Planet Amazon Podcast

Amazon FBA Wisdom: The Journey of SmartScout Founder Scott Needham

• Adam Shaffer • Episode 9

Share episode

We welcome the bright mind of Scott Needham, founder& CEO of SmartScout and host of the Smartest Amazon Seller Podcast, on our show. In this episode, we delve into his fascinating journey from starting a humble reselling bookstore with his brother to becoming, at one point, the head honcho of an empire with the world's largest catalog of Amazon FBA products. As the man behind SmartScout, Scott generously shares the expertise gained from his software development background, which has been instrumental in the success of their Amazon business. It's a roller coaster tale packed with insights, strategies, and an incredible entrepreneurial spirit!

Scott discussed how SmartScout helps brands estimate their market share and revenue on Amazon. It's a peek behind the curtain, revealing the tools and strategies that can help Amazon Sellers enhance their presence on Amazon. He also announced some of the newest SmartScout features to look forward to, such as a new map feature showcasing Amazon seller locations.

Don't miss this riveting discussion that promises a deep insight from one of the best into the world of Amazon and e-commerce strategies.

For more information about SmartScout, visit their website at https://www.smartscout.com/  

Want to chat with us about this podcast? Send us a text message here

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.

Adam Shaffer:

podcast with Adam Shaffer 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. Hello everybody, I'm Adam Shaffe and this is Planet Amazon, where we talk about all things Amazon, and today we have a really special treat we have a great guest. His name is Scott Needham. Scott is the founder and CEO of SmartScout, which is an indispensable tool that many, many of us are using to explore and understand and research the Amazon marketplace. It really is awesome, and Scott will talk more about that later. But Scott's been around the industry for a long time and hopefully we'll get him to tell us some of his history and his journey through the Amazon marketplace.

Adam Shaffer:

But I really got into this by listening to Scott, because he has a podcast called the Smartest Amazon Seller. I think I got that right, scott, and it's something that I listened to when I started getting into the business and it really helped me learn about some of the little things, some of the big things, and also I learned about a bunch of service providers. That really did help us in the end. So, scott, thank you for your inspiration and for teaching me so much from afar. You didn't even know that. But thank you and welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background, because you had probably, if not the biggest, one of the biggest three-piece sellers for quite some time?

Scott Needham:

Yeah Well, thanks, adam, you're right. Been around for a while, have seen a few different phases of Amazon, so I started. My brother started growing a reselling business out of his bookstore maybe 12, 13 years ago, and when I saw the opportunity I was like I also want to work from home or be my own boss. There's a lot of things that combined to make it very exciting and it's been quite a ride.

Scott Needham:

When we first started out just shipping a product into Amazon FBA, we could just sell it there was just not a lot of competition, a lot of spots, and to where it is now, where it's very sophisticated. You know we've gone through COVID, we've seen like a lot of bumps and whatever, but there's definitely a lot of smart Amazon professionals out there, and so you really do, I do feel like to. You know, to survive you really have to learn a lot, and some of the best learning, in my opinion, happens on podcasts where you can dive deep into some subjects and get some real quick takes from people that are in the trenches. Did I feel like I might have missed your question?

Adam Shaffer:

My question was not really a question. It was really that you've been doing this for a while and it would love for you to tell people more about the journey. Now you did start saying that you got into it from your brother. Yeah, that's right and it's inspiration, but it wasn't just a one and done. I mean, you built a huge business.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, no, we. I came from a software development background and so you know you get married to the idea of just like these big businesses and companies that, like technology creates. So I always wanted to go very big and along the way, you know, we we did a lot of things. Right, there was no technology at the time in 2013, 14 and beyond and so we had to build our own and we, you know, we built our own inventory manager. We even built our own research platform. Like I remember building that, like in 2017, and which ultimately became a smart scout, was like kind of our own internal research. And we did. I at one point have the largest catalog of Amazon FBA products in the world. Like we had 120 K unique products in stock. You had 120,000 SKUs.

