Connected Commerce: Can One Bad Review Outweigh 10 Good Ones?

Hai Mag 00:08

Hey, welcome back to Connected Commerce. This is Hi, your host, and I'm the CEO and founder of Eva Commerce. And today I have a I have a friend, my guest, he's Danan, and Dana will tell us about his stories, his experience about connected commerce. Dana and I met I think more than five, six years ago. It was in in Miami, it was a nice

Danan Coleman 00:31

Miami. Yeah.

Hai Mag 00:34

event of

Hai Mag 00:36

I don't remember that company like bringing a a kind of a network together. They know they can help.

Danan Coleman 00:42

Yeah. That that was

Danan Coleman 00:43

that was festivus was the event. And it was yeah,

Hai Mag 00:46

Festivals.

Danan Coleman 00:47

it was Steve Simonson and Melissa Simonson.

Hai Mag 00:50

Yes, two great people and you know, Steve is still around. I'm not sure

Danan Coleman 00:53

Yeah. Yep.

Hai Mag 00:55

what Melissa is doing. I didn't hear from her for some time, but you know

Danan Coleman 00:59

Yeah, she went heavy

Danan Coleman 01:00

into TikTok for a while. but I haven't seen her in over a year. But I I I regularly I talk almost weekly with Steve and I'm part of his group on Catalyst eighty eight. I don't know if you know about that. You should join that group though. He's Yeah, yeah.

Hai Mag 01:14

should join but also I

Hai Mag 01:16

should definitely invite Steven to this podcast too. So

Danan Coleman 01:20

Yeah, good luck with

Danan Coleman 01:21

that. He won't even go on mine.

Hai Mag 01:23

okay.

Hai Mag 01:24

Well we'll see. There will be a little

Danan Coleman 01:26

Yeah.

Hai Mag 01:27

bit of a competition. But I mean a lot of people in our you know audience and the the Amazon people they know you but please tell us about yourself and also like all the new things that you are doing right now.

Danan Coleman 01:41

Okay, cool. So in the beginning, when a mother and a father love each other. No, so I got started selling on Amazon in 2010 when there was no FBA, there was no ads, or or this stuff was in beta at least. And if you had one good picture, you made many good sales. a lot has changed since then. I'm still an active seller, I've been in supplements the entire time.

Danan Coleman 02:07

But I have a unique situation in that I and I I personally, you know, God love all of you that enjoy doing private label. I do not. I have exclusivity to factory manufacturers brands in supplements, and we are just their Amazon arm and we handle everything having to do with Amazon, but we get the product on consignment and then once a month we just let them know this is how many sales we had. Please charge our card, please send.

Danan Coleman 02:34

Here's the label. Please ship this into Amazon. So we have no inventory. We have no cash flow stuck. That's my Amazon business. It's not a massive business and it never really has been, but it's highly, highly profitable. So eight years ago, I got into software for Amazon sellers with Manage by Stats. And

Hai Mag 02:52

Right.

Danan Coleman 02:52

then I

Danan Coleman 02:54

helped broker the sale of that to carbon six and then went into strategic partnerships at carbon six. And so when we met high, I was doing strategic partnerships for Managed by Stats. yeah.

Hai Mag 03:04

That's right. That was like

Hai Mag 03:06

the the the the latest phase of the managed by stats I remember. I

Danan Coleman 03:11

That's right.

Hai Mag 03:12

I think like they they sold it like a year after or something like that.

Danan Coleman 03:15

Yeah,

Danan Coleman 03:15

something like that. Yeah. And so long story short, I've I've helped a number of companies scale through my existing partner platform. I've I've expanded my partner platform. and and I've started my own businesses. So I've got three four four businesses, but two primary businesses in the space. One of them is called Catalog Defender, where we're monitoring products for critical problems, then we alert you.

Danan Coleman 03:41

It's the most inexpensive and dedicated to just that for for that type of service. I've got e-com triage where I remove negative product reviews for Amazon sellers, all TOS compliant, three to ten percent removal rate. That's my primary thing. I freaking love that business because I'm able to do something for sellers that basically ultimately they don't the time to do. And that's this.

