But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I use for my ecommerce store, and I depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce, and here is why it is so powerful.

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Now I also want to give a shout out to Privy who is also a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now what does Privy do? Privy is an email list growth platform, and they manage all of my email capture forms. And in fact I use Privy hand in hand with my email marketing provider.

There is a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I use Privy because once they specialize in e-commerce. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store. Customers love the gamification aspect of this. And when I implemented this form email sign ups increased by 131%.

So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ For 15% off. Once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve, now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host Steve Chu.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today I have Karon Thackston back on the show. Now if you don’t remember Karon, I actually had her back on Episode 74 where we talked about how to optimize an Amazon listing for maximum sales. And she’s been helping e-commerce clients get higher rankings in search and higher conversion rates with the power of copy for the last 25 years. And she’s the author of ten books; she runs the popular site MarketingWords.com, which I recommend that you check out.

But anyways, last time we focused on tactics for optimizing Amazon listings. Today we’re going to talk about more copywriting strategies to increase sales, and just get a pulse on the overall landscape on Amazon today. And with that, welcome to the show Karon, how are you doing today?

Karon: Hey great, how are you?

Steve: Yeah I’m doing great, and I’m really glad to have you back. It’s funny that one of my students actually posted about you on the Facebook group, and that’s when I realized, hey I haven’t had Karon back on the show for a very long time. I definitely had to have you back.

Karon: Well I appreciate it, and I like hanging out in your group. You guys have some great ideas and conversations going on in there. So, always interesting when I spend some time over in your space of the Facebook landscape.

Steve: So I know you actually deal with a lot of Amazon clients. And so what I want to talk to you about first is since you have a previous post on the matter, how is the Amazon landscape changed, what are some of the issues that have been popping up within your community?

Karon: I am still finding a lot of people that come in from other communities, or folks that are in our Facebook group that are newbies that aren’t quite getting a handle on what changes have taken place as far as keywords go and the whole new Amazon 250 thing.

Steve: Why don’t you give an introduction just in case people listening don’t know what you’re talking about?

Karon: Yeah, let’s start from the beginning. Amazon way back five, six, seven years ago probably started out with a 250 character maximum in the search term fields. Some categories now show that as generic keyword fields. And they changed that a couple of years ago to 5,000 characters, which a lot of people still think that the 5,000 character limit is in place, which is Amazon’s fault.

I think they should put hard stops there. However, earlier this year Amazon made an official announcement after a lot of speculation that they were in fact going back to the 250 character limit. Amazon listed as 250 bytes, and bytes differ. A byte equals one character if it’s a letter or number. A byte can equal two characters if it’s some special question mark or special character on the keyboard, which you typically would never have in your search terms anyway.

Steve: What about spaces?

Karon: Spaces don’t count, they used to. Amazon is saying spaces don’t count in the 250 now. So you get a couple of we still stick to 250 or below instead of trying to guess how many spaces we had in there. That gives us six more characters. It’s not worth all the trouble to do that in my opinion. So now we’re back to 250. You do not have to fill out all of the search term fields or the generic keyword fields whichever one your particular category says. You can put them all in one field if you want to.

However if you go past 250 characters, Amazon will ignore everything that you’ve put into the search term fields. And people are still of the impression that because the field will actually hold the 5,000 characters, the total of five fields will hold 5,000 characters that they’re still allowed to do that. So they’ve either left 5,000 characters worth of keywords and phrases in the backend, which are probably now not being indexed or used for ranking at all because 5,000 is way more than 250, or they’re not understanding what needs to go in the back end keywords and what doesn’t.

If you have the keyword in your title, in your bullets or Amazon says in your description, then you don’t need to repeat it in your backend search term fields.

Steve: That’s interesting, so that implies that the bullet points are now indexed?

Karon: It does, and we have seen that for a very, very long time. In many style guides, not all of them, some of them are still anciently old and have never been updated. But in the updated style guides, probably about half of them tell you, you would be better off to put keywords in your title, your bullets, and your description than to put them in the search terms. Amazon makes a point of stating that the search terms are optional. They’ve said that for a very long time.

They make a point of saying that when you put anything in the backend search terms or generic keywords, whichever one you assess, that it is, to paraphrase, you’re making a suggestion. And Amazon is not in any way, shape, or form obligated to use the information you put in the search terms.

They would much prefer that it be in the copy somewhere. And this goes — my suspicion, underline the word suspicion is that eventually just like Google, Amazon will say bye-bye to the search term fields, or either they just won’t give them any credit at all whether they make it public or not like Google did with the meta keyword tag years ago.

I haven’t heard that from anybody at Amazon, but Amazon is following down the Google path from years ago with a lot of their changes. So it makes sense that they would eventually say if the keyword or phrase is that important, it needs to be in your copy not in the backend.

Steve: Here is something funny that did happen to me. So I had more than 250 characters on one of my listings at one point. And then one day for that particular listing all the sales tanked, and I wondered what happened. I looked and all of my keywords had disappeared.

Karon: Really?

Steve: Yeah, it was the weirdest thing. And then there was another listing ahead where I exceeded 250 also, and then the sales just kind of tanked one day. And then I removed almost all the keywords and just used like maybe three or five on each line, and then the sales just came back.

Karon: I see, here is something that has people confused too, because you’re hearing all these different stories like yours. Now I had never heard anything about somebody’s keywords just disappearing before, that’s a new one for me. But because there’s so many variations of what’s going on, and because Amazon historically never rolls anything out to everybody across the board at the same time, you get people that say, well I took all my keywords out and it ruined my listing. Or I went down to 250 and all my traffic going away, or the reverse, all of my traffic went away until I went to below 250 characters and then it came back.

So people get really frustrated not knowing what to do. And because every listing is unique, there are points where you’re just going to have to test and tweak and like you, you paid attention. You had things happening, you went in there, and saw, okay well I still have too many key phrases or keywords, let’s just dial it back so I might see what happens and fix the problem. So patience is key, testing is key.

Steve: So what is your best practice, what is your recommendation in general now with these keywords?

Karon: Yeah right now we are going with high le [ph] relevant search terms in the backend. We aren’t doing anything that’s extremely broad. If it’s not a synonym, a substitute for what you’re calling the product, you know if you have a stainless steel water bottle or something to that effect, some people would put water jug in the backend or something around that. If you would not substitute a water jug for this water bottle, then don’t use that is one of my rules of thumb.

It needs to be people have the mindset of, well if you’re looking for a water jug then you need something that’s going to deliver water. So maybe they would be interested in a water bottle too. To me that’s too broad.

Steve: So do you have your clients now fill out all of the 250 characters?

Karon: If they are not highly relevant and have a really good search volume, we don’t. I am not somebody that will tell you use every character available to you regardless of what you put in there, because we have seen too many times where using irrelevant keywords has actually turned around and bitten people in the rear end. You get folks with the water jug example.

They’re looking for water jug, yours pops up, and the picture maybe the water bottle kind of looks like a jug or something. So they click on it, they go over and go, this thing only holds 20 ounces, that’s not a jug, that’s a bottle, they click away. That bounce if it’s repeated over time, Amazon pays attention. And they’re going to start demoting you in the search rankings because they only want to list the products that are selling.

So when you lose your rankings you’re also going to lose your sales, or either your PPC costs are going to go way up, and you’re going to have to drive them with an additional fee through their monetary system. But there’s too many times where going broad has turned around and ruined everything. So we stick with the relevant words.

Steve: Okay and presumably though that the rankings would only go down for that specific keyword, but you’re saying that putting less relevant keywords will ruin your rankings in general. Is that correct?

Karon: Not necessarily for everything, no. I don’t have any proof that it would ruin the listing for everything. For the terms that you’ve put in there that are broad, that’s going to drag it down. However, Amazon would be looking at the listing overall is my guess. So if you’re dropping for a handful of keywords that are too broad, it’s still going to drag your data down.

Steve: Okay and so just your overall product conversion metrics is what you’re saying essentially?

Karon: Right.

Steve: Okay and then you’ve had clients where you’ve removed some of these faulty keywords and their sales have increased?

Karon: We have. We have also had clients where we have put all of the relevant keywords in the copy and had nothing in the backend, and they did wonderful. Now let me stop here and say pay attention to what I’m getting ready to tell you. I am not advocating that you do that. We ran three tests, one two, three, that’s it. So it’s in its very early stages. But to me that is a mild indicator that Amazon is actually for once in its life doing what it says, and it really does prefer to have the keywords in the copy.

So our rule of thumb at Marketing Words is put as many keywords and phrases in the title, bullet, and description as you can without it sounding stupid.

Steve: Okay, that’s good advice actually.

Karon: You don’t want to confuse or irritate customers. They’re the ones sitting there holding the credit card. Getting great rankings is awesome, but if you can’t get anybody to buy what’s the point?

Steve: So I’ve actually heard rumors also that like the first line of the keywords has more weighting than the others. Do you have any evidence of that?

Karon: I don’t, we typically at this point in time are just telling people to put everything you’ve got in the first field. But I haven’t heard anything about it being more powerful than the others.

Steve: What about the first ten characters let’s say of the title?

Karon: Not the first ten, I mean I haven’t heard anything about the first ten. What I have been told by a couple of different leadership team members at Amazon were that the first 80 were indexed and used for ranking. The others might be indexed, but at least according to these people, not necessarily used in Amazon’s ranking algorithm.

Steve: Okay, I mean I know that sometimes the total gets truncated depending on what device you are on. So it pays to put your messaging I guess towards the front of the title so it never gets truncated depending on the device and the screen size.

Karon: Right, and sometimes you’re not going to get a whole message through there. I mean the [inaudible 00:16:00], a little tiny. You get something like 35, 37 characters, that’s not a lot of space.

Steve: Yeah, so however we talked about manipulating all these keywords and titles and that sort of thing. And you know Amazon doesn’t really allow you to easily split test these things. So I was hoping we would talk about your process for doing the testing to make sure in fact that one of your changes is actually making a difference.

Karon: Yeah absolutely. There are some common mistakes that most people make when they’ve never done any testing, and they’re doing it manually. Obviously there are service tools out there that you can use to conduct split tests and what have you, but you still have to know what to test. So what we do through group, a monthly group that we have called a listing lab. It’s not a copywriting service; it won’t teach you how to write listings.

It’s specifically for testing listings you already have, is create two lists a month, two tests a month that you would do either through a tool that you have a subscription to or manually either one, and also teach people how to do the testing. So the first thing would be actually using a tool that allows you to do what’s called multivariate testing. If you’re doing things manually, you would want to make one change to your title, or one change to one bullet, or one change to your search term section or something to that effect, which is slow.

But if you go in and you take out a keyword that was in your title and put a different one in, and you tweak a bullet and you found three other search terms you think would be great in your backend, and you get wonderful results, you have no idea which of those three brought about the change. So you don’t know whether to keep tweaking your title or change some more bullets or put more keywords, or take those keywords out. So, do one test at a time, and only change one element at a time so that you are fully aware of what did or did not make a difference.

Steve: What tool did you recommend? You mentioned some tools, what have you use in the past?

Karon: Well the only thing — we don’t actually do testing as a service at Marketing Words. So what a lot of the people in Listing Lab, and a lot of our other clients use is one called Splitly.

Steve: Okay yeah.

Karon: I have not used that tool, so I can’t tell you anything about it. But I have not heard anybody that’s come back and said anything negative about it so far. There may be people, but the reports so far are good with Splitly. So if you don’t want to do all of these things manually, you can use a tool like that or something else that’s available, and set them up to run automatically.

Steve: So you recommended testing exactly one thing, letting it run for two weeks and then changing it back, right?

Karon: If it’s possible we like to do the same amount of sessions looking at traffic instead of [overlapping 00:19:21]. But with smaller listings sometimes you don’t have that luxury. If you’re only getting a few hits a day, you may just have to do the time frame and wait two weeks and take a look at it.

Steve: How many sessions are required to come to a conclusion or not a conclusion but to get a good idea?

Karon: In a perfect world you’d want to do a thousand or more.

Steve: A thousand or more sessions, okay. And how do you determine whether it’s actually statistically significant or not?

Karon: This is where you get to go looking your data, and I’m a data geek so that thrills me. But a lot of people go; oh you got to be kidding me. It’s really simple an Amazon. If you go into reports and then business report, say you looked down the left hand side, you want to look at details by child item. Even if you don’t have variations in the listing, the details by child items seems to be more specific and more accurate.

