Amazon's 2025 Prime Day was a wake-up call for sellers - the four-day format killed urgency, lightning deals lost their punch, and profitability took a hit across the board. In this episode, Brandon Fuhrmann, a 12-year Amazon veteran and co-founder of the Innovate conference, breaks down what went wrong with Prime Day and what it means for your Q4 strategy. As a seven-figure seller in the brutal kitchenware category, Brandon shares the hard-won lessons from navigating Amazon's evolving landscape where fees are multiplying, Chinese sellers are getting smarter, and profit margins are under constant pressure.

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

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Chapters: 

(00:00) Intro

(05:07) Insights from Prime Day 2025 and Changes in Dynamics

(11:11) Ad Strategy & Lightning Deals

(13:14) Preparing for Q4 & Prime Day 2026

(19:01) Managing Fees & Profitability

(22:37) Join Us at Grow NYC!

(25:35) Maximizing Profitability Through Cost Management

(30:52) Navigating the Competitive Landscape and AI Optimization

(40:56) Amazon Innovate: A Seller-Centric Conference

(47:42) Fermat: Optimize Shopper Experience with AI

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Relevant Links:

• Brandon’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonfuhrmann
• Amazon Innovate: https://amzsummits.com/events/innovate-2025/
• Grow NYC: Joingrow.com
• Special Offer | Fermat: fermatcommerce.com

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Transcript:

Speaker 1:

Looked at something that I thought was just fascinating is that profitability, because Prime Day just really just kind of crushed me this year with everything that went on. I actually made more money in August than I did in July.

Brett Curry:

Are you frustrated with growth on Amazon? If you're not completely confident in your Amazon ad strategy or your brand growth strategy on Amazon, we should chat. Hey, what's up? I'm Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. We help seven, eight, and nine figure brands scale on Amazon. Now, success on Amazon really comes down to three things. The first is visibility, and this is really made up of SEO and merchandising. SEO is really about getting your products to show up on the right digital shelves when people search for keywords related to your product. Merchandising is really about helping your products jump off the shelf so that people notice them. Number two is velocity, and this is largely driven by improving your overall organic rank and crafting a comprehensive Amazon ad strategy. And then number three is value creation. This is turning impressions and clicks and visits to your pride detail page into paying customers.

This is all about better copy, better images, better videos, better bullet points, better a plus content, and overcoming any hurdle that's keeping someone from buying your product. Now as an agency, we've been doing this for eight plus years. We've been invited to the Amazon headquarters multiple times. I speak on stages about how to grow on Amazon, and we've condensed eight years of Amazon knowledge into one simple practical guide. So click here to get that guide, or maybe you'd like to work with the pros to diagnose what's wrong with Amazon for you or just see what opportunities you might be missing. So click here to also request a free strategy session and we can't wait to help you dominate on Amazon.

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're going deep on Amazon. How is Amazon trending in 2025? We'll unpack a little bit of Prime day from the context of what did we learn then that we can apply to Q4. Amazon has always been a wild ride and this year is maybe wilder than most. And so we want to give you what you need to be to crush holiday sales. And so my guest today is Brandon Fuhrmann and he is the co-founder of Innovate. Used to be Amazon Innovate. If you've heard of that event or seen that event in the past, my buddy Sean Frank from The Ridge says it's the best Amazon show He attends. Brandon Young, also confirms that, and so high praise from two powerhouse individuals in the D two C and Amazon space. And so going to talk about the show a little bit, but Brandon is also, he's been a top seller on Amazon for 12 years. So either a seven or eight figure seller essentially the whole time in an extremely competitive category, kitchenware, which most people have just dropped out of that category, it's deeming it too hard, and so he's got lots of wisdom. Excited to unpack this one with that. Brandon, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going?

Speaker 1:

It's going good. Good to be here. You mentioned 12 years. It seems like it's like a hundred years in Amazon years, but yeah,

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally. I think we can definitely count digital marketing or or Amazon years. They should feel like dog years or be calculated the same way because yeah, if you've been doing this for longer than three or four years, you're sort of a veteran, right? You've been doing it for 12. Dang, I can't even believe it myself. Know the game. Yeah, for sure. And so we love the Amazon game. We built a full service Amazon department inside of OMG starting back in 2016, and so kind of fell in love with Amazon. Love Hate though, right? It's such an opportunity.

