Summary

Hugh Sinclair, the founder of Commerce Blitz, discusses the challenges of logistics in the e-commerce industry and how his SaaS company provides a solution. He explains the importance of managing inventory and distribution to avoid missing sales and losing inventory. Sinclair emphasizes the need for simplicity in logistics software and how Commerce Blitz offers a user-friendly interface. He also discusses the competitive market and differentiates his company by offering customization and maintenance services. Sinclair shares his goals of empowering small businesses and potentially being acquired by a larger company in the future.

Takeaways

Logistics is a critical aspect of the e-commerce industry, and managing inventory and distribution is key to avoiding missed sales and lost inventory.

Simplicity is crucial in logistics software, and Commerce Blitz offers a user-friendly interface that allows users to easily manage their inventory and sales channels.

Customization and maintenance services set Commerce Blitz apart from its competitors, providing a tailored solution for businesses of all sizes.

The goal of Commerce Blitz is to empower small businesses and level the playing field in the e-commerce market.

In the future, Commerce Blitz aims to be acquired by a larger company in the ERP, supply chain, or 3PL warehouse space.

Sound Bites

"Logistics is where you make all your money, but it's also where you lose all your money."

"Simplicity was the hardest part. Most systems out there are very complicated, but it's really about where is this product, I have to ship it."

"Word of mouth has been our main source of customers, and we're nearly at 200 customers now.”

Links

Hugh’s company CommerceBlitz: https://commerceblitz.com/why-commerceblitz/

Please leave us a review: https://www.podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

The book Think Like a Startup Founder (early access): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s site for speaking, podcasting, and ruminating: https://jothyrosenberg.com

Jothy’s non-profit foundation The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on why people with a disability over-achieve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

01:08 The Big Idea Behind Commerce Blitz

07:11 Simplicity and Customer Satisfaction

08:28 Building a Customer Base and Product Market Fit

11:42 Differentiation and Market Segmentation

15:09 Product and Services Business Models

16:26 Company Size and Expansion

27:34 The Importance of Grit

36:52 The Future of Commerce Blitz

And here's Hugh. Hello, Hugh.

Hello, how are you?

I'm good. I'm good. So I always like to start with, so people get a sense of where you are, where are you from, actually, originally, and where do you reside now?

So originally Brooklyn, New York, and then moved to New Jersey during my high school years, and I've been in New Jersey ever since. So I'm in New Jersey now, been in Jersey then. I like New Jersey. Oh yeah.

Long time. The Garden State.

That's right, that's right. I'm really close to Manhattan, really close to the large logistics areas. So Port Elizabeth is right near me. Nine cities within 20 minutes. It's kind of an interesting place to live.

Cool. OK, so diving into your startup world, what was the big idea that drove you to start your SaaS company?

I was dealing with logistics for e-commerce during the Amazon boom. And eBay was the first place I got my teeth cut. Amazon came in through Zappos and all of that happened. And we were dealing with a retail outfit. So I had about 400 brands and we did about three to four million SKUs a day.

And we were drop shipping 90 something percent of the catalog. So trying to deal with all of that was a little difficult to find software that did that for me. So we just started preparing our own. And most of the software at the time, and still largely the case, we had to deal with supply chains, so manufacturer to distribution. They kind of stopped when it came to distribution. So we started doing that. And I haven't looked back since.

Okay, but so how would you explain the big problem that, because I don't think people who are not immersed in logistics sort of understand how big that problem is.

