#693 – Ezra Firestone talks Shopify, Sumo, Amazon, & More!

Join us for an engaging episode as we sit down with E-commerce legend Ezra Firestone, where our shared passion for sumo wrestling takes center stage. We explore the fascinating journey of sumo wrestlers like Koto Shoho and Anishiki, highlighting the surprising rise of Ukrainian athletes in this traditionally Japanese sport. Ezra shares his personal connection to Ukraine, influenced by his business ties and extensive work with Ukrainian professionals. Listen in as we reminisce about the Hawaiian sumo champions who inspired Ezra during his childhood in Hawaii, where Japanese culture played a significant role in shaping his interests and career path.

This conversation then transitions into the dynamic world of e-commerce, focusing on the importance of resilience and adaptation. Ezra and Bradley discuss the parallels between maintaining physical well-being and thriving in a competitive business environment. Drawing from personal experiences, we discuss the journey from being sedentary to embracing a healthier lifestyle and how this transformation mirrors our strategic decisions in e-commerce. The shift from Shopify expertise to embracing Amazon’s dominance showcases the necessity of staying agile in an ever-evolving market landscape.

Finally, we explore the transformative role of AI in e-commerce and the strategies for maximizing growth. AI-powered tools like Zipify are revolutionizing Shopify store performance, but not without raising concerns about the impact on traditional job roles. Our discussion touches on the strategic expansion from Amazon to Shopify, emphasizing the importance of adapting to technological advancements while considering their broader implications. We also dive into effective marketing strategies, highlighting the power of email and SMS in engaging audiences and the importance of balancing business success with personal fulfillment. Join us for a thoughtful conversation that bridges the worlds of sumo and e-commerce, offering insights and inspiration for sellers at any stage.

In episode 693 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ezra discuss:

• 02:03 – Sumo Fans Discuss Wrestlers From Ukraine and Japan
• 04:30 – Rediscovering Judo in Upstate New York
• 06:57 – Resilience and Adaptation in eCommerce
• 12:00 – Amazon as an Extension of Brand
• 16:40 – E-Commerce Strategy and Amazon Growth
• 16:50 – AI-Powered Shopify Store Optimization Strategy 
• 27:24 – Marketing Strategies for E-Commerce Growth
• 29:33 – E-Commerce Marketing Strategies and Goals
• 35:03 – Rock Star Mentality and Enjoying Life

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today you’re hearing from the two biggest Sumo wrestling fans in all of e-commerce myself and today’s guest, who just happened to be one of the most legendary figures in e-commerce, having sold hundreds of millions of dollars online, Ezra Firestone and we’re going to be talking about all things from Sumo to Shopify and everything in between. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 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. It’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we have got one of the legends in all the e-com game back on the show. Privileged to have him here. Ezra Firestone. Ezra, how’s it going?

Ezra:

Let’s go, baby serious sellers. And we got the Sumo shirt going down. What’s up with your boy Kotoshoho getting?

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, that was I. I was like what in the world? How in the world did Kotoshoho win the tournament at his rank? And he was just been an underperformer for years, but uh

Ezra:

And Aoinishiki. I can never say his name right, but

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah.

Ezra:

my boy out of Ukraine man coming yeah like who saw that coming? You know, I certainly didn’t. So,

Bradley Sutton:

He would have done better. I heard he got injured halfway through the uh the tournament. I was reading in, like some forums and other than that. I think he would have taken it, but he’s like.

Ezra:

I mean to put up an 11 and 4 record, though I mean that’s yeah, that’s dude out of Ukraine like we haven’t had since um Tochinoshin. We haven’t had a white guy, you know yeah, at that level, you know, and also I have a soft spot in my heart for Ukraine because my business partner in Zipify is Ukrainian and I have, you know, 50, 60 employees in Ukraine and I’ve been, you know, doing business in Ukraine for over a decade and I just, yeah, I have a soft spot for Ukrainians and I know that culture pretty well, and so for us to have a Ukrainian guy at the top of Sumo is wild.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s two of them one guy yeah, yeah, ShiShi not as good yeah, I, I met him, um, I refereed, I referee the US Sumo open every year and, uh, when he was like 19 or something he won a silver medal there. But I was refereeing, you know, when he was an amateur there and it was kind of cool to see him now to see what he’s doing. But it’s, it’s interesting there’s at the height of the Ukraine Russia war. There’s he doesn’t look at, but there’s a Russian in the top, but he’s from the part of Russia where they, they have Asian features and so he looks almost Japanese. His name is Rojo and so, like they’re last year, whenever they would go against, like here we got Ukraine versus uh Russia, but yeah

Ezra:

Wow, I’d like to. Yeah, I don’t know about Rojo, but I’ll go check them out.