There's such madness there as well. And we'll get into things like fees and how those are going to continue to go up in Q4 and talk about some weirdness around Prime day and what we can expect from that. But obviously with Amazon at 50% of all e-commerce and growing can't ignore it. Got to have a good strategy there. Good T, just good execution plan. And so we'll dive in, but I guess let's start with Prime Day because it's always a bit of a bellwether of what is holiday going to look like and of course we'll have the fall prime day probably. And curious, and actually, have you heard anything about the fall prime day as in terms of when that's going to be or what that's going to look like this

Speaker 1:

Year? I've heard a couple of rumors, but I don't really want to say because I'll say it and then by the time this comes out they'll have announced it and I'll be dead wrong,

Brett Curry:

But

Speaker 1:

Something is coming there sometime.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I think is a great way to put it. But even the early prime day, the July prime day, the OG prime day, it's somewhat of a bellwether for holiday. And so let's talk about that a little bit. It was a four day event for the first time. Last year was a two day event. It's been a one day event in the past because it was an extended event, you didn't have the same urgency as years passed, day one, day two. This year globally we're down 40% in sales. We saw that across a lot of our clients. We decided, hey, if we're going to do a year over year comparison, we need to look at the two days of prime day plus the two days after, because you can't compare four days of sales to two days of sales. That's an unfair comparison, but overall, it was a decent prime day. A lot of our clients were up. It didn't feel quite the same as normal. And I know you kind of echoed that as well, that it was not the biggest prime day you've had. And so unpack that a little bit. What was Prime Day in general, and then where did you see the biggest drop off or the biggest change related to Prime Day?

Speaker 1:

So I've been doing Prime Day for a long time. I sell kitchenware. And kitchenware is usually great on Prime Day because I feel like there's a lot of people who are just like, I want to buy something, but I don't really know what it is, but I know I want something because deals and then kitchenware kind of slots into that perfectly because it's like everyone could always use something for their kitchen. So I feel like I've always benefited in years past from that mindset and from the urgency that takes place during the two day prime day. I've woken up one of the first years of Prime Day. I woke up at five o'clock in the morning and this is before they had cookies or anything, and I went to amazon.com and my product was literally sitting on the front page of amazon.com and I sold out of every unit I had by 6:00 AM Eastern Time, not even PSD. So I've

Brett Curry:

Been through my part of the country, aren't even awake yet,

Speaker 1:

And you're

Brett Curry:

Done.

Speaker 1:

So I've been through a lot with that and I've seen that happen in years past, and a couple of things definitely affect that one. Obviously the four day Prime day led to a lot less urgency when you have that kind of, people were just taking their time, waiting for deals, kind of thinking about it, not sure what they wanted, and it really changed the products that sold compared to years past when you had that urgency, it kind of put a little pressure on there. The other thing that changed is if you were running a prime day deal, like a lightning deal essentially, you used to be able to adjust the quantity on that, so you could kind of sit there and create a full scarcity as the deal was running and people would just start running away with it because they thought it was like 90%, you can't do that anymore. So a lot of that urgency was also taken away.

Brett Curry:

Does that mean, and so since that went away, does Amazon just show all of your inventory or did they just take

Speaker 1:

That You could either choose a finite amount or use all your inventory. All your inventory basically means that there's not going to be any bar at all. So there's not even a little bit of scarcity. And the finite amount is you could sell out immediately and then be done, or you could not do too much and then be at 1% for the entire day and look like you have the worst product that no one's interested in. So it's a really fine line with how you set that and how you prepare for that. So I think that with that, a lot of that kind of changed how people responded to Prime Day and how products were sold during Prime Day.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And just a quick note on the urgency piece. I know you're into events and we'll talk about innovate in a little bit, but we see small events and you think through webinars and things like that, and you always want to make it where this is super easy to say yes to, where if I look at it, I'm like, I don't really have to think about it. I want to say yes to this, but also where there's not enough time for you to be comfortable coming back to it. And I think that's potentially the chord that was not struck with a four day prime day where it's like, okay, fairly easy to say yes to this deal. It's a pretty good deal, but I've got time and what if I find something better and what if I Right, exactly. There was a lot of, it was just enough hesitation, right? Yeah. So I'll be really curious to see will Amazon shift this next year? What will they do for fall? I think fall was Prime week last week or something like that, or last year. And so I'd be really, really curious to see what they do next.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that changed too is how they were calculating discounts and factoring them in, and they were using coupons in last 30 day prices and they made it that it was an extremely complicated number to fill out. And also because of when Prime Day fell, those numbers reset on Prime Day. So it was kind of crazy if you have a certain price within the 30 days, but it wasn't 30 days before, you might get flagged and your deal might not be running on Prime Day. So there was a lot of weirdness where it was like, I don't even understand how they calculated it. I'm sure I feel like people at Amazon don't even know how they calculated it, but some of the prices for my products were so bizarrely low that I couldn't really do anything or so bizarrely high that it was like, this isn't really a deal, but that's what they wanted. So I feel like that was a really kind of interesting wrinkle in it as well.

Brett Curry:

And again, that's an area where you don't have a ton of control over that, where Amazon says this is the base price, I guess you have control over your discount, but do you have to set the discount before you see what they're going to approve as the base price?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean you set the discount and then they'll come back and just flag it and not let the discount run. Depending on there's 15 different discounts you could run. You use the prime exclusive discount or whatever they're calling it now. I think they changed the name again, but all those different discounts and then they don't tell you exactly what's running or not until it actually, the system automatically flags it for whatever reason. But they usually do that on Mondays or so, and then we were already kind of going by then, so it's like, yeah, it's tough to figure that out and tough to figure out what's working and what's not, so

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Got it. I know, and so related to that, you were telling me kind of offline Lightning deals, those were impacted, and I know a huge, huge part of this. That's kind of how you sold out so early in years past, but how have Lightning deals changed and any additional points to add to that?

