But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store, and I depend on them for over 30% of my revenues as of last month. 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 out 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 purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email.

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.

I also want to give a shout out to Privy who is a sponsor of the show. Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. And what does it do? Well Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all my email capture forms. And in fact I use privy hand in hand with my email marketing provider. There are a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I like privy because they specialize in ecommerce.

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 prices in our store. Customers love the gamification aspect of this. And when I implemented this form email signups increased by 131%. 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 onto 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 Casey Gauss on the show. Now Casey is the founder of Viral Launch which is both a software company and an Amazon product launch service. They have two main software tools called Market Intelligence and Product Discovery which help you find profitable products to sell on Amazon. And their launch service has actually catapulted many clients onto the front page of Amazon search.

Now Casey is also going to be one of the speakers at my conference, the Sellers Summit in May. And Casey is an expert when it comes to finding and launching successful products on Amazon. And today we’re going to find out how he does it. And with that, welcome to the show Casey, how are you doing today man?

Casey: Steve thanks so much for having me. I’m doing amazing how about yourself?

Steve: I’m doing well myself. I’m a little bit sick, so if I start coughing or whatever, it’s all good. I will stop eventually.

Casey: Exactly.

Steve: So Casey, you got a pretty cool story about how you started Viral Launch. Can you give the audience just kind of like a quick overview of how you got started selling on Amazon, and why you decided to start Viral Launch in the first place.

Casey: Yeah of course. So essentially I went to college for a couple years. I was running track and studying business. Always had all these ideas I wanted to give a shot at. And yes I taught myself how to code, dropped out of [inaudible 00:03:58] and a friend of mine was the guy with the idea for Viral Launch. So he was the Amazon seller and he always wanted to start a business with me.

So I built the original platform for Viral Launch just as kind of like a side gig. But pretty quickly we were making money and it was so cool to see the amazing success that some of our clients were having. And so that’s really how I started to get my understanding of Amazon, what’s working, what’s not. I love data, I love metrics, and so yeah I’ve never sold anything on Amazon but we’ve helped people sell literally billions of dollars on Amazon.

Steve: But you developed Viral Launch along with your partner who did sell physical products on Amazon, right?

Casey: Yeah correct, and I ended up, I officially bottomed out like a year after we had gotten started. He wasn’t really into what was going on, and I just saw the incredible opportunity and wanted to run with it.

Steve: Okay. So what I like about you Casey is that you run the service where you’re helping like thousands of Amazon sellers launch. And so you kind of have intimate knowledge over it like a wide range of different products on what works and what doesn’t. And so what I was hoping to do today was kind of discuss what it takes to launch a successful product on Amazon today. A lot of things have changed in the last couple of years. And I guess let’s start with what factors you look for in deciding what product to sell in the first place.

Casey: Yeah, so I would definitely say probably our biggest advantage right now is just our perspective of the space. So we work with guys just getting started on Amazon that maybe have a budget of $2,000 a month all the way to our largest private label client does just over one 100 million dollars a year on Amazon. So really, really wide range. And from I am a huge advocate of the go wide strategy.

And essentially what this is is looking for those products where you’ll only do 10,000, 20,000 maybe somewhere around $30,000 a month in top line revenue but competition is extremely low. And what this allows you to do is quickly get into a market; you don’t need to have a crazy marketing budget. You don’t really have to spend too much time maintaining the products, making sure that competitors are not coming in and pushing you out of the market.

I would much rather — the saying is, I would much rather sell ten products that do $10,000 a month in top line revenue than one product that does 100,000. There’s a few reasons why. In those markets where you’re doing six figures a month, you are going to have a lot of competition generally. You’re going to have to spend a lot of time, continued time making sure that you maintain your rank, that competitors aren’t using shady tactics to leave bad reviews.

It just becomes a big mess or it is just a lot harder to manage than getting into these markets where it’s no headache to get up, to get ranking, to start getting those initial sales, to reach maximum sales potential, and to move on. And once you build that process around the product launch, your product launch strategy once you build that process, you just continue to push new products through that process, and in low competition markets it’s really easy.

So there’s definitely a lot of guys that have success in the products that are doing six figures and make sometimes high six figures per product, but they’re spending six figures to get that product to become successful. So for the – yeah go ahead.

Steve: I was going to ask as part of your go wide strategy, do the products have to be related, or they’re just completely desparied products, truly individual?

Casey: Yeah, I mean that completely depends on what your goals are as a business, right? So if you’re looking to build the brand that you can then sell, if you’re looking to build the brand that you can try to take off of the Amazon, I mean cohesion is important among your product line. But if you’re looking purely for cash flow, then yeah you can just go really wide on just a bunch of random products.

So the biggest account that I know that does that, they did just over 30 million last year, and they just sell literally everything from pet products to health products to car accessories, I mean they’re selling everything. But they just really — they’re like that, that [inaudible 00:08:15] for picking off just amazing markets where the competition is low. They get in and they can just kill it really quickly.

Steve: So branding isn’t as much of a factor when you take the strategy, right? Are you going into this with the philosophy like if this product dies it dies, and there’s always going to be another product to replace it type of philosophy?

Casey: Yeah, I mean obviously the goal is not to allow products to die, and in these markets products die a lot less frequently than in these high volume markets where people just get burned out from competition or they lose their pulse on the market. In these high volume markets, you always have to stay on the cutting edge or else people will push you out, and that’s a big revenue source for you. If you’re making a quarter of a million dollars a month in sales and your $100,000 a month product goes away, that’s really going to hurt if you are doing, you have 100 products that are all doing $10,000 a month, and you lose three of those, I mean that’s not that big of an impact on revenue.

Steve: Okay. And so what are some of your metrics then to find some of these lower competition products?

Casey: Yeah so the quickest metric to identify is this market worth looking into or not is what we call the sales review ratio. So from a conceptual level, essentially we look at reviews as the general barrier to entry in a market. So let’s say I’m selling a fish oil, and everybody on page one has 10,000 reviews. Let’s just say for the sake of an example, 10,000 reviews. That means that I need relatively close to 10,000 reviews to sell at the same volume as those other fish oils.

Even if you had let’s say 1,000 reviews, independently if you looked at this product 1,000 reviews seems like a lot. But if you compared to the other products, basically I think from the data that we have for essentially that customers are saying, wow, I wonder why this product only has 1,000 reviews while all these other ones have 10,000. It must not be as good. That must be — people must not be buying it for a reason, because from the consumer’s perspective the only indicator of popularity on Amazon is review quantity. They’re not looking at bestseller rank or anything like that.

So what this means is basically we look at the average sales review ratio. So we estimate monthly sales, let’s say this product is selling 1,000 units a month, and they have 100 reviews. So 1,000 divided by 100 is 10. If they have 1,000 sales — if they’re selling 1,000 units a month, and they have 1,000 reviews, then the sales review ratio is one. And so the higher that sales review ratio, the essentially the higher the ROI is for the amount of work that you have to put in to get there, and the easier it is to get there.

So anyways we look for these markets where the average sales review ratio is like two to three. So if the top ten guys are all selling 1,000 units a month and they have 100 reviews, that’s sales review ratio of ten, it’s relatively easy to get in there, get 50 reviews, 75, somewhere close to that 100 review mark, you will be able to sell a decent amount of volume pretty quickly. So that’s like the number one thing that we analyze for a product’s market.

Steve: Okay. And in general, I’m just curious what do you see the correlation to be right now in terms of reviews versus sales?

Casey: Yeah so we don’t have — it’s not necessarily one to one in so much as like if you have ten reviews and you get x percent of sales then you get 30, it’s all relative. So in some markets you only need 10 reviews to sell 1,000 units a month, but in some markets you need 2,000 reviews to sell 1,000 units a month because it’s so competitive.

Steve: So you’re looking at a review ratio of at least three you said three to five?

Casey: Yeah so if you can get 10 or higher, then that’s amazing, and again on average. One mistake that we see people make when like making their product selection is again you search fish oil and they see one ASIN has low review quantity but they’re selling a ton of volume. So they’ll think, oh I just need to sell this one particular ASIN and I can replicate those results. But the problem is you can’t attribute where those sales are coming from.

Maybe they’re amazing at driving Facebook ads and that’s where their sales volume is coming from. You need to make decisions based on the performance of the market as a whole.

Steve: So how do you determine whether someone is driving a lot of external traffic to a listing? Like if you’re looking at all the listings on the front page for example.

Casey: Yeah so basically one, there is no sure fire way. Two, essentially the way that we do it or estimate is we say, okay, well the majority of sellers are not driving significant volume from external sources to Amazon. In which case if I look at the average of the market and say the top 10, top 15 are selling 1,000 units a month, then I can assume that the majority of those sales are coming from Amazon.

If there’s one person that’s selling 10,000 units a month, then I have no idea what kind of volume that this — or how this guy is driving that volume. So I’m not going to guess it’s coming from that search term. I’m going to guess; maybe it’s coming from somewhere else, in which case I may not be able to replicate it, so I don’t even want to try.

Steve: Okay. So you’re basically looking for outliers and ignoring them?

Casey: Right exactly.

Steve: Okay. And in terms of sales revenue, you’re looking for that 10,000 range, does that sound accurate?

Casey: Yeah. I mean so it’s relative to every – basically one of the sayings that we have is every product is a good product to sell so long as it makes sense to you in your business. And what that means is I have friends where if they’re not doing 50 to $150,000 a month in top line revenue for a product, they’re not happy with the product. But then other people, they come in; they only have two, $3,000 budget. If they’re doing three to $5,000 a month on Amazon, they’re very happy.

So it’s all relative, but in the go wide strategy, I would be cautious around products that get up into the 30, $50,000 a month range, because I’m adverse to competition in this case.

Steve: Okay yeah, so you’re basically just hovering just under the radar of the most popular products so that you get less hijackers and trouble in general, right?

Casey: Yeah exactly.

Steve: Okay. So in terms of creating the listing, what are some of the more crucial points of a listing that you need to pay attention to based on what you’ve seen in terms of helping other people launch products?

Casey: Yeah I think that the whole listing optimization process is one of the most underrated things when it comes to having success on Amazon. If you don’t have a well optimized listing, it can literally mean thousands of dollars and if you’re in those competitive markets tens of thousands of dollars lost in sales every month, because not only does it have an impact on conversion but the biggest impact is in how it performs in the search results.

And so basically the three main tips that people really don’t get, one of them people have a little bit different opinion on. But the first one is you have to have plurals in your title. So you need to have a singular and plural form in your title. So let’s say I’m selling a singular grill brush, right, I need to have brush and brushes even though it may not make that much sense. I need to have both of those in my title because inevitably people are searching grill brushes or brushes for your grill because yeah.

And so you need to treat these words different. You can see this by going and searching fish oil, you’ll see different order of the results. And so one example that we’ve had is we’re launching let’s say it was this guy’s grill gloves. And so we ran a promotion targeting the singular form grill glove but he only had the plural form in title. So we got him mid page two for the singular form grill gloves, we add grill gloves which is what he was targeting. But for the plural form he was like top ten on page one for the plural form because it was in his title.

So these are general, it depends on the market but generally the singular and plural forms of words of high volume, and if you’re excluding one then you’re missing out. Number two is kind of keyword stuffing your title. So I know people want to add these beautiful titles that really impact click through rate, and I mean you definitely need to use the data to your advantage. But I would much rather rank for two times as many keywords, three times as many keywords but have a lower click through rate, because in total in aggregate you’re going to be driving more sessions.

So I think that’s really important. And then number three is, don’t include your brand in the title. This is a waste of space and Amazon shows your brands in most search results right there. So I think it’s a big waste of space. People aren’t searching your brand unless you are a name brand like Nike or Toshiba or something like that. Your brand is there already and it just is wasting character count.

Steve: Interesting okay.

Casey: Another quick little tidbit is you should be putting a colon or a hyphen after the fifth word in your title. The reason being is by putting that colon in your title, the five words that come before that assuming there’s no stop words like and, the, that is what dictates your canonical URL. And so, your canonical URL — we’re not exactly sure if it helps SEO in Amazon, but we do know that it helps SEO in Google, so yeah.

Steve: That’s an interesting tip. I remember when I’m trying to get the canonical URL correct; it’s just trial and error for me. I didn’t realize that you could put a colon or a dash in there to force it.

Casey: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. So I know you guys do a lot of launches as part of Viral Launch. And I was hoping we could just talk a little bit about some of your most recent successful launches with your service. What exactly do you guys do these days step by step to launch a product on Amazon? Can we talk about like giveaways and sales velocity, and that sort of thing?

Casey: Yeah, yeah. So first off you have to have an amazing listing. Again in the example with the grill gloves, here this guy was missing out on sales because he didn’t have the singular form in his title. And so make sure you have a well optimized listing.

Steve: Does enhanced brand content a big deal?

Casey: So enhanced brand content is supposed to help conversion rate, and we’ve seen it everywhere from it has no impact; it has a small amount of impact. I don’t think or if it does have any impact on SEO it’s so small and it’s hard to tell with all the noise. But what you should be doing, this is a good question — one little trick is if you have enhanced brand content, make sure that your description in Seller Central is still filled out, because those words will still index and help you rank.

Steve: Interesting okay. So can you tell me what type of products where enhanced brand content made a bigger deal than the other ones?

Casey: So honestly we didn’t see any correlation around beauty products or anything like that. So we also have this little test tool, and we’ve done a decent amount of split testing around content and how this impacts conversion. Split testing content is hard though because sometimes when you update the title, it hurts your search ranking, then it also you see declines so it’s hard to normalize after you change.

