Episode Summary
In this episode of 7 Figures and Beyond E-Commerce Marketing Podcast, host Greg Shuey interviews Amazon expert Robyn Johnson, co-founder of Marketplace Blueprint, to discuss how compliance and inventory levels can make or break an Amazon selling strategy. Robyn shares her journey from being a youth minister to scaling a million-dollar Amazon business, eventually launching an agency specializing in listing optimization and advertising. She explains how Amazon’s algorithm prioritizes sales conversions over content quality, making inventory management and compliance essential for success. They discuss recent policy changes, including stricter compliance regulations, the impact of running out of stock on organic rankings, and strategies to balance FBA and merchant fulfillment. Robyn highlights real-world examples where brands faced setbacks due to compliance missteps, illustrating the importance of understanding Amazon’s evolving policies. She also provides actionable insights on launching and scaling a brand on Amazon, avoiding pitfalls, and ensuring long-term success on the platform.
Key Takeaways
- Amazon Prioritizes Sales Conversions Over Content Quality – Unlike Google, Amazon’s algorithm focuses purely on sales performance. To rank well, sellers must demonstrate strong conversion rates for target keywords. Running out of stock or facing listing suppressions can severely impact rankings and require a costly relaunch.
- Compliance Issues Can Shut Down Listings and Entire Businesses – Amazon has tightened regulations on product compliance, requiring brands to have proper certifications for categories like toys, food, and products with antimicrobial claims. Misclassifying products or using the wrong keywords (e.g., “doll” in a toy listing) can trigger policy violations, leading to listing suppression or permanent bans.
- Running Out of Inventory is a Sales and Ranking Killer – Sellers must keep at least 4-6 weeks of inventory at Amazon’s fulfillment centers to prevent stockouts, which lead to ranking drops. If inventory runs low, brands should strategically adjust ad spend and promotions to slow sales rather than running completely out of stock.
- Balancing FBA and Merchant Fulfillment is Critical for Risk Management – While FBA increases conversion rates (sometimes by 400%+), Amazon’s recent changes in reimbursement policies mean high-cost or luxury items may be better suited for merchant fulfillment. Sellers should also consider using Seller Fulfilled Prime to maintain the Prime badge without relying solely on FBA.
- Amazon is No Longer the Wild West—Brands Must Be Strategic – Selling on Amazon requires a structured approach, including securing trademarks for Brand Registry, following compliance guidelines, and understanding how changes to policies (like UPC requirements) impact listings. Small brands should invest in expert guidance to avoid costly mistakes, such as losing inventory due to misclassification.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Is my inventory strategy optimized to prevent stockouts? If your product goes out of stock, are you prepared with backup fulfillment options?
- Am I fully compliant with Amazon’s latest policies? Have I reviewed my product descriptions, claims, and UPC registrations to avoid listing suppressions?
- Do I understand how Amazon’s algorithm works? Am I optimizing for conversions and sales velocity rather than traditional SEO tactics?
- Am I using FBA or FBM strategically? Have I assessed which fulfillment method works best for my product’s cost, margin, and risk?
- How am I preparing for future Amazon policy changes? Do I stay informed through forums, industry groups, and expert insights to avoid sudden setbacks?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Robyn Johnson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robynjohnsonaz/
Marketplace Blueprint: https://marketplaceblueprint.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.047)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the seven figures and beyond e-commerce marketing podcast. I am your host, Greg Shewy. If you’ve listened to any of our episodes, you know that I eat, breathe and sleep this stuff. And I am really excited to be with you again today. My guest today, her name is Robin Johnson and Robin has been heralded as one of the country’s foremost leaders on the topic of selling and marketing products on Amazon.
