Overcoming Amazon's Seller Support Challenges with John Cavendish

People are pulling back on marketing spend and because they see the pain coming, they think the pain's coming. And as they say, one way to guarantee your future ends up like that is to stop spending money on marketing. It's all going to be okay. If you're going through hell, carry on as they say and start trusting people.

So tell me your name and tell me what you do in this crazy world of Amazon.

My name is John Cavendish, and in this world of Amazon, we deal with seller support. So our belief, or my belief is the worst part about selling on Amazon is dealing with Amazon themselves. So we take away the pain of dealing with seller support. The company's called Seller Candy.

So you are doing a lot of things, this Amazon world, working with a lot of Amazon sellers. Where do you see the biggest pain point being for Amazon sellers in the next 12 months?

In the next 12 months? I mean, the pain keeps coming and coming and coming, doesn't it? So seller support was getting better and now it's maybe going downhill a little bit, but everything is getting locked down. So updating listings, pushing updates through, I mean, it's just taking longer and longer for Amazon to respond and also for Amazon to do the updates in the system. So the big pain is just sucking time away.

A lot of people are talking about expansion opportunities on Amazon and they're thinking largely between other Amazon marketplaces and then other marketplaces in general. The Temus, the TikTok Shops, the Walmarts. Do you have any advice for people on whether they should be thinking about those other platforms or specifically which ones they should or shouldn't be?

On my side, no. I mean, to be honest, that's not my wheelhouse, that's not my expertise. I mean, what I see and what I've seen through my friends and also our clients that run agencies, because we work with a lot of agencies, is that people are pulling back on marketing spend and because they see the pain coming or they think the pain's coming. And as they say, one way to guarantee your future ends up like that is to stop spending money on marketing. My big thing for this year is spending money on marketing. I mean, I've heard awesome stuff about TikTok Shop. I've heard that Walmart is actually picking up now, which wasn't really happening a year or two ago. I can't offer my expert opinion on them.

But that's still good insight in there. Good info. If you could go back in time to when you first began your entrepreneurial journey and give yourself one piece of advice, what would that piece of advice be?

It's such a journey though, isn't it? Because entrepreneurial journey is almost like a personal development journey, and I am not the same person I was 10 years ago when I first started business. I didn't have the war chest I have now. I didn't have the ability to take the risks that I have now. Because my first business, I was doing supplements on Amazon back in 2015, it'd be a $10 million business if I started it now because I would know how to double down, how to hire the right people, how to do all that stuff.

If I was going to start out again and give myself advice, I think it would be like it's all going to be okay. No, if you're going through hell, carry on as they say and start trusting people. Because as I started hiring a team, I got an amazing EA, executive assistant, and the better people I get, the more I'm like, I know, like, and trust and love the people I work with. I think that's the coolest thing about entrepreneurship is it's not really a job if you're hanging out with people you like and making money and doing fun stuff.

If you weren't doing this Amazon stuff, what would you be doing?

If you're starting at zero without much cash, I don't think Amazon is necessarily the best way for you to make money in 2024. There was a gold rush in Amazon mid-2010s, but now with the way that you can directly connect to people, reach out. If you have some experience and some skillset, with the experience I have now, I would simply be saying, put together an offer. Go to market with something that you could market and sell. Build up your cash flow and your was chest before you start going into things like e-comm, unless you really have good guidance from someone like yourself or an Amazon coach or just somebody to hold your hand along the way. I guess think there's too many bros selling drop shipping in Amazon now through social media. Most of the people I knew were out in 2018, 2019, drop shipping and everything like that. It's a cycle.

Can you give a specific example of how community has helped improve your ability to do business or shape your business or maybe how you worked with community to support other people's businesses?

I love community. I mean, this is just my ethos is that I think we get most connected to the communities that bring us the biggest step forward in our lives. So I think I shared with you when we were out at that Mastermind a few months ago, but there's a couple of communities in my life which, because it changed me so much as a person, I'm so connected to and I really want to be a members of.

One of them is the Dynamite Circle, which is this group of like... Follow the DC, because Dynamite Circle sounds a bit crap. But it's a group of online entrepreneurs. I joined them in 2014 and most of my friends that I met all over the world are doing it. And the reason I love it is people in different business models, they're all making it work. They're all living off their businesses, traveling, doing cool stuff. So whether someone's making two grand a month or 2 million a month, you get to see how they're applying a real legit strategy that's working. And it's not just a bunch of people who want to start a business, a bunch of cool business owners, and you can go and do fun stuff and travel and they're not all addicted to just balling all the time.

If you could stand on a stage and give one piece of advice, one tip, one tactic to every Amazon seller in the world, what would that one thing be?

