Accelerating B2B Sales via Amazon with Carolyn Lowe, ROI Swift: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Sep 08, 2025

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re talking selling B2B on Amazon with Carolyn Lowe. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

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Show Notes
Marketing Smarts Summary
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***Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business*: Accelerating B2B Sales via Amazon with Carolyn Lowe, ROI Swift**

You’re very familiar with Amazon. Have you ever thought about selling on Amazon…B2B? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. In fact, Amazon can be an incredibly powerful platform for B2B sales, as well. We wanted you to hear from a pro who can help you get super tactical on Amazon, so we welcomed on Carolyn Lowe, CEO & Founder of ROI Swift. They help brands scale smarter & faster on Amazon. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

How ROI Swift came to be
Amazon B2B vs. traditional B2B sales
Setting realistic expectations for timeline and results
If Carolyn were a car, what would she be?
B2B-specific selling strategies

And as always, if you need Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

Accelerating B2B Sales via Amazon with Carolyn Lowe, ROI Swift
- [0:00] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
- [1:26] Welcome to the show, Carolyn Lowe!
- [2:47] The founding story of ROI Swift
- [3:41] Why B2B businesses (Business-to-Business) should consider selling on Amazon
- [5:02] Real-world B2B success examples
- [8:49] Amazon B2B vs. traditional B2B sales
- [12:30] How Amazon fits into an omnichannel B2B strategy
- [16:50] How Amazon Business differs from consumer Amazon
- [21:06] B2B-specific selling strategies
- [23:20] Managing inventory for dual B2C/B2B sales (Business-to-Consumer)
- [25:34] Best practices for navigating Amazon’s platform
- [30:45] Setting realistic expectation for results timeline
- [34:03] Why Amazon ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) outperforms paid search and social
- [37:47] When Amazon isn’t right for your business
- [40:11] What’s the future of Amazon and B2B?
- Quick-Fire Questions
- [43:02] What is Carolyn reading or watching?
- [44:08] Who would she most like to have dinner with?
- [44:37] If she were a car, what would she be?
- Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
- Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:03
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it. Welcome to the Strategic Counsel Podcast. I’m Anne Candido.

00:32
and I am April Martini. And today we’re gonna get a bit tactical on a topic that many consider a black box and actually it really is. And that is how to successfully sell on Amazon. Specifically we’re gonna tackle this through a B2B lens as many of you are looking for new ways to diversify your marketing and selling strategies. And even though Amazon is primarily recognized.

00:56
As a B2C commerce site, we’re going to share some really, really intriguing stats later as to why it could be powerful for B2B sales as well. Yes. And to set expectations, there is no silver bullet to gaming the Amazon algorithm. I’m sure none of you are shocked. That’s not what this episode is about. We will get tactical so you can take action immediately, as you know we like to do with every episode of the show. But this episode is about helping you determine how to strategically use this tool

01:26
in your marketing and sales effort. Right. since neither April nor I are experts in this area, we have a special guest who’s going to provide the guidance needed to do just that. And that’s Carolyn Lowe, CEO and co-founder of ROI Swift. Hey, Carolyn, do you want to introduce yourself and give everybody a bit of your story? Sure, Ann. Thanks for having me. em And yes, my background is 25 years in e-commerce. Started out at Dell.com and

01:54
the Dell.com website back in 99 when people were buying their first computer and I’m going to date myself to tell you this was before the iPhone was even around. I am clearly a dinosaur, uh we’re with you on that. And who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks? So I did that for a long time. And then once we got to be like an $8 billion division, it just stopped being fun. And we were a fortune 100.

02:19
And then I left and went to a small mom and baby company and I was their entire e-commerce department. So I ran their website, their email marketing, their Facebook ads, their Google ads. This was in 2014. And then they had this little Amazon business doing like $10,000 a month. And I said, this is a gold mine. And so I sort of flipped it around and within a year they were doing, you know, $400,000 a month on Amazon. I said, wow, I want to do this for, yeah, I want to do this for 500 more brands.

02:47
And so I left the mom and baby company, kept them as a client in 2015 and started ROI Swift. they’re one of our claim to fame acquisitions. We’ve had a bunch of folks get acquired. So I went from big corporate where, you you could hire anybody you wanted. You had an unlimited budget to, wow, these small companies have amazing products and you should have more choice than just like Pepsi or Coke because they’re the big behemoths. So.

03:13
I started the agency about 10 years ago and we’re about halfway through helping 500 brands sell successfully on Amazon. Oh, that’s fantastic. And hence the expertise that I know you guys are all craving. So I think everybody’s ears are definitely perked for this conversation. So Carolyn, let’s start with just the obvious question, which is why should those selling B2B even consider Amazon? Because it’s not one of those usual places that most B2Bs consider selling on.

