E521: Why Increasing Prices on Amazon Is NOT AS BAD As You Think!

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Chad Rubin is back on the podcast! He's an Amazon Seller of over 20 years, the ex-CEO of SKUBANA before it was acquired in 2021, one of the original founders of the Prosper Show conference. 

Chad is back on the show to talk about Profasee, one of his latest ventures into the software space, that aims to reclaim profit margins without affecting your Amazon BSR, or your product ranking. 

Video Timestamps:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 02:46 – Chad Rubin's ecommerce background
• 05:51 – Why Increasing Prices on Amazon Can Be A Great Option
• 11:32 – How Mike Tried to Increase Prices
• 13:36 – How Profasee Works
• 17:47 – What data does Profasee prioritise for success?
• 20:16 – Real life examples of Profasee's results
• 32:18 – Affiliate Offer for Profasee

Timestamps:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 03:03 – Chad Rubin's ecommerce background
• 05:55 – Why Increasing Prices on Amazon Can Be A Great Option
• 10:57 – How Mike Tried to Increase Prices
• 12:53 – How Profasee Works
• 16:40 – What data does Profasee prioritise for success?
• 19:01 – Real life examples of Profasee's results
• 30:12 – Affiliate Offer for Profasee

Chad, thank you again for coming on again to the podcast and dropping value bombs as always. 

If you're interested in Profasee, I highly recommend you do so by checking out this link. If you want to hear more of Chad's value bombs, follow him on his LinkedIn.

As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested. 

Don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can. 

Thanks for listening!

Until next time, happy selling! 

Full Audio Transcript

Mike Jackness (00:01.46):
Chad Rubin, man, welcome to the EcomCrew Podcast.

Chad Rubin (00:05.45):
Thank you, grateful to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mike Jackness (00:07.688):
Yeah, I'm super excited about this talk more excited than I usually am because this is something that I have like been personally super passionate about over the last, let's say 12 to 14 months, maybe 16. It's hard to everything's a blur these days. But as a lot of people who listen to us know, we recently just sold a business. It was a big deal for us. It happened on June 2.

And people also know that was kind of a long road, but if people have been listening, kind of part of our journey, I did some episodes way back, went about things we were doing to position that business to sell for more, you know, just increase enterprise value. And there was a lot of things that we worked on over the years, we switched our, our sourcing to China from, from domestic to save on margin, we improved logistics over time. We did a bunch of SEO work listing optimization. But one of those things that we did.

was to just start focusing on price and start raising price. And it's interesting, because we'll talk about the dollars and cents of this, but there's only so many levers you can pull in an e-commerce business. It isn't that complicated, but the one that seems to have the most outweighed positive results is simply just being able to increase your price. And oftentimes,

That may mean you might sell fewer widgets. Sometimes you might sell just as many, sometimes less, but a lot of times the end result is just more net profit, which is I think what all of us are aiming for. And so when we sold that business, a huge lift of the enterprise value for us was simply, again, like I was saying, raising pricing. We started out doing that all very manually. And then you and I just happened to be…

at a dinner one night. And this is what happens as a podcast guest, you end up at these dinners and awesome, interesting people like yourself are there. And you're like, Hey, what are you up to? And I was kind of telling all the you about all the stuff I just mentioned. And one of the things I mentioned was the pricing. You're like, well, I'm working on that. And it was an obvious like, well, let's, let's test this and see how, how it goes and how much better or worse or.

Mike Jackness (02:16.968)
the same or whatever it might be your tool does versus us trying this manually. Oh, uh, I don't want to do a spoiler alert, but spoiler alert, it did significantly better than we were doing manually and we'll get into the exact numbers later, but, um, yeah, it was just kind of kismet that we were there. It was something we were focused on and. You know, it's something that you've just started working on that like just hasn't existed. There's so many things that have been done over and over again. In the e-commerce space. And so, yeah, again, super excited to talk to you about done a bunch of

riffing and intro here but give you a minute to kind of introduce yourself and what you're working on and we can kind of get into a slimy potatoes.

Chad Rubin (02:55.002)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I probably very similar to you. I've been in e-comm for almost 20 years now. So I've seen everything. I've lost a lot of hair, as you can see, and blood and cash and sweat and tears. And so I started off actually as a direct consumer brand, selling vacuum filters, travel filters, air filters, selling it on Amazon, selling a multi-channel. While I was doing that, I started

Mike Jackness (03:04.29)
Yeah.