Bradley Sutton:

So how you know, guys you’re gonna have to put up with. You got two of the biggest Sumo fans in e-commerce here, so you’re gonna have to put up with a little bit of this conversation. How did you get into Sumo? I don’t know about the only, but at least the biggest two.

Ezra:

You know, I grew up in haw and Hawaii. We had um, we had Akebono, we had Musashi Maru and we had Konishiki. Uh and um. When I was growing up, I mean in Hawaii, these were our heroes. These were, like you know, island boys who went out there on the world stage and became champions. And, uh, Hawaii is very influenced by Japan. You know, Hawaii is where America’s best Judo is a lot of the time California as well. But, like you know, there’s a lot of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii and there’s also a lot of Japanese tourism in Hawaii because it’s close, you know, or it’s closer than America anyway, mainland America, and so there’s a really strong Japanese influence. And I grew up doing Judo in Hawaii and I grew up watching Sumo and it was just a big part of my childhood and we were very proud as Hawaii boys to have  Hawaiians out there on the world stage. And so, you know, we haven’t had a Hawaiian Sumo player since, basically since then.

Bradley Sutton:

Who has never done much. Yeah, there actually is a new one. He just started two tournaments ago. Low, he’s there. Used to be, I forgot his name, but there was another guy. He was there for a while but he never got like past the Makushita ranks and then he retired. It’s his younger brother, so he’s in Musashimaru’s stable, he’s still in like the lower, like Joni Don or something like that. But yeah, like nobody has ever reached the high, you know, no, no Hawaiians ever reached the high ones other than those that you mentioned for a while.

Ezra:

Yeah, we had three dogs, man, we were battling it out. It was cool for a while and then, you know, I kind of uh moved away and lost track, but recently, uh, in the last like five or 10 years, have gotten back deep. You know, it’s like when you get, you become older and you become nostalgic for your childhood and, you know, start reaching up towards 40 I’m 39, so you know about when I started, about 29, 30, I got back into sumo.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you, um, you actually have like your own, like Judo, Dojo or uh. Also I see on your Instagram sometimes I have a yeah, I have.

Ezra:

I have a little Judo little miniature Dojo in my house. I have a cool little setup where I have three. I have like um Crescent moon village, where it’s like three houses all connected and one of them is my office and gym and dojo. So I train here. But actually I’m um buying a laundromat in the small town that I live in and starting a Judo club. Uh, it’ll be upstate New York, we don’t have a lot of Judo, you know. It’s like not. Uh, there’s a couple, there’s some good judo in New Jersey and there’s some good judo in New York City, but where I live upstate, there’s not a lot of judo. And so, I teach a judo class, um, at a local jujitsu gym, which is really fun. Um, but yeah, I think it’s hilarious that I call where I live upstate, but there’s like this battle where it’s like because up, New York’s giant, and you could drive for seven hours out of the city and still be in New York, but people who live actually in upstate Rochester, buffalo they’re like, dude, you do not live in upstate, but if you came from New York City, like me, then everyone calls this upstate. So, I’m sorry, this is what people call it. I did not invent this.

Bradley Sutton:

I think you know this is actually, you know, kind of a segue to talking about e-commerce. But you know, you and I, just offline, we’re talking about, you know my previous health issues and heart attacks and stuff like that. But I think it’s important as e-commerce professionals, especially those who now work from home, like, like it, the you’re. So what’s the words? sedentary, you know sedentary, whatever the word is like, like where you just forget that you have to work out because you’re just at home and stuff and having hobbies like that, uh, like a sport to do, uh I think is super important for anybody out there, would you agree?

Ezra:

Yeah, there’s a study that’s talking about sitting as the new smoking for our generation. Everybody’s hunched over, they’re on their phones, they’re sitting, they’re you’re thinking. It’s like that goes through your whole system. It’s like you’ve got to sleep well, you’ve got to eat well and you have to move man, and it could be as simple as an hour walk once a day. It’s like you don’t have to do rigorous movement. I’m a fan of rigorous movement but you’ve got to move, you’ve got to like move the energy within your body or you get sick. I mean, that is just what happens to us.