03:41
Absolutely. I remember being back in like 2014, Amazon invited the top 250 women sellers. I was still working with the mom and baby company out to their headquarters. And we had a two day with all the Amazon exec leaders. And I remember them saying, we have this Amazon business. I remember they had like, oh, we have $400,000 in revenue a month or something like something tiny, right? It was a rounding error for Amazon. And now there’s more than 6 million active B2B customers. So rather than buying everything,

04:11
Office Depot or Staples or Uline, businesses are buying stuff on Amazon and it’s easy and it’s an interface you know and it’s there the next day. And this was shocking to me that 96 of the Fortune 100 companies have an Amazon business account. know, government in all 50 states uses Amazon and they have over 35 billion in sales annually on just the B2B part of Amazon.

04:37
I mean, I think that’s just a testament to how much that platform has really, really grown and really also speaks to the level of convenience that it’s not even starting, that it’s really been known for. So being able to transfer a lot of that equity that they have from a B2C standpoint over into a B2B standpoint. I I would love if you have some examples of how businesses have

05:02
are starting to use it in a way that is really helping them drive their sales of their business and how they’re using it as a incremental marketing and sales tool. Yeah, we have a great example of like, this is super unsexy, but I love unsexy. People sell unsexy products, unsexy brands all the time and they still make a lot of money. Totally. So this is a great uh fence post company. They largely make fence posts. They had a consumer market and

05:31
We said, okay, there’s a couple of things you need to do. You need to put it in a business price. It can be the same as your consumer price. And you also just need to, you know, if you’re a small business, you can get credentials for that and those will show up, but you just need to take a few steps to show up to Amazon business customers. And so the interface is slightly different, but it’s 99 % the same. So what we said was, well, okay, you’re selling to all these consumers. I think there’s some contractors who might want to buy what you’re selling, right? And these general contractor companies,

06:01
doing commercial work, they said, okay, great, we’ll do it. And now they’re selling more. It’s still 75 % of their sales as consumer, but the 25 % of their sales that’s B2B is more than they were selling in their entire account two years ago. yeah, crazy. So I would love to know what, because this is our like peak behind the curtain, right? So when you go in to make the quote unquote sale, like you just talked about,

06:31
What is the reaction? Because I think like we set up in the beginning, it’s not natural to think about Amazon being B2B. You’ve set up all the compelling stats for why and gave us that information. But talk to us about what kind of reactions you get. Are people hesitant? Are they like, well, you’re the expert, we’re going to go ahead and give it a shot. I mean, what does that look like? Oh, that’s a great question, April. So I think what happens a lot of times is people are like, okay, I’m a shampoo company, right?

06:59
you know, women’s hair products, uh, businesses aren’t buying shampoo. Yes, they are. Salons are buying shampoo. So first, once we, once we sort of present the data, they’re like, Oh, and it doesn’t cost me anything extra in it. It’s just sort of incremental, you know? And so it might only be 10 % of your sales, but it’s like 10 % of your sales. And here’s the best part. There’s way less competition on the B2B side. And then Amazon just launched.

07:27
B2B only advertising. So if we have heavy B2B customers, what we see is sometimes their average order value is eight to 10 times that of a consumer, right? They might buy 10 salon size shampoos, whereas a consumer might buy one regular size, eight ounce shampoo. So when you pay for that advertising, would you rather get a $40 sale or a $400 sale, right? And so that’s I think it’s just amazing is there’s

07:55
way less people doing sort of this B2B only, you know, because consumer sometimes isn’t as profitable because everybody’s on amazon.com. So we think that there’s a ton of opportunity. We’re seeing a ton of opportunity. look at like the return on ad spend on the consumer versus when we run just to business customers on Amazon, which they let you do now. So we do get that, Hey, but I’m not a business product.

08:20
and then you explain it to them and then you show them the numbers and then you show them how profitable it can be and they say, okay, let’s try it. Well, it’s very interesting because it’s a totally different shift in how you generally would sell B2B, especially in a product-based environment. they used to be, and there still is, this avenue of like vendor sales or quote unquote B2B sales. I’m just going to say that. And that is an industry for a lot of people too. mean, my brother-in-law, mean, he

08:49
sell the in between he is a b2b salesperson right now they do more manufacturing kind of things but that might still evolve and this platform continues to get bigger and bigger but there’s other businesses who need maybe not like hundreds of what you’re selling but they need tens of what you’re selling or any ones and twos of what you’re selling so the whole effort of going and sending up like any sort of like vendor sales because in the salon aspect there would be people who would

09:19
basically go out and sell to salons. Like that would be their job is to make those connections. It seems like it’s compressing the process, that path to purchase from a B2B standpoint and making it a whole lot more accessible. So it’s just interesting that this like middle kind of like section here or middle piece and even like the people, this middle piece may be getting a little squeeze. Is that like a reality here? And what do you have to say about that?

09:48
Yeah, no, that’s definitely the case in bigger companies, where you have a large outside sales force. I think where we’re seeing a lot of success is where people have less money or funds to do an outside sales force. And so they can’t go knock on all those doors. And so this is kind of a way to get in front of businesses without having to have a massive investment of an outside sales team.

