Is eCommerce Harder, And Is It Still Worth Doing In 2022? – 283
In episode 283 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Bradley discuss:
- 02:00 – Has The eCommerce Opportunity Passed For Other People?
- 03:00 – Bradley’s Backstory And How He Got Started In eCommerce
- 05:00 – Tim Got Started In eCommerce Accidentally
- 07:00 – How Marketplaces Became A Tremendous Opportunity
- 10:30 – Bradley’s Business Partner Got Kidnapped In China
- 11:30 – Making $200,000 On Hoverboards
- 13:00 – Big Corporations Couldn’t Keep Up Back Then
- 15:00 – Is It Easier Now That We Have Tools To Sell On Amazon?
- 16:30 – The Landscape Of eCommerce Selling Has Radically Changed
- 18:30 – Thing Changed When The Chinese Sellers Came In
- 21:00 – The Supply Chain Makes You Or Breaks You In eCommerce
- 24:20 – eCommerce Is Difficult But Why Is It Still A Big Opportunity
- 26:00 – Project X Helped New Sellers Crush It On Amazon
- 28:30 – eCommerce Now Is The World Of Aggregators
- 32:00 – Building Brands Is The Way To Success
- 33:30 – Join Tim And Bradley At The Helium 10 Prosper Show Social
- 35:00 – How Tim And Bradley Met For The First Time
Transcript
Tim Jordan:
We know that over the past few years e-commerce has changed a lot, but we have to ask ourselves, is it actually better or worse? Is it easier or harder? In this episode, I bring in Bradley Sutton from Helium 10, and we’re basically gonna discuss this question is e-commerce harder, and is it still worth doing? It’s gonna be a great episode listen to the end. And here we go.
Tim Jordan:
Hi. I’m Tim Jordan and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’Re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.
Tim Jordan:
Hey everybody. This is Tim Jordan, your host of the AM/PM podcast. In this episode, I have my good friend Bradley Sutton from Helium 10. Most of which you know, or most of you would know, I would say, is that the right wording? And Bradley is the host of the Serious Sellers Podcast he is, what’s your actual title? The chief evangelist?
Bradley Sutton:
Yes. Chief evangelist spreading the gospel of Helium 10 and Director of Training.
Tim Jordan:
Not just of Helium 10, but of selling online in general. And you know, Amazon is like been the gateway drug for a lot of us. I think it’s safe to say that both mine and Bradley’s lives were substantially changed by Amazon. We never expected to be sitting together in an off, we never would’ve met each other and definitely wouldn’t be sitting in a tech company’s office. Like, software is the farthest thing from my expected line of career that I could possibly imagine. Here I am sitting in the office of a tech company putting together a podcast, which is super strange to me. So e-commerce has changed a lot of people’s lives for better in the whole community. We see massive wealth gain. We see massive freedom gained, all those great things, but a lot of people right now say, well that’s because you got into the golden years, like you were in, in 2012 or 2015 or 2017 when e-commerce, especially in marketplaces became very, I won’t say mainstream, but like more accepted and more people were involved in it, cuz it was a lot easier than a lot of other business startups. Right?
Tim Jordan:
So that’s the question that we wanna ask is like Bradley and I got lucky, we’ll say that, like I think that’s a fair statement to make. Right. Would you agree?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. Okay. So we got lucky, but has that opportunity passed for other people? Like, has that ship sailed? Are we preaching this gospel of e-com entrepreneurship and it’s too late for everybody else? That’s the question we’re gonna talk about? So Bradley, I think that it’s been like two years since you’ve been on AM/PM podcast, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. You weren’t, it was Manny. He was still the host.
Tim Jordan:
It was Manny when Manny was still the host. So Bradley, give us like the five minute history of like how you got started in Amazon and E-Commerce.
Bradley Sutton:
I was I’ve been in e-commerce for a long time. Indirectly, you know, it was kind of like in the first fast and furious movie, just to kind of date myself there. I was about 20 years old.
Tim Jordan:
Monica.
Bradley Sutton:
The movies have kind of declined since the quality, but that’s a side story, but yeah, I was all into it and I was trying to like hook up my car and I had a Korean car at the time. It was a Hyundai now, now nowadays like Hyundai and Kia. They’re like, you know, top of the line. Great. Those days you had a Hyundai or Kia, you’re laughing stock of your neighborhood. You know, everybody wanted a Honda, you
Tim Jordan:
Didn’t have a civic. Right?