You can look at the number of sessions which tells you how many shoppers have been to your page. You can look at of course the number of sales. And in there is something called unit session percentage that is Amazon’s version of a conversion rate. So taking a look at all of these will give you a general idea about whether you’ve had success with your listing or not. If you’ve put in new search terms, look at your sessions. Has that driven more traffic, did you have the same amount of sessions when you look at the dates or the amount of traffic previously as you had in this test, or did it go up down what have you?

If you got more traffic, did that traffic result in more sales? If you got more traffic but nobody bought, then maybe you need to take those search terms out and try some other ones that would drive traffic that would convert to sales. So digging around in there, I could get lost digging around in the data all day long.

Steve: Yeah, I just have a couple of questions. I mean this isn’t really a true split test because it’s two weeks for example and then you’re changing it up in two weeks. So there just seems like there’s so many variables in play, right? There could be seasonality, there could be like a social media mention that happened that drove a lot of sales like how do you kind of factor all those things in?

Karon: That’s why you want to look at a large number of sessions when possible, because that’s usually going to happen over a longer period of time. You can also go back and look for trends. If you’ve been doing testing for a while and you’re used to looking in the data, you can go back and look at what happened over a 30 day period previously, or over a three month period previously. But you do have to be aware of your own products.

So if you have a product that’s seasonal for summer only, and you’re doing testing in January, you’re probably going to get inaccurate results. So you’ve got to incorporate some common sense into this as well. But you are correct, usually with ABs, you’ve got two tests running simultaneously, so it sort of accounts for some of these anomalies. And you can’t necessarily do that in Amazon. They will not allow you to create two identical listings and then tweak each one to run them side by side.

Steve: Right, so I guess — so this is like a very long term thing this split testing, right?

Karon: It’s not a quick fix and it’s for people who understand the value of testing and want to get in the habit of doing that every month and seeing how they’re able to improve those listings.

Steve: I was going to say like it implies that you should only do larger changes to your listing so that the changes are more obvious. So what are some of the things that you recommend people split test immediately?

Karon: Definitely the search terms. Especially with a limited number of characters that are being used by Amazon now, you want to be sure that the ones that you put back there (a) are actually helping and (b) are driving visitors to your pages that are converting. A lot of the information can be found in PPC campaigns. If sellers are running those sponsored ads, you can dig in there and find more detailed information down to the keyword level that will also help you make those determinations.

But that would be one of the first things that I would do especially with all the changes going on. I would also recommend testing the variations of keywords that you put in the title. So if you’re selling dog treats, crunchy dog treats, chewy dog treats, jerky dog treats, dog treats for allergy dogs, you’ve got all these different variations, they all still have dog treat in them. So I would suggest testing the variations of dog treat, or whatever key phrase applies to your product of course, and seeing which one of those polls better.

A lot of times people immediately go for the ones with the highest search volume, but often ones with lower search volume that are referred to as long tail key phrases that are more specific have a higher conversion rate.

Steve: Okay and so that’s just a matter of testing. I’m surprised actually that you didn’t talk about the image, like for some reason the first thing I think about in terms of conversion is the main header image.

Karon: Well Marketing Words does words. So it’s not marketing images, it’s marketing words. So we don’t have anything at all to do with images or any other part of the listing, only the ones that deal with words.

Steve: Okay, let’s talk about enhanced brand content for a little bit. Have you noticed with your clients where using this has dramatically increased conversions?

Karon: No.

Steve: No, okay interesting.

Karon: We have not. It has made some improvements, but not to the point where I’m ready to tell every seller you need to develop a branding, get into the brand registry and what have you. I have seen a lot of talk in various Facebook groups where people have said after going through everything to get the EBC listing up and the additional cost and yada, yada, yada, it was okay.

Steve: Interesting okay, because it’s a lot of work to actually put up the EBC on all of your listings?

Karon: It is, and it gets expensive. If you’re not doing the listings yourself I mean obviously it takes a lot more work for whoever is developing the listing. So if you’re not doing yourself, you’re paying that to somebody to do it, there’s an additional cost there, there’s an additional cost with Amazon. But it has not — we haven’t seen the comments from people, our clients or in other Facebook groups that have backed up what Amazon said with 25% improvements in sales and all the statistics that they originally quoted.

Some people are getting, but I would say at least half of the comments we’ve seen have been, uh it’s okay.

Steve: Okay, so in terms of priority, where should you be focusing your optimization efforts?

Karon: In the title and the bullets. The description is sometimes being indexed, sometimes the whole thing is not being indexed, sometimes you get the first however many characters that are being indexed. And honestly at this point I have not found any rhyme or reason to it. I can’t identify any common denominators at this particular point in time. The bullets however do seem to be indexed reliably. So I would focus on including the search terms in the title and in the bullet points at this point.

Steve: So a couple of minutes ago you mentioned testing the backend keywords, and then you maybe earlier in the interview you mentioned that one of your clients had nothing in their keyword fields. I was just curious what the rationale was for not having any keywords in the backend?

Karon: We wanted to see what would happen.

Steve: Okay, so it’s just a test, you don’t actually recommend this, right?

Karon: No. What I was saying do not. We did it with three listings only. I do not recommend that you run out and remove the search terms from the backend.

Steve: Okay. Let’s switch gears a little bit and let’s talk about reviews, review copy, right? Ever since Amazon has allowed people to opt out of getting e-mails, it’s been harder to get them. So it makes it even more important to kind of improve the copy on your solicitation emails so you actually get a good percentage of reviews. So what is your recommendations there?

Karon: There are a couple of things that happen that I think contribute greatly to e-mails not being opened, or customers not responding to review request emails. And one of them is that virtually every seller out there is using the exact same template that every other seller is using. The other thing is that the subject lines, people are defaulting to putting the product name and the order number in the subject line, which for a lot of people is an indicator that the message is a spam message.

They’re trying to trick you into, oh your charge of $427 for your order has been fulfilled, those kind of spammy messages, and they put the order number in there and what have you. So one thing that I recommend is doing unique review request e-mails, which is a lot more work than using the exact same template for every single product that you have.

However, we have actually had folks that have used the suggestions in the review advantage eBook that we have that emailed us back and said, you know what, I just got two thank you comments for the review request emails that we’re sending out. And that just never happened before that I’ve seen. So people are looking for helpful useful information. It all boils down to the, what’s in it for me mindset of clients.

When they get emails that all look the same and all pretty much say the same thing, and they are give me, give me give me, you know we want you to leave a review, and could you please do this, and could you click over here and give feedback, and all the information that’s in there. And then they get different emails that say, hey you just purchased this brand new skillet from us, and here’s a couple of recipes you can try, or here are some tips for keeping that brand new nonstick skillet in perfect use, some things that you may not be aware of, or here are some ways that you can do other things with the skillet besides frying. Maybe you remind them that the handle is not rubberized. It’s a metal handle, so it can go straight in the oven too.

And when you start giving information that customers find useful and helpful and are grateful for, then you increase the chances that you’re going to get reviews. You certainly do ask for a review in the email as well. Not only that but you create a lot of goodwill too.

Steve: For those resources that you mentioned, are you implying that you are linking people and taking them off to a different site or just within the email?

Karon: Within the email, absolutely not linking to another website.

Steve: Okay, and then no attachment – actually I don’t even know if you can do attachments, and nothing along those lines, right? These are simple content messages?

Karon: Right, within the email themselves. And yes certain attachments are allowed by Amazon, but what we recommend is including it in the body content of the email.

Steve: I just want to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online.

Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via e-mail, and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/free, now back to the show.

And what about the subject line. You said don’t use the product and the order number, what are some examples of emails that have been working really well for your clients?

Karon: A number of tips. Email works well for example three unique ways to use your new nonstick skillet, or five tips for getting the most from your new nonstick skillet, or something to that effect. You could also do, if there are things — I wouldn’t use this if there isn’t something urgent that needs to be said, but if there are use tips that people need to be aware of the immediately, you could say stop, or warning, or wait, don’t use your new skillet until you read this.

Steve: Interesting.

Karon: It needs to be true however. So if its — we’ve used to that for example with baby products that there was something that needed to be done with the product before the first use or what have you. So it was justified then, but don’t use that type of subject line just to get attention and then not deliver with an urgent message.

Steve: So it’s almost like running a blog and an e-mail newsletter at that point. You’re sending out content?

Karon: Mostly content with the request for the review.

Steve: Okay, and can you just talk about like the phrasing, say you provide a good piece of content and then you say something like, well if you enjoyed this content, would you mind helping us spread the word. What are some of the exact words that people have been using when you get to the review part of the e-mail?

Karon: You cannot legally say if you have done anything, then come and do this, that’s now against Amazon’s terms of service. They want these to be completely unbiased. So the review actually comes in as pretty straightforward. You say thanks for buying, here’s the information that we want to share with you, and then when you get to the request for review, you simply state, we would love to have your opinion about your new skillet, please take however many minutes and leave a product review on Amazon.

Say we understand you’re busy, if you’re willing and have a few minutes, would you please leave a review. But nothing about if you’ve loved your skillet, we’d love to have your opinion, if you appreciated the tips we’ve given, all of that. Amazon is now considered as a way to incentivize the review essentially. It’s some sort of manipulation because you’re not saying regardless of what you think, if you liked it or not come and leave a review.

Steve: Okay and your examples have implied that you should be sending out product specific e-mails. But let’s say you have too many skews to do that, what is a good I guess generic way to write the e-mail?

Karon: That would be a difficult thing to do for the approach that we take. If you have lots of different skews that are the same but different, lots of different types of shampoo for hair growth for example, but maybe one has added jojoba oil or something else, slight differences in there, you could probably write in groups and use tips that were applicable to all the different types of shampoo. But in order to use the approach that we talk about in the review advantage eBook, I don’t think you’d be able to do a generic one.

Steve: Okay, so it seems like the general like at a very high level at least, the advice is to provide some sort of value through your content, and then ask for the review?

Karon: Exactly.

Steve: Okay and then phrase the e-mail not like a receipt type of e-mail, but like a piece of content that someone would actually want to read?

Karon: Exactly.

Steve: Okay and can you just kind of comment on some of the results that you’ve had with some of the students in your class when switching over to this method?

Karon: Right, well it’s not a class, it’s just an eBook that somebody…

Steve: Oh it’s an eBook okay.

Karon: It’s an eBook, but like I mentioned before, when people have applied this we’ve gotten comments back either in the Facebook group or that have emailed to us saying that they’re actually getting thank you notices from the customers. Sometimes the customers are leaving it in Amazon feedback or in the review itself saying the information that this seller provided, one of them was child probiotic drops. And the information that the seller provided in the email he sent was extremely useful to me in knowing how to best use the probiotic drops with my eight month old or nice touch or something to that effect. And that’s not an entirely uncommon thing to have happen if you provide quality content.

Steve: Okay and it’s kind of want to conclude this interview by asking you what are some of the common mistakes that you’re still seeing people make on their Amazon listings?

Karon: Five hundred character bullets.

Steve: Five hundred character bullets okay.

Karon: They drive me crazy for a couple of different reasons. On mobile for one thing, I don’t think people pay enough attention to Amazon mobile. They work on a desktop or a laptop computer and they’re looking at their listings on Amazon. But when you 500 characters per bullet with five bullets that all show on the page depending on the layout that your listing ends up having on Amazon is a big chunk of words, and it’s really reader unfriendly. It’s even more so if you look at it on a mobile phone, and you literally have to keep scrolling three or four times to get all the information, and all the person is seeing is a big chunk of words.

We much prefer, and we have gotten much better results with bullets that are at least half that length or shorter, because you get more that show up especially in the format with the pictures at the top and the three bullets are showing at the bottom and you have to click them all, and on mobile devices where you only get the three that are going to show before you click the arrow. So shorter bullets is a biggie.

Steve: Interesting, that’s like counter-intuitive because since the bullets are indexed it seems like you’d want to put more information there. I actually personally have not noticed on my phone because there’s always a show more when I shop on Amazon on my phone which collapses everything. I actually only see like the first bullet point in fact, or the first two maybe.

Karon: But when the bullets are shorter, more show.

Karon: Okay, any other mistakes that you’ve seen? I’m sure you see a lot of plain mistakes, any other ones that come to your attention?

Karon: Yes, with the keyword research, I still think that people are going too broad; they’re not being relevant enough with Amazon.

Steve: Give me an example of that actually, a quick example.

Karon: Something that a lot of people do is they’ll go broad and use accessories. So we will go back to the water bottle example. And maybe it’s a water bottle that you can use when hiking because it has little carabiner hook to put on your backpack or what have you. They’ll put things in the search terms like camping accessories, way too broad. Yes you might be able to use water bottle while you are camping, but most people are not going to consider that a camping accessory.