Adam Shaffer:

Aysons yeah, yeah, oh, I didn't realize it was that big, my God.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, and we, you know, started to like we're like, oh, this is not like the. It had a lot to do with our strategy with a brand, is we found ways to go deeper, to go for the long tail stuff. So a lot of those products, like we weren't selling more than a handful of months, but you, they do usually command a higher gross margin because they're less competitive. And I even felt like we provided a service out there where, like, we were making products available on Amazon FBA that wouldn't be available without it. So it was a, it was fun.

Scott Needham:

There's a lot of challenges of a big catalog and I usually would probably advise people to like you know, don't like Russian to the long tail stuff. Because here's what I'll say with that big of a catalog, no single SKU mattered to us, and that sounds like. That sounds like a strength. It's also a weakness. It's like if no SKU matters, then there's nothing, like there's no product that we are investing into. And so if the SKU creates a problem for you, you know, say there's a compliance issue, like you just want to get rid of it as fast as possible, and every moment you spend on that, you know, creating support cases or whatever, or the IP claims, all sorts of uh issues with products that, like, you're not invested in.

Scott Needham:

You know, if we were doing the same volume on a more concentrated skew count of, like, say, 50 or 100, man, that would be a fun business to be a part of. So, like, see some ASINs that you do, over a million a year on, I think, um, I've started to gravitate towards that as a um. You know, uh, an interesting way to do Amazon. But then again, if you get burned on a single ASIN, you've got the inventory, and I've seen that too. You know some, some products, a hand of a brand line that we had, you know, uh, seven figures of inventory that, um, we've been working through and, um, it's a good product. Like, I don't like regret some of the decisions, but like, uh, we went a little bit bigger than we should have. So, uh, man, I just kind of like highlighted the problems of both.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, no, no, I mean. But we, we started when I started doing this. Um, for us it was get, get a client like so for us it was working with brands to help them sell. And so you'll start with a brand and there's not that much velocity. So there's just a lot more work to build up that brand and those ASINs on Amazon. And we realized it was a lot easier to work with brands that have velocity already and they're not necessarily having a great experience with Amazon, whether it's hard for them to do it, um, it's hard for them to reconcile, it's hard for them to deal with the cases they don't understand Amazon or they're selling to Amazon um, one P and they're just getting squeezed. So we kind of evolved to more going and trying to work with brands that had some volume already, because we spent maybe more work on these smaller ones.

Adam Shaffer:

But wow, I didn't realize you had so many SKUs because I'd lose. I'd lose my mind. But weren't you like at one time the king of pickleball or something before you? You weren't? I remember hearing that.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, so, um, that says a little bit of our transition. Um, I had a cousin who, in 2016, he started a private label business. He saw an opportunity, is like, okay, pickleball is an upcoming sport and no one on Amazon were selling the graphite paddles and if you look on Amazon right now, that's just kind of a joke, that like it was that underrepresented. So, um, uh, you know, I advised him here and there and but he built it on his own and was doing, you know, a few million dollars on pickleball paddles. So, fast forward, he was ready to try different adventure and I was like, well, I want to try a new adventure. And so, uh, we bought it, we bought that business from him.

Scott Needham:

Okay, I didn't realize that I actually, you know, bought my way into the pickleball industry. Are you still doing it? Yeah, we sell a little bit, but boy, it got real competitive. I, by the time that we actually purchased the business from him, pickleball was not, uh, the lead product he's. There were other products in the portfolio, um, and I almost might argue that that was maybe a mistake. Uh, let's back up like a mistake on his end on not going all in on, you know, a growing uh segment and building an audience and doing all the things that, like you know, he had the makings of. Just like creating an awesome brand that could have been a top um player in a space that is now much, much bigger. Um, right now, you know it's. It's super competitive.