She’s been a guest on shows like entrepreneur on fire, confessions of a marketer, and she regularly speaks at shows all over the world. By the way, Robin, kudos to you because I’m not a speaker. Nothing’s more painful to me than getting up in front of a crowd, but she does it. She’s done it, at SMX London, PubCon, PubCon. I mean, that was the first marketing conference I ever went to in Vegas. That was great. prosper and more. She is.
also the co-founder of Marketplace Blueprint. They are a digital agency that specializes in listing, listing optimization and advertising on Amazon. She has over a decade of experience selling online on Amazon eBay and other e-commerce venues. Over the next 30 to 40 minutes, we’re going to dive into how compliance and inventory levels can completely derail your entire Amazon strategy. I’m not an Amazon guy and I am a
really excited to be able to learn about this topic. So Robin, thank you for being with us today.
Robyn Johnson (01:33.806)
Thank you for having me on. love, you cause I’ve been eating, breathing, sleeping Amazon. So it is so fun to be able to share. And as I have gotten to know people outside of the Amazon space, I kind of tell people it’s kind of like Alice in Wonderland. It looks like a butterfly, but it’s actually a bread and butterfly. So there’s a lot of things that have the same labels, but they might behave differently. And so happy to share from my perspective and experience with Amazon.
Greg Shuey (01:52.107)
Hahaha
Greg Shuey (02:04.023)
That’s awesome. So when was the last time you spoke at PubCon?
Robyn Johnson (02:08.076)
The last one, that would have been October. Yes.
Greg Shuey (02:11.425)
Nice, cool. I mean, they’re all over these days, right? Do they still do the one in Vegas?
Robyn Johnson (02:17.528)
Yeah, that one was in Vegas. I don’t know if he’s going to do the March one because it hasn’t been announced yet. The one in Austin, but I think he’s still planning on doing the one in October. I’ve been speaking at PubCon since like, I want to say like 2016, 2017. And I love it. I think it’s a great conference to meet people and really good quality content and yeah, great, great people.
Greg Shuey (02:43.285)
I’m an introvert. That stuff just rocks my world. yeah. Well, before we dive in, could you take a few minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and then how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Robyn Johnson (03:00.126)
Yeah, so, you one of the reasons why I don’t shy away from public speaking is before this, I was in the least capitalistic, capitalistic profession possible. I was a youth minister. I worked at like Kinkos and like some other places, there’s several other places before that. But once you try to sell chastity to teenagers, everything else is easy. So,
But you know, my son got sick and when you work for the church, they say the metaphors are out of this world because the pay is not. We took a hundred dollars. We were broke. Like anytime the money, the air conditioner would make a sound or the car would, know, would stutter, then I would get really, really scared. We took a hundred dollars. We took a hundred dollars out of our emergency fund.
And we started buying things selling them on Craigslist and then eBay and then Amazon and we took that hundred dollars and we turned it into a million dollar business in just a few years Yeah, and that was in like 2010 ish. So We started selling at Amazon at a really high volume And then we started coaching high volume sellers as we started moving from kind of this reselling and working with brands
we realized what an issue Amazon was for brand owners. And about eight-ish years ago, we started the agency. And so we’re a full service agency that handles all of the things like, hey, Amazon, this baby spoon is not a sexual illness product, to trying to explain to somebody why they can’t see their sock as antimicrobial because Amazon will ask for an EPA registration number. So all of those weird things. And then of course, the advertising and the SEO as well.
Greg Shuey (04:45.687)
Cool, awesome. That is a great story. Thank you for sharing that. That is fantastic. So you’ve gone the rounds. You’ve been a seller, you’ve been a consultant, you do work now. So…
Robyn Johnson (04:49.486)
Thanks.
Greg Shuey (05:00.395)
Before we get into kind of the meat of what we’re going to talk about in terms of like compliance and inventory issues, can you help our listeners really understand how Amazon works and why listing restrictions and suppressions and other inventory issues impacts their overall ranking and ability to sell on the platform?
Robyn Johnson (05:22.488)
Yeah, so if we were going to oversimplify things, you would say that while Amazon looks like Google, it behaves very differently. It doesn’t care about fresh content. It doesn’t care about unique content. It doesn’t care about dwell time. It only cares about making a sale. It’s the most capitalistic search engine out there. So if you want to be the number one seller for a spatula, then you have to show Amazon that you will convert for spatula.
Greg Shuey (05:25.473)
Yes.
