Florida, December 22nd, 2022

With a fully remove team, Emplicit is an e-commerce agency that helps brands reach their maximum potential by delivering highly-specialized Amazon and other platform expertise tailored to the unique needs of each clients. Their services include SEO, content and brand store optimization, managed Amazon advertising and strategic planning and consulting.

Brian Byer is the Chief Operating Officer at Emplicit, based in the US. In an interview with TIA, Byer described his first year in the position in the agency and the biggest challenges faced so far. He gave an overview of Amazon marketing and explained there are gradually expanding into other e-commerce websites that are becoming prominent.

To kick things off, where are you from and where do you live now?

I am originally from Long Island, NY having run a digital agency on Madison Ave for a long time. I recently took advantage of Emplicit’s Fully Remote Workplace and relocated to Heathrow, FL. You don’t want to miss the golf, tennis, and close access to Disney if you come to visit.

What’s a regular day like in Brian’s shoes?

I wake up early, always have! I’m usually responding to emails early and I start calls around 9AM. My day tends to be spent on back to back Zoom calls until around 5PM when I get back to Slack and Email. Essentially nobody would know if I own shoes on most days as I spend a lot of time working from home, talking on Zoom!

Can you tell us about Emplicit and what the company does?

Emplicit is an ecommerce focused marketing agency that specializes in helping brands manage and optimize their sales and operations on platforms such as Amazon, Walmart and Target.

As a Chief Operating Officer, which have been up until now the biggest challenges?

I joined Emplicit in January after having spent nearly 8 years in my last role at Pactera EDGE. It’s been a lot of fun helping to implement changes that have helped us raise the level of our client deliverable as well as create a service offering and scalable billing model that’s appealing to some of the largest brands selling online today. Rebranding the company from Sunken Stone to Emplicit was certainly one of the largest challenges and one that’s been embraced by the Emplicit team and the market in general.

​​For those who aren’t familiar with Amazon Marketing, can you provide an overview?

Amazon marketing starts with Research & Strategy. We look at our client’s products, research their competitors, and create a highly optimized Amazon presence that’s built to convert. We build a strategy and based on keywords, we create Optimized & tested, Product Listings to ensure our clients products rank organically through Amazon search. We work with our clients to build a review funnel campaign and ensure our clients garner as many positive reviews as rapidly as possible. Success begets more success on as an Amazon seller. Amazon also has their own Ads platform, and we create campaigns and manage our clients media budgets (PPC, Display, Video, etc). We provide an end-to-end Amazon experience because, without that, we would be failing our clients and wouldn’t be providing a full experience for what they need to win.

Can you share any of your upcoming projects that you’re excited about?

We have an aggressive growth strategy and a great team at the company. While we would be considered an Amazon agency today, we are excited to expand into additional platforms as more and more marketplaces become prominent. We can easily take clients and have taken clients, up to Walmart and Target. Those and International Amazon are two big initiatives we’re going to undertake in the next couple of years.

Emplicit has an in-house platform called Stonehenge, can you tell us more about your work using metrics to assess the performance of ecommerce brands?

We have built proprietary technology that helps our client facilitate integrations with Business Intelligence tools such as Power BI, Tableau and many more. Our ability to produce visual data representations further enhances our ability to calculate and optimize our clients inventory needs, ordering timelines, data syndication and create a central data hub for their entire ecommerce ecosystem.

Based on your experience, what are the most important roles in an ecommerce team and any third-party agencies engaged to deliver a project?

Of primary importance is a plan. Essentially a strategic deliverable based upon discovery, research and a lot of ecommerce selling experience are the cornerstone to a successful agency partnership. I would strongly recommend spending the time/money needed to create a plan and effectively measuring twice and spending money once!

From your perspective, what is an interesting project?

We don’t do a lot of project-based work, the vast majority of our clients are committing to annual retainers after the initial strategy / infrastructure creation work. Our ideal client is a $10 million+ ecommerce brand with a sophisticated marketing team that’s looking for assistance in either optimizing or expanding into the world of Amazon and other marketplace opportunities.

What is the most common misconception people have about Amazon international expansion?

We don’t have VAT in the United States, most of our clients are headquartered here and think Amazon just would handle VAT on their behalf. We have created the infrastructure needed to help our clients sell in the EU with our managing VAT, logistics, and product localization. We have an EU based team that can help navigate the complexities of those clients looking to build a long-term global business as well as create highly optimized campaigns in new, foreign markets.

What trends do you foresee in the battleground to retain relevance for 2023?

Ecommerce platforms are growing, and Amazon will continue to battle Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy and more for relevance. We are implementing partnerships with platforms to help us syndicate our clients’ listings across 100s of platforms and will continue to maintain relevance and help our clients grow.

How do you explain what you do for a living to a child?

I used to explain to people simply that “I work in an office”, however that’s no longer a truthful answer being as Emplicit is close to 100 employees strong, all working fully remote. I guess the next time a child asks me what I do for a living I’ll tell them that I manage a company that helps businesses sell on Amazon.

Which unusual skill do you pride yourself in having?

I’m ambidextrous.

Thanks Brian!

• Learn more about Emplicit at https://emplicit.co/
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Amazon MarketingeCommerce PlatformsMarketing