Chad Rubin (03:20.374)
selling cross channel and started seeing that there were issues synchronizing inventory across those channels. Amazon doesn't talk to Shopify, Shopify doesn't talk to eBay, eBay doesn't talk to Home Depot, a dropship vendor. And so we just needed a system to put together. So I started a company called Stubana. We sold that in April of 21. And even while I was starting Stubana, I found that there was a need for a community in the Amazon world. And I co-founded the Prosper show with three other people.

and we sold that, I think, just before 2020 and 2019. So I've been doing this a while. After I sold, probably going through an interesting transition similar to yourself, you're probably going through right now, perhaps, I started to stare at a tree, and I started to seek purpose, but I also started to work back on my e-comm business. So I did some personal development, and I was like, okay, let me still dip my toes in the water in e-comm and still see if I can fix this business, because it's been suffering. So…

I went back to this e-commerce business, started adjusting things. I did everything a guru would tell me to do, right? Listing optimization. My listings were dusty from, I think, 2015 Amazon. We had to adjust our PPC. We essentially had to get alignment. I essentially had to change some seats, get butts in the right seats. And finally, I was like, wait, why do we never change price? Price is the single largest lever you can pull to drive prop to the bottom line. It's a small… Is it…

Mike Jackness (04:30.905)
Yep.

Chad Rubin (04:48.694)
And it doesn't need to be large, significant swings in price, just like small increments can have a massive impact. Why is nobody talking about price? Why is pricing nowhere to be discovered around Amazon people? And so we started digging into this and started doing it manually, probably very similar to how you were doing it. Very rudimentary. And then I was like, yeah, AI can do this so much better. It can do so much faster. We can do this dynamically with machine learning models and data scientists.

Mike Jackness (04:54.333)
Yeah.

Chad Rubin (05:17.414)
and we started building towards that. And hence prophecy was born. And prophecy is just a play on the word. Like prophet is predicting with this, in Biblically, it's predicting with a level of certainty that something's going to happen. And so we spell it P-R-O-F-A-S-E-E, which is prophets you could see. So it's a bit of a play on words. And I'm really, really excited about this new tool that we've been building, working on. I've poured everything into this tool to make it what it is today.

Mike Jackness (05:46.716)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's brilliant. Let's just back up for a second. You just said something there that I think is really important is in terms of a small change can make a big effect. So just going through a basic math example of something that might happen all the time in e-commerce. Let's just say you have a product you sell for 10 bucks. Your net profit's $1. After COGS, Amazon fees, PPC, et cetera, you're running at a 10% margin.

Well, let's say you bump your price up to $11. Well, you're gonna keep 85 cents of that, right? Because Amazon's gonna take 15% of that. So now your net just went up from a dollar to a dollar and 85 cents. So you've raised your price 10%, but it raised your net profit margin by 85%. And obviously like multiplying that over thousands or tens of thousands of sales over the course of a year can make a just massive impact in enterprise value.

And we often try to pull all these other levers, like optimizing PPC more, getting your listing, maybe to convert better, pushing back on vendors for cogs, or just absorbing price increases or other increases because we're afraid to change our price. We've all been kind of coached or hit over the head that like Amazon's this price sense of the platform that if you, God forbid, raise your price, like your sales are going to plummet. And so I had these same fears, right? I mean, I was.

I was terrified to raise our prices on this business that we were gonna be positioning to sell, but the reality was that it was one of the best things we ever did. And shockingly, it's one of the things I'm still having a hard time getting my head around, price elasticity on Amazon seems to be a lot stronger than I thought. In other words, I can raise my price from 10 to $11 and not even see a decrease in sales. Sometimes it actually increases sales, which is wild, but.

The worst case scenario of fewer sales and less profit is the rare outcome. The most common outcome is either same amount of sales and just higher profit or slightly less sales, but still significantly higher profit.

