In this video, Rachel Go chats with Yoni Mazor, co-founder and chief growth officer of Getida. Yoni shares his founder story, common areas Amazon sellers should look for reimbursements, the role of education in Getida’s growth, their recent rebrand, and more.

Transcript below.

Yoni’s background

Rachel Andrea Go: Thank you so much, Yoni, for joining me today. Can you share a little bit about your background to get started and how it led you to where you are?

Yoni Mazor: Sure thing. So, first of all, thank you for having me on this program. Yeah, currently, I am one of the co-founders and chief growth officer of Getida. Getida—we’re essentially a technology company and our mission is very, very simple, it’s to make sure that Amazon FBA sellers get the FBA reimbursements that they’re eligible to receive. And today we’re— we founded in 2015, but today, we’re the largest organization in the world focused exclusively on this mission. We have a team of about 240 team members in 12 countries. We audit tens of billions of dollars of FBA transactions daily—every day. We’re an authorized solution provider on the Amazon Seller Central platform.

And yeah, that’s kind of who I am, what we are, and I got here, I guess, in a nutshell—you know, Getida was born from our activities as Amazon sellers. You know, over a decade ago, we started selling online. And then, you know, we sold on our website, we sold on eBay, but in 2013, we started selling on Amazon, and then the business grew very quickly from zero to 20 million then to 100 million. And what happened was, we had too much data to process on the FBA reconciliation side. We were not able to use spreadsheets, we were simply breaking.

So, that kind of pushed us to do two things. The first thing was to set up the technology and software to audit all the transactions at bulk, but set up a dedicated team to service these claims. So, when they get the information, they open a case with Amazon, they manage all the back and forth, and then bring a resolution. So, any of the inventory that gets lost, damaged, destroyed, disappeared, disposed [of], overcharged fees — we’ve got to reconcile it. And if there’s eligibility for recovery, we got to get those. We also discovered that on an annual basis, the discrepancy rate ranges between one to three percent from our revenue, right?

So, we’re doing, like, a million dollars a year? We have to recover 10 to 30 thousand. But we’re doing a hundred million, [so] that’s one to three million that we have to kind of recover. That was material enough for us to say, “You know what? We need a good technology and a good team to focus just on solving this. So, we created the solution for ourselves. Then we told our friends from the industry that we have these capabilities. They told us, “Help us. We’ll pay you.” And that was the early genesis of Getida back in 2015.

Over the years, it just kind of grew, you know, word of mouth, organically, because the value proposition was so simple: It’s free to join; it’s free to stay, there’s no subscription; you can cancel at any time. It’s purely performance based, so only if we recover refunds and reimbursements for you, for the client, for the seller — only then [do] we get rewarded. So, for three, four years, it just grew organically. [In] 2019, we decided to cash out of retail, take all of our profits, attention, motivation, and energy, and put it into one place, which is helping FBA sellers worldwide with this challenge. And, yeah, from that point on, you know, we kind of took leadership of the niche, and that’s how we are today, in a nutshell.

Growing Getida through awareness and partnerships

Rachel Andrea Go: So, speaking of how your growth went and all of that, what are the main growth levers of Getida?

Yoni Mazor: Today—as of today? You got it. So, here’s what’s amazing about, I guess, our positioning at this point. I guess it’s fortunate but unfortunate, right? So, we realized that, you know, our biggest challenge is not really competition or anything like that; the real—the biggest challenge is simply lack of awareness. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Amazon sellers, FBA sellers are not even aware that, hey, there is a problem that they need to fix. In other words, when they send all this inventory to Amazon, they have no idea that things can go wrong and they need to reconcile it: Find that issue, file a claim to get a reimbursement — they have zero awareness. They don’t know, they just don’t know, because they have so many things that they do on Amazon and they are so many things they’re concerned with, and rightfully because, you know, you got to source, you got to launch, you got to prep, you got to send, you got to advertise, you got to market — all that generates revenue.

All that is kind of pushing forward, when in fact what we do is actually stopping everything and looking back into the past, and nobody has time for that. Nobody wants to kind of—you know, you want to keep pushing forward. So, although one majority doesn’t even know there’s a problem, so we need to educate them. So, you know what to grow, we need to kind of invest in education, heavily in education worldwide.

