"So how do you win if you're doing what everyone else is doing? If we're all using Best Selling Rank or BSR, then everyone is always going to sell the same products and we're just flooding the market with all the same products. So we try to go where the puck is going and not where the puck is." - Chad Rubin of Skubana
In our second 3 digit episode we have Chad Rubin of Skubana as our guest. "Chad Rubin of Skubana" is how I refer to him but he is so much more than that. He co-founded Skubana, a multi-channel inventory management software that we have been using for over a year now. He is a 7-figure seller who also runs the Accelerate Workshop, an exclusive one-day workshop for high-volume multi-channel ecommerce sellers.
Like Kevin Stecko of 80sTees.com, Chad is one of those we jokingly call the "grandfathers of ecommerce" because he has been in ecommerce for a very long time. At the time there was an absence of good ecommerce tools, so to satisfy his own ecommerce needs, he created his own internal tools and shared them with the world, one of which is Skubana.
In this episode we talk about a topic that is of crucial importance especially for those just venturing in ecommerce--how do you find profitable products to sell in a market that is already saturated?
Many sellers do their research: they look at BSR and probably fire up Jungle Scout to judge profitability, and that could work, but people who do that usually end up selling "me-too products". That saturates the market even more and buries their products beneath thousands of similar others.
Chad has a solution. He doesn't want to do what everybody else is doing; he instead focuses on what people are actually looking for but which Amazon does not have yet. He explains how he does this in detail and provides some examples in our conversation.
We also covered other topics, including:
How to prevent being copied on Amazon How he had his business audited, not for selling purposes, but to increase profitability The systems he put in place to run his business efficiently with just one employee Lifetime value of a customer Amazon's A9 algorithm and ways to rank higher The importance of conversion rate The Accelerate workshopThis is a fully packed episode with actionable advice and lots of resources and software recommendations. We've compiled the links below so you can easily check them out.
Resources mentioned:
AsiaInspection
Stamped.io
EcomCrew Podcast Episode 35: Chad Rubin on the Development of Skubana
Crucial Vacuum
Think Crucial
Accelerate Workshop
Shopify apps he is using:
Bold Brain
Bold Tiered Pricing
Bold Upsell
Webinar:
International Selling Secrets Direct From Amazon For Maximum ROI on International Marketplaces
That's episode 101 guys! We hope you find Chad's valuable actionable advice useful in your own business. If you do and you enjoyed this episode, we'd really love it if you'd leave us an honest review on iTunes. That will help us in our rankings and discoverability so we can reach more ecommerce entrepreneurs out there.
As always, thanks for listening. Until the next episode, happy selling!