Ezra:

And so, um, yeah, I’ve been uh fortunate to have hobbies that are, you know, and be super interested in athletics. But I’ll tell you what from 20 to 30 base well, from like 18 to 28, I basically did nothing. I sat in front of my computer and built my businesses. Now I, luckily, like I was starting to feel the effects of it. I was all stiff, I was like I never really got to be overweight, but I was like soft and like I just was having physical issues and it was like, oh, I got to start moving my body and I started. Then that’s now 11 years ago for me, and so now I’ve been going straight for 11 years. I’m in great shape, I feel really good. I you know.

Ezra:

It’s like I caught it when I was in my end of my twenties, which you okay. I had a grace period. I was an athlete as a kid. I had a 10 year grace period, from 18 to 28, where I didn’t do anything but if, but, if you do that from you know, 20 to 40, now you’ve been 20 years sedentary. Now you start up. It’s like it’s harder, but you know what? You’re never too old, it’s never too late, you’re never too far gone. The human body is so resilient, I cannot tell you. I, for the first time in my life, experienced chronic pain when I had a mold poisoning issue during COVID and it was a couple years long. And I have so much compassion for people who are in chronic pain or who have some form of disease, because it’s really hard to have a positive attitude and show up and be when you are suffering. But the cool thing is you can come back from pretty far gone. Man, like pretty. You can be real far gone and still recover yourself. So it’s you know hope is never lost.

Bradley Sutton:

You can be dead like me and come back.

Ezra:

Yeah, you can come back from the line, baby. Yeah, hope is never lost, man.

Bradley Sutton:

If this is your first time listening to Ezra on our podcast, you want to get a little bit more of his backstory. Make sure to check out. Mhel wrote it down here Episode 96. First time he was on the episode, he was one of the first 100 guests here in 2019. And then episode 249, way back in 2021. I think this is great because from 2021 to 2025, the amount of stuff that have changed in e-commerce and just you know, a with AI and, and now all of a sudden, there’s marketplaces like TikTok shop uh, I think it’s, it’s interesting to note. So, like way back when the big, or in 2021. You know, you were always you’ve been, you know, known as one of the top Shopify wizards in the game for years, but then you were just getting into Amazon, like way back in 2020, 2021, around that time. What’s happened in the last four years just on the Amazon side? Like, did you grow it up? Did you, did you scale back.

Ezra:

To be fair to myself. I launched an Amazon brand back in 2013 that I then sold in 2018 for a couple million bucks it was about. I got it up to like two or 3 million a year. So it was never a huge company, um, but I was deep in the Amazon game early right. I actually built a piece of software that was very popular from you know let’s call it 2013 to 2015 called Booster Page, and it was before. It was like, when Amazon was fine with you giving away coupons to generate reviews. There was no, this was not against the rules. This wasn’t even a gray hat. It was like you as a seller were totally allowed to offer somebody a coupon in exchange for trying your product and giving their feedback. So I was in the Amazon game but I got out of it. I got out of it in 2018. I sold that business. I was always the e-commerce direct response guy Shopify, Magento, Xcart, Yahoo Store, OS Commerce, Big Commerce, Volusion.

Ezra:

I’ve been deep in that world and that’s where I’ve made most of my money. But I had a very successful brand. We had done already with this brand by the time I went on Amazon over $100 million in sales and I wasn’t doing Amazon because I was meeting the capacity of my own supply chain through direct response. I was like why would I go to Amazon where they keep the customer data People can negatively review, bomb you? Amazon finds out who your manufacturer is and backdoors you and creates their own version of your 360 or whatever it’s called version of your product. I was anti-Amazon because of the ruthless nature of it, but what I realized once I fixed my supply chain I was like, okay, now I actually could support additional channels beyond my own paid advertising and Shopify site was that hey, man, 45 or 50 cents out of every dollar is spent on Amazon and I’ve got seven or eight knockoff brands on Amazon that are selling my products, ranking for my keywords, and just to defend my own brand position. I think I need to be on Amazon.

Ezra:

So I went on there and year one I did $6 million. Just defending my brand position because there were so many people searching for me already. Right, and yeah, do I love Amazon? Do I love the work that is an Amazon business? It’s probably. I don’t. Probably don’t love it as much as I like, uh, Shopify business. You know, like the work that it takes to run a Shopify business. But am I super grateful that Amazon exists and that I, as a seller, of the opportunity to be there and that I can go out there now and I can get creators making videos for me and selling my product as affiliates, that I can go out there and rank organically, that I can go out there and optimize my A-plus content and build out dope listings and do all kinds of tips and tricks and send in a bunch of inventory. So Amazon pushes me and send outside traffic into Amazon to build sales velocity and all that. I’m in the game. I like it, I’m grateful for it and I think the thing about Amazon for us is we treat it kind of like an extension of our brand in as much as like Amazon is net, for none of my businesses is Amazon the majority. It’s about 30. I have a business right now. It does $100 million a year, so it’s a really big company and Amazon’s about 30% of that revenue. I have another business that does about 30 million Amazon’s probably 35% of that revenue. So I kind of like hover. I have several other businesses that I’m invested in that I’m not like directly operating, but I’m like an investor, owner, advisor, and Amazon for us is always in that 20 to 40% of our business. We don’t have only one little conglomerate of businesses that are Amazon only and our revenue there is, let’s call it, 7 million amongst the three or four brands. So it’s not a big sort of um. We’re working on it. I’m acquiring new brands, I’m building new Amazon only brands, but uh, that’s the only company I have where we’re just like the thesis is, build out Amazon only.

