1660: Modern Ecommerce & Whatnot Live Shopping with Stephen Somers

Robert Plank 0:00 Stephen Somers teaches you how to make a modern income online, an online side income through platforms like Whatnot and Amazon. And he is a third-time guest and the founder of MarketplaceSuperheroes.com, and they have helped over 10,000 people build income streams in this way. So we are here to talk about if you are looking to grow, expand, go to that next step in your business, and also perhaps find out about just some of getting caught up with mr. Stephen. And you know, a long time back, he quit his nine to five job and he built this education business, and now he's having other people kind of do a lot of the heavy lifting for him, and he's still the face of the company. So, and they've expanded from Amazon into whatnot. So, it's exciting times in the present and future for Mr. Stephen Summers, and for us finding out about just how we can tap into the the craziness of e-commerce and so much more. So, Mr. Stephen, how have you been,

Stephen Somers 0:59 Mr. Robert, I've been very well, and I'm absolutely delighted to be back for the third time. Any time I've spoken to you, which has been over the many years I've been in business, it's always been a really enjoyable conversation. So great to see you again.

Robert Plank 1:12 Likewise, yeah, it's it's like you you're around the right people, and you get excited and educated, and you find out about what's possible, and it's just everybody wins in that way. So yeah, we we met eight years ago and then reconnected again four years ago. So we're on like an every four year kind of pattern, which gives us a lot of new things to talk about every time. And so, what is new with you?

Stephen Somers 1:33 Yeah, so since I last spoke to you in 2022, wow, can't believe it was then. Marketplace Superheroes, the company that I started and and and run has had a lot of changes. I had a business partner back in 2022, another Robert actually, Robert Ricky. I bought Robert out of the company in 2023 because that was a huge change for me. My sister Lisa and I we now run the company together. Lisa has had worked in the business and has done for over 10 years now, but she helped me kind of whenever Robert was bought out of the company to kind of take it on to that next place and that next evolution. In 2022, we actually started to bring other experts into marketplace superheroes to teach our newer programs because I kind of realized it's really hard, like teaching programs and running an education business and doing webinars and joint venture webinar, and it's just so much to do. Like, and people out there will tell you all kinds of stuff. But at this point, having sold over $50 million of stuff online in different businesses, like you have, you have to get to a point in time where you say, okay, I can't do all this on my own. So we started to bring in different people to work with us and teach programs. So we've got Mike Seiben. Mike's from Canada. Mike teaches our Amazon programs now. I'm a guy, a guy called Josh Garrett. Josh is over in the UK. He teaches our newest program where we actually teach people to sell and whatnot. And over the next few years, we will be adding more experts in. We have a new some new programs in the pipeline with new experts as well, so that's been really interesting journey as well. Of like starting the business as the expert, growing that company, learning webinars and email marketing and all that stuff. And now I get to spend a lot of my time creating content, working with the experts, and creating better material for for our users and stuff like that. So yeah, but I'm still doing all the webinars. I do the majority of those along with Lisa now, my sister. We bring in the expert as well. So it's it's really become a real collaborative thing over the last few years, which has been great. So I've really enjoyed that. Had a lot of challenges over that time as well. You know, it's not all been plain sailing since we spoke for the first time during COVID. Remember that time when we we were all sitting in the house for like two years, we both made a ton of money as a business and lost a ton of money as a business as well. We actually started a freight company. We we were helping people import products from China to the US, to the UK, to Canada, to Australia. We warehouses in all those countries, and we had a certain way we were running that business, where we were like charging space on our containers, and so the way we were doing it was we were charging at a certain rate. Long story short, COVID came along, never happened in the history of humanity. Freight rates eight xed within one week, and that business ran into massive difficulty within the trio space of a week, and so I learned a lot from that last millions-not not like 10s of millions, but a few million over that time-and learned a lot of lessons, a lot of very painful lessons. That being said, though, throughout that entire time, like you know, the companies continued to grow and evolve. We've worked with our our students, helped them succeed on Amazon and now and whatnot. So it's not like it stopped us from doing that, but it was just something we were running in the background for our clients, and we thought we'd become a company we could potentially even sell in the future. It really looked like that, and so that was some great lessons came from that as well, which I. Happy to talk, but I'm an open book as well. I don't believe in you know holding things back or whatever because in the difficulty we learn the best lessons, and those lessons have helped me become a better business owner. But there you go. That's a whistle stop tour. We're still very successful selling programs online, coaching people through success, and I think the future is looking brighter than ever now, even though we had a little period there where it was very difficult in one part of our business.

