#707 – Amazon to TikTok: Tomer’s Magic Launch Formula

E-commerce aficionado Tomer Raabinovich returns to the podcast, sharing his groundbreaking journey in launching Messless, a brand crafted to supercharge the productivity of digital entrepreneurs. With the audacious goal of hitting eight figures, Tomer breaks the mold by offering a candid look into his brand’s development, a rarity in a world where most Amazon sellers guard their secrets. Tomer’s story is not just about launching a brand; it’s about revolutionizing the way we think about transparency and innovation in the e-commerce landscape.

Get ready to uncover the secrets behind a successful product launch on TikTok. Tomer walks us through his strategic use of this vibrant platform to captivate audiences with minimal competition on Amazon. By focusing on creative campaigns, magician-inspired packaging, and a unique 30-day productivity challenge, he demonstrates the power of blending creativity with tactical marketing. Tomer’s approach includes cold outreach to creators, leveraging TikTok’s potential for virality, and utilizing meta ads for upselling, offering a masterclass in modern digital marketing techniques.

Finally, we explore advanced strategies that are reshaping the e-commerce industry. From the cutting-edge use of AI in product development to the critical management of PPC campaigns, Tomer emphasizes the importance of maintaining control over core operations. With tools like Helium 10 and an in-house PPC strategy, he paints a picture of how brands can build competitive edges and drive growth. Action over perfection is the mantra here, Tomer’s experiences remind us of the value in taking risks, learning from missteps, and consistently pushing forward to turn aspirations into reality.

In episode 707 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Tomer discuss:

• 00:00 – E-Commerce Brand Launch Strategy Discussion
• 08:49 – Product Launch Strategies and TikTok Marketing
• 09:24 – Productivity Challenge and Amazon Keyword Research
• 15:04 – Utilizing Challenges for Shopify Traction
• 16:53 – Advanced E-Commerce Product Strategies
• 22:35 – Amazon PPC Advertising Strategies for Brands
• 23:58 – Amazon Sellers’ Profit Growth Strategies
• 25:25 – Evolving Strategies for Amazon Success
• 36:10 – Overcoming Fear of Failure

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got back one of the first guests we ever had on the podcast, Tomer, and he’s going to talk about everything from PPC to TikTok launches, to optimization, to packaging and even how to do magic tricks when you’re promoting your TikTok products. 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. That’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 back for the fifth time here on the podcast, we’ve got Tomer Now. I was just looking at my show notes here. Um, he was actually one of the very first guests ever.

Bradley Sutton:

Very rare that somebody’s first appearance is in a single digit number. There’s only about four or five of them, because some of those first episodes were just like solo episodes. But he, his first appearance ever on the show, was episode five, guys. So if you want to get more of his backstory, episode five, uh, he was on episode 120, 364 and then the latest was episode 551. Back, uh, more than a couple, oh no, about about a year and a half or so ago, back in 2024, 551. So I’m not sure what number episode this is. We’re somewhere in the 700s. But welcome back, Tomer, to the show.

Tomer:

Thanks so much, Bradley. Very good to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Thailand is where you’re at. You just told me Is that going to be permanently home for you, or still just until things settle back in Israel, or what’s going on there?

Tomer:

Yeah, so we just tried to take it one year at a time. Right now, Kids are here in school, so it’s been. This is our finishing off our second year here and we’re going to stay here for another year and let’s see. Let’s see what happens.

Bradley Sutton:

Like Airbnb you buy a house, renting a house.

Tomer:

We are just renting a house right now. I think just being like unattached as much as I can with things is best. Yeah, just to have the freedom.

Bradley Sutton:

So your kids are going to Thai school or like an international school.

Tomer:

It’s an international private school. It’s like a Cambridge British type of school with kids from all over the world. They learned English in like three months, picked it up really quick. They learn Thai every day. They learn Chinese twice a week and I keep telling them. Hopefully they can help me with some suppliers in the future how about you guys?