10:14
I still think that there’s this fence post company, they still have the outside sales force and they’re doing to the trades and they’re still doing trade shows and selling through distribution. But I think this gets to a lot of these sort of smaller businesses that the outside sales forces might not be calling on regardless. Is there any cannibalization then of that? Like if we go to the fence company, right? I mean, I know you said, okay, we’re reaching kind of a different audience, but do they see a trade off? You said the

10:42
they’re making 25%, right? Which is, forget how many times of what they’re making on the consumer side, but on the other side, since they have a Salesforce, are they having any loss or is it true that that’s just upside because of the types of clients? There’s little cannibalization. know, when I was at Dell, we sort of joked because we were on QVC and if we were selling a Dell or an HP laptop, they didn’t care. They bought whatever was on QVC. So there’s definitely folks that prefer channel over brand, right? Like how many times have you said,

11:12
Well, I don’t know this brand, but it’s on Amazon, so I’m going to buy it because I trust it, right? Versus like, ooh, I don’t know. I don’t know about this seller or this retailer or whatever. So there’s definitely, I had this guy used to work with who said, if it’s not on Amazon, I don’t need it. And so if it wasn’t there, he wasn’t buying it. Well, I mean, think that’s a really good point because like we said, the channel itself is becoming and has actually been for a while pretty reputable.

11:40
There’s little things within it where we talk about the direct from China sales and makes it really hard to return things. And there’s some little nuances on there. But there is an element of being able to have something at your fingertips that makes it very, very easy for businesses who are like, I need this tomorrow or I need this the next day. And maybe I only need a couple. And I don’t want to entertain the thought of having to go in.

12:06
find a vendor or find somebody who’s going to continually want to call on me and all those sorts of things. So it definitely feels like this as a marketing channel and a sales channel is becoming a big deal. So what tends to happen though is that people tend to see success in these sorts of channels or start to rely on these channels and they start to go all in.

12:30
So maybe you could speak a little bit to how should people think about using Amazon in a B2B way compared to the other channels? What role does it play? Are there opportunities to cross-pollinate? Speak a little bit to how it fits into the marketing and the sales mix. Yeah, that’s a great point. I never recommend anybody is one channel only, You want to be omnichannel, you want to be in retail, you want to have B2B, you want to your own website sales. You really want to minimize that.

13:00
that risk of we had this one brand, luckily, you they got acquired, but they were 90 % Amazon. It was a four person company and they had a nine figure exit that had 20 SKUs. That was it. But had something happened, they were an over the counter medicine. I’ll tell you, there were so many Saturdays where our team had to go back into Amazon. Amazon would shut down a listing. We’d have to get it back up, you know, so there’s definitely that, that risk.

13:29
And so you know, especially for you know, if you’re a home product, you want to be in Home Depot, you want to be in Lowe’s, you want to be in Amazon, you want to be on your own website, you want to be in the mom and pop shops, like you just want to be everywhere where customers are. And especially with Amazon, we had this company come to us that was doing $10 million a month and Amazon shut down their entire account for review manipulation. They were like, we are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. They said we’ve been through three agencies, nobody can get our account reinstated.

13:58
and they were 80 % Amazon at the time doing $10 million a month. So within two weeks we were able to get them reinstated. But I mean, that was debilitating for their business, you know, how much revenue they lost because their account got shut down and they were so reliant on Amazon. Well, and I think that right there, like we tell everybody not to put all their eggs in one basket, right? Which feels very much like you’re in agreement on that. Can you say a little more about like,

14:28
more into what is the right mix, perhaps. I know it’s going to be based on type of client. I already can hear that coming, but just give us examples of where it does work really well, right? The horror stories and rightfully so, you know, I think we’ve covered, don’t put all your eggs in that basket, but when it goes really well, what is the right mix or where have you seen it just have tremendous success in other examples like the fence post company, however you want to take it.

14:55
Sure. So we’ve seen this a bunch with mom and baby, especially is a big category. I don’t know if we can think back to when we had little ones. You were either shopping on Amazon or you were in Target because most of the Targets had a Starbucks in it and you could buy everything you need in a Target. was like one-stop shopping. getting out of the house was tough. Yes, exactly. It’s like, okay, this is my outing for the day. And so we realized 65 to 70 % of moms, those were their two preferred channels.

15:25
And I’ll tell you, the ones that were really hard for us were retail, like the baby stores and uh Walgreens decides they want to pull your inventory at the end and charge you a half million dollars in charge backs in December at the end of the year. And I like e-commerce because you do have a little more control over your destiny. You’re not beholden to a retailer or a buyer. We’ve seen places where buyers have changed in retail and all of sudden a product gets pulled off the shelf.