Chad Rubin (08:00.598)
Yeah, for sure. I think the thing about Amazon that makes pricing that much harder is something that I call a knock-on effect. Your pricing today affects your order volume tomorrow. And you alluded to this around fear and hesitancy around price changes because the knock-on effect could mean that if you change your price in a way that Amazon doesn't like it, your BSR, your best seller rank, your competitive positioning could be impacted. And we've been, I would say, misled in this way because

It's actually just unfounded and not true. I mean, Amazon changes their price every 10 minutes on the platform. And…

Mike Jackness (08:36.504)
Mm-hmm, and that's one things that they're like their products that they sell

Chad Rubin (08:41.67)
Their products that they sell, yeah, as a 1P, as their own vendor, yeah. And brands are chronically and statically pricing their product. The only price change that they do is they run a discount. And that's it. As if that's like the holy grail. Giving them more margin and not even knowing what the impact of that discount or that lightning deal is going to do for them, or that prime deal. They just know that they'll sell more units. And so, but the knock-on effect is sometimes it's…

Mike Jackness (08:45.597)
Right.

Mike Jackness (08:56.3)
Mm-hmm. Great. They're giving up more margin. Yep.

Chad Rubin (09:11.342)
most optimally to raise price. You could be leaving value on the table, but sometimes actually makes sense of lower price, which increases your demand, increases velocity, and it offsets that decrease in price where you're selling more units where you're essentially making more absolute profit dollars and now own page one and increase your ranking position versus renting it with PPC.

And that's what makes it so difficult.

Mike Jackness (09:38.748)
Yeah, no, I mean, it's super interesting because, again, I think it's like that fear factor just is so overwhelming. And then it's like, I am going to do this, like, well, how am I going to go about doing it in a way that I can even keep track of it? I got so much other stuff on my plate. And then looking at the add-on effect or just the flywheel effect of those changes, like, how do you track that?

Uh, it's like, where do you, where do you get started? I mean, I'll, I'll kind of go first and tell you, you know, in the audience that hell I did it. Um, which was flawed compared to the way that you're doing it, which, uh, was fun. We'll get, again, get into the results of, of what ultimately happened when we, when we made the shift, but what we did, I was just like, okay, we're going to start with, and it's funny cause we ended up doing the same thing with you, but we started with not, not our top 10 skews cause I was like, I'm afraid to touch those.

So let's do SKUs 11 through 20. We're going to just do a small test. And what we're going to do is we just did dollar increments. Again, we were a little less sophisticated. And so we noted what our BSR was quote unquote today and what the price was today, and then raised the price of dollar. And then said, okay, basically every Monday, we're going to go back and look at this data. And so what we did for quite a while there was

look at those 10 SKUs and raise the price. Let's look at, okay, well, the SR actually didn't fluctuate that badly, like prices didn't, or when we raised the price of dollar, sales didn't really go down. Maybe we can do it again. And then eventually we would find some spot where we raised the price of another dollar and sales started to actually go back down. And then we would put the price back where it was the week before. And so we saw a lot of success with that. And so we expand that idea to our whole catalog. And so we were doing that for the better part of like nine,

nine months or so and saw something like a 15% lift and net profit by doing this. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I remember it being very, very close to that number, which made a huge difference to our business. And the thing that's fun, we'll talk about here in a minute, as you improved upon that even more, because your way of doing it is way more sophisticated than what I just mentioned. We weren't taking into account, maybe we should raise PPC spend here or

Mike Jackness (12:00.768)
Uh, you know, is, is one of the things that we should be looking at lowering our price. We never considered that at all, uh, to try to increase volume. Um, and so it was purely just can we raise price and have it not affect our BSR was as far as we got. So, you know, maybe kind of getting into the weeds a little bit of what you guys are doing over a prophecy and the things that you've learned and the data points that you're looking at to make a more educated change in pricing.

Chad Rubin (12:30.358)
Yeah, so prophecy exists to maximize profit by changing price without sacrificing your ranking position on Amazon. So we're never gonna make a change that will actually sacrifice your ranking position. And so the challenge is, and I was doing this manually too, and my process was using a spreadsheet and tracking all these signals and trying to notice the right signals and do it for every single ASINs very hard. So…

Mike Jackness (12:55.358)
Yeah.