Robyn Johnson (05:48.302)
So if you launch a product, I wouldn’t recommend launching Spatulas right now, by the way. But if you wanted to, let’s say the current best-selling Spatula sells 1,000 units a day. It’s probably way more than that, but let’s just say 1,000. That means that you would need to sell 1,010, 1,009, 1,002. You’d have to consistently outsell that. And we have to do that for each one of those keywords. So what’s really, really important is that you
not only have a product that has great image, the primary image is your ad creative, your title is your ad creative for most ad types, there are some exceptions. But so that’s really the SERP is really created from your PDP, your product detail page. So you have to have that. the 10 commandments of Amazon selling are that you never run out of inventory, you never run out of inventory, you run out of inventory, you know, keep going. You know, there’s
because when you run out of inventory or your listing is somehow unavailable or what’s called the buy box is suppressed. the buy box is where it says that, have you ever gone to an Amazon listing and there’s no add to cart button? So when that happens, that means the buy box suppressed. You can’t run ads, you’re not gonna convert as well. So any of those things are gonna cause you to not get those sales on those important keywords where your competitors are. So even if nothing else changes,
you’re going to fall down the ranks. So you could have spent a whole bunch of money because ads impact organic on Amazon trying to launch and rank your product. If you run out of stock, then you’re going to fall back down and you’re going to have to climb back up again. So it’s really important that you keep your list of listings active and with, you know, and converting at the same rate.
Greg Shuey (07:37.517)
Okay, cool. That’s a great download. Thank you for sharing that. So as with just about any other platform out there, Amazon rolls out a lot of changes every single year. As you think back to 2024, like what were some of the biggest changes that they rolled out that impacted sellers?
Robyn Johnson (07:49.033)
Hehehehe
Robyn Johnson (07:59.438)
You know, think there are, they did roll out a ton of ad stuff and that could be a whole other thing. they, changed some things with inbound shipping, that could be a whole other thing. But I think the thing that I’ve seen that has really derailed a couple of people, a couple of companies that they didn’t expect was Amazon was determined that they’re liable for recalled items. And you might think, well, yeah, they should be. And I agree 100%. Yeah, they should be.
but it caused them to make some policy changes that impacted people in some different ways. And they’ve also have gotten in trouble several times for compliance with things like CPSC, EPA. And so the last year has really tightened that down. So before maybe it was the wild, wild west, I would say in the last two to three years, it’s become more of a legitimate, like mature marketplace where you need to have all your ducks in a row and your marketing ready.
But because of those compliance issues and because of the changes with UPCs, now you have to be used to be, you could just grab a recycled UPC off of eBay. But now Amazon wants that UPC to match the brand that’s registered with Amazon with your trademark at the GS1 database. And if it doesn’t, it can cause issues. They might not even let you create the listing. We even had a brand that they had a GS1 attached to their brand.
Five years ago, they recycled that product, that UPC from one product to a new product. We tried to update it last year and Amazon actually gave them a policy violation for materially changing that listing. So it’s really important now that you need to spend the $42 or whatever it is at GS1. And especially for newer brands, we find sometimes they wanna like try to find a less expensive way.
If things go really, really well, you could cause a really big problem. There were a lot of companies this year that Amazon basically said, tough cookies, you shouldn’t have broken the policy in order to get that brand changed or in order to be able to continue to make listing updates, or we’re just going to shut that down, listing down completely for violating that policy. And you’re going to have to start all over again, which means they had to get new reviews.
Robyn Johnson (10:17.417)
if you had the right connections, you sometimes were able to get it changed, if you were in the right programs where they could help you. But you wanna make sure you’re really thinking that through. And then the compliance things, Amazon has gotten a lot stricter about. And so, we had a toy company that’s like, can we just say that this product is for 13 years and older? And I’m like, no, because we have a seven year old in the image. So no, no, we can’t because that law is there for a reason.
But you know, they’re a lot stricter on that and all of those things can cause your listing to go unavailable.
