368: What Successful Amazon Sellers Do Differently To Grow With Jeff Cohen

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have my friend Jeff Cohen back on the show, and Jeff is the VP of marketing over at Seller Labs, and he’s actually one of my go-to guys when it comes to keeping up with Amazon. So today, we’re gonna talk about the overall landscape for selling on Amazon in 2021 and what lies ahead. But before we begin, I wanna thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

00:26
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

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That’s P O S T S Q I P T dot IO slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavia, who’s also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you the time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like living proof and chubbies? Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning.

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That’s KLAVIO.com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention a new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:24
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I have my friend Jeff Cohen back on the show. Now Jeff is the VP of Marketing over at Seller Labs, which is a company that specializes in Amazon tools and services. And in fact, I use many of their tools today to run the Amazon side of my business. Anyway, the reason I asked Jeff back on the pod is to talk about what’s going on with Amazon for 2021, what lies ahead and what seasoned Amazon sellers are doing and their habits. And with that,

02:53
Welcome back, Jeff. How you doing? Doing great, Steve. Thanks for having me back on. Love chatting Amazon and e-commerce with you. So it’s actually been a while since I’ve had you on. I’m just kind of curious what’s going on in the Amazon tool space. Yeah. You know, I think that very similar to what you’re seeing in just the Amazon space in general, there’s a lot of investment coming into this space and a lot of development coming into this space. And I think that’s awesome for Amazon sellers because everyone is able to

03:23
you know, get a better product at the end of the day, right? So we acquired a company a little over a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago in the, in the general e-commerce space, which is going to allow us to offer additional resources for Amazon sellers who are looking to expand their business. And, you know, we’re seeing a lot of that in the general tool space, the general tool space. We sound like a bunch of tools in general, in the general space around software that’s helping Amazon sellers.

03:53
you know, compete and grow and build their business. one thing that I’ve noticed from teaching my classes, you know, a lot of people will get some early success with Amazon, but as they start getting bigger and bigger, it becomes increasingly a problem how to actually maintain your Amazon account. Like bad things happen all the time. Like you might be running low on inventory or like you might’ve had a rapid drop in sales in a certain skew. What I wanted to get out of today’s podcast interview is a good

04:22
Process and I know you interact with a lot of seasoned Amazon sellers the process like the day-to-day Really on how to actually manage an account that’s growing with a whole bunch of different products

04:33
Yeah, I think there’s a lot that can be learned by studying successful Amazon brands and Amazon sellers. And one of the things that I have found with all of the sellers that are building businesses that are successfully growing, and I know we could all define success in different ways. So whether you’re building a $50,000 a year business or a $5 million a year business,

05:02
these traits are similar and the first and it all starts with goal setting. I know it sounds so simple to say, but it’s something that so many people aren’t doing correctly. Do you actually know what you’re trying to accomplish this year? Do you have that written down in a specific measurable way? And is it actually obtainable? And you know,

05:26
Within Amazon or within e-commerce, there’s a lot of different types of goals that you can be setting up. So do you have goals around your sales? Do you know how much, not just do you want to do this year, but how much you’re planning to do this month? And what level of profit are you trying to do that at? And how much ad spend do you want to put to that? What do you want your target ad spend to organic ratio to be? How many reviews do you want to get? These are all different.

05:55
types of goals that Amazon sellers can set, but without a goal, a plan is just a wish. And so you have to have a path to get yourself to the number that you’re trying to target for this year. Give me an example of a really tight concrete goal. So we’ll hear a lot of sellers tell us that they want to grow from a million to 2 million.

06:22
That’s a simple goal. want to grow my top line sales from a million to 2 million. But the complexity of that, that’s the simple part of it. The complexity of that is what skews are going to get you to double your sales. And the challenge, Steve, is if I say a million, then people who are only doing 100,000 go, I’ll never get that big. And if I say a million and you’re doing 5 million, you go, oh, that’s too small. So you’ve got to put your own number into this to figure it out.

06:51
But if your goal is to double your sales, where is it going to come from? And it’s either going to come from increasing traffic, improving your conversion, or possibly adding more SKUs to your mix. And so you have to have that plan for how you’re going to get there. And so you might look at it and go, oh, I currently have five SKUs and my five SKUs are generating $100,000 a month in sales. And I believe that I can increase those by 20%.

07:21
great, I’m now at 120,000, where’s the other 80,000 gonna come from? Well, now I need to start bringing new SKUs in, or maybe you have a SKU that’s on the bottom part of your catalog that you believe you can really improve. And so by being able to break it down and start looking at your catalog or start looking at your goal in this type of manner, you can start to build that.

07:49
plan for how to get to that path. And one of the things I love to tell people is think of your business as the size you’re trying to get to that’s under improved. I’m not using the right words. They’ll come out. So if I want to be a million dollar brand and I’m only doing 500,000 this year, then I want to be a underperforming million dollar brand as opposed to a half million dollar brand that’s trying to double in sales.

