E57: Neil Twa

Richard Hill:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 57th episode. In this episode, I speak with Neil Twa, eCommerce and Amazon marketing expert. Neil works with Amazon brand owners and those that want to become successful brand owners in eCommerce via Amazon FBA. Myself and Neil go into the key areas of focus to be successful with Amazon FBA, how sellers can very easily optimize their SKUs so they appear in the Buy Boxes. The quick wins that every Amazon seller can implement and also hear Neil's thoughts on Amazon's growth and how local sellers can compete. If you enjoy this episode, please make sure you subscribe so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now let's head over to this fantastic episode.

Richard Hill:
How are we doing Neil?

Neil Twa:
Doing fine today sir. How are you?

Richard Hill:
I'm very good. You are officially the first Amazon expert we've had on the podcast. We're really excited. It's a topic that I'm not that familiar with if I'm honest. We have a lot of clients in our agency that come to us for Google Shopping and have a very substantial Amazon business, or a very big part of their business, their eCommerce business comes from Amazon. So I'm really keen to drill into a lot of different areas. But I think before we get into the nitty-gritty, maybe just give us a bit of a background on yourself Neil. And-

Neil Twa:
Yeah. Okay. I'll give you 30 seconds of something you might find interesting that my mom would not find interesting. We'll keep it to the basics. I've been with eComm for a long time, right? I actually owned eCommerce companies while in the corporate world for a while, accelerated through university, decided that was going to be a painful death, jumped out of my third year and got into the corporate world because eComm is what I wanted to know but at my age, at this point without sounding old, eCommerce wasn't being taught in university, right? So because of that, I had to go to the corporate world, ran up the script, ended up in IBM doing global business management stuff around search engines and other types of eCommerce based platforms. And then ended up leaving in 2007 and I started this series of my own companies.

Neil Twa:
Did affiliate marketing, paid traffic, made a lot of other people's products really successful and realized, why am I not selling my own products? Right? This is dumb. So when I learned the process of a physical eCommerce around 2008, 2009, in terms of the physical product asset-based, I was doing affiliate marketing, which was all digital product based. And I had done a lot of paid traffic and got very good at understanding how that worked doing a lot of mobile traffic before people thought mobile was even cool. We were running mobile ads off of spreadsheets into the back end of mobile systems out into South Africa for dating apps. So one of my best apps was - South Africans love to, whatever.

Neil Twa:
But wanted an alternative traffic source that wasn't so heavy handed at that time as paid traffic because a lot of the system you may be familiar with now that are more push button for us were very manual, which sounds really weird because it's not that long ago. But at the end of the day, I was looking for a different traffic source and I found Amazon in 2012 and it really is a traffic sourced engine that really had an eComm buyer centric focus.

Neil Twa:
So we really stayed focused on it for the last eight years. And have just gotten really good at launching products and branding products and doing over 10 million a year in business on Amazon FBA and just got really good at branding and co-branding with FBA and products and stayed focused on them for about eight years now and really enjoyed that model. And while it's adapted and changed, it's been great and has had a lot of successful business opportunities for a lot of people, including ourselves. So not everybody thinks as positively about Amazon, maybe as they could or should.

Richard Hill:
It's a bit of a mixed bag, I think, isn't it out there?

Neil Twa:
No it is. Because you get that whole corporatocracy feel and it's like, "I don't want to give into the man." This guy stuff, right? But then you got to remember that 58% of all the sales on Amazon are small businesses. And that's a lot of the small business opportunity. And as you know, we pivoted through last year and many small businesses found trouble with that, but many of the small businesses I know that had an Amazon presence saw a 30, 40, 60% increase in business last year, which was amazing to watch.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. No, fantastic. So eight years using Amazon and really perfecting the different elements of Amazon. So when you say support, so you've been importing products yourself and that side of things as well, yeah?

Neil Twa:
Yes, sir. We've done a lot of import and logistics, no doubt about it. And it's not all China because people typically want to jump to China. Three years ago, having as much detailed experience as we did. We saw the writing on the wall and realized China was one of those areas we needed to diversify away from. So we moved into a lot of Southeast Asia, India suppliers and stuff who really picked up the slack. And as it turns out fast forward three years, you can get just about anything you want outside of China now. So it isn't one of our direct importers anymore.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, it's interesting. I know when I was doing everything I was... I mean, this is many, many years ago. I feel like an old man now, but it was I think probably 12 years ago, last time I imported and we were containers every week, pretty much. But it was all Shenzhen, China back in the day.