Robert Plank 5:28 Of course, well, they they say in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity, don't they? And so, if it was easy, everyone would do it. And so, if you want easy, then maybe you shouldn't be in business for yourself. Maybe you should go like work at at a nine to five because that that is easy until maybe they lay you off and then you can go find another easy job. So it seems like a lot in life is not easy, but then it kind of allows us to rise up to the challenge and differentiate ourselves. And like you hear so many stories, even pre COVID, about how crazy, fast paced, competitive e-commerce was, and Amazon really like changed a lot. And then, yeah, and then COVID was just kind of an upheaval. But even like when COVID was happening, I was thinking to myself like, okay, this is a great chance to like try new things and take some new risks. And we're kind of forced out and having to do like some just some new things, right? To innovate and survive and and see what happens and so it's like and especially now post COVID there's this whole AI thing right you think about like the different phases right there's like the COVID phase and then it's like okay we're back on track not really now AI is here to mess with us again and like I hear I hear so many complaints right I hear so many objectives why people say like well this thing is hard. E-commerce is hard. Course creation is hard. Okay, well, AI made it all free, so cool. I don't have to do it, right? That takes the pressure off. But I just hear a lot of like complaints about this, right? Like that maybe like AI has made selling courses difficult because you can just ask AI, right? Like, how do I get listed on whatnot and like, have you had to adapt and change and maybe like overcome the the AI competitiveness?

Stephen Somers 7:07 Yeah, like it's really interesting you say that, Robert, because we do a lot of webinars with other people's audiences, so people will promote what we do to their audience. The numbers are the exact same as before AI came along like if you get a great offer, great great thing, that it's all the same. Like nothing's really changed dramatically there from from that perspective of that part of the business. Now, when it comes to like cold advertising, things have changed a little bit more in the pricing end of things. You know, people used to sell two two and a half $1,000 programs to cold traffic, and not saying that's impossible, but it's just very expensive to do that now. So the price points have changed, and the kinds of offers you make have changed, but still the same underlying business. I would say with us, AI has actually been an opportunity, like you said earlier on, more so than anything, because what we have found now is we can make better tools that are that we can make ourselves now that our students can then use to get better results with the programs. Because I don't know about you, but like, like number one, would you really want to spend all your day just talking to a chatbot all day? Like, I I don't want to do that personally. I think like that that's not because you're you have to know what to even ask in order to use AI in that way. So, from an informational perspective, yeah, like how do you set up an Amazon account? You know, how do you start a Facebook ad? That's easy stuff. Like, you could go to YouTube for that. You could go to AI for that. But then we get into the nuances of the different businesses, and we get into well, what happens if this happens, or that happens, or this other thing happens? And AI can be good, but unfortunately, a lot of AIs, if you just use them out of the box, they're trained on like Reddit polls and different things like that. And a lot of the information that you get back, from my experience, I'm not sure I would trust that information if that if that was the only source of information that I have, so I've found that students, even though they have access to kind of like faster information, nothing's really ultimately has really changed. Because if you look back over the years, might have been books or whatever, and then people move to online programs, and then people move to whatever YouTube for free information. Now they get it from an AI chatbot, but nothing's really changed. Like it's the same thing. I think for us, what we have found now, we've been doing what we're doing a long time. So we add in a level of coaching, so you can come and talk to somebody, ask your question from someone literally doing the business. I think that's really important, and they have their our way that we're actually teaching you to do something with AI, it it could be anything. And I would also say when you put our information into a tool and you actually build it out using AI, that's where it can be really useful because you're putting your own IP into a tool. People can use it; they can get faster results. They can get. Technically, better results. So I would say we've seen less questions in like our Facebook communities and things like that. Still plenty of questions, but I would say there's less technical questions because that information is easier to get. But I just don't see AI yet as being this thing where like AI can just do it. I've yet to find one business so far in the course creation space, even that 100% uses AI for everything-emails, webinars, the whole lot. There's nothing else needed. I just I tell it what to do; it goes and does it for me. I've just done. I haven't found it. And anyone that's using AI to that level, number one, you can see it's AI generated, and it's really bad content. So to me, I'm not. I I started out being a little bit afraid. I was like, oh, does this mean you know programs are not a thing? But now it's like, no, no, no. Let's use this technology in conjunction with what we're doing to make things even better. Let's create tools for our students. Let's make it easier for them to to like not have to remember an entire program. They can like speak to a bot about the program. Okay, let's do that. And yeah, it's been working out well so far.

