#249 – Shopify Wizard Ezra Firestone Just Made the Move to Amazon – Find Out Why!

If you’re selling online, it doesn’t take very long before the name Ezra Firestone comes up. He’s sold tens of millions of dollars on Shopify and now he’s made the jump to Amazon. In his first few months selling on Amazon, he’s already at 500K in sales with just one product.  

That’s why today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes Shopify wizard, Ezra Firestone to talk about why he made the move. Along the way you’ll hear about the particular challenges that accompany Amazon’s tremendous opportunities, and why you might want to sell on both platforms.

Ezra is the Founder of Smart Marketer, Co-Founder and CEO of Zipify Apps, and Boom by Cindy Joseph. He’s a long time thought leader in the online selling community and has managed to balance prosperity with a firmly held social conscience. His LinkedIn tag line is, “Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit,” and he tells Bradley in the podcast that if entrepreneurs “have fun, make good stuff, and profit,” that it means the business has been a success, regardless of the number of zeros attached to the profit statement.

It seems that if you’re Ezra Firestone, you can do both. Listen in and find out how he does it!

In episode 249 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ezra discuss:

• 03:15 – Why Ezra Made the Move to Amazon
• 04:15 – Make Sure That You Don’t Cannibalize Your Own Products
• 05:42 – Big Success Has Made Ezra a Big Target
• 08:45 – Running a Lot of Ads and Creating Buzz on Amazon  
• 09:40 – Ezra’s Customer Acquisition Play
• 13:05 – Getting Unsuspended After Attacks
• 15:00 – An Off-Amazon Customer Base Increases Brand Value  
• 19:05 – How Did the Pandemic Affect Ezra’s Sales?   
• 21:55 – Ads, Emails, and SMS   
• 22:55 – Ezra’s SMS Messaging Tactics
• 26:40 – How Are New Shopify Sellers Fulfilling Their Orders?
• 27:50 – Ezra Says, “To Start, One Market at a Time”   
• 29:10 – “Have Fun, Make Good Stuff, Be Profitable”
• 30:25 – How to Contact Ezra   

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcast or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today, we’ve got Shopify wizard, Ezra Firestone back on the show. He’s sold tens of millions of dollars on Shopify. And now finally just got started on Amazon in his first couple of months with just one product, he’s already sold half of a million dollars on Amazon. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS, free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. And we’ve got somebody back on the show today, who until a few months ago was not an Amazon seller. All right. He stayed away for a long time, Ezra Firestone in the house. Ezra, how’s it going, man?

Ezra: I’m good, brother. How are you?

Bradley Sutton: I’m doing all right. I’m doing all right. So, first of all, first things first, we’ve got to have our priorities straight here. Are we still maybe going to Japan if they open it up in a couple of months for a Hakuho’s last ever tournament potentially?

Ezra: 20 plus hour flight for me. But I mean, it’s like, I mean, we have to witness greatness. This is Muhammad Ali in his prime. So yeah, I think I’m in, man. I think I’m in.

Bradley Sutton: Alright. Ezra and I have bonded over our love of e-commerce and our love for Sumo wrestling guys. We have a lot of different unique personalities here in the Amazon world and you never know what, what other things that people like to do that you might like until you start networking.

Ezra: I’m trying to buy this Noren, you know what a Noren is. It hangs in the doorway with the slit in between the two parts. So I’m looking at this like a vintage Sumo Noren for my door. But it’s pretty expensive and I’m like, I don’t know, but I think I’m going to go for it.

Bradley Sutton: Just do it. Just do it. Yep. I love those too. I want to have one in one of my hallways. That’s just like, there’s no door at all. So like, it seems awkward. So, that’s a perfect thing for it. Hey, there’s an Amazon product idea for you guys out there.

Ezra: Well, maybe don’t do it Sumo because some people might not like Sumo, but definitely norens for sure.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I see in the background there, you’ve got, you can almost have your own little Sumo mat.

Ezra: Oh, dude, I went to the beach last week. I mean, we are both former Sumo competitors. I’ve been working my arm drag.

