Protecting your e-commerce business

Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

The Roman Empire was famous for being the greatest empire in the ancient world. It lasted hundreds of years. It controlled the then known world, which was around Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, but it's 410 AD, the barbarians sack Rome. What happened? And how can we learn from this as e commerce operators? Stay tuned. Protect your Empire! Hey folks, Michael Veazey here from Amazing FBA. I want to talk about this under appreciated topic. Everyone's obsessed with growth, and of course they should, and the empire building. But once you've got something valuable and desirable, then of course, you're going to get people attacking it in some form or degrading it. And one of the things that a more mature entrepreneur will do when they move from pure startup phase, where you just growth, growth, growth, revenue, revenue, revenue is to understand that you've got something valuable, and now you need to protect it. So that's why we're going to talk about it today. Success invites Attack You think about the Roman Empire, this fertile ground in Italy where it was was focused and Rome is halfway down Italy. It had costly desirable infrastructure, a whole city with beautiful buildings and they had a reputation. They were famous. They were the kind of tall guy that everyone wanted to take a pop at. And although you probably don't feel like you're running the Roman Empire right now, you may have in your category a reputation and an obvious desirability of the market so you need to be protecting it. If you're working in e commerce or Amazon specifically, if you're running a business for fewer than 10 years, 60-70% percent of all the cash you ever see from the business will come when you sell it. Guess what? If you don't have the proof that you own the things that you sell, like your trademark, If you cannot show that you have dealt with the risks inherent in the business, and we'll talk about those, the business is either not sellable, or you will sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds less than you could have sold it for. And that is a huge loss. That is real money, not in your pocket, that could have been. So reason to take this stuff seriously. Let's talk briefly about the threats, which is not much fun, and the ways you can protect yourself, which is much better. In no particular order, Sales Channel risk The first one is sales channels risk. The, the Amazon sales channel is a great powerful thing to have access to, but it can be suspended. So there are two ways that can happen. Listing Suspension One is your listing gets suspended because you've got some words in it that you shouldn't have. Maybe these days, weirdly can be even put in place by the Amazon artificial intelligence engine at Amazon. One half of Amazon does that. And then the other half of Amazon that monitors things like what you're allowed to say in your listing will shut your listing down, which is insane, but entirely consistent with how Amazon operates, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Obviously you could put something yourself in there naively, and that can suspend a listing for months at the worst. Check TOS So first of all. Checked terms of service and do not assume that one half of Amazon isn't doing stupid things. Check your listings very, very regularly. Particularly there's kind of hero product. If you've got a small set of products, 10 products of which one is doing half your sales, then you watch that like a hawk. Okay. And the other one is of course, to not just depend on one hero product. So not an easy one to mitigate. But luckily most of the time that doesn't happen. such that it's permanently suspended but you've got to account for the fact that it could be suspended. Keep enough cash to survive hero product listing suspension That's another reason, by the way, we'll talk about cash, but that's another reason why you've got to have enough cash...