At the start of Q4, OMG Commerce founder Brett Curry hosts a special Last-Minute Levers masterclass to help brands maximize performance during the busiest shopping season of the year. Joined by Amazon strategist Luba Ilyasova, ad expert Jonathan Steffens, and Connor Crook, CEO of Diamondback Tools, the session dives into what’s changed on Amazon in 2025, how to build a profitable holiday strategy, and which final levers to pull before Black Friday / Cyber Monday hits.

From international expansion and tariff navigation to using Amazon’s newest ad analytics, profit margin tracking, and creative promotion tactics, this masterclass offers a playbook for protecting margins, scaling smartly, and avoiding common Q4 pitfalls. Whether you’re planning coupons, bundles, or last-minute campaigns, these insights will help make this your strongest and most profitable holiday yet.

—

Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

—

Chapters: 

(00:00) Intro

(04:32) Diamondback Tools & Amazon’s Role in Brand Growth

(06:43) Strategic Fit – How Amazon Complements DTC and Wholesale

(11:54) Key Shifts in 2025 – Tariffs, International Expansion & SKU Updates

(16:07) Major Amazon Changes – Matching Product to Customer Intent

(21:04) Sponsor Acknowledgements & Tool Shoutouts

(22:14) Ad Trends and Competitive Landscape in 2025

(25:26) Making Data Actionable – Customer Journey Analytics & Search Query Insights

(32:40) Last-Minute Levers for Q4 Success

(34:15) Testing New Main Images & Launching Video Ads

(35:51) Building Gift Guides & Creative Holiday Angles

(37:18) Integrating Email and SMS With Amazon Promotions

(39:26) Diamondback’s Promotional Strategy for the Holidays

(45:21) Virtual Bundles – Opportunities and Pitfalls

(50:27) Balancing Aggression and Profitability in Holiday Ads

(52:33) Post-Event Remarketing & Retention Tactics

(56:35) Final Thoughts – Promotions That Actually Work

(58:37) Closing Remarks – Building Profitable Brands This Holiday Season

—

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 
• Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact 

Relevant Links:

• Connor’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-crook-bb82b110/
• Diamondback Website: https://www.diamondback.com/
• Boom by Cindy Joseph (Amazon launch case): https://www.amazon.com/stores/BOOMbyCindyJoseph/page/8ACDB09A-AEB9-4CEE-9311-BC3DCA688D8D
• Native Deodorant: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Native/page/B87A8989-7690-424A-B775-553034F6E58E
• Sponsor Offer | AZM Prep (Mention Ecommerce Evolution): https://amzprep.com/
• Sponsor Offer | KAPOQ (Mention Ecommerce Evolution): https://kapoq.com/
• Sponsor Offer | Seller Candy (Mention Ecommerce Evolution): https://sellercandy.com/
• Sponsor Offer | Threecolts (Mention Ecommerce Evolution): https://www.threecolts.com/

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

Well, welcome to last minute Levers,

your final prep before we enter

into what is arguably the most

wonderful time of the year

for sellers and merchants and

brand owners. We got

q4, we got peak holiday,

we got BFCM coming up right around the

corner.

And so we wanted to take this time to

do something kind of unique and this is

going to be a bit of a unique event.

I'll kind of lay the

stage here momentarily,

but we want to get you ready and give

you some final strategies, tactics,

levers to pull so that you

can make this a smashing

success. And so this is not

going to be your typical webinar.

I love learning. I love

attending webinars.

Sometimes they're kind of like

death by PowerPoint or Google

Slides or Gamma or whatever

the latest flavor is.

We'll certainly have some visuals, we'll

have some presentations to show you,

but I wanted this to be

more of a conversation with

experts so that you can

get some raw feedback and

ideas and I think this will be

fun and I think the pace will be

enjoyable.

And so I'm really just your host today.

I'm just the guy behind the

microphone keeping everything moving,

making sure we're on track and really

pulling out some great insights

from our guests.

And so I do want to introduce

our guests because do we have a

lineup for you? So first

off, we've got Luba.

She's part of team OMG.

She's our senior A BM or

Amazon brand management

strategist.

And Luba is one of those people that

I don't know anybody that knows the

insides of baseball for Amazon, like Luba.

She comes from running a hardware

store just long as the other day,

running a hardware store on the upper

west side of Manhattan to becoming

an Amazon pro.

And she actually ran Amazon for a client

of ours years ago and then someone that

I became a real friend with,

the owner and Luba and

her team grew that brand,

a pretty big brand from 3 million a

year on Amazon. Nothing to seize that,

to just shy of 17

million a year on Amazon.

She's grown other brands. She's

a trusted coach and advisor.

She's kind of running our team here

at OMG and so can't wait for you to

hear from Luba. She's

fiery, she's got insights.

You're going to love her as

soon as you hear from her.

So we'll hear from Luba momentarily.

But welcome to the program

Luba and scale of one to 10,

how excited are you to be

presenting on the webinar?

I actually love being on a webinar,

so I would even say it's 11.

Oh,

we're dialing this one up to 11 for

all you Spinal Tap fans out there.

Next up we got Jonathan Finka.

I had to look this up. Jonathan,

you've been with OMG for seven years,

man, that is in internet years.

That is a long, long time.

So super glad that

you're part of the team.

Jonathan is an ad pro.

The dude remembers numbers like

nobody's business. He is very strategic,

he's logical.

He understands how brand building

works and how Amazon advertising works.

And so Jonathan, with that

man, welcome to the webinar.

Welcome to the show, so to

speak. Thanks for coming on.

And same question for you. Scale

of one to 10, how excited are you?

More of a realist. So I'm going to

give it a seven, a strong seven.

I actually, I had those

hedging bets in my mind, right?

Placing bets and I knew you were going

to come in under, so I love that.

I think that's a good ad strategist

who's really watching the numbers and

bidding and looking at

probabilistic outcomes.

Got to take the realistic approach,

right? It's a seven. Yeah,

and I think that's spot on. So love that.