So it's all about the problems. If you have a thousand units of something and you're selling and you have a thousand available, it's easy as long as you're sure you have those thousand units. When things start to go wrong, when things come up blank, when things aren't properly skewed or properly addressed.

they tend to go missing or you tend to miss sales, but you also tend to lose inventory. So a simple example would be, you have a drop shipper that you deal with, and that drop shipper, something happened that day that drop shipper is just not able to ship that day or is doing an inventory rebalance or as of yesterday, a tornado hit their warehouse, therefore I need to pull all of their listings down very quickly.

because I don't want to sell product I don't have, because that will negatively impact my Amazon accounts, my normal accounts, and just increase my customer service load tremendously. So what we do is we sit there and we make sure that you can properly balance that stuff. So if you're selling one drop shipper's goods with other drop shippers on multiple channels,

you want to quickly be able to hit a button, a panic button, if you will, to say, great, we're gonna put this down for the day, or I'm going to switch distributors to a different one, load that inventory instead, which tends to be a very manual task on the backend, unless you have a system like ours in place to kind of weave it through for you very quickly and set those rules. So it comes down to not so much to your distribution, but where you're getting it from. And now that.

So would it be safe to say that Amazon is good at doing this and you're helping make sure everybody else, the little guys are good at this too?

Amazon's great at keeping stuff in a warehouse and shipping it for their Amazon product. You can also ship fulfillment by Amazon product if you trigger it through their fulfillment area. So if you have stuff in your warehouse and you're shipping it and your website sells it.

it doesn't necessarily trigger Amazon to ship it for you. You want to ship it yourself. If you've run out of product in your warehouse but you have everything in FBA, I don't know where product is going to sell necessarily. So if you have listings on Amazon, you have listings on eBay, you have listings on your website, you have some distributors you're working with.

One of them could take off at any given time. And you wanna be able to get all of your available inventory to those sales. Whoever gives you money, here, have product that you just bought it from me, here, take it. You don't want that getting locked up. So Amazon's really great at managing their piece, but their competitors are Shopify, their competitors with Walmart. So they're not going to share data. You have to do that yourself. And that's why we come in and help the little guys move around a bit more and not get stagnant in one place.

So good identification of the problem. And then when it came to building a solution, was the hardest part of that all the connections it needed to have or the SAS user interface? Or what was the hardest part of that?

Thanks for watching!

So complication was the hardest part. A lot of the systems out there look at supply chain stuff or look at warehousing modules. They're very complicated screens, there's a lot going on. You could do a lot, but most of the time it's really about where is this product I have to ship it. There's nothing complicated here. And I feel that most of the instances are just making it too complicated. Engineers are solving problems that don't exist. So.

What we decided to do is go out and make something that's a little simpler, a lot more. Any screen you can pick up in five minutes and start learning how to do it. But give them information easily sortable. So you know what's out of stock right away. You know you have a problem order within a few minutes rather than waiting until the next day for something else to kick over and then you have angry customers.

So it's really just about handling information quicker and connecting to these things. So you might think of Zapier as a great solution to connect things or an API that, oh, I can talk to everything, that's wonderful. But if there's no logic behind that API, there's nothing to say, hey, when this happens, do this instead, or if it's out of stock, please pull this listing, then how are you going to do that?

And that's the point of our stuff. It gives you the ability to set rules, create things, control, and get a bit more of a grip on the situation of multiple different places that you're selling on. So if you want TikTok Marketplace tomorrow, sure, let's add that in and set that as a feed and know that you have control over that as well.

So has your theory about keeping it simple would satisfy people? Has that, as you've gone out into the market, has that proven to be true? That people really want it to be simple and are attracted to it?

I find that to be the case. Unfortunately, warehousing in particular is the second highest turnover in the US, besides restaurants. So for people, you have to get people in pretty quickly. It's also very seasonal. So in the fourth quarter of the year, you're ramping up people to ship more goods because packages are moving and things like that. So you have to get people in place quickly and have them not make mistakes. So the simpler and easier it is to pick up, the less intimidating it is, the more people are willing to do.

And that's what we found to be the case in a lot of this. We might not get the warehouse, the logistics manager to buy in directly, but we usually get the marketing people, the product managers and things like that to quickly go, oh, this is a much easier case for us. We can then do that. And then feed this information to the logistics manager to do more of the LTL stuff and things of that nature.

So when you were first getting started, did you create a minimum viable product and kind of go through the process of testing that with people? Or what were the first few steps to kind of get you to a point where product market fit was there and you could sell it?

