Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode, the Winning
Shop Fight Podcast to me host Nick Truman.
Nick, why? Look, it's the yellow.
Well I'm in a new office and the lighting is terrible and there's
no point putting the studio lights in yet because the
electrician needs to give us a switch.
And I was like anyway it all looks a bit different.
The gorgeous plant is still here.
This thing has been itching the back of my neck for many many
years. In the old office we're building
a new studio, so every week you'll notice something a little
bit different. The doors currently here.
You may never see this door again.
Depends how quickly the builders come in and fix a few things, do
some painting and other bits and pieces.
Last bit of news before I jump into today's topic, which
honestly I'm very excited about because it's a big topic and
there's lots of things that you guys should be doing could be
doing, are doing, not doing and I want to talk about some of
those things. Five in particular.
The other piece of news is I'm going to be at Sub Summit next
week. So let me just check my
calendar. Got my laptop here.
So sub Summit is on the 13th, 14th and morning of the 15th of
May in Kansas City. I'm going to be out there.
I know a few of our partners are coming out as well, but if you
like running or you don't like running, we want to get into
running. We are going to be hosting a run
with Tax Cloud and a couple of other partners by the looks of
things as well. People are sort of jumping in
left, right and centre. But we're going to be running,
running a run at 7:00 AM on the Thursday.
So that is Thursday, the 14th of May.
So if you want to come along, Kansas City, 7:00 AM, we'll be
doing a run that morning and there'll be a link in the
description as well, which Byron will pop in once he edits this
up and sends it out. And it'll probably be late
because I'm recording this at the same time it's supposed to
be posted. So the minutes late this is, is
how many minutes the episode took and how long it took Byron
to chop a few bits and pieces together and get it live.
Byron and I will be running. We're both there.
I was going to say avid fitness fanatics.
I can't call myself that, but Byron does a lot more sport and
stuff than I do. Well anyway, we're going to be
doing a run, so come along if you can.
If you're not into running, it'll be easy.
I think there's a 1K option and a 5K option. 5 KS, 3 miles for
all you nutters that still use the Imperial system over in the
US or the UK. We still use miles and things
here as well, even though they don't make sense.
Anyway, let's talk about wholesale.
I'm very like Scatty today because I'm in a new place and
I've got 5 things I want to talk about how you can harness the B
to B wholesale side of your business to help B to C grow.
There's obviously a lot going on there and people get very
excited about it. And then they see direct to
consumer, their own sales. Direct to customer doesn't
actually change that much at all.
So we're going to have a quick talk about that.
The first thing as a avid SEO guy for heading towards 20 years
quicker than I'd like to admit, I've got a very good face cream
for one of our clients. Thank you, Skinsense, love you
guys to bits. And but the one of the things
that you guys should be looking at from an SEO point of view
when doing wholesale is making sure, and we'll also come to
this on point #4 as well effects SEO quite a lot.
But it's not just SEO on that. And but on this, you want to see
if they can link back from their website or even do a big social
announcement to say, we now stock this awesome brand.
And it's within their interest to have a social story and a bit
of authenticity behind the fact that if you buy the brand from
us, we're a, we're a good out there.
We're a good retailer and we're trusted by all of our suppliers,
including this lovely, awesome brand.
But it's also good for you to get the SEO links and brand
mentions are nearly as important as an SEO link these days.
So if you become a trending topic, So therefore you might
want to say to your wholesalers, I want all of you to go live
with our wholesale, with our products to your retailers, our
new wholesale solution, we want all of you to go live on, on the
1st of August. For example, this big, we like
to call it sometimes a winning shopfire thunderclap, which is
quite a well known term. It's like this massive boom of
awareness where everybody's suddenly talking about your
brand and all these new sites are stocking this brand.
It's a high trending brand, but your own website holds the main
authority. It's the number one.
People then start looking for this brand because they've seen
it in several places. And you might find some of your
non brand SEO rankings as well start to increase as a result of
that big boom. What you don't want is this
quiet little Backpage somewhere on the retailer's website
suddenly mentioning you and it's there.
It's great. Google maybe finds it, but it's
it's not having that same effect of reaching people.
The more people though that big boom on the same date reaches,
the more notice Google will take of that and improve your
rankings as a result. So make sure you get some links
from those sites when they say, hey, we're now stuck in this
awesome brand over here. You can buy on a psy.
You can even use your loyalty points and reasons to still buy
it from them. So you're not just telling them
to promote you and then people buy the product directs for you
and but also those brand mentions really, really
important. So make sure they are using your
brand. And second thing you want to do
is as all that happens, you want to monitor what's called brand
awareness or what we call brand awareness here at my agency.
And brand awareness can be met monitored in one very simple,
quick and, and freeway, which is through Google Keyword Planner.
So you can see how many people are typing your brand in every
month on Google. It gives you what's called the
monthly search volume and that updates.
It's somewhere between the 6th and the 10th of the month.
So this is the 5th of May. When I'm recording this say any
day now, all of April's data will suddenly populate in there
as well. So if you suddenly go from
wherein 2 wholesale, two small wholesale retail stores, as in
we've wholesaled to the retail store, we're in two of them.