15:53
So that is always scary, right? You buy all this inventory and then all gets sent back to you. And what do you do? Or it all gets discounted down to $2. So in terms of the right mix, like you said, it’s definitely by category. But if you’re 50-50 or 60 % online and a little bit less reliant in retail, obviously in food and beverage, you have to be more reliant on retail. But we’ve seen lots of food and beverage companies even still doing 30 to 40 %

16:21
their business online, even if they’re traditionally thought of as like a retail product. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the channel itself because I’m sure people have a lot of questions. when we think about Amazon business versus Amazon direct-to-consumer, tell us a little bit about how the channel is the same, how the channel is different, what is the important things for people to consider when they’re playing on the channel. Because I know just having some experience in a B2C,

16:50
context, there’s a lot of competition, even for your product that people have bought and are reselling, um that people are counterfeiting. So there’s a lot of that on the B2C standpoint, from a B2C channel standpoint. So if you could speak a little bit about how the channel is different or how it’s the same and what are the ways of being successful and what are the watchouts, and we can break that up into many different pieces.

17:20
That’s kind of like the bulk of, think, what everybody’s really looking for and looking to understand and so that can be successful in the channel. Yeah. So that’s a great question. Like, how is it similar? I think similarly, if you’re thinking about retail or other places where you’re packaging and you got to stand out on shelf. So the mom and baby company, we actually made an orange package that just really popped both online and on shelf for like a nausea drop. So what we found is that

17:50
the morning sickness category is tiny versus nausea relief or gastrointestinal stomach issues or whatever. We really found that this white package with morning sickness did one one millionth of what this orange packet of this product called stomach settle is doing. Whether it’s online or on shelf, you have to pop.

18:15
You got to get people to stop and look at your brand, especially if you’re not a household name. One thing that one of our natural oral care brands loves is that in retail, can’t really, it’s the package, that’s it. They can’t tell their story. They can’t tell how they give back to charity. And they can’t tell how they treat all these kids with like really horribly messed up teeths that’s part of their foundation. So you can’t tell your brand story in retail. So that’s one thing that they love is that

18:44
Hey, I can’t tell our story. All I can do is they can show our package and try our product. And so you really can create uh more of a connection with the customers, even on Amazon with what you can do as the content on the page and your brand store and your brand story. So I think that that’s one of the ways, like, first of all, it has to pop on both platforms. But second of all, you get so much more retail on Amazon than you do on shelf to tell your story. And so

19:13
brands we’ve seen do a really good job of building up like this brand that was over the counter medicine wasn’t, it was only in like CVS. It wasn’t even in Target or Walmart. And they were doing eight figures a year on Amazon. And so, because they could tell their story and it was incredible and it was made by a doctor and that would be impossible to do, right? On TV ads or billboard ads or

19:36
much it would cost you to do that on any other platform. I think those are some of the ways they’re similar and different. But of course, retail, you’re usually giving them 50%. Wholesale pricing, Amazon, you’re giving them 15 % for the referral fee just to be listed there when you make a sale. Plus, if you wanted to get there quickly, you have a FBA fee that’s usually 10%. And then you’ve got to spend to advertise. So the nice thing about a retail shelf, you can get discovered walking down the aisle.

20:06
And then, but online, you’ve definitely got to pay to play and Amazon now, you know, makes more on advertising than Microsoft can hope to make in a year. So they’ve gone from making all their money on referral fees to making a lot of their money on advertising. So they’re pretty soon, I think just going to be like a advertising platform. I definitely want to get back to that part because I think that part could be very interesting too when we talk about the media. But if I was going to then like fast forwarded just on the Amazon platform itself.

20:36
If I’m a B2B business selling on Amazon, how do I need to think about that differently than if I was a B2C business selling on Amazon? Yeah. So B2B, you want to focus on the values that businesses care about, right? So trust, quality. mean, obviously you want to focus on that on consumer, but how many times have you bought something from some seller you’ve never heard of? And it sounds uh like an overseas company. I’ve done that, right? I’ve bought phone cases. Oh yeah. If you’re B2B, you care that this is a

21:06
US company and they’re not a fly by night and they have a phone number and they’ve been in business. lot of our B2B businesses have been in business for 10 or 20 years. So you really want to focus on that customer trust and then it’s either a certified small business. You can get all these designations like small business, minority business, women owned, and the government has to buy 40 % from these traditionally disadvantaged businesses.

21:30
those will show up on the B2B side and people can filter on those and say, hey, I only want a woman-owned business or oh things like that. you really want to focus when you’re selling to businesses on that trust, quality, speed, know, no one wants to wait seven days. Like you said, if they need fire extinguisher tags, they’re not going to wait a week to get those. So a lot of times you really have to be on that fulfilled by Amazon in order, you know, people filter all the time on, okay, I only want stuff that I can get tomorrow.