Bradley Sutton:

are you guys learning local language or you can pretty much live in Thailand with just speaking English?

Tomer:

uh, no, you can. Just. If you live in one of the islands, like we do in Ko Samui, then you can definitely just uh manage it with english. We basically hang out with expats like us all day long. So yeah, it’s very nice.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, cool. And there’s another beauty about being in the e-commerce world you can live from wherever and sell from wherever. It doesn’t really you know, you’re not confined to a geographic location. So I’ve been looking on LinkedIn and your social media and stuff and you’ve been doing a very I don’t remember you doing this before, but a very public launch. And so, first of all, just what’s behind that? So many people on the Amazon world sometimes it’s silly they’re like oh no, I don’t even want to tell you what category I sell in, let alone say what product they are, let alone do a public case study showing everybody exactly what’s going on. So what was the original motivation behind that?

Tomer:

Right. So we launched a new brand recently called Messless, which is about being more productive and more efficient with your time, and we are selling supplements and we have another product coming in that is very different, that we’ve been working on for the past two years. But the whole thinking behind this brand started because I had my own event, as you know, called Top Duck Summit, where we get together like seven eight-figure sellers once a year in Europe and I always gift them something at a summit that is like cheap stuff from China, usually like power banks and different things and I always felt like this doesn’t make any sense. I claim to be one of the top people that understands e-commerce very well. Make any sense? They claim to be one of the top people that understands e-commerce very well and I keep gifting them like different things, just with a label on it. And then I thought I’ll just build a brand for those people For digital entrepreneurs, they call it. So anyone working from their laptop is my target audience. So this is how the brand came about.

Tomer:

And then I said to my team I told them we’re going to be public with this whole thing. I don’t care what happens, we’re just going to be public from even before day. One starts just showing everything that we do behind the scenes. And I just started talking about the events and different things. And we just launched it very recently and we’re going all in on Amazon, TikTok Shop and Shopify, so going all in. And I know you shop and Shopify, so going all in. And I know you have Project X. I know you have different things in Healing 10 as well, and other companies did like case studies in the past, but this is not a case study. This is an actual brand With the goal to scale it to eight figures. Right, that’s like I’m building a serious brand here.

Bradley Sutton:

I think what you said is very important because you know, like, when we did project we’re doing, a new one called Scale Stories just actually launched, and we’re doing it very differently than Project X, because, you know, six years ago, whenever we did the original Project X, you could just, you know, start a brand on Amazon, and actually that was suggested like, yeah, you know, like, don’t, don’t do Walmart, or you need to do it. You know Shopify right off the bat, but 2025, 2026, I think everybody realizes not, you have to be multi-channel almost from day one. And so how are you having the launch feed off of each other? If so, like, I assume that you’re not just launching in each one, as in a silo, like you, you might, you know, have goals of, of, of some kind of. You know, TikTok bleeding through to Amazon, going back to Shopify, et cetera. So what’s your strategy? How did you maybe budget? Hey, this is how much percent we think we’re going to do on Amazon and this is the help that one marketplace is going to give to the other. Talk about that a little bit.

Tomer:

Yeah. So I think you have multiple options. I think if you’re starting a new brand, I do think you should start with one channel. I think starting multi-channel is difficult unless you actually know what you’re doing and unless you’ve done at least one of them very well in the past. And it also heavily depends on the product you’re selling, because most products work only on one marketplace. Like if you look at kitchen products like commodity kitchen products, like silicone spatulas and pots and whatever pans, those work really well on Amazon, but they’re not going to do well on Shopify or TikTok, right, because Shopify is all about LTV, aov, so lifetime value, average order value is where it’s at, and TikTok is all about discovery. So people need to be interested in what they’re watching and actually say I want this thing. So supplements and consumable products or beauty products are one of the only products out there that kind of fit, check every box, right. Because if an influencer holds a bottle and say this changed my life, made me feel better, right. Whatever that convinces people to buy on Amazon, obviously it works. People search for it because amazon is a search engine and then for Shopify, AOV, LTV, it fits right. So that’s why supplements is one and that’s one of the only niches I’ve never sold in. So I’m like I want to go all in on the most competitive niche there is. So that’s what got it started. Now to answer your question about how I see it. So I think when you go multi-channel, you have two options. You can either say I have a marketing department, I have a supply chain department, I have like this department, and so on, or you can say the way I do it is I treat it as almost three different companies. So I have the meta ads in Shopify, I have the TikTok shop and I have the Amazon side, with one person on each of those kind of managing their own channels and talking to each other. But that’s how I see it. I see it because you want to be an expert in each field if you’re going to do it all in-house.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s how we’re doing the fulfillment on Shopify and TikTok. Are you using MCF? You have a 3PL, we have a 3PL for those and everything is produced.

Tomer:

We have the supplements being produced like two miles away from the 3PL, so that’s very convenient, and also the packaging facility that we’re going to use is very close there as well, so that all worked out.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s your Amazon launch like? Obviously we I mean, this hasn’t been a thing for years now, but you know, gone are the days of things like search, find, buy and giveaways and two-step URLs and things like that. You know most are mainly trying to leverage, you know, advertising and things like that in order to scale during launches. Is that what you’re doing on Amazon? You have some like secret things that you’re doing.

Tomer:

Yeah. So on Amazon again, it really depends, I think, what you’re selling. So we have products that we are launching on different brands where it’s I call it like page one day, one type of thing. So when you launch the product, if it doesn’t have a lot of competition, you can be on page one with a focus supplement. That’s going to be very tough to do, so our entire strategy is just to do some van reviews, start very low on PPC and just have a few hundred units there to begin with, but then we count on the traffic from TikTok. That’s really the launch platform for us for the supplements specifically. And then the other thing that I’m doing now I have a 30 day challenge running called um productivity challenge. So we’re doing that for this new brand and I have a few hundred people there that they all go through the challenge and the idea is that we’re going to run meta ads to that challenge. We’re going to start again in November, uh, like a new cohort of that and it’s just a free challenge to attend. But then when you sign up, we’re gonna basically offer an upsell for the both supplements that we have and then down sell on only one of them, and the goal there is to kind of see. So what I’m trying to do with every project that they take on is I’m just shooting arrows. It’s different things and just I want to see what sticks right, because maybe TikTok blows up, maybe this meta ad strategy is going to blow up, maybe Amazon is going to pick up and whatever picks up. We’re just going to double down on that.

Bradley Sutton:

You want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for, maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash Cerebro. H10.me forward slash C-E-R-E-B-R-O. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers podcast discount coupon SSP10. What’s your TikTok launch strategy? Is it a mix between trying to push your own content that you’ve made a whole bunch of videos, or is it more almost 100% reaching out to X number of creators to give them some free samples so they can make some videos, and then running GMV Max ads? What’s that strategy like for you guys?

Tomer:

So you know me, Bradley, I don’t like to do what everybody else does, right? So I’m always looking for how can I hack the system in my favor as best as I can, right and make it as easy as possible and do it differently than everybody else. So I always say that I want my products to be better and I want my experience and everything I did to be different than everyone else. So this is why the products themselves they have their own formula and it was a complicated process. Janelle Page is with me on this brand that I know. She was on this podcast as well and she helped a lot with the formulation and brought me to all the experts, because I know nothing about supplements myself, right? So what I’m doing with this, so what I what I’m doing with this. So what I think about TikTok is the whole point of TikTok is you want to go viral with your videos. Now, the more, the more creativity you can offer to your creators, the easier it’s going to be for them to go viral. So if I sell a regular silicone spatula, let’s say, and I give it to a creator, it’s going to be very difficult for them to go viral with it, because they need to be very creative with how they’re going to show the spatula to go viral. But if it’s like a funny spatula or there is I don’t know it’s digital or electronic or something or there is something about the packaging whatever it may be right, like a different experience that has like a surprise moment in it, then that can be a very strong hook for them. And if I have a few like, let’s say, five things that are layered around the spatula, it’s going to be that much easier for them to go viral.

