Planet Amazon Podcast
The Planet Amazon podcast addresses all things Amazon and other eCommerce marketplaces. In each episode, we talk with Brands and Sellers about Amazon news, new features, policies, brand policies, logistics, marketing, issues, and challenges, among other topics. All the discussions in this podcast will be from our and our guests' perspectives, always considering how to successfully manage brands on the $600+ Billion Amazon marketplace and the other eCommerce platforms. This podcast is a must for all brands selling or looking to sell on eCommerce marketplaces. Planet Amazon is hosted by Adam Shaffer, President of Phelps United and a veteran/leader in the eCommerce industry.Phelps United offers brands comprehensive Amazon seller services in 5 key areas that save time and expense while sales and profits accelerate.
Planet Amazon Podcast
From Conference Rooms to Amazon: The Joan Workplace Management Experience
In this episode, Gent Nemani from Joan by Visionect, shares his experience of how this B2B company has successfully managed channel conflict and pricing by entering the Amazon world with their revolutionary Joan conference product line.
Gent walks us through the challenges and complexities of logistics, reconciliation, and customer service when working directly with Amazon and how they found a solution by choosing the right partner to help manage the intricacies of Amazon, all while ensuring the Joan product line's continued success.
Don't miss this opportunity to learn invaluable tips and experiences on effectively selling commercial products on Amazon.
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The Planet Amazon podcast, brought to you by Phelps United, addresses all things Amazon and other eCommerce marketplaces. In each episode, we talk with Brands, Agencies, and Sellers about Amazon news, new features, policies, brand policies, logistics, marketing, issues, and challenges, among other topics.
To watch all Planet Amazon Podcast episodes, visit our YouTube channel.
To learn more about Phelps United, visit our website.
Welcome to the Planet Amazon podcast with Adam Schaefer, where we explore the world of Amazon and other e-commerce marketplaces. Join us as we delve into the latest strategies and tactics for successful selling on the world's largest online marketplace.
Speaker 2:Hello, i'm Adam Schaefer and welcome to Planet Amazon, where we talk about all things Amazon, of course, and today we're going to talk about commercial products on Amazon And we have a great guest that we want to introduce you to And we'll bring him on right away and I'll keep on talking.
Speaker 2:But we want to introduce you to Gint Nomanie from Vision Act, and they sell and manufacture the Joan product line And before we pass it over to him, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Gint was that his products are basically a product that only companies or organizations would buy and users consumers really don't buy this product. Yet he finds, and his company finds, that Amazon is a great platform and so many brands that I talked to don't understand that the Amazon business portion of the business is very big and it's growing and it's a great place to market the products. But you know you need to pay attention and spend a lot of time to develop this platform if you want it to be used properly. So with that, let's introduce Gint And Gint. First of all, thanks for joining the podcast. We're thrilled to have you here And if you could just give us a little background on yourself and the products and your company would be great.
Speaker 3:Yep, thank you for having me, adam. Yeah, my name is Gint Nomanie. I'm the regional sales manager for Vision Act, so I work mainly with our Joan product line. Vision Act is a technology company. It specializes in electronic paper solutions, so, similarly to Amazon Kindle since we are talking about all Amazon I only think it's fair to mention that. But Joan is dedicated to workplace management, so we do room scheduling, we do desk and asset booking, we do visitor management. Today we'll focus mainly on the room schedulers, because that's currently our only hardware solution and that's what we sell on Amazon.
Speaker 3:But I've been with the company for over five years now. The companies originally from Europe. The headquarters are in Ljubljana, slovenia. That's where I started my career with the company. About a year into my tenure with Vision Act, we opened an office in the States. They asked me to relocate to help continue the sales efforts in the United States and Canada. In the meantime, i've also taken over Latin America and South America. So yeah, it's been quite a ride. The company has been doing fantastic when it comes to room schedulers and Amazon is a big part of that success.
