Amazon Private Label Podcast for FBA Sellers - Sel

Shawn’s tale of rags to riches How Shawn went from selling hamburgers at McDonalds to having sold 100 Million + in revenue generated How to choose a market How to brand build products What products to not go for How to source directly in china? How Shawn deploys strategies for launching new products How to use AMS or Amazon Marketing Services and why it’s important Products that Shawn goes for, high and low end Mistakes and lessons learned from Shawn Trips Shawn take to China And all the wisdom I was able to extract out of him within 1 Hour

In our part 2 series, we reconnect with Aaron O’ Sullivan Aaron is a serial entrepreneur who has been building brands on Amazon since 2013, scoring several million in product sales. He has spent the last 3 years building teams based in the Philippines, helping scale up one team to 45 staff by building all of the Amazon systems and processes to run multiple brands. Aaron has clients doing anywhere from $10k > $500k per month on Amazon / e-Commerce, many of whom have become the bottleneck in their business, slowing the growth of their company and preventing them from scaling to the next level. In this episode you’ll learn: Systems to build in your Amazon business System building strategies Tools to use for your systems building Best tools for systems Aaron’s mission in life and business http://systemscultureimpact.com/uploads/docs/The-Ultimate-Cheat-Sheet-For-Creating-A-Well-Oiled-Product-Launch-Machine.pdf

In this episode we had Meny Hoffman come on the show. Meny Hoffman is CEO of Ptex Group, an award-winning business solutions agency headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. A lifelong entrepreneur, he is passionate about collaborating with growing businesses to create winning strategies that allow them to lead and flourish. Meny is also the founder of the LTB (Let’s Talk Business) platform, which offers business education to entrepreneurs and business people looking to learn, grow, and lead. He is a proud husband and father of seven. In this episode we went into depth: Inside Meny’s operation Meny’s story on how he came to lead PTEX group How meny inspires and leads his team Team strategy, leadership strategy Creating systems and winning strategies Amazon brand strategy Marketing strategies In-depth on growing and scaling your company And much more. Show Notes: To learn more about Ptex Group product branding service, CLICK HERE. To download “7 Simple Ways to Build Your Brand on Amazon” CLICK HERE. Connect with Meny Hoffman on LinkedIn HERE

