How Smart Amazon Brands Build Customer Retention Without Breaking The Rules

Chris: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, this is Chris McCabe. Welcome back to Seller Performance Solutions, our wonderful podcast with a guest this week. Andrew Smith of SwaptQR. How are you doing?

Andrew: Chris, thank you for having me. Doing great. How are you? How about yourself?

Chris: Is it Swapt for short?

Andrew: It's Swapt. Yeah, Swapt for short,.

Chris: Because I saw in your domain SwaptQR right?

Andrew: Exactly. SwaptQR Swapt for short, might switch to SwaptAI just to get in with the train.

Chris: Uh, nice. Nice. Well, we're glad to have you on because your area of expertise and the material you deal with every day is extremely hot right now. I know it's gonna be coming up at the next couple of events that I go to, one of which is the one you're sponsoring in New York, which is not that far away.

It's coming up on February 12th from seven to 10. We'll include the info on that in the show notes. But jumping in, maybe can you give some [00:01:00] background on how you got into helping brands get the word out about what they're good at, what they do well? How they can interact with buyers and then also how you started interacting with Amazon sellers?

Andrew: Definitely, yeah. So my background, I was early at Klaviyo, so Klaviyo does email retention, a lot of Shopify brands, a lot of Amazon brands are using them for their Shopify side. So I was doing a lot of email marketing and learning about retention tactics and found out that Amazon has no way of like bringing it back for more. So it's crazy. You start doing the analysis. 'cause I worked with a lot of these brands when I was at Klaviyo. You do analysis on the LTV, so the amount of time someone purchases throughout the year on Shopify, a lot of the times it's four to six x at least what it is on Amazon.

So your Amazon purchasers will be a minority of what your revenue ultimately will be because it's capped due to the lack of control. So. At Swapt what I [00:02:00] started doing for a long time and we met, you know, early research days, which was like, how do you actually give some element of repeat purchase behavior to a brand when they have no way of unlocking it?

And is there something you can do with like a thank you or something like that? And then the hot thing that you were talking about before is that stumbled me in to this entire world. Of gifting for reviews. And it has been a journey. I've talked to founders, I've talked to brands like hundreds to thousands of brands I've seen done. I probably have more research on this, more QR codes, from Amazon than anyone person I know. 'cause every time someone sees it and

Chris: believe it

Andrew: Q are on Amazon, they text me it. Yeah. And I also know all these things 'cause brands, they open up to me right away. They'll tell me what they're using. And what I've found is that a lot of brands, either a, don't know what's compliant, and there's a lot of bad [00:03:00] actors, really bad actors out there that will just claim they're compliant when they are blatantly not.

Chris: Yes. They don't prove it. There's no proof they're being taken at their word.

Andrew: They're being taken at their word.

Yeah. And they're malicious. Yeah. And the reason why I say they're malicious is because they themselves know that they're not compliant. But they tell brands that they are, and not only are they non compliant, they have no semblance of even becoming compliant. So like this stuff that's extremely illegal, like even federally illegal, it's FTC federally illegal to pay someone to leave a review.

If you gift a gift card in exchange for review, it's a $51,000 fine.

Per review.

Chris: Yep.

Andrew: And. That's exactly what all these brands do. They say, Hey, here's a, $20 gift card, which by the way, doesn't scale economically. Like if you're a brand and you're trying to do the economics with this, [00:04:00] it does not look good on paper.

, So now you're paying someone a gift card for a review, which is totally illegal, and the software providers and agencies are enabling you to do so by holding your hand through the process. So now. It's a question of, and what I've found is that obviously reviews are really important on Amazon. Sure.

But it's a question of, what can you do that's federally illegal versus like, what can you do that's actually absolutely illegal? And how do you power your growth by choosing the good route? And that's what we've been trying to figure out here at Swapt. And it's been a long, hard journey.

The answers are not obvious. But we're trying everything under the sun and we've been working really hard on finding that path for brands to achieve the excellent growth while staying completely legal.

Chris: Yeah. And within Amazon's rules, the only, [00:05:00] at least in recent memory, you're the only owner of a service like this that even asks me about compliance. So you're already kind of in first place for that because you would think that every owner of all the different companies that come and go through chats and groups and WhatsApp and this and that, would've at least shown us some of this stuff while they're in the tweaking phase or when they're putting it together, or as they start to accumulate more and more brands, because a responsible business owner would be worried if they're putting clients at risk.

Andrew: Yeah.

