In this week’s episode, Carolyn Lowe, the founder and CEO of ROI Swift, shares practical Amazon marketplace strategies for brand success. Drawing from her own experience managing a $2B division at Dell and advising established e-commerce businesses and startups, Carolyn discusses profitability tactics, advertising approaches, and emerging opportunities on the platform. Learn how brands can optimize listings, protect against competition, and leverage Amazon’s B2B potential.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Carolyn Lowe: The biggest gap is just that knowledge gap. Unless you’re working in it day in and day out, things change constantly. One day, Amazon will like an ingredient in something, and then the next day they’ll say, “This vitamin is banned,” and you’ve got to go get your listing reinstated.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. With over 200 million Prime members worldwide and billions of monthly visitors, Amazon represents an enormous opportunity for consumer brands. Amazon.com reflects an increasingly sophisticated marketplace, with an array of advertising tools and a media network capable of reaching audiences across its ecosystem, which today includes Prime Video’s streaming channels for sports, TV show, and movies. For brands, successfully navigating Amazon’s expanding universe while maintaining profitability and protecting brand equity has become more complex. Our guest today is an expert in helping brands maximize their success. Carolyn Lowe is the founder and CEO of ROI Swift, an agency that excels in growing small and medium-sized businesses on Amazon’s marketplace. After managing a $2 billion division of Dell and running global marketing for several major brands, Carolyn founded ROI Swift in 2015 to help emerging consumer brands achieve profitable growth. Carolyn is also the author of the book, “Business Growth Do’s and Absolute Don’ts: Applied wisdom From my work with Dell, Costco, Amazon, and multiple startups.” To discuss strategies for succeeding on Amazon, I’m delighted that Carolyn is joining us today from Austin, Texas. Carolyn, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Carolyn Lowe: Thank you for having me.
Adrian Tennant: You founded ROI Swift after holding senior positions at Dell. What inspired you to focus specifically on helping brands succeed on Amazon?
Carolyn Lowe: It’s interesting. It goes back to 1999. I was working at Dell and running a $2 billion division. And, you know, it just wasn’t fun anymore. You know, I was working with some really great brands. I was working with Costco and on air on QVC and selling computers, a million dollars worth of laptops in eight minutes.”And this was the early days of Amazon. They had one building up on the hill and they wanted to sell Dell computers. And I couldn’t find a way around the channel conflict, you know, versus Dell.com. But fast forward six years, I had two kids, and then I went to a mom and baby company, and I was their entire marketing department. They’re a $3 million company. In a year, I 5X’d them. I ran their Facebook, moved them over to Shopify, Google. This is 2014. And they had a fledgling Amazon business doing $10,000 a month. And so I grew that to $600,000 a month and said, I really want to do this for 999 more companies. So I left my job as the head of e-commerce in Amazon for this single mom and baby company. And then I brought them with me and then started ROI Swift so we could help that many more brands.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. When evaluating whether a brand should sell on Amazon, what are the key factors you recommend your clients consider?
Carolyn Lowe: That’s a great question, Adrian. It really comes down to economics and what I have found and what most folks have found is that there’s some people selling on Amazon unprofitably. There was a natural cleaning company and we went in and we worked with them and They were doing $30,000 a month. And I looked at all their SKUs, and I pulled their SKU economic report, and I said, “You’re actually losing money on every single one of these that goes out the door. So stop selling these, and you will actually make more money!” And I think a lot of people jump in, and they don’t go down to the SKU-level economics to really see, “Hey, these are the products that I could do, or these are the products that I have to make a bigger size, or a two-pack, or something to make it profitable given Amazon’s fee structure.”
Adrian Tennant: You’ve mentioned that many brands doing significant revenue on Amazon aren’t always profitable. Carolyn, what are the most common reasons for this?
Carolyn Lowe: The most common reasons are just not understanding those individual item-level economics, understanding Amazon fees, or maybe spending too much on advertising and not focusing enough on the thing that gets so overlooked, which is your organic optimization. You know, just like your website, what does your page look like? So, say you have a Shopify website, and you’re converting at 2 percent. Back when I was at the mom and baby company, we redid the product page on our website and what the template looked like, and we saw a 20 percent increase in conversion. And so all of a sudden, you’re going from 2% to 2.4%. Everything gets much more profitable at that point. Every dime you spend on traffic, or every dollar you invest is doing that much better. It’s the same with Amazon. People will spend a lot of money on advertising, and they won’t go down to those item-level economics and say, “Well, I’m only making after my COGS – my cost of goods – and my fees, I’m only making 50%, and I’m spending 25 or 30% on advertising. And so I’ve got 20%, and then by the time I take out my operating expenses, really there’s not a lot left.” So, we really focus on that, almost looking at “How much should I spend on ads?” even on an individual product level, because unless all your products are exactly the same in cost of goods and gross margin, it doesn’t make sense to do a one size fits all.