Since my last podcast, a lot has happened. It’s been literally almost 8 months since I last podcasted. I’ve gotten emails, like yo, david where have you been? Why aren’t you podcasting. So I haven’t been ignoring podcasting, or hating it. I’ve just been so deep into the grind building the empire, owning multiple channels, and scaling this business into something much bigger than myself. In the last 10 months, I’ve yet to tell you what’s been going on. To name a few, I went to China for 3 weeks. That trip was mind blowing, and for those that haven’t taken that jump into outerspace, I say do it. I now have a business visa, and will be attempting to go once a year. The Chineese are the nicest people ever, the atmosphere is so energizing it literally takes all the air out of you. And last of all, I built some of the greatest relationships by being there, from meeting multiple manufacturers, visiting factories, touching products, redesigning with cad engineers, and even meeting Americans, Canadians overseas. The trip was simply mindblowing . And best of all I ate everything, and it didn’t kill me. More on that trip and perhaps a dedicated episode to it. Besides China, if you’ve been following this podcast, your well acquainted with my journey into physical products, ecommerce. At the moment we are in the process of launching 22 products within the next 1 month or so, of which these products all have bene in development for about 1-2 years. Some are inventions, some are private labels, many have patents connected to it. This journey hasn’t just been one of launching products, sticking a price to it. It’s been a journey of ups and downs, massive failures in both financially and emotionally. I’ve had my girlfriend of 3 years break up with me, and that shot me into a low for awhile.  But with failures and lows, comes highs and successes. The path simply can’t be downward. Especially if your persistent for wins. And in fact the last 10 months have been anything but that. Since the last episode, I’ve hired two employees which manage a lot of the operations. I’ve also hired two full time virtual assistants, with an army of contractors from freelancer, upwork, fiverr. These contractors are all experts in their field, and I leverage them for their talent, time. The biggest secret here, is we all have the same amount of time as Warren Buffet and Elon Musk. 24 hours. They have no advantage as us in the number of hours they are allocated each day. But how we task out, create standards of procedures, and leverage other peoples time, is one of the true secrets to being on the way to building an empire. In the last 8 months, my perspective has changed from building multi-million dollar business, to firmly believing it will be a billion dollar business. I don’t just say this out of pure thin air. I’ve worked it backwards.  To build a billion dollar business, you only need to have a business worth of 300 million, because a 300M dollar ebita business will most likely get a 3-4x multiplier….in the event of a sale. And why would one ever sell that. Money is of no importance but a scorecard to keep track of. Our businesses should be built for the customer, and with passion and energy. They should be built with our customers and employees interests first, and our own personal needs second. Anyways to create a 300M business, it requires hard core persistence, this wiliness not to give up, to sell it to others, and a firm belief that it will get there. In the last 8 months I’ve realized the magnitude of the potential of the world we live in. For those who haven’t experimented, I dare you to. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Shopping Ads, Email Lists, Email list retention, email list sequences combined with how active people are, enticing people with better offers based on how unactive they are when they open your emails. These are all massive opportunities of unlimited revenue, that I’ve recently been experimenting with and having major successes with, and I’m just scratching the surface. In the last 8 months, I’ve transitioned from having small storage units scattered around town, from running from small easy space units to get inventory for a fba shipment or a wholesale order which took almost all day and all my energy to now owning my a 2500 sqft warehouse. If you’ve listened to many of my podcasts, you’ll know my obsession with warehouses. I’m really not sure what it is. Maybe the idea of storing all your inventory in one place. Maybe the idea of build rocketships or anything imaginable like in the tv series I watched growing up – called dexters laboratory. Maybe iit’s the fact that knowing all your inventory is sitting here without annoying fba warehousing fees, limits on how much inventory, or limits on the size of inventory. So finally, I made the jump and acquired a large warehouse where we’ve consolidated a lot of the inventory. In addition there is room for expansion for more warehouses, a key ingredient in scaling this business both on Amazon and everywhere that will have us while keeping our MAP prices (minimum advertised price) And all of this happened in 8 months. I’m looking forward to the last 8 months. Will update you more in depth on each of these areas sspecifically in future episodes. Till next time kings, keep building  

Today I’ve got another invincible king on the, Aaron O’Sullivan. Aaron is a serial entrepreneur who has been building brands on Amazon since 2013, scoring several million in product sales. He has spent the last 3 years building teams based in the Philippines, helping scale up one team to 45 staff by building all of the Amazon systems and processes to run multiple brands. Aaron has clients doing anywhere from $10k > $500k per month on Amazon / e-Commerce, many of whom have become the bottleneck in their business, slowing the growth of their company and preventing them from scaling to the next level. In this episode you’ll learn: Systems to build in your Amazon business System building strategies Tools to use for your systems building Best tools for systems Aaron’s mission in life and business And lots more, stay tuned for transcript.

Today I’ve got another invincible king on the, Murray Priestley. Murray is a partner at Global Private Partners, a private equity investment firm based in Asia and the author of the book The $1M Pay Day. Murray has a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering & Computer Science from Monash University.  He has lived and worked in over 9 countries, and through his journey has been the executive And this is the AmzSecrets.com Show, episode 93! Before we jump in quick announcement. I will be in China on the 14th, and always looking to mastermind when I’m out of my castle, shoot me an email and I’ll try my best to meet up with you. What you’ll learn: How to scale your Amazon business and beyond How to pivot when things are going wrong Murray Priestley’s journey into entrepreneurship Mistakes along the way How to save $500,000 dollars How to scale your brand and businesses with you in the mix How to build an Amazon FBA business How to know what your good at Making critical decisions in your business Understanding mistakes and selling your businessAnd much more! Stay tuned for show notes.  Show links: http://1MPAYDAY.com – Get his book