Robert Plank 11:11 Very good, so AI is the accelerator, and it's the place to ask the small questions, the little technical details. But as far as maybe the bigger picture, the strategy, the the troubleshooting of your own listing or business or paths forward, then that's better for the the training in that community. And I'll have to clip out what you said about kind of like the a little bit of the case against AI, right? You say, well, AI is great, but do you want to spend all day, every day, just talking to a chatbot? Well, no one does, and and you think like, and you're so right that before AI there was YouTube. Even before YouTube, you'd have all these kind of like independent free message boards, forums, and you go and and before social media, right? You'd have its own domain name and your own registration, and then there'd be that group of people that have like 3000 posts each, and you you could you could ask a question and get like 20 different responses, but like how helpful long term is that be? Just basing it off of the free information, so having the community helps so much, and like, and even when the teaching the e-commerce course came about, like there was there was so much weird focus on like they'd spend two hours just talking about registering your account and and an hour or two talking about like what scale to get and what like shipping take to get. I'm like, isn't there more important things to to focus on? And like even like when I see people that like really succeed, they're like always working on like the content, the SEO, the the new SKUs, the the the paid ads. It's like there's way more important stuff to be focusing on. And what's really cool about what I've seen from you and the kind of getting the word out is the the story brand of it all, right? Like there's you could talk about like your course and your features and how good you are, but when you say like, hey, here's here's this mom of three that built the the FBA business using ads, or here's this other person that like they they put out like crayons and school supplies and things like that. It's like that's more interesting because it's like it's it like built in solves a lot of the the problems and kind of helps us keep on the encouragement. So I'm curious about in this in this ever going process of like advertising and marketing and trying to get new people in your courses. Like, have you had a lot of fun with that kind of like spotlighting the real successful people?