Greg Shuey (10:53.825)
Yeah, there’s no more just winging it. It’s not the wow wow anymore. Got it. Okay. So I know you work with a lot of clients that could you share an example of how a compliance issue really derailed their growth? And then what were the consequences and how could they have been avoided?
Robyn Johnson (10:55.766)
No. Yes.
Robyn Johnson (11:10.112)
Yeah, so we have a product line. If you know what Funko Pop action figures are, it’s like a competitor to that. And they had hired somebody, an inexpensive agency or consultant to help them update their listings. And that person changed the category of their product to be in the toys and games thing. And they also added the word doll to the title. And so what happened is the word doll by itself
Greg Shuey (11:17.889)
I didn’t even know.
Robyn Johnson (11:40.094)
and changing something into toys and games will trigger a CPSC requirement. if they have, that means that Amazon is going to expect that item to be tested, or you have to submit multiple seller support tickets to prove to them that this is not a child’s related product. You know, it’s not a children’s product. you know, and most of the people who have been on Amazon know the EPA registration thing and pesticide thing has been an issue for many years.
But you might not know if you’re not in the Amazon space, they’re very particular around the words that relate to pesticides. So you can’t say anti-microbial, you can’t say antibacterial, you can’t say deters pests unless you have an EPA registration number. So if your product does actually do that, they expect you to have that registration number. And if it’s not, they’re gonna make you remove that. And we even had a client that
They were in a skin bleaching product and they’ve done everything right, but Amazon upped what was required as far as compliance and made it so that that particular category was no longer eligible for advertising and then pretty much put that company out of business. actually closing down right now. So, you know, when it comes to Amazon, they are like a giant tank rolling down the road. So it’s best if you can run with them or get out of their way. If you’re trying to
you know, fight them against where they’re going, it’s not going to go.
Greg Shuey (13:09.623)
it. Okay, well let’s talk about inventory for a couple of minutes. So you mentioned that, you know, the Ten Commandments are don’t run out of product, don’t run out of inventory. So how do those inventory levels directly impact someone to be able to scale on Amazon? And then are there strategies that sellers can use to maintain optimal stock levels?
Robyn Johnson (13:32.91)
Yeah. So in the beginning, we kind of just started with running ads and creating listings. What we found is we really need to help give brands a restock recommendations, work with them to help make sure they’re sending inventory in, you know, and part of that is, you know, knowing how you’re shipping products into Amazon. If you’re using LTL or FTL, then those delivery times expand significantly as you get close to Christmas. You need to know if you’re sending to a distribution warehouse because that will change your lead time.
But the nice thing about what we do is, and if you’re doing this, this would be a great service for you to add, is that when we’re looking at the inventory levels and we’re looking at the ads, if a product is gonna go out of stock, the first thing we wanna do is pull back any discounts and pull back any ads. Because what we do is we wanna slow down that conversion.
so that we don’t have an actual out of stock. This way we’re not going, maybe we’re moving from here to, we’re moving just down a couple of spots on the list. We’re moving just to page two and not to page 47. If it’s a listing that’s on a variation where you’re just out of the blue of your socks, that’s gonna have less of an impact than if it’s by itself. So if you have a product that’s a variation,
Greg Shuey (14:50.125)
Hmm.
Robyn Johnson (14:53.432)
then you do have a little bit more flexibility. Maybe you just take the discount off of the blue, because that’s the one you’re running out of, and you increase the discount on the black and the red and the green. So people who were kind of ambiguous about color might be willing to go towards that less expensive one, right? And you could inch prices up on products that you think will have a longer stockout price, but you have to be very careful in the way that you do that.
Greg Shuey (15:10.861)
interesting.
Robyn Johnson (15:21.686)
If Amazon feels the price has gone up too much too fast, they’ll lose the buy box for that. And that’s gonna hurt you more than it’s gonna help you.
Greg Shuey (15:29.215)
Interesting. Okay, cool. So let’s pretend a seller’s running a promotion and it goes gangbusters in 24 hours and they accidentally sell out. Is there anything they can do there to make sure that they don’t get nailed or that they get suppressed or whatnot from Amazon or are they just out of luck?
