Learn about the foundations and best practices of selling CPG products on marketplaces like Amazon, including how to balance inventory and demand, manage the customer experience, and the pros and cons of building a CPG brand.

Transcript below.

Ryan’s background

Rachel Andrea Go: Thank you so much, Ryan, for coming to join the MyFBAPrep interview series today. To get started, can you please tell us more about your background and why you decided to start ExpertCPG?

Ryan Flynn: Sure. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Rachel, [I] really appreciate it. So, yeah, I started with Amazon back in 2014. At that time before that, I actually worked in small business banking for a large national bank and I worked with entrepreneurs, small business owners and helping them with all their banking needs. And, you know, as part of that journey, I had a couple clients that were selling on Amazon, and at that time, they just opened FBA up, like, publicly out of beta so anybody could join, and it was really doing well for those clients.

So, at that point, you know, even in 2014, I was a big Amazon customer. I love technology [and] I’m like, “What is this whole ‘selling on Amazon’ thing?” That led to a whole gateway of learning about, you know, you can sell anything on Amazon. I just started myself, buying and selling things, flipping them on Amazon, and then, you know, quickly started running into brands that were like, “Hey, we don’t know what we’re doing here. Can you help us with this?” Which was kind of the genesis kind of where we’re at now and helping brands reach more customers on Amazon.

Rachel Andrea Go: Amazing. That’s a really interesting industry to switch out of. Could you share any lessons from the finance and banking industry that you took into eCommerce?

Ryan Flynn: Sure. Not a lot translate[s], but I think the biggest one that does would be, you know, I think just talking to people. When you’re working in—anytime you’re working with, like, quote “the general public” or also you’re working with people’s money and you’re working with entrepreneurs, right, it’s always this kind of interesting dynamic. And I think just talking with people and understanding entrepreneurs and their angle, and it’s like—it’s funny, you could look at someone’s bank balance for their business checking account and think, “Wow, things must be great,” because they’ve got, you know, whatever the amount is in their bank account, right?

But, like, you don’t—until you get into business, you don’t realize it’s like, “Oh, no, all that money is already spoken for,” right? You got to—we got to pay the credit card this month, we got payroll coming up, we’ve got whatever it may be, we don’t have our receivables coming in till whatever, right? And so I think just though talking to people and understanding them on that level kind of translated well to working with brands. I love talking with new brands that we’re potentially going to help and are onboarding and, you know, I think that translates still today. And I love being kind of curious about hearing the story about how somebody started their business as well.

White-glove Amazon support from ExpertCPG

Rachel Andrea Go: So, speaking of helping brands, can you tell me more about ExpertCPG and some of your key offers?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, so, ExpertCPG Commerce — what we do is—our main offer is we call Total Account Management, and that’s essentially where we can be a brand’s, I call it, their outsourced Amazon department, right? And so we work primarily with, you know—”CPG” is in our name, but we work with all different kinds of brands for Amazon. But we do do a lot of food and grocery, health, personal care, beauty, some pet as well, but we do have clients, again, outside those categories.

So, we can essentially be those brands’ kind of Amazon department where, hey, they’re on Amazon; maybe they’ve plateaued, maybe they’ve, you know, kind of hit a wall, and/or their business is just growing in other channels, whether it be retail, DTC, you know, it could be specialty retail, it could be national, regional, whatever it may be in brick and mortar. They just don’t have the resources to do Amazon themselves anymore and do it well to the level they really need to be, so that’s where we can come in and provide the strategy and execution of doing Amazon. So, they work with our brand managers and our team, and we’re essentially able to continue to grow Amazon as they grow the other parts of their business.

And then the other offer—so, that’s kind of always been our core offer is account management, our Total Account Management. We actually just started last year—we realized there was a gap for brands that were brand new to Amazon, right? We’ve helped those brands before, but it’s a whole different animal launching on Amazon, getting products on Amazon than it is just, maybe, you know, trying to grow on Amazon and you’ve been there for a couple years. So, we developed and launched an Amazon program that’s not really time based. It’s more milestone based, essentially, getting up on Amazon, getting content created for their pages in their brand style and everything, getting their first FBA shipment in, getting those first reviews in, getting ads launched, like, doing everything so that it’s kind of a “done with you” approach, right? And it’s frankly, like, a fraction of the investment like Total Account Management would be. Again, there’s no, like, long-term commitment, and it’s a great way for brands to just get going.