Scott Needham:

The way that we sell pickleball paddles is some of the brand equity that he created. You know, uh sold millions of paddles and so, um, not millions of paddles, maybe like a few, maybe a few hundred thousand of paddles, and so people know that brand in there. They stay a little loyal to it, so we get a few sales for free. Then we also niched down and we found just some interesting designs that we knew that people would want. We kind of made it fun. We got like, uh uh, leopard print or zebra, uh, you know, gold, silver. So we kind of just like went more on the design side to create some unique paddles and those ones have done uh, you know, they've done, they've done well enough to, uh, you know, to be profitable.

Adam Shaffer:

And and so you built this business. But I remember bumping into you and I I don't know, are you still doing, because I know you've been spending a lot of time on the software, but are you still doing buy box or are you still selling?

Scott Needham:

them. We are, um, we're ratcheting that one down. So there's a lot of things that happened. One, we put our money into a different business. Two, three and four or just like I get just like rattle mistakes.

Scott Needham:

We got squeezed in 2021 by the quantity restrictions and that was kind of like a downer. We had a brand that kind of left us with a lot of inventory, just a few things sized up, where my brother was like I wanna run with this private label business and I was like I wanna run with the software business and so by Boxer, while it was profitable, just kind of, I felt like it was a lot of risk to hold on to a business that the founders weren't putting effort into it. So we kind of just sold through the inventory, kind of take cash out. We did try and exit, tried pretty hard and got an offer, but things just didn't work out. The company that purchased they just weren't ready to make the offer yet. Yeah, and the market changed a lot. Yeah, that was like I think the market changed a little bit after, so like we probably could have been all right at that moment. This was just before interest rates were starting to go up and yeah, that's the story. What's so interesting is what I know now versus 10 years ago. I think we could have been a lot more successful at that business.

Scott Needham:

We see a lot of accelerators, people that work with brands. They're doing pretty well in comparison. They're doing pretty well in showcasing what they can offer brands. And some brands don't even like say they've been burned by their 1P relationship, like what you were saying. They kind of get squeezed a little bit but they don't have the expertise, nor do they want the financial risk of creating their own seller account and just like starting from scratch and so they can work with someone to kind of they get the same retail relationship where they get to sell the inventory and just like don't have to worry about it anymore, but they have a little bit more control and working with a skill.

Adam Shaffer:

They have a lot more control because and usually the bigger brands it's hard for them to push Amazon around, but they, we're there for them, like they kind of I don't wanna say they own us, but it's really we're trying to please them every day.

Scott Needham:

Absolutely, and it's totally. They're right. Every brand has a is sitting on our opportunity, and if you just let Amazon do what it's gonna do, like you're kind of missing on that opportunity, whereas, like what we were referring to, that you kind of have to really get a lot of expertise to be skilled at the Amazon marketplace, and so a brand should have some of that expertise close by. Yeah, for sure, because, like today's prime day, there are multiple ways to think about prime day, and it's fine if you have no strategy, but, like you have a reason why you have no strategy. I'd argue that everyone I could find a strategy that works for everyone.

Adam Shaffer:

The very least I would put a prime discount on our stale products and you know, it's a great time to move out of some of the stuff that's been sitting around for a while, and it's good also like, if you have, like we were talking before this call on products that are, you know, subscription products, I mean not a bad time to get people into products that they're gonna buy over and over again 100%, because you'll never have more browsers on Amazon than today and, you know, are they enticed by the 25% discount Absolutely, especially in some of those products, categories like think, like a grocery or a beauty, where people are interested in trying new stuff out.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, you know.

Adam Shaffer:

I'm still sad because we're not selling anymore, but one of our best selling products ever was fingernail replacement clues. So it was like girls would, or anybody would be able to, change their fingernails and put this clue on and it sold for like $399 or $499. We made like a dollar, but we sold 20 or 30,000 a month. I mean it was just the most amazing product of all time. If I can get that back, that was just one of my favorites. But it was one of those things that they did a subscribe and save and you know, maybe 30% of the take was from subscribe and save. So anyway, I won't cry too much about it, but it was a great product.

