Spillover Commerce Signature Strategy Blog
By Sean Stone • Last updated December 3, 2025
What do Grüns, and Hatch (alarm clocks) have in common? If you said “best seller badges” you’d be missing the point.
They have figured out the new playbook that we see as the future for eCommerce brands.
Hatch is using it be the best seller, in a category where they compete DIRECTLY WITH AMAZON (Echo Glow), while being at least 2x the price.
The best part is this playbook solves all of the problems that Amazon brand owners have been complaining about in 2025.
I’m sure you already know them, but just in case you don’t:
- Amazon fees are now so high that they take over half of each seller’s Gross Revenue.
- Amazon PPC has gone from a nice to have growth lever to an insanely expensive cash sink.
- Ranking a product and then sticking at the top of the page has never been harder.
- The Amazon gold rush has left premium brands flooded by low priced knockoffs.
- Amazon businesses that are still succeeding are terrified that their business is 1 Amazon policy change away from being cut in half (I’ve seen it)
- Amazon doesn’t let you change the price of your own products.
- Amazon does everything they can to stop premium products showing up on their platform.
Marketplace pulse estimated that in 2025, Amazon Fees were above 50% of an Amazon Seller’s revenue!
What if there were a better way?
What if we could go back in time to 2019 when selling on Amazon was a fun, high-margin, and win-win?
Let me stop teasing, the answer is something we call Spillover Commerce.
Spillover Commerce is a playbook we use to help Premium Amazon brands unlock Meta + Shopify, while growing Amazon profits.
To put it simply, we install a Shopify channel in your business, that is small and high margin, but grows over time.
As this new channel becomes more profitable over time, we raise the amount of Meta ad spend to support this growth.
As Meta ad spend grows, we start to see a substantial spillover effect onto Amazon, which acts as another profit booster.
Then, as we get more profitable, we start to grow our Meta ad spend, which has a large spillover effect onto Amazon.
This leads to a lot of additional branded search on Amazon. Then using clever offers, we capture that increased demand on Amazon, in the most profitable way possible.
This then allows you to spend substantially less money on Amazon Advertising, while actually growing your sales, and growing your margins.
Plus it allows you to bring a gun to the Amazon knife fight, aka competing on price on Amazon.
This gives you an unfair advantage over the cheap knockoffs of your product, and lets you take back the margins you had back in 2019-2021!
Here is an example of Gruns, bringing a gun to a knife fight.
They are at least 5x the price of Kate Naturals, an Amazon-only brand, selling Spirulina Powder for $9.99, while they are on sale for $50.25!
In the rest of this article, I’m going to show you exactly how we did it for one of our clients, and how you can do it too.
You don’t need millions of dollars from investors, you just need a profitable Amazon Account, and the right playbook.
Before I do, time for a shameless pitch, if you don’t feel like reading or trying to implement this yourself, you can book a call below, and we can show you how we can do it for you.
What Spillover Commerce Actually Means
Imagine it’s Black Friday. You get an Instagram Ad for a really cool looking gummy bear vitamin.
Jeff Bezos has spent years making sure that Amazon is the next place you search.
So you go to Amazon, and you see that there is a version of this product on Amazon.
Sure It is more expensive per ounce, but you don’t want to create an account or give some website your credit card. You also don’t trust this website’s shipping or returns policy. You also want the product to show up the same day or the next day.
So you buy it on Amazon.
Now your best friend sees that same ad, clicks through to the website, and sees a product they like. They also think to check Amazon and see what you see.
However, they like that there is a better deal on the brand’s website, and they don’t care as much about shipping or returns.
So they buy the product off of the website.
This is Spillover Commerce in a nutshell.
It’s about brands reaching customers where they are, and then offering incentives for them to take whichever action aligns with their own personal interests.
Some people want fast free shipping and easy returns. Give them an Amazon offer that makes sense
Some people want better overall deals, and a longer, deeper relationship with the brand. Give them a Shopify offer that makes sense.