Ezra:

We’re not doing direct response, we’re not doing Shopify, we’re not running ads. We’re just focused solely on Amazon. Because the cool thing about Amazon when you do that is your margin structure is a little better than if you’re a Shopify brand that comes over to Amazon. Because I’m not spending a bunch of money on Facebook ads, I’m not spending a bunch of money on influencers and ambassadors. I’m not spending a bunch of money on other marketing. I’m only spending money on cost of goods sold, Amazon ads and then a little bit of Amazon direct response marketing. So it’s like my cost of marketing for that company is lower than my cost of marketing for a Shopify side.

Ezra:

Now, of course, I still have team members and I still have cost of goods, but I don’t need as many team members to run an Amazon business as I do to run a Shopify business, and cost of goods is pretty much the same across any company that you’re running. You know you want to be spending between 10 and 20% of your total revenue on cost of goods. You’re spending more than 20% of total revenue on cost of goods. You’re going to. You don’t have enough margin. So, um, that’s kind of like how we’re operating.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, Interesting. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on. Well, while you’re on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome Extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what’s happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome Extension, which you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. How has AI changed the way you do business. If at all, like how you run your businesses, how you reach out to customers? Whatever the case is?

Ezra:

AI has made things, made certain human interaction unnecessary, so we have AI bots doing follow-up with influencers to get us assets. You know we have AI doing a lot of our customer support. We’re using AI in our creative production ads, emails, videos so there’s a lot of low-level and mid-level knowledge work that humans were doing for us that AI now does and that, I think, is an unfortunate trend. And I think we as a society are going to have to revisit the social contract, because right now in America, unemployment is what like three to 5%. Maybe you know something somewhere in that neighborhood, not probably not quite as high as five, but you know it fluctuates and I think in five years it’s going to be 20%. I mean, what are these entry-level white-collar workers going to do? I don’t know. There’s so many less jobs that are going to be available because it’s automated via AI and we use AI for data analysis. We use AI to help us. So we’re using it in a number of ways that are wonderful.

Ezra:

I have an application called Zipify and it’s an app that helps your Shopify store increase your average order value. Dude the AI is. So basically, the idea is like let’s imagine somebody is shopping your store and they come to your homepage, do you display an offer there or do you wait for them to view a product? The AI will figure that out and then it will basically do it or not, based on what it knows about that user, how long they’re browsing, what they’ve looked at before on the product page. When they are viewing a product, do you pop up an offer for another one? Do you let them add to cart? When they add to cart, what do you show them? So on and so forth throughout the purchase cycle. We’re sort of like making additional relevant offers, and it could be things like hey, take the thing that’s in your cart, replace it with this bundle that also includes it but gives you additional items and makes you know, overall you save money. So you get the product that you were going to get, but you also get other items in a bundle and you save money. So the AI is beating humans at figuring out what to upsell and cross sell. It’s like. So now, now marketing. Uh, now deep. You know this isn’t low level or mid-level, that’s high level knowledge work, figuring out what your merchandising plan is as somebody shops your store. AI is doing it. So it’s like dude, what can it do? It’s now doing voiceovers. It’s doing videos like where is it going to go?

Ezra:

It’s wild and I’m a little afraid of it for our young people coming up, you know, because I think it really reduces the amount of roles that companies are going to need so you can run companies. You know. Think about every nurse’s office, every doctor’s office, every dentist’s office, every law firm. Like the desk people, the, you know. Think about um. You know you’re checking out at a store, like self-checkout with AI, not just self-checkout, but self-self-checkout with AI robots. Like you know, when the people they already did this at the toll booths, at the bridges, but it’s like you don’t need people there anymore, just all these ones. What happens when it starts driving the cars? I just feel like it’s terrifying, frankly.