Adrian Tennant: Great advice. Can you walk us through your seven killer image listing guide and why it’s so critical for success on Amazon?
Carolyn Lowe: You’ve done a lot of homework, and not a lot of people know about our seven killer image listing guide. Again, it goes back to that organic optimization. So 67 percent of traffic on Amazon is mobile. And on mobile, it’ll show you the first six images and a video. So you really have seven, quote, images. On desktop, it’ll show, you know, sometimes it can show up to 10 images. But two-thirds of your folks are already on mobile. So just assume they’re only going to see your first six images plus your one video. This is where it’s critical. We see so many brands do this; they make these really gorgeous images but they actually do nothing to sell your product or convert your product. So we see this a lot. We have a lot of case studies with a beauty brand where it was a makeup item, and they just had five pictures of the same thing, of five different people wearing their makeup. We really have to convert people with those images because, as you know, a lot of folks don’t read that much anymore. So you really have to show them with pictures. I have two teenagers. I can validate that this is true! So what we did is we said – Okay, we want one that’s more like a testimonial-type image, a lifestyle image. We want another one that’s a comparison chart: your brand is all checks and their brand is all Xs, you know, whether it’s clean ingredients or whatever that is. And then the other one, you really want a sort of a benefits slide and then sort of any social proofing and then almost like a ‘how-to’ or instructions or if it’s apparel, a size guide. So, that sixth image is dependent on the category. And then, of course, you really want a beautiful 30-second video with titles over it because nobody has their sound on by default. Just really explaining your product and why, you know, we have brands that are premium that convert higher than some non-premium products just because we do such a good job telling that brand story.
Adrian Tennant: What role does advertising play within Amazon, and how should brands think about their advertising strategy on the platform?
Carolyn Lowe: Yeah, that’s a great question. We look at a lot of things and it’s just like your website, right? We see a lot of people jump in, put a product page up there, and then just start pouring money into the Amazon advertising abyss, I like to call it. So you just sort of pour money into the abyss, and then you say, “It didn’t work.” So, just like your website, Amazon’s the same. There are two ways to get more revenue. You can drive more traffic, or you can increase your conversion. We like to do both, right? If you come down to it, you either need more people on your page or more people converting that are coming to your page. Those are really the two big levers you have, whether it’s Amazon or your website. And so we look at an individual item level; what is the conversion on this page? So if it’s below a certain percent, like if it’s below 15%, we say, “Let’s go fix the page.” Lots of people are coming but they’re not buying. So there’s something wrong with the page. If it’s above 15 or 20% and it’s got low traffic, we say, “Great, now let’s go. We’ve optimized the page. It’s doing really well. We need to get more folks here. Let’s invest in more advertising on this.” So we really look at it not just at a blanket level but at an individual level. And what’s the issue here? Is it a traffic issue? Is it a conversion issue? And let’s go fix that.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve helped brands achieve dramatic growth on Amazon. Now, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So, Carolyn, can you show an example of a success story and the key factors that drove that growth?
Carolyn Lowe: Absolutely. We work with a lot of big brands, but we also sort of love the unsexy brands. There’s a lot of opportunity. So I was just in Dallas this week at the Patio Pool and Spa Expo, and one of our brand partners was there. And they make outdoor fencing railings. Their best seller is outdoor fence posts and fence railing. So you can imagine it’s not really sexy, and it’s really hard to tell on Amazon this fence from that fence. So one thing we did was we redid all their images, we redid all their copy, we redid all their A-plus content and really showed the difference. And they have since tripled in about 18 months. They were doing high six figures a month on Amazon, and they have since tripled. So we really started with their top sellers. We redid all their images, we redid all their product pages, we redid all their backend optimizations, and they spend very little on advertising, single percentage points.
Adrian Tennant: Amazing. And you mentioned A-plus content. Could you just explain that to us?
