#760 – Taking a $500M Brand to Amazon

What does it take to sell hundreds of millions of dollars online, and what happens when the average customer order can cost as much as a car? In this episode, Bradley Sutton catches up with Alvaro Lopez, SVP of Marketing at Flooret, in Switzerland to unpack his journey from studying international relations to becoming an experienced e-commerce operator. Along the way, Alvaro built and exited his own Amazon business, helped scale Solo Stove and its sister brands across international marketplaces, and managed an Amazon portfolio that grew to nearly $65 million in annual sales.

Today, Alvaro is applying those lessons at Flooret, a premium flooring company that built much of its success through direct-to-consumer e-commerce. Selling flooring online creates a very different customer journey than selling a typical Amazon product. Customers often begin by purchasing small samples before committing to a full flooring order covering around 1,000 square feet. That makes understanding customer acquisition costs, sample-to-order conversion rates, and the entire purchasing funnel especially important.

Now, Flooret is expanding further into marketplaces like Amazon and Home Depot by meeting customers where they already want to shop. Alvaro explains why sellers should stop thinking of themselves as simply an “Amazon brand” and instead focus on building a true omnichannel business. That means establishing a direct relationship with customers through a website, email, and SMS while still taking advantage of Amazon’s massive bottom-of-the-funnel demand. He also breaks down how Helium 10 can help larger brands estimate their realistic obtainable market and determine how much opportunity actually exists inside a category.

The conversation also dives into AI, lean teams, and finding opportunities that create the greatest impact with the least effort. Alvaro believes AI should amplify strong employees rather than automatically replace them, especially in areas like creative production, reporting, and business analysis. His final advice is simple but powerful: regularly step back and identify the highest-impact opportunities in your business. Sometimes the next big win is more revenue—but improving shipping costs, customer service, retention, or returns can be just as valuable to your bottom line.

In episode 760 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Alvaro discuss:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 02:28 – From Diplomacy To E-Commerce
• 04:43 – Launching And Exiting His Amazon Brand
• 06:54 – Scaling Solo Stove On Amazon
• 08:41 – Building A Massive Flooring Brand Online
• 11:13 – Expanding Beyond Direct-To-Consumer
• 15:28 – How The Flooring Sample Funnel Works
• 18:31 – Bringing High-Ticket Flooring To Amazon
• 23:12 – Stop Being Just An Amazon Brand
• 24:11 – Building Your Website, Email, And SMS
• 27:53 – Using Helium 10 For Market Sizing
• 30:17 – Using AI To Amplify Your Team
• 33:16 – The Effort-Impact Scorecard Strategy

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Imagine having an average order price for a product line be similar to what a car costs. Today’s guest has been responsible for selling hundreds of millions of dollars online, and he’s going to talk about the unique strategies that have helped him do that. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And I am in another part of the world today. I’m driving where we pass the Alps, Swiss Alps here, but we’re in Switzerland. Flew all this way, went on the wrong train, and then took $110 Uber for 15 minutes almost to get to another town to meet with this gentleman here who’s been on the show, Alvaro. How’s it going?

Alvaro:

Bradley, it’s great seeing you. I hope I’m worth every single penny of those 110 francs.

Bradley Sutton:

But Alvaro has been on the podcast before, but it’s been a few years and it’s a different company and everything else. So, we’re going to pretend like he’s never been on the show and go back to his origin stories and things like that, because we have a lot of new listeners on the show too. So Alvaro, we are here in Switzerland, but I don’t see blonde hair and blue eyes. So where were you born and raised originally?

Alvaro:

My name is Alvaro Lopez, which means originally I’m from Lima, Peru. One of my favorite parts of our last conversation, Bradley, was we got into the serious discussions of Peruvian food. So yeah, very lucky, born in Lima, amazing cosmopolitan city, but raised in Maryland, just outside of DC. And then throughout life, was raised there, went to college in Utah. And then really ever since I was 19, went on a mission and I’ve kind of been living in seven countries to last 18 years of life in adulthood.

Bradley Sutton:

Was it BYU, Utah? Where did you go? And what was your major when there?

Alvaro:

Up north? It’s actually the third biggest college in Utah. Not many people know about it, but if you love football, Jordan Love, Grove Packers, Bobby Wagner, Sam Merrill from the Cleveland.