Ezra:

But we are using it and it is useful and it’s like the unfortunate thing is do you want to keep up? You have to. You got to use it. You got to stay lean, you got to optimize, you got. You’ve got to optimize, you’ve got to stay profitable. So you kind of have to use it where it’s good and it keeps getting good in more and more places. And so, what we’re doing is we’re teaching our team how to leverage it. So we built this thing. It has every video we’ve ever made. It knows all of our ads, it knows every one of our products and all the info about the product. It just knows everything about us, the brain for the brand, and then we can ask it hey, this was last year’s Mother’s Day promotion. We did six emails, two each day for three days. We did two SMS. These were the ads we ran, so on and so forth. Write us a landing page, write us an email sequence, write us an SMS, and it’s based off all of our historical data and then our human can go in there and modify that, you know.

Ezra:

And the other thing that is freaky about it is I’m specifically thinking about America because I believe in supporting my country and hiring, like I stayed in America, dude, for customer support. For the last 12 years I’ve been in America. I have not been in, you know, the Philippines. I have not been in. Uh um, you know India, where everyone else went. I stayed hiring, stay at home moms in America because I want to, I want to create, keep, keep jobs here. Well, now, dude, the AI can do those jobs. It can filter, like we have. We have 50% less tickets because it’s filtering people out, giving them information. And then now they have the people out there in the Philippines and in India and wherever else with an AI. They sound American, they sound like English as a first language. I mean, maybe not American, but they sound like English as their first language, whereas before they didn’t. And so now, even though I’m still with my own businesses trying to stay in the US, more and more people are leaving because the AI is enabling the knowledge workers in these economies where you can pay them. Literally you can just pay people less in India and the Philippines and they can navigate in that economy with half of what you could navigate in in America. And now they’re taking jobs. So it’s like it’s really an interesting time.

Bradley Sutton:

I agree. I agree, going back to what you said before about how you have some brands that are only on Amazon. You have some that are only on Shopify.

Ezra:

So I no longer have any that are only Shopify. I have I need one of my Shopify brands also on Amazon, but I do have a little conglomerate of brands sub $10 million in revenue. That’s Amazon only and our goal is to build that up to $50 million a year in Amazon only revenue. And we’re doing that by launching many brands and by launching many products within those brands and trying to get base hits and home runs and discontinuing anything that’s not a base hit or a home run.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, for people like that, who I mean a lot of our listeners are probably only on Amazon, or at most, amazon plus TikTok shop, who should be thinking about Shopify and who should be doing like what you’re doing where, like you know what. Hey, we’re just going to stay Amazon.

Ezra:

If you’re not at $10,000 a month in revenue, ignore Shopify altogether. Right, if you get to 10K a month in revenue and you’ve got let’s call it, 2k in EBITDA profit. I don’t know what the average EBITDA margin for an Amazon business is these days, but you’re probably running between 15% and 20%, I would hope. If not, you’ve got to raise your prices or reduce your COGS. It’s hard to run a business on a 10% EBITDA margin. You just don’t have a lot of profit there. $1,000 in profit if you’re at a 10% EBITDA margin. But if you’re sitting there at 2K a month or more on that, or let’s say you’re doing 100 grand a month in revenue and you got 20K, now you have money to expand and Shopify will do by default, 5% of your Amazon sales, the same way Walmart will do by default, 5% of your Amazon sales just from you being on Amazon. So I have a little soap company. I slapped up a little website for it. A simple Shopify website got it ranking in Google for its brand name and it does literally to the number 5% of its Amazon sales. I don’t run any ads. I don’t run Google ads, I don’t run Facebook ads, I don’t run Instagram ads nothing. It just does it from people searching for the brand because it’s going pretty well on Amazon. So you, if you just build out, the other benefit is if you ever want to sell that Amazon company, if you have an email list, if you have a Shopify website and it has any amount of sales, you’ve increased the multiple that you can sell that brand for. So you now look like a real brand. You’re diversified a little bit. You got a little bit of income coming from another channel. So I would say minimum 120K a year.

Ezra:

Amazon brand is when I would start thinking about Shopify. Before that it’s irrelevant and frankly, if you’re at 120K you probably can double or triple that on Amazon without doing anything on Shopify. So it’s like I believe in the old saying from the American South I probably said it on this podcast before. I need a better analogy. It’s kind of mean to the ponies, but feed your stallions and starve your ponies. Man, starve your ponies and feed your stallions. So Amazon’s your stallion, feed it. Can you double that with the same amount of effort that you would have used to open up Shopify? Yeah, you can. So double that first. Then look at some point you’re going to want to expand. You know Shopify is a great expansion tool, but you don’t have the skillset. You don’t know how to build landing pages, you don’t know how to make ads, you don’t know how to run emails, you don’t know how to like. There’s some skills that you’ve got to acquire and so it’s like you know you’re a specialist at Amazon, you’re not a generalist at e-commerce and eventually it makes sense to do so. So I would say you know, if you get to half a million a year in revenue on Amazon, it’s time. Before that, you could argue.