Anyway basically again it depends on the market or the type of products specifically, but conversion rate is largely driven from like your product photography and making sure that you have the features like in your listing. From there it’s all about having the keywords in your listing to make sure that you’re ranking and getting as many sessions as possible.

If you have beautiful photos that highlight the products, that are helping them to understand how many pieces are in this, what do I get, what don’t I get, how big is it? Answering all these questions so they don’t even have to read because less and less do people want to take the time to read, they just want to know is this right and then buy it. So you do a lot of that with your photos.

Steve: I was just trying to get an idea of like where in the hierarchy enhanced brand content falls in your priority list. It sounds like it’s pretty low.

Casey: Insanely low yeah.

Steve: Okay, all right cool. Sorry let’s move on with the launch process.

Casey: Yeah so anyway make sure you have a well optimized listing. And then from there basically you want to go and understand two things. What is the main keyword? Again if it’s a fish oil, generally we want to go after the highest volume keyword, reason being is let’s say we went out after like omega three supplements, the problem is the people ranking for fish oil are seeing really high volume and because they have omega three supplements in their title, in their listing, they’re still getting keyword push or boost for these long tail keywords as well.

So it’s very difficult to compete for a long time or a sustained period of time on these long tail keywords because these high volume sellers for the big keywords are also getting power for the long tail. So that’s one little tidbit. So we want to try to understand your main keyword. Let’s say it’s fish oil, and then from there we want to go look on page one to try to find these pockets of lower review quantities.

So again let’s say everyone on page one has 1,000 reviews and there’s like a pocket where someone has 250, 175 and 100 reviews, and you only have you know 50 reviews or 100 reviews. We want to ideally try to rank you within that little pocket of lower review quantities so that relatively you are competitive when people are scanning through the results and they see your review quantity next to the guy above you, the guy below you, it looks relatively competitive.

Steve: So are you implying that you’re trying to get a specific rank so that you waged in between two lesser ranked items on the front page?

Casey: Yeah in terms of review quantity.

Steve: Interesting, okay sure.

Casey: So it’s not like we have things to an exact science where all the time we can get you exactly position seven for fish oil, but sometimes depending on how sales trend throughout the — are distributed throughout the products that are ranking for the keyword, we can get relatively close. And so that’s always our goal. Anyway so we want to find this pocket, and then we look at, we try to estimate the number of sales that are happening for that particular product aside for that particular keyword.

So you’re looking for sales, for keyword. There is no tool that does this, there’s tools that have search volume, but the problem with search volume is you don’t know what conversion rate is. So we have some Amazon data that shows us conversion rate for this word is 20%. So people that search that then check out. And then for another word, it’s 0.2%, so it can vary so much. You also don’t know what sales distribution around for the results are.

Steve: Sorry those numbers that you just spit out on conversion rates, are those the person’s listing in question because how else would you get those numbers in general?

Casey: We have some special data.

Steve: Okay, it’s just from real accounts.

Casey: It’s not from accounts, it’s from up from Amazon like actual Amazon search volume, clicks in the listings, check out, and add a cart and then complete the check out.

Steve: Okay because you’re basically scraping a whole bunch of listings, you’re looking at correlations, is that hoe you gain the data?

Casey: No, no, no. It’s literally Amazon and Amazon report that we have access to.

Steve: Oh interesting. Okay, I won’t ask any more.

Casey: This is a lot of caveats if you want me to talk at a higher level, I totally can. So anyway so we estimate what the sales volume is for that particular keyword. Let’s say we want to land in this pocket between positions seven and 11, we’ll try to estimate what kind of volume these guys are doing for this keyword. Let’s say it’s 900 to 1,000 sales a month, which equates to 30 to 33 units per day. And then we will run a launch targeting fish oil, giving away 30 let’s say 35 units per day for seven days is generally the rule.

And so the way that Amazon tracks – let’s just say the contributor to keyword ranking on Amazon is sales. And so they track sales history in these buckets in these 24 hours, 48 hours, three days, five days, seven days and then seven day interments trying to understand how sales performed recently, but then also historically. And so our goal is we find that we have a much better time ranking maintaining rank if we fulfill that seven day bucket.

In really competitive markets sometimes we’ll go 10 days. In super competitive markets where you’re maybe selling 20, to 30,000 units a month, we’ll try to hit like the 30 day mark and sometimes even a little bit more. But anyways let’s say it’s relatively competitive, we’re going to give away for seven days. You go put that into the Viral Launch platform or whatever platform you use to drive sales and you press go.

And so in Viral Launch, again I’m biased, it’s easy because the program magically distribute the coupons for you every day. We’re giving away those 35 units, but…

Steve: Are these pure giveaways or drastically discounted items?

Casey: Yeah drastically discounted at like 80, 90% off.

Steve: Okay so I have heard that Amazon uses the amount of money that it actually makes as opposed to pure units. Is that — yeah go on.

Casey: So that’s a huge myth, and so basically I feel like this myth pops up like every two, three months and like gets legs again and really comes back. And so right now there’s a big wave of this myth, right? And so there’s a couple of things here. Well one, just yesterday actually we did a study on here, we haven’t published it because we’re trying to decide what information we want to show whatever. Anyways the first two products in the report are like they’re number one on page one for their targeted keyword. I mean results are just as good as they have always been.

So I try to understand where these rumors come from or like where they’re based in, and I think it’s a couple. So one, it’s right after the holiday season and Amazon is taking into account the historical sales of the products that were ranking well and performing well in December. So when your product comes from page three or page 30 and it has poor sales history, it’s really hard to compete because when Amazon looks at the 90 day, 60 day sales history of these products that have been ranking on page one, they significantly outperform your particular product that you’re now trying to rank.

So that’s why it was harder like two weeks ago — from end of December to mid January, but things are becoming easier just as easy again. And then I think people don’t give away enough units, or people don’t have the keyword like in their title. You would not believe the number of people that try to run a promotion for fish oil; they don’t have fish oil in their title as an example which is again really critical like we’ve been talking about.

So I think that’s where the rumors or people are impatient. So usually keyword ranking is delayed two to three days, but sometimes it can be delayed five, seven or I think like the longest that we would feel comfortable saying is like 10 days. So if you don’t see something after like four days, some people freak out, they’re like, oh shoot, like I’m not ranking, I’m cutting this off. And it’s like well you just need to be patient because sometimes it takes like five days or whatever.

Steve: Let me ask you this, so why the rationale for a severely discounted product as opposed to just a full giveaway if it’s just strictly units?

Casey: Well a couple. One you save just a little bit of money, and then two Amazon doesn’t allow you to do 100% off giveaways anymore. So I believe it would have to be 99% off.

Steve: Yeah that’s what I was getting at.

Casey: Okay yeah. So I mean you save just a little bit.

Steve: Okay, all right so when you say targeting a specific keyword, are you implying like super URLs or what techniques are you using actually to target these specific keywords?

Casey: Yeah so the traditional super URL are 2014, 2015. That stopped working early 2015. So we’ve been using what we call a two step URL which takes them to a page before the listing, the landing page. We’ve been using that for a while, but yes it does target a keyword. We can drive rankings without, but then that’s a more involved process and it’s a lot less efficient and it takes a lot longer. But yeah so pretty much everybody is using these two step URLs.

In Viral Launch you are able to use whatever URL you want so long as it goes directly to Amazon. And so yeah, so I know a lot of people using these two step URLs and…

Steve: Can you be more specific. I’m sure a lot of people in the audience don’t know what you’re talking.

Casey: Yeah, so like we don’t share exactly that’s part of the secret sauce, but it’s relatively easy to find how to put together a two step URL. So if it goes to like — so yeah I’ll just say like one type of two step URL. This is not what we use, but it will take you to the seller store front, and will only show the fish oils. Let’s say you’re selling fish oil, it will take you to brand X, Y, Z store front showing only fish oils. And whoever is buying the product goes to that page through the URL and then they see the product, they click the product, they added to cart and they checkout.

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I guess my main question was you’re not having your people on your list type in a physical search on Amazon for your product and then buying it that way, are they?

Casey: No, never no. So one, that’s just not a good experience for them. I would imagine coupon redemption rate would be lower.

Steve: Sure:

Casey: And then I just don’t like telling people what to do. That seems manipulative like if we’re taking you to the store front, like hey, here’s this brand’s products, and you are looking for their fish oil, so here’s this brand’s fish oils. I feel more comfortable doing that than saying, hey, like go search this, do this, and yeah.

Steve: Okay, and so these two step URLs, they do work like based on your experience with all these launches?

Casey: Yeah. I mean we’ve run probably like 25,000 launches since March of 2015 when we started using two set URLs, and they do work really well. I mean every month we’re testing out all the URLs that we are able to see, like this is how well each one works to understand what we should be using and kind of what’s available on the market, how things are trending.

Steve: Okay. And so you mentioned that you were doing these launches kind of staggered, evenly distributed across different days, do ads come into play at any point like sponsored product ads?

Casey: Yeah so I mean the goal is to drive as much volume as possible because the more — it’s never — there’s no such thing I think as overkill when it comes to like you’re driving these things. So if you give away too many units, you’re benefiting yourself in total because Amazon is taking into account the sales history. So if you sold a lot throughout this launch period, it helps you to sustain that ranking, it helps you to continue to drive ranking.

So if you’re supplementing back with something like sponsored ads or I’m a big advocate of lowering your price, I think you like the more willing you are to lose money upfront, the more successful, the higher the probability of having long term successes. So you should definitely run a promotion and have your sponsored ads going like crazy, lower your price like crazy, be willing to come close to breaking even so that you can continue to sustaining high sales volume so that you can continue to maintain that rank, you can continue to build up reviews. That allows you to perpetuate that increase in organic sales volume.

Steve: And so you’re generating all this sales velocity. Are you doing anything to kind of increase the review quantity at all, or are you just letting it go?

Casey: Yeah, so right now that is something that I try to stay far away from. That is like the one hot trigger for Amazon, and we’ve always kind of been lumped in with the review groups. People in the past always thought we were a review group. We were never a review group and I always wanted to stay away from that because it’s such a hot trigger for Amazon and I never want to even come close to getting on their radar around, are these guys doing shady stuff or not.

Also we would be putting our clients in jeopardy. I mean I guess that we have a 40 person company, like we can’t make these dumb decisions I guess if you want to call it. So yeah so you can definitely use email follow up sequences throughout the promotion although Amazon is on some products not allowing people to leave reviews if the product was heavily discounted. But I think that — and this is why I’m an advocate of lowering your price and running sponsored ads, because these are sales that you can get reviews from.

And I think that you should be trying, you should be throwing the kitchen sink at trying to get reviews because from the way that I see it, what the data is showing us, reviews are really the currency to success on the Amazon.

Steve: Okay and so are you doing anything different from everybody else outside of using like an e-mail service?

Casey: I mean yeah. I definitely use an email service. We do a lot of different things when it comes to using the e-mail service. We definitely advise people not to do any black hat stuff; I know there are so many people that are. So, one thing that we’re becoming more and more interested in is insert cards. I think that is a great area, I’ve never heard of anybody getting in trouble for that. So anyways, yeah that’s something that we’re starting to explore more, but yeah we haven’t really dived in and don’t have any secret tactics or data behind those tactics right now.

Steve: Okay. And in terms of determining how many products that you actually need to give away to rank on certain parts of the front page, can you kind of walk through how that calculation is done?

Casey: Yeah so essentially it’s you want to match per day sale for the people that you are trying to rank along with, or out rank. So if they’re selling 900 for the sake of numbers, if they’re selling 900 units per month estimated, then that 900 divided by 30 is 30. And so you need to sell 30 units per day.

Steve: Okay and how do you determine whether you need to do that for a week, ten days, for an entire month?

Casey: The general rule of thumb is seven I think after that. So if you — yeah it’s — I don’t have specific numbers around if your volume is X, then it will be ten, if it’s — so if — yeah I guess it’s just off the top of my head. If it’s over 4,000 units a month do ten, if it’s over 8,000 units a month, then do like 20 to 30. And honestly if it’s like 3,000 units a month and you’re willing to do ten days, or you’re willing to do longer, that’s just going to help you to sustain your ranking.

Another thing like the most aggressive sellers, the people that are the most successful with launches are the people, again they’re willing to lose money. And so it is a little bit hard for me to say that because obviously I’m biased. I’m not like saying use Viral Launch for longer. Essentially what these people do, actually you are building a set up so that you don’t pay us if you run multiple promotions in a month for the same products.

So I guess I’m not as biased. So anyways what these people do is let’s say I’m selling fish oil, the first ten days you target fish oil. And then the next five days you target omega 3, and then the next five days you target fish oil supplement. And basically you try to just go after the highest volume keywords as possible just to knock them out and try to rank for — blanket the search terms essentially with your product.

Steve: So given that the review rate is much more reduced now since you can’t manipulate the system, is ten days enough? Like given those ten days, you’re probably not going to get a huge number of reviews to kind of match your competitors in just ten days, and so does that imply that you have to constantly have giveaways for a sustained period of time?

Casey: So it depends. This is why I’m an advocate of lowering your price because that helps to sustain sales. Sometimes in some markets it can work wonders. So you’re running a promotion giving away 30 units a day, and you turn that off, you’re selling — let’s say you have a really low review quantity and you’re selling five units a day organically now. You lower your price and I’ve seen it where people go right up to 35 and it also helps to improve their ranking, just some really great things can happen from that.