Steve: Okay, got you. So it seems like the general trend that you’re advising is to just focus on less, less is more essentially?

Karon: Less is more.

Steve: Okay, well Karon I did want to give you an opportunity to talk about — like the last time we talked I think you only had maybe five or six eBooks or products available. Now I looked and I think you have over ten I want to say. So can you talk about what you have to offer, and what you’ve added lately since the last time we spoke?

Karon: Sure absolutely. The Amazon product description boot camp is something that we added a little while back, and it is a live event that is recorded. We just closed that out a couple of months ago, so it is fully updated. The replays of that webinar, which were four sessions, we went for four weeks, and all of those are now available up on our site. And I will send you Steve a coupon so that people can save 20% off of the Amazon product description boot camp.

This is very detailed. We where you through keyword research, you watch several sessions of keyword research, doing the titles, doing the bullet points, doing description, but we also get into Amazon mobile, and we also get into the basics of testing as well in all these video sessions. Something else that we added is called Listing Lab, which we talked about briefly just a minute ago.

That is a testing group, it is not of course. It’s for people who want to start testing their listings and need help figuring out what to test and how to test. That gives you two tests that I have created each month that you can either manually implement on however many listings you want, or you can use it along with a tool like Splitly or some other Amazon split testing tool if you use those types of things. So that is something that can help you gradually over time see improvements with your listings as well.

And then there’s the review advantage eBook, which is the one we just talked about that has all of the suggestions and the formatting and the how tos of how to create those review request e-mails that do include helpful content for your shoppers as well as a request for their review. And I’ll send you coupon codes for all of these.

Steve: I’ll link all this stuff up in the show notes. I do you want to just give a quick endorsement; the eBook that you offer on just Amazon listing optimization is excellent. I highly recommend everyone go pick it up. It’s really inexpensive, and it’s a no brainer.

Karon: Thank you, that’s Amazon Advantage, the Amazon Advantage eBook. I appreciate that very much.

Steve: Well Karon I appreciate your time, and thanks a lot for coming on the show.

Karon: Thank you, see you next time.

Steve: All right, take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Copywriting plays a huge role in sales, and it’s nice to get it straight from someone who has helped hundreds of ecommerce store owners improve their sales. For more from information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode194.

And once again I want to thank Privy.com for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools that make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop ups for any primer that is closely tied to your ecommerce store. If you want to give it a try, it is free. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now, I talk about how I use all these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.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.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Now we all know Greg as the founder of Jungle Scout, but most people don’t know that Greg is actually a digital nomad. He runs a multi-million dollar e-commerce business as well as a multi-million dollar software company, while traveling the world with no home base. And today we’re going to find out how he does it.

But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Privy who is a sponsor of the show. Now, Privy is the tool I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now what does Privy do? Well, Privy is an email list growth platform, and they manage all of my email capture forms, and in fact I use Privy hand in hand with all of my email marketing providers.

Now there are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. Right now, I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store. Customers love the gamification aspect of this, and when I implemented this form, email sign ups increased by 131%.

There are other cool things that you can do too also. For example let’s say you offer free shipping for orders over 100 bucks, well you can tell Privy to flush a pop up when the customer has $90 in their shopping cart to urge them to insert one more item. So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, and try it for free. And if you decide that you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ For 15% off.

Now I also want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. Now, I’m always blessed to have Klaviyo as a sponsor because they are the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store, and I actually depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. And right now with the holidays, they are close to 30% of my revenues. Now, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform I’ve ever used, and you can actually try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today I’m happy to have to have Greg Mercer back on the show. Never heard of Greg, he’s the founder and owner of Jungle Scout, and actually a bunch of other tools now including Fetcher, Splitly, Jump Send, and there maybe a couple other ones that I can even remember off the top of my head. In addition, Greg makes a killing selling on Amazon. I think last time I interviewed him; he was doing 400K per month. Who knows how much he makes now with his physical products.

But anyways, I’ve known the guy for quite a while now, and he’s actually spoken at my conference the Sellers Summit multiple times. And one thing that’s always intrigued me about Greg is that he truly lives a nomadic lifestyle. And in fact, every time I chat with the guy, he seems to be in a different country. And meanwhile, while he’s traveling, he’s sitting there running his multiple seven or eight figure businesses. So today I thought we would kind of dabble a little deeper, and figure out exactly how he does it. And with that, welcome to the show Greg, how are you doing today man?

Greg: Steve, I’m doing fantastic. I appreciate you having me back. It’s always a blast talking to you, and yeah this has been a fun topic. It is something I have never really talked about like on a podcast or live before, kind of like my nomadic lifestyle. I mean people kind of — some people know I’m a nomad, but like not really getting into the weeds of this topic. So this is going to be – it’s going to be a great episode.

Steve: Just curious, where are you are right now?

Greg: I am in Budapest in Hungary.

Steve: Budapest, Hungary. Last time I talked to you I think you were in Canada, right, or Vancouver. And then you were in Spain, the last time also, another time, crazy.

Greg: Yeah, I don’t remember, it’s something like that.

Steve: So do you actually have a home base?

Greg: I have no home Steve. I sold — at one point I had a home. This was like three years ago. I sold it, my wife and I we sold our house, all our stuff, our cars. So literally everything I own, all my material possessions fit inside a small backpack in a carry on rolling suitcase.

Steve: That’s crazy. So your wife is like that too?

Greg: Yeah, my wife’s like that too. I was a little bit scared when we got started with this lifestyle. So I don’t know if this is for her. She’s – or should I say pretty light.

Steve: This is recorded.

Greg: Lots of clothes and shoes and kind of things like that. So I was like, man I don’t know if she can really do this, but she loves it. She jumped right on, same thing she just carries our child with one carryon suitcase and stuff, and yeah she doesn’t want to quit.

Steve: Cool man. Well, I don’t know too many physical product nomads. I know a lot of digital product nomads. So you’re definitely the minority, and I kind of want to know how you manage to pull it off, actually especially with your physical products. So I know you’re still selling on Amazon, right?

Greg: Yes, exclusively on Amazon.

Steve: And how many skews actually do you actually have at this point?

Greg: I don’t have that many skews. I think it’s under 200, under 250 or so.

Steve: Okay, so that’s still a good number of skews, right?

Greg: Yeah, I mean it’s all relative.

Steve: Yeah, so how do you manage to sell so many skews, and still be travelling around all over the place, like what is your process — let’s say you want to launch a new product, like what is your process without a home base?

Greg: Yeah, good question. That’s one of the first of so great about like Amazon FBA, right? We’re shipping stuff to their warehouses. But I do have — I have like three people on my team that run my physical products company, so they can accept like samples. But to be completely honest with you, I’m actually most of the time not even getting samples anymore.

Steve: No way, okay.

Greg: Yeah like we have this one company in Hong Kong that will accept samples, and the nice thing about that is they can get on like the next day being shipped out from China. They just like with their cell phone just record like a quick video of it, of like three to five minutes of them putting it together like trying to like gauge quality and stuff. And then they throw it away, I don’t know what they do with it after that.

So we’ve really actually, we’ve gone down to like never touching anything anymore. So you like they send us little videos of the sample, we never touch inventory because I get shipped from the factory straight to Amazon’s distribution centers. We just dispose of returns.

So it’s very much like it’s hard for me to fathom. It’s like I wonder like how many boxes I have in like Amazon’s warehouse. So if I were to look at all of them, it’s like would it take up — like I have no idea how much space it would take up. I mean would be like it’s…

Steve: It’s probably like a whole warehouse, yeah.

Greg: Heinous yeah.

Steve: Because I know you do oversize products too, right?

Greg: Yeah, I do a lot of like big and oversized stuff now. So it probably would be like, I don’t know, a 2,000 square foot warehouse? I have no idea honestly.

Steve: So how did you hook up with these Hong Kong people?

Greg: It was a recommendation of a friend. They started off actually just as a kind of a sourcing agent for us. To be honest, they didn’t do that kind of a job and thus, so they don’t do that particular task force anymore. But like another kind of job that we just asked them if they’d be able to do would be like sample inspections and they said yes. So we’ve kept them on for that, and don’t really use them as a sourcing agent anymore.

Steve: Can you talk about the sample inspection process, like how do you convey to them what you’re looking for?

Greg: Yeah, a good question. We don’t necessarily actually convey what we’re looking for. They’re pretty good about just like any sample they receive. Let’s just pretend like they receive like a chair. They’re pretty good at like understanding like, okay this is a chair; these will probably the types of things that they’d be looking for. So they will try to assemble it, they will like note if they had any troubles like assembling it, or maybe like a screw didn’t line up right.

Then they will like sit on it and stand on it and kind of jump on it, maybe like drop it from a couple of feet in the air. They do this online video, and they’re pretty good about being like, look at this like this edge. This edge didn’t come out of the mold very well, there’s a little like piece of plastic on it, or they’re inspecting it like a fabric. They’re pretty good at being like this feels relatively thick to us, things like that. We don’t necessarily say like, these are the 20 bullet points that we want you to look for in the sample inspection.

Steve: Okay, so did you have to train these people, or is this like kind of what they do for a living?

Greg: This isn’t what they do for a living. It’s a pretty like — not sketchy but kind of like Mom and Pop operation. This wasn’t exactly like an official thing that they do. We just asked them. Like I said, they were sourcing agents; we asked them to do this. And yeah it’s just this one young lady, like I said, she’s records everything on her cell phone, and that’s it.

Steve: And so you had to establish trust with this person at some point, right?

Greg: Yeah absolutely.

Steve: Okay, and did they take on new clients like with the listeners?

Greg: I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re too interested in it. We only pay them I think like 30 bucks or something to do that. So I don’t think it’s a very good moneymaker for them. I don’t even think they have a website to be honest with you. I don’t even think I could send traffic somewhere if I wanted to.

Steve: How did you find them in the first place?

Greg: A recommendation of a friend.

Steve: Okay. So if I paid him like 50 bucks or 60 bucks and said, don’t take any more customers from Greg, that will be…

Greg: On top of the goal, just say real quick that that’s only like one part of it. I still I actually do quite a few inspections now during manufacturing process as well. So I’ll do one during the manufacturing process, I get a whole bunch of pictures and information from that, and then I’ll do a final inspection before I ship a container as well. So this sample inspection is only a small part of it, because like anyone can make one good sample anyways. That’s why I don’t really take sample inspections like really that seriously anymore. It’s more so like, okay what do you actually produce on the production line?

Steve: What do you use for your inspections at the factory?

Greg: Asia Inspection.

Steve: Asia Inspection okay.

Greg: I think what’s one of the other big ones? I think we started using this other one, V-Trust or something, is that one of the other big ones?

Steve: There’s a whole bunch of them, like there’s like [inaudible 00:10:59], KRT Inspect yeah. Asia Inspection I think is like pretty cheap and a lot of people use them.

Greg: Yeah they’re pretty inexpensive. Yeah I would recommend them for anyone listening to this. I don’t have anything bad to say about them, like the user interface on the website is also — I mean it’s like a little bit junky, but it’s fairly like convenient as far as like communicating through like messages, and they can also do all the other inspections. Like if you have like a baby product or you have whatever else like a lab testing, they can do all that as well, so yeah.

Steve: So when you were — before you guys, before you had these guys, you were doing your inspections I would imagine, right?

Greg: You mean like…

Steve: The sample inspections, sorry.

Greg: Yeah sample inspections I was doing myself. I mean I could still do that, like I could still mail like one of the people who work for me could still receive samples, or I could still like mail samples to wherever I’m living at in the world, right? I mean what’s the difference between mailing a sample to Budapest versus the States?

Steve: I guess so, I guess you just have to be familiar — or if it’s just a sample, I guess it’s not a problem.

Greg: Right, it ships to my Airbnb, leave it there, give them a little…

Steve: Okay, and then you get the inspections, and then you just send everything off to Amazon directly, right?

Greg: Yeah.

Steve: What about when bad things happen, like can you talk about like a crisis situation that you’ve dealt with like while you’re traveling and kind of how you handled it?

Greg: With bad products or just any type of crisis?

Steve: Just any type of crisis, because I’m thinking to myself like we can leave for extended periods with our store, but sometimes like things come up that we just have to handle, like sometimes we’ll have to go back and handle it, or it just seems like I wouldn’t feel comfortable being away like all year round and just leaving this company running by itself.

Greg: Yeah. I can’t really think of like — so of course we have bad things happen to our companies all the time, I mean it’s just like part of business. But I don’t know, maybe just because like I kind of had this mindset, I can’t really think of anything that would be like difficult, or that’s more difficult for me to handle since like traveling. I’ve never really been the type to want to like handle inventory anyway. I don’t want to unload containers like myself at any point anyway. So I mean I don’t know how that for sure would help, yeah I don’t know.