22:00
Is that specific, like if somebody wants to go in and I’m to get really tactical and set up an account for themselves, is it just a general Amazon account or is there a specific Amazon business section that they need to go to in order to set up an account for themselves? Yeah, if you want to do it, the great thing is like they have things that you don’t have on the consumer side, like they have um

22:24
PO fields and department fields and different levels for which users can order what and how much they can order. So they have all those checks and balances in place for your business. So we have one for our business and you just Google Amazon Business account. You go, sign up. I think it’s $1.99 a year for the prime one. And then you can set up who’s all your different users, what forms of payment they can use. there’s a lot more checks and balances. Amazon can also invoice you.

22:54
So you can get invoiced versus paying on the spot, which is great to get terms, you know, if you don’t want to pay for it for 30 days. So there’s a lot more that they offer to businesses than they offer to consumers. Well, and along those similar lines in my head, I started to think about inventory, right? So in your example where these companies make these jumps and then I’m sure like, and if we go back to the shampoo example, right, different size of its commercial versus if you’re buying it yourself.

23:20
So how do businesses manage when that starts to happen or what should they be on the lookout for thinking about as they go through that process in the hopes that they make that jump on the business side, right? Yeah, no, great question. So what a lot of folks do and what we do for our clients is we have this sort of custom reporting and you can see like, okay, what’s my seven day sales trend? What’s my 30 day sales trend? We have these alerts and triggers.

23:46
went to send in more inventory. So inventory is this fine balance. The good news is the inventory is all pulled from the same place. So if a business customer orders it or a consumer, you don’t need to have separate inventory. But the good news is, is, we have these alerts set up, okay, your seven day run rates increased or your 30 day run rates increased. And so here’s how much inventory you need. And there’s that fine balance between Amazon last year started charging low inventory fees. So they used to charge you when you had too much inventory in stock.

24:14
And now they charge you when you don’t have enough and they can’t get it to the customer fast enough. So it’s this fine balance of, want to minimize my fees because I don’t want to have too much inventory and I don’t have too little inventory. Either way, Amazon gets you coming and going. You said, and what do you need to know about Amazon? And this frustrates everybody. It’s their sandbox. And as much as you don’t like what they do sometimes, it’s their sandbox and the customer is always right. And so

24:43
That’s everything for them is built on customer trust. They’d rather keep a customer and lose a business because they know sort of like QVC, they can replace it with another business, right? Like how many phone case companies are there out there selling on Amazon? You do something wrong. They’re like kick you off. Fine. I got 10 more lined up. Which is usually a deterrent for a lot of people even wanting to do this, right? But it’s almost like a necessary evil to some extent. uh

25:10
We hear people all the time as like, well, I don’t really want to do digital media and why should I even do digital media? like, because everybody is somehow digitally oriented in searching. It’s like, so you have to, regardless if you like it, regardless if it’s a pain, you have to take the right steps and you have to get the right expertise in order to guide you. But

25:34
That all being said, mean, you’re in it. mean, and you’ve been in it for a very long time. You mentioned a few strategies for how to be successful. Maybe you could speak a little bit more to strategies that businesses are using to try to navigate this, the black box, the sandbox, whatever we want to call it. But maybe you could speak to some of the strategies that are working for businesses. Yeah, I think like we said, sort of just like digital, right? You don’t want to throw good money after a bad website, right?

26:03
Same thing with B2B. You do not want to be spending on ad dollars until you have a 10 out of 10 product page, which means you have six amazing images and not just pretty ones, but ones that convert. So we have all these case studies of ones where we’ve changed the main image and click through has gone up 30%. Because as you think about it, you only get that page. So you’ve got to get more sessions or you got to get more conversion.

26:31
We like to do both, right? So how do you get more sessions? Well, your listing has to be great. There’s all this backend SEO, just like, you know, just like a website. And then there’s also the, your main image is kind of like your Google shopping of Amazon. You get one image and you’ve got to pray those people click through. So we do a lot of main image testing. We figured out what works, what doesn’t work in terms of getting higher click through. And then once they get there,

26:57
you need to answer all of their questions. So we use like AI tools for reviews analysis for our brands products, as well as our competitors products. We figure out what they love about our products and what they hate about the competitors. And so we’ll plug all that in. then we generate our designers will generate images based on what your differentiator is and why you’re so much better. And even though we work with premium products like higher price than some of the overseas manufacturers,

27:26
They actually are growing, they’re tripling, quadrupling over the last year or two years. So there’s a huge opportunity for that, but your product page has to tell your story and say, yeah, I’d rather spend $5 more and buy from this company because I trust this company more than that company. Well, I think that’s a really interesting, you said that before and I meant to go back to that, a really interesting distinction, right? So on the B2B side, and I get the government side of they have to…

27:53
buy from so many of these types of companies and all of that. But why do you think this trust factor is that much more important? Is it the size of the purchase that you’re making? it like, what are the things or the reasons that it’s different B2C versus B2B? And I think again, there’s higher stakes if you’re wrong, right? If I buy a phone case and it falls apart in two days, I’m just going to be mad and I’ll tell Amazon and they’ll, you but if you know, a business order is $300 worth of printer paper and it

28:23
smudges, then you’ve lost that customer for life. And a lot of these businesses are repeat B2B, especially in consumables. So that’s why you want to make sure that you get it right. Because again, I said the orders are typically bigger on the B2B side. There’s more at stake for them if they choose wrong. So same thing with a retailer. If they put something on the shelf and it doesn’t sell, that buyer’s in big trouble. Same thing with you. If you’re a business

28:50
If you’re in purchasing for a big company and you buy something and it’s horrible, there’s a bigger issue for your company versus if I’m an individual and I buy one ream of paper and it’s lousy, that’s fine. I can just go buy a different ream. So I feel like there’s higher stakes and definitely with a business you want higher quality. we see that even these premium brands, businesses are gobbling them up, especially if they’re US-based and they’re at price parity.