08:16
I’ll look at my business in a different way if I’m underperforming, then I will, if I’m trying to just double my sales, I’ll be able to identify the gaps. And so sometimes people need to just change their thinking a little bit in the way they look at their business so that they can do the gap analysis and figure out really where the products or where the profit or where the targets that they’re going to hit are gonna come from.

08:45
I mean, to be honest, to me, setting a goal of going from one to 2 million is like a terrible goal because it’s not concrete, right? Whereas when you said, hey, I’m going to release 10 more SKUs this year to generate X number of dollars is a much better goal to have. and I always say that you want to look at your catalog in three sections, right? So using the Pareto principle, you’ll have the head of your catalog that’s generating the majority of your

09:14
80 % of your sales will come from 20 % of your SKUs. So that’s the head of your catalog. And you want to treat those differently than the ones that are in the middle, which is probably about 70 % of your catalog, which is different than the tail, which is maybe like items you need to get rid of and you need to stop selling. so instead of looking at it like, want to double the size of my business, you actually need to have little micro plans for every SKU in your catalog.

09:42
And I mean, you’ve got a catalog with a lot of different SKUs. And if you tried to apply one strategy to your whole catalog, you would fail. But if you try to apply a strategy to a group of products in your catalog or products that are performing in a similar way within your catalog, then you can start to group different products and put kind of individualized plans together for how those products or product lines are going to grow over time.

10:12
So let’s go a little bit deeper into all those. So let’s say we’ve isolated our cash cows. What do seasoned sellers, how do they deal with those skews in particular in terms of just even monitoring and maintenance? Yeah. So what you want to be doing is you want to, I say, know your numbers, right? So understand what your projected sales are for those skews, what your projected margins are for those skews. Understand your inventory on those skews because those are the skews you do not want to run out of, right?

10:41
So you want to make sure you have a very specific plan for how you’re going to keep those skews in stock. Because if those skews drop off, those are the ones that are really hard to get back up and running. And those are the ones that are going to just hurt your pocketbook the most if they fall. Yeah. And then in terms of the other skews, do the ones that aren’t doing so well, I guess.

11:09
Do you just tend to pay less attention to them? So I think it’s a matter of balancing your time on a daily basis, right? So on a given day, you want to put your energy to where you make money. And so when you talk about habits from successful sellers, successful sellers are working on the things that make them money. Now, in the green room, before we came online, we talked about social and you had

11:38
specifically mentioned that you’d notice I’d cut back on some of my social interactions. That’s because I kind of realized that my social interactions weren’t leading to the things that make me money. So I needed to be spending my time on something else. It’s a self-actualization of where you’re spending your time. Now, when you’re looking at those middle skews, there may be some that are just highly profitable, but they’re just slower velocity. And you’re okay with that, right? That’s not a bad thing.

12:06
There may be some that have stock problems and so they sit in that middle and the work you need to do is improving the inventory channel because if you can, maybe you can move it up. Everything in the middle is either going to have a green arrow, meaning that your goal is to move it up into the head of your catalog, or it’s going to have a red arrow, meaning it’s on its way out and you want to spend less time on it. The key to this,

12:35
The key to all of this and segmenting your catalog and having goals on a SKU basis is to know where to spend your time. Because the last thing you want to do is wake up in the morning and see that a SKU has been suspended or see that your sales have dropped and then waste half of your morning working on something that really doesn’t impact your business. And if you know from the get-go that that’s a SKU that you aren’t going to spend your time on anyway,

13:03
then when it drops, you just say, okay, I expected it to drop, I’m gonna move on. And at the end of the day, you focused on what matters most in your business and what’s gonna actually drive your business forward. And you didn’t work on an additional output. So when I talked to my team, and it’s a marketing team, so it’s a little bit different, but when I talked to my team, I talked to them about what we call outputs and outcomes. So are you focused on the output?

13:32
that you desire or you focused on the output. The output could be the number of posts that you make. It could be the number of adjustments you make in ads. could be the number of keywords that you optimize. But those are just outputs. If they’re not actually driving the outcome, if ad management isn’t the outcome I desire, then working on ads isn’t really leading me to my end goal. And that’s…

14:00
what you want to ultimately align is by having goals, you now know what outcomes you desire and you can now direct your outputs to ensure that they lead to your desired goals. Makes sense. So let’s add some maybe hypotheticals to this. Maybe a real example of maybe like a day to day or month to month of, of someone who’s just managing an account with a lot of skews. Yeah. So I think that

14:31
when you get into day to day or month to month, you have to get into what I would call like developing an audit plan. And you’ll have different parts of your business that you have to manage in different ways. And so as business owners, we have to do accounting, advertising, competitor analysis, listing analysis, inventory, communication, taxes, I guess it’s, we’re recording this in April, so we might as well mention taxes, all these.