Bradley Sutton:

Utah State. Hold on, hold on. What’s the mascot, Aggies? 

Alvaro:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And what did you major in and did you enter that field upon finishing your graduation mission and all that stuff?

Alvaro:

No, actually, it’s a really good story about, I think it’s in life in general, you should always be open to opportunities. I studied international relations on a track record to try to be a diplomat, to work for the state department. But I spent a year as part of my undergrad in Spain and that’s where I met my now wife. She’s German and she’s from the Basel area and she got a great job. So I came back and I leveraged my network during my undergrad and found a role in a fast growing agency at the time that was helping American brands, selling Amazon.com, Walmart Jet at the time. 

Bradley Sutton:

What year are we talking about?

Alvaro:

This is 2015, 2016, going into 2016. And yeah, fast growing agency startup helping, I mean, this is a different generation of Amazon sellers, so much opportunity then. And I opened up the European division and started working with European brands on getting them on Amazon.com and the rest is history, man. It’s been a decade now working in e-commerce, both on agency and brand side. But yeah, my background truly is in political science degree and it taught me a lot about understanding the road and economics, but it’s most important to be open to opportunities and just be extremely diligent and practice your fundamentals to be really good at whatever you’re doing. And yeah, a decade.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I like always asking that question because obviously, I mean, for now at least, there is no such thing as an e-commerce major. And so it means by definition, whoever’s in this game, they went to school thinking there would be something else. And it’s just interesting to see people’s different paths and how sometimes the kind of major, your education does kind of somewhat lead into e-commerce and sometimes it has nothing to do with it, doesn’t matter. No matter what educational background we come from, we all ended up here in the same place. Now, thinking back to those years, you were working for an agency and things like, did you ever think about launching your own brand? And did you ever launch your own brand or the last 10 plus years, it’s always been kind of like either for a company or for an agency as a service writer?

Alvaro:

Yeah, great question. I did. And I did sell it and I exited. I think that’s more or less like the natural progression of people who have any sort of appetite for entrepreneurship. You see, the beautiful thing about working in agencies, you see a lot of brands, you work with a lot of founders, you start to understand more or less fundamentally what makes brands work, what makes certain brands more successful than others. And back in 2018, partnered with one of my cousins who actually had studied agriculture economics in Copenhagen. He’s also half Peru and half Danish. We had started a Peruvian superfood startup back then, really designed for Amazon. So we private labeled a couple of what were at the time trendy superfoods. And yeah, did the classic private label, actually leveraged a lot of Helium 10 at the time and launched it on Amazon, got it to just under 100K. And it was a really great learning experience. And as I was exiting that as I took a bigger role at the brand level, because I have worked agency brand, founded my own brand of business, consulting, et cetera. Doing my own brand taught me more in the three months to get a bootstrap and going, then I would say a decade of operating for brands on agency or a brand. So I would say if you have any appetite, definitely de-risk the way you go into developing your own brand or founding a business, meaning have a really strong business strategy that doesn’t leverage too much of your capital. But I think if you have any appetite, do it. At worst, have a business plan where you can break even, but the learnings would be incredible. I think you can implement for many businesses and drive value over time.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, the last time you were on the podcast at the time, you were working for one of the most well-known companies out there in a certain niche, and that was a solo stove. Any company that has commercials with Snoop Dogg and stuff like that, it’s like, okay, this is not your typical just, oh, this is an Amazon only brand or anything.

What were some of your accomplishments while there? What was your role there? And what are you most proud of during your time there?

Alvaro:

Yeah, dude. Solo Stove was an awesome time. So many good friends. To this day, I’m working with colleagues there, and some of my closest friends are people that I met at Solo Stove and the sister brands. They’re under solo brands at Chubby’s and Oru Kayak. So my original position at solo stove is as the international marketplace director. So I came in running at the time when I inherited was just really the domestic Amazon business for Solo Stove. A couple of months into that role, we had acquired Chubby’s, Oru Kayak, Aisle Paddleboards, which is like the original sup from San Diego. And I ended up taking all the brands under my portfolio. By the time I left, we were in 35 stores in 21 countries. And I inherited a good business. It was between five and 10 million. And when I left, the entire portfolio was just under 65 million top line, just on Amazon. And collectively though, the whole business was under half a billion. And then so many learnings in that time period. But yeah, a couple of years as international marketplace directors for Solo Stove in the sister brands. And in the last two years as a vice president of Europe for Solo Stove. And when we did go live with Snoop Dogg, let me tell you, it’s actually one of the funnest experiences trying to translate Snoop going smokeless into German. I think that’s a whole different podcast I’d love to have with you.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So now you work for a company that’s kind of like completely different than Solo Stove. And at face value, one might think, wait a minute, how would you even sell these products on Amazon? So can you talk a little bit about the company you currently work for?