Adam Shaffer:

So let's come back to SmartScout and talk about that for a little bit and we'll come back to some of the selling on Amazon. But tell us about SmartScout because we use it every day, like somebody in our company's got it up on their screen all the time and we find we use it for when we're talking to brands, we try to help them understand the category they're in. We try to help them understand the competitors that they're up against. We try to explain and use some of the features like Amazon is out of stock and you're selling it to Amazon, yet they're in. Stock rate is X and that's not really a great thing. And we use it to scout for products, but they're not label products, although they could be their brands we're looking for and brands that aren't being represented well by Amazon. So that's really like what we use yours for, but tell us your thoughts on that.

Scott Needham:

Now, you're totally right, we built it for the brands to look at. You know, okay, there's a million brands on Amazon, but I've only got this. Next week I could only talk to 20. So what are those 20? It's kind of like, and so we just throw everything at you, and you know it's up to one of the challenges of SmartScout. While we do, you know, we've grown, you know, hundreds of users this year. One of the challenges, though, is everyone uses a little bit differently, and it is up to the user to, you know, to kind of tell those stories with the data, like, okay, I got all this data, but like now, what you know, and I think you guys have kind of hit just right where you know brands actually can kind of connect with it, because it's the first time that they can, you know, have some data or some to quantify the opportunity that is.

Adam Shaffer:

Amazon. Yeah, it sizes it for them. They go come on, they're selling that much that brand. Come on, nobody knows who they are. Yes, that brand is selling that much on Amazon. And we'll say it's directly, you know. But nothing's perfect, but it's directionally correct. I mean, they're that big, they have X percent market share. They're doing approximately this much a month.

Scott Needham:

You're right. So that puts me in the business of, like you know, estimating revenue on Amazon and I'm going to first tell you I'm like, oh, like you know, there's, there's, there's some difficulties, there's some challenges to get estimate revenue, but we, we keep working on it, we keep improving it. We found some new, like you know, ways to be a little more accurate and but I feel way more confident about that directional piece that the market share. So, you know, there's, there were. I didn't want to build a tool that others had done. You know, I can't imagine, like you know, copying a jungle scout or helium 10.

Scott Needham:

The way that I look at it is those guys have done a really good job of showing, you know, like a product research and how to like understand, you know how to optimize products and stuff about that, whereas smart scouts kind of a step above its, its, its market research, you know, you see the whole brand, you see the categories, and so that's kind of the way that we think about it.

Scott Needham:

We think about, you know, the high level perspectives and just just to kind of like hit your point I was talking with someone yesterday they use smart scout and when they're talking with a with a perspective brand. They're like hey, you know what, like you're right now, you're like 0.1% market share, or maybe you're not even on Amazon. If I, if you can get 1% market share, is that interesting to you? Like, does that like? Would you be interested in getting 1% market share of this? Like you know this category? Or how? About 2% market share? Like what is what is your goal? And I think smart scout like, just like, immediately conveys that to both parties of like what the opportunity and like what a goal could be.

Adam Shaffer:

And your revenue estimates. I mean, depending on the category, you're really pretty good. I mean we've said, hey, you know, we're estimating your revenue is about X dollars annually on Amazon to go. Yeah, I mean that's, you're right there, like it's right there. So you know, we've been fortunate that some of the people we've been talking to it's really right there. But when we showed them their competitors, either they're surprised because they never heard of them or they know exactly who they are and they don't know how the hell they're doing it to them. And a lot of times they do blame Amazon because Amazon doesn't pay enough attention, is out of stock on their products a lot. So it gives us a lot of openings to try and move. And again, our strategy recently has really been to take folks that are selling one P, aren't thrilled with the experience and don't want to have all their eggs in the Amazon basket. They don't want to open up their own three P story. They're either they're afraid Amazon's gonna be angry with them or sometimes Amazon is angry with them.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, and like we can. Amazon's not gonna be angry, but you never know, and you know who wants to guarantee that one and or and or. Amazon's just not giving enough love to a bunch of their favorite skews. That would do a lot better. So it's like just shift them over, let us show you what we could do and then, if you're happy, we'll keep on shifting and they wind up either going half and half with us and with Amazon, or some of them just move at all, and there hasn't been any retribution that I've seen. I don't know.