Love having both you on the program.

So you're going to hear a ton from

Jonathan and Lu as we go here,

but the real star of the show,

the real guest of the show

here is our friend and

client, Connor Crook

from Diamondback Tools.

What's up Connor? How's it going today?

Things are good. Things are good.

I've been down in the warehouse

sewing stuff all morning.

You've been making tool

belts today, not tool belts.

We're looking at some brand expansion

and I'm just sitting down at the

machine playing around with some concepts

and seeing what might come out in the

future.

You're playing your best

Christmas elf here. Like, hey,

let's not just talk about products,

let's not talk about growth.

Let's go make some stuff. You're

going to get to hear from Connor,

one of the longtime OMG clients, a friend.

We're really seeing tremendous growth,

amazing product time and back tools.

And so we'll get to see

how Amazon fits into their

overall growth strategy,

what their promotional strategy

is going to be like for q4,

and then some challenges and

some wins from this year.

And really that's going to

be the flow of this webinar.

I think it's important to

take just a couple of minutes.

We won't spend long here,

but let's talk strategically how should

Amazon fit into your overall brand

growth before we get into a season like

this and start discounting and start

going nuts, trying to

close sales and whatnot.

I think it's important to back up and say,

why are we doing what we're doing? How

is Amazon fit into the grander scheme of

things?

Because ultimately I should be trying to

build a business and trying to build a

brand, not just trying to sell stuff

on Amazon. So we're going to back up.

I really love Connor's perspective here.

So we'll do that very briefly and then

we're going to get into some challenges

and some wins from this year,

what has changed and what's different

and so how that's going to shape our

Q4 plan. And then we'll get the last

minute levers, promotional strategy,

lots of good stuff for you to take away

and make this one of the best holidays

yet. So let's start with

strategy. So Connor,

I want to hear from you,

how does Amazon fit into your overall

brand strategy and how has that

evolved over recent years? Because again,

as we get into this situation where we

may be tempted to slash our profits to

close more deals in q4, we step back

and think about the overall strategy.

So how has that evolved

for Diamondback Tools?

Yeah, Brett, thanks.

So I bought Diamondback back in

got going next year and our strategy

was all about our website tool

wells.com. We eventually

added some dealers.

We weren't really able to get into the

dealers in the US but we had some success

internationally and I was

really hesitant about Amazon,

just horror stories that I've heard

about them copying your product,

knocking off your product, you lose

control of it. And after a few years,

I think it was 21 or so,

we had an employee at the

time sales lead who said, Hey,

I've got some experience with Amazon,

I can set it up. We'll see how it goes.

Well you know how to do it. Let's do it.

It was also a good timing because that

was post COVID when the DTC market was

slowing down and it was a good time to

really branch out into some different

channels. So once we got in there,

what we found is Amazon provides a couple

of different really key features for

us. One, it's a different sales

stream, it's a different customer.

I think Luba has some information she'll

share about globally the overlap or

lack of overlap with Amazon,

but we've definitely seen from

what information we can get from

Amazon that it's a different customer.

We have some really interesting anecdotes

about how you can get a customer on

Diamond Bag that becomes your

online customer and vice versa.

Some of the different

just shopping habits.

Another great thing that it's done

for us is help smooth cashflow issues.

Amazon DTC wholesale,

they all have different ebbs and flows.

Obviously right now stores or wholesalers

are stocking up for the holidays,

but customers are cooling it down.

They know Black Friday's coming,

so we know that we're going to

have a spike in both Shopify and

Amazon as you go into the holiday,

but then even there they kind of ebb

and flow a little bit differently.

So just understanding

how Amazon can smooth

cashflow, how it can bring

in new customers, and

it's just an expansion

to have one more stream.

And I was talking about costs

and stuff. I look at it this way.

Amazon wholesale and DTC,

they're all going to cost you

30 to 40 points. It's such.

A good point. It's such a good

point. You really can't avoid.

It. Yeah, you're going to

pay margin to a dealer, okay,

dealers doing certain things for

you, they're selling for you. Amazon,

that's a place where you can market.

It's a place where they're

going to sell for you.

They're going to do part

of your warehousing for you

and they're going to open

you up to new eyes so

you can pay for that.

DTC has been a tremendous amount,

much of it with OMG on

advertising, on Facebook,

on Meta and Google. So either

way you're paying. Yeah.

Yeah, man, it's such a good point. Yeah,

you're going to lose 30 or 40 points.

It's going to vary a little

bit by your category,

but you're going to be giving up that

margin and just where it's going does vary

a little bit from channel to channel.

And I love this chance to step back

and just look at this holistically.

I'll use a couple of examples here.

Boom. Originally boom by Cindy Joseph.

Now boom, beauty longtime client of OMG.

We worked with them for years and

years on the Google and YouTube side,

and then we helped them launch on

Amazon and they went from zero to

$6 million the first year and very

little cannibalization of their core

business. And it's because there

was a lot of pent up demand.

There was a lot of people that have been

seeing the boom, my Cindy Joseph ads,

and they love the message

and they love the angle,

but they just weren't buying because

Boom wasn't on Amazon. They launched on

Amazon. Things take off.

Obviously we do a lot of work on the ad

side and the organic optimization side

and stuff like that. Then

you look at native deodorant.

We were working with Moist,

the founder from the early days and went

through the acquisition and grew them

with p and g for years. I think they

did a billion dollars last year.

Moist tweeted, but one of the things

he said about Amazon was like,

I just wish I'd gotten there

sooner. That was the main thing.

I wish I'd gotten there sooner.

But I think what we're

potentially tempted to do,

and I tease this a

little bit at the outset,

is we're tempted to say

we're on Amazon, it's Q4,

it's about to be cyber five or cyber 12

or cyber whatever it's going to be this

year. Got to do well.

So I'm just going to start giving away

all my margin and then end up making

mistakes.