Chris: And I guess they're afraid of what I'll say, and it's against their whole formula. So I don't hear from those people. But it doesn't make it any less alarming because I do hear and see those service provider names floating around, people using them in conversations on WhatsApp groups or mentioning them, them to me privately.

And it's like, did you look at their funnel? Did you look at how this [00:06:00] works? Are you just accepting at face value that they said they were TOS compliant? And a lot of times I get some scary answers, so I can only imagine what you hear.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, my worry too is that what a lot of what happens, right, is like a lot of people see this as sort of like a cat and mouse game of like instead of doing the more responsible thing, which is trying to figure out how to create a middle ground, they create like sort of this cat and mouse thing of like, we're gonna do whatever we can to sort of like point the middle finger towards Amazon's compliance, which is totally inappropriate. Yeah. And not business professional and what happens with these bad actors and what I've noticed is they use the whole, and this is like one of the sales pitches I know they use which is, anything can get you in trouble on Amazon, Swapt, has never had a single warning complaint, anything from Amazon.

But I know. Inventory apps, like literal apps that like measure and help you with inventory that have somehow gone [00:07:00] brand suspended. And it is kind of crazy, like the fact that a lot of things can get you suspended and put off Amazon. So a lot of services will just say, Hey, nevermind trying to follow Amazon's compliance.

Like you're gonna get thrown off tomorrow for nothing.

Chris: The difference is if it's a bogus reason or if it's a complete mistake, you can dispute it and get reinstated pretty quickly. That's what they don't tell you.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Whereas if you're doing something federally illegal, it might be a little more difficult.

And that's my other worry when it comes to like speaking to people like you, like perhaps these brands and these agencies are recommending things really illegal and they go to Amazon and they go to compliance experts like yourself. And they lie about what they were doing.

Chris: Yeah.

Andrew: And I see this happen all the time and it's extremely frustrating as someone that's trying to do something normal.

'cause I'll get asks from people, they'll say, no, that's a QR code. Like those are illegal on Amazon. It's like, that's not necessarily true. It's really how you use them. But [00:08:00] the fact is

Chris: it's the same as asking for a review. I get the same question, is asking for a review against the rules. Well, it depends on how you do it. You can ask for a review and you mentioned sending a thank you. You can thank people. Some people were like, I'm not gonna thank anybody because then it's gonna look like I'm trying to convince them to leave a positive review. No, that's not true. You can thank people. You can ask for reviews.

What the nuance of it and the complexity where it comes in is how you do these things and the methodology. Well, nine times outta 10, the methodology I see is taking it way over the line. So all the people who are like, well, this might be a smidge over the line. I would say 80 to 90% of what I see is not a smidge over the line.

And so and so in theory, they don't even need to talk to me about it because they should have been able to just interpret it that way themselves.

Andrew: And all of this creates extreme headaches for anyone trying to do it the right way. But I don't wanna keep beating the dead [00:09:00] horse. Right,

Chris: right.

Andrew: I would love to chat about sort of like what we got coming up and

Chris: Yeah.

Well, let's focus on what you're gonna be talking about on, February 12th in New York, in Manhattan. I've seen the title of your talk and you can give it here again, but just to flesh out a what you're focused on in the talk, and b, what kinds of questions you're expecting from the the brands in the audience.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So what I think is gonna be really fun, and I'm like very much looking forward to this event because what we're gonna be able to do with this event is basically socialize a lot of what we're talking about here and like giving more one-to-one communications that are personally tailored for the brand.

I can start and say like, Hey everyone, I have this one general recommendation for how to do it, and that's actually not gonna be accurate for one brand or the other brand. Right. So what I am excited to go over is a few of our best examples.

For example, like if [00:10:00] you are a product that requires a lot of education. And I'll just give you one example and then we can go into like, sort of like the more general approach that I wanna take during this event. But if you're a brand that is like a supplement that requires a lot of education, like it, it could be very dangerous to not understand how to take a specific supplement.

Actually, funny enough, wife is in. Nutritional pa, she's a nutritional pa and she deals with a lot of patients. And shows me these kind of metrics a lot, which she'll talk to patients who are taking supplements improperly. And last year there were over 23,000 er room visits and deaths accumulated from taking supplements improperly.

And a lot of what happens is you purchase these things online. And you don't have the education, you don't understand what you can and can't take 'em with. And obviously like that could lead to a bad review if you go to the er. But then also, like you might not [00:11:00] feel good after you take it. So like a lot of our supplement brands, you just don't feel great after taking.