14:59
components that you have to do to manage a business. And so you want to develop kind of an audit plan so that you can understand what parts of your business you want to manage in different ways. Concrete example, advertising. Advertising is something that you need to be managing a couple of times per week. You can’t just set your advertising and forget it. so advertising is something that you either want to be doing on your own or having

15:29
a tool that’s doing it for you or using a service depending on the complexity of your advertising. But it’s something that needs a constant attention. It’s an investment that you’re making, but you only get the return on investment if you’re continually watching it and making the tweaks to it. In contrast to that, have listing optimization. Well, listing optimization is not something you really need to be doing on a very regular basis.

15:58
Maybe once a quarter, you want to be looking at your listing. You want to be checking your category listing report, maybe updating your A plus content, maybe changing some images or something like that. But you want to be keeping an eye on your listing. And so that’s where you can use technology, right? Like a tool like Pro that is watching your listing for you so that if for some reason your title changes or your bullets change,

16:27
you get a notification. And so there are things that you don’t necessarily need to be working on on a daily basis, but you want to be aware of if something happens. And that’s where you can use automation to be kind of watching some things for you on the side while you’re in there, you know, trying to renegotiate with your vendors to get your products on a ship faster. if the conversion rate drastically drops,

16:55
Just hypothetically, is that something that Pro will let you know also? Yeah, so Pro is gonna let you know that. think that Pro will let you know you’ll get, you can either see it on the dashboard or get a notification. I think the question is really, I like to break it all down to there’s the alert, right? There’s being aware that something happens. Then the next stage is the information. So what information is presented to you?

17:21
to understand what happened and then what actions do you take? And so in Pro, we try to answer all three of those questions. In some instances, we can point you in the right direction, but you have to go do some additional research. you know, I had that happen recently for one of my listings, my sales dropped off. Well, what I ultimately found out, I typically say there’s two reasons why your sales drop off immediately. One, you got a negative review.

17:50
I was watching my reviews. knew I did not have a negative review or two, your competitors changed their pricing. And what happened was my competitor for the category of those SKUs changed their pricing dramatically. They dropped their price by almost 50%. Now I don’t know why maybe they were doing it to liquidate some inventory before long-term storage fees or something like that, but they dropped their price by 50%. Well, that was a significant impact on

18:20
my advertising and my sessions. So the sessions is telling me that the traffic on the SKU dropped, but that’s just part of the picture. I now need to figure out why that’s happened and what I need to do about it. Now, I personally made the decision to not do much about it because I didn’t want to change and compete from a price perspective. And three days later, they changed their price.

18:46
And now, you I have to rebuild my listing up because obviously my BSR dropped because my sales changed on that set of SKUs. And I’ll probably miss my mark in a given month, but because I’m watching my pacing for the month and I understand where my, where my sales are pacing, because I have a monthly goal, I was able to identify this quickly and immediately and at least take a deliberate action one way or the other. chose to, I chose to take the action of not taking action.

19:16
But I was at least aware of what was happening and taking action versus being lost and trying to figure out what’s going on.

19:26
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19:54
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20:24
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

20:34
So can we try to enumerate all the little things that a seasoned seller will monitor on their account? So you mentioned PPC already. You also mentioned listing optimization in case there’s any drop-offs. We already talked about sudden drops in conversion rate. What are all the little things that people look out for on a regular basis for an audit? Again, I don’t know how regularly, I mean, some of these things are watched daily. Some of these things are watched, but you need to know if they change.

21:02
Did something happen to one of your costs? Maybe Amazon has resized your product and all of a sudden your fees have changed. That’s killer. That can just crush your profitability. Feedback reviews, obviously we started in that industry. It’s one we always remind people about, but feedback and reviews are critical to your business. And then what you do with them once you get them is critical. Are you making updates to your listing? Are you making updates to

21:31
Are you making updates to your listing? Are you making updates to your processes when you get those reviews? A lot around inventory, right? So Amazon now has this concept of the IPI score. That’s really critical in how much inventory you can send in. We believe around Q4, it’ll also impact the price you pay for that inventory. You have long-term storage fees. You have…

21:58
you know, the impact of inventory and profits. So do you need to run a promotion? Do you have any lost inventory or reimbursements that Amazon owes you for? We kind of covered all the ones around listings. When you get into traffic, you’ve got a lot that you can be kind of monitoring in traffic. Amazon’s released this whole new system called Post. It’s actually really a cool tool if you having…

22:23
If your brand registered and you haven’t started playing with posts, it allows people to start following you. And that’s a number I monitor for my brand. Amazon is starting to release tools for you to connect and promote to your followers, which is an email going to Amazon promoting your brand for the people that engage with your brand as you run a sale or you list new products. You have your stores page on Amazon.

22:50
There’s now detailed traffic around stores page. And then there’s a lot of, I’ll call it new ad placements, right? So Amazon released video ads and they’ve got, they have all these different sponsored product ads and sponsored brand ads and display ads that you can be doing that are all different pieces that you have to monitor. So how much of this can be automated?

