Hello, and thank you for joining. I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET & NOSH, and I am pleased to welcome you to The Nombase Podcast. Don't forget to check out nombase.com, BevNET's platform built for the CPG community.
It's where you can find episodes of this podcast and so much more. Amazon is a powerful growth engine for food and beverage brands, not just a sales channel, but a place to build visibility, test innovation, and connect directly with consumers.
Amazon is also a platform that is continually changing. New tools, changing shopper behaviors, and evolving fulfillment models are rewriting how brands grow and compete.
What worked a year ago might not work today, and that makes understanding the state of Amazon more important than ever.
Today on the Nombase Podcast, I have the pleasure of chatting with Daniel Tejada, co-founder of Straight Up Growth, an agency that specializes in helping CPG brands scale and succeed on Amazon.
We are going to dig into the state of Amazon heading into 2026, discuss what's changing in fulfillment and advertising, and share real world strategies for food and beverage founders looking to drive smarter, more sustainable growth online.
Daniel, it's great to have you here, especially now when Amazon really does have so many updates and changes coming down the pike.
Thanks for having me here today, Melissa. Excited to chat through the latest and greatest in CPG here on the Amazon front.
All right. Well, let's get right to it. First of all, how would you describe the current Amazon landscape for food and beverage?
What would you say has changed most this year?
That's a great question.
Amazon changes every year, but food and beverage in particular is seeing some of the largest shifts in terms of the Amazon landscape, and particularly around Amazon Fresh, and even how Amazon is looking at search results, how they're favoring really
more of an omni-channel approach more than they've ever favored in their past. So it's really quite interesting how Amazon is shifting when it comes to groceries specifically.
2:22
So let's talk Amazon Fresh and let's also talk Amazon Fusion, but let's start with Amazon Fresh.
Can you explain Amazon Fresh to all of the folks out here who are listening?
So Amazon Fresh has been around for quite a while, right? It's their, essentially, delivery system where they're working with grocery stores like Whole Foods.
It's when you're shopping on Amazon and you get to see the single items instead of a 10 or 12 or 20 pack of a skew there, right?
So the idea is essentially you're able to shop like you would in the grocery store and get things like same-day delivery, something they're really trying to push. There's a special program called Fusion within that.
But essentially, for something like Amazon Fresh, if you spend $25 on Amazon Prime through Fresh, you're essentially able to get free delivery, right?
And so it's a way of Amazon sort of capturing that grocery store visit market share, which is in the past, it's been more focused on like shelf stable and more bulk type of items for grocery.
And Amazon Fusion, is that a program within Amazon Fresh?
It is. So it's limited in terms of getting access towards it. It currently serves about 1,000 zip codes.
By the end of the year, they're looking to expand to about 2,300 different zip codes throughout the US. But it's very, very interesting. So what it allows you to do is ensure same-day delivery, of your fresh items, essentially.
Not everyone is in it yet. It's definitely something that Amazon hasn't even really fully announced to everybody. But it's a really, really strong program.
We've seen some significant, significant growth from our brands that have participated so far.
And how long has Amazon Fusion been around?
This is the first year that I have seen it. So it's definitely relatively new here. There's some of our bigger brands have access to it right now.
But definitely ask your vendor rep if it's an option, because it's something quite powerful.
All right. So Amazon Fusion is an opportunity for brands that are perishable, require refrigeration. And if consumers hit a $25 threshold, they'll skip delivery fees, which is huge.
Does this intersect with Whole Foods delivery at all or are they completely separate?
Yes. So Fresh and Whole Foods are part of that same program, essentially.
Can you break down for us Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, and Fusion and how they fit together strategically for brands?
So Fresh is essentially the umbrella, right there. And what we have is programs like Fusion is the ability to get that same day delivery within 1,000 zip codes up to 2,300 by end of year, right?
Things like Whole Foods is part of Fresh, but there are other stores as well that participate.
Like my zip code is set to Santa Monica for some reason on my Prime, and I see some of the local grocery stores that I've been to in Santa Monica have access to the Fresh program, for example, there. So it is a little cumbersome.
So you really just want to think of it as like Fresh is really what we're working towards, because that's kind of the umbrella.
And then there are certain programs we can enter within that, like Fusion, where now we're getting access to same day delivery.