This also allows you to adjust your ad spend to each channel, because you have an offer and a strategy that aligns with the customer, and the platforms they use.
[Wondering if Spillover Commerce could work for your business? Take our Scorecard to find out how ready you are!]
How Hatch Does It
Hatch, the alarm clock company, is selling alarm clocks at an alarming rate (sorry).
But what really stands out is how much higher of a price they have, compared to their competitors.
How do they do this?
Well, they start by having 89 advertising creatives running at any given time.
They also use Amazon Ads to advertise on very few keywords, relative to how much they sell on Amazon. According to Helium10, they are only in the top 10 sponsored ranks for 68 keywords that have 2000 searches or more.
They also use Amazon Ads to advertise on very few keywords, relative to how much they sell on Amazon. According to Helium10, they are only in the top 10 sponsored ranks for 68 keywords that have 2000 searches or more.
If they spent $2000 on each of those keywords each month, then they would have a 5% TACOS. That is bananas.
If you’re the CFO of Hatch, and you’re reading this and saying “that’s not how much we are spending!!” then contact me.
For everyone else, the way they are doing this is with Meta Ads, going straight to a specific shopify landing page.
Then, they have different offers on each platform, to drive sales on each landing page that work for each type of buyer.
How Grüns Does It
These guys are implementing this at an even higher level, but what is crazy is how much higher priced they are than their top category competitors.
That’s right, they are the best seller in their category, charging $50+ per sale, while Kate Naturals, which is clearly an Amazon-only brand, is fighting to charge $9.99.
The best part is that Grüns is doing this while selling $5,900,000 in the last 30 days.
We looked at their advertising ranks on Helium10, and with a filter of 2000 searches, and 1 to 10 sponsored spots, they are advertising on just 165 keywords.
If they are spending $2,000 per month on each keyword, that works out to be a TACOS of 6 percent!
They are also running the Spillover Commerce Playbook, and if I were Kate Naturals, I’d be furious!
Why This Beats Low-Priced Competitors
This is what allows Grüns to be the Best Seller on Spirulina products, while they have a $9.99 competitor sitting in 6th place.
But it gets better than that, because there’s a dirty little secret about Amazon that no one tells you.
Your branded keywords cost less for you than for anyone else.
A lot less. I’ve seen $9 CPCs bidding on competitor keywords, and I’ve seen $1.00 CPCs on top of search results, exact match keywords for branded terms.
So not only do you use this strategy to build a competitive advantage, but over time, it becomes a MOAT.
It’s something that is defensible. If you’re trying to sell your brand, this is something that buyers will pay a premium for, because this playbook is built on marketing fundamentals, not short term “hacks.”
[Wondering if Spillover Commerce could help you beat low priced competitors? Take our Scorecard to find out!]
Why Amazon Sellers Have a ROI Advantage
Amazon Sellers who have an established business get the option to “spend once and profit twice” when using Spillover Commerce.
Why? Because of the Amazon Spillover Effect gives them extra traffic to their Amazon Listings, which is often traffic that would never have converted on their Shopify website.
This usually shows up as additional organic sales on Amazon, as well as a boost in rankings.
If you can get to breakeven on Meta, you usually start coming out ahead because of the increased profits you see on the Amazon channel.
So if you have a competitor who only sells on their Shopify store, and has no Amazon presence, you have a marketing advantage you can use to your advantage.
How to Know If This Will Work for Your Brand
I can think of 10 different brands that spend a lot on Meta and don’t perform well on Amazon at all. There are a few factors that make this playbook work, or not work.
The biggest offender at the time of me writing this is Kylie Cosmetics, which is selling almost nothing on Amazon at the time of me writing this post:
The criteria you need for this to work are:
- already an established market on Amazon (not a new category)
- another brand already crushing it on Meta ads to Shopify
- A product with enough margin to absorb high CPMs from Meta through offer leverage.