So, over the years, we probably trained thousands if not tens of thousands of sellers how to do it themselves by the way, because we’re on a mission. The mission is to help the sellers get the maximum that they can recover, and we could do it in three ways: First way is education. Just educate them so they do it themselves. That helps them to get to the maximum level. Second way is in—some of them that they don’t have time for this. They need help, they just hire us [so] we could do everything for them. And the third option is actually in between. So, the sellers do the maximum they can do on their own, and we educate them and encourage that. And then they can have Getida as a backup.

So, any issue, for whatever reason that they miss out on, we can be the backup. We can discover it, recover it, and bring it back to their pocket and only get rewarded if we’re successful. So, these three kind of tracks. We fulfill our mission to help sellers get the maximum levels. And once again, the lack of awareness of—is one component, but it—within the lack of awareness, the ones that don’t know, they don’t know, but there’s also lack of awareness from the ones that do know. In other words, they know that this is an issue, they have maybe a team, maybe even using other providers, but they don’t know [how] much more they can get.

So, if they owe 10,000 dollars but they’re only getting three to four thousand, they have no idea that there’s another six that they can potentially be getting. So that’s why we can always run a free audit to any seller at any time. Just provide the data. Say, “Hey, you’re using a team, you’re using other providers, you like him? Great. Keep him. Here’s a free audit. Here, there’s another 6,000 dollars that, for these issues, that you can still recover. Then, you can make an educated decision if you like us to get that or not for you. So, once again, with the educ—with the awareness, some don’t know at all, some don’t know how much more or what’s the maximum level they can get.

So, the more we educate about that through other, you know, shows like this or conferences, or webinars, or seminars, or masterminds in the communities, we do it on a, you know, pretty large scale. Just to get an idea, last year, 2023, we, you know, we participated in more than 150 events. That’s about three events per week on a global scale as a part of our mission to, you know, keep helping with this and growing with this. So, definitely growth opportunity with education.

Another growth opportunity is with, you know, partnerships. You know, we have hundreds of partners worldwide. You know, they’re all, you know, active in the ecosystem, but I think, you know, we can probably double, triple, or quadruple it. I don’t see a reason why not because, at the end of the day, our mission is so clear and our value proposition of how we up is so simple, it usually resonates well with other industry, you know, players. And they just want to make sure that their user base is effective, they’re getting the optimization they can get or the maximum recover they can get with their Amazon business because.

For example, if I’m a software company, I’m an advertising software company, or if I’m a bank giving you lending, you know, if I tell you, you know, to use Getida and all of a sudden we go up to 18 months into the past and recover all this money that wasn’t available before on the advertising side, it helps. Why? Because now you have more money for advertising. So you can pay for the software for advertising or the service and advertise more and, guess what? Sell more and, guess what? Make more profit. That’s a good touch, that’s a good element.

If I’m the bank giving you money and you owe me money, I want to make sure you can get as much money as you can from your business from selling or from reimbursements so you can pay me back the money. So, everything is in good shape. But of course, you have more money, you can invest more, sell more, then I can lend more. It a—you know, it’s going up. So, like I said, education, partnerships, and just R&D, research and development. So, now we have a pretty large user base; we have tens of thousands of users.

We never for a second stop investigating and checking and, you know, what kind of other discrepancy types are there and new variations of them because, once we find—in other words—I’ll put this way: We’re very attentive to the street level. So, if there’s a seller that comes to us and says, “Yo, Getida, check this out. Look what happened,” first of all, we get excited: “Okay, you have a challenge. What is it? Let’s check it out.” And then we see this new type of issue that we never saw before, right? And we help the sellers solve it, and all of a sudden, they get a few hundred dollars in reimbursement. That same new type of issue that we never saw before, we take it, we scan it across all of our user base, and boom — they also get the value.

So, we have this ability to compound and deliver more and more value to our user base because we have the network effect. That’s why we need to invest in more, you know, research and development and also stay attentive to the user base and the feedback loop to constantly add more value and grow from there. So, in a top few touch points, that’s, you know, I guess, options for us to consider and play along to achieve more growth.

Common reasons for reimbursement on Amazon

Rachel Andrea Go: Speaking of issues and new issues that you discover sometimes, what are some of the most common areas that Amazon sellers are due reimbursements?