23:18
I mean, you talked a lot of different things and it can be overwhelming for someone who’s kind of getting started per se, right? Sure. much of this stuff can be automated? Well, what needs to be manual? Yeah, I think that, well, you know, you’re asking a software guy, so anything can be automated. I think that what’s manual is the development of your goals, right? You’re the one responsible for your goals.

23:47
Then you can use tools and technology like Pro to start monitoring a lot of these pieces for you that give you quick dashboards into understanding what’s going on in your business on a daily basis, what’s changed in your business and what you need to be alert or alerted to. Then ensure that as you’re given the alerts and you’re given the information, you’re spending appropriate time based on the goals that you’ve set. What are you responsible for?

24:17
you’re really responsible for having goals and having plans for your products. And then use a tool and technology to build out that structure for monitoring and reviewing that information and then check it on a daily basis. It’s a quick login. I like to say, start your day with Seller Labs. It’s a quick login to our dashboard where you can see a lot of this information and have a very clear understanding if your ACOST have changed, if your tacos have changed, if you have a new review, if you have

24:47
a critical notification that you need to be aware of. I guess for me, I would actually prefer to get alerts like, oh my God, this one’s product conversion rate just drastically dropped or the sales drastically dropped that needs to come to my attention. Cause at least for my account, and I’m not the largest Amazon seller in the world, but from a day-to-day perspective, not much really changes. Yep. Yeah. So what, what we, it’s funny when we did a survey to our customers,

25:16
They told us that alerts are not very important to them, but they also told us that recommendations, suggestions, and ways to improve their business are. So I think there’s a connotation of alert that automatically means you’re getting emailed, right? And that can become inundating if you’re getting so many emails that you don’t even know what’s important to you. And so we’ve kind of built a system that handles this in two different ways. One is

25:43
the actual alert. If you want to get an alert by email or by text or just by our notification center, you can. And then we also built in a lot of what we call indicators within our tool. And so we have what’s called a product view. And then we also have a catalog view. And when you’re in the product view, which is detail specific to the product or the catalog view, which is more generic to your overall catalog, we have a lot of red green indicators that are saying over this same period of time,

26:11
Here’s how you’re doing compared to the previous period of time. And so you can start to look at that as a seven day or a 30 day or a 60 day window to truly understand how your business is performing compared to the previous window. Now I’ll give an example. When you’re in the month of February and you’re looking at your 60 day window, guess what? All of your arrows are going to be red because you’re comparing yourself to December. But as you roll into other months,

26:39
that may not be the case. And so you have to understand the seasonality of your business and also which period you’re comparing it to, to make sure that you’re analyzing the data correctly and taking the appropriate action. Yeah, I always, for my personal business, I always use a year to year numbers. So the exact same day of the week, the prior year and what happened. And I had a really pleasant experience with this in March because last year during March, our business was in half. And then, so this March, it was way up.

27:09
Yeah, it’s funny. going be a lot of case studies about year over year growth from March 2020 to March 2021, right? Yeah. Okay, so these season pros are using some sort of dashboard, it seems like, to just kind of monitor the key metrics. And then what else are they doing? Well, I think that it’s about taking the appropriate action. Okay. And so I like to say it’s about a macro-micro…

27:37
view, right? So from the macro view, you’re looking at the high level of your account and the high level of your account is telling you whether you’re trending up or you’re trending down. When you go into the product level view, you’re in the micro view of your account and you now see exactly how some products are doing. And so maybe on a weekly basis or maybe a monthly basis, depending on the size of your catalog and the size of your business,

28:03
You want to make sure that you’re kind of what I call changing the lens, right? Are you looking at your business in both directions in terms of macro and micro and how things are doing? And then tying that back into the Pareto principle that we taught, that we talked about at the beginning. And are you spending your effort on the skews that are going to actually generate the outcome that you desire? Because the Pareto principle is the 80-20 rule.

28:31
that states that 80 % of your outcome will come from, I’m sorry, 80 % of your time will lead to 20 % of your outcome and 20 % of your time will lead to 80 % of your outcome. So if you can flip that and you can get your effort on the right pieces, you have a major impact on your business. And we see it a lot at Seller Labs. A lot of people come to us and they’ll say, can your tool help?

29:00
me improve my business? Well, what are your goals? What are you trying to do? Well, I just want to grow my sales. Well, then no, our tool can’t help you. If you come to me and say, my goal is to reduce the A cost on this set of SKUs from 10 % to 8%, okay, great. We can help you. You’ve got a specific goal, and we can now help you put together a plan to get to that and make recommendations.

29:28
to optimize your advertising to get to that number. Now, one thing that a lot of sellers do, and it’s a mistake that sellers make, so I wanna give your audience the warning of this, is what I call unintended consequences, which means that sometimes when you get so hyper-focused on one particular number that you’re trying to drive in your business, you actually end up impacting other numbers unintentionally.