And on the user side, all they do is go to Amazon Fresh and pick out what they want. Is that all they see? Yep.
So they're not shifting anything.
They don't have to pay an extra fee for that program. It's just going to be another delivery option when they are actually going through checkout and things like that.
And are there any other ways that Amazon Fresh has changed and will continue to change into 2026?
Yeah. So I think one thing that's interesting is we definitely see Amazon making an emphasis on grocery in general, right? Fusion is only for brands in the grocery or gourmet food category, for example.
There's no other items or subcategories that they are even offering this offering to. So that's interesting. The other thing that we've been seeing is, well, Amazon has started to slow down on a lot of its private label.
One area where they're actually ramping up is grocery and food, right? So they have that Amazon grocery brand, essentially. You know, think of it like their version of Kroger.
It is interesting to see, though, that Amazon is slowing down on every other category except for grocery when it comes to their own private label.
Usually, that's a sign that they're probably going to be investing more into their programs, into their teams and things like that. If I had to guess, just based off the fact that they're keeping that grocery line going.
Does that mean it's more important than ever for brands to use their ad dollars on Amazon wisely?
Oh, yeah. No, it's like at the end of the day, I remember one of the first big brands I ever pitched was Energizer, like the battery brand.
We had pitched them initially, they had no reason to talk to us, and then they learned that Amazon was selling more batteries of their private label stuff than they were selling throughout the whole country, right?
And so at that point, they came to us with huge budgets, trying to be like, hey, we need to be the top battery again. And so you really don't want to sleep on Amazon because eventually, before you know it, you've lost that market share.
7:51
Well, certainly before you lose the market share, you need to know what your market share is, which brings us to one of the other updates that you had mentioned, which is the Amazon Marketing Cloud.
So first of all, can you explain the Amazon Marketing Cloud?
Amazon Marketing Cloud or AMC is another way people refer to it from the acronym there. It's essentially extra data and insights directly from Amazon that can empower you to do a whole lot of different things, right?
There's things like new to brand, there's things like understanding your LTV. And so these are all data points that brands have wanted for a long time and they finally started to release them.
Now, they first released it where you needed to have API access in order to even get access to the insights. You also had to understand how to do like SQL queries in order to do so.
Amazon is making it easier and easier in order to actually make this happen. So at this point, there's even places in your Seller Central where you can start to understand some of your Amazon Marketing Cloud data. And it's quite a robust tool.
They're constantly adding more and more features to it all the time.
What's the easiest way for me as a vendor to go into Seller Central and be able to access data if I'm not you?
So going into some of the brand metrics areas will give you some access to some already done for you insights. So you can look at things like your customer journey, for example.
How many touch points does a customer have before they've actually purchased? Things like that. There are reasons to work with a software provider that has built some more robust AMC tools.
So for example, there are ways you can see your new to brand percentage at an item or keyword level. And I'll give you actually a real world example. We had a brand that about 80% of their revenue was driving through a single skew, right?
Or a single sort of ace in there. What we noticed, looking through AMC though, the repeat purchase rate was very low, and so that made the LTV relatively low for that item there.
So we actually, given that shift that we saw, we changed our ad strategy and started to focus on a different item that had a very, very strong repeat purchase rate.
So now that same hero item does about 50% of total revenue instead of 80%, but we've seen our repeat purchase rate increase significantly and our LTV increased by like 30% doing that.
So overall, when we kind of run through it, the math makes it where it's much more efficient for us to go after this new item as our new brand sort of hero skew because of the fact that we're going to see a better LTV.
And that's data that just didn't exist in the past. So it's actionable. It allows you to really kind of shift, not just your execution of your advertising, but your overall ad strategy.
So newer on the forefront of the data that's available to vendors, they are able to see lifetime value, which helps them maybe understand which products to get behind.
Did you also say that you're able to attribute lifetime value to specific ad campaigns?
To specific ad campaigns and even specific keywords.
So we've had brands, for example, where we're spending on a non-branded keyword, and we are thinking to ourselves, okay, every single one of these buyers is new to brand because it's non-branded, right?
When we jumped in there, only 40 percent of our buyers on this keyword were actually new to brand.
Even though it's super high volume, it's because we're such a market leader in that space, we actually decided to start focusing on other terms and even other products in our portfolio because we now had access to both that keyword level and product
level detail. So just additional insights that allow you to be a better marketer.