Stephen Somers 13:32 Yeah, you know, way back when when I started in 2014 offering our programs, we taught people had to build their own brand on Amazon at that time and import from China and all that kind of stuff. We did that for many, many years, and we got some great results with people and all the rest. But I mean, ultimately, that process took a long time for someone to get a bit of a result because they had to figure out the product, then the brand, then get it, you know, in the samples and import. It was months and months and months to do it, which is normal in the grand scheme of business. You know, there's businesses take one or two years to start. But but the reason I'm saying that is because nowadays the stuff that we teach people, we really focused from 2022 onwards on what are things we can teach that will be easier to implement. That will get us more stories faster, and it's and we didn't do it just to get stories, but we're here to help people start an online income stream, a second income stream, and so it's like you know as well as either, Robert. Like when you're in business, you learn more when you're in business than when you're like thinking or reading about being in business, or getting information about being in business from a chatbot, whatever. So our whole thing became getting people like into action, and then getting them results faster, and then having people spotlight those results to encourage, to use one of your words, to encourage more people to go and do something. And this is the problem with AI. AI doesn't really help you like do something most of the time because it can't do push-ups for you. It can give you a fitness plan, but you got to go down and do push-ups. So it's the same thing here. It's like if I'm going to sell on Amazon, if I'm going to sell on whatnot, what, whatever, AI can't go and like speak to suppliers for me. Some will say it can, but it can't really. Like you're going to use a chap like an AI voice machine to like call supplier and build a human relationship. Of course not. It's not going to work for you. It's disaster. So again, it's like the the main problem actually, and the way why we use these stories is is getting people to actually go do something. So whenever we talk about our stuff, I always say you know results not typical, and you have to do that legally. But also, I always tell people like why that's the case is because the typical result for most people when they buy an online program is they log in once, maybe twice, some refunds, some just leave it there in the background, and they never look at it ever again. So the the typical result is people do nothing, and that's a responsibility thing with people who actually buy something. And on the other side, I say if you see somebody like ourselves or our students who get these great results, that's not typical because they had to. They went through the material, they followed the the process, they put their hand in their pocket and put money into their business, and then they took their time to like make it happen, and no tool or whatever can do that. And I think that's one of the other big parts of being an educator. Is I often tell people, and I'm going to track here a little bit, Robert Ball. Just do it for one second. Say, you know, I always tell people, stop believing in yourself. It's a waste of your time. People go, what? Like I'm told, I have to believe in myself, and I'm like, but you've never sold anything online before. You've never made money for yourself before, right? So how could you believe in yourself? That's like it's impossible. You've never done it before. So it's like, and it's such a struggle for people because they're like, oh, like I really want to believe I can do this, but I just can't. And it's like no, you need to believe in the system in front of you, in the process. And so again, I find no amount of AI is going to help. You have to speak to someone and almost like believe for them, or or rob your belief, and then just put it into their life. And anyway, that's a off topic on the question you asked me. But at the same time, to bring it right back around and link it up, what's going to help people believe seeing other people just like them actually go and do something with the material?

Robert Plank 17:30 Yes, that's valuable. So it's all about the human connection and belief in the process, not in yourself. And it's it's so underrated, isn't it? Just the the effort that's needed on a recurring basis, like maybe even every day or every few days, just to kind of keep on like re-energizing yourself. Because otherwise, I mean, and it's such a weird concept, right? Because like all the information is there, right? You can watch the videos, you get the AI, but then there's like taking that action is at a hard part. And to me, it seems like for me, it comes back to like 10% which like even that seems hype. Like whenever you hear about someone like tracking like the opening rates in a Kindle book or tracking like who logs in, it's always like they read the first chapter of a book or like you're saying they they log in and they go through like the first video or one or two, but then actually get to the end. It's like 10% of them get there, and then but that makes it really cool because when you see any company like having all these success stories, you're like, whoa! So there's they have like say like 50 people over time that have gotten great results. You have to figure like there's at least like 10x of other people that they join with the best intentions, and it's like you you lead a horse to water? You can't make him drink. Some some people just won't complete, and so there's like a very high chance of failure. And so it's up to us to do our best to set ourselves up for success, and don't just rely on the AI, but also have that self awareness and know like I'm going to need like if I were to categorize like where my energy and effort should be, it needs to be on just like refocusing and just kind of taking whatever steady steps I can take. And so, in the spirit of that, I know we only have so much time because we're on a podcast. But I'm always curious about like what's working for your successful students. And I know that like this whatnot app. I think I've heard of it. I've never installed it. Never used it. I've heard like there's like it's one of those where there's like a countdown clock. But you tell me like what's whatnot and how does it different from Amazon and what's the results?