Robyn Johnson (15:53.848)
So remind me to ask if I forget the suppressed part, but if we’re gonna run a promotion and we’re gonna be running ads, one of the things we’ll look at is we’ll say, okay, we have a conversion rate of about this much, we’re spending about this much, this is how much inventory. You always wanna keep four to six weeks of inventory at Amazon, right? And then you wanna have inventory that, so if we’re gonna run a big promotion, I want that four to six weeks of inventory, not to just be sending into Amazon, not to have arrived at Amazon.
Greg Shuey (16:08.809)
forecasting.
Robyn Johnson (16:23.256)
but to be fully checked in and available. And this is really, really important. People will say it’s arrived at Amazon, it’s been received. If it doesn’t say that item is available, we don’t want to start that promotion because we want to have not only that inventory checked in, but those ads will deliver even if it hasn’t like really kind of gotten fully into that final warehouse. And then it will show an extended delivery date, which is going to tank your conversion, right? So you want to make sure that you have fully available units
Greg Shuey (16:48.685)
Hmm.
Robyn Johnson (16:52.958)
And we have inventory that we can send in to supplement. soon as like that first day of that promotion, things go really, really great. Since we have four to six weeks worth of inventory, even if it’s more expensive, we might send a small parcel in the very next day to kind of accommodate for that. If we’re really like, you know, this could go a lot of different ways, we’ll add a merchant fulfilled SKU onto the back of that as well.
Greg Shuey (17:11.415)
So what are you here?
Greg Shuey (17:17.417)
Okay. So what I’m hearing is you should never accidentally run out of product when you’re selling on Amazon for six weeks, ready to ship. And then you need to also have stuff in your own warehouse in case something happens. Got it.
Robyn Johnson (17:31.33)
And it’s not the end of the world. If you run out of stock, you know, we’re the only time where I’ve seen it really like, like this was the end of the world for a brand is they was a, it was a board game that had a really successful Kickstarter. had done really, really well. We sold, you know, they had goals. The first year we worked with them, we sold them out. We started, you know, we, the goal was to sell out maybe by January. We sold out by like November 1st. you know, we really were able to ramp them up fast.
but then they had some issues with their supplier and it took them eight months to get restocked. And board games especially, they’re not, you know, you have to really, there has to be some external awareness. And so when they came back the next year, they kind of expected that same, you know, ump and you know, it was a much deeper climb and they weren’t completely prepared for that. So, you know, if it’s a short out of stock, you can recover from it. The longer you’re out of stock, the more you’re almost starting from scratch.
Greg Shuey (18:28.533)
Wow. When you’ve had to start from scratch again, like what does that ramp up time look like from going to not doing very well anymore to back to feeling good about where you’re at sales wise?
Robyn Johnson (18:44.494)
So anytime you’re kind of, so this is kind of what’s kind of funky. So on Amazon, you might say we’re going to run ads that are intentionally unprofitable. If you were just to look at the campaign or you were just to look at things, we want to look at, we look at Acos, Acos instead of Morazz most of the time. And so basically we look at tacos, which is the equivalent of Morazz, right? We want to look at how those ads are impacting organic sales.
So we might say, okay, you’re coming back into stock. We’re gonna run ads that we know you’re gonna be losing $6 on every unit. And we’re gonna run that with the, and the reason we’re gonna do that, we’re gonna focus on a very small number of keywords. And we’re gonna focus on ranking for those keywords. So another thing I like to tell clients is that advertising on Amazon is like arguing with a toddler. Pick your battles, but when it all costs. The biggest mistake you can do is try to run ads on all of your products.
Greg Shuey (19:37.057)
Hahaha.
Robyn Johnson (19:43.104)
Incremental sales is not a path to profitability on Amazon. You want to have enough sales for specific keywords to drive that organic range.
Greg Shuey (19:51.957)
Okay, cool. Fascinating. All right. So we’ve talked a little bit about sending inventory into Amazon. FBA also, as that is referred to. What’s your advice on balancing fulfillment options like FBA as well as fulfilled by merchant in order to manage compliance and then inventory levels effectively? How should sellers split that up?