Speaker 2:That's great. Thanks, gint. I mean maybe you have one handy, but I think you were showing me one earlier. Can you just show the product? It's pretty cool Really. what you do with this product is you have it outside your conference rooms in your organization and there's a control center somewhere in the office whether it's the office manager or somebody and people book and schedule their meetings on these devices. So maybe hold one up if you have one.
Speaker 3:I can show you the three models we have. This is the Joan 6 device. This was actually the original one, obviously in a bit of a different visual, but this is what we started with back in 2017. We won the CES Innovation Award with this one, then the Red Dot Industrial Design Award and numerous other ones. We have the larger Joan 13, simply called Joan 13 because it's a 13-inch device, and then the latest and greatest is the Joan 6 Pro, a six-inch device, but as you can see here, this is in portrait mode. That one's in landscape. Obviously, the visuals are different as well, but it's fair to say that they all do the job.
Speaker 3:As far as room scheduling Now, for whoever isn't aware of this market, this is basically intended to be placed in front of a meeting room, conference room, huddle room, whatever bookable area you have that people in an office space or anywhere actually want to book for a certain period of time, and it connects to mainstream calendars like Office 365, google, ical, outlook, so the actual people that work in the office can book from the calendar itself. Usually, there are room resources in the calendar that represent a particular conference room, so they would invite all the colleagues or visitors. They would create the meetings, add the meeting subject, the actual time slot, and then they invite the room resource And if it's available during that time slot, once they hit save, the information gets displayed on the device. So in this case see here it would simply say marketing daily, organized by Casey Mayfield. Until what time? you'd have an overview of what's to come.
Speaker 3:And then the Jones 6 and Jones 6 Pro devices are actually touch displays so you can book from the device itself. If you're standing in front of a meeting room door, you can simply click book for an ad talk meeting or choose an exact time and date and then book it from then. As a third option, we do also have a free mobile app on iOS and Android. So even if you don't want to touch the display, you can simply take your phone out and do it straight from there.
Speaker 2:That's great. I mean, we're kind of animals at our place. We just kind of bust into the conference room and throw the people out, but a much more civilized way of managing the schedules and the conference rooms that are kind of valuable real estate these days, so really cool. So help me understand. And the audience like the target audience, like I think what a lot of people have trouble getting through their minds is Amazon is a platform. Okay, maybe I sell soccer balls or jewelry or clothing and there's a big market for that, but who were you actually focused on on the Amazon platform? What is the ideal customer for you?
Speaker 3:Honestly, our target audience is very broad when it comes to the customer base, so it includes businesses and organizations that are small and medium businesses, enterprises, hospitality, education, basically anybody that might feel the need that there's too many people barging in and picking up over the office, or perhaps there are double bookings and all of a sudden there's two important meetings happening at 11 am and somebody needs to do that meeting in the hallway. So, of course, it's basically anybody that either has their own little e-commerce business and just needs to tell the misses that I'm booked for this particular hour. Technically, you can be used for home office or, like I mentioned, any size of an organization or business that sees scheduling conflicts.
Speaker 2:That's. It is great And I love the size of these things. And for those that actually market and sell on Amazon, what's beautiful about these products? not just in what they do, but they're quite small in light and they carry a pretty reasonable ASP. So in the world of Amazon that's like the perfect combination of I wanna have something that's not super heavy, so the freight costs aren't high, and I wanna be able to make enough money from each transaction that it's meaningful and that's this product line.
Speaker 2:So, moving on, what people don't really completely understand maybe some do is that on the Amazon platform it's thought of as consumer, but within that consumer base there are thousands and thousands of businesses that are buying from Amazon consumer, but they're buying for their companies or their installers, but they buy from Amazon.
Speaker 2:But Amazon has another part of their business on that marketplace called Amazon Business, and with Amazon Business, companies sign up and they get special discounts, they get workflow management, they get order consolidation and it's also very easy for them to understand when they buy products if they wanna shift to different locations. It's easier to manage it that way. And this part of their business, i'm gonna say, estimated about $40 billion. So the overall Amazon in merchandise is about 620 billion. This is about 40 billion, but it's growing much faster than the traditional consumer portion of Amazon. It looks the same, it feels the same, but companies log in as a commercial customer they have a separate login for this and gives them these special privileges. So again, i think that commercial companies don't understand. This is a great place for you to market your products And so obviously you guys were selling through traditional solutions providers and resellers. But what led you to Amazon?