And so seeing how this fits,

this is a great place

to close new business,

a great way to attract new

customers. To your point, Connor,

sometimes you meet people and you will

get customers you wouldn't have otherwise

gotten. And so that's really

what this is all about.

I want to talk briefly about, anyway,

actually we can dig in as much

as we see fit here as we go here,

but what are some of the

things that have shifted?

So I'll start with you Connor,

and then I want to go deep with Luba

and Jonathan. What's shifted this year?

What's changed on Amazon because there's

been a lot and then how that's going to

influence us in q4.

So what are some of the changes you've

kind of endured here in 25 so far,

Connor?

Well,

the big story in e-commerce and commerce

in general this year is obviously the

tariffs.

The tariff situation has been really huge

here at Diamondback and interesting on

a lot of different levels because we

were a made in USA product for the first

five, six years I ran in business.

That just became untenable and for a lot

of reasons and we moved our production

to Vietnam. That was a

huge move that we did.

And as about the time we got all

of our product moved to Vietnam,

we had the announcement of liberation

day and we were being liberated from,

I don't know what liberated

from your profits. Exactly.

So it quickly became our strategy around

liberation day and the tariffs was, hey,

we are selling a lot of our

product internationally.

We need to lean into that and we need to

figure out a way to get our product to

various places around the world

without coming to Charlottesville,

Virginia along the way.

And so we were

working with that a lot with wholesale,

but it's also a part

of our Amazon strategy.

We had always fulfilled

orders into Canada from here,

FBM from here in Charlottesville or

FBA through American warehousing.

So we are moving a lot of our Amazon

strategy around Australia and Canada.

We're leaning in heavier there.

We're starting to put in

advertising in Canada.

We haven't started

advertising in Australia yet,

but we're seeing solid

organic growth there.

And so it's all about moving the product

and getting it to those locations

without coming here to avoid the tariffs.

So international expansion

has been really big for us.

Another thing that came with the shift

in manufacturing was skew changes

internally. We made the decision that

this product is a DB 500 or whatever

it is when it's made in Asia,

it becomes a DB 500,

a phrase. Well then you lose

a lot of traction with the

algorithm.

So working on strategies to avoid losing

the traction that we've grown around

certain products has been a big

part of our growth this year.

We also, because when we moved to Asia,

we divided between our best

product and our old product,

which is now on sort of our

better level best product.

And so there's been a lot of discussion

around channel strategy as to what goes

on Amazon, what goes on tool belts.com,

what goes to dealers and how do

we emphasize different products.

And the biggest part of our Amazon

strategy this year is just really been the

growth DTC wise.

September was pretty far off of

the pace of where we hoped to be,

but we made up for it on Amazon.

And the interesting thing is it's not

cannibalization because we're seeing

most of the growth, Amazon or a lot

of it is in Australia and Canada.

As we've moved more there, put more

of our product available on Amazon.

So our Amazon strategy has

been avoiding tariffs and

leaning into international,

dealing with updated skews and

trying not to lose traction and then

trying to figure out how to make

Amazon really a thoughtful part of our

omnichannel approach so

that it's growing without

cannibalizing the other channels.

Man, such good insights there a

lot we can unpack. I love that.

Thinking about which products

are going to be on Amazon,

which are going to be strictly

DTC or other channels and yeah,

tariff mitigation and

international expansion,

all of those are opportunities

that Amazon unlocks for us.

We'll get back to some of

that more as we go here.

I'm going to kick things over to you Luba

right now and I want to hear from you

what are some of the things that

have really shifted this year

and what's changed that has

materially changed the game on Amazon?

You've been doing this for 11 years,

you've seen everything under the

sun as it pertains to Amazon,

so fire away and feel free to share your

screen too if you want to share that

presentation if that's useful.

So first of all, Connor,

great success on Amazon and most

importantly I think you have the

winning perspective on how

Amazon feeds into your ecosystem

because too many people

are afraid of Amazon.

And I've always said that if you

are not in control of your products

distribution on Amazon,

somebody else's will.

We see it all the time where a

brand's products end up on Amazon

sold by third party resellers and

you have no control over content,

over pricing, over quality.

And we always advise brands who

may not even be interested in it,

at least take control of your own

product that is being distributed there.

There's always going to be the case.

And just to elaborate on the

whole cannibalization thing,

we've actually,

in a good old days when you could

match Amazon scrambled email to the

actual customer information,

you can't do that

anymore, not at the scale,

but we ran with one of

the brands I worked with,

we ran their Amazon customers versus

their direct to consumer customers.

There was about 10 15% overlap.

That's crazy.

You would think it

would be so much bigger,

but in reality people shop

where people want to shop.

I can see 20 Facebook

ads for a beauty product.

I will not buy it through

Facebook, I will not.

I go and I will look on

Amazon, is it available there?

That will be my first resource.

But what dramatically changed

on Amazon this year is

matching product to customer intent.

That is the biggest

change that took place.

You can't any longer

spend your way into sale

because if your product is not optimized

to the point where it's matching the

consumer purchasing content, your

ads are simply not going to show.

So you have to be very

thoughtful about who

your customer is,

what your brand is and what

is your value proposition.

So we're going to be giving away some

of templates and I know everybody uses

tools, we all have tools, sometimes

we have way too many tools,

but these are quick templates

that you can use and I'll

just walk over them and then

we'll email the links to anybody

who is interested. So template.

We'll make sure everybody gets it,

we'll email it out to the whole list.

So the first template that I put

together that I like to use is sort of

estimating if you should

even be running the deal.

So you just plug in with the

referral fee. That's standard 15%.

So let's say on average you

pay $5 in fulfillment fees,

that's your 20% is your gold taxers and

let's say you're going to run a best deal.

Best deal for either be next week

or for Black Friday, Monday is going to

cost you a thousand dollars per deal.

Now this calculator helps you

calculate if your regular price is

$15 and you're giving 10% discount

and you sell 6,000 units with

20% advertising cost,

will you make money in the end or not?