Bradley Sutton:
So it was hard to find parts. I wanted to do those kind of things I saw on the fast and furious movie for my car. And so in Korea, the, in Korea Hyundai and Kia that’s, that’s the Honda and Toyota of that country. So they had tons of companies that were making cool parts for those cars. And so me, I always, I think I’ve always had like an entrepreneurial mindset. So I saw a company was making a lot of stuff and they were trying to sell in the USA. I’m like, Hey guys, I need stuff for my car, but you guys are drop, are shipping this stuff from Korea to United States, you know, I’m ordering this. It’s gonna take me a month and a half to get there. How about we join together and start a warehouse and let me run your US operations.
Bradley Sutton:
And the guy was like, shoot, let’s do it. So I was basically, it was a .com website and I was basically running the us operations and it became a million dollar business and it was great. You know, I got all my car parts for free and that was like my became my full-time job. So I went in and out of that over the years and I was in also corporate corporate America too, which you know, wasn’t fun, but Hey, you need to, you need to feed your family right? And then so one of my old partners from that Korean company was like, Hey, we’re starting this thing. We’re gonna start importing phone cases. And we found this company in LA who has a .com. They’re a huge .com site for like phone accessories and things like that. Why don’t you come work with us as startup? Let’s see what we can do.
Bradley Sutton:
And that’s why I was like, all right, let me do it. I left corporate America. And then I was like, let’s try selling these phone cases. And they just blew up, not on their website, but that was right around the time, like 2014, 2015, that Amazon started blowing up and they didn’t know what they were doing on Amazon. And they started selling thousands of units a day of these phone cases and that we were importing contain 20 and 40 foot containers a week. You can imagine how many little phone cases fit in a 20 and 40 foot containers. That’s how much volume they were doing. So that was kinda like my first exposure to Amazon right there, back in 2015.
Tim Jordan:
So you were essentially first to the market, right? Like, especially with the car parts, even the phone case stuff nobody’s doing it. And then my insurance was completely by accident. I was working as a firefighter and had a side hustle with the state department and I had incredible wholesale price lists. In fact, this is no joke yesterday. I was in Vegas and I met a lady who worked for Amazon in the brand protection department of automotive. She remembers me. So from 2015, 16, I was selling wholesale automotive parts under map pricing under a hidden company name and sellers couldn’t or I’m sorry, the actual manufacturer couldn’t find me. And she remembers me cause I was the largest seller of oil and fuel and water filters on Amazon for like two years crazy. But anyways I got into an accident and eventually I got into private label and built brands.
Tim Jordan:
And even when I was like doing the private label thing, I got lucky because it was easy. Nobody else was going to China and meeting manufacturers. It was great. So, you know, we both got sucked into this world then of content and working in the industry to help educate other people. And we get this great network and like, everything just keeps accelerating for us. But as Bradley and I sit around and we think about like the world of Amazon or the world of eCommerce, like at least myself, I have to ask myself like, am I pedaling snake oil? Like, is this all a bunch of dog crap? Because I say, oh, this is great. It’s changed my life. I made so much money, yada, yada, but like, can people do it now? And that’s the question that we’re gonna ask. So let’s talk about some of the reasons Bradley, like why it was easy for us. Like, yeah, we got lucky in timing, but the timing was based on some parameters that existed in the world of e-commerce specifically marketplace selling that aligned with like our timing. So one of those things is marketplace, right? So talk briefly about like, why marketplace, so Amazon, eBay, Walmart, whatever it is created, a big change in the ease of which we are in a business compared to a .com site like direct consumer. Yeah. When marketplaces became really, really big for third party sellers, like why was that such a tremendous opportunity for us?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, that was one of the, that’s the biggest, one of the biggest struggles for anybody who’s trying to start on.com is like, well, I make a.com. That doesn’t mean that I just have instantly tons of traffic. You know, how do you get people to even know you have that dot well, you know, are you big in social media? Are you big on message boards? You know, do you have some big kind of advertising campaign where you can bring the eyeballs to your market? That that was what, how Amazon was kind of the hashtag game changer was they they’re bringing all the customers to you. You just have to have your kind of offering up and, and you don’t have to worry about bringing in outside traffic. You just gotta be visible on Amazon. If you figure that part out on it, which in those days it was pretty easy. Just throw something up, brand new product. And you’re you’re on page one. Cause there’s, there’s nobody else, you know, selling it. That was what really changed the game for people who were into e-commerce.
Tim Jordan:
And Amazon’s been blamed for shutting down the shopping mall industry, like every city in the world that had a big shopping mall. Like those shopping malls are closing, cuz people shop going shopping malls. But it’s funny to think like Amazon is a shopping mall, right? If I walked into the shopping mall, I walked into one building and there was a lot of different brands, a lot of different stores, a lot of different options. So just because my feet were on the ground in that store, I would walk past or in that mall I would walk past the store. I didn’t know, existed. And I’d go check it out or I’d see something on a man in and go, okay, those pants would make my butt look. Right. Actually I’ve never said that in my life, but sorry, I say dumb stuff when Bradley’s around, but Amazon essentially did that same model, but online, like you show up to Amazon and we’ll show you different products.