Alvaro:

Yeah. So the company is called Flooret. 

Bradley Sutton:

How do you spell it?

Alvaro:

Like floor, F-L-O-O-R and then E-T at the end. So Flooret. If you want to sound fancy, you can say Flooret, but that’s only if you’re fancy. Company’s originally from San Diego, founded by four great friends. They did an incredible job running the business for just close to eight years. Did close to half a billion in sales in those eight years. Really revolutionizing the way people thought about purchasing flooring, which if you’re anything like me before working at Flooret, I just thought if I need flooring, I go to the local hardware store or I go to Home Depot. So they were really the first to market, giving customers the ability to purchase flooring completely online.

Bradley Sutton:

So when we say flooring, it’s like sectional hardwood and these are carpets, rugs, like what kind of flooring?

Alvaro:

The core product from the get-go is the vinyl plank. So people know as LVP, luxury vinyl plank. So that’s really what they had hyper-focused on for the first five to six, seven years was just LVP. In the last few years, they had expanded a bit more to kind of de-risk being hyper-focused on LVP and introducing resilient hardwood and laminate lines. So the whole concept was, can we produce a premium spec, a premium product at the best price in market by cutting the middleman? That was the whole thesis. And the founder of the business, truly the main founder, I’d say, Tal, he comes from a family business that did flooring for generations, like at least 50 years, 60 years. So he’s very familiar with the industry, very experienced and knew that there was the ability to cut distributors and wholesalers, if you will. And I say this with the perspective that today, as we do Omni-Channel, Florida is very interested in working with independent retails just given the history. But that was the whole concept. Can we produce premium flooring options online by cutting the middleman, thus giving consumers wholesale pricing? And it worked.

Bradley Sutton:

So this half a billion dollars in the eight years, how was that all like .com? How much, if any, was on Amazon or was it wholesale?

Alvaro:

Yeah. So almost 100% of it is direct to consumer through the direct webshop. So most recently it’s been through Shopify, but just in the website itself. So I don’t know at what point we want to talk more about the Omni-Channel expansion, but my background, as you know, Bradley is working on brand and on marketplaces. So as I was taking this role and I came with a team that had experience in consumer brands and e-commerce brands, not in the flooring industry. So the whole mantra was, how can we grow this business through effective product development, retaining the core, of course, these amazing products, but expanding into new lines that has consumer demand and are innovative. The second was channel expansion. How can we expand to channels where our customers want to be met? And, you know, I can speak on that shortly, but we’ve seen that as we’ve just launched with no ad spend on homedepot.com, significant incremental revenue from people that just want to be met there and soon to be in Amazon. And the third is, you know, getting, optimizing our core, which the core of the business historically to not oversimplify was develop demand through pay media, largely paid social and paid search, get people to purchase samples on the store. And we expect to convert X percentage of those samplers into full box orders on our site. And we are continuing to see more opportunities to optimize that and ramp that up without cannibalizing, getting new products, you know, without cannibalizing, expanding into new channels. And I guess going back to the second point quickly, you know, we’ve expanded now in the commercial sector. We have a whole sub-brand called Flooret Commercial. It’s the fastest growing channel in our business today. And that’s more on the industrial scale, right? With hospitality, medical, you know, schools, offices, multi-house units, et cetera, and an independent retail expansion. So with all that being said, no one in the business today really has an incredible flooring background outside of like our engineering team. We all have consumer, you know, and DTC experience, and we’ve seen significant growth in the last 12 to 18 months, leveraging fundamentals that we’ve learned, you know, at Solo Stove and at Chubbies and at other major brands that we’ve worked with across the business.