Neil Twa:
And it's a big component of that. Absolutely. One of the areas I saw personally in the last few years that changed and really drew a huge amount of attention to that was drop shipping. And a lot of drop shippers were going through AliExpress and that really pushed the whole China, China, China narrative. And so since we don't drop ship, everything's private label, manufactured for us with our own brand registries, we could diversify manufacturing, which changes the way things work, right?

Richard Hill:
So Amazon, eight years of experience, lots of different things you've seen in the way that products list, the way that products rank, the way that third party people can come in and lay stuff. You see a lot of different things there. I think it'd be good to kick off with, talk about FBA specifically.

Neil Twa:
Fulfilled by Amazon. Absolutely. So there's two different models that Amazon has deployed. The first one was FBM, Fulfilled by Merchant, okay? And that was really that I could take Amazon's platform and fulfil a product that I shipped. When they deployed the FBA mechanism, nobody really understood what it was and the power behind it, literally. And when you fast forward eight years, I've watched them put $15 billion of infrastructure into FBA to become a logistics juggernaut, right?

Neil Twa:
With FBA, Amazon fulfils your product, they touch all the product. We can ship containers directly to them. We have third-party companies that will help us with specialty things with products like bundling and things of that nature. But it allows us the freedom of true location independence, which is what a lot of people think online businesses are about, but they don't realize how many people I know have hitched themselves to their business in their location, even though they have an online presence.

Richard Hill:
So their warehouse or their head office.

Neil Twa:
The warehouse, the space, the office and whatever component of that works. We have really truly stayed location independent. My team is distributed. I have 12 employees in a company that is diversified across coaching and consulting. And we have a software called sixleaf.com. My team, my partners, the whole thing is distributed around the world. We have no single office location. And because of that, we have the ability to be location agnostic. We can go for a month on the beach and hang out. We really truly can do that because of our products are all handled through FBA. They're all in Amazon's warehouse.

Neil Twa:
One of the changes for last year that we've had to adapt, which is also creating opportunity always, is that certain regulations of FBA have changed due to their literally enormous growth last year. And especially last quarter, 60%. They did 4.8 billion in revenue right between Black Friday and Cyber Monday and through Cyber Week. 4.8 billion. So their infrastructure is really being challenged right now. So having a secondary capacity through what we call 3PL, third-party logistics means that other people are helping to ship our products temporarily while Amazon has some hyper-growth capacity problem.

Richard Hill:
So they sold themselves out.

Neil Twa:
Yeah. They really overdid their infrastructure and they're hiring like crazy and they're trying to distribute. It is a beautiful mechanism to deploy physical products because it's asset-driven. It's an asset-driven business model at the end of the day, it's not just a virtual model. At that point, I can value the business. I can value the business at intellectual property level. I can value it for sale. I can actually have true EBITDA for that business and that business independently can be sold. So that's one of the mechanisms we deploy.

Richard Hill:
Cool. So for the guys listening in on the podcast that have never listed anything on Amazon. Now, I think there will be some. I think a lot of our listeners, they're just very independent and will sell purely off their site. And if they want to get their products on Amazon, on Fulfilled by Amazon should I say, how easy is it? How straightforward is that?

Neil Twa:
Well, technically, Amazon's party, its FBA platform has turned into what's called a third-party logistic, a 3PL. And in that way, you can diversify your channels away from Amazon, which we do later on. You can open a store, a WordPress shop. You can open a Shopify store and you can connect it into your FBA seller central account and have Amazon actually ship those products, even though they're purchased off of your front end website.

Neil Twa:
So if you've had a store at Shopify and you want to deploy products out into an infrastructure that you don't manage or maintain, you can send product to Amazon's warehouses. You can have Amazon sales channel sell it for you, and then Shopify can obviously sell it for you too, and you can deliver it hands-off. So if you're currently in one of those other mechanisms and not on Amazon, we call it found money by putting your product on Amazon.

Neil Twa:
I have friends and companies and stuff. We run between 100 to a million and a half in spend a month on paid traffic. But we noticed about 15% of that traffic will end up on Amazon, right? They'll hit your site, they bounce off. You pay for them. But you didn't get the benefit of the sale. They end up on Amazon and they buy your competitor's products. And so people who are typically doing between 10, 20, 50,000 or more in spend a month on stores outside of Amazon, you are literally going to get a 15% sales boost just by getting that product listed on Amazon, because people are literally going to...