Tim Jordan:
Like you’ve got the foot traffic there. So it was kind of like for us, what, putting a little small KIOSK store front, would’ve been in a shopping mall 20 years ago, which I think is like a weird, a weird analogy. But it’s interesting. So marketplace has definitely made a big difference. Now when the traffic came to marketplaces specifically Amazon, a hundred thousand people a year were dropping an Amazon. There weren’t a lot of people selling on it. You know, when I think back to like 2012 or I really wasn’t even in Amazon then, but people talk about like I was selling used textbooks. Well then if you look at the history of Amazon, they started accepting third party sellers for everything, but people didn’t know it. So there was that golden era of like 2000 14, 15, 16, when people were coming to Amazon, Amazon was allowing third party sellers for nobody knew it yet. Right. And that’s when like you could sell anything. Do you remember that time as I do, as like being very low competition, you could literally list anything and people, people were buying it you’d rank instantly.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean that example, I just gave phone cases. I mean, that’s cliche nowadays, right? But it was literally, there was no, no one out there. And we, this company didn’t know anything they were doing, you know, they didn’t out search mine, buy. They didn’t know about how the Amazon algorithm works. Most of it was even fulfilled by merchant. They weren’t even taking advantage of FBA and just by throwing it up there. And the one unique thing they did is they’re one of the first ones on Amazon to do this is they were doing 3d imaging for their phone cases. And nobody was doing that on the listing photos, on the listing photos. Yeah. And so it just became really popular and yeah, you just threw it up there and they were just making tons of money and they were a perfect example of why it, the argument could be made.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes. Is it more difficult now because now, you know, that that phone case business is literally dead, you know, went from, it, went from, you know, they were the top on Amazon to now they complete went outta business. And one of the many examples with that company that shows that things are technically harder. Here’s something, you know, you know, so much about my back story, but here’s something I don’t think, you know, and I’m kind of throwing myself under the bus for this, but I really didn’t know much about Amazon in those days. I was mainly the logistics and sales guy. I would go out pound the pavement and I would also, you know, send everything to FBA and sticker everything and stuff. But there was a time where the phone case business would get a little bit hard and we needed to make money.
Bradley Sutton:
And one of the reasons was, and this actually, everybody knows about, you might not know about it, but one of our business partners got kidnapped in China by the mafia. And I had to sign like my life away, basically as a ransom to get ’em out. Like I would pay them $75,000 over this, you know, certain amount of time which I didn’t have yet. We were just living paycheck to paycheck. And so one of the, we were like, how are we gonna make this money? You know, the phone case businesses going down, you know, I had to literally go to like the mafia that Chinese mafia had a lawyer in LA based in LA. And they made me go to the office and sign like, Hey you know, I have to, I’m gonna pay this and then it wasn’t in the contract, but it’s kind of like, we know where you live.
Bradley Sutton:
If you don’t pay it kind of thing in your family. I did an episode about this a couple years ago, but anyways, so we’re like, well, how are we gonna make this money? And so one of the, this was around the time that hoverboards were going really popular, right? And we’re, they were going for like four or five, $600. And we found this factory that was making them into drop ship and stuff. And we were only paying like less than a hundred. So we’re like, Hey, this is a great way to do money. But like, we can’t make our own listing. And again, I didn’t know much about Amazon in those days. So, you know, you guys all hate me, but we’re like, well, I found these, these listings where this is the exact same one. So why don’t we just put our listing right there and just undercut them.
Bradley Sutton:
And, and in about one month we did about $200,000. For these hover boards on somebody else’s listing, which now, as we all know, this is called hijacking. I didn’t know what was going on and check this out. You don’t know this, recently I found out who that was and it’s our, one of our mutual contacts. And he doesn’t know that was me. And it’s so weird cuz now we’re kind of like friends and I know who I was looking at it. And then I was like, wait a minute. This was his wife who was sending me these cease and desist letters. Cause I remember her name now that I’m like, I know this person too. I’m like, oh my goodness. These are the people who we were screwing over for a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Tim Jordan:
I think we should out you right now.
Bradley Sutton:
We’re probably, we’re not gonna out. We’re not gonna mention the name here. Hopefully he doesn’t listen to this podcast. But I recently realized last year who it was. I didn’t, I haven’t told him or anything because that’s terrible. You know that I feel bad. But again, the point of this is the reason I’m doing this is not to out me, but it’s because in those days you could almost do anything. Like, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. And I made $200,000 on hover boards just by hijacking a listing. And those days, you know, thankfully are gone. But yeah,
Tim Jordan:
We’re gonna discuss this off camera. We’re we’re gonna have an intervention when we sit with him in Vegas in a week.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s right. We’re gonna see, we’re
Tim Jordan:
Anyways. Yeah. You keep away with anything for sure. It made it easy. Another thing that made it easy is corporations couldn’t keep up. Yeah. Like I was at a show IRC, was it IRC?