Tomer:

So, with the supplements, what I did is, as you know, I used to be a full-time magician before I did Amazon stuff, so I came into this packaging idea years ago and I cannot explain it like on a podcast. It’s very tough to explain it, but what it basically is like a magic trick when you gift it to somebody else and we gift like four supplements, so two from each supplement and my entire strategy with this is to send these unique gift boxes to creators that we actually want to work with and they will present it in different ways and they have a lot of freedom to be creative. It’s like a very funny looking packaging and has some surprises inside, so we believe that this is what’s gonna push us over the edge to kind of go viral easily with this for the creators we’re gonna work with. So our to answer your question, our strategy initially is just to give away some supplements just to get to the minimum GMV that we need. So we can reach 7,000 creators every week. So we need to get over 2,000 GMV to get there. And then we’re just going to use different services just to very cold outreach to a lot of creators and you want to see who are the ones that can actually create gmv for us just for the supplements, and then we’re going to give those people the gift boxes and just kind of ramp up from there. Um so.

Bradley Sutton:

So that means okay. So then you’re doing a, a traditional reach out for the initial one, like the same skew, just you know there’s nothing special in it and then somebody who does well with just the traditional way. Now you’re gonna go back to them and be like, hey, I got something a little bit more special, and then, like, do a one-off thing where you’re sending them a very special SKU, not like the retail SKU, but the one that has the magic.

Tomer:

We can also do this with the larger creators right and pay them a retainer plus commission. We can also do that. We are going to do that anyway. But this is the core strategy of how we approach this, and I do believe that if TikTok is your goal, or you want to do it, you need to have products that can go viral almost on their own, because that’s going to make it so much easier for the creators to create good videos for you.

Bradley Sutton:

Makes sense. Makes sense, okay, interesting. Interesting Is there for what you had said about the challenge and stuff that’s mainly for the Shopify, getting traction on Shopify.

Tomer:

So when I started the challenge, I just said to my team I just want to do a challenge. I know we can use this later in many different ways. And they said yeah, we can post this, like I can post this myself on TikTok or I can post this on YouTube Shorts, or we can do this, we can do that, but it’s all like short tips, like a few minutes that you need to watch every day and you just know what to do in terms of being more productive. So we can leverage this in different ways. But then, after we kind of started the challenge, we thought, well, this looks like a very good fit for something we can run on Meta and then upsell it on Shopify. So that’s where you’re going to start and see what happens. But when we started the challenge, also creators we started working with now on TikTok they said hey, can we talk about the challenge as well? You know they want to share it as well with their audiences and we’re like, yeah, sure, we can do that, so let’s just see how it goes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, cool. I think the last time you were on the podcast was maybe a little bit before, all of a sudden AI became the topic of conversation in every conversation. You know like nowadays you can’t go to an Amazon conference where half the topics are not about AI or any kind of industry really. So I’m just wondering the last year and a half since you’ve been on the podcast for the brands you currently manage for uh, you know your, your clients and people, that you, that you help. How has AI, if at all, changed any of your workflows? Or you know how? How has it ingested itself into your SOPs? What are you doing differently or not, because of AI?