So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm trying to grow a brand and I have 50,000 other things to do, and I operate my own Amazon business in addition to everything else, how much time does it take me to run an A-B test here using the Amazon Marketing Cloud to
So, I don't think it necessarily takes a ton of time if you know what you're doing, right?
To be able to look at the report, then kind of look at your ads data and accordingly shift and make changes, right, is something that can be done in 15 minutes, right?
The gap is a lot of folks running an Amazon business have a lot of different jobs, right?
There, you know, when I talk to folks, it's like you have to get inventory in, your listings go down, you have to talk to your 3PL because they were supposed to send in a shipment and that shipment didn't go through, right?
So there's a lot of hats that you're wearing. And so while I'll talk to a lot of folks, they're like, yeah, I want to be doing this, but they don't necessarily have the time in their day to day schedule to go through it, right?
It's not rocket science to implement, but it is extremely important that we are implementing these things because they do create vast improvements in terms of efficiencies and can really be the difference between hitting your sales target for the
So I imagine you and the Straight Up Growth team, do you guys oftentimes start with a brand and really go in and clean things up, see what's happening, and then make recommendations for, you know, moving forward to just put them on the right track?
Amazon folks really turn in to this super complicated kind of monster channel, right?
And at the end of the day, yes, there's some complexities, there's some intricacies to the channel itself. But the biggest thing is, it's very simple at the end of the day, right?
I have a thing called the Golden KPIs, for example, which are just four metrics that I look at, and I can really understand what a brand needs to do depending on how these metrics look, right? So Sessions is one metric.
Sessions is the number of unique visitors you get to your product listings, right? So think of it like the number of eyeballs or the number of at bats you're getting.
If that number is low, and I have a really big sales target, and the number of the amount of traffic I have to my listing is low, that tells me I have a traffic opportunity, right?
And so for us, we'll then look at brand analytics to look at your market share.
I'll then look at how many sessions do you have by item or by product, because we may find that you're too spread out with your spend, and maybe you're going after too many targets, and because you're spread out so far, you actually don't have any
concentration, right? Another thing we may do is look at things like conversion rate. If your conversion rate is below the category median, which Amazon will actually provide where all the averages are.
So you don't have to guess, am I converting well? It will tell you, hey, this is where you should convert. If you're below the target, let's look at listing optimization.
Let's adjust our images. Let's adjust our premium A plus content. Our last piece is percentage of ad-driven sales.
If I'm over-invested from an ad's perspective there, then I know I need to improve my organic ranking so that I can increase my profitability.
So at the end of the day, Amazon should be very simple if you can break it down into its simplest form, essentially.
When you explain it, it sounds so simple. But certainly, when you go into that platform and you start looking around, all of a sudden, it's like opening the hood of a car. If you're not a mechanic, it starts to look like spaghetti.
Do you have any examples of case studies where you've worked with a brand to use those pillars and the Amazon Marketing Cloud to help with lifetime value or repeat rate to actually change ad strategy?
I had an example of a brand in the hydration space, which is obviously very competitive, very hot, popular category there. We were doing a really, really strong job of increasing our new brand.
When we looked at the category median, we were actually close to the top rate every month. Revenue was growing, but organic revenue wasn't growing as quickly as we'd like it to grow.
And so, Amazon had provided some high-level LTV data for us, where they, you know, our $29.99 item, the average customer or LTV was about $90.
However, we looked at Amazon Marketing Cloud and discovered that if a customer purchased twice from us, our LTV jumped up to $170 right there. So, what we realized is that we were seeing a lot of churn on the secondary purchase, essentially, for us.
So, what we decided to do was add Amazon's DSP. We decided to specifically target customers who've purchased once, but have not purchased in the past 30, 60, 90 days. So, essentially, a re-engagement campaign.
All of a sudden, our, you know, secondary purchase rate went from, you know, in the 30% to about 50%. And we saw that LTV jump up to closer to 170, like we wanted it to get to at the end of the day.
So, simple change, also a very high ROAS segment, like re-engaging shoppers is a lot cheaper than acquiring customers at the end of the day.
But really just strong results for us and helped us go from like a 40% growth rate to a 70% once we shifted that without necessarily changing our spend dramatically as well.