Tim Jordan:
IRC in Chicago. Yeah. Chicago and I was having lunch at just a random table, like in the cafeteria. And some guy was sitting next to me. I was talking about Amazon and I just kept talking about ranking and all this stuff. This is like 2018. And after like 45 minutes of just me rambling, this guy, hands me, his business card. He says, I don’t wanna offer you job. So what kind job I look and his card said, Mars corporation, like Mars corporation owns more food brands almost than Heinz. And Mars is the largest manufacturer of pet food in the country. They own Pedigree, Purina, like everybody right? And he runs the pet food division. And he told me, he’s like, we have hired like seven Harvard MBAs to run our Amazon storefront. And they have no clue what they’re doing. He’s like, I’ll give you, he was like, I’ll give you a six figure salary. You can work from home, teach my guys how to do this. And I was amazed. Like I’ve never been offered a six figure salary before. This is like the VP of Marge corporation who runs their entire pet product line and of course I didn’t take the position, but it made me realize like these big corporations couldn’t keep up. So there was a time where we were so fast and so nimble. And we learned so much and we were so flexible that like the big corporations that normally could compete with us, couldn’t now that’s changed a lot. And that has changed the landscape of especially marketplace e-commerce because now they have the education and they can definitely outspend us. They can out budget us. They can out invest us, make things harder. But that was big. Also back then, there were not a lot of tools. Yeah. That made it easy to sell. Now this sounds counterintuitive. It’s like, you would think that one of the things that would make selling on Amazon or selling e-commerce easy is because there are more tools, but before we started recording, you said I actually, it was easier to sell before there was a ton of tools. Yeah. Right. Can you explain that?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. So it’s like, you know, it was kind of level playing field, you know, for everybody and you can get lucky, you know? So, in my opinion, it’s definitely in infinitely more difficult to get lucky on Amazon nowadays just by chance. But in those days it was. And it’s because, you know, people didn’t have tools and different insights. So I guess, you know, like you said, the counter argument almost could be made. Is it easier to sell on Amazon now? Because we have tools like Helium 10 that give you so much insight. I’m not sure because of the, there’s so many people who have it, but it’s like, it’s easier to have metrics and know exactly what you’re doing.
Tim Jordan:
So I would say that the tools, the increase in tools made selling on Amazon easier. Yes. But it made the competition fiercer because anybody could replicate what we were doing. And everybody had the same data and the insights and all those things. So it was easier to dominate before the tools all existed. Now it’s easier to figure out how to do what we need to do, but because it’s easier, there’s a lot more people involved. Yep. Yep. All right. So the things I’m looking at, my notes, things that made it easy there was the dawn of the marketplace, much less competition, corporations couldn’t keep up. We could get away with murder nearly, right. I should probably shouldn’t use that in context of the Chinese mafia, but yeah, we get away with a lot of stuff and because there weren’t a lot of tools and solutions and guidance.
Tim Jordan:
Not a lot of people were easily able to figure out what we were figuring out. Now it’s different. Like when we started the episode, we said, Hey, it’s different. Now we will admit like 2022, the landscape of eCommerce selling specific marketplace selling is like radically different. And it is more difficult. Now when we get a little further in the episode, we’re gonna tell why I believe that the difficulty is an advantage to us. Sure. But we have to admit like it’s more difficult. Yeah. The first thing that creates difficulty for us now that things change is there are a lot more sellers and a lot more competition, right? Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. A lot more sellers, a lot more competition and things are getting filled up where, where, you know, I use the example of phone cases, collagen peptides, you know, garlic presses. It’s like, it’s not like, okay, that those will make a comeback later. No, that’s done. You know, those guys are established. You’re not gonna break into that market. But to me, the flip side is like product research is a little bit more easy because now you would’ve had to like look into finding the next fidget spinner at the right time. But now tools, and I’m not just talking about Helium 10 or Amazon tools, I’m talking about, you know, Etsy, Pinterest. Now you can actually Google analytics,
Tim Jordan:
Google Analytics
Bradley Sutton:
And all these ways you can kind of like, you don’t have to luck into a niche anymore. You can actually do filters and different things where you can say, oh, there’s a trend here that this is blowing up on TikTok. This is about to blow up on Amazon. So that, that sense it’s a little bit easier, but yeah, the competition is just, you know, crazy. And, and not everybody’s using these tools though. Like, you know, you look at the Chrome extension, it says helium 10 has 700,000 active Chrome members. I mean, how many Amazon sellers are there in the world that that’s a that’s that’s for the world, 700,000 active people using Helium 10 chrome, how many millions or tens of millions of sellers are there. So it’s not like everybody’s using the tools right now.