And you just plug in numbers and

see where you want to be in terms of

advertising, how many

units you need to sell,

how much margin you can give away to

come out where you want to come out

financially. That's a

useful little template.

Peak event budget, pacing

what you plan to spend,

what you actually spend

paid revenue, total revenue,

are you where you want

to be in Taos? If not,

then you may need to dial

down your advertising expense.

You may want to look

into why you pay so hot.

And finally inventory,

do you have enough on hand

inbound to FBA at a WD,

how are you selling through?

Should you pull back your ads

or maybe pause the promotions?

This is something that I usually

recommend running during the

large high velocity events,

literally to have 15 minute touch bases

and during the event just to see where

you are because things can get out of

hand.

Love it. Those resources are amazing Luba,

so we'll email that out to everybody.

Feel free to use those, share those.

I think now is a good time actually to

mention our sponsors and you alluded to

this Luba,

that everybody is using tools and

I think the most sophisticated,

the fastest growing brands are using

tools makes life easier and better.

But sometimes you just need to get down

and dirty with a spreadsheet and I do

that all the time. We use HubSpot and

other tools for sales, I love them,

but sometimes I just want to put stuff

in a spreadsheet because I want to

manipulate and play around

with it and think big picture.

And so I do want to highlight our

sponsors before we hear from Jonathan on

what's changed, some wins

but Amazon Prep, a MD prep, kpac,

hello tax seller, candy LTA three Colts,

check them all out,

they've got special offers,

they're all valuable in their own

and so check out our sponsors.

Jonathan, from your perspective,

challenges wins and what's

ads side of things.

So I think everybody knows that

the landscape in Amazon is always

getting more competitive and

the past couple of years in that sense,

but it is different in the way

that it's getting more competitive.

Obviously we've been seeing a lot more,

at least the bucket of brands on Amazon.

I think we OMG work with

about 30 ish brands on Amazon,

but we've all pretty much across the

board been seeing more and more intensity

from either copycat

sellers or knockoffs or

even more that are more sellers

popping up that are trying to

say that they're your product or

making swiping your images and

whatnot. But that's sort

of always been around,

it's been a lot hot more intense

over the last couple of years.

But of course the tariff play and just

kind of piggybacking off of what Lulu was

saying about using really scrutinizing,

will this promo actually be

profitable at the end of the day

to tie into that is really brands have

had to really hone in on what are your

numbers. We've worked with many brands

that were just on Amazon and they

had their product that they were slinging

on Amazon for the last few years and

they never really like, Hey,

what's margins? What's your goal?

And they would come to us and

they'd say, what should our ACOs be?

What is tacos?

I've never heard of that

and not a business owner

myself, but I like to think that if

I, I would have that nailed down,

but just as it's getting more and more

competitive, we're seeing higher CPCs,

the tariffs are obviously

eating the margins,

that number is really important and that's

also really important for the ad side

of things to know that

if that number is being determined by

your agency or you're trying to figure out

what is that performance

target we need to be hitting,

it's really critical to have

everything else in a row so that

yeah, we can be at that

15% or 20% or 30% ACOs

or whatever that taco number is.

Just making sure that you are being

obviously profitable

at the end of the day,

but then as aggressive as you can be.

Another big shift in the Amazon ecosphere,

which also is if you're going to events

or whatever and hearing from promotions

from Amazon,

they're always talking about their new

features that they're rolling out and

it's sort of been a data overload and

it's really been rolling out for the last

two years,

but with all the brand analytics and

the customer journey analytics and the

search query analytics and then the Amazon

marketing cloud and all the insights

you can get from that,

there's just so much that you

could really dive into it.

Especially like the Amazon marketing

Cloud and all the different audience

segmentation that you can go into there.

You could go in there and be absorbing

so much data for you could probably

absorb that data for two months and

not really come out of it with an

actionable like, Hey,

I'm making more success over here because

there's just so much data and so much

to look at. There are some really good

nuggets and I think that the customer

journey analytics is a great insight so

you can dig into your audience trends

and then Amazon's also

giving you like, hey,

your awareness is decreasing month on

month and here's some tips for growing

your awareness, whether that's

expanding sponsor brand ads,

sponsor display or running promos to

certain subsets of your audience groups.

And we do use that very frequently,

but then the software

providers that we use,

KPO one that we use a

lot for just really great

reporting and they can pull all

of that kind of together and

then we can have more cohesive narratives.

So the software is doing the work of

analyzing all this data into group sets

that we want to be looking at to

then optimize our PPC around that,

the Amazon marketing.

One thing I want to do, sorry,

let's just key on something really

quickly Jonathan. So with the,

we've realized that our problem

was never necessarily more data.

Now we have lots and lots of data.

We're swimming in the data

and if you're not careful,

you just at the end of the day

you end up and you're like, well,

I looked at a lot of numbers today,

like an unbelievable amount of numbers,

I don't know what to do. So the only

way this is beneficial if we say,

okay is what this means and

this is what I'm going to do

next, and so you just talked

about something interesting

where if awareness or

impressions are going down on a specific

item, you're maybe looking at, okay,

how do I reverse that trend?

And so can we unpack a few of those

or just the highlight if I kind of

cut you off midstream, but

what are a few of those? Okay,

these are the important data points that

you could be finding and then what do

we do with those?

Yeah, so especially on the topic

of as we're getting into q4,

we've always got the promos,

the big deal event next week and then

of course Black Friday, cyber Monday,

so the customer journey

analytics as I touched on,

you can look into that and see your

different audience pools of shoppers that

are in awareness, shoppers in

consideration, intent purchase,

and so sponsored brand ads sponsored

display are the ones that ad

types that we can use to really grow

the awareness and considerations.

So shoppers who are seeing the

brand, becoming aware of the brand,

maybe even engaging,

coming to the listing page and

those are critical initiatives

in the lead up to a promotional

event is just getting awareness out

there.

People don't know your brand and of course

they're not going to be searching for

your brand, at least not as often.