Bradley Sutton: Alright. I love it. All right. Anyways, back to e-commerce now, you’re obviously well known for your Shopify prowess, making millions and millions of dollars on Shopify. But let me just ask you what prompted you to say, you know what, it’s time to go ahead and expand to Amazon. Usually, people do the opposite, they start on Amazon and then expand to Shopify and other places you went the opposite way. What triggered it?

Ezra: I think that you have a much more valuable brand, if you can sell from your own platform and I’m ultimately building and buying brands to sell them. And so, it’s also a lot harder, right? Because you got to run your own ads. You’ve got to build your own technology stack. You got to do your own email marketing. It’s a lot harder to make a Shopify brand work than an Amazon brand work, in my opinion. So, I built up the Shopify brand, boom, we were at 32 and a half million last year. And for many, many years, my supply chain couldn’t handle any more volume than I was giving it through direct response. So it was like, why would I give any sales to Amazon when I can fill all the volume that my supply chain can handle with my own ads via my own store and keep all the customer data. And then, roundabout, the end of last year, like I had really beefed up my supply chain. I obviously beefed it up enough to do 32 million in sales. And I thought, I can actually handle additional volume here, but I was worried about cannibalization of my direct to consumer platform. So basically if I go on to Amazon, not only do I now lose money in terms of margin, because I got to pay Amazon to ship it prime currently on my website, I charged people for shipping. But some people will find my products via Facebook ads and they’ll buy them on Amazon. So, I actually undercut myself by offering products on Amazon and other reasons. And then three, Amazon’s all crazy volatile and the negative review you and they do all this crazy stuff. And you have no control over the reviews.

Ezra: And a lot of the reviews are fake attacks from competitors and it’s definitely something we are currently under attack from a bunch of competitors. Leaving fake by biased reviews, trying to get a shutdown because there’s a bunch of parasite brands that are sort of buying ads for our keywords and being like knockoff cheap versions of us. And when we came on to Amazon, we took all that away from them. And so we’re getting really viciously attacked. It sucks. And it’s like, one of the reasons why I don’t like selling on Amazon is because of the nightmare you have to deal with from people who can attack you in Amazon, really not caring so much about it and really nothing you can do other than go through the traditional channels and try to get it back up. And so we’ve been shut down, suspended, all this crazy stuff for a while. It’s not claims against us. It’s super crazy because we’re huge, we’re a big brand and there’s a lot of activity for people trying to sell under our name and sell knockoff products, which then makes us a giant target. And hey, and my suspicion that there will be cannibalization of our direct to consumer platform is true, there is. There are people who are now finding us in our Facebook ad process and going over and buying on Amazon about 25% of them. About 25% of people who would have bought on Facebook are now buying on Amazon. But, the additional scale we are getting people that never would have found us either. So when you factor in the additional volume of people who were not necessarily looking for us or seeing our Facebook ads or who maybe were only looking for us on Amazon, and then when we weren’t there went and bought a competitor, it evens out and we’re making more than we would if we weren’t on Amazon, but we are dealing with a whole bunch of drama we wouldn’t have to deal with.

Ezra: And ultimately for me, for the value of the brand, proving that it can be successful in marketplaces and getting that additional expansion of revenue and profit makes sense because ultimately I’m going to sell it, right. So it made sense to expand on to Amazon because it kind of reached that point of maturity where it needed to go there. But I’m still pro building my brands on Shopify. But I also understand that not everybody has that skill set and whenever anyone asks me– when everyone says, Hey, how should I start a brand today? I always say, start on Amazon, if you don’t know, direct response, marketing and advertising and sales funnels and video ads and email marketing and lifetime customer value marketing and stuff like that. Start on Amazon and then expand on Shopify. I still think that’s the way to go. But for me, since I have been in this industry for 15 years, I do the Shopify first model.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. You started later, you talked about people, cannibalizing your keywords and things like that. And I remember when you were first getting started on Amazon or before you even started on Amazon, I told you that I was like, people are actually searching for your keyword of your brand is actually has some decent search one even before you even started in January, I’m looking at it now, there were like almost 4,000 people a month who were searching for just as keyword boom sticks by Cindy Joseph. And so like, those 4,000 people, I’m not probably, they didn’t end up all 4,000 of them buying a competitor’s product, but a good portion of it. They couldn’t find your product, but they did find other people who were maybe advertising against your keywords and were like, you know what, I’m going to buy this. And so now these people are entering this keyword and they see your product and you’re getting their sales. I see an increase in the search warrant. I mean, when you first launched in March, you must have done some kind of campaign with your existing customers because the search volume for boom sticks by Cindy Joseph went up to 12,000 in March. Like, did you tell your customers that you were on Amazon?