Tim Jordan:
Not the same tools at least. Yeah. I remember when we have to talk about Chinese sellers. Sure. Right. I remember when we first started selling and there were very, a few Chinese sellers and we talked about how bad it was when the Chinese sellers showed up. It’s like, oh man competitions went through the roof. The manufacturers we were using are selling directly. Like, this is a problem it’s making these harder. And then after a while we realized, Hey, this is actually advantage to us. Cause even though the Chinese sellers are on there, like we’re better marketers, right? Like we understand the system better. And then that continued to evolve where now Chinese sellers are some of the best in the industry. Right? Like you can’t tell the difference between a Chinese built listing and you know, US built listing or European built listing, like things just keep getting harder and harder and harder.
Tim Jordan:
Another thing that adds complexity is to grow. You have to complicate your business. And what I mean by that is even if I have a brand that I was selling for three years and it’s made me a lot of money, if I’m going to continue to compete, I have to expand that thing. I have to expand to different marketplaces, expand to different countries like selling a product. It used to be, I could sell anything in Canada. It was easy. I could ship all sorts of crap to Europe. And it was easy. Brexit happened. People started tracking us down for VAT, sales tax happened, like, remember in the US, like all 50 states you had to register for sale tax. There are a lot more restrictions you used to be able to sell all sorts of crap. Now there’s category restrictions, pesticide, crap, and topicals. So that’s definitely.
Bradley Sutton:
Reviews. That’s, that’s the number one thing. And now, you know, back in the day, not only was it allowed, it was actually encouraged to incentivize reviews and Amazon even had that thing where yeah, you go ahead and give this for free. And then we’ll go ahead and just put a little badge on here that says it was in exchange. And, and now, you know, it’s, it’s harder to get, you know, real verified, written reviews and,
Tim Jordan:
And that’s not just on Amazon, that’s any marketplace, any
Bradley Sutton:
Marketplace. I mean, the FTC is cracking out so much on, on fake reviews, but going back to, you mentioned China to me that that opens up another thing. Like when I was when I was doing that car part business online 20 years ago, we had a factory in China and we were paying employees, which is pretty decent at the time between like $30 and $90 a month or something like that full time. No, they were, they were living at the factory and we provide food and stuff like that. But if you try and go to China now at factories, I mean, it’s sometimes 10x, you know, the salary. So the profit margins back then was so big because you were just getting this stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
Have gone up from nothing, you know? And, and now shipping has gone up, you know, cost
Tim Jordan:
Tariffs,
Bradley Sutton:
Tariffs, all this stuff has gone up. So that makes it a little bit more difficult too.
Tim Jordan:
The thing about China, I call it a paradox of Porsches on dirt roads. And what I mean is I would go into China in the past. You were right before COVID and I would go to these small town, not, not really small, but like very suburban towns, right? Like rural towns, like way out in the middle of nowhere, nothing but dirt roads. And you pull up to this, this dingy and there’s like 20 Porsches in the parking lot. Right. And I’m like, how does, and it’s cuz the factories are making so much money that we need them more than they need us. And it used to be backwards even eight years ago, like negotiating lower prices, better quality, lower MOQs. And that supply chain makes or breaks you in e-commerce right? Like I don’t care how good you are at ranking and hacking and track.
Tim Jordan:
If you don’t have a good product at a price that you can put margins on, it doesn’t matter. Another thing that’s happened that substantially increased our difficulty in creating e-commerce businesses is now those big businesses know what they’re doing. The Mars of the world, the Nikes of the world. Like they are coming after us. I have a buddy who, well they’re coming after the market share not specifically us. I remember I had a buddy Joe Roosterfin who had a board game company called RoosterFin toys or RoosterFin games. And he started having some success on Amazon, a lot of success and then like Mattel or Hasbro or someone decided, okay, we don’t want him here. And they had the budget where they could literally of just outbid him for every keyword he was attacking. It’s like the way he described it, he’s like this giant billion dollar company just turned their cannon right at me and started firing.
