Amazon News: Prime Day Deal Drought, AI Push & Seller Pitfalls

Amazon News: Prime Day Deal Drought, AI Push & Seller Pitfalls 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 1: Hello, everybody. Welcome, another Friday, Amazon Seller News Live. Appreciate you joining us. Today we've got Robyn from Marketplace Blueprint. Welcome back, Robyn. Speaker 2: Thanks for having me again. Always happy to be here. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Appreciate you being able to join. You always have excellent insights. I'm looking forward to the news today with you. So yeah, we got some big news, of course, in the last couple of days, Amazon finally announced Prime Day. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and maybe you can give us some insights as to, you know, what some of your clients are doing to prepare and just give everybody out there watching some tips and such. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into it. So Amazon Prime Day extends to four days with new features and celebrity deals. Prime Day 2025 will run from July 8th to 11th, offering Prime members 96 hours of exclusive discounts on everything from household essentials to luxury brands. This year includes a new Today's Big Deals feature with themed daily drops from major brands like Samsung and Levi's. Amazon is also leveraging AI shopping tools and celebrity campaigns like LeBron James to enhance discovery and personalization. For Amazon sellers, this longer window and deeper platform engagement mean bigger demand spikes and more chances to move inventory fast. Potentially anyway. So Robyn, let's get your initial take on the four days of Prime quote day this year. Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting that they're doing four days when, you know, anecdotally, at least it's, you know, people are saying that there's less deals. Or the deals aren't as aggressive or people's plans to go into Prime Day aren't nearly as aggressive as they have been because of worries about inventory and things like that. I think maybe it will kind of give them, you know, no matter how the Prime Day does, it will still be their biggest Prime Day ever because it's a longer period of time. But I do think it takes a, you do need to like really review your strategy because a four-day tentpole event is a little bit different. You can't just rely on one lightning deal or one short deal. You want to make sure that you've got things covered from multiple different angles. It's still going to be a really big event, but it's going to be interesting to see how deep some of the discounts are because of everything that's been happening with brands and inventory. Speaker 1: It's interesting that they're going to four days and like you said, it's going to be their biggest Prime Day ever, particularly because it's four days. It'll be interesting to see how each day compares to last year and the year before, to see if it actually is an increase in sales or not. So far, the economy, at least the numbers and everything are coming along good. And we got Danon popping in. How's it going, Danon? Speaker 3: Hey, sorry about that. I don't know what's going on, but I've got two live streams I'm supposed to be on right now, but I don't have a link for the other one. So here I am until I get that link, I guess. Speaker 1: No worries. Well, we're just talking about a prime day. So I appreciate you jumping on. We can get your insights. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: But four days this year. So as Robyn mentioned, it'll be their biggest prime day ever because it's four days. They're going to add it all together. Speaker 3: Prime week. Speaker 1: Yeah, Prime Week, Prime Month will be next, perhaps. Prime Week next year and then Prime Month the year after that, perhaps. But yeah, for me, I don't know. I'm always torn on Prime Day. As most people know out there, I do a lot of reselling and helping brands and such resell their products on Amazon. So not as much I'm a private label, although I do some of that. So Prime Day for me typically ends up just shifting sales from the week before and the week after into that Prime Day, however long that is. And it kind of averages out if I look at the total amount. Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't, I have literally never done a Prime Day deal. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 1: Nothing at all? Not even like coupons or just sales or discounts? Nothing? Speaker 3: Oh, hold on. My wife is frowning at me and saying, We've done it once or twice. I lied, apparently, but I didn't know I lied until my wife told me I lied, which is part for the course. She knows everything. I know nothing. So, but we, I know we didn't see a lift from it. Nothing significant. And there's no reason for us to eat into our profits for it. And like, we don't run lightning deals. We don't do Prime Day. And when I say we've done it once or twice, what, like, how long ago? Yeah. When Prime Day was one day when it first released like eight years ago. Yeah. Okay. So for all intents and purposes, we've never run a Prime Day deal, but yeah, exactly. I know that lots of people see a huge lift in sales and I believe that there is some, you know, when you get that massive conversion rate, I believe that you see some additional lift from that organically and Robyn probably would know better than I on this, but yeah, I think it's worth it for some people, just not for me. Speaker 2: So what we've seen is if you don't offer a discount, it has to be significant, it really does need closer to be that 20-25% discount. If you don't have any discounts, you're right, it's going to just average out, you're not going