And the way I try to help people under like justify that is essentially it’s like a higher priced giveaway versus giving your product away at 90%. To continue to sustain that rank, you can give it away at 40% off aka the lower price to continue to drive rankings. So the people that are most successful in these markets where you need a decent review quantity to be successful are the people that are just spending like you have to drive sales, that’s the only way you can drive reviews, sales volume.

So do whatever you can, lower your price, drive sponsored ads. But this is a huge reason why I’m an advocate of this go wide strategy right now because we’re specifically looking for markets where the review quantity is really low. That barrier to entry is really low and I can achieve maximum sales potential for this market in 30, 60 days because there’s not that many reviews that I need to be successful.

Steve: I see okay, and then at the same time you’re getting less people who want to hop on the listing because the revenue isn’t as attractive as one of the six figure product lines, right?

Casey: Exactly, some of these products I mean you’re giving away 30 units total, 50 units total over the course of the product’s life time and now you never have to worry about it.

Steve: One thing I’ve noticed on Amazon, there’s always these outliers where they have like a crazy number of reviews in such a short period of time. Do you have any idea how that’s happening right now, or do you think they’re buying the reviews? Are review groups getting busted, like what’s your overall take on the entire landscape of black hat?

Casey: I mean, my stance on black hat is never do it, especially when it comes to reviews. I mean this is the one area where I’ve seen people really get taken down because they’re towing the line or just doing things that they shouldn’t have been doing. But I mean I don’t know how much you want to talk about black hat because I don’t want to incentivize people to do it.

Steve: Yeah don’t incentivize people to do it, I just want what your take is and like any stories that you’ve heard, and whatnot and what’s going on in general landscape yeah.

Casey: So my take is that it really sucks because us guys that are not willing to cheat are paying the price for it, right? So everyone is incentivized to cheat because everybody is cheating and getting away with it and that’s the way to get ahead in these highly competitive markets and new markets. So overall this sucks. I really dislike it, I know a lot of people that are doing it and there’s a lot of different ways to do it right. So paying people through like friends network or yeah there’s definitely still those review groups.

The problem is, I think it’s hard for Amazon to detect these kinds of systems if they’re done well. And so I don’t know what the answer is like long term how Amazon is going…

Steve: There’s no answer. I was just kind of curious what … yeah. What is your take on like the people from China selling directly on Amazon? Are you seeing a lot more of those that you’re competing against?

Casey: Yes we are, for right now the advantage is that they don’t understand how to market it. They don’t know how to pull the levers to drive success, right, like they cannot conceptualize running giveaways because like they don’t understand how to lose money to make money. They don’t understand paying for great photos and great listing. They’re just trying to sell these products really cheap.

The day that these guys assuming that it happens really start to understand, oh this is what it takes to be successful on Amazon not just a low priced product that matches other people’s, that is the day that it becomes very scary for us third party seller, the third party seller market because at that point then we’re just a middleman. These Chinese manufacturers know how to sell; they do know how to do getting into the lower priced products.

And if you want to talk on the large brand side, I’m on like a bi weekly or monthly cost strategy call with a bunch of these like really large brands like L’oreal, Tome [ph] and all these big brands and these guys don’t get it either. And so basically they think that the trip to having success on Amazon, the only lever you can pull that success on Amazon is paid media. So they’re spending just tons and tons and tons of money on AMS, AMG, all these marketing programs that Amazon is having them just spend their money on.

They’re spending more – their spend on these ad programs is far outpacing their increase in revenue. And so some of them are just like we have to stop running ads, or we have to stop participating in these programs because we’re just losing so much money and it doesn’t make sense. So I think that’s definitely to our advantage, this third party seller market we’re on the fringes, we always know what’s working. And that’s why we’re able to drive success among these big name brands and these super cheap Chinese sellers at least for now.

Steve: Okay, hey Casey I want to give you some time to talk about your latest software releases, Market Intelligence and Product Discovery. Can you tell the audience a little bit about these tools?

Casey: Yeah so basically I think the most critical decision you’ll make in your selling on Amazon journey is product selection. And after running 30,000 launches, we’ve been able to see what works, what doesn’t, how can we help sellers set up for success. And we see so many people making bad product decisions, so we came out with Product Discovery and Market Intelligence.

So Product Discovery is an idea generation tool that basically allows you to search by product which we’ve all seen tools that do what we really kind of dive deep and really help people find these amazing markets is you are able to search by keyword, high quality keywords that you can filter by product score. So literally it takes like minutes to find five star products that you’re interested in your market.

Then we have brand search which allows you — we have millions and millions of brands that we’re tracking and it allows you to identify brands in your category that are growing, doubling their revenue every six months, or maybe they have a really high review rate and you want to go buy one of their products to see how they’re listing reviews so that you can maybe steal one of their tactics.

There are so many different ways to leverage brand search to identify good product opportunities, what products are driving the most successful brands. And then we allow you to sift through all 36,000 of Amazon subcategories to find these niches of opportunity. We just have a ton of data, ton of filters around helping you to identify your next great product essentially.

Steve: I remember looking through the brand search and I found this one company who was just killing it selling knockoff nerf darts and just making a killing. I never would have thought of that. Now Casey I know you also have a podcast. Do you want to talk about that a little bit as well?

Casey: Yeah thanks. So we have this contest called Follow the Data, and basically again running 30,000 launches, working with over 7,000 brands, we just have a ton of data around what’s working and what’s not, what are the common myths. And essentially we try to come from a place of data to help you understand how to get the most out of your Amazon business.

Steve: Cool man. Well I’ll be linking up all these resources in the show notes. Casey thanks a lot for coming on the show, really appreciate it and I’m looking forward to hanging out with you in May.

Casey: Same man, I’m pumped.

Steve: All right dude, take care.

Casey: Thanks, you too.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. With the millions of data points that Casey has at his disposal, he can definitely back up everything he says with data. And if you want to see him in person, check out my conference at Sellerssummit.com. For more information about this episode, go to my wifequiteherjob.com/episode204.

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 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 parameter 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.

And I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. 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.

And finally I want to thank Payability for sponsoring this episode. If you’re looking to take back control of your cash flow, and scale your Amazon business fast, then sign up for Payability and say goodbye to cash flow issues and stock outs. With daily payments, you can speed up your supply chain, buy inventory at optimal times and stay in the buy box. The more control you have over your cash flow, the more buying power you will have. Visit Go.payability.com/steve to get started, and cash in on a $200 credit just for being a My Wife Quit Her Job listener. Once again that’s G-O.payability.com/Steve.

Now I talk about how I use all these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce 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 the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we’re 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 Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Always 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 25% 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 out 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 that goes out.

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 I also want to give a shout out to Privy who is also a sponsor of the show. And Privy is a tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all my email capture forms, and I use privy hand in hand with my email marketing provider like Klaviyo. There are a bunch of companies that will manage your email capture forms, but I like privy because they specialize in ecommerce.

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 prices in our store. And customers love the gamification aspect of this, and when I implemented this form, email signups increased by 131%. Now 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 onto 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 Nate McCallister on the show. Now Nate is someone who I met at the Import Summit several years ago, and he actually runs a bunch of sites and services related to Amazon. So first off he’s an Amazon FBA seller himself, a service provider, a software company, and he’s also a consultant for other sellers and he runs the popular site EntreResource.com.

But the main reason I wanted Nate on the show today is to talk about the current state of retail and online arbitrage. And as an online arbitrage himself, he’s been involved with the software tool Tactical Arbitrage, and he’s the founder of the popular tool Storefront Stalker as well. And with that, welcome to the show Nate, how are you doing today man?

Nate: Hey Steve, thanks for having me on. You can hear me all right?

Steve: Yeah you sound great now. Can you believe, it’s been like three or four years since we met at the Startup Bros conference?

Nate: I know man, time flies. It seems like it was just the other day.

Steve: But I’m pretty sure…

Nate: That was a great conference.

Steve: It was. I had the most fun at that conference I think mainly because the alcohol just kept flowing. I remember they went all round.

Nate: Yeah they made sure that that was [overlapping 00:03:53]. Yeah that was a great conference, great venue. I asked them if they’re going to do another one, they just kind of like uh…

Steve: Yeah.

Nate: A lot of work went into that one; I think it beat them up.

Steve: Yeah, it totally did. So Nate for the people who don’t know who you are, give us a quick background story, tell us how you got started selling on Amazon.

Nate: Yeah, again I’m Nate McCallister. I got started selling on Amazon several years ago. I guess it was a couple years before we met. So if you get a calendar out to check and see how long it’s really been. I stopped stuff that belongs to this kind of rosy era at this point. But I got started; I was interested in making money for myself. I had jobs I didn’t really love, and I was always — I just didn’t really have much direction. I always was listening to podcasts like Smart-Ass, and I didn’t know about your podcast. I don’t know if it was around back when I was digging for the stuff.

Steve: It’s okay dude.

Nate: But yeah, so I listened to these podcasts every day when I was at work, and you hear about all these people doing these different things. And they were all exciting. But for some reason that one of them really resonated with me was an interview. It was somebody was talking about how they were buying and selling stuff and selling it on Amazon, buying stuff from local stores like Target and Toys R Us, and they were going and selling them on Amazon. Now I thought that was crazy, and then I thought it was even crazier when they were like, yeah we made one $120,000 this year doing that.

I don’t remember the exact number, but it was over $100,000 just like that, one of those mental numbers that it kind of sticks to you when you’re first getting started is six figure. The guy was making six figures. I was like man, that’s awesome, you can do that. I was like if this person is doing it, nothing offensive against them, but if they can do, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything too crazy involved. I like shopping, I can do that.

So I started doing that and I started by actually just selling some stuff from my house. I stole — I had two copies of The Four Hour Work Week. I’m sorry that was Four Hour Body. I had two copies of that because I saw one at the thrift store, so many just like that. I remember I went up to you for some reason Steven. But I was just scanning everything in my house, scanning with the Amazon app and saying what if there was any profit to be had. So everything in my house was obviously I didn’t even own it and so I didn’t have any cost.

So I was like okay cool, so this book sells for like — I saw that it sold for around like seven bucks. And I sold it and I fulfilled it at the time. I fulfilled it myself and after all was said and done it was like a dollar an hour every hour. But I was so excited because I was like, man I did that and that was just stupid dollar or whatever. I could’ve made more money as a hobo asking for cash outside the road. I was like but I know that this can scale now, I know that it actually is a thing people — like I listed this book and it sold immediately and it was because that book is extremely popular.

But I was shocked. I was like, oh I forgot that other people in the world buy stuff like this so fast. You don’t really appreciate until you’re like, man every second somebody is buying something that you have. So that was really cool and for some reason that really was an eye opening thing for me. And it ended up; I started doing that a lot. I started right after I got from work, I would go out, and I would source. It’s called sourcing when you go out to these retail stores and you scan stuff, you see what makes a profit.

There’s different apps that are out there that show you the price on Amazon, and then you enter the price of the product in the store and then you can, you net the arbitrage on that right which is the price difference after the fees of the price bought for and then the price for Amazon minus your fees. And that was really cool because you know I’m sure a lot of your followers sell on Amazon as well, right? And you understand fulfillment costs and all that.

So once you start to see that, man, all of these stores have products that make money, it’s just a matter of going through there and sifting and finding out. So that was really cool to me, but then again after I start doing it I was like, this is awesome. But I’m running out of time, like I still have my job and I was also in school. So I was in college. I had a kid, a young child at the time too, and really, really wanted to do this entrepreneurship thing.

So me and a friend, he decided to start doing it with me, and we decided — I don’t know where we heard about the concept or we just started doing it what inspired us to do but we thought that there’s websites online just like there’s physical stores, physical retailers that are selling things that are going to inevitably be lower on some products than they are on Amazon. So we were buying and selling products now online. So like I was able to do this like when I was waiting for a class to start, or when I was supposed to be paying attention in my class or at work. I was able to be sourcing.

I was finding products to buy and sell, and we would buy something from like let’s say just a basic example you would find something at target.com. It’s not as easy now as it was back then but you’d find something like that for ten bucks, you would pay whatever your cost for it to get to you and then you would you pack it up, send to fulfillment center and let it and hopefully it would sell at the price you estimate it would at when you originally bought it. And we were making pretty good money with this, and still even at that point we were like man, we still don’t have enough time like my time was just so crunched.

So we hired virtual assistants and we started — we paid people in the Philippines, we taught them our process. I was like all right — and I’m a huge Tim Ferriss guy. So I was obsessed with The Four Hour Work Week. I just said my first book was Four Hour Body. So I was obsessed with Four Hour Work Week. I learned a lot about outsourcing in that. And so I decided to hire somebody from the Philippines to do this process for me.

So I spent about a week training this person on how to do what I was doing, and I wasn’t really great at it yet either, which wasn’t a bad thing because they were able to learn from scratch, and they weren’t sending me products now to buy, they were basically sending me the links to these profitable opportunities and then when I got home I would buy them, and then we get them shipped to my house and then we’d back them up and ship them.

And it got to some point where I started making enough money that I was able to finally actually I was making more than I was at my job. And at that point I decided to quit my job. And then actually it kind of escalated from there, ended up selling good but anybody that knows me knows that I like business in general. I’m not obsessed or in love with one facet of business. So I love selling on Amazon, but right now my big bank people probably know me for my software is in the work I do with the software.