Scott Needham:

I have in various cases. Some brands are forced to just do one P and there's no rhyme or reason. I would guess if you're talking to, we're talking brands that do half a billion a year. It's kind of those where they're like no, we're going to keep you in house.

Adam Shaffer:

I mean I can see like Apple, Samsung and some of these big, but those are going to be hardworking anyway. But when I talk to some of the people at some of those bigger brands, they're like I don't know how Amazon does make money on this. So we're good, it's a shock.

Scott Needham:

No, and like one P is also. They've started pulling away from full catalogs.

Adam Shaffer:

They won't carry their focus on ASINs.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, they're going to be like well, we just want to be profitable. So you're seeing that other split where, like you know, a percentage of a brand's ASINs won't be covered anymore, and so you know that is actually a prime opportunity for you know people to help out.

Adam Shaffer:

So when it comes to SmartScout, like so, so again we're a customer because we use it both internally and we use it to help us tell our story what other users are using it. I mean, like we know and we saw at that Amazon Accelerate show, they were there promoting their stuff with Stackline and they're so expensive and your product does a lot more than theirs does. I'm surprised that more people aren't running over to you.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, I mean, I've been a student of the company Stackline for a few years now. They may not even know what we're up to, but we might be a thorn on their side because we there's some overlap. Stackline has a lot of other services, they you know but when it comes to, like, market intelligence, we think that we have, you know, some improvements. There's one, there's a few things that they've got that I'm like, ooh, we want to build that too, so but the price difference couldn't be bigger and it's so category specific.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, yeah, they'll charge you per category and we kind of just throw everything at you at once, because that's kind of what it makes it work, you know, is to be able to, you know, compare certain categories. In my brands that might be multi category, and so we really feel strong about, like the, just the category itself. You know, market intelligence brands are hungry for that data and the truth is there really are tens of thousands of brands out there that would pay, and so that's just a and so is that a bigger customer?

Adam Shaffer:

the brands themselves or the sellers?

Scott Needham:

We do better with sellers because we are one you know in our history, so we communicate with them a lot better. Do we have use cases and do we work with brands? Yeah, we do. I would say we've done a lot of effort to just get to the private label seller. We could maybe call them like the smaller brands where we've introduced some keyword tools. A lot of times they want to stack up their competition as we throw on. We don't manage ads, but we could be like an intelligence tool that helps support an ad strategy. That's the direction that we're in. We really are spending days improving the little things. Am I wrong? You used to be in the electronics category, or?

Adam Shaffer:

you still are? Yeah, we still are, but we were born there. But that's an area we'd like to get better.

Scott Needham:

I'm not sure if you've checked Smart Scout in electronics category. If you were to check it out about six months ago, there's a lot of spots. Right now not a lot of spots.

Adam Shaffer:

I got to check it out because I remember calling you up once and saying, hey, help me, because we were making a big bet on a computer.

Scott Needham:

We were totally in the dark on some subcategories. This is why the electronics category has some subcategories that are out on their own. They do not benchmark to the main category, electronics. When I say benchmark, they didn't have a sales rank. That's probably our key number that we use in building out our estimates. I take, for example, CPUs. It's Intel and AMD a very simple category from a brand perspective. There's two major players. But I couldn't tell you what number 10 in CPUs is. I couldn't tell you what number 100 in CPUs is in terms of estimate sales. I can tell you what our estimates were for electronics.

Adam Shaffer:

Electronics, which is like monstrous right.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, we built a model that works for each of those subcategories.

Adam Shaffer:

I'm going to get back on after this call and check that out. Yeah. That is it's been a big category for us. It's just. I don't know.

Scott Needham:

It was very random which little categories were here or there, for example, ipad cases. You know what? Amazon created a custom category for iPad cases and we couldn't get any estimates out of it. We had to build our own model. We did get some external data to validate. Then we look at reviews per month on the top listing. It's a good idea of what's going on. Again, we feel pretty good. Is it going to be completely accurate? No, but I went through it. I compared it to electronics catalog. We were within 25 percent of those two.