29:56
And a great example of this is if you’re specifically trying to drive, your goal is, want to lower my A cost, I would ultimately say, is your goal really to lower your A cost or is your goal to lower the impact of advertising on your sales? Because I can lower your A cost, but by lowering your A cost, I might also reduce your sales volume. Right. And overall profit. Yeah.

30:25
And here’s what’s really weird, right? Because I think you’ve worked with Ed and I think you’ve actually seen this happen. Sometimes to lower your A cost, I need to increase your spending.

30:38
Yes. And it’s such an inverse mentality that you never think that the solution to lowering your cost is by spending more money. But there are principles that if you can get to a certain position on the page or you can get to a certain conversion rate that dictate that all the metrics turn around and all of a sudden something that

31:06
was not profitable at an 8 % A cost actually becomes more profitable at a 10 % A cost because you improve your organic position and you overall drive more sales. How does one avoid falling into this trap? Because it seems like this is something that’s pretty hard to detect on the surface.

31:29
Are you talking specifically about the ACOST one? Not necessarily the ACOST, but just falling in the trap of doing one thing that affects a whole bunch of other things and pinpointing that that was the original reason. Well, I think it comes back to the concepts of the lean startup, which is pivot or persevere moments. And if you haven’t read the book, The Lean Startup, the lean startup really kind of follows the culture of Israeli product development.

31:59
and gives you a lot of the principles that were used within this. And one of the big principles within this is the idea of pivot or persevere. So it’s a matter of building a system, measuring what is happening, having some desired outcome, and then learning and making the decision to either pivot, which means change the direction, or persevere.

32:27
double down and keep going with the direction. And I think that where a lot of people fail is that they make the decision of the direction that they wanna go, but they don’t actually set the metric by which they’re gonna measure it. And so they don’t know how to come back to close the loop to make the decision of whether that worked for them or not. Now, you and I are both content creators and web people and

32:56
We own two companies and this is kind of a little more complex, but we wanted to actually syndicate our content from one website to the other, which you know from an SEO perspective can be dangerous, right? Well, we were able to set metrics behind that to understand what was happening so that when we did that experiment, we could tell that it actually worked and it drove the metrics that we want, which was an increase in traffic without the…

33:26
the negative impact that we believe that it would have. again, you’re, it back to an Amazon example, if your goal is to reduce your total cost of advertising, and then there are ways to look at it and to say, not just what’s your A cost on a particular ad,

33:48
there’s ways to look at it completely and there’s ways to look at other data such as your placement reports to understand how you perform in particular placements that would say mathematically, hmm, I should bid for this placement over that placement because my conversion rate is 2X better. And this is where some people, it just kind of blows their head and they’re like, I don’t want to think that much and why people come to us and say, can you just run my ads for me?

34:18
And this is where some people go, I love the data and that’s what I want to do. And so I think part of this, like any part of your business is, is determining which of this are your areas of expertise and which of these are areas that you either want to use AI software to do it or where you want to use people and people power to do it, to run it for you. mean, for me personally, the answer is always AI. So in that example that you just gave,

34:47
If there’s a tool that does that, that’s what I would use. Yeah. mean, the complexity of advertising, what we have found the complex, like our AI version of our tool can build out what I would call a fairly sophisticated campaign. The problem is, that ad tech at Amazon has become so advanced with so many different options and variables that it’s impossible for any tool to give you

35:15
all of the potential inputs that you need. So it just depends on like the size of your business and what you’re trying to do with it. If you’re looking to just kind of maintain a certain amount of sales and a certain growth and a certain ACOST, AI and a tool like ours can run a strategy like that for you. If you’re looking to really use advertising to grow your business, that’s where you maybe need to go to like a managed services where you’re getting

35:42
a little bit of that human interaction along with that AI to say, hey, it’s time to start looking at video ads. Hey, it’s time to start adding, you know, to start bidding on this placement a little bit harder just because there’s no AI that can take all of those pieces into account. No, yeah, totally. At least over time, for now, maybe. Maybe over time, it’ll get better. Right. And I think like AI…

36:09
artificial intelligence for people that aren’t sure. AI is great for helping you to identify gaps in your business. And really that’s what we designed Pro to be, right? Is a kind of a gap analysis tool for you to then figure out where you need to spend your time and energy. And I think for people getting started, they might run into some challenges that they just don’t know how to solve and they need to seek help to solve them or

36:38
they might be simplistic enough that some basic strategies can solve their problems and meet their needs. Jeff, let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about some of the things that are really moving the needle for the successful Amazon sellers that you encounter. It could be like new features that Amazon’s offering. It could be the latest strategies and tactics. What are you seeing out there? So I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple here. One on the advertising front.

37:08
we are seeing really strong success with video ads. Okay. Fairly easy to produce a video ad. So walk me through this. Where does the video ad go? Where is it displayed? So you need brand registry. Video ads are displaying on the search results page. If you scroll about a third of the way down on the page, they’re also showing up on mobile and Amazon is starting to make more and more placements for video ads.