Steve: Hey Nate, what – So I going to say I do want to talk about your software, but one of the reasons I wanted to have you on because you have expertise in the retail and online arbitrage world. And I was wondering like all these techniques that you did a long time ago, it sounds like maybe four, or five years ago, it’s gotten harder right?

Nate: Yeah it would, anyone who says it hasn’t gotten harder is just lying. There’s really no reason to lie about it either if you’re doing it because you don’t work out that there’s a share of the truth. The truth is that there are now more tools that make it — that level the playing field. If I were to do it the way I did before by myself, it’s very hard.

Steve: So what is the difference between retail and online arbitrage first of all for those people out there who don’t know the difference?

Nate: Yeah, so retail arbitrage is just basic brick and mortar stores. You’re going — literally you’re walking into the stores like you would if you like you’re going to Target to go and buy anything you’d normally buy at Target. You’re going there except this time you’re buying for business, and you’re scanning things with either the Amazon, Amazon has a free app that you can scan bar codes or a paid tool like Scan Power or Inventory Lab. They all have these softwares that you scan and check prices so you can see sales rank and stuff like that.

You take out your fees so you know how much is actually — you can see profits, right? And you can see the data that you need to know before you buy something. Just because something is on sale at Amazon for 54 bucks doesn’t mean it’s selling for 54 bucks. So these tools give you — most of the good ones let you see things like historical graphs from Keepa and CamelCamelCamel so you can actually see if things are actually selling. So that’s retail arbitrage you’re actually going to the store, buying stuff, taking physical stuff home with you.

Steve: I see, okay.

Nate: Online arbitrage is the same thing except for instead of walking into a store; you’re going into a website. So you can be in your underwear at your house doing online arbitrage. And back when I did it on a large scale, it was all coming to me, and the stuff was all being — I would get it and pack it, and ship it. But now there’s — I didn’t know about prep centers, but now there’s prep centers where you can actually you can buy the stuff, have it shipped to the prep center. It’s a third party company; you have it shipped to a prep center, then they ship it to Amazon for you.

Steve: I see.

Nate: There’s a lot of businesses now. So online arbitrage you could really do it without — if you wanted to, you could do it without actually ever seeing the product except for your return.

Steve: Can you do online arbitrage on Amazon in such a way where you do merchant fulfilled and then you use list something on Amazon and then as soon as you get a sale you just go to that site and order it and have it delivered directly to the person?

Nate: Yes. So that would be called drop shipping, and you can do that. But it’s a high risk model and I don’t ever recommend it. I recommend — I love the drop shipping model like it’s really cool, but I don’t recommend it for anyone on Amazon because the problem is that you’re counting on another company to be in stock. So like if somebody orders it and then they go out of stock and you can’t fulfill it for some reason, a lot of people make the mistake of instead of going in and taking a loss on it right like sometimes if the raw product wasn’t available anymore, instead of maybe buying a full price unit and taking a hit on it, they just cancel the order and that is…

Steve: That dings your account yeah.

Nate: Yeah very, very quickly. And if you doing it at scale, that’s a problem as it’s not scalable because at scale you’ll always have those instances and it will end up shutting down your account. So I tell people that drop shipping is cool but you should do it with like a third party website like ClickFunnels, a sales funnel or Shopify store where you’re drop shipping stuff from in your own brand’s name or in your own you know something that if you cancel an order you’re not going to put yourself out of business.

Steve: So Amazon has started brand gating a lot of these brands, right, and so does that — how do you get around that when you’re doing online arbitrage or retail arbitrage? So for example let’s say I want to sell like cheap Lego products, would that still be possible today?

Nate: So on Amazon the difference between private label and arbitrage is going to be — well it’s the same I guess. You’re going to have a lot of – well in private label you don’t have restricted brands. In retail arbitrage and online arbitrage you some brands you just can’t sell. And there’s also some categories you have to get approved to sell. So it is a game of — it’s not as easy as it makes money if I buy it and sell it I can sell it. It’s unfortunately it doesn’t make money on Amazon and then you have to check that you can actually sell it.

So that part can be a little bit frustrating at first for newer sellers because there’s a lot of gates and restrictions right now for newer sellers. But it’s still totally feasible, it’s just something it’s just the nature of the game, and it’s always changing. Ever since I’ve been a seller, every year it’s gotten a little bit – it’s not that it’s hard to make the same amount of money; it’s that it’s just different.

Steve: You have to move around brands.

Nate: Every year right.

Steve: Would you say that like most of the popular brands are gated at this point or no?

Nate: Say it again.

Steve: Would you say that most of the popular brands are gated at this point or no?

Nate: No, a lot of a lot of big brands are like Nike had a big thing with authenticity issues. There’s a bunch of big popular brands that you would want to be able to sell that once you’ve been selling for a while you just know that you can’t sell them and you don’t even bother scanning them. But it’s totally — and there’s also softwares now that make it so that you can actually kind of remove those restricted products from even and I’ll get into that a little bit.

Steve: Okay sure.

Nate: Yeah and all the scanning apps will tell you when you scan it if it’s restricted for your account. So that’s how you get it. It’s easy to fall prey to that where you buy stuff and you think it’s going to make money and then you realize when you get home that you aren’t able to actually sell it.

Steve: Yeah but the tools will tell you, right? The tools will tell you what’s restricted, right?

Nate: Right, the tools will tell you. When you use the app, you log in, yeah they’ll tell you what’s restricted.

Steve: So you mentioned certain categories you have to get ungated. What is the process for getting ungated these days?

Nate: It depends what the category is, it’s completely changed since back when I first got ungated. Sometimes it’s just you click and approved and sometimes there’s actual applications that you have to fill out. It depends what the category is, and then randomly the categories will come open where they’ll just take anybody that applies. It used to be you got to submit what’s called a flat file which is a big long complicated Excel file showing that you knew how to make variation listings and you have to send invoices and all types of stuff.

I haven’t had to get ungated in anything in a long time, so I’m not even sure for some of the categories how difficult or easy it’s become. I know it’s definitely different, and categories like shoes and clothing don’t require these complex excel files like they used to.

Steve: Okay. So would you say that most online arbitragers are sticking to certain categories then? Like what are the popular categories?

Nate: Yeah. So as far as category goes, I always tell people that they should just be open minded to whatever they can sell. Money is money in that sense; it doesn’t matter if the category is toys or if the category is home and garden or apparel. It’s different than when you’re a private label or a wholesale business where you’re trying to create a brand and you want to have some continuity. When you’re arbitraging, you don’t really have continuity with that, which is one of the pros and cons of this model, is that you don’t really have that same brand equity.

You have kind of a flea market so to speak. It doesn’t make it sound attractive, but you have — picture is more of like, I don’t know a garage sale rather than a boutique shop that sells the same stuff.

Steve: Okay sure.

Nate: My imagery is terrible.

Steve: That’s okay.

Nate: It’s a broad array of stuff. And toys are profitable, a lot of people do still favor certain categories, toys, shoes, and clothing are always big especially for retail arbitragers, shoes and clothing are huge. But online arbitrage toys and kitchen and home and garden and stuff like that, there’s really no category that if you’re approved to sell it, you should look at it and not totally get it off for any reason. But some do perform better than others overall like you know basic stuff toys and outdoor equipment, sports equipment, stuff like that does well.

Steve: When you find an online arbitrage opportunity like a website, does it tend to last or does it go away relatively quickly?

Nate: The leads don’t last long for a number of reasons. First you have a limited stock that the store might have. Then you have the fact that depending on how many other people are doing online arbitrage, if they find the store and then it’s also — so it’s not that the store itself stops being profitable, it’s not those items will stop being profitable. But everything is constantly in flux. So there’s always new products on Amazon, there’s always new products in the stores, there’s always going to be price discrepancies because these third party sites don’t always compare the price to Amazon.

And even if they did, the price changes on Amazon so much. It’s just not — so you do get these arbitrage opportunities all the time, and some of the softwares that I’ll talk about a minute can scan hundreds of sites at the same time and find products.

Steve: So can you buy like a bunch of stuff that you think is a good deal but then all of a sudden the price plummets on Amazon, that does that happen?

Nate: Yeah that definitely happens more once when you’re getting started. It’s just something that new sellers should absolutely take into — I call it kind of just like a learning tax. It’s like your tuition to sell on Amazon is you’re going to make some bad buys. The real key is to just always assume that you’re overestimating the price before you make a purchase, and be really cynical and critical I guess, cynical I guess is the word. And think that there’s some reason why this isn’t a good deal. And if you look at everybody that way, you’ll end up better off.

I used to look at it as, oh this is great, this makes — I had a really stupid model where I was like, oh if it makes a dollar let’s just get it, why wouldn’t I want to if it makes a dollar. And like after fees I’m like, this is so stupid, that gives me no wiggle room. And also it’s like what’s the point of tying up all my capital on stuff that makes no money really, really embarrassing. So you need to have like a minimum acceptable net profit per item and minimum acceptable ROI.

And that varies by the seller. It depends how much cash flow they have, but you have to give yourself wiggle room. And those tools like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel that will tell you, they’ll show you historically how many times things have been selling, the price, so you can see like if I buy — just like I said earlier just because it’s listed at 59 bucks on Amazon, it doesn’t mean it ever did sell at 59 bucks. It doesn’t mean it ever will sell at 59 bucks. The realistic price for it could be 24.99.

Steve: Okay. So what are the margins like? What are some guidelines that you typically have for profit? Do you do it by dollar amount, or do you do it by percentage?

Nate: You want to kind of weigh both. Anything you know having a minimum net for me of $4 profit would be what I’m looking for, and then a minimum ROI. I would not want to go below 25% on a short thing. But it depends. I don’t do it at scale anymore, so I don’t have the cash flow that other sellers are putting in their products. So some people will take bargains way, way smaller than I would, maybe as low as 10, 15%.

Steve: That’s crazy.

Nate: Then there’s some sellers that won’t on take anything below 40 or 50. Unfortunately there’s tools now that make it so that you can find products.

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Yeah, so walk me through the process, like walk me through what the tool does and like how you would go about finding an opportunity.

Nate: Yeah, so the tool that — I can’t really do on a podcast about online arbitrage without talking about this tool because it just is…

Steve: Yeah do it, go for it yeah.

Nate: So the tool is called Tactical Arbitrage. What it does, well it does a couple of different things, but at the heart of it the purpose of the tool is to help you find products to sell on Amazon at a profit. So at any given time, like I had said before there’s millions of different products on Amazon, but then there’s also millions of different products on tens of thousands of other sites right. So Amazon is the king but there’s also tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of other web stores out there online that are also selling things.

And there is ways for us to pare those up. So the software Tactical Arbitrage, what it does is it compares the prices of products on Amazon with and then it goes out and finds those same products on hundreds of other sites across the internet. And when it finds it, it can show you the price of a third party site compared to the price on Amazon, and then take out your fees and tell you what you would make on it all things being equal if you bought it on a third party site and then shifted in to sell it on Amazon.

Steve: That’s crazy okay.

Nate: Yeah it’s really gotten extremely — when I started promoting it with Alex, I guess it’s been a year and a half, two years ago now, it was just 30 sites that supported it, and it was I mean it was amazing back and people were going crazy about it because everybody who did online arbitrage knew how powerful this was because it was literally finding these leads that were taking us hours and hours of manual sourcing page by page by page to find. This thing was just blowing through them and then kicking out just some little beads at the end.

Steve: So let me ask you this, if there’s a whole bunch of people using the same tool, won’t they all find the same deals?

Nate: There are so many different parameters that can be set that it makes saturation less of an issue, and you’re also going to have kind of the first come first serve thing with — it’s not that every site. Like if I go to a third party site that’s a smaller third party site, one of the tertiary sources that TA supports and I find a product, and it has a – there will be a couple of things that could keep it from being extremely hard to get past.

First, if the sales rank is extremely — it depends on how whatever the sales velocity is supposed to be is obviously going to be a big factor. If this thing is going to sell 100 in a month, I’m not going to be really — that source is probably not going to be able to tank the price. You get this is all things being equal, there’s other variables.

Steve: Sure, sure.

Nate: But then you’ve got the fact that most people, most stores have a limit on how many you can actually buy, and then you have other variables like people aren’t all looking at the exact same categories. I mean there’s hundreds of different, there’s so many different products and for people to be looking at the same ones and then flooding each other on the same ones is not as big of an issue as it seems like it would be. It’s not like everybody is going into – you’ll see the movie of — what’s that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger where you want to give the turbo man to jiggle all the way, but seeing where they are, they all rush into the theater and they want to get like ten of these turbo men.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, yeah, aha. So it’s not like that.

Nate: It’s not like that.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Nate: So it’s a huge, huge market. There’s hundreds of sites, and then you got facts like not everyone has the capital to buy the lead that they found. The leads once you get the products, you always want to anticipate that people are going to come in and undercut you as well. So that’s another thing that I recommend people do when they’re buying is they keep that in mind. So if you think it’s going to sell 30, and you’ve seen historically it’s selling at 30, you might want to plan on it selling a little bit lower and see if that is still worth it for you.

Then again it depends on your risk tolerance, and it comes with practice over time you start to get better and better at it.

Steve: What sales velocity do you like to see for a product?

Nate: It doesn’t matter honestly as long as — it’s depends how many — it’s all relative right. So like if I have something and I know it’s going to sell immediately, I should say it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to hold something that I think I’m going to hold for longer than 60 days. It you still will, but you don’t want to plan on that. And some people it’s different for them. But you definitely want — it’s not like I’m saying I’m only going to buy things that ten a week.