Fascinating. Are there any other ways that you've been able to engage with one-time buyers or, you know, folks who have bought a couple of times to drive lifetime value for a brand?
One of the biggest things that we like to look at is the... We'll use the Amazon Marketing Cloud to see how many customers are coming back and purchasing. One other great tool we'll use is try to get customers into Subscribe and Save.
So we can create custom audiences with our DSP platform in which we can target customers who are not Subscribe and Save customers but are purchasing.
Just because we know that we'll actually track the LTV of Subscribe and Save customers specifically because that's always one of the highest buckets you can be in.
And so we'll even do things like maybe add a promotion to a DSP specifically for folks that are trying to reengage into Subscribe and Save or something like that.
18:20
So you've mentioned Amazon's DSP a couple of times.
DSP is Amazon's programmatic advertising for, is it display, video, and audio ads?
Yes. And now they've even added things like digital signage in stores, for example, which is really interesting. Another way to help grow your fresh channels as well.
So that's one of the updates as well, right?
So they're expanding into in-store digital signage. You had mentioned Whole Foods before, correct?
Yes. So you can actually get into a number of placements directly via Amazon's DSP, which is cool. You can also do things like geotarget.
So if there's specific zip codes you're looking to hit, it's pretty exciting stuff there.
So if I'm shopping in a Whole Foods market, they have digital screens behind the deli, they have digital screens at the cash registers, or those the displays you're talking about?
Exactly. Yep. So if you want to get your brand right there, you actually have the ability to do that.
And Amazon can track those sales that come from that, because people are giving their Amazon Prime numbers when they actually go to deliver, right? So they actually can close the loop on conversions on that as well, which is awesome.
Wow, that's totally mind blowing.
Oh, yeah, they're coming for you.
They're totally coming for you. Are there any other updates with Amazon's DSP?
So just Amazon's partnering with a lot more spaces. Like they recently announced a partnership with Netflix.
So we're going to be able to potentially be running streaming TV video ads, not just through Amazon Prime video placements, but even through Netflix for those paid or for the ad supported users, essentially. So it's pretty cool.
I mean, you see a lot of different marketplaces doing so, but the fact that Amazon got Netflix is pretty big.
Amazing. And are you able to choose your genre of...
Yeah, so I mean, the targeting is pretty... It's really robust, honestly. I can choose shows.
I can also overlay different customer demographics on top of things there, which is interesting. And then Amazon even has special sports packages.
So they've had these for a little while, but I could run a Thursday night football ad through Amazon's DSP program, for example, which is pretty mind-blowing.
20:45
FBA is notoriously tricky for liquids and temperature-sensitive products, which certainly make up so much of BevNET's audience.
What are the current packaging and temperature control rules, and how do brands who fit into this category navigate FBA?
To be transparent, FBA is very difficult for a lot of, like, refrigerated items in particular, are just, they're very difficult.
Like, you could do things like sell through Vendor Central, but you need to have a big enough, you need to be scaled to a large enough size for Amazon to even care, transparently through Vendor.
So what you find right now for a lot of these refrigerated items, multiple items during the summer, for example, you'll see a lot of cold pack shipping, right? And historically, brands will use, instead of FBA, they'll tend to use FBM, right?
So Fulfilled By Merchant. Now, the disadvantage for a long time is that with FBM, you would not be considered Prime Eligible, right? And so that would hurt you from a sales and conversion standpoint when it comes to Amazon.
Very recently, though, Amazon just opened up like Prime Eligibility for FBM. So think of it like it's like a Fulfilled By Merchant Plus almost, where you can still be considered Prime Eligible, even though you're using FBM, right?
So this is a new, like really brand new program. That's just come out. It's something we're still starting to explore.
But I do think this could be a decent solution for brands that are refrigerated and historically have not been able to participate, you know, when it comes down to Amazon. So it's definitely pretty exciting to do so.
I know there's some resources that you could reach out to us and we can share with you in terms of what Amazon is doing in terms of the new FBM Plus that they've got going on.
What is the best way for folks to reach you?
They could always come to our website, straightupgrowth.com. I'm also very active on LinkedIn. Just search Daniel Tahata.
You'll find me. Message me and we'll find you.
All right. I have another question for you. Reviews are such a huge part of conversion on Amazon.