So maybe the strategy that I'd recommend, depending on what type of brand you are, has to do more with like, instead of just thank yous. Like it's also really genuine education that keeps people outta the hospital. And that's something that I really like. Just like brainstorming with brands of instead of like, you know, doing this or that let's tailor your retention and retention will skyrocket. If people understand how to actually take your supplement properly. Or if people actually understand like retention interviews. And it's funny 'cause it is a byproduct of understanding how your product works, which is like a review where like, yeah, you can have a supplement product.

It's a customer here right in front of me, but it's extremely difficult to tell right on this right here. What the heck do I take this with? I'm trying to read it. It's like, it just says consuming this product [00:12:00] can introduce you to chemicals. And I actually have no idea, like this is exactly how it comes from an Amazon.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: And I love this brand. This brand does very well. A lot of brands like them that do super well. I have no idea how to take that supplement. Do I put it with water? Do I do this or that? Like, it's extremely confusing to me. And guess what's gonna happen if your customers purchase your supplement and they don't know how to take it.

They a could do them some serious harm. What if you take this super caffeinated product with this additional like depressant or this other caffeinated product. Maybe there should probably be a few guides around that. So it's really building up strategies that accumulate good education and not use case. There's plenty of other use cases. Yeah. But that's what I'm excited about, like really educating brands on how they can get the most out of both reviews and how they can get the most out of retention by actually having these direct lines to their customers to give them more know.

Chris: Right. Not using [00:13:00] reviews as the yardstick for all legitimacy, because some, we can talk about this on another episode. Yeah. Some brands come out of kind of nowhere and have thousands of reviews overnight. And if you as a buyer don't know that some brands just pop up with thousands of reviews and get away with it, you might assume that that brand's been there for years and that they're entrenched and established and That means they're trustworthy, whereas now they've just gained the review system. So it's much better to study like, how long has this brand been around? When did they get their certifications, whatever you can find that's publicly available or whatever the seller can tell you about, you know, how long the supplement's been around.

And also, like you said, the instructions on how to take it because the less likely people are to misunderstand that the more likely they are to say, this didn't work for me. And the listing didn't call out conditions like A, B, C, which I have one of those and I had a bad experience. Yeah, for sure.

Andrew: Yeah. And there's [00:14:00] also like, that's a whole other topic of like how important it's to make sure that you have like good review. If one supplement does brings people to the hospital on Amazon, that's like that person and all of their friends that are no longer buying supplements on Amazon. Yeah. So it's like extremely important for the Amazon community, to not allow bad actors like that to exist.

And if you start creating these review funnels that just like pay people for a gift card, unfortunately you're part of the problem because the lack of genuineness with that review is gonna directly transfer to your customer experience. But I resonate with those brands because vine is also not a viable option if that's the case, because the issue with Vine is that if I get a supplement on Vine, I might not be the workout type or the type that needs this sort of supplement, and I might not understand why the price point doesn't match the gain.

And [00:15:00] I might give you a bad review. And that's why a lot of brands have been steering away from Vine as well in different categories. Which is what ultimately causes this gap?

Chris: I think so. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah,

Chris: for sure. All right, so, you're gonna have a lot to say in New York. For those of us or anyone listening who can't be in New York February 12th, best way to reach you if they have questions on this or if they want one of your demos or any other information?

Andrew: Yeah, so swapped qr.com. We've got a demo button, S-W-A-P-T qr.com. And my email's just andrew@swapqr.com. I'm sure. Uh, wherever you can access this podcast, we'll just make sure to put that somewhere.. So we'll make sure that that gets to you, but mm-hmm. You know, very responsive on either and would love to. You know, I'll have this convo with people and show you sort of what we do and what the recommended tailored approach would be per brand.

Chris: Sweet. And for anyone who's seen the link to the event, whether you're in the New York area or not, , if you look at the [00:16:00] speakers and the member of Amazon teams who's coming, yes, there's lots of talk about revenue generation and brand growth and protection, but there's also a lot of compliance product and safety compliance, but also adhering to, like you said, local and federal laws on top of Amazon guidelines. So that's always gonna be a big part of anything we do, but especially this upcoming February 12th. So if you're able to join us, great. We're looking forward to seeing you. And if not, you know where to find Andrew and you know where to find me if you have questions about any other type of compliance.

So thanks again, Andrew, for joining us. I'm sure we'll have you on the podcast again. And, thanks everyone for listening to Seller Performance Solutions. Let us know if you have any questions. Take care.

Andrew: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Bye all.