#729 – The $3M Amazon Seller Who Still Sells His First Product

Andrew Engle transitioned from mechanical/manufacturing engineering to becoming an Amazon seller after identifying where the real money was: selling products on Amazon, not services. In 2019, he launched his first product, found using Helium 10 (Black Box) and guided by Freedom Ticket, and it took off quickly. Within about two years, the “side hustle” out-earned his job, and he went all-in.

Today, he and his wife run a lean operation doing roughly $3.2M/year, with about 90% coming from Amazon North America (including remote fulfillment into Canada), plus a growing Shopify slice. A significant driver of their next-level growth has been leveraging Amazon Business, which has expanded B2B sales to around 30% through business pricing rules, dedicated business campaigns, and, in particular, separating out Sponsored Brands for business use to maintain a strong TACoS and ROAS.

Andrew also shares the behind-the-scenes realities: how taking on debt during a hot streak got stressful when a major competitor arrived, and how they’ve worked back out of it. He breaks down what they’ve changed to protect profitability amid tariffs and fee pressure (including shipping strategy and AWD), as well as how Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences are helping them run smarter top-of-funnel Sponsored Display and reach campaigns without wasting spend.

In episode 729 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Andrew discuss:

• 00:00 – Seller Story: Freedom Ticket To $3M on Amazon
• 03:06 – Andrew’s Backstory
• 03:56 – $3.2M Revenue And 15% Net Profit
• 05:23 – Platform Breakdown: Amazon, Shopify, Canada
• 06:18 – First Product Found With Helium 10 Black Box
• 07:40 – Amazon Business Scaled To 30% B2B
• 10:02 – Business Pricing And Ad Structure
• 13:05 – Sponsored Brands (Business) Breakthrough
• 18:16 – AMC Audiences And Sponsored Display Reach
• 22:24 – Debt Mistake And Profitability Lessons

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got a seller who learned how to sell on Amazon from Freedom Ticket. Then he found his first product with Helium 10, and in the last few years, he and his wife by themselves have scaled their business to over $3 million annually. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am 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. We have a serious seller on with us. He’s been on the podcast a couple of times before, Andrew, but we’re going to treat it as if it’s the first time because this is now the new format of podcasts where we get really deep into the seller stories out there. Andrew, welcome back to the show.

Andrew:

Hello. Yeah, thanks for having me back on.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go ahead and go back to your history. First of all, where are you located right now? Where are you calling in from?

Andrew:

I’m in Des Moines, Iowa.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And is that where you were born and raised?

Andrew:

I was born here, but I was actually raised in Sioux City, Iowa, but I’ve been in Iowa my whole life.

Bradley Sutton:

So, Iowa your whole life. Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing?

Andrew:

I think it’s pretty good. I think it’s pretty good. I mean, during the winter, it’s a little rough, but other than that, we get to experience all the seasons, that’s for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

So are you a Hawkeye fan or a Cyclone fan?

Andrew:

Oh, Cyclone fan. You got to look at my hat right here.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Is that where you went to college?

Andrew:

Yeah. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And what did you major in?

Andrew:

Mechanical engineering.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. And did you start working in that upon graduation?

Andrew:

I was. I did mechanical engineering and then manufacturing engineering together for 10-ish years before I started doing this.

Bradley Sutton:

And what got you interested into e-commerce? Because that’s a pretty fairly lucrative career, I would imagine.

Andrew:

Kind of. I mean, engineering was fun. Engineering is hard. Sometimes it can be boring you know. So this is definitely a little bit more exciting to do. Sometimes you don’t want the excitement though. Sometimes it’s too exciting. But I don’t know exactly how I got into it. I worked at a couple different places that sold products. And it just seemed like the companies that I worked for, when they would sell products, that’s where they made most of their money from. Not necessarily the service side where they would go fix things or something like that. It always seemed like the money was on that side.