Bradley Sutton:

What would be those beginning steps other than, obviously, like you said, building the store? How do you get organically ranked? What should be your advertising strategy when you’re new on Shopify et cetera?

Ezra:

So, here’s what you do and I have a whole article on this that I can send your audience of like how do I expand off of Amazon? I did a whole webinar, like a one and a half hour webinar. If you’re on Amazon, here’s how you expand off and build out Shopify properly. But you slap up a Shopify website. Maybe you use Zipify pages. We’ve got a landing page builder. It makes it real easy. You make sure that every one of those pages is optimized for your brand name and any long-tail keywords associated with your brand. You get that set up with ShopPay so you can accept money. You get all that going. Then you start running Google AdWords traffic for your brand name because people are going to be searching for your brand. Once you’re at the size that we are talking about, running to your Shopify website. That’s the simplest, basic, most basic way. Then, okay, maybe you want to build out sort of a direct response long form sales page. You know where you’re trying to sell to cold traffic. So when you’re set, when you’re, the base assets you need for Shopify are a video ad and a long form sales page. So it’s like shop Amazon If you, if you think about like a super optimized, a plus Amazon page.

Ezra:

That could be the equivalent of a long form sales page, but on e-commerce usually it’s going to be even more sales material. It’s going to be like a sales letter and you know social proof videos and a story about how the product was made and any information on where the ingredients came from. And you know, and a story about how the product was made and any information on where the ingredients came from. And you know, still going to have the Amazon buy box. But, like, imagine an Amazon A plus listing fully filled out on steroids. You know Amazon A plus listing that’s got everything, that’s got the creator content at the bottom and it’s got videos in the carousel and it’s got all that.

So you’re going to build one of those out for Shopify. You’re going to go ahead and go and take your Amazon creator videos that you’ve probably done for Amazon. You’re going to slice those up. So you’ve got like a one that’s fast paced where it’s like you know you know a video that’s ownership benefit demonstration, so it’s demonstrating what is the benefit of this product to somebody who buys it.

Ezra:

And then you can run that out on meta and Facebook and you can run it to this long form sales page with you know, because the idea is like take 10% of your profit, 10%, act like it doesn’t exist and use it to market your Shopify store, even if you lose money, it does not matter. The goal is you’re building up an email list, you’re building up social followers from these ads you’re running, you’re getting some sales, you’re starting to get a customer database and there’s this like compounding effect. If you just do that, if you just say 10% of my Amazon profit goes to expansion, it doesn’t have to be profitable, it’s just for brand expansion over three to five years. First of all, you’ll figure it out, it’ll start being profitable, it’ll start making it work. But the compounding effect of that you’ll eventually have a pretty sweet Shopify business that then makes your overall brand more valuable when you go to sell it.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. I like it. You’re doing an event in Colorado, a Smart Marketer event. I think you do this like yearly. So what kind of things, like who should be going to that? What kind of things are you going to be talking about? And then maybe we could just maybe have a little preview of some of those topics with you.

Ezra:

Yeah, man, we’re talking about AI. We’re talking about paid advertising Facebook, Meta, Instagram, TikTok, Google, YouTube. We’re talking about AI. We’re talking about optimization of your sales process. We’re talking about email marketing, SMS marketing. We’re talking about systems, processes, delegation, team building, anyone who is in a marketing role at a company or anyone who’s a CEO or a founder. We only have 300 seats. We sell out pretty quick. I don’t know how many tickets there are available still, but it’s a wonderful event and it’s got a good vibe. We have fun, we work hard.