Speaker 1:

So in addition to how they calculate quantity, it seemed like the way they were being displayed on the front end also was similar to how Prime exclusive discounts were being displayed. It didn't seem like there was really much additional marketing being done to them. They kind of got lost in the shuffle. That seemed kind of the same thing. And to me, it feels like I wasted a thousand dollars a deal compared to years past

Brett Curry:

Because you got to pay for that deal regardless of how much you sell. That's right. You got to pay to be,

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly. And end of your discounts. A year ago prior, I sold 5,000 units of one of my products where it was like, heck, I would take that chance every day course. So it was like a no brainer to me, but it just, nothing really took off. Nothing really happened. So it just seemed like it just had a different level of marketing than what maybe they had done in the past.

Brett Curry:

So they paid a thousand dollars to get the Lightning deal this year. You both had the quantity issue, how many units you consider are eligible for? You have the pricing issue, so maybe it ends up not looking as much of a deal and then they're maybe not promoting it as well either. Do you think that just applied to potentially your deal or your category, or did it seem like globally lending just didn't get the same traction

Speaker 1:

It seemed globally? I heard this in a lot of sellers, and I think for some, at least the four days may have played an aspect to it. Again, if there was no scarcity as well, then people just don't, and they literally removed every possibility of scarcity from Prime Day,

Brett Curry:

Which just seems really silly to me. Amazon is smart. They're brilliant retailers, not a better retailer on the plane except for maybe Walmart or something. But yeah, it seems like they maybe missed it. So here's an important question. Based on that information, what are you going to do differently in Q4? What are you potentially going to do differently next Prime Day? That's a long ways away. Things could shift. Again, they will shift, I'm sure, but what lessons are you taking from this? You're applying to

Speaker 1:

Holiday? Yeah, well, so there's two. First of all, we have the fall prime day, and that's the next thing to get ready for. So the lessons that I'm taking, so first of all, I've looked at something that I thought was just fascinating is that profitability, because Prime Day just really just kind of crushed me this year with everything that went on. I actually made more money in August than I did in July way, which shouldn't happen,

Brett Curry:

Which should not

Speaker 1:

Happen. No, but it did. So I think with the fall prime day, there's a couple of factors that definitely you need to take into consideration. So first of all is the storage fees are already in effect. So you have the Q4 storage fees, which are like four x normal storage fees and selling in kitchenware. I'm selling items where I sell a lot of items that are at a relatively low price. If you're selling a $400 item, maybe you don't care that much about Q4 storage fees, but for me that's a huge deal. So it's very hard to bring in extra inventory for that prime date. So for me,

Brett Curry:

That's another way that's going to chip away at your profits if you get that quantity wrong.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly. So to me, I think I'm bringing in the inventory I want for Q4. I always overestimate, especially with Chinese New Year coming in shortly thereafter, it's okay for me to have a couple extra months of inventory. So if I have stuff and I know that I've got a good amount in FBA and I know the pricing is good, those are the products I'm probably going to be discounting, knowing I can probably get the rest of the inventory in time for Black Friday, cyber Monday. So that's kind of where I'm going to probably start looking at discounts is actually discounting products that I have a good amount of inventory and that I could actually use to reduce storage fees leading into Q4. So that's definitely the first way I'm probably looking at it. The second is really sitting down and drilling down and understanding how they're going to be marketing each of the different deals and coupons and discounts because there was so many different ones going on that it was kind of difficult to really understanding and kind of get confused by. So I'm going to accelerate in a couple of weeks, which is a great conference, but great show. Great. It's amazing on

Brett Curry:

Seattle. Love

Speaker 1:

It. But that's one of the things I really want to discuss with the people there is try to understand how they're promoting these and how they're viewing each of these different kinds of deals. From our end, we kind of get lost in the shuffle.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally. Totally makes sense. Are you still going to lean into the same kind of lightning deals or do you think your deal strategy might shift

Speaker 1:

A little bit? It might shift. I think it's going to be a game time decision, but it's definitely going to shift as far as right now, it's going to shift away quite a bit. I still might run one or two, but I'll probably just go with the prime exclusive discounts and maybe a couple of other things and call it a day. People have been talking against Lightning deals for years and how they don't work for them, but they'd always work for me until now.

So I believe in verifying with my own data instead of trusting random people that I know or friends or whatever, different. Every category is different, but yeah, I'm going to definitely move away from that for the most part, but keep probably a couple just in case. I also, I'm kind of viewing it as a bellwether for Black Friday Cyber Monday, which is obviously going to be a lot more sales, and it's kind of like they've got between July and October, they've got three months to get things together, figure out what they want to do, but I can kind of test some things and see how they're going to work maybe for Black Friday, cyber Monday and use that as to figure out how I'm going to plan for that instead of just not testing anything. So probably run a little bit of everything.

