Show notes
Steven Pope, the founder of My Amazon Guy, joins this in-depth conversation, to share his big brain thinking and offer actionable insights to take your Amazon business to the next level. Key Takeaways: PPC Advertising Strategies: Discover the power of setting up auto campaigns for every SKU, even those you might overlook. Learn how a simple $0.05 bid can generate an extra $700 a month! Product Targeting and Ad Placement: Avoid common pitfalls in product targeting and leverage new ad formats like Prime Video ads to gain a competitive edge. Global Market Expansion: Learn why Japan is a booming market for Amazon sellers and get tips on how to expand internationally while managing shipping costs effectively. Localization and Future Trends: Explore the future of Amazon advertising with localized keyword data and targeted PPC strategies. Focus and Specialization: Steven emphasizes the importance of sticking to your core competencies and outsourcing tasks where necessary to build a robust, specialized business. About My Amazon Guy: My Amazon Guy is a comprehensive Amazon seller consultancy that provides a full range of services including PPC management, SEO, and content creation. Founded by Steven Pope, the agency is known for its expertise in navigating the complexities of the Amazon marketplace and helping sellers achieve remarkable growth. Don't miss this episode filled with valuable tips and strategies from one of the top experts in the field. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just starting out, there's something here for everyone. Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more insights and expert advice on Amazon selling! Follow us on social media: Twitter: @TheSellersEdge Instagram: @TheSellersEdge FULL TRANSCTRIPT: JONATHAN: So I know that you are somebody who has many thoughts on the ongoing complexities of Amazon. I think that it continues to evolve. And I think even Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying that they are in the business of helping people buy things. They are not in the business of helping people sell them. STEVEN POPE: Amazon is the most customer centric platform in the world and sellers are left by the wayside. And that's a moat though, right? Like if you can overcome that challenge as a seller, you're going to be wildly successful. If you have a good product and you still can't overcome that challenge, that's where the biased, my Amazon guy pitch comes in and you hire an agency and we'll help you out. But that's pretty much it. You have a lot of a deck stacked against you because Amazon is putting up roadblocks. The Chinese are coming in hot, hurting margins. Amazon is adding fees, making margins hard from that side. And there's just a lot of people that want a piece of that piece. JONATHAN: Yeah, for sure. I mean, especially with, I mean there's a lot of things going on. They're adding additional fees right now. And that's just something that I feel like Amazon keeps getting greedier and greedier when they don't want to help Amazon sellers. But they're also just like, I don't even know about the additional promotional sales beyond Prime Day. Is that something that you think sellers will benefit from or do you think that's okay and, but like Amazon will, obviously STEVEN POPE: Yes, Amazon will crush it. They're going to push a lot of Amazon products. They'll sell a bunch of kindles. They'll send a bunch of, sell a bunch of Amazon basics. But the average day, Joe, Amazon seller does not win on Prime Day at all. Yes, their sales will be higher on Prime Day. I want to be clear about that. But if you look at the long view, if you look at the seven day stretch, they're static week over week, right. So you're stealing from Peter to pay Paul, as they say. Right. Like you're not going to come out ahead. Now, should you take advantage of Prime Day? Yes. Should you run a discount? Maybe. Should you add some additional PPC spend on Prime Day? Probably. But you'll notice that I do all that with an Eeyore saying of like, yeah, okay, Optimus prime, you know, like begrudgingly. So yes, you probably should pay, play the game. But it's not necessarily the top thing I would focus on. JONATHAN: What do you think is the number one thing that Amazon kind of has going against sellers? Like, is it the fact that. I mean, everything about Amazon is cumbersome for sellers from seller central being just the cumbersome platform that it is to seller support not being entirely efficient. I'm just curious, what's the one thing that if we could fix it would make life infinitely easier? STEVEN POPE: Well, the first one that comes to my mind would be seller support. Right? Like, I. I am so tired of getting copy paste garbage out of seller support. Like half the emails in Chinese and like, you know why, right? Like they've sold out to China. They don't care about us as an Amazon seller brand business or anything. Really. That would be the easiest one to fix, too. All we got to do is install chat GPT 4.0 and maybe put a little, you know, connect it over to my database at my Amazon guy with all our sops, and boom, we have better answers than Amazon does. And I know this because Amazon's own employees are coming to my materials to quote to each other. I've seen the emails. I've seen them on my website. I have proof. I have the actual deets. But that would be the easiest one to solve. No question about it. Here's how I would do it. Two sentence only responses cannot go over two sentences. Sentence one, I've solved your problem. Sentence two, here's what happens next, right? That's it. That's like every email ever. That's how you solve it. Now, obviously social support is not going to be solved. Andy doesn't give a flying anything about that. Jeff Bezos set up the company with a very strict vision. Buyer centric company, sellers be damned. And as proof of that, now there's more fees. Surprise. Low inventory fees. Like, what the frick? Like, what does. How does that help anybody? I'm going to charge you to not sell your shit now. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it. Okay, I think I might pay attention to Walmart just a tiny bit more. God bless. Walmart's not going to actually help us either. Right? Let's be clear. They bought jet seven years ago, but couldn't integrate it. They did nothing with that. Have you ever done grocery pickup at Walmart? What a joke. Like you're sitting in the parking lot for 30 minutes, target might have a chance. Like, you go to Target's grocery pickup and it's like, man, they're like waiting outside for you. So, yeah, like a little bit of hope that Target might come and take some market share from Amazon, but they have a closed platform. They're not accepting sellers. So that's out. Then the Chinese come along and launch TikTok and Timo. And you're like, oh, gosh. Is like, seriously, like, the Chinese are going to be our savior from the Amazon monopoly. Take a deep breath. No, they're not either. So we're pretty much stuck with the Amazon monopoly. That's a fact. It is just how we have to live with it. So become a stoic monk and enter into the platform. Or don't. Right, make your choice. But it's created a lot of wealth. It's the largest wealth transfer in my lifetime. So as much as I like to shit on Amazon's policies because they're terrible, the platform itself is actually quite nice. God bless the trash, man. That takes all my brown boxes away. God bless the whole system is just benevolent. I've made millions of dollars selling on Amazon, helping other sellers. On Amazon, there's money to be made. Is it a gold rush anymore? Probably not. Is there still copper and nickel in them hills? You betcha. Do you think the playing field is leveled for both newer established sellers and bigger brands, or do you think it's weighted one side or the other? I don't know how to answer that question because it sucks for everybody. So I guess in that sense, yeah, it's a level playing field. The problem with big brands is that they don't have distribution control. Right. So what happens is all of the mom and pop sellers buy your product from a distributor and show up and undercut you by 5%, so you can't have a map policy. So it sucks for brands in that sense, that are big. It sucks for new guys because they have to go gamify reviews and lower their price just to even have a shot at it. And if you try and launch a product like a supplement, you're paying dollar five in pay per click advertising. So a lot of challenges, no matter who you are, but it's still a win for everybody. I want to be abundantly clear. I still think it's easier to launch and sell on Amazon than it is anywhere else. Shopify and D two C. Your conversion rate on a website's like one to 3%. On Amazon, it's 10%. Come on. Like, it's. Even if the PPC is more expensive on Amazon by 25% than it is on Google Ads, it's still four times more effective because the conversion rate is four times, five times better. So it's. There's no question that we have to work with the. The elephant in the room, but I still like to call it a pink elephant. JONATHAN: I like it. I appreciate that a lot. You brought up the low inventory fees. I'm curious if you think that switching over from the weekly limit capacities to the monthly is helped in any way. STEVEN POPE: Too early to tell potentially, but I would say the whole system is getting more confusing, more complex. You need like a calculator just to get through your day as an Amazon seller. These days, like when you first signed up back in the day, I was getting two cent a click on ads. I didn't have to do prime, I didn't have to pay attention to anything and I could just print money on Amazon. That day is long gone. Today you need a sophisticated modeling software just to understand your profit margins. You need to hire an account and just understand the tax laws, right? You gotta, you gotta hire a lawyer if you wanna frickin get Amazon to like comply with their own policies or you're gonna hit your head against a brick wall. So, so I, you know, I'd say there's a lot of things that are happening in the seller's favor, but it's hard to mention those in the midst of all of the things that are getting worse, right? Like, to be clear, the UI is getting better. To be clear, Amazon's giving us more data than it's ever given us before. I love me some ICAP search query performance, reports impressions, clicks, add to carts, purchases. I call it the marketing funnel. That is the best piece of information tech we've ever been given out of Amazon. I now know my CTR at a keyword level. I now know my conversion at a keyword level. I now know how many impressions I get or how many are even available at a keyword level. Used to have to use outside tools to estimate any of those things. So the system is technically getting better in some ways, but overall the policies are getting worse. JONATHAN: Yeah, I do love search query performance. I feel like I spend more time in that than any other part of Amazon. Especially because you're seeing keywords that you don't see anywhere else and especially because you see the search volume associated with them, which I think everybody else is ball parking. STEVEN POPE: They were ball parking. It was still directionally helpful. You know, 80% accuracy is better than no idea, that's for sure. JONATHAN: Absolutely. I mean, is that the one thing that you're really looking at in seller central? Are there other things? Do you look at product opportunity explorer now STEVEN POPE: The search query performance, probably my favorite. You know, the only time you go over to the product opportunity explorer is probably to figure out your next product expansion or see how you're stacking up but the search query performance report really is, is enough to understand how you're doing, right? Like if I'm right, that click through rate is the easiest thing to improve. And you go and look at your click through rate and then you make a change, you can then monitor the change, you can see your results then. That's awesome. Right? Now some people are like, oh, everything's about conversion. Conversion this, conversion that. Well, first of all, we've already established Amazon's got a 10% conversion rate. So are you going to double your conversion rate on the platform? No. So why spend the amount of time that people spend working on conversion when they could do something easier, which is generate traffic? What's the best way to generate traffic to improve your click through rate, right? Having the ability to go in and switch a main image, run a couple a/b tests, and all of a sudden traffic's generating out of a wazoo. Like, it's just so much easier to do that, right? A couple of tips I'll give you. Add a keyword to your main image. Everybody's got a hoopla about adding a keyword to the main image, but everybody fricking does it. HP printer does it. Go Google that one on Amazon. Go look that one up on the search. Colgate does it. Zule kitchen does it. All the big brands do it. And if you don't do it, you're missing out on traffic. I've never seen Amazon enforce it. Oh, you added a keyword to your products, I'm gonna rent your product. Never seen that, not a single time. But I do see some occasional image suppressions. If you bleed the image or you try to add a starburst, that's the stuff Amazon actually cares about. So add a keyword to the main image, add your accessories, make it so somebody could actually understand what they're looking at. Right? So if you're selling a wallet just randomly on my desk here, so if you're selling a wallet and you just, you frame it like this, and it's like that's all the thing you see, then is everybody gonna understand that's a wallet? I don't know. Some people will, but not everybody. But then if you added some banner across there that had a keyword that said men's wallet, and then you could see some money sticking out. Let's see if I have any money in here. I do. I've got some money. So you see some money sticking out and all of a sudden, oh, that's where I put my money. That's a wallet. That's the difference between a good main image and a terrible main image. And I've never done that demo before, but that's how straightforward it is. JONATHAN: I love it because I can't remember the last time I saw paper money. You brought up a lot of great points. You brought up the images. So I kind of want to pivot the conversation there. One of the things I want to talk about was there's been a rise in AI generated content, especially with the kids calling what the kids are calling dupe culture. Yeah. I don't know if you read about the recent incident with the pop flexibility score with Taylor Swift. She was wearing it to promote one of her new songs, and then all of a sudden there were just a bunch of copycats that were trying to rip off their listing with AI generated content. Now, I've come to think of AI generated content as the new keyword stuffing. I think it's something that people find out that they can abuse. They're going to abuse it, and then eventually detection is going to evolve to a point where it's going to become more detrimental than beneficial to sellers or to copycats. I know many would argue that that's an optimistic take on it and that it's just going to be a burden to live with. What are your thoughts on how that plays out? S…
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