It depends how many of them I can actually get if I can get them out within a reasonable time frame without the price tanking, or if it’s a seasonal item, I’m not going to load up on Valentine’s grocery items and then have them tank or have them not be able to sell out during Valentine’s Day and then be stuck with lots of perishable inventory. So it’s relative to the situation. I don’t want to buy something — if something hasn’t sold and there’s some people have minimum acceptable ranks like if it’s only once a month that’s — and it depends what the category is, the sales rank varies

And sales rank actually I could have a whole webinar on that. The sales rank is very much not a great way to tell the sales velocity. It’s like an indicator and a point in time, right?

Steve: Sure.

Nate: So if I sold a book and this is the first time I had sold a book ever, if I sold it today, the sales rank is going to look pretty good because I just sold it. So the sales rank if I was saying that 100,000 sales rank means the sales move on per day. That is relative to the fact that it just sold, I might be getting ahead of myself. So sales rank is…

Steve: Yeah that makes sense. I mean it’s relative to a certain time period yeah.

Nate: And that’s the mistake that we made when I was getting started as I was thinking, I was like, oh man the sales rank is reflective of — I used to think like whatever you know in toys. I thought 100,000 in sales rank in toys meant that it was once a once a week or something. And the gist was that logic does not work. The only way to really tell is to look at the Keepa graphs and the CamelCamelCamel graphs and see when they’re actually selling, and again that’s stuff you kind of learn over time. And you learn really quickly once you lose your own money on it.

Steve: Sure. Let me ask you this Nate, okay let’s say you’ve used Tactical Arbitrage and you found some products and you bought them The next thing you need to do is you need to piggyback on a listing and make sure you have the buy box, right? So how does that work?

Nate: Yeah so you always want to see how many competitors are on a listing. Some people don’t like to do a listing if Amazon themselves are on it because they can kind of control the buy box, they can actually, they can drive the price down pretty low. You want to get it within reason. Usually pricing at the same price, it depends on the sales velocity, and again that’s another thing that’s kind of an art I guess that takes a little bit of time to master.

And I know a lot of people buy with the intention of undercutting the buy box by a buck or something and they calculate their margins on that. But it gets kind of vicious. I mean a lot of people have re-pricing set up. So usually just coming in and pricing it at the same price as the buy box, it’s there. And there’s also other tools out there now that will show you how many are actually in stock from the person that’s ahead of you on the buy box. And Tactical Arbitrage can actually show you that, tools like how many can show you that.

And so you can see like, okay, this person that has the box now only has two left in stock, this thing is selling five a day. I don’t need to get crazy on price, you know what I mean. If you’re like, oh I’m out of these, I’m never going to sell out of them, this was a mistake, I need to recoup my money and get my cash flow back up. Yeah that you might want to cut, but it’s — the economics of it is relative to the situation I suppose, usually you want to price at the buy box price that’s already there.

Steve: So let’s say both you and I have 100 units, and the only way we’re going to sell is if we have the buy box, right? So what is the tendency to just kind of inch down the pricing and kind of steal the buy box from each other, and doesn’t that always lead to kind of like a race to the bottom?

Nate: Yeah it does. It depends how fast the product is selling. If I only — with arbitrage you don’t usually — a lot of people that do arbitrage sell very like kind of one off things where they might only have two or three of an item or maybe even just one of an item. So for them to really stake land and really get into it, but on a macro level yes there’s all types of price cutting and this war of attrition that happens this race to the bottom.

And experienced better sellers kind of know when to expect that and they plan around that, and they also sometimes they just go, okay this person is going to keep undercutting me. I’m just going to let them sell out and then I’m going to sell once they are gone. And if they come back, then they have to change their strategy.

But a lot of the bigger sellers have really refined their process knowing what to do and what not to do to make sure that they’re selling their product but also selling it at a reasonable price, because some people have very thin margins and other people have really those really high margins. They do that because they don’t ever want to get to the point where they’re like, I’m selling this at a loss or at cost. So if you have a minimum of like 50 to 75% margins, I mean worst case scenario you probably, it’s more difficult for you to ever actually lose money off that.

Steve: So if a lot of people are selling like a few limited quantities of a bunch of different products, how do you even monitor all the buy box stuff? What software would you use?

Nate: For the buy box it depends. I usually use Amazon’s native tools. I don’t think there’s a lot of people that use re-prices. But when you are doing equal when it was popular, a lot of people in my community use that. When you do arbitrage, you don’t go as deep on things, so there’s not really — it depends. Some people really monitor it closely and some people aren’t as hands on with the pricing and all that. They kind of set it and then move on. Some people use automated services to do it. So it depends. Everybody has their own strategy for it I suppose.

Steve: Interesting, what did you do when you were — Do you monitor the price like a hawk or?

Nate: Yeah I monitor the price pretty closely on things I went deep on. If it was something that I knew that I had really planned on selling at a certain rate, I would come back and monitor that. But if it was just something like a one or two off product, there’s no point in bothering dropping that price or playing with it. If I’m sure that that’s going to sell, I’m not going to be tying capital down. Some things it’s like you always want to make sure that you don’t tie up too much capital in inventory obviously.

Steve: Sure.

Nate: So you do want to make sure that those bigger buts that you’re getting the buy box as much as you would expect it.

Steve: Ad what is like a good expected buy box percentage?

Nate: That’s relative too I suppose, it depends how many you have on that unit you’re trying to sell. And there might be some products where you just keep the buy box until you’re totally out of stock. It’s relative, it’s not like I can say if you price at the same you get 40% of the buy box. It’s based on factors like if you price at the same sometime there’s a lot of that goes in the algorithm. Sometimes even geographical things like if the person’s — if it’s in a fulfillment center that’s closer to the person on the East Coast, they might give them the buy box.

Steve: I see okay.

Nate: There’s a lot that goes into. So it’s not like, that’s not really a stat that I really think is worth too much. If you’re a private label seller it’s huge, but yeah.

Steve: Sure. For private label if you’re a private label seller you always have the buy box. Let me ask you this, so do you ever have to get feedback or does feedback even matter? Like do you use Feedback Genius or do you ever purchase ads? Does any of that stuff matter when you’re doing this?

Nate: So that’s the cool thing with arbitrage compared to private label. I know with private label feedback is everything, reviews are so important. In arbitrage, it doesn’t matter that much because you’re selling other people’s stuff, and usually you’re selling products that are already selling. So you don’t do anything in terms of getting reviews to products. That’s the brands thing and you’re actually, you’re buying it because the sales velocity, it’s already selling at a rate that is good enough for you to have bought it in the first place, that makes sense?

Steve: Yeah sure.

Nate: Instead of bringing a product in the market and hoping to raise the sales velocity by getting positive reviews and all that stuff, you’re actually buying something that says, okay, this is already doing that. I just need it to keep doing that.

Steve: All right so since we’re on the topic of pros and cons of like arbitrage versus private label, would you say that this whole arbitrage thing, it sounds like there’s a lot of maintenance involved, right? Do you always have to be on your toes in managing all your products and constantly getting new buys? Is there anything that’s very — is there anything consistent about like an arbitrage opportunity?

Nate: So the products are — some people find products that are kind of evergreen. They’re called re-plans where you find something that you can keep buying at your local store and keep feeding it there or buying online and keep selling it and making a profit almost like you would with a wholesale account. But even those you can never count on those lasting forever, they usually are short lived.

Steve: Why is that?

Nate: Prices change, people catch on to good opportunities. I mean there’s just so many — it’s hard to keep a good product a secret forever. Just like with private label, people can see what’s selling and then once they say, oh wow, there’s this product that’s selling for $12 or for $15 is on sale at Target every day for 4.99, and somebody is just pumping them and making money. Eventually those kind of get damaged or destroyed when people come in and race to the bottom. So that is one of the downsides to it. You don’t have that same level of continuity, the same consistency. It’s in your kind of constantly like hunting, it’s kind of like actual hunting, and gathering as opposed to like private label could be seen as more like farming.

Steve: Sure, yeah, yeah.

Nate: Than actually going out and killing different animals every day.

Steve: Okay but I guess a big plus of this is it doesn’t require that much capital right to get started.

Nate: Yeah that’s the best part. The best part arbitrage does not require a lot of capital and it is scalable to a pretty high point. You’re not going to become a millionaire probably doing it, but there’s a lot of people that do six figures a month in online and retail arbitrage with some help with giving and outsourcing stuff and having people help them with their prepping and shipping. But it’s definitely easier to get started. You can start by selling things in your house as long it can be listed and you have to list them properly, right? Don’t sell your old MP3 player as a brand new or anything.

Steve: Sure, sure, sure.

Nate: But you can sell books from your house as used, or whatever is appropriate for that product and get started that way. A lot of people — some people kind of take it too far and they’ll do stuff like they’ll go — a lot people go thrifting and I don’t really recommend it. If anybody does that usually is because you have to sell good products. You can’t just sell crappy products and Amazon really doesn’t have much gray area for what is new and what isn’t new. I mean you can sell things as used, but I know a lot of sellers who get in trouble for saying something is like new and it’s really not.

And so a lot of arbitrage sellers are getting suspended for walking that line, and you can do the business without walking that line of selling bad products. So you can start it and do it the right way without dumpster diving. And it can be scaled pretty hard pretty high, and then you can always still get into private label and wholesale as well and diversify once you build that capital, or maybe you’re happy with how much you make in online and retail arbitrage.

I know a lot of people are shocked at how much they have made. I’m shocked at what I’ve seen some people that I know who really, really focused 100% on it. It’s exciting and it’s definitely a cool opportunity. I love talking about it because I know that it is very systematic and people can learn it if they want to. And it’s kind of a nice equalizer for entrepreneurship for example a nice gateway for people to start selling products and actually making some money online and getting paid for what they put into it.

Steve: So we talked a little bit about Tactical Arbitrage already. Do you want to talk a little about your tool, the Storefront Stalker?

Nate: Yeah so my tool is called Storefront Stalker. The name doesn’t reflect on the tool as much anymore. It started out as a tool that the purpose of it was to export the ASINs of competing store fronts so you could see what they were selling. All that information is available on Amazon, but this was just putting it into a spreadsheet so you could review it. So somebody who keeps undercutting you on one of your products or on multiple different products, they probably are sourcing from the same places as me.

Since we’re getting the same products it’s just some logic you have to use I guess. But then you can see what they’re buying and then you can possibly go and buy it yourself, because you guys probably are already overlapping that sources, so they might have things that you didn’t know or opportunities. So with that software you can then take these spreadsheets, then you export and upload them into a tool like Tactical Arbitrage. And I can run that through the software and it can go and find for me different sources for any products.

So Storefront Stalker can go to any Amazon category. I can export that category if I want. Like let’s I do baby toys and then I filter it down to toys that are less than $40. I can export that into Tactical Arbitrage and it will scour the internet for product opportunities. So I guess I only want things that are a sales rank of below 100,000 and I want the profit margin basically to be like 40%. So it will find me products across the internet that match up that I can buy and then sell back on Amazon at a profit. So it’s pretty cool, it’s pretty powerful.

So my tool is kind of the medium between that. It’s not very sexy on its own, but when you take that feature and plug the data that it gives you into Tactical Arbitrage in the CSV files, it’s pretty cool the results you can get. So it’s basically like retail arbitrage on steroids. Instead of going into one store manually, you’re essentially going into 700 stores with a shopping list of things you want to buy, and these lists can be up to 400 Amazon pages which is going to be like 80 or 9200 ASINs. And you can find all these across the internet. You can let it run and then you can go to bed and you can wake up and see what it found.

Steve: Does the software actually buy the product for you if you want to, because I can imagine…

Nate: No.

Steve: No okay.

Nate: No, that would be cool if it could and if it were accurate, but the problem is…

Steve: Well I can just imagine waking up and like having to shop at like 80 stores. That would take forever, right?

Nate: Well it depends and some people would love that opportunity if the products were profitable. I mean so like if you have — a lot of them, a lot of times the items might be — you have to double check the item and make sure it’s a perfect match because it’s really incredible when you think about what it’s doing, and sometimes it does it by UPC which is going to be a much better match because UPCs are like Social Security because basically like DNA. They match for everybody, but Tactical Arbitrage also does image recognition and title searches.

So it goes through and it is actually trying to make sense of all this stuff and putting it together. And so you’re going to have some that might be a multipack. So it might look a little bit better than it is. So you have to go through and make sure that the product actually matches. But everyone who’s the most appealing is when you run the software. People that use the software find that the results that it gets are just awesome. I mean it’s crazy what it can do and how much data it can plow through in one sitting.

Steve: So I know you’re going to be biased with this next question Nate, but do you see retail arbitrage – like do you see Amazon like stamping this out in like the next three years or so? Like if you were to look out three to five years.

Nate: So I don’t think that — I think that Amazon is always going to be implementing policies that make it more to difficult to sell anything that’s not perfectly brand new. And Amazon technically doesn’t — it depends how much you look into buying something from a third party store and selling it as new is technically not new. The problem is that I have one of my things I did last year — you know Cynthia Stine?

Steve: Sure.

Nate: I worked with her on suspensions and we had client after client after client was getting reinstated after they were getting in trouble for selling — having issues, false claims about counterfeit products. And we provided Amazon with invoices from Target or from Toys R Us or from wherever they got it, and Amazon was accepting it and letting them back in. So there’s a bit of a gray area.