Bradley Sutton:

So this kind of product, and the reason I said it might be something you wouldn’t think is for Amazon is just, you know, due to the size and things. Is everything oversized? And it sounds like you haven’t been on Amazon before, but you’re launching on Amazon. And is this going to be FBA? Or is this like of a size where it doesn’t make financial sense to pay to send it to Amazon and then pay to ship it? Are you guys going to do like, you know, seller fulfilled prime or just, you know, fulfilled by merchant? Or what’s your Amazon strategy going to be for this product that, again, I wouldn’t think that would be good for Amazon.

Alvaro:

Yeah, I guess two kind of points prior to answering is right now the flooring industry on Amazon, you see a lot of very cheap, stick and peel. That’s kind of like the big one, huge market. I mean, someone can go on Helium 10 today and kind of assess the market through an audit or build its own market through the Helium 10 tools and see that it’s a several hundred million dollar industry right now on Amazon that a lot of Asian OEMs are taking advantage of. And, you know, congratulations to them. They’re doing a very good job, but you’re right. It’s not a place where you expect premium flooring or even home and good brands today. Now, in the second point before I answer is Flooret has sold on Amazon for a couple of years, just samples, just cut samples specifically. And we made a concerted effort to expand the sampling experience on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold on. I want to make sure because I don’t fully understand that. I bet some of the audiences when you say samples is are these like people who are interested already in your brand and they want to see a small sample or are there just people who buy samples just to be doing a lot like they don’t even they haven’t decided what brand they’re going to get and they just get a sample to see like a certain, you know, wood finish or something like that. And then they could end up buying your product or maybe they even buy, you know, somebody else’s or somebody buys a sample from another company, but then they see that you guys haven’t explained this concept because I that’s I’m not familiar with it.

Alvaro:

Yeah. And I don’t blame me. I wasn’t either prior to taking the job. But yeah, you know, the flooring online is it’s much more nuanced than fire pits or shoes or a lot of consumer brands are familiar with because you’re right. It’s a much longer lead time. And there’s essentially two funnels that a customer we have to convert customers through in order to get a full purchase. So to simplify the process of online orders for flooring is a customer either is new to brand that just about found out about Flooret through Amazon PPC or through paid social paid search or all of the above. Yeah, I mean, the first step customers take in the journey is we expect them to purchase very affordable cut samples, which is literally like we are sawing off a piece of the full plank. So the customer can see the color, the texture, feel the grip, feel the thickness, the wear layer. And we expect customers to select multiple colors of that to really see the different options that they have. And then in that realm, the customers also have the ability to buy a full plank sample to see that scale. So that’s the first step is we need to convert customers who are either new to brand or have known about the brand for a while, get them to purchase samples. Yeah. And then the second step is ultimately to once they’re in that funnel, they’ve been able to compare. The second opportunity is getting them to or, you know, feeding the customer with enough education and enough, you know, enough inspiration through our design resources that we have on site or with our internal employees and consultation with them to then purchase at scale their flooring needs, which are on average, just for full context is around a thousand square feet that people purchase, which if you do the multiples, it’s, that’s a car. That’s the worth. That’s the value of a car that we’re checking out online.

Bradley Sutton:

When you’re kind of like doing P&L and stuff or deciding about prices and stuff, you’re not really trying to make money off of the samples, which you probably aren’t, but it’s your, you’re optimizing based on, on the, you know, the, the, you know, the, the likelihood of that per the LTV, you know, of, of, of the, or the potential LTV of that customer. And maybe you, you, you’ve probably done the math at like, Hey, we sent out 10 samples. Maybe, maybe nine of them aren’t going to do anything. We lost money. They’re great. But then that 10th person does. And then, so like, it’s a lot more nuanced when you’re trying to figure out, Hey, what’s my, what’s my TACOS and ACOS and where’s my break even and stuff. Is that an accurate assessment? 

Alvaro:

Yeah. I mean, there’s two really core KPIs in acquisition, which is the cost of acquisition to get a customer to purchase samples. And then the conversion rate of that unconverted sample order until full order.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. And then, so now that you’re trying to quote unquote, expand Amazon, is it expanding just to more samples and, but the end goal is, is trying to get them to purchase from the website or are you going to have, you know, can somebody buy a car’s worth of flooring from the Amazon store?