Robyn Johnson (20:19.95)
So there are some sellers, six months ago I would have said 98.5 % of people need to be using FBA. There was a change to the reimbursement policy. So it used to be that when Amazon lost your inventory, if you were selling it for 20, they would say, okay, minus our fees, you would get 14.50, so we’ll reimburse you 14.50.
Greg Shuey (20:30.349)
Hmm.
Robyn Johnson (20:46.894)
They have changed that to say, us your cost of goods or we will decide what those cost of goods are for you. And now we’re going to only reimburse you the three or $6, right? Which means you’re kind of out that capital that you would have, you had the front to re purchase inventory. So there are some luxury items where maybe now it makes more sense to merchant fulfilled. If that’s the case, I would strongly, strongly recommend you do the hard work and I’m not going to, you know, sugarcoat it is hard work.
to get into seller fulfilled prime or you get the prime badge even though you’re selling it yourself if you’re worried about that. But having a prime badge, you do, with the exception of those that have a lot of brand affinity, a lot of brand search volume, or your product is so unique that people can’t get it other places, then you need to have an FBA offer. So if you’re a spatula,
next to other 5,000 other spatulas and everybody else is FBA, you need to be FBA too. If yours is a product that’s specifically designed for Down syndrome kids with congenital heart defects, since it’s the only product that’s available, you can probably get away with Merchant Fulfilled or Seller Fulfilled Prime at a higher likelihood. But Amazon will tell you that FBA is a big key. we have seen, even on products that we’re selling well, 400 % plus increase in conversion rate just by making the product
FBA with no other changes.
Greg Shuey (22:13.325)
Interesting. So when you say luxury goods, how do you classify that? Are you talking like higher-end jewelry? Or are you talking? Like product category or just price tag
Robyn Johnson (22:24.846)
price tag, know, especially if you, you know, if you have a large margin. So when we kind of look at almost maybe, as I’m thinking this through it loud, I think we almost even look at it as the cogs of the product. So how much would the company be out if that inventory was lost? Two years ago, Amazon had a problem with the warehouse that was processing sunglasses. And so sunglasses were getting lost a lot. know, you Amazon doesn’t always lose inventory, but it’s not
It’s not, if you were to tell an Amazon seller, Amazon lost some of my inventory, they’d go, yeah, that sounds right. You know, it happens. know, so it’s, it is something that you need to think about. I think with smaller brands, what you need to really think about is cashflow. If they were to, if you send everything in on one shipment and that shipment were to get lost, can you recover from?
Greg Shuey (23:00.727)
Yeah.
Robyn Johnson (23:20.75)
And that’s one thing that we really, because sometimes brands will be like, we want to send everything in. We think this is going to go really, really great. And we have to kind of balance. Like, yes, we want there to be inventory available if it’s going really, really well. But we can pull back on those levers. So like, let’s say a brand has a lot of, like, they have an email list of 20,000. Instead of sending an email to your entire listing, it’s available on Amazon. Maybe we start by segmenting that out and we start with 100 and then 200 and we
we kind of ramp up that awareness over time because what we want to make sure is that you’re not putting yourself in a position where if something were to go wrong, you wouldn’t be able to come out at the other side.
Greg Shuey (24:03.681)
That was going to be my next question is like, there a certain size of seller where it makes sense to do it all yourself versus sending it in? So thank you for that. Are you finding it more difficult for young smaller brands trying to get, you know, a foothold in the market? Are they finding it more difficult to launch on Amazon these days?
Robyn Johnson (24:24.59)
So it’s, I would say yes. So there’s a couple of different kinds of sellers. So if you’re a private label seller, so you saw a Facebook ad that said, Amazon is gonna be a laptop, lifestyle, passive income. I guarantee you that will not work, especially if the price tag is 10, 25 or $35,000. I promise you, you will lose your money. I have never heard one person be like, yeah, that’s how I became a millionaire. Any Amazon will tell you, sellers will tell you this is not a passive business. But with,
Greg Shuey (24:44.908)
Ha ha.