It’s not one of those events where you’re going to be partying all night. I mean sure there’s a party or two here and there, but like it’s like we go, we show up at we at how to move the businesses forward and the cool thing is, like you know, we have these round tables. We’ll have like 50 or 60 experts and they’ll be leading a table. So you can go to the AI table or you can go to the Google table, or you can go to the you know add creative table and go to the Amazon table and you can network and talk about that particular topic. It’s pretty sweet event, and you don’t have to give all credit to Molly Pittman. She’s my CEO and business partner in Smart Marketer and this event is her vision. Uh, I used to do events. I stopped doing events, um, when my daughter got, uh, got sick and died and so I just kind of didn’t want to. Um, I just didn’t have it anymore to. I just didn’t have it anymore and she really wanted to do it, and so I come and I speak and I’m a part of it, but it’s really her, her vision and her show.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, and so smartmarketer.com, if anybody wants to get more information. Now, two of the things you mentioned there kind of piqued my interest. I think we’ve talked a little bit about it before, but something that in the Amazon space you know people used to it we don’t talk about because there is no email, there is no you know phone numbers for customers. But once you start branching out which is the other reason, like you said, to do, you know, Shopify is you can start owning your own customers and be able to market to them. What is the latest trends? How are you leveraging SMS and email marketing in 2025?

Ezra:

So the interesting thing about email and SMS is every year it gets a little harder to reach people, because every year more brands are doing it and every year people are getting more and more communication. So it’s like you know, as an average adult, you get something like 300 plus emails a day. So it’s like you’re not or maybe not quite that many, but it’s somewhere in the range of hundreds.

Bradley Sutton:

I think I get that.

Ezra:

Yeah, I get. I get that for somewhere like that. You’re getting a lot of email every day and so you don’t see them all and you don’t open them all. Now you got the promotions inbox that you know. So it’s like, basically, the deal with email marketing and SMS marketing is you have two goals in e-commerce One, get somebody to view your products. Two, get them to give you their personal information. That’s it. If you’re ever doing e-commerce marketing off of Amazon, that’s all you’re trying to do. Get them to see your products and get after them and get them to give you their personal information. Only two goals. Any website page ever has my homepage, hey, I want you to go forward and check out products. Hey, can I have your email address or SMS? Okay, so there’s a bunch of ways to acquire these assets. When you’re doing the Shopify side of things, of course Amazon sellers are doing it. They’re putting inserts in the box and saying, hey, sign up for your free warranty or go get a free gift, and they’re trying to get people’s you know customer data that way, and then they’re building out. You know it’s like, okay, amazon people are trying to do it too. But, like, the key with email and SMS is you need four times as much as you think you should be doing is what you should be doing. And you have to think of yourself when you’re, when you’re outside of Amazon, like a media company and a product company. And so what I mean by that is like your brand is made up of a group of consumers who are sharing a collective experience women over the age of 50 who are aging and everybody telling them that it’s dirty, bad and wrong, their hair is turning silver, their skin is wrinkling or their hormones are changing, they’re going through menopause, and then your job is to engage with and relate with and communicate with that group of people who are sharing that collective experience about that experience, and then offer them solutions to the problems that they face, which are your products, and so when you’re doing email and SMS, you want a mix of content that is relevant to their life experience. So, for example, Helium 10, you guys are doing this right. You and I are creating a piece of content that is relevant to the life experience of someone who sells on Amazon. We’re giving it to them for free, hoping that it will add value to their life. And then, tangentially, we’re talking about Smart Marketer, Live, Zipify Apps, Helium 10, saying hey, look also, in addition to this content that we think is going to be useful for you and hopefully help you with your business and your life, we have products that we think are cool, that we think you would enjoy, that we think would be useful as well. Check them out. And so you got to be doing that kind of thing and you got to be doing straight selling. Hey, this product is 25 off today only.

Ezra:

There’s three things that sell with email and SMS incentive, deadline and ownership benefit demonstration. So you need an incentive. Why buy now? Cause there’s you could buy tomorrow. There’s 300 other people trying to get you to buy today. What is the incentive? Buy one, get one, buy one, get one half off, limited time discount, special new product bundle, whatever some incentive deadline. The last chance is today, is tomorrow. It ends in a week and this is the benefit for you. This is what you will become, feel, be perceived as, have right Like ownership, benefit, explanation, demonstration, communication is what marketing is about. It’s how you sell to somebody, is you demonstrate to them and explain to them the after state of using your product? And if you do that, like what’s interesting, the after state of using your product, and if you do that, like what’s interesting about marketing outside of Amazon, guess what? The best product doesn’t win. The best promise wins. The best promise wins in the marketplace, not the best product. The product just has to live up to the promise that you make. You have to keep making it better.

Ezra:

So you got to learn how to make a really good promise and there’s some things that work really well. There’s Nostalgia. You know Forrest Gump was the best movie of its time because it packaged up all the memories of the baby boomers and sold it to them. Right, I use this in my marketing for my apps. You’ll see me doing like parodies of movies, right? You know the big Lebowski and good sellers and like people, like man, I really love your, your ads, cause it brings me back. And then, yeah, I checked out, yeah, I like your product too, you know. So there’s a lot of like little things we can use in marketing, um. But for email and SMS it’s like, uh, incentive, deadline and ownership benefit are kind of the three keys.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it all. Right, um, before we get into your, you know 60 second strategy of the week. Uh, can you let us know, uh, how people you know we already know about the Smart Marketer website? How can people find you on the interwebs out there?