Andrew:

And then there was, my brother had a friend who his parents or something were saying that they were selling something on Amazon and were making decent money. I’m like, oh, that’s cool. So just one of the times when I had saved up some money, I kind of looked into it and I chose one product and it took off. And that’s kind of…

Bradley Sutton:

What year was this about?

Andrew:

2019 is when I started.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So, you were still working full time and you’re like, hey, let me try this as a little side hustle thing. And you actually hit a home run in your first product.

Andrew:

Yeah. I actually had my full-time job and I already had one side hustle and this was going to be like another one. And then quickly, within like two years, doing this made more money than any of the other stuff I was doing. So, I had to kind of pivot and I went to this full time.

Bradley Sutton:

So in about 2021 is when you kind of went all in with e-commerce?

Andrew:

Yeah. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now fast forward today, we’ll fill in some gaps, but 2025, I’m not sure if you look at the year-end books or anything yet, but approximately across all platforms, how much growth sales do you have?

Andrew:

I think this year we’re going to be around 3.2 million total.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. And your profit margins are pretty decent enough to support?

Andrew:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s been a little bit of a battle going back and forth with tariffs and all their stuff, fee changes and all that stuff. But yeah, we’re usually around 15% net income, like net profit.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you splurge a little bit or you invest it all back into the company, take trips, buy some Lamborghinis? What do you do with some of that money?

Andrew:

We do go on pretty good trips. Most of that comes from like credit card points though, just because we, you know, just for advertising. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we go on trips. Lately, the last like couple of years, the business has been like paying back some debts. So, it’s been like, you know, going back into that. But at the middle of next year, we should be kind of pretty much all the way out of that, which will be exciting. It’ll be very exciting. So maybe we’ll go on even more trips.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. Maldives. Hopefully that’s on your bucket list.

Andrew:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I keep seeing you going there and it’s like, it looks cool.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. I’ll never get tired of that place. Now that 3 million, what’s the breakdown as far as marketplaces? I assume the biggest is Amazon USA. Are you selling in other Amazon marketplaces? On TikTok, Walmart, eBay, et cetera, and Shopify?

Andrew:

Yeah. I would say between like North America, like Amazon North America, it’s about 90% is Amazon. And I think about 5% of that is Canada.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you actually have inventory there or are you just doing the remote fulfillment thing?

Andrew:

No. So that’s just on remote fulfillment. And that’s something I kind of want to lean more into is actually doing FBA from there. But then probably the other 8% comes from Shopify. And then like the other 2% comes from like eBay and Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

And nothing on TikTok yet then?

Andrew:

Nothing on TikTok yet. That’s untouched territory for us so far.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you remember how you, I believe you had said it was using Helium 10 before, but how did you find that first product that took off? And are you still selling that product today?

Andrew:

So yeah, we’re still selling the first product now. And to find it, I mean, we just use Blackbox. I think it was like Freedom Ticket 2.0 was the one that was out. So I got, I think I got a free trial or paid, you know, I can’t remember what it was like 50 or 90 bucks a month or something to like go through that course. And which was awesome. Right after I launched, I remember Project X came out and after Project X, I was like, oh man, I wish I would have like done, I was like, I would have changed a whole bunch of stuff, you know, but it helped because it was really early on when I started selling. So that helped a lot. But yeah, we’re still selling that product. We found it on Blackbox.

Bradley Sutton:

And then has everything since then been like an expansion of that original brand or have you gone into other brands?

Andrew:

We started we had some other brands. But honestly, this one, this first one that we’ve had has been growing so consistently that we’re finding it hard to like put time into the other projects just because this one, you know, this one pays the bills and it’s working and growing really well. So we just keep putting more and more time into that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Interesting. Interesting. Now, we recently had somebody on the podcast talking about Amazon Business and actually another Helium 10 Elite member, Brian. And so you’ve mentioned in the past too, in our Elite Facebook group that you’ve leveraged that. Has that just been like the last year or so or has that’s been something from day one you’ve been leveraging?