Speaker 3:Well, amazon is just an entirely different machine. It's a beast of its own, if you can say that way, and it gives you access to a broader customer base. It also helps you reach more customers and also give you brand recognition. Being available on Amazon simply gives you access to more people and it also gives you a kind of like a in the lack of better words. It makes the brand feel more important that you're simply available there.
Speaker 3:Now, you did mention that a lot of businesses don't necessarily work on Amazon, but once we started this brand, that was one of our first goals to get it on Amazon, and we really nailed it, because our devices, or wireless devices, as I was saying, you can put them on meeting room doors. There's a lot of companies that do similar products. We kind of own our niche of wireless room schedulers because of the electronic paper technology that we use, so all of our devices are battery powered. Therefore, it is ready out of the box, so somebody can purchase them on Amazon, get them delivered in a dare to take them out of the box, configure them and then just pop them on the meeting room door in a matter of minutes.
Speaker 3:All of the models come with a magnetic mount. So there's a magnet with an adhesive on the back. You simply take off the adhesive, you attach it onto the meeting room door and then there's another magnet behind the device And that's all the installation necessary. So if you can imagine something like this is perfect for us, because maybe some of the other companies that do room scheduling don't necessarily want to go through Amazon. For us it's perfect.
Speaker 2:It's plug and play where they might need to get somebody to install their products for them. If yours anybody could do, i get it And so okay. But Amazon's known for. I go to Amazon because I want to get a better price. I can get a better price on Amazon than I can at my local retailer or my local reseller. How have you been able to manage it? Because that's one of the biggest issues that companies that sell commercial products. They're worried. Oh my God, it's going to destroy my channel. People aren't going to want to buy that I've been selling to forever anymore, because they could buy it on Amazon cheaper. So how have you dealt with it? Have you had any channel conflict?
Speaker 3:Sometimes, especially in the beginning, there was a lot of fear when they saw a drone available on Amazon. But we've been very fair to our partners from the very beginning. We keep our solutions at MSRP, so we don't really want to negotiate on pricing, even if it comes to the bulk. Very, very rarely does it come to that. So MSRP pricing is very important to maintain the rest of the channel as well, as we need to make sure that we don't have any rogue resellers pop up on there. So we have one authorized reseller of ours that we work with. We have a great partnership. We don't fear that the price will ever come down if we don't agree upon it, and we always make sure that both our team and their team check Amazon on a weekly basis to see if there's anybody else on there, especially if they're on there and trying to sell below MSRP.
Speaker 2:That's great. So you've been able to manage channel conflict and you are working with one called a 3-P seller. You're able to kind of make sure that they're staying at minimum advertised price where MSRP, and you're keeping your channel in chat, which is great, and that's an area that becomes difficult for some other product manufacturers that have their products at many different distributors. So obviously you have a pretty good relationship with your distributors, because that's where I see the chaos happen. People buy from distributors on different names and then they wind up listing the products on Amazon and destroying the brand. So it sounds like you're pretty fortunate there. That's pretty cool. Now what about marketing your products and the content? How important has that been for you guys and what have you been doing to make it better and better?
Speaker 3:So we've always had recognition in the industry of having great content when it comes to images, when it comes to the actual designs of the devices and then the images of those devices, also video. So we really pride ourselves in creating good content. As far as specializing in marketing on Amazon, we've kind of let our partner do that for us. We've had some bad experience in the past where we were trying to kind of have our own seller account and we simply don't have the interest of focusing on Amazon because it's quite a broad channel that we have. So, as far as the day-to-day ads, we leave it up to the specialists and then, when it comes to the content, they tell us what they need we provide.