Danan Coleman 04:05

This company is basically dedicated just to that thing. in my free time between the hours of 8 30 p.m. after the kids are asleep and 1 a.m., I will consult brands or agencies. And that I literally just do that for fun. and then I started ecom dot events, which is all as many events, both digital and physical, that I can find in the Amazon or e com space all over the world.

Danan Coleman 04:30

Hi, you know, I've kept a spreadsheet for for as long as we've known each other. so over five years I've been keeping a spreadsheet of the events that are happening in our space. And I've just taken that same spreadsheet and built it into a website that's interactive and has a good graphic user interface and stuff like that. You can search and you know, as as I continue to develop this, I'll get discount codes.

Danan Coleman 04:52

so always try the code Dana D-A-N-A-N for an event and see if it works because I'm trying to make that the code for every event. And then I've got my podcast, which is the e comm growth show. And that's and and then there's the WhatsApp group.

Hai Mag 05:08

Right, exactly. So I think you're doing a lot of amazing things. The one that I like, which we don't do at Eva, we do a lot of things, so it's always not easy to do partnerships with Eva because

Danan Coleman 05:20

Yeah.

Hai Mag 05:20

we only do omni channel everything, you know, and then it's hard. But this negative feedback removal, I just wanna say that like a lot of people don't understand it, even

Danan Coleman 05:33

Yeah.

Hai Mag 05:34

from a a logical point of view, instead of trying to get more reviews, five star reviews, four star reviews, if you are able to remove one one star review, I mean this is not easy, guys. There is nobody is doing some abracadabra and then remove that review. It is a low

Danan Coleman 05:53

sweat work.

Hai Mag 05:54

probability scenario, like you already

Danan Coleman 05:56

Mm-hmm.

Hai Mag 05:57

mentioned, three to ten percent. By the way, that's a great success rate if

Danan Coleman 06:02

Yeah.

Hai Mag 06:03

Most of the time it doesn't happen. But if it happens, then removing that one review is almost has the same impact as you get maybe seven, ten, four to five star reviews. So which that's review. Five to three, exactly.

Danan Coleman 06:17

Yeah, yeah, the the spread is five to fifteen. Yeah, so for yeah,

Danan Coleman 06:24

yeah, so for every negative review you remove, it's like similar to acquiring five to fifteen positive reviews.

Hai Mag 06:31

Exactly. And if the positive, let's say it's five star. Now, what if like you just you know spend a lot of money into wine or some other program, whatever, or wait for the the the you the consumers to give that rating? Hey, remove the negative reviews, and there are some ideas around that. Maybe it'll give us a a story around that, that I don't know, but the idea is now to talk about some connected commerce stories, Danan and

Hai Mag 06:57

We'll be very happy to listen the first story from you.

Danan Coleman 07:01

Cool. right. Well, so I've done I I've done a lot on e-com. I I've settled on Amazon. I'm pure Amazon today, but I've launched a Shopify store. Gosh, must have been nearly eight years ago at this point. no, it was. It was actually eight years ago now that's because I started it right around when my daughter was first daughter was born. and when I did that.

Danan Coleman 07:28

I learned that Shopify is a whole different beast. So I'd come from the local search marketing SEO, your local business, and I could get pretty much any brand, any company on the first page of local results for their primary keywords. And so I had a backing knowledge, a base knowledge of what is the internet looking for, right? Well, it's the most relevant.

Danan Coleman 07:56

Results based on search, right? That's all it's ever going to be. And AI doesn't change that. AI wants to produce to you the most relevant result based on what you're looking for. So what I learned is that I didn't like doing that because Shopify took a lot more work. You had to SEO the website, you had to get out there, whereas on Amazon the traffic was already there. So this is sort of like a

Danan Coleman 08:20

The opposite of a success story, but it it was a learning experience. I spent a ton of time doing this. Focus your energy, time, and money to the area that's making you money. And when you have that optimized like crazy, only then start going out to other avenues to start making more money. And I'm sorry, hi, because this

Danan Coleman 08:44

You do multi-channel fulfillment, right? or multi-channel everything. omni-channel, yeah, yeah.