29:19
um or slightly more, they’ll pay a little bit of a premium for that. I mean, I gotta imagine the buying behavior is similar on a B2B than it is a B2C. Once you find something you like, especially Amazon makes it very easy just to continue to buy more of that. You can set out the automatic purchasing and all those sorts of things. I gotta imagine that once you kind of get in there, it starts to pay itself back from the repeat purchase. Is that oh a true assumption?

29:47
Absolutely. Yeah. Once they see it and they’re like, great, you can just go back to past purchases and boom. it’s, you know, it’s harder to do that on other platforms. The other thing that’s great is for retail channel, you know, sometimes you want to avoid channel conflicts. So you don’t want your product to be the same at Home Depot. You don’t want it to be less on Amazon, but Amazon sort of gives you better visibility if you have some sort of deal. But the way that you can do that is

30:15
You can do that with like quantity discounts. So buy five, save 10%. And so that way it doesn’t upset your retailers because the price on Amazon is the same. The price on Amazon business, if they buy one is the same, but you have a quantity discount. And so that’s a great way to sort of get around channel conflict of not having cheaper prices on Amazon than retail. Well, sometimes too, it can take a while to kind of see the revenue kick in to see these things working.

30:45
And I know our clients sometimes get very frustrated on any channel when something doesn’t happen right away. So can you give some perspective and set some expectations for how long it generally takes for something to kick in on Amazon? And what are the signals of success? When should a business know that they don’t quite have something right, whether it’s their product page or something else? Can you speak to a little bit of that?

31:12
Yeah, it sounds like you’re living the same sort of challenge, right? You’ll do a campaign and then give me an example, what happens? Like if you run a campaign, how long are people expecting results overnight? Oh, yeah, of course. They are. mean, they’re making their investment and they want, you you turn on, I don’t know, call it the social media, call it like a Facebook campaign and tomorrow we should have quadrupled sales by then, right? mean, so yeah. So yes, the same expectation exists everywhere. Of course, of course.

31:41
Exactly. So when we used to do paid search and social, now we exclusively do Amazon. And it was largely because of that. mean, Google wasn’t a problem, but Meta with all the changes. I’m like, my hat is off to anybody who is still fighting with Meta and all the privacy changes and losing credit card data. things don’t happen overnight. Same thing with Amazon. mean, there are some like Starbucks is what a 10-year overnight success, but there are things

32:09
We used to say 60 days to dial it in on Facebook. And so we’re like, okay, here’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to take us six to eight weeks to dial it in. And so that’s why with most folks, we’ll do a six or 12 month contract because we’re going to kill ourselves in the first 60 days, right? We are cleaning up the mess of advertising. We’re launching new campaigns, right? We’re fixing the backend SEO. We’re analyzing their products. Okay, this one has high conversion, low traffic. Let’s go get some more traffic. We don’t need to

32:37
work on the product page. So we’ll prioritize based on what is the problem with this product, right? Is it traffic or conversion? And if it’s conversion, we’ll work on the product page. If it’s traffic, we’ll work on organic and ads. But same thing with us. We’re like, it’s not going to happen overnight. We usually say, again, 45 to 60 days to see improvement. And then unless you have something go viral, you’re going to see about 10 % month-on-month organic growth, right? And then if you want to spend more,

33:07
then you’ll see more, right? Most of our clients spend about 15 % in the 10 % 20 % range of their total monthly sales on advertising. So if they’re doing $100,000 a month, they’re spending between $15,000 and $20,000. And they can still usually be profitable in that range. So that’s really what we focus on is, okay, sometimes we have to back into it. They’ll have a revenue goal. We used to do same thing on paid social. They’ll have a revenue goal. like, okay, well, this is how much you need to drive from ads. This is your organic traffic.

33:38
This is how much you need to drive from ads. This is how much you need to spend. Similar thing with Amazon. Okay, we have a brand new, their goal was a million dollars this month. Okay, great. Here’s what you’re to get from Organic. Here’s what your return on ad spend is. Here’s how much you need to spend. Similar concepts, but it does not happen overnight. I will preach with you, and April, that it does not happen overnight. We don’t have a lot of patience anymore. Yeah, nobody has it. They put money in, they want to see their money out.