37:38
still kind of a first mover advantage in the fact that not everybody’s gotten into video ads yet. And it gives you the chance to really explain your product to your consumer. We have a company who we develop video ads for, they’re a t-shirt company. They literally just have somebody wearing the t-shirt turning in a circle so that you can see how the shirt fits when it’s on you. So don’t think that you need to have these highly produced videos.

38:08
to make these work. It’s really just humanizing your product. Now, video ads are great, but video in general is critical. So Amazon sellers now have the ability to upload video onto their product detail page. That used to be something that was reserved for larger sellers. also, and on Seller Central, there’s a thing, I think it’s under inventory, which is kind of a weird place for it, but it’s under inventory that allows you to manage

38:37
upload and manage videos. And those also show up under what’s called your video shorts. so video just in general has become a much, much bigger play on Amazon, whether it be from the advertising perspective or just from the consumer engagement perspective. What about these Amazon articles or Amazon posts that you were talking about? Yeah. So I think there’s, it’s still very early for Amazon posts. They primarily show up on mobile.

39:06
So when you’re doing mobile scrolls, you’ll see posts very similar to some of the early days of video shorts on Amazon. Post, if your competitors are not doing posts, guess what? Your products show up on their post. It’s a great way to start engaging with your audience and building an audience. And you can build, they don’t allow carousels. You can have carousel ads.

39:32
So your products can be on a carousel where you can show four or five different products associated with one. The ones that have done best for me are lifestyle images, real uses of your product. That’s what people want to see. One of the tricks I’ve learned kind of the hard way, you cannot repeat any kind of image on post. So they want new content whenever you do it. you have to, you I recommend you just sit down and you plan a number of posts every month.

40:02
I think for every seller has to kind of determine how competitive their category is. For one seller, they might be getting a thousand views and might be happy with a thousand views. For another seller, they might be getting 10,000 views on a post. And so you have to kind of experiment with it a little bit to truly understand how posts will impact your business and traffic to your website. So what type of posts work well? Like I said,

40:30
lifestyle images seem to work a lot better than like infographics. I also think that ones that are showing your, your product like in use, right? So, so not like highly produced lifestyle, but literally pictures of your product being used, like the types of pictures you would want to see in a customer review are the ones that are working really well in post. So in terms of

40:59
just the time and the ROI on these things, because obviously it takes time to post these. What have you seen? So I experimented with these at the beginning and then I kind of stopped and then I kind of came back to it. I think it comes back to what we talked about at the beginning and kind of where you’re at in your business. If you’re just getting started, I wouldn’t spend my time on posts. They’re not going to move the needle. Okay. If you’re at the point in your business where, where,

41:29
you have an extra hour or a month, you can sit down. you’re already producing these images for Instagram or any other social channel, it’s just literally an hour of your time to schedule the post on Amazon. Video is one that I would probably put higher up in my to-do list, primarily because video can really have an impact on the engagement and conversion on your product detail page.

41:59
And so therefore it just has a higher overall value impact. Now, again, depending on the size of your catalog, you want to work on the video on your highest volume products. And so you can use a report within seller central that shows you your session data, or you could use a tool like Pro to see your session data. And you can actually sort your products by session to see which are your highest sessions or like unique users to your page.

42:27
sort by your sessions to see which of your products are getting the most amount of volume and just start working on that. And I think that’s really the case, whether it be video or A plus content or stores or any of these other ancillary Amazon activities, you’ve got to get your basics nailed down, right? You have to have your product photography, your listing and such. Then when you start to expand into these other pieces,

42:56
then you want to focus on the ones that are the highest value to you. Now, if you have a catalog and you don’t want to build out an A plus page for all of your catalog, build out a generic A plus page that talks about your brand in general and post that across everything. And then when a page hits a certain threshold, then go spend the time to build out A plus content for that page.

43:21
So in terms of the video that you’ve emphasized many times during this talk here, would you say that you should just be going all in on video? Because I can see any sort of motion as you’re scrolling will entice people to look at something, right? And I’m sure the click through rates on those are a lot higher.

43:37
I’m a visual person. So I would put my emphasis on photography, number one, and video number two. Okay. And the only reason I say that is because, you know, mobile dictates a lot of traffic and transactions on Amazon. And if you haven’t used the Amazon app to shop, it’s time to crawl out from under your rock. just kidding. Just see what you’re like.

44:07
It’s amazing how many people have never looked at their own product detail pages on a mobile device.

44:15
So my question would be, have you looked at your pages? Have you looked at your competitors’ pages on a desktop, on a mobile device, on an iPad, and understand how you’re being presented to your consumers? Images sell. That’s the truth. When we’re talking about listing optimization and listing creation, it’s really about feeding the Amazon algorithm for organic search. Unless you have a highly technical product, people are not reading all of your bullet points.

44:45
Right. Sorry.