Hai Mag 08:50

I'm the channel management, right? And I think

Danan Coleman 08:54

Yeah. So here's an interesting thing is that if you've got something humming along really well, you used to have to manually launch the next thing and it was completely independent from what's going on. But like High has created a software where you can unify all of that.

Danan Coleman 09:11

And so if you can just exert a bit more effort and time, but the payoff is 900 times what you put in, then I definitely recommend it. So that was one that was my first learning experience was don't try to put your five fingers into six pies on six different tables. Cause you're never gonna be able to focus. this is a bad example, but basically.

Danan Coleman 09:36

Don't spread your attention, money, and time so thin that you're always busy getting no results or low results. So that was my that was one of my biggest lessons learned was was that not exerting all of my effort to to do low production or low income. and then today doing a little bit of a sidestep here on

Danan Coleman 10:00

Well, where should you focus next? Hi, what are you seeing? Cause I'll I'll tell you what I think. and by the way, this is not from personal experience, but I am partnered with agencies that are TikTok and Walmart and and I I have my finger on the pulse of a lot of different brands. But I wanna know, like once you kind of honed in on this, where do you see people going? Hi.

Hai Mag 10:21

No, that's a great question. And I was thinking about that, right? Like you you are right, and I am having like maybe two to four brand calls every day, and we talk about Amazon, Shopify, Tic Tac. Of course, we have different practices, it's not the same person doing Amazon and Shopify. Even on Amazon right now, we have four specialized roles, all done by different people.

Hai Mag 10:47

But from the customer side, they are like, hey, it's a great idea. Let's start all of it together. Now, I always think about it, it's like a kind of a qualification situation. Okay. And for example, in sales, you use some qualification methods like to qualify whether it is the right time to really engage. Can you really sell something? And

Hai Mag 11:12

When you look at it, there is like very simple principles. They one of them is called BANT. The Bent stands for B is budget. Now, when somebody says, Great idea, the reason, and because I tell them the reason why you should do omnichannel, Amazon, TikTok, Shopify together, because like TikTok helps you already to generate demands on Amazon and Shopify. And then Amazon

Danan Coleman 11:38

Yes. That's exactly where

Danan Coleman 11:40

I was going.

Hai Mag 11:41

Exactly. Amazon helps you to grow more than Shopify. You need Shopify because you want to know your customer without having the one P customer information. Your valuation will not be only dependent on what you sell on the marketplaces without knowing your product. So it all makes sense and there is network effects. But the question,

Danan Coleman 12:01

Yes.

Hai Mag 12:02

do you really have the money for it? Because if you want to do Google Ads, like people come to me a couple of years back, I would say

Hai Mag 12:10

Let's start Google Ads. Now I tell them, okay, start Google Ads, minimum 5k. 10K is even better. Do you really have that money? Because if you want to spend a couple of hundred dollars and try to test something, that's not a test. That will not work. Google will

Danan Coleman 12:25

Yeah.

Hai Mag 12:27

work, but you need to spend the right amount of money. Meta will work the same way. So the budget of

Hai Mag 12:33

handling everything that's important. Then do you have the time? Do you have enough resources? Like let's say we do omnichannel, but you still need to do the fulfillment. You still need to have a lot of people to try to handle all of it. So availability availability is a is always an issue. So after having that qualification, like is it the right time? Is it

Hai Mag 12:56

the timing is right, do you have the right resources? Then we really, really recommend whether it makes sense to start a new channel or doing all three together or something

Danan Coleman 13:08

Mm-hmm.

Hai Mag 13:08

like that. But if somebody comes to me like and they don't have enough budget.

Hai Mag 13:13

and the people and everything, I would tell them, okay, let's start from Amazon. Why not? You know, like it's always the easy way, you know, you don't need to know the consumers, they don't need to know your brand. If they have a bit more, I would say

Hai Mag 13:28

tic tac plus amazon because

Danan Coleman 13:30

Agreed.