And then actually on the 1st of April, April Fool's Day and 1st
of April, we went from those two little ones to three big ones
and a couple more small ones. It's quite a big footprint now.
And then you can watch actually how much has our April monthly
search volume for our brand's name on Google increased because
other brands are stocking you now.
You might actually want to start spending some money on your
brand ads on Google. You would not believe what
percentage of people's budget they're spending on brand ads.
And there's a lot. I won't go into it today because
there's a huge topic in the PPC world as to whether you should
bid on your own name or not. If you're sold in 100 different
retail places to that same customer that could buy you in
100 places. You almost definitely want to
spend money to get those customers direct because you're
going to keep more of the margin from those sales.
You now own the customer and you can market to them direct.
If you're selling to a retailer, you lose that control.
So although you get to sell a massive pallet, you know,
pallets and pallets and trucks and trucks for the stuff to 1
retailer in one single transaction, you do lose power
to then resell to those customers.
You're relying on that retailer stocking your item again and
selling it to their customers. So be careful how much you're
spending on on both the click cost and the total amount of
your PPC budget to advertise on your own brand name.
So something we look at a lot when we start auditing accounts.
I never say this on the show, but, and I probably should
because it's my show and my agency.
If you want us to audit your Google Ads account and tell you
how much you're spending on brand versus non brand and
anything else we think is going wrong, drop us an e-mail team at
Spec dot Digital. Spec dot Digital and or you can
e-mail us at the podcast. Hello at winningshop5.com.
Be happy to have a quick look. 5 minutes of my time and I can
probably pull apart three to five things that you should be
changing in there, but happy to have a look and give us a bit of
context. What are you worried about?
What's going well? Or give us a blank slate and say
what do you think? Let me have a look #3 set a
retail price. This is so important.
We've had brands we worked with before that have got a retail
price list. As an example, they've got $100
as the price if you buy the product from their website and
then one of their retailers pops one of the retail brands.
Some of the wholesale sell bulk products to this other retailer
pops up £0.50 or $0.50, sorry, or a dollar cheaper than your
$100. And they appear side by side on
Google. And another way to differentiate
will come on to you in a minute as well.
But they appear side by side on Google, or it's the same product
in Google Shopping. Or the customer actually sees
the same product from you and then sees it at a dollar cheaper
elsewhere having already bought it from you.
It's going to be a bit of a sour taste in their mouth.
In the UK, in the USI don't, I might have this wrong.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't I'm not aware of any.
I love that phrase. I'm not aware of any.
I'm not aware of any laws that say that the retail price has to
be respected. But this is about having an
important relationship and a good strong relationship and
communication with those retailers that are selling your
brand for you. If you have a bad relationship
where you have no contacts, like they bought it through a
distributor or something, then you're kind of stuffed like
you're going to be racing to the bottom on price on your own
products. And yes, you could probably stop
them at a cheaper price because you've got a bigger margin
because you've not had to wholesale the product in you've,
you've removed that one, that one thing which is the other
retailer. So actually you hold more of
your margin. You know, you might have an 80
or 90% margin, they might only have 20 to 40% in your product,
but you don't want to race to the bottom.
It makes you a discount cheap brand and that's a very bad
thing. It's bad for business long term.
So set a retail price and check up on your retailers at all
times. There are some really good tools
you can use as well that if if you have G tins for your
products, so barcode numbers, unique identifiers, you can use
those G tins to see who else is appearing against you on Google
free shopping and on Google Page shopping.
You can also use other tools that we use to watch what other
people are selling that same item for.
So setting a retail price is really, really important,
important. Don't be unfair and undercut it
yourselves. That will annoy all of the
retailers. And there is an advantage to
having them both from a financial, commercial point of
view, but also from a more people are stocking our brand,
more people are hearing about that's point of view.
But the other thing to flag on this as well is you also don't
want to become more expensive. We have a lot where brands are
more expensive to buy from than Amazon, Their own Amazon account
on Amazon and Amazon Offered offer free next day delivery,
Fulfilled by Amazon and you offer either free two to five
day delivery or you don't offer free delivery or it's free
delivery over a threshold, whereas Amazon can beat that.
Some brands now use Fulfilled by Amazon to fulfill all of their
normal Shopify orders as well as obviously all the ones that are
on Amazon. That's not a bad way to do
things and there's loads of options for that.
But again, just look at the competitiveness of if you buy a
product from US versus buying it from someone else, really,
really important, especially in this day and age, AI is going to
find that same product in 10 locations in no time.
And trust me, I'm a savvy shopper.
I can find a good deal on the same item very, very quickly.
And #4 is kind of relates to the last one as well.
We had a situation years ago, same situation I mentioned a
minute ago, but the different product where the product was a
pound, still a pound cheaper, let's say, or a dollar cheaper
from someone who was a retailer that was also selling our
brand's own product. It was a dollar cheaper.
Same picture. So they literally use the same
image from my client's photography studio.