Do I think Amazon has — Amazon I don’t think has the ability to wipe it out. They definitely have always been — ever since I’ve been doing it, I’ve been doing things have made it change. It made it a little bit more difficult every year. So right now it’s a great opportunity, five years from now I’m sure it will still be an opportunity. It will be way harder. My guess would be it will be harder. But it’s just the nature of the beast and we just tend to take it one year at a time I guess in this.

Steve: Okay fair enough. Nate, where can people find you online man?

Nate: Yes so my blog is EntreResource.com. I also run the Facebook group FBAToday.com, and you can find me across some of the other groups, Tactical Arbitrage I’m in there a lot, and catch me at most of these Amazon conferences. You’ll be seeing me coming with things to sell and buying bears on them.

Steve: It sounds good Nate. Hey I really appreciate you coming on the show and giving us this update on retail and online arbitrage. It’s actually a topic that I actually did not know a whole lot about, and you cleared up a whole lot of things out for me today.

Nate: Cool man. Well I appreciate you inviting me on. It’s great to chat with you and we’re going to meet up in San Diego next month.

Steve: Yeah next month. I’ll definitely see you there.

Nate: All right buddy.

Steve: All right man, take care.

Nate: All right.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. Based on that interview, I think that retail arbitrage is a great way to dip your toes in the water and start selling online, and Nate has provided some tools and suggestions on how to get started. For more information about this episode, go to my wifequiteherjob.com/episode202.

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 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 parameter 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.

I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. 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.

And finally I want to thank Payability for sponsoring this episode. If you’re looking to take back control of your cash flow, and scale your Amazon business fast, then sign up for Payability and say goodbye to cash flow issues and stock outs. With daily payments, you can speed up your supply chain, buy inventory at optimal times and stay in the buy box. The more control you have over your cash flow, the more buying power you will have. Visit Go.payability.com/steve to get started, and cash in on a $200 credit just for being a My Wife Quit Her Job listener. Once again that’s G-O.payability.com/Steve.

Now I talk about how I use all these tools in my blog and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce 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 the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we’re 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 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 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. And 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. So for example, let’s say you offer free shipping for orders over $100, well you can tell Privy to flash a pop up when the customer has $90 in their shopping cart to urge them to insert one more item. 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 I also want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. I’m always blessed to have Klaviyo as a sponsor because they are the email marketing platform that I personally 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 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 purchased, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email sent.

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 happy to have Scott Volker of The Amazing Seller back on the show. Last time I had him on was way back in episode 89, and since then we’ve become good friends. We’ve hung out at multiple conferences together including my conference, the Sellers Summit. And recently we hung out at FinCon where we were both on a panel together.

Anyway because it’s been so long, I think it’s been like two years, I invited Scott back to talk about some of his updated Amazon strategies, and basically just to see what he’s been up to. And with that, welcome to the show Scott, how are you doing today man?

Scott: I am doing great. I can’t believe it’s been two years really.

Steve: I can’t believe I’ve been podcasting for like three years now to be honest with you.

Scott: That’s insane, truly insane.

Steve: Time flies.

Scott: Yeah it really, really does. I mean I’m excited to be back, excited to share what we’ve been up to, and yeah I mean just some things have changed, but some things are pretty much the same. But we’re growing and we’re having fun doing it, and yeah excited to be back on.

Steve: Yeah so it’s been a couple years, and I know some stuff has changed. I’m just kind of curious like so last time I think we talked about a completely different set of products. Are those original products that you sold on Amazon, like when you first got started are those still going strong?

Scott: Well they’re not going strong, but there’s a reason for that. I kind of let them go in a sense. They were kind of like my beginning products that kind of got me started. Now with that being said, there are some months that we’re still doing about 10,000 in revenue on those, and I’m literally Steve I’m not touching it. And I think I’m only spending like 20 bucks a day on pay per click. So they’re kind of like set and forget, and I take whatever I get and it’s a decent little chunk to not really be doing anything.

But one of the reasons I kind of backed off on that, number one was the starting point. It kind of got me into the game, it kind of got me like, oh my gosh, like I should probably pay attention to this thing. And I did but then I started to see like if I was going to build this thing out or build a brand, I would do it differently. I wouldn’t do exactly what I did in the beginning. I’d go after products that were different, I would build a brand, I wouldn’t just go out there in just find a product or a widget that was selling in a sense.

So with that being said, it’s kind of my fault. I think I could have grown that into something bigger, but now I’ve taken my energy and focused on different projects.

Steve: I see, so you didn’t feel like you could create a real brand around that product, so that’s why you put on the back burner?

Scott: Yeah exactly yeah. It was kind of like — and it’s one of those things that now it’s gotten saturated. And even though it’s gotten saturated because I got in early, I’m still ranking okay, I’m still getting sales organically, but again literally if I spend — oh gosh, if I log in and check my stuff once a week it would be a lot.

Steve: Okay. Well so given what you just said Scott, how has your criteria changed then for selecting a product to sell?

Scott: Well okay, here is the deal, it’s not even so much the criteria has changed as far as like the numbers go, but as far as where I look for products or what I think would make a good, not even product but a good brand. We talk a lot about like the open brand concept, and I’ve got a partner that I work with on that side of things where we’re able to test products relatively quick. If we find something, instead of trying to fit it into a brand, you can kind of just go, okay let’s just launch it under the open brand. It’s kind of like retail arbitrage for privately label.

Steve: Sure right.

Scott: And we’ve done that, and we’ve actually got one product right now, it’s really, really crazy on how that all happened. And we sourced it locally at first, and then we now are going to China after we validated it numerous times. My partner kind of was dragging their feet a little bit on that, but that’s one product that it may be a trend. So it’s one of those things too that if you see something trending you might be able to jump in, but there’s not really a brand behind an open brand with that.

So with product criteria, the stuff that I look at now more so than anything is really brand, and I string some products together. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this, this maybe breaking news I don’t know I’m going to let you know this right now. But yesterday we logged in, myself and Chris Schaefer, which are partners in this new brand that we’re working on, and we noticed that they rolled out a new feature in Amazon with their coupons. And basically now we can create coupons that target our past customers or ASINS, and we can let that coupon show up to that person almost like they were pixelled in a sense. Have you seen this yet?

Steve: No I have not; it is news to me, interesting.

Scott: Yeah and depending on your account, maybe how old it is or whatever, but if you go to the advertising tab and you’ll normally see campaign manager, enhanced brand content, early reviewer program, lighting deals, coupons, promotions, if you go to coupons, I think that’s where it would be, yeah creating new coupon. That’s where it would be there, and if you want to create a coupon, but then if you go under there and you see promotions, you can go under there and then you can go ahead and create your promotion. So the coupon thing is new. The promotions has always been there.

Steve: So basically you’re only giving coupons to your past customers essentially?

Scott: Well you can select that, you can select the criteria. It could be past customers, it could be an ASIN. So if you have one of your ASINs on your products and you want someone bought this but then you wanted to see something else, you can put that up alongside them. And I think they’re charging like 60 cents a transaction, then whatever else the percentage of this after use. You can either use percentage off, or a dollar amount off.

Steve: Okay.

Scott: Pretty cool man.

Steve: Yeah.

Scott: So yeah we’re actually playing around with that right now to just kind of see exactly what it’s doing. I think we already gotten some sales from it. We just started it like literally like less than eight hours ago. So yes so anyway…

Steve: Let me ask you this real quick. So you mentioned that now you’re focusing more on brand, do you still think the open brand concept is sustainable in the long run?

Scott: That’s a great question. Sustainable, it’s kind of like retail arbitrage, that’s the way I look at it. It’s kind of like it’s a little different because you can keep reordering. But I guess the question is, are the products, products that are trending, are they products that are I guess seasonal like those are the things that I would say? And again it’s like unless you’re just going to be like you’re just going to focus on like electronics, like you’re going to be the electronics dealer or something like that.

It’s hard to say sustainable if you’re looking at like just random products. So to me it would be probably harder to sell a business that’s random products versus like one that is specifically focused towards a market.

Steve: Okay right.

Scott: So I don’t know about sustainable. I would say for people that are like, they’re like, oh my gosh, I don’t know what product to pick. If you want to test products or market, it’s a great way to test markets. I think there’s like five different markets that are in the open brand that we’re working in, and they’re just different markets, right? So you can test sport and outdoors, you can test cooking, you can test fishing, you can test like all these different ones and then you can see which ones maybe has some legs, and then you can take it to the next level if you want to.

So it’s a way for you to test. I don’t know if it’s sustainable, maybe it could be. I wouldn’t want to make that my in thing.

Steve: So is your process now then to just kind of launch a private label product first, see if it has legs and then consider whether you can create a brand on it, or do you consider all the brand stuff right away?

Scott: Well I do consider the brand stuff, but I always start with that. It was funny, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine and I said years ago we would build the website, we would do our product research, we would say we think that this thing is going to work. Now what I like to do is go to Amazon, let them tell me if there’s products selling in that market. Can I create a better product; can I validate it before I actually put all the work into building all of the stuff that it takes to build the brand?

So for me it’s kind of like Shark Tank, right? The sharks on there, they always come down, they go okay like what are your sales? Until you have sales, you’re not proving the concept. You haven’t proven or validated that the market is going to buy your product. So I like to go the other route, do a small test order, put it in, and then from there we can kind of grow with that. So yeah that is kind of the mindset and kind of the process that we take.

Steve: Okay, so let’s talk about that. So we place a small order, then what is your product launch process now today?

Scott: Yeah that’s a great question. So what we basically do is generally we will do a test order of anywhere between 300 and 500 units. Now some people say, Scott how do you do that, like they all want me to do 1,000 units. And we ask, we just keep asking and will negotiate, or will move on to a different supplier. We’ve found that generally you can find at least 500 that you can test, 500 unit run.

You’re going to spend a little more, but that’s okay because we’re just testing and we’re kind of reducing the amount of risk if we were to buy 1,000 units so that’s fine. So what we’ll do is we do our product research. Normally how we do it, we want to look at the sales of current competitors and see what they’re doing. We’ll look at the reviews, see what we can do better, we’ll look at the listing optimization, see how we can do a better job there, better pictures, better title, better optimization, all the way around.

And then what we’ll do is we build our own email list. So we instead of like before you could go to a service that would do a launch for you. And I wasn’t big on those before, I never did massive ones, some people were doing like hundreds or thousands of units and just giving away their products. We’ve never been about that. I’ve generally been about 100 units is what my budget is for my promotion, because I’m going after products also Steve that are not selling hundreds of units a day. I’m going after like can I find a product that can sell ten units a day, $10 profit each, make $100 profit per day. Like can I find that product, low competition, less than 200 reviews, that’s what I’m looking at.

So if I can spike the algorithm, if I can get ten sales a day through an email list or some type of promotion that I can run, in my case I like building email lists because I have an asset now, and then I can spike sales, then I can start to rank organically, then I can start to get in to Amazon’s traffic.

Steve: Right so you’re basically trying to stay under the radar of like the big guys where most of the evil stuff happens essentially?

Scott: Pretty much yeah. I mean again it’s like when you get into gray hat and black hat, it’s always well how can I be the other guy that’s trying to get one 100 sales a day. Number one, if you’re going after products that are selling 100 units a day, in order to rank you’ve got to sell 100 units a day, like bottom line.

So then you get into how do I give away — and I’ve heard some stories where some people will — they’ll take 100 grand and go in because we’re going to dominate that market, they’re going to try to take over it. They’ll take 100 grand and just use that as money to give away their products, so this way here they will just get ranked. And then once they secure their spot, then the organic sales will take over. That’s just not my cup of tea.

Steve: Right okay.

Scott: I don’t want that. And I’m not looking to just building it on Amazon either like that’s where we start, and that’s kind of where we kind of — because we can we can kind of like get started quicker in a sense where we don’t have to build out the website, we don’t have to do the merchant account, we don’t have to do refunds, all that stuff, fulfillment, we can do that.

So to me it’s the way to get started, but I’m always thinking, okay and like I was talking to you just before we got on here, like okay our next move is like we’re going to build a little mini funnel, we’re going to do a free plus shipping offer, we’re going to go through ClickFunnels, we are going to do all the stuff, that’s like what we’re working on now. But it’s been seven months in this new brand that we haven’t done that yet. We’re moving in that direction.

Steve: Okay let’s talk about your email list then, your launch email list, how to do you build that up?

Scott: Yeah we’re building it with your good friend and my good friend Mike Jackness which does the same thing and he did it in his brand is giveaways. We’re doing a 30 day giveaway. A lot of people will do shorter ones; I don’t like the shorter ones. We’re doing a 30 day one, and generally will give away a prize that’s worth about $200 to $250 in value, and it’s a physical product. And now because we have about eight or nine skews, we’re able to include those skews in the bundle as the giveaway, so now they’re kind of aware of our brand. But then we’ll wrap it around something major.

I kind of use a fishing analogy where if I’m going after the bass fishing market, I’m going to go find the best bass fishing lures and the tackle box and the vest, and I want to make that my bundle, and then hopefully my tackle box will be in there too. And then I will do that for 30 days. I’ll drive Facebook ads to a landing page or Instagram influencers. And then I will drive them through a contest, and then I will follow up with them through email. I’ll announce the winner and then on the back end will say to all the people that didn’t win, hey sorry you didn’t win, but we’ve got a 25% off coupon on our tackle box until midnight.

Steve: Can you describe how you figure out the product for the giveaway? It’s not your own product in the beginning?