44:48
They are looking at all of your images. And very few will scroll down unless it’s a complicated product also, right? Right. When I went to buy a ping pong table, I read everything. I read multiple reviews. I did a lot more research. When I’m buying, I’m trying to think of something I just recently bought on Amazon, but when I’m buying a coaster or a silicone ice tray, I’m looking at the pictures.

45:16
I might look at the reviews in general, but I’m not reading them to me. I’m not putting that much research into it. so whatever your main selling points are of your product, those have to come across to your consumers inside the images. Otherwise your consumers are going to not understand your product, your value and your brand. Yeah. And that’s why putting the bullet points in the images itself itself often helps. Right. Exactly. And this has just been an evolution over the last few years.

45:46
in terms of how important images have become to the overall sales process. So I know you encounter a lot of sellers and you probably have a pretty good pulse on this. What’s the counterfeit knockoff situation like these days where the false negative reviews, all those problems, has Amazon done a good job at solving them so far? So I think that it’s a cat and mouse game that Amazon will never win. think if you’re a reseller, you’ll always kind of be battling

46:15
proving that you have the ability to sell that product. If you’re developing your own brand, it’s critical for maintaining your product and your brand. still see big brands who… So Amazon has something called price competitiveness. It’s a number that they follow within their system. It’s actually looking to see how your product is priced compared to your product other places. I do see a lot of brands that have trouble with that.

46:45
particular metric because knockoffs will put, will try to steal their brand other places, not just on Amazon. So I guess, you know, problems that increase as your size of your business increases. Amazon has gotten a lot better in terms of the data that you can provide during the brand registry process around design patents and patents and trademarks to help you protect and to identify who the

47:15
approved sellers are on your product. But I don’t think it’s something that will ever go away completely because there’s just too much money to be made from it. So it’s always a cat and mouse game. How many of your clients are using Project Zero or the Transparency program? So I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but I know the ones that are using it really love it. And for those that aren’t aware, it’s you end up paying a small little fee.

47:43
per unit to put a unique barcode on your product, which then allows Amazon to validate that your product is really from your brand. I was going to do it for one of my products just to do it so I could go Talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Just so I could talk about it as somebody who’s done it. But the challenge of implementing transparency is that-

48:10
it’s really easy to do for a new SKU. It’s hard to do for a SKU you already have in stock because you essentially have to pull your inventory out or you have to get to a point of inventory zero so that you can restock with the transparency SKU. So it’s a little bit of a catch 22. I think if you’re having issues with a particular product and you’re looking to kind of revamp and redo that product, it’s absolutely worth

48:40
the 15 cents or whatever minimal charge that they make on it. If you have a pretty entrenched inventory at Amazon, it adds a lot of complications to implementing the system. Cool. So Jeff, what are you looking forward to in Amazon for this year? Anything you have a look out for? I think the, I’m going to do a blog post on this and I’ll share it with you. I think inventory is going to be one of the biggest storylines of the year.

49:08
We’ve had a lot of impact in 2020 from COVID around inventory and shipping. I don’t think it’s, unfortunately, I don’t think it’s gonna get any better. I think that we’re already starting to see the docs backed up. We’re already starting to see shipping times take longer and we’re starting to see shipping cost increase. And so we’re seeing a lot of sellers

49:37
try to source or resource their products from somewhere maybe in the US or more NAFTA oriented that’s easier for them to get their products into the warehouse. with some of the changes Amazon has made around IPI score and limiting inventory for new products, I think that managing a just-in-time inventory system is critical to your Amazon business.

50:06
which is just a whole new complexity that Amazon sellers didn’t have to deal with two years ago and they have to deal with today. And so there’s still a way to launch a business and use FBA, but to really expand a business and grow a business, you have to get some kind of third party logistics center involved. As a proponent of building e-commerce websites, you and I both agree that

50:35
you probably need that anyway. So it’s a good problem to kind of solve for, but I think it’s one that even with Amazon, we’re starting to see more and more. And the good sellers are the ones who quickly adapted last March and released merchant fulfilled opportunities. And we’re able to capture sales, while others were still trying to figure out what to do. And I think that as we roll into

51:02
the Christmas time period, the Q4 time period, we’re going to continue to see Amazon with limited inventory and expanded inbound shipping times. mean, a year ago, pre-COVID, Amazon was taking a week to receive and stock your products. It can take three to five weeks for Amazon to receive and stock your products.

51:29
And I just heard a lot of horror stories from people during Christmas of product they shipped into Amazon that never became sellable. That they either needed to pull out of the inventory or pull out of the warehouse or was just inventory that they had stocked for Christmas or they couldn’t get their inventory in. I know one seller who was planning to sell 200 units a day and it was a new SKU, but he was limited to 200 units.