Steve: Do you use any tools to just help you manage all these things as they go, to manage all your physical products and just figure out what the heck is going on at any given time? Like 200 skews is still quite a bit, right?

Greg: Yeah, you’re talking about like inventory management?

Steve: Inventory management, just people management.

Greg: Yeah so I guess like as far as like how I communicate with my team, it’s like over Slack and Trello. Trello is like our project management tool. That’s where we like put in the things in there that need to be done. We manage like POs in there, and really everything is managed in there. You just kind of know like, hey Greg, we need you to pay this, or a question, or what do you think about this product or whatever.

As far as like our inventory management, we use Forecastly [ph] for that. It works really well. Actually it has — they released like PO management inside there recently too, we need to switchover, tried using that inside Trello. But that’s about it really as far as like managing inventory goes, because we don’t do any FBM, fulfilled by merchant or anything like that.

Steve: Okay, and then we were talking earlier about how you started focusing on like oversize products. Can you kind of talk a little about like what are some of the complicated things related to that? I guess it doesn’t really matter since you don’t touch anything, but just curious what your thoughts are.

Greg: Yeah there’s still outsource some tips for the listeners though, like for example you have to be really careful with your shipping charges when you’re shipping these like big products. I saw some things that only like 300 or 400 units will fit in a 40 foot container. So it’s like those like pretty big products, you have to be careful that you’re really mindful of all the shipping charges. So it’s not necessarily — I think everyone has a good understanding of getting a container from the US to like the West Coast or whatever.

But depending on what warehouses Amazon is shipping them to you have to be pretty – you can get kind of get screwed and get — if you’re shipping into LA, and then have to send like three DCs that are like pretty far away, accumulate like fairly substantial cost compared to if you’re sending the whole thing into Moreno Valley. But keep in mind for anyone listening that you can create the shipping plans like as far in advance as you want. I don’t know about any limit.

So we will create them pretty early on. And also keep in mind, a little hack for everyone is like if you get a crappy shipping plan, you can delete it, you know delete the whole shipping plan. I’m not talking about like an individual DC, but delete the whole shipping plan, and try again in a couple days and see if you get a better one. So that is kind of a little bit of a hack that we actually use. We will like you know for like a whole month we might try to create like ten different shipping plans until we get one that we think is probably like the best one that we will get.

Steve: Who do you use for your freight forwarding?

Greg: I use Flexport.

Steve: Flexport okay.

Greg: Yeah they’re pretty good. I don’t think their rates are the best, but they do have like a really good platform, it’s really convenient. Once you’re set up in there, it’s like it’s not worth saving a little money to go with someone else for me.

Steve: So what’s your process for like an oversize product? Obviously you’re not buying a full container right off the bat, right? Like how do you test it?

Greg: Like if only 400 or 500 units in a container then yeah we definitely buy a whole container. We actually — we pretty much actually exclusively now order quantities based off how many fit in a container, so either 20 foot or 40 foot container. So that’s kind of like one of the first question we ask, how many fit in 20 foot container, how many fit a 40 foot container and then order inventory in those multiples.

Steve: I see, even like that’s just like a test order, right? You just try one container?

Greg: Yeah.

Greg: Okay, and so what do you do with this stuff like especially the oversize stuff that doesn’t move at all?

Greg: I never really have this problem, like I have — well I mean like of course some stuff like sells better than others. But if stuff ever like not moving fast enough, we only really go after products that we think we can sell like quite a few like at least like 300 or 400 a month minimum, but usually we shouldn’t be surprised, we could be something like 800 or 1,000 a month. So if they’re not moving as fast as we want to, we’re pretty aggressive like with the giveaways, or like giving out coupons or spending more on PPC or lowering the price until it starts moving.

And pretty much like our plan is like we’re either going to be selling at least like 500 units a month of these things, or we’re going to break even or lose a little bit of money and never order it again. We don’t have any skews that only sell like 50 units a month or something like that. We just would not let that happen. We do, do like keep dropping the prices until it starts moving really fast.

Steve: Okay. Can you talk; can you be more specific about kind of like what your process is like for a launch then? So let’s say you’ve launched something, and within the first month like how many units would you expect to sell before you start doing anything? Or do you start with giveaways to begin with?

Greg: We start with giveaways. So the launch process would be, we put the price at — so let’s say our goal for this price is sell for 50 bucks when we first put it up there. We’ll put the price like $50, but we’ll be giving away coupons for like I don’t know, we usually sell like 75% off. I would do that for the first like probably like two weeks, maybe giveaway like five or ten coupons a day. And of course we use Jump Send; I’m a little biased because it is our product. I think it’s the best.

So we give away like five or ten coupons every day for like well say like two weeks, and then we kind of see where the product is at by then. Usually by the end of two weeks, we’ve gotten like a few reviews just from these people like buying at a discount, or you’ll probably get a few organic sales in there as well. At that point that’s usually when we turn on PPC. So like we kind of stop coupons at that point. We turn on PPC with a really aggressive bid. So we’re ranking like number one for off like our main terms, and we’ll also decrease the price.

I think I said the target price of 50 bucks. So we’ll decrease the price to maybe like $35, $40. So it’s like a really good deal and we’re super aggressive on PPC. And at that point it usually continues to sell well without any more coupons because they’re probably like all the sales are probably mostly the sales from PPC, it’s a really good price, it’s price well below any other competitors, so that sales velocity keeps up. We can usually do that for like two, three, four weeks.

At the end of that point we’re usually ranking well for our keywords and that’s when we just slowly start to climb the price back up to our target price, and at this point it’s been a couple months. We at least have 20, 30, 40 reviews by then, and then that’s it. So I mean we definitely lose money in the first month, second month, the goal is probably like to break even, and then I look at all these like a long term type game, right? So like month three maybe we only have like five or 10% margins. Hopefully by month four or by month five, we have 25, 30% margins.

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So in the beginning your PPC, like you don’t even care what the end cost is, you’re just trying to move units.

Greg: That’s exactly right, because the biggest thing in Amazon’s ranking algorithm for keywords as far as in my opinion at least is sales velocity. That’s what we’re going after is just sales velocity. So that’s why we don’t really — as I said earlier, it’s not like I’m like just so amazing at choosing these products. I said earlier like we don’t really have products that just don’t move, we’re just really aggressive until they start moving well.

Steve: So let me ask you this, given your strategy then, like could you just pick a pro — like it seems like you’re a little bit more haphazard probably isn’t the right word, but you’re probably willing to go into more competitive niches with this launch strategy?

Greg: Not necessarily. So like we have a pretty like set criteria when we’re looking for these products, we’re looking for something that has really good demand, but it’s the lower end of competition for that amount of demand. So we definitely take a very data driven approach to what products we launch.

And also say for anyone not kind of familiar with my Amazon strategy that I have no cohesive or like well put together product lines at all. Also a comb and a lamp and a chair and the bumper for your Ford and like whatever else, I have no like nice cohesive like brands. It’s all just totally random stuff; whatever the data tells me is going to do well.

Steve: Okay, and then, so can you just kind of quantify those guidelines for people who haven’t heard them before?

Greg: Yeah so of course I’m using Jungle Scout since I’m the founder of it, but this is — I’m looking for existing demand in a particular niche. So all like let’s say I’m going to sell — I’m not very creative. Right next to me is a stainless steel water bottle; we use that as an example. I’ll search for stainless steel water bottle, or maybe even just water bottle. And if I want to sell this product, I have to see that there’s existing strong demand across the niche.

So when I search that, I run Jungle Scout, I look at how much demand there is for those particular products, and I want like at least 2,000 but preferably like 3,000 or 4,000 units of demand total throughout the niche. That just lets me know that there’s that many people searching on Amazon for this type of product and purchasing it. So that’s like the validation I need to know that there’s strong demand in this particular niche.

And then the easiest way to gauge competition is the number of reviews. It’s not only the social proof that the number of reviews gives that tells you how competitive a niche is, but it’s also like the sales velocity and sales history of a particular listing which again in my opinion is a major ranking factor. So niches that have a lower amount of reviews or less competitive.

So I just look for like in the top two results. I like to see like three or four sellers with maybe like under 50 reviews, and to me that would be like a good indicator that it’s not very competitive. So those are like basic demand and competition metrics that I use.

Steve: Is that why you’ve kind of strayed to like oversize products, because it tends to be a lot less competitive in that area?

Greg: Yeah the oversize products are definitely less competitive right now. Also we are doing like some more high dollar stuff, and again is little bit less competitive there just because it’s a higher barrier of entry.

Steve: Okay and I’m just curious, like whenever I talk to you, it just seems so easy, you know what I’m saying? You’re like yeah, never had any problems with quality and what not.

Greg: I’ve definitely had quality problems.

Steve: Okay, how about this, so let’s talk about like a little bit of vendor negotiation here. So let’s say you go through your factory inspections, certainly you’ve had problems where like on the inspection line things haven’t gone so hot, right?

Greg: For sure.

Steve: So what is your next steps when that happens? Assuming you don’t even have a relationship really with this vendor yet.

Greg: Yeah, so it’s definitely going to case by case basis. And I’ll just say like when you talk about like quality problems, I feel like probably like 70% of our inspection reports like fail based off like Asia Inspection standards. So definitely like lots of quality problems, but it’s really — then it’s like, okay let’s look at the reasons it failed, and they have like different grading scores, like oh it can only have seven minor defects or two major, one critical, whatever they are.

So, this is why especially like on higher dollar orders, or like orders where I’m ordering a few containers at a time, I’m doing DUPRO inspections, during productions inspections. So I feel like early on, so maybe if they’re making me 1,000 units, this inspection is done when only like a 100 units are done — are completed.

And the reason that these work really well, I’m a big fan of these now, and if you’re listening to this and you’re placing like smaller orders like a couple of a thousand bucks, and what I’m talking about here doesn’t make sense. But when you’re ordering like a $30,000 order, or a $40,000 order, like these bigger orders, then it’s like 200 bucks for inspection is a no brainer.

But if you can get feedback after like the first 10% of units are done, then at that point it’s pretty easy to work with the factory, show them the inspection reports, like look, Asia Inspection said you failed this inspection, these are the reason. So like these threads don’t match up, this loose thread is supposed to be cut off, you’re leaving it hanging off or whatever. So at that point it’s like it’s fairly easy for them to fix those 10% of units and correct it afterwards.

And I have in my original agreement with them different scenarios about them failing inspections, and how we handle it. So like I can opt for like a discount, and this will be on the final inspection. So I can opt for like a discount, or they have to fix it, or like different scenarios like that. So because we already have that agreement in place, I feel like they’re pretty — they don’t want to give me like a 20% discount, right? They would rather – it’s easier to fix the 10% units and stop screwing up on it. So yeah, it’s kind of like my…

Steve: So basically you iron out these defects early on in the process. So where do you schedule your inspections, at what point in terms of the production?

Greg: Like 10% or 20% would be a good – it’s like my preferred one for like the DUPRO inspection. And then all these bigger orders, I always do a final inspection, and that’s when the goods are finished, about to be loaded into the container.

Steve: Okay, and then and then it’s just off to Amazon directly.

Greg: Yup, you’re right.

Steve: Okay, have you ever had any problems with people hijacking you, taking your buy box, like you reporting them and then like it’s like playing whack a mole, because like every other day someone is hijacking you?

Greg: Yeah of course like any Amazon seller who has a bunch of skews has this problem. But I feel like it’s not as like widespread as what like if you like in the Facebook groups would make you believe. I don’t know if I don’t have that problem as much because if you’re selling the silicon grill gloves in a plastic bag, it’s like very easy to like hijackers to say it’s the same product.

But if you look at like my Jungle Snogs [ph] on Amazon, it’s like a very like customized box and there’s like changes to it, and that’s like representative of a lot of my products that have like this a little bit like nice or like very customized box, so it’s probably changed the actual product. So I think I’m very like less susceptible to hijackers because it’s like, well yeah I don’t have whatever the stainless steel water bottle that’s really that tall and skinny with that logo printed on the side of it, right?

I do have people that like hop on my listings. I only have like one unit that probably you bought it with a discount, and then selling it, like something really bent out of shape of that, but it’s like whatever dude. It’s like one, they steal one sale from you, life goes on, I don’t lose any sleep or care about that. But I don’t have that many problems with people who like try to get on my listing with like 300 units in stock. Sure it’s happened to me like a handful of times, but it’s not a major issue by any means.