Ezra: We didn’t. I think just the fact–

Bradley Sutton: Wow, that is organic then.

Ezra: I think it just got around, like I think the fact that we got on Amazon people just started being like, oh, I can find boom on Amazon now. And past customers started noticing us at the top of the beauty category. I think it’s just natural when you run a bunch of ads, and make a splash into a marketplace. I think we’re doing like 15k a day on Amazon right now just for branded query stuff. So, I think it’s just sort of a snowball effect of now we’re available there and then Amazon’s pushing us in the whole thing.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I’m looking on Amazon right now. I only see what I mean– I see four SKUs, but they’re all in one listing. It’s– which one is it? It’s the Boom Stick? Have you only launched the Boom Stick on Amazon or did other things and they sold out?

Ezra: We’re not putting the other products on there deliberately. So Boom Stick is our hero, our product. It’s the thing that everybody comes to us for. And it’s the thing everybody was searching for on there. If you want any of my other stuff, you’ve got to come to my store. Amazon for me is not about being my biggest volume portal. It’s about giving people who won’t buy from me, otherwise, an opportunity to buy from me. And so people only buy on Amazon and getting the notoriety for my brand on that channel. But I probably won’t launch any other products on there. Do you want my other stuff? You can just come to my site. And I think that’s it’s for me, it’s more of a customer acquisition play because at once you know about the Boom sticks, you’re going to start thinking about me. You might see me on Facebook. You might learn about my other products and I want you to have to come to my site to buy those. So it’s really not– I’m not trying to build a giant Amazon brand. I’m just trying to capitalize. I’m trying to take away the opportunity for people parasitizing my brand and capitalize on the people who will only buy on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton: Are you doing anything different as far as packaging, or this is the exact same package, exact same UPC. Everything’s the same as what somebody would get on Shopify?

Ezra: On Amazon’s different UPC. And it’s different it’s in a box versus not on the website, but I changed the SKU in the UPC so that I could potentially change the price, but I currently have it at the same, but I could though.

Bradley Sutton: That’s key. That’s one thing that was smart because Amazon is actively checking other websites and let’s say you have a deal on Shopify where you’re going to have a $5 off. And now it’s, instead of $30 is 25. Well, if your Amazon price is $30, guess what? You just lost the buy box. And it’s going to look like you’re out of stock and it’s a big hassle right there. So, that’s kind of a good method. Now I’m looking here. You’re already the number one BSR in face highlighters and luminizer is I’m looking at these estimates. I mean, obviously I don’t have access to your sales by just looking at Helium 10’s estimations here. It’s almost 200 grand a month. You’re doing just in these SKUs. That’s pretty amazing. I mean, you have a seven figure product here on your very first one.

Ezra: Do you want to know how accurate Helium 10 is versus what I’m actually doing?

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, what are you doing? I show about 6,000 units amongst these four SKUs, average six to 7,000 is the estimation.

Ezra: Oh, between April 26th and May 25th. I’ve sold 6,490 units.

Bradley Sutton: Oh, I love it. I love it. If you run X-ray right now, it’s 6,500 units. So that’s actually scary, dude.

Ezra: Oh, that’s crazy dude.

Bradley Sutton: That’s crazy. All right. So 6,500 units.

Ezra: That is accurate, bro.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. I love it.

Ezra: That’s great, dude.

Bradley Sutton: I mean, this is just great. So guys don’t think that, you’re going to start from scratch and you’re going to have a quarter of a million dollars per month plus to $400,000 a month per month product, the reason obviously of Ezra success is because he was established out there. And if you’re a brand name without even selling one product on Amazon, if your brand name is getting thousands and thousands of searches on Amazon, of course, it’s a different sandbox than the rest of us. But this just shows you the potential of, if you do get established off of Amazon and bring that brand recognition, you have got a leg up on all the other 95% of Amazon sellers who are just barely starting and nobody knows their brand at all. So you mentioned some roadblocks, people attacking you and bad reviews. What was the suspension?