And so then just building that awareness

pool is hypercritical and then you can

also use those pools to then

retarget both during the

event to say, Hey, you

looked at my product,

so I'm using a display A to

retarget people who looked

at my product in the last

seven days because I know you've been

kind of window shopping in the lead up to

this event and now I'm remarketing my

product to you while the promo's running

and then also post an event and you can

again remarket to those same cools if

you have a consumable remarket to those

who purchased at the repurchase rate

range.

And then also in the search query

analytics.

This is a very insightful data point

that's going to say for your whole

subcategory, Amazon sees

we're selling tool belts.

Amazon sees there's 5,000 purchases in

the last month for tool belts and your

brand only got 1%. Okay,

this is mission critical because

this is on the core of our.

Product, a lot of upset, a lot

of room to grow and extend.

Right?

A lot of room to grow and then

obviously you can see the fruit of

your effort and that we're working

on the SEO to make sure that we're

organically ranking and indexing for tool

belts and that we're working on the ad

side of things to make sure that we're

showing up for tool belts and then week

over week, month over

month, we can see, okay,

our share is increasing here

we are gaining this relevancy.

And so yeah,

just really knowing not all of this

data is going to be actionable,

but using the data to

steer some of your actions

and using it to assist you and

not getting too lost in the,

because it can drive you

a little crazy. It's.

Easy to do.

One of the best analogies I ever heard

was that of a pilot and if you ever have

looked in the cockpit when you're boarding

a plane or something, you're like,

there's an unbelievable

amount of dials and

displays and knobs and

buttons and stuff like that.

Really pilots mostly use about six

of those to fly the plane, right?

Everything else is just

if something goes wrong,

they can diagnose and

fix things and whatnot.

And so that's really the way you're going

to be too running your Amazon business

or hiring an agency or an in-house team

is they're going to run the business

based on five or six data points with,

they'll have everything else to kind

of diagnose if something goes wrong.

I love that the lead up,

the main event after math,

Jonathan where the lead

up we're looking at, hey,

how do we grow awareness and kind of

fill the funnel so that then during the

main event we can close as many people

as possible and then afterwards,

how do we remarket to people and close

those that maybe didn't close or close

people that maybe got money over the

holidays but haven't bought anything and

now they're going to buy from you.

And so lots of good stuff there. Lube,

did you want to chime in on that?

On a data, the number one data

point that I always look at,

and I'm coming from a brand perspective,

so number one data point that I've

always had to report on was profit margin

in terms of dollar and percentage.

So if the profit margin in terms of

dollar and percentage was at or above the

level that I needed,

that was literally the only data

point that I needed to look at.

Now if the profit margin was

not where I want it to be,

if it was below in terms

of dollars or percentage,

then you start looking into

which of my products is not

making me money?

And then you start dialing in why

is that product is not making money?

Very often you discover that the reason

is because it's sitting mostly unpaid

traffic versus organic.

If that's the case,

you dial back down and

you say, okay, great.

Why is it unpaid traffic?

Is it not getting click through rate

is the conversion rate is the number of

session.

So I always like to work back from

the profit margin looking to what's

not working and answering

questions, what can I change,

which lever can I pull to improve it?

Love it, love it.

Let's roll right into the

next topic with you Luba,

and feel free to share some

of the visuals on this,

but as we look at our last

minute levers for holiday

2025, what are some of those?

And so after you share,

we're going to talk to Connor about his

promotional strategy and then we'll wrap

up with Jonathan. Jonathan on the ad side.

But I know part of this could

be we're looking at deals,

we're not going to do deals

because we want to protect margin,

but roll through some last

minute levers here for us, Luba.

Absolutely. Well first of all,

before we get into levers,

I just want to reinforce the ideas that

you cannot sell stuff that you don't

have.

And I've seen brands lose Q4 because they

didn't ship stuff in time

and always be proactively planning.

And if you can, and I

think you're doing it,

if you can have fulfilled

by merchant backup

to your fulfilled by

Amazon, Talking about paths,

deal track or no deal track,

I'm not going to lie naturally,

it's much easier to have successful

Q4 if you plan on running deals,

but even if you don't plan on running

deals, there is still a no deal track,

which is where you focus on

video ads on optimization

of your product detail page,

setting up specific store

pages and retargeting.

That's where your SAEO,

which is genic search optimization,

we all optimizing for AI these

days. And for Amazon agents,

Chad g pt,

you want AI agents to pick up your

product as the most relevant to

consumer query. So leader

assets optimization,

store curation and use of

advertising is going to help you if

you are not going to

run deals. What are the

last minute levers you can pull?

And I'm just going to

scroll through some of this.

What are the last minute levers you can

pull right now because we are really in

the final stretch of getting

everything done and ready.

The number one thing I

recommend test new main image,

have several versions of a

main image, test it through.

There are multiple services that

help you with that PFU product

tinian,

there may be more if you have

your own user group AB test on

Amazon,

test as many new images as you can

right now that may possibly dramatically

improve your click through rate

regardless of you running deals or not

set up sponsored brand video

campaigns. Believe it or not,

if you don't have high

production assets for a video

using Amazon Video Builder actually works.

Those videos that you make

using Amazon templates,

they perform rather well

build an Amazon gift guide

page. Even if you're selling,

you may think you're selling

the most UNG giftable products,

but I worked with a Showerhead

brand which had a huge spike in q4.

People were giving each other

showerheads for Christmas.

You just never know what's helpful.

Quick note on that, Luba,

we got a long time client,

they sell mops and microfiber

products. Shout out Brett Haney,

but a long time ago they ran an email

that was the worst Christmas gift ever and

it was a mop and they're like,

don't give her a mop or don't

give him a mop or whoever.

And it actually ended up being

a tremendous seller for them.

And so they're like, oh, sweet,

we'll just lean into this worst,

worst gift ever. Here you go.

It's like you could have a

holiday guide and even poke fun at

your own product, but people are going

to buy, people are going to buy in q4.

People are going to buy in q4,

build an Amazon give guide page,

have a sponsored brand

ads targeting that page.