Steve: So you have 200 screws right now, do you kind of just let those coast, meaning like it’s too hard to do micromanaging on all those skews? So once you’ve done your launch and you have your PPC, and sales are coming in, do you just kind of let it ride at that point for the most part?

Greg: Yeah for the most part. Yeah I mean they take a little bit of management or kind of optimization, or like if we sold 700 units last month, but this month we only sold like 250, then it’s like we need to go in here and figure out what the heck is going on. But there’s not much like ongoing work once you’ve set up like a great listing that’s doing well that has solid reviews and all that kind of stuff. It’s like one of the beauties about FBA.

Steve: Are you are using enhanced brand content at all?

Greg: Yeah for sure. So we do that on all of our listings.

Steve: On all of your listings okay. And for the ones that aren’t converting that well, what are some things that you look for or how do you do your analysis?

Greg: Yeah good question. I’m a big fan now of like a competitive matrix. So like comparing your product against other top sellers on Amazon, we’ll go and do that if items aren’t converting well. Let’s see, we spend pretty good money like on nice lifestyle images, I’m a pretty big fan of those. Let’s think what else…

Steve: I guess when you find something that isn’t covering that well, like what are your first steps?

Greg: I’d probably look — my first steps would be to look at the competition and just try like think from a neutral buyer, why aren’t they buying my product as opposed to the competition? Does it seem like a price sensitive crowd? Do my competitors just have much better reviews? Do they have much better listings as far as images and that kind of stuff goes?

So probably step one is just to look at the competition and just — it’s always like so hard to know for sure. But I feel like I’m pretty good at guessing like, okay if I search right now standing desk light or whatever, it’s like, okay understand why these top few are the best sellers, it’s like they have the best price, get great reviews, is the nice listing. Yeah the majority — and then of course one part of it might just be like poor ranking for your main keywords. And if that’s the case, then you have other problems besides listing optimizations.

Steve: So how do you boost the rankings for your main keywords? Do you do anything special?

Greg: Increased sales velocity. And so we might give away more coupons, we might get more aggressive like on our PPC bids even if we’re losing money on the ACOS.

Steve: Okay, so you do it kind of — you don’t get any tricks or grey hat tactics too?

Greg: No, I’ve kind of like experimented with some of that stuff, it’s like kind of fun to do. But I don’t — I think it’s like a waste, mostly that’s a waste of time versus like little like you have to join this webinar to know this special hack. I joined it, it’s like I tried this crap doesn’t work.

Steve: What about promotions, do you do like buy one get one free or quantity discounts on some of your listings to help them move, or do you just typically issue coupons Jump Send?

Greg: So for my initial promotion it’s just Jump Send, but if you went on a bunch of my listings right now, you would see that like if you buy two, you get a 10% discount, or like little things like that, or buy these two together if I do have two like products that go together nicely, and get 10% discount. So I do, do some stuff like that to try to increase sales velocity.

Steve: I’m just curious like as you are split testing your listings, which aspects of a listing actually have the greatest effect on conversions?

Greg: Price and — the two things that will make the biggest difference on split testing your listing is the price and the main image. Bullet points and description are pretty much a waste of time as far as I’m concerned. The title can help a little bit, but it’s mostly your main image to get people onto your listings, that’s like some more increased sessions. Most sellers on Amazon depending on what niche you’re selling in are fairly price sensitive, so price helps a lot.

And then after that if you’re like your sessions are good, your price is really competitive, but it’s still converting poorly, that’s when I’d usually try to make the rest of my images better with those things I was talking about like competitive matrix, really nice lifestyle images. Also like most of our images now will call out the features that are like our unique selling proposition on the actual images.

So you know like if it’s a little bit bigger or taller or it has this improvement that the other listing doesn’t, we’ll have like a little — the text on the image that kind of points to that and like really calls that stuff out. That type of stuff seems to work well. I don’t think many people actually read like description. So whatever you want the customer to know, put that on your images.

Steve: So given that you just said that, would you say that enhanced brand content is like last priority then?

Greg: I don’t — it’s so hard to know, right? Like we did some testing with some of these enhanced brand content, and it seemed like some listing — I see different numbers floating around there. But like in our actual experience, it seems like some listings it does help conversion rate a little bit than others. It didn’t seem to matter. I doubt that it ever hurt though. And our thing is like we usually have quite a few images from the photographer, like from our initial photos.

So it’s like at that point it’s fairly easy to put some extras in enhanced brand content. I also always I’m worried that Amazon is going to start charging for enhanced brand content, and I feel like if you already have it, then it’ll probably be grandfathered in. So we pretty much always immediately like go ahead and at least like throw up a few images for the enhanced brand content.

Steve: Okay, yeah I guess that make — I mean if you have the resources and the wherewithal to do it, you can just do it right away, right?

Greg: Yeah in my opinion.

Steve: Okay, let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk – we kind of strayed from this whole nomad thing.

Greg: Sure.

Steve: But what people don’t realize is that you’re running these physical products and you’re running this pretty big software company as well. And so, how do you kind of split your time between the two, and how do you manage a team while you’re just all over the place?

Greg: Yeah, good question. So I spend the vast majority of my time on the software business. So I would I spend a maximum of three or four hours a week on my physical products company. I have a really good manager over there. I really like empowered him to like take action and use his best judgment, and he’s done a really good job with that. So not that I don’t have good managers on the software stuff too, but I guess the software stuff just like excites me a little bit more. It’s a little bit more fun for me, probably just maybe because I have been doing this long, or I don’t know.

So yeah the software side of things, it’s grown to I think probably like 35 people on the team now or so. Since the inception, it’s been a remote company. So like kind of all of our communication and project management and all this kind of stuff has been built from the ground up to be a remote company. I feel like that’s like kind of one of our keys to success.

And even — it even goes as far as like our hiring and our recruitment, we look for like specific traits in people that we think will like thrive in a remote environment, whereas other people are only better like in going to work and kind of like held accountable in that kind of. So all the project management is in the cloud, we use all like the Google tools as far as like sheets and whatever.

Steve: So there is no physical office, right? Like even for people who are all just happen to be in the same area, you don’t have an office rented for them that they go in, right? Everyone works from home?

Greg: So we actually just like three months ago rented an office in Vancouver because we had like ten people that live in Vancouver. So we ended up getting a little office there. But other than that everyone, just about everyone works from co-working spaces though, which I’m a huge fan of as opposed to working from home. So we reimburse everyone for their co-working spaces, and not many people work from home, almost everyone works from co-working spaces.

Steve: Can you kind of comment since you do both software and physical products, like if you were to start all over again and you just wanted to just make some money to maybe quit your job or whatever, which route would you take? What are like kind of like the pros and cons of each?

Greg: Yeah that’s a good question. So if I was trying to make kind of let’s say like replace my real job income, let’s say like 5K a month, maybe 8K a month or something like that, I would probably actually go with the physical products business. And I would start — of course I’m a fun of selling on Amazon. So I would kind of start there. I’ve been very fortunate with the software stuff; I’ve had really good timing. I had a product that had good product market fit, and I kind of took a lot of that for granted in the earlier days until I got more involved with other kind of people who were just like in the software type communities.

And I mean there’s a reason that like in VC funding, and rarely see around stuff are so prevalent in like the software space, because it’s very rare for like a company like Jungle Scout to start off like bootstrapped without much self funding and be able to make it. That’s a pretty rare story kind of like in the space, especially if you don’t have a programming background, just because hiring developers is so costly.

So if you were a developer, then maybe I’d say you could think about bootstrapping a product, and you could definitely — it’s definitely achievable to get to the 5K or 10K a month mark. But if you’re not a – especially if you’re not a developer, I’d definitely go with the physical products throughout.

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It just seems like for most people who aren’t developers they think that physical products might have like much higher initial outlay than like a software. I’m sorry if you are a developer, it seems like there’s a lot more money involved in starting a physical products business as opposed to a software business, but it seems like it’s the opposite?

Greg: Yeah, I would almost argue the opposite. But most of your big cost in the early days for a software company is going to be your development costs. So if you’re a programmer or you’re doing it yourself, then you’d have that argument.

Steve: Okay and then so for like a physical products business, like realistically how much can you start with, in your opinion, like how much you need?

Greg: If you’re trying to do the private label thing, it’s pretty tough to do with less than like two or $3,000 getting started. If you have $5,000, it’s fairly easy. If you have like 10K or more, than I’d say like you can get started and grow a decent size company like relatively quickly. So I’d say those to be like some rough guidelines, but of course there’s lots of outliers out there. People are puzzled with their first hundred bucks and now are doing really well and stuff like that.

Steve: What are your views on like the drop shipping models that you’re seeing? Every time I go to my Facebook feed, I see all these different business models, and I’m just kind of curious what your take is on all the different ones out there.

Greg: Good question, because I see these things all the time too, and I’m intrigued by it because it seems so like popular right now. Even like when I do like a Facebook live, it never fails that anyone says like, what you think about drop shipping. And I may not be like very educated about how people are doing it nowadays. I always think that more like I’ll call it traditional drop shipping of maybe like ten years ago where you have — you establish relationships with social wholesalers that are willing to drop ship these items for you.

You’re just in charge of selling the product at your e-commerce site. I haven’t really heard of many people that are like very successful with that particular model today. But I think — I mean do you know much about like what else people are doing today. It’s almost what you’re saying now, there’s like what I’m going to call like less legitimate businesses, like you sell a product on eBay, and people would do it off Amazon Prime, and send it to that person, right? But that’s not like a legitimate like long term business, that’s like just like a little hack until your prime account gets shut down.

Steve: Yeah, I was just curious; I mean I answer these questions every day actually.

Greg: Are there people like doing like a good job with the like what’s called modern or new drop shipping models?

Steve: Well, it’s always an uphill battle, right? You might have something that works, but then like a couple of months later it goes away. So it’s not really like a sustainable type of business in my opinion. I was just curious what your take was since you’re kind of more in tune with the people that are doing these various things on Amazon.

Okay let’s go back to the nomad thing. And so how soon can you actually become a nomad? Do you think like when someone is starting out, like what do you recommend people starting out, like if they want your lifestyle Greg with Amazon? Obviously you don’t recommend that they ship everything straight there on their first try, do you? Or like what’s like the kind of gradual steps to build up to your lifestyle?

Greg: Yeah, good question. Let me start by telling you and I keep saying [inaudible 00:45:03]. All right so first real quick as far as like the Nomad type lifestyle goes, like Southeast Asia is like super high like very nomadic type people, like in Shanghai or different cities in Bali and like that area. It’s like a really high quality of life for very inexpensive. It’s like if you’re living in like a US city right now especially on the west coast, you’ll be amazed like that year, your cost of life has decreased by 80% if you move to like one of those countries.

So you can get started at it without much money. You just need to be mindful or kind of like I guess how much runway is in your bank account, about how quick you need to be making money. I took a little bit more like conservative approach, where I guess I like replaced my income. And then before I quit my job, before I sold my stuff, before I started becoming a nomad, but like looking back I actually wish I would have done it earlier just because like what I know now, it’s like I wish I was just focused on this way earlier. I guess I was just like scared of it at the time.

But I think your question was what are the steps to move up to that? I think it would scare most people to just order a thousand units from China and have it shipped straight to China. So it’s like you’ll probably want to ship it to your house so you can like look and feel and hold these products that you just spent like your hard earned money on before you ship it into Amazon. That’s fine until you understand that.

Steve: For 1,000 units, do you recommend getting an inspection?

Greg: It will depend on the cost of the whole order to me. If it’s under like 2,000 bucks, then I probably, I wouldn’t do an inspection. You could — actually for my first like two years, I never did a single inspection.

Steve: Yeah, same here man, same here.

Greg: And I don’t have very many horror stories, like fingers crossed. So it’s definitely not required, but one thing I always did do is I made my sales rep take a whole bunch of pictures and videos just with their cell phone for me. And I actually had this written into the contract. So I’d be like, you have to take a picture on the assembly line, you have to take a picture of one of the first like the first carton being loaded up, and you have to take a picture before you close the doors of like the container and stuff like that.

So that’s kind of like a poor man’s inspection, right? Of course it’s going to be a little bit biased because the sales rep like choose which pictures to take, but it does help you spot like some issues. Like wait a second, this is mostly white; you just paint it red, like that would jump out in like this type of a poor man’s inspection.

Steve: Yeah that makes sense. We kind of did that too, but the problem is our stuff was fabric, and there was always fabric qualities that we had problems with, like not necessarily the design. Okay, that’s a good tip actually, so poor man’s inspection, first couple of units, ship it to your house, and then manually ship it over to Amazon for your first couple of units. Do you recommend like if you have a tight budget, how would your launch change, launch strategy change? Would you still kind of do the giveaways and then the heavy on PPC and lose money, do you feel like that’s a requirement?