Ezra: They said some crazy stuff. And they had a whole bunch of people say it, and then Amazon shut us down. They keep doing one star reviews against us, like getting people their dues and these like review clubs to buy one, buy our product, and then give us one star reviews. They’re just doing all kinds of dirty stuff, man. It’s really bad.

Bradley Sutton: So how did you get unsuspended then?

Ezra: We had to put all this proof to Amazon about all this kind of stuff we did with our products. And we had to go through the traditional channels. And then we also had the issue of like, we couldn’t get our A-plus listings and we couldn’t– we just had issue upon issue, issue after issue with Amazon. But hey, it’s working, we’re up, we’re selling, but we are being very heavily attacked and we’re not manipulating everybody else I know is in these reviews, these rebate clubs where they basically pay this service that then goes out and gets real customers to buy their product. And then they’d back or give them a rebate via like Venmo and whatever because we’re not doing that. And we have the bad actors coming after us. It’s like, it’s hard to have a highly positive review ratio.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. This is just– I’m just looking at these numbers. It’s just mind boggling. But guys, I worked for a big company before, too. And they were off of Amazon first and they did a similar to Ezra and they had something similar where they weren’t getting bad reviews and things, but people didn’t care. And that’s kind of like a good goal to have is to have your brand recognition so strong. These people have seen Ezra’s ads in Google and in Facebook. And they’re coming to Amazon with the intent to buy boom. Now they are not, these are the kinds of customers that, I’m looking at his listing here, it’s only got “only” got four stars, but these are the kinds of customers that are not dissuaded by that. If this was just some, no name brand, I see three and a half or four stars, I’m going to go away from it. But these are people who are coming with a specific buyer intent to buy this exact product. They don’t care if it’s four stars or not. They already made that purchase decision. So that’s the power of building your brand recognition off of Amazon. So, once you do start at Amazon, you don’t have to worry about bad reviews that much, of course, we all worry about it.

Ezra: Yeah, there’s still a bunch of customers who are leaving us positive reviews, so it’s helpful. And I also think even if you have an Amazon brand building up, I teach a course called beyond FBA, which is about how to scale an FBA brand off of Amazon. And the goal is only to get 10 to 20% of your sales off of Amazon. And the reason that’s the goal is like, embrace what you’re good at. You’re an Amazon business owner. You’re good at Amazon marketing, but get enough traction off Amazon so that the value of the company goes up when you go to sell it, if you have 10% of your sales off Amazon, you’ve just gotten yourself an extra multiple or two in valuation, right? Because the whole point of a brand is not just to run it for cashflow, but it’s to build an asset that you can one day sell. And if you have some level of Shopify platform and sales, the value of that asset is way more than if you don’t.

Bradley Sutton: All right, guys, quick break in the episode for my BTS. Bradley’s 30 seconds. Here’s my 30-second tip. One thing that you need to keep in mind, and we’ve talked about this in this episode is about your brand awareness. When you first start on Amazon, you’re not going to have much brand awareness. People don’t know your brand, they’re not searching for it, et cetera. But as you build your brand on Amazon and off Amazon, you’re going to find that there are branded searches. And this is important when you’re doing your product research, you might see a product that has tons of sales in, for example, like Ezra Firestone’s boom product. But how many of these sales are actually coming from just branded searches, where people already are just looking for this exact product or from generic searches. So always keep that in mind, run Cerebro on an ASIN and see as far as keywords that have at least 400 search volume, how many are ranked in the top 10 that have the brand in them, as opposed to being just generic search terms. And that’s going to give you an idea. It’s not an exact science, but if you don’t see one branded search in those ones that are their top 10, that are over 400, 500 search warrant, then pretty much most of their sales are coming from generic searches. But if you ever see a product where most of, or almost all of the keywords that they’re top 10, or they have at least 500 search volume, all kind of have their like brand name in it, then you know that you need to keep that in mind that, Hey, there might not be a lot of generic demand for this kind of product. So I’m not necessarily going to look at their sales and kind of have an estimate of what I could make if I get in here, because this product is getting a lot of branded sales. So keep that in mind, when you do your product research, always look at how many branded keywords are coming up or words that products are converting for.