Specifically

Jonathan already mentioned retarget

with recent product visitors set

FBM backup.

You just don't know what's going to

happen with your inventory in q4.

Always have a backup.

It's not going to be as

effective as having FBE offer,

but at least you're not going to go

completely dark depending on your

business model. If you

have SMS and email list,

this is what we found, and Brett,

I think Nick actually has some

studies on this where the email

includeDTCall to actions, one

by on website, one by an Amazon,

and they've actually seen really

well response to buy on Amazon.

Yep. It's a great strategy where if you've

got an email list, and I hope you do,

especially if you're multichannel and

omnichannel test with some of those,

including that buy on Amazon button,

a lot of people would rather

do that anyway, so test it.

Amazon has stats which say that Amazon

buy with Prime button on your website

actually improves conversion by 25%.

That could be very meaningful, 25%.

So whether you are all about

aggressive deals or leaning more into

optimization and PPC, what

I call the no deal track,

all of these seven levers you can pull

right now and have meaningful impact

on your Q4 sales. I do

have one disclaimer.

Do not make any major changes

to your product detail.

Page 72 hours prior to

high velocity event.

And why is that? Luba 100% agree,

but make it clear why you

don't want to do that.

You're confusing the guts of Amazon.

There is an algorithm you make

change to the bad end or to the

copy and the algorithm now

needs time to figure out how

you relevant to customer incourse.

So if you're going to do major updates,

either do them at least 72

hours prior to major event or

wait till next week's,

big prime deal days are going to be

over and then make all of your changes

in time for the algorithm to index

them prior to Black Friday Cyber

Monday.

Totally makes sense. That makes sense.

Awesome. So let's do this, Connor,

and I believe you're muted,

but talk through your

promotional strategy for this

year and how has your

promotional strategy changed

over the years because it's

important to consider it.

A lot of people expect discounts, and

so this is the time of year for deals.

It's also a great way to give away

all your profits. And so yeah,

how are you guys approaching this year?

How has your promotional

strategy changed over the years?

Well, my first comment,

now that I'm unmuted,

I'm going to reiterate some of the

things that Lou has been talking about.

Inventory? Yes.

Yes, yes.

Inventory, inventory,

inventory because it makes a huge

difference to success on Amazon.

One of the main things we have seen in

our success this year is maintaining

steady inventory because whenever

you have stockouts on Amazon,

you get dinged and you just

fall back down the algorithm to

recover from.

A big part of our growth and success

this year has been maintaining the

inventory of all the products

that leads into what are our

holiday plans. We don't really know yet.

And the reason we don't really know yet

is because we're still a month out and

we don't know exactly what

our inventory balance is.

We know that we're going

to have coupons on Amazon,

we're going to do

discounting on our website.

We're going to try to make

them a different play so

that if you go to Amazon,

you get this product at a good deal.

Whereas we've become very specific about

categories of products on our website,

and then there's also product bundling,

which we like to do on both of them.

But the product bundling is one of those

things we really don't know until we

get approach and we look

at our inventory because

bundling is oftentimes, well, here's a

product that we think is really great,

but we haven't been really

selling that much of it,

so let's make it part of a bundle.

Maybe that way we can promote

that product going forward.

I believe that customers always

prefer a free gift than a discount.

I also prefer to keep protect my margin

by giving away free gifts because

we're a brand that we want people

to become immersed in. So the

more Diamondback products I

can get into the customer,

the more I know they're going

to buy down in the future. So.

I love that. I want to key on

that just really quickly, Connor,

I think it's a great point, and we have

several apparel brands that do this,

especially early in holiday,

and some of this is mostly all they

do for the holiday is free gifts with

purchase and it fits because

we need stocking stuffers.

We need a gift to give someone else. Maybe

I want to buy a tool belt for myself,

but if I do this, I get a

free gift. Now I can be,

I was really shopping for my son or

whatever because I'm going to give him the

free gift. There's all kinds of ways to

kind of position that and angle that.

I remember my buddy Peter that owns a

Groove Life's silicon wedding ring company

for the longest time, and I think

they still do it. They mentioned, Hey,

free gift with purchase, it's a

$19 value, a $30 value or whatever.

And all that really means is you're going

to get a free ring in your size of a

color or something that

couldn't sell, right?

It's just like it's inventory

that's sitting there.

Let's make this a high perceived value.

Let's increase our conversion

rate for it for holiday. It's man,

I'm making you feel an outsized benefit.

It maybe even feels bigger than

a discount, but guess what?

I'm not eroding my margin at

all. And so love that strategy.

I think more brands need to use it.

So we're going to be running

coupons on Amazon as we get closer

into the season and

we'll have some bundles,

but of course we won't really probably

start running some inventory reports over

the next couple of weeks as we

see what's coming in inbound,

what's been selling well,

and then we'll make some decisions

about what exactly products we put into

bundles, any particular discounts,

because going back

inventory is so important,

you never want to run

out of the inventory.

So we try to run different promotions

between Amazon and our website

just to kind of give different

customers a different opportunity.

Connor,

is that sort of based on the skews or

the products you see moving on those

various channels or is it based on the

products that you have excess inventory

on in those channels?

Thinking about what products do

you discount or feature what you

bundle, how do you look at that

differently on DTC versus Amazon?

Well, let's just take a step back

and look at this strategy in general.

You can use all the, we have a lot of

tools now. We've been talking about tools.

You can use tools on your

website or on Amazon that say,

I know that if a customer buys this pen,

they're probably going to buy the top for

the pen and they might buy this bag to

put it in. Great. I know that information.

I can bundle those things together and

I know that customers are likely to buy

all of those things. On the other hand,

I know that I got this pen, this top,

but I got a lot of these

phones lying around,

so I'm going to say on my

website or on my Amazon page,

people who bought this also

bought this. No, they didn't.

But if I convince you they

did, then maybe you will too.

Maybe they didn't, but they should. And

so if I bundle it and now people will.