Greg: Not necessarily, but if my goal — if you’re listening to this right now, it’s like, all right Greg, like I have a job, I want to quit my job and start traveling like what you’re doing. I would actually probably go into like a lesser competitive niche and just understanding that like I’m probably going to sell like a 100 units a month. But it’s like, all right, well a 100 units a month, if you’re making five bucks profit on each one, $500 profit a month, like you’re well on your way to — that’s like a great start to like getting to your goal.

The nice thing about those lesser competitive niches it’s like once you have like five reviews, and you did like you gave away like 20 units or whatever, don’t spend too much on PPC, then it’s a much more cost effective way to get started, because if you’re brand new, you only have a few thousand dollars to spend, it’s probably a little bit gut wrenching to like lose a thousand bucks the first month in PPC overspend, right?

Steve: Yeah totally. So in terms of like a less competitive niche, are you talking like a couple of hundred – like it sells maybe like a 1,000 units across the whole niche per month?

Greg: Yeah probably like 1,000 units and then like in that top ten. Like one dude has 100 reviews, the rest have like 20, 30, 40, and there’s a few guys in there with a handful of reviews that are still doing well.

Steve: Okay, so basically you’re advising them to just kind of get their feet wet, and just make a couple sales, get used to the process, and then gradually build up from there.

Greg: I think so. I think you are willing to learn. You learn so much more from that than like any course or any You Tube video or anything else. So I think it’s a great way to start.

Steve: Cool man. Hey Greg, I didn’t realize this, but we’ve actually been chatting for quite a while. And we jumped all over the place, I apologize for that. We were supposed to focus on your nomadic lifestyle.

Greg: I don’t know who will need this episode.

Steve: I don’t know either man. The thing is you made it sound so easy, like I was expecting all these like stories of like trouble and hardship as you’re doing this.

Greg: I can tell some of those as soon as you want. It’s not all just rose and butterflies.

Steve: But I mean you’re always like so easy going. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you pissed off or stressed at all. Like you were speaking doing hand stands at my conference.

Greg: Life is so sure enough to do and have some fun.

Steve: But yeah, I think like everything that we talked about today should in fact help someone who’s thinking about getting into this Amazon situation, and maybe eventually adopting this nomad lifestyle. So thanks for coming on man, always appreciate you hamming on, and I will see you next year in May.

Greg: It sounds fantastic. Thanks and take good care.

Steve: Yeah dude. Bye man thanks.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. To be honest with you, I really don’t know how Greg does it. I mean the guy works hard, but it seems like he’s also perpetually on vacation at the same time. But his lifestyle does prove that you can run an e-commerce business from anywhere without having to deal with inventory. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode188.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo.com for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I also want to thank Privy.com for sponsoring this episode as well. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop ups for any primer that is closely tied to your e-commerce store. If you want to give it a try, it is free. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

Now, I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.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.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

But before we begin I want to give a quick shout out to Privy who is a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now what does Privy do? Privy is an email list growth platform, and they manage all of my email capture forms, and in fact I use pretty hand in hand with all of my email marketing providers.

Now there are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store. Customers love the gamification aspect of this, and after I implemented this form, email sign ups increased by 131%.

Now there are other cool things that you can do with Privy also. So for example let’s say you offer free shipping for orders over 100 bucks, well you can tell Privy to flush a pop up when the customer has $90 in their shopping cart to urge them to insert one more item. So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale.

So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, and try it for free. And if you decide that you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ For 15% off once. Once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

Now I also want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. I’m always blessed to have them as a sponsor because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my store, and I depend on them for over 20% of my revenues. Now, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.

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Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s, mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Brad Moss on the show. Now Brad was actually a speaker at my conference, the Sellers Summit this past year, and his presentation was very well received by the attendees. He is the former head of Seller Central at Amazon, and he’s got intimate knowledge about how Amazon works from the inside. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have him come on the podcast today.

Today he’s actually the founder of productlabs.net, where he helps Amazon sellers to [inaudible 00:03:35] their businesses. In addition, he has some software under development that analyzes your account to see how you can improve your sales. Anyway Brad is an awesome guy, and he’s got some crazy Amazon stories to tell as well, which he kind of shared with me at the conference. They are really entertaining. And with that, welcome to the show Brad, how are you doing today man?

Brad: Thanks Steve, that’s quite an introduction. I’m glad to be here.

Steve: So one thing the listeners don’t know is like you just had a newborn, and then you kind of flew out the family over the conference with like a newborn baby. So how’s the baby doing?

Brad: The baby’s great, the baby’s great, and more importantly, my wife is still holding in there.

Steve: Yes, your wife is a saint.

Brad: Yes she is, she is, but yeah the bam is awesome, and he’s great.

Steve: So give us your quick background story for those listeners who don’t know your back story. Tell us about your stint in Amazon and why you decided to start Product Labs.

Brad: Yeah sure. So do you want the long or short version?

Steve: Let’s – I’ll cut you off if it gets too long, how’s that?

Brad: Okay, it sounds good. So I started on Amazon maybe five years ago, five and a half years ago. And I actually started on Amazon, I come from an entrepreneurial background, and I actually had a game development studio before. And I worked in video games for a while. And so when I started on Amazon, they actually tested me with a project called a seller gamification. And it was a really cool concept, and I worked on that for about six months. And we were a day before launching when some middle management stuff happened at Amazon. That never happens at a big company right?

The day before launching, people were fighting over this engineer who is Nike engineer, and my side lost. So we never launched that, and I think you guys would’ve seen a lot of really cool stuff from that program had it launched, but it never did. Nonetheless, it got me really intimately familiar with Seller Central and how the system works, because we had to build this program into Seller Central. And so from there, there was no head of Seller Central, there was no business leader over Seller Central.

And from there we said, well this is a natural transition and Seller Central was pretty terrible in certain places. And so I moved into that role. And so I ran Seller Central for a while and tried to make some improvements. And it’s quite a hard thing to wrangle. There was over 167 different systems that are running inside Seller Central at the time, and there was all these different teams inside there. So I was trying to, or I had to set the rules and guidelines for these teams, and they’re doing things coming on especially external teams coming into our org [ph] to build some stuff inside Seller Central.

Seller Central is okay. I wish it was much better, and I had a lot of things that I wanted to do to improve it, but you can only do so much inside a big company.

Steve: Can you give us an idea of what the environment is like in there, and what it’s like to work there kind of?

Brad: At Amazon?

Steve: Yeah.

Brad: Sure. So for example — well it’s pretty neat in that being the lead they gave me quite a lot of responsibility, and they did that, but then they put the whole burden of proof and reasoning on my shoulders as well. So as a business lead, I would say, hey I want to change this widget to — I wanted to change the front page of Seller Central to no longer show that whole middle bar, and they’d say why. And I have to have a business case behind it and say, well if we get rid of it, they’d have to have the numbers behind to say, well if we get rid of that, we’re going to see an improved what we call GMS, which is like GMB.

It’s total sales in the system — would improve GMS of five million dollars if we do that. Well that’s not good enough because of XY and Z. So I owned the program, but I had to prove all the stuff that I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it every step of the way. And I had to prove to my manager. My manager was typically on board, but I have to go — sometimes it was big stuff that we were changing. I have to go, run it past a VP or the senior vice president. So Sebastian Gunningham was senior vice president at the time. I think he still is, and we talked about changing the whole head, the header, the whole head, the top part of Seller Central.

And we did, and we made it mobile friendly, well on certain pages so that if you looked on your mobile phone, you could actually navigate. Certain pages don’t work, and you still can’t quite navigate them on your mobile phone. But we made this refresh of the whole top nav, and we presented that to Sebastian and some of the reasons why, and his navigation and what sellers would see as an improvement from there.

Steve: So everything is very metrics focused, like every decision, right?

Brad: Exactly, so it wasn’t like, hey I want to make this red because I like red better. It was that would never fly at Amazon. We have to do an A/B study. For example we on boarded that PPC, the product sponsored product system. Those guys wanted to come into Seller Central; they wanted their own title at the very top. There’s inventory and orders, they wanted their very own, and right now you’ll see one that says advertising, right? We put that in there.

We actually thought the word marketing was a better word, because we wanted to put other stuff inside that tab aside from just the PPC, sponsored products. And so we did an A/B test between marketing and advertising, and users. We found that users recognized the term advertising a lot more clearly than marketing. And so that’s why it’s named advertising today.

Steve: I just want you — I’m just curious like whenever they make these huge announcements and whatnot, all the decisions that they make, do you guys, do you always have to run tests to see how it effects revenue before any sort of decision is made?

Brad: Not always test. There’s many times there’s theories. And that might mean — and that can lead into my next role which I did which was mobile. So because I ran Seller Central, I got to know that really, really well. And then the question always was mobile, how do people access Seller Central, their accounts on mobile. And so I then picked up the business case, said okay well, is there a business case to make Amazon to make a mobile version of Seller Central.

And today everyone — the end of the story is, yes there was because we have the Amazon seller app today, and that’s what I built. But it was a hard business case to make. I based it on several different factors, and to give you a little bit of perspective. When I first started at Amazon, I noticed this one page on Amazon that no one was paying attention to. And I said, hey if we do some updating here, it’s going to be a $30 million opportunity, the analysis that I did it.

And then my manager just laughed at me, he said no, we’re not going to do that. I said why? It’s got to be a billion dollars in three years. Oh we’re not going to do it at all. I said, oh that’s a high bar. So with mobile, my question that was running through my mind the whole time was like, well, can we build something that will grow to be a billion dollars in increased revenue for Amazon in three years?

And so with mobile, the case came down to, well the arbitrage seller, the sellers who go — might go to Costco, and they scan something, they say, hey look. this is selling for $10 cheaper on a Costco than it is on Amazon. If I buy it and then I list it on Amazon I’m going to make an extra three bucks on buy box. And so whenever someone did that, that product got rolled into our program, and that’s an increased value when someone purchased that product that they listed through the app. That got attributed to our mobile program, and that started growing. That was part of the revenue.

Steve: I see.

Brad: For the increase we had 300 million which we mentioned here. So that was one of the cases.

Steve: It sounds like the decisions are all like macro, like if it’s not going to be a huge difference, then Amazon is not going to bother even doing it.

Brad: Exactly, well at least at least from someone like in my scenario, in general yes. Sometimes there’s even a bigger macro like strategic vision somewhere that Jeff Bezos sets out, or his team sets out and every one of those come in and there’s like no dollar values tied to them. They’re just like we just want to do this.

Steve: Right, that makes sense.

Brad: It comes from Bezos, and then they do it. But most of the time, there is a strong business case behind why are we — why someone is doing stuff, why these new announcements come out, and these new programs are launched.

Steve: I mean so let’s switch gears a little bit. And so you left the company what, five years ago, and then you decided to start Product Labs where you kind of help Amazon sellers, what was the impetus for that?

Brad: For leaving — I mean for leaving the company I’ve done maybe a major [inaudible 00:13:05]. I’ve done some pretty good work with some really good teams there, and I decided to move on. I mean again there are some middle management fighting that starts happening especially when you have a successful program. And so I didn’t really want to deal with that too much, and also there were some family reasons that I wanted to move back to Salt Lake City.

So I left, and as soon as I left, I had a lot of people that just started pinning me that I had just known casually. And they said, hey I need to understand stuff on Amazon; there are so many problems here. And having known the system on Seller Central, and how difficult, tremendously difficult a lot of the things can be — that said they’re getting better — some of them are slowly getting better, right? But some of the systems are so hard to understand, it’s such a steep learning curve. I realized there are a lot of people that just needed this help.

And so I just started with a few clients and said, sure, I’ll able to help you get things up and rolling. And we got them up and rolling and they saw some great success. And then I pulled a partner and it’s another ex Amazon business lead, his name is Tim Hughes. He was at the conference.

Steve: Yeah.

Brad: Yeah you met him. And so I pulled him in and said, hey let’s do this and grow this, and I want to build some software that’s tied into everything that we’re doing. And so Tim has been hitting up a lot of the software side of things. And so yeah, it just slowly started to grow from there.

Steve: So Brad, I know a lot of people come to you and you’ve helped a lot of Amazon businesses grow. I was wondering if you could kind of walk me through your process of when some someone comes to you, how you analyze their account and come up with action items on what to change.