Today I’ve got Dr. Travis Zigler, who graduated in 2010 from The Ohio State University College of Optometry with Magna Cum Laude honors. He is the co-founder of Eye Love, eyelovethesun.com, whose mission is to end preventable blindness. Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Zigler, use the profits from Eye Love to fund free and low cost clinics in South Carolina and Jamaica. They also started a charity called the Eye Love Cares Foundation, eyelovecares.org, which provides exams, glasses and sunglasses for those in need, free education, and scholarships for students that align with their mission.   Eye Love does an average of $180,000 per month on Amazon and Shopify. He has created highly engaged communities of over 2,000 people and growing daily. In this episode you’ll learn, How Travis started his business How Travis acquired businesses and leverages them together How he’s built a business from passion How to build a brand leveraging SEO and content The people behind Eye Love and the charitable actions of the company The growth and decisions behind the company Strategic decisions and business operating  Lots of golden nugets. Did I say lots!? Transcript coming soon Dr. Travis Zigler 1. Business Igniters on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Business-Igniters-165108987349546/ 2. Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/Dr-Travis-Zigler-261315727610737/ 3. Eye Love: https://eyelovethesun.com/ Ashlin Hadden Insurance Agency http://www.voldico.com/find-an-agent/ashlin-hadden/

Today I’ve got Jamie Davison on on the show, Jamie and his co-founders Jason and Brad combine to sell over $60 million per year on Amazon. He is the co-founder of AMZ Insiders, a coaching program focused on helping new sellers create their own successful Amazon business and provide insights and tips to existing sellers. Selling on Amazon How to build an Amazon business How Jamie and his partners business scaled very fast Jamies path to getting where is today How he quit his job and why Amazon strategies and secrets How to scale an Amazon business How to grow an e-commerce business How they are divvying tasks and diversifying Important networking tips  How they plan to double their business And much more Free Video Training: www.AMZInsiders.com Blog: www.AMZInsiders.net Free Facebook Group: Amazon Insiders – FBA Sellers https://www.facebook.com/groups/AMZInsiders/ Email: Jamie.Davidson@AMZInsiders.com

Today’s I’ve got on the show, who is a CPA and the founder of CPA On Fire, a tax and accounting firm specializing in working with online entrepreneurs. Over the last few years he has been working very closely with Amazon FBA and other eCommerce sellers to help them with the challenging aspects of accounting and taxes specific to eCommerce sellers. What you’ll learn: Can you take us to the beginning before you started your accounting firm, where did your journey begin?What’s the story of how you became the official cpa for entrepreneur on fire? How many employees he has How  Amazon sellers should setup their business.   How to big sellers legally save a lot of money on taxes What’s tax deductible in our e-commerce businesses How Donald Trump Saves on Taxes Distributions to owners vs. payroll Sales tax and set the record straight. Should we paying sales tax to all the states where FBA is at, or just our state tax What software tools do you recommend a seller should use. And WHY And lots more.  Show notes coming soon.

Today I’ve got  Nedjc Voraic on the show, Nejc is an entrepreneur who started learning selling on Amazon about 1,5 years ago. With help of the knowledge of his mentors, mastermind group and a lot of trial and error, he managed to build a serious business. The beauty of his philosophy is that he does not put much focus on conversion, ranking and listing optimization. He has now scaled to over 140.000 € a month, mostly from selling in Europe. In this episode you’ll learn: Mistakes Nedjc made and how he pivoted  How much he started with How he has grown his business How he scales his business How to build an amazon business Tools Nedjc uses Mentors Nedjc uses What worked for Nedjc and what didn’t His morning routines  His business strategy How to source outside of China Tricks and secrets Nejc uses And lots more. Transcript coming soon How to Contact Nedjc: Mail: nejc87@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nejcvolaric 15 min free Skype call where I share our methods 1 on 1 and answer your questions: https://calendly.com/nejcvolaric/15min