And we kind of graduate brands from that program, and they can just—maybe they’re a fit for Total Account Management at that time for us, but maybe they’re not. Maybe, you know, it’s like, “Hey, we’re going to take this over,” and we’ll show them everything and kind of give them the keys to the kingdom, and they can continue to do that themselves kind of indefinitely.

The CPG advantage on Amazon

Rachel Andrea Go: Amazing. So, you mentioned CPG’s in your name, so I’d love to ask about that category in particular. So, what makes CPG so attractive to sell on Amazon versus other categories?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, I mean, I think selling on Amazon in general is attractive. Like, CPG is interesting, right, because, I always tell brands this, you can’t argue with customer behavior, right? Like, Amazon’s like this devil that, you know, brands kind of have to dance with. And it’s good because it keeps folks like you and I in business, right? But it’s like, if someone hears about a product somewhere, whether they see it on “Shark Tank” — we have some clients that have been on “Shark Tank” before — or they hear about at a party, or they see it [in] an Instagram ad, or whatever it may be — wherever they hear about this product, what do we all do by default? I don’t know about you, [but] I just pull up the Amazon app and I’m, like, literally typing it in and looking at it, reading reviews, right?

Even when I’m in a store, right? I’ll be in, like, Lowe’s buying something to fix at the house and be like, “Oh, I don’t know. This looks all right,” but I’ll go look at reviews either on Lowe’s app or Amazon’s app, right? Because I want to see also what the price is on Amazon if I don’t need it that day. So, like, it’s hard to argue with consumer behavior. [But] it works great for CPG. And that plays right into the other thing of, like repeatable, like—a lot of CPG is, you know, repeatable purchases and having potential high lifetime value for a customer. So, you know, there’s obviously things like Subscribe & Save on Amazon, there’s some interesting ways to now incentivize more subscribers. We’ve seen great success with some of our clients. And so, again, it’s like, everybody loves to complain about Amazon, and I get it, right? But it’s so frictionless, [so] that’s where the customer goes, and that’s where brands need to be.

Rachel Andrea Go: Could you dive in a little bit more with your experience in Subscribe & Save and some of your tips in utilizing that?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, sure. Well, first off, Amazon doesn’t always automatically enroll you in Subscribe & Save, so that’s, like, one thing to keep in consideration. You have to meet certain requirements, and it’s buried deep within the help pages of what those requirements are. It’s usually, like, a star rating and inventory availability and things like that, and you had to be on there for so long, I believe, as well, having an active offer for so long as well. So, that’s the first thing.

If you’re in a certain category and/or Amazon determines your product meets these requirements, they’ll automatically sometimes enroll you in their default Subscribe & Save offer, right? And so, the biggest thing with that is, you know, when that happens—I think you can opt out of it, but, like, when that does happen, you want to make sure—the biggest thing with Subscribe & Save is inventory, right? Because the last thing you want — and I’ve had this happen to myself personally — it’s like, “Wait, I never got more of those,” and then you’ll go into your Amazon app, and I don’t always read my Amazon emails [that] Amazon sends you, right? But it turns out they were out of stock, right?

I used to buy the same vitamins from Amazon for years, like, the same multivitamin, right? And it was on Subscribe & Save, and then one day, it was just like, “Oh, I don’t have any more” [so] I went, and they didn’t sell that product. I can’t remember what the exact thing happened, but that wasn’t available anymore. So, all of a sudden, it was like, “Aw, man,” so I had to go find a whole new multi[vitamin], you know, I just went and completely switched brands and everything, right? But I was locked in for that brand for, again, for…gosh, I was probably four or five years. I was buying that same multivitamin without even thinking about it. So that’s where, like, again it’s crossing CPG and Subscribe & Save.