Speaker 2:That's great. And again, that's another area that comes up where we definitely meet a lot of brands, whether they are consumer or commercial, and they either sell it to Amazon and struggle with Amazon, because Amazon will control the pricing and doesn't necessarily help with the content. So that has happened. We should stay on that one. But they also, no-transcript, try to build their own three-piece store, which is doable, but then they have to put in an entire infrastructure for that because they think it's easy and it's not easy to deal with that.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's so much, from the logistics to the reconciliation, to the following the rules. So they're getting back to the customers with questions. It's a 24-7 job and you have to be good at so many different things, and one of the mistakes I see is that brands figure I'll just do it myself and they wind up adding a lot more cost and wind up failing when if they had a partner and somebody they could trust and somebody that they're close with, they could do a much better job because it's much more efficient that way. But tell us about what happened. I am curious to find out your Amazon story.
Speaker 3:So before we found the right partner, we were simply selling directly to Amazon through our distributor, and at the very beginning they had an account manager that was quite savvy with everything Amazon, and once he left the company, somebody else took over and they were learning as they went along, and I at that time had no idea how that works if you work directly with Amazon.
Speaker 3:So all of a sudden the prices were going down. We had, let's say, like a slow run for a month and all of a sudden the prices below MSRP. And I find out we can't control that because now it's Amazon's product and they can lower it as low as $1 if they want until somebody buys it. So that was really crushing our channel relationships and we can do anything about it. After that we had to pretty much close down shop when it came to Amazon because it was doing more damage than it did good. So finally we found our partner and they kind of came along and saved the day. And, like you said, there's just so many things that you need to know. On top of that, there's constant changes, so it's not only what you know but what you need to learn along the way. So you need to constantly adapt.
Speaker 2:Every day there's something new. Every day there's something, and it's not like Amazon advertises their changes. Sometimes they'll send you a note, but sometimes you've got to figure it out and learn it from doing it And there's a community that you talked to different people. Hey, have you seen something like this before? Oh, yeah, they started doing this, and Amazon's kind of quiet about some of these smaller but important changes that get made. So you're definitely right there. But once Amazon got your stuff boy, they can move volume, but if they're not moving as fast as they want, they're going to lower the pricing. And we also run into partners that Amazon has a margin guarantee with them. So even if they decide to lower their price, they're going to claw back this margin. I know that happened to you, but definitely happens to others And definitely not a great experience to go through. Have you dealt with any of that torture?
Speaker 3:No, we didn't get to that because we pulled the plug basically as soon as we realized that we can't control the price. That really was a deal breaker for us.
Speaker 2:So you basically turned it off. Like you just said, it's worse for the brand by being there right now until we can get this thing under control.
Speaker 3:We turned it off. Then we started trying to do it ourselves through a seller account. We had some initial success, but then all the changes came along. It was constantly something. So we were considering to potentially hire somebody to just run Amazon for us. And then I was just thinking, why would we need somebody internal for this when there are so many partners there that specialize in this? Then we can have profit share and go at it like that. So I was looking for the right partner. It took a while, but here we are now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we've run into brands that either they try it themselves or they do with Amazon or they've done both and they've taken such big financial hits when they do something wrong. So in one case somebody shipped products to Amazon but it wasn't packaged right And Amazon tried to get something like $86,000 and trying to remember the amount but it was some big amount of money as a penalty for the work that Amazon had to do to undo what they did and to make it sellable again. There are some that are three Ps that are selling it themselves, that ship product to Amazon and Amazon might lose it. But you need to go figure that out with Amazon and put in cases and stay in constant contact with Amazon, which is not easy because it's a machine sometimes And you've got to stay with that or you're going to lose that product.
Speaker 2:And if it's a product like yours, where there's some real cost of goods, it could be painful. If it's something super inexpensive, like a paper product, okay, But You can't take too many of those hits. I don't know if you've ever had to deal with that, but losing product is not fun.