Yes, our NDP was May of last year. We launched that very softly. I didn't advertise it, didn't talk about it. We had a few clients that I had already started working with to try to figure out the catalog situation. And we started using them. And once we had them on, we started to expand it slowly. It was referral basis, so looking for the problem.

So I was looking for people who had specific distribution issues. They're trying to expand on channels. They're having catalog management problems, which tends to be most of my customers don't realize they have a catalog management problem until they start realizing that things are missing from their website, things of that nature, SKUs are conflicting. And then you start showing them, hey, this is a catalog issue, not so much a logistics issue. Let's show you how to manage a catalog a bit better, so that way we can.

tie this into a lot more. So giving them that control kind of started there. So we just started with the word of mouth. I got a few people on and got them excited about it. That was the key. I needed to get a couple customers who wanted to write me stellar reviews, white glove service for them. We took care of them as best we could. We did stuff outside of our purview. And then we got that in there. We started building up and we're nearly at 200 customers now, mostly from word of mouth.

I think I spent $500 on advertising, but we're just executing a go-to-market to get more eyeballs on this, because it took us a while to really understand what my customers were seeing as a problem. So I know it's a catalog issue. Our customers don't know it until they stub their toe on it and trip on it and go, oh, okay, I need to fix my listings before I can fix my logistics. And...

And you don't realize it's a problem until you do it, because a lot of the world sees logistics as I have a factory, I have a warehouse, and I'm selling to wholesale buyers. And there's a couple trucks in there that move things, but that's as simple as most people see this. But then you start adding in all these marketplaces and the financial reporting, how much do you have on hand?

and things of that nature. What am I responsible for? What do I actually have in my warehouse? What is in transit? What am I selling? I could have a hundred million dollars for sale, but only have a million dollars in my warehouse. So obviously I don't want to spend a hundred million dollars on insurance. I would have to do it and insure for a million and things of that. So it started to get to what was my customer looking at? What was my problem?

And I found that in our case, it was the marketing people, the product managers, and the C-suite people that really wanted what we had to offer there. And they would then convince the warehouse that, look, we need to adopt this because it will make the reporting to us a lot easier and make your jobs easier.

I realize we haven't actually so far said the name of your company was just Commerce Blitz.

Yes, it's commerce splits. That's what we do.

Yeah, yeah. OK, so offline, you told me that it's a very competitive market. And so what is in your differentiation? Is it this simplicity, which you mentioned first, or is there more to how are you differentiated? How do your customers view your differentiation?

So a lot of people look at, they think about supply chain, they think about ERPs. And it's a big, it comes up all the time. Are you an ERP? Like, no, we're not an ERP, but we talk really well with your ERP. And for that matter, it made it a lot easier to explain. So if we're doing distribution management and you have a lot of different disparate channels, you need a source of truth that can tell you how much inventory you have, where the orders are coming from, and be able to pull all that, aggregate all that data down so you can do something with it. And...

When my customers are going through that and they're trying to figure out how to do these things, they really are running through a logistical nightmare on that because if I'm looking at my competition, I'm saying, great, who are you using? And a lot of times it's a couple of the guys who are out there doing it. I won't mention their names, but there's a couple of distribution order management systems in there. There's some...

of sites that pull their information together so they can aggregate it and pull it down in a feed. But these are always slow, have to be maintained. And when as soon as they hear the ERP thing or they start talking about this stuff and they're talking this level, they think this is going to be expensive because I'm going to have to hire more IT staff to manage all this.

So for us, what we do is we come in and say, great, we're gonna help you customize this out for your team, be able to build stuff for you, but we're going to maintain it for you. So you don't have to hire more IT staff to maintain connections, maintain different things. And you can still use spreadsheets that you're probably used to using, because let's be honest, everything ends up in a spreadsheet somewhere in the logistics chain. But.

we really discourage you and want you to be able to pull that information from the source in the right way. So it came down to my competition has a bunch of confusing screens or it's a series of different products that you're putting together with an IT staff that you then have to maintain. So a lot of times it's I'm talking to a software development house to make something for me and now here's three people that you now hire full time to maintain your stack.