Kevin has been an entrepreneur his entire life. It’s been 30 years since he last received a paycheck from someone else. He has created, developed and guided hundreds of products from inception to market. In 2015, he started five private label brands on Amazon. Together those brands have grossed more than $3,000,000.00. His goal is to reach $4,000,000.00 per year on Amazon alone by the end of 2017. In this episode, you’ll learn: How Kevin pulls 3 Million+ sales a year How Kevin picks his products Types of products Kevin has had success and failed with What most sellers do and what not to do How Kevin uses tools, strategies and knowledge to grow his business How he is expanding outside of Amazon Inner workings of his business, his execution and mindset Why he has 5 brands How he markets his products What he did before selling on Amazon and e-Commerce How he creates molds for products How much he started with And much more! Stay tuned for transcript Notable notes: Link for how to add two products to cart: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/cart/add.html?ASIN.1=XXXXX&Quantity.1=1&ASIN.2=XXXXX&Quantity.2=1

How I saved 40,000, by automating my customer service on Amazon, ebay, Walmart Jet and beyond. What’s up guys, today’s episode, episode 87, is on How I will save $40,000+ by automating the customer Service in my Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Jet, and website support tickets. Today’s episode brings a huge golden nugget so stay in. One of the hardest parts of running an e-commerce business is the customer support side. It’s not just a lot of work providing the best customer service possible, it takes a lot of the founders time, all the meanwhile you have to add more products, scale the marketing and grow to the moon. I believe, if it wasn’t for the AmzSecrets show, I wouldn’t have gone this far to force myself out of the trouble that I was in. I would wake up each day, spend 1-3 hours checking eBay, checking Amazon, checking facebook channel, and then checking my email inbox for my website. WHEW. It was a huge time waster in terms of founder energy. Every few months I would post in our facebook group, AmzSecrets.com/fb, how is everyone doing their customer support? And some people would say outsource, but not really go into detail. The problem with spending even 1 hour per day on customer service is you really don’t know how those hours would be spent differently if you otherwise had them. Before this episode, I had hot-keyed customer responses directly into my keyboard. It was pretty awesome. It saved 10 minutes per response, and gave the perfect response. It was pretty optimized, it was cool. And then recently I spoke to John Jonas, who has outsourced every task to 17 different virtual assistants, in episode 86. This really changed my perspective and evolved my business a major step further. I probably wouldn’t be spending time doing this podcast right now, if I hadn’t built out my customer support. I’d be answering tickets, and closing out those spam ticket responses. I started looking at FreshDesk… I created an account, setup my email forwarding, It was very solid, however I realized it still had one major issue: How do I have customer support answer questions everyday without giving them access to my account’s sensitive data? Now that is a golden question. And it took me over 10 months to figure out. Freshdesk was great, because it offered centralized support tickets. I could thus forward emails all to one spot, and freshdesk would create support tickets out of each one. The problem however was freshdesk was too general. It didn’t pull order information from Amazon or eBay. So I canceled my free trial of freshdesk and when onto querying e-commerce support desks, which led me to xSellco. And no this is  not a promotion of xSellco, or affiliated to them in any way. XSellco is pretty awesome, it pulls e-commerce data from both the e-commerce channels and aggregates them all into one spot. It’s like a freshdesk or helpdesk but for e-commerce. Now that I have pulled the order # per email coming in, and the customer address, I can now get a virtual assistant to assist per customer order. Now this led to the next part, and I really owe thanks and gratitude to John Jonas from episode 86, who mentioned to “create videos step by step on how you currently do customer service.” It takes a lot of upfront work, but after that it gets easier. Yes that is really time consuming. And a pain in the butt.  