Tomer:

Yeah, I will say again, I mainly work with seven eight-figure sellers. Most of them don’t use AI a lot. They obviously use it for images and copy and basic stuff like that. Some of them use it for customer support and different things. I think the main thing I use it for is for product ideas and product development these days and I have something called the possible product formula. If anyone wants, I can send them the talk for that. That I did a few times this year and it’s all about. I know that any course out there on Amazon teaches you on how to find your first product and those are usually find something light, easy, you know, like one piece product, non-electronic, no FDA approval, like in sports, kitchen, baby categories, whatever, right. That’s kind of what most courses teach. And this whole talk is for, again, those that are active sellers or bigger sellers, and the whole point is to create a moat around your product, so make it impossible for competitors to come in. So this could mean you can put patents on it. But even if you go after like a dangerous product, right, or if you go after FDA approved products or if you go after categories where advertising is not allowed, so that automatically creates a moat around your product, so that those are the products I’m excited about these days to trying to develop for myself and for other sellers. And just coming up with ideas so ChatGPT, all the perplexity, all these different tools are amazing to come up with I call them barrier are amazing to come up with. I call them barrier strategy. So, to come up with these different barriers strategy for your products and just that like beginning process of like I found this cool idea, a yoga mat or whatever right, I just want to go after very big niches with a lot of competitors, a lot of volume as well, and then just creating barriers for that specific product, and we’ve done it over and over and over again. We’ve seen a lot of success with it for the past few years, and AI just helps a lot with that process.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. What else is new-ish for you? And I think it’s fun that we live in e-commerce you know there’s some people in. If you’re in the accounting industry, like, best practices do not change, you know 15 years ago to five years ago, but you come on the podcast once a year and the whole way you would like all of a sudden I’m assuming this would be for you too Are you going to be taking advantage of, like, the Vine pre-launch where you can get the 30 reviews even before your product launches? Like that you never could have on day one of your launch, 30 reviews and so that was like not even a thing you know six months ago. But what else that that’s new, whether it’s advertising and you know something on TikTok, something on amazon. What’s new that you guys are doing?

Tomer:

well, besides the vine thing, I don’t think there is much that we are leveraging that is new. I will say that again, when I look at I’ve been talking to so many seven-figure sellers these past two years and I think most of them are missing a few core things. One of them is the impossible products thing. The second piece I think that they’re missing is PPC, and I know you also have a new training on PPC and Helium 10. What I will say about this is a lot of sellers think I’m going to hire an agency or a freelancer and they’re going to do it for me. Now I’m very bullish these days on. You have to do it yourself by yourself. I mean, you have to bring it in-house. If you are, I will say I will do a caveat here. If you are, I will say I will do a caveat here. If you are 99 amazon like, if you’re a big brand listening to this podcast, amazon is 10 20 of your revenue. Fine, use an agency. That’s what they’re for, I believe, and that’s great. Agencies are perfect for that. But if you’re like a native amazon brand and that’s your core business, ppc is your second biggest expense after inventory and you wouldn’t give an agency to manage your orders for inventory, right. You wouldn’t let them decide when to order units, how many units to order. You’re not going to allow them to do that. So the same thing for PPC. You shouldn’t allow anyone to set your budgets or campaigns or bids or anything. Because, let’s say, you use an agency and it works for three, six, 12 months and then it stops working. What are you going to do? You’re going to be back to square one or even worse, and if they damage your account, you’re going to be in a much worse position. So I believe PPC needs to be brought in in-house. All of the eight figure sales I’m working with, all of them managed in-house. So that means, as you scale up, it’s okay to use an agency, like for the time being or temporarily, but not as the core strategy for your business. So I also have it in my book.

Tomer:

But if you are not, you need someone on your team who knows PPC on a deep level, and if you don’t have anyone, that someone is you, unfortunately. So you need to bring in someone, and just bring in a very sharp, analytic person that understands spreadsheets and numbers is good enough to learn PPC. It’s not rocket science. By any means you can use a tool like the one in Helium 10. I don’t care what tool you use. You need to use some tool, I believe I think like flat files. All of that is over and done. I think you need to use a tool with ruling system and stuff, and also you need to have an expert looking over your shoulder when you set stuff up. You know like, again, helium 10 or a different tool and just making sure you set things up correctly and you have someone to consult with. But it is very important to understand this and if you talk to like 10 different PPC experts right now, like agencies or whatever, you’re going to get 10 different opinions on how you should manage your PPC, and it’s not that nine of them are wrong and one of them is right. Right, it’s like there are many ways to run PPC and you just need to find the one that actually works for you. It might take a while, but you have to figure it out for your brand and for your products.