That seems a little weird to me since you just invested in ERP. You have an accounting software. You're trying to deal with your logistics and trucks and things of that nature. Now here's another set of IT people to deal with your e-commerce. But they're not really e-commerce people. They're just dealing with supply management. So it's helping them save some money, a lot of money, and helping them streamline their actions. So when you're building a product.

When the marketing person's building a product, I really want that person to build everything the logistics person's going to need as well. Because it's just, why build it twice? Why try to maintain two systems? Let's feed the information out in the correct order. And that's where we start excelling over the competition.

So you've got two business models, basically. You've got a product business and you've got a services business.

Yeah, so the product business is mostly around our turnkey, which allows you to sign into the website. You sign up for our service, you pick the plan that works for you, and then you add in your different distribution and your different sales channels, and you start seeing things immediately. And that's pretty great for a small-medium business. And it really runs pretty well up to 10 million. You're probably not going to need much more.

But then we look at the more customizable enterprise level or bigger companies like a 3PL warehouse or a large e-commerce that needs basically portals for their users.

to come in and that's where it comes down to the customization. So we can start, we can customize those portals for their use and then we maintain them since we built the platform and it runs on our logic. I don't have to maintain different systems. I can maintain everybody. So it allows everybody to get the benefit of the growth of the platform. It also allows them to get more strength out of it. So it really does level the playing field between both, which I like.

So how many people are in this company of yours right now?

We're just about 20 people, mostly developers and engineers, who are expanding out our sales and marketing area now. So that's gonna be it.

I was going to say that it seems like you must be ready for that, to expand that. I mean, if you've got 200, you said you had 200 customers. So that's a pretty good statement about product market fit. Um, and, um, and have you been focused on a fairly narrow market segment? Like, you know, some, some portion of retail, it's not all retail.

Yeah.

It's not all, no, it's funny because it's, I look at clients and we do this whole thing where, so my big takeaway from doing this whole thing was that don't do marketing before you're ready to do marketing. Understand your product market fit first. But understand that might change because you're going to meet customers, they're going to give you things back and you're gonna have to take that feedback and go, I thought about it something totally differently. But.

That's why I'm here because I think totally differently and I need to understand what they're doing. So don't market too soon. And then when if you pull that back and say, look, let me wait, talk to people, start having these conversations one-on-one like this. And it helps me really get to the bottom of what I'm selling to customers. Now I can shake the package, I'm going to them, I can start figuring out. And that's how we narrow down our price point, how we narrow down what the different offerings are. But as we're getting to marketing and doing that,

I need to bring people in and say, here's our demo, here's how it works, here's the problem solution we're solving. I'm not going to put my thumb on the marketing side because I'm A, not very good at marketing and B, I'm an engineer and engineers don't think that way.

So a marketing guy comes into me and I have some great people that we've been shopping around and we picked a great team. But they come in and they go, okay, I see the issue here. Your client is not the warehouse manager. Because I was talking to warehouse managers, they're like, I don't want to change the system. That's a lot of work for me. I'm fine with this. This is job security. I can make spreadsheets every Friday. I give them out. This is good. So this is not the person I want to talk to. So it's trying to figure out who am I talking to?

who's going to benefit most from what we're offering. So trying to go through that stuff and distilling it down to the very simple things. Because I can make things very complicated or I can try to make it simpler. And that's the whole goal here. And I went through a whole cycle in my journey here going from we're going to take over the world, here's AI, here's how AI is going to do this stuff for you. We're going to take all of your case packs and we're going to break it down to parts. And we're going to...

do kits and sets out and make sure all of your stuff, that stuff is just noise. I need to say, look, we're just gonna make it simpler for you, we're gonna help you get it out there, and we're gonna help you manage a catalog with a lot more ease. And the minutia I'll get into. But it's not, and that's what our marketing stuff started coming down to, it started getting much smaller, it started getting much simpler. Our videos are three seconds. So here's how you do this. See, that's it, bye.

