Ecomm Breakthrough

Tools and Websites 
Profasee 
ChatGPT
Ellie.com
Notion 

Books 
The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss on Amazon
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant 
The Great CEO Within

People Mentioned 
Brandon Young

Transcript:

Josh 00:00:00  Today, I'm super excited to introduce you to Chad Rubin. Chad leads prophecies operations and oversees its strategy. He often speaks about e-commerce, Amazon, and leveraging AI strategies on webinars and conferences worldwide. He is also the author of the Amazon bestseller cheaper, easier, direct. Prior to Profasee. He founded Think Crucial and co-founded Cubana and the Prosper show. He is also a father, husband, and loves coffee and tacos. So with that, Chad, welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast.

Chad 00:00:35  Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Josh 00:00:37  I want to ask you the question, Chad. You've you've gone through multiple exits. You have your own ecom brand. Why the focus on pricing and why is it so important at the end of the day?

Chad 00:00:48  Yeah. So. Well, firstly, the reason why I was focused on price was that I was trying. I'm trying. I'm still working through it. I've been working on turning around my e-commerce business. It's been deteriorated over time. Didn't get a lot of love for me as I've been building other initiatives in my life.

Chad 00:01:03  And so, you know, for me, I optimize spend and my ACOs, and I've been optimizing our conversion rate and my listings itself and the infographics on those listing pages. But the one thing that's driving the most to the bottom line is a very small lever, and it swings big doors, but it's not being swung with price. And I just couldn't understand why. Like if we have a $10,000 ad campaign, you would never leave it on. You would never leave it on optimized, you'd always be optimizing it. So why is nobody optimizing price? Because it's a it's hard to understand and it's very manual. And by the time you make the change to the price, the market shifted. So this is why I focus on it. And it's a juicy it's a delicious problem.

Josh 00:01:50  It really is. And it can provide I mean it's a huge impact to your bottom line, right? If you want to, you know, increase your bottom line, the best way to do it is just by raising your prices.

Josh 00:02:01  Says Roland Frazier, one of the previous guests that we've had on the show. One of the things that he does first, when he acquires any businesses is he simply raises prices. Because to your point, so many brands do not touch their price. They're too scared to be honest with you because they're like, well, I like sales where they're at. If I raise them, you know, 10%, 25%, I'm going to lose it. All right. And I think I actually fell in that camp prior to all of the inflationary environment that we've been in recently with Amazon continually increasing their FBA fees. You've got manufacturers increasing, you know, the cost of goods that you're purchasing from them. ACOs is going up ads. So with all of that, like our back was against the wall, although I felt like, hey, 1999 is kind of the that's the tipping point. You go over the $20 like you cross that mental bridge of $20 and something cents Since all heck is going to break loose, right? And I'm just going to be in a downward spiral, lose my market share.

Josh 00:03:08  And on the contrary, we raise the price by $5, increase the price by 25%, and still maintain we were currently the number two best seller in that entire product category. Didn't move a needle. We stayed right there. Now we've got more profit coming to the bottom line. So I want to ask you the question, Chad. Like, are you seeing the same thing with a lot of the clients that you're working with and these early users of the software, that there is more room to increase prices on Amazon, and it's not affecting organic rankings or it's not a spiral downward. Or are you seeing the opposite true of hey, really like lower your price? Yeah, you get margin compression. But man, you you shoot to the roof and you stay locked in in those top positions. What what have you seen.

Chad 00:03:57  Well, okay. So Profasee in general is about maximizing profit without sacrificing your BSR. So there's a lot of people in the Amazon space that say, just raise prices. And that's a lot of times could be reckless advice and insight, right? Because like, pricing isn't one size fits all.

Chad 00:04:14  And yes, pricing needs to change. But the question is should it go up or should it go down because you can increase price and that may offset demand and you can lower price. It may spur demand. It'll increase ...

Tools and Websites 
Sojourn Group Consulting
Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)
NARF (North American Remote Fulfillment)
Walmart Connect
Helium 10

Influential People 
Gary Vaynerchuk (Gary Vee) on LinkedIn
Steven Pope from My Amazon Guy on LinkedIn
Bradley Sutton from Helium 10 on LinkedIn 
Kevin King on LinkedIn

Events 
Sell and Scale Summit

Productivity Tool:
Slack

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Today I'm super excited to introduce you to Josh Gibson. over the past 20 years, Josh has been leading sojourn Group consulting, a company with a strong e-commerce focus. Sojourn Group consulting specializes in marketplace sales, and has evolved from being a third party seller into an agency that helps other sellers grow their marketplace presence without having to hire a full team. Their years of experience and team make their bolt on solution very simple for many companies. Outside of work, he is happily married for 15 years and is the father of four children ages eight, six, four and two. That makes him very busy at this stage in his life. He says there's little time for anything except work and family. So welcome to the podcast, Josh.

Josh Gibson 00:00:45  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Josh Hadley 00:00:46  Well, with how busy you are with a young and growing family and the business, we're excited to have you share some of your time with us. So thanks again for joining us. What else is there that you know? You're saying that Amazon eats your margin for business lunch and dinner or for breakfast? Lunch and dinner, right? So what else is there that you know, people should be paying attention to? And Amazon specifically for now that, you know, there could be a lot of, you know, marginally going out the business.

Josh Gibson 00:01:15  Yeah. I mean, it's important to to track your weights and your gyms and your categories of what products you're selling in because there's some products. Say you're selling a printer. A printer should be in an 8% category, but sometimes they'll slide into a 15% category. So you're losing that that amount of money. You don't see it unless you're tracking tracking it. Or they could dim it out wrong. Say something. They as they went through their Cuba scan, it dimmed out incorrectly. So being able to go in and update and fix those dimensions and then do do file backs on those. also trying to find better, more efficient ways to do inbound shipments. and so there's, there's tools out there that we use that can take like right now we're running a full truckload, for $400, inbound FBA, where that same truckload going, another the route could be 3 to $4000. So it's the more time you do this. And the nice thing about our team is we can sit in a bullpen and go, okay, what are you guys learning? What'd you find out? and trying to take our collective knowledge, plus being able to go to, like, this, scale and sell summit and meet other people that know more things and aggregate this information to become more valuable.

Josh Gibson 00:02:19  which, to your point is, if you're an owner operator trying to do this yourself, it becomes complicated because you don't have the resources and the ability to to learn all these things. Yeah. But to your point, it's it's the weight in gems. It is the categories. It is inbound shipments. I'm blanking on a few others, but it's really managing that protection of your bottom line. that's important. And it's also like specifically with inbound shipments is the annoying part is you can get that FBI ID cleared, they can say fully received. And we've seen with some clients ten, 12 months later, they say, actually we're five short. And if you're not going back and reordering those, even though you thought you did a good job auditing it. You can los...