You know, folks only have a limited amount of time to decide what they want to buy, and reviews really do help. What strategies have you seen that help brands get more of those verified reviews and use those reviews to drive conversion?
There's the basics, you know, brands are going to implement the Amazon Vine program, right? They're going to make sure that they are... So we get you some reviews.
Some best practices, though, driving outside traffic can be fruitful.
So even if you're a brand that has already been established and you've got your.com audience, for example, doesn't hurt to say a note like, hey, we just launched on Amazon, want to hear what you guys think, right?
And you'll send some traffic that way. Some brands get weird about, like, you know, sharing their.com traffic and their Amazon traffic. And that's okay, too.
You know, we're not here to tell you which way to go. But there are other tricks. Like, one thing we have is like a second loser strategy.
We're essentially, let's say you've exhausted folks in your funnel for.com. They will not convert. Why not send that traffic to Amazon at this point?
You've spent money to capture that email address or capture that phone number. They don't seem to be converting on your website.
We have found plenty of brands that once they drive them to Amazon, they'll actually go and convert because there's like a higher degree of trust and things like that. And so those are folks that can also leave reviews for you guys.
Other things that you'll see, sales velocity on non-branded terms. Customers leave reviews at like twice the rate on non-branded search terms as branded. I don't know why that is, but it's just something that tends to happen on Amazon.
I think it's the branded customers already know that they want that item and they kind of like forget about it. But these new-to-brand terms, they tend to actually take the time to leave feedback.
So we find as your sales velocity increases on the non-branded side, you tend to see your review rate increase significantly or pretty quickly as well.
I'm just curious from a consumer perspective. Sometimes you'll see an item that has thousands and thousands of reviews, and it seems impossible. Are some brands or some products paying for reviews or how does that work?
So that was definitely a thing for sure.
Brands were gaming the system and doing some more black, gray hat things like giveaways and stuff like that for reviews.
But there's also plenty of, if your sales velocity gets high enough in certain categories, like I have a product in the beauty space that has 76,000 reviews. I have an item in the keto space that we launched maybe two years ago.
We're number one in our category. I take 52% of all sales. I've generated 30,000 reviews in two years.
We haven't sent us, done anything black hat, but if the velocity is high enough on the non-branded side, you can naturally see some big growth.
One other thing I would mention on reviews is like, a lot of brands are like, oh, like this brand has 30,000. You don't need to have 30,000 reviews to be able to compete.
For us, there's certain thresholds that we're looking for where we expect to see conversion rate multipliers, but your first target should be like, how do I get to 100 reviews?
If I can get to 100 reviews, I'm not going to convert at the same rate as somebody who has 30,000, but I'm going to be doing a lot stronger. Our ultimate goal is only to get to 1,000 reviews.
If I can hit 1,000 reviews, I'm now converting at a similar rate to somebody who has 20, 30, 40,000 reviews there. So it doesn't always have to be this massive target.
You just want to make sure that you're staying above four stars, four and a half, ideally. And then really, once you hit that 1,000 review mark, you are ready to rumble.
That's great. I feel like that's super optimistic that 1,000 is a real threshold. I feel like a lot of people will be really happy to hear that.
Awesome.
Yeah. No, it's not always as scary as you think.
Yeah. All right. Something else you mentioned when we were preparing for this call was buy box suppression.
What is buy box suppression? What's going on with it? And how can brands protect themselves or adapt to it?
Well, first, what is buy box?
Buy box is your eligibility to sell the item itself. When you're actually on a product listing, theoretically, unless you're a brand-gated item, almost anybody can sell any item on Amazon.
So if you were drinking a Poland Spring water bottle and I was selling a Poland Spring water bottle, even though I'm not Poland Spring, I could still go to their listing and theoretically sell it.
Now, historically, the usual factors for at least eligibility would be things like your price and if you're prime eligible. And so most brands are going to offer the best price and be prime eligible. However, Amazon recently has started...
Well, they've always price matched. So if you were selling your item cheaper on walmart.com or cheaper on your own website, they would break your buy box.
And so basically, instead of having a buy now feature, it will say, see all buying options on the page, drops your conversion rate dramatically, drops your sales dramatically. Also pauses your ability to advertise when your buy box is broken.
So this is how Amazon has kept the lowest price on the internet. The new update though, that's tricky to navigate, is that Amazon has now started price matching different pack sizes.