Neil Twa:
You're not older than I am, I don't think. We're around the same age. I'm probably older than you are. But at the end of the day, it was once upon a time, if I had a website, I was a legitimate business. And we've now shifted into the point if you're in eCommerce and you have Amazon, you're a legitimate business. And I don't think people recognize that just yet, but I think you're going to find this year, it's becoming recognizable because of the increase, the growth, the closing of certain stores, people are typically going to where they trust. And they trust Amazon, regardless of what I think about it personally, or anything in the corporate world, they do trust Amazon. And there's a huge opportunity for those to move product into Amazon and see at least a 15% boost.

Richard Hill:
Quite a simple jump you can get by listing. I mean-

Neil Twa:
It's not terribly complicated. No. And there's a process and a framework that needs to be deployed to make it successful. But, yeah.

Richard Hill:
I think it's like adding any new revenue stream or any new channel, isn't it? In effect.

Neil Twa:
It is.

Richard Hill:
Obviously it's got its own Google Shopping and Facebook ads, DPAs and so forth. If it's done correctly with an expert like yourself, you can speed over a lot of humps straight away and go straight to that 15% almost a bit like it.

Neil Twa:
Or more, right? So you're a PPC expert with your Google Shopping experience.

Richard Hill:
Yup.

Neil Twa:
There's Amazon PPC internally. What you may not know is that the engineers that deployed AdWords actually got stolen away by Amazon years ago, right? To build their PPC platform. So there's a lot of crossover between those two and those who understand that platform of search terms, keywords and stuff on AdWords, very quickly pick up Amazon's PPC and can make it successful very quickly.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. That's another whole other area, isn't it?

Neil Twa:
It very much is.

Richard Hill:
So you've got your products listed on Amazon, but then typically what I find is obviously, you go to a listing and you see different merchants listing a product, but then you might also see Amazon listing a product. How does it work in terms of, which product will rank or which product will show -

Neil Twa:
Because that is interesting, right? So there are mechanisms in which you can list a product on someone else's listing. And what's referred to as the Buy Box, which is that little box to the right where you click, add to cart button. You may not know it much as your wife does. In our house, we call it subscribe and spend, not subscribe and save. But in that little box, it's called the Buy Box. And if you're not totally brand registered and brand compliant in some ways for trademark, others can jump on your listing and you cannot get them removed.

Neil Twa:
Now you may be the main brand, or you may be somebody grabbing a product that you got used or new, or you want to sell one like it and you jump on their listing. The mechanics of it are very simple. He who owns the listing, does get the majority of the Buy Box. But that can go as low as 40% for the owner of that listing if other people jump onto there and have different pricing, different mechanisms, they can get the sale.

Neil Twa:
So every time somebody clicks on that box, it's rotating through a new seller. Amazon could be one of those sellers or you could be one of those sellers that receives that and it becomes very much a commodity based run to the bottom of the pricing world, which is where a lot of people get frustrated. Especially if you're doing retail arbitrage, wholesale FBA, or online arbitrage.

Neil Twa:
If you're doing private label, you win the Buy Box 99% of the time. You own the price, you own the control of that Buy Box.

Richard Hill:
Because you've got the margin you mean.

Neil Twa:
You've got the margin, you own the listing, you own the trademark in the brand registry, then you can easily kick people off if they try to get on and 99% of the time you're winning it. And you always get the sale, which really creates a whole different opportunity.

Richard Hill:
So the trick then is having your own brand, your own products and getting the Buy Box. So the next obvious question is, how do we do that? Give us some tips.

Neil Twa:
How do you do that?

Richard Hill:
How do you that? Imagine -

Neil Twa:
Right. What the hell do I sell? That is the first and always answered question. In any free trainings or anything I do is always answering the question -

Richard Hill:
Because I can remember... Sorry to interrupt you.

Neil Twa:
No, no.

Richard Hill:
But I remember a few of my friends, this is many years ago now. Many, many years ago. And there used to be all sorts of all different channels. There's all sorts of different strategies and things you can do. And I remember, I'm sure one of them was giving away 70 samples or however you want to call it. Samples or discounted different websites that you'd go and list your product on and say, "We're going to give 200 of these away for a dollar or whatever it may be." "And then obviously in return, would you very kindly give me a review." And things like that. I know that was one thing probably eight years ago, I was familiar with. I never did it myself or anything, but I had some friends that were importing, they were bring in travel, money pouches to go around your waist when you're traveling and different travel products. Yeah.

Neil Twa:
Yep.

Richard Hill:
This day and age, it's obviously moved on a little bit I'm guessing.