Andrew:

So we not from day one. It’s kind of been in this past year that we really started to focus on that because for a while we had like 10 or 15 percent of our sales would come from businesses and we like weren’t even trying.

Bradley Sutton:

You just like had put the price and then nothing special on advertising or anything, just organically.

Andrew:

No. Yeah. Just our products can be used by consumers and by businesses. And then we started to like really look into that because we’re like, man, these business orders, they’re big and they keep coming back. And so, we started like, you know, setting up dedicated, you know, advertising for it or using the ad multipliers for business, like bid multipliers for business. And we’ve grown that like we’re about 30 percent B2B now.

Bradley Sutton:

And would you say your product is like very business-y, like attractive to business? Like obviously coffin shelf, you know, is not necessarily something that businesses would care about, you know, unless you’re a Halloween supply store or something like that. But your product, is it more something that, you know what? Yeah, this is like something that people like to buy in bulk or that businesses need.

Andrew:

Yeah. Like businesses do need this. Like consumers can use the smaller pack sizes of the stuff that we sell, but businesses will use it. And kind of all of our products, we’ve kept them together. So, you know, the same person that buys one of our products would buy the other stuff too. And that’s kind of, we’ve always wanted to keep it that way, but that’s kind of helping us in the business side because businesses, when they buy one thing, they usually are buying a whole bunch of other stuff too. And we can do some things with ads or with audiences to try to like push more of our products towards them and, you know, try to get them to buy more. So, yeah, it’s a business-friendly product.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Now that you’re actually are paying attention to the business program, my first question is like, what’s your pricing strategy? Because I found, I learned from the last episode that it’s not like, you know, Amazon price discounts where, oh man, you gotta be like at least 15% off. Like you can have a discount of even just five cents and it’d be fine. But what, do you have a general percentage off or dollar or cents amount off that you’re putting, first of all, for what your, what shows to the Amazon business customers?

Andrew:

I used to just do like whatever the, like Amazon had, if you added a business price, either I’d do like a dollar off or something, or I would do have some blue business savings badge or something that you can get if you put it at a certain price. But I was talking to someone at Amazon Accelerate during the seller cafe and I was talking about Amazon business and they were like specifically told me to go into, I think it’s like custom pricing or like automated pricing. And you can set up a rule for all your products to just do, I think it’s 2% off, we’ll get you the badge.

Andrew:

And then if you do like 3% off of like, if they buy multiples, then you’ll get unlocked and get into this like other thing on Amazon business. So that’s, I just kind of followed what they said. And it’s been, I mean, that was in September. So it’s been a little while, but things are working with that. And that’s actually really easy now, because even if we add new products, just automatically the business price gets put on there. So, I kind of like doing it that way now.

Bradley Sutton:

And now for your advertising, do you just put a modifier on your regular campaigns for business customers or do you have standalone like campaigns that are specifically just for business customers?

Andrew:

So we started off with having the bid modifiers, but now we have dedicated campaigns for business stuff. And we still have those modifiers on the original campaigns too, but the ones that are, at least for the time being we do, but those Amazon business like dedicated campaigns do amazing. And we go like pretty broad with those, like lots of autos, lots of broad match. I mean, we do some like phrase and exact match stuff too, but you can go like pretty broad. Cause I don’t know if a lot of people are doing it quite yet. And usually, businesses buy so much more and everything, the ROAS is so much better that, you know, you can keep those bids high and they’ll keep pushing it out there. So…

Bradley Sutton:

What have you found then, you know, since you started segregating the advertising, what have you found as far as like, are the same keywords performing for both? Or do you have like separate funnels? Like, do you have auto and broad discovery campaigns going for the business? And then if so, like, do you find some keywords like never even are not even good for, for regular customers, but, but they’re great for business or vice versa?

