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.
Today, we have a conversation with Robyn Johnson from Marketplace Blueprint.
Robyn has been heralded as one of the country’s foremost leaders on the topic of selling and marketing products on Amazon. She has been a guest on shows like Entrepreneur on Fire and Confessions of a Marketer. She is also a SEMrush Academy professor.
Robyn is the co-founder of Marketplace Blueprint, a digital agency that specializes in listing optimization and advertising on Amazon. She has over a decade of experience of selling online on Amazon, eBay, and other eCommerce venues.
Connor: Hey Robyn, 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 and how it got started?
Robyn: Marketplace blueprint actually started about 6-7 years ago. But we’ve actually been working in the Amazon space for about 12-13 years now.
We started reselling trying to make ends meet. We grew that very quickly and started coaching high-volume Amazon sellers.
In the process of selling at a high volume ourselves on Amazon, we realized what a big problem Amazon was for so many brands, and that’s really kind of what led it led us to start the agency and now we work with a variety of companies.
All the way from pre-revenue launching, to a lot of Shark Tank companies, all the way to publicly traded companies. So we really love getting to work with companies at all different stages of their growth. Connor: That’s awesome! Can you dive a bit more into the type of Amazon consulting services that you offer? I’m sure our audience would love to know exactly what problems you could solve for them. Robyn: With the services that we offer, we really focus on integrated search for Amazon. So that means that our agency provides more than just listing optimization or advertising. We look at everything altogether.
For most of our clients, we are going to be doing not only the listing optimization, but we’re also going to be doing the advertising, management and strategy, and any structured data issues.
We actually have three full time former Amazonians that their entire job is just to submit and follow up on seller support tickets. We really work together to make all of Amazon work together, whether that’s integrating a company into Amazon special programs, or using their content to try to increase the conversion rate for their ads. We try to look at everything to make sure all of our clients are getting the best impact for their dollar on Amazon.
Connor: Jumping off of that…if there was one problem you’d say that Marketplace Blueprint solves best for your clients, what would it be? Why? Robyn: One thing that Marketplace Blueprint really solves is that we’re really here to help make all of the things that make Amazon stressful, less stressful. We handle the following up with Amazon Seller Support tickets, we help you navigate that chain and we stay on top of all of the industry information, especially since a lot of our brands are not Amazon native. They are companies that maybe are on Home Depot and Lowe’s and Walmart. It has that wider distribution, and ,because of that, they have a different set of problems.
So we can help them manage their 3P sellers and we can help them be able to kind of control the buy box a little bit better. What I would say that the main problem that we solve is we help detangle a lot of the complications that can come with the Amazon marketplace. And because we work with so many brands across so many verticals, we usually know the quickest way to get things done and we used to get around even some of the newer snags that can happen with Amazon accounts. 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? Robyn: As our company grows over the next year, our products would stay fairly close to the same.
One thing that we’re seeing a lot of agencies that maybe had only done advertising in the past are now jumping more on to wanting to do creative. The advertising products are changing where now creative is going to play a larger and larger role in Amazon, and we’re seeing this not just in the ads but also through Amazon posts.
We can really see that we would continue to expand our creative to match the new offerings that Amazon has so that we can make sure that our brands get the maximum amount of exposure with the least amount of ad spend. Connor: And how specifically would you say that Marketplace Blueprint and your team is different from other similar businesses in the industry?Robyn: What makes us different is that while there’s a lot of Amazon ad agencies, there’s not as many companies that really look at Amazon holistically. One of the things that makes us different is that we look at how your listing optimization impacts your organic ads; everybody on our staff has a deeper breadth of experience on Amazon.
Not only do we have several people who’ve been with the company for five or six years, but most of the people that we’ve hired recently in the last one or two years are former Amazonians, people who worked within Amazon that really understand the processes.
Another thing that really separates us is that we are able to assist clients with compliance issues, Seller Support issues, and escalations, helping to make sure that the entire account is healthy. We check on account health to make sure there’s nothing that could be stopping the account from continuing to grow and have the listings stay live.
Connor: What made you decide to get involved in the consulting space? What’s your starting eCommerce story? From what we’ve found, a lot of business owners in consulting have fun stories of how they first started…Robyn: We’re excited to get into the consulting space because we saw what a difference we can make for people. Managing Amazon is a full time job. And for a lot of companies, to be able to manage and keep up with everything that’s happening in the industry, every change that Amazon rolls out can be really overwhelming.