Margins. I mean, Carbon6 last year was the year of profitability, I think, wasn't it? So actually knowing your numbers, watching your numbers when things are going bad. Watch your numbers more closely. Measure more often, because it's easy when things are going bad to look away, whether it's shame or something in us, as we talked about, it's personal development. Business is personal development. When things are going well, you default to your natural patterns of what do you do when you're scared? And that's what kills you and kills business because maybe you bail on it, maybe you pull the ripcord too early. And that's where having a mentor or a community and someone you can vulnerably share with and say, "I think I'm losing the business, think I'm losing my mind." And maybe all I need to say is, "Hold on. You haven't effed it yet."

So you've sold some stuff on Amazon, you've helped a lot of other people sell on Amazon. What is the dumbest, most ludicrous or most ridiculous product that you've either sold or helped somebody sell?

I never sold anything too super, super ridiculous. Seen people sell. I have seen some great products. Is this a family-friendly show?

It is. It is all truth.

I haven't sworn yet.

Truth. Go for it.

Truth. Okay. A story I told you earlier today, I've got a load of them, but one of the funniest ones. So just as I was starting my Amazon marketing agency back in 2019 before Seller Candy, before we exited and pivoted that model, was one of the first products and this guy was selling a lubricant for guts. We're in America, everyone wants fire-

Fire.

Sorry.

Of course.

Yeah, for firearms. Firearms, guns. Did you have any heavy artillery, I assume in Alabama? No artillery in your house?

Not in this house.

All right. So I was like, okay, do the keyword research, do the nice presentation to help them. So do all the research and if anyone wants to go there, I don't know if it still works, type in Gun Oil into Amazon. Gun Oil is the number one brand of men-to-men lubricant. So when you search for his product category, it's like lubricant, firearm, firearm products, lubricant, firearm products. I don't know if Amazon's fixed it yet, but that's what it used to be.

Gun Oil.

Gun Oil.

Amazing.

Write it down.

What's been the most exciting moment for you personally in your entrepreneurial journey?

I don't know about anyone else who's listening to this podcast, but I think that us and a lot of entrepreneurs find it hard to celebrate things. And even when you're excited about something, the excitement passes, then you're always onto the next one, the next one, the next one. Many of my friends have become financially free, sold their businesses and got depressed or gone like, "What am I going to do next? Now I don't need to work anymore." [inaudible 00:08:38]-

So it wasn't about the success, it was chasing the achievement of success.

Yeah, the feeling, but the success, say you make 10 million bucks, you sell your company for 10 million bucks to Carbon6, and then you're like, "Okay, I'm free." How long are you going to be excited? Six hours, six days, maybe six months. And then six months later you're like, "Well, what's the meaning? Why was I doing that? And what was I chasing? What internal need am I chasing?" I mean, I've struggled with that in the past.

The other community I got super involved with was Tony Robbins. That community is another one that made me a massive pivot and helped me focus more on appreciation, move from expectation to appreciation, focusing more on appreciation and living more in the moment, less in the I must do more to succeed. Always more is more. Because they talk a lot about rules and value. Say my value is freedom or my value is success, then my rule for success is more than I have right now.

Oh, that's a good one.

And if that's your rule, then you can never feel success. Because my rule for success is it must be bigger always than I am at this moment in time. There is actually no way to ever feel success.

Love that. Great. And the most important question of the day, is a hot dog a sandwich?

Is a hot dog a sandwich? No.

Defend that.

Defend it. Is a burger a sandwich?

I think so.

A burger's more like a sandwich. Yeah. I live in Vietnam. Pardon me. I'd say that's a sandwich, fully enclosed. And maybe for me the definition of a sandwich is having to be able to close at all sides if it doesn't have-

So like encapsulated.

Encapsulated. Yeah. Because they have in, was it Northern Europe, they have open sandwiches, don't they? So it's actually a piece of, they call it an open sandwich, a piece of bread-

You're just confusing me now.

Yeah, they have a piece of bread with just the topping on it and it's just a piece of bread with stuff on it.

Yeah, it's an open-faced sandwich.

Open-faced sandwich. So maybe a hot dog is a semi-open-faced sandwich.

Perfect. All right. If people want to find you on the great interweb out there, where can they find you?

They can check out Seller Candy, sellercandy.com. You can check me out on LinkedIn. I also have a newsletter, which I'm just starting out where I start talking more about other business concepts, and I don't really have a good landing page for that. So just email me at john@sellercandy.com and I'll add you to it. Like I shared, Amazon is amazing and I've made a lot of money through Amazon, but I want to help people on the journey from operator to owner and also from successful person to actually becoming a business owner. And I feel like this is my ethos. Sorry, off topic again.

Keep going. Perfect.

We have business. You start business, you think that your service or your product is the business. The service or product is 20% of the business. It's my belief 80% is finance, operations, sales and marketing. So helping people who want to start something and think, I'm going to make loads of money because I'm good at this. Well, yeah, but you'll drive yourself nuts if you do it like that. You build your product, you define the offer, and then you beat the hell out of finance, sales and marketing to actually turn it into the sheer thing. So I want to help people on that journey.

Awesome. Thanks for being on.

Thank you so much.