Andrew:

They’ve been the keyword on the keyword level it’s performed pretty similar. I don’t know if we found any like new, any like new big keywords, but I know one thing like our on sponsored brands. So, we’ve been, we’ve been using a lot more sponsored brand ads lately, just on the consumer side and on the business side. But we noticed when we were going through and setting all these like business modifiers earlier this year, they were like, wait, the sponsored brand ads don’t have a business modifier, you know, but they, but you can go and actually create a sponsored brand, you know, business campaign. So, we started doing that. And those are doing amazing. Those are some of our best campaigns now. And I think it’s because like the other ones were targeting businesses, but you’d get the consumer sales in there too. And it would just drag the ROAS down where you can have these sponsored brand business campaigns, like wide open, and it’ll just be all the time.

Bradley Sutton:

How long has have, first of all, who makes up your team? Like now, you know, you’ve scaled to three over 3 million. I doubt you’re handling everything a hundred percent yourself. I hope not. Do you have VAs, you have partners, you have employees?

Andrew:

It’s, it’s a pretty lean team. It’s me, it’s mainly me and my wife. And then for a while we had, my nephew was like helping pack in our warehouse and, but he’s like out, he was playing football and stuff. So, he’s like back in school and he’s, you know, doing that, but it’s mainly me and my wife. And then we’re going to be hiring some people this year to kind of help take us to the next level here because we definitely need some people.

Bradley Sutton:

So, everything from making the listings, customer service, advertising, inventory, a hundred percent in-house, just your family.

Andrew:

Oh yeah. Yep. So big, big shout out to Chelsea, my wife for helping me out with that.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. Yeah. Maybe she should have been the one on here. Usually, it’s the unsung hero of things. How long have you guys been using Helium 10?

Andrew:

Um, since like, since the beginning, I mean, since even, even before we were selling, like, I think it was the first set of tool. It was the first tool we used.

Bradley Sutton:

You got the education, you know, that’s how you said you learned. Even before your first, yeah.

Andrew:

Yeah. The, um yeah. Freedom Ticket was amazing. And, um, I should probably go through even, you know, the other iterations of it, but I didn’t, you know, Freedom Ticket to really the whole thing. So that helps.

Bradley Sutton:

And, you know, obviously use Helium 10 to find your, your product. Um, are you still using it to find like product line extensions? Some of these, uh, you mainly using it for keyword research. Uh, what do you use it for these days?

Andrew:

Uh, Helium 10. Um, man, we, I mean, we use it for everything, uh, like day-to-day operations wise and tracking stuff. Uh, unlike the launch side, we use a listing builder, Scribble. Well, like used to be called Scribbles. Yeah. Now it’s Listing Builder, you know, Magnets, Cerebro for sure. Uh, Listing Analyzer to check out different stuff. Uh, we also use listing analyzer, um, kind of on a day-to-day basis just to check competitors. Um, we just kind of got in a habit of doing that.

Andrew:

And now we, you know, we just keep that going, I guess. Um, just to check our rank, our BSR is compared to competitors and all that stuff. Yeah. Profits. I mean, checking we just, we just use Helium 10 pretty much for everything, unless it’s our own like custom tool or something.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, something I ask people who like, weren’t using Helium 10 and then they started after they had their business. It’s like an easy question. It’s like, all right, what, how did it transform? Like, like, what did you do that saved you a lot of time or, or that actually got you revenue, but you’ve been doing the right thing, which is using it from day one. So, you don’t have that anecdote, but like imagine a world without Helium 10, like where would you be impacted most? Where it’s like, you know what, first of all, this is not even a manual thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Uh, like, like maybe something like, yeah, I would have to hire a VA to go every day and look where my ranks of keywords are. Um, or, or something like, you know what, not even hiring a VA could do this because it’s like, there’s just literally no way to do it. Like what, what would you miss the most? Uh, if there was a day now, not that it’s ever happening since Helium 10 is here forever, but what would you miss the most?