In plain English:
- Amazon Product Market Fit
- Meta Market Fit
- Platform Specific Offers
[Want to know if your brand is ready for Spillover Commerce? Take our Scorecard to find out!]
Deep Dive: Each Criterion Explained
Amazon Market Fit
Already an established market on Amazon means your product fits into an existing category where it is semi-comparable, like Hatch selling alarm clocks that are easy to compare to other alarm clocks.
From the screenshot above, you can see that we can compare these products, and it’s obvious that Hatch is winning.
You need to have some level of “market” or you will not be able to take advantage of Amazon’s built in traffic machine,
I have personal experience with a product being too unique, and the Spillover Commerce playbook didn’t work.
It wasn’t because the strategy was wrong, it was because the product required too much education for a consumer to comfortably purchase their product.
However, we could have launched a new “Amazon Intro Offer” and seen a massive amount of success.
Sadly, the brand wasn’t interested, and so the project failed, but it serves as a powerful lesson.
If you’re completely inflexible about what your brand offers and on which platform, Spillover Commerce won’t work.
Meta-Market Fit
Another brand is already crushing it on META + Shopify, which we call Meta-Market Fit.
This is validation that the playbook can work. You don’t absolutely need this form of validation, but it sure does help.
If we were launching a competitor to Grüns, we would know they have Meta-Market Fit based off of their Facebook Ads Library, which shows they have 730 active ads.
This establishes a competitive roadmap you can use to go up against others, as well as help with establishing advertising angles and first version landing page design.
Really, what you’re looking for is proof that someone else was already able to figure it out using Meta ads. We work with some of the best Meta advertisers in the world, but they all say the same thing.
You don’t know if it’s going to work until you actually start doing the work. So if someone else has already started doing the work, they’ve done you a small favor.
Platform Specific Offers
Every Meta ads expert will tell you CPMs keep going up and the only way to combat it is to have a price point that will make the high CPMs work.
If your average sale price on Amazon is 19.99, you’ll never be able to sell the same product at the same price point on Shopify because the CPMs from Meta will be too expensive.
You also can’t just sell the same product at a higher price because shoppers are smart and will go to Amazon and see you’re trying to rip them off, which erodes trust long-term and wastes money short-term.
Huel handles this by having bundles on their website that are a lower cost per ounce than Amazon, offering 17 servings on Shopify and 19 servings on Amazon.
Even with the Black Friday sale on Amazon, if you buy from Huel’s website and choose to subscribe and save, you save a lot of money each month.
Even if Huel didn’t have a high enough price to cover Meta CPMs, they have a business model that supports a high LTV because the second or third order will easily subsidize the CPA.
So even if they aren’t profitably acquiring customers from Meta (I think they are), they can still make the relationship profitable on the back end
This offer reconstruction is something most Amazon sellers miss and is the reason why there is a graveyard of Meta ad spend from Amazon brands who tested Meta-to-Shopify and failed.
Implement this, and your chances of success explode.
Implementation Overview- Step-by-Step
If you just skipped here without reading anything else, because you just wanted the playbook, it’s below. However, I want to give you the chance to catch up, in bullet point form, because some of the stuff I said was important.
- We want to advertise on Meta to a Shopify store, and let the spillover traffic hit Amazon
- This allows us to sell at higher prices than our competitors, while spending less on ads
- It also gives us less platform risk, as we now have multiple growing platforms
- We validated that we can run this playbook by checking that we have:
- Amazon Product Market Fit
- Meta Market Fit
- Platform Specific Offers
- We have the desire and patience to implement this approach
- Installing a new profitable channel in your business can’t be done overnight
- If that was possible all your competitors would have already done it.
So the implementation has a few steps:
- Brand Criteria Evaluation.