But once you get it done, you have opened 2-3 hours per day every day. You have also untied yourself from the desk of the computer to do the brain thinking part of your business. Once I had xSellco, driving support tickets from multiple channels, all in one spot, I knew I could automate the whole entire shindig. This first process took about a week to feel comfortable with support tickets going all into one spot. I had to check to ensure that they were correctly being loaded, the data was accurate from the respective channels, including my websites channels. Next I wanted to give my customers the same kind of customer support that I offered them, when I was giving customer support. I wanted to deliver the same experience, high quality experience. I converted the hot-key coined responses, made by me, and put them into templates specifying each customer response. Create a master customer service sheet. I then charted all my products, associated issues, and how to respond to each issue with the respective template. So basically all the virtual assistant would have to do is find a related keyword associated to the SKU, and select the template to use, specified in the master excel sheet of customer service. Once that was set in stone, I waited for 10 tickets to come in. I then turned on a screen recorder, and recorded my screen and my voice into videos, going into each customer support ticket, showing exactly what I did for the virtual assistant to replicate. I showed him how to refer to the master customer service sheet, and how to respond with which related template. Then I also showed him how to create shipping labels using shipstation.  This allows me to view all new outgoing shipments of replacements and print them all in one go each morning for shipment. In addition to that I have setup USPS to do daily pickups, which is free, for anyone who did not know that. It is like having a USPS office at your house. You can set that USPS pickup to come daily for the next 3-4 months. The cool thing here, not only is he helping me out tremendously, he is also responding to customers faster than me, by checking it more than 3x a day. I am currently paying him $330/month, which in Bangladesh goes a long way. One cool thing about this is he is full time at $330/month. So he is not only helping me out with customer service, but other tasks around the businesses as well. By the end of it, it probably took me about another week to finalize my customer support and make it very easy with 3 videos for my virtual assistant to learn fully how to do customer service for my current line of products, and easily adjust to new products as well. Now, lets take a step back for a second. If your competitor goes down the route of hiring a full time employee to do this in the United States, it will cost them maybe $40,000 a year. Also keep in mind the office location, health insurance, and all the other headaches with having employees. That’s a major advantage in scaling your e-commerce company. The major lesson and golden nugget here is break down big problems into multiple small ones so that they become manageable.  There was one major problem: How do I not do customer service anymore and I broke it into two smaller problems: How to have a virtual assistant do customer service for Amazon and beyond without access? And then – how to teach customer service to a virtual assistant for many e-commerce products? So, after all is said and done, I currently think  this has been a huge game changer in terms of scaling my business. I can easily train more virtual assistants with the 3 videos I have, the master excel sheet matching skus to product complaints, and template responses. It’s only been a few days since It’s been fully executed and I feel I have a lot more time on my hands to do more important things in my business such as: Scaling facebook ad campaigns Scaling amazon ad campaigns Add more products to the product line Focus more on scaling, rather than repetitive tasks. Lastly, this allows me to not be constrained to my desk responding to support tickets every day within 24 hours. Has this experiment worked. Yes, and by far. Amazon news flash : Amazon is now worth 2 walmarts So what does this all mean David? I like this article a lot. It doesn’t say the most important thing. Although it says it took Amazon 20 years to double Walmart, it doesn’t say why. Jeff Bezos stuck in it for 20 years. He survived the tech bubble in the 2000s, and had 20 years of near zero profitability while scaling his company. The real golden nugget is, it takes time to build very successful companies. As much as we all want to build epic businesses, we need to acknowledge that it takes many years of Persistence and brilliant executions. That’s all for now guys, David Aladdin out.        