Robyn Johnson (24:54.094)
Amazon is actively courting brands and they’re actively courting young brands too. But Amazon has gotten a lot more complicated. So it is harder for a brand, you know, when it was the wild wild, you could kind of figure things out. Now it’s like, well, they’re, they’re asking for this. They’re, well, is this an error? it, know, and so brands will try to launch themselves and then they get frustrated and then they never launched at all versus, know, if they can, if, and I know not every brand is in a place where they can do this.
Greg Shuey (25:16.429)
Hmm.
Robyn Johnson (25:22.242)
But if you can hire somebody that will help you walk through some of those pieces, you can avoid things like inventory getting stranded. So let’s say you have a lithium ion battery. You have to send that into a hazmat warehouse, which means you have to be approved for the hazmat program. If you send hazmat goods into FBA, Amazon is within their rights to just destroy that inventory. So we had a client, we said there’s no lithium ion batteries in this, right? And they’re like, no, no lithium ion batteries. No. And I was like, you’re sure.
Greg Shuey (25:37.494)
interesting.
Greg Shuey (25:44.114)
my gosh.
Robyn Johnson (25:51.85)
no lithium ion batteries. Spoiler, there were lithium ion batteries in that.
Greg Shuey (25:57.142)
And did it get destroyed?
Robyn Johnson (25:59.01)
Amazon so we spent six months arguing with Amazon They did destroy the inventory But since we had been our team had been proactive sending solar support issues escalating and calling every day for six months We were able to get all hundred thousand dollars of that the return back to that that line
Greg Shuey (26:16.747)
Wow, that’s wild. That is wild. Okay, cool. So how do sellers or if you’re a brand and have a team of Amazon marketers working for you, how do you stay updated?
on these compliance requirements that are rolling out, new ones that are coming out or updates to them so that they are following the rules and that they don’t encounter any setbacks.
Robyn Johnson (26:47.662)
So there’s some things that Amazon just says, hey, know, a couple weeks ago they said, hey, we’re gonna update the title policy. And people said, well, that stinks, but you know, we can prepare for that. And as a result, you know, most people were prepared for it. I didn’t really hear much hubbub after it rolled out. Sometimes Amazon just feels like we don’t have enough spice. We don’t have enough caliente in our lives. So they will roll things out and you’ll see Amazon sellers are in group chats. They’re in LinkedIn, they’re in Facebook groups.
Yeah, yeah. And you we monitor a bunch of those. I actually had to tell my kids like, you’re just on Facebook. I was like, this is work too. But we kind of monitor and there’s a lot of crowdsourcing like, I tried to upload this, what are you, you know, has anybody else seen this error? Or, you know, warning, you know, I just got this and they reference this policy, which I checked was not there before. And so like, last year, in the middle of the year, they suddenly, AI decided
millions of products were plants, seeds, they were seed products. And so they sent warnings saying, we’re gonna deactivate these listings if you don’t take out your references to seeds. And people were like, well, it’s a walkie talkie. So I don’t know what you’re talking about. And it turned out to be AI gone wrong. And so there was a lot of like, LinkedIn posts, here’s how I’m handling it. This is what seller support tool mean. So there is a lot of that.
Greg Shuey (27:51.469)
Hmm.
Robyn Johnson (28:14.83)
But the easy thing to do is keep an eye on the forums and keep an eye on the Amazon news page. And then, you know, that’s a good place to kind of keep an eye if you don’t want to have a whole bunch of social media where you’re trying to track all of that.
Greg Shuey (28:28.429)
Sure, that’s a lot, I’m sure, it’s a lot. Okay, so wrapping up, for brands who are really looking to scale on Amazon, what foundational practices should they be implementing to avoid setbacks and then being able to continue to grow their business month over month and year over year?
Robyn Johnson (28:30.936)
Yes.