Andrew:

Probably the keyword tracking and just making sure that you’re like the keyword tracking and the alerts just to make sure every morning you can wake up, make sure everything’s good. Um, it would be, I mean, it would be impossible to track all that stuff. Even if you had a VA, you just wouldn’t be able to do it as well. You would just notice that why isn’t the selling, you know, and you’d be, you’d lose a week or something until you figure out what was going on. Yeah. We would, it would at least be like an extra person that their whole job would be just to gather data on the internet. You know, that would be it.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Now you’ve talked a little bit of Amazon business that a lot of people don’t use. What else are you doing that that’s fairly, you know, um, unique that has helped you scale to where you are now? Obviously sponsored product ads, you know, I’m sure you’re doing them. It’s not unique, you know, 90% of Amazon private label sellers, but, but something that you think, Hey, probably less than 10% of people are doing at all, or maybe at least doing like you.

Andrew:

Sure. Sure. Um, actually at the last, at, um, right before Amazon Accelerate this year, we had the Helium tentatively meeting like right before that. I can’t remember who I was. It was, it was in one of the groups where we were coming up with hacks and, and he was saying how, uh, you know, Amazon marketing cloud, it just came out for everyone. And I was, I was interested in using that. And he was talking about how you can, you can type in, you know, in natural language, like AI, like what you, you know, what custom audience or custom, you know, thing you wanted Amazon marketing cloud to make you. And then it would just make it, you know, it would write the SQL stuff for you. And I was like, huh, that sounds amazing because I don’t know how to do that.

Andrew:

So, um, I’ve really been using that a lot and I’ve gotten some really cool, um, like custom audiences that I think are really helping us out. Um, including like, it’s kind of unlocked some things where we can use sponsored display, like reach campaigns, like the VCPM campaigns that everyone kind of hates. Um, we’re going back and using those a little bit into what we know our audiences and we can just push it right out to them.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s an example of like one of these audiences?

Andrew:

Is it like a, um, So like B2B general contractors, like, uh, or I think it’s like business lookalikes, uh, yeah, B2B, like general contractors or something. It’s a big, like, it’s a big audience on its own, but then we say, okay, look at this audience segment, but we want to make sure that if the customer has clicked on one of our ads, like make sure they have not viewed our detail page, bought one of our products or like clicked on one of our ads for the last 365 days. So it’s like a pure reach campaign and it updates every day. So if someone if, if we go and like put these ads out and then someone clicks on it, they get taken out of that. So they don’t keep getting served the same ads, you know, they, they kind of like fall down into like the next level of the funnel and stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

Um, so like what, you know, get, give people an idea about how this has transformed some of your advertising. Like, is it just a purely amount of, hey, you’re, you’re converting more or your ROI has improved because of this ad generated revenue, your, your, you know, what, what exactly is better by getting niching down to these, these audiences in your advertising?

Andrew:

I would say, um, I mean, just so we’ve kind of seen it in our, our tacos has been, you know, trending lower. Um, it’s hard with like top of funnel stuff to get like hard numbers on it. But even in Amazon marketing cloud, it’ll show you like the path, like the path of conversion, you know, for the last, however many days, and you can see like, ever since we started really pushing out with the sponsored display, you can see like some of the first touch points are those campaigns. So it’s, it’s getting out there and it’s working and you can see the conversion rate if they, you know, first see this and then they go to some of your other ads, but it’s a lot to track. I mean, it’s kind of, we’re, we’re still coming up with methods and kind of system, um, uh, systems to track how effective it is.

Bradley Sutton:

You doing anything with AI as far as creative, you know, like, you know, coming up with things for sponsored display ads or sponsored brand ads or video ads, or just doing those kinds of old school.

Andrew:

It’s like, it’s like hit or miss. So, um, we don’t do any of it like consistently, but if we’re coming, if we want to, if we’re coming out with a new product or, you know, something, we want to try a new ad style. We can go and use, uh, usually ChatGPT and we can create different pictures or a mid-journey or something and, and try, just like try different stuff out.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s one of the biggest mistakes you’ve made running your business? Like we’re in retro, you know, hindsight is 2020, but where you’re like, Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that. Or it could have been something, you know, like it was an accident. Um, but it turned out bad. And then how did you fix it?