Tim Jordan:
He’s like, there is nothing I could do about it right now before big corporations marketplaces. They didn’t know how to do that. They didn’t understand how to stop that. But now they do also, I think that we’re starting to see a little bit of difficulty in e-commerce compared to six, seven years ago because different brands or different product types work better on either a marketplace or B to C. Right? So some things that may have done really well on Amazon originally to competitive, you have to go build a Shopify site. Some of the things that originally were on Facebook marketplace or Etsy, or Shopify now are better on, on, are you seeing that like this, like this settling of the masses where like some things fit better into different niches or different, not different niches, but different channels, different sales platforms. And it is becoming more difficult because we have to figure out where it best fits into the global e-comm system.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. I mean, I haven’t cracked that code because it’s, sometimes you can do things and you can kind of have some kind of predictability, but it’s kind of hard, you know, like you said, it can go both ways. Some things are like better in brick and mortar. Some things are better on Facebook. Some things are better on Etsy and then sometimes it goes back and forth with where, where it’s better at, you know, for a while there was some stuff we were actually believe it or not selling way more on eBay than on Amazon, even in this day. And then there was a, you know, I talked to this company, Kreassive out of LA and they do a lot of like furniture and desks and things like that. They’re like 5x on Wayfair as opposed to Amazon. And so, you know, sometimes we get this mindset. Everything is better, no matter what on Amazon. And that’s not, I mean, maybe it was a case, you know, in the glory days or something, but nowadays you, you gotta kind of like make sure that you’re, you’re checking these other marketplaces out because you could be leaving money on the table if you’re just trying to do only Amazon.
Tim Jordan:
Yeah. We could sell anything. I tell people, I used to be able to, like, if I wanted to, I could put a cat turd and a brown paper bag and sell it on Amazon for whatever I wanted. And now like, it is so difficult to figure out this. So I think we’d agree that like, it is way harder now than it was back then. Yeah. Like, and we understand some of the reasons why it was easier than some of the reasons why the complexity has gone up, but I assume that you feel like I do strongly that like e-commerce is still an amazing opportunity. So we have a lot of people that listen to this podcast, tens of thousands of people actually that like are either eCommerce sellers trying to scale up, or they’re just entrepreneurial. And they’re thinking about eCommerce or something. Like we try to keep this podcast entrepreneurial from the eyes of an eCommerce seller. Right. So if we agree that it’s harder, why do you still think it’s a good opportunity? Like break all this down now and tell me Bradley, we admit that it’s difficult, but we also could probably make the statement that we’re more excited now than we ever have. Why?
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, still you can do stuff now that you never could have done, you know, like 20 years when I was getting to the, the fast and furious scene, like we had to really pound the pavement to get people to know about us. And the only way we were successful is because we were literally the only game and, and we have monopoly on the market and we were in every Facebook group. It still took a lot of work. You could not just go in and as long as, you know, the, you know, the keywords and you know that there’s not that much competition and you can confidently say, you can go in and launch a product on Amazon and you kind of know what, you’re, what you’re probably gonna, gonna hit as far as sales go. Like, there’s, there’s nothing like that out there.
Bradley Sutton:
And, and it’s also, the fact is, is that it’s a level playing field, you know, when, when we talk about, oh yeah manufacturing costs are higher in China. Shipping now takes three or four months as before. Now there’s more competition. Well, guess what? That’s the same thing that everybody has. It’s not like somebody’s got a advantage over somebody else. So like, in my opinion, I still see, I just interviewed somebody on the podcast the other day, who she said, she learned her method of selling items, Amazon just from watching project X. That was it. She watched project X learned it. And within her first month, she, she hit like $40,000 of sales on one product, you know? And, and then now she’s scaled up. She’s now almost six figures per month.
Tim Jordan:
You think we could ask her for like a commission on that.
Bradley Sutton:
We’ve got to, like, we really messed up on that. We dropped the ball on that.
Tim Jordan:
For those of you that dunno what project X is, it’s a free case study that Bradley and I did about getting started, like finding the right product. So yeah. For any of you that feel indebted to us, maybe if you watch that we’re gonna set up a GoFundMe page. That’s gonna go to mine and Bradley’s expensive dinner fund when we’re in Vegas next week. Okay. Anything else?
Bradley Sutton:
No, that’s pretty much it, like, I just don’t know of the, any other way to like, just ramp up and take something, you know, where you don’t need to come in with like, you know, $200,000, you know, some startup fee and some huge loan. You can start with, you know, a thousand, $5000, $10,000 and you can make a decent business. It within just a couple of months, like, I don’t know of any other way to do that offline with, with as little of the pool as you can with e-com,
Tim Jordan:
It doesn’t exist. Now. I’ll also say this, I love that. It’s more difficult. I love it. Because even though it is more difficult and it is more complex, it’s not necessarily more complicated. Yeah. And the difference is complicated is like very, very difficult in the individual components, but complex just means there’s a lot of individual components and all those components can be figured out. There’s just more of ’em stacked up. And the reason I love it is because it forces us to be better. So the people that in 2015, aren’t making tons of money by accident. We don’t have to deal with them now because they can’t even get to started. Like there’s a barrier to entry. There’s a moat. Right. And yes, it kind of stinks. Cuz we have to do more work. It’s kinda like selling on Walmart. Like it’s harder to get accepted at Walmart once you’re there.