Bradley Sutton:

But, like you said, you always march the beat of a different drummer. Uh, what do you think you’re doing?

Tomer:

that’s unique when we’re talking about PPC but let’s look at 80, 20 right for PPC. So 90 of your spend should be sponsored products. Then like seven, eight percent should be sponsored brands and like a two, three percent should be sponsored display. That’s more or less. If you’re spending 19 on sponsored products, you can probably spend at least some money on sponsored brands. Doing brand videos is so easy with AI these days and just going very granular with specific videos for specific keywords and same thing with, like headline ads, sponsored display. If you’re spending zero, you can probably just target very new competitors that you have and make some easy money that way because they have zero reviews and that’s like easy. So those are like just those are just big stuff. Then what we do is just single keyword campaigns exact phrase, broad for the same keyword and we just create more and more campaigns as we go. So this is what’s working for us, right, and also it might differ from product to product a bit, it might differ from brand to brand a bit and we’ve seen a lot of different strategies over the years that worked right For specific sellers and specific brands.

Tomer:

I even talked to this seller I won’t forget this. He was like an eight-figure seller from New York when I was speaking there at an event and he brought me to his office and talked to his team and the team told me they have a PPC hack. I’m like, okay, what’s the hack? They said, well, we delete all of our campaigns every day and we start new campaigns every single day. I’m like, what are you talking about? And they said, well, what it does. It sends a ton of traffic to the campaigns and they had these crazy spreadsheets they managed history with and all of that because they don’t have any history in these campaigns. And I’m like, after that session, I’m like I know nothing about PPC. I don’t know anything anymore. And I told this to a bunch of agencies and they all had, I think, bad dreams from it afterwards. But again, the point is there are a lot of ways to do it. You just need to find your. And the more you talk to people, the more confused you’re going to be. So just choose a software, learn the software, learn how it works, learn how you can use it in two or three different ways, test it, see what’s working and off you go and I will say PPC, we need to remember it’s just traffic. That’s not the thing that’s going to move the needle right. You need to have optimized listings first. That comes long before PPC. The SEO needs to be on point, the images need to be on point, you need to have some reviews, you need to have a good price point, you need to have a good offer in general, and PPC comes much later.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, speaking of that, you know like you’re one of the first people in the Amazon world talking about things that now is kind of mainstream. You know about how important click-through rate and conversion rate are and looking at your competitors’ images and looking at you know the themes of what people are doing in their images, and those were in the days where it’s a little bit harder to take action on that because you got to go do photo shoots and stuff. Now you know, with AI and things, that now images you know could be, you know, more easy or easier. So are you still doing similar things as far as optimizing click-through rate, conversion rate or anything new you’d like to report on that angle?

Tomer:

I don’t think I’m doing a lot of new things. On conversion rate, ctr and stuff. I think everybody’s like caught up with what it is right, ctr and stuff. I think everybody’s cut up with what it is right. All the new sellers, all their sellers, are kind of doing the same thing that is now mandatory to do. So everybody has a full listing, a full limit stack, everybody has a video, everybody has a plus content, everybody has beautiful images at this point, so it’s just a lot more difficult to compete. This is why I think, again, it starts and ends with the products you develop. The thing I am doing differently, I think, is the KPIs I’m looking at Because I think, for example, if you go back to PPC, I think a lot of people are obsessed with their tacos too much. So that’s how much money you spent on PPC against your revenue. So 10% tacos means you spent, let’s say, $10,000 out of 100k revenue, and tacos is the wrong metric to look at. And when you have an agency, that’s usually what they’re aiming for. And I tell sellers, like your goal is to raise profits, tacos, I can bring your tacos to zero by spending zero money on PPC right now. So tacos is just a lever you can pull, similar to price, so I can push my price up or down to try to maximize sales and profit. And I can also push tacos up or down to maximize for profit.

