“Hey, thanks for tuning in to another Partner Interview at EcomBalance. At EcomBalance, we’re all about creating win-win partnerships where we are able to grow with other companies in the eCommerce space.
In this exclusive interview, we interview Richard Connorton from Seller Candy, an Amazon seller central service provider.
I was born and raised in the UK, but have spent the past six years living in Vietnam. I studied finance at uni, but quickly realized that I hated it so went back to software sales and ecommerce roles. I’m now the Partnership Manager at Seller Candy – a company that helps Amazon sellers manage their Seller Central operations.
More personal things; I’ll eat and drink absolutely anything – a necessity after spending so long living in Asia. I have a cat called Riddle (huge Harry Potter fan) and I’ve won multiple 8-ball trophies, which probably says more than I’d like about how long I spend in pubs!
We hope that you enjoy the interview and that it brings value to you as an eCommerce business owner.”
Connor: Hey Richard, thanks for taking the time to chat with us here. We love getting to know our partners better so that our community can benefit from what our partners are offering and doing in the industry. To get started, can you give us a high-level overview of Seller Candy and how it got started?
Richard: Thanks for inviting us to do this! Sure – our founder, John Cavendish, followed what seems to be almost the natural path these days. He started with his own 7-figure Amazon business and built multiple brands before transitioning to an agency model to help others with their growth. That was going well but that agency was growing so fast that we needed extra support with operations and case management. We looked around and couldn’t find a single service out there that did what we needed. So, we made one! Our full-service clients were taken care of by a partner agency and Seller Candy was born to help with everything we wished we’d been able to find. We don’t do content creation, PPC or strategy – we’re entirely focused on operations in Seller Central only.
Connor: That’s awesome! Can you dive a bit more into the products and services that you offer to help entrepreneurs outsource Amazon Seller Central? I’m sure our audience would love to know exactly what problems you could solve for them.
Richard: Nobody really likes dealing with Seller Support, right? It’s frustratingly difficult to get anything done. You spend hours going back and forth with emails and calls with no resolution at the end. Seller Candy acts as a kind of backend operations arm of Seller Central businesses of all kinds. We sit between sellers or agencies and Seller Support – if you have an operational issue or case that you would usually raise to Amazon, you instead raise that with us, and we take care of it from start to finish. We do all of the messaging and calling, escalating cases and getting them solved quickly. We’ve actually got a menu with all of the stuff we do on it (it’s here) – anything from merging ASINs to recovering suppressed listings. We can also help with reimbursements from Amazon and Buyer Messages (added in our Customer Service module a couple of weeks ago).
Connor: Jumping off of that…if there was one problem, you’d say that Seller Candy solves best for your clients, what would it be? Why?
Richard: Solving problems is our raison d’être so I’d have to say all of them! The people who get the most value from what we do are Amazon sellers, resellers, brand-owners, wholesalers and even agencies who don’t want to commit any time or energy to dealing with Amazon’s nonsense but still want to grow their business and leverage the reach of the platform. We’re making no promises of revenue growth or sales – that’s up to you. What we will promise is to keep your accounts as healthy as they possibly can be.
Connor: As the company continues to grow over the next year, what are your plans for expansion? Any new products or offerings or enhancements to your current products?
Richard: I think I said earlier that we recently added Customer Service due to popular demand. We can handle all Buyer Messages (as long as the product isn’t too technical!) within Amazon’s terms to keep account health as high as it possibly can be. I don’t know that there are plans to add much else just yet, although we are looking at a monthly package that works for newer sellers so that we can give them some much needed support too. We have just launched a podcast called the Amazon Strategist Show which is quite exciting! I believe Nathan is coming on in the next couple of weeks. We’re digging into real strategy for growth and sustainability without the hacks.
Connor: And how specifically would you say that Seller Candy and your team is different from other similar businesses in the industry?
Richard: The biggest difference is that there aren’t really any other businesses that do what we do. There are people out there who do small sections of it – reimbursements, account suspensions, listing suppressions…we’re the only business that brings all of those things into one place and productizes it to make our customers’ lives easier and give them unlimited support.
Connor: What made you decide to get involved in the Amazon service space? What’s your starting eCommerce story? From what we’ve found, a lot of business owners in the space have fun stories of how they first started…
Richard: Me personally? It is an unusual story I suppose. I’ve never sold anything on Amazon myself but here’s how I came to work with John. I live in Vietnam – I have for about 6 years. About 4 years ago, a friend and I were renting a house with 3 floors, and we needed to fill the 3rd. Along came Arvin who, at the time, was John’s VA for a couple of his brands. We became close friends and, as they say, the rest is history! Fast forward a year and I was working with them in the old full-service agency and then on to the Partnership Manager position here at Seller Candy. Arvin also came along, he’s the Head of Delivery and manages about 50 staff.
Connor: Love it! Talking more about the eCommerce industry, where do you see it going in the next 1-2 years? Any unique predictions that you could share?
Richard: It’s undeniable that it’ll keep growing in every way. Kids are growing up buying everything online and the number of non-adopters is falling. Looking more at the support side and Amazon specifically, they’re clearly moving in the direction of removing or at least heavily scaling back human interaction in their support. They’ve already condensed several support departments from multiple buildings to a single building (in Spain I think). They’re testing templated responses so heavily because soon that’s all there will be. The support staff you speak with on the phone have a KPI in place to hold you at their level and not escalate to the leadership team, the only ones who can actually make changes to accounts. It’s worrying – everything is only going to become more difficult for sellers when issues do come up in their accounts.
Connor: Giving you an open mic for a minute, what is something you’d want the EcomBalance audience to hear?
Richard: I ordered a deck of cards from Amazon last week, but it still hasn’t arrived. I contacted Customer Service, and they told me they’re dealing with it.
Connor: Changing gears a little bit…When it comes to bookkeeping and accounting, what do you think the biggest pain points for business owners are? Feel free to speak from personal experience as well.
Richard: I’d say probably a lack of consistency. From my understanding it’s quite difficult and costly to get everything up straight initially for those who haven’t used a proper service. Once that’s all done and everything is correct, many business owners will take it from there and then things get messy again and the whole cycle starts over again. I’d say the most important thing is to find someone reliable and stick with it – it’s worth it in the long run!
Connor: As we close this out, I just have one more question. Where is the best place to find and follow you and the company online? Also, if you have one, is there any special offer that you’ll be offering to the community today?
Richard: You can find more information about what we do at www.sellercandy.com. We’re also on some social media channels, mostly Facebook and LinkedIn (we’re the only Seller Candy). Also, if you get a chance to check out the Amazon Strategist Show we’d love to hear your feedback. There’s no links I can give you yet as we’ve not even posted the first episode, but we have a couple recorded and I think they’re pretty great. Thank you Connor!