- Photo and Visual Asset Creation
- Technical Setup
- Phase 1 – META Ad Testing
- Phase 2 – META Ad Growth Testing
- Phase 3 – Amazon Ad Spend Reduction
- Phase 4 – META Scaling
- Phase 5 – Amazon Domination
- Phase 6 – META Domination
[Wondering if Spillover Commerce could work for your business? Take our Scorecard to find out!]
Implementation Overview- Step-by-Step
Brand Criteria Evaluation
We have already done this once, but it bears repeating. You need to establish these 3 things, at least as a hypothesis.
Establish Amazon Product Market Fit. This is simple, is there a market for what you already sell?
If yes, you passed the first step. If not, you may want to reconsider what you are selling, or reconsider what platforms you’re selling on.
Establish Meta Market fit. As an Amazon seller, this might be hard, but you might be able to find indirect competitors, who are Shopify only brands, that you can steal the playbook of.
If you are a shoe seller on Amazon, look at what Nike is doing, as they are the only company I can think of that has a massive web presence, and almost no presence on Amazon.
See if you can apply this to your niche.
Establish Platform Specific Offers. This is really just about thinking “what do I think shoppers would buy from me, if packaged in the right way. Remove all concerns of Amazon’s Terms of Service from your mind.
Here, we are thinking just about the shopper, without constraints. What would make a good win-win on Shopify? What would make a good win-win on Amazon?
All the smartest brands know that these are different offers.
Photo and Visual Asset Creation
Once we have determined what our competitors are doing, we need to get on the same level as them. This requires new visual assets.
In other words, we need new photos and visuals. First, we figure out what is working for our competitors.
Then we try to figure out why it’s working, so we can either create a similar ad, or something even better. This is a volume game, it starts small, and compounds over time. Gruns didn’t start on day 1 with 730 creatives.
A quick word on AI, don’t do it. Not to start. The industry is flooded with “AI Ad Creatives” companies full of empty promises.
We can start using AI later, once we know what works, but for now, we need real photos and videos, of real people, using our products.
This takes time, to set up, and then ongoing commitment, so we establish this very early in the process, so we know that we are playing to win.
Technical Setup
If you own an Amazon brand, I’d be willing to bet that you have hardly touched your Shopify store since the day that you set it up (or paid someone to do it for you).
Those days are gone.
We need to build a website that acts as an asset for your business, generating sales for you all day every day.
This takes time, and we usually implement this while we are waiting for the visual assets to come back from the designers.
Once we have this completed, we are ready to start advertising.
Phase 1 – Meta Ad Testing
This is where we test our first few angles on Meta. The goal is to get baseline traffic data.
We are not planning on spending tens of thousands of dollars here. We are looking at starting data to see if we are hitting our benchmarks.
We track your metrics versus KPIs to make sure that we are hitting targets.
This is what the middle of Phase 1 looked like from an early account we implemented Spillover Commerce on, 1 ROAS and a net loss, not impressive.
This is your first validation point. If you start converting right away, you can be sure that you can move on to Phase 2.
It is really uncommon for a company to go to Phase 2 right away though. Usually, what happens is we test a bunch of different angles. A bunch of different types of visual assets, and maybe even multiple offers.
This is the hard part. This is the part your competitors don’t want to do. This is the part where you will be questioning the entire process.
It’s key that you don’t pull the plug too quickly.
Once you are profitably selling products every day, it’s time to move on to Phase 2.
Phase 2 – Meta Ad Growth Testing
Once we have validated that something CAN work, that doesn’t mean that it will work at scale.
So what we are doing here is taking whatever worked in Phase 1, and leaning into it a little harder.
This is what Phase 2 looks like, this was 2 weeks after the screenshot above, seeing glimmers of profitability:
This is not what we would consider “Scaling.” This is the test step we run to make sure that when the time to scale arrives, it is highly likely to work.
At this point, we should start to see consistent sales every day from META, at a profitable ROAS or at the very least, a profitable Media Efficiency Ratio (MER), known as TACOS for Amazon sellers.