Ezra:

Yo. Instagram, LinkedIn, twitter. Wherever I’m at Ezra Firestone, I’d love to connect. I love the entrepreneur. I love listen. I’m a do-it-yourself entrepreneur. I worked a full-time job. I grew up without money. I didn’t get out of high school Like I’m some bum off a couch in Brooklyn and I have done really well. You know, and so you can too. And the key is show up every day with a positive attitude and take the next step you can take in the direction of your goals. And you know, burnout happens to entrepreneurs and I’ve not burned out and I’ve been taking care of myself mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, energetically, so that I can show up and have a good time and do what it takes to bring enthusiasm and joy to my work. And it’s like there’s no reason I should be as successful as I am. But if you just keep at it, this is a game of decades. I’m 20 years in and in the last 10 years is when all my success came. It didn’t come in the first 10 years. I was, I was, I was doing. All right, I’m making it, you know, but like real, true wealth creation has been in the last decade.

Ezra:

So you know, give it 10 years If you’re two years in and you’re not where you want to be and you’re ready to quit. It’s like, no, don’t quit before the miracle. You need 36 months with a new project before you can judge it. You know, and decide. Do I want to continue or not? 36 months of working at it weekly. So yeah, you can find me on social media and smartmarketer.com, zipify.com and loverunnethover.com L-E-V-R-U-N-N-E-T-H-O-V-E-R.com. You could read the story about my daughter and check out her charity.

Bradley Sutton:

Any last tips, quick hitting tip about e-commerce, about Judo, about Sumo, about Hawaii, anything at all.

Ezra:

Let’s see. Well, I discovered that if I was, I did a parody video as a rock star and I started. I was like, I want to live the life. I’m a method actor. I started drinking tequila at 10 am. I was smoking blunts, I was doing it and I was like, dude, I would be a drug addict if I was a rock star. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I only lasted one day, but it’s like, listen, you got to have in your life now, because you don’t know how long you got. You’re not promised tomorrow, really, truly, and it’s like if you’re not enjoying the ride, you’re missing the point of this game that we call life. Do what it takes to enjoy yourself. Have hobbies, have relationships, have a social life, have a spiritual connection. Put some energy. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in your business. You’re connected to it all the time. It’s right here on your phone. You can’t get away from it. It’s like this crazy thing and it can very easily become myopic, like the only thing that you think about. And so you know, I would encourage you to like have some kind of life that brings you joy and pleasure, so that you can show up to work and work hard, but that it’s not the only thing in your existence, because you know who knows. You want to look back and have a good ride man.

Bradley Sutton:

I just realized we had talked about linking up in September here in San Diego, but that is right in the middle of the next Sumo tournament, so we can have whatever day that is, we can have a nice rewatch together.

Ezra:

Yes, we should do that for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

There actually is a local Sumo club, uh, down here in San Diego too. I haven’t been there, but I know they’re pretty active and so who knows, maybe, uh, maybe, uh, we can get a Mawashi on you and uh and see what you got.

Ezra:

I, I listen, I almost competed at the Sumo Tournament. They did a New York City, Sumo Tournament but it’s like it was like under 190 pounds and then,

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, lightweight is under 187. Yep.

Ezra:

Yeah, and it’s like dude, I’m 160. I’m not, I just don’t, I don’t want to get smashed, bro, like. So I thought about doing it, but then the guy who won, of course, was like 190 on the dot or 188 or whatever. It was like he was, he was a beast and it was like I just feel like you know 30 pounds, 20, know 30 pounds, 20, 30 pounds is a lot when it comes to sumo, at the smaller weight obviously, at a bigger weight, when a guy’s 350 and a guy’s 380, it’s not, it’s not as big a deal, but yeah, oh, for sure but I’d be down.

I’d be down to get in there and mix it up. I’d like to. I’d like to put on a Milwashi for the experience of it I love it all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, guys, like I said, this is the only podcast you’ll ever hear where we talk Sumo, we talk Shopify and everything in between. So we’d love to have you on the next couple of years and see what you’ve been up to and congrats on all the success and look forward to seeing you in person soon.

Ezra:

Thanks, brother. See you in September. I appreciate y’all listening.

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