Chad Rubin (12:55.502)
There's contextual elements like seasonality, for example, or holidays or calendar events. Then you have store past sales data. Then you have your competitive landscape. So pulling in all your competitors' prices and how they react, because when you make a price change, it's not only how amazon.com reacts, it's not just how your customer reacts, but it's how your competition reacts. And so we're pulling in all these signals, sessions, conversion rate, everything into a model.

and the model is ingesting all that information to find the signal and then find the noise. Now, a couple other things to mention is that when we first started prophecy, what we realized in 2022 was that most sellers never change price. So just like Instagram or Facebook, if you never like anything, if you ever poke somebody, if you never follow somebody or dwell on a video, the algorithm won't know what to serve you.

what's going to activate your dopamine. That's the result that they're programmatically programming in the AI so that you forever death scroll. And so in that same vein, if you never change price, our model doesn't know what to chew on. There's nothing to chew on. You never change price. There's no patterns to reveal what happens when prices don't change. And so what we started to do, and you experienced this for the first 30 days, we launched a hyper-learning phase, we call it.

And that's the phase where we learn, we improve, we evolve, we get smarter. And those learnings, by the way, don't stop at the hyper learning phase. They compound over time, which gives you a sustained competitive advantage. But that's how we train the model and it evolves and grows with these small price changes on a net neutral profit impact basis to maximize, to learn how to maximize profit.

So that's the first part of how we started solving this problem. And then we deployed the next phase, which is called the profit optimization phase, is where we actually go and deploy the optimal price to make you the most amount of money possible to maximize price. And so there's a few other things that we learned as well, which was one is when we first started this, we had an algorithm for an entire brand, for an entire seller central account, a 3P account. And then we realized, well, every product

Chad Rubin (15:16.674)
has its own elasticity. Can't possibly have one model for everything. So when you sign up for Prophecy, we actually have an algorithm per product. Each ASIN gets their own AI algorithm that's optimized and continues to compound over time, which is pretty unbelievable. And then lastly, if there ever is a trigger on Amazon, which is the fear piece of like, oh my God, Amazon's gonna suppress my listing. We built in some price protection.

Mike Jackness (15:18.301)
Mm-hmm.

Chad Rubin (15:44.994)
technology into the platform so that we maintain the buy box and we don't violate any of Amazon's competitive pricing rules. And if there is a trigger, we reset the price automatically back to the original anchor price, the reference price.

Mike Jackness (15:58.888)
Yeah, awesome. That's obviously, I mean, when you got five skews in your catalog, it's easy to keep track of all that, but the business we just sold had 250 or whatever skews and that stuff's impossible to keep track of at all times. So I mean, I know that, you know, part of what you have here, it's somewhat like Coke or KFC or something. There's like a secret recipe. So without, you know, getting too deep and intrusive into the proprietary technology you have. I mean, what are…

some of the things that you're looking at and how frequently are you changing pricing? I mean, how are you, or the algorithm is it, how was it able to determine success and drive things in the right direction?

Chad Rubin (16:39.49)
So yeah, great question. So one is we're pulling in the APIs from Seller Central, from ads, from your ads account, along with third parties. And then we enrich that data. So we're pulling in the amount of signals that we pull in, the amount of data that Amazon gives you to do science on is unbelievable. Then, so that's like the first piece. Then…

We also used to do reverse ASIN lookup, and now we've built in, we have our own competitive algorithm that we built where it goes and scrapes your competitors. When you make every, on a daily basis, we pull in their price, we pull in their reviews, we pull in anything we possibly can that could be a signal into our model. And I would say a few things. One is the hyper learning phase that I shared with you is competitive, is I would say the secret sauce, so to speak. The next is we built two,

machine learning models in parallel to each other. So the first one predicts demand, and then the next model predicts price at a specific demand. And we do this all automatically. So the only thing that a seller has to give us when they sign up, they give us their min price, the minimum that they wanna take for a product in terms of retail price, and then they give us their max price, and they give us their landed cost, and we pull out all the other fees.

And we actually also now we pull in advertising fees as well, which we can get into around some of the ad work that we're doing at Prophecy to harmonize price and advertising together, because price dictates what your ad spend could be to even amplify profits further. So I would say those are the core pieces that we've built that I think are extremely proprietary. Nothing that we're doing is out of the box, right? Everything that we built as custom, we raised two and a half million

Mike Jackness (18:15.068)
Great.

Chad Rubin (18:31.874)
for the business in December of 21. And yeah, we're just, I had spent with AI and loved, this is before ChatGBT, I loved where AI was taking the world even before OpenAI. And certainly OpenAI made it mainstream and we're at the intersection of AI and profit for Amazon brands.