Getting to work with these brands, brands that we’ve always really enjoyed and that we’re really really proud and happy to be a part of, has been something that’s been really amazing.
Also, we’ve got to develop this really amazing team where we have quite a few people that used to work at Amazon that we have been able to expand our knowledge set and build new processes to be able to better serve our customers. 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? Robyn: You know, the ecommerce industry has really been growing up, especially marketplace selling – it was really “wild, wild west”.
But I really see that over the next couple of years, we’re gonna see a maturation of the marketplace sellers that are successful where before it was kind of “Field of Dreams”, it was “wild, wild west”, a lot of hacks, we’re starting to see that a lot of fundamentals for overall traditional marketing is starting to take a better foothold.
And because we’ve been focused on that for a long time, we’re really well suited to be able to help coach our clients through that. Things like making sure that you’re not just growing your gross sales and your revenue, But more of “are you profitable? Is there a path to profitability on this marketplace?” And what can we do to help increase your margins to make things a little bit more doable because inventory based businesses can be so cash intense.
Also, we’re seeing a maturation in the way that you have to structure the customer journey and understand your ICP – your ideal customer profile or customer avatar, whatever you want to call it. We’re seeing that you have to have more of a strategic, well thought-out marketing strategy versus just running a bunch of ads and hoping that it will work out. It really needs to be coordinated with your off-Amazon advertising as well.
So I really do see that a lot of folks that are not able to adjust to this higher level of demand might not be able to make it. We might start to see a shrinking of the population of what maybe most of us would consider private label sellers as we start to see more and more brands come to Amazon. They will bring that branded search with them and be able to take some of that ground that has been traditionally held with prep by private labelers up to this point. Connor: Giving you an open mic for a minute, what is something you’d want the EcomBalance audience to hear?Robyn: If I could tell the EcomBalance audience one thing, it would be that when we need to look at Amazon as a part of your overall strategy, and while we want to make sure we’re getting the most out of Amazon, it’s important to be partnered up with really good people that can help you off Amazon.
We don’t do that ourselves, but we can point you in the direction of people who are really, really world-class in the industry.
The other thing is that on Amazon, there can be a tendency to focus on gross sales, on ranking, on growth, and those are all wonderful things. But, specially, as there has been a lot of upheaval in supply chain, costs, and shipping containers, the costs for shipping has been on a big old roller coaster ride for the last couple of years, really focusing on profitability.
And not just looking at trying to get to profitability someday, but how you can have a strategic plan to get to a profitable point and we see a lot of brands that kind of come in just hoping that it will work out without a clear strategy. And it can mean that maybe you pursue the wrong things or the wrong product expansion.
So really having a well thought-out strategy to get you to profitability, and to maximize that profitability is going to be really really important.
Amazon selling is very cashflow-intensive because physical products are very cashflow-intensive. It is really important that you be able to focus on what is going to get you the most profit so that you can have the biggest cash reserves available if something were to change, if our relationship with China was to change, if something was to happen that would change the cost of goods or shipping or even Amazon fees. 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. Robyn: When it comes to bookkeeping and accounting, I think that the biggest pain point for business owners is honestly their fear of what the numbers will say. I think that a lot of smaller businesses will only have their numbers done once or twice a year, thinking “what difference does it make?”, not understanding that looking at your books on a regular basis, and even having your books set up in a way that you can manage from them and identify early red flags of when your costs or when your margins have changed can help you avoid big mistakes and expand into a product line that would put you into a tight cash flow position.
Being able to identify where cash is going, and when it’s returning and how much you have on hand on a monthly basis at minimum is really important. It’s even more important that we are watching those costs because the economy has been changing and fluctuating.
Additionally, as ads get more competitive on Amazon, it’s more important for us to keep an eye on those margins. You might assume that you’re walking away with a certain amount per sale, but in reality, you could be earning less because of the increased cost of ads due to competitiveness.
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? Robyn: So the best place to find us is through our website where I have a listing optimization guide. There’s also a way to contact us to get an audit. We can do a free audit where we look at some of your listings, And I’ll record a quick video that tells you anything that we see from the front end of your advertising that we might recommend that you change as well.
We’re always happy to do that, feel free to reach out too. We do offer a free consultation if somebody is interested in trying to find out about our services to see if it’s a good fit. And if we can’t get you a good connection, we can refer you out to somebody else.