Bradley Sutton: Let’s switch gears. We’ve talked about Amazon. Actually, one last question about the Amazon thing. I remember I connected you with this one department, they’re on Amazon, like, have they helped at all? Or pretty much everything you’ve done has just been on your own?

Ezra: It was nice to connect with them and everything, but we didn’t end up engaging with them because there wasn’t really anything they could do for us. Like if you want to be premium beauty, you have to have every one of your SKUs on Amazon. We’re not going to put all of our SKUs on that, remove us from that. Any special advertising stuff wasn’t that compelling and the priority support they were providing with us, wasn’t that helpful. So it was just like, ultimately it didn’t end up being a fit for us to pay them the, whatever it was, to be a part of that program, it was nice to talk to them. It was good to connect with them. They did help us through some A-plus content listing things, but ultimately, we are not a good fit for Amazon’s programs because Amazon really wants to embrace Amazon native brands that are really focused on scaling on Amazon. And that’s not us.

Bradley Sutton: Yeap. So, yeah, I’m just curious, you were one of the first I’ve connected with that, but if anybody listening to the show, if you guys are a seven, eight figure seller off of Amazon, let me know. And let’s see maybe somebody can help you, if you are going to fully do your catalog on Amazon. I kind of make sense from Amazon’s point of view, I guess they only want to kind of help people that are really going to go all in with them, but Hey, that’s not necessary in this game, but let’s switch gears, go back to Shopify. What happened in the last year, obviously since we talked last, there’s this thing called the pandemic that happened, where sales, up down sideways for you.

Ezra: I mean, we had some issues with COVID where, when it first happened, our supply chain shut down because our warehouse got COVID. Our supplier that makes our stuff got COVID and then our shipping center got COVID the people there. So we had some issues in March and April and we were back live and May as well. We were back live by June, June through December was our best months ever. So, we had that nice COVID bump of more people buying online, and that definitely helped us. And then year to date, we’ve also had the best year ever. I think we’re on pace for something like 45 million this year, just on our website. So, obviously COVID is not good. And I’m not saying it was a good thing, of course, but there is the just objective side of, you know, e-commerce grew and that helped e-commerce merchants.

Ezra: And so COVID had a positive effect on the e-commerce industry and that just is a description of what happened, and I feel for all the families and everybody who was really affected by it, and I’m definitely donating and all that stuff. And also I’m happy that more people are doing e-commerce now and buying e-commerce. That’s good for me. You know what I mean? I think it’s good. It’s good for all the people I know and all the entrepreneurs I know, and I think it makes the people like us who have these skill sets, like even more valuable.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. It’s hard to find the silver lining of anything bad, but this is definitely one of them, like, Hey, this was a bad event that happened, but if you’re looking for a silver lining, well, if you’re in the e-commerce, unless you were in the travel industry for neck pillows or something like that, that people just weren’t using, you probably had a bump in your sales now over the last year or so, since we talked last, what has evolved, if anything, on the Shopify side or on the advertising side, like how you send people through funnels or how you advertise to people, email marketing, are you doing text marketing? Like what has changed for you in the last year and a half as far as the off Amazon traffic?

Ezra: I mean, SMS is definitely a bigger– is a growing platform. So it’s like another way to communicate with subscribers. You have ads, you have emails and you have SMS. So, pixel the audiences, those are people who’ve viewed your stuff, um, or visited your website, who you cookie with a pixel, and then you can follow up with them. You’ve got people whose email address you have, and you’ve got people whose SMS address you have. And some people are using Facebook messenger through ManyChat. Those are really the main ways you can communicate with a prospect and SMS is on the rise. We use it a lot for cart abandonment, post-purchase, all kinds of stuff. And I’ve got an app for Shopify that I just rolled out. That’s all about SMS. It’s called Kinnekt. It’s sort of a competitor slash similar to other SMS apps out there, but with my sort of flavor on it, I think that the name of the game is the same thing I’ve always been doing, video ads to sales funnels to get people’s email address and offer them my product. And you just gotta keep doing that better. The brands that tell the best stories and make the best promises win in the marketplace, not the brands that have the best product, the promise wins, not the product. The product’s job is to live up to the promise that you made. So he or she, or they who make the best promise are the ones who are the most successful. So I’ve just been focused on that. You know, how do I make better promises? And then how do I have my products live up to those promises I’m making? But my strategy and structure has not changed at all doing the same thing I was doing 18 months ago.