Neil Twa:
Well, it has, because the market's increased and the number of products has increased and somewhere between 550 and 600 million products are estimated to be on Amazon. Of course, they only know exactly, but we know about what it is. When I started, there was about 200 million just to tell you how fast that's moved, right?

Neil Twa:
So how do you differentiate? We estimate from our years of experience. Now, there are about 12 million target products that we would go after that'll earn seven or eight figures, okay? What are those products? There are certain areas and niches we'll go into and certain ones we don't go into. But at the end of the day, here's where most people get caught up. It isn't, what is that specific product? It is the concept that there are so many products I can sell I'm actually bogged down in analysis paralysis because I don't actually know how to decide which product to put it on. And it feels very risky to invest money in something that's a guess. And a lot of people drive that by emotion.

Neil Twa:
So the question becomes the numbers. The answer to it is the numbers. You have to go by the numbers. It's a data-driven decision model at the end of the day. When you take emotion out of there in terms of what you can sell, you realize that the numbers are all that matters. I can sell a fuzzy bunny slipper to grandma or a pocket knife to grandpa. It doesn't matter as long as the numbers work out. And so you take that emotion out and you start to look at the products more logically and analytically, and you determine their numbers of success. You do the market research against the competition's numbers, and if your numbers are better, you sell that product.

Neil Twa:
And so when you take the emotional component out of that, you start to realize that product research becomes a process. It becomes a methodology of taking tools and taking a process and then looking for what we call our green lights. If three different metrics meet the green lights, we sell the product. It doesn't matter what I care about. It doesn't matter what I think about that product. What matters is someone is already selling it in the market. My numbers are better. And in about six months, they're going to wish they'd never met me because at the end of that, they're going to be discounting their products, doing rebates and giveaways to try to keep up. And instead my product is going to be raising in brand driven affinity.

Richard Hill:
So when you look at that then. Some very specifics of what you should be looking for. So I assume you mean, you've got a certain amount of margin in your product? That's -

Neil Twa:
Certain amount of margin in the profit, we call net profit. What I take home is all that matters.

Richard Hill:
Absolutely. Yeah. So net margin. The, what we would refer to as a run rate, how many are getting sold? Or-

Neil Twa:
How many units per month or per year are moving in that product and the higher the amount does not equal better, okay? Because again, profit margins versus numbers. I can sell 10 of a product that makes me a $100 or a 1,000 of a product that makes me 10 bucks. At the end of the day, one is logistically less complicated to manage and run and has less overhead.

Richard Hill:
So you've got to go after the one that suits your personal model.

Neil Twa:
Profit margin at the end of the day. Not how many units that move.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. You don't want to be in a race to the bottom trying to make a dollar per SKU.

Neil Twa:
No, I want to raise my prices over time. I want to be the person that raises.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I'm with you there. Absolutely. Anything else?

Neil Twa:
The component of the products are certain areas. I'll tell you, for example, we don't do anything that goes in the mouth or on the skin. We learned that a while ago. We owned a supplement company for a while and got it out. Why? Because there are components of other alphabets beyond Amazon that will look over the top of your business and over the top of theirs and you can just avoid all that other trouble again, by moving into product areas where you're not going to have certain alphabets looking over your clients or looking over Amazon.

Richard Hill:
Legal, yeah.

Neil Twa:
It just takes a whole different ball of wax. And the other one is electronics. Electronic is an amazing category on Amazon, but it will swallow you up whole if you don't have a minimum of $100,000 in cash flow to go after electronics.

Richard Hill:
Margins. And that's margins more so would you say?

Neil Twa:
Margins, volume and technology. It creates customer service, entanglements, manufacturing, defect rates, and other error things that you can avoid, right? So we don't go into those categories for that reason, but that opens up a whole lot of other categories to go into.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So that's narrowed it down quite a bit.

Neil Twa:
That's narrowed it a bit for you.

Richard Hill:
That's narrowed it a bit. So that's great. So you've been doing this eight years. What else would you say in terms of a couple of real gems, a couple of real secret sauce elements that, let's say the guys that are listening in, we will have some, no doubt, real, multimillion pounds a month guys on Amazon-

Neil Twa:
Absolutely.

Richard Hill:
...already doing. Obviously they know a lot of the basics, a lot of what everything is. But what are a couple of little nuggets that you can give us today for the podcast listeners, that might really just be unheard of.