The other thing is, you can increase your incentive of how much you offer on an ongoing—so, usually, default’s like 5% or 10%, but then you can increase that within your dashboard as well. The biggest revelation that’s come out really within the past, I believe it’s like, year, the timing, is, like, you can actually create a coupon now to incentivize that first purchase on Subscribe & Save. So, like, create something meaningful, like, “Save 40% on your first Subscribe & Save order,” which is, like, “Wow, am I actually going to make money? I might actually break even or maybe lose a little bit of money on that.” However, we’ve seen subscriptions skyrocket for brands when they offer something like that for the right kind of products. So, that’s just a couple little tips there.

Rachel Andrea Go: That’s a really interesting insight as well about how inventory mismanagement can affect your total customer lifetime value. So, good advice. Thank you for that.

Ryan Flynn: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a huge one I think brands don’t think about, right? Because customers are—even if they’re not on Subscribe & Save, they’re so ingrained of just maybe going to Amazon to reorder when they’re out, right? Maybe it’s coffee, right? And so, it’s like, maybe I try different kinds of coffee [and] I’m not going to put one on Subscribe & Save, but all of a sudden, I want to get that one again. But if you’re out, like—you know, I always tell brands, inventory is fueling a train, right? And a train, it takes a lot of momentum to get going, but once it’s going, it does not take as much energy or fuel, whatever you want to call it, getting down the track, right? Because it’s got that huge momentum behind it. That’s what Amazon sales are like, and sales rank is, like, right where you’ve got that momentum of sales and you’re growing.

And, you know, Amazon does use kind of, you know, sales as an indicator of overall rank on the site. When you run out of inventory, it’s like stopping a freight train dead in its tracks, right? Which is really physically impossible in the real world, but it’s possible on Amazon. And then to get going sometimes again, even to get back in stock — maybe it’s even a week or two later or, God forbid, a month or two later — it’s like getting that freight train going again, like, how do we get these,” you know? Even though you have the same ads, the same promotions, you’re not going to necessarily pick up where you left off.

Struggles when selling CPG

Rachel Andrea Go: Yeah, exactly. And that kind of leads into the next thing I was wondering about. What are some of the big challenges of CPG?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, CPG’s an interesting category, right? It’s—typically, you know, you think a lot of consumables or maybe topicals, things you put on your body, things you put in your body, right? That’s what it comes to, a lot of, like—obviously, we talk about food or, you know, health, beauty, personal care, that kind of stuff. Or, if you have a pet, if you consider pet. I kind of lump pet into CPG a little bit, but, like, if it’s a dog treat, right, you’re giving that to your dog.

So, I think, in terms of the actual products, I think the biggest thing is, you know, it’s really—you’ve got things like expiration dates potentially, right? And then you’ve got things like packaging. And so packaging and prep — which obviously plays in a lot with what MyFBAPrep does — is, like, that can kill things, and getting back to kind of narrowing that down, one of the biggest things with CPG is margins, right? Because you think about, like, I’m going to sell one unit of let’s say a specialty shampoo on the store and shelf at Target, right? I’m selling one unit, right, and, you know, there’s not a lot of extra costs. There are definitely costs selling in Target, but it’s not like selling one unit of shampoo on Amazon, where you’re selling for a sales price and you have Amazon’s referral fee, the FBA fee, the inbound placement fee, you’ve got, you know, obviously, any kind of if you want to consider ads as part of your contribution margin or marketing spend, and then you’ve got obviously back out your COGs.

So, margins get very slim when it comes down to single unit SKUs on Amazon, which, again, comes down to kind of that multipack, bundling, things that I know MyFBAPrep helps a lot of brands with. And that instantly changes margins overnight for some brands, right, where, it’s like, “Hey, we could sell one pack,” and maybe you still do, and it’s kind of like a lost leader, it’s kind of like a trial thing, but then you sell multipacks, bundles because obviously, your only costs are really incrementally going up a little bit or your FBA fees based on the size and weight. And so you’re going to see much higher margins. And especially when you’re talking [about] how well, how big advertising plays into Amazon these days. You know, if I’m spending $2, let’s say, a click to get a sale for my strong keyword, one of my strong keywords that I have in my ad campaigns, and I’m selling a $12 item, that $2, you know, it’s not going to leave our margin.