Brett Curry:

Totally. Yeah, I think that's a real advantage of the October Prime days. Run some tests, experiments a little bit, then that's going to maybe inform your Cyber five strategy even more than T 12 or

Speaker 1:

Whatever it was last year. What's that? It was like T 12 last year, right? It was,

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah,

Speaker 1:

Totally.

Brett Curry:

So we'll see. I mean that kind of the trend and we saw four day Prime day this year, so probably won't see the Cyber five or the Turkey T five, whatever this T 15. I mean I don't dunno how more you can expand it. Keep going. Exactly, exactly. Any callouts on the way you guys approached ads during Prime or any shifts you expect this year or what you're hearing from your community? I know my ads team, they're very active and obviously CPCs rise 20, 30% got to pay on the category during these prime windows and usually worth it because conversion rate goes up in step with that or conversion rate goes up more. But any changes for you on your ad strategy? Anything not you're expecting there

Speaker 1:

Too far? The only thing that we do differently is that we always will try to start increasing it leading up to prime day to kind of really get a foothold and start preparing and just start increasing it and getting maybe some little better rankings here or there because sometimes, especially in July, sales are not at their peak, whereas those two days can be quite a bit of extra sales and get extra ranking that could last for a month or so. So yeah, we'll do some extra promotion on the ads leading up to it. But other than that we don't really, I don't think there's anything we're planning on changing, but again, it's a ways away at this point for

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. Although we'll be here before we know it for sure. Let's kind of double click a little bit on, you talked about storage fees and other fees and stuff. Can you talk about what, and those fees, some of those fees are going up four X for q4. Can you talk about all the fees and costs that you're considering and what's shifting and then what you're doing about it?

Speaker 1:

So there's so many different fees at this point. When I first started, there was a couple fees and you just had to kind of look at them. Now when I look at my seller board report, there's, I don't know, 15, 20 different fees and you can't even really trace back half of them your transaction report. You can barely see what they're for. So it's really important to really manage every fee as best possible. It's like death by a thousand cuts. And something that I always want to impress on people is that if you're making, I'm just using a number, a hundred dollars a day and then there's a $5 fee, you might be like, oh, $5 isn't that much, but that's 5% of your total profit. Your profit has gone down considerably based on something that's relatively small and you get a bunch of those and suddenly a hundred dollars turns into $73 or $52 or whatever that number is.

And that's maybe most of your margin, right? Exactly. Or all of it. And so some of what I've been doing too is kind of digging back and looking at each month and being like, okay, what's going on? What can we change? Where do we lose what's happening here? And trying to see if there's any bleeding that we can cut, anything that we can change and trying to factor in all those ghost fees into your profitability of each product. And none of the profitability softwares really do this perfectly because there's a lot of global fees and things that they might factor in globally, but not to each product, but really trying to figure out, okay, is this product really profitable or is it just kind of ghost profitable because I'm getting charged this much in storage fees, but this much at a WD for this and we've paid this extra for whatever it is. There's so many different things that it can be that really trying to make sure that I understand where the money's actually coming from and building in extra margin almost in a way to take care of that. I know I also am not going to be perfect at calculating that. So if I want, I dunno, 15% margin, then I should really aim for 17

Brett Curry:

To give yourself a little bit of buffer because you may not have calculated the fees correctly, there may be some extra fees come in, things like

Speaker 1:

That. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

So a couple things to note there. So you mentioned none of the softwares calculated perfectly, maybe a global fees and not each individual SKUs fees or as fees. Any recommendations there though? Are there any software tools that you do recommend or are you mostly doing this by hand with spreadsheets and digging into Seller Central

Speaker 1:

And things like that? Yeah, so I use seller board, which gets me like 90% of the way there and they tend to report the fees as far as I can tell. I mean there's so many, I might be missing one and I probably would never know, but that seems like they're reporting all the fees in their backend. But again, some of them are globally, so I'll kind of look in and look at let's say long-term storage fees and look at else everything that I might be charged as a fee and kind of making sure that's being broken down properly and being added to the bottom line for each product as well. Got it. There's always a couple that don't really get moved in. Like a WD fees for example is a really good one that doesn't really get factored in properly in there. So if I'm paying for storage there, I'm not paying FBA storage, but I'm still paying a decent amount in storage as well.