Stephen Somers 19:33 Yeah. Well, just to say, Amazon is still like the huge biggest marketplace in the world by by a lot, but whatnot is growing rapidly, and the reason it's grown rapidly is because it's a different type of marketplace to Amazon. So Amazon is Amazon. We know what it is, but I need to re-explain that. But whatnot is a live shopping marketplace where people are usually on their cell phones at home, either speaking. To camera on a stream, or in some cases, what we're teaching our students, they're just showing like their hands and showing products. But ultimately, people are live streaming. They're showing products to people that are watching their shows, and then people are then, in most cases, bidding on live auctions on the products that the person is putting in front of the camera, so they're a lot. It's a live auctions. Like if you know QVC and Instagram and Tinder had like a weird baby, it would probably be something like whatnot, right? Because that's what it is. It's a shopping channel. It's a live streaming, and the reason it's growing so rapidly is because it's taking advantage of the trends of today. One is obviously going to be social media. I mean, we all know how huge social media is nowadays, and then it's now this new like live social shopping. That's what it's about. I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the biggest people in the world, from business perspective, is talking about this nonstop right now because it's so huge over in countries like China, and it's starting to make its way over to this part of the world, so we're actually teaching a lot of our students how to sell trading card games on whatnot, and the reason for that is because it's the hottest category by a mile on the platform, like right now. Just whatever happened about whatnot, this this category just took off like rapidly. Now there's many more that are taken off as just as big or close to it, especially when you're talking about you know fashion and things like that. But we were trying to find a product and see if we could sell it on there, and so we got into trading card games, and we've just we had great success. I mean, we started at the end of 2025, sold over half a million dollars of product on there now, or approaching that now, so like and and it's and that's a marketplace that did eight $8 billion last year, whereas Amazon did $700 billion last year. So like it's still small, but obviously quite big in the grand scheme of the world. But it's just growing so rapidly, and that's what we were sort of why we alerted our community to it because we started selling a ton, like in the first 125 days, we sold like 247 $1,000 worth of stuff, which is unreal. Like, like from a standing start, no following, nothing, like zero followers on the platform. So I don't know exactly what the future holds. I wish I did, because I'd probably be very, very wealthy if I did. But from what I can see, and based on the trends we're seeing and the results our students are getting, it looks like whatnot's going to be around for the foreseeable future, and we'll have to see how big it gets. You know, but TikTok have already brought in an auction platform that's very similar to whatnot, so they're starting to compete in that space as well. So this, if you just kind of zoom out another bit, and you go live social shopping. This is very much where the trend is going, and as a company, we usually never like like jump on a trend. But the reason we got involved in this one is because we're like, well, this perfectly aligns with what we do, and we want to actually be early on something. We're usually not like one of those companies, and it's got our students some great. Like we have a lady called Shameen. She lives in Canada. She was a cabinet maker with her husband for 34 years. They recently separated. She sold like over $50,000 Canadian dollars worth of trading card games in her first like less than 90 days on the platform. You know, and that's amazing because this lady is like, you know, she's not 21, right? She's she's a little more mature and would not be your typical like streamer selling trading card games. So it's just this weird time where lots of demand, not as many sellers, not very many people have professionalized. But the really cool thing is that it's going to move into lots of more categories as the platform and as live social shopping expense.

Robert Plank 23:45 Very exciting times. Well, like there's the there's there's trends, but there's also like fads, right? And so it's like well, sometimes a trend is worth playing around with, especially if you have the existing foundation in place. Like you're not throwing out a whole old business. You're like devoting some time to something new, and like you hear sometimes like when TikTok was new or like Periscope was new, like some some people like went all in on some on some new platform before it got all over crowded and messed up in a lot of rules, and it's like, well, if you tried doing like if you tried hopping onto every new trend or fad-that's bad. And then if you tried to hop onto whatever new platform and figuring out yourself, well, then by the time you figure it out, then you know it's already too late. So I can see how it can be a lot of fun to say, like, okay, well, if you got you got whatnot, and it's still like like you say, super small in comparison to Amazon, but $8 billion, so you can you can kind of like have this new marketplace and make some money and grow a business and and change some lives in the process. And so if someone says, okay, well, I want to know more about this community marketplace superheroes. Where is it? What's it all about?