However, if I have the same $2 click and I’m selling a $30 item, it’s a lot better math, right? And so, think about things like that. That’s one of the biggest things I think brands—I think Amazon does a poor job of educating brands about and we try to educate brands about is that margin perspective kind of thing.

Rachel Andrea Go: What are some of the other unique challenges selling CPG products entail on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart versus retail, big box stores, maybe DTC, and all of that?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, I mean, yeah, marketplaces are definitely a unique channel. I think one of the first things that come[s] to mind is, because Amazon and Walmart.com, the third-party side, is a marketplace, is because anybody can sell your product and how they get that, right? And that really plays a lot to the CPG world. It’s better than it used to be. I mean, I think about when it was five, eight years ago, right? It was like the Wild West where literally — and there’s so some of these businesses out there — their entire business is literally just buying from distributors like a KeHE or UNFI, because that’s where a lot of brands, as they grow into retail, they need to distribute, and these distributors, right — those are the two bigger ones here in the U.S. — and they need to sell into those distributors.

And so when that happens, though, sometimes is that anybody can buy their product from there, not just a store, so it’s just like, “Hey, I’m an Ecom, I sell a ton of products out of my garage, and I just get them all shipped from KeHE and I flip them onto Amazon.” And maybe they’re only buying a couple cases at a time, whatever the minimum is, right? And they’re happy reselling that because they’re doing it; maybe they’re a stay-at-home parent or maybe they’re just doing this kind of [as] a side hustle thing.

But the problem with that is, it totally conflicts with the brand’s pricing, and, you know, you’ve got—all of a sudden, you’ve got eight offers on your—and you’re trying to sell as a brand yourself direct[ly]. And so that’s where it’s channel selection [that] is really important, knowing who you’re selling to ultimately. So, that’s one of the biggest things I would say. When it comes—I think also just—we already kind of talked about [how] it’s kind of like the whole “I’m not sending a pallet to this retailer. I’m not sending a truckload to this retailer. I’m sending different things to Amazon.”

And Amazon’s—they’ve really changed in the last year and a half the whole sending inventory to Amazon inventory placement and all this stuff, splitting shipments up. And it’s kind of—it can be very confusing for brands to get around that. And it’s just, again, working with a team like ours or whoever it may be, right, and just knowing a little more how to strategize of getting product into Amazon and/or using things like — which I know, again, you guys help with — like FBM to back up FBA and things like that. So, there’s lots of different―those are just a few. Keep going. But, yeah, those are just a couple of the top ones.

Playing to CPG’s (seasonal) strengths

Rachel Andrea Go: Have you noticed that CPG brands are affected more or less by seasonality in comparison to non-CPG?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah. So, I think it depends on the category,  right? I mean, CPG products are pretty evergreen by their nature, right? And it just depends on kind of the category they’re selling into, right? So, I would say, for instance, if it’s, like, a health-focused item, let’s say it’s a protein powder or something that’s more clean eating, right, maybe it’s a snack or something like that. Traditionally, we’ve seen those do really well in the January month, because obviously, if you’re like me, too, I ate way too much cake and cheese and everything else, all the sweets, all the Christmas cookies over the holidays, right?

So it’s like, come January, it’s like, all right, now it’s time to start paying attention a little more. And so a lot of customers are focused on that kind of stuff. So, health items do really well kind of in that. Another thing is, too, we have a number of—have this whole kind of stable of clients in the barbecue space with rubs and sauces and things like that. They obviously do really well in the summer months, right? That really takes off really starting in kind of May, late April, May through kind of early fall. It’s just gangbusters for them. And then you’ve got other items that, you know—obviously, as I mentioned, we have some items that aren’t CPG related that are very giftable items for the holidays, right? But then even CPG-type items that can be giftable for the holidays, especially if brands, you know, want to create a multipack or bundle that’s kind of a gift set, right? And there’s ways you can do that on Amazon strategically and promote that. And it can be a big boost, especially the ways you can target maybe some of your top customers with something like a SKU like that, where it’s like, you know, if they’re a loyal customer using Amazon’s what’s called Brand Tailored Promotions, you can target that SKU to them and offer them potentially a discount on that gift item, and then they’re going to get that in a different way than they would just searching on Amazon. And so that’s a great way to kind of drive incremental sales from your top customers.