Scott: In the beginning it’s not. I get a lot people say; well should I not wait to have my own product? The answer is no, like just that’s going to be your launch list. So we did it before we even had our product. We had a product ordered but we didn’t have it yet. So we just found something that was going to be related. The one mistake I see people making is they’re just going to like I know everyone wants an iPad. So I’m going to do an iPad. Well that’s not your market unless you’re selling iPad accessories.

So to me it’s got to be really dialed in even in the fishing space. If you’re going to sell something that’s tailored towards bass fishing, you want something that’s tailored towards bass fisherman. It’s got to be that targeted, because we don’t just want people that are free seekers, we want people that are in that market because people will say, well why wouldn’t I just go to someone that has a list for people who want to get deals?

That’s the problem, they’re just raising their hand because they want to get deals or get deals just like I mean back in the day, we’re talking like eight, nine months ago with Amazon review groups or people that were building these were these groups. These were just email lists of people that were raising their hand that wanted to get basically free product from Amazon. Well those people aren’t necessarily my target market.

So what I want to do is get something that I know is going to get them to raise their hand, and then from there we can go ahead and then start following up with either content, or other offers and stuff like that. So a good offer is key though, and you’re right, you can’t just give away your $29 tackle box. That’s not enough. You need something’s going to get some buzz, you can have a bundle. And we’ve had really good results since we’ve been doing those, and we’ve done it in a couple of different markets.

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I’m just curious, so that list that you get, like what is the quality of that list like?

Scott: You’re going to love this. In the very beginning when it’s fresh, it’s generally between 50 and 60% open rates. Okay so not too bad. So then people would say, well, wait a minute here, you got 1,000 emails, and you get a 50% open rate, that’s only 500. Okay so now it cost me fifteen cents to acquire an email by the way, so — oh it cost me 30 cents to acquire an email. And those are people that are opening my emails so that means that they’re interested.

And so what we’ll do is we will — like right now, I think we sent out an email yesterday to about 16,000, and I think that one right now and it hasn’t even been a full 24 hours, you know how that goes over time and it’ll get a little bit better, I think we’re over 25% right now. That’s above standard.

Steve: And so in terms of – so that’s the open rate, but in terms of like the people that actually buy, what percentage would you say that list in your last campaign?

Scott: Yeah in the last campaign, and it’s kind of hard to say because I’ll be honest, here is the other cool thing that happens. You get one person or two people that take your promotion that you’re doing and they share it to a Facebook group, and then it blows up, we just had that happen. We sold over 190 units from one email. So did that come directly from the email list? Not necessarily, but it came from someone that was on the list that shared in a group.

But I would say it depends on the offer again too Steve. I think you know that.

Steve: Sure.

Scott: You could send out that to everyone and it might not be the right product. We have right now nine skews. So we’re going to actually be able to kind of tell you a little bit more of that probably in the future because we’re going to run kind of like Mike has done. We’re going to do like ten days to Christmas sale, and we’re going to do like a little email campaign where we’re going to kind of give people different offers. But I would probably say it’s — I’d be kind of lying to say I knew exactly. But I would say, for the most part I would say probably half a percent to a percent.

Steve: It’s hard to track that right because you are not allowed to use affiliate links in emails either, right?

Scott: Yeah you’re not really supposed to. The only thing that we can do is we can track the coupon codes that we’ve given out.

Steve: Right.

Scott: And look at that and actually the one that we just did, we’re starting to get data, but also Amazon is kind of delayed on the data. But the way I look at this, the way I look at it is like this too and I know you’re a numbers guy. You like the numbers. Here’s the way I look at it though. I look at it like this. I got an email list and I paid $1,000 for it, all right. And I launched this product and I sold 250 units in three days. I got ranked on Amazon, I’m starting to get organic sales, I’m not even using sponsored product ad yet.

So that 250 sales that came from that email that I sent out because it was a discount, is that worth 1,000 bucks? To me it is because I’m not even looking at that. I’m looking at now I’ve got potential to take that list and send them another offer, or send them a piece of content that gets shared into a group that I get 60,000 views on a video we just shared. All of those things come back to me.

So I don’t necessarily look at it like, okay I sent an email, I got a 1% conversion, I got a half percent conversion. I don’t look at that. I look at more of like the long term of that. And you know as well as I do, I can take that list now which we’ve done, and I’ll upload it to Facebook, and now I’ll create a retargeting or I’ll also create a look alike audience from that email list. So that’s a little bit more of a higher level I guess thinking, and that’s how we do it. So the email list is built not just to sell a product.

Steve: Can we talk about like the emails that you actually send for a little bit?

Scott: Yeah absolutely. I mean our first email obviously if you sign up for a contest, the first one is going to like thanks for entering. And then from there we’ll give them another — there’s a link that’s in — we actually — actually Chris Guthrie, a good friend of ours, him and I partnered up on a piece of software that we created called Giveaway Boost, which we created for doing this. And there’s been a few other ones out there. We just wanted to have ours more tailored towards e-commerce which is more features.

So we actually built that in. So what it will do is it will give them their own tracking code. So they can share that tracking code and will incentivize them by if you share this with people you know or think that you would like this, and you get three entries, you’ll get an extra entry. So we incentivize in that way. So in that first email, that’s what it’s thanking them. It’s letting them know what they just did, and that they’re confirmed. And oh by the way, here’s your special link that will get you additional entries.

And then we’ll follow up probably in about three days with some just regular content. So it’s basically like, hey, we just wanted to drop in here; I know that you probably want to catch more bass this weekend. So here’s a couple of tips that we’ve been using and they work really well. And oh by the way, here’s your special link again to share the contest, whatever. So it’s kind of like that hybrid approach.

So stuff like that, and then once the contest is over, we’ll announce the winner. So the headline is usually like the winner is, and then from there, and that will be a huge open rate. And then from there we will announce the winner publicly because we want to let them know that we’re actually fulfilling the prize, and we’ll also if we can get a picture with that winner. And then from there it will say, but you’re still a winner because we are going to give you a 25% off discount through this weekend just for entering the contest, we want to thank you. And oh by the way here’s another cool YouTube video that we shot about this other thing.

So it’s really a way for us to connect with them without just pushing a sale, but then we also — and one thing I would say and you know this, and hopefully your audience knows it or they’ll not know it now is the one thing we’ve done is we’ve always added some form of deadline to our offer. So if there is a 25% off coupon, and it goes live on Friday afternoon, it will end on Sunday night. And that will give us the opportunity to email three times, once to let them know about it. The second time to let them know that there’s still a bit more time, and then the third one is its end. It always spikes the sales. The last day is usually the most sales that we’ll get from that email.

Steve: Right. So I’m just curious then, so how does this giveaway strategy fall into some of your other email gathering strategies? You mentioned a free plus shipping offer in the beginning, how do you arrange all these different offers together?

Scott: Yeah well, the free plus shipping is something that’s just getting underway right now. So I can’t really give you that, but it’s like our next move. Right now the whole building of the email list has really been, two ways really. One has been from the contest, and that’s been the number one way. The second way is kind of like giving away like a free PDF the seven lures you must have in your tackle box kind of thing. And that gets a trickle of emails in. And then the third way will be free plus shipping, and those will be like warmer leads in a sense.

So I can’t really tell you on that one, but we’ll be setting these up just like you would. We’re going to segment, we’ll have a contest list, more or less a customer list, and then you’ll have a warm list that came from a free plus shipping offer. And the free plus shipping offer will be interesting because we’re going to be doing it where you get the free plus shipping, and then really on the back end it’s not even to be like the next product maybe, it might just be more of what they just got for free.

Steve: Sure of course.

Scott: But then maybe test it down sell up sell, all that fun happy stuff.

Steve: So just curious, what are some tips on giveaways? So your price you recommend 250 to 300 bucks?

Scott: I’d say yeah, I’d say the more the better just because it gets more hype, right? It’s like a bigger deal. So I would say the offer is key, your targeting is key too. You can’t just throw that up and think everyone is going to see it and like it and share it with someone that they know is into fishing. You have to really do that targeting, and it’s going to take a little bit of work. We have done Instagram, we found influencers. We didn’t even run ads; we just basically reached out to influencers.

In this new brand though, we have not really had success with influencers on Instagram, and I think more so because we haven’t really spent too much time. We tried like three or four, and then we just kind of said, you know what Facebook ads are kind of easier right now, so we’re going to stick there. But we did one. We actually did an open case study. I did it for — my son’s into sneakers. I did the whole Jordan and all that stuff. So we did a public case study for one of our live events showing how we built the email list and stuff in the sneaker head market.

And that offer was all driven through or actually shared through Instagram. I found on Instagram a couple. I found like three different Instagram pages that had — one had 300,000, one had like 500,000, one had a million, and I think the most I spent was like $125 for a post. And those converted really well in that space as far as email capture, which is kind of crazy because in Instagram you have to go to the bio link and you have to — then you’re warned that you’re leaving Instagram.

We spent like I think 125 bucks on that one run for that one page, and we got like over 500, 600 emails in than four hours.

Steve: In terms of writing your Facebook ads for these promotions, so let’s use your fishing example, what are some targeting aspects of Facebook that you would use?

Scott: Well, I think first off you’ve got to find out where your audience is hanging out. And I mean an easy way to do that obviously is to just kind of go to Facebook, it’s a search engine, and just start to search for groups, and search for pages. And then from there sometimes you can target some of the — not the groups but the pages, or it can at least get you started. So if you’re starting from scratch, that’s where you’re going to kind of have to start doing some of your own testing.

So you’re going to go in, you’re going to look at the target, the different interests that you’re going into like fishing or it might be bass fishing or whatever, right, like those interests. And then in the beginning, I mean you’re kind of like you’re guessing as far as like demographics until you start getting some of that data and then you can start to really hone that in. The advantage of having even a small tiny 250 email list of people that you know raised their hand already, and then taking them and uploading them into Facebook and using them as your lookalike, that really can speed up the process because then it almost goes out and finds those people for you.

But beginning I would say it’s going to be testing. And for us it was kind of like you’re kind of shooting kind of blindly, but you’re just guessing. And then you start to look at the data and you’re like, okay wait a minute here, guys that are 18 to 24 are clicking, but they’re not converting. So let’s just pause those guys, let’s only target the guys that are older than that. And you just start refining that through your different tests. But I would say just go there and find groups, and there’s going to be tons of them that you can look at groups and Facebook pages, and then just start seeing from there what kind of people are hanging out in that market, and then start to use that as some of your insights.

Steve: I guess what I’m trying to get at is like what is your exact process, like how many ads do you run, how many different ad sets, how much money do you put on each ad set at the beginning, what is like a target click through rate or a conversion rate, how many people do you — how much do you expect to pay per lead, that sort of thing?

Scott: Well I’m going to kind of go over to being that’s not my expertise Steve, so I’m not going to give you that.

Steve: All right.

Scott: Chris Schaefer, my partner is that. He’s the guy that loves those numbers like you; you guys would have a great conversation over those Facebook ads. But I could give you the basic stuff. So when we were starting that stuff, we allocate 20 bucks a day, and that’s like our testing money. Generally, I mean in the beginning we were shooting for a dollar per email, like that’s what we were shooting for. We’ve since got that from where it was, it was I think we got it to 50 cents, and then we got it to 30 cents, and then recently, our most recent one was 15 cents.

But again that is from him looking at the numbers after day one, and then tweaking, turning off this and putting this. Now the one thing I would say, a little tip here and I know this is the case because we kind of go over this stuff, if you have a — again testing, it all comes out on testing. If you take a static image, just an image that’s just not going to be any movement, no gift, no nothing, that may not convert as well as a video or just a gift.

And what I mean by gift is like what we did is we took, I think it was five pictures in our contest, and all we did was create an animation of it. And we put it up and acted as a video, and our conversions were better and our click through rate was better, and our cost per email was better just from that one thing. And that was just Chris saying, I’m going to give this thing a test and see what happens. And he did it, and it was like that’s what we use now in every single ad set.

So yeah I mean to give you like all of that, all of those numbers. I can’t give you that. All I can tell you is we’re spending between $20 and $30 a day; our email cost is about 15 cents give or take per email. That’s per email, that’s not click that’s per email. And then from there as far as different ad sets, I think we’re using right now four, you know what I mean to test. And that’s basically the bare bones. And I know even Chris has said like we could get even more granular, but why? At this point we want to spend more time doing other things, and just kind of run this behind the scenes.

Steve: Yeah I mean 15 cents is really good, and that’s probably because people are sharing this, right?

Scott: Yes. Yeah they’re sharing it, and again another byproduct of this is every time we do a contest, we add about 2,000 Facebook likes to our page, which just happens automatically because we have to have the ad running through our Facebook fan page. So of course that we’re naturally getting likes on our page, now people would say, well aren’t likes kind of useless, aren’t they? No, they’re actually not, because we can retarget that page now and run ads cheaper to our Facebook fan page, and we can also now do our Facebook lives where we get exposure to our audience, but then they can share it inside of our fan page versus a group. So that’s the other things that we look at.

Steve: And in terms of this email list, do you end up cleaning it after?

Scott: Yes.

Steve: Okay. What is your process?

Scott: Well at this point it’s really like we give them opportunities to open or click. So it’s like one of those things, like after — I think we’ve been doing it about every 30 days that if they haven’t opened a email, we will then send them kind of like in that last set of emails, and if they don’t click or open after that, then we’ll just get them off the list or manually remove them. And of course we’ll get unsubscribes which we’re happy to get those. I mean it’s just them doing it for us.