Alvaro:

I’m under the mantra that it’s very important for consumer brands who are looking to grow to me, customers where they want to be met pause and think to yourself, am I meeting my customers where they want to be met? And there’s, you know, we’re not going to get too deep into how you can unlock that, but there are many ways for you to speak to your customer and understand where they want to be met. And it’s not news to anyone that Amazon is a massive marketplace. It’s the biggest marketplace in human history, huge categories, almost in every spectrum of online shopping. And we know for a fact that there is a significant amount of our customers that would prefer to be met on Amazon. So when I’m thinking about, you know, optimizing a brand strategy, both to increase our NPS score, the quality of reviews that we get and make customers happy and grow the business. I do think consistently about what channels do I need to expand to. So that’s the first thing is I know there’s appetite for customers to be met there and leveraging experience and working with incredible brands on Amazon. I’m, I feel really lucky to know, including people like you Bradley, that are very well experienced in the marketplace industry, but I feel really lucky to know incredible people on Amazon employees in Seattle and Chicago, New York, who are actively working and you can see it in their quarterly reports, but Amazon wants to attract more brands on Amazon. They want to attract, and you see, I mean, the biggest example of that was Nike, right? The back and forth. And now Nike’s on Amazon and they’re there to stay because they learned the hard way. If you don’t have a strategy on Amazon, your customers will still shop there and someone else will get it. 

Alvaro:

So we’ve, I’ve been really lucky to be able to work closely with Amazon colleagues internally to help us define a strategy on how to unlock our growth potential there, but retain the premium brand element. So that’s been number one is I don’t want to just expand to expand. I want to expand there because customers want to be met there. And more importantly, do so without cannibalizing the premium brand investments that we’ve made. And you can see this it’s today, Flooret doesn’t come off like Zillow, we come off like a brand. And we, and I know for a fact, we are the industry lead in that realm. And so the second point to that is in that realm, as we’ve been strategizing with Amazon, you know, we’re looking to approach things by optimizing and simplifying the way Amazon customers expect to shop. So where on our site, customers are familiar with dynamically purchasing on Amazon, what we’ve learned, and I don’t want to give away too much about our launch strategy here, but we know that we have to preemptively select the quantities and the amount of boxes and square footage that customers will go on. We’ll follow a very similar merchandising strategy with all the fundamentals being met, great SEO, you know, optimized for Rufus and AI, I know it’s the latest jargon on Amazon, great A-plus content, great brand stores, all those fundamentals will be met, infographics, but we will be doing so in a strong merchandising approach, parent-to-child ASIN approach, and preemptively selecting for customers how much square footage they’re getting for the specific SKU that they’re on.

Bradley Sutton:

So it’s going to come in like pre-packaged, like enough for a room and stuff like that, and then so you’ve always have to do a lot of market research, but yeah, like so there could be an average order value that is kind of insane, you know, I mean, that’s the goal, you don’t want people buying three square foot at a time. 

Alvaro:

Correct. Yeah, I think on Amazon, my experience has been like a lot of customers will go to websites, go to web shops to be educated, to learn, and we know that there’s a lot of organic demand for floor ad on Amazon, and I know that when customers, there’s no more bottom of the funnel sales channel in the world than Amazon. So when a customer of mine is on Amazon, I want to simplify their ability to check out as easy as possible.

Bradley Sutton:

Tell the audience something that they probably haven’t heard before, a strategy, something unique you guys are doing, something maybe they haven’t thought about, could be on Amazon, could be an off-Amazon strategy. I mean, we’ve already talked about things that nobody’s ever heard of, such as, you know, having an order value the same amount as a car and stuff, but let’s more talk on the strategic side. What’s something you guys are doing that you think is pretty unique for the average, maybe Amazon only brand?

Alvaro:

Yeah, I think it’s funny. I’ll kind of like speak more on like what I answered when we first spoke in Frankfurt. I think it’s really important that any brand on Amazon stops thinking of themselves like an Amazon brand. Like we’re past that stage. That was a very viable business five plus years ago. We’re no longer in that road. It’s a different realm today. I’m sure that you have very successful brands today with strong P&Ls that are 99% plus on Amazon, but in order for business to be viable and successful in the next decade, in two decades, you need to proactively work on your brand and have a direct connection to your customer.