Bradley Sutton: I wanted to introduce this concept of SMS marketing out there. Can you talk a little bit more about how you’re utilizing it?

Ezra: Well, so there’s a couple of ways to use it, right? There’s pre-purchase someone comes to your website, you pop something up that says, Hey, get 10% off by text messaging us. They tap that pop up. It opens up their i-message. They send you a text message. You auto reply with it. So there’s like a pre-purchase incentive to buy, okay. So you get them subscribed to your SMS list by incentivizing them with a coupon, they tap a pop-up by tapping that pop-up, it opens up their i-message. They send you a text message. You auto reply with the discount and the link. So one click to iMessage, which is a pretty cool technology. So that’s pre-purchase. Usually the way that you use it is to get people subscribed via an incentive. Of course, there’s cart abandonment, SMS messages, there’s post purchase SMS messages. There’s SMS messages based on, Hey, the order just got delivered, go check. So, there’s all these behavioral automated one there’s dynamic, upsell, cross sell, Hey, you bought this, but not this. Try this other thing. And then there’s broadcasting. So sending broadcasts to groups of people, SMS is just like email, everything you do on email, you do with SMS. It’s just a different communication medium, but the same idea, communicate with the subscriber based on where they are in the sales process.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Now going back to Zipify, which is what a lot of people also, you don’t know you for, which integrates with Shopify. There was something I was looking at your website the other day and I just pulled it up again. And what does opt in light boxes mean? That’s why I wanted to ask you.

Ezra: Oh, a light box is just like a, it’s a pop-up. So it’s like you click a button and it pops open what’s called the light box, which is essentially a popover, it’s like you’ve ever seen a pop-up for an email on a screen. That’s what it is. It’s also known as the light box.

Bradley Sutton: So, when would somebody use something like that for Shopify? Like, are there certain triggers? Like, Hey, if they’re just on the page and they’re not doing anything for X amount of time, like let’s pop this up or how does that work?

Ezra: There’s a welcome popup, right? Someone comes to the site and you pop something up that says, Hey, join our list and get 10% off. There’s an exit intent. Someone goes to leave, you pop something up that says, Hey, don’t leave, stay here. Or like, you send someone to your website and it’s like, go buy this on Amazon. They click the button and it pops up and says, before you do give us your email address and we’ll send you a coupon for 5% off, they give you your email address. Then you redirect them to Amazon with a coupon. I have this thing called a booster page that I built, which uses Amazon one-time use coupon codes and it delivers them uniquely. So it’s like, Hey, do you want this product on Amazon for 10% off? Great, give us your email address here. And we’ll give you a one-time use code they use on Amazon. So we use small discounts, 10%, 5%, 15% max, but then Amazon doesn’t penalize it. But basically that technology is built into Zipify where you can integrate Amazon one-time use codes and a sales funnel where you get someone’s first name, last name, email address, phone number in exchange for that. And then on the thank you page link over to your Amazon with that dynamic one-time use code. It also ties into your email where you can email them the individual one-time use coupon code for Amazon and instructions, how to use it. And that works really well for us as well.

Bradley Sutton: Coo. Now you guys have a lot of people that you train on on different Shopify things, and I’m just wondering a lot of them I’m sure, maybe are opposite as what you did, as far as starting on Shopify, then going to Amazon, you’ve probably got a lot of Amazon sellers who are now looking to like, Hey, how do I start on Shopify? For those people who are just getting started on Shopify, who are Amazon sellers, do you notice them like, are they using their Amazon FBA to initially fulfill their Shopify orders?

Ezra: Absolutely. It makes total sense. Your fulfillment network you already have, no reason not to.

Bradley Sutton: No, no, I’m not– I’ve never done it before. I’m about to start with our Project X case study. I might actually be needing some help from your team, getting our Shopify set up.

Ezra: Why don’t let me give you beyond FBA mentorship literally takes you A through Z, tells you everything that you need to do to go from FBA.

Bradley Sutton: Look it up. I want that. Yeah.