Today we’re going to take your business to the next level through better outsourcing of tasks. I’ve got  John Jonas on the show, He’s the CEO of OnlineJobs.ph, the largest website for finding Filipino virtual workers, with over 250,000 Filipino resumes and over 100,000 employers from around the world using it. He works about 17 hours per week, choosing to spend his time with his family rather than working. What you’ll learn: How to outsource tedious, repetitive tasks How John Jonas build his foundational framework to grow his busiensses Strategies and plans he executes on How much it costs to outsource The country he uses to outsource work Why to outsource to the Philippines What John worries about What led him to outsourcing How he has grown his company and only works 17 hours a week And much more! Contact John: http://onlinejobs.ph

Forget excel sheets! Ben, Chris, and Dana are Amazon sellers from San Francisco who got frustrated managing PPC by hand and set out to automate the whole process with Prestozon. The founders met at our last company which was a supply chain finance and einvoicing company targeting large enterprises. As the company grew we decided we wanted to be on a smaller team again and set out to sell on Amazon and use our software and data backgrounds to automate the process where possible. We launched our first product ASAP (and made a bunch of mistakes) so we wrote software to help us find a better product to launch. Once we started doing PPC for our products we were amazed nobody had a good solution for handling it, so we set out to write Prestozon to automate the whole process. We did this while Dana and I were traveling in Asia (China, Sri Lanka, Bali, and Thailand) and Europe and we’re 100% bootstrapped. What you’ll learn: How Prestozon was founded Why they started Prestozon How to optimize your Amazon PPC How to decrease Amazon ACOS How to increase ad spend and profits How to tweak product advertising settings Techniques to improve your Amazon advertisements Negative keywords and how they affect Amazon ppc And much more. Show notes coming shortly. Get in touch with them and learn more: http://prestozon.com

Bernie built an 8-figure electronics business, wrote the book “Flywheels and Feedback Loops: A Guide to Success for Amazon Private-Label Sellers”, and released the tools he used to automate the building of his own brand on Amazon. These tools are available at efficientera.com In this episode, you’ll learn: How Bernie grew his team  When to add team members to your growing amazon business When to buy and puchase more inventory Critical decisions that led Bernie to where he is today Payroll, accounting Why he started his e-commerce company, and where he is taking it to Hiring decisions Inventory control and strategic advice Where he see’s the e-commerce space going How he’s up against massive corporations His customer support is killer And much more!

Jonathan Foltz shared tons of golden nuggets. This is a definite listen for those who want to explode their business off the Amazon channel and diversify their business. He leverages the Facebook Advertising platform and pulls millions. I will probably be re-watching this a few times. He is a digital entrepreneur that has started 16 companies and does not intend on stopping. He has built a couple million dollar companies and his marketing agency, Digital Age Business, runs 4 separate Shopify stores of their own. As a philosopher and futurist, he has been speaking around the country about the new Digital Revolution that is upon us and how we can take advantage of it. In this episode, you’ll learn: How to create successful Facebook campaigns Strategies that Jonathan leverages with Facebook Ads The future of technology Futurism & singularity discussion Step by step Facebook strategies that work today Testing Facebook campaigns and ad sets How much money to spend when testing What works better, video ads or image ads And much more. Transcript coming soon. Get in touch with Jonathan: Digital Frontiersmen  

Today I’ve got two invincible kings on the show – Wilson who is the founder of Mindbay, a specialized Amazon brokerage firm who has handled over 50 transactions in the last 3 years. Wilson has been an online entrepreneur for over 20 years and has operated an Amazon shop himself. Hameed Hemmat, also a partner in Mindbay, has a background in App development specifically with iOS apps. He sold his app business recently that he was running for 5 years. He also operates a successful eComm store in the indoor grow space. In this episode, you’ll learn: How to sell your Amazon FBA Business How Mindbay sells Amazon and App businesses When to sell your Amazon FBA Business Why to sell your Amazon business Best practices for selling your Amazon Business Getting acquired  What you need to do before getting acquired A very detailed step by step process that is involved And much more! Mindbay Exclusive – Free quote on your Amazon FBA Business http://amzsecrets.com/82  

Today I’ve got an invincible king on the show, coming live is Ed Kohler, who’s 43 years old  has been selling on Amazon for 3 years and is now doing 7 digit sales for more than a year.   What you’ll learn: How Ed built his 7 figure amazon business Channels he uses including one big golden nugget How he expanded into office space Multi-Channel Fulfilment Wholesale strategies Wholesale problems Ed faces Predictions and analysis of Amazon landscape Amazon wholesale strategies And much more!  