But for the most part it’s pretty standard right now, and we’re kind of still new and kind of growing in this because for us it’s less than a year. And I know Mike has got some pretty — Mike Jackness that is, he’s got some pretty intricate systems and stuff going on behind the scenes to do all this stuff, and I’m definitely looking forward to chat with him on this stuff. But we’re definitely going through the process on a basic level to just clean it on kind of top level. And then from there we’ll probably do some type of like wake up campaign where we kind of get them reactivated, and if they don’t after that then we can just keep off.

Steve: I guess are you putting these people like in an autoresponder sequence after the contest is over for a long time.

Scott: Yes. Actually right now I think we’ve got it built out to about 20 emails.

Steve: Twenty miles okay, yeah that’s a lot actually.

Scott: Yeah and I think we’re doing about — at least we’re doing one drip every single week, but we’re also doing a live every single Friday. So like every Friday there’ll be like an update of what we published, or new content or a new deal, or whatever. And then the drip will be basically content sprinkled in with a little bit of an offer.

Steve: So let’s talk about that. So who’s creating this content, and I imagine this is all going into establishing a brand, right? You’re putting something out there with the content, so what does your strategy look like there?

Scott: You mean as far as like who is going to be writing the content or who is going to be the face and all that stuff?

Steve: And how you formulate the content. So you have this email list now that you have to kind of nurture along, and hopefully at some point they’ll buy from you, just because you have given them mind share of your product. So how often are you creating content, how do you know what content works well, like what’s the strategy there/

Scott: Yeah well okay and we’re again testing a lot of different forms, because I think every market reacts a little bit differently. We’re finding that Facebook lives work really well, but also you have to be there live. So it can be a little taxing on the person doing it and you know that. So we are trying to do at least, we were doing one of those a week, sometimes two, now we’re doing about one every two weeks. But we’ve since started to add short videos that are tutorial based that are giving value that are kind of showing how to do something. And that is being done generally about twice a week on a regular basis.

And then once we get past — we just started talking about this, once we get past a certain amount of content, we can then start to kind of repurpose it and kind of bring it back to life again. But the way it works really is my partner in this, my partner that I started this brand with, they’re the face. So they’re the ones that’s coming up with the content. And the way that they’re coming up with content is a few different ways. Number one they’re part of other groups and other pages. So they’re very aware of what people are talking about, what people are excited about, what people like, what they don’t like. So then they just put their spin on whatever that is, whatever is interesting at that time, that’s one way.

The other way is we now are starting to get emails from people asking can you show us this, can you do this, how does this work? So then we can start to create content around that. It’s great also because you can start to add social proof that, hey Sally from Mississippi asked this, and I wanted to answer her question, here is the answer, a piece of content. So, all of that stuff is kind of being produced.

Once that’s being produced, it’s also now being published on our blog. Our blog is our home base, and by the way it’s kind of crazy, we did the blog without thinking about like driving traffic to it, or even getting search engine optimization, really dialed in, and we’re already probably getting about 25,000 to 30,000 uniques a month.

Steve: That’s crazy man.

Scott: To that blog, which is basically us just taking what we’re creating on Facebook and then republishing it on our blog our home base, and then from there people can — and then we drive people, generally we’ll drive people from the email either to the blog or to Facebook whichever we want to get attention. If it’s Facebook we’re doing it because we want to get shares and we want to get comments and all that stuff, or we’re driving it to the blog because we want people to be able to download something or consume something there. So we just kind of direct the traffic wherever we want to.

I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2018 Sellers Summit are on sale at sellerssummit.com. Now what is the Sellers Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level BS, mine is a curriculum based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business.

And in fact every speaker that I invite is deep in the trenches of their you converse business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the Sellers Summit will be small and intimate. Last year we cut off ticket sales at around 100 people, so tickets will sell out quickly.

If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or one million dollars per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Sellers Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale Florida from May 3rd to May 5th. And as I mentioned earlier, we’re almost sold out already, and I actually will be raising the ticket price from here on out every two weeks. That’s right; the ticket cost is going to go up every two weeks until the event. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again that’s sellerssummit.com, or just Google it, now back to the show.

So let me ask you this, regarding the content is it product focused content or is it is it informational content related to the niche primarily?

Scott: Yeah it’s that. I would say out of ten posts, it would be one or two may be product based, but it’s not going to be us coming on being like, hey, I just wanted to show you my new fly fishing rod today, and I want to show you why I like it so much, it’s got this, it’s got that. It’s not that, it’s generally like, hey, I want to show you how with my new rod I just was able to go out there and catch three fish or whatever.

Steve: Right, it will be like fishing techniques as opposed to like, hey, check out my rod?

Scott: Exactly, and then in the conversation you’re able to say, oh by the way I custom made this fishing rod because I was frustrated because this, that and the other thing, if you want to go check it out you can, but here let me go ahead and show you what I have been doing. So you’re just sprinkling that in your, and then from there people are just naturally wanting to see. It’s one of those things, it’s like we don’t want to be sold, but we’re sold if we see something that’s working or something that could benefit us in some way.

So it’s a way to do it and give value, and then from there you can also sprinkle in that offer. And so we’ve done — like I said, if we do ten posts, it might be eight of them that are pure content with mentioning all of the products, but it’s not necessarily product driven. The other might be 100% like, hey, I wanted to show you this new thing that we just created because I was frustrated, and we created something that’s awesome that I want to share with you guys because I’m so excited, like that type of thing. I’m so excited and we just launched this thing, I want to give you guys a 30% off discount all through the weekend.

Steve: So let me ask you this, so the way you’re doing it, there’s definitely a person who is the face of the company.

Scott: Yeah.

Steve: So let’s say there’s people out there who don’t want to be the face of any company, they don’t even want to show their face, how would your strategy change?

Scott: Yeah, that’s a good one. And here would be my advice. I would try to find someone that is so into your space or into your niche, and maybe they have a YouTube channel that they’re just publishing on the weekend, maybe they’re fixing their car on the weekend because they’re into fixing muscle cars, and they have no idea about like that they could actually make some money at this, I would look for someone like that and then tap into those people. I think if you want to build a brand, and really differentiate yourself not just with the product but with the personality, because I think that is a huge advantage, I think you just need to find someone. And it could take some time.

It’s funny though, I mean I don’t know about you, but I mean I come across people all the time that I see opportunities that if I was in that space I could probably make it happen. I could probably say to them, hey, I know a thing or two about e-commerce. I know a thing or two about information products like what do you say, you want to do something here? And they’d be like, what do you mean, like what’s FBA, is that like the government, is that like the IRS? No, no it’s not. Like literally there’s people out there that have no idea and they love talking about this stuff.

So, I would try — I just actually met with – actually it was at FinCon. I had my little TAS meet up there, and I met with a couple there that they make their own honey and they make their own honey cider vinegar and all this stuff, and we were actually giving them a consultation, we were actually doing a hot seat with them. And they are the face of the brand. But in the beginning they weren’t that person, but they just were doing it because they love it and they just love growing their own plants, and they just love all this organic stuff.

And they were like my neighbor, I’m sure I could connect with them and say, hey, I’ll tell you what, you do this, just jump on video, do this, that, and the other thing and I will take care of the rest like that’s how a partnership could form, and that’s your face. That’s the only thing they got to do is just be the face and just get on and do videos and stuff. So to me it’s like it’s a process to find that, and people say well where do I find that? You just be aware. I don’t know about you, but I mean I find people all the time that I could do that with.

Steve: Yeah I mean I think for us, it’s a little different. I mean we have access to a lot of people. I’m just I get this question a lot which is why I was just curious what your take is, because a lot of people are shy and then they don’t really go and talk to people, they don’t go to conferences, they don’t really network, and so it’s a little bit harder when your life is a little bit more insular, you know what I’m saying?

Scott: Well okay but I’ll give you an example. Okay I’m at my daughter’s volleyball, she is nine years old. I’m sitting there in the bullion chairs. And no one knows who I am, no one knows what I do nothing, and I got a lady that her sister was there with her, and she’s a huge volleyball player, was in the day, a D1 college, she coached, she’s done all this stuff, and she wants to make a little bit of extra money on the side and doesn’t know what to do.

I could have very easily said, you should go into the volleyball space, you should be an instructor, you should be an on line coach, you should — or I’ll tell what, I sell volleyball stuff or I sell sporting stuff for this market, how about you come on as a face, I will pay you and you can be part of the brain, I’ll give you a cut. That’s what I mean, like it doesn’t matter who I am, it’s just it’s there it’s right in front of you and it doesn’t mean that I have a podcast, you have a podcast, we have more connections. It means that I’m there locally inside of this place where there’s this raving fan base.

I don’t know about if you’ve ever seen this, but like volleyball or even soccer, you know soccer, kid soccer it’s crazy, right? So it’s like there’s a huge niche for girls’ volleyball at certain ages like this person could be like the local and the online trainer, but they had no idea that they could do that. So like for me I could bridge that gap for them and be like I know all this other stuff over here, all you got to do is just do what you love and just teach.

Steve: Yeah I mean it’s basically just keeping an open mind.

Scott: Totally.

Steve: Right yeah.

Scott: And if you’re aware, if you’re looking for it in a sense, it almost happens. But if you’re just close minded, you don’t think about it. You just think it’s got to be someone that’s on YouTube already, and they’re doing this thing. It doesn’t mean that, it just means you have to be open and you have to ask questions and get to know people a little bit.

I did it just by listening to the conversation. I wasn’t even on the conversation. I just heard it and my wife was talking to her sister, and I was like, okay well, if I wanted to get into that space, I could probably grab her, and she would probably be a great face. Totally looks like a volleyball person, like great personality, I’m like but she doesn’t know that you can do that right now, and she’s just not into that space.

Steve: So Scott, to kind of end this interview, I just kind of want to get your take on where Amazon is going. So how do you feel about RA, OA, private label, and then branding?

Scott: Yeah okay I think Amazon isn’t going anywhere, that’s first.

Steve: Obviously yeah.

Scott: So, you can either take advantage of what they’re doing right now, and get in on some of that, and to me it’s like getting a foot in the door. It doesn’t mean you’re going to build your business primarily on Amazon. I’m not a fan of that; I’m a fan of getting started there. But I think that, yes change is going to be happening, are we going to have to adjust? Yeah. Has SEO changed over the years? Sure.

So I think retail arbitrage, online arbitrage, I think that’s going to become a little bit more difficult, because brands are going to be able to lock down who can sell. They already can, but I think it’s going to become even harder. So that will probably become a little bit harder, but there is this place out there called eBay, and there’s still people doing pretty well over there, so you can always look into that.

But I think for RA or OA or even wholesaling, I think that’s not really going anywhere in 2018, I think it’ll still be there. I think people can still take advantage of it. I think it’s a great stepping stone. I don’t think — me personally if you’re going into this thing to create a business, I would start a business building your own brand, that’s what I would do. If I could choose one thing, it would be do exactly what we’re talking about, doing exactly what you’ve done, do exactly what Mike Jackness has done. This stuff will be here for the long term.

And I think Amazon is just that channel that we can tap into and take advantage of their platform and of their resources and stuff like that right now. Now in the future if they decide to change things and or maybe they take your legs out and you can’t sell there anymore for whatever reason, you definitely want to have your own platform, you definitely want to have your own email list, you definitely want to have your own sales channel so you can start directing traffic there. That is important.

But I think Amazon is only going to get I guess bigger, and it’s going to create more opportunities for us to be able to take advantage of these different resources. But for the ones that are doing these little hacks or gray hat, black hat stuff, just know that it’s a short cut, and that it probably will go away, and it could get you banned and then you could be sitting on inventory that you’re not going to get rid of. That would be my take.

I think private labeling, no matter if you’re selling on Amazon or not is still going to be here, and I think that building your own brand will just give you more security, and it will allow you to sell your brand if you want to and get more money for it if you end up by kind of getting out of that space.

Steve: Well Scott, thanks a lot for coming on the show man. Where can people find you and find out what you’re up to now?

Scott: Yeah, TheAmazingSeller.com is where you would find me, and the podcast is on iTunes, Stitcher, I believe it’s on Google Play as well. Yeah that’s pretty much where you’d find me. You’ll find me at Sellers Summit, I think one more year, right, Am I going to be back?

Steve: Yeah, what are you talking about, I told you to put on your calendar, good Lord?

Scott: I did, I did. Always a pleasure hanging out at Sellers Summit, and everyone that comes, it’s just been a really great community. I’m really impressed to you and Toni, and everything that you guys have done and you’ve built like a nice community there for Sellers summit. It’s just — it always gets really, really good reviews. So I want to thank you again for letting me be a part of that.

Steve: Dude, always happy to have you man.

Scott: I appreciate man. All right, go get some sleep; you’re still recovering from that jetlag are you?

Steve: Yes we are, yeah coming back from China is pretty brutal.

Scott: All right man.

Steve: All right dude, take care.

Scott: I appreciate Steve.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. What I like about Scott is that he’s always trying new things, and always at the cutting edge of Amazon trends. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode197.

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.

I also want to thank Privy 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 to make it super simple as well. 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.

And finally I want to thank Payability. If you’re looking to take back control of your cash flow and scale your Amazon business fast, then sign up for Payability, and say goodbye to cash flow issues and stock outs. With daily payments, you can speed up your supply chain, buy inventory at optimal times, and stay in the buy box. The more control you have over your cash flow, the more buying power you will have. Visit Go.payability.com/Steve to get started, and cash in on a $200 credit just for being a My Wife Quit Her Job listener. Once again that’s Go.payability.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 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.

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 out 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.

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 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.