Neil Twa:
Well, let me see if I can help them. I can't guarantee anything, but let's go. At the end of the day, obviously there's market research and product. We talked a little bit about that. It's not necessarily emotional driven as much as it is numbers driven. Now, why is that the case? Well, as I mentioned, once upon a time I worked for IBM until 2007. While there, latent semantic search engines, knowledge-based engines, knowledge management was a big component of what I did. So building systems and engines that learned, had human interaction and machine language learning, they adapted, they took information and they made decisions and then they replied faster and more accurately based upon the amount of data you gave them.

Neil Twa:
Well, guess what Amazon's engine is that does eCommerce? It's keyword based, it's called the A9 engine. It has other variations in components, but it's still the core format of the engine, the technology they used eight years ago, still today. So it wants things from you. And it wants you to tell it certain things, it wants you to respond certain ways. Everyone thinks, here's your nugget.

Neil Twa:
Everyone thinks that the engine responds purely to sales or some component of sales or pricing, but that's actually not 100% true. The engine responds to activity and in the last few years, it responds a lot more to social activity. It is looking for social activities and signals from other networks to determine a products' viability above another product. It's determining and trying to learn trends. And then the instance it's learning trends, it's going to automatically respond to those products in trend with the market.

Neil Twa:
Why you see certain products in certain times of the year appear higher on the engine isn't because you or me are setting in the background pushing the buttons, it's because a system of engineering is looking at the trends of that product and moving it higher towards the end of the engine. So there's ways that you can help that learn by sending social signals from other networks to your product.

Neil Twa:
Now, never sending it directly to your listing. That's another nugget I can give. Never, ever send traffic straight to your Amazon listing from outside of Amazon system. Never, ever do that. If you want to try to do some of that component, I will tell you the end result is it's going to fail miserably.

Richard Hill:
So trying to do what we would call, outreach link building in an SEO sense to an Amazon listing is a no-no as well.

Neil Twa:
Always a no-no. Now, here's another part for you since you got the search engine background and stuff, it is again, as a search engine, looking for social signals, what you will find is across YouTube and Google they're now talking a lot of the same social signals. So you can take a new listing on Amazon and in so many days or weeks rank it at the top end of Google for your target keywords for your product in Amazon. If anybody who's listening and has any technical knowledge understands what I just said, you're going to understand the relevance of that. It's a huge search engine with a very, very high affinity.

Neil Twa:
There are certain SEO terms I'm lost on. You will tell me what they are, but it has to do with that 99 out of 100 for the domain rating and the listing rating on Amazon actually goes down into the reviews too. So there's a fourth little nugget for you guys.

Richard Hill:
So what you mean by that is so a domain authority, Amazon's like one of the highest page on the web. But their internal pages are also very -

Neil Twa:
All the internal pages, even down to the pages each review as an independent page. There's a little one for you that can be ranked with the same level of domain authority as the main domains as an independent page.

Richard Hill:
Just to back up a little bit Neil. We're saying, obviously we've got the listing, we're making sure it's optimized in sort of, you didn't really say this 100%.

Neil Twa:
Read between the lines, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Think of it in an SEO point of view that, it's correctly listed in terms of the keywords, the structure, it's thorough, it's unique, you've got a strong listing but then we're then making sure that the listing itself is being mentioned in social, and then we're driving traffic to those social mentions.

Neil Twa:
Correct.

Richard Hill:
That's what you're saying, isn't it?

Neil Twa:
Yup.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. And then obviously that the idea is Amazon will see those signals a bit on an SEO point of view and see genuine signal. I can't say the word. I can't say any words today. I'm really getting really mixed up. Signals. Signals.

Neil Twa:
That's okay. - Domain authority so that's okay.

Richard Hill:
So then we're seeing the signals on Facebook, Instagram and so forth, Pinterest. So it's obviously-

Neil Twa:
Are signalling the engine, yeah. That this product has had certain value or affinity above others based on the kind of market, based on the number of people talking about it and other components of that. Because you're looking at a big engine at the end of the day. And people seem to think that it's just, well, if I have a really great super-duper product and maybe this product is even patented, I will sell millions of dollars in Amazon. And I'm telling you that's not the truth. The truth is, if it's sold on Amazon already, you can sell another variation of it. And maybe just as well, if not better. Because it's already ranking, it's already in the engine and it's already there for you to take advantage of.

Richard Hill:
You're not trying to start again. You're taking something that's already proven is what you're looking for.