Hai Mag 13:31

that's great like tic tac will give you first a demand lift and second different type of customers that you normally don't know and then

Danan Coleman 13:38

Yep. Yep.

Hai Mag 13:41

shopify always it is important but it can wait

Hai Mag 13:45

too until you are really really doing well on Amazon Tic Tac. But if you have the money, it can always start at some point because then you really understand the the customer by the by knowing them.

Hai Mag 14:00

really on the Shopify because now you know their household address, they are, everything about them. And maybe they will subscribe to your product, especially if you're selling supplements like you,

Danan Coleman 14:11

Yeah.

Hai Mag 14:11

CPG products, beauty products, and you really want to know who is subscribing to your service, then you can sell them different products, then you can build loyalty. There is no loyalty in TikTok or Amazon. Loyalty means the same customer buying another

Hai Mag 14:28

product from you depending on your the category you are in that loyalty or a membership that you can build on Shopify can have an amazing you know kind of impact a network effect to your growth as well. But

Danan Coleman 14:43

Yeah,

Danan Coleman 14:44

so

Hai Mag 14:44

I

Hai Mag 14:44

love that example that you have but you know, you are also even working on four or five things all the time, right? Like sometimes I think people like you and me, we don't like to you know, to just focus on one single thing. We just wanna do a few things at the same time.

Danan Coleman 14:59

no. It

Danan Coleman 15:01

tr spreading my time across many different areas is a huge problem for me. But

Hai Mag 15:06

Okay. But it's

Hai Mag 15:08

maybe in your nature.

Danan Coleman 15:09

Yes, it is. It is. I what

Danan Coleman 15:12

I love to do is dive into something, figure out how to do it, and then hand it off to somebody. So that was a hard part for me to learn in my own business was once I've figured out a system, handing it off to somebody else. And that's what I've been really focusing on for the last year is handing over the jobs that can be done by other people and and being okay with.

Danan Coleman 15:34

The results, if they're not as good as what I would have expected to do, because nobody's me but me, right? And so I have that with a staff member and with a couple of staff members, which I've kept my companies really, really lean, right? and that allows me to give the the pricing that I do and still remain profitable. But now what I'm working on, and this is the subject matter of every conversation on earth today, it seems like.

Danan Coleman 15:58

is I'm using AI to automate the work that my staff do. Not even the work that I do first, but the work that I s my staff do, because then I can repurpose them to higher revenue generating things. and just to go back to what you said about, you know, Shopify, the beauty of Shopify, one of the biggest beauties of Shopify that you can build your own network. And then when you go to launch a product, you can launch it to

Danan Coleman 16:25

You should send them an email. So you build brand recognition, brand loyalty in your own little ambassador network and go, hey, I'm doing a new thing. Because you're a previous customer, you get 20% off, which is really just the Amazon fee that you would pay anyhow, 30% off. And you still make the same amount of money you would make if they bought it on Amazon. but you know, you can use that for the launch of a new product.

Danan Coleman 16:50

You can use repeat purchases. You can do a lot when you are on Shopify and you start building a list. I've come to learn, and I should have been doing this for many, many, many more years, but building a list of people and networks is critically important for remaining in a space, a known entity in a space. Like if you let's say you're Yeti, right?

Danan Coleman 17:14

Well, what if Yeti just sold this one bottle and then never contacted you again and then it didn't advertise to you again? Well, guess what? You own a Stanley now. You know? So, you know, having experience with both not building a network and not getting lists together and now doing that, the the ability to

Danan Coleman 17:34

Launch something, announce something. Right now, hi, like you and I have known each other for five years, but we haven't spoken in probably two, right? And I

Hai Mag 17:43

Possible.

Danan Coleman 17:43

don't remember if it was me that reached out to you guys or you that reached out to me, where we're like, hey, let's both be on each other's podcast. That's the value of a network. Instead of like, you know, and and arguably we should have been in better communication with each other for this, but you know, it is what it is.

Danan Coleman 17:58

But you now you and I both now have a way for people to know we exist, right?