Tomer:

And I think that’s a big misconception with a lot of sellers, that they don’t know what to actually track. So the only three things that matter in this business are one is profit. I call it PPD profit per day. I want to maximize how much money I make every day, week over week, month over month, year over year. Second thing is sales. I want to sell as many units as I can every single day, even if it’s for the same profit. The reason I say that is because I prefer to sell 2,000 units instead of 1,000 units for the same profit, because that way every sale I make is a sale you didn’t make as my competitor and I get better ranking, better reviews, and this is a competitive marketplace, right, I want to sell as much as I can. And then the third metric is market share and you can measure.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold on. Let me go back. Are you saying that, hey, if I make $5,000 selling 1,000 units, you would be happy making $5,000 of profit selling 2,000 units, because you had more market share? Right, but the percentage would obviously be less. But you’re fine with that because you know you got money.

Tomer:

There is a small mark there, right, but I will talk about it in a sec. But the third one is ranking and market share. Right, so I want to make sure that I sustain or gain more market share over time and don’t lose it because I can. I don’t want to like double my profits and lose all my market share in the process, right, so I want to maintain that. So then there is like a benchmark. So the benchmarks are let’s focus on three of them. So one is margin. I don’t want to go after 15% net margin in my business, let’s say before overhead. 15% is a healthy business these days. So if you make 100K a month, you want to make at least 15K in net profit that month. And if you have over that, some businesses we are consulting for have 20, 25%. That’s amazing, but a lot of businesses are struggling with like 10, 12% and that’s a very difficult business to manage and also exit if that’s your goal. And the second thing that is very important is ROI. So when I talk about ROI, I mean if I invested $10,000 in a product, let’s say in my cogs, how much money am I getting back? So the minimum ROI you want for your product is 50% 5-0. So if I invested 10K, I want to get 15K back. After all the fees, after PPC, after everything, I want to get back 15K. So to answer your question, if I sell 1,000 units for $5,000 or 2,000 units for $5,000, if the 2,000 units for $5,000 is less than 50% ROI, that’s not healthy.

Bradley Sutton:

Got it.

Tomer:

But as long as it’s over 50% I’m fine and I will push as hard as I can to sell more units, even for the same profit or even for a bit more profit per day. And the third benchmark is refunds. And you don’t want to have that higher than, let’s say, 7% refund rate. If it’s clothing, maybe it’s 20% and that’s fine, but again, the margin should be at least 15%. And again, just looking at these benchmarks, when I talk to sellers and when I look at their accounts, it’s always if you have seller board, you use Helium 10 Profits or whatever you can just see very easily where they stand with all of these benchmarks and just see oh, your tacos is 20% and your margin is 10%. That should be reversed, right, let’s work towards that. But yeah, I think a lot of people just look at their own KPIs every single day and they don’t know what to look at or what they’re trying to actually maximize, and I think that’s critical. And I think that’s critical. And maybe the last thing I think that seven-figure sales are doing wrong is how they hire team members. So the most common thing I think that they see that is happening is people hire for specific roles, so they will hire someone for customer support, they will hire someone for PPC, they will hire someone for supply chain. What ends up happening is you have like five, six, seven people you’re managing all on your own and you’re still very much the bottleneck of your own business at that point and it’s probably easier to just do it yourself than have all these people working for you.