So in the past, brands moves would be, okay, I sell a six pack on Amazon, I sell a 12 pack on Walmart. Now, Amazon will look at the unit count price of that and actually match the price that way. So they are doing buy box suppression based on that.
So this has gotten really fun in terms of navigation. There's a couple of different sort of solutions, but one thing that I'm starting to see brands do is actually create a different size of the item itself, right?
So instead of a different pack size, they'll create a different like, they may have a 12 ounce, now they're going to create a 14 ounce for Amazon or something like that, because that technically still falls under Amazon's rules.
Another thing that I'll see brands doing for it to be considered a different product, like the ingredients have to be slightly different.
So I've seen brands even adding different ingredients to skews so that they can call it a different item on that front. But size variations, like pack sizes don't work anymore.
So that's really the big thing to understand and make sure that you really understand your pricing across all of your different channels, because things like Walmart now can start to impact your Amazon much more aggressively than it ever had in the
Man, you really have to stay on the ball.
You cannot sleep.
This is why, I mean, I don't have any gray hairs, but there's a lot of folks on our team that have gray hairs, for sure.
OK, so we are past Black Friday, Cyber Monday. How do brands use these tent pole events to drive lasting, sustainable growth throughout the year?
Great question. So, one, just because you didn't, let's say, close or convert that customer during Black Friday or Cyber Monday, doesn't mean that they're lost, right? Your retargeting pool should actually be pretty large after this.
So we still will have our DSP retargeting campaigns increase those budgets right after those events, because it makes sense to do so, right?
The other thing, if you were ranking or focused on ranking, there, you're going to see some weirdness during those days, because some brands go absolutely crazy with their budgets, whatever.
A lot of brands, though, just, they turn their budgets way back down, right? And they pretend like Amazon has died, right?
If you are trying to rank, ranking is a measurement of orders against a specific search term against the total number of orders, right?
And so for us, if I'm trying to rank, I don't want to just stop because of Black Friday, I'm going to continue to spend, especially on the terms that are ranking well.
It also tends to be a time that budgets start to get depressed a little bit because people overspend on Prime Day and things like that. So that's also a good time for you to start turning up your budgets because everyone else is not.
Another way that I'm sure brands could think about putting money behind their spending on Amazon is telling their story, especially in this emerging food and beverage space where education can be paramount to selling a product and driving your brand
forward. So there are some more content options as well that Amazon has, the upgraded A plus premium version of Amazon's A plus content. Could you first of all start by telling us about Amazon's A plus content and what this new update is?
I'm going to bring it back to what's important for customers when they're purchasing on Amazon. Like we can be advertising manipulates traffic and our listings manipulate conversion rate, right?
Things like bullet points used to be very valuable, right? In my early days of Amazon, at this point, if you're looking at your desktop computer, the bullet points actually get hidden.
You have to click a button to make the bullet points appear, right? The other thing to consider, 80% of shopping on Amazon happens on mobile.
With that in mind, things like your product image tags, your A plus content and your brand story are essentially the three most important components for conversion on a product detail page.
Image tags, we're going to see brands using a lot more text overlays across the board, right? There, if you're not doing that, like you will be a lower converting item compared to competitors. Those have existed.
What's new are things like brand story and then A plus premium. So premium A plus content used to cost like $50,000, for example, if I was a seller central brand, just to get access. Now it's free if you're a seller central brand.
It's very robust. It takes up 80% of the white space on desktop. It takes up the entire phone screen on mobile, which is awesome.
It allows you to add video, allows you to add sliders, cross comparison things, all this fun stuff. Amazon brand story is new in the last 12 months, and they also just updated it where you can actually upload video into your brand story.
So, we've got some really great visual ones that we've seen.
For something like premium A Plus content, it's not crazy to see a 1% to 2% increase in your overall conversion rate just by switching to it, which really adds up, especially if you're a high traffic listing there, that those percentages can turn
And do you recommend brands use A Plus premium?
Let's say you're bootstrapping it, you don't have unlimited funds. Do you recommend they use it throughout the year? Do you use it at key moments?
How do you recommend they use it?
It's always going to be live on the listing. I think the real question is how often do you update it, right? Essentially there.