Yoni Mazor: Okay, I’ll give you, like, two or three just to add some more value and hopefully, for at least on one of them, whoever’s watching this or listening to this can actually take action and make money, guaranteed. So, enjoy, right? So, let’s say, Rachel, you send a thousand units to Amazon’s fulfillment center. That’s an FBA shipment, and Amazon, instead of receiving 1,000 units, they only receive 990 units. This is called FBA inbound shipment reconciliation. Most sellers are, you know—this is pretty intuitive. I send something, I send, like, you know, 20 grand worth of products. I want to make sure that 20 grand worth of products are received properly so I can sell and make money. So, most sellers get that and understand that, and that’s kind of the step one. That’s the entry level type of issue.

So, if you never heard of this before, you never dealt with this before, all you got to do is go to Amazon Seller Central, go to the “Inventory” tab, and then on the inventory there’s a drop-down menu that says, you know, “FBA Shipments” or “Manage FBA Shipments.” You click there. You’re gonna see a whole log of all the shipments that you ever shipped and you’ll see, you know, this shipment, I sent 57 units, they received 57 units, no problem. This 119 units received, no problem. Oh, 1,000 units, only see 190? Go into the shipment and all you see over there, you see [a] module that says, okay, you know, “-10 units,” and I drop that menu and what should we do? So, you want to choose and research and investigate, you know, missing units.

So, if you do that, Amazon will start the investigation, hopefully reconcile it, and they will probably gonna ask you for documents, so make sure you have those documents available. So, send it to them and then, once again, if they’re missing—sorry, if they’re finding or they’re gonna find the missing 10 units, that—it’s great for you, because now you can sell and make money, you’re good to go. But if not, they’re gonna reimburse you. They’re going to reimburse you and compensate you for that loss. So—and that’s money. So, you can go back up to nine months on this type of issue by the way. So go in, scan the past nine months, and if you find an issue, open a case and you got reimbursed. This is value right now, just from listening [to] and watching this. This is great.

Now, the second type of issue is, once the inventory units are inside Amazon sellers — okay, they already got received and now they’re in the bins — all of a sudden, inside the fulfillment centers, you know, units get lost, damaged, destroyed, disposed [of], or get disappeared inside. And that’s when—sellers don’t even think, “Oh, really? Really, that happens? A, B — what—how do I account for that?” That’s when things become more sophisticated.

So, obviously, if this is too much for you, there’s solutions out there to help with this, [and] we happen to be one of them. So, you know, consult a doctor as they say. But, if you really want to try to tackle this out, I’ll try to spit it out here on the camera. Usually, I have slides for this, I do a whole workshop, but I’m trying to add value. So, what you want to do is go to Amazon Seller Central. You want to go to “Report” [then] “Fulfillment,” and [with the fulfillment report, what you want to do is download the inventory ledger report in the—for the past 18 months. So, when you choose the dates, you choose the past 18 months. You open the inventory ledger report for the past 18 months, you take all the FNSKUs that you have there in the report, and you go to, you have to go to—Amazon has a module, actually.

You got a copy—it’s a copy-paste game. They have a tool that they provide you, [you] copy-paste the FNSKU into this tool, and Amazon will run a reconciliation, and if they owe a reimbursement for any missing, damaged, or, you know, lost units, they’ll reimburse you for that. And if you—and then there’s another tool for—what you want to do is you want to find the transaction ID. You have in the inventory ledge report a lot of—a column with transaction IDs. You want to kind of grab that, copy-paste that into the tool, and it will see any damaged units [and] it will reconcile any damaged units. So, this is when things become a bit more sophisticated. You have to kind of download reports, filter them, grab the components, copy-paste into a tool, and take it from there. And whatever results you get in the past, you know, 18 months, you get reimbursement for that — enjoy. But once again, when we come in, we look beyond that, beyond the tools.

Amazon has its tools, but we have our own tools to see if, you know—even though that their tool might have [thought] that there’s no issue, we still mathematically are able to show them that there is an issue, there is a discrepancy, and, like, “Oh, we apologize. Here’s the reimbursements.” So that’s why it’s very effective to, you know, have a solution like Getida where we come in and we kind of audit the auditor. If the tool is the auditor, we audit that, its ability. So keep that in mind. So, that’s kind of the second type of—two or three type of issues; one is loss, one is damage. And the third issue I would say — I’m not gonna explain how to do it; it’s a bit too complex — but at least the issue, what it is—when the moment you understand it, hopefully, you’ll be able to take action.