to even maybe even see just a small bump. And it barely covers the decrease in conversion before. But if you are participating with those deals, then you can, there are certain types of products that do better on Prime Day than others. So if you have canned beans, nobody wakes up on Prime Day and be like, man, I really hope those black beans go on sale. You know, so you're gonna see a smaller lift. If you have something like a Roomba, you know, a luxury item, something that people want but have been having trouble justifying the cost, like a Dyson vacuum or, you know, a massage thing or something like that, those do really, really well. And what your strategy, you have to really decide, are we going to wait and sit it out? And, you know, conserve our ad budget for after Prime Day is over or, you know, go all in. So we had one brand, I think this was one or two Prime Days ago that they decided to go all in. They not only ran a lightning deal, but they ran a clippable coupon on top of that with heavy ad spend. And I think they like, I want to say it was like six or seven times their normal daily sales. And you might say, well, at that discount, that's crazy, because you're living away so much margin. They're in a very competitive category, but all of those sales put them in a great organic position, and then we pulled back on the ads to try to maintain that first position. So if you have the pockets that are deep enough, it can, and your competitors don't, then it can really help. Now, this year's a little unique, because not all brands have, to do that strategy not only requires the capital for the ads, Not only requires capitals for the discounts, but it also requires that you have enough inventory where you're not gonna end up short stocked. And I think that's why this could be a long winter for resellers and we might see fewer discounts or more discounts coming from 1P on Amazon because a lot of companies do have concerns about inventory levels as they head into Q4. So, sorry, hope that wasn't too long of an answer. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, not at all. I mean, and that's a big, big question this year because it actually plays into this other article that's kind of right on the back of Prime Day or has to do with Prime Day. But some Amazon sellers submit fewer deals for Prime Day as brands hold on to pre-tariff inventory like gold. So yeah, it kind of plays right into what you're saying there, Robyn. You want to do the deals potentially if you have the inventory. And there's a lot of still still a lot of uncertainty. It's starting to iron itself out and getting more smooth with different deals and such that have been brokered with China and some other countries in the UK and such. But there's still some uncertainty. So there could be a lot of hesitancy to run really big deals and blow through inventory. Speaker 2: Well, and the deal with China still has a pretty hefty tariff. So we started talking to our brands about planning for tariffs in November. And a lot of them were already on top of it. I don't want to make it seem like we were all wise. A lot of them are like, oh, no, I'm already on it. A lot of our brands heavily bought inventory in December. But we had one brand that they really gambled on that the tariff thing would be solved within a certain period of time. They actually got hit with that 145 percent tariff. It just arrived like three days before the tariff was reduced and they ended up with like a $40,000 tariff bill for a smaller shipment. And so, I think that there still is uncertainty because You know, things do change. And the other thing is, even if they stay exactly where they are, for people who are sourcing components or their products from China, they have a lot less margins. So a lot of our brands that even had been more aggressive growth, we're hearing a shift in the conversation to profitability. When you couple the inventory issues with increased interest costs, you know, it does make it so your cash flow is really, really important to be monitoring. And brands just can't, you know, go for broke the way that they could have, you know, two or three years ago. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's gonna be kind of an interesting storm to see exactly how it plays out. Because, you know, the numbers from May show that inflation is flat. The working class people have had an increase in salary larger than For a long time, I forget exactly when they said, but you know, so wages are going up. Inflation is relatively staying flat. The economy is continuing to chug along, but you've got a lot of companies that may have low inventory or have paid those high tariffs and are increasing prices. And so it's definitely gonna be interesting to see what kind of deals show up. And it could potentially be an opportunity, right? If this is true, and in the end, less people submit deals, and you're the one who does submit deals, you're gonna have more customers to yourself, right? Speaker 2: If you have the deals and you sell through and then for some reason you're not able to restock, then that hurts you long term. Speaker 1: Correct. Speaker 2: Really, it's more about consumer confidence. It's where do people think. Even things like uncertainty in the Middle East and all of those things can play a factor. Now, it could be that people really use this Prime Day. It's close to back to school time. There might be some people that are even shopping early for Christmas because they're worried about inventory. It could be that it still ends up being a really, really great sales day. Of course, there will be a lot of sales attributed to that period. It'll just be interesting to see how deep the discounts are. Speaker 3: We definitely I say we I don't buy Christmas presents, but my wife definitely uses days like Prime Day to get Christmas presents and or or also those luxury items that, hey, you know, we've needed a new Roomba for about Three years I've rebuilt our Roomba like man must be five times. Um, and that this would be a time that we would do that, you know. Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. There's a lot of people that think like that, I'm sure. My mother, growing up, she would buy Christmas presents all year long. Anytime she would see a sale on something, she'd buy it. If you opened her closet, it's stuffed full of Christmas presents that we would get come Christmas. A lot of people do that, stocking up throughout the year. You definitely could see a lot of that. Robyn, give us an idea with your clients how you help them plan or recommend them plan for inventory if they're going into a prime day. Let's say they have a product that sells 10 units a day and they're going to run a big prime deal. How do you plan for the actual deal and then the months after the deal for inventory-wise? Speaker 2: 10 units a day is a pretty small number. So for that, it doesn't make sense to do a lightning deal. And lightning deals and all those things are gone. So then we're looking at either a prime exclusive discount or a coupon. There's a couple of things that play in it. One is reference price. So if you haven't run lightning deals before, you basically say, I'm willing to get X amount of inventory at Y discount. And you have to commit to that months and months in advance. Now you can cancel it, but you have to do this minimum discount. If they see that because of the discounting you've been doing, that's not actually the discount that you're saying it is. So the minimum discount is like, let's say 20%. If they look at your reference price over the last 30 days and they say, actually, that's not a 20% discount, they'll reject the deal. Depending on what the discounting structure has been for the entire year, that could play an impact in it. That might be where as we're heading into two or three months ahead of a tentpole event, that's when we want to really make sure that if we're going to need to do a price increase, we want to make sure we're staying well ahead of that because we need to make sure that that reference price is set well before the tentpole event. The other thing we're going to look at is inventory. How would this project for inventory? What is their lead times if things went better than expected? What is the potential liability if things go not as great as expected as far as long-term storage fees, other ways to move the inventory? Maybe they can multi-channel fulfill or something along those lines. That's pretty rare. Usually, we have pretty good forecasting on that. The other thing we're going to look at is what are their KPIs for profitability and advertising? If we know that their top cost is X and their landed cost is this and this is how much they need to net, We work with them to see what discount is appropriate. If we can't hit the metric of what we really need, then that all informs the ad budget. Because it's not just about the discount, you also need to have the ad budget. And so we'll look at all of those things and then we might decide to pull back on ad spend the week or two prior. We might decide to go all in. So it's really gonna depend on is their goal ranking? Is their goal profitability? What metrics are the stakeholders really focused on? So when you're working with like a publicly treated company, they might really be looking at top line revenue more than profitability because of earnings reports. Whereas sometimes, especially smaller brands, you know, if we're not really careful to kind of make sure that we're guarding profitability and if we're losing money per unit, then it needs to have a specific goal. So kind of like discounting, subscribe and save initial purchases. We know that we're going to make it up on follow up purchases, but we need to have the data then to say, okay, we can see that subscribe and save holders, you know, are staying on X number of months. So it totally justifies the cost. Of losing, you know, a few dollars per unit on the initial sale to kind of promote it during this big event. Speaker 3: I have literally nothing to add to that. No value whatsoever. I can only provide comedic relief if required. Speaker 1: Yeah, the subscribe and save ones, which, Dana, your products are probably, you probably have subscribe and save set up. Speaker 3: No, we don't. Speaker 2: We've got to do that first hit for you, man. Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, the thing is, is that We don't have the margin for subscribe and save. If I'm not mistaken, you have to do at least 10%. Is that right, Robyn? Speaker 2: No. There is a portion of subscribe and save that is covered by Amazon. What I'm not talking about is necessarily increasing the subscribe and save discount from five to 15. There's a coupon that you can do that says, I'm sure you've seen it where it's like, get 25% off your first purchase when you do subscribe and save. If you know that you have a consumable item that's replenished 30 days and you can look at that customer data in Amazon and see when people order from us, how often are they reordering and you can see that people are reordering, especially with a new product launch. You want to make sure people are happy with the product. Then you can discount that first initial purchase to get them into subscribe and save and then You would say, okay, we're not going to make a ton of money on this initial purchase. I mean, we're going to break