When this happens, you should suddenly start noticing that your Amazon Sales have picked up, thanks to the Amazon Spillover.
You’ll also be able to observe a noticeable difference in branded searches in the Amazon Search Query Performance.
At this point, you are no longer second guessing your decision to implement this playbook. Now you’re thinking “how do I grow?”
There is a chance you will need to get new visual assets before you can move on to Phase 3, but at this point, you will no longer be asking “is this working?”
You’ll start asking “how can I get this working more?”
Phase 3 – Amazon Ad Spend Reduction
This step is like spring cleaning for your Amazon Advertising account.
You’ll be shocked to see how much less money you need to spend on Amazon, once you have a steady flow of shoppers coming from an external source to buy your products.
Here is a screenshot, showing the Amazon profitability from this time, where Phase 2 started, is when we started pulling back on Amazon Ads as well (red graph), while profits started going up.
When this happens, we typically focus on cleaning up ad spend on keywords we are not trying to rank on, as well as spending money on irrelevant competitors, and other “incremental” campaigns.
During this phase, you’re really just looking at your ad spend and asking “Is this really helping me grow? Or just adding incremental sales?”
Incremental sales are where you start to cut ad spend first. Your primary goal is to show up at the top of the page on Amazon (duh) but with less ad spend than before.
Your ACOS will probably go up, not down, because you’re going to start spending mostly on high ACOS campaigns.
Your low ACOS campaigns will be your branded campaigns.
Phase 4 – Meta Scaling
This is where everyone wants to be on day 1.
Think of a bank heist. If the robbers just walked in, took all the money from the vault, and walked out, untouched, everyone would do it.
This is what the beginning of Meta Ad Spend Scaling looks like, note that seasonality is a factor, as this is part of the lead up to BFCM:
What we are doing here is taking all the best performing tests, and turning up ad spend slowly, to make sure that we are able to accommodate scale on Meta without hurting our performance.
The pass/fail criteria for this step is if you are or are not hitting your MER/TACOS goals for your Shopify funnel.
The only goal is making sure, 100% sure, that you are profitably scaling your spend on Meta.
There is not a lot to say here, except that you should be increasing your spend, and sales on Shopify, and watching your Amazon profits climb while it happens.
Phase 5 – Amazon Domination
Once you’re profitably scaling on META, the amount of branded traffic you’ll be getting on Amazon should be substantial.
The metric we have noticed (this is not a guarantee of success) is that if your branded traffic gets near or exceeds the traffic of the main keyword, you’ll be able to dominate on Amazon.
This is what Sierra Madre is doing right now. Their main keyword is “emergency sleeping bag” and their top branded term is “Sierra Madre emergency sleeping bag.”
At the time of me writing this, both search terms have an estimated search volume of 3500 searches per month.
However, they are out-selling their competition, with higher prices, for the exact same products.
You’ll be ranked #1 or #2 for all your major keywords. You should be able to win a best seller badge, assuming you’re in a category that isn’t dominated by national brands.
Phase 6 – META Domination
You would think that Amazon Domination would be the end goal right? Well, you’d be wrong.
Once you’re dominating on META, your audience size increases, your customer acquisition cost decreases, and your moat around= your business increases.
This is where brands like Hexclad are, they are #1 on Amazon,
Hexclad is so far beyond that now, that being #1 on Amazon is actually an afterthought, imagine being so successful, you forgot to care about being #1 on Amazon.
When you get to this point, you can start to cut your Amazon Ad spend without fear of ranking loss.
The number of customers who buy from your Shopify website without any marketing attribution will go up.
You’ll be trading up into a new layer of problems, but sales, marketing, and profits won’t be them.
This is the pot of gold on the other side of the rainbow.
Once you’ve been here, you never want to leave, but that’s the perfect time to sell the business.
Our agency can do this for you. Use this form below to contact us and we can get started!