Carolyn Lowe: Sure. If you’re the brand owner, rather than just having a detailed description with just text, you can put images, you can put video, you can talk about your brand, you can cross-sell to some of your other products, which helps a lot. So what they call A plus or enhanced content is available to brand owners, which really helps with your product, especially on mobile.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Carolyn, you’re also the author of the book, “Business Growth Do’s and Absolute Don’ts.” In it, you discuss lessons learned from working with Fortune 100 companies and startups. What are some of the principles you’ve found to be universally applicable regardless of company size?
Carolyn Lowe: That’s always an interesting question. Regardless of size, the profitability, like I said, I came from Dell and we had a saying: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” And that sort of level of knowing your P&L, you would not believe how many folks whether they’re CEOs or department heads, just don’t have a really good grasp on their P&L. So that’s the first thing, universally, know your numbers! The second one really has to do with people. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And in the book, I talk about a lot of the mistakes that I have made in hiring and being a little bit slower to hire and a little bit faster to fire. You can’t get to where you’re going with the wrong people on the bus.
Adrian Tennant: What are some of the biggest mistakes you see brands making when they try to manage Amazon on their own?
Carolyn Lowe: That’s a good question as well. I see a lot of brands that don’t know what they don’t know. And that was the biggest eye-opener for me when I started working with Amazon ten years ago, was it’s like an onion. You just keep peeling back the layers. Like some people don’t know about B2B. Some people don’t know about certification. Some people don’t know about posts. So some people don’t know about Betas or Vine or all these different programs that Amazon offers. People don’t know about them or they don’t know how to use them. So a lot of times I think the biggest gap is just that knowledge gap. Unless you’re working in it day in and day out, things change constantly. One day, Amazon will like an ingredient in something and then the next day they’ll say, “This vitamin is banned,” and you’ve got to go get your listing reinstated. So I think running it on your own, you also just don’t have that access to all the other data. So there’s a big rowing brand that came to us, and they manage it in-house, but I know their private equity firm that owns them. And so the private equity partner came to me and said, “Hey, can you give me some data about what happened on big deal days, the big Prime days?” And so I gave them some data across a bunch of different brands, and that’s the one thing you’re sort of operating in a vacuum if you’re doing it yourself. You don’t have the luxury of knowing like, “Is this normal? Is this not normal?”
Adrian Tennant: I can see that. How do you help brands protect themselves from competition from Amazon’s own private label products?
Carolyn Lowe: That is difficult. You know, Amazon does go after a lot of commodity categories. You know, if you’re Duracell and you’re making batteries, I’m sorry, you are going to lose some share to Amazon Basics. A lot of the brands we work with, though, they’re either like B-Corp and they’re mom and baby companies, or they’re sports and outdoors, or they’re sort of big and heavy. And Amazon doesn’t love that model, right? Everything pretty much gets shipped. So, you know, I feel like It’s hard if you’re in a commodity category. If you’re in toilet paper or batteries, I mean, or electronics, Amazon can just slap Amazon Basics on it. And that’s where you really sort of have to differentiate yourself. I know it’s hard in batteries, but take, for example, the brand Anker, A-N-K-E-R. They’ve done an amazing job because the Apple cords would always fray and break. And so they started with making a better cord for your iPhone. and then they made even better power chargers. And so I think they’ve really done a great job solving customer problems and just taking a commodity product and making it better.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
 | Adrian Tennant: In partnership with our friends at Kogan Page, this month’s Bigeye Book Club selection is “Marketing for Social Change: How to Turn Purpose into Business and Social Impact.” The book’s author, Kian Bakhtiari, presents a practical guide for brands looking to create meaningful social impact while building authentic purpose into their business strategy. “Marketing for Social Change” shows how brands can move beyond performative purpose to create lasting positive change. Through compelling real-world case studies, the book demonstrates how creativity and action can drive both social impact and business success. Shipping is always complimentary for customers in the US and the UK, so let “Marketing for Social Change” be your roadmap to building a purpose-driven brand that makes a real difference. |
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back, I’m talking with Caroline Lowe, founder, and CEO of ROI Swift and the author of “Business Growth Do’s and Absolute Don’ts.” What metrics should brand managers watch most closely to gauge their Amazon performance?