Tomer:

And what I teach sellers is to hire managers, so to hire generalists. And what I teach sellers is to hire managers, so to hire generalists. And I always say you are either a very creative person or a very analytic person as the owner of your business. So creative means you’re probably more passionate about product development and product research and working with photographers and figuring out the images for your listings. Or you’re a very analytic person, so you actually might enjoy PPC, or looking at your numbers. And or you’re a very analytic person, so you actually might enjoy PPC, or looking at your numbers and looking at your profitability, so uh, and supply chain as well. So whatever you are the first person you want to bring into your team is the opposite of you. So if you’re very analytic, you want to be someone who is super creative, and vice versa, and that person will manage the whole aspect of creatives to begin with. So they will help you with talking to the photographers, to the copywriters, all of that. You might still be doing product research, but they can talk to suppliers. They can think how can the product be improved, and just go through the product development process and then, when they have so, after you have that person, you hire the second person, the analytic manager. When you have those two managers, you can you should be able to manage to grow to a seven figure business just by having those two people. And after that, once it’s too overwhelming to those people, they hire people underneath them, and I really believe this is the way to build a business from the ground up.

Tomer:

And what I see a lot of sellers struggle with is when they have all these low-level people. They’re trying to bring middle managers in between, and I think that’s much more difficult to do, and I’d rather have people that learn everything about this business from the ground up and then they can teach other people on what they’re doing, and then if someone is sick or someone leaves, you always have backups all over the place. So this is what I’ve been teaching sellers for a long time. It’s also in my book the Same Methodology, exactly with a full team structure and all of that. But I do believe this is the best way to build an e-commerce business and help so many sellers scale just by building the right team.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, Awesome. All right Now, before we get into your last strategies no-transcript available on Amazon Audible.

Tomer:

Wherever you buy your books, it’s there. I have a program called Alpha Pack. This is where we help sellers scale from seven to eight figures. You can learn more about that if you go to jointopdog.com, and within that page you should also see details on the 30 day challenge for Messless. If you want to buy our supplements for Messless, you want to be more productive and sleep better, you can go to get.messless.com.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. You’ve talked about launch TikTok PPC conversion rate analytics. You’ve talked about a number of things. Anything that you haven’t talked about, something you can give as a last words of wisdom for our audience out there.

Tomer:

So I’ve been on the podcast, as I said, multiple times, and usually I give like a small hack or a small thing at the end. But I do want to give one thing from the challenge that I just that I’m doing right now that I think was a big lesson to a lot of people going through it, and which is start before you’re ready or before you think you’re ready, and this is how I’ve done everything that was actually successful in my life. Bradley, I don’t know if you remember the first episode you did in this podcast. You probably didn’t feel like you’re ready to jump in to this podcast, nope, but you did anyway. And I think a lot of people think, oh, I need to feel motivated, I need to be ready to do this thing before they do it. But you don’t. The way I wrote my book is I knew I wanted to write a book and I just posted on Facebook I’m going to go and do a 10-week course Right now. It’s $500 to participate, limited to 100 people, and that forced me every week to give them a chapter of the book and I was just doing content. But that helped me work with my goals writer to finish my book in 10 weeks, right. So this challenge I’m doing, I’m just doing like day after day after day myself. It wasn’t like prepared 30 days ahead of time, so I just commit to something. It helps me personally if I say publicly to other people that I’m actually going to do the thing and then I just do the thing right. And I think too many people are waiting for something to happen to start. But I just think that if you think about it for a long time and you think I’m going to start this thing, I’m going to start this thing, you can already start. You’re ready to go if you’re constantly thinking about the thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I like it. I like it. That’s good. People have used the cliche term analysis, paralysis and other cliche terms about just never jumping in because they’re too scared or they don’t want to mess up or they’re trying to be perfectionist. But no, you just got to jump in and I don’t think there’s failure. You could lose a little bit of money on something, but that’s not necessarily a failure, because you’re going to learn something from it. So I like that strategy.

Tomer:

All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, I look forward to seeing you. I haven’t seen you in person in a while, it seems, so hopefully we can cross paths at an upcoming conference or event soon, and until then, wish you and your family the best and we’ll see you for the sixth time, maybe in a year or two, on the podcast.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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• 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.
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