Mike Jackness (18:44.348)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (18:53.2)
Yeah, I know it's definitely really, really cool. So what I love to do, because we only have maybe 10 minutes left of the 30 that we allot for the podcast, is to just give you guys some real world examples of what we experienced by doing this. Now, again, I had already been working on pricing. So I did the best that I thought that I could to get to where we were. I thought that we did a great job. So…

We were already not just starting from ground zero. I think a lot of people listening haven't touched their price in forever. Probably could experience even better results, but I already had been raising pricing, so we had already been working on this stuff. And I also think it's important for this way that we are in a podcast for full disclosure, you and I worked out like a super deep discount for us to test this out. And I think that's just important to disclose.

And so what we did, similar to what I just kind of mentioned, the same way that we started out when I did it, I was afraid to just like, let's not touch our top 10 SKUs here. We're going to get the data that we need from SKUs 11 through 20. I mean, let's play in that range. So if something were to go terribly wrong, I've known you and I trust you. And so I didn't just do the bottom catalog. I was like, we'll take out the middle meat and test on here.

We ended up testing nine SKUs. There was a 10th SKU that was getting some price suppression problems. We were still kind of figuring out what was going on there. Amazon's weird with some of this stuff. You can never get an answer from support and get a straight answer. So we ended up testing nine out of hundreds of SKUs out of our catalog. It was something like it represented six or 70% of our revenue, something like that. It was a relatively small sample size, but that's what I wanted to do just for testing purposes. So.

That was kind of the groundwork. And again, as you kind of mentioned, Chad, I mean, there's a hyper learning phase. And so like the first 30 or 60 days, you're kind of just looking at the data, not making, or maybe there were some changes, but the data is not, you know, the results, that's not the results period. The results period kind of comes after that. And so we've been working on this for a while. I mean, I think we first started talking about this back in.

Mike Jackness (21:02.812)
at the beginning of the year, or maybe even late last year, I forgot. Now it's been it's been months, you know, collecting data and being able to prep for this podcast. Like, I love episodes like this, where like, you know, you've accumulated data for a long period of time and get to do a big value bomb at the end, which is kind of what's happened here. So again, and just real world numbers, we tested those nine skews. And the data that period that we used here, we had 92 days of

of data that we're going to be talking about here. So it was basically a quarter, you know, a quarter of the year. Um, and over that time, uh, prophecy made 828 pricing changes. Um, which again would be significantly more than we would have been able to do manually. Or the way that we were doing it, you know, previously we would have done. Uh, you know, nine times 13 pricing changes over that time. So just over a hundred pricing changes. So prophecy did eight acts of the number of pricing changes.

And from where we were, again, we've already done all this work where I was proud of myself. And you got to show me how bad I was at my job. We were able to get an additional 12.1% profit lift on these SKUs, which represented per month $1,400, $1,406. And so, you know, every year on just those nine SKUs, it's almost $17,000.

of additional profit. And, you know, I think of everything in terms of enterprise value with anything I'm thinking about, because I know that the ultimate goal at some point is to sell. And so it's really, you know, 17,000 times three and a half times four times four and a half, depending on what you go to sell the business for someday. And so it's exciting because I mean, we did just sell the business and we were able to realize some of that, but the new owner has an opportunity now he's expanded the relationship from the

to more, I forgot exactly. He told me he was pondering it so I'm not sure exactly where he ended up at, but I know he's gonna do more. And so the opportunities there to have additional six figures a year in profit for this business, simply by tweaking pricing on a more frequent basis and letting the numbers speak for themselves, letting analytics do their thing, let it happen in an automated fashion and let you go do something else with your business and your time.

Mike Jackness (23:29.108)
we basically probably freed up half of a full-time employee's time by using the software when it's implemented across the whole catalog. So it's, it's pretty impressive stuff, man. I, I got to give you a tip of the hat because I was definitely skeptical going into it. I was like, I don't know that this is really going to be worth it. Or this is, you know, this hasn't been done before, but man, it results speak for themselves.