Robyn Johnson (28:49.87)
So I know that we talked about all the things that can go wrong and Amazon is still a really amazing place and all of those things are, it happened here, it happens there. It’s very rarely that all of those things happen to sellers. If you’re a brand, you’re gonna wanna have a trademark so that you can get into the brand registry program. It’s really important that we do that before you start to list your product on Amazon because of that UPC issue and the things that it can cause further down the road.
And then you wanna make sure that you have looked into what are the requirements for your products. If you’re a toy company, what is the CPSC requirements? Do you need lead? Do you need valates? If you’re a food product, do you need a good manufacturer certificate? Knowing those things yourself, and great places to find that out are if you’re gonna do a toy, join Astra, which is the Association of Specialty Toy Retailers. If you’re gonna do a grocery item, then join the Specialty Food Association.
and they will have forums that I can’t get into because I’m a service provider and rightfully so, we got to keep the spammers out, right? And you can have conversations of this is the product I’m launching, what do I need? What lab companies have you had success with? So those can be all really great places. You want to make sure that you have thought about making sure that your Amazon sales are not going to catalyze your e-commerce sales if that’s the only place you’re selling.
And if you have big box distribution already, you really need to talk to somebody who understands the impact of resellers to determine whether or not you need to change your packaging before it goes to those big boxes or to have an Amazon only SKU. This is going to be the really, really key if you need to use advertising to grow your platform. If you search for Lego, you will find on that first page there are non-Lego products. It is possible to outrank
a brand for their own branded keywords with conversion history. So you’re going to want to make sure that you’re really thinking through how are we going to combat knockouts, knockoffs, not knockoff, how are we going to combat knockoffs and making sure that your intellectual property is protected. But the biggest thing is when you sign on, I just had somebody do this, do not let an agency set up your Amazon Seller Central account for you. You need to be the primary email on there.
Robyn Johnson (31:11.246)
trust me, I’ve had to deal with many nightmares for this. Do not let that happen. Any good agency will walk you through you setting it up. So, you know, it should always be you. then Amazon, read the 14 guiding principles of Amazon, because Amazon, that is not just like something on their webpage, that is 100 % how they operate. And you need to understand that to understand why they implement some of the policies that they do.
Greg Shuey (31:39.977)
Is that a resource on amazon.com for sellers?
Robyn Johnson (31:43.118)
Oh, you might have to, I think you have to Google, I think it’s on LinkedIn, they move it around. You know, I think it actually might not be the 14 principles. I think they added two principles. I think it might be 16 principles now. But if you just do Amazon guiding principles, you know, so I know people who work at Amazon, I’m like, all right, come on. And they’re like, no, you cannot, you cannot submit a project without being asked about this principle or that principle. And the biggest one is customer obsession.
If you’re not ready to really care about your customer’s experience, Amazon is going to be a very challenging channel for you.
Greg Shuey (32:15.693)
That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that. think that’s going to be a great resource. And I also love that you mentioned don’t let your agency on your accounts. It’s the same for us on the D2C side, right? It’s like, agency should not own your meta account. It should not own your Google Ads account. It’s the same. You need to have control over that and then grant your teams access to the data that they need.
Robyn Johnson (32:39.022)
especially on Amazon, that controlling account determines where the payouts go. So that means you might not get, know, that all of the revenue could go to that agency if they wanted to be nefarious.
Greg Shuey (32:43.275)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (32:51.313)
Interesting, interesting, interesting. Well, Robin, that was awesome. Thank you so much for being with us today. I am incredibly grateful that you took time out of your busy schedule. We’re recording on a Friday afternoon. You’d probably rather be just relaxing on the couch, but thank you so much for being with us.
Robyn Johnson (33:11.79)
Thank you very much for having me. I love helping sellers, especially young emerging brands and people who are looking to take it to the next level. So thanks for letting me share my nerddom. My friends get a little tired of me talking about Amazon.
Greg Shuey (33:25.517)
No, it was great. And that’s why we do this, right? To help small brands and mom and pops and people to be able to grow their businesses. So that’s why we do it. And for everyone who is listening, thank you for joining us and make sure to join us next week. Thanks so much.
Robyn Johnson (33:29.315)
Yes.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