Brett Curry:

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Speaker 1:

So there's a bunch of different ways. Every fee is a lever you can pull to improve profitability. So you could store less inventory and kind of not keep as much. That's definitely a lever, right? That'll definitely move the needle. Probably the biggest is probably a. And

Brett Curry:

With that, are you just looking then for hey, these are the ASINs or these are the skews that we've just got too much inventory in and so you're looking at velocity and stuff and running those calculations and maybe your software helps with

Speaker 1:

That? Yeah, for sure. Trying to just get better at that, right? That's certainly a way, I mean if you're paying, I don't know, let's just say, I don't know, a thousand dollars a month in storage fees, if you can get 10% better, maybe you'll be paying $900 a month and that's a thousand dollars a year that you're going to save. So even just little wins like that, 10% better at something can really yield big results over the long term. So it used to be that you could just be pretty good at an Amazon and figuring out what you're doing, but now you've got to be really digging in and really every little bit counts and you try not to make one wrong move. So that's one thing. Another thing is I use a WD quite a bit. Some people will send their inventory directly into FBA, but then you've got to pay the inbound placement fees and you're paying those storage fees on that.

If you're sending it into a WD, they will drip in that inventory. So you might end up saving significantly there on FBA fees, and even if you're storing it at three pl, you'll still have to pay those placement fees unless you're shipping it to five locations, which is kind of crazy. So there's different ways to work with inventory like that that'll definitely help yield results. So I've definitely done some work there in repositioning how I do some of that. The biggest is probably the ad spend though really realistically that's the biggest lever outside of price or anything like that or so that's definitely something I've worked to cut down a bit. Totally.

Brett Curry:

Where are you paying too much? Exactly? Where do you have wasted ad spend? What's not leading to either overall lift or direct conversions? And yeah, that is a, look, I'm a huge ad fan. I think it drives velocity drives rankings. You almost can't succeed depending on the category. Almost can't succeed without it on Amazon, but man, is it an area for waste as well. So that's definitely a spot you got to be looking at

Speaker 1:

And

Brett Curry:

Watching closely, especially in q4.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, exactly. And I've went through my tacos and it was just like, okay, my total a cost how much I'm spending per dollar. And I was just like, okay, I've got to cut this down a bit. I have to, I'm sorry. And I cut each one a little bit and I didn't sell as much, but I got more profitable and that's okay, right? So little wins like that.

Brett Curry:

It's not about top lines about how much you keep, and so you've got to maximize

Speaker 1:

Profits for sure. So that's definitely another thing I've done. And then another thing that's a couple of things that are kind of underrated is one, obviously if you've never audited your packaging is trying to make sure that you fit within Amazon's guidelines, that if they say that they charge $4 and 83 cents for something that's this size, don't be a 10th of an inch over it because you're going to pay the next level. If you can get that down, even if the packaging costs more, even if they got a packet tighter, even if you've got to vacuum seal it, whatever it is, that's going to save you significant money on each one. So that's definitely a big piece there. Another one is just really updating your images and making them look nicer, just trying to improve conversion rate. If you're converting better, your ads are going to cost less. You can maybe charge more money. So probably every two years it seems like I go back to the well and completely redo my entire lineup, like little by little technology change, graphics designers change, and you can kind of eke out some pretty decent success that way. And you'll be surprised sometimes how much a product may take off by a new main image.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it is such an interesting point, and it really is looking at all the component parts of success on Amazon and even looking at if I can get 1% better in some of these areas exactly, or 10% better maybe in some of these areas, those do stack. And it's one of those things where if you find, let's call it a 10% improvement in a handful of key areas,

That may end up being a 30% lift, a 40% lift in overall performance or overall profits. And so yeah, you've got to look at that and yeah, we can't just rely on Q4 conversion rates, lifting, rising all ships, and we benefit from that. It's going to happen, but what can you do to create outsize gains there? Exactly. And so even simple things like images, a buddy of mine always talked about, Hey, I want to craft my images on my ASIN so that if that's all someone saw, so remove the copy, remove everything else, all they saw was the images and the videos, that'd be enough for them to convert. And if you can do that, then your listing is in a pretty good spot if you can't upgrade those images and look for improvements there.

Speaker 1:

That's a great point. That's a really good idea for sure.

Brett Curry:

Cool. And then I know a few other things you mentioned when we were prepping is removal fees, reimbursement fees being reduced, things like that, and any callouts there on some of those feed some of those fees?

Speaker 1:

I mean, nothing I can really say to help with that. I mean obviously three reimbursement portal you can of update your prices and try to get a better price and get more money returned to you, but there's not really anything you can do about that. The other fee is the returns is if you can do anything to cut down on your return rate as well. So I always will take my reviews and return reasons and put them into chat GT and kind of be like, summarize this, what should I do? And try to figure out if there's anything that patterns that might be missing or anything that I could change might help reduce return rate. Super smart. So it was funny, someone had said, put into chat GPT and asked them things about myself that I don't know or what I should be doing with myself or something like that. And it gave this whole thing and it was like, by the way, you should upgrade the metal in your product. People are complaining, do it already or something. And it was like interesting. Wow. And I was like, wow, that's some tough love.