Brad: Yeah sure. So this has been — when we started, this is always the biggest question. And part of what I talked about at the conference was we’re realizing everyone has their own opinions of what you should be doing, and a lot of them are really good. And it turns into this huge list of 50 things that I got to do you right now to improve my business. And being overwhelmed like that and having the kind of Amazon training and experience that we ha, whenever you get overwhelmed, it means there’s no structure, and that you don’t really know what’s going on in the operations of your business.

And so we created this kind of a map to the whole Amazon system and what works, and what is driving what. So one of the key things at Amazon whenever we’d build these decks, these metrics decks that we review every single week, that’s how the whole business is run is through these metric stacks. We would identify what we call inputs and outputs. So inputs are things that you can change. For example like a good picture on your detail page, or like the title of your detail page. You could go in there right now and change that.

But that’s going to drive something, and so the question is what’s the output that that’s going to affect. And so we went through and we did analysis on the whole selling cycle inside Amazon. And we’ve built kind of a framework where we’re looking at, oaky what are the inputs and outputs. So for example if I change a picture, that is actually going to affect my conversion rate on my detail page, right? And it’s not actually going to be changing my sessions or changing my costs.

And so we need to understand where things are broken first. So we actually do a breakdown, we look at the health of these output metrics. So the key ones that we look at are, one the conversion rate, and what the conversion rate is.

Steve: What’s a good conversion rate?

Brad: Ten percent or above is what we give an A.

Steve: Does that apply to all categories or is that like a general guideline?

Brad: Yeah that’s a general guideline of what we found. Yeah I’ve seen this high of 60% on some, and I’ve seen some miserable ones too.

Steve: What would you consider something that definitely needs improvement, like a conversion rate?

Brad: So 4 or 5% definitely needs improvement. Even six and seven probably need improvement, you can improve it.

Brad: These conversion rates are crazy that you’re quoting compared to like the average conversion rate for a standalone store, which hovers around 2 to 3%?

Brad: Yeah you’re right. It is the average retails at around 3%, and these conversion rates, I don’t know if it has to do with your further down the funnel inside Amazon, and so when someone is clicking on your page, they’re much further down the funnel hence the conversion rate is higher. But this is the conversion rate inside Amazon that we’ve got a metric that we’re gauging this on.

Steve: Okay, and so you go through someone’s products and then you just kind of point out conversion rates that are below ten?

Brad: Yes, so we look at what your conversion rates are for all your products, and the number of sessions for all your products, so this one is very specific by category, the number of sessions. So how many people are visiting your page because really if it’s conversion rates time sessions equals the number of sales, right? That is simple math. But that’s how we’ve broken it down that way. So if you’re looking at sessions, there’s a kind of a threshold of sessions.

We actually look at the market, what the other sellers are doing in your market and the number of sessions that they’re getting, and where you are and if you’ve achieved similar sessions to them or not. And that’s kind of the threshold. But when you want to talk about generality sessions, around 3,000 sessions is typically good for most categories, 3,000 sessions a month.

Steve: How do you determine how many sessions like a competitor is getting per product?

Brad: So we do research on their products, and we use some tools that give some approximation of what their sessions are. [Overlapping 00:19:06] It’s going to be based those — yeah based on their BS R, and conversion rate and sales, we triangulate kind of where their sessions are.

Steve: How do you know what their conversion rate is though?

Brad: Well that’s part of — we do some analysis on some of the detail page, and we give some estimates.

Steve: Okay, got it, got it.

Brad: It’s not exact numbers; we don’t have those numbers, so we do what we can.

Steve: These are kind of subjective based on the quality of the listing, right?

Brad: Yeah, and based on where they are on the listing. So, we’re looking at the top sellers, and we know that in general top sellers have a higher than 10% conversion rates. The question is how much higher do they have?

Steve: Got it, got it. Okay and so you’re comparing the number of sessions that you’re getting versus a competitor to see where you kind of lie in that curve, right?

Brad: Exactly.

Brad: If you’re far off from the leader, then you’re probably doing something wrong?

Brad: Yeah, and one of the things that we tell people is it’s hard to hit a homerun every time, and my expect — I think it’s an unrealistic expectation to expect a home run every time. Now a lot of people want homeruns every time, but it’s very difficult and it’s actually can get really spendy. And when I say homerun, I mean become the number one seller of your product in particular category. So we’ve set our thresholds at a spot where you’re going to be in the top quartile of sellers of your product, and that’s kind of hitting in A in our book.

Now you can get beyond that which we call super if you’re doing beyond that, which means you are — you may be the top one or two sellers in the category. But you’re going to be up all night if you’re always trying to be and you’ll never achieve that if you’re always trying to be number one in every single category that you’re in with all of your products.

Steve: It seems like 3,000 is kind of like an arbitrary number, because what if you’re selling something that just doesn’t get that much search volume, you’re never going to hit that, right?

Brad: Yeah, so that’s why we — this discussion is much more based on the competitors and the particular type of product. And so I just threw out the 3,000 and that’s a good general — it’s a general number of most products that we’ve seen. But it has a much wider standard deviation, the sessions does versus the conversion rate.

Steve: Okay, so assuming that – okay so let’s say the sessions is kind of like far off from the lead, like what are your next steps?

Brad: So we’ve identified — so for conversion rate there’s basically four inputs, what we call inputs that affect the conversion rate, and for sessions there’s eight different inputs. And so for sessions, we break things down into two categories either organic traffic, so traffic that’s just coming from people generally searching the Amazon catalog. Or influence traffic and that’s traffic that you’re paying for or that you’re pushing into Amazon. And so, each one of those has basically four categories of inputs.

So if you are getting — for example if you’re not doing very well and part of — so I’ll step back a half step. Part of our assessment we look at where your sessions are coming from. So we analyze if it’s coming from just native Amazon clicks, or if it’s coming from advertising clicks. And there’s a ratio there. So if over 50% of your clicks are coming from ads, you’re really dependent upon ads and there’s probably something wrong with your organic listing, because people aren’t even finding it by doing the normal search result.

Steve: What’s a good ratio of organic for paid then?

Brad: So I would say between, I mean 50 is probably about as far as you want to go. And again there’s another component here of strategy. If you want to push really, really hard for a month or two, and so you’re doing tons of paid ads, then you can expect this to go up. But in general that will come back down, and it should be around 30%, 30 to 50% of organic versus influence, or paid traffic.

Steve: And the 3,000 number you kind of threw out earlier, that’s for both components, right?

Brad: Exactly.

Steve: Okay got it.

Brad: So then for the organic for example that’s low, then we say, okay what’s going on with your — there’s four different things. One is the title of your listing, that’s going to affect your sessions. The actual keywords, the keywords inside the content of the detail page, that’s going to affect your organic ranking. And the keywords in the back end and not just keywords, but the other components in the back end, we fill those out before weighing, and you may need to adjust those. And then the last thing is the categorization sometimes can be off, and that will pull you out of the organic ranking, the right way that you — of where you should be.

Steve: So how do you test, like in the back end for example, let’s say you’re choosing the wrong keywords, if you were to just have someone change those, do you change a bunch of them and then see what happens, or do you just change one at a time?

Brad: So because the results take — I mean it’s a question of A/B testing that you can’t fully A/B test on Amazon at any point. It’s more of like you make a change and then you see what happens, and you make a change and you see what happens. Because of that, we usually change several keywords at a time. And it may not be all of them, it may not be, hey all these keywords are bad. It may just be, hey there’s a few more we want to add in here, so let’s try these. Let’s adjust these and test it for the next several weeks, and see how your organic ranking is improving or decreasing.

Steve: Okay. And then the other thing you said was words within the content. Does that imply that the description and the bullet points are getting considered for keyword?

Brad: Aha yeah.

Steve: Interesting, I didn’t know that. I thought the description did not, but…

Brad: So the ABC is not getting plugged, the enhanced content stuff is not getting indexed, but the descriptions are, and the bullet points still are from everything we’ve tested.

Steve: Okay, so it’s in your best interest then to write out a flashy description?

Brad: Yeah definitely, and it should make sense. I mean so for example this comes back to conversion rate, but the descriptions are so interesting, because it’s a mixture between driving sessions and driving conversion rate. We took a client from 4% to 10% in conversion rate just by changing the text in the description, and it was just the text. We didn’t change the images; we didn’t change the titles, just the text. So people do read some of this stuff. It doesn’t only — the images aren’t the only thing that matters.

Steve: Was that a more complicated project that required more or better description though?

Brad: It was a supplement, but it was a more complicated supplement. So I would say it was a unique supplement, more of an outlier in its field.

Steve: Okay, that needed more explanation probably I would imagine.

Brad: Yeah.

Steve: Okay that makes sense, that makes sense. Okay so let’s see, we’ve got — so we’re still talking about sessions, and you said there were four things for organic?

Brad: Yeah.

Steve: And so title, bullet points, description, what is the forth?

Brad: The listing back and then the categorization, how you have categorized.

Steve: Okay yes. How do you figure out if you’re in the wrong category?

Brad: I know there’s a lot of category hopping because people are really pushing to try and get Amazon badges out there. I’ve noticed Amazon cracking down on some of that too and they’ll move you in different categories where you need to be. Categorization it’s the same as — I don’t know if the real question is how do you know if you’re in the wrong category? The question is more, are you in the most effective category for your product? And sometimes you are and sometimes you aren’t.

And so that’s another thing that it can it can be more scary to move because you can adjust some of the indexing that Amazon — historical indexing, you can move it up and down if you’re moving categorization. So that’s a more serious thing that we consider, and it’s only when things feel like they’re really bad and it’s kind of like we’ve tested several of the other ones, they’re not working, and so then we consider listing categorization…

Steve: Okay, that makes sense.

Brad: As the last resort.

Steve: Okay and what is your view on enhanced brand content in general?

Brad: So enhanced brand content is over on the conversion rate side. It should improve your conversion rate. And so I think it’s great, it looks good. As a consumer I like it, and when I’m looking at a product that I’m really interested in. I know it shows up pretty well on mobile if you’re looking at mobile, and a lot of people shop on mobile these days. That’s one thing that people need to always consider is the mobile shopper, because that is where I think it’s over 50% of traffic coming is from mobile.

But the EBC is great, and if your conversion rate is low, we’ll definitely look at your [inaudible 00:28:34] content. Sometimes people have a terrific conversion rate, they may have a 20 or 30% conversion rate, and they want to do the enhanced brand content, that’s something that you can do. It may not be the top priority, but if everything else is already covered, then by all means add more enhanced brand content.

Steve: That’s kind of private question more along the lines of if your conversion rate is already pretty good, like is it something that you should still spend time to implement over some of the other things?

Brand: Yeah, so it’s a matter of stack ranking what you want to do, right? If your sessions are really low, I would not be ABC. I’d really focus on trying to optimize the organic sessions or the paid sessions that you’re doing.

Steve: What about parent child, like does that fall under the sessions?

Brad: Parent’s child does fall into the session side, the organic side. And that’s part of the categorization, we kind of lump those into the categorization as well. And everything that we’ve tried, I can’t speak to others experience, but everything we’ve tried always points to a benefit of having a parent child relationship for products.

Steve: Interesting, because there are different schools of thought, right? You get more listings in the search results.

Brad: Yes and no. I mean you get some more — your listings will still repeat in the search results. It’s just they may be lower. So you might still see your blue and your red socks. One might be a couple of pages later than your blue one. And they still both point to the same parent. And so the parent moves up. The idea is that everything kind of moves up because there’s conversion on it, or someone might discover the blue one. And then blue pulls the blue one up even though some comes in through the black.

Steve: Right. Okay so in general you recommend that you try to do parent child in your experience at least.

Brad: Yeah, that’s kind of a standard thing. We brought someone’s catalog, but then the first two months their whole business grew about 200%, and all we did was adjust the back end categorization of things. And that means parent child relationships, doing them the right way, and then adjusting just a few back end keywords, and their business grew 200% from what it was. And that was it that we know, that’s all we had done to get to that point.

Steve: Are there limits to the parent child, so let me just give an example in my case. I sell napkins, could I put like similar designed towels within that parent child, like what are the limits and the boundaries of what you would do parent child with?

Brad: So yeah that’s a really good question. I guess on the kind of the parent child, what do you dump in there, right?

Steve: Right yeah.

Brad: I mean I’ve seen some listings that probably have 30 different styles, and then each one of those styles has five different sizes in it. Some of those things are doing well. So the question — I don’t know if I have an exact answer for you. That would probably come into the point where it’s more of an art than a science, and what do you think the consumers are imagining here, or seeing here in the situation. Do you think they’re coming to that page and then converting over to the towels versus the napkins? And if they are, then do it by all means.

Steve: But does it hurt to do that is actually what I was asking?