Carolyn Lowe: Amazon has their own metrics and then we have a plugin and a software that we use, which is much more user friendly than Amazon’s platform. We look at things like weekly traffic, weekly conversion rate, are things going up and down? So our software can tell us, you know, we can compare week on week at an individual item level. Those are the kinds of things that we like to look at, right? Not just as revenue up or down, but is it a traffic problem? Is it a conversion problem? Did a new competitor come on? So we really sort of look at a variety of different metrics. We have this deck that we put together for CEOs. It says three things every exec should know about their Amazon business. It’s that item level economics. There’s one that takes you to your sales and your traffic and your conversion. And then the other one is just understanding which ones are your moneymakers and which ones are your loss leaders.
Adrian Tennant: Of course, Amazon is constantly innovating, and that’s especially true of its solutions for advertisers. Carolyn, what are some newer tools you’re either considering or already using with your clients?
Carolyn Lowe: If you don’t have a lot of budget, you know, I’d say if you’re selling less than six figures a month on Amazon in revenue, you probably are using most of the tools on Amazon. You’re using the Sponsored Products. So your product comes up first, you know, just like Google, you can buy a Google ads, you show up at the top of the page. And then there’s one opportunity at the top called Sponsored Brands where you can highlight multiple products. That’s a great placement. There’s video ads. They’re called Sponsor Video. So, in your search results, you’ll see one that’s a video and it auto plays. Those have been very successful. You know, we built up a million-dollar individual item, like one SKU or UPC that does a million dollars a year, and it’s an $11 product, but really built that up through those sponsored video placements. And then once you get more sophisticated, there’s custom creative, and then you can start moving off Amazon into their display platform. So their DSP, where you can pre-target people off Amazon if they didn’t buy on Amazon. But for most of the folks starting out, even doing $1 million a year, the highest ROI is going to be all the things that are on the Amazon platform. They’re already shopping. The other ones start to, once you’ve exhausted all of your profitable on Amazon advertising, then you can move off Amazon.
Adrian Tennant: Yeah, one of the interesting things we’ve seen is this idea of local Amazon advertising almost replacing the local broadcast affiliates, for example. So using places like Prime Video to run awareness advertising. So it’s sort of separate from Amazon.com, but clearly you’re staying somewhat within the ecosystem.
Carolyn Lowe: Yes, so you can run it on Fire, on Prime Video, on any of the platforms or any platforms outside of Amazon as well.
Adrian Tennant: Just to reinforce the point that Amazon is always innovating and changing, as you know, they recently launched a new service called Haul, which is focusing on low-priced products. I think typically $10, $20, that kind of range. Carolyn, what’s your take on Haul?
Carolyn Lowe: You know, we’ve been looking at some of these markets. I mean, you look at how big Shein is, you know, Amazon can’t just do little things. You need big things to make a big difference, right? You do things like you buy Whole Foods, you buy a grocery store chain, you know, for $17 billion, or I forget what the number was. But, you know, I think that there’s that apparel market that Shein and others have captured, and Amazon is looking at. And that’s one thing that, you know, traditionally is not been quite as strong is branded apparel. And then there is that sort of low-cost apparel as well. So in general, you know, I know the woman who used to run Amazon Fashion, and she lef,t and now she’s at GoDaddy running GoDaddy because it’s a really sort of challenging part. So I’ll be interested to see what happens there. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out with the tariffs that the US might impose on imports, especially China. So I’ll be interested to see how those play out once you tack on some tariffs.
Adrian Tennant: Looking ahead, what emerging opportunities or changes do you see coming to Amazon that brands should prepare for?
Carolyn Lowe: Yes, I think there’s a few things. As you know, they’ve increased the placement fees. So there’s this fine balance of you have to have enough inventory, but not too much inventory. And so they charge you more if you have too much, and then they charge you more if you don’t have enough. I think the shipping and then that’s always going to be an issue, the fees. And then the other one I think that’s coming to is really a lot of the AI that Amazon has introduced. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than you could do yourself. As a business owner, a lot of their AI on their creative is getting better and better. Their advertising platforms are evolving. They’ve also shortened the time for reimbursements. We used to be able to get clients $80,000 to $100,000 back a year in money that Amazon owes them in fees. Amazon just shut that down and said, “You can only go back 60 days.” You can’t go back to infinity. Amazon is getting all of that liability off their books. People are rushing before this hits to reclaim all the money that Amazon owes them because Amazon isn’t going to just out of the generosity of their heart, write you a check and say, “Here you go. We’re so sorry. We lost two cartons of inventory worth $200,000.” But unless you do the work and put in cases, they won’t give you any of that money back. So they’re definitely closing some of those loopholes. And they’re looking, based on a survey that I got from them, my guess is they’re looking to acquire one of those type of services or build it into their platform themselves.