Tim Jordan:
Like you’re kind of there by yourself. So it cuts out a lot of the riff raff, right. Even though there’s more competition general, it cuts out a lot of that stuff. But it also means that it forces us to build something that’s actually valuable. Right? When you were selling the cell phone, you said that that, that business is outta business. When I was selling oil filters like that business disappeared because I ran out of my supply chain. Like I was cut off from the supplier. So even though it was easy, we were getting by, we were achieving the system and not building something as long term. I’ve mentioned a million time in this podcast, the book built to sell, right. And like built to sell the whole premises. We have to build a business. That’s sellable. Not saying we have to sell it, but like we’re able to pull ourselves out of it.
Tim Jordan:
We’re not re you know, relying on ourselves. And because it is more complex now, e-commerce we are forced to create a more mature business. Now I didn’t come from business. I don’t have an MBA. Right. I’m basically a college dropout, right? Bradley didn’t come from like a Harvard MBA, you know, background where he knew how to run a business. Like we kind of figured this out. And sometimes it’s a problem because we forget the important things. We don’t take care of our PNLs. We don’t take care of hiring the right kind of people. So because it’s more complex now it forces us to be more mature, more established. And the great thing is about e-commerce is like the stakes have never been higher for success. We all know in at least the Amazon space, the world of the aggregators, right. Five or six years ago, selling a business was almost nonexistent. A few years after that there or low multiples.
Tim Jordan:
Now people are becoming like overnight multi-millionaires from spending 18 months building up an e-commerce business. And it’s not just Amazon. It can be Shopify. It can be Walmart businesses Wayfair businesses, chewy businesses. Right. And when we look at the increase in wealth, like Bradley you and I know a lot of multimillionaires now that are dumies. Yeah, right. Like they may be, they may be clever, but they’re not actually that smarter. They’re not that educated. And they didn’t have a lot of resources. They didn’t come for money. Like we know tons of them. And it’s because e-commerce, and what’s interesting is those stakes go up constantly. I’ve got some good friends over an investment bank, global wire advisors, right. That represent Amazon well eCommerce businesses. And like they put out these crazy reports that are showing how the value of these businesses is skyrocketing.
Tim Jordan:
Right. Skyrocketing. So yes, we admit that business is harder now to get started. But I love that that barrier to entry exists, the moat exists where not everybody can do it. And if we will put in the time and effort to do it, the value and the wealth increase and all that stuff is like astronomically higher than it’s ever been. And not saying it always is too hard to do. Like Bradley said, we’ve got people that, you know, we’re instantly forty thousand in sales a month and other than six figures a month, that’ve been after a year, you know, it can’t happen. Anything else to add to that? Yeah. Kinda of their summary.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s kind of like you know, everybody always just uses the, the example of, Hey, everything is SA getting saturated, but yes. Do things get saturated? Absolutely. But every time one things gets saturated, then there’s two new things that comes on another TikTok leggings. And now there’s all these weird things that you didn’t even know existed.
Tim Jordan:
You’re actually wearing TikTok leggings right now. Those
Bradley Sutton:
Do those do make my butt look,
Tim Jordan:
You can’t see it on camera, but Bradley does have, but enhancing TikTok leggings on that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep. But from Amazon, but anyways, everybody needs that visual, I think. Yep. But you know, the point is that I cannot see it ever going, you know, the only time that am selling on Amazon is not my number one, you know, place to start a business is if one day, you know, like the government decides Amazon’s a monopoly or something they make and split apart, all these different businesses. And now it’s, you know, more difficult, but like, there’s nothing that is ever gonna, but
Tim Jordan:
There’s always gonna be another marketplace.
Bradley Sutton:
There’s always gonna be another marketplace that, so even if that happens, that’s not the end of the, that’s not the end of the world. But there’s just no replacing how we, we just talked about how difficult it is, but how easy it is to start a business, relatively speaking, when you’re comparing it to like, oh, I need to start a company in the, in the outside world, in the brick and mortar
Tim Jordan:
World world. So it’s not as easy as it was in 2015, but it’s still much easier than most business. This is exactly the benefits are much higher. There are more tools. We just have to do it the right way. So we have to be more careful, I guess, is the yeah. Would you agree with that? Like we
Bradley Sutton:
Careful. And then I, I love what you said a couple minutes ago about how it’s forcing us to get our ducks in a row. You know, like that cell phone case company, they didn’t have their ducks in row. Cause they didn’t have to just making handover money, handover, fists, and then just all disappeared. But now that we’re forced to get our ducks in a row and get everything get everything correct. Now that helps the longevity of our business and it helps us. We’re actually now building brands. Yeah. You know, as opposed to just, you know, worrying about that bottom line, we’re building brands and then that’s, those are the people who are successful. Well, those are the people who are having these seven, sometimes eight figure exits and things like that.