Bradley Sutton:

If somebody has been only an Amazon brand historically, and it’s probably not news to them what you just said, they’ve probably realized right in the last couple of years that they do have to build that, but they haven’t yet. Where would you start? Like the first two channels or the first two steps to getting there?

Alvaro:

Yeah, let me simplify a very expensive consulting fees that a lot of consultants would love to take your money on, but it has never been easier today to launch a website. I don’t care what platform, Shopify, Squarespace, you could literally have, you can build a website today through AI models, processes, your prompts, upload a couple of assets. You could have a very simple website today. You could have a very simple email, SMS acquisition on said website today. What would I use? Probably Shopify and Klaviyo if you want to keep things really simple, but I promise you, if you just spark that this week or next week and you optimize it piece by piece over time, this will pay dividends and your brand will have a lot more equity, your brand will be more successful. You’ll have a lot more insights from your customer. And most importantly, you’re able to iterate. And as you know, e-commerce, there’s no faster moving sector in commerce than e-commerce because a lot of your competitors are taking insights and they’re moving quick. So you want to be ahead of the game. I think the most important is just start. Simply use AI resources that are available, readily available. Launch a site, launch an acquisition for email, SMS today.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. You make a website, but then nobody’s going to come to it if you just make a website and it’s just there, maybe a little bit of SEO. So what’s the best ways to send your initial traffic and how do you decide how much you can And then also, community is important. If somebody has not started a community over the years, it’s been different. What the answer would be, maybe Facebook groups before, maybe it’s Reddit, maybe it’s having a big Instagram audience or YouTube channel. So talk about that. Paid advertising to a website plus community. What’s the first steps?

Alvaro:

Yeah. I think my experience has been, if you’re a real serious brand and you’re really serious about growing your business, invest in product and invest in customer support and people organically will come back to your site and repeat purchases. That’s really important. So if you have a website, yeah, definitely have a hook for them to come back to your site. It’s very important. Amazon will always be successful because it’s such a strong platform to transact. But to the vein of what I’m trying to get to in terms of connect with your customer, if you continue to continuously invest in product and in customer service, and with patience, you’ll see customers will go on site. Now to fast-track demand on your site, if you can run Amazon PPC campaigns, you can run paid search and paid social. It’s much easier. You can get more technical. But again, through AI models, it’s easier today than ever before to be a really strong performance marketer. Now as you scale, should you do that as a founder? Probably not. You should have resources dedicated to perfecting the art there, but it’s easier today to drive demand through paid means. The real answer is here. Every brand is different. But again, start.

Bradley Sutton:

Over the years, you’ve been using Helium 10 for a long time. What have you and your teams gotten the most value? You’ve been exclusively working for nine-figure companies, and some people might think, oh no, Helium 10 is just for the mom and pops or startups. So how have these nine-figure companies that you work for, even now, a company that’s not too strong on Amazon, how are you leveraging Helium 10?

Alvaro:

The most important is I’m always biased for action. When we understand an idea or a strategy is good, think about what’s the next step to move forward. But what Helium 10 makes really easy is understanding a serviceable, obtainable market. So oftentimes you hear about total addressable market. Bradley, the flooring market is 30 billion plus in the US. It’s a huge market. Can I hit 30 billion? No. So what’s beautiful about Helium 10 is I can quickly leverage keywords of my best-selling products, go through Helium 10, and build a market to understand what applicable competitors, what their revenue estimated sales are on Amazon for me to understand truly what the total applicable market for flooring or home and goods, what is the total applicable market for the products I want to launch on Amazon, and how can I slowly but surely scale through organic and paid means to win in those niche categories. So that for me is the biggest advantage at the moment with a brand like Flooret. Now when you’re in a brand that’s doing 10 million plus on Amazon, that’s when you can really, you should be leveraging Helium 10 on the hour to understand how are competitors bidding against you. It’s really the technical functions once you’re a real serious brand where Helium 10 becomes a much bigger part of your day-to-day. But at the moment for brands who are large and thinking about moving on Amazon, I genuinely can’t think of an easier tool to assess the serviceable attainable market than Helium 10 because you guys have the most experience on that. One of the first pioneers in that realm.