Neil Twa:
What we refer to as similarity, right? In the market. And familiarity with the market's location and product in niche equals trust. So I can take a brand new brand with no knowledge of what it is, right? And no knowledge that the people even know it exists and I can put it into Amazon. And in seven to 14 days, I can take over the competitor in that market with a brand no one's ever heard of and with no reviews.

Neil Twa:
So with the way we do things now, we've learned again to get the engine to reward us based on what it's looking for, because it's just a machine. I may or may not have had allegedly 25,000 accounts or so under my control in the past that gave me some of this knowledge. That's allegedly.

Richard Hill:
What would you say about reviews now? Obviously, genuine reviews. You've got to SKU -

Neil Twa:
Genuine reviews absolutely. It needs to be a process. At SixLeaf we have an auto review feature coming out shortly that is certified by Amazon because it gives you the ability to set up an auto review process. And nothing is more genuine than authentic reviews. Never mess with the system. Engine looks at it a certain way, but it has all these new little systems running around that engine that it will catch you. It will catch you if you try to have your uncle, a cousin's twice removed, put a review on your product. If you're tied to them on social media, let me give you that tip, okay? Because it's smart enough now to go out and look to see if you're tied to somebody who's tied to somebody who's reviewing your product and you have five products and there's five reviews from Uncle Joe. They're going to figure it out guys. They're getting very sophisticated. Don't manipulate your reviews. Take -

Richard Hill:
Don't try and do anything other than-

Neil Twa:
Don't review networks, don't buy reviews, don't solicit reviews. Put a process in place to get legitimate reviews. It's not that bad. People want to give reviews. They really do at the end of the day.

Richard Hill:
I think that's where everybody goes. I know from my personal point of view, I'm a fellow addict when it comes to Amazon. Absolutely. We've got the corporate account or the business account and every year it gets to Christmas and I have to click the button of how many orders last year. And it's just like, how is that possible? And I think last year-

Neil Twa:
- order history.

Richard Hill:
I think last year we had, it was 235 deliveries.

Neil Twa:
I don't know what your average is, but it'd be fun to find that out. Because I think I probably have at least that because I have five women in my house.

Richard Hill:
Oh okay. You're going to beat me I know.

Neil Twa:
Subscribe and spend.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, 235. The whole subscribe thing. That's quite a new thing for me. Obviously, I know it's been there but I've never really done it until recently. Now I've got all sorts of, oh yeah that's my aftershave. Oh yeah, that's my deodorant. Oh yeah, that's my... Just some of the basic things. It just takes so much stress out, not stress, but so much time about when you're going out and just getting the mundane things that you need to survive.

Neil Twa:
Well, and if you're not selling one-off products, that's a great mechanism for buyers to take advantage of. Now, we talked about not doing consumables a minute ago, but anything that has a lifetime or available is not necessarily consumable as much as something you can sell that every two to three months someone needs. If they need it every month, even better. Why? Because Amazon will give you with FBA and brand registry, the ability to have subscribe and save in your listings for your products.

Richard Hill:
Wow.

Neil Twa:
So you start building up a residual base of people who are ordering every one to three months your products as long as they're in a consumable format. If they're a one-time product, you're going to have a one-time a year, one time a lifetime purchase. So just be thinking through that as you look at your products.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I think that's a -

Neil Twa:
When someone sells a toothbrush versus car, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I think that's a great takeaway. Good for the guys that are listening in. From a personal point of view, there's nothing better, I don't thing than a subscription business like that.

Neil Twa:
Subscription in residual income are one of the major components people don't realize about this income model.

Richard Hill:
I mean that subscription piece. So think about the products that you sell. If you're not on Amazon already, how a damn good research and obviously reach out to Neil as well and see how he can help you. We can talk about that more at the end, but the ability to sell your products on Amazon on subscription, that's insane, isn't it?

Neil Twa:
You can actually sell them on Amazon as subscription. So if you have subscription on your main website, you can actually set up subscription on Amazon too. Not just subscribe and save, there's actual subscription [inaudible 00:29:09]. So very cool features. There's even Amazon Live for your podcasts and stuff. Or for product reviews. You can actually go on Amazon Live now, which is like Facebook Live only it has traffic that is outside of your network, which is kind of cool, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah. We're going to have to see it. Well, 2021 is the year for eCom@One podcast.

Richard Hill:
We'll definitely have a look at that. Absolutely. So I know when we had a look at all the different things you've been doing, you've been working on many, many accounts and working with the many, many companies. But I believe you've got one strategy that generated over four million quid with a very small amount of, $4 million sorry, with a very small product set in 2020. Could you talk about the strategy that you pulled off?