And so you can get away with building a good one and updating it maybe every year, right, if you really needed to. If you're trying to run best practices, you could add things like seasonal modules.
So maybe you'll keep one kind of brand focused one, but you'll have a module you could switch out. So it's a little bit less work if you don't necessarily have the bandwidth or you don't have the funds to focus entirely on that.
That's definitely not a bad call. You could do same thing for like something like your brand story. Do you need to switch that out all the time?
No, but there are instances where like you've got Christmas coming up, you could put little presents around your items on some of the images, things like that without having to change the entire look and feel.
34:07
Okay.
So we have talked about so many ways to spend money on Amazon to drive your growth with ad costs rising, with the cost of everything rising. How should emerging brands balance visibility and profitability?
And, you know, what metrics are you looking at to gauge sustainable growth? Like what's, how do we do this?
Amazon has gotten more and more expensive, right? It's also more and more competitive there. But there's definitely hope, right?
I've got brands that are scaling profitably. I have brands that are scaling kind of breaking even with the intention of eventually hitting a profitability metric once we hit, you know, a certain sales target, right? Things like that.
I think one of the most important pieces for Amazon that brands don't think about, run a P&L on your, you know, an Amazon P&L for your SKUs, for your brand. So you understand what you're actually making money on, what you're not.
Because sometimes, like, we read this exercise with one of our brands, we had brought on, we realized their number one seller, which was doing 70% of their revenue, they were losing money on, right? They were selling it for too low of a price.
So we actually shifted what item we focused on for that brand, found a SKU in their portfolio that was, you know, much more positive from an EBITDA perspective. We now do 80% of our revenue off of that SKU, right?
And have turned that to be a top seller. So definitely do your homework in terms of understanding what it costs you to sell on Amazon. The other thing, create product level strategies, right?
You know, a lot of brands are going to have multiple items they sell, they may have 5, 10, 20, 100 different SKUs, right? Every parent listing you're trying to drive costs you a certain amount of money to actually rank, right?
So we believe in a less is more strategy where you can actually choose to create, you know, some hero SKUs, right? Or hero items of focus for your brand.
That's where you can put your new to brand dollars behind and then kind of do some cross promotion, exercises or actions to get your other items sold, right?
So that concentration of spend is very important in order to like actually gain momentum on Amazon.
I'd rather go really, really hard at one item than take a budget that's big, but too small for the number of items that I'm using and kind of spend a lot to get nowhere, you know? So yeah, probably my biggest two piece of advice there.
36:31
Really great stuff.
And you know, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but I feel like you have more of a crystal ball than many other folks in this industry for Amazon.
As we're looking forward to 2026, if you had to predict what's coming for food and beverage brands on Amazon, you know, whether it's logistics, data, consumer behavior, what do you see?
See a couple of different things. I see more data and insights just given what we've seen this year. Amazon Marketing Cloud has gotten more robust, more democratized in the sense of it's available for more folks.
Amazon's willing to give you more information about what's happening in the category. They'll create new ad offerings. Grocery, I think, is going to be exploding.
I think this is going to be one of the fastest rising categories given what they're shifting in terms of programs, in terms of how they're changing the business. And one thing, honestly, this is a little bit of a scary thing to note.
Amazon is doing a lot of layoffs, and they're really focused on actually the folks that help you at Amazon right now. This is not a engineer type role that's going.
It's a lot of white collar folks that like, like I know even from layoffs recently, some of my brands have been impacted by the fact that like their vendor reps are just gone, and there's not necessarily a person at Amazon that even knows who their
new rep is, right? So that means we're going to see a lot more brands out there on their own without necessarily having that Amazon support. So I do think it's going to be a little bit of a tricky year to navigate.
Brands are going to need to bring in more in-house expertise or partner expertise, I believe, given the fact that they probably won't be able to lean on their Amazon reps as hard as they have in the past, given some of the shifts Amazon is making to
Well, if I had a crystal ball, I would predict that Straight Up Growth will see a very growth-forward year in 2026 based on everything that you've shared.
Daniel Tejada, co-founder of Straight Up Growth, thank you so much for joining us and giving us really an amazing overview of how to win at Amazon.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate the time.
For everybody else in the audience, thank you for joining us on the Nombase Podcast, and we'll see you next time. That concludes another episode of the Nombase Podcast.
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