Hai Mag 18:03

Exactly. Now, like I like by the way the example you gave about this email marketing and you know kind of re like because I'm investing into a a software company, its name is Ralph Lexo and it does email and sms marketing for Shopify. Unlike Flavio,

Danan Coleman 18:20

Mm-hmm.

Hai Mag 18:21

it is also taking care of subscriptions, bundles, gamifications, and the memberships and loyalty, and that is the the the exact

Hai Mag 18:31

key value of the one P relationships and one of the prospects you know like they they were telling me you know what what's the value of email marketing like I mean nobody's responding anymore like nobody reads their their emails but we figure out that even the email marketing yes people do not respond but they click you know there's a lot of clicks they look into your I don't know picture logo product

Hai Mag 18:59

They see it, it may

Danan Coleman 19:00

Yep. Yep.

Hai Mag 19:01

take maybe one or two seconds, and maybe they don't react because there are so many emails, maybe there are so many things to do, but they still check it. And as a result, now they there is a picture in their mind about like the name of the brand, what's going on, so they know. So you just remind yourself, and you know, when they need it, when they have that intention to.

Danan Coleman 19:26

They'll think of

Danan Coleman 19:27

you first.

Hai Mag 19:28

They will think about you first, whether it's B2B or a B2C. That's the same thing. And then people don't get that attribution, but it all happened because of that email that you send, or it's the text message that you send. So that is still very important in connected commerce to continue to do that. Reminders, emails, newsletters. The the reactions are much lower, but doesn't mean there is

Hai Mag 19:55

like no awareness happening as a result of that.

Danan Coleman 19:57

Yeah, well,

Danan Coleman 19:57

I mean, billboards. How do you attribute a an ROI to a billboard, right? If you think about it, and it it depends on how you write your, especially in the subject and the sender name. Like if the sender name is newsletter at mailchimp.ca, okay, cool. I have no idea who this is from. And if your subject line is

Danan Coleman 20:20

Get the best you can get while the getting is still gotten good, right? Cool. No, no idea who the brand is, no idea what the email is, and I'm gonna delete it. But if you are Coca-Cola and it comes from news at Coca-Cola.com, and in the in the subject it says Coke News, colon. We just released a new flavor, right?

Danan Coleman 20:41

You might delete that email, but you just saw Coca-Cola two times and it got branded two more times. And so in marketing, this may be different now, but I because I haven't looked at at the metrics on this, but many years ago, it took seven to eleven touch points to get somebody to take a single action, which would be open that email or, you know, re find out do a search, find out who you are. Which is why on radio back in the early 2000s, it was like,

Danan Coleman 21:07

Go to twitter.com or actually back then it was www.twitter.com and they would just say these things in in a single commercial. They would say the domain seven, eight, nine, ten times. On twitter.com, you can do do. so yeah, yes, you don't get good responses from emails these days. It's if you're getting one to two percent, you're you're in the upper echelon of good responses, but still worth branding.

Danan Coleman 21:34

You know, like as you expand your brand, you're gonna need more avenues, more eyeballs. So, anyhow. That's my opinion.

Hai Mag 21:40

I I'll take it as

Hai Mag 21:41

as the second story, which is like the impact of brand awareness into you know the intention and conversion, which is hard to attribute, but it is real and now it is more real than ever because the digital footprint that you have on email, SMS, Twitter.

Hai Mag 22:03

Reddit, Reddit is becoming very popular. And then the AI tools, reading your digital footprint and then giving a zest of it to the consumer at the end of the day, one way or another, that brand awareness and your digital footprint is important and you need to do more of that. But I love it, Danan, that you touched on that as well, besides the the other story, and that was also really great.

Danan Coleman 22:27

Yeah. Sorry, I

Danan Coleman 22:28

I have so many things going on that I when I get on a tangent, I just like I change course.

Hai Mag 22:35

That's cool. So Dana, thank you very much for being a part of our podcast and look forward to repeat that again. So thanks a lot.

Danan Coleman 22:44

Thanks for having me. See you later.

Hai Mag 22:46

Thank you.