Rachel Andrea Go: What are some of the best competitive advantages of selling CPG?

Ryan Flynn: I think one of the biggest ones — and it’s not like a business one, it’s more of a touchy-feely one — but I think it’s pretty neat for brands, because, with any product, right, especially CPG products, like, any time you’re starting a business, like, it’s your baby. It’s literally something you’ve, like, devoted, you know, months, years, maybe decades into, right? And it is like literally you’ve put your entire life into it. And I can say this from owning my own business for 10 years, it just intertwines as a part of your life, right? It’s just your one thing. It’s not, “I have work and I have personal [life],” it just becomes one thing.

I think it’s cool for brands to see their products being used every day or, you know, walking into a store—I get excited when I see our clients’ products on store shelves, right? I’ll walk into Lowe’s or I’ll walk into a grocery store, right, and I’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, here it is.” I’ll walk into Costco and it’s like, “Oh, this is so cool,” right? I’ll take a picture, I’ll send it—we’ll send it to the brand or whatever and just let them know we saw it, and I think that’s really neat. I think that’s amazing, knowing that people are using your products every day, you know, whether, again, it’s a consumable or it’s a shampoo, whatever it may be. I think it’s kind of a cool one that maybe not a lot of people talk about, but that’s a neat one.

I think, you know, one of the other things is just, like, the ability to have a higher lifetime value, especially on a platform like Amazon where, if you can get those Subscribe & Save subscribers the right way, it could be harder to lock that in potentially in a store, right? Because, I mean, channels are blurring so much every day between traditional retail. I use Walmart as a great example, right, like, you think about Walmart’s grocery delivery or grocery pickup and how you use their app for that, it’s seamless of you finding—if you were to type—search for, let’s say, all these barbecue rubs, for example, right? A certain brand of barbecue rub, and it may not be in the store, but the way Walmart’s app is set up, if it is in the store, you can just add it and check out or whatever, or you could just buy from a third-party seller, and it’s really very—it’s the same experience, right? There’s no friction to doing either/or. So, I think that part’s really interesting.

And so my point is going back to the Amazon angle of just being able to capture that customer for longer potentially, using things like Subscribe & Save. And I think, you know, with CPG, just the ability to be kind of everywhere, right? Because it’s like, once you do get into those, you go from maybe regional-type stores into national chains into the big box stores; your economies of scale get really good, but—and, again, it kind of go ties back to that first thing, the warm and fuzzy part of seeing it everywhere.

Stay on top of inventory, assets, and reviews

Rachel Andrea Go: Speaking of economies of scale, how can CPG brands predict demand and plan for inventory considering expiration dates?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, so, I mean, we kind of already talked about it. Like, inventory is the biggest thing that’ll just kill your momentum on Amazon, and Amazon’s internal tools, I mean—Amazon’s traditionally always been horrible at forecasting inventory, which is why we have our own system internally that our brand managers look at pretty much daily. It takes into account more recent sales activity to keep our brands in stock, right? And even they do have a nicer inventory dashboard, but it’s so buried, just like with everything Amazon; the UI of it and how you find things is so convoluted sometimes, it’s like, “Where is this and how do I know?” And then it’s like, “Oh, this dashboard’s actually not bad, but can anybody find it? Is anybody using it?” That kind of thing. So, again, momentum and inventory is a huge thing.

It doesn’t affect it, you know—recording this in early 2025, it doesn’t affect things as much today as it did, you know—talk about two or three years ago where, essentially, it was a thing where inventory storage limits were a really big thing during the pandemic. But that’s still prevalent today, so considering not having too much inventory or hitting—if you have a wide category SKU count, you don’t have the sales yet to back it up, [so] Amazon’s not going to give you all that inventory storage space where you need to kind of stage products with partners and 3PLs and things like that to be able to ship into Amazon more quickly.