Coming live from StarBucks his name is Brandon Young,  who has not one, but two amazon businesses that pull over a million dollars yearly. He does cross platform, and is international. In advanced, our audio had some background noise and was not 100% perfect, but the amount of golden nuggets and insights in this episode is invaluable to all amazon sellers and e-commerce sellers. In this episode, you’ll learn: How to build brands into the future How to scale your amazon business How Brandon dealt with multiple amazon suspensions How persistence is key Strategies to selling on Amazon Diversifying your Amazon business into Walmart, Wish, and Wholesale Many of the ways about navigating an Amazon suspension Confusion with Amazon suspensions Our frustration with Amazon suspensions Growing an Amazon Business to newer heights And lots more! 

What’s up you invincible Kings! Wondering what is the best e-commerce platform is? For almost a decade, I’ve been building e-commerce sites, platforms, web services, and have often pondered the true answer to this. I’m your host, David Aladdin, and Your listening to episode 79. As of recently, I’ve come to a solid conclusion as to which is better, woo commerce or Shopify. The best e-commerce platform for physical products is shopify. In this episode, we deep dive into why Shopify best’s woocommerce, and why I think you should use it too. Woocommerce, oh how much potential you have, yet so much headaches. Woocommerce, is an awesome platform to start an e-commerce store. Don’t get me wrong. It’s core platform is free, recently acquired by Automattic and distributed as a core platform as free. Shopify is better for physical products…. The first question you ask yourself is…am I selling physical or digital goods? I prefer Woocommerce for digital goods and Shopify for physical goods. What is Woocomerce? Woocommerce is has many strengths, including the fact that it easily installs onto WordPress, an free install-able core operating system to hundreds of thousands of websites on the web today. In addition, wordpress is fully customization, from themes, to plugins and every single aspect of your website. Out of the box, it comes very polished as well, with reporting, product creation and fairly flexible to work with most WordPress themes. Not only that, Woocommerce was once the solution I used to power my own e-Commerce site, until I started to realize the major potential flaws and headaches that came with it. For one, Woocommerce claims its’ free, but most of the functionality exists in plugins that cost on average of $70 to buy, with 1 year of updates. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but when major core areas of your functionality cost $70/year to keep updated, it gets pretty frustrating year after year, buying these upgrades, with fairly glitchy updates. That’s not to say that you have to pay for the update, but usually when you don’t pay for the upgrade, that core section is unupdated either now not working, preventing a conflict in another area, that is now not working. Now imagine having 5-10 of these plugins, each $70/year. If you don’t upgrade, you potentially have conflicting plugins, or security vulnerabilities in your site. Security vulnerabilities is something that scares me deeply with Woocommerce. When you have the e-commerce portion of your website hosted by wordpress, on a shared or dedicated server, you always have the potential of being hacked. My biggest concern was this. If I automated my fulfilment through my e-commerce wordpress site to my FBA storage, I could potentially be screwed one day if my wordpress site was hacked for whatever reason. And yes, there are tons of ways to secure your WordPress site. But in the past decade or so, with all the security plugins like wordfence, ninjasecurity, secure cloud based security, the list is long.., I’ve still been hacked – say it be a wordpress theme glitch, an un-updated plugin from codecanyon. It happens a lot. Was it me just being lazy? Definitely not. WordPress has been highly refined over time, but every add on that you have, requires constant updating. It is extremely annoying to see 10 new plugins requiring updates each week, and then checking all of the plugins to get updated. WordPress is great but breaks down a lot from updates If you use wordpress, you know exactly what I mean. Then on top of that, sometimes, if you update all the plugins, you can get the white screen of death, which can just happen as perhaps your server sql database crashed, or something corrupted. Then there is the issue of some plugins bought from codecanyon which require updates outside of the wordpress plugin directory, thus you need to seperately go and download those plugins seperately, re-write all the code there, and continue business as usual. Now this is just for plugins. Themes require updates too. And even then, a security flaw may leave your WordPress installation vulnerable. If a hacker was able to get into your WordPress e-commerce site fullfilled by Amazon, they could essential create a purchase order for 1000 units, and now you have a major nightmare on your hands. Hackers could send 1000 