Neil Twa:
Yeah. It's what's referred to as our five by five game plan. So two years into selling on Amazon, we learned, having business background and experience, anything is systematized can be scaled. Anything's tracked can be scaled. We can't track it, you can't scale it. So at the end of the day, we learned that there was a mechanism that we could deploy in a repeated fashion. And we coined it in our five by five game plan. That is five products in the market make up a brand. Those five products need to be doing an average of 25 sales a day. And you need to have a minimum of $12 in profit per product to actually beat out the 200,000 other sellers who are earning six figures a year.

Neil Twa:
Once you implement that game plan, it is a process and a methodology and a framework if you will, that you just keep deploying into your brand, starting with five products. Can you get to seven figures with five products in a year? Yes. Can you do it in six months? Absolutely. We've had people break the five million a month mark in nine months using our five by five strategy. So it is infinitely scalable, but it does have to do with literally within one year you're going to put five products into a brand and with a criteria, some of what we set up earlier, seven figures is actually an expected result with the process that we deploy.

Richard Hill:
Wow. Just like that.

Neil Twa:
I know it sounds really easy. Just like that. Like in the magic of television and podcasts, there you go. Your seven figure brand is on -

Richard Hill:
Five SKUs in the same sort of category. So there's similar-

Neil Twa:
In a brand-

Richard Hill:
Oh okay. So they can be different categories.

Neil Twa:
In a brand, right? Because every product that launches in your brand becomes easier to launch. You can launch a product by the time you reach three and four in your brand, you will, by our process, know which products the brand wants from the customers that are buying it. So you're not guessing. And when you set product launches, you get results immediately with no reviews, you go immediately to sales. We've seen 30, 50,000, $100,000 in 30 days with a brand new product, an existing brand is totally doable.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. Fantastic.

Neil Twa:
You just give the market what it wants because it's already asking for it, which is what I love about Amazon.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? I mean, it really is. Well, on a personal point, I bought some shares in Amazon, not too long ago. And so I follow the news more around Amazon and what they're doing and different partnerships and same with Shopify and a few of the other big brand. Well, obviously Amazon is way bigger than Shopify, but just the growth that they've had, obviously during lockdown or the last what? Eight months?

Neil Twa:
Yes.

Richard Hill:
Is unbelievable. Where do you see things going with it?

Neil Twa:
On my crystal ball.

Richard Hill:
I know it's a bit of a big question. But do you think that... Right at the beginning we talked about, there's a bit of a love/hate relationship. There's a bit of a bit of a divide. Do you see people maybe trying to move away from Amazon with their purchasing and really trying to support that local element more and more and more?

Neil Twa:
Well, unfortunately not. Would I like to see some more localized? Absolutely. Because we have local businesses that tie to Amazon and vice versa because of the mechanisms they can use to support local businesses, but also deploy online for people who come into their local stores, which is cool. Because they can use their existing email lists and other things to get people aware of their Amazon products. And in some instances, revenues overtake their local stores. So then they just choose to keep the stores open because they love to be in the store, right? If I put my crystal ball on and my hat for a second, here's what I would say.

Neil Twa:
Having done this for eight years, I'd like to do it for another eight, right? At least that's how we would love to do things, but it's a dynamic market so we'll do what we can. But I do know eComm itself is now shifting in momentum. Forrester Research and others are predicting its 21 trillion in global eComm market is going to move offline and onto online by 2040. So if you look just forward to the next year, we had a pivot last year because in three months time, 10 years worth of sales occurred in three months for online. It's been a massive vertical shift, right?

Neil Twa:
Now, it's plateaued just a little bit at that vertical shift. But what I'm actually foreseeing is at this moment, it's going to continue to keep that upward trend maybe not at the rapid pace that it just occurred. But a significant amount of people who did not purchase previously online or make it a normal pattern of behaviour have now made it a normal habit and pattern of behaviour.

Neil Twa:
So did you miss the mark? No. I actually think in the next two to five years, we're going to see that number increase in a number of upward jolts due to just changes in the market and adaptation and people like my parents who are buying online a lot more from their mobile phones who were not doing it before. With that shift in that expected market shift comes a momentum and a narrative that will push people forward to it.

Neil Twa:
Simplicity of delivery, a lot of services came online, people learned a lot of lessons about what they did wrong in hyper-growth situations. And that market change is going to allow a lot of things I think this year to be realized just from that shift in expectation to the online. So we see, actually in the last component to answer your question more much more specifically. Due to the changes in capacity and people's inability to keep up with it in certain ways they weren't knowledgeable about business growth situations and many are going to collapse under that because of the growth.