So bundling to me is a way that

you can help your customer by

helping them complete their bundle,

but it's also a way that you help

yourself as the brand by slow inventory,

promoting inventory that you do.

We've got this great product,

but it's not getting in

the hands of the customer.

So if we just get more of 'em out

there, it's not a bad product.

We just hadn't found the right

target audience for it yet.

So I don't think our mix there is

different on Amazon versus on our

website.

We do want to see what's selling

on that channel so that we're

highlighting that product,

but then what we put with it might be

based on some mix of those other factors.

Totally makes sense.

I want to pause for just a minute

and talk Luba and Jonathan.

I know you guys were talking about

virtual bundles and some new opportunities

there specifically that we can lean

into around the holidays related to ads.

Any points on that? And whoever

wants to go first, go for it.

I'll go first and I'll say that virtual

bundles has been probably one of the

least. You utilized tools on Amazon,

mainly because A,

you're paying two or three

fulfillment fees for one order.

So if you're doing commercial bundle

of product A, product B and product C,

you're going to end up

paying three FBA fees

at the lower price. Kana,

you did not know that.

I didn't know that,

but I hope that the person

who manages my Amazon channels

here in my office and there and the

consultants that they use have that

conversation regularly.

I love that. I love subtle messages.

This is how you lead folks.

This is how you become CEO, the subtle

messages. I love it, Connor. Yeah,

with emails after pro.

Yeah, so that's good.

You have to be careful about putting

those bundles together because you do pay

more than one fulfillment fee. Also,

it only shows up on one of the

product pages. So what you want to do,

if you want to move that product that

you have laying around and doesn't sell,

you want to put it on the most

traffic page that you have,

even if it may not make sense from the

product usage decision,

but that's how you bring

visibility to your slow movers.

That's how you create a virtual bundle.

But the biggest drawback was virtual

bundles always was that they could not be

advertised through sponsor it product ads.

So you could create a ton of them and the

only way to advertise them was through

setting up a pitch store saying bundles

and driving sponsored brand ads.

So Jonathan, how excited are you about

sponsored product ads for bundles?

We have seen some light

success out of virtual

bundles, but with the addition of

putting them into sponsored product ads,

we could see obviously a lot more

traffic going to them. As lube said,

that historically hasn't really been a

way to push them too hard just kind of

existing on the listing page.

And it's just like another

variation of frequently bought with,

it's not that right,

but it is just as a shopper perceiving

it historically didn't really ever mean

too much to them unless the

discount was pretty large.

So did you want the less levers for PPC

here now? Yes, please. Please.

That. Back to Connor

in a second. Yeah, go.

For it. Yeah, I'll be here

real quick. So in the lead up,

obviously already we're almost

done, get the lead up to next week,

but lead up to promos always being,

considering the performance dip that

we usually see two to three days,

sometimes a little bit longer in

the lead up to the day of the event.

So you want to be just really

aware of that PPC performance,

and so making adjustments to make

sure you're still hitting your targets

sponsored brand. Jonathan, any insights.

There?

And this probably depends

on how aggressive or how

conservative our clients want

to be, but do you ever advise, Hey,

don't black too much in that lull

because our people that are looking,

then they're looking in

the few days leading up to

the fall prime day,

which now just totally blank on what

it's called or the Turkey 12 or whatever.

And so how much should they pull

back or should they pull back at all?

Right. No, yeah, not

necessarily meaning pullback,

and I don't think we touched on this yet,

but obviously any promotional period,

you really have to know what

you're trying to build on Amazon

and where does your brand

fit into the Amazon system?

With Diamondback tools,

they have a very diversified product

portfolio and someone who's buying the

belt is likely developing a belt system.

And so there's many different pieces that

they're going to buy potentially over

the lifetime, especially

if they love the brand,

which most of our shoppers we

do see, they love the brand,

they come back and they buy more, but

it's not like a $20 supplement that

you're consuming every single month.

And so the repurchase window is

very different and someone who

buys a whole tool belt system

is not likely to buy that

exact same system again, at least

not for, hopefully it lasts for five,

10 years.

I don't know how long it typically lasts,

but that's going to last a long time.

So thinking about the event in that

sense that they're not diamond back is

building subscribers.

So we do want to be moderately

aggressive for the promotional

periods with this kind of

brand building product line,

but because we're not building

subscribers because we have a longer

repurchase window, we're not

going to be hyper aggressive.

If you're a consumable product and you

know that if somebody likes your product,

they're going to be back in 30 days where

you're going to get a subscription out

of it, you can afford to be

a lot more aggressive. So.

Thinking maybe even go break even or

close to it in a situation like that where

in other scenarios that would be silly.

You're not making any money giving

it all to Bezos. Yeah, exactly.

Right. So all that to say in the lead up,

it's not necessarily

you need to pull back,

it's just you need to be a bit

more hyper aware that you could see

sharp fluctuations in those couple

of days in the lead up to the event.

And then even days right

after the event where your

usual parameters for bid adjustments

and if you have bid up and

down or you have some kind of

software running your bids,

just knowing that it can be a little

bit out there skelter in those couple of

days.

So you might shoot your tacos from a 5%

up to a 15% for those couple of days.

So you want to go in

and make some changes.

You don't want to blow up your efficiency

just for the sake of that additional

awareness. A lot of window shopping

that's happening in those couple of days

during the event,

you still again kind of have to know

how aggressive you're trying to be.

And so we check in at least

every hour from 9:00 AM

eastern till about 8:00 PM

Eastern, which those are kind of,

that's when it picks up and

that's when it falls off.

And then of course if you

have a lightning deal,

you really got to be on top

of that, but during that time,

tacos is a bit better.

So that spend divided by total sales is

a bit better of a true north star than

ACOs. ACOs is still very important.

If you target is 15 and you're

seeing the ACOs coming in at 300%,

it's probably some adjustments

you need to be making,

but there's a lot of lag

because that hourly data

updates that Amazon gives us is there's

going to be a ton of sales attribution

lag. So the ACOs is a

little bit less relevant.