So, the third type of issue is fulfillment fees. So, when Amazon stores your unit in the warehouses and the order comes in from the marketplace and you sold something from the marketplace, Amazon will pick the unit from the bin. They’re going to package it in a box and they’re gonna ship it out. They’re going to charge you a fee for that. It’s called fulfillment fee or pick-and-pack fee. And if Amazon—so, the amount of fee that they charge you is based on the weight and dimension of each unit. So, the larger and heavier it is, the more they’re gonna charge you. So the larger and heavier that Amazon might mistakenly think it is, the more they’re gonna charge you incorrectly. So, let’s say your product is only six inches, six ounces, you know, long, and they need to charge only $4 every time you sold the unit, but instead, their system thinks it’s, instead of six inches, it’s 60 inches — another zero; instead of a six ounces, it’s six pounds.

So, all of a sudden, they’re charging much more, like $10 instead of $4, right? So, you sold a thousand units and, you know, they overcharge you $6 per unit — that’s $6,000 that they overcharge you. So, sellers need to be on the lookout and reconcile that as well. So that’s another type of issue. So, between everything I mentioned, there are three or four types of issues and elements that are there, and there’s a whole list and baggage of other things and miscellaneous things. That’s in a nutshell. Hopefully this is helpful.

Let your company mission guide your rebranding

Rachel Andrea Go: I noticed you went through a rebrand of Getida recently. Can you tell us a little about that? Like, what triggered it, how did it go, all of that?

Yoni Mazor: Yeah, interesting question. So, yeah. So, 2015, we started Getida, and around 2016 when we kind of—things became a bit more cohesive, you know, we got our logo and our logo, you know, was good, it was cute. I think we paid, like, $50 for it. And, you know, that was—became kind of the baseline for the whole branding. And I think for that, you know, bootstrap, modest beginning, we did amazingly well, you know? So, fast forward eight years later, we’re, you know, a much larger structure and company. So, what we did was kind of—all the, you know, team members involved, we kind of sit all together, you know, talking about what we accomplished, what are we doing now, what we want to do in the future — so, kind of identify yourself at this stage of life and, you know, put it all into words and then create this whole belief system.

It took, like, six—over six months, this whole process. We hired two agencies to help us to facilitate all this up and, you know, create our new, I guess, brand Bible or guidelines, and take all those elements and, you know, all these belief systems and truth and history and package it aesthetically so it represents, you know, where we are and where we’re going. So, you know, our old slogan was “maximum refunds, data driven,” because our mission was to get maximum refunds, but the way we do [it] is data driven. Today, the new slogan is—it’s “more than money back. It’s the way forward,” because, you know, obviously, our mission is to make sure that you will maximize the recovery and reimbursement.

But beyond that, we believe that, if you recover all these funds and reinvest it into the business, your Amazon business, it will propel you forward to the next step. So, that’s kind of the holistic approach that we do have to solving one thing very well that—and that pushes you forward. That’s what we effectively discovered in the past eight, nine years doing this with all of our users, our sellers. We see that the ones who recognize this challenge, they partner with us — it seems like they do very well in other things as well, and they’re on the flywheel going up and they really get propelled forward.

And the ones that kind of slack off about it, [they’re] too confused about [it], they don’t do it — they don’t survive long in this industry, as far as we’ve seen. So, we took all this holistic approach and reality on the ground and we packaged it in a way where we’re very strong, you know, strongly passionate about. It didn’t cost $50; it was a six-month project [that] involved very high-level, you know, high-quality people. It cost probably hundreds of thousands, but I think, you know, we are very delighted with the outcome and we’re, you know, very energetic about using it for the next generation of Getida.

Rachel Andrea Go: What is your advice for a smooth rebranding for those who are planning one?

Yoni Mazor: Smoother branding…. Honestly, it’s, at least for me as a co-founder and owner and, I guess, traveling so much distance with a certain type of branding and, you know, coming to a position where you have to kind of reinvent yourself, we always said, “Trust the process,” you know? Saying this is a process where you got to open up not just for yourself; you have team members around you, you have agencies — open up for the process.