Andrew:

I would say it’s probably the, like we, we got it, this was back in 2023 or something. Um, we started taking out some loans to, uh, expand, you know, to buy more stuff cause we were growing and everything was working great. I think what happened was we, we really hadn’t had any, like, we really hadn’t had anything bad happen to us. Like everything we did was just gold. So like, we’re like, whatever, let’s just keep pouring money.

Bradley Sutton:

And you just angered like thousands and thousands of Amazon. Ah, this stinking Andrew.

Andrew:

It was like, everything’s just keeps working. So let’s just like, let’s borrow some money and just keep, keep feeding the beast, you know, but then right. As we were like getting, you know, some bigger orders coming and we were like, okay, we probably don’t want to take on any more debt. Let’s like, let this, let’s let this go. We had a big competitor come in on our main product line and like take half of our market share. So like a bunch of the money that was, you know, planned forecasted to be there to like pay all the loans back was drying up. So we’re like, okay, we got to like, we got to really lock it down. But we’re, I mean, we’re still kind of digging out of that. So like by, by June of like next year, I think we’ll be out of it completely, which will be amazing. Yeah. That’s taken years to get through.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Uh, so then what would your advice be for people out there? Uh, so that they avoid something like that.

Andrew:

I would say, um, look up your debt-to-income ratios for like businesses and stuff. And don’t go, you know, make sure you’re tracking that. Cause I was not tracking that at the time we were like, yeah, we were kind of like just going on vibes and kind of like we had this forecast, this financial forecast tool that we made where it’s like, yeah, the money’s going to be there. You know, the money’s going to be there. And we were kind of pushing it a little bit further than we should have. So, but then, you know, then we figured out like, oh, these bad things can happen. So we’ve got to pull it back.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s the, what’s the flip side? What’s the biggest win you’ve had? Well, like it could have been again on accident or you actually tried to do something and just like did exceeded your wildest expectations.

Andrew:

So, um, I’m actually really excited for what happened at, uh, Amazon accelerate this year. Um, I heard everyone like talking about, uh, this was the first time I’ve, I had went, um, but everyone was talking about how great seller cafe was and, you know, all the different things you can get fixed and all this stuff and on our main product line, um, we could not get our reviews to link together, like to like group together and add together on our, our main parent. And, um, I was like, okay, I want to come and like, bring it, you know, bring this to them. And then I also want to, or actually like before I even got there, because you submit the problem to them, you know, like a week before, a couple of weeks before, even before I got there, they had fixed it. And I was like, I, and I had tried for months, I had tried for years, like multiple times over years to fix this problem. And I just like gave up, you know, cause I just couldn’t do it.

Andrew:

And they fixed it in like a week. And I was like, what? So they’re like, you know, we could just hang out or if you have any more problems, I’m like, oh, I got problems. Like, I just started like listing all this stuff, but one of the other big ones that they did, um, they fixed some of our referral fees. Um, you know, we’re in the business and industrial category and some of our referral fees were still at 15%. They brought those down to 12.

So that’s good. Um, and then a lot of our, a big portion of our products were not eligible for subscribe and save for some reason, especially for like business products. I’m like, man, we really got to like fix that. Like why, you know, and I just, it was similar to the review thing. I just couldn’t get it fixed no matter how many times I asked them or how nicely I asked, you know. Um, but they fixed that too.

Andrew:

So that those were, those are huge wins because we got our, our reviews now on the main product or like over 10,000 and like the, the next, um, like the next highest competitor is like three or 4,000. So we’re like way ahead and we’ve noticed our like conversion increased immediately, like the, you know, the day that we learned we could see it. And then our subscribe and save is taking off like big time on all those products. So that’s, that’s a huge, I was so excited, like flying home from Seattle. Yeah, that was so fun.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon Accelerate. That’s where you can get your stuff fixed.