Speaker 3:We had a few, luckily not enough to Mention it as one of the pain points, but yeah, if, if that starts snowballing, then that would have definitely been an additional issue and Beyond Amazon, or you guys, you have your, you have your own website.
Speaker 2:Do you sell direct under on? you have a D to C or D to B, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we do like onesie twosies. So the the website is more for just being Able to communicate with the customers, because we do have an online Help center there. We have options to connect with sales team and customer support team. So there are certain companies that will purchase a unit just for a proof of concept and then we'll Try to connect them to the right part there. But yeah, it does exist.
Speaker 2:Okay, i mean, i mean that's pretty standard these days. I mean for people to have that. What what's interesting, you know, to bring up, is that Amazon has a pretty cool program these days, because when you look at the freight rates Amazon gets, they're just, you know, awesome. And people that have a D to C or or a direct to business site, they need to stock products well with their partners and they need to stock it with their own You know 3pl, their own warehouse. But Amazon has a program Now where you could actually leverage your inventory at FBA and you could drop ship for your direct to consumer or direct to business site and The rates are a little bit more than their FBA, but they're still Pretty cheap as compared to what the common mortals going to get through UPS or FedEx or anything like that. So it's pretty cool systems called multi-channel fulfillment and DFF, and so something cool to think about, or enough you guys ever have. So so what's the next step for you guys and Amazon? is it keep on going, keep on growing you adding more products.
Speaker 3:Definitely keep on growing, keep keep testing Different, different ways to market the solution. So I know we've added some video ads on Amazon. That was pretty interesting a while back because everybody knows about you know the banners and this and that, but just maybe it's a little less than a year ago. They started offering an option where you have a little video that runs between the items and Our devices really are a visual type of product You want.
Speaker 3:You know, you don't want to just see the image, you want to see how, how everything changes. You know, for example, this this is typical that when it's available, it doesn't just say free, but also when it's booked, the screen goes dark. So this is something that you'd be able to see from afar if the meeting room is available or not. And once you see something like that happen on a video, maybe it's more appealing. So definitely trying to grow, i, i can, i can. I can honestly say right now our Amazon business is a top five Earner when it comes to our channel partners. So this is really nice, since we've had those initial issues that the kind of get back on top with Amazon. We we're adding our accessories in the recent months now to to Amazon as well. So we have the additional magnets. We have wall mounts, desk stands that are available for these devices. Those are all going to be Published on Amazon as well and are going to be stocked with FBA through our partner. So hopefully We just keep on growing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, i was thinking like the products, the way you describe them, could be used when you go to like a Conference or something that's kind of a pop-up, like it's not there forever, but they have different rooms that they need people to be able to, you know, book, and so I see this as a great like on the road, you know, for people that run events to be able to use. I think it's a great idea. I was definitely thinking about that. Well, yeah, i love it.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, i love it. You. You have these trade shows. Just one is coming up next week, that's Infocom. Exactly That. Have those meeting rooms at the booths. Of course it makes sense to put something on there and not waste too much time to actually install them. This just connects to Wi-Fi, connects to your calendar, and you're off, you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i think I told you we're going to go, we're going to see you at Infocom, so that's a great show. We can run around and put Jones on all the rooms there. Do some kind of behind the scenes, I'm up for it.
Speaker 3:Definitely That's a great idea.
Speaker 2:Well, they'll throw us out. We'll find out, but it should be a great show.
Speaker 3:We can do it on Friday Before they come in. It's going to be done anyway, Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean we should mess with that a little bit, but it's a great show. It's an Orlando for anybody that I mean. By the time this publishing it'll be, it probably have happened already, but it's an audio visual show that's in Orlando And it's probably one of the better shows for this kind of product that you have in the US. So it's pretty cool.
Speaker 3:So if you were to say, like, what was the biggest lesson you learn from being a commercial product manufacturer and selling on Amazon, what's the most important lesson you've learned that you could share with everybody, I think, communicating the onboarding process very clearly, sharing additional information, even if it looks unnecessary it's better to prevent a bad experience from the customer side rather than having to deal with it afterwards And also customer support. You know something like this if somebody has an issue they can't, they can reach out to Amazon to get that customer support. So you need to communicate properly the available technical customer support, when it comes to either returning the device, if necessary, but, most importantly, how to actually install it and have it start working.
