Amazon News: Analytics, Titles, Dormant Listings & eBay’s Facebook Move

Amazon News: Analytics, Titles, Dormant Listings & eBay’s Facebook Move Unknown Speaker: Welcome, fellow entrepreneurs, to the Amazon Sellers School podcast, where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle and anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch. Speaker 2: Yeah, we've got some really good news. It was pretty slow in the beginning and then kind of lots of good news popped up. Some good, interesting changes. Well, some good, some bad with Amazon and eBay as well. Some revelations there. We'll see if they make a difference, but let's go ahead and jump into the first article here, which is actually a post from Isaac Gross over on LinkedIn, but he's highlighting that Amazon's latest addition to brand analytics dashboard. Customer journey analytics, a powerful tool for sellers. One notable feature allows sellers to identify shoppers who added items to their cart or wishlist but didn't complete a purchase, enabling retargeting through AMC custom ads. This update reflects Amazon's commitment to providing data-driven tools to sellers, helping them optimize strategies and boost conversions. Gross emphasizes that turning these insights into actionable steps will be keys to success in 2025. So it provides a lot of really good information. If you can see that graphic, it's a little bit small. But essentially it gives you kind of a complete flow or a high level overview flow of how customers are coming into your product or your brand and where they're going from there. And it allows you to do better marketing to them. You can always do abandoned cart marketing or you could for a while, but it's very limited. But now apparently you can do that advertising We're right in the advertising console. What are your guys' thoughts on this? I know, Danan, you don't do a lot of ads, but Robyn, you do quite a lot, I'm sure, and Jackson, you do some as well. Yeah. Speaker 3: I don't do any ads, actually, but I'll just make a comment on this. To be able to see what your sessions, conversion, blah, blah, blah is in a visual graph is extraordinarily helpful. And there's a little tag up there under the customer journey analytics title that says, the last sentence, take action to engage with different segments. I read that to mean that you can segment every single one of those and do a custom campaign to each. And if that's the case, that's huge. That's like Google retargeting. As soon as somebody hits your site, they see your product 50 bajillion times because that's how many websites they go to a day. I think this is going to be absolutely massive. Speaker 4: So one thing about this is really going to depend on your product mix. So, you know, I looked at a couple of our accounts and we had some that had access already, some that says it'll be here soon. And one thing that it does is it's not at a decent level. So, you know, you can set these retargeting pieces up even without this tool. So if you don't have access to it or they're, I'm not sure if this will apply to, if the data will include things that are not within brands that are part of your like brand registry access, because this is actually under the brands tab under brand analytics. So you'd have to be, have access to brand registry in order to use this tool, I believe. Yeah. So if you, If you don't have that, if you're a reseller, you can use audience targeting and still do that retargeting based off specific products. What this does is it allows you to create either a brand-tailored promotion or sponsored display to that specific group, but it's not going to be broken out. It doesn't look like, at least at the surface, I haven't completely played with it. It looks like when I go to create a brand-tailored promotion for a segment, It says in the last 60 days, you've had 3,122 customers that have added your product to cart, wishlist, or save your product, create a grantee or promotion to boost conversion rate, consider using your top three eSens. So there's still some granularity and it's going to depend on the variety of your product mix. But I think especially for customers that have subscribable products, especially for those that are working towards increasing the number of repeat customers to increase overall revenue, this could be a really, really powerful tool. Speaker 2: Yeah. You could always, like I said, you could always do, well not always, but for a while you could do the targeting of people who abandon carts, which is something that I do for all the brands we work with. But yeah, I think Robyn, the question comes down to how granular you can get that targeting with this new data. And I think just the fact that you can target it now in the ad console instead of having to do it in that special dashboard where you don't even know what the ad that's going to them looks like. You don't have any control over it. But now you're gonna be able to control that in the ad console and have some control of what the ad looks like and what's being pushed to them and things like that. Speaker 4: And I think that, you know, and you can see something like looking at where people drop off in your funnel. I think that when people talk a lot how Amazon has changed and it's harder, it's getting more sophisticated. So we now start to need to think about like overall sales funnel. And this helps you identify where you're losing people and seeing if people are adding to cart and not purchasing, there's some unanswered question or the price isn't justified or something. And that allows you to say, okay, if we're seeing a bigger drop-off than versus before, especially if you've changed creative, but you also have to think about if you have items of different prices or if your products are like even within a brand are pretty varied versus somebody that has just a line of soaps. It's going to be different than maybe somebody that's in supplements where the same customer that's buying one is not the same customer that's buying the other items in your product line. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would hope that this is kind of just the beginning and that eventually you'll be able to look at these things on an ASIN level would be ideal because some of the other things, the tools that they've given us, I believe it's in search analytics, right? You can go, yeah, you can go down to the ASIN level. So hopefully at some point, you know, customer loyalty analytics, customer journey analytics, they will allow looking at specific ASINs as well. Speaker 3: Key term is at some point. Speaker 2: Yes. It's a move in the right direction, right? They're giving us a little bit more data. It's kind of incremental. So we'll just have to watch and see where it goes. But at least this is one area where Amazon is moving in the right direction instead of the wrong direction. Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. Speaker 4: And this is something to highlight to your non-Amazon native brands that you might be approaching. In Google and Meta, because of privacy regulations, they're losing the ability to retarget and have that granularity, especially with the changes that have happened in PMAX. They're losing a lot of granularity in their ability to add. Well, Amazon is adding to that. So we're seeing some shifting of ad dollars in relationship to those PMAX and Meta changes. Speaker 3: Interesting. That's. I mean, that just reinforces what people like Todd and I have been telling brands for a long time. If you're not on Amazon or you're not optimized for Amazon, you'd better be because that's very interesting. It's good to know that. Speaker 4: And the downside is that when you make a sale on Amazon, it's not your customer, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: So you have to have some way to try to bring them into a longer Cycle to increase lifetime value, but it but especially if a brand is trying to get targeting and that's true even for like service based businesses that want to use sponsored display for all business to try to Get people into a pixel conversion And so in retarget them based off of that Yep Jackson have you played with this at all? Speaker 1: No, I have not it's interesting though. This type of stuff, which I totally agree it's good that Amazon's bringing out new functionality and different visibility on this sort of stuff. The angle that it makes me think about is just how how this all affects the ecosystem as a whole when Amazon makes these sorts of shifts, because the complexity that running Amazon PPC has become compared to like even four or five years ago is getting so dramatic that it's kind of like if you're a small brand who can't afford an agency, It's becoming almost like a full-time job depending on the size of your catalog. Yeah. You can't really not use an agency if you want to grow into an actual business that can, you know, support you, be your living, that sort of stuff, right? But it also puts this pressure in the whole space because it's so easy as an agency to fall behind and not actually be delving into this extra functionality and just kind of sticking to the basics, which Depending on the product line might actually be the right thing, but another product line, it might be you're falling behind. And it gets so complicated because as a business owner, how do you know, like you, like you have to know all this information vaguely enough that you can then hold your agency. Speaker 3: Manage it. Yeah. Speaker 1: You know, and, and hold their feet to the fire to actually be doing all this stuff when it's very easy to not. And then it's difficult to as an agency because it's like, well, This stuff's new. You're being the guinea pig in a sense of trying to figure it out and spend client money to do that. And then it's adding time to how many hours you're putting to analyze and optimize an account. And you don't even know if this is going to bring any value yet because it's new. Whereas like posts like this, Isaac's like, Hey, this is great news. Yeah. But how much manpower, brainpower effort needs to go into just figuring this all out and who does it impact negatively? Who does it impact positively? How many months or years does it take until this is something that's everybody has an intuition about? Because I know for my time when I was running ads as my primary thing, it's like, A lot of running ads well is this kind of crossover of intuition about the catalog and what the product type is and how to best market to that. Target audience and then intuition about how Amazon system works and finding out these weird things and peculiarities of how it does, you know, weird stuff. Like if you create a new SKU for the same ASIN and add it to the campaign, it doesn't perform as well as the old SKU, even though nothing's changed. Weird stuff like that. So all these little details that are intuitions inside of the ad, the ad agency space for Amazon. Every time something like this comes out, it upheaves the system a little bit, especially the more it gets involved. I see Robyn smiling a lot, and she's probably going, I'm happy, but I'm not, sort of thing. You know what I mean? But I don't know, so that's my thought. Speaker 3: I miss the days of starting an automatic campaign and having it run at 8% ACOS for a decade. Speaker 4: There's a webinar somewhere on the internet where I say, if you've got more than a 2% ACOS, you're paying too much. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 4: Yeah, because we weren't doing advertising before really. It was really, really young, when it first came out. And we were doing it for things that we were reselling for. It's changed so much and that's actually a conversation we have in our agency a lot is scope creep and what do we manage? What gives the client the best fruit? Speaker 3: Robyn, did you say scope creep? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: Can you I don't know what that is. What is that? Speaker 4: So scope creep is okay So in an agency you it's a kind of if it's it's the agency version of if you give a mouse a cookie Yeah, so, you know if you go work ran this data then they're gonna ask for this data and they say hey Can you help us out with this and then? So, you have to be really clear in your scope in order to make sure you're managing your business correctly. Speaker 2: I see. I see. Okay, cool. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty much in a sentence what I was talking about where it's like the scope of agency work changes with this because expectations change, falling behind in the industry and making sure you're up to speed. This type of thing is like a love-hate thing in the agency world in my mind, right? Speaker 4: Well, in a lot of this, if you actually click into the reports in this dashboard, it will take you to the search query report. A lot of this is stuff that we've already been using. I think that it will help people who are non-analytical. We have some clients that are brilliant visionaries. My husband is the one that does a lot of the reporting and analytics for advertising. You can see their eyes glaze over when we get into the weeds. I think visuals like this really help. We've spent a lot of money on dashboards to try to help with that. This is one less thing that we have to run through. Our, like our automations, um, in order to get visualizations for clients. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Well, you guys, uh, Jackson, mostly you, you just described me to a tee, right? Like I don't run ads. So I, I, I rely upon brand search to make my sales. Right. And it, it works. But I also realized that, and my wife, she spends, I don't spend any time on our Amazon account really. Um, My wife spends about five hours a month. Yeah, five to eight hours a month on our Amazon account, but I'm acutely aware that The times are changing to a scope where if we don't diversify how we're managing or pivot how we're managing our business, then we are going to be one of those sellers that gets cut out. We already don't have much profit to work with anymore because we're selling at the same price As we always have, so we've been selling this brand for maybe eight years, maybe 10 years, eight to 10 years, something like that, and we've never changed the price. And so the costs of doing business on Amazon, as you guys know, for us, I think it's four, maybe five times now what it was when we started, and we're still selling at the same price. Speaker 1: A lot of products and catalogs that I work with. The prices are actually lower now than they were four years ago because it's like compete. Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that that goes into like, you know, how long is a product? What's the life true life cycle of a product? You know, and that has dramatically changed. After a whole bunch of Chinese sellers came in and they're able to do direct, right? You could have a life cycle of 10 years, but, you know, 50 sellers come in undercutting your price and your life cycle just went down. Speaker 4: And I think a lot of that life cycle piece comes into how are you protecting your intellectual property? How are you building up brand and building up a community? You know, Lego doesn't have to worry about all the people knocking off Lego because they have built a community where people get mad when you say Legos. It's not Legos, it's Lego. You know, like there is a culture around it, right? And for those brands, they're able to extend their life quite a bit. The brands that we have that are proactively defending their intellectual property on and off Amazon, those are the ones that have a longer life cycle. And if you watch a lot of Shark Tank, Kevin's like, oh, there's no IP there. That's the reason why. Speaker 3: It all points to the diversification of what you have to know and do to manage a brand on Amazon. When Todd and Robyn and Jackson and when we started, we didn't need to know shit about running a business. We only needed to know how to launch a product. Those days are long gone. I think you have to have a brand these days. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's definitely changed a lot in the 10 years I've been selling it. It's gotten a lot more difficult for, I think, someone who's just starting out. All of us here have a decade or more of experience, I believe, doing this. We've learned as we've gone along, but just put yourself in the position of someone who's just starting and has to learn everything that we've learned over the last decade. It can be very daunting to launch a product on Amazon these days. Speaker 3: Sounds like we need to do a course, The Beginner's Playbook to sell on Amazon. Speaker 4: We can change it every few months. It'll be awesome. Speaker 3: It'll be awesome. I will do a commercial of me sitting on a Bugatti Veyron and say, let's grab it on Turo for 400 bucks. I have this idea, one day I'm going to do a commercial of that, but when I'm sitting on this car, I want someone to come out of this mansion like, hey, I told you to get the hell off my driveway. And then I run away. Speaker 2: That would be funny. One thing that I think is easy to miss here, but I think rather interesting, is if you look at the brand search, right? So it's a, it's a fraction of the overall, what is that? Like just over 10%. So not huge, but look at the number of people who search for your brand that directly visit your brand store from there, instead of going to one of your product pages. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 2: Almost all of them. Like what is that? 80, 90% of them, We're going to your brand store rather than a detail page if they search for your brand. Speaker 4: I'm looking at a different brand and actually in the console and it's not that. So it's going to depend one on your product mix and also your advertising strategy, right? Because if you're driving to your store page from sponsored display, then that's going to change that flow. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that makes good sense. Of course, it's going to depend on the brand. Speaker 1: Yeah, lots of brands. You're searching for the brand name and then plenty of brands, you're just searching for the generic product and getting discovered because it's Amazon, right? Speaker 3: I would love to see what my brand looks like on this page, except we still haven't done brand registry on it. I'm sorry, not my brand, the brand I'm selling on Amazon, the supplement brand I'm selling on Amazon. Speaker 1: You don't have brand registry? Speaker 3: No, I don't have brand registry. Speaker 1: How are you alive, anyway? Speaker 3: Yeah, I know. I know. When COVID started, I had an appointment to fly out to California to meet with the CEO of the company. Take over the entire catalog, right? Cause we've only got a fraction of the catalog. And, uh, and then COVID started and they're like, yeah, no, don't fly to California. Um, and then I couldn't, I literally couldn't get ahold of him for two years. Couldn't get ahold of him. Couldn't get ahold of his wife. We could only ever talk to, uh, whoever my wife orders from and, and charges our credit card for our, our monthly sales. And they would not call me. I have no idea why, but we just, Just like a month ago, something like that, my wife Jade, she got them on a call and they're like, yeah, yeah, cool. We definitely want you to do the brand. Here's our access to our account so you can do brand registry. You're like, oh my God, thank you. But no, we still don't have brand registry to this day, but it's, it's on the, for 2025, we're going to get that because I'd love to see what this report looks like with that brand. Speaker 1: So you do have a trademark though, right? Speaker 3: They do. Yeah, it's not my brand. So I, long, long time ago, decade or so ago, I got exclusivity to this brand on Amazon. Speaker 2: Hey, Amazon sellers. Tired of losing money on storage and shipping fees? Well, Amazon Storage Pros is here to take the headache out of logistics. We manage everything from inventory and creating efficient shipping plans to working with 3PLs and Amazon's AWD so that you can focus on growing your business. Start with a free storage cost audit and discover exactly where you're overspending and how to fix it. Don't let logistics eat into your profits. Visit AmazonStoragePros.com. That's AmazonStoragePros.com to get your free storage cost audit and start saving today. And now back to the show. Speaker 1: Very good. Speaker 2: Well, I want to move on to the next story, but I just wanted to point out real quick, too, that in the middle there, added to wishlist and saved for later. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: I don't see any line from added to wishlist going to purchase. Speaker 3: There's a little tiny line there. Unknown Speaker: I see a little tiny line. Speaker 2: Save for later. Oh yeah, there is a little bit. But it kind of shows how almost nothing coming from those adding to wishlist and save for later, people usually just forget about, I think. There may be an opportunity there to target them with ads, perhaps to remind them that they added it to save for later. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: Well, wishlist, you know, we use wishlist when my kids make their list and then we send it to grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: So you're going to see that. The thing is, is that when people add to wishlist, it's not likely that they're going to be the purchasers. So that makes sense that the line is going to be smaller. Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be a good question. I wonder if Amazon is tracking that if someone else purchases off of your wishlist. Does that count as a wishlist sale? Speaker 3: Guaranteed they have that data. Speaker 2: You would think they would because if they're clicking your wishlist link and then adding to cart, that add to cart came from a wishlist. So theoretically, that should be in the added to wishlist thing there, but I'm going to guess it's probably not currently. Speaker 4: Yeah, if you think about like wedding registry you usually register for this whole wide swath of things and then really hope that they really get that butter dish that you want, you know, so there's a You know that there's when you register you always register for a large amounts of to give people options So at least I tell my kids like if you really want what you want Then you better put a couple options in different price points, right? Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, for sure. Speaker 3: Amazon would just give us all of their data that they ever had. We could run PPC to the family members of the wishlist people and get those dang sales. Speaker 4: The idea of having that much data makes my heart want to explode because it would be the worst of times and the best of times because there'd be so much data, it would be so easy to get distracted in that and not use it. I attended a PubCon in 2016 and Bill Hunt, who's amazing at what he does, he said, you have to get the basics right before you can even think about improving. So I think when these new tools come out, you can allot 10% of your budget and your energy towards testing and developing these new things, and you need to, but you have to make sure that the basics are buttoned down first. Speaker 3: Yeah. I could not possibly agree with you more on that. I tout that all the time. It's like all Amazon sellers, if you don't have a solid foundation before you even start running ads, and look, I'm no expert on ads, But my wife, by proxy, I'm an expert on having a solid foundation. If you don't have that, you'll overspend. You just won't have the conversion rates. You'll spend more money in the wrong place. The next version of that is if you've got something working and your ads campaigns are working, don't steal the budget from what's working to go try something new. Develop a further budget or have one available. For pilots and if a pilot is successful, then you implement, but taking budget away like it completely skews your numbers into. Something that could be unsustainable. Speaker 2: I've got a post-it note right up here by my camera that says, focus on the most profitable things, less work, more profit. Speaker 3: Can I borrow that? Speaker 2: Something important to remember. Speaker 4: My friend Laurel says, fastest path to cash. Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. All right, so this is a rather big story. So new product title requirements effective January 21st. So 11 days from now as of this recording. Amazon is implementing new product title requirements to improve listing clarity and enhance customer confidence. Titles must now be concise with a maximum of 200 characters and avoid special characters or repetitive words unless part of the brand name. So, 200 characters max, certain special characters that you can't use, which you can look at this news on Amazon for those. But then you can't have the same word more than twice unless it's a preposition or title or conjunction. Speaker 1: That's interesting. Speaker 4: And they're saying that loaf pan, cake pan, that's not a different context, so that would be duplicate. And pan and pans would be duplicate. And then if you had L dash creatine and L space creatine, they're saying that would be a duplicate too. So, I think, you know, a lot of people focused on this and it came out about the length, because apparel is down to like, some categories in apparel are down to like 125 characters. Speaker 3: Oh, wow. Speaker 4: So, and the length will be a bigger issue, but I think that the biggest issue is the repeat words. Yeah. Trying to get Amazon to allow those special, they say if it's like old navy, navy blue sweatpants, that since navy blue is in a different context, that doesn't count towards a duplicate and it doesn't count if the word is in the brand name. But I have a feeling, you know, the AI might not always parse that the way that we want it to. So there could be, I think that that will fundamentally change the way that people write titles. And I think it's ultimately a good thing. I think it will clean up the catalog significantly. But oh my my, it's going to be a crazy couple weeks. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. So I don't know how Amazon is going to enforce this. It's going to be some AI and you know, it's going to get it wrong with some of the things you just mentioned there, like the different ways to say a word. The AI is probably just going to be like, oh, duplicates suppressed. Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't think it's going to be that crazy if I'm being honest. Because I think they're going to roll this out, but I don't think they're going to slap everybody right away. I think they'll get a notification. And it does say in there that they're going to make suggestions of some sort. That'll probably ruin a few lives. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Robyn. Speaker 4: They're saying on the 21st, what will happen is in manage inventory, you'll get a notification. They'll show up there for the ones that are violating the policy. And then you have 14 days before it goes suppressed. But there was a little bit of vagueness of whether if it would go suppressed, or if it would just change to what Amazon wants. So, you know, I asked that in the EMA yesterday, but I don't think I got an answer. Speaker 3: If I remember correctly, I have seen this before, a title enforcement like this before, and it wasn't as drastic as they made it sound. I don't think that Amazon's going to be so crude as to just start suppressing listings unless they're a gross violation. That's just my opinion though. It hardly matters. It has to change, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, you would hope they don't, but this is Amazon. They don't have the greatest track record in some of these areas. Speaker 4: So for our agents, we kind of do hope that they get really aggressive, right? Because we've been proactively working to get the changes, we're like, we're going to send out something to clients. We're going to be letting them know about this and some of the title changes. So since we're ready, if they roll it out really aggressively, that gives us a huge opportunity to boost our rankings while the listings are suppressed. Speaker 3: That's a fair point. That's very true. But I also think that there are a ton of sellers just like me that I only know this because I do these streams with Todd. I would never know this happened. I'd just be suppressed. One day I'd log in, or my wife would log in, 30 days after it happened, like, hey, dang it, our listing's suppressed. Well, what for? Who knows? Amazon doesn't tell us anything. Like, okay, awesome. Let's spend the months figuring it out. You know, but, yeah, you're right, Robyn. If 50,000, 500,000, 5 million, not 5 million, but that many sellers get suppressed, yeah, it's gonna give a lot of people a huge edge. Speaker 4: My biggest question and the biggest thing that I think is of concern is if you're a reseller and you don't have brand registry, so you can't change the title. If Amazon doesn't roll out the change, they don't change the suggestion for you. Then one, you might change the title to something that doesn't work and you won't have that opportunity to change it back or if it goes suppressed, you know, I think that's the piece that is the biggest question for me. We have a couple of resellers that we work with that we kind of help kind of manage their ads and things along those lines. That's the biggest question if you don't have brand registry. What would happen there? Speaker 3: Yeah, fair point. Speaker 2: I'm going to guess that one that I just highlighted in red. Will provide override suggestions for non-compliant titles. I'm going to guess you're going to have the 14 days to act upon the suggestions. Oh yeah, before we update the titles automatically. So the AI is going to update those ones that, you know, like the resellers. If they're wrong, the AI is just going to update them for you. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: Override suggestions, but it doesn't say that they're going to make the changes. It just says that they're going to provide suggestions, doesn't it? Speaker 3: No, no, no. Speaker 2: Over here. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 2: The 14 days to act upon the suggestion before we update the titles to comply with our requirements. Speaker 4: I don't know if that's better or worse, but... Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. Speaker 1: Some cases better, some cases worse. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: It's probably better than being suppressed if you're a reseller, right? Speaker 4: What's interesting is that in the AMA... Speaker 2: It may not be the best for the brand owner. Speaker 4: It was just interesting in the EMA they mentioned there was something about the suppression too. Speaker 1: We missed the meeting a couple of days ago. Speaker 3: Yeah, we did. I actually meant to be on that. Speaker 2: The thing is, I mentioned you never know what's going to happen on Amazon. They don't have the best track record. The group that is creating this new policy and rolling it out, Robyn Johnson is a complete separate group than the AI team that's creating the robot that's going to implement this. Just because they're saying this doesn't mean that's exactly how it's going to roll out as we've seen in the past. Speaker 3: That's exactly my point. What further alludes to that is she said that somebody said something in there about the listing being suppressed, but this doesn't say anything along those lines, right? Speaker 4: Well, and just to correct myself, the AMA, they did specifically say listings would not be suppressed. Speaker 1: So I take that back. Speaker 3: Oh, okay. Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Speaker 3: Okay. Okay. Speaker 4: I didn't mean to interrupt. Speaker 3: Oh, no, no, no, no. That's good. I mean, well, that's very good. So they said that listings will not be suppressed. So they'll just be changed, which could technically have the same effect as a suppressed listing. Speaker 2: It could kill your keyword ranking on a lot of things, especially with the title. Speaker 3: Yes. Yeah. I want to see if the AI is going to change it to a title that's banned by Amazon's other AI that checks titles. Speaker 2: Boy, that would be funny. It changes it to a trademark term or something and the other AI takes it down for trademark violation. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 4: I worry more about ... Let's say you had a Funko Pop. I'm sure Funko will be on top of it. They've got a great marketing team. If they didn't and AI says changes the word and adds the word doll, then that would add, that would change it to make it require a CPSC because that doll, the word doll triggers a CPSC certification. So that's kind of more what I'm worried about there. I think the keyword rankings, if you're already converting consistently, then it shouldn't impact that because you've already indexed, you've already ranked. So I think that that won't be a big issue. It'll be more of a wrong description, using a trademark. I think that they probably will already have the trademark terms put out, but it's just all of the unforeseen things like that that make me a little nervous. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll just have to keep an eye on it and, you know, update as many of your titles as possible. You're going to be much better at it yourself than the AI trying to do it for you. And, you know, we'll see what happens here on the 21st and go from there. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 2: Yep, yep. All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump on to the next one here. Speaker 3: This one's an interesting one. Speaker 2: Yeah. This kind of surprised me a little bit when I seen this one from Stephen Pope. Speaker 3: Me too. Speaker 2: So I'm interested to get your guys' thoughts. So put this under strong opinions, but repurposed dormant listings to maximize review value. So Stephen Pope advises Amazon sellers to repurpose dormant product listings rather than delete them, leveraging their accumulated reviews as valuable business assets. Instead of starting from scratch, sellers can launch new products under the same ASIN or SKU, capitalizing on the existing reviews to boost credibility and sales. This strategy works best when replacing a listing with a similar product to maintain relevancy and compliance with the reviews estimated to hold a value of $15 each, according to Steven. Utilizing them effectively can significantly enhance business growth. I think one thing to point out here, there's a lot of black hat people who steal ASINs and put them under different products. That's not what he's saying here. He's saying if you've got two white dice and you're eliminating that listing and replacing it with an upgraded version or something like that, reuse the same listing. Rather than creating a new one. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm in total agreement. You know what I mean? It just depends on those factors, right? If you've got an old listing and the reason you discontinued it is because the reviews are 3.8 stars, then no, you're not going to. You know what I mean? But if it's something where you've got Yeah, I don't need to go into detail, but my opinion is if the reviews are good, the product's similar enough, and you have the means to repurpose it, it could make sense. There's the argument of like, if you believe in the honeymoon period, which I'm not saying I do or don't. Then having a new listing altogether, buying program, there's pros and cons to anything, right? But I don't know. Speaker 3: I want to hear what Robyn has to say on this because she's grimacing like, and Robyn, do you know of something in the guidelines or terms of service that makes this a violation or something like that? Speaker 2: Definitely a violation. Speaker 4: The violation, it is 100% a violation. Now there was a time when I would have said this would have been fine. The reason I'm like wanting to throw, respectfully, Stephen, wanting to throw up in my mouth a little bit. Speaker 3: You know what? Stephen, if you're listening to this, I have never heard anyone respectfully throw up in their mouth at me and I think that is one hell of a thing. Speaker 4: The reason for that is Amazon has been getting really particular about UPCs and GTANs, and they need to match at the brand level at the brand registry. And part of that I think is related to recalls and their liability there. The bigger issue is, let me tell you a story. So we have a brand that has a product that has, you know, different, not seasonality like winter, summer, fall, but like as things come into pop culture and out of pop culture, they have their products, the individual products have a life cycle. So they have a brand. So, and then their products that become, you know, they use licenses and then they change from like show to show as, you know, the pop culture moves. So five years ago, they changed an old, they took one of the UPCs that was registered to their brand, that they were no longer selling, it had been discontinued for years. And it had been on Amazon, but it hadn't been used in a long time. And so they recreated it five years ago. And they they changed it to a new listing. No problem, no big deal. And then we went to optimize the listing this last year. And they got a policy violation for fundamentally changing the type of product. And we've been like, this product has been this way for five years. We escalated, escalated. They said, this wasn't the original way that this listing was. And they made us create a new ASIN for that product. And when I went to Accelerate and every place I tried to escalate, their basic response was tough poopies. Because you violated the policy. It's always been the policy that you can't change this. So could you get away with this? Speaker 3: Totally. Happens all the time. Speaker 4: Yeah. Could it bite you in the butt in a big way? So if you are doing what we're saying is important, like building an established brand, then the, you know, and plus the, the reviews aren't going to match. That's actually the one thing I train my kids to look specifically for is if the reviews don't match the product, then that's not a review. Then that means that whole listing can't be trusted. And then I think as AI gets better at identifying those things and it's only gonna get better, I can see this causing massive problems if it was adopted. And it could end up with a policy violation or account ban. And it's gonna be hard for you to say, well, I didn't know since that is the letter of the law in terms of service. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it would really depend for me Let's say we're selling these two white dice and I make a slight change to it. The dimples are deeper and the edges are rounder or something like that. Technically, it's a new product. It's changes to the same product. So if you follow the letter of the law, you probably would create a new listing to that. But with changes like that, I would just update the photos and reuse the same. Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't consider that to be a... A good enough example for what Steven's saying here, because if I improve my product, like we, I don't do private label, but those of us, those of you that do, you're constantly trying to iterate a product, right? If you're doing it right, technically, then you are constantly improving a product to the next version, right? iPhone 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, right? If you're just improving your dice, you don't have to change your listing. You just need to update your images, right? You don't have to inform people that this is version two of the dice, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. So maybe a better example would be, let's say you sell a smartwatch and you've got it currently with a nylon band that attaches it to your arm and you Upgrade it to a silicone band. A change like that technically I think would be considered a new product. The brand owner might say it's the same product, we just changed what we're manufacturing the armband out of. So that may be a better example than rounding the dice or something. Speaker 3: Yeah, but to counter that, if I were the brand owner, I would launch it as an individual lease and run it through Vine, then merge it into the parent. Speaker 2: Yes, I was having the same thoughts. Speaker 3: I agree. Speaker 4: I hear he's specifically saying, should you delete a product that you're not using anymore? I don't think he's referring to like brand changes packaging or they have to change something because the supplier goes out and they have to change something. I think it's more substantial things, and the reason that Amazon gets so uptight about that, like to use grocery as an example, there was a gluten-free flour that changed the recipe, but they didn't really alert people of it, and they added pea protein, and what a lot of people are allergic to, and a lot of people got really sick. You know, so like there are things along those lines that they're worried about. And also, you know, Amazon will sometimes randomly find things from like three years ago and then put it back in your inventory. And you know, if you're not watching, you could end up with some really unhappy customers and then that could sink your, your reviews for the product. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. I, my, my, uh, conflict with Steven's post here, My perspective is that I think he agrees with the safety aspect of it and the non-breaking of policy aspect. The only word I have an issue with is in the kind of graphic design work, he uses the word somewhat relevant to the 2.0. I don't really like the somewhat because The perfect example in my mind of when I would be like, without a doubt, you do this is say you have a product with 30 variations, right? And the only difference is like a color design or something like that. And otherwise, it's functionally the same. And you release, you know, five new 10 new designs, two of them flop, and eight of them take off and they're fine, right? Speaker 3: I'll take those stats. Speaker 1: Then when you want to launch more designs, You can either repurpose those older ASINs with the reviews if you want to save money on, say, GTINs or something like that. And then it's functionally identical. You're literally just changing the name of the color. It's not going to be like an allergy issue. It's not going to be a quality issue. Nothing like that. It's still technically not ideal. And if you've got the G10s, why not just make the new versions, but certain scenarios like you could justify it. And I wouldn't imagine you getting flagged down the road. Speaker 3: I see this more along the lines of And I don't necessarily disagree with you, Jackson, but in this case, if you went from this guy to the next version of that guy, that's nothing. That's just... Product improvement. But if you went and you took this listing and you did a full blown Dungeons and Dragons die set, right, that would be different. And my question would be, this is directed at you, Robyn, would you do that? Speaker 4: I have a responsibility to our clients to make sure I don't put them in a place where they're going to have their account at risk later. My concern would be, clearly, the intent of this is review manipulation. If we're being honest, that is the intent and Amazon is smart enough to know that. Now, would you get caught in the millions and millions of listings? Probably not, maybe not, but if it becomes your bestseller and it becomes an issue, is it worth the saving of $42 to get a GTIN the right way and never have to worry about it? For me, that would be worthwhile. And we don't have to worry about things like, you know, returns and, you know, like other skew, like it would just clean, keep, it keeps things clean. And so I don't think the benefit is worth the risk for most products if it is a If it is a product update, like we're making the dices deeper or we're changing the packaging, that's different than, and to his credit, he does say it should be a like for like product. So he's not saying just do what the black hat people are doing, just to clarify there. But my concern is that Amazon is gonna get stricter and stricter about this UPC thing Being found more liable for more things. And so I, for me, I would not advise it to a client because the risks don't outweigh the benefit for me. But I am, I am a conservative player. So, you know, yeah. Speaker 3: As am I. However, I actually support dabbling in the gray. In some cases. Right. Because it's well, your lawyer just interpreted this differently than mine. Right. And if it were my product, I probably would repurpose this for a dungeon, a D&D dice set dice set. Right. Because what is the cost and time value of acquiring 500 stars and being and remaining at a four and a half star? It's a lot. I understand, Robyn, you're talking about getting the GTIN, but I'm thinking of how much time, money, and effort was required to acquire 500 reviews and ratings and to be at a four and a half star. Tens of thousands of dollars, or in this case, well, this is a very inexpensive item. Let's call it thousands of dollars, 10 grand, right? Let's just say, plus the amount of time, three months, four months, five months, six months, right? Depending on how deep your pockets are. If I could fast track that, I would. Speaker 4: But if this dice is in a variation with other dice, you're not gonna lose all the reviews. You would just be adding on. So the reviews wouldn't even play a part. So we had a toy company that came out with a new product because there was a supply issue and they had to change the substance of the toy. They had to change one of the primary materials. And so we added it as a variation with a new version. And it is a new version and had a new UPC. And so they didn't lose any of those reviews. Speaker 3: Okay, fair point. Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm like, even the example I gave is a pretty edge case, because if you're doing your parentage correctly, you add a new variation. As long as you don't separate it from the family, it's old reviews are going to sit there in the pool. All right. Speaker 3: In that case, I just use this die set listing to sell used car parts. Speaker 2: Well, you got to be careful because Amazon's gotten pretty strict on the variations as well. But if you can get away with it, I was going to variations and it's a legit variation, I would do it that way, rather than repurposing the listing for sure. But the good news, Stephen Pope is going to be on the live next week. Speaker 3: All right, let's grill him. Speaker 2: I'll bring it up to him next week and we'll get his reply. Yeah. Speaker 4: Make sure I said respectfully. Unknown Speaker: That's right. Speaker 3: Don't worry, Steven. Robyn respectfully threw up in her mouth. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 4: I've just seen this go badly and that was before the, you know, so it comes from seeing it happen a couple of times within just our, you know, We have less than 50 accounts. We've seen it come up pretty, you know, at a decent clip. Speaker 2: Be careful. Speaker 3: It's definitely a dangerous thing to do. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 3: Absolutely. I jest a little bit here on what I'm saying and I'm making statements to try and test people's thoughts, but yeah, it is absolutely dangerous. I do not think you should do anything that puts your account potentially at risk because 90% of the sellers out there are not going to have a problem doing the most egregious black hat stuff. Well, maybe not 90%, but a large percentage get away with the most crazy black hat stuff. But those of us that walk to the letter of the law, it seems that if we sneeze in the wrong direction, that Amazon backhands us. So I don't mess around with that stuff. But again, I do support We're operating a little bit in the gray, as long as it's not a direct violation. Because technically it's still white. White hot. Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to decide your risk tolerance, I guess. It's up to each individual. But all right, let's jump on to the last article here before we wrap up. And I know, Robyn, you have to jump off a little early. So just wave adios when that time comes. So this last article here, eBay listings to appear on Facebook Marketplace. eBay sellers can now reach a wider audience as their listings may appear on Facebook Marketplace thanks to a new partnership between eBay and Meta. This collaboration aims to enhance visibility and sales by leveraging Facebook's user base, although some speculate it is motivated by Meta's legal challenge with the European Commission over competition concerns. So we'll jump over to you right away, Robyn, and get your thoughts on this. Speaker 4: This is one of those things kind of like when Amazon was saying TikTok and everything else, I kind of want to see how it plays out because there's how they think it will go and how they will go. Zach has made quite a bit of a splash in the news, and there's a lot of people talking about this and that with Facebook right now. I think that it could be really good and help people streamline their listings. It's just how well will that inventory juggler system that they have, or if it goes here, will there be a lag? Will there be issues? And then how much adoption will there be? So I think that I would have to see how it actually rolls out Real life to make my judgment. I don't have a strong I don't have no like the guttural feeling that I had as much on this as I did on the other topics. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, I like it. But the problem is, is that Facebook's marketplace really kind of sucks. I think this is an area where Facebook really drops the ball. I mean, TikTok shop should not be what we're talking about. It should be Facebook marketplace. But, you know, Facebook, like put up Facebook marketplace and just kind of gave up on it stopped implementing it or stopped improving it, I should say. The same thing can be said about their events, like trying to find an event on Facebook is dang near impossible. And those are two things that Facebook should be running the show on events and their marketplace because they have the platform, they have the eyeballs there, but for some reason it seems like they never really cared about those two areas very much. Yeah. Speaker 3: You know, when Facebook Marketplace was launched, the place to be at that time was Craigslist, at least in America. And so they, you know, they took, like everyone went to Craigslist to find out what was being sold in their area. Everyone. And when Facebook Marketplace launched, Within a year or two, nobody was going to Craigslist. It was only used for job placement and the occasional other stuff, right? By comparison. And so they swiped that entire audience, right? And once they had that audience, did they really have to do anything more? No, they were still on Facebook, which is all they gave a shit about. Speaker 2: But just imagine if they had done what TikTok shop has done inside of Facebook. I mean, it could have been amazing. Speaker 3: But jillions of dollars more value would have been added to their stockholders. Speaker 2: I think they got too bogged down with bureaucracy over there with everything else going on. All big companies end up getting bogged down with bureaucracy in a lot of cases. And I think that was the case with Facebook where they, they changed from a company that is building new things and creating new things into a company that is trying to get new stuff. You know, they acquired Instagram, they acquired WhatsApp. I mean, Facebook hasn't built anything since Facebook. They've only acquired things. Speaker 3: Well, I mean, it's, it's cheaper, probably cheaper to do that, right? Speaker 2: In some cases, yeah. I mean all the big companies do that. If you look at Nestle, Coca-Cola, everything new is all acquired. Speaker 3: Yeah. Regarding eBay though, so this reminds me of a time when like Chevy, at the time when they were selling a bunch of trucks and Suburbans and stuff like that, I think the EPA said, well, listen, your overall fleet of vehicles needs to have an average miles per gallon of this or above. So they made the Geo Metro that got like 34 miles to the gallon. It was an absolute piece of ugly padookie. But it got the gas mileage and it made their average go up so that they could continue to sell their Suburbans and trucks. This is what that looks like to me. Like, no, no, we're not in competition. We allow other people to put their products on here and they'll implement and there will be some sort of listing on there, like buy this from eBay. And it says in this thing here that when they go to finish purchasing, they'll go over to eBay, right? So all they're doing is arbitraging eBay listings so that they can, uh, say, see, see, um, European Union, whoever that commission is. Uh, this is, we're, we're including everybody here. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: If they go too far with it, Facebook Marketplace is going to be blasted by just tons and tons and tons of listings because Their keyword, their results, the SERPs, search engine result pages or listings for keywords are garbage on Facebook marketplace. So I see a way to absolutely game that via eBay to get in front of those eyeballs. Because who wouldn't want to be in front of potentially every Facebook user that's interested in what you're selling? Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Speaker 1: So on this one, though, I don't even follow. So is the claim that Facebook marketplace by being present is hurt like Facebook marketplace is somehow competition for eBay, but because their competition for eBay, they're hurting competent hindering competition. I'm confused. Speaker 2: No, so I'm not completely up to date on the European commission, but essentially, uh, the European commission ruled that Facebook marketplace was excluding competition somehow by, because, you know, they, they run the social media and then they have the marketplace. And so they have a monopoly on the Facebook marketplace. And that's where they're in violation, so they need to open it up, I guess, for other competition. It's really weird in exactly how they think Facebook Marketplace is a monopoly. They're basically looking at it like Facebook Marketplace is a monopoly inside of Facebook, and therefore we can't allow that. Speaker 1: It's strange, because it's like, that would be like saying, Amazon is a monopoly within Amazon. You need to have eBay listings propagating into Amazon. Speaker 2: It's like, what are you talking about? Speaker 1: You can go and create an eBay account, you know, so. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's which is exactly why I consider this to be the Geo Metro for eBay. It's like, The government said, this is bad. No, no, no. You can't do this. We think this. And they go, okay, we did a thing. There you go, government. Speaker 4: Happy? Speaker 1: Good. Speaker 3: Everybody's happy. Speaker 2: We're going to throw a handful of eBay listings in and say that we're allowing competition. Speaker 3: Yeah. And here's a million bucks to your next campaign. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what it feels like, unfortunately. If they actually did it and Meta actually cared about their Facebook marketplace, And did something like TikTok shop and then a partnership with eBay, where the eBay items can be purchased right inside a Facebook marketplace. And, you know, there's a cut of that that goes the meta somehow, kind of like the Amazon and TikTok deal. It could be amazing for consumers, but unfortunately, it's probably just a, we're trying to avoid getting fined more kind of thing. All right. Yeah. It's unfortunate. I would love to see Facebook really take off. You know, I mean, Facebook is annoying, but it's also nice to stay up and connected with friends and family. There's a lot of people that I first met on Facebook that I've become friends in real life. It's great to be able to stay in contact with those people. Facebook's good for that. Speaker 1: Yeah, well, hopefully they successfully go down the X path and stop fact checking all the fake news. Speaker 2: That's what they claim. That's what he claimed. We'll see what actually happens. Speaker 1: Sounds like a lot of stuff is getting on a different path to go with the flow of how the country's going. Speaker 2: Well, that's the big question, right? Even if he does do that, and he stops, you know, content moderation so much, does it just go right back to what it was before if someone else gets elected in four years? Speaker 1: Yeah, who knows? Yeah. Speaker 2: Cool. All right, guys. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you joining us. Everybody out there watching or listening. I appreciate it. And we'll see you next Friday. Speaker 3: See you later, everyone. Speaker 2: Have an awesome week and weekend. Unknown Speaker: This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening, fellow Amazon seller. And always remember, success is yours if you take it. Speaker 2: Hey, if you made it this far in the show, I really hope you enjoyed it and I'd like to ask you a favor. Could you head on over to Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this and leave us a review? It would be greatly appreciated and would help us continue to grow the show and offer more episodes for you. Thank you. God bless and have an awesome day.