Adrian Tennant: Interesting. When we were preparing for this interview, you mentioned to me that you’re seeing some interesting trends with B2B buyers using Amazon. Can you tell us a bit more about the business-to-business opportunity for consumer brands?
Carolyn Lowe: You know, brands you wouldn’t think have a B2B play absolutely have a B2B play. I was out at Seattle headquarters. Amazon invited the top 250 women sellers in the country to headquarters, and we met with all of the leadership team and we had like a two-day session. And it was interesting, back then they were touting they had 400,000 businesses on Amazon Business. Now, there’s tens of millions of businesses, right? A lot of people have replaced their Office Depot or Staples accounts with Amazon Business, right? You can get it in the same amount of time, and it’s usually much cheaper and have the world’s best selection. So from A to Z, there’s even a haircare brand we work with. And you think, what would B2B buy in haircare? Well, when you have those 32-ounce shampoos, those are perfect for B2B. And then they can start doing quantity discounts. So products you didn’t think would use B2B that are strictly consumer, we’ve seen this in baby. We’ve seen daycares and other types of businesses buying a lot from traditionally consumer, whether they’re silicone bibs or fork and knife sets. I mean, you name it. And so for folks that have a B2B account, you can also do special pricing. So hey, you can do a quantity discount. “If you buy 10 or more, you get 5% off.” And only business customers will see that. The other thing, too, is the US government. So traditionally, the government has to buy 40 percent from disadvantaged or traditionally disadvantaged businesses, which include minority-owned and women-owned. With all those certifications, like we have a lot of women-owned companies we work with, we’re minority-owned, and they get those certifications, and so they show up on your business page and say, “Hey, this is from a small business” or “This is a woman-owned business.” And so that also helps them get purchases from folks that have to buy a certain percentage from traditionally disadvantaged businesses.
Adrian Tennant: Some really interesting points there. Lots to think about and a great conversation. Thank you. Carolyn, what’s something about you that people might not expect?
Carolyn Lowe: I think one thing, if you go to our website or you go to LinkedIn, you know that I’m a private pilot. You know, since moving to Texas, it’s hard to get around the state of Texas. But I think one thing that I’ve always thought was interesting or a lot of people don’t know is fairly adventurous. My senior year of college, I had placed out of my finals, I had a lot of business management, business consulting, and those were all project-based. So, while all my friends were taking finals, I jumped on a plane and went to Key West and got a tan before graduation. So, I think the sort of crazy, impulsive, adventurous side is probably something not a lot of folks see.
Adrian Tennant: Carolyn, if listeners would like to learn more about you or your work at ROI Swift, what’s the best way to do so?
Carolyn Lowe: They can visit us on our website and reach out there. It’s R-O-I-S-W-I-F-T dot com. You can also just find me, Carolyn Lowe, L-O-W-E, on LinkedIn. I’m fairly active on LinkedIn. I love to connect with all my, you know, two decade ago friends from Dell. They’re all off doing some amazing things themselves. So those are the places you can find us, LinkedIn or our website.
Adrian Tennant: Carolyn, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Carolyn Lowe: Thank you for having me.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Carolyn Lowe, founder and CEO of ROI Swift. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction
00:20: The Amazon Opportunity for Brands
02:08: Meet Carolyn Lowe: Founder of ROI Swift
02:24: Inspiration Behind ROI Swift
03:44: Key Factors for Selling on Amazon
04:37: Common Reasons for Unprofitability on Amazon
06:14: The Seven Killer Image Listing Guide
08:16: Advertising Strategies on Amazon
09:34: Success Story: Dramatic Growth on Amazon
10:48: Understanding A+ Content
11:32: Universal Principles for Business Success
12:22: Common Mistakes Brands Make on Amazon
13:58: Protecting Against Amazon’s Private Label Competition
15:05: “Marketing for Social Change” Promotion
16:20: Key Metrics for Amazon Performance
17:43: Emerging Advertising Tools on Amazon
19:26: Amazon’s New Haul Service
20:54: Emerging Opportunities for Brands on Amazon
22:39: B2B Opportunities on Amazon
24:46: Unexpected Facts About Carolyn Lowe
25:31: How to Connect with Carolyn Lowe
26:04: Conclusion and Thanks
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