Tim Jordan:
So I think it’s like to say that there’s still never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because of eCommerce. And I’ve used this example before in this kind of story, but you know, when you look at the history of commerce for the past 3000 years, it was done the same way someone locally made something and sold to their local village or their community or their city. And like your ability to sell was fairly limited. Yeah. But only in the past 20 years and more so in the past 10 years, it been possible for anybody in the world with a cell phone in their pocket to sell anything to anyone in the world. Like that’s literally what’s happened right now and that’s under. So for thousands of years it was done the same way. And just in like the past 10 or 15 or 20 years has that changed and it’s escalating rapidly. So more of the story, the exits are bigger. The opportunities are bigger. There are more tools that are more resources, there’s more education. You can’t get lucky as easily, but if you take the time and you focus on this stuff, e-commerce is pretty powerful. And because it is a little more difficult, those barriers to entries exist. It is cleaning up a lot of the trash that used to bog us down. And it’s still an amazing time to be an entrepreneur. Any other final thoughts?
Bradley Sutton:
Final thoughts going back to the that commission for project X. So, okay. We’re not gonna ask our commission, but if you wanna pay us back, check out, you can actually hang out with us in person in about a week or two, depending on when you’re listening to this at the prosper show at the Helium 10 party, buy us a drink. We’re not gonna ask your commission, buy us a drink because they only give me a couple drink. Do they give you more than
Tim Jordan:
They gimme like sixty? Did they give you two
Bradley Sutton:
Two, that’s messed. There’s some favoritism going on with Helium 10 here, behind the scenes. But anyways, I need some drinks bought for me. And so does Tim h10.me/prosper2022 90’s kids like us. We will be stoked that we’ve got Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray. Seeing there, we’re gonna try to let’s bring the podcast, make it Amazon seller out of Mark McGrath here, selling some merch.
Tim Jordan:
We could sell halos hanging on the corner of the bedside bed.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Something like that. But anyways,
Tim Jordan:
What are the people listening? What did they just say? Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. We just aged ourselves with that. Yeah. Sugar Ray. Look it up you out there, but come hang out with us. But in general guys you know, I’m sure Tim would agree. Going to conferences is absolutely great. You learn so much from the conference itself. You get as much, if not more value in the networking events that are, that are before and after. So if you guys ever have a chance, even if you can’t go to the actual conference itself, find these like little networking events, you know, Tim and I, we first met. I’m not even sure if you remember. So I didn’t even realize it was him at a it was before where I was working at Helium 10, it was in Louisiana. It was something like Amazon. What was that? Amazon boost. And then somebody invited me to like, Hey, this, yayhoos got this like kind of like rooftop party in the, what do you call that special section of Bourbon street and you were there. Yeah, I was there and I didn’t know who you were, but I, I made sure to introduce myself to you because said you were the host. I was like, I gotta, thank you, huh. And then like a year left. I said, wait a minute. That was Tim Jordan. I was like, now and now we’ve been brothers from another mother for the last few years. There are people I’ve met at conferences. I’ve I I’ve kept in touch with for five years. So guys
Tim Jordan:
I did not know that’s when we met. That’s incredible. Well, you, you were
Bradley Sutton:
I’m not sure if you remember much from that
Tim Jordan:
Night from the stress, you know, being from stress. Yeah. The stress of being host. How that was that, well, there you go. There is the honest to goodness truth from Bradley and myself, we will admit that we got lucky. We will admit that e-commerce is much more complex, not complicated. It’s much harder now than it used to be, but it’s still a bigger opportunity than it’s ever been. And if you are at all entrepreneur and want to get, get something going, eCommerce is definitely needs to be a part of your bigger plan. So thank you all for listening. If you can’t see the video, if you’re watching audible, where here in the office and Helium 10 together which this is the first time we’ve both been on this podcast and it’s the first time we’ve ever done an in-person podcast together, right? Yep.
Tim Jordan:
So that’s kind of interesting. But we appreciate y’all listening. We love you supporting the podcast. If you would leave us a review, if you find any value in this, leave a review on whatever podcast platform you’re listening, whether it’s Spotify or iTunes or Google, or if you’re on the YouTube channel, give us a thumb up and leave us a comment and let you know what you think about this episode. Y’all want any other topics, let us know, leave them in the comment section. We appreciate you and we’ll see you on next week’s episode.
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