Stephen Somers 24:56 Yeah, well, if you go to MarketPlaceSuperHeroes.com, you can go and get free training. We're actually just updating the site at the time I'm speaking to you, but maybe by the time you're listening to this, that'll be all updated. But there will be very on the homepage the easy options to grab a guide around selling on Amazon, selling on whatnot. There'll be free training there that you can watch. At the moment, if you go to Marketplace Superheroes, you can watch a whatnot training for free. We explain the model in a lot of detail. Actually, it's really really good class, it's totally free. YouTube as well, we're actually about to upload a ton of new YouTube content, which is really exciting. We typically teach, you know, the the models at the base level over there as well. So I highly recommend checking out both of those sources. But yeah, no, I think I think it just just as as now we're wrapping up. But just to say on the TikTok point, that's an interesting one because for a long time people were going, is that fad or is it a trend? And I think that's a really great question. Whereas now, if you look at whatnot, it's definitely a trend because it actually has been around for four or five years. Just has come into the kind of the public in the last sort of a year and a bit, but it's really quickly established itself, and people really caught on to it. So again, I think that's important to look at if you're ever considering anything. But look, if you're brand new to business, especially, and you're looking for something that is new, I recommend just even you know, even if you don't check it. But we have go research whatnot in a bit more detail. There's people succeeding at a really high level over there now, and again, it's the trend of live social shopping. That's where things are going. So I recommend doing more research on that as well. I don't think you're going to go far wrong. It really is where where things are going.

Robert Plank 26:31 Well, very cool. Live social shopping. What a concept! And in so many ways, everything old is new again, right? QVC and eBay and and live streaming, but it's all kind of like new and old at the same time, and there's still people out there who are looking to get deals and buy items, and and also there's the sellers, and so like why not be a part of that, and especially get the human connection where sure you can ask chatbot questions, but what if you have that? Plus you have this amazing community at Marketplace Superheroes, where they have the webinar training, and you can ask the questions and do the meetings and get some of these problems solved, right? Stop stop researching and stop being in learning mode. A little bit of that's okay, but you also have to take action, have some controlled experiments, and see what works out for you, and and eliminate the losers and double down on the winners, and so that's marketplacesuperheroes.com, and on YouTube it's marketplace superheroes official. And as we're heading there, and before I let you go, Mr. Stephen, it's time for the scary part of the podcast where I try to stump you, I try to put you on the spot by asking you about a fun or interesting quote or lesson that has served you. So, what comes to mind as far as a fun or interesting quote or lesson?

Stephen Somers 27:45 Yeah, from Charlie Munger, I love this idea about you have to deserve what you want, right? To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. And he said, the world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people. So, if you haven't got what you want in your life yet? You can ask yourself a simple question: Do I actually deserve that? Am I taking the actions that a deserving person would be taking? So the the typical is in fitness, right? If you're overweight, you're not happy where you are physically. You can look at that and go, "Well, what do I deserve right now based on my actions? And usually, you'll find, you know, what I don't yet deserve what I want, but here's what I'd have to do to deserve what I want, so I love that idea.

Robert Plank 28:26 Yeah, it it hurts your feelings at first, but then it makes you think. Well, maybe I need to take a different course of action. And the thing that you deserve to do right now is go to marketplacesuperheroes.com and check out that webinar training. Get educated about what not and the cutting edge, what's possible, and what you can and should do with e-commerce moving forward. MarketplaceSuperheroes.com, Mr. Stephen Somers. It's such a blast catching up. I'm so glad that we made the time to do this. So thank you.

Stephen Somers 28:53 Thanks, Robert. I appreciate it.