Adam Shaffer:

That is awesome. What's coming up next for SmartScout? What's the next great features? Are there big releases or are they just iterative? Let's just keep on having.

Scott Needham:

We got some big stuff coming. We're building an executive dashboard Sorry, like an executive brand report. Let's say, you want to look at Lego. If you're the CEO of Lego and you don't touch Amazon, we want to build something really interesting or cool to speak to that audience. Maybe you'll find yourself using it in pitches. You're like okay, here's your top product, here's your top competing product and how they stack up against each other.

Adam Shaffer:

That's a brand I really love and want. That's a tough one to get into, but Lego man, I'd kill for that one. Not kill, but I really love it. That sounds great. Executive dashboard If you saw what we did with your stuff you'd be like I don't know, maybe we should show you so you can see what we do.

Adam Shaffer:

We'll say, okay, who's our target? They got to do more than 3 million. Let's just say you're 3 million and greater. We try to put some size to it so we don't have heavy bags in there, but maybe some size. We try to say where is Amazon a seller, but not the dominant seller? We do all this stuff. Then we come up with our list. But now we have all these brands but the brands are owned by other companies. It's not that easy. Then we take that and we go to a company called Lucia or InfoUSA and we try to find out who the parent companies are from the parent companies to try and find all the contacts. Then from there we put it in HubSpot and we mark it to these guys. It's wild, but you're the first step in the target list. You are the target list.

Scott Needham:

Interesting. Yeah, I don't know if I've heard anyone but has that awareness that, okay, here's a brand, but there's a parent brand here. We got to find those people.

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, because you try to even find the brand. Who are they? It could be that the brand has got its own infrastructure, but a lot of times it doesn't. I mentioned to you, like Smuckers, they're this big parent brand, but they have Dunkin' Donuts and they have Pet Food. They have all these different things. It's like Procter and Gamble. Sometimes it's the brand and sometimes it's the parent. You got to find the right people there and you have to do some account-based marketing to figure it out. It's been super helpful for us. Get us that executive dashboard. I hope you know George more for that.

Scott Needham:

We generally try and give more than we ask. We have a full reskin coming up. You'll see, the whole thing will be a little bit cleaner, a little bit prettier.

Adam Shaffer:

One feature we love is I mean, it's silly, I don't know why we do is. I guess we're sellers at heart, but it's the map that shows you where all the sellers are. It's like the bubbles, where there's a lot of them, where there's a few of them, we always try to find ourselves, and we try to find some of the guys that we're competing with on there. I don't know what it is about that, but it's quite interesting.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, what it does really well is it visualizes what's going on on Amazon and behind the scenes. It gets you excited to research more. Most sellers have zero interest in the tool. It doesn't help them at all, but what it does is it gives you this motivation that you're like, oh, there's something to this. How can I see their strategy a little bit more?

Adam Shaffer:

Yeah, also, we're in our backyard. Who's in our backyard? We want to know them.

Scott Needham:

Right. Did you see our update that we made just two or three weeks ago?

Adam Shaffer:

No, maybe, but I don't know what it was.

Scott Needham:

We put on the map. We've changed the color, whether they're a private label or a reseller.

Adam Shaffer:

Okay, that's helpful for sure, because the private label we're interested in, but it's the guys that are potentially competing with us that we want to know a bit more about. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. I'm going to check that out. That's awesome, cool. What's going to happen after SmartScouter? Is this it? Then you're going to retire.

Scott Needham:

Well, you know, I don't know, when I'm with the heatwei, I've always even like a year ago, sort of really entertain, you know, building more adjacent categories, like okay, we got this research thing, like what about an inventory manager? And so, like the reason why is we've built a lot of leverage in this e-commerce space, so I hope that I'm able to use that in some way that I can reach. You know, and, like you know, I've spent four years left a lot of nights of sleep, you know, figuring out how to reach sellers and brands. I hope that my you know what we are able to offer only gets better, and so you know I'll be around for a while.