Speaker 2:That's good, good advice. I mean the customer service part is a big deal and making sure you're working with your partner on responding, because what you don't want is returns and you want people happy and you want great reviews. So you need to get to people quickly and you need to get them and solve their issues. So that's super important. So for other commercial and it's not just commercial it's funny I mentioned soccer balls before and people think soccer balls that's a consumer thing. My kids use it, you know we buy them.
Speaker 2:But on Amazon you'll all of a sudden see a sale for 50 or 100 soccer balls and some league is buying off of Amazon. That's a commercial sale. Yeah, you know volleyball nets. We sell volleyball nets and we'll sell 10. Like, who's buying 10? and it's recreational or community centers buying these things, or a beach club is buying them. So there's so much commercial business to be had on Amazon.
Speaker 2:I just think that you need to make sure that if you're going to do it, you do plan ahead and you try to figure out how do I make sure I don't create conflict with the customers that I've had for ever and ever and get them angry that we're selling on Amazon. There's a positive way of doing it and that's that you're making sure it is a showcase. As you said, make sure that the content is great, make sure you're telling your story, but make sure that you're controlling your price so that people aren't buying it below what the other sellers would be able to sell it for. And you know Amazon will do it because they can do it and other sellers will do it because if they can make 50 cents or a dollar, they'll do it.
Speaker 2:Like people are just like that. So I think, planning, making sure you have a good partner, making sure you have great content, and then you do need a marketing plan and you need to work with your partner to make sure you have an advertising plan, because it's become a big part of what happens on Amazon today is advertising. You need to get there, but you have a quasi unique product. So you know, i think you probably stand out more than some of the others. I think this wireless thing is a real winner, because nobody really wants to do the wires anymore if they could avoid it.
Speaker 3:No, especially if it's come to, if it comes to retrofitting, where you know the wires aren't already available. Nobody wants to drill holes, pull wires, change the infrastructure of the walls simply for a room scheduler, or a lot of times, companies now have glass walls. If they're glass walls, where are you going to hide the, the, the cables? So we end up becoming kind of like the only option for those type of situations. So we are definitely happy that we kind of created this niche for ourselves.
Speaker 2:Are you selling on Amazon worldwide, or is it just US or North America?
Speaker 3:It's North America. Currently in Mexico, we're trying to enter Canada and I believe we're testing it out either with the UK or with Germany, germany, germany, uk would be probably good for this, yeah, ok.
Speaker 2:Well, you have to tell us how that goes when you launch a new brand, launch a new markets. But from what I understand, i mean Canada is great, but it's still small, but it's it's, it's good. Mexico, depending on the product, could be big, but UK and Germany are pretty powerful. Yeah, so could be a good market for you. So, with that, any other words of wisdom for us on this? And, if not, we're going to wrap it up today.
Speaker 3:Just as I mentioned earlier, you know it's important to understand your audience. We really do understand our audience. or for any manufacturers out there considering to start selling on Amazon, Invest in the branding, invest in the content, understand your audience. So do some market research and then continuously improve based on the reviews and the feedback you get from the customers.
Speaker 2:Sounds easy, but it definitely adjourns.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, Well we were just fine.
Speaker 2:Just fine, Yeah yeah, yeah, it's always a good partner, it's always helpful. Well, we really appreciate you joining us today. I look forward to seeing you next week at Infocom. I'm going to definitely be there for a day And you know, let's keep on going and keep on growing. And thanks for your advice on commercial products on Amazon.
Speaker 3:Thank you, adam. This was great Look. thanks to see you next week. Great.
Speaker 1:Thank you for watching another episode of the Planet Amazon podcast, where we talk all things Amazon. If you want to learn about how to accelerate your sales on Amazon, visit Phelps United's website at PhelpsUnitedcom.