Andrew:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now some of the stuff you mentioned obviously helps with profitability, but I think it’s a question I’m asking a lot of our guests this year is, you know, 2026, I mean, every year, uh, this is an issue, but 2026, especially I hear more like sellers lamenting profitability because of, you know, tariffs or rising costs of manufacturing, rising costs of advertising, increased competition, whatever it might be, inflation. What are you guys doing to make sure that you’re still profitable? Is it a mixture of raising, raising prices, you know, cutting, cutting costs? Um, how are you doing it?

Andrew:

Yeah. Um, it’s tough. Probably the biggest, um, one of the biggest problems we had this year was the tariffs. It’s not necessarily the tariffs themselves. It was like how fast and how quickly they’re changing. That was wild. Um, we just didn’t know what our cost of goods was going to be from like month to month, you know, and then kind of like money management around that we were when they had like the tariff pauses, um, it’s like 90-day tariff pause. It’s like, okay, put in a huge order because like, you know, we don’t know when it’s going to, if it’s going to, after 90 days, is it going to go back to where it was? I don’t know. Um, but we were kind of just doing everything we could think of. Um, canceling any subscriptions and stuff that we’re not using. We changed up how we were doing some of our shipping for some of our stuff.

Andrew:

Our stuff is really heavy and we used to buy like full containers and actually we found it was cheaper to do LCL, like less than container load. So like pallet shipments, even if they’re like eight or 10 pallets or something, if we shipped those, uh, LCL, it was actually way cheaper. And it’s just cause our stuff was so heavy. Like we would, like, we would hit the limit of the full container, the weight limit of the full container way before the volume, you know, our, our containers would be, uh, whatever the way limit is like 20, like 22 or 24 tons, but it was only like 25% full, like volume wise. So, we were able to save some money that way.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you shipping that to your warehouse or directly to Amazon?

Andrew:

A little bit of both, a little bit of both, mainly just to Amazon. And we were kind of like, I’m sure everyone had the same issue, but Amazon really kind of forced people to start using AWD. So we’re using, uh, AWD. We have our own warehouse as well, and we ship directly to FBA. So it’s kind of a mix.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What else, other kind of a secret sauce you might have that you’re willing to share?

Andrew:

Oh, like some of the Amazon marketing cloud audiences. So some stuff that’s cool in there, uh, we would take, like if we’re going after business customers, we would, we would take the, there’s some, some setups, some easy setup, uh, audiences in there where you can say, okay, uh, for these ASINs. So, you can say just for like these products that are all grouped together in the same family, create a lookalike audience from my, uh, customers that have bought multiple times and then, you know, create an audience for that. So then we would do that for like every product family that we had. And then we could, so it’s lookalike. So it’s, you know, not your current customers, but people who look just like them and then you can send all your ads and stuff like directly to them. You’ve had really good, uh, response to that. That’s a, I would highly recommend doing that. Cause it’s, it’s very, you don’t have to even like use the code or anything. There’s like a no code option just to create those.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, um, it’s been great catching up and we want to, um, maybe, you know, bring you back at end of next year or so. Let’s see if, uh, you, you hit that 4 million mark and get, you know, some, some tick tock sales, uh, perhaps, you know, once you’re ready, you know, obviously Helium 10 can help you with that. Just get all your listings up there in like five minutes to migrate it over. So, so, um, very interesting. I see a lot of success, you know, even with stuff that you might not think are that TikTokable, it actually ends up having success just cause there’s nobody else selling that stuff. So that might be the case with you. So I wish you and your wife all the best. And again, maybe we’ll, uh, party in Maldives together one of these days.

Andrew:

That’s right. Sounds good.

Bradley Sutton:

Have a great rest of your day. We’ll see you in the next episode.

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