Chad Rubin (23:52.978)
Yeah. I mean, but it's so hard. That's why nobody's actually doing this right now in this space. There's always people doing like buy box repricers, but private label repricing is just a whole another animal because you're repricing across ASIN. You're taking into account how customers behave, how your competition behaves. It's just, yeah. So I'm really grateful that you got a chance to test drive it. And I guess I wish, you know, I think

Right now we manage 5% of your catalog roughly. Like imagine if we actually deployed your entire catalog. The sheer amount of profit that we could have had for you is a missed opportunity, but I guess I'll get you on the next business.

Mike Jackness (24:32.732)
Yeah, I'm not gonna make that mistake on the next one because we are looking to sell another one next year. So, you know, again, it's one of these things, you got a lot of things going on in your business. You know, one thing leads to another, it just takes time. I mean, again, everybody, you know, there's just lots of people that are like, I got this new fangled tool. I'm gonna like, you know, and it just, most of the time it just doesn't really provide the results. And so, you know, it took some time to get the comfort with it, to see the results. And again, the proof is in the pudding. I'm a math guy, I'm very analytical.

I got some other fun data that you share with us or that I have here for this that just speaks to more of what we're talking about. So I mean, our average price per unit across the SKUs that we tested going into this was $14.11. You know, the business that we sold is in that home hardware space, it's relatively high volume, low price, make it up on volume kind of SKUs. So small differences make a huge difference. So we went from $14.11 average.

to $15.53, which doesn't seem, again, we were just kind of talking about this, it doesn't seem like a huge deal, but our average gross profit per unit increased from $4.90 to $6.34. So it's a $1.45 uplift in gross profit per unit. Our average gross margins went from 35% to 41%.

You know, it's just, again, these are just all in the, and actually what's interesting here is that our cogs went up during this period because we had a price increase from vendors. And so even with that, we still experienced these, you know, pretty, pretty amazing results. The only thing that's really interesting here, Chad, you know, we, Dave has this saying that we use on the podcast a lot of time that, you know, revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. We actually sold less.

I mean, we went from $100,384 in sales in the previous period to $96,024. So our sales did drop by 4K. You know, we did have a 4% drop. And, and I think the problem is that like, all of us get so hung up on that number that maybe you would undo all these things and go off and lower your pricing and cause you see if you're just doing this in the vacuum, like, oh my God, like the sky is falling, but the reality is, is that the business is so much healthier.

Mike Jackness (26:58.656)
and doing so much better on $4,000 less in sales than the previous period.

Chad Rubin (27:07.534)
Yeah, so you're just more profitable on the stuff that you were selling. And by the way, that price change, it was a 1.1% price change, right? Where the prices on average went up 1.1% and you saw the impact on the bottom line. And it really, it's just small. Pricing is all about money in the fridges, right? In the nooks and crannies of the business. And I think that just goes to business in general, right? A lot of the money that you make in general is in the niches or in the fringes and pricing is no different.

Mike Jackness (27:10.78)
Yeah, like a lot more profitable.

Mike Jackness (27:29.149)
Yup.

Chad Rubin (27:37.45)
And so these small levers in pricing can pull a massive door.

Mike Jackness (27:42.416)
Yeah, I mean, again, proof in the pudding. Um, just super impressive stuff. Super excited to see how, uh, this continues because I, again, we've kept a relationship with the guy who bought the business with us. Um, you know, be talking to him about how things continue to improve. I think it's something we're going to try in our other business that we, that we've kept that we own outright.

And it's just, again, the reason I wanted to do this whole experiment is something I was already passionate about to begin with. It was more, I'm competitive, I hate losing, so I feel like I lost, but this, I think for the better, right? You obviously have done a much better job with this. And you know, it's frequency automation, you know, this is all you're focused on now, so you're just looking at a lot more data points and thinking about this a lot more sophisticated than I ever was or ever would be able to.

And the ROI on the investment for the software is, you know, nine X or something stupid. I mean, it's, it's one of the rare win-wins. So, I mean, you offered us something really cool, which I'm super excited about and very thankful for because we always look to do something cool for our audience. If you go over to ecomcrew.com slash prophecy, as Chad said, it's P-R-O-F-A-S-E-E.