Ezra: Okay. Send me an email to Ashley and say, Hey, Ezra said, I could have beyond FBA mentorship literally walks you through step by step. Every single thing to do, you can then tell everyone else how to do it.

Bradley Sutton: All right. I love it. I love it. So yeah, I’m going to make that a blog study right there and maybe a little video series, but do I need extra software or like Shopify literally can integrate with the merchant channel?

Ezra: Shopify with Zipify pages to build your [inaudible] out and Shopify connects directly to FBA. One-click.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Guys. It’s a no brainer guys. If you’re not doing Shopify.

Ezra: Yeah. Well, it’s like one of those things where it’s like, wait until your brand gets a 10 grand a month on Amazon. Like get some traction, focus on your Amazon ads, optimize your listing, like get going, okay. Then build out your site. But do one thing at a time, get yourself up and running, get yourself some sales, get yourself some velocity, get yourself some reviews, get yourself some ads, like use Helium 10, understand the market. Like I wouldn’t recommend going to Shopify straight away. I’d recommend doing Amazon until it’s working.

Bradley Sutton: Not from day one on Amazon. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Last couple of minutes here of this episode, maybe you can just hit us with some of your tips. We have this thing on the show. We call the TST, 30-second tips and maybe just give us some rapid fire, like strategies based on customer interaction. It could be about Shopify, could be about anything.

Ezra: You only have so much time on this planet. What are you doing? Are you having fun? Are you enjoying yourself? Are you showing up with a positive attitude? Are you taking care of your physical body, your mental body, your emotional body, are you investing in your relationships and your hobbies outside of work? Or you’re just grinding and miserable? It’s like you get to choose how you show up in the world and the world could use one more happy person. So do what it takes to be happy, have fun, bring a positive attitude, be enthusiastic and make good stuff, stuff that truly serves the world. Stuff that truly serves the community. Keep making your products better and then be profitable and do it in that order. Have a good time, make good things and then worry about being profitable. And if you’ve done that you’ve won the game we call business. I don’t care if you’re at $50,000 a year or $50 million a year. That’s the game. Have fun, make good stuff, be profitable. And don’t burn yourself out by working 12 hours a day and sort of have your business be the reason that your personal life sucks, which is what a lot of entrepreneurs do. Make sure you’ve got hobbies. Make sure you’ve got a social life. Make sure you’re investing in your relationships because that will ultimately make you more effective in business.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. I love it. Now, speaking of doing things in your personal life. I follow you on Instagram. I noticed you do some pretty out there. Things like jumping in cold ice, cold freezing lakes. Is that a new thing for you or you’ve been doing that for a while?

Ezra: It’s a river. I live in upstate New York about a piece of land. It’s got a river on it and cold plunging has been getting popular with the whole Wim Hoff thing and whatever, but I was getting in the river. I like it. I get in the river year round, cold, warm. I like it. It feels good. I like being out in nature.

Bradley Sutton: When I visit you out there, we’ll, we’ll do some Sumo and that, and then a cool-down, we’ll jump in that river.

Ezra: You check out Wim Hoff, man. He talks all about it and he’s got the breathing exercises and the cold plunge and all this kind of data about how it’s good for you and stuff.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Cool. All right. Well, you’ve mentioned, we’ve talked about different things like Zipify and then your FBA course and things, can you let people know now let’s give some links here on how people can find those on the interwebs?

Ezra: Well, I mean, you follow me on Instagram, @ezrafirestone. And I posted all my stuff on there and then you can just go to zipify.com.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. Are we going to be able to see you out to any conferences this year now that things are opening up again?

Ezra: conferences this year. I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton: There’s the Amazon one in July in Vegas, the Prosper show you can come out there, but that’s the only one that I know of there. There’s like white label expo and there’s a couple of, um, Retail X. It used to be called, I forgot what it was called before that’s in Chicago, but as far as the Amazon only conferences, just Prosper.

Ezra: Send me a link to the ones you’re going to, I speak at a couple ones I was speaking at all or not planned yet, so I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Cool. All right. Well Ezra, thank you so much. And we’ll definitely be– hopefully Japan will open up so that we can make that trip together and watch the goat.

Ezra: It’s super fun, man. Thanks so much. Talk soon.

Bradley Sutton: All right, thanks. We’ll see you later.