Brett Curry:

But it's one of those things where the AI

Is just looking at the data and doing recommendation based on the data. It's maybe saying things that a human might not say exactly. And so really valuable there. And so yeah, you got to look at that feedback. And again, that's another piece is you've got this amazing feedback loop if you close the loop, if not, it's just feedback that's floating around and you do nothing with it. So you got to take that, apply that to changes and improvements in the product. So yeah, I mean the return reducing the return rate makes such a difference in so many ways. You got extra fees there, you got shipping costs, things like that. If your delivery rate is too high, that impacts ranking and a number of other things. So yeah, get on that. That's definitely time well spent. Want to transition to a couple other really key points. I know we talked about offline, the competitive landscape is shifting with Chinese sellers getting better at quality listings and things. We talked a little bit about AI and some of the changes there, so I want to get into that too. But let's talk about the competitive landscape and particularly Chinese sellers, they seem to have up their game. What can you tell us about that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean they're using the same AI tools that we're all using, so suddenly the listings have much better English on them, have much better English copy on the product images. The images are looking nicer. So a lot of the branding advantages and language advantages that I think US sellers had or English based sellers had have kind of gone away and it's kind of a much more level playing field in that regard. And a lot of times they're able to price products cheaper and get better deals on them. So it's become a really much more difficult landscape in that regard. I think especially in my category, which is really just a tough one for that. It used to be

Brett Curry:

Mostly a price issue where Chinese sellers would come and just undercut everybody else, but it looked a little janky and then the listings were not great and stuff like that. Now that's improving. Now we got a real problem here with lower prices and comparable listing. So what are you doing to combat that? Any recommendations or any insights there?

Speaker 1:

Like I said, I redo my main images and really I say every two years or so, I bring everything down to the studs basically and start over again and kind of redo the best I can. Whatever your listing was in 2023 is not necessarily going to convert the same way in 2025. The competition is different, the pricing is different. And so I feel like every two years or so I'm really restarting again and looking for what my competitive advantages are and what can I can promote, what I can press, what I can charge, and it changes. So that's really all I can do is really try to push those levers and make that work

Brett Curry:

And that that's really the game forever, isn't it? Where we're looking for the next innovation, the next product enhancement, the next optimization meaning better merchandising, better images, things like that, and how can we stay ahead of the competition? Because certainly if you make those changes and they work, your competition's going to copy you and then you have to be looking for the next thing and feels exhausting, seems exhausting, but that's just the game. That's the retail game, that's the Amazon game for sure. And the speed is pretty quick there, but got to be reinventing, got to be optimizing on the ongoing and so makes a ton of sense there. What about AI and what are you doing specifically using AI to give yourself an advantage?

Speaker 1:

So yeah, I guess a couple of things I've been doing is I've been playing with AI I just mentioned in terms of analyzing large bits of data. That's definitely been helpful. I'll take it and I'll compare SQP reports over different periods and kind of try to gather where maybe I've increased, maybe I've decreased, maybe I'm missing something there

Brett Curry:

S QP reports for those that DONA

Speaker 1:

Search query performance reports in brand analytics I guess within Seller Central and that will show you what keywords you're ranking for and what keywords you're actually making actual sales for. It's really the best place to find that, right? But it's easy to kind of miss something in that report if you're comparing a lot of different time periods or are just different time periods in general where it's kind of tough to see all that data side by side. So I will go in sometimes and compare several of those and have it put together reports for me where it's like, okay, I noticed in January you sold 32 items on this term, but now you've sold eight. And then you go, okay, well that's the problem. I got to fix that. Right? It's a problem.

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Speaker 1:

So being able to actually

Brett Curry:

Segment, add an issue, it's a ranking issue, it's some kind of issue there,

Speaker 1:

But being able to segment exactly what's going on, which keywords are actually the problem is huge. So I've definitely been using it for that. I've also been using it to iterate on images. So I think I was telling you before about this nano banana or whatever, I hope I'm not even saying

Brett Curry:

It correctly. Yeah, Gemini

Speaker 1:

From Google, but it's been really great to play around with images and telling it to make boxes or text or whatever. And that's a really great way to me it seems like it gets like 85% of the way there, 90%. And then I can send it to a graphic designer and be like, just make this good, but I've done most of the work already. That's all need. So it's a lot less work for them and I can kind of get it to where I want

Brett Curry:

And way easier than you trying to sketch it out or using Google Docs or something to annotate something. You can create it using Gemini and now you're much closer in your designer. Yeah,

Speaker 1:

Exactly. Exactly. So that's definitely a big thing that I've been doing. And then also sometimes when it comes to writing texts with keywords in them, AI has been pretty good at making it look nicer and not look as keyword stuffed as it might be. Right,

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And curious, what are you using there? Using chat gt, using clawed, using something

Speaker 1:

Else? Pretty much just chat GPT.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, I think all the tools have their benefits and as an agency we're probably using chat GPT the most for a lot of things, but I do love Gemini for research as we're pitching a new deal or I'm researching a new category or whatever. Or if I really am leaning into something search based a lot, I'll use Gemini. And then for me, anything that's copy based, so all the copy that I pull in from show notes and stuff for the pod, I think Claude is the best, but there's reasons to use all of them. So just curious what you were leaning into there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

So what about the impact of rufuss? So now looking at the AI that Amazon is using, what impact have you seen? What are you shifting in terms of strategy or tactics because of rufuss, if anything?