So you come crew.com slash prophecy that'll redirect you over there with a 10% discount for life, which is pretty cool offering. So I super appreciate that. Again, full disclosure is a affiliate deal for us. So we do participate in that some as well. I always like to disclose that as well, because that's just how we are. But yeah, I mean, results against speak for themselves. We very rarely talk about stuff like this on the podcast in this type of way,

don't like standing behind something that I haven't tried or that I don't see results from. And quite frankly, four out of the five things that we end up testing never makes it to a podcast because it's just junk or doesn't live up to the hype. And this is quite the opposite. So again, there's only so many things you can be doing to your business. I mean, it's getting harder and harder. I mean, I haven't experienced a year since we started that it's been like, oh, I'm going to do this.

Mike Jackness (29:56.084)
got easier on Amazon and we started in 2015. Every year has been slightly harder in some way. And then you adapt to that new reality, but then it's like something else comes and makes it harder. Something else comes and makes it harder. And this is like for the first time, something that I feel like we've actually taken two steps forward instead of, you know, or three steps forward rather than, you know, just trying to keep up with the status quo because it really has been that difficult. You know, the only thing that I see

Uh, you know, on the horizon that that's too bad, I guess, or whatever you might call it is that, you know, everyone ends up signing up for this and all the competitors are changing their pricing and, uh, you know, you lose that advantage. But, you know, I just recorded a thing today for, for something else talking about how being first with, with new tools and technology is where all the money is and e-commerce and business in general. You know, we were early to Google ads when they first came out, we were early to Facebook ads early to.

Instagram early to being you know doing SEO working on conversion rate optimization doing email marketing all that stuff was we were always the first ones there and I think that this is just another one of those things where You know while you're the only one that's figured this out. It's it's going to be a really awesome opportunity And maybe a lot of your competitors never figure it out and an opportunity continues to exist But for right now, I think it's definitely worth checking out

Chad Rubin (31:19.07)
It's Mike, that means the world to me. And I really appreciate you taking a chance on us and testing it. I'm super stoked for you and the results and certainly with the sale of the business.

Mike Jackness (31:28.956)
Yeah, no, it's interesting because I think like a lot of entrepreneurs, we had just way too much stuff going on and all these different balls in here trying to juggle and that was just like one of those things. And so a lot less going on these days and feeling a lot more clear headspace and it's just been awesome overall. So yeah, I definitely appreciate you, man.

Mike Jackness (31:54.416)
All right, so just again, ecomcrew.com slash prophecy. If anybody wants to reach out to you, Chad, what's the best way for them to get you?

Chad Rubin (32:02.606)
Just chat at prophecy is my personal email if you have any questions feel free to reach out You can find me on LinkedIn Twitter posting a lot of my thoughts around Amazon ecommerce and just being a better human

Mike Jackness (32:15.688)
Yup. And that's Chad Rubin, R-U-B-I-N. Definitely give him a follow on LinkedIn. I don't know, every four to six, maybe eight weeks, there's usually like one of these like controversial value bomb, interesting posts over there that gets tons of comments and a lot of engagement for a reason, cause it's like deep thought, awesome stuff. And, you know, maybe one out of five of those is related to pricing or maybe one out of 10. That's usually just really interesting stuff just in this space. So definitely go over to LinkedIn and give that a follow.

All right, Chad, be good, my friend. Thanks so much for coming and doing this. Again, thanks for all the things you did for us as well. We really appreciate it. Like I always mentioned to you, I mean, you know, the thing that's hard for something like EcomCrew, there just isn't a lot of additional opportunities for us. I mean, everybody is always promoting the listing optimization tool or the PPC tool or product research tool, and that's just really where things end. So I'm excited that there's another category now for us as well. So it's cool for everyone all around.

Chad Rubin (33:14.99)
to in a sea of where everyone's using the same tool, right? So it's hard to have that edge. And I think pricing is one of those places that nobody is focusing on. It's this, what do they call it? White ocean opportunities. And for us, like everyone's going over here to product research and trying to find the right keywords. And I think pricing is undefeated when it comes to short-term gains and making as much money as possible.

Mike Jackness (33:21.298)
Yep.

Mike Jackness (33:28.12)
Mm hmm. Yeah, I agree.

Mike Jackness (33:43.184)
Yeah, absolutely. Good and agree more. And again, results are black and white and you can't argue with the 12 and a half or whatever that was percent lift on profits on those skills. So, all right, man, be good. Best luck with everything and until next time, happy selling and we'll talk to you then.