Expiration dates are a huge thing, especially, not only sending product into Amazon, and Amazon only accepting, I think it’s—they want the expiration to be with less than 90 days, but I’m thinking from a customer standpoint; like, if I’m getting something and I get it and it expires in two months, it’s kind of not a great—especially if it’s a longer use thing, right, it’s not a great customer experience. But then, you know, brands, by their very nature, just sometimes have a lot of excess inventory, so that’s just cash tied up. It’s just money—the equivalent of money sitting somewhere they need to move, so. And the inverse of that we’ve seen actually work well where people are overstocked on certain things and how can we just blow this product potentially through Amazon by discounting it, liquidating it, and understanding [that] we’re going to maybe—the brand’s actually going to lose a little bit of margin on this, each sale, but they’re going to convert that inventory back into cash, I should say.

Rachel Andrea Go: What are some common mistakes that you see CPG brands make when they launch on Amazon?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah. Two big things, two biggest things — I see this all the time, I always see brands, you know, they’ll launch on Amazon and they’ll be excited about it; they’ll post it on their social or whatever, they’ll post it in their communities and they’ll be excited about seeing it up there. And it’s exciting, right? It’s like, when you’re on Amazon, you can send it to your friends and family, they can buy it, and you can do that on your website too. But when you’re on Amazon, it’s almost like a prestige kind of thing in a way too.

But I think the biggest mistakes brands make is sometimes they don’t translate their brand very well into how it could fit into Amazon. So, again, brands do an amazing job typically of branding their actual physical packaging and their product, their website, even, like, translating that into Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, whatever it may be, right? And it all flows really well, but then you land on their Amazon page—so, if I were to visit a brand’s website, Instagram page, see them in the store on a shelf, and then go to their Amazon page, sometimes Amazon’s just like, “Oh my gosh, this is—” they have a picture of the front of the bottle, the back of the bottle, and they have, like, just a—one stock image that doesn’t have any words on it or anything like that, and there’s no cohesive branding.

And so I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you guys have all these assets somewhere in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder. Throw them up there on Amazon.” Or, you know, what we do a lot is we just translate a lot of those things that brands already have into how it should look for Amazon. Amazon’s got Brand Story now, which they’ve had for a while, but Brand Story’s a great way to just—I tell people, anytime you can take up more of the page on Amazon — it doesn’t cost you anything on your Amazon page — do it. And there’s so many things that brands don’t—like, virtual bundles—I go on and on [about] things brands could be doing for that. So, again, translating your brand and your brand aesthetics onto Amazon, conveying all your features and benefits in all that content is one.

The second biggest thing would be not getting those initial reviews and just starting to advertise right off the bat. Amazon has their Vine program, which I know is a love/hate thing for brands because it’s not sometimes the most well-thought-out thing, but we actually—the Expert CPG—little plug for the Expert CPG Commerce podcast: I spoke with actually a friend of mine who was a Vine reviewer, like him and his wife do Vine reviews, and they just do it very—they have full-time jobs. And there are people that this is their full-time thing, right? But he explained how they get—how products get matched up to them, and brands do want to—before they enroll in Vine, they do want to make sure they have all their content and aesthetics up there because reviewers are actually looking at this to decide, “Would I want this or would I use this kind of thing?” Right? Or maybe it’s like, “Hey, would my kids want to eat this?” And things like that. And if you just have a very bare-bones page and throw it up on Vine, that’s not going to translate.

Vine’s still the best way to get within, I would say, terms of service reviews. There are other ways to get reviews. I mean, Amazon’s really clamped down the last couple years on reviews. You’ve got to be really careful with friends and family, because Amazon can connect things. We have a brand that I talked to last year at some point, and they got shut down because they were having people review the products and—[people] connected to them, friends and family, and Amazon would not reinstate their account, so it was kind of unfortunate, so. But the point is, going back to: You want to show some social proof of these reviews and getting them in there so that, when customers—you know, they’re comparing an ad, your product in an ad that has zero reviews to something on a page and it has a hundred reviews — it’s apples and oranges, frankly.