34:03
I was going to ask about the conversion of ad spend because you made an illusion earlier or not even illusion. I think you alluded to the fact that the ad spend in the performance, the ROI on ad spend or the return on ad spend, the ROAS has been increasingly getting better and better and better on Amazon. So I’m just curious how the ROAS on ad spend on that channel compares to

34:30
some of the other channels that people have been investing in. So does a dollar go further on Amazon when you do an ad spend there versus on social or any other channel that people might be considering? And I know that’s a big broad question to ask, but any insight you could provide there because people again are very hesitant to invest in ad spend because they’re like, where’s my money going? But if Amazon’s anything like social, it’s like, if you look at your organic traffic, it’s like 1%.

34:58
until you put something behind it. You have to put money behind it for anybody to see it. Again, that sandbox, that black box locks everything down and incentivizes you to spend on ad spend. Yeah, that’s a great question. In general, when you go to Amazon, are you there to discover something or get educated? Usually not. You’re usually there to buy something. Because it’s a marketplace, it’s like walking into Target. You’re usually there to buy something. My conversion at Target,

35:26
is probably better than my conversion looking for a new phone case on the internet. So in general, Amazon ROAS is better than that of paid search and paid social. So what you’re doing in paid search and paid social is usually brand awareness and discovery. You want transactional sales, but when we worked with a brand called Tacoviz, they were two guys in a WeWork and now they’re like a $250 million brand of Western Wear.

35:53
but nobody knew who the heck they were in 2015. So 99 % of our stuff was going to new to brand customers, right? And maybe like less than, you know, one to 5 % was going on retargeting, right? And if you’re new to brand, that stuff is going to be the same. You know, we usually do about 80-20, 80 % net new customer acquisition, 20%, you know, retargeting or brand protection, right?

36:21
branded versus non-branded. Same thing with Amazon. Amazon’s 70 % keyword-based still. So they’re not searching for your brand name. They are searching for like men’s swim shorts. Okay. And you want to show up there. So you want to optimize your pages. You want to look exactly like what they want when they get there. You want your titles to be great because you can only see the first 70 characters. So there’s a lot that goes into the advertising, but in general,

36:51
Amazon ROAS is like two to three times that of like paid search and paid social non-branded because people are there to shop. But the one thing that I advise people against is there’s a couple of different placements on Amazon. You can show up top of search results. You can show up with a video when people search on a certain term like swim shorts. Those are very, very popular. was less of those um in the past, but the

37:18
on Amazon advertising, meaning when someone’s searching and your ad shows up, is still way better than the off Amazon like DSP, the demand side platform, which is more like that either brand awareness or retargeting. So the on Amazon stuff converts really well. The off Amazon stuff, once you’ve maxed out all of your on Amazon stuff, you got to go somewhere else, right? Like I’m sure after a point, they might max out one part of digital so they move on to another part.

37:47
or programmatic or something bigger. All right. So I’m going to ask a question that none of us that run agencies want to ask. But do ever tell anyone on the B2B side, it’s not the right place for them? Like, have you had situations where you really felt like not a good fit and then why? Yes. So one of them was Tocova’s, the boot company. And it’s not on the B2B side. We’re just Amazon because the CEO said, okay, we’re going to sell on Amazon. I was like, no, this is a bad decision.

38:16
You have no distribution. You own your own website. No one can get a hold of your products, right? You should not sell on Amazon, right? And instead they went ahead and opened, know, gosh, I don’t even know how many stores they’ve opened. So that’s really smart. So the people I sell not to sell on Amazon, it’s like, if you own all your distribution and you’re not relying on retailers, do not sell on Amazon, right? And the other people are just ones with tiny markets. Like there’s this one company that does, you know,

38:45
20,000 a month and the market for their product is only 30,000 a month. So if people don’t know your product exists, whether it’s on the business side or the consumer side, there was this great one hose company. like, but nobody’s searching for that. No one knows it exists. So go spend money on paid search and paid social to let people know that this product exists. Amazon’s not the right place for you to spend your money right now. So not a great place for initial brand awareness.

39:15
is what you’re saying. Right. Like we look at what’s the search volume too. So if the search volume is small and the market category is small, we’ve told people like, don’t hire us. Here’s 10 things you can go do. Here’s a free team at Amazon that’ll give you like a year’s worth of help. You don’t need us, you know, because we have a copyright or a designer, a strategic account person, an organic specialist and an ad specialist on each of our accounts. So it’s like five people. We’re overkill for someone who’s only got a

39:43
total available market of $30,000 a month on Amazon. Gotcha. So obviously Amazon continues to evolve. I’d love to, if you had a little crystal ball sitting in front of you and you were going to be like, okay, I’m going to tell you guys how I think Amazon is going to evolve in the future and what B2B’s role is going to be in that. What would you say to people knowing that you’re just speculating, if you were going to read the tea leaves, what would the tea leaf say right now? I mean, I know Jeff,

40:11
FaceUS isn’t in charge anymore, but like each day he’d make decisions that impacted three years from now. So like when they bought Whole Foods, he made that decision three years earlier saying, we can never compete in grocery with our model, right? We need to find someone who has distribution, who has the same customers as us, right? For me, it’s scary about how many people they don’t need anymore because of AI and a lot of the entry-level coding jobs they can do with AI.