Same image. This other brand was really well
known. My client was not.
They had white labeled the product so it was the same item
and you could see that in the picture.
But ours was like, hey, check out this awesome brand.
We are with the brand name and this other brand just said buy
this item. And you've heard of the
retailers, you knew who they were.
They had product reviews. We didn't because we hadn't sold
enough ourselves. They also had a dollar cheaper
and they had free delivery. We charged for delivery, had no
reviews. We're a dollar more expensive
and the same picture. So whether you read the title
and description and stuff on Google Shopping or not with the
same picture, so clearly the same item, we're a terrible
place to buy from. And when we put that in front of
the finance director, he immediately said, right, we will
match all of their products. And I need to have a
conversation with my sales, my commercial wholesale sales team.
And we said, yes, you do. And we managed to put off a
report for all those things, get that sorted.
Our sales increased because now we were fair and level with
everybody else, but then we we fought another thing.
So that's the photography, but also the product descriptions on
the site. Coming back to SEO, if 50 sites
have got the same item with the same description, why is Google
going to put you ahead of anybody else?
These retailers are possibly more established than you are as
a small to medium brand. And even if even if you're an
incredibly established retail brand that everybody know, a big
retailer, a Walmart or Target, I don't think I'd stop at that
kind of level of brand. If people know who they are,
they trust them and they can buy your brand and lots of other.
There's a there's an advantage to shop elsewhere, but you want
to keep the margin and own the customer.
Therefore, you can own the communication, you can do your
own e-mail marketing and you can get give that customer your own
loyalty points to get to come back and buy from you guys
several times. There's all these advantages to
make sure they use their own photography and they use their
own product descriptions. If they're not going to do that,
the ones you supply make them different and not quite as good
as the ones on your website. So if somebody sees the item on
Amazon or somewhere else and go, I really want to buy this item.
If they go on Google and look for the item, they find you and
go, this item's even better than I thought.
And is there's, there's even better reason to buy it direct
from the from the retailer. You know, I'm going to get some
loyalty points and stuff here. I'm not going to get that on
Amazon. So again, find the thing that's
actually going to hook people in and #5 this one's really cheeky.
And I've had more than one brand of this in the past.
So take what you will with this one and offer, especially with a
large item offer drop ship. So you can say to people, we
will go and fulfil the items for you.
So if somebody buys it from your website, we'll send it straight
out. You don't have to stock it.
You don't have to worry about delivery.
We'll cover all of that out of our margin.
You just go and sell the item and we'll give you 1020% or
something of the of the car and you don't even have to touch it.
You know, we'll do all the rest, but there is an advantage here
then to send it out in your packaging with potentially some
of your offers or something from your side that even though it
was sold through someone doing drop shipping through you, you
can then potentially get them to find your site somehow and come
and purchase again. I've had it before.
I've bought stuff on eBay for example, and I just the only
brand I really see is eBay. I bought some furniture from
eBay years ago, but the invoice that arrived was from his
furniture company and I looked up my item on their website and
it was cheaper. So I reached out saying just to
be clear, like I don't want to do anything.
I can't be with this big item. And it took me a while to get it
up the staircase in the house, you know, into, into the
bedroom. But this item like it was £40
cheaper on your website. I do feel a little bit, you
know, hard done by and they said what eBay take massive fees?
So we put our prices up on eBay. But if you spend £200 on our
website, here's a £40 off credit.
And I thought that was a really cool way of doing things.
But the invoice was in their branding and had their website
URL under their logo on the invoice, which is how I found
them in the first place and found all their other stuff.
If I'm shopping on eBay, I might buy from 10 to 20 different
people. If I put those stuff in my
basket. If I buy from them, I'm buying
it all from one place and they're owning that customer.
So be really, really careful with this bit because you don't
want all of your wholesale customers say they were driving
40% of your business. You don't and they were all
doing drop ship on large items. You don't want them getting the
huff and then you suddenly start losing those big orders.
That could be really bad for business.
Again, relationship's really important.
Be really careful about it, but do it in a subtle way.
If the box turns up and it's, you know, bright yellow and
black branding in your branding and it's like, hang on a minute.
I thought I was buying this from someone else, then the retailer
might get quite unhappy at the same time.
Or if you buy a pair of trainers from Footlocker, I don't know if
you guys have them in, I think you'd have them in the US.
I'll find out next week. But if you bought a pair of
Adidas or Adidas, as some people call it from Footlocker, they
come in an Adidas box, right? You know you're buying Adidas.
So it depends on your brand equity in the market and what
you can achieve from there. But anyway, join me on a run
next week if you haven't already, hit subscribe.
We'll be back again on Friday with some incredible content.
I am in the I've been in the studio a lot recently.
I'm back in the studio again tomorrow in London.
We've hired some really nice, all different studios.
We've hired some nice studios. We're doing some face to face
ones and we've even got a guest coming up who was on the UK
Apprentice, which is pretty cool as well.
So thanks for joining in. Hope you can join us again next
time and make sure you hit the subscribe button and join our
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