51:59
based on the inventory rules. So how could he ever get to, you so if you know you want a Q4 product and you know it’s going to have a higher volume, you almost have to get it in early and start building up your inventory, which is just a totally new game for sellers to have to figure out. I was actually pleasantly surprised that the fee increases for this year weren’t that high for FBA. Yeah, I think Amazon had to do that.

52:25
There are fee increases coming in June. They delayed them and they’re not as high as everybody was initially anticipating. But I think that’s also, can Amazon really put all these restrictions on you and then charge you more to do it? It’s gonna get to a point of diminishing return where it’s just easier for you to use a third party and merchant fulfill and not put it into FBA.

52:53
Oh, I mean, I still think the prime badge is still. Well, I was going to caveat and say that you need the prime badge and FBA is critical to your sales, right? Like 100%. I saw that with a product I launched last summer. When we, when we went to FBA, our sales more than doubled for just literally no more than the product being in the warehouse. Yeah. But it was a lower volume product. wasn’t a product that 200 SKUs was at.

53:21
200 units of inventory was ever a problem. I was selling two to three a day of each SKU. So it just depends on what type of SKUs you’re trying to launch and what kind of volume you’re trying to launch them with. And seller fulfilled prime is still not really a thing. Is that right? Yeah, that has been basically shut down now for over two years. Yeah. A lot of these companies like ShipBob and Deliver and

53:52
companies like that are really trying to work with Amazon to implement two-day shipping and get seller fulfilled. But Amazon, as far as I’m aware, has not made any third-party logistic companies, seller fulfilled, prime eligible. The only people that were ever seller fulfilled prime were companies that had their own warehouse. Yeah. Okay. So things aren’t changing on that front. So yeah.

54:20
I mean, we’re our own 3PL since we do personalization and we’ve been trickling inventory into Amazon for as long as I can remember now actually. You have to, mean, obviously now with personalization, I think there’s an automatic expectation that it’s just going to take longer. you, you, you have a different mindset of your customer. Oh, meant, uh, personalization causes us to actually hold our own inventory. Right. Yeah.

54:47
But you’re getting, but the customers are buying on Amazon and asking for a personalization. no, no. We’re selling blanks on Amazon. just- Oh, got it. Okay. You’re not selling your, you’re not doing handmade or customized on Amazon. Well, we are with a couple of SKUs, but that’s a very tiny piece of our business. I guess my point was, you know, all these IPI scores and everything have forced us to just kind of trickle in inventory instead of just sending a whole bunch in all at once. Yeah, it’s definitely, I mean,

55:16
you and I are about the same age. It’s definitely the just-in-time inventory system that the automotive manufacturers all had to figure out, right? And I think that it’s just adding a new complexity to your inventory and your inventory management. And you now have to possibly consider doing weekly shipments to Amazon based on your 30-day sales versus taking your, know, two years ago, you took your whole container from China.

55:45
Yeah. And you, and it hit the dock and you sent it into FBA. Yeah. I mean, it’s still possible depending on your sales volume, but yeah, it’s, it’s much less likely to happen unless you have an insane volume. Right. And again, if you’re trying to do that, you can’t do that with a new SKU, right? Because there’s definitely automatic restrictions on new SKUs. So yeah, if you have a high volume product, you can build your inventory up to be able to do that. Um, but you know, it’s a, it’s an added complexity.

56:15
that Amazon sellers have had to figure out. And I think, you know, there are ways to make your Amazon business simplistic. And then there are complexities that come as your business starts to grow. And I think that’s, that’s ultimately, I guess, to kind of bring it back. That’s ultimately where you want to build systems and processes and routines to take care of things for you so that you can be spending your time working on the more complex things that you need to actually build and scale your business. Yeah. mean,

56:43
That’s a great segue. I actually really like the dashboard and audit system. if people want to learn more about that, Jeff, where can they find you if they have any questions and the tools?

56:56
Okay, I did a long pause there on purpose so your editors can fix this. Do you have a certain URL you want to give them? Oh, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. didn’t know if we had a vanity URL that we’ve used with you. If you don’t, just create one, whatever you want to use. Whatever you say now, just you can create it and then…

57:25
I usually know these things before I come online. I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal. That wasn’t the motive of this. No, I know. Okay. Are we ready? Yeah, go for it.

57:38
Yeah, if you want to learn more about Seller Labs, you can either connect with me on LinkedIn or you can go to sellerlabs.com slash quit Q U I T and learn more about our Seller Labs Pro and we’ll have a special offer for anyone that is a listener of your podcast. Yeah. And I just wanted to say this as an aside, these days there’s just so much stuff that you need to monitor.

58:03
And just to give you an example of this, whenever I have to send out a promotion on my store, I log into four different tools to do so. And if you’re trying to monitor all these metrics, it’s nice to have just everything in one place. Jeff, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Steve. I appreciate you having me.

58:22
Hope you enjoy that episode. And as I mentioned earlier, Amazon is just constantly changing and you don’t call the shots. Now their policies are changing for the better, but it is a gradual process. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 368. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

58:49
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

59:17
Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.