Inventor eCommerce Q&A with MotoMatic: Starting, Scaling and Selling with Shopify vs Amazon
I got the chance to talk to accomplished inventor-entrepreneur, MotoMatic about how he built his business developing and marketing fully custom products on Amazon and Shopify.
How did you get into eCommerce in the first place?
Getting into e-commerce was entirely accidental.
I generally tell people, that I was an inventor first, an e-comm guy second. Well, technically, not an e-comm guy at all at that time. I was very lucky to find a product with an immediate market fit.
There was not a single product of my kind at the time.
There were Youtube videos with hundreds of thousands of views on achieving a homemade version of what my product ultimately achieved, but nobody had made a "plug and play", for example. So I created a first run batch of 2,000 units thinking, "Worst case scenario, I sell every single unit, but it takes me 2 years to sell them." they sold out in a few months.
Now, a huge part of why they sold out immediately is because I was the first and only option on Amazon. So I didn't need to learn the important things like SEO, CRO, etc. at this time. That didn't come until later once my blue ocean got discovered by competitors.
How did you ideate and decide on your product ideas?
On my main brand, I didn't really ideate.
I saw that there were hundreds of thousands of people looking for solutions on YouTube (just by the view counts on homemade remedies) and I went full steam ahead on my first product.
On my follow-up brand, I kept getting blasted with ads from this company making novelty items, clearly having good success, but they weren't selling on Amazon. I think they weren't willing to bite that bullet of Amazon's fees.
At this point, I knew that huge marketing spend like that would result in an overflow of buyers going to Amazon to find the product, so I figured I'd copy their products (keychains and plushes) and sell on Amazon to capture their overflow. It worked. They listed on Amazon soon after.
What are some typical mistakes you see others do here?
I think the biggest mistake is not selling on Amazon.
I understand that it's best to list on your own website where you can upsell, harvest emails, bundle (Amazon does offer virtual bundles now - finally), and take other measures to increase AOV and LTV, but your marketing halo will naturally extend to Amazon.
Your brand name and associated keywords will naturally gain search volume, you should capture those people rather than potentially lose them altogether. Also, it often helps boost your Amazon rankings when so many people are looking for and buying your product.
I assume TikTok Shop is the new mistake of where people need to be listing but aren't and probably also the content angle - but I'm still learning this platform, so I can't speak to the efficacy, the way to succeed in that environment, etc.
How did you go about testing your products?
Physically, I tested most of my products with cheaper production methods, such as 3D printing.
Even now, I will test sell-through with a small 3D print batch. The quality is a bit worse and the integrity is more questionable, but it's a good way to gauge how well some products will sell. Obviously, that can't work for everything.
Marketing, I didn't ever test any.
I just went straight to listing my products. I did try launching another invention via the Kickstarter route - but this was still when I was more inventor and hadn't studied the science of e-comm.
I naively believed Kickstarter was some kind of indie, organic, funding site where ideas got funded in a digital meritocracy. I now know it's a pay-to-play medium where e-comm scientists are the winners.
Now that I've been playing with the pipettes and beakers of e-comm, I am considering stepping back up to the Kickstarter centrifuge to try and create a successful campaign.
You can see my previous failure here.
Now that I'm trying again with a new product, I've taken the time to build out an email list. I've teased prototypes. I've run paid ads for a product that isn't available for sale yet (but there's plenty of room on the email list). I've actually fully funded the run of product already, I just want to see if I've learned enough to crack the Kickstarter code this time.
How have your marketing practices for new products changed over time?
Very simple. When I first started, I did zero marketing. I got incredibly lucky that my product was wanted and had a blue ocean.
My own, organic, sales were sufficient enough to keep me at the top of Amazon for a long time - it wasn't until about a year or two ago that things started to stagnate, then slip.
Only about a year ago I started doing marketing. I went all in on Amazon, Google, and Meta ads and it's the difference between me doing $5,000/month in profit to nearly $40k/month in profit (and climbing) on one brand alone.
What's your view on selling on Amazon vs your own Shopify store?
I love Amazon.
It legitimizes my product's popularity to other people. They can see that my product is Amazon's Choice and Amazon's Overall Pick and that it's one of the highest rated products in its market.
That said, the hyper-profitization of Amazon is becoming more and more of a nuisance. Extremely strict parameters every step of the way and fees are applied for any misstep out of said parameters.
I love Shopify because you get so much more opportunity to test and grow and learn.
You can A/B test pricing, landing pages, listing images, various upsell/cross-sell strategies, UVP displays, etc. With Shopify, you can close marginal gaps in CAC.
In Amazon, the gap is set and very rarely is a shrinking entity - it's almost always an ever-widening entity, like some black hole that feeds exclusively on margin.
What are some of the challenges doing what you do that people wouldn't expect?
I think my main challenge as an inventor/e-commerce store operator is the original naivety I had of the best product winning.
I think there's a lot of very clever inventors out there who make great products but who also have the naivety that I had. You can't simply be an inventor and succeed, I don't think - maybe in very rare cases.
I really think you need to be equally as e-commerce savvy if you want your inventions to experience any sort of success and longevity.
What are some trends that you see on the horizon?
I'd say supplements are a huge trend right now.
LTV is built-in, which is fantastic. I also think a lot of people wanting in on e-commerce are recognizing that the barrier to entry for supplements is a bit more complicated to navigate at this time and so there's more of a moat to keep out foreign players and also keep out the people whose only business idea is to go on wholesale sites and buy physical goods to resell (that fruit isn't low-hanging, it's sitting on the ground, rotting).
I imagine the supplement barrier to entry will erode quickly, though.
How can people contact you or learn more about you?
The only place I publicly talk about anything business is here on X (Twitter) - but I don't publicly share my business names/products at the moment.