And it helps, it just helps make it easier. And people, Hey, if it's not complicated, express that it's not complicated. This does not need to be complicated. Someone bought a product. You have to ship that product to them within the timeframe you told them. That's it. That's the total science here. You can keep doing that over and over again and you do, and you maintain better than 2% error. You're, you're doing all right.

You've never heard of three second videos.

So are you basically wearing two hats? I mean, everybody wears many more hats, but I mean, the big hats of CEO and CTO, are you both?

I was CTO for quite some time. I did bring in a co-founder, Harsh, who's on the...

and he's fantastic, I brought him as a CTO. He's run a lot of big commerce and big catalog management stuff. So he really liked what we were doing. He pulled us onto another project. And then he ended up, hey, take my money. I want in on this. And we said, great, this is wonderful. Join the team. So it's been fun that way. I did, when you start, you do wear a lot of hats and you really wanna bring it down. You don't, as I said.

Expanding your marketing team out the door is not was not a good idea for us And we really shouldn't have done that and we went back and said nope Can it we're going back to this and we were gonna deploy a different go-to-market afterwards But right now the engineers are gonna have to be the front salespeople. So I am the chief revenue officer and See you we're changing that out

Okay, good call on that. All right, so what are your goals? What are your aspirations for this?

Um, more podcasts. That's, that's my goal is get out there and talk a bit. Um, I really like, uh, I like how my software enables people to grow. So my, my goal here is very simple. And our, um, reason for being is just to create options for low guys, help label the panning field for, for the, uh, for people growing up there.

Amazon does not need to own the world. Yes, it's a great marketplace and you can do a lot there. And then 50% of e-commerce sales done on Amazon. But that is falling quickly. And you're looking at different TikTok shops and Fiat and Metta and different social marketplaces. You're going to be able to buy product everywhere. VR goggles, AR stuff is gonna be a click on this. There's little buttons Amazon put out that you can put on your, that was years ago.

But being able to wear you can buy things is just generally how retail goes. So, and retail has gone a lot more from direct to consumer than it has in the past. It used to be a big distribution hub, did everything, but companies like Under Armour and Adidas went straight to consumer. So they have their own stores, they have their own pieces and they pulled that back. They weren't always that way.

So watching them consolidate and go straight in means they want more of that dollar share from the final sale.

But a smaller company really has to augment the catalog with a lot of extra stuff. So if you're selling pet supplies, you might make a series of shampoos, you might make some soaps, you might make a couple of beds, whatever. But you wanna augment your catalog with extra things from other manufacturers to make yourself bigger and more appealing, and so you can sell sets of things. And that's the big thing, is like a windshield manufacturer.

sells windshields, but they don't make the rubber surround, they don't make the glue, they don't make the extra little clips. Those all come from different suppliers. And if they don't have to buy them and store them in their warehouse, they don't have to worry about...

when they're going to go out of date and Whether the warehouse is the proper temperature for that type of glue or things like that They could just drop ship it from their manufacturer It allows them to sell that kit and allows them to really take advantage of things that they wouldn't have taken advantage of So long story short, I want to get a little guy little more power a little more control over their life

Okay, but take it out further. I mean, is this something you see getting acquired by a bigger company? You know, so what's the exit strategy?

Exit strategy is definitely an ERP or a supply chain or even a 3PL warehouse, large e-commerce outfit to buy us, yes, and roll us into their offering. For decent profit, we want to do that, right? But it's...

I always say, so I go to a lot of startup meetings, I go to a lot of pitches, and everyone's talking about the exit strategy and how if we get this percentage out there. The one thing I've learned is that you have to build a business first and then sell it. So for me, that focus is there, it's just, it's not my driving focus. Yes, eventually someone's gonna go, hey, that would be really great with your supply chain, I can see way further down it. Yes, I know, that's the point.

Yeah.