Speaker 1:

So I'm not really shifting any strategies per se. I guess the only thing I would say is Rufuss makes suggestions, questions, or data that it's kind of, do you want to know if this is cotton for a t-shirt or something? So I'll just make sure that my backend is filled with answers to those questions that maybe we will address those questions. So I know that they're asking them, especially if they're on competitors listings where I can see what questions they're asking about them. Then maybe I want to make sure they're asking them about me. Maybe there's some kind of disconnect in how it's interpreting the data. But other than that, I haven't really changed that much. I don't see a ton of what customers are doing with it. But yeah, I mean I'm sure it's coming, but it's kind of tough to reconcile that with the standard search and then how to do that.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it makes sense. How are you finding, are you just visiting your listing, visiting your competitors' listings, playing with Rufuss, seeing what the questions are and what it's surfacing and then making adjustments there? Are there any tools you're using? Any specific recommendations

Speaker 1:

There? Yeah, so what was the tool's name? I completely forgot the tool. We talked about it last

Brett Curry:

Time, me later, we'll put it in the show.

Speaker 1:

So theres a tool, a seller release that I thought was really cool that would actually extract all the rufuss questions in one place for you. I don't remember what it's called, but I'll find it and I would like to use it. I would like to say I have used it, but I haven't yet. But yeah, it seems like a really great opportunity to get those all really quickly and be able to address those as best you can.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, cool. But I think it also makes sense, something you should be doing anyway is shopping your own listings and looking at your competitor listings and seeing what's surfaced from roof is there, and then making adjustments accordingly. So makes a lot of sense. Anything else I want to make sure we talk about Innovate, which is an amazing show in New York City coming up here quickly. Anything else you would note in terms of what's shifting, what's changing and what you're doing to prep for q4?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the only other thing that I kind of haven't mentioned is I mentioned some of the inventory strategy, but I think really looking at a WD, I know it did not go so well last Q4, but I feel like they'll probably do a lot better this Q4 and kind of making sure I've got a good amount of inventory with them. It's going to make it easier to get things into Amazon when things might be tight, especially during the middle.

Brett Curry:

Can you maybe just explain, I think we're familiar with that, but how does that work and how, when are you using it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so it's basically like a warehouse. They call FBA fulfillment center. So this is more of a warehouse, so you can use this to ship to pretty much anywhere like case packs. You're not going to ship individual units, but they make it so that you can ship into Amazon relatively affordably. You don't have to pay inbound placement fees, you just have to pay, I think it's a dollar 70 a box plus whatever the shipping charge is. So it actually ends up being relatively economical to book those Amazon. And then Amazon will also have it on auto replenishment, so it'll actually drip in as it sees fit too. So for me, most of the year, it makes it really easy if I have stuff in a WD where I don't have to think about inventory planning as much because I know the inventory is kind of dripping in.

Maybe I'll think about it from an ordering perspective, but not like a what's in FBA perspective. But in Q4 I've manage it definitely a lot more head on because moments can change thousands of units, but when it comes to booking appointments and getting a truck, you might not be able to get that truck in Q4 and a WD will just seamlessly send it. I'm not saying it's going to perfect. I'm not saying it's going to be great necessarily, but it's another tool where you can get your inventory in that might beat a truck potentially as well.

Brett Curry:

Great, great. Totally makes sense. Love that. Well, tell us about Innovate. Like I said, some trusted friends of mine, some leading influencers in the space, say Innovate's one of the best. I'm speaking there this year. I'm really stoked about that. I can't wait to hang in New York with you and your team, but tell us about Innovate. Why is it so special? What's going down this year? Why should top sellers plan to attend?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so this is our seventh year, which is, I can't even believe I'm saying it. What makes our show special I guess is a couple things is one, first of all, the show started completely organically. It started up as a meetup, but seven or eight years ago for people just trying to learn how to sell online. And I was one of them. My partner Jared started it and I started running it with him. And then at some point it just kept growing and growing and growing in New York City and we decided to put on a conference and we had a little basement for a hundred people and cut to today, this is our seventh one and we're going to have over 700 people this year. And it's just grown to be this massive, massive event. Something that I think really sets us apart is a lot of these shows or events are put on by either event companies or service providers or people who just don't really know who they want to get to speak at the event where for us, we know we have a lot of friends, we have a lot of connections, and we're able to get really the people that we want to see, speak and get them to talk about the things we want to see them talk about.