40:38
But this is crazy, but here in Texas, they’re doing the drone deliveries. And I think, I don’t know. I mean, there’s not enough money in it, but if I’m spit balling crazy lady here, I’m thinking they’re like, if you think about what are their costs, right? Shipping costs aren’t going down, right? You mail a package, you can’t mail a package for less than $10, right? So where are your biggest pain points? Your biggest pain points are your shipping. They have their own planes already.

41:06
They’re doing drone deliveries with like a five foot robot in Texas. They’re piloting it in Waco this month. And so I’m thinking that there’s something big with them around just turning fulfillment and delivery on its head. That’s the, think still the most expensive part of their business. So interesting. It reminds me of it was a Christmas. I can’t remember what Christmas movie that is when the one guy who worked for some sort of like Amazon’s delivery service.

41:36
took over and they’re just delivering Christmas presents every day. But they were just drones all around delivering Christmas presents every day. So it was like Christmas. I don’t remember what the Christmas movie was, but it just reminded me when you were saying that. I’m like, we’re gonna have drones flying all over the neighborhood, just delivering presents all the time. Well, and if you look at what companies they buy, right? A couple of years ago, they bought an autonomous driving, like every other car. I’m in Austin, Texas.

42:04
And I see more cars with no drivers in them than cars with drivers in them. Like Waymo has taken over all of us in Texas. Yeah, San Francisco was like that too. Yeah. Yeah. so, well, they bought the autonomous, right? Because those, you have your gas price. Literally one just drove by my office right here. You have gas prices. You have the human factor of someone getting out of a car and delivering. I’m sensing it’s all automated. uh You know, the Waymos drive themselves back when they’re low on battery and they recharge.

42:34
If you can get rid of the human piece of that, as well as the gas piece of that, I think that will be a huge step for them. I haven’t looked recently at what their… I would love to look at their P &L and see what percent of their expenses are in the fulfillment and delivery piece. It’s probably a huge portion. I think that’s a good bet. Okay. I think we have really gone around the horn on this topic. Before I ask you to…

43:02
wrap us up and give anybody any insights that we might have missed. Are you open to some rapid fire questions? Yes. All right. We’ll start with the first one. This is an easy one. What are you reading or watching right now? Great question. There’s a lot of books that I like to reread. One I like that I’m rereading is The Thing About Hard Things. uh And I’m listening to, and this is, I just drove back from Dallas for a work thing and I was listening to My First Million and it was very depressing to hear about this.

43:31
18 year old in Denton, Texas, who cleared 60,000 in profit the last year on his power washing business.

43:40
Right? mean, anything can be a business now. And if you’re smart and savvy enough to really put the effort in, anything can be a business. Okay, so our second rapid fire person you would most like to have dinner with Abigail Adams. Why? That’s a good one. Well, I was touring colleges with my son and we went to Thomas Jefferson’s home Monticello when we were in Virginia. I was just, we saw like what

44:08
living conditions were like, and just to be a woman and just to be as powerful as she was way back then when they had like next to zero rights, I’m just like, she’s the ultimate baddie. So I would love to meet her. Well, that’s a great one. Well, since we were talking about cars just recently, so very apropos, if you were a car, what kind of car would you be? I would be some sort of fun electric vehicle. I don’t know what it is though.

44:37
So what does that speak to? don’t know. My husband has an electric Mini. We bought it as a third car and it’s like our little around town fun car. And I’m like, it just makes you happy when you drive it. So I would like to be like a little fun, happy car that people want to drive around. love that. Carol, this has been amazing. Before we end this, can you give us any other additional insights? Something if we missed anything, put a bow on this and obviously tell people where to find you.

45:07
Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is just know your numbers when you go into Amazon. Know if you’re going to be profitable. Understand like, okay, this is how much Amazon is going to take. These are all my fees. Don’t go in there without knowing exactly, you know, do the math ahead of time. And there’s a bunch of tools. There’s calculators that you can use out on the internet and all that stuff. Just Google it or just chat, GPT it, whatever you want to do. And so I think that’s the biggest one is like we’ve seen people selling stuff on profitably and

45:35
spending a lot of time and money and making no money and actually losing money. So that’s the biggest thing is just know your numbers going in, know if it’s going to work for you before you jump in. And then uh you can find us at roiswift.com and you can find me on LinkedIn, Carolyn Lowe, L-O-W-E. Wonderful, wonderful. And with that, we encourage all of our listeners to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put into practice. Remember, strategic counsel is only effective if you put it into action.

46:06
Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further? Reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com. We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to Follow or Subscribe to Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast platform!