And an ERP like SAP or Oracle NetSuite might say, this is it, or Microsoft Dynamics might say, hey, I can't see into Amazon like you can because of this. And I don't have this aggregate data from all of these different last mile shipping hubs that you have. This is a data play for me.

that becomes a better drive for them because our customer book, not so much how much we make per month, but the amount of people that are just on it really starts to drive our value and get us out there to those kind of companies.

Well, that was going to be my next question, which is, you know, if you've got a partial services business and a partial product business, you know, if you really do a great job, the gross margins and services tops out at maybe 35%, whereas product gross margins, you know, 80, 80 plus percent.

And so if you're in the kind of business where somebody's going to value you as a multiple of revenue, that hurts a little bit. But if you can get them to value you based on the data or the number of customers or the number of something else, or if not, can you begin to outsource some of the services so that it's not on you when they're

coming to sort of value you.

Yeah, it's what multiplier can you add to their business? They're not buying you because they want to run your business. They're buying you because they want their business to do better. If we can be additive to their business, that's far more of an upside and much more value for them, which therefore means we get a better buyout. The things that I need to say.

And how many years in the future do you think that is? Just rough guess.

I think two to three years, I think we'll be there. Yeah, it should be quick.

Nice.

Okay, my favorite topic, okay? All right, so I wanna talk about grit. Because every startup founder has plenty of grit. And I'd love to hear where yours comes from. How'd you get it?

Okay.

Yeah, mostly comes from fear. Honestly, you have to fight your fear. It's easy to get, as an engineer, it's easy to get a good job, be comfortable and do okay and just solve someone else's problems. But I come from a, my dad was a business owner, has been all my life. He actually, he was a tour manager for the Clash.

but he also started a company. So he'd always had two hats on. He always ran something, had some other gig while running something else. So he did that for years. He did production for years. So I got into it watching tour managers from around the world come through watching different, Stonewall 25. I was backstage for that. But it's amazing watching the production come together because watching any production anywhere is a business.

because there's marketing involved, there's ticket sales, there's direct consumer buys, there's the concession stance in dealing with how to rent out the space to what we're selling each hot dog for. And you start watching this and I got really into it and how to set this up. So I never got into one little part of anything. And for me, the grit just comes from, I'm scared to do anything on my own and there's no steady paycheck here, believe me. And

and really try to get through all that. I just don't understand not doing it that way, not looking at it the whole picture, not being in all that. And I will make a very bad lineman in that sense. I need to be, okay, here's the books, you figure it out, game plan is up to you. And that's where I've always been. And it's been both a cursing and a blessing at the same time, but it's the reason why I start companies, it's just, that's how you do it.

And you can't be afraid to fail, although scared of doing it. But failure is where I learned all of my lessons. So I don't, I don't learn the easy way. As I always say, I have to, I have to experience it. I have to be hitting the head with that brick and then I will go from there. Um, I don't know, maybe it's just Jersey.

Well, we share that. I mean, the whole point of this book that I finished writing and is in production is coming out in June. And by the way, as a guest on this, I'll be sending you an autographed copy of it when it's finally out.

As long as you sign it, I love it. Yes, that's great.

Well, and to your last point, so it's full of sort of lessons learned the hard way. And what I think makes it helpful to people is that it's about, it's not about, you know, bragging about successes. It's about, Hey, this happened and here's how I could have avoided it. And, you know, and I view these discussions as taking, you know,

I had something that was about this much in terms of lessons. And then each time I have someone like you on, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger with more and more lessons in all kinds of different companies and markets and totally different stuff. I mean, actually, you're the first person that's ever made logistics really fun for me to talk about.

Yeah, it tends to be the most boring subject and nobody cares about it. And it's not, it doesn't come up at any, any convention. Uh, and it's funny, I've been to a lot of e-commerce conventions. It's all about marketing and getting the shot. But logistics is where you make all your money. I don't, you know, it's also where you lose all your money. So to me, it always became.