So we're all sellers and we're just like, Hey, we're interested in TikTok, great, let's get someone to talk about TikTok. We're interested in branding, great, we'll get someone to talk about branding, whatever we're interested in, whatever the hot topic is to us, we're going to get the experts to come talk about that. And we're going to get mostly actual operators and not as much service providers to talk. People are actually doing it themselves. Running these businesses will tell you about what they're doing specifically, I'll say, and we get all different kinds. So some people will get the aspirational guys who are doing a billion dollars and we've got a couple of those, but then some of the people doing five to 10 million are really in the weeds and they've got great things to offer too. So we try to get a really good mix of platforms and people that are really doing different things just exceptionally well and getting them to talk and share their secrets where they may not normally do. So

Brett Curry:

You can generally tell an event that is run by just an event company where their primary goal is how do we profit from this event? And obviously if you run an event, you want to turn a profit, but goal, I

Speaker 1:

Wish that was my primary goal. What's that? I wish that was my primary goal,

Brett Curry:

But for you guys, it's like what do I want to learn and what is going to give me an edge in the coming months and coming year for my brand? And so this is put on by sellers, run by sellers, curated by sellers, and these are just hot topics. And even the occasional service provider like myself, when we come in, it's still like, Hey, this is what sellers want to know. And I'm still in the weeds on a lot of things, so can provide those insights. But yeah, it's just been, it's received top marks from so many people that I trust that I think you got to make it a must attend event. And also the venue is cool, right? I love New York City. Of course. Did you guys on one of the P Pier 67 or something

Speaker 1:

Like that? Yeah, it's amazing venue. It's right on the water and it overlooks the Hudson River. And last year we opened the windows and just get this beautiful breeze coming in. It was really spectacular. The food is great. We've done this for seven years. This is the first time we were doing a venue three years in a row because we just loved it so much that it was like, we got to keep doing this here. So it's a great venue. And something else too for us is like the timing is important. It's just before Q4 where there's still time to make changes. You might need to get involved to get things together. If it was a little bit later, it could be problematic or earlier, maybe it won't be the most updated and advanced content, but this is just before Q4 hits, so you got time to really get things together and have a perfect q4.

Brett Curry:

So the timing is strategic, take advantage of it, Brandon, where can people find out more and where can they register?

Speaker 1:

So you can register at Innovate Show, that's our website. And you can see all of our speakers that we have there, including of course, Ezra Firestone, who's amazing, who I'm super excited for as well as, and I think I made that connection. I don't want to take too much. Yes,

Brett Curry:

Absolutely, dude. He's legendary. He's so good. I know you know that. But for those that have not heard Ezra, that's worth a trip to see him live and in

Speaker 1:

Person. Great. Absolutely. And we've got a bunch of others too, including Evan Dash, who's not as known in the D two C space, but literally runs the Dash Home Appliances, which is like a billion dollar brand, just tremendous. They're in every retailer. And something that's really unique to them is they've started within the last 10 years or so. And I don't think there's another kitchenware brand out there that's ever done anything like that recently. So just some really amazing people that I'm excited for. And like I said, I'm a seller and I get excited about these people and what they're talking about. So I sit through most of the sessions as best I can or watch them after. But yeah, it's just a great event. But yeah, if you can visit Innovate show, you can get a ticket and I'll drop you a coupon if you want to put that somewhere, if you want to.

Brett Curry:

Amazing. Yep, I'll put it in the show notes as well.

Speaker 1:

And yeah, you can use that coupon and register as well.

Brett Curry:

Innovate Show, be there. Can't wait to hang out in New York City. Brandon, how else can people follow you? So are you active on socials, you want to connect with people on LinkedIn or Twitter or anything

Speaker 1:

Like that? Yeah, you can find me on any of the socials. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I don't really post very much. I'm just that guy, but I am there, so if you want to connect, ask a question or whatever, you can definitely find me there. Yeah. But yeah, I wouldn't expect too many postings from me.

Brett Curry:

Keep those expectations low.

Speaker 1:

It's

Brett Curry:

Quality, not quantity, but

It's brand Fuhrmann. So it's F-U-H-R-M-A-N-N. Yes. Two ads as you're searching on the socials defined, Brandon. And so with that, Brandon, this has been awesome and thank you for dropping knowledge. Thank you for the time and look forward to seeing you in New York City soon. Great. Thanks for having me. Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to from you, what would you like to hear more of on the show? If you liked this episode, if this was helpful for you, please share this with someone else who would benefit from it. And if you've not left us or view on iTunes, we'd love that as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. This episode of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast is brought to you by firmat. Forma is the AI native commerce platform that optimizes shopping experiences leading to best in class shopper engagement and conversion, leveraging proprietary data tools, and its adaptive commerce. Graph. FMA delivers hyper-personalized experiences to both human and agent shoppers that adapt in real time to behavioral and performance insights. Trusted by industry leaders like Backcountry, Bissell, and Glossier, as well as Premier Agency partners for MO Platform blends advanced analytics and optimization tools like heat maps, strategy engines, and conversational data insights to maximize shopper impact and tailor every touchpoint. Check it out for yourself@commerce.com.

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