Adam Shaffer:

Are you still gonna sell or are you not? Are you really not?

Scott Needham:

Yeah, no, it's helpful to have a playground and to reference and learn. And you know, do some things Do. I don't get in a nitty gritty as often, but boy is it interesting to see like. Here's an example. I really like the tool seller board and just being able to use my brand on seller board just teaches me so much about the software part and the business. And so you know I understand the pain points that you have and actually I know where seller board comes up short. So that's you know. I'm definitely gonna try and keep tabs on having the private label business to keep myself sharp.

Adam Shaffer:

So when you sell, it's mostly private label, your brand. Yeah, that's where.

Scott Needham:

I probably spend most of my time now.

Adam Shaffer:

Really Okay. I didn't realize that that's great, and you would just add Accelerate. What were your thoughts? Did you like it? I?

Scott Needham:

mean, I've been to go into Amazon conferences since 2014. They had like a strategic sellers conference or whatever and they iterated on it and finally I'm like, okay, you guys finally got it right. I'd go for more of like the trade show conference style where, like you know, you got a lot of service providers and that was really good.

Adam Shaffer:

I thought it was great. I like that we get to see the Amazon executives and they don't actually turn over like the other people in the trenches.

Adam Shaffer:

So, like many of the people have been there for a couple of years, so maybe you can make some relationships. I don't know. I thought it was pretty cool. I liked seeing a lot of the service providers. I thought it was always fun to see what they got. But it makes you feel like you're a seller and as a seller, when you sit back in your home or your office, you feel like Amazon is always trying to screw me and at least there they're trying to tell you that they care about you. I don't know if it's a big show or not and it's propaganda, but it makes you feel like there's some value.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, one thing I like is when you know say you got the right people in the room right. I like when the host of the show is trying to make a big splash and not trying to like recoup their money. You know and like you get things.

Scott Needham:

Like you know they rented out the space needle whole area for like a night and you know they probably spent shoot. They could have spent half a million to a million dollars on that party alone Just to like make an impression. That's always fun for me. Does it make the conference that much better?

Adam Shaffer:

No, like the donut wall did. The donut wall was right.

Scott Needham:

Yeah right.

Adam Shaffer:

If you like donuts, it was pretty good.

Scott Needham:

I didn't see the donut wall.

Adam Shaffer:

It's like. What would happen is like each day there was a wall on each of the floors. Sometimes it had like peanuts, or sometimes it had cookies. Then one day it was just donuts on these spears and you just go and take the donuts, okay. So if you're a glutton, it's really pretty good. I am.

Adam Shaffer:

Wow, wow. So with that I mean I really really appreciate talking. I could talk to you all day because I know you're into the stuff and I'm into it. But I really appreciate everything you do for Amazon ecosystem, for the community. You're always out there, you know. You respond to all your emails and you're very approachable. So thank you for that. And we love and keep your podcast going. Don't stop. I really enjoy listening to it, but we do love SmartScav. So keep on iterating.

Scott Needham:

Yep, yeah, we're happy. And like the podcast like I'm actually ramping it up again right now, like I've got more guests in the last two weeks and it is such a great tool and I hope you are able to use it in this way. It is such a great tool to meet people and to explore ideas.

Adam Shaffer:

You know I love it, so thank you for the inspiration also. So with that, if people want to learn more about SmartScout, it's an easy URL, right.

Scott Needham:

Yeah, it's just smartscout. com.

Adam Shaffer:

SmartScout. com Go for it. I recommend you guys at least go and check it out. It doesn't cost anything to look at it and to play around with it and I think that you'll get a lot of utility from it. So it's worth it, for sure. And anybody that asks, whether they're brands or they're sellers, I mean to us it's one of the main tools. We use a lot of other things, but this is our go-to. So thanks very much, scott, for that. Thank you With that, let's wrap it up, and thank you very much.

Adam Shaffer:

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.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Adam Shaffer

Host