The pitfalls of branding building

Rachel Andrea Go: Brands get on Amazon, they launch properly, and they grow, but then they kind of plateau. So, what could cause a brand to scale quickly, grow quickly, and become really successful, and then suddenly stop?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, great question. I think it’s not so much of a factor of Amazon and what a brand’s doing. I would say it’s, like, what they’re not doing. And what happens—we’ve seen happen a lot is — [and,] again, where we fit really well into a brand — is that, as a brand grows, it’s just like their time and attention are just pulled in every other direction, right? When you’re starting a brand, you’ve got your product development, you know, co-packing, whatever it may be, how you’re producing it, you’re getting—doing some initial sales, you’re doing DTC, you’re up on Amazon, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, “Okay, now we’ve got—we’re in this retailer, and now we’ve got this new product line we’re developing and coming out. Then we’ve got this manufacturing issue, and then we’re, you know, looking for a different 3PL partner.”

And it’s all of a sudden. It’s like—what happens is, Amazon naturally just gets—because Amazon kind of can’t operate on autopilot in a way, like, as long as you’re sitting on inventory and you don’t even have to have ads running, [although] you probably should. It could be bad, ads running without checking them, but that’s a whole other conversation. Amazon can kind of run on autopilot, right? Like, it can just happen. It’s like, “Oh yeah, we need to send more product into Amazon, well great.” But now all of a sudden, a year, two years, three years pass, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, all these new things have rolled out.”

And by the way, in the past three years, the amount of things that have been added into Amazon that Amazon has done a horrible job of telling brands about that’s buried — again, I talked about some of these things are buried deep down inside — again, it’s like—Brand Tailored Promotions. If people don’t know what that is, go into Amazon, look at Brand Tailored Promotions. You can target existing customers, you can kind of retarget people who haven’t bought in a while, all this stuff. And so it’s really neat, and they do a good job of explaining it now, but it’s buried deep within there. And brands that we do audits for are like, “Oh my gosh, this is in here. I had no idea.” And it’s not their fault, because they’re just trying to do everything and do it well. So, that’s the biggest thing we see is the resource constraint. That’s where we, again, fit really well into.

And then I would say the other thing that we really have focused on in the last year or two is mobile. If you—again, Amazon does—a theme here of Amazon doing a horrible job — if you go into your business reports on Amazon, there are columns that are hidden by default that tell you what your actual mobile sessions are versus, like, a desktop session. And I’m guilty of it; Rachel, you’re probably guilty of it; we all look at Amazon pages when we’re working on our laptop or our desktop. I have a huge monitor in front of me, right, and so I’m seeing these big Amazon pages. But pay attention to what your page looks like on your phone, right, or in the app.

And so there’s—a little tip for everybody: There’s a Chrome extension called Mobile Simulator, I believe it is, [maybe] Mobile Emulator, and we use that internally, but just to—a little click [on] one button, and it brings you up and has a little phone layout of it, but it shows you what the page looks like on mobile. And that can be really eye-opening for a brand to be like, “Oh wow, we have this small text in our explainer images, our infographic type images, and nobody can read it on mobile because it’s super, super small. It looks good on our desktop.” Or it just kind of blends in, the colors don’t match. So, that’s a big one. Again, I could talk more in depth about mobile, but that’s another big one.

Rachel Andrea Go: Cool. And kind of putting your entrepreneur hat on, I know that you rebranded recently and I’d love to hear your experience with that and your lessons with that.

Ryan Flynn: Yeah, great question. We rebranded about a year ago, in early 2024. So, previously to that, we were Charmac. And how I got Charmac, by the way, was, when I originally created the LLC, like, 10 years ago, my two oldest kids at the time were Charlotte and Mackenzie. And so, I’m just like, “I’ll just combine their names and that’ll be the name of the company.” You know, sometimes when you create an LLC, you don’t know what it’s eventually going to be. And come to find out there’s a Charmac trailer company in Ohio that we’d sometimes get mixed up with. And then, you know, also “Charmac,” doesn’t—it’s just a kind of a made-up name, it doesn’t say what we do.