Well, but it's also where if you're a consumer and you order something from Amazon, I remember last Sunday, I don't remember what it was exactly, but last Sunday morning I ordered something on Amazon and it was there four hours later, it was at my house. And that's amazing. That is truly amazing.

Yeah. Yep.

And they built a logistics network. Uh, and that's really what they did. I mean, it's the same story for Walmart. Um, and I love the Walmart model in that sense because Walmart, every Walmart is a distribution center. And so what they did Walmart's big thing was not buying better. Well, they, of course they bought in bulk, but

they picked a delivery that was closest to the distribution point. So if it was landing in California, they picked a Walmart that was nearer to their distribution and they took the entire order at that Walmart. Then they break it up and they send their trucks around all of their Walmart's. And that whole logistics chain is how they save the money on logistics because now you're not paying for that distributor to distribute to every one of your stores.

You're doing it yourself and your trucks are going to all the stores anyway. So if you just set up the circle and run this correctly, you can make sure your trucks are 80% full all the time and it saves you a lot of money. Um, and that's how they did it. Amazon took that on its head and said, look, we're just going to throw.

tons of money at the problem, make 2% profit maybe for 20 years and get our logistics thing together and they have trucks, they have that, they're competing with FedEx directly. That's why a lot of times even with my clients it's put your stuff in FBA if it's turning quickly. If you have to store it for a long time, don't. But if it's turning quickly, keep restocking FBA every two weeks.

Do that every two weeks. And if your website sells something, sometimes you might say, look, Amazon will ship it for me. It might be cheaper. Probably is. Pick and pack fees are not that expensive. But it will certainly save you money over FedEx if you do it right. Or especially UPS on smaller boxes and things of that nature. But it gets you being flexible in there and figuring out what's the best delivery method for me. And Amazon FBA is certainly on the table all the time and should be.

I mean Shopify tried to do a logistics network just before COVID. COVID hit and they.

shut that down pretty quickly. I think they might come back with another thing now, but that whole last mile delivery is where most of the money is spent on logistics, on delivery any off any product. So shipping a t-shirt costs you at least six bucks. I don't care if it's going two houses down. It's going to cost you at least six bucks to get it out and through the mail.

You might be able to save that with bulk, getting it down to maybe four bucks. But then you have the packaging and things like that. So that t-shirt needs to sell for 25 bucks for you to make any money on it. By the time you're done buying it from your supplier, storing it in the warehouse, having people handling it, that the cost set up stupid quickly. And, and being able to manage that and deal with the reverse logistics on the returns.

then adds the compound. So if you're trying to lower that down, so trying to keep all this in balance. Yeah. That's why Amazon does not make much money on retail at all. It's a very small percentage.

What's the majority of their money made on that?

AWS, Amazon Web Services.

Oh, yeah, I know that. But I meant like, so I thought that you were gonna say that there's like, you know, that Amazon Prime is how they make most of their money within the retail, you know, part of their business.

subscription. Yeah. Now, I honestly, if you look at the numbers every year from Amazon, the retail side of things does not make much money. It's really very low. They make a lot of money off the fees from the people selling through their platform because they put all of that back on that. So the retailer, so and they don't, you know, arguably don't take care of them very well.

Um, but they, but in order to get that marketplace, you're buying marketing. You're not buying a sales platform. You're buying the marketing engine that is Amazon. So you're paying to play in that. And that's, that's the deal.

And it's roughly the same if you try to self publish a book through them. You don't make any money that way at all. So yeah. Well I found this really interesting and I hope this gets the word out about what you have and how it's different.

The fees will kill you.

Come check out Commerce Blitz. We have a wonderful website. We have a blog up and we do have a knowledge base that gives you three second videos if you want them. And a bunch of stuff. And your book, I can't wait. I'm really excited to read. I love those stories. The grit of it all. It's true. It takes a special kind of person to do this job.

I have the URL from your site. It'll be on the show notes so people can find you. All right, well, thank you very much for being on. You really enjoyed it.

Thank you, Jothi. It's a pleasure.