It might be showing if your

target's 25, you might be at 50,

and that'll lag down to probably

closer to 30 after the event,

and that might be okay

for during the event,

but that tacos number is

still very important to be

paying attention to because

there's not going to be too much

clawback to the total sales. And then

as we get outside of the event, we

already hit on this a little bit,

but remarketing, using

display ads to remarket,

especially if you are a consumable

repurchase brand product.

So you can use that to time

when you're remarketing,

did they purchase in 30 days

ago during that event? Okay,

now it's time to remarket to

them with display ads. Yep.

Really great.

So we're going to talk about a couple of

those bonuses and then how we can help

you as well if you need

additional help for the holidays.

But final thoughts from you, Connor,

on just how you approach

couponing and discounting

and this time period,

are you going to mostly lean

into just coupons on Amazon?

Have you ever considered lightning

deals and some of those other

tools that Amazon has available?

Just kind of talk about

any final points there.

So margin and profitability,

I think we've played around with

some of these other tools before,

some of the lightning

deals and those things,

but a big part of where Diamondback is

right now in our evolution as a company

is establishing the baselines,

which sounds kind of sad, I guess,

pathetic that we're nine years in and

we're trying to establish baselines,

but we've been through a lot, especially

with the change in manufacturing,

so profit margin,

contribution margin from

the different channels.

Right now we want to really focus on

doing the same thing for a little bit of

time and establish and establish a plan.

So I think we're going to really

lean into coupons this year.

It's something we've done in the past

so that we can then look back and say,

effective how are we doing?

And that way when we look at next

year, we've got a plan for, okay,

last year this was the margin that we

assumed was going to be the sweet spot

where we didn't lose too much profit,

but we sold more units. And then we can

really start to hone in on these things.

So

going back to 2017 when I started

the business or bought this business,

that was the time of revenue,

revenue, revenue, revenue, revenue.

Let's see how fast and how hard we can

go and how much we'll count profits

later. Just grow, grow, grow.

We'll figure it out. Yeah, yeah.

Guess what got equal? Bottom line, right?

Eventually, yeah, that time has come.

And so for us as a company and our

stage of evolution is really now

establish those baselines,

know those numbers so that in the

future we can really start to see are

we being successful? Hey, we sold

a whole bunch on Amazon. Well,

so what could we have done better?

Did we do better last year?

Did we give away all of our profitability?

So stick with the coupons this year

and really focus on establishing a

baseline so that we know when we're

being successful in years in the future.

Love that coupons, establish that

baseline. Look at virtual bundles,

look at how you're doing this.

Fantastic Connor, brilliant insights,

a way to weave the brand story through

this man. Really appreciate it. And hey,

everybody out there, go

buy a tool belt, man.

Somebody in your life that needs a tool

belt. My brother-in-law's a contractor,

I'm aided by my recommendation. He's

like, oh, I'm a Diamondback tool belt fan,

for sure. Yeah, look at that. Showing off

the product. I love it. And so really,

really good stuff. Check it

out on Amazon. So Connor,

thank you so much, Luba.

I want to let you wrap up here

with a couple of final thoughts

on prepping here and also want to mention,

if you're looking at this and you

feel like, man, I've got the team,

I got the plan, I got

everything. Awesome. Crush it.

I can't wait to hear about your success.

If you're like, well, wait a minute,

I would like a Luba and or a

Jonathan on my team to help me.

There's a short window to do that,

but there is a little bit of time and

so we'd love to do some last minute

planning and prep to help

you crush the holidays.

And so you can GoCommerce

click on Let's Talk,

we'll do a strategy session for you,

a little prep time for the holidays,

but Luba closing thoughts

as we get everybody ready

for Q4 closing tips and thoughts.

Closing thoughts. Don't do

promotions, coupons, deals,

or anything else just for the

sake of creating a deal on them.

Just you feel like you have.

Yes. And then two weeks

later saying, well,

we run a lightning deal

and it didn't work.

The reality today on Amazon

without external traffic,

without that external push, your deal is

not going to perform. That's just cold,

hard truth. So if you are

running a coupon at the very,

very list or a deal or any kind

of promotion, at the very least,

pretty much every brand today has access

to creator connections where you can go

and set up 10% commission,

create a connection campaign,

make sure that you put in

word deal promotion Black

Friday into the title because

that's the only searchable field

for affiliates and just

have that evergreen

because you can go in and you can change

it if you have a little bit more time.

LTA helps you to scale it.

The least low effort

is create a connection.

The higher level is paying up with

LTA and really growing because

Amazon is all about the brand.

Just slapping a coupon on doesn't

work without brand identity,

brand equity and external. Amazon

wants your external traffic.

Whenever you do Amazon, always

ask what does Amazon wants.

Average conversion of a consumer

when they land on Amazon is close to

70%.

That's why Amazon is giving you 10%

referral bonus back because they want you.

That external traffic. If you provide

it, they will reward you for it. Yes.

Well, whenever the brand says,

I tried a deal last year

and it didn't work well,

what did you do outside of putting

the deal together and running ads?

That's the last.

Thought. Protect your margins.

Make this a profitable

holiday season. In the end,

that's all that's going to matter.

It's what you get to keep if you're

building a brand or business to one day

sell, that's all a future

buyer really cares about.

They want to see growth and

some other things as well.

But without profits there, you

don't have a very strong case.

And so last minute lever I'm going to

pull is let's talk about our sponsor.

So a MZ prep, KPAC, hello,

tax seller, candy lta,

and three cults. Check them out.

We'll send out some unique offers

from them as well as we send out these

resources that Luba has

expert put together,

I promise you you want some more

Luba in your Amazon business.

And so we'll send out these resources.

Thanks once again to Connor Crook,

to Luba to Jonathan. And as we mentioned,

if we can be of assistance

last minute here,

let us know omg commerce.com.

And with that, we'll wrap up.

Thanks everybody and good

luck this holiday season.

See everybody.