So, I’m a big fan, on business, of, like, naming your, you know—MyFBAPrep is a great example of that, kind of naming kind of what you do. Like, it tells a prospective customer or customer kind of, “Here’s what we do,” right? Because it doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination there. And so, that was part of it. We worked with a lot of CPG brands, [so] we kind of wanted to reflect that as well. It seems like—I can’t believe it happened a year ago now because we actually were recapping for our team all of our kind of highlights and wins in 2024 recently, at the beginning of this year, and it was like, “Oh my gosh that was—” because it happened in January of 2024, so it was like, “Oh my gosh, that was this year that happened? It seems like we’ve been Expert CPG for years,” right?

And so, it’s a lot. Rebranding. If anyone’s ever done it, you think it’s easy — and by the way, this is just for a service, right, a service-based business that has no physical products — that’s a whole other animal, and brands that are listening or watching this, they definitely know that. That’s a whole different animal. But you forget about all the little things, especially technology-wise, and I’m pretty savvy, but you just forget, like, oh, this email address or this little thing, you know. Obviously, you’ve got the website, but that’s a whole other animal. But I don’t know, just little things would crop up over time. Like our legal entity is still the same, it’s a DBA essentially, but it’s just these little things. But after a few months, all that stuff kind of starts working itself out. So, yeah, it’s a beast, but it’s worked out well, I think.

Ask the right questions and find the right partner

Rachel Andrea Go: Amazing. So, what is your advice for brands who want to either launch or restart their growth on Amazon?

Ryan Flynn: Yeah. I think you first need to decide whether you’re going, you know—especially if you’re like me, right, or our team even, it’s like — there’s a ton of things we could be doing, you know? It’s like, “What should we be doing? What should we be focusing on?” So, really determining if Amazon is, number one, the right channel for your product, or if growing on Amazon right now is the right thing for your product. It’s like, is that a big focus? And I would argue, especially if you’re already on Amazon, you have some traction, I would argue, yeah, you should be focusing on growing Amazon. And then, depending on where you are at, the stage in your product—of a new product [you’re] putting out on Amazon, I would argue you should at least be there, right? So.

But I would say, you know, finding out if—one of the first things to consider is if you’re going to do it in-house or if you’re going to have an external resource, like an agency like ours or a freelancer, whoever it may be. It doesn’t have to be us. It could be anybody, right? But, like, deciding that and deciding kind of what the scope’s going to be. Because what happens is, I think is that people think, “Oh yeah, we’re going to focus on Amazon. We’re going to do this, this, and this.” And then it goes back to what I said happened earlier, right? It’s like, Amazon naturally just kind of gets—it’s like, “Oh, we got really—Amazon was a focus at the beginning of the year, but guess what? In March, we got that big PO from that regional retailer we just got into and all of a sudden that’s taking all our time.”

So, I would say finding the right resource and, again, if you want to do Amazon well, again, an external service is going to be a fraction of the cost of having a full-time Amazon person in-house, but you just need to make sure that they’re aligned with your goals, right, is number one, and does their service offer any kind of scope of work that kind of aligns with exactly what you need.

Now, there are brands that come to us and say, “Hey, we also want to do this, this, and this and these other channels.” I was like, “Okay, we don’t do that. We just really do Amazon.” We also do Walmart.com as kind of an additional service for our clients, but that’s all we—as Expert CPG, that’s all we do. Amazon by itself is—it’s enough, right? It’s an inch wide and a mile deep. So, we’re not one of these agencies that say, “Oh yeah, we’ll help you with the SEO on your website and we’ll do Meta ads for you and all this stuff.” It’s like, nope. Amazon is—we’re laser focused on that, because it allows us to be experts in that and really dig into some of those programs and take advantage of some of those things we talked about earlier of, like, brands don’t know about, through no fault of their own, but they just don’t know about them.