt, right, I mean, it fits. And, you know, I remember the very first show, he and I, James and I first met when he was running the sports and outdoors category. I think he was maybe our third category manager for my previous business. And, you know, he's just always been such a quality human being. Not only is he professionally proficient, but also ethical. And that's what I love about the Prosper show that he founded. I happen to be living in Seattle at the time that he was talking about starting the show, and I was like - How can I help? Because it's, it's such a need, because there are so many sellers, with so many challenges that they were facing without any real options or opportunities. And James pulled it all together. He brought people like you in the fold. He brought in sellers who had been doing it for a long time to share, and Prosper has grown into I think it's the largest show of its kind. It's certainly the first of its kind. And I think it's the best of its kind. And, you know, every year, the content is relevant, it's useful. It's helpful and again, it's, James does things the right way. One of the worst things that you can do is use black hat tactics, and you know, do things to try to trick the algorithm instead of doing the right thing. And that will not only get you suspended, but it'll also get you banned from Amazon. So, you know, you won't see any of that nonsense at the show. It's the right way to do business for the long term. You know, the way you do business, the way James does business. And you know, it's a great show. I, I'm lucky enough, you know, for many years, I was on a lot of panels at the Prosper show. So I'm going to reverse roles, and I'll be hosting a panel on business-to-business selling on the Amazon platform. It's actually one of the fastest-growing segments of Amazon Marketplace that very few people really know about. So I'm excited to learn from some really experienced sellers who've been doing that, and, again, I'll be in the audience to listen to yours as well.
[18:49] Mike: Yeah, I think that the Prosper show, probably the most impactful of all the shows out there. And I'm, and I'm amazed at how many of the large successful sellers are not only you know presenting, but they're in the audience. I mean really successful people who continue to come to prosper year after year. I've been there for the last four years to continue learning because there's always something that you can take away. And you know, with this a mutual admiration society, I'm going to be in your section also. And a lot of times when I go to these shows, you know, as a speaker, we both speak all over the place, I don't even go and sit in on any of the other sessions, but Prosper is one where I'm truly interested and I always come away with something that I can share while, you know, we're on the phone with our clients here or meeting with our clients, so I'm looking forward to seeing you and once again for being a part of Prosper.
[19:52] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny. Joe pulled me aside last year, and he said - Why are you sitting in on these? Joe Johansen is James’s partner by box expert and co-founder of the Prosper show, and he says - Why are you sitting out? I said - You know what, Joe? The show each, each presentation doesn't disappoint. I've been doing this for you know, I was pushing 18 years, 17 years last year show, I said - I always walk away with one to three actionables that I take and employ in my business. So, and, you know, I've been I don't know of anybody who's been selling longer than me, 2003. And so I always get something. It's really to your point. It's really valuable. I look forward to seeing you as well.
[20:29] Mike: Okay. Well, thank you very much, Jason, we appreciate you being on the podcast here, and I look forward to having you back.
[20:36] Jason: My pleasure. Thank you, Mike.
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