Neil Twa:
Hyper-growth is what everybody would believe is fun. It's that lottery mindset idea, I scratch and boom ,I make a billion dollars. But nobody realizes the systems' infrastructure of people that have to make that all run and can collapse under it. So actually many businesses right now are finding themselves incapable of delivering the amount of product that is currently setting there. Literally down to the UPS guy last night, who was like, "We are slammed." Delivering at eight o'clock my time when he never comes at eight o'clock. And so we're seeing that a number of businesses are falling out the door and Warren Buffet said when people are not being greedy, be greedy and when the tide goes out, you're going to find out who's naked.

Neil Twa:
Well, at this point, the tide is going out temporarily and it's opening huge opportunities. It's opening movement for people who can move, it's opening holes in the market that were not there previously we wouldn't go into. We're evaluating certain products and niches we wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. We're touching them now and looking at how we touch them this year. Again, opportunity costs. We're moving into a market I think right now that's going to open the doors for a lot of people who are ready to take that risk this year to move into areas and take certain aspects of risks they wouldn't have done last year. I think we're going to see that happening very fast in the first and second quarter of this year.

Richard Hill:
A lot of things there. I think the logistics one's an interesting one, isn't it? There's actually not just Amazon coping, but everybody coping with the sheer volume of orders that are coming through all the platforms.

Neil Twa:
Correct.

Richard Hill:
And then people just having to turn stuff off in a fact because they can't deliver it.

Neil Twa:
Hyper-growth.

Richard Hill:
And that's quite a lot of that going on in our agency where clients are saying, "Turn everything off. We can't ship it. Pause the ads for a week. Pause the ads for a month."

Richard Hill:
We had a client in November that we've done five times what they were doing the previous November. December, they just said, "Turn it off. We actually can't do it." So December-

Neil Twa:
Well, it might be those systems catching up in about the first quarter, the second quarter of this year, which I think is where you're going to see a big shift occur again, because that opportunity is getting reconciled as we move forward, which is good and bad for those who are watching the wave. There will be another wave by the middle of -

Richard Hill:
Interesting times, isn't it? The hyper-growth. This three, four, five years growth in several months. It's an amazing thing to witness. And obviously a lot of opportunity for those that can be very dynamic and very push and go through with it. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I always like to finish with a couple of questions. First one would be, if you could recommend one book to any of our listeners, what would that book be? It doesn't have to be on Amazon. It can be on anything.

Neil Twa:
Yeah. I don't sell books on Amazon. Believe it or not. I forgot the author. Someone will have to forgive me, but it's Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway.

Richard Hill:
Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. Yeah.

Neil Twa:
I have to remember. It's a lady and I can't remember at the moment.

Richard Hill:
Lady, yeah. I know I have it on the bookshelf behind me as well.

Neil Twa:
It's a good one for people to take out because we just went for a world fear rod -

Neil Twa:
And those who felt the fear and did it anyway, so we're going to seek opportunity that's in front of us. And so that also brings me to Jim Collins, Good to Great. The difference between a good to great business at this point, good is not good enough in the market of eCommerce. If you're going to sustain some of these hyper-growth or situations, you're going to have to have put together a great systems and processes to overcome them, or you're going to be out of business. Jim Collins is a great read, still a great study, even though the cases aren't necessarily as relevant, the intent behind the case studies is very relevant. In the field of Fear And Do It Anyways. I don't know that one hit me hard. I can go back and reread that one myself, just to put my mindset back in the right place.

Richard Hill:
Two great books. Fantastic. So we'll link those up in the show notes as well. Now, if the guys that are listening want to find out more about yourself, reach out to you, connect with you. What's the best way to do that?

Neil Twa:
Simplest way is go to voltagedm.com and just hit the contact button. Our brands, our software, sixleaf.com for product research and building Amazon brands is great for those who maybe want to get started at product research through Phoenix. We have a third party review data scientifically reviewed tool. We are the most accurate data tool by third party verification for product research. And we use it every day to validate our products and numbers very, very big and of course, well, there's DM to talk about business management and consulting around Amazon.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Well, we'll link all that up in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on eCom@One. Thanks a lot Neil.

Neil Twa:
Thank you Richard. Appreciate the time.

Richard Hill:
Thank you.

Richard Hill:
Thank you for listening to the eCom@One eCommerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eComOne, the eCommerce marketing agency.