Obviously, when you do, I highly recommend hiring an agency that can really structure it the right way, because we had branding, but it wasn’t really—we did well with it, but it wasn’t really structured. Now, it’s really structured. We have a document of 70 pages. It’s really, really good, it’s really structured the way it should be, and you can use it at scale on a global way so you can become a really—a truly multinational, right? Before, our logo was based on a big G, that’s [the] English letter G, but today, it’s an arrow. That’s, you know, universally, it’s much more pleasing. So, I’m taking an example from Nike. They’re Nike but now it’s just a swish. Or Starbucks, it’s just a—so, we realized that icons become much more, you know, globally accepted from multinationals, so we took that into consideration. So coming into this open mind higher agency that have a track record especially of, I guess, brands that you respect and admire.

If they were really good with those chances, that’s a good way to choose your partner to help you facilitate everything and then keep an open mind, be honest with yourself. Look at the past, look at the present, but try to envision the future and, hopefully, taking all that into consideration will make it as smooth as possible, even though, you know — this is my experience, it wasn’t smooth, but the outcome is good. So, just by believing I guess the only way there will smooth it out so you get to the finish line because you want to get to the finish line. There’s so many thoughts, so many opinions — just on the logo alone there are how many directions, right? Think about that, but just also, “What are we?” All these things. But [an] open mind will be very important to keep it smooth even though it’s gonna be an adventure.

Keep an eye on AI and growth opportunities

Rachel Andrea Go: So, what happened in 2023 in Amazon that you’re most excited about?

Yoni Mazor: Yeah, I think definitely was the breakthrough of AI, not just with Amazon [but] the whole world. So, there’s a whole flurry of I guess new tools and features that are AI based, you know, that are outside the industry that the industry uses but also the ones that are organically or they’re liberally within the industry, in the niche.

One worth mentioning is actually called eContent. So, it’s a platform that, for example, you can take your product, you know, a picture of the image of your product on a white background. You can feed it to the system and then you can prompt it to stage it anywhere you can: Stage in a room, stage it in a warehouse, or stage it in, you know—let’s say it’s a kitchen item. So, put it in a kitchen, the kitchen looks like this, like that — so, things that, you know, you could have done only with the studio, right, to mark up, you know—to place it, then you’re kind of leveling the playing field and now you can do it very, very quickly and very high quality, you know? Instantly, on the spot. So, all of a sudden, you’re—the breadth of your visual, you know—the catalog steps up very, very cheaply and affordably in ways that you couldn’t even do even if you wanted to with an agency or whatever, like the way they can profit.

So, that’s the seeds. I see that 2023 has a lot of seeds of this AI and that seems to be exciting. I want to believe that will be exciting, because how, you know, these seeds will germinate and grow and create impact first and foremost for consumers out there; now they can appreciate better products before they buy it. They can visualize so they can make more smarter, better decisions so they can have a good outcome with the products they buy. That will reflect everything else into the industry of the sellers, the solution providers, the tool providers, all that stuff. So that’s kind of a look into 2023 that will probably be my headline, you know? Excitement.

Rachel Andrea Go: Amazing! And finally, what’s your advice to merchants going into 2024?

Yoni Mazor: 2024, economically, you know, [at a] macro level, the United States economy seems to be very resilient, you know? The prospects for the next recruiters is, you know, continued growth. That is very important. So, demand is still there and it will, you know, still grow, so that’s the first layer—indicator of, “We’re in a good place to be,” because if the economy is growing, eCommerce within it is in a good place because it’s still penetrating, you know, from 100% of United States retail, you know, I think eCommerce is maybe 60%–70% right now.

So, you can bet your horses that, you know, that number will increase because more people are adopting it, especially in the younger generation. They’re just eCommerce and digital native. So you got the TikTok. They see the TikTok, they go to Amazon, they buy it or, now on TikTok they can start buying it. So, eCommerce in general, as our prospects continue growing. So, the economy is growing, the industry is growing. Within the industry you have Amazon, which is also still growing.

So, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a brand, it’s a good place to be. Just keep focus, keep your attention. It’s a learning game, [so] keep educating yourself. Add layer after layer after layer of knowledge and awareness and understanding of what’s going on and all the opportunities that you have in front of you to optimize. Hopefully, now, it’d be auditing and reimbursements is one of them with this episode. And that’s it, that’s kind of my outlook to 2024.