Bradley Sutton:

So a lot of what he was talking about was like in our Market Tracker 360 tools, you know, some of you might be like, oh wait, I didn’t know Helium 10 could do that. But yeah, that doesn’t come with our regular plan. But we have even smaller brands can leverage Market Tracker 360. Now AI is all the rage these days on Amazon, off Amazon. What’s an AI tip? Maybe it has nothing to do with Amazon. Maybe it’s about you replace an employee with an AI agent or it’s a mandate you have for all your employees on how they manage their slack or their outlook. I mean, it could be about anything, but what’s one AI tip that will help e-commerce entrepreneurs lives out there?

Alvaro:

Yeah. I mean, I’ll give a preamble, very focused on driving value to the business and optimizing the P&L. It’s very important to me, but I also love working with my colleagues and I personally prefer working with lean teams that are highly accountable to their KPI. So I hope you build a structure in your team where every individual is driving value and has clear KPI. So really in the world where we live in now, where there’s so many ways to optimize your business, leveraging AI through cloud code or open AI, GPT connections into your Google business or Shopify, whatever it is, give the mantra to your resources in your business, how AI can help optimize what they’re doing. Not necessarily replace it because we’ve seen, you’ve seen the big headlines of like Microsoft or Ford’s replacing entire staff with just AI and it doesn’t work, right? Because there’s an element of human management that’s still very important to it. But what I can tell you by experience today, I’m not ready to move on from creative resources, but what I am ready to promote and to optimize through my creative team members is how can AI help them leverage incredible assets that spark inspiration, that give authenticity to our products and can better drive conversion rates. And for me, that’s been a huge unlock for AI specifically on the creative realm, the creative we’re getting and the amount of savings you get from what historically was massive production sets that are, as you know, can be very expensive has been incredible. So that’s one aspect that I think is very important. And it’s, I guess as a bonus, like reporting, it’s so much easier today, leveraging reports, getting visibility and clarity on insights on your customers and your P&L than ever before. What used to take a week for a board presentation now can I can do as long as I’m feeding the right data within a few hours.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ll get to your last 30 second strategy in a second, but if people are interested in flooring, how can they find your company’s websites? And then how can people find you if they maybe want to reach out to you personally?

Alvaro:

Yeah. So flooret.com. So again, I’ll say Flooret is spelled floor. So F L O O R E T. If you’re bougie, flooret.com is the best place to find us. If you want to find me, I’m connected with Bradley on, on LinkedIn. Alvaro Lopez. It’s a very Spanish name. I’ve maybe asked to spell my name. Alvaro is A L V A R O. Lopez, just like Jennifer Lopez. Credit to JLo. Yeah. 

Bradley Sutton:

I call him ALo. 

Alvaro:

Yeah. ALo. Right. Alo ALo.

Bradley Sutton:

Now a strategy quickening, advertising strategy, keyword research strategy, market research, anything at all, preferably Amazon related, 30 seconds or less.

Alvaro:

Yeah. Look, we’re doing a big launch today, as I told you. So it’s, it’s, it could be easy in business to feel overwhelmed, to feel like you have to conquer dozens and dozens of different levers at once. I think my tip for today is it’s important, at least on a quarterly basis to pause and really think about the effort impact of what you’re focused on. Do an effort impact scorecard. So you can truly hone in and focus on the, on the levers that will drive most value to your business. Oftentimes it is growth oriented. What can you do to drive more growth, more sales? But I’ve seen recently some of the biggest EBITDA drivers or, or biggest business lovers we’ve done this, this, this quarter is savings, cost savings, optimizing for shipping rates, you know, optimizing for customer service metrics. It’s, you know, saving more customers so that they’re happy and return rate decreases. Just pause and think, where can I put my focus on that drives most value for my business, be it top line or bottom line.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Might, might, might seem cliche or something, but guys, like if you actually map it out and say, wait a minute, you know, this thing that’s low effort, but it’s high impact. Oh my God, I need to double down on this. But wait a minute, this thing I’ve been spending 50% of my time is high effort, but the actual impact is low. And it kind of like a, it could be an eye opener for you. We do that at Helium 10 too.  All right, Alvaro, thank you very much for showing me your, your town here of Basel, Switzerland, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.

---

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

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

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

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.