even on this initial purchase, but by having them in subscribe and save, it will be less expensive than retargeting them with advertising. Speaker 3: Which we also don't do. Speaker 1: With the subscribe and save though, you can do 5%, 10% or 15%. It might be worth at least checking out 5% and turning it on because then you get that automatic sale every month or every two months, whatever they set it at. Speaker 3: Jade, I think you should be joining us on these because she's sitting right next to me listening, giving me thumbs up, thumbs down, threatening me, stuff like that. But she's going to look into that now because I think the last time we looked at subscribe and save is when it very first came out and it was 20%. Speaker 2: And the data now is so much better. Before it was like Maybe it's working, you know, but they give you so much more data now on repeat customers. So it's really, really valuable. And then the other thing to think about with subscribance is if you have a product that has a short expiration date and you've been using two SKUs to kind of help manage that, you can shift subscribance from one SKU to another, but it is a bit of a process. And it doesn't make sense to invest in this push for subscribe and save if you can't maintain that inventory. Because, you know, that is really what's going to be required to keep those subscriptions. So make sure you have kind of, it should not be a willy nilly thing. It really needs to be a thought out strategy. Speaker 3: Yeah, cool. Speaker 2: Not that you would do willy nilly, but. Speaker 1: I've got a product that it sells pretty good. It was selling upwards of 600 plus units a month and I think we had a hundred and some people on subscribe and save. And then Amazon decided to throw the meltable tag on it. And we couldn't get it out of it because I think the requirement is you have to prove that it can sustain like 150 degrees. Fahrenheit. And there was no way this is like a candy product. So it wasn't going to sustain that. We ship it throughout the whole summer FBM and never have any problems with returns or anything like that. So it's not like it actually melts. But you know, there wasn't no pay any paperwork that we're going to be getting that can prove it. So yeah. Speaker 2: And 150 sounds crazy, but it can 100%, like if it's 117 in Phoenix, the inside of those UPS trucks are hot. It's basically like an easy bake oven for your products. Speaker 1: Definitely. Speaker 3: Oh, there you go. Speaker 1: The problem is though, we've lost all those subscribe and save, because they don't allow you to move that over to an FBM. Fulfillment, unfortunately. Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, then in that case, what you should do is contact the candy company and say, Hey, listen, I've got a new idea. We do bake during shipment, only in the summer, fresh baked, arrived fresh baked. You say, hey, Amazon, just put it at the top of the bins, the top bins, and it bakes on the way during delivery. Speaker 1: Send it out raw and it's done by cooking by the time it gets there. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a good idea. You should do it. All right, great. Speaker 1: Sounds like a good idea to deliver fresh baked bread in the Phoenix, Arizona area. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Very good. Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to watch Prime Day. That's for sure. Any other thoughts on Prime Day? Comments or anything like that, Dana or Robyn? Speaker 2: I'll just repeat what I've said before. Advertising on Amazon is like fighting with a toddler. Pick your battles, but win them at all costs. Speaker 1: Yes, for sure. I think it makes sense if you can sustain the inventory, if you have the inventory to sustain it and you either have the profit margin to support the discount or you're willing to take that loss to get that ranking, improve your ranking. With headlines like this, we'll see if it turns out to be true or not, but you potentially have more customers for less deals, which could lift the deals that are out there to get more sales. Hurry up and wait and see though, but the time to get your inventory in is just about or pretty much past. So by the time you're watching this, hopefully you've already got your truckloads heading in if you're going to be doing prime deals. Speaker 3: I think we've only got 17 units in inventory right now. So we're totally screwed. Speaker 1: 17 units. There you go. Plenty. You definitely won't run out. All right. Let's go ahead and jump onto the next story here. Slide us over to the side because this headline is pretty big. So Amazon shuts down post program after failing to gain traction with shoppers. Amazon will officially shut down its post program by July 31st. Following low engagement and a broader redesign of its site, posts allowed brands to share lifestyle content in a social media style feed, but failed to align with the shopping behaviors of Amazon customers who come with purchase intent not to browse like on Instagram or TikTok. Experts say the tool never delivered meaningful ROI and its removal allows advertisers to focus on proven ad formats like sponsored brands. For Amazon sellers, this means less distraction, more emphasis on ad strategies that actually convert. I wouldn't really call posts and ads. They're referring to it kind of like an ad here, but it wasn't really an ad. It's just like the social media. It's the first social media aspect of Amazon that they tried to create, which I use posts. I post for the brands that we work with all the time, usually once or twice a week. It doesn't get a lot of traction usually, but every once in a while you get one that takes off and will drive some sales. But I can't say that I'm surprised that they're ending it. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, they're probably going, well, we don't have a lot of adoptions, which means we can't eventually charge for it. So we shouldn't keep pouring money into it because it's not going to make us money. Speaker 1: 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 2: We've had several brands that have done it. Anytime a brand would ask me about them, what I would say is, if you have the kind of product that has fun, engaging social media, they are already doing other places that is already yielding you results, putting that onto Amazon posts isn't going to hurt you. It's a long-term game. You have to expect six months of consistent posting before you even start to see really any organic traffic. We have had some brands that have used it successfully, but they're usually in baby or beauty or art, something where they were able to provide the posts and They work very consistent about it. For most brands, it just was not worth the lift. There had been talk about how you were going to be able to run ads and this was going to be great because you're going to get to be in the feed and it was going to be wonderful. But for most brands, it didn't yield a lot. It took a long time to get the organic results. And I kind of agree that, you know, when I first came out, I just didn't see customers adopting this. But, you know, it never hurts to try. And Amazon was really, for a while, they're giving some heavy, you know, like some good organic traffic when they were first trying to promote it. I think it, you know, it's funny because we were on a call with an Amazon rep. We met last week and we're like, you know, they, she recommended Amazon posts or it was like the day or two after and Nate was like, you guys just killed that program. And she's like, no, we didn't. And he's like, yes, she did. And so it's, it's always interesting to see how these things kind of roll out. Speaker 3: It also shows that Amazon doesn't know what Amazon is doing. Speaker 2: Well, that's not the agent's rep. Amazon is purposely siloed like that. It's a feature, not a bug, but it definitely feels like a bug sometimes. Right. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: What's interesting, so I just jumped over to Amazon Posts. I was going to take a look at some of my latest statistics and right next to, so they got the posts under brand content in the Amazon ads. And right next to Amazon Posts, it says new. Okay. I don't think it's so new anymore and you're discontinuing it, but you still got it labeled new. Speaker 2: Well, and you know, she was saying we couldn't, he couldn't find it in the announcement in Seller Central. Like they took it down. Um, so I, you know, maybe they, maybe somebody put posted something that they weren't supposed to. Uh, but I, I, yeah, but I definitely saw it in Seller Central, but then it looked like it disappeared or something. Speaker 1: And now I am looking at my posts here. So like I said, for most of my brands, I've got one of my VAs just posting a couple of times a week. And this is the third one that I've looked at. Let me look at one other one here and see if it's the same. And it is. In May, the engagement and clicks just dropped off a cliff. It went almost to zero in May as if they just shut it off. It's getting a few every once in a while, but totally just tanked. I'm not sure if that is when they decided, okay, we're done with this and just stopped giving it any exposure. For each of the brands I'm looking at, it kind of is like up here steady and then may just start a rapid decline in all of the impressions and clicks and everything. So it definitely appears that they're going to be getting rid of it for sure. Now, Robyn, have you seen any examples of posts taken off for clients and stuff in the past or it's just pretty much... You gotta keep posting and posting and posting for a little bit of graphic. Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to be posting consistently, posting good quality. And then sometimes it doesn't make sense. Even if a brand has a really good social media presence, what you're posting on Instagram might not follow the guidelines for Instagram posts. So usually we tell them, unless we can just move them over, it didn't really make sense. Unless it was a really aesthetic brand, then sometimes we did see some, You know, a decent enough amount of organic traffic that if they already had the assets, it made sense to do. But, you know, if you have to create the assets for it, it just didn't make sense. You should focus on, you know, places where people are actually scrolling. Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I agree with that. And we didn't create anything. We pretty much just took We can go back and forth from Facebook posts or Instagram posts and tweak them a little bit if we needed to. But yeah, I mean, there's not much like this one that we've been posting on in the last 90 days. It's got 1,736 reach, three clicks, 48 engagement and 3,791 viewable impressions. So nothing major going on for pretty much anything. What was that? Speaker 3: But still something. Speaker 1: It's a little bit, but is it worth me having a VA going in, you know, and actually creating the posts and stuff? Probably not. Speaker 3: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think consistency, like Robyn said earlier, consistency is key. Like you don't, it's social media is no longer, so any social posting is no longer instant gratification. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 3: You have to be consistent. I see that in my podcasts. Like, I don't do a bunch of optimization and promotion and run ads or anything like that for my podcast, but there's a post six days a week, there's a video six days a week on there. And so I've just seen organic engagement go up and up and up and up. And, you know, social media has been like that for quite a few years. If you're not consistently doing it, it's, Or even if you're inconsistently doing it it's almost the same as not doing it all but i think that. I think that you should be taking advantage of every avenue to put yourself out there, put your brand out there, put your name out there, whatever. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I think post has always kind of been hidden from Amazon. It's always been kind of one of those things. It's there, but you don't really know if it's doing anything or where it's going or what's happening. You know, Amazon never really, They pushed it, like you said, Robyn, a little bit in the beginning, but then it just, it kind of became an afterthought pretty quickly, I think. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. Speaker 2: Well, now they have creator connection, you know, and other things for social media, for like influencers. And, you know, it also doesn't really make sense for them to try to force this Amazon post thing now that they have these partnerships with TikTok, which got that other renewal. So congratulations to TikTok for another stay in the execution. And Instagram, you know, it makes more sense. I think that they've realized, you know, they, this is not a, they're not going to be able to, I try to like scoop up all of that traffic that they're, and you're seeing this in the way that they're adopting like Amazon, like buy with Prime and things like that. I think they're looking at, like there's some things that we're not going to be able to fully incorporate into our platform. And they're looking to expand in other ways, like the advertising on, you know, Prime videos and like a sponsor display for all business sometimes called non-endemic advertising and DSP. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don't think anyone, at least nobody that I know, I'm sure there's some people out there, but no one is opening their Amazon app if they're looking for social Content. Right. They're opening up their Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or whatever the case may be. Nobody's flipping over in the Amazon app and let's see what's going on in the world today and opening up Amazon to look at that. So it's just a different ecosystem. And I think Amazon has been trying to capture that for a long time, but I don't know if they ever will actually capture it the way they want to. Yeah, it's just a different mindset. Speaker 3: Yeah, I could see, my wife thinks that people will want to see more videos, not necessarily posts, but videos. Speaker 2: Videos are so important. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm on board with that. Like there's not enough videos of products and often when there are videos, it's awful music and like, Pans, zooms, and 360s of a product. That's not helpful at all. You need someone that says, this is what it is, this is what comes with it. There needs to be basically a what's in the box video, features and benefits video, and a lifestyle video of it in use. Speaker 2: And a troubleshooting. Speaker 3: And troubleshooting you say? Speaker 2: For some products you need troubleshooting. So like, you know, like if you're getting reviews that are saying like the back stand doesn't open on it and you're like, push the button right here that says release, you know, like you'd, you'd be surprised how much some of those things make a difference. But I, you're 100% right on that. We're, we're, we, you know, we really want brands to upload videos. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, videos would definitely be better. But even then, Amazon is more like the home shopping network or something like that, right? You're still not, when you're looking for social media stuff, You're not like, oh, let's go get promotion blasted in my face for products that I probably don't want to buy, you know, jumping on Amazon to look at that. But maybe there's some people out there. There's a lot of people who like to watch the shopping network. I'm not one of them, but there's, you know, that network exists. For a reason and my you know, I look at my my my wife's social media every once in a while when she's flipping through or my mother-in-law if she's there and and they'll be watching sometimes these people, you know pitching different products and stuff like that. So people do that. I'm definitely not one of them but that market is out there that like to watch those kind of home shopping network style videos. Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm definitely not one of those people but what I do do is when I'm looking at a product, if I find something that's interesting to me on Amazon, I then go over to YouTube and look for video reviews of that product or even brand videos of that product. Speaker 1: If it's a big enough one, if it's a high enough spend or something that you need to make sure is the right product and is high quality or something, yes. But you're probably not necessarily doing that if you're buying a new trash can for your kitchen or something. Speaker 3: Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. I mean, I want my kitchen trash can to self-clean, self-take itself out. Speaker 1: Well, that I might watch a video on. That'd be kind of interesting. Speaker 2: We have a mill and we love it. Speaker 3: A mill? Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's a... I'm a love-the-planet kind of person. I don't know about the diaper and all that stuff. So it's a composter and you put your food and chicken bones and stuff in it and then it heats it up and makes it into compost and then they come pick it up. Our local composting facility comes and picks up our compost once a month or you can use it to make compost in your backyard. Speaker 3: Oh, interesting. Speaker 2: It's very fancy. Speaker 1: Now that's something somebody would probably watch a video on because they're going to want to research and make sure they're getting something that actually does what they want to do. Cause that's, you're going to have a little bit more of a passion around that kind of thing for people who are buying that. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's just for weirdos like me. It's not, it's not for everybody, but you know, for us it, it makes us happy and we have a lot less trash. Speaker 3: We need weirdos like you on the planet. Speaker 1: Yes. It's good to be a weirdo. We've all got that weirdo on something, so it's all right. Speaker 3: Yep. Speaker 1: Very good. So anything that you guys know of or recommend for brands to do out there as opposed to post if this is something that they have been doing? Creating videos, obviously, we talked about. Do you see a lot of brands jumping into creator connections and doing a lot of posts and such there? Speaker 2: Depends on the brand and it depends on the use case, you know, it is it's not it's not available for everybody, you know, so usually if we have a young, you know more like if I have a brand that's In Walmart, Costco, or they're publicly traded, or they're in Costco, they already have a dedicated social media person. They don't necessarily need our advice. If we have a young or emerging brand, usually what I'll tell them is where I would recommend that you focus either is if you're good at creating content, then you should focus on creating content, building a following, building brand affinity. If you're not good at creating content, then you need to be actively working to build relationships with influencers in your space. And that goes outside of most people's comfort zones, because you'd be like, you know, hey, you know, and but there are there are like, more like, like softer ways instead of a hard pitch to approach influencers. And if your product really is great, you know, we try to If we can limit our clientele to products that we really believe in, then going and having those influencers can make a huge difference. PR firms can be good if you have the right kind of product. Again, nobody's going to get on the news because they have a new flavor of canned beans. But if you have something that's really revolutionary, that can help. But I think making sure you're really clear on who your customer is and where they are We're spending their time. So if you have a 70-year-old demographic, they're less likely to be on TikTok. If you have a younger audience, let's say you have, you know, an 18-year-old audience, then you should really be focusing on Twitch. You know, so especially if it's a video game thing, right? We have a brand that's focused that it's kind of in the niche where people at Comic Con would buy it. And so they're working with influencers in that like nerd geek and I say that with all affection as you can see from the back as a fellow nerd, you know, those spaces. So it's understanding where they shop, where they congregate and some communities won't be on any social media. Some will be in discords and slacks and so you have to figure out how are you going to access where those people naturally reside. Speaker 3: You're definitely a nerd if you can drop discord as a community location. Speaker 2: Well, not only am I a nerd, but I have raised two nerds. My cousin has a, her son was like a junior Olympics sports swimmer, and she was complaining about waking up early. I was like, see, you had raised your kids as nerds. You could sleep until 10 like me. Speaker 3: Because you're up until three playing video games like me. Speaker 1: Yeah, this Discord and Slack is like the old school IRC channels and IRQ, which was the chat program. Speaker 2: ICQ. Speaker 1: ICQ, yes, ICQ. Yeah, good times. Things have come full circle. Speaker 2: I had an AOL CD. Speaker 3: Oh yeah, me too. I used to get those in the mail and throw them away. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all the time. AOL, that was, I was the nerd back then who was always like, AOL is not the real internet. Speaker 2: You gotta do your thing. After you get like, you was like, AOL was like the gateway drug that got you into, you know, IRC and yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 3: You got mail. Speaker 2: You did that really well. Speaker 3: Yeah. Practiced it ever since I was a kid. Speaker 1: I was a computer nerd back then that if you pull up If you guys know the Firefox browser, of course, when that first launched, Firefox 1.0, they took out a full page ad in the New York Times and created the Firefox logo out of people's names who donated. And my name is in there. Unknown Speaker: Nice. Speaker 1: Yeah, I was a big Firefox fan back then. Speaker 3: Firefox was good. Speaker 1: It's still pretty good, but I got to use Chrome all the time because most of the Amazon tools only work in Chrome and not Firefox, unfortunately. Speaker 2: My son's always like, why are you using Chrome and Edge? You should be using Opera. And then there's another one that he wants us to use. But he's pretty deep into the nerd. He's into electrical engineering and stuff. Speaker 3: Yeah, he probably uses Brave and DuckDuckGo. Speaker 1: Yes, I've got Brave on the computