Podcasts about amazon api

Welcome to The Ecommerce Braintrust podcast, brought to you by Julie Spear, Head of Retail Marketplace Services, and Jordan Ripley, Director of Retail Operations. It's time for another episode of the Retail Round-Up, March edition! From a new fee structure on promotions to a longer Prime Day event and expanded advertising capabilities, these updates could reshape how brands approach pricing, marketing, and overall strategy. Joining us today are resident experts Ross Walker, Director of Retail Media at Acadia, and Armin Alipahic, Operations Team Lead. Make sure you tune in to find out more!   KEY TAKEAWAYS In this episode, Julie, Jordan, Ross, and Armin discuss: Amazon's New Fee Structure for Deals & Coupons – Amazon is introducing performance-based fees for Lightning Deals, Best Deals, Coupons, and Prime Exclusive Discounts starting June 2nd. These changes could significantly impact brands' profitability, particularly ahead of Prime Day. Prime Day Extended to Four Days – Amazon quietly announced that Prime Day 2025 will be a four-day event, giving brands more time to compete but also raising concerns about increased promotional spending. Amazon's Push Into TV Advertising – The launch of Complete TV aims to streamline TV ad buying, including both linear and streaming placements. This move aligns with Amazon's broader strategy to dominate the traditional TV advertising space. Search Query Performance (SQP) API Launch – Amazon is making SQP reports available via API, allowing brands and tech providers to automate and integrate search data more efficiently. This could be a game-changer for search optimization and ad performance tracking. Steeper Discounts for Better Visibility – Amazon is incentivizing brands to offer discounts of 40% or more by promising additional deal placements, though the specifics remain unclear. However, higher promotional costs may make deep discounting unsustainable for many brands.

In this episode, Dave talks about how you can start developing custom software for Amazon, and what the main benefits are. He'll be covering how to setup custom software, the requirements needed, and the advantages of using third-party APIs to enhance data access.  The Big Takeaway Custom software can significantly enhance Amazon business operations. Most off-the-shelf software are mostly perfect; just lacking the necessary customization. Third-party APIs can provide valuable data not available through Amazon's main API. The Selling Partner API is the latest standard for Amazon integrations. AWS costs for API access are generally very low. AI advancements have reduced the cost of software development. Custom software can provide a competitive edge for Amazon sellers. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction to Custom Amazon Software 02:25 - The Need for Custom Solutions 05:38 - Setting Up Custom Software 10:50 - Understanding the Amazon API 12:41 - Getting Started with Development As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested.  Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can.  Thanks for listening!

week's Tacos Tuesday show is brimming with expert advice on leveraging Amazon's new data rollouts, like brand metrics and category insights, now seamlessly integrated into Helium 10's Adtomic tool. Discover how these new metrics can help you understand both organic and sponsored performance, offering a pathway to improved conversion rates by analyzing category averages. Plus, we dive into innovative advertising elements, including AI and sponsored TV, to future-proof your Amazon PPC strategies. Launching a new product on Amazon and unsure about the best PPC tactics? Destaney breaks down the nuances between phrase, broad, and exact match campaigns, emphasizing the necessity of bid evaluation and search term analysis to boost exact match performance. Learn about keyword isolation and its potential to enhance relevancy and campaign success. With actionable tips on using our Keyword Tracker to analyze Amazon's recommended rank, you'll find out how to significantly improve your organic ranking during the crucial launch phase. As Prime Day approaches, how can you keep your ad campaigns sharp and your sales soaring? We explore effective strategies to drive extra traffic while overcoming eligibility issues, such as running sponsor brands to subpages and utilizing alternative platforms like TikTok and Google. Our discussion includes crucial advice on building landing pages for optimal conversions and making savvy budget adjustments for Prime Day. Balancing defensive campaigns with organic sales is key, and Destaney shares her wisdom on maintaining a competitive edge without cannibalizing your organic presence. Join us for this insightful episode packed with practical tips to elevate your Amazon advertising game! In episode 571 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss: 00:00 - Amazon Advertising Strategy Session & AMA With Expert Guest 03:11 - Brand Metrics in Advertising Strategy 05:31 - Value of Amazon's Search Query Performance 08:48 - Understanding Repeat Purchases for Supplements 13:44 - Keyword Isolation Debate and Strategy 17:13 - Amazon Relevancy and Ranking Insights 20:45 - Optimizing Pricing Strategy for Prime Day 22:43 - Optimizing Amazon Advertising Budget Allocation 23:59 - Alternative Traffic Sources and Prime Day 30:22 - Amazon Advertising Strategies and Tips 31:31 - Planning for Prime Day Success ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got expert guest Destaney back on TACoS Tuesday and she's going to be answering a lot of advertising questions on a variety of topics such as keyword isolation, sponsor display strategy, Prime Day, PPC tips and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ad's reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show, that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon advertising related. And as always, we have special guests on with us each month and every other month we have the specialist of guest here. So, without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce her Destaney welcome, welcome back. How's it going?   Destaney Wishon: It is going incredible. Super excited to be here.   Bradley Sutton: Can you believe we are in the middle of June of 2024 already? It's like I don't know what's going on here.   Destaney Wishon: We're already being thrown straight into Prime Day planning, like it never stops.   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, it's never ends and, like I think the last few years that I've been in the Amazon world, it has been the fastest years of my life, like it's just going by. There's always so many things to do. So, just right off the bat, let's, let's just kick it off with anything new in the Amazon advertising world. Over the last couple months since you've been on here, you know like new reports from Amazon or your team has been trying out some new strategies or trying out some new ad types or different things, anything you can update us on.   Destaney Wishon: I think the two biggest things Amazon's given us a lot more data lately. Helium 10 and Adtomic have already been pulling in some of that data from like a category perspective, so insights and planning brand metrics, which is being tied directly into Adtomic now, is one of the best rollouts in my opinion, and they've recently updated it to add even more data around like subscribe and save and lifetime value and repeat purchases, which is always a conversation for sellers, as well as allowing us to see category comparisons how many clicks are within our category, how many detailed page views are within our category and how are we comparing to average. I think that was a huge rollout. And then the second big rollout is just all the creative elements we've gotten recently, either from an AI perspective or like sponsored TV. I think those are really big and even if you're not ready for them yet, it's showing the direction Amazon's going, which is the important part.   Bradley Sutton: Yes, now I was on some kind of training yesterday or day before and somebody actually asked about that the brand metrics that is showing in advertising, and so that brand metrics page that's showing all you know the data there is across organic and sponsored, or it's only showing you what's happening in sponsor. Okay, good, yeah, I was like there's a 50-50 chance. Somebody asked me which one and I'm like I'm going to, because I saw there was some like fine print and it just made it seem like it was across the board. So how are you, which parts of that are you using and how is that affecting your ad strategy?   Destaney Wishon: I think the biggest thing is again, it's showing you retail and advertising, organic and advertising combined so we don't really have a lot of resources for that anywhere else. Those are two different API's from a technical perspective. So, amazon doesn't usually give us that data. But you know there's a lot of questions already in the comments asking about conversion rate and performance and efficiency. And Amazon advertising is amazing for driving clicks. That is its job. Think about it as a customer. If you click on a sponsored ad, you're ready to purchase and if you don't purchase, it's because the price was wrong or the listing was poor, the reviews were poor. If the ad drove the click, it was successful. The reason brand metrics is important is because brand metrics gives us conversion rate compared to the category. So, you can pull up brand metrics right now and like, let's say, I'm selling dog toys, I can see that my conversion rate is a 23%, but the category median is a 30%. If I'm converting less than the category, my PPC is not going to be near as efficient, because people are going to click, but they're going to buy a category product and not mine. So that's probably the biggest thing that I'm using it for.     Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool, cool. Now you know. Speaking of conversion rates, you know obviously there's search create performance that can help you with your conversion rates at the even keyword level. But then there's also the counterpoint that sometimes people do is that, hey, you know, the data there is so limited compared to overall. You know, like anybody can just see the number of sales and compare it, because there's only a certain kind of, you know a certain set of situations where it's going to register in search query performance. You know, like if somebody clicks something today and then 25 hours later, they actually buy it, it doesn't count. They click on something, they click something else, they hit back on their browser and they purchase. It doesn't count. You know, like I don't know about your experience. My experience sometimes is between twenty-five to forty percent of overall purchases, but my opinion I just want to get yours is that it's still valuable because it's still apples to apples it's not giving you the whole picture but valuable because it's still apples to apples. It's not giving you the whole picture, but you can at least benchmark what's happening with you at the keyword level compared to the exact same situation for other competitors. Is that how you feel, or are you kind of ignoring that data.   Destaney Wishon: A hundred percent. From a volume perspective, like a sales volume or an impression, I don't use it because, like you said, it's a smaller data set, but from a conversion rate perspective it's probably still showing you. You know 30% to 40% of your overall data set, but from a conversion rate perspective it's probably still showing you. You know 30% to 40% of your overall data set. Here's how it converts. So that actually scales out pretty well in my opinion, and that is super, super valuable to understand. Because, again, if someone else is converting better than you, they're going to get the same amount of clicks but drive more orders. That's what conversion rate is at the end of the day. So. when you're able to dive into SQP, you can actually see those comparisons on the search term level.   Bradley Sutton: Yes, absolutely. All right. Now, going back to Atomic, you had talked a little bit about Adtomic and some of the newer features, but something that's been out for a while now is the custom bid rules. Have you, for any of your clients that you're using Atomic for, have you started at all with the custom bid rules? or are you still using, like,  just the Adtomic algorithm and making decisions based on that?   Destaney Wishon: Anyone who, I think, has followed me knows that I'm a pretty big fan of breaking out by strategy.  So, that's where we recommend implementing custom bid rules is because there are certain keywords that maybe you are willing to take a loss on at the end of the day from a keyword level. Again, be clear. I don't want to say you know, go run your overall amazon advertising at a 400 ACoS but there's certain strategies that are going to need different rules and that's why it's so important not to have a set it and forget it automation running. In my opinion, now if your only goal is a 20% ACoS, you don't care about anything else. Your only goal is profitability for your business, for your solopreneur endeavors. That's fine, but if you're really building a brand that's going to scale, it's so competitive in the category and CPCs are kind of increasing that you're going to need to have some keywords that maybe you target at a 50% ACoS because they're your top sales driving keywords, and then maybe you're creating a campaign targeting competitor ASINs that you want to run at a different ACoS. That's where it gets really important to start building out those segments and strategies. We also do it on the lifecycle level. So, if you have an established product with hundreds of reviews, you can run at a lower ACoS because your conversion rates higher. If you have a new product launch, you don't want to set a low ACoS or else you're going to drive zero sales and your honeymoon period is going to flop because you have no data.   Bradley Sutton: So, there's a lot of people, maybe even watching, who are for the. If they're just getting into supplements, they're. They probably have some crazy sticker shock of what kind of cost per clicks they have, but you know how, how do you count? You know how, how do you calculate LTV? You know, with the data that Amazon you know gives and tools available and where is your like, like, how do you, you know help brands like that really focus to make sure long term they're profitable?   Destaney Wishon: Historically, this has been a really vague area in Amazon. They haven't given us a lot of insights. I know that we have a lot of plans on the Helium 10 side here, but the first thing that you need to consider is just that repeat purchase rate. In supplements we consistently see $20 to $40 cost per clicks for a $20 to $40 product. And the part that people need to remember is, if you get a customer to buy your supplements and you believe in your product, your supplement should be good enough that they buy it the next month and the month after and the month after. So, that's why lifetime value is so important to understand, because if they end up buying your $20 supplement four times, that's $80. So, even though you paid $20 cost per click, the product you sold was actually $80, because ideally, they come back and repeat purchase from you. So, it's super important. I think. When it comes to actually coming up and finding those insights, the majority of people rely on typically their DTC information because that's where you have it most easily accessible. Amazon gives you subscribe and save data within brand metrics, insights and planning. Amazon gives you subscribe and subscribe and save data within brand metrics, insights and planning, like I mentioned, and also through DSP, you can have a pretty clear indicator of what you subscribe and save or your repeat purchase rate is, and that's what helps you justify those high cost per clicks and that's why you see them as well. People know that someone comes back five to six times. They're going to be willing to pay for that first purchase because they have a great product.   Bradley Sutton: All right, we got the first question from Joan. Joan says it's a pretty common question. I would say what's the best strategy to control ad spend? For a $21 item in a competitive niche, cost per click is often over $2. Some of those supplement sellers wish they had cost per clicks at $2. But we're selling product but we're only helping Jeff buy more rockets. We aren't profitable unless I can improve ad spend efficiency. So, right off the bat, if at $2 on a $20 product they're not profitable, probably their conversion rate is not very high. I'm assuming on some of these keywords.   Destaney Wishon: A hundred percent. The first thing is to realize whether or not you have a conversion rate problem or an Amazon advertising problem. So, going back to our initial kind of call out, I recommend going into Adtomic, going into your account overview. A few people later on have asked this question on where you find the data I mentioned Adtomic, account overview, brand performance and then, once you're within brand performance, you can niche down and figure out how you're performing compared to the category. If you're converting better than the category, then it is an ad efficiency issue. It means you need to improve the keywords you're targeting. Instead of going after dog toy, which may be too broad for your dog toy, go after soft dog toy for small dogs, where you're going to be sacrificing lower volume but a higher conversion rate because the keywords are a lot more related to the product you're selling. So, you can justify that $2 cost per click. The other answer is to just lower your bids. If you can't afford $2 because you're not converting, well, lower your bids. What's going to happen when you lower your bid is your ad's going to show up in less premium real estate at the bottom of the page, or page two and page three, but it's going to be cheaper and more profitable for you. So that's the trade-off you're going to have to make until you improve your conversion rate.   Bradley Sutton: Jay Smith says hello from the UK I recently launched should I be doing this in a British accent? I recently launched a new product and I'm finding my phrase and broad match campaigns are performing much capital, much better than exact match. Are there any scenarios where you would suggest pausing exact match campaigns and only running phrase and broad during the first few weeks of launch? I don't think I've seen this question before.   Destaney Wishon: Yeah, I wouldn't recommend pausing them. I think the first thing you need to realize is do you have different bids across all three of them? More than likely your exact match bids are higher, so it's maybe just a little bit more expensive for you. The other thing to consider is, again, if I'm targeting dog toys, an exact match that's really broad from a term itself right, so it can be a little bit competitive targeting just dog toys. But if I run dog toys and broad, I'm showing up for dog toys for small dogs, dog toys for this, this and this. So, sometimes your broad and phrase match are going to be a little bit more profitable because they're targeting longer tail terms that are more aligned with your product. So, open up your campaign, open up your ad group, look at the search terms that those broad and phrase matches are performing on and if they're long tail, take out those long tails and put them into exact match and you can control the performance just as well. Easy answer is lower your bid on exact match to find the conversion ACoS point. But the longer answer and the better long-term solutions to figure out why the search terms and your broad and phrase match are performing that much better and then move them to an exact so you can control a bit precisely within your exact match campaign.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent. On the flip side, here's one that we get all the time and this is, you know, the eternal debate. this is an eternal debate here. Uh, it's from hey, hey there. When you use a search term from an auto ad for an exact or product ad, should you move it to negative in the auto to avoid redundancy? Is there any cost per bid difference that could affect impression and conversion between those ads? So, this is also called keyword isolation and Destaney, what's your philosophy on that?   Destaney Wishon: I am very familiar with why people isolate keywords. We personally don't isolate keywords because we find that when you move them from an auto campaign to a manual campaign, you're starting from scratch from a relevancy perspective. So, within your auto campaign you got to think, your bids are typically lower. They're typically slowly focused on profitability, so you're casting a really wide net. So, the ASIN or the search term you're converting on within the auto campaign could be on page seven and page eight. It could be within the frequently bought together section that's a new sponsored section or anywhere else on the page and it's running well for a reason because Amazon has, you know, the shopper history and they're targeting those placements because they have a lot of data. When you pull it out, if you negate it, there's pretty much a hundred percent chance it's not going to perform the exact same when you put it into a manual campaign. Most people kind of almost restart that relevancy journey that they were on and find that their manual campaign does not perform as well, especially in the first six to eight weeks because you have to refine that sweet spot. We continue to run them separately and just control the bids.   Destaney Wishon: There's a few scenarios where I could recommend isolation. If it's your core keyword, eating up all of your impressions and sales in your auto campaign, sure move it over to a manual. But then also the second part of your question is there a cost per bid difference? Yes, typically there is per bid difference. Yes, typically there is. We find autos are typically winning inventory for lower CPCs and impression conversions. Also, a yes, your manual campaigns typically higher impression because you're typically running a bid specifically for that keyword.   Bradley Sutton: Excellent, excellent. All right, a question I think I can handle. I'll do this one that's from Jay Smith. During the first week of launch, my sales have been really high, especially on top keywords, but my organic rank is not moving much on many of the top keywords. Any tips for improving organic rank during launch, or does it just take time and consistent sales? My BSR is top 10 in my subcategories when my sales are good. So, a couple of things. First of all, make sure that you have boost on in keyword tracker so that we're checking 24 hours a day and rotating browsing scenarios just to see you know, who knows, maybe your rank is improving in some locations, just not, uh, others or some browsing scenario. So, make sure you have that boost on. That's that rocket ship. The other thing is look at the CPR number inside of keyword tracker. Once you have you know you already said you have the keywords in Keyword Tracker there's a customized CPR number. It's actually different than the one that's in Cerebro and Magnet because it's specific to your listing, takes into consideration the age of it, your Title Density and things like that, and then see what that number is. If that number is, let's just say, 50, that means that, hey, over a week, week and a half, you would need around 50 people to search, find and buy your product, whether it's organic, whether it's in PPC. Probably it's going to be PPC. If you're not organically ranked very high, it's 100% from PPC and so you can clearly see how many conversions you're getting on that keyword and that's the best chance, that number of getting you to stick to page one. So, if you're not at that number yet, well, there's another reason.   Bradley Sutton: The other thing to look at is you could have a relevancy issue to Amazon. So run your product in Cerebro and then sort it by Amazon recommended rank. All right, this to me is the most slept on mini feature in all of Helium 10. It's a direct link to the Amazon API. This is not a Helium 10 estimation or an algorithm or anything like that. It's directly to the actual Amazon advertising API. But it gives you a look into what Amazon thinks your product is. So just sort that in ascending order, meaning it's, you're going to see the Amazon recommended rank one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and just take a look at the general uh, those, those general keywords. It tells you what Amazon thinks your product is. And so, if it does, if some of the keywords you're trying to increase your rank on are very specific and none of them even appear, like in the top 20, 30, 40, 50 words, well, yeah, it might take you. It might take more effort, to get to page one. Or you need to re-optimize your listing to kind of like show Amazon what your product is. But I've had issues like that where my listing was fine but Amazon was confused about it and so, even though I was getting sales, it wasn't increasing my organic rank. So, there's three things that you can try there. Kim says is there any magic mojo way to control profitability? When bids quickly rise due to an upcoming event like Prime Day, I often find that the increase in sales rarely offsets the lost profit. So, if I could find an automated way to control bidding, it'd be helpful. There's some good questions today.   Destaney Wishon: There is. Your bids don't change unless you're changing them is the first thing that I'll say. So, unless you're using a software with rules that you're changing them is the first thing that I'll say so. Unless you're using a software with rules that you're not controlling or you have aggressive placement modifiers on, your bids will stay the same, regardless of what-?   Bradley Sutton: She's probably talking about cost per click. I bet you she mistyped that probably.   Destaney Wishon: CPCs. So, if we're talking about CPCs, it's also related. You're not going to see a major change. You can keep your bids low during Prime Day if you want. Just know that you're probably not going to get as much traffic because the rest of the market is increasing their bids. So as everyone else is bidding higher and higher and higher, it's like bidding on real estate. You're going to be showing up lower, lower on the page, so you're just going to get less sales and some people are okay with that on Prime Day. I will say personally, across the board, as an agency, we find that the increase in conversion rate almost always offsets the increase in bids when we're really strategic. That being said, the majority of our brands do have some type of promotion or deal or discount, so their conversion rates inflated because customers think that they're getting a deal. So, short answer is don't rely on placement modifiers and keep your bid management software set to a target ACoS and you're probably not going to see that big of a change in bids on the day of.   Bradley Sutton: Shubham says what's our launch strategy for 50 product? Prime day is also coming up, we wanted to reduce the price to where our customer buys, but how many keywords shall we run in? Launch PPC? But let's just take the other part of that, you know, those people who might have some products that are going to be ready in the next, uh, month, month and a half. Should they just go ahead and launch? Should they wait until actual prime day and take advantage of that? Should they wait until after prime day? What's your general strategy as far as timing goes?   Destaney Wishon: The first brand that I managed on my own as a consultant was a prime day launch and it was incredibly successful, but this was seven years ago. The thing to consider is how much you're going to lean into Bradley's point. If you don't reduce the price, you are going to drown in Prime Day and not do incredibly well, and you may not anyways, because you don't have a lot of reviews. That being said, if you plan on doing a pretty heavy discount on Prime Day, it is a fantastic way to get inflated traffic from people who are ready to buy, and customers on Prime Day are a lot less sensitive to reviews, in my opinion, and a lot more sensitive to price. So, I always hate this question because I feel like it's so dependent on budget and financing and all these other variables. But if you want to heavily reduce your price and stand out, then Prime Day is the way to go. There's no other industry that drives this amount of traffic on any specific day. I don't think, so definitely take advantage of that.   Bradley Sutton: He had a follow-up question. He or she had a follow-up question. At what point should we start using Adtomic? We're new launching our very first product, so is there, like you know? Is this something that somebody should be using from day one, should they reach a certain advertising spend figure? What's your personal opinion?   Destaney Wishon: Personal opinion is it's really dependent on, I think, what your skill set is internally and where your time's going. PPC is a major efficiency time suck. I think it's probably one of the most hands-on, consistent, redundant tasks and that's where everybody needs a bid management solution, no matter if that's you going in every day and managing bids by hand or relying on a tool like Adtomic. I'll leave that up to you. But if you're running any Amazon advertising campaigns and you're not managing your bids, that is the biggest mistake you can make. So, I think the convenience of Adtomic, incorporating directly into category insights and like Market Tracker 360, is the biggest value add in my opinion. But if you're in your first few weeks and you have time to go in and optimize bids manually, then that's perfectly fine.   Bradley Sutton: David says what metric do you look at to determine where a budget needs to be increased or decreased across your campaign types? Sponsor brand, sponsor product and sponsor display?   Destaney Wishon: Love this question. As a whole, we typically see sponsor products drive around 70 to 80% of sales because they make up the most real estate on the page. Sponsor brand. Sponsor brand's video is 10 to 15%. Sponsor display is the least amount of budget, only because most people aren't fully utilizing it appropriately. At the end of the day, sponsored brands and sponsored products, RoAS and ACoS should be almost the same if you're running them appropriately. I've pulled this across hundreds of millions of spend and it's still just targeting keywords and setting bids. So, for those two ad types, you should increase or decrease based off RoAS, for the most part, or ACoS, but your ACoS and RoAS should be the same. That being said, if you are managing a brand that has a good DTC presence or a meta presence and you have amazing video assets and amazing lifestyle images, sometimes we'll shift more budget to sponsor brand and sponsor display because we want to educate our customer with those videos before we convert them with sponsored products.   Bradley Sutton: Chris says if you've got an eligibility issue, what are other ways to drive traffic aside?   Destaney Wishon: A great question. If one thing we'll see is some brands will only have certain products running into eligibility issues, but all their other products will be okay. If that's the case, we recommend still running sponsor brands to the store. You can create a subpage with some of your products that are ineligible and some of them are eligible and continue to run sponsor brand traffic as a really quick workaround. Beyond that, I think it really depends on product type. Like TikTok can be fantastic if you're great at the videography and the UGC needed to make TikTok successful. Google can be good, but typically you need to build a landing page between your Google and your Amazon ads so that way you have your conversion increase still, Bradley, do you have any other recommendations here?   Bradley Sutton: No, you kind of hit it, you know. And then, plus two, you know there's other platforms that you know might be able to drive some traffic. And then you know, the more your branded search increases, the more organic, you know, eyeballs you guys are going to get without, you know, sponsored, but you know that goes for anybody. You know whether you are eligible or not. That's kind of like the goal is to is to get a lot of organic eyeballs on your products without having to spend, without having to spend. Brendan. A lot of people think about Prime Day coming up, how do you approach prime day, lead in, lead out? When it comes to budgeting also, what's a fair estimate for cost per click lift? So, like, is there a rule of thumb where, hey, usually you need to increase your, your budgets this amount, you know to make sure you have enough, or usually you need to you know boost your cost per click X percentage.   Destaney Wishon: I'm going to start with the lead in, lead out. That one's super easy to kind of answer. Typically, the seven days leading into prime day are historically the worst performance in all of Amazon advertising. End of story. That being said, the part that people forget is that customers are shopping. They're just not buying. That's why your clicks are up but your sales are down is because customers are starting to build their carts for Prime Day. They know that Prime Day is now a national holiday, so in the back of their mind, they may go onto a platform and say, hey, shoot, I need my toilet paper that I always buy. Oh wait, I'm not going to buy it until prime day, so I'm going to hold off.   Destaney Wishon: So, some people like to lower their bids and budgets on the week leading up. I prefer to continue to run at the same strategy if I'm running a dealer discount, because those customers are going to add to cart and click and then when they see my discount the next week, they're going to check out. So, I am still building my funnel and attracting my shoppers the weekend, even though they're not buying until seven days later. That is one really important key to mention. Again, if you're not running deals or discounts, maybe it's worth it lowering your bids and budgets on lead in lead out. The last two years has been some of the strongest conversion rates we have seen across the board even stronger than prime day in a few instances. And that's because prime day is no longer prime day, it's prime week and it's being challenged by Walmart and every off platform. So, customers are still continuing to shop on the days after.   Destaney Wishon: So, lead out, we continue to keep bids and budgets high and we'll also run a lot of retargeting if we're running any type of DSP or sponsored display, because sponsored display and DSP allows us to capture all of the traffic and all the clicks from Prime Day and then continue to retarget that audience after Prime Day. So that's super important and super valuable. And then estimate for CPC lifts. There's really not one because it's like every agency or software that releases CPC insights is skewed by the type of brands they're managing. Right, pack view always cracks me up. When pack view does like their insights, it's going to be skewed by a lot of enterprise brands. So, their CPC lifts could be 50% because they're running crazy discounts and have crazy marketing budgets. But maybe a smaller software won't increase their bids because they don't believe in Prime Day right, so we personally do 20% to 30% increase in bids if we're running deals or discounts and just go from there.     Bradley Sutton: All right. Last question of the day before we get maybe into just your closing comments or your closing tip. This is from somebody new who hasn't asked a question today. Zee says does sponsored products and sponsor display defensive campaigns eat up organic sales? Does it affect my TACoS in the long run?   Destaney Wishon: The answer is yes. There's some level of defensive campaigns. That would have happened anyways, but that's really hard to prove because the way Amazon is set up as a platform what happens if you do not advertise there? Someone else will. So, you need to decide on the balance of do you have a strong enough competitive advantage that a customer's going to stay on your page and not go to your competitor's page, and is it that big of a deal if you do cannibalize some of your organic presence? I would rather cannibalize some of my organic presence than lose a customer to a competitor. So, it's just deciding. Now, that being said, Celis, who is on the Helium 10 podcast, at one point he runs Lego, or used to run Lego. He was one of my great friends in the space and he tried to convince me that, like, branded defenses never need it. And I was like Celis, Lego doesn't have competitors, like, of course you don't need to bid on Lego. Who the heck's gonna try to compete? So, it's definitely a little bit dependent on depending on your category. I like the. I'm enjoying the conversation here on if it's niche or niche.   Bradley Sutton: Andre says it's niche in the UK, all right, niche in the USA, he says so as well. Okay, yeah, we have started a big debate here this is the one takeaway that people have from today. But in order to make that the not the one takeaway people have, can you give us like a 30 or 60 second uh strategy to close this out, something you think that could uh help sellers, maybe leading up to Prime Day? Or it could be just a general advertising strategy or a metric that you think people are sleeping on, or an ad type anything at all that you can think of that quick hitting and people can take away from today?   Destaney Wishon: I'll give two really big ones. Start viewing your Amazon advertising by strategy. Have some keywords solely focused on profitability, where your goal is to lower your bids and have an amazing ACoS and RoAS. Have some campaigns that are all about sales and driving volume and organic rank. Have some that are for brand defense. And when you segment out these campaigns, that gives you budget control. So, to Zee's question earlier of like hey, maybe I do realize my brand defense campaigns are eating up my budget. Lower your budget and shift your budget over to your organic rank campaigns. When you segment, it gives you maximum control. The second thing I'm going to shout out is the last webinar we did on ad type expansion. This is a hundred percent. The second biggest issue I see within accounts is not expanding to sponsor brands because they don't think it's right for them. At the end of the day, sponsor brands will perform almost identical to your sponsor products with good bid management and good campaign setup. But it's more real estate on the page that's unique real estate. So, you're going to show up at the very top of the page. You're going to show up on product detail pages in placements that sponsor products does not win.   Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right. Well, Destaney, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. You're not going to be back here on TACoS Tuesday, at least before Prime Day. Maybe we can. We can talk offline about doing something Prime Day related, since there are so many Prime Day questions. It's obvious that it's top of mind and, unlike inventory and other things you know, PPC is something that you can kind of like up to the day before prime day, kind of like, you know, lock in your, your strategy, uh. So that is something maybe we can think about doing next month right before prime day. But, Destaney, thank you so much for joining us and thank you all for such great questions. It seems like every show, the questions get better and better. So, thank you guys for tuning in and we'll see you next month for TACoS Tuesday.  

We're back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10's Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. California man receives dozens of Amazon packages he never ordered https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2024/02/15/mysterious-Amazon-packages-Woodside-California/6441708019084/ The Amazing Ways Walmart Is Using Generative AI https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/02/15/the-amazing-ways-walmart-is-using-generative-ai/ Sponsored Brands video introduces vertical video creatives on the advertising console and Amazon Ads API https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-video-introduces-vertical-video-creatives/ The final leg of our journey takes us to the launch pad of Helium 10's latest tool, akin to Surfer SEO, but built for conquering the Amazon listing optimization battlefield. Bradley shares his journey from four months in the trenches, crafting over 150 listings to decode the Amazon algorithm for ranking. And for those hungry for knowledge, we spotlight an array of events and webinars, including a keyword research masterclass with Jason from Vitacup. Tune in for these insights and more, as we provide serious strategies for serious sellers looking to make their mark. In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers: 01:21 - Amazon Brushing 03:26 - New Brand Metrics 04:30 - Walmart AI 06:40 - Amazon Vertical Video 07:40 - FBM Returns 08:30 - FBA Inbound Placement Service 17:39 - 3D Models 18:55 - Upcoming Online and In-Person Events 23:00 - Helium 10 Seller Connect Forum 23:23 - New Feature Alerts ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Amazon's new FBA inbound placement service fees are going live in a couple of weeks. Walmart's integrating generative AI Vertical video PPC ads are now live. Helium 10 releases its most requested tool of 2023 for sellers. These and many more stories on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 weekly buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on and news articles in the e-commerce world and we let you know what new Helium 10 features there are and we give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. Got a few articles today, but a little later on I'm going to give you guys a complete breakdown of that new FBA inbound inventory fee service that is coming out soon. Some sellers are saying they might have to pay double what they used to. Is that really true? I'm going to break down some things inside of Project X to show you what the fees are going to be, and make sure to stay to the end, because we also have exciting, exciting new tool announcement that's in beta for Helium 10 members.   Bradley Sutton: All right, let's go ahead and hop into the news. The first article today is from upi.com and it's entitled California man Receives Dozens of Amazon Packages he Never Ordered. Does that sound familiar to you? This sounds like things that were happening years ago that maybe some of us thought you know went away. But basically, this guy in California yesterday he says he received dozens of mysterious Amazon packages at his home over the course of six months. Now, first he just started with a couple of envelopes, he said, but then a lot more products were coming. All right, the name on the label wasn't his name, it was somebody else's name, and he at first thought that, you know, just maybe there was a mistake that happened. But more and more packages sooner arriving, everything from, says, solar panel cables, video game consoles, digital picture frames, portable spas. And then he said he eventually just stopped opening them and just simply sent them back. All right, somehow his card actually started getting charged.   Bradley Sutton: Now, that's separate than what I'm talking about or what this guy I think is talking about here, but basically this is the Black Hat method of brushing. Even this article talks about brushing. Like I said, this is like circa 2020, when this thing happened. And then this article says hey, brushing involves Amazon sellers sending packages to random addresses so they can artificially inflate their number of positive reviews. So the way that brushing works is kind of like these sellers they get somebody's real address and then they just use all these different Amazon accounts and send products to that address and then that allows them to do like a verified review. For me I wouldn't be sending it back. You know me as an Amazon seller. I'm gonna think like an Amazon seller. If one of those companies is gets my address and they're gonna use me for brushing, give me all those products, I'm gonna put it right back on Amazon and make some money off of it. But that's interesting. I wonder if this is just an isolated case or is brushing making a comeback. Hopefully Amazon cracks down on that, because you know shouldn't be doing any of these shady shady behaviors, in my opinion.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Amazon Seller Central, and it was a news article that came out and says increase sales with new metrics available on the build your brand page, all right. So this is something that a lot of us might not even know is in Seller Central. All right, you have to like if you're using a sub account, you actually can't see it off the bat. You have to go and to the admin account and give yourself the rights to this. But basically, this what Amazon announces hey, there's gonna be four new key metrics that allow you to measure your brand's performance branded search ratio, star rating, brand conversion rate and repeat customer ratio. All right, so there's gonna be actionable things that you can do. Go to the build your brand section of Seller Central, scroll down and then if, for the brands that you have brand registry, you are going to be able to see, for the different countries, these new metrics. Again, branded search ratio here's one about the star rating. It's gonna give you a whole bunch of insights on things that it wants you to do how to increase your conversion rate, et cetera.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is going to Forbes now and this one is entitled the amazing ways Walmart is using generative AI. Now, a lot of this didn't have to do with Walmart sellers, but if you scroll down in this article, there's an interesting tidbit here where it says here under the section, where it says under the section improving the shopping experience, it says there's also a new text to shop feature that lets customers ask for what they want by texting Walmart. All right, so there's a simple text chat powered by AI technology. Customers can search for items, add or remove products from their cart, reorder products and schedule delivery or pickup. Like, Walmart seems to be beating Amazon on this one at least, but if this is only in beta, well, you can't really say that it's beating Amazon if it's not widespread. But that's interesting, like, will that increase sales for third party sellers using the Walmart app If people can just start texting and ask questions? Will Amazon roll out their version of this, which has also been rumored?   Bradley Sutton: Another thing that Walmart says they're launching is they're introducing a new online AI shopping assistant designed to help shoppers find the best product for their needs. So this AI is going to recommend relevant and related products based on, like, you're throwing a certain party or you have a certain age kid who has a need and you just, instead of like searching for keywords, you kind of like explain the situation and they'll give suggestions. Now, you know, part of me the skeptic is like I can't imagine how this is going to work because, like you know, like what I'm going to say hey, I've got a 19 year old kid who got his first new car, what products would he like, you know? Like, is it really going to know exactly what? But then again, guys think about it. How many times is this happening? You, where I don't know, you type in a search, or sometimes even you just are having a conversation with somebody. You go back to your phone and you're getting hit with ads, like about that very thing that you were just asking. You know it's got to be AI doing that. I don't know. But so, who knows, maybe AI is a lot more advanced than I give it credit for.   Bradley Sutton: Next article is from Amazon Advertising and it's entitled Sponsored Brand Video introduces vertical video creatives on the advertising console and Amazon API. So now when you're creating sponsored brand video ads, you are going to have an option to choose from creative assets. It says upload video, horizontal or vertical, alright. So a lot of people have had access to this for a few months now, I guess in beta, but now this is the official announcement. It looks like it's rolling out to everybody else. I've heard a lot of good feedback on how the vertical video looks, especially obviously in mobile browsers, which is what, or the mobile app, which is what it's designed for. So take a look at your advertising console. Do you have that available? It says it should be available united across North America, south America, Europe, middle East and Asia Pacific for sellers for that Next article, going back to Seller Central again, and it's entitled instant replacements are available for seller fulfilled returns.   Bradley Sutton: Starting on this week, buyers will be able to request instant replacement for items sent using the prepaid return label program. You see me shaking my head. Those of you watching on YouTube. They were on this Seller Central article, 468 down votes and only 55 up votes. Up votes. So this is something that if you're doing fbm, you know, like myself, it's like might be a little scared. What now? Just a customer can just instantly get a replacement and I have to ship it to them and they have like 30 days to return it. They might not return. I got to start keeping track of if they return it, if they return the right product. But we know, you know that Amazon is very customer centric and so I guess you know this really shouldn't surprise us all. Right now.   Bradley Sutton: Let's do a deep dive, guys, into the 2024 FBA inbound placement service fee. That's. This is just one of the couple things that amazon, or a lot of amazon sellers are very scared about this new in inbound placement service fee, and then the low inventory fee. That's going to come a little bit later, guys. This is coming now, march first. All right, so you look up, if you, if you want to get some detail on this, just go into your Seller Central and type in FBA inbound placement service and you you'll get this article. But let's do a deep dive into some of these things that that it says. Now, basically, what's going to happen is that you are going to start getting charged if you are only sending to one location, for example. All right, you're going to get a per unit charge based on the size of your product and based on where it's going uh, west coast, middle or, or uh, Midwest, I don't know, central area or east coast. Now, this is going to be interesting because, according to this article, this service fee is going to hit you 45 days after your shipment is received. So you've got a little leeway in there. So the first charges are not actually going to happen until mid-April, but it's going to be in effect starting in March.   Bradley Sutton: Now, the only way to completely skip this fee is if you accept Amazon's suggestion to ship to four different locations. I mean, that's only if Amazon tells you to ship to four different locations. You know, for me in the past a lot of times it's sometimes two locations, sometimes three, sometimes it tells me to only ship to one. So like I'm wondering how that's going to be. Is Amazon going to like force me to send it to one and I still have to pay, no matter what? But if you send to four or more locations, amazon is going to waive this fee. If you ship to two or three locations only, you are going to get a surcharge per unit that you were sending to Amazon and if you only send to one location, it is going to actually be the highest fee.   Bradley Sutton: Now, how does this affect sellers? Well, everybody has different preferences. I'm here in Southern California. What do I want to do? I want to send to one location and I want it to be in Southern California. It's going to get there super fast, right, and the shipping is very like sometimes half what it is if I ship it, like all the way to an FBA DC in New York or Florida or something like that. But now I've got to start thinking what do I choose? Do I choose to send it to multiple locations? Is it going to be expensive? Am I going to get a surcharge? Or should I just send it to one location and I save on the shipping fee because it's so close, but I just pay this extra fee?   Bradley Sutton: Let's start breaking down what some of these fees are. I'm not going to go into detail on this table here. You guys looking at YouTube, you can take a look at the screen here or just go into your Seller Central. But, for example, like if you have a small size box size 15 by 12, by 0.75, less than one pound you're trying to send everything to one location, you are going to get a 21 cent to 30 cent charge per unit. If you're sending to two or more that same package, you're going to get 12 cents to 21 cents per unit and, like I said, if you send to four locations or more, it is no fee. All right, so let's go ahead.   Bradley Sutton: What I did was I actually went to my. This is what I suggest you guys do to go into your Seller Central and go into your shipments and look at your old shipments to see what's going on. For example, here is one of my shipments that I did late last year. This was for, I believe, the large coffin shelf, so this is an oversized box, and they had me send I only sent 20 units, for whatever reason I think it was right before I ran out and it had me sent to two locations. All right, so two locations, and one of these was in Washington. Okay, so, as you can see right here, for these 10 units, because this is a huge oversized box, I got charged $25. All right, so about $2.50 per unit, all right, the other 10, it had me send all the way to Delaware, all the way across the country, and it actually cost me $35 for those same amount, 10 units. All right, so you can see how much more it was by sending it to the opposite coast, and the one in Washington wasn't even that's not even close to me. Like I said, I'm in Southern California, so if I were to send it to California, it would have been cheaper, right, it might have been like what less than $20, right Now, what you do to calculate this out?   Bradley Sutton: You go type into your search in Seller Central revenue calculator. All right, type in revenue calculator. We're going to have this in Helium 10 eventually too, but for now, go ahead and use a Seller Central. It's a little bit more difficult to use but it has the details you need for this new fees. Go into Seller Central, find your product this one that I just did and put how many units you're going to you're going to send. So I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to go ahead and inbound 20 units of this product.   Bradley Sutton: And now if I were to ship it to one location only let's say it has me ship everything to Spokane, Washington I'm going to pay $2.70 per unit to ship this to Amazon. That's do you remember what it was? In Washington, it was $2.50. That's more than double just for shipping to one location. Now, in this shipment I shipped it to two locations, you remember. So if I ship it to two locations, I just hit this partial shipment splits and it brings down the price to $1.57. But still, that's now $31 more I'm paying for shipping. Do you remember total? On those two shipments I only paid $55. Well, now that $55 shipment just became $80 a shipment, all right, and that's only 20 units, that means I'm paying $4 just to get it from my warehouse to Amazon. So you can see that there's a decision you have to make. Like what if I could send everything to San Bernardino? Right, if I send everything to San Bernardino and I pay $2.70, but I save a whole bunch of money on my shipping, the shipping price would have to be $2.70 cheaper than what it would cost to send to multiple locations into the East Coast in order for it to be worth it. But again, it's not just the price. Now you got to think well, if I send it to Delaware, it might take like six days to get there, another few days to check in. If I send it to California, it'll get there the next day, maybe just a couple days to check in. So there's all these things you are going to have to start kind of like calculating out.   Bradley Sutton: Let me show you another example. Another shipment I did this was actually from this year was the smaller coffin shelves and I sent like 80 units total. All right. Now take a look. I sent one shipment to California. 30 units cost $25. All right. So like what? 80 cents per unit? At the same time, it had me send some more to a different warehouse in California. It was only 10 units for $8.57. So 85 cents. And then, lastly, it still was in the West, but it had me send another 40 units to Henderson, Nevada, and it cost me 37 bucks, so a little over 90 cents. All right, so the average for this 80 units I was paying. What about? I paid about 80 cents per unit to ship and I didn't pay any fees. Right, if I do the same exact shipment after March 1st? Conversely, here is one more shipment I did separately and I sent 100 units all together and it went to Southern California and it only cost me $70. All right, so that's 70 cents, about 15 cents cheaper per unit than those other ones I sent all over the place. All right, so again, these were two separate shipments, very similar in scope. One had me send to three, one had me send to one.   Bradley Sutton: What's going to happen if I have this same scenario in a couple of weeks, starting in March? Let's go back to that revenue calculator. I go ahead and put the coffin shelf in here and I say, hey, 100 units, the same exact shipment to California, to the West, 68 cents per unit. Do you remember what it cost me Originally? 70 cents. This is doubling the cost of what I have to send, or how much it cost me to send it in the old days, literally doubling my cost. Now, what about that other one where it had me send to three different locations? All right, it's still not four. It didn't have me send it to four, so I have to hit the partial shipment splits. I select three locations and now I see that it's going to cost 33 cents extra. It's not double, but now my price goes from 80 cents to $1.20, which is almost the same as the 70 cents plus 70 cents that I pay if I send it to one.   Bradley Sutton: Is your mind kind of like spinning in circles with all these things you guys have to calculate? Now? I'm sure there's gonna be hopefully easier ways that Helium 10 can help you decide which one is going to be better to use. But again, you can't just blindly do your shipments anymore. You have got to really think about what's going on. All right, let me know in the comments below what are you seeing. Go ahead and put in some of your old shipments in there and let me know what you're seeing in your account. All right, last article of the day. It's actually just a post from LinkedIn.   Bradley Sutton: I wanted to give a shout out to Jason from Vitacup and he talked about the release of Amazon's 3D photos. This was something that we talked about like about four or five months ago, when they announced that Amazon Accelerate, and now he is reporting that he's seeing it out there in the wild. Now we actually saw this a couple of days ago because when I was setting up that brand rights that I talked about earlier how I had to give rights to do that to my sub-accounts this was one of those new ones that you have to give rights to.   Bradley Sutton: So if you guys are giving rights to see the brand, go ahead and click this 3D models thing. You have to have the seller app and then it's gonna allow you to take pictures from all sides using your mobile phone and then it's going to allow you to be enrolled in this 3D beta that Amazon has going right now. So take a look to see if you guys have access to that. Now, the reason why I wanted to give Jason a shout out here was he's actually gonna be a special guest next week in a keyword research webinar. He's an eight-figure seller and he's gonna give us his best keyword research strategy. So that's just one of the many online and offline events coming up for myself and the evangelist here at Helium 10 over the next few weeks. Shivali now is going to let you guys know of all the other events that's going on.   Shivali Patel: Hi there. We have tons of online and in-person events over the next couple of months, so let's just quickly run through them so you're in the know and can potentially even plan ahead. First up, we have the virtual Billion Dollar Seller Summit from February 20th to the 22nd. Bradley is a speaker and if you plan to attend his session, you can take $150 off the price by using the coupon code BDSS2024. Again, that's just BDSS2024. At h10.me/bdss, you can also sit down with Bradley at the Sellers Edge training this upcoming week where he's gonna start a conversation with a guest eight figure seller and they're going to talk shop on keyword research strategies for Helium 10, amazon Product Opportunity Explorer, Search Query Performance and so much more. Get registered at h10.me/edge2. The two is just the number and it's not spelled out. On March 1st to 2nd, if you're interested in remotely anything Walmart and you're located on the other side of the world from me, perhaps you'll be able to make it out to Ecom Seller Summit and say hello to Carrie, who will be speaking. Visit h10.me/australia to grab a ticket. You can use the name, Carrie, as a code to save $50 and catch her session in person.   Shivali Patel: The week right after Australia, we have the Prosper show in Las Vegas, where Bradley and Carrie are speaking, but all three of us will be there. Go to h10.me/prosper to reserve a spot and come swing by the Pack View and Helium 10 booth so we can get acquainted. Don't be shy, even if you see us just walking around. Now. If Vegas is too far for you, as is Australia, then I have the perfect in between event for you, and that is going to be held from March 13th to 16th in Prague, Czech Republic. I'm opening up the conversation for strategic innovation that leads to increased profits and so much more. The link for this event is h10.me/prague. You can use my code Shivali50 for a 50 euro discount. If you don't know how to spell my name, that's S-H-I-V-A-L-I 50 for a 50 euro discount.   Shivali Patel: There will be an Amazon sponsored seller meetup in Manila, Philippines, so save or mark the date for March 21st. Bradley will be attending, but we don't have a sign up page yet. We'll keep you posted, though, and I will also be speaking at amazing day summit and attending the Amazing Days Summit in Sofia, Bulgaria. That's going to take place on April 3rd, 4th and 5th. These two events are just days apart, so perhaps it's the perfect excuse. You need to come out and spend a week in Bulgaria. If you'd like a ticket, go to h10.me/bulgaria and use the code Helium10 for a 10% discount.   Shivali Patel: The last couple of events you can anticipate some more in-person Bradley time are going to be the seven figure seller Japan mastermind in Okinawa. I might make it out to Japan, but it's still up in the air, so I guess you'll just have to come out to find out. The link to learn more about the Japan event is h10.me/japan. However, Bradley will definitely be speaking at Seller Velocity, as you can see here. So naturally I've got a code for you and that's going to be BRADLEYFIRST in all caps. You can put that into motion at h10.me/velocity. Look, guys, at the end of the day, each of these events are packed with incredible sessions, knowledgeable, expert speakers and the invaluable opportunity to network and honestly, I couldn't tell you just how many connections I've made by attending these events and the strategies I've learned to implement into my own business so I can take it to the level I'm hoping towards. So, really, if you can come, come, we'd love to meet you in real life and we'll see you there.   Bradley Sutton: All right, thank you, Shivali, for those events. I hope to see you guys at some of them. One quick thing, guys if you didn't get our notice we have a new message board or forum. That is on our website. So sign into your Helium 10 account and then go to forum.helium10.com and you'll be able to post messages there, interact with other Helium 10 users and see some announcements and strategies that myself and Carrie and Shivali are doing. So, again, forum.helium10.com. All right, let's get into our Helium 10 new feature alerts.   Bradley Sutton: The new tool that Helium 10 is coming out with right now is probably the most asked for tool last year 2023, of what, when I was on the road, people asking about this and something even beforehand I had in mind. Now, before I get into how to use a tool, it's kind of important to understand the background of how we even came up with this. This wasn't like my idea or something, but it's something that's been on my mind for a while Now. As you guys may or may not know, I used to run the content team here at Helium 10. And now I still write blogs to help out the content team, and something we've always used is this software. The one that we're using right now is called Surfer SEO and it's really cool Like we have blogs for SEO, right, and it gives me all of my kind of like titles that I need to have and then all of the main keywords that I need to put in blogs and it tells me how many times I need to use it, where I have to put it and, as I'm writing my blog, it gives me the score of how I'm going to be ranking for Google SEO and it tells me also how I'm doing compared to other blogs about the same subject. And so I've always thought, well, you know, like that would be kind of cool thing to have for Amazon sellers.   Bradley Sutton: And Amazon sellers thought the same way. One of the you know, as I was touring everyone said, hey, we like a tool that allows us to kind of like take, hey, the best keywords from Helium 10, but then helps us to understand where we need to put it in the listing and how it kind of stacks up for the Amazon algorithm and then how my competitors are doing it. All right. So I'm going to show you guys how to use this new tool. It's in listing builder, but let me just tell you right off the bat like. I actually spent, you know, like four months on a case study, making like more than 150 listings in different accounts and trying all these different things that kind of like the best they can decode the Amazon algorithm to see, hey, what forms of words work best for the Amazon algorithm, what helps the ranking, what kind of frequency, what does it matter where the keywords are, et cetera. So I did a lot of work on this, but let me just say there is no buddy out there myself included who can tell you exactly how the Amazon algorithm works. It doesn't work that way. All right, it's not like I can just give you an exact formula, but what we, what I've been able to do here is get it to a formula here that will give you the best chance at having good SEO for your Amazon listing. All right, so where you find this tool is now in listing builder, all right.   Bradley Sutton: Now you're gonna see a little bit of different things here. There's some things that, based on when you're seeing this video, it might be different Later on, like these colors might be gone. You're gonna have the number here of how many times the keywords came up. We'll update this video later, once this tool is fully finished. Like I said, it's in beta. But the first thing you do is just like you normally do with your keyword research. You're first gonna get all your best keywords from Cerebro, whatever other tools you have, stick them all now into listing builder. Before I didn't have you do that, remember, I said, hey, only get your 20 best keywords, right, and then the rest of the keywords just find the individual words. That's no longer.   Bradley Sutton: With this new tool. You can go ahead and throw all of your keywords into listing builder at once. You don't have to separate the best and the worst. One of the reasons why is because now we have the Cerebro competitor performance score. Again, this is from Cerebro and it tells you what are the most important keywords for this niche, based on what the listings are all ranking for. Very highly, all right. So I put all 116 phrases right here. I also see the search volume and it breaks it down here on the top to all the one and two and three word parts of these phrases, so that I can see hey, what are all of the individual keywords that are showing up here, what are the two and three word phrases that show up in multiple phrases? Now, after you get your keywords in here. You scroll down, you're going to see your original listing quality score if I already made my listing here on the right-hand side, and that's just based on Amazon best practices, like you know how many characters in your title, things like that. But the new part here click on Keyword Performance Rank and what you're going to want to do is add your competitors. Okay, so this is something new. So this here is a bat-shaped bath mat that I was doing. So I went to Amazon and I wanted to put in all of the top bat mats here and I just pasted all of the ASINs or I could have just selected it right here in this Add Competitors section and now, instantly, based on these keywords that I already got from Cerebro, it is going to give me a score for every single one of these competitor listings that we see right up here, and actually the number one listing just happens to be the product that is selling the most, all right, so it kind of shows that, hey, this formula is a pretty decent indication on how you might be doing in the niche, potentially, all right. So that's what you're going to see right here when you click on Keyword Performance Rank, and then once I make my listing now it's going to give me a score. So right now I'm not first, all right, I might need to tweak my listing a little bit. This is only version one of my listing. It says I'm second out of 10 competitors. All right.   Bradley Sutton: Now, if you want more detail on what is going into this Keyword Performance Score, well, it is based on a lot of these kind of like match types. There's five of them that I kind of pinpointed with all of my tests that I was doing, and it also has to do with where in the listing it is. You know title is the absolute most important. Search volume is something that is factored into the score as well. The points is the next, and then description right, and then you get different points based on the search volume and then based the highest points for a keyword is exact match, like if the word is coffin shelf, you put coffin shelf and then that's an exact match. The next one that you also get points is plural or singular match, so like it's coffin shelf or coffin shelves, right. Next is a phrase match, but a partial phrase match, all right. So it gets really down and dirty. Guys Like I did a lot of work trying to come up with this formula. So when you get into this tool, put your mouse over the little eye, the little information, and you will see, kind of like, what all of these different match types mean. And then, as you are making your listing, you will literally see this score change based on these factors, right here.   Bradley Sutton: Now, remember, keyword stuffing is not suggested. You, I did see that some kind of like duplication of keywords is good in some circumstances, but you're not going to get points, extra points, by putting the same keyword five times in a listing. The first time you put it, and if it's in phrase form, that can get you the most points. If you have it again, that actually can kind of like let Amazon know you're especially relevant for it. So you are going to get some credit. But as you play around the score you'll see that it's not the full credit as if you like the same one that you put in the title.   Bradley Sutton: Now again, I'm not going to sit here and say hey for a fact. If you get the top keyword performance rank out of your competitors, that's going to guarantee that you're going to get the most sales. Obviously, a lot more things have to be considered when you're talking about getting sales on Amazon. But this is what I came up with and our data scientists. I'm not smart enough to make like full formulas here. I had to get the data scientists help, but this is what we found will give you the best chance to really make sure that Amazon knows that you're relevant. I'm going to have a few workshops coming up on just general listing optimization techniques, but once you have all that down, this is what is going to help you really bring your keyword research and your listing optimization to get the best bang for your buck.   Bradley Sutton: So I want you guys to try out this tool. Like I said, it's in beta right now. New things are being added to it every day. If you have a diamond counter hire. Elite members have been playing with this for weeks, but now it's to a point where, like, hey, if your diamond are higher, for now, we want to get your feedback too. So please give this a spin and then, if you have any questions or comments on it, reach out to customer support and let them know about it, and we'd love to hear from you to see what you think about this tool that everybody was asking so much for the last year or two. All right, guys, thank you very much for joining us on this edition of the weekly buzz. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

Join us for a fascinating discussion as we unpack Amazon unBoxed 2023, exploring the most exciting releases such as generative AI and more that can level up your advertising game. Our co-host from Pacvue, Anne Harrell provides us with a unique perspective on the advertising industry. Let's start with our chat with Jeff Cohen, Principal Evangelist, Advertising API at Amazon, as he shares his transition journey and the biggest differences he's noticed. Listen in as we dive into the role of ad tech in digital transformation and its implications for brands. We examine Amazon Ads' new offerings like generative AI and sponsored TV, which promise to revolutionize brand imagery and audience engagement. Get the inside scoop on Amazon PPC and new-to-brand metrics that could redefine your brand's success measurement. We also explore Amazon Publisher Cloud, a game-changing technology for publishers that promises unique and differentiated opportunities for advertisers. Get to know Miranda Chen, the director of growth and modernization for Amazon Marketing Cloud, as she walks us through its potential. Learn how lookalike audiences can help your brand reach new customers and how templatized analytics can make AMC more accessible. We also examine Amazon Marketing Stream and Rapid Retail Analytics, which provide valuable data on retail signals. Discover how sponsored products can appear on platforms like Pinterest and the features that make Amazon's new Sponsored TV offering a game-changer. All this and more, right here on our podcast!   In episode 504 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Anne, and our special guests discuss: 00:00 - Amazon unBoxed 2023 04:31 - Insights on Amazon and Advertising Growth 08:29 - Sponsored TV and Ad Tech Announcements 12:29 - Embracing Change in Amazon Advertising 20:40 - Amazon Advertising Full Funnel Solutions 23:39 - Benefits and Capabilities of Demandside Platforms 28:25 - Lookalike Audiences for Reaching New Customers 34:59 - Amazon Marketing and Rapid Retail Analytics 41:15 - Amazon's Sponsored TV Announcement ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/video Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got a special episode here at Amazon Unbox 2023 where we're going to talk about all of their releases, like generative AI and sponsored brand hats, and also a lot of cool things like sponsored TV. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10 I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're here at Amazon Unboxed in New York. I've been on the road for like three weeks and there's a second there where I wasn't quite sure where. I was. I've been in so many countries lately, but we've got a co-host today and from Pacvue, and how's it going? Anne: Great. How are you doing? Bradley Sutton: I'm just delightful. Now, what is your background? What do you do at Pacvue? Anne: Yeah, so I'm a product solutions director for DSP at Pacvue, so I do basically anything related to DSP and AMC help with our product road mapping, help with strategy for some of our enterprise level clients doing customer within AMC marketing you name it, I probably do it. Bradley Sutton: How long have you been at Pacvue? Anne: I've been at Pacvue for coming up on four years now, so about three and a half years total. A lot has changed since I joined. I started at Pacvue focusing on our managed services team, so I was primarily working with some of our strategic accounts, helping to build out their capabilities, doing strategy not just for DSP but across kind of omni-channel focuses, so for search as well. Prior to working at Pacvue, I actually worked in an agency in Austin, Texas, where I'm normally based, where I again did omni-channel strategy for enterprise level accounts. So my background is not just with programmatic and DSP, but I really gravitated to it. It's just one of those types of advertising channels that really allows you to have a lot of flexibility and creativity and really is conducive to innovation. So I really enjoy working on the DSP side of things. Bradley Sutton: Cool. Now what did you go to school for? Anne: I went to school for advertising, so I think I'm in the right place. Bradley Sutton: Okay, so you're right. Where did you go to school at? Anne: It's called St Edward's University. It's in Austin, Texas. So I've been in Austin since I went to school and I just never left about a decade. Bradley Sutton: Okay, I was about to say, because you don't sound like you were born and raised in Austin. Anne: I was not Okay. Bradley Sutton: What were you born and raised? Anne: Well, where I was born was Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but raised is a harder question. I moved about 10 times before I graduated high school. So you pick a state, I probably was raised there. Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool, yeah, because I was like wait a minute, she doesn't sound like a native Texan here. Anne: I know no accent yet. Bradley Sutton: All right, maybe 15, 20 years from now you might have a little twang in here. Anne: Right, right, I actually have a little bit of a Southern accent, I think I kind of got rid of it as I moved around. Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Now what are you? We're going to be talking to some people that probably people have never heard of podcasts, right? You know there are exactly executives here at Amazon who are you most excited to talk to today. Anne: If I were to have to say, my favorite subject matter is definitely the DSP AMC side of things, and I know that we're speaking to Kelly, who's the VP of DSP, so that's obviously a great place to start. We're also going to speak to Miranda, who is a director for AMC at Amazon, so I think there's going to be a lot of really great content around that. But in general, we're also talking to a lot of people who are very broadly focused across all of ads, and so I think we'll have something for everyone in this one. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, so you guys might be. There might be some newbies out there, don't tune out. This is stuff that you're going to need to know If you're an advanced seller. We're going to talk about some stuff that you guys might be able to use right away. That was just announced this week at Amazon Unbox, so let's go ahead and hop right into the interviews, all right. First up, we've got my brother from another mother here, jeff Cohen. Jeff, how's it going? Jeff: Everything is great. So great to see you, so great to see the whole Helium 10 Pack View team at this conference. It's great to catch up with everybody. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, Now you've been in the game longer than me. I remember the very first conference I spoke at. You were a speaker and you were already a veteran speaker at that time. You know side note that that conference there probably had the best food I've ever had at the conference. This is probably the second best Like. Jeff: I'm really impressed with the offerings here. Yeah, I'm curious what conference that is, but we don't have to go into that now. Bradley Sutton: But it was right here in New York. But you were on the SaaS side. You know, like I am now. Now you're at Amazon, like what's been the biggest you know kind of eye-opening thing or difference, now that you're on the other side of the aisle. Jeff: Yeah, interesting because I always like to joke that you know I drink the Amazon Kool-Aid before I ever like came here. I've been an Amazon like fanboy since like 2005 when I started textbookscom and it's been interesting because I'm in a unique position where I can bring the outside in and the inside out, and I think that you know, one of the many things that I've learned is maybe like the patience that you have to have with Amazon Maybe I didn't have as much patience when I was on the outside and the amount of time that it takes for some of the things to develop at Amazon. But when they like grow and they go to scale, it then moves at like this rocket ship pace. And so I think you're starting to see that with some of the tools, like AMC or even like you know what's happening with, like Amazon Studios and some of the new, you know productions that are coming out, you have this like rocket ship pace of what's happening in terms of the development and the new opportunities and how advertisers are using the technology, and so you have to kind of be patient when new things come out. So when you have a totally new product like Sponsored TV, you got to realize that it takes a little bit of time to kind of figure out how does it work into the individual advertisers media mix, and so that's the measurement work for each brand along the way. But then once it kind of gets up to full speed, you get to see like how it all works and you know and how it's really excelling brand growth. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, now we're going to be interviewing a lot of your colleagues here about some very specific announcements that happened here at Unboxed and before I ask you to give a rundown, you know, one of the things that was announced today it's on the website too is about the new generative AI that can help people doing Sponsored Brand Ads to generate some new creatives. Can you talk about that just a little bit? Jeff: Yeah, I think there were like three themes to the keynote today that I kind of jotted down. One was this idea of, like digital transformation and one was this idea of like how ad tech plays in in a responsible way. And then the third one was like how we reinvent, right, how we have reinvent what's possible. That was said numerous times, and I think Gen AI kind of fits into almost all three of those categories. And you know, we saw a lot of opportunity, a lot of new changes with Gen AI that have come out of AWS. We saw a lot of changes with Gen AI that came out of Amazon Accelerate, and now we're starting to see some come out of Amazon ads and I'll you know it's cool, right, we can take a product and we can turn that product into a full lifestyle image. And I think it's if you can just start to kind of think about where the possibilities go from there and what else brands can do and how we can enable that, either with what Amazon ads is doing or with what our partners are doing right, because it doesn't always have to be invented by us at Amazon it's really making it easier for brands to be able to take advantage of this technology that maybe was a little expensive or time consuming or difficult to use, and now it's all done with prompts and it's really simple and easy and that's really cool yeah. Bradley Sutton: Now, what about some of the other announcements? Say you have any. You know things that stick out that you're especially excited for. Jeff: Yeah, I think that what we're doing I mentioned it during our opening segment but Sponsored TV, I think is a really cool one and you know, in short, it's democratizing the ability for brands to be able to place ads into our streaming portfolio right so across Prime Video, free V and all the other channels that we have that I can't even remember them all because I'm supposed to think so quickly and I think that's really cool. And again, like there's no budget for that, you do have to have the creative, but Amazon has services that can help you make that creative or there's third parties that can help you make that creative. And I thought that was a really exciting announcement that was made, you know, on the heels of the announcement that was made a month ago. It was kind of reinforced about like what's happening with Prime Video and it moving to an ad supported network, creating a ton of, you know, new inventory for brands to begin to explore, and that's really super exciting as we start to go into it. And then there was like a bunch around ad tech and like what's happening around measurement and I know, like from you know, we're all near and dear to this idea that measurement is critical to our overall success and new metrics that are being released, making it available to understand how new to brand customers are impacting the business, and I think those are all really important for us to be thinking about because we have to close the loop. As advertisers and as we move to this cookie-less world right, it's signs point to it happening in 2024, we have to find ways to be able to close the funnel and understand how our ads are working, and Amazon's working really hard to help brands be able to do that, both within our suite and also when you're outside of our suite. Anne: Yeah, you mentioned the new. New to brand metrics, new to brand consideration metrics, I think is what we're calling them. Can you walk our listeners through what those really are? Jeff: Well, when you're looking at new to brand, right from like a super high level, new to brand is starting to give you this metric that's beyond ROAS, and it's starting to allow brands to look at who was not buying their brand within the last 12 months. Who's now buying their brand, and there's a suite of metrics now that are available for you to be looking at so that, as you're looking at different inflection points of your advertising, you can start to actually dial down into what action you're looking for people to take. And I think that's what's really cool. And it's like this evolution and brands have to think through this evolution like one of the simplest ways to think of this, right for people who maybe, like this concept's a little far for them. One of the simplest ways to think of this is around this idea that, like, if you're trying to get more awareness of your product, when you're looking at a video, you don't want to just see video views, you want to see how long they've been watching the video, and so you might start optimizing your campaign based on video length, how many people get to a half the video or three quarters of the video. And so, when you start to get into the new to brand type of metrics, you're actually saying, okay, I want incremental growth and by definition is, you know, sales you wouldn't have had before. One of the best ways to measure that is by people who are new to your brand, and so by having multiple metrics now to be able to understand how those are being impacted, you can now go back into tools like AMC and see how that funnel is working and which ones are driving the actual you know points that you want to drive and that that's really cool, right, it's, it's very excited about. Anne: I'm very excited too, yeah. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right. Last question for you know maybe not something that was released here at Unbox, but you know you're very active on LinkedIn. You see what people are posting about. You know I'm sure you look at metrics about what advertisers are using. Is there something in Amazon advertising that you feel is is kind of being slept on or not enough people are talking about it, that you think more people should be using it? Jeff: I mean more people should be using Helium 10 and Pacvue. Bradley Sutton: That goes without saying. Jeff: Okay, besides that, I think that you know, bradley, you and I get asked this question a lot, right? And? And our answer is always it depends. And I think that, instead of like saying, like this is a tool that you should be using or this is a a, an advertising function, you should be trying, I think that advertisers need to be open to the idea of test and learn, and I think the more you can train your mental model to work in a test and learn type of environment, the more open you are to change, because the only thing that's constant is going to be change. Right, and you started by saying like, where this industry was years ago when we both started, think about all the change that's happened and all the change that's occurred, and the brands that have not just survived but thrived through that are brands that have taken advantage of new opportunities, have invested by testing and learning and have then double down on the things that we're working. And I don't mean to oversimplify it, right, but it's not a very specific answer of like, use helium tens tool for keyword, blah, blah, blah, but it's like that's just one piece that you then use to implement the strategy. So work backwards. What's your goal. How are you gonna get there? And then figure out what tools you need to help you scale. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. All right, well, jeff. Thank you so much for joining us. We've been trying to get you on the podcast for like two years. I'm happy it finally happened and we'll definitely be keeping in touch. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. All right, next up, we've got Kelly here. Now, Kelly, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell us what you do at Amazon. Kelly: Absolutely so, Kelly McClain. I lead our demand side platform at Amazon, so we call it ADSP, and excited to be here. Bradley Sutton: Thank you for the time. Awesome, Awesome. Now you were, you know. Just saw you on stage a few minutes ago. What were your big reveals of the day? Kelly: Yeah, really good question. So I think if, if you think about Amazon ads and kind of where we've, where we've been and where we're going, we've really continued to make a lot of progress on on how, what we've been building a lot of our goals. We're focused a lot on interoperability with our ad tech solutions, so making it easier to use. We're focused a lot on performance improvements and then again, all of this is underpinned by making sure that we're putting privacy at the core of everything that we're doing, and so, with that in mind, we've been kind of launching this week in particular, a lot of different updates around, as you think about planning, activating and measuring, right. So within planning, we were launching Cross Channel Planner, which is a new way for you to really think about full, full funnel planning. We announced Amazon Publisher Cloud, which is the new clean room technology for publishers, which we're really excited about. We've been making a lot of performance improvements to the demand side platform, both with the user interface as well as the backend performance, and then we've also been been launching a lot more on our measurement capabilities, right, so making sure that marketers are getting the insights real time, making it a lot easier for them to kind of understand. You know how they should be looking at performance and where they should be making future investments. So we're excited about it. It's going to be a really fun week. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. We have our resident DSP nerd here, Ann, so she's going to go ahead and ask have some follow up. Anne: Definitely. Amazon Publisher Cloud was announced today, which is a big step for your publishing partners, obviously. Do you see any benefit for advertisers with this release? Kelly: Yes, definitely, and you know, I think to your point. I mean we've had, if you think about kind of clean room technology, right, really starting with cloud solutions. Then Amazon marketers cloud right thinking for marketers on how we can help support them. And Amazon publisher cloud it's going to be a mouthful after I'm speaking all morning. So excuse me, but you know that's really about a solution for publishers, right, giving them much more of the ability to pair any unique insights that they have right Demographics that they might know, of course, with folks who are coming to their site and then pairing that with Amazon Ads data. But the real core of that is, of course, providing opportunities for publishers but making it easier for them to connect with advertisers, right, advertisers. Often that you know there's so many different deal opportunities out there. A lot of the kind of deal process is very manual today and it's hard to discover the right deal and knowing which deal is right for you to reach your audience and so you know. A simple example, right is, if you're, let's say, you're a common website and you know the different demographics that are coming to your site every day, but by layering on Amazon audiences, you might realize, oh, I actually have pet food lovers who or sorry, pet food lovers- I have pet lovers who are coming to my site that I didn't realize, and so then that offers publishers the ability to maybe customize some unique deal opportunities to advertisers who might be trying to target pet lovers right, or specific brands who might be selling pet food, and it provides much more unique, differentiated opportunities, and we actually had a recent test with NBC Universal and they were able to offer three and a half times more reach than what they'd seen in the past, which is really exciting. So we see this as beneficial to both marketers and to publishers by really making it a lot more simple to connect with audiences. Bradley Sutton: At the end of the day, you know, pet food lovers are pets in about 10 years at Unbox. I predict like there's going to be some DSP where pets can actually base, you know, based on what they see on TV. Anne: They've already made more of the food, Exactly exactly, so we just launched something. Kelly: And if that's possible, maybe pets will be transformed into some sort of language that they can then activate. Anne: I think so, I think so. I don't even want to think about that. Kelly: I know, I never really thought about that? Anne: Yeah, that's very exciting. So, essentially for the advertisers listening, it's going to make your reach potentially broader but also more relevant, right? So the publishers have the ability to make targeting more relevant Absolutely Great. Another big announcement was the cross-channel planner. Yes, so can you walk us through how you think the ability to forecast reach will change how advertisers perform through their DSP program? Yeah, absolutely. Kelly: I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges today, as you all know right, is the fragmentation of channels and information and the overload of signals, right, and so that's where we're excited with Cross Channel Planner providing more of the ability to help marketers understand who they should be reaching right across the funnel and get much more information on how to kind of more efficiently drive their spend. In the past, we've launched Channel Planner, so that was our first product for mostly catered towards streaming TV, right, and how do you think about reach curves and how do you make sure that you're delivering against that for upfront pitches and so forth, and this is really kind of the next iteration to driving more efficient spend. So, ultimately, we think this is going to be kind of the next step of just providing much more granularity across all of the Amazon ads products on Amazon beyond Amazon, to make it easier to figure out. Okay, where should I be allocating my budget in the best way possible? We had a baby brand who actually was reaching audiences and they activated. So they leveraged Cross Channel Planner, activated via the DSP, and then they used custom advertising to direct customers to their online store and actually had four and a half times click through rate and 11% increase in impurchase rate, which was pretty cool to see. So again, I think the ability to plan and then easily activate is something that we're really committed to and excited about. Anne: Do you think this will be applicable for advertisers who are advertising both on Amazon and off, so more so that third party placement this will help plan for that as well. Absolutely. Kelly: So Amazon is known for retail media and driving conversions in the Amazon store, and we've been making so many investments over the past several years to really drive much more full funnel solutions and making all of our solutions work for all types of advertisers whether you're an advertiser that sells on Amazon or not because we're really excited about the power of again combining Amazon signals with marketers, third party and third party signals in a way that you can actually drive conversions, drive reach and have more of a full funnel experience and conversation. And that's where our Amazon publisher direct team comes into play, where we have a lot of these relationships and can reach anyone across the internet. But we've also been investing in modeled audiences and the performance through the DSP, and so a lot of people are kind of thinking about the loss of cookies in a negative way. We actually see this as an opportunity. We see this as a way to really innovate and rethink how marketers can potentially reach people in a privacy, safe way. That also drives performance, and so this is why we've also been investing in our modeled audience solutions right so, especially as we think about driving sales or reach off of Amazon, and we've been seeing over 25% increase delivery with a lot of the solutions, as well as 12% less cost per click per impression, which I'm barely able to talk. I'm going to lose my voice by the end of this day. But so, yeah, I think all of these from again, the planning, how you can activate all of the performance improvements we've been doing within our DSP we're excited. We'll continue to help accelerate marketers across full funnel wherever they want to reach people, which we're thrilled about. Anne: Definitely the ever looming third party cookie deprecation. Yes, exactly. Kelly: Yeah, a lot of energy, but understandably, and I think it's the right thing for us to rethink how we can really connect marketers and people in the right way, moving forward. Anne: Agreed, agreed. Another thing that was mentioned was the bidding enhancements that are now going to be available through the DSP program. So, essentially, you pick a KPI and you let Amazon do all the bid optimization in order to get to that KPI. Do you think this is going to change costs for advertisers, like, will CPMs go down in highly competitive categories or go up because of this automation? Kelly: Good question and, being a DSP enthusiast, I'm sure you know that our system has been really hard to use in the past. We've heard feedback from customers and partners that it was very complex, and so we've really been. So this goal seeking bidder, as well as re-augmenting our interface so that it's much more anchored on goals, has been paramount. We want to make it easier to use the DSP. We want to understand what is your goal, what are you trying to do? What outcome are you trying to drive for your business? And we've been making a lot of user interface improvements. And then the goal seeking bidder, on the back end to your point, I'm not sure what it will do in terms of you know, I can't talk to overall pricing in the system, right, but what I can say is that we're already seeing, you know, up to 40% reduction in CPAs, where we're able to better optimize against a goal, and we're seeing marketers just really gravitate towards the ability to kind of have much more of a simple experience. But we also believe in control, and so I think that's one of the powers that we think the Demand side platform has is, if you want all of the customization, if you want the complexity, we have that right. You can really adjust whatever types of bids that you want. You can layer on various different types of audiences. You can play around with different creatives. You can, you know, make a ton of different ads to try and test and at the same time, if you want a more simple, easy experience, you know what your goal is. We're able to help optimize and provide recommendations on the best way to do that. So we see it as kind of a nice balance in providing marketers kind of that wide range of capabilities, because we think there's a lot of different discussions in the industry right now on what way folks are going to be going. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time and thank you for all you do at Amazon. We appreciate it. Kelly: Thank you for the partnership. Appreciate it, of course. Bradley Sutton: Thanks, thank you All right Now we've got Miranda. Miranda, this is our first time meeting you, so can you introduce yourself and tell us what your position is at Amazon? Miranda: Absolutely. I'm Miranda Chen. I'm the director of growth and modernization for Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC for short. I've been at Amazon for 11 and a half years now, live in the Bay Area and at AMC I lead several teams responsible for product and engineering, developing our audience activation capabilities, making AMC easier to use for more and more customers, as well as our go to market and customer enablement activities. Bradley Sutton: All right Now. We have a wide variety of listeners, anywhere from brand new people selling on Amazon to humongous billion dollar brands. Now, the billion dollar brands probably know all about AMC, but some of our newer ones might not understand that. Maybe there can feel like wait, marketing, stream, marketing, AMC, there's all these acronyms. So can you just give a quick, maybe 30 second, one minute introduction about what is AMC? Miranda: Yeah for sure. So Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC, is Amazon ads as clean room, so it's private and secure by design. Each advertiser has their own campaign signals of all their various Amazon ad spend within their particular instance. So we have signals from sponsored products, sponsored brands, streaming TV effectively like all of the actual campaign events and enables custom flexible analytics on those signals. And then it also enables advertisers to be able to upload their own first party signals or third party signals so you can think of, like product catalog, retail conversions, things like that, and so then you can generate really really flexible insights, typically using SQL, such as path to conversion, reach and frequency, overlap analysis and then actually take actions on them. Bradley Sutton: Cool, so most of our listeners probably weren't able to attend here at Unbox. What's the big release for your department here at Unbox? Miranda: Yeah, so we had a couple different releases specifically related to AMC that I can touch on. The first was AMC template analytics. So it takes some of our most popular queries, such as path to conversion, reach and frequency, and then allows users to be able to generate those insights without needing to touch any codes. So that's a pretty exciting development, particularly since we know that not everybody no SQL has taught themselves SQL overnight. And then the second one was AMC lookalike audiences. So we already have the capability where one can generate a custom audience based on specific parameters. So let's just say, an advertiser saw, wanted to create an audience of folks that had seen their detail page view or even added to cart but didn't actually activate and then wanted to drive better performance. They could create a particular, they could run a query, generate that insight and push that directly to the DSP. So that's one way. That's AMC rule based audiences. And then now we launched this enhanced capability for lookalike audiences. So it enables effectively exactly what it sounds like. So finding alike audiences based on that same seed, leveraging machine learning in a clean room capacity trained on Amazon, shopper and customer signals, but all still in a private and secure place. Bradley Sutton: All right, you're already starting talking technical terms that are over my head, so let me bring in the smart one of us. And to clean rooms. My room's not clean, I don't know. That's not what we're talking about here, but go ahead and please follow up and make me sound smart here. Anne: Yeah, of course. So I'd like to talk about lookalike audiences more specifically, because this is a way for brands to reach highly relevant, essentially new customers. So do you think this will change the way people are targeting that new to brand customer targeting incrementality? Miranda: Yeah, I mean we think it's going to be a great way for brands to be able to reach more and more shoppers. So, as I mentioned, the lookalike audiences are trained on based on deep, deep ML, based on lots of very, very, very good signals, and then the advertiser can actually leverage, can get to choose what's their specific seed for the audience, like what's the general size of the audience, based on their objective and then also the relevance. So I think it'll be a really key tool as a part of the marketer toolkit. Anne: Yeah, definitely. Do you think lookalike audiences are scalable for brands that maybe have lower purchase data or lower engagement data that are using AMC? Miranda: I think so. I think they're precisely like the brands that actually could benefit from it, right Because they have a small bit of deterministic signals that they actually want to be able to enhance. And then also because AMC is private and secure by design, as I mentioned, they can also choose to upload their own first party or third party signals and then create a seed based on that and then continue to go find additional customers that seem similar to that seed. Anne: Right, I love that you call it a seed, because it sounds like it will grow over time if you're utilizing these tactics, so that's a great way to phrase it. Miranda: Thanks, it didn't come up with it. Anne: Well, we'll give you credit anyways. So you talked about the AMC templatized analytics, right? Is this a way to make AMC more accessible and, if so, are the queries that are available through those templatized analytics? Will it grow over time? What's available through that? Miranda: Yeah, so we think it's a first step towards making AMC easier for more and more customers. So we don't have a specific timeline yet on additional templates, but it is something we'll be continuing to evaluate. We have been talking to different customers and internal teams about how we can also make AMC easier to use through point and click applications as well. We also work with dozens of partners that are making AMC easier to use, either through visualizations or through their own innovative dashboard. So I think through the combination of either homegrown or partner built capabilities, we'll be able to continue to bring AMC insights to more and more customers. Anne: Yeah, pacview is one of those partners. We do have an AMC dashboard Great, I think. Another question that's kind of just in general about AMC do you think there are any verticals or categories that benefit the most from this data, or that you've seen a lot of growth and success with using AMC? Miranda: Yeah, we think of AMC as equal opportunities. So we look at the data a lot. We're very, very data driven surprise, surprise at Amazon and what we've seen is that there's penetration for AMC across brands and partners and agencies as well as across all verticals. So we've seen, certainly, strength from brands that sell on the Amazon store, but also pretty strong results with entertainment, with automotive, financial services. So you can think of someone who's like automotive who might have a bunch of local dealerships. They want to be able to do more fine event grained analyses based on specific geos, and so something like AMC is perfect for that be able to do more precise measurements. So, yeah, certainly we think it's a great product for all, but it really depends on that particular advertiser's objective and then what are the types of signals that they want to bring in and what kind of insights they can generate. Anne: Definitely, it is flexible. Miranda: Exactly Infinite and flexible. Yes, Great. Anne: My last question is just a kind of a fun one. Do you have any specific query or an example of a query that you think was really innovative that's been pulled through AMC that you can recall? Miranda: I think it's probably a generic answer, but I think the Path to Conversion one is probably one of my favorites, just because it's the simplest. I think AMC was actually the first place where an advertiser could see all of their signals across all of the Amazon ad products, and so someone who was buying sponsored products and DSP might not have realized before that they actually were driving better results together, and so Path to Conversion, and actually be able to understand how those two products were interacting, for example, really brought a lot more power and insight, I think, to advertisers. Anne: So I don't think that's generic at all. I love that one too. Miranda: There's a reason. That's core kind of at the top of the instructional query library. Anne: Right. Miranda: Agreed, all right. Bradley Sutton: I have another question for you. I like asking stuff that maybe nobody else is going to ask. When you want to take off your Amazon hat and kick back with a hobby to kind of like balance work life, what's your go-to hobby? Miranda: Well, I have an almost four-year-old so she is probably my hobby in most of the time. I'm going to try and go do fun things on the weekend, whether it's exploring new coffee shops or going to find music. Bradley Sutton: The four-year-old is a coffee drinker, is she? Miranda: No, she's not, but she's an avid consumer of chocolate croissants, and so we sample baked goods in lots of different places. Then mom gets her coffee. I think that's probably it, but in my prior pre-kid years I did a lot more yoga and hiking and things like that. Bradley Sutton: So enjoy those years. You know, my kids are over 20 already, so I wish I had a four-year-old. I remember those days All right. Thank you so much for joining us and you educated me a lot. It sounds like Ann knows all about what you're talking about. It was like a different language to me, so I appreciate you educating us on IMC. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. Miranda: Thank you so much. Bradley Sutton: Alright, we've got Teresa here. Teresa, could you go ahead and introduce yourself? Teresa: Sure, I'm Teresa Uthralton. I'm the Director of Partner Development here at Amazon Ads. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, awesome. How long have you been here at Amazon? Teresa: I've been at Amazon for almost 10 years, so I'm approaching that red badge. For those of you that know our badging conventions, Nice, nice. Bradley Sutton: Now you're from here in New York. I've always been in New York, yep. So I'm going to start off with maybe the most important question of the day Julianne's Pizza in Brooklyn. Is that the best representation of New York pizza, or not? Teresa: Oh, that's tough. There's so many really good pizza places now I can't even keep up with them. There's so many. Bradley Sutton: Alright. Well, we're going to have to connect right after this, because I have two days left and I need to maximize my time here. Teresa: Yes, Alright now. Bradley Sutton: We're not here to talk about food here. Teresa: I recommend checking out Roberta's in Bushwick though. Bradley Sutton: Roberta's in Bushwick. I have not been there. Anne: Yes, I think you'll really enjoy that. Bradley Sutton: We're going to that one. Anne: Right now. Yeah, actually, cancel the interview. Let's go there, we go. Yes, of course. Bradley Sutton: Now Anne here is going to ask a lot of the more technical questions, especially those that have to do with enterprise. Now I'm here to represent, kind of like, the voice of the average Amazon seller, and you know, there's some people out there who might not fully know what Amazon marketing stream is first of all. So could you just go ahead and just kind of give a quick elevator pitch for what that is? Teresa: Sure. So Amazon marketing stream is a partner-facing product, and what it does is it provides really granular hourly signals on all our advertising metrics through the Amazon API, and what that means to a seller is that they will be able to get all sorts of insights about their business that normally they would not have known. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right, I love that. Did you practice this? I didn't even tell you I was going to ask that. All right, cool, cool. How about rapid retail analytics, your other specialty? Teresa: I know I love rapid retail analytics, so Amazon marketing stream obviously totally focused on advertising signals. As we know, so much of what's exciting about Amazon ads is that you got online retail and digital advertising Right, and so rapid retail analytics provides that level of granularity on retail signals, and one of the reasons that's so exciting is that that data used to be available at a daily cadence with a 72-hour lag, so we literally it's almost near real time now, which is a really, really exciting development. Bradley Sutton: Okay, all right. Well, now that I got that out of the way, let me turn it over to the smart one of us too, and for some follow up questions. Anne: Yeah, so I kind of want to double click into Amazon marketing stream, specifically the fact that it was recently released for DSP or it's being extended to DSP. How do you think this will change the way advertisers manage their DSP campaigns now that they have that real time data that we were talking about? Teresa: Well, it's interesting. I think one of the things that I've learned is I've been humbled by our partner's creativity. Right, you know, I was just. I was just telling someone. I joined this team three weeks before Can last year and so I showed up at Can meeting all my partners for the first time, and we had just launched the first version of Amazon marketing stream and I was like this is the coolest product. But what really got me excited was it's a product that we developed based on the feedback we got from partners Like they, they have a seat at the table, they participate in all our betas and our product teams love them, right, because they get like this incredible, you know, they get their hands dirty and they come back and they're like these are the 27 things that are wrong and you need to fix right, which is if you're a product team, that's actually like really helpful, right, so, and what? The thing that's so interesting is like it launched and everyone loved it, but then people are like well, but it only has sponsored products. Right, like, I want more, I want more, I might want more. So I think what's exciting about having ADSP signals in there is that's going to unlock a whole bunch of opportunity around partners that are deep on ADSP Right. Definitely and I think you know, probably a few months from now, we'll have some really interesting case studies, success stories. There's really like almost no end to the creativity of our partners, which is really great because they're such awesome builders. Anne: I agree. I'm curious AMC they not AMS? AMC? I know they get our accurate, our Amazon accurate. I know, there's so many of them Also provides hour by hour data for both DSP and for sponsored ads. Prior to this, especially prior to AMC, but also prior to AMS, this wasn't available for advertisers, so you kind of had to guess when you were running, like day parting or anything along those lines. Do you think the release of the stream data for DSP will eliminate the need for the AMC hourly data? Teresa: Well, I think you got to go back to like what are the use cases that people use other product, right? I think, like what is great about Amazon marketing stream? Right, it's an aggregate, aggregate data pipe, if you think about it, right, and so ultimately that's going to help people build solutions that are evergreen. It's going to help people train AI models right, because how do you train AI models? You need, like, lots of granular signals, right? And whereas the Amazon marketing stream is really about very specific use cases around, like understanding the customer purchase path, understanding incrementality, understanding attribution, so I don't think it's like one or the other, I think it's very like use case specific. Anne: Right. That actually leads perfectly into my next question, which is how you see these two datasets working together with advertisers currently, or how you see in the future that they can work together. Teresa: Yeah. So I think, like what I think is really exciting about partner innovation is, ultimately, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer, right, like there's that whole age old question about, like I know half my advertising is working, but I don't know which half, and I think we're getting about as close as we're going to get probably in our lifetime, but we're on the cusp of that with a lot of these tools, and so I think the the part about Amazon marketing stream that I think is so exciting is that it will allow the kind of automation that makes brands so much smarter and helps them do more with less. Right, and we're seeing like especially like this year has been an uncertain economic climate for a lot of folks, right, and a lot of a lot of folks are trying to figure out like my budget has been cut or my budget is capped, but I'm being asked to drive more growth Right, and I think, like partners have been able to deliver solutions based on Amazon marketing stream and rapid retail analytics that have really enabled that Awesome. Bradley Sutton: And you had a last question. Anne: I did. It's a fun one. What's your favorite thing about being at conferences like unboxed? Teresa: Oh, it's meeting my partners. You know, I learn so much from from meeting with partners, right, like I said, it's very humbling. The innovation, the creativity, what they teach us about our customers, what they teach us about our products and it's such an incredible learning experience is so energizing. Were you at our our cocktail party last night? Anne: No. Bradley Sutton: I was not. Anne: We had a lot of cocktail parties. I'm sure it was very. Teresa: That was like such a fun buzzing party and I got to meet partners from all over the world. At our award ceremony on Monday we met partners that came from Delhi and it was just really, really exciting. Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right, well, thank you so much for coming on the show and we appreciate all that you do at Amazon. Teresa: Thank you, thanks guys. Bradley Sutton: All right, we've got Ruslana here. Ruslana, welcome to the show. Ruslana: Thank you, Bradley and Anne, for having me. Bradley Sutton: Are you based here in? Ruslana: New York no, I'm based in Seattle. Bradley Sutton: Seattle. Okay, Seattle was just there for accelerate, lots of rain, but I like. I like Seattle weather a lot. Quick question for you, first of all just how long have you been at Amazon and what is your title there? Ruslana: I'm a vice president of sponsored brands display in TV advertising and I just celebrated my 10 year anniversary Last week awesome, congrats, congrats. Bradley Sutton: now we're gonna go into like what you announced today, but you know something while you were on stage, you also referred to something that was, you know, launched a little bit ago. We're how, now you know, sponsored products can show up on websites like Pinterest and things like that, and one thing that was I have a bad memory, but it was new to me, maybe I knew about it, I guess, didn't know was like it's not just a product that's gonna display, but it'll also show, I believe, like the reviews count and even the shipping time did I, did I hear that right. Ruslana: Well, with sponsor products, our goal is to deliver the same value that Advertisers are getting today by having sponsored products was an Amazon store and some of the critical sort of trusted Amazon attributes, such as reviews, pricing information, as well as Prime delivery promise, are essential elements To helping customers make decisions and actually purchase. So yes you are, you got it right at that. Sponsor products will be containing Kind of product level or Amazon key, amazon trusted information Within these new and exclusive placements across some of these sides to help our advertisers to really go quickly and with ease from discovering something or exploring something to actually purchasing awesome, awesome. Bradley Sutton: That's been. That's been out for a while, but today, when you're on stage, you announce something brand new, and that was sponsored TV. So just give us maybe a quick 30 second, one minute overview of what that is, and Anne has some follow-up questions on that. Ruslana: Well, we see a sponsored TV, tv advertising as a whole, as a critical element of brand-building strategy. That should not be something that Brand cannot do. Any brand of any science should be able to tap into this opportunity and reach these engaged audiences on a big screen In the living room, and so sponsored TV is aiming to accomplish just that. We have worked very closely with our brands and our customers and Backwards from them, to understand what their key pain points have been and why they have not potentially used TV more actively Was in their overall brand-building strategy and, as a result, launch sponsored TV. I'm trying to eliminate three main pain points no guarantee commitments, no spend, minimum creative support and, lastly, access to first-party Amazon, first-party signals. Even when you advertise in TV, powered my machine learning and Right measurement so that advertise and send value, because what we've learned is spend is intimidating, a Lack of the right creative or ability to create the right credit. Just knowing what resonates on such a screen is Hard and intimidating and, lastly, just understanding the value that TV delivers for these brands was difficult. And so, given those three main pain points, that's there. That's why we're sponsored TV. I think to wrap like there is another element right. We at Amazon, we very custom obsessed and in this instance, we have two customers right. We have brands, and we just talked about the value we deliver for the brands, but there's also another key customer, which is the viewers, and for viewers, this is an opportunity to discover diverse collection of brands and products in places where they choose to spend their time. Bradley Sutton: Okay, now I'm just wondering where, like? What kind of placements are these? Are these like, like, like trailers that come up, or are there just actual, you know, banner ads that might pop up while you're watching a TV show? Ruslana: Oh, this is a TV advertising we're talking about, so they are video, so this is not this not sponsored display. Jeff: Yeah. Ruslana: This is video ads and they sponsor TV. Today service was in freebie content. Like I don't know if any of you watch freebie, I do. I love certain shows there, so big fan. So there is freebie content. There is streaming. Do you stream? Do you twitch? Bradley Sutton: Yes. Ruslana: Okay. Well, when you twitch during live streams, that could be. Another opportunity was in. Bradley Sutton: There might be people watch watching this right now on our rebroadcasts of this. Ruslana: People that twitch. This is where the ads would show. And then, lastly, was in a fire TV apps. Bradley Sutton: Okay, excellent yeah. Anne: So it was mentioned that the goal of this campaign, or at least one of the goals, is to make it more accessible to Advertisers who have lower budgets, don't necessarily want to deal with spend minimums etc. Do you feel like there's a lower level of budget sufficiency for running these campaigns, or can it be tested with a small amount of money? Ruslana: Well, we, as I said earlier, right customer obsessed, working back, working backwards from our brands and working backwards for them. I'm really observed that they do want to be able to engage with this audience. Why wouldn't you like if you launched a product that is net new, delightful, on the market? Why wouldn't you want to tell? Like you know, I talked on my keynote about hex glad. I don't know if you don't know, if you have it in your kitchen, but if you don't, I highly recommend. I discovered through our sponsor TV offering the brand and I love the non-stick and also non scratch. Bradley Sutton: Oh no, you had me out when you showed part of the video where it flipped over and nothing Was coming on. Anne: I like that. Ruslana: Very impressive and so at the end of the day, like that is the brand that I'm delighted to cook with every day, and I like my eggs for breakfast. Doesn't matter if it's Monday or Tuesday, Wednesday or Sunday, so in at the end of the day, I think these are the type of brands. They want to engage with the right audience at the right time, and I think this is the right time. Anne: Great. Can you walk us through some of the targeting that will be available with this type of advertising? Most of sponsored ads is keyword basis. That going to be the truth for Sponsored TV, or is it going to be more signal-based behavioral audiences? Ruslana: Well, we always try to help our brands reach the right audiences. So let me Maybe adjust one statement here Most of sponsor brands is not keyword based sponsored products. Keyword based sponsored Products is keywords based. Sponsor brands has keywords Elements in their way and how you express intent. Sponsored display doesn't have that way to express intent. But our aim is to always work with our brands and help them, give them the right tools to express the intent in the best possible way so we can deliver their message and their story in the right place at the right time. So in the case of sponsored TV, the advertisers could use both sort of category based interests and as well as Genre based interest. Bradley Sutton: I've got a spooky brand on Amazon, so like come Halloween season gonna be Maybe throwing some ads on some spooky Halloween shows or horror show. Anne: Perfect, I think we have time for one more question. So I'm curious how do you recommend brands measure success with these campaigns? Do you have specific KPIs that you think you know appropriately measure the success for sponsored TV or anything along those lines? Ruslana: So they reach. Traditional metrics are available similarly how they would be available for any other TV offerings, but in addition, we are sharing branded searches as well as detail page and store page Traffic, and so that is a starting point for the offering. We will continue evolving our metrics and help brands understand the value they're getting out of their sponsored TV offering Wonderful. Bradley Sutton: Thank you so much for joining us today. Ruslana: Thank you for having me and in Bradley.

Let's catch up with Eugene Wong, an accomplished 8-figure Amazon and 7-figure Walmart seller, as he shares the latest developments in his thriving e-commerce empire. Eugene not only walks us through the intricacies of managing his expanding businesses but also reveals his secrets to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, turning personal hobbies into profitable business ventures, and exploring new income streams.  Join us as Eugene discusses his journey into the world of TikTok Shop, where he has successfully launched products. Plus, get a sneak peek into the brands incubated by his dedicated employees and learn about the innovative system changes and automation he's implementing in his business systems. This episode is a goldmine of entrepreneurial wisdom for anyone looking to diversify their income streams outside E-commerce selling and thrive in the ever-evolving online seller landscape. In episode 489 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Eugene discuss: 02:52 – Eugene Shares Updates On His Business 03:44 – His Healthy Habits And Habits Outside The Amazon Grind 06:13 – Let's Talk About Sports Cards From Hobby To Business 09:13 – Problems, Balance, & Boundaries For The Main And Side Businesses 13:54 – “You Need To Think Of What Your Hobbies Are” 15:43 – Diversifying Your Income Streams 18:00 – Launching Brands Incubated By His Employees 20:54 – Let's Talk About TikTok Shop 24:32 – Browsing Eugene's TikTok Shop 28:03 – TikTok Is Banning Amazon Links? 29:49 – Business System Changes He Is Implementing 33:03 – Eugene's 60-Second Tip ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we've got an eight-figure Amazon seller slash seven-figure Walmart seller back on the show, who's gonna have a little bit different kind of episode. We're gonna talk a lot about how, as entrepreneurs, maybe we can take a hobby of ours and turn it into an alternate income stream, as well as how he's launched on TikTok shop. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. Bradley Sutton: Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba, or Pinterest page? And maybe you see a cool product that you wanna get some more data on? Well, while you are on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you wanna then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we've got back on the show for the second time, a very, very serious seller here Eugene. Eugene, how's it going, man? Eugene: Hi, what's up Bradley? Doing very well. Glad to be back. Bradley Sutton: Alright, so, so guys, you, Eugene has sold multiple eight figures on Amazon, seven figures on Walmart. If you want to get his full backstory you're gonna want to go to episode 306. All right. So h10.me/306 to get a lot of how he grew up and what his parents wanted them to do, and then the kind of direction that he went to. Quite an interesting story. We're not gonna go too much there, but you know, that, that was almost a couple years ago. Now it's like pulling teeth to get Eugene to come on podcast. He's so humble and he doesn't like I don't have much to say. I'm like, dude, you sold a hundred million dollars, few, $300 million online. Anything you say is interesting. So finally we got him back after two years at Eugene on the show. Welcome back and how, how are things been going with you? Eugene: Things are good, and happy to be back. Lots of changes to update you on. Bradley Sutton: Cool, cool. Now, right off the bat, Let's just talk about on the business side of things, numbers, just raw numbers, 2021, we are still kind of in Covid and things. And 2023 at the end here. Things have changed, better, worse, whatever the case is. How are your numbers on Amazon and Walmart compared to a couple of years ago? Eugene: So, I think last time when we first last spoke on the episode I projected, I think 18 million, and we were pretty much right there at the end of the year. So it wasn't surprising. Like we kind, kind of forecasted 18 to 20 and we fell into the lower tier of that. But we hit our target, so we were happy with that, we hit it. Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. Would you say Walmart and Amazon have grown or stayed around the same amount, or have both been increasing in a similar way, different ways? How's the trajectory been? Eugene: Well, actually, Walmart got worse for us. Amazon is the one that increased Walmart to spread got even wider, which were, I mean, it's, it's something that we continue to batch our heads over, and we're trying to still crack the code, but it went down. Yeah. Which stinks. Bradley Sutton: And now we're gonna get maybe into some strategies that you can share with us that you or your team is doing on the business side. But I want to take a step back and go outside completely outside of the business side. Right now this wasn't a big focus of mine when I had you on the podcast two years ago, but if you've listened to the podcast anytime in the last year, you'll see that I, I ask almost every guest, like, Hey, what do you do to take yourself out of the business as far as for you know, hobbies and as far as health routine and et cetera. So let's start, I know a lot of what your hobbies are, so let me start on the part that I don't know about. What are you doing to stay physically fit, healthy? You know, like, you seem like you're a pretty fit person when I see you, so you you're not just sitting in front of a computer eating junk food all day. Do you do the gym or do you walk, or what are you doing to stay fit? Eugene: Unfortunately, or admittedly, I don't really do too much physical activity right now because of, because of my hobbies and the work, right? I mean, obviously eat eating healthy well try to. But there's not much like I don't go to the gym too much anymore. I do help out with my kids' sports that they're in, football and soccer. So that keeps me pretty active, I guess that's probably my main source of exercise. Bradley Sutton: And what else are you doing? You know for hobbies you like, like, I know, I know you're big on Lego and stuff the family, like, you still doing projects like that, or what else? Eugene: Lego, actually if you wanna buy some, I have a lot for sale, but, Lego, I didn't fully quit, but, but I'm downsizing that because I just don't have time for it. I do a lot of surprisingly, I mentioned this also when I was at Sell and Scale sports cards, right? I had my eyes on that, that business model. And good or bad for me, whenever I get involved with something, I always look for the business angle, right? Not, not about money per se. It just, it just like finding the passion in it and sports cards. Not sports cards. Bradley Sutton: Hold that thought. I'm gonna share my screen of something that I was involved in yesterday here. Oh, no. Now, now just explain like, kind of like what's going on. These are your hands we're looking at in this video right here. And you're opening up these pack of cards. I see your name right here. Eugene: You drips my name. Bradley Sutton: So this was a live Facebook. Explain like you're doing commentary on what's going on here, explain what we are looking at right here. Oh Eugene: My gosh, I can't believe clip that. I'm turning red right now. Yeah, so, so that's that's, that's part of the sports cards part. It's pretty much, that's called braking. So, pretty much nowadays, this is not like your, your childhood sports cards. Nowadays, boxes can cost 500,000, even $10,000. It's sickening. But a cheaper way to jump in is, is you can get your team. So let's say you like the Philadelphia Eagles, and instead of buying the whole box and ripping every single pack yourself and paying the full price, you can just buy one team and you get all the cards for the Eagles. If you're a fan of the Eagles or if you want to gamble, which is kind of one of the elements to it. So I've I've evolved from, from being a pure hobbyist into kind of like collecting and ripping product and opening basketball and football stuff to evolving into breaking, because I saw the business side of it, and it's very fun. Eugene: It gets me outta my element. It's actually a very stress reliever for the Amazon side of business. In fact, I need it. Like, I need an outlet like that. It's very creative outlet, because I have to first of all sell and engage an audience which is complete against my, my my personality. Like, I'm a super introvert, like, being on here, you had to rich, you twist my arm, but, yep. But I dunno, something about the sports cards. I'm just very comfortable with it. I'm very knowledgeable with it, and I like helping people most importantly. Bradley Sutton: You started as a, on the hobby side, like, you would go into Facebook groups and like join the breaks as a person who would buy like a certain player or a certain team. Is that correct? Or did you start immediately on the flip side where like, I'm gonna make this a business from day one? Eugene: No, no, no. I definitely wasn't the business from day one. I was basically gambling, right. I was, I was opening the packs myself and, and, and paying in other people's breaks, but it wasn't sustainable. Yeah. I knew that entertainment was not a sustainable form of–. Bradley Sutton: But it was like a rush, right? Like it's a rush. Like, guys, let me tell you, you from experience, like I've been doing this for years too, and it's fun. Like for those who aren't into sports cards maybe it's kind of hard to describe what we are talking about here, but it's super fun. But what I like about this is that you took something that was an escape on the side like a little hobby. And then you're like, wait a minute, I could actually turn this into maybe even a side business where you're still doing your hobby, but now instead of the money just going out and you paying it, it's almost like maybe you're breaking even now. So you still get that rush and that escape from your Amazon business, but you're almost able to turn it into a side business. Because the way it works is this, this is not easy work, first of all, to organize this break, collect payment from like 20 strangers to, and then later organize the cards to different teams. But, but that's kind of like built into the, built into the price, right? So are you kind of like breaking even on this now, but you're still able to get that rush that you did when you were just a pure hobbyist? Eugene: I mean, in the beginning when you first start out, when you don't have any, you don't have reputation, no one knows you. Yeah. You, you might be losing money or breaking even, but I mean, again, I'm humble, but it's hard for me to say this, but like, I built quite a following and, you know what I mean? I snap fill my, or I'm using the wrong terminology. I fill my pretty quickly. And usually a lot of people struggle. And I'm in a group that has a hundred thousand people and I'm probably one of the larger ones. And the stuff fails 'cause people trust me, my reputation's there. I'm not one of these like, shady guys and I know what I'm doing. So reputation's everything in this industry, just like Amazon as a brand, you know what I mean? Like one big mistake or, or one, like one shady element will take you down. And this literally is the most sensitive hobby where it will, you will, your name will be tarnished forever if you, if you mess up in a shady way. Bradley Sutton: You slip a good card out or something, something like that. Now how much time a week are you spending on this I guess we could call it side business/hobby. Eugene: Probably too much time. And, and I think this, this is a good, good blend of the Amazon and, and what we like the business aspect. It's one of those things where, where I struggle with balance and boundaries, right? So I know I'm sitting on a gold mine with my hobby that turned into something. Now the problem is the scaling and hiring of people and hiring talent that goes live as well as capital to source product and stuff like that. So it, it's a very similar business problem to the Amazon side, but of course I'm more passionate about it. But also it let, let's, let's be honest, it's not gonna generate the profit that it does on the, for the Amazon business, right? Sure, sure. So I have to be realistic and real, real things in. Bradley Sutton: Do you have employees for this endeavor then as well? Eugene: I'm interviewing right now. Bradley Sutton: Okay. But right now, until now, you've kind of just done it all on your own. Eugene: Yeah, yeah. Okay. For, it's been a year over, a little over a year and a month. Bradley Sutton: But then, but then we talking 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week, 30 hours a week. How much would you say you're spending on the baseball cards or sports cards? Eugene: Maybe 20. Okay. Bradley Sutton: All right. Now, when that happened, does that mean that you, it was 20 hours less on the Amazon side? Or is it a mixture since this it's kind of not like to me, when, when I do sports card stuff, and, and I, I'm very similar to you. I was in the sports card. I'm actually flying to Japan in a few days. 'cause I'm setting up at a card show to sell some of the stuff that, that, that I have over here and over there. So I get it. To me it's, it's work. It makes money just like you're profitable on this, but it's also fun. It's also an escape. So, so did, did you decrease your Amazon workload by 20 hours? Or is it kind of a mixture? You maybe only took away 10 hours or something because this is kind of like a hobby as opposed to just business for you? Eugene: I don't think the 20 hours replaced 20 hours of Amazon. I mean, I guess the balance definitely took away some from the Amazon. And, and of course my guys are, are solid, and I know they kept things going. But of course, there's some things that fell by the wayside, right? It's, I normally don't miss, and I admittedly like, this is why I need to balance, this is not the golden goose right now. It can be. But I need to find a way to develop it without hurting the main golden goose, right? So, so that, that's, I'm, I'm living through it right now and trying to balance that out. It's just that I, I can't, I don't wanna give it up because it took almost a year to build this up into this thing. And now, now I know there's another level to climb, but, but I'm not at the stage where I can say, Hey, I'm 100% all in still on that because I can't give up the Amazon side. Bradley Sutton: Wait a minute. Are you the one who also had a huge eBay account where you're also selling the cards on eBay? Eugene: Yeah. Bradley Sutton: Y you were the one who made all those listings, or Eugene: No, that was, alright, now you're gonna make me give away the secrets here. That account was, we used to sell very heavy on eBay. Okay. So we, we sold, this is before like, we got heavy into apparel. We were selling electronics and, and, Bradley Sutton: Okay, okay. Eugene: Yeah. So Bradley Sutton: When you say we, this is like your, your, your main conglomeration the, the same business that you've been doing for 15 years. This wasn't as okay. Now it's starting to, to come into picture a little bit more. Now you Eugene: Gave this Yeah it looks like that. It looks like it, like 500,000 sports card sales, but it, it's not, yeah. But I'm starting to, because assignment model is potentially in the works as well too, but that's a whole another infrastructure. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Yeah. So guys, I mean, the reason why I brought this up wasn't just because I think this is cool that, that he does sports cards like me there's a few people in the industry like Brandon Young and Mitul Patel, and a bunch of people of us are all in like this group where we, we talk about sports cards and stuff like that, but it's the fact that think about what your hobbies are. And you can't apply this to everything, but there's a lot of you out there who might have a hobby, and this is kinda like the Gary Vee mentality actually, where it's like, can you actually monetize the hobby where it's not just a complete dream? Like if my hobby is swimming or something like that like if I'm, if you hobby was swimming and you're like, I'm gonna start swimming for 20 hours a week, it's kind of, it might be hard to monetize that per se but for the rest of you guys out there, actually I'm, I'm sure I could come up with something like maybe I become a swimming influencer or something. Bradley Sutton: Something like live streamer, I'm sure there's, but, but, but that's my point. Like a lot of it, even if it, even if it seems extreme guys, is there's ways where you can turn some of your side side hobbies or, or things into almost like a side business where you are getting that escape from your day-to-day. Amazon, which is what I've been preaching for the last year, guys you have to have hobbies and things that take you away from the daily grind you know, resets your mind and, and just puts you in a different space. But at the same time, you gotta be careful that if you're just like like one of my hobbies is Korean, Korean dramas. Like I just watch Korean dramas all day. I could if I had the time, but that there's no monetization for me on that, that means it's literally just taking away time from, from my, my, my Amazon businesses if I just go deep into it. Bradley Sutton: So you've gotta have the balance, but then think about it like, is part of, of this hobby is there a way to monetize it where not only would you break even, but now all of a sudden you've got another profitable business like Eugene has here with a sports card. So I, to me, it's fascinating what you've been able to do, but again, you would not have been able to get to the point where you could even do this if you did not build up your team in a good way and be able to delegate so much of your Amazon business to your team. Eugene: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think my, my role had had evolved, and this is probably the past couple years, is that you gotta let the team do their thing, right? And my role now has become, okay, how do I make sure the team has a secure future? I have to branch out and go outside of the box and do different things, right? I've, I think there's, there's been other failed attempts at things whether, whether it's an Amazon type of type of business or outside of completely outside separate from e-commerce type of business. And you know what I mean I'm always looking for new ways to generate income, right? And that's more in general to diversify, which is very important I think not only within Amazon, but even outside of having Amazon as a business and then having, I don't know, own something else, going to real estate, anything else, right? Sports cards, whatever. And that's another way to protect my family, not not only my like personal life, but like more, like I said, the guys here that, that they deserve. They're running the day-to-day, they deserve something to take home at the end of their whatever tenure or yearly bonuses and things like that. So that, that's very important to have that opportunity. Bradley Sutton: Alright, let's switch back from, from hobby back to business now. How many brands overall do, are you currently running? Eugene: We only have three brands, right? And it's all under the same account we have. Bradley Sutton: So let's say like these three brands are selling on Walmart, you're selling on Amazon and maybe have some.com websites or something for them. Eugene: Yeah, they're not all on the same marketplaces. Some have their own website. Some are on multi-platform, some are just on single platform. Okay. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Alright. Any, anything, like, have you launched any new brands or have any new things in the pipeline or that you've done lately? Eugene: Yeah, we something that, and again, this is a a situation from one of our employees. It was kind of incubated by them, which I loved. And basically a pitch came across my desk with one of my employees. I'm like, Hey, like, what do you wanna talk about? And they had this great idea, the conceptual it was and they have like anxiety and ADHD, which which they struggle with. And they had a, a concept, a product concept that would help with that. And the mission statement, the vision, it resonated with me. Obviously required an investment. There was a risk there because this was not our lane. This is definitely not apparel or electronics that we were used to. Eugene: This is like basically it's a weighted, weighted lap pad, right? But it was, it's really made for kids. The ones on market just were not, were not as good, right? The quality or, or, or the way the, the, the weights are shifting inside and stuff like that. So internally we developed a better way to do it a better weight system. We also have ones that are custom. We have like a dog as well too. This is, this is a dog, and you can fill this with whatever you want. Rice or, or glass bees. We have a, we have a unicorn. So like, that's the new brand that we're, we're trying to invest in slowly. We're not trying to sink all our chips in that, because that can really hurt us long term, right? Eugene: So we're trying to play that out, that just launched this year. And it wasn't, it's not one of those like products that we're used to where we're used to selling, let's say like five, 10, 20,000 units of it a year, and then okay, wins and repeat. This is a definitely a lot smaller niche, but this was a passion project by someone internally that I committed to these guys. Like, look guys, if you have passion projects, let's let's discuss it. Let's talk about it. Right? I can't say yes to everything. However, there's certain ones that we can't bring aboard. This is one of them that passed the initial phase, and now it's all the way through. And this is kind of one of our first brands that we really made like full effort of full branding, not how we, like, HD is like a, was like a mix of stuff. Eugene: And while it's getting better now, it's really focused on apparel. It didn't start that way. This was our first clean brand that was fully immersed into this concept. And we have a, a future plans for sensory types of items for it as well too. We have workbooks we have influencers. It's more of a lifestyle brand. But it's one of those that it's gonna be capped it. I don't think it's gonna be ever one of those $20 million a year things, at least I don't think, but of course there's, there's future plans. We wanna do trade shows and, and pension get on shelves, Walmart well target probably more, more so. But but that's, yeah, that's one of the exciting things that we have in the pipeline is just, it just we gotta be patient and drive it the right way. Because you can burn through resources, especially PPC, PPC is if you don't do it right, you can really hurt yourselves. And, and we, we've been in that boat a couple times already this year. Bradley Sutton: Okay, I'll very unique. I never heard about I mean, I'm sure people, people have it, but I haven't had a guess that, that have said, Hey, we had a internal kind of where the employees could, could come up with ideas. You know, you have employees who, who have been with you five, 10 years, they know the business. All the ideas for new products doesn't have to come from the owner you. So that's cool to open up ideas and be open that to that who knows how much stuff your employees out there might have might have some ideas about some new products. Okay. TikTok shop is something that I think has grown exponentially as far as buzz around it. We've had other Helium 10 Elite members like Elizabeth talk about some of their some of her amazing success in TikTok shop. Are have you taken any of your brands in TikTok shop? Are you utilizing that or just influencers at all in TikTok? Eugene: Yeah, we we actually just started we we're really late to the game, I think, well, I think we're late to the game obviously in China. I mean, they have factories that are just going li like live factories, literally. Like, there's cubicles of people going live which is crazy, and the amount of money that brings in is disgusting. So we finally made the leap in using our HD clothing brand to jump onto TikTok shop or TikTok live and TikTok shop. That's how it evolved. So so the minute that opened to us, we didn't get invited to the first round of it during the beta but as soon as it opened up to us, we gave it a trial. We put some listings up and right away we got some sales, which is cool. Eugene: And when we stocked out on TikTok shop, the sales went to our website as well too. So, so we got double wham, we got bonus sales on our website, which we never really get, like our website just to have a website, to be honest with you. We don't focus on it. But we got sales there and TikTok shop. And then when we went, when we did more TikTok lives, we connected with more, more creators. And that went viral as well too on a couple posts, and we sold out a lot of our stuff. Now, the, the bad part is we were not prepared at all for the inventory. Like, we're prepared for inventory for Walmart, Amazon, and that's really it, right? And then now with TikTok in the mix, those sales are very unpredictable. We can't say that, hey, just because that, that influencer posted that content that it's gonna sell a hundred dresses in two days, we don't know that. Eugene: So, like, I don't even know how the heck to order for that. So it's a problem we're trying to figure out right now without like blowing the budget on, on over ordering inventory for a chance. So we usually pretty tight with inventory. We don't like taking too many chances, especially with apparel. Apparel, you get stuck with it, you're in trouble. So, so it's a good and bad problem to have. So, so we're also just like peace pets. We're, we're not taking a, a gung-ho approach where we're just gonna throw everything at it. We just gotta take our time and learn some of the, the growing pains. And of course, TikTok shop has growing pains. I'm not an expert at it, but like, I've heard enough horror stories that there's a lot of I think internal things that, that are not just like when I say Walmart or Amazon when they first started, there's a lot of things that don't go right. Eugene: For, for both the seller and the buyer. Things can be abused and manipulated. So so there's a lot of that stuff that, that, that happens still, but but it's definitely gonna be the future for sure. And, and I, I'm investing in that more and more each day. Obviously I think all brands should go on there. Clothing I think is actually a very easier thing because we just have a model that talks about it and wears it and walks around in it, right? And demonstrates it. That's pretty easy. Bradley Sutton: Alright, so I'm here looking at your TikTok channel here. ShopHDE I see you've got a few videos here. Lemme just pull up one, enhance performance and style. Okay, so I see here, there's a, a shop button. I'm gonna hit this. I'm gonna hit this shop button, and let's see where it takes me to, ah, okay. So it just takes me like, I can just instantly I add it to the cart and then have this. It's kind weird looking leopard skin shorts here shipped to me. That's that easy as that. This is like my first time looking at, at TikTok shop, and then I can actually go click here directly to your shop and I can see all of your products, I'm assuming. Okay. And I can see best sellers. Looks like your tennis outfit is the top sellers here. Actually, it's all women's clothes, like your men's. That just shows you that, that I guess more women are using TikTok shop, perhaps, because none of your men's products are, are on this bestseller list here. That's interesting. Eugene: Yeah, men don't like to shop on TikTok. Apparently. We found that out early on. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Okay. So now all of this this is your channel here. These, these aren't your employees, like, are like, are these influencers here who have done all are these, like, what do you call it? Is this UGC or are some of these your actual employees or people you have hired to do videos? What are we looking at here? Eugene: It's a mix of, I mean, we, one should be one of our employees. It's a mix of influencers as well as our, our our models in China that makes some of the videos and photos for us. So it's a collaboration. Bradley Sutton: Now here, I just happen to see this 8,000 views. Like is this a, a, a video that you boosted somehow, or just randomly? It went kind of maybe mini viral or something? This particular one right here, 8,000 views. That's pretty good for this. Maybe that's why I don't, this is one of the top sellers. Eugene: I know. I didn't think it was that one, but we had an influencer that blew, blew a couple up and their, their audience just went crazy and they stocked us out. We had to cancel orders and everything like that, so that was a mess. But, but yeah, a couple videos went viral from the, from the creators, which is kinda like, that's for us, that's one that was one of the secrets. We, we don't need to create everything on our own, and we don't have the expertise or the skillset to necessarily create every single one on our own. So we might as well leverage that, give up some of the commission and utilize their, their following their audience to make our stuff go viral. And then like I said, the inventory is, I don't know how to solve that fully yet. Maybe some other gurus out there know how to, but without spending both loads of money on over ordering inventory, I we're trying to figure that out. So that keeps me up at night. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So like, what, what kind of numbers are you doing overall? Like monthly or weekly on TikTok? Eugene: End of June is when we started on getting onto the TikTok shop. And then I think July was our first month of full month of sales. I think it equated to probably like like 300 some more to think, which is not for us, that's not a lot. But from a new platform like that, we were excited and we, again, we love creating nothing from something. And that was one of the things. And, and yeah, so we want to keep it, keep it going. We wanna invest harder into it. And that was I don't wanna say our person didn't try, but that was like, that was like such early stage and we're able to get traction like that. Bradley Sutton: Just imagine in the beginning, you actually don't even get big commissions right? From TikTok. Don't they give it to you free commission or something like that? Do you know? Eugene: I know there's a lot of perks that TikTok gave to onboard you. And, and they'll, they'll reimburse you on shipping. They'll give sellers like a 30% off coupon that we don't take to hit on they TikTok takes to hit on it. So there's a lot of those special deals behind the scenes. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Well, this is cool, guys. You know, like, like some, like he just said they just got on there here a couple months ago and are already doing like over 10 orders a day. Less fees than Amazon. But we talked about this on the weekly buzz recently, guys that TikTok is trying to move to send everybody instead of allowing potentially this, this is just a rumor for, for right now, but you know, TikTok, people have been saying that TikTok is gonna like, stop allowing influencers maybe to send links to Amazon. They want people just buying on the TikTok platform. So if you haven't got set up with TikTok shop, this might be something to look into and then get, get to some kind of cadence here. Like obviously Eugene's team here is, is posting on a regular basis, and we saw just one random video got six, I see one with 6,000 views here. Bradley Sutton: Here's another one with, with 8,000. So it can sometimes, you know people pick up on this and, and they can definitely boost your, your sales and for at least the, the time being, even if TikTok shop is out of stock, like he said, what people are gonna do is they're gonna go look for his website or maybe go look for his Amazon store and find their product. So, so there's residual benefits, not just the, the traffic that TikTok shop brings, but it's also gonna boost your dot com sales and your, your Amazon sales. Pretty cool. One thing you mentioned before was that you having your own warehouse and, and having a big business, you, you've got your own internal systems in place, but you were making like, some big systems change over something at your company. Eugene: Yeah, I mean, long story short is we, we had to, we had some personnel changes more from the, like the developer side, which is like we've had our internal like systems that run our warehouse management systems, our our data harvesting, our like just customized data that we pull down from Amazon API and, and manipulate into usable chunks that, that help us internally as, as a team. So I've kind of, in a way lost a big chunk of that as far as like being, have that flexibility to be able to kind of create whatever you want on the fly. I still have it, but it's not as workable and or, or more so the employee is not as, as available. So it's one of those things that I hadn't planned for very well over the course of, of building the businesses is just kind of not rely on, on that system so much. Eugene: And we've been trying to break away slowly, but I think it's one of those things you get lost in the comfort, and, and that's a major mistake. And that's definitely one of the teaching tools that, that I would tell anybody is, is like yeah, don't, don't, don't pigeon your hole yourself in and get locked into a situation like that. Really it's like, it, there's other, there's enough services right now compared to when we started that deal with forecasting inventory data management, data harvesting that can that maybe the basic Amazon report is not enough for people. Like, I know it's not enough for us. It's too basic and it's it takes too time consuming to drill down to what we really need it for. So we need to have scripts that run behind the scenes that pull down big data sets to formulate into this grouping or these triggers for us for the different departments that focus on the specialties to make them, Hey, I know this happened, so I gotta look at this and do this, right? Eugene: Without that, it can get messy and you're gonna miss a lot of things. Yeah. So, so we're in the process of trying to find how to blend these worlds together now where, alright, we can't go fully customized. We can do a little customization, but who are we gonna partner with? Who are we going to, I guess, park our business with to be able to kind of fill a lot of those gaps? And then the ones that we can't fill we'll need to figure out how to restructure that process internally and, and find out how we make do without, without having that. So, so it's a little, little bit of a turmoil for that. It just definitely, you can still get it done raw with like raw data and, and spreadsheets, but at, at this stage maybe if you have like selling fry products, you can do that, but our clothing is, we have so many skews, so many new, new styles that come in, new PCs because of clothing, t's almost impossible to manage. So so we need systems and efficient data systems to be able to run the business properly. So yeah, Bradley Sutton: That's one of the reasons why I was like, man, apparel is like crazy. It's like one, you have one item, but it could have 25 variations. If it has like five colors and five sizes each, it would be a nightmare to try and manage. Alright, well, just like with your first episode we always close these with asking for your TST your 30-second or 60-second tip. What kind of strategy do you have for our listeners today? Eugene: You get the right people in the right seats and you get the hell out of their way. I think as simple as that, we used to micromanage, we used to try to lay this corporate structure down and, and that was just suffocating and it just didn't work, right? Like, like we're, we thought we were from running from our business classes. Oh, this is how you run a business. No. You can do it that way, but, but employee satisfaction, I think it can be really bad. So we, we really just kind of give them the tools that they need, give the training that they need. Some, sometimes there's not a lot of training that we have to pay for training to get them to the, to that level to build those core competencies. And then from there, just get outta their way. Eugene: They'll need you, they'll, they'll reach out to you when they need you. Because if you step in, like right now, if I step into every decision, like, oh, I don't like that color, I don't like that pattern, I don't like that dress. Well, they did the data. They have multiple people that did the research data behind the scenes already to validate that, hey, we make decisions based on data. That was a data driven decision. It wasn't like, oh, I like that purple color, it looks cool, right? That that doesn't go anywhere. Right? So, so I try not to step in anything now, I do step in for any legal copyright things. I mean, that's where my eye is trained. Like, hey, I think we're violating that looks too close to that type of situation. Let's stay away from that. Eugene: Like, that's where I step in. But other than that, they gotta have that greater freedom. And, and of course there's gonna be certain levels of spend where, where I, I do need to step in, but like, other than that, like, it's not, let, let them roam free, but, but you gotta let them run and exercise their creative freedom. If they're not very creative people and there's certain ticks that, that that drive them, I mean, you focus on that, allow them to do those things, and it's definitely a form of respect at that point. Right? Of course. You gotta develop that trust. It's not like day one you hire someone in their seat and, oh, do whatever you want, right? It's not like that. It's over time you do that. But that's kinda like the biggest things I've learned is just get out of their way because you're gonna slow them down if you try to baby them or micromanage them too much. I think it's pretty simple. Bradley Sutton: Okay. Alright, Eugene, thanks for coming on here. Again, we really appreciate the knowledge and a little bit different. I wanted to do a little bit different podcast today with a little bit different vibe. And so you bring a unique viewpoint to things. If you guys want to know more about what, what Eugene and I are into all these baseball card stuff, you can check what's your Instagram for the the baseball card stuff? Eugene: it's @eugerips like my first name, @eugerips Bradley Sutton: Alright, so take a look maybe we'll, we'll add some more Amazon sellers to this sports card phenomenon. So Eugene, look forward to seeing you maybe at one of these conferences coming up and wish you the best of success. Eugene: Likewise. Thank you Bradley.

Episode #61 - "Amazon Ads API Updates, Understanding Psychological Effects, and How They Impact Your Amazon Strategy

Amazon API provides businesses and developers with valuable resources, insights, and opportunities to enhance their offerings, streamline operations, and make data-driven decisions in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.Amazon has multiple APIs, but how do you pick which is right for your business? Are you ready to commit to a developer?Let Scott and Will answer all those and more with this fun episode about how similar getting bad dates are to getting bad data.Episode Notes:00:15 - Will Introduction 06:05 - Dealing with Bad Data 09:20 - Getting a Developer Means Commitment 11:20 - Prosper's Focus 12:50 - Partnering with Delta Logic 14:45 - Building on Someone Else's Layer To Speed Things Up 15:45 - Marketplace Reports 17:20 - Selling Partner API and Advertising APIInnovation is fastest where the money is growing the most for Amazon - Will Christensen18:00 - Amazon Creating a Media Juggernaut 19:50 - Amazon Protecting Data 20:45 - The Dangers of Using Bots for Data Scraping 21:50 - The Rebates 24:15 - Sellers That Get The Most Value Out of Reports 25:30 - How Profitable Are You? 27:25 - Price Elasticity Gap LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/will-christensenWebsite: dataautomation.comRelated Post: Tap Into the Insights Your Amazon Business Needs

In a recent PPC discussion with Destaney Wishon of BetterAMS and MAG VP of Marketing Kevin Sanderson, delved into the intricacies of these metrics, shedding light on their unique features, strengths, and limitations.Brand metrics emerged as a powerhouse of data, offering a holistic view of retail and advertising performance. Unlike the targeting tab, which provides conversion data at the keyword level, brand metrics go beyond individual keywords and present data at the category level. This broader scope allows advertisers to gauge their performance in relation to the entire category, providing valuable insights for benchmarking and strategic decision-making.One of the standout features of brand metrics is its ability to showcase a direct comparison to the category median. This invaluable tool enables advertisers to assess whether they are performing above or below the median, giving them a clear understanding of their market position. Additionally, brand metrics incorporate both advertising and organic data, providing a comprehensive perspective that goes beyond the targeting tab's scope.On the other hand, the targeting tab offers a more granular view, focusing on specific keywords and their conversion data. However, it is important to note that the targeting tab's efficacy is heavily reliant on the quality of keyword research. Advertisers emphasized that relying solely on the targeting tab for comparison with brand metrics could lead to misleading insights. Poor keyword targeting may result in underperforming conversion rates, which may not accurately reflect the brand's overall performance.Furthermore, the targeting tab lacks visibility into sponsored brand state, which further limits its comprehensive analysis. While it remains a valuable tool for optimizing Amazon advertising performance, the participants cautioned against directly comparing it to brand metrics, as the two metrics provide distinct sets of data.The discussion also touched upon the availability of third-party software that claims to offer more accurate benchmarking at the keyword level within a category. However, the consensus among the participants was that relying solely on such software could be risky. The Amazon API restricts access to certain data, making it challenging for third-party software to provide truly accurate insights. The participants recommended utilizing Amazon's own search query performance data, as it provides valuable information on brand share and performance at the search term level.00:00 Brand metrics vs Targeting Tab for Amazon Advertising Analysis01:22 Importance of brand metrics in providing a holistic view and comparison to category median.01:56 Limitations of the targeting tab in comparison to brand metrics.03:01 Lack of third-party software for accurate benchmarking at the keyword level within a category.03:24 Recommendation to start with the data provided by Amazon.

Watch the live stream: Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. Brian #1: Can Amazon's CodeWhisperer write better Python than you? Brian Tarbox “Despite the clickbait-y title, whether CW's code is better or worse than mine is at the margins and not really important. What is significant is that it has the potential to save me a ton of time and mental space to focus on improving, refactoring and testing. It's making me a better programmer by taking on some of the undifferentiated heavy lifting.” Some decent code generation, starting with Amazon API examples. The generated dataclass method was neat, but really, the comment “prompt” probably took as much time to write as the code would have. The generated test case is workable, but I would not consider that a good test. Perhaps don't lump together construction, attribute access, and tests for all methods in one test function. That said, I've seen way worse test methods in my career. So, decent starting point. Related and worth listening to: Changelog #506: Stable Diffusion breaks the internet w/ Simon Willison Mostly an episode about AI generated art. There is a bit of a tie in to AI code generation, the ethics around it, and making sure you walk up the value chain. I'm planning on playing with GitHub CoPilot. I've been reluctant in the past, but Simon's interview is compelling to combine experienced engineering skill with AI code generation to possibly improve productivity. Simon does warn against possible abuse by Junior devs and the “just believe the code” problem that we also see with “copy from StackOverflow” situations. Michael #2: Apache Superset Apache Superset is a modern data exploration and visualization platform An intuitive interface for visualizing datasets and crafting interactive dashboards A wide array of beautiful visualizations to showcase your data Code-free visualization builder to extract and present datasets A world-class SQL IDE for preparing data for visualization, including a rich metadata browser A lightweight semantic layer which empowers data analysts to quickly define custom dimensions and metrics Out-of-the-box support for most SQL-speaking databases Seamless, in-memory asynchronous caching and queries An extensible security model that allows configuration of very intricate rules on who can access which product features and datasets. Integration with major authentication backends (database, OpenID, LDAP, OAuth, REMOTE_USER, etc) The ability to add custom visualization plugins An API for programmatic customization Brian #3: Recipes from Python SQLite docs Redowan Delowar Expanding on sqlite3 Python docs with more examples, including Executing individual and batch statements Applying user-defined callbacks: scalar and aggregate scalar example shows using a sha256 function to hash passwords as their inserted into the database Enabling tracebacks when callbacks raise an error Transforming types between SQLite and Python Implementing authorization control … much more … This is great for not only learning SQLite, but also, since these kinds of topics exist in other databases, learning about databases. AND a great example of learning a subsystem by creating little code snippets to check your understanding of something. One mod I would do in practice is to write these examples as pytest functions, because I can then run them individually while keeping a bunch in the same file.

#005 - Talking with our BetterAMS technical genius, Dustin Wassner, on the Amazon API and its ability to scale advertising tasks such budget adjustments, rules-based bidding, keyword recommendations, & more. Dustin shares thoughts on where Amazon PPC could be headed as Amazon Marketing Stream now offers real-time data that provides insights on conversion rates and CPC's that we never had previously. If you're looking to bring tech to your brand and business, Dustin is the man to talk to! Dustin Wassner - LinkedInAmazon API ToolkitAmazon Marketing Stream 

A daily look at the relevant information security news from overnight - 29 June, 2022Episode 254 - 29 June 2022Android Photo Overshare- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/amazon-fixes-high-severity-vulnerability-in-android-photos-app/ Linux PWNkit - https://www.securityweek.com/cisa-says-pwnkit-linux-vulnerability-exploited-attacksService Fabric Fix- https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-fixes-bug-that-let-hackers-hijack-azure-linux-clusters/Firefox 102 - https://www.securityweek.com/firefox-102-patches-19-vulnerabilities-improves-privacyUnRAR Vuln - https://thehackernews.com/2022/06/new-unrar-vulnerability-could-let.htmlHi, I'm Paul Torgersen. It's Wednesday June 29th, 2022, and this is a look at the information security news from overnight. From BleepingComputer.comAmazon has fixed a vulnerability in its Photos app for Android, which has over 50 million downloads on the Google Play Store. The image and video storage app enables users to share files with up to five family members. Unfortunately, if the flaw is exploited, it also shares access tokens for Amazon API authentication with the bad guys. From SecurityWeek.com:The CISA says a Linux vulnerability known as PwnKit has been exploited in the wild. The flaw is a memory corruption issue that affects Polkit, a component designed for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems. Proof-of-concepts are available and exploitation is easy, which is why the CISA has added the vulnerability to its must patch list. Government orgs have until July 18 to install patches, but you private orgs should really get your patch on too. From BleepingComputer.com:Microsoft has fixed a container escape vulnerability in the Service Fabric application hosting platform. Exploitation could allow threat actors to escalate privileges to root, gain control of the host node, and compromise the entire SF Linux cluster. According to Microsoft, Service Fabric hosts over a million apps and powers many of their Azure products, as well as others. Not only should you get your patch on, but Microsoft recommends that customers continue to review all containerized workloads (both Linux and Windows) which are permitted access to their host clusters. From SecurityWeek.com:Mozilla has launched Firefox 102 that includes patches for 19 vulnerabilities, including four high-severity bugs. The new version also improves user privacy by mitigating query parameter tracking when navigating the internet with Enhanced Tracking Protection in strict mode. This confines cookies to the sites that created them, preventing cross-site tracking And last today, from TheHackerNews.comA new security vulnerability has been disclosed in RARlab's UnRAR utility that could permit a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system that relies on the binary. The flaw relates to a path traversal vulnerability in the Unix versions of UnRAR that can be triggered upon extracting a maliciously crafted RAR archive. Other versions of the software, including those for Windows and Android, are not impacted. Any software that utilizes an unpatched version of UnRAR to extract untrusted archives is affected by the flaw. That's all for me today. Have a great rest of your day. Like and subscribe, and until tomorrow, be safe out there.

OverviewThe last couple of weeks has been busy with Amazon advertising new features releases. We understand that it can be pretty difficult for sellers and advertisers to stay on top of all the new features, which is why we've decided to review the majority of the new features released in today's episode. For each feature, Matt and Joe discussed the features use and how these can tie into your current advertising strategy. Episode HighlightsSponsored Products Rule Based Bidding                   [01:23] Updated lookback windows for Sponsored Display audiences [09:17] Forecasted impression share and impression rank for recommended keywords [11:56] New sort by feature for recommended keywords [15:53] Sponsored Brands bid optimization for new-to-brand customers       [16:21] Automated Translation of Keywords [18:39] Sponsored Display bidding updates   [22:20] Amazon API support for Sweden [24:30]

«Хорошие намерения не работают, а работают механизмы». «Working Backwards, работать от пользователя и идти обратно — самый правильный подход. Я в этом убедился за всю свою карьеру». Собеседник: Сергей Руденко, Principal Product Tech, Amazon LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/cmer4 Ведущий подкаста: Юра Агеев ФБ: fb.com/ageev.yuri Подписывайтесь на канал подкаста в Телеграме: t-do.ru/mspodcast О чем говорим: 1:24 — Сергей рассказывает о себе 2:59 — Как применять принципы компании в ежедневных решениях 7:46 — Как такие принципы помогают снизить уровень стресса 9:17 — О пользе культуры документирования 13:17 — Кто и в каких случаях ведет документацию 15:11 — Типы документов для разных целей 17:01 — Зачем писать пресс-релиз и FAQ 22:02 — Какие сложности возникают в document-driven культуре 24:44 — Что такое API для команды 27:44 — Как API настраивает сотрудничество между командами 32:01 — Почему намерения внедрить изменения недостаточно 36:10 — Как механизмы в компании помогают построить процессы 39:54 — Примеры механизмов в компании 42:37 — На каких уровнях работают механизмы 46:59 — Что нужно, чтобы механизмы приносили пользу 50:38 — Как механизм помог наладить работу сотрудников 52:58 — О важности Working Backwards подхода 54:44 — Как улучшить использование документов В подкасте мы упоминаем: — The Bezos API Mandate: https://bit.ly/3ieA6Z4 — How Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage: https://bit.ly/34EUKcT — The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager: https://bit.ly/3fJpcZL

Heute beantworte ich wieder diverse Leser-Fragen, die mir in der letzten Zeit per Mail geschickt oder die in Kommentaren auf Selbstaendig-im-Netz.de geschrieben wurden. Darin geht es unter anderem um das Amazon Partnerprogramm, die Nutzung der Amazon API, den Site Stripe von Amazon, die Meldung bei der VG Wort, englischsprachige Websites, Plugins und mehr.

Sponsored by EzoicShow Notes:1. AdInserter PluginWhat does it do?It manages display ad placement sitewide.Actually, you can insert anything sitewide with it including shortcodes.Cost: Free with premium version.2. Elementor ProWhat does it do?Creates nice-looking content. It’s a page builder.I only use it for custom archive pages (tag and category pages) and landing pages.You can bolt custom archive pages to the archive URLs (i.e. /tag/your-tag-nameCost: Free with premium version.3. OptinMonsterWhat does it do?Provides opt in forms for your site to build an email list.It’s costly, but it works flawlesslyEvery type of form imaginable: Welcome mat, exit pop, regular pop, ribbons, sidebar, in-content, bottom, etc.Total placement control.TIP: If not building an email list, the exit pop is a great way to send visitors to other content.4. Grow by MediavineWhat does it do?Displays share buttons on your site.Very easy to use. Formerly Social Pug. Now owned by Mediavine. You do not need to be in the Mediavine network to use it.Plenty of display options including Pinterest hover button.Simple, free and it works.Free and paid versions.5. AMZImageWhat does it do?Inserts Amazon product images in your post via Amazon API.Can insert fairly large product images.Automatically linked to the product with your affiliate link.Add captions to the images (if you want).Very fast and easy to use.Free and paid versions.6. Mammoth Docx. ConverterWhat does it do?Imports Docx. into WordPress visual editor and strips out all the bad code while retaining formatting in the document.It’s free.Huge time-saver.NOTE: you’ll need to rename the images because they end up with generic file name and will be the same across all posts which is a nightmare.7. Q2W3 Fixed WidgetWhat does it do?Makes it super easy to create a sticky widget (aka floating or fixed).Great for creating a sticky sidebar ad.NOTE: Do not do this with AdSense ads. You must use an ad network like Ezoic.Free8. Shortpixel Image OptimizerWhat does it do?Optimizes your images as you upload them into WordPress.Can bulk optimize existing images.Optional: Convert to WebP format.Huge time saver and speeds up the loading time for images.You pay for the number of images you optimize. It’s very reasonably priced.9. Table of Contents PlusWhat does it do?Creates a clickable table of contents.Place via automatic placement or via shortcode [toc]Can customize the design.Free10. Thirsty AffiliatesWhat does it do?Creates affiliate links so you can control the affiliate link code sitewide.Huge time-saver.Example: If you promote X product and then X product changes its affiliate code on you, instead of changing the code in 20 blogs posts, you simply change it once in the Thirsty Affiliates dashboard.11. ManageWPWhat does it do?Automatically updates plugins, themes and WP version.You can schedule the updates - I schedule it for once per week.It’s free. However, there are paid options such as daily updates.12. Yoast SEOWhat does it do?Makes it possible to customize your page SEO title and meta description.Schema Markup for your site and articles.Sitemap.Control whether archive pages are indexed or not indexed in Google.Cost: Free with paid upgrade version.13. Yoast Video SEO PluginWhat does it do?Adds video schema markup to embedded videos.Why?So your videos stand a chance to rank in Google search driving traffic to your

Es hat lange gedauert - aber nun sind wir wieder da. In der 15. Folge (!) sprechen wir über 2 Themen:Bilder auf CDN (Content Delivery Network)Neue Regeln beim Amazon PartnernetAm 5. März hat Rand Fishkin per Twitter gefragt bzw. festgestellt (https://twitter.com/randfish/status/1103000473395556353), dass ein Umzug von Bildern von einem CDN hin auf die eigene Domain (Hoster) viel Bewegung in den Serps verursachen würde.Andere wie z.B. Glenn Gabe konnten dieses Aussage nicht bestätigen. Martin ist ebenfalls skeptisch. Google speichert in seinem Index nicht die Bild-URLs an sich, sondern tatsächliche Bilder. Die URLs werden dem Bild dann jeweils zugeordnet. Welche Bild-URL das am Ende ist, spielt für das Ranking keine Rolle. Das muss letztlich auch so sein, weil es ja viele Bilder gibt, die als Kopien unter anderen URLs abgespeichert werden. Alle Kopien werden aber von Google einem Bild zugeordnet (Martin nennt das "Meta-Bild").Insofern spielt der Ort, wo ein Bild gehostet wird, für das Ranking keine Rolle.Carsten berichtet anschließend, was sich beim Amazon-Partnernet geändert hat. Das betrifft die Höhe der Provisionen, aber auch die Amazon-Api. Martin fragt sich, was das denn nun für seine Seiten und Produktlinks bedeutet - und Carsten erklärt es.So werdet ihr Hörer es hoffentlich gut nachvollziehen können.https://partnernet.amazon.de/help/operating/scheduleBitte schriebt uns in die Kommentare, wie Euch die Sendung gefallen hat. Stellt gerne auch Fragen, auf die wir in den kommenden Sendungen eingehen können

As you may have heard, there was a recent Amazon API change which removed software providers' access to real Amazon search volume data. In this episode, Casey discusses how this impacts you as a seller, how this change impacts Viral Launch's tools, and the future of Amazon search volume.  It helps to see the visuals, so check out the link to our blog post below. http://bit.ly/future-of-search-volume

0:15  We’re Live! Chuck says he is having one of those weeks that makes him want to be a pig farmer. Chuck talks about his sponsors not paying him on time. John jokes that Chuck is going to burn down the building. Chuck continues with how these companies are promising to pay in 45 days, but no show. Chuck says he understands that this is a process. John and Chuck agree on a paying upfront policy.  5:10  John talks about sticking to what was agreed upon as far as due payment. John jokes to put up an ad that out the issues of nonpayment from the sponsor. Mani asks about book sales. As Chuck goes into having issues with PayPal restricting his account, but he cannot pull money out from the book sales.  9:10  Chuck talk about talking to Richard at .NetRocks. Mani suggests not using PayPal and switch to Strip to receive payments. Mani jokes about running an 'I cannot buy my lunch' sale. John talks more about using this injustice as a marketing strategy.  13:00 Mani ask is the course is for sale now. Chuck mentions that it is on sales for 500 dollars as of now. Mani asks about some analytics on the current sale. Josh and Mani suggests an urgency strategy for the course and using a timer on the sales page. Josh and Mani give other kinds of suggestion for the sales and marketing strategies.  18:00 Mani suggests writing up 4 marketing emails for revamping the sales of the course. Mani asks about Simple Programmers sales on Plural Sight. Josh gives some analytics and numbers on the sales. Josh says it is about 18k in sales. Josh talks about the issues with the commission and discount offer.  25:00 Josh talks about the 45k sales last year. And Josh says their attitude is what have you done for me lately. Josh says John’s numbers are still pushing in sales at Plural Sight. Mani talks about the tier of commissions according to a Robert Farrington. Josh continues to talk about the clicks and conversions of the material on Plural Sight.  30:00 Josh and John talk about the EPC target. John suggests working backward to figure out how to meet the EPC. John talks more about the complexity of the sales.  Josh talks about experimenting with a waitlist. Mani and John talk about the traffic direction, click and marketing with courses on Simple Programmer.  40:00 John asks Josh talk offering their own discount to up the sales. Josh think it has to be beyond 25% to make it worth it. Josh talks about the sales on the membership.  Josh talks about Jonathan Stark’s book called  The Freelancers Roadmap and how he is using this as a bonus to the sales they’re doing.  45:00 Josh talks about a plugin to setup authors call WooCommerce Authors. Chuck talks about how he is using the WooCommerce site. Chuck ask about how to set up the author plugin as far as getting people on the site.  50:00 Mani and Josh discuss marketing and writing copy for courses, rather they are martial arts or developer material. Josh talks about the skill of building out the course. Josh talks about doing a 21-day course but did not work, then they switch to interviews on webinars. Josh talks more about working with Jason on building courses.  55:00 Josh continues to talk about the process of marketing courses on books or videos. More on the complexities of launching courses.  Chuck says he likes to idea of hiring someone for their skills to build a course. Chuck talks about how he could do this with one of the developers.  1:00:00 Josh talk about his idea with this upcoming course with coding and technical material. Josh talks about this as a review type course to prepare for coding. John talks about signing up for another marathon but he got sick.  Mani suggests chewing garlic to help with a cough. Josh asks about the Thrive convention.  1:08:00 John says is it wipeout from running. John asks if they notice the merge with Create Space and Kindle. Which could help with sales on their book. Mani ask about John’s book Bulldog Mindset. EntreProgrammer talk about the publishing companies. Josh and John talk about Novel Rink that pulls Amazon API and how it is being shut down.  1:13:00 EntreProgrammers talks about how this is similar to people running Facebook ads and such. Mani talks about how it is short-lived as people are trying to build businesses off of a social media platform. Mani says like Alex Jones. John says Alex would be able to write a book. Josh says Alex is still very diversified with several places to pull his material.  1:19:00 Josh said he did have the opportunity to get into the Prepper niche. Josh talks about how Google controls 80% of their email list. So they are done if they get in trouble with them. Mani talks about Alex Jones traffic numbers.  Thoughts of the Week!  Josh - Pomodoros are effective John - Have an exact why Charles - Just got to keep going Mani - Syndicate your content

In episode 175 of the AMPM Podcast, host Manny Coats speaks to 8-figure Amazon sellers and partners at Seller Tradecraft, Fernando Cruz and Nick Young, about how to begin and sustain a contending Amazon FBA business like theirs. Somewhere between building a team, cutting it down, and driving Uber, Fernando and Nick managed to break eight figures in their now thriving company. With $10 million plus in sales last year (2017) and a 300% growth in one year, the partners were able to do the other things they loved. Nick traveled to Spain and explored Europe for weeks at a time. Fernando scaled a different kind of mountain: Mt. Kilimanjaro. Unsure of what product niche to enter and without a solid strategy in place, most new sellers entering the Amazon FBA business flounder, especially in the first few years. How can sellers build an Amazon FBA business and find success early on? In this episode, Fernando and Nick share their process and strategies to help others launch and grow their own profitable Amazon FBA business. 00:28 – Introducing Fernando Cruz and Nick Young 03:31 – Living the dream of doing what you love while earning a static income 04:08 – Finding a simple, long-tail product and figuring out a strategy to dominate the market. 05:13 – New seller fumbles of not understanding the numbers or checking financial pulse of their company. 05:58 – Launching your product aggressively with goals and a timeline. 07:02 – Amazon API to monitor weekly profitability. 07:45 – Defining “aggressively” in terms of PPC campaign and using it to your advantage. 08:47 – Going beyond the maximum Amazon bid to hit sales aggressively 08:50 – Front Page Bids 09:27 – Pros of using manual and/or automatic campaigns 09:56 – Keyword count when launching a new product on manual 10:46 – Launches, PPCs, and giveaways 11:23 – Creating targeted titles for a launch 12:18 – PPC campaign management 12:44 – Strategies for building your dream team overseas and in-house 13:42 – Measuring your company through your team management 14:53 – HR, time-tracking, and recruiting 16:10 – Handling time difference and overlaps for your overseas staff 17:08 – Salary v Hourly and Employee Benefits ‘ 17:38 – Managing remote staff and tracking their activity 18:30 – The cost of employee resources and needs 19:25 – Acceptable price range for hiring the right employees for the right positions 20:13 – The best advice to sellers who want to reach the $1 mill mark and beyond 21:22 – Receiving and repaying loans for your business 22:31 – Keeping your costs under control after launch strategy to guide business 24:03 – ACOS to drive sales, get good rankings, and use as an indicator for keywords 25:44 – Delegating responsibilities and evaluating time 26:38 – The Interview Process to screen the best candidates for the job To watch the video version of this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, check out our YouTube channel below: Enjoy This Episode? If you found this episode helpful, be sure to check out our previous episodes for more insight into being a successful Amazon FBA Seller! Don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and join the conversation with over 22,000 prominent other sellers! And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast! Be sure to check out our latest content on our Instagram! Ready to get serious about your Amazon FBA game? The Illuminati Mastermind offers monthly training for intermediate to advanced level sellers (not recommended for those new to Amazon) for advanced tips and tricks to help your sales climb higher. This program is designed for six, seven, and eight-figure sellers, so only serious sellers should apply! Reserve your seat today so you don’t miss out on this helpful webinar! CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT HOW TO JOIN New to selling on Amazon? We have the perfect training for you! Freedom Ticket offers the best tips, tricks, and strategies for beginners just starting out!

EP099 - Tulip Retail CEO Ali Asaria and News Amazon News Wholefoods - Amazon Day 1 buzz Amazon getting deeper into programmatic ads Amazon building a FC on top of what was once the largest mall in the US, in Randall, OH Amazon is #1 app with millennials via Comscore Other news CPG's face the threat of digital disruption Warren Buffet - Retailers and Brands in an epic battle Walmart partners with Google home (See Scot on the Today Show talking about it here) Digital Retail Newsmaker Our Digital Retail Newsmaker segment, features an interview with Ali Asaria (@aliasaria), CEO and Founder of Tulip Retail. Tulip Retail is a mobile application provider focused on empowering workers in retail stores.  They recently raised $40M in venture capitol, lead by Kleiner Perkins.   Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 99 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, August 31th 2017. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. New beta feature - Google Automated Transcription of the show: Transcript Jason:  [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show, this is episode 99 being recorded on Thursday August 31st 2017 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingull. Scot:  [0:41] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason you know what I got 99 problems and are podcasting ain't one. Jason:  [0:49] I'm sorry to hear about your other problems but I'm super excited we're about to have the Y2K of our podcast. Scot:  [0:56] I know you'll have to see what happens when we go triple digits this whole thing could fall apart on us. Jason:  [1:00] My naming conventions for our audio files way up with iTunes like everything's going to break. Scot:  [1:07] Don't tell me that I'm actually legit right now. Jason:  [1:10] I didn't mean to make you nervous I've actually I programmed everything at three three digit so until we get to 1000 we're good. Scot:  [1:16] I'd Optical you have been on the road as per usual and I think you were most recently up in Boston tell us what's going on in that part of the world. Jason:  [1:27] Yeah yeah I've been traveling light I'll be on the road I think almost every day this month, and I was in Boston this morning and yesterday which is a great retail City I was meeting with a couple of clients and some of my colleagues but one store in particular I had been meaning to get to that I finally got to, is the ministry of Supply Flagship in Boston and is in a retailer and what's pretty cool is. They have a make on demand. Wool Blazer machine in the store so you you can figure an order your Blazer. And they literally knit it in the store on demand. [2:12] So it's kind of you know which is definitely a potential potential future Evolution for a lot of retail is kind of you know. The Maid to Order personalized products at Masco and and pushing manufacturing out to the edge and all these things and you know. [2:30] In the distant future we might have a lot of this manufacturing capability in our homes but for many years before we have that. It'll make sense to be putting it into retail store so it's just think it's kind of interesting concept to watch. I saw them sell a couple sweaters while I was there and definitely not a perfect experience at the moment I think it takes about 3 hours to knock out one of these sweater so you're you're ordering it you're leaving the store to do some more shopping and then coming back later that day to picking up. Scot:  [2:58] Because you don't just stand there and robots kind of so it on to you Westworld style or that's not how it works. Jason:  [3:04] That would be awesome that will be a future version no it's a pretty big machine that looks like a fancy 3D printer it's pretty funny fun to watch. And what's interesting you'd almost expected the like that it would be a little gimmicky in that the product want to be that good but it's actually it's a stylish wool Blazer and it's like a. [3:25] The the Yarns are like high-tech wool it's like an athletic performance wool so it's like it's intended to breathe and Wiccan and you know it's it's meant to be convenient travel garment that. That look stylish but but doesn't make you too hot and sweaty. Scot:  [3:45] Call how do they get your body measurements with a Kinect kind of a thing. Jason:  [3:49] So they are not doing like a 3D scanner for the body measurements they the measure you the old-fashioned way with a. A tape system but one of the disappointments is they are not custom making the sizes yet so they do they measure you but they measure you to figure out which of the standard sizes they'll make you. So you can custom pick the colors. And some options and things like that but you can't for damn pole say I want 2 more inches in the in the Chester's or shorter sleeves or something like that which. Seems like a obvious thing you'd want and expect in a made-to-order garment. Scot:  [4:26] Is there some complexity around like making it kind of fit right and back on stuff. Jason:  [4:32] I think it's it's early like I think this is intended to be a permanent machine there some other versions Adidas is done one of these with sweaters and it was sort of a pop-up shop in Berlin for a couple months this is intended to be a permanent fixture in the store. But I think you know we're seeing generation one of the experience and I think they've said that there. They're you know going to see what customer adoption is like and and eventually expand to make door sizes. Scot:  [4:56] Thankful well thanks for the trip report and, one thing I want to talk about is it's tomorrow is force Friday and for this is like a Star Wars Insider thing but before they do the movies the first wave of merchandise comes out that's called Force Friday, so I'm actually making a huge sacrifice I am forgoing Midnight Madness for Force Friday to be on the podcast here tonight far listener so that's how much I care about her listeners Jason I'm willing to give up a little bit Star Wars action. Jason:  [5:30] I am super grateful I hope you don't miss anything super valuable by not being a right at midnight but I've actually I feel like there's been a lot of things pulling on your, testing your dedication to the podcast is that I don't know of our listeners are aware of this but we we actually had to delay the recording of last week's podcast because you are a celebrity appearing on The Today Show. Scot:  [5:53] I wouldn't say I was a celebrity it was just kind of one of those things aligned much like an eclipse and I was I was able to be on the Today Show it was kind of fun so got to talk about, it's funny I'm sure you've done these things where you talk for 30 minutes about something and they use like a 10-second snippet but I talked a lot about it we'll talk about it later in the show, the tie between Walmart and Google so they were looking for experts couldn't find anyone I guess you were traveling and they ended up finding me so and I was the one guy that answered his phone I like 9:30 at night. Jason:  [6:27] Is funny they actually called me first and they had me send a picture and then they got the picture and said you know what you have a face for podcast we're going with Wingo. Scot:  [6:36] Applebaum was funny the only wall we had at Channel visor that had the logo where the camera can fit in Halogen orange wall and it made me look like a Oompa Loompa so that was exciting. Jason:  [6:48] I'm glad you noticed that because I did but I felt that it want to bring it up unless you. Scot:  [6:52] Everything's I have like spray on tan but that that's not the case. Jason:  [6:57] Yeah I have to be honest I feel like that was shoddy work on the cameraman like I feel like they could have fixed that. Scot:  [7:02] Well you know they don't have the professional crew like we do here at the Jason Scott show. Jason:  [7:07] Exactly the audio engineer on the Jason Scott show would never let you sound Orange. Scot:  [7:12] A couple other quick things for get into it the, as a recording this we found out today that September 12th is the big day when Apple's going to announce something which we all know is going to be the iPhone 8 so that's going to be exciting and I'm sure they'll be some e-commerce implications we have a couple of things tonight we'll talk about, and then I'm going to cook Commerce on September 13th to 14 really just as a spectator to come look and see what they're doing I'm super excited they're doing a tour of a prime now facility so I look forward to reporting back to letters on what I see there, if any lister's are at that event and want to connect shoot me a note on Twitter or LinkedIn or where. Jason:  [7:53] And it's adorable that you think you're going to go there without me because I of course will be the one sitting next to you. Scot:  [7:59] Bloom I wasn't sure if you're going make it that's exciting. Jason:  [8:01] I am I am having to take a red-eye from a client obligation on the west coast so I might be a little sleepy but hopefully they're there will be a Starbucks in Manhattan that I'll be able to find. Scot:  [8:11] I'll be waiting there with a Trenta for you so that you're ready to get refueled and and hit the ground running. Jason:  [8:18] I totally appreciate it a side note on the world's best planned obsolescence like I thought you no one's expecting they're going to announce and iPhone 7S which might be available. Very soon after the announcement and the iPhone 8 that's going to be probably a pretty constrain product and might not be available for a month or two. After the announcement maybe that's the sort of common speculation and there's also a lot of speculation that they're going to launch a new Apple watch at the event and so they, Apalachee solve the problem for me you know what I was going to be sad cuz I'm going to want the aid and that means I'm going to have to delay gratification and wait to get it, but on the day they announced the announcement announce the announcement yeah I got off the plane and my Apple watch exploded. [9:03] The screen not an actual exothermic explosion but the screen flew off. So now I have a legitimate reason to buy the Apple watch so that'll that'll acute fulfill my my short-term gratification and then then the iPhone 8 will be my longer-term when I guess. Scot:  [9:21] Dump yard so Elon Musk doesn't call them explosions their violent release of atoms so that's what you're watching. Jason:  [9:29] Yes not as violent as some of his Rockets thankfully. Scot:  [9:34] Well Jason this time of year between summer and kind of the Fall is the crazy time in the world of digital retail cuz everyone's pushing out all the things they've been working at out for the since last holiday, and getting ready for this holiday season and true to Fashion it's been a crazy busy news week so let's jump into it and then, one thing for listeners to stay for years we have a new segment today it's called digital retail newsmakers and, that will follow a short update on the news and first thing we want to cover tonight is Amazon news. [10:25] Yes so the first thing that we have to cover here is we are kind of deep into this Whole Foods Amazon, integration so the sequence was Thursday last week was I believe the 23rd or 24th, Amazon sent out a press release saying we have received, that the transaction is going to close on Monday and here's some of the things were going to do, and that release itself really set the not only the internet on fire but also the stocks of the grocery companies so I saw that several of the main grocery companies were down 8%. And I thought it was funny because when they, that in the precious there was three or four bullets and it was almost a bullet for bullets list of the things you and I predicted on our Whole Foods Deep dive that we did right after the announcement. The quick take so pat on the back to us because I think we got most of the stuff right. Jason:  [11:29] Yeah yeah I feel pretty good and then one thing we, we did talk a little bit about on the show but the other thing a ton of people were predicting that there would be a lot of them Regulatory impediments and that that would slow down and that the government was going to look at it. Really closely and I think both of you and I discussed on the show and then did a bunch of Prince interviews where we we said that that was silly on that that this was going to. Not have any antitrust issues whatsoever and sure enough it it it got very fast approval. Scot:  [11:57] Yeah yeah and then so the day one activities were pretty impressive were you able to pop into Whole Foods on day one. Jason:  [12:04] I was and yet impressive is definitely the word the the speed at which they got so much done is truly impressive and scary to a lot of the folks that have to make a living competing against them. Scot:  [12:19] Yeah the so. The biggest one is price cut so they picked some of the most popular items and did some pretty substantial price cuts and and then kind of said more to come, this is nursing you know you're starting to see this kind of, you know you hear of this whole fake news and how the news media covers things in the political side of things but seeing e-commerce where. Yeah I saw some people report as much as 40% off and you know what day it done is just really kind of found two things that had been discounted and then didn't average that was one way of looking at it, and then the most conservative article I read said that it was only like 1% and what this person did as they took like. Every SKU in the store and. Including like that you know the 50 to 100 top sellers and then they just kind of looked at the math that way and that one's kind of the dinner some cuz it was clearly designed to get the worst results and it basically said well you know the prices have achieved more than 1% we checked. 10000 items and so I thought that was funny that it's clearly they they either had absolutely no idea how Commerce works or they were just trying to. Prove a point that it wasn't that big of a discount. Jason:  [13:33] Yeah I mean it it does go like there's an age-old problem with. Like tracking prices and you know everyone has a different basket of goods and and you know every basket is going to have a. A different outcome in so you know the most interesting studies are the ones that like pick a consistent basket of goods over a long period of time and then you can see. Ctrends. [13:57] But you know I just have to say like the fact that they got prices changed at all in my mind was super impressive and their brilliant about milking those price changes for for a huge amount of PR but just in general. They got a bunch of Amazon signage up in the stores they got a display in every store that was merchandised with a bunch of Echoes that were for sale. And you know they they they change prices on you know a hundred items that are you know likely price sensitive items that that people are paying attention to in generated a bunch of media that prices are lower in Whole Foods which is. Going to drive a bunch of extra traffic to Whole Foods weather. [14:40] Does customers particular baskets are lower or not so you look at all that that they got done on the first day that they took control of the store and you go you know man in a traditional grocery store that list of activities would take nine months to deploy. Scot:  [14:54] Yep and it goes even deeper so when the arrow kind of points from Whole Foods to Amazon so the things I saw they had you know a really good selection of Whole Food private label and that's called, whole 6330 another word for 365 and so that was on Prime now it was promoted categorized and you know the pricing seem to be pretty aggressive I didn't check exactly to the store but it seemed to match the, a couple things I saw on Main Amazon you had some things so that that was also an impressive that they got that done so quickly. Jason:  [15:33] Yep absolutely there they are just operating at a different speed than everyone else in and that you know should should really be a wake-up call if if you're you're planning to compete with them. Scot:  [15:46] Yeah nothing in the announcement that I thought we had talked about that a lot of people poo-pooed but is definitely happening like it's two things so number one they're kind of it's not a day one thing cuz there's an integration. Amazon Prime will become the whole food customer reward program and then, I know folks that have gone in and chatted and heard from cashiers that there will be an overall Prime discount to your entire basket. One cashier said 10% I have no idea how they're going to verify your Prime imagine maybe a mobile app or something but that's going to be interesting to watch roll out. And another one that you know is interesting in and unite talk about this kind of being able to, I think a lot of people are really obsessed with this are they going to just ship is going to become a shipping station and this kind of thing and actually the reverse was announced where Amazon's going to put Lockers in there so if you're going to Whole Foods you have some Amazon returns you bring them with you, I just told her to lock her and now you saved yourself a trip to the UPS store or whatever it is you need to drop those off. Jason:  [16:49] Yeah yeah bunch of the crazy things on day one and I'm sure we've only seen the first wave of the interesting integration so it's it's going to definitely be a fun one to watch. Scot:  [17:00] And then continue on the Amazon news11 tidbit I saw we've talked about this on the show or fair amount where you know I think the Amazon ad. Kind of opportunity is way bigger than people realize and there's a lot going on there so there's an article in digiday where they talked about. Not Amazon has really kind of opened up in within the Amazon Marketing Group AMG and AMS a lot of AP eyes that allow for more programmatic bidding so as you know being in the ad to yourself you know the. Biggest advertisers have these pretty complex things they want to do they want Total Control they want to be able to programmatically do things the first generation of the Amazon API would basically say or or Amazon's. Add technology basically said Mr Advertiser that's great but here's our little system this toy built you're going to have to use it yourself that really kind of delayed adoption so now when it comes to things like the bility to you spin up. Retargeting campaigns display ad campaigns and then search programmatic search kind of things they have a piece out there now that they are pretty actively. Getting into the hands of advertisers which eyemagine is part of a Q4 push to to really kind of dramatically grow that business so so that's pretty interesting and I still think that's probably the most underappreciated kind of. What could be another multibillion-dollar pillar for Amazon is is the the Amazon ad technology. Jason:  [18:32] For sure. Another interesting Amazon announcement partly because of the irony is that they announce their, a new fulfillment center that they are opening and the location is quite interesting because, they are taking over a 900,000 square foot mall and Randall Ohio so this is one of the very first. Indoor Regional malls close back in 2005 and you know there's a lots of Taco in the mall again and World about you know what. Scot:  [19:19] You think they really turn it into a cell phone I kind of envisioned I'm having a bold as it don't you think. Jason:  [19:25] Yeah the location yeah I think the I think Amazon's fulfillment centers are highly optimized I don't I don't imagine they would reuse the space. Scot:  [19:34] Yeah it's called it like a huge fulfillment center I think it's going to 800,000 square feet which Amazon's building of it like 1.5 21.9 now it's actually a small fulfillment center for Amazon. Jason:  [19:46] Yeah but I mean to put that inside that's a very typical sized you know Regional mall and so your point like a regional mall is a small Amazon fulfillment center. Scot:  [19:59] Yeah and then I think it's a nursing cuz I'll probably a lot of jobs inside of there too so I don't know what do you say so. Jason:  [20:05] I think they Dance 2000 people on day one. Scot:  [20:09] What is to do the math of the conversion rate for every dollar you lose in retail and how many employees does that and then what's it look like over at Amazon I think that would be a fun exercise will do a deep dive on it. Jason:  [20:21] Awesome are there is a lot of good dialogue around that Trends in in retail hiring and what happens with unit e-commerce Jobs go up as as brick mortar Jobs go down on all this or something so that be a great thing to deep diver. Scot:  [20:35] Another quick hit on amazon.com Square put out a pretty interesting chart I will put it in the show notes and what they did is they did one of their comps Corey studies with Millennials and they found that shocker Amazon is the number one app with millennials, and they asked interesting series of questions like you know what app would it be most hard to live without an Amazon came out on top of that, I and another interesting fact wait on that as you had Amazon it number one and then you had some Social Media stuff, Google was in there but it's kind of me okay third the size of of. Of Amazon it's just another maze data points that kind of shows that as people. A Amazon has become the de-facto kind of product search that the people look for and then be, as people look for products they are not really going to Google anymore they're going to Amazon. Jason:  [21:29] Yep and you know it that isn't surprising I've just done a bunch of consumer research on behalf of of some clients and you know one of the huge takeaways is is Amazon is just simply becoming a loved brand and. You know they're there an important part of the consumer's life they're not just a place to get stuff so it makes perfect sense that their app would be the. The sticky one of the top of the Heat. [21:57] I think there's also a lot of interesting not Amazon news this week. One of my favorites is there was an article in the Wall Street Journal this week talking about citing Warren Buffett and talking about. Retail and Brands being on a collision course. [22:18] And this was that super exciting for me because I have been that that is slide one in my my retail Trends presentation for the last 6 months so when. Warren Buffett agrees with me that's one of the rare occasions when I feel like I'm probably on to something. Scot:  [22:34] Call did Warren call you for advice on this. Jason:  [22:37] She did not but essentially like the the the spin here is. Retailers and brands have always been Frenemies that retailers have been trying to create their own private label brands. Forever but you don't allow the more recent Trends are the the stigma around private labels is going away and customers are much more happily adopting them and. As a result. National brands are losing their equities are losing their Equity you know stores are all getting Consolidated so the retailers have more power and from Warren's position who owns a lot of cpgs. You know you know what I think he's saying that the retail and brands are on a collision course and the retailers are winning. [23:26] Which which I certainly think is is possible in one sense I think the industry interesting thing we talk a lot like. These products retailers are making are no longer private labels like they're their National Brands the. Kirkland is the best sounding you know sells more on Amazon than they do on on Costco right like that's that's a brand it's not a a private label for Costco and you know that the Amazon Echo. Is it certainly not a private label product like it's it's the market-leading you know best ecosystem product in a space. So I certainly think that the trend is true I think it's beyond. Just private labels but one of the interesting subtext under this is the this article kind of echoed a lot of Articles have been in the news this this week. [24:21] The one one of my competitors in the space wpp announced servisoft Revenue quarter and you know people are making a lot of. Conversation around hey is advertising or digital advertising. Dying or weighing it looks like he's big big Ad Agency holding companies are starting to see soft soft sales so you know a lot of. People that care about me or asking you know if my curse in Jeopardy and I do think. That that we're seeing those kind those digital ads really start to wane like that. What I call interrupted rim and advertising like interrupting when someone wants to see in order to you know force-feed them this advertisement just. Is a decreasingly. Effective tactic and it's the the analog versions are less effective in the digital versions are less effective and I think you know our friend Scott Galloway like he calls advertising is increasingly becoming. Attacks that poor people pay any talks about all the. The the rapidly adopted ways that more affluent people are paying to avoid ads and you you get your your media from Netflix without ads and. You pay for ad blockers and he pay for subscriptions to you newspaper to get it without ads and said I feel like this traditional. Interrupter of an advertising is sort of dying and you know so agencies like mine or having to reinvent themselves to serve customers in ways other than advertising and and of course the. [25:53] The particular company I work for it doesn't really do that kind of advertising so so it doesn't particular dust. But the big article that came out that really triggered all this was about a week ago and it was marked picture who's the chief customer officer at P&G. And he announced that they had really concluded the digital advertising wasn't working and they were they were going to cut at least a hundred million dollars of their digital ad spend because it wasn't effect. [26:19] And that's interesting because I do think there's a strong Trend towards. [26:26] Eliminating some of this this interrupt driven advertising but I don't think that's the whole story of Procter & Gamble. Patrick gamble has some some some serious activist investors that are kind of in their shorts right now and you know there's a lot of pressure on them to cut costs and it really looks to me like. They just did a brain-dead analysis and some of their marketing activities and are trying to justify the fact that they're having to significantly curtailed their spending so you know their there they're doing like. [26:56] Kind of brain-dead last-click attribution on a on a whole bunch of marketing spend and just saying hey hey you know we don't anticipate sales are going to significantly go down when we. We stopped spending this this hundred million dollars but it you know it it really kind of. Doesn't feel like they they've done a very detailed analysis on how you know how, you have and how that media is or could be influencing sales in their wholesale partners and and you know they're there, they just seem really rudimentary on the metrics Mark Mark is like one of the most powerful guys in advertising and he spends all his time talking about, a metric called visibility like whether or not you can just see an ad, and wow it's super important that that that metric be right it seems like someone about 32 levels below Mark should be focused on that and someone at marks level should be a lot more focused on, how can I marketing tactics drive more profit for human and you know it just seems like, like tractor is kind of lost lost sight of that kind of view on on their digital marketing spend. Scot:  [28:01] Sold articles are nursing say think so Buffett and then also one of Sam Walton's descendants of sold quite a bit of Walmart stock, and it's just confusing cuz the Articles kind of time together but like you can tell the, the two events that happened separately in Warren Buffett's not really saying the reason I'm selling Walmart stock is because of this battle of between Brands and retailers but but it's interesting to because he's he's kind of. With his wallet he's buying Brad's and Son retailers but then he's kind of saying that he thinks retailers are winning that battle what's your. [28:38] Which kind of your view on that. Jason:  [28:39] Yeah I don't I agree he he I'm a less sophisticated investor than you but part of me feels like he has a very disciplined investment strategy, that you know is based on value investing and so you know in a market where the cpgs are losing power to the retailers are the retailers stocks becoming, yeah less likely to meet his value criteria and does he feel like if he can pick the the subset of winners among the cpgs that those are potentially better. Better value investment censored you know better fit his in his particular investment profile. [29:20] I don't know if that's true or not I was that's internally speculation on my part. Scot:  [29:24] Yeah it's it's a little confusing the way they time together but they're not really meant to be together. Jason:  [29:31] Yeah for sure it's going to be an interesting space to keep watching, I think we talked on the show it's going to be increasingly hard to make a living selling other people's stuff and so what you just are going to see is you know, retailers are going to start looking a lot more like Brands and Brands you don't going to have that retail distribution so they're going to have to start selling direct to Consumers and so they're going to start looking more like retailer so I definitely wouldn't we say collision course I think the two businesses are going to know start looking a lot more the same than different is as we progressed. Scot:  [30:02] I'm just glad that we have a little break from the mall again merkel's it's getting kind of a little old. Jason:  [30:08] Yeah and I don't think we have much of the data points but like, a bunch of surprisingly good earnings quarter this year so they're a bunch of companies kind of surprised us with some beats even if they're there future outlooks weren't particular promising. Scot:  [30:25] Yeah I think that's why actually had quite a strong quarter and surprise whilst reading. Jason:  [30:29] Yeah and and again though like had caution that that wasn't the new normal and then there's talk one way down to spite the fact they had a big beat. Scot:  [30:37] I mentioned it to the top of the show with the Today Show kind of live there but the other big news in e-commerce was Walmart in Google really kind of. Deeply partnering to effectively take on Amazon and yeah I think I think it's early to call this one but what's really interesting in this story to me is the whole, you know enemy of my enemy is my friend so you know here's two companies that have never really had, an alliance I'm aware of other than I'm sure Walmart's large Google Advertiser in that kind of thing really kind of aligning and saying, hey you know we need to create a counter to this this Amazon kind of meth it's growing and and figure out what we can do there it's interesting too cuz Google has always play this kind of you know, we're neutral we just in traffic to all the different retailers we don't have a favorite retailer but it's starting to sound like Walmart is one of their favorite retailers. Jason:  [31:35] Yeah and I mean you know you think of that like it's it's increasing in the case that Amazon's big competitors are are these platform Echo Systems more so than. Then other retailers and so you know that that puts them much more odds with Google and Facebook than it does Walmart so it's interesting you note. Google and Facebook have some monetization problems versus Amazon's model in so you don't Google Plus Walmart feels like a more valuable. Competitor to the to the Amazon Echo System and I think you called it but like one of the most interesting parts of that announcement is not that hey you can order Walmart excuse. Through Google home, it certainly is interesting and by the way Walmart's up till like 67 million skus now so there you know it's a pretty pretty deep assortment, but the most interesting thing is Walmart is sharing first-party data with Google and so what would that lets Google do is. You know have much better inside and what you purchased in the past and be much more predictive so that your your voice experience can be much more impressive in its going to accurately guess. What size Campbell Soup you buy or what size Ruffles potato chips you buy and so they they get that SKU right cuz you know voice. Ordering becomes a disaster when they don't have good data about you and have to guess which of the hundred variance you might you might be interested in buying. Scot:  [33:03] Yep another quick one that I saw is so so. [33:10] Google shoppings at ad unit is called Product listing ads and saw that they are running a new pill a ad unit usually the way this works is you go to Google you search for, you know I don't know. Screwdriver or power drill or whatever and that's you see a bunch of those products from multiple retailers we saw unit that effectively was kind of a retailer take over so you would search for, I think the one we found with some office supplies at the Go staplers and they had, The Container Store where you could just kind of say as a user you would only see Container Store Staples in the ad unit and then there would be the same number of kind of, products with in there so that was kind of nursing not in a Google test tons of things all the time that we're always looking for new ones so I thought that was kind of interesting single retailer ad unit, that we hadn't seen before I will put a link to that in the show notes as folks are interested in learning more. Jason:  [34:03] Yeah that's toy interesting another one we saw was that the target. It seems to have moved off of AWS and that that's interesting for a couple reasons listeners World member about a month ago, Walmart launched too aggressive initiative we're not only did they say will not use AWS but we're encouraging any vendors that that's support us to not use AWS and now you see, Target moving off of AWS like the the obvious impetus for all of this is. These retailers don't need to be paying money to a competitor that that competitor can then use to develop new products and offerings, they make them you know more competitive with Amazon and so so you know this is always been, kind of the case but I think it's it's becoming much more apparent that retailers are recognizing it's foolish for them to use any Amazon Services even if their services than aren't competitive because they're all of course. Supporting and funding. Efforts that are competitive so if your Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud platform like, you know this is probably great news for you you got you know a lot of retailers are, are modernizing their it infrastructure and moving to the cloud and increasingly it's clear that the one category in the world that's not going to adopt AWS as the dominant Cloud platform is going to be the retail one. Scot:  [35:34] Cool and I know we're up against time we want to make sure we have room for a newsmaker but you know long time Lester's will know we are very enthralled with augmented reality and virtual reality and there's a bunch of news there. So I put it on my Star Wars hat one of the ones that was exciting is as part of the retail launch day of of this Force Friday they have added an AR functionality to the Star Wars app. I know the way this works is you go to your retailer and there will be a display there and you hold up the AR app to a QR code like thing and then there's a Star Wars character that appears in virtual reality or augmented reality that you can see. Did you can take pictures of them and collect them so one of the clever things they've done is there's something like. 20 characters 15 to 20 characters so as Star Wars people you kind of try to collect these things and let's say you're going to Walmart on tomorrow on Force Friday, well they're going to rotate characters to characters you see over the next four or five days will be different so they're kind of using this this virtual kind of technology to draw people, back to the stores versus just having him come in one time so I thought that was kind of interesting marriage of of the Two Worlds that we like there. Jason:  [36:48] Yeah I am not surprised at all that you are the earliest adopter and I'm excited to give it a try myself another interesting AR. [37:00] Milestone is this week both Google and apple release their variance of AR kits, which are essentially their api's for developing AR & VR but mainly AR experiences in their mobile phones and this is a huge deal, Google this had some AR technology called Tango, but it was really restrictive it only worked on very specific Hardware configurations and now Google is released this AR kit which works, on the majority of Google Hardware out there so it already works out over 100 million devices apple is released a kid that's works on basically all the. The Apple devices that can run the current operating systems in this is really likely to usher in. A huge crop of new you know highly functional AR apps in the. In the app stores like you look at a successful Arab like Pokemon go in the developers had to develop it on themselves and now you're getting. Napi from from the hardware manufacturer that that is much more robust and higher performance and. And takes the burden off the programmer to do all that so we've talked a lot on the show about. How AR apps are going to be important part of retail and you know that the availability of these api's is is definitely going to be a catalyst for seeing one of those so I'm excited to see what comes. Scot:  [38:24] Yeah I'm kind of seen some indications that there's e-commerce is a category that they're really interested in and, I think Ikea is a lunch partner and you know it'll be interesting to see, I'm imagining so apples really excited about this we couldn't event coming up in a couple weeks you know what if we had a retailer on stage I don't think that's ever happened where we had a retailer on stage kind of talking about new technology, let me nursing to watch and see what the retail implications are. Jason:  [38:55] For sure and I akea is the perfect lunch partner cuz they're one of the retards that went to the work to program their own custom AR app. I'm the day already had so it will eyemagine it was super easy for them to sort of adopt and expand it to use the new new kits. Scot:  [39:11] Yep in the last little tidbit so company when we did our deep dive on a rvr that we talked a lot about is magically. And I belong away depend for their headset was released today or are at work it's off to the patent pipeline so that's definitely an interesting read if you're into this whole world, there's there's, the air BR world is please pretty split on this a lot of people think this company is really kind of you know never going to ship something and that it's really vaporware and other people feel like maybe they're getting pretty close now this patents up. Jason:  [39:44] Yeah yeah for sure I'm eager to find out more let you know they've had some patents on the kind of underlying technology before this Pacific patent is actually about. The wearable glasses version and at least you know the Pak patent makes it feel seem like. They expect to be able to build a pretty lightweight convenient device. That that might be consumer-friendly and and that's interesting cuz a lot of people have feared that the technology you know like the prototypes of the moment the smallest one is a pretty heavy backpack. [40:17] So the fact that they think they can build it into assetto eyeglasses is is very encouraging and so with that we should. Turn to our next topic is Scott mentioned earlier tonight we are trying a new segment that we're calling digital retail newsmakers so what we're going to do is pick interesting companies in the e-commerce ecosystem, it has an interesting recent news and talk to the folks involved to get the inside scope, so Scott who is this week's digital retail news maker. Scot:  [40:57] Will Jason on August 22nd which was last Tuesday Kleiner Perkins which is one of the bluest of Blue Chip Venture Capital firms out there announced a 40 million dollar investment in Toronto based. Tulip. And here's the kicker all these headlines about Molly getting all the buzz around e-commerce Amazon Etc while read about store closures, tulip is not an e-commerce company but it really focuses on providing a mobile application platform to store associates that are in. Source so we are really excited to have alyas area live from Toronto he is the CEO of tulip retail with us here tonight. [41:36] Thank you so much for having. [41:38] Sure sure before we jump into it I wanted to bring up kind of a beef I have with you I was a very early Blackberry user, and from because I was on the BlackBerry from definitely like 2000 2007-2008 super pretty heavy user I think I've got all the way from the little kind of. Pager kind of form to the bigger ones and my favorite app was brick breaker breaker which I learned that you had some kind of a involvement in tell us the backstory on that. Yes it is quite a backstory but it's funny cuz like for a lot of my career I always always get introduced as the guy who created Brick Breaker and now it's funny cuz it's times past, what does time passes lesson bus people remember that game and sometimes. Recapture to be like the excitement that was created from that that one out that I created that was on that one more time so I'm like a hundred and fifty million mobile. [42:34] Yeah they were calculated the hours consumed done on your brick breaker. Oh man there's actually so many articles written about how much wasted time has been like that has been lost like from even likes to senior people like that I think the former president Obama used to be a big player I feel sort of guilty about it but not too. Jason:  [42:50] You are single-handedly responsible for lowering our GDP. Scot:  [42:54] Even ready to be at least I could you imagine the numbers on that. Jason:  [43:09] So obviously we have hinted at part of your background but Allie for listeners that don't know you why don't you give us the the recap of what your background is and how you came to tulip. Scot:  [43:22] Yeah so I mean my background is I mean I studied Computer Engineering at University called Waterloo here in Canada and I was really focus on Hardware that time and I got this new job at this. It's relatively new company called blackberry and started working there and wherever and eventually work there full time. But quickly I mean after I graduated University I I felt like I had to start something so I started this company I mean about 10 10 11 years ago. Caldwell. Yay and it was literally just me in a closet. I'm trying to build an e-commerce site from scratch I rode by wrote the code myself and I was packing the boxes myself and then we'll does he agree to what is now like one of the largest e-commerce companies in Canada, in that process it for the beanie Mike rewrite I literally like when I started well that's yeah I didn't know anything. About retail about merchandising about Warehouse Logistics and vendor management Ida learn all that from scratch as an engineer. And then that kind of led me to do what I'm doing now is building software for retailers having dinner retailer for a big part of my career. [44:20] What tell us more about well. CA what did what did you sell there. Better inside your Pharmacy and eventually groups of being what's I would describe it maybe it's like diapers.com for Canada so it sells everything from baby to Health and Beauty it's kind of largest largest company in Canada in that category online. Get it sounds like it's still operational so is that something you sold or or what how did you know what was the end result that. It was kind of interesting so I was the CEO up to about 4 years ago and at that time. Rebuilt how much software there that I actually went to the board and I said hey look there's a ton of value here I want to step down as a CEO of this retailer so that I can build a software company out of all this, great engineering that we have here and the potential for it and so to actually started with me you know promoting, who is Dennis to out who is now the CEO of so that I can step down and pull out a lot of the IP and that's that's how we begin, tulip with me kind of saying there's actually made me more value in this softer than there isn't any in the rest of the pictures. Jason:  [45:28] Very cool, and I guess I don't know if irony is the right words got always correct me with when I use bad diction but the wheel that CA is if as I understand it is is premature play, e-commerce site and then it seems like the biggest play for tulip is is is clearly an omni-channel pitch. Scot:  [45:52] Yes it's got me this is kind of the irony of my career but I think maybe a lot of lessons make sense right is that it's so much of my life was focused on trying to. Compete with physical retailers by building an online, retailer in love and in that process I was competing with all these retailers that I eventually build relationships with and so I would I would know all the folks at companies like Toys R Us that we now work with and some of the other folks and. What I started to realize was that what the thing that I think a lot of us know but it have any figured out how to really capitalize on which is. 90% of retail still happens inside these places called physical stores and there's so much opportunity there but it feels like 90% of the Innovation is all happening on that on the comp side only on the outside. My career is now about kind of trying to take all of that Innovation that I learned that I originally deployed Annie, try to replace that inside storage. [46:46] Cool so so 4 years ago you started tulip in when did you know you wanted to kind of go the store router was it kind of you edited there in somewhere. Yeah we started right away saying that stores matter and there's a massive opportunity there but I don't think we knew exactly what we were going to do there. The journey from me really sad was with me sitting with a bunch of big retailers that I built relationships with over the years and saying like help me understand what are your biggest challenges. And what I started to learn like just by sitting on the floor inside the stores and talking to heads of stores was that. It's really hard to innovate inside physical retail because they're stuck with these old green screen like you don't point-of-sale terminals that were built in the 1980s and the culture of stores and so difference and there's like one of our retailers has 40,000 employees there, all we know part-time and high turnover and so you're in this world where they're so much. The man from customers to innovate on their retail experience but when you're a retailer front operate these like very complex businesses it's really hard to adapt with the software in the technology that we have right now and so I was just like hey this is all opportunity this is a, big tough scary but big opportunity and so that's kind of what we went on. [47:57] Got it so so soon I'm an e-commerce guy and I don't know much about stores which would be a good assumptions give me kind of the elevator pitch for for tulip. Diane and why stores need to use this. 90% of retail is happening inside physical stores but I think the part that we forget is when we say. What's happening in physical stores it's happening with real human beings going up to other real human beings called store associates and buying through them and so you have this large job it's actually the largest job in North America I didn't know that, retail store associates of job which is never had tools before so we've all experienced customers. Frustration of going into a big retail chain and try to talk to a store associate that looks like they just were hired the day before and they can't answer basic questions that. You was a consumer can answer on your own phone right I can I can sometimes look up inventory an answer more complex you know product questions on my own phone and I would expect a store so she filled answer answer the opportunity to realize. Give this massive massive job category that's never had gray tools before. What happens if we actually gave them the tools to be able to answer customers questions and pull up inventory from other channels and help people transact across you, and in-store regardless of where that product is. Well if we could do those things. Maybe there's a potential lift and in the sales that we can do inside stores and that was the theory when we started we had no idea like at the massive opportunity and in the lift that we could create once we once we did and that's kind of where all the success companies come from. Jason:  [49:32] Perfect that you know we we used to make the joke like for a longtime store associates weren't even you know a common rule in a retail store was it store associates couldn't even use their own phone in the store. Scot:  [49:44] I work with these folks right so now I sit on the floor sorry but I mean I'm sitting on the floor with these door so I started to see the other side of it. Open very young people who know how to use technology cuz now everybody knows how to use a phone but they're so frustrated because they can't get access to basic information sometimes the only computer they have is the point-of-sale terminal so if there's people checking out. There is nowhere for them to, research information sometimes they're using their own retailers like mobile app because that's all they have and so I feel for these folks now and I didn't even though maybe in my previous career I used to kind of make fun of them because I see now what it's like being on the floor inside a story you want to help customers we don't have tools rent. Jason:  [50:24] Oh yeah it's it's believe me it's it's a difficult job and we you know and like originally doing all these rules, we are nobody wanted the sales associates to have more technology cuz frankly everyone was afraid they'd be playing brick breaker on it all day long and not talking to customers so I guess there's some irony there, but the the you don't when customers started walking in with their own phones and having all this information in the sales people are completely unequipped we used to talk. About you know the sales associates were essentially bringing a knife to a bazooka fight like it was. Totally asymmetrical so makes perfect sense to start equipping those the sales folks. You you can help me as an advocate a little bit because it is you may know from listening to show Scott doesn't really get the value of retail store so you know Scott. Scot as a drum in his office called retail Mulligan and and he just constantly beats it. [51:22] And you don't Infernus him like there are in fact a lot of stores closing and there are in fact, actor water stores facing some headwinds but I just beat you know curious what what's your general like so you know your future is tied to the future of the store's what what what do you think's going to happen to physical retail. Scot:  [51:41] I think you can see I'm a little biased because I bet my career in my entire company on that idea that stores matter right but I think like from our perspective right like you're seeing is right we see a lot of the retailers we work with right now, as tulip enters into the retailer to start our work with them. The head of stores has been mandated to close 10% of the stores but increase sales by 15% in those in the remaining store and so what's I think what's happening I think we're all seeing as that, even if the shift towards like you know you, goes from 10% to 15%. There's still a massive number of transactions that were going to continue to happen inside the stores in a space where there's like three trillion dollars retail transactions in North America and so you have a massive massive category on the other hand. You know 5% shift online means lots of jobs lost and so. The world in which tulip lives is we're working with me Taylor's that are saying yes stores will have to close and we have to correct for them the right number stores for the remaining ones. Bad experience that we drive for those customers we need we really need to up our game and it can't just be by. Lowering prices or in a fighting on trying to not have Amazon have access to the channel it's got to be about creating a differentiable experience inside stores at customers. Actually want to come to and that's kind of the world in which tulip plants ring. Jason:  [53:02] It makes perfect sense I'll just eat like the customer behavior is fundamentally changed as a result of. These digital tools that they've now become accustomed to and you know one of the big examples we always use his ratings and reviews to become super important for customers and making decisions, but none of those digital tools are available in the overwhelming majority of stores writing so you know a super common problem for a retailer is what is the in-store digital experience that, brings all those digital amenities to the The Shopper that they become accustomed to from their online shopping, and most of the answers to that question are inconvenient like they're they're super expensive and very hard to maintain and you know, digital signage and digital fact tags and you know there's there's a lot of baggage attached to doing everything on the customer's mobile phone and having him be kind of heads down in your store and by the way it's super hard to get the customer to download your mobile app anyway so they're all these these headaches and, it it it seems like providing the the sales associate which is the one variable in the store you can control. With access to these digital tools to use on behalf of the customer or with the customer seems like one of the the best solutions to that problem. Scot:  [54:17] Right I think you see that right when people talk about the, the end of stores you look at something like the Apple store right be like apples in this position where they don't have to open physical stores but they continue to open them and they're doing phenomenally well right and so I think we see this world in which like another we work with examples right bonobo started online. Did really well and then started opening physical stress you see all these like these folks were doing well online still opening stores but the stores feel very different, in terms of experiences it's different, how you drive a perfect experience for a customer, device they can share that with a customer cuz they know that to the customer that matters but in addition to that they'll also pull up pricing from other retailers write a big part, the selling process for some of our some of the rituals we work with his saying. Are you afraid that this product is cheaper on Amazon let's go to Amazon together and look at that price because they know that the customers thinking in the back of their heads. Jason:  [55:15] Well so of all the sort of features that can exist on that tulip tablet you know I'm imagining things like inventory information product information you know customer, Behavior information although sorts of things I get is there one one experience that you feel like. Is the overwhelming leader I would just be curious I once they sings Get deployed like what's the the most go to feature for for the majority of sales associates. Scot:  [55:42] Yeah there's there's basically two big experiences that we drive that usually Drive the most left right. The first one is on the channel selling so that's the ability for the store associate to say, whether or not the product you're looking for is in the store in front of us right now I can sell you any product from online and in the store in one basket and so that's that's key for that for a lot of the details who can't carry all of their inventory at one location. Does the second big thing that we do which is really interesting cross we learned a lot about her last years was is what's called clienteling and basically. Try and retailer on a lot of their business but like a significant percentage of the business for a lot of the best high-end luxury retailers happens through these one-on-one interactions that they have with customers and so a lot of a tulip does in that case. Is we help retailers write personal email text or says it's my personal emails during SMS messages to their best customers saying. Hey this just came in I thought it would look right with that thing that you bought before I put these these three items together and putting them on hold for you at a building that really one on one relationship that you can only get with that with a great tool plus a great store. [56:46] Awesome and so you mentioned but no bus which I guess now you get to count Walmart as a customer it's always nice to upgrade took like 5 minutes to switch that logo. What are some of other retailers that are utilizing your technology. Able to talk about in class which is a big pig to play fetch 800 locations across America, one of our best customers Saks Fifth Avenue and that whole network of retailers that are associated with them in miles from specialty retailers like, Toys R Us to the bonobos to Chanel it's been it's been very interesting to see how different ringtones work. [57:31] Cool and then says I fell off and we're always love to hear the story to the extent you can tell it of fundraising you know it's pretty clear that you convince the the nice Folks at Kleiner, 10 fasting what you're doing so that they're they're Believers is this the first round of funding you've done and, you know what what's the point of you of some of the feces out there that are raised that are looking that you're talking to are they do you run into some of that are like. Stores what are those or are they all pretty open-minded to that that kind of pitch these days. Yeah I think that's like one of the tough kind of side effects to the rise of Amazon are all the challenges we talk about one more time trying to compete with Amazon that I think not everyone knows about it is that it is next to impossible to raise money right now. For a business that is in the econ category right well. See experience that a lot just because VC's are very well aware of how difficult it is to compete at scale when once you have to go head-to-head against Amazon. I'm in that same kind of, light when we started to if I started to talk to me season but when I wanted to do next and I just was told basically by everyone that I was crazy why are you going after this category that's. It's going to be massively shrinking and no by the way retailers are the worst customers and so hard to work with but we just felt like it was just too big of an opportunity and I think. A lot of the things that scare people but the category for me kind of indicated that there was actually something there that people have figured out cool. Jason:  [58:59] So you're one of the things that I'm curious about all the you mention for example the the customer follow-up use case and just maybe I would generic be caught like the clienteling use case. [59:13] Imagine there's a yes or two pads for all those sorts of things build that native functionality into to it and so then you know it's it's in your ekosistem in and all that sort of thing versus interfacing with all the other, tool that does big retailers you just mentioned. Likely already have in their ecosystem is like does to try to be a complete solution with everything integrated in one big killed base or are you having the interface with a lot of other retail systems and how's that working out. Scot:  [59:46] So I think that's probably the biggest challenge for building tulip is that we're working in a space where you cannot you can't go to a retailer. The size of the returns that we typically work with and say, hey please throw it all of the tens of millions of dollars you can vested in all of your big ecosystem and all of that you know that the side effects of what what those things are connected to because we want to swap it out for this other cool app which we just built and so if you look at two of it where anywhere, rather large company now, about half of the company literally just does Enterprise Integration since the typical project bras with a big retailer will take some time six months maybe more. Just integrate with 15/16 back-end systems everything from sap to IBM and all of the mixture stuff that they have so a lot of tulips kind of, way of working greenhouses to say hey we're going to work alongside all of the systems that you bought already and we're going to have meant them and replace parts of parts of them when you don't have the right system but we can't come in and say please swap everything out at least to start with. Jason:  [1:00:46] Sure sure what one other question I'm curious about the, kind of retailers that are sort of best suited like I'm of the opinion that no retailer is purely self-service or purely sales assistant that like almost every retailer. Spectrum of those too but there some some classes of retailer that are much heavier sales assisted. And obviously some of your early customers like I would put in that category but then you know there's huge swaths of retail that are mostly cell service and you mentioned your biggest appointment was Toys R Us I would think of them as a, mostly self-service environment so I'm I'm tears in my wrong that that you're a better fit in a sales assisted environment or what's what's the strategy there. Scot:  [1:01:33] So when we first started we said let's focus on retailers where sales associates really matter where, retail just saying the store experience and we want to act like it Ramon in Destiny's people that's the category we thought we do the best in we started getting contacted by grocery retailers, 7-Eleven type retailers in quick-service and all the sudden we started to realize that I think what we're going to see is that. I think personally that every single job in the cattle work like sales associates in Cashiers all of those jobs will have a mobile device in their hands as part of their job for some of the. Less service-oriented one those mobile devices will be focused on you inventory counting and more of the kind of back in tasks and more of the service books ones will be more about. The summit tools kind of very famous for out front and center you know sending emails to customers and helping with the I like product information but in the end I'm of the belief that. Every category retail is going to have to arm its associates with a mobile devices as part of their job that's just so the reality of the Next Generation Enterprise. [1:02:33] On until we started with a lot of these high-end folks but now we're we're going to be deploying with a lot of the three times that you would traditionally think of his being sales associate Focus. [1:02:42] Regal one so do you help stores with kannada omni-channel implementation so do you get involved with buy online pickup in-store and ship from store in that kind of stuff. Absolutely I think like. You know one of my my big beliefs in this in this industry is that we all kind of maybe did it to service to the industry by over focusing on the word omni-channel because. Two lot of the consumers and and practically from an experience this perspective I'm just held it really mean anything until you do something with it right and so it's more of a philosophy than it is an an an experience and so tulip ends up being kind of good thing you do after you realize how many shells important, super a lot of okay we want to build a cell across channels that's an omni-channel selling experience but to do that I need to actually give it tool to. Perform the sound and so tulip is basically everything we do is if I don't Channel but it's kind of its kind of maybe the post on me channel thing that you do. What day in matching would be hard and we struggle with us at chill advisory even on the digital side and, the store side just kind of blows my mind this maybe while you have half your company is on the integration, peace but you know that the buy online pickup in-store in the ship from store has really high failure rate and no one really publishes one but my guess is somewhere between 5 and 10% based on personal experience. And I can imagine you're only as good as the systems you're integ