units, or 10,000 units of your inventory, and you could be out of a lot of money. And that is why I decided to try out Shopify. So, even though I had bulletproof website security, there was still a small chance any wordpress site could get hacked, and thus my conquest to discover a better solution began. Less headaches with Shopify… 5 Months Ago, I tried shopify. Running an e-commerce business is night and day compared to Woocommerce. No longer was I Spending a ton of time updating random plugins with the fear I might get hacked. No longer was I going to woocommerce.com to re-pay licenses for outdated plugins as years went by. As I entered shopify, there was a design aspect of the dashboard that made building an e-commerce store and launching products the #1 priority. With woocommerce, it felt like they just included the bare minimum so that you’d have to buy their premium plugins year after year.  Upon signing up I realized how simple Shopify took the headache out of e-commerce. It ran faster, product creation was faster. Inventory management was easy but most importantly, the power of shopify lies within it’s developer community. Shopify’s Apps made Amazon FBA integration Easy Everything works as expected. Unlike plugins, shopify uses apps to connect to your store. Sort of the same thing, but the installation process was a click of the button. The first app I used created all my Amazon listings in one click into my Shopify store. Literally within 5 minutes of installing, I had 18 product listings created in shopify from Amazon, and my inventory counts were synced as well. That didn’t take care of fulfillment. I had been using ecomdash to fulfil orders between Amazon to eBay. I had tried to setup ecomdash with FBA to Woocommerce. Problem was, customers were buying stuff on Woocommerce at the time, and ecomdash wasn’t fullfilling these orders. Woocommerce has an annyoing interface between orders pending, paid, fullfilled and shipped. For whatever reason, orders were being paid for but not shipped, a technically glitch I didn’t fully figure out even when using auto-complete orders plugins with woocommerce. Bleh. Again, these are some of the headaches you deal with when you build on WordPress. When I installed my ecomdash app to shopify, it completely synced and  when orders are placed in Shopify, my FBA inventory is now shipping out to those customers. Everything is now working as expected while diversification of platform and scaling has been further achieved. Furthermore, my FBA inventory is safer protected behind Shopify than my WordPress installation. Yes, shopifiy itself could get hacked, but that’s way less likely, and their 200,000 fellow users would also be in big trouble too. Now their app system doesn’t just stop their. Although most their apps are monthly pay based apps, I am much happier to pay 10 dollars a month, without having to individually or group update them, and just focus on scaling my business and adding products. I don’t want to worry about the security and the functionality of an e-commerce site. With wordpress that was happening every single month, and with Shopify, it runs perfectly. What if you have WordPress and Woocommerce installed and you wanted to switch to Shopify? So this is and has been my current situation. I have WordPress installed on the root domain, and shopify on a sub directory, as shop.mydomain.com. By doing so, I’m not messing around with my long existing blog, with hundreds of articles. If I were to change the urls there, it could affect my SEO, and I don’t want to that. So simply put, I kept my traffic driving articles where they are. And I have set it up such that I have wordpress as a bloging platform mixed with shopify as an eCommerce tab. And it’s been working pretty good. The winner is: Shopify is better for physical products  Woocommerce is better for digital products. Shopify does cost a bit more to run, but that’s the price I’m willing to pay for peace of mind. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/amazon-go-is-just-what-amazon-needs-for-its-next-600-billion-opportunity-cm720547 So what does this mean David? I’d say it creates a potential for your products to start being seen in retail stores. It could potentially disrupt of all retail. Imagine sending your goods to Amazon FBA. Then Amazon FBA sends their best selling  best products “aka” lightning deals and “go deals” to their retail stores. They don’t have to just sell groceries. It’s like when Amazon first started, they went into books. But their now into everything. Adding Amazon Go, is the next step to the puzzle, and they can stock more than a super Walmart can stock, if they wanted to. And this could eventually lead to Amazon Super Go, where they have tens of thousands of products from Amazon in these Amazon Super Go’s across the country. No one thought Walmart could be distrupted. But I also see it as Amazon’s getting back at Walmart for pushing into retail with the Jet acquisition. In 10 years time, retail can look completely different than it looks today. It’s like asking us…what did Amazon look like in 2006. It was completely different. In 10 years… so much has happened.