Brad: It might be something to try, I don’t know, I don’t think I can give you an exact answer on that. It might not hurt it and it might hurt it. And parent child are not that scary. Having done them a lot, it’s actually not as scary as it feels to do them when you pull them in there. I mean it’s just — you create an ASIN, hold the children in, and if you don’t like it anymore, you pull them right back out. And they’re their own ASINS, because everything sticks on the same ASIN.

Steve: So let’s switch gears and talk about conversions then. So what are some of the things that you’ve changed that have greatly affected conversions, like what are the inputs first of all?

Brad: Yeah, so conversion rate for the four inputs we have identified are, one the listing, what the media is for the listing. So your pictures can be a really big deal. We bump conversion rates ten points or 20 points based on just changing a picture. And the top picture of a product. We brought one from 3 to 13% just by redoing what the main hero image was.

Steve: Oh yeah, I can totally see that.

Brad: Yeah and so pictures are quite a big deal, and that’s the first thing everyone always sees. So that should always be the — you should look at it with laser focus. And then the content, like I mentioned all the text inside there, so the bullet points and the detail page. And then the next one is the price or kind of put in a more general term is the value of your listing versus your competitors. So your price is actually going to influence your conversion rate up and down. If your competitors are all selling for a lot more money, and you’re selling for a lot cheaper, your conversion is going to go up, right?

And vice versa, if your conversion rate is really low, and you’re $10 more expensive than the next guy, it could — that’s an indicator that really it could be your pricing issue. And part of pricing does come into are you relaying the value or the increased value of your product to the consumer? And if you’re not doing a good enough job, when the price is really where it’s going to yield. And we say, oh this isn’t really worth it, so I’m going to bounce this page and go buy from this other guy. Sorry did you have a question?

Steve: Yeah I was going to ask you, what is your view on video? I’ve seen a lot more videos now on listings.

Brad: Yeah, I think videos are great. If you can get them on there, I think they’re fantastic. It’s just additional rich media for your listing.

Steve: When you add a video though, it’s always at the bottom, right?

Brad: Yeah, the video shots, yeah those get clicked on quite a bit from what we’ve seen.

Steve: Interesting, okay.

Brad: And those — it’s when people are looking for more information about the product, they’ve looked kind of at the top and then they see a video that pertains exactly to your product right when they’re going down to look at some of the customer reviews. Because you scroll down, you’re about to look at some reviews, you’re like, oh here’s a video that might explain a little bit more about someone’s experience with this, or from the manufacturer himself.

Steve: So if you were to prioritize all these things, like what is your order of hierarchy in terms of what you focus on?

Brad: So, and then I’ll give the fourth one too, I just gave you three. The fourth one is customer feedback, so the stars that you have. And that’s actually an output too. It’s not necessary an input, you can’t go in there and change your customer feedback, right? There’s four additional inputs that affect your customer feedback, but customer feedback is another — one of the four metrics that goes into your conversion rate, reporting that you do.

Steve: How is that an input again, sorry?

Brad: Well customer feedback is not an input. Customer feedback is an output. And then I don’t know how deep you want me to get. There is four — we’ve identified four additional things that go into the customer feedback if you want that higher — if you want to get that higher.

Steve: Maybe let’s come back to that first.

Brad: Let me come back to that yeah. Okay sorry, so what was your previous question?

Steve: The other priority in terms of like what in order of priority, yeah?

Brad: We typically look at – well media is one of the biggest things that we see people struggle with, and even a brand that has a really well done pictures, sometimes is not displaying it the right way. For example, we were helping someone with a pillow, and it didn’t quite look like a pillow. It was a really fancy pillow, and didn’t quite look like one. And so we advice them and we had adjust the picture, the main picture, and so people kind of understood a little bit more that it was a pillow you sleep with, not the one you put on the couch. And that improved conversion rate quite a bit when we did that.

So that’s usually the biggest offender is the visuals there. It’s either that — well it’s hard to say, because many people coming in, they’re running a business and the value side of what your price is, they can’t change the price or they have it listed really high, and they want to make more money on it, and they can’t come down, but the conversion rate is really low. And so if they can’t come down on that, that leads back to, well, how can we make the media look nicer or the content look a little better, or improve the customer feedback so that this is going to justify the high price point that you have.

On that price point by the way, some people ask when to improve their price, and this is always a fun thing to discover. When someone has a really high conversion rate, that’s an indicator you can bump up your price. Now I won’t go crazy and probably destroy your listing, but that’s an indicator people are willing to spend a little bit more on your product if your conversion rate is so high.

Steve: What do you consider a conversion rate where you would want to up the price?

Brad: About 20%.

Steve: About 20%, okay. What is your strategy there, do you kind of slowly inch it up?

Brad: Yeah, I mean we do kind of 50 cent increments, sometimes dollar increments. It depends on what their top price is. If they’re selling for $57, you might jump it up to $58, and watch the conversion rate over the next couple of weeks.

Steve: I see, and that in general you’re doing the analysis on what generates the most revenue?

Brad: Exactly yeah, and all this in puts into a big system we have that identifies what are their cost of goods, what are the returns, the whole cost side of things, which is a whole different equation. But we pull it all together, and do an analysis on what their net profit is and their profit margin is.

Steve: Have you seen the conversion rate increase as a result of a price increase?

Brad: I think I have, but I can’t think of any specific example.

Steve: I mean sometimes, and this happens in e-commerce sometimes where you raise the price and there’s a higher perceived quality of an item due to the price and it has the opposite effect. I know that happened with my course actually. Once I started raising the price, I actually increased the conversion rate. Just wondering how often that happens in your experience, or people are just very price-conscious in general?

Brad: I think on Amazon people are pretty price conscious. That’s one thing always to remember when you’re coming on, when you’re displaying a product on Amazon versus another e-commerce website like your own is in general people like deals when they’re coming to Amazon. It’s built on low price, but that said I think there is some wiggle room in there, and you might be able to adjust that improved perceived value for what you’re doing.

Steve: Let’s kind of jump back to the customer feedback, like you were talking about you’re going to dig deeper into the customer feedback. Like what are some things that you can do to affect that?

Brad: So you have the four things that we’ve identified and there could be more, I’d love to hear if there’s other cool things that people are doing out there. But number one is, answer all the questions and answer them and make sure your answers are professional and concise and positive. So answer any questions that people have. Number two is the thing when you ask for reviews, we’ve gone through this whole review ups and downs over the last six months or twelve months, asking for reviews and trying to improve your conversion rate under reviews.

In general we found it’s like one to 2% conversion rate per review, but when you start asking for them, it can jump up to 5%.

Steve: Is that still the case even with the opt out?

Brad: So the opt out has cooled back down a little bit, but we still see it improved, and we still use that as a general rule of thumb for everything that we do, because we do see reviews coming in through the emails.

Steve: How many emails are people sending, or do you recommend people send?

Brad: No more than two, two would be the max. The three click chain, that’s not good. I mean you’re just bugging people at that point in our opinion.

Steve: Do you ask for seller feedback first prior to product feedback or what’s your Strategy?

Brad: No, just product feedback. Seller feedback is almost useless. At a certain point, no one cares who the seller is. At a certain point if you have good feedback and you can scrap bad feedback, because most the time the bad feedback is about a product anyway. And so at a certain point, your feedback is great, and there’s no reason to have higher seller feedback versus not. No one really cares who the seller is.

When I came into Amazon I thought people did and I was really pushing that, then I got laughed at because everyone knew what I didn’t know, it’s no one cares who the seller is as long as it’s prime and they get that promise, then people don’t care, at least at this point in the game. They may as well…

Steve: Does Amazon care though; I mean does it go into the waiting factor in terms of…

Brad: Yeah, so the only reason seller feedback matters is on Amazon side. So it doesn’t matter to the customer, but it matters in the Amazon side. And as long as you keep it clean and you have a decent amount of feedback and it’s all about four and a half or four point seven or one whatever the math, I think it’s four point seven, then you don’t really need more, you don’t even want more necessarily. And it will come in, it’ll trickle in, but as long as you’re up that good, then you’re great.

Amazon will — it’s kind of like a check box right in there. Mine is looking through things like a check box, and then, oh the seller doing X number of revenue? If they are, we might give him more attention or might give him an account manager or something like that if that’s what you’re trying to go after.

Steve: So yeah, once it gets to a certain threshold, then it’s not going to really improve your organic rankings across the board for your product?

Brad: No, not at all, not at all.

Steve: Cool, hey we’ve been chatting for 40 minutes, is there anything – you’re off again, sorry. Is very anything that you want to add?

Brad: Just the last two inputs, customer service, the gen A plus customer service in general, and then obviously the most important thing is an A plus product, making sure your product is not faulty. And that’s hard because of the way up the channel right, you got to make sure that it’s good. But if you have an awesome product and people give you great feedback.

Steve: How are you guys dealing with these sellers that just leave malicious feedback or like these hijackers that come and take your buy box and then disappear like in a week, it’s like playing whack a mole, what do you guys account of that?

Brad: Yeah we have — and that’s we jump on it as fast as we can, and that’s one of the reasons for brand registry 2.0 is so you can control that a lot more closely, and you can get people off your listing really a lot quicker if you’re the brand owner. They even have — I heard from someone on the team, they have like an SLA [ph] of around like six hours to respond to your inquiries and questions on preference in 2.0.

Steve: Okay cool.

Brad: So that’s what she told us yeah.

Steve: So Brad, to end this interview, you want to tell us about some of the services that you offer and give us like a little peek about what your software is that’s coming out?

Brad: Sure. So I’ll mention the services first. So essentially we do two things. One, we do these kind of analysis for people, so the stuff we’ve been talking about. They’ll bring their business on; they kind of don’t know where they are, if they should focus on doubling down where they are now, or expanding. And they don’t quite know where they are in the marketplace and what they want to be doing. And so at that point, many people come to us and they say, hey, I’d love a full assessment of my business.

So we do these assessments, and it’s a full deep dive, strategic deep dive for people. It takes about two weeks to do from our side, so we look along different angles of their business and what’s going on in the marketplace. And then we give them a report and we talk through it, and talk about things they need to do to improve their business. That’s kind of the first thing we do. The second is we do that and then we do everything for them.

Steve: I like that option.

Brad: Yeah, it’s the full hands on kind of [inaudible 00:46:11] service. And we run these companies, we run the whole Amazon channel for businesses, big and small, and we say, hey if you want to focus on product development, that’s where your passion is, that’s what you’re really good at, and you don’t want to deal with all the Amazon garbage that happens, we will take over that full channel for you, everything from customer service, PPC optimization to the detailed page opposition.

And then we put it in our system and we optimize for profit for them. And we say, hey, look this is what’s going on with profit; we think you should be doing XY and Z. And these are the tasks we want to do this month to improve your margins. So that’s the second thing, and we do a lot of that for clients, is the full on managed service of the whole Amazon channel for them.

Steve: Okay, and are you prepared to talk about what’s coming out?

Brad: Yes, so I’ll give you a little bit of peek. So we’re very interested in understanding more about who the customers are, and who your customers are. I know for everyone who does Facebook and works through the Facebook side of things, there’s some really cool Facebook analytics and demographic information. We are really interested in tying back kind of together with what’s going on Amazon, and kind of triangulating all the activities that you’re doing on Facebook with Amazon and validating the whole system for people.

Steve: Are you saying that we can create audiences based on our purchasers?

Brad: That’s where we’re going.

Steve: That sounds very interesting.

Brad: Exactly where we’re going yeah. There’s that and then we’re also interested in the Amazon marketplace as a whole, what’s going on and things like how many Amazon brand Amazon own brands are there right now, and in what categories are they in. So we’re looking at things like that, and we’d love to make all that public to people to just let them know what’s going on, what Amazon is doing, and then anchor [ph] a little bit more about what your competitors are doing.

Steve: Cool man. Well, hopefully Brad will be at the 2018 Sellers Summit. In fact as soon as I hang up here, we’re going to talk about that a little. But thanks for coming on the show Brad, I’m happy to have you man, you did a great job at this year’s summit.

Brad: Oh appreciated Steve. The summit was one of my highlights of the whole year to be honest. It’s a great event.

Steve: Cool man. I hope to see there again next year.

Brad: All right great, thanks.

Steve: Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. What I love about Brad is that he’s really approachable, he knows his stuff, and he’s willing to share his knowledge with everyone. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/ episode186.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo.com for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is the email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants, and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on auto pilot. So head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I also want to thank Privy.com for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop ups for any primer that is closely tied to your e-commerce store. If you want to give it a try, it’s free. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again that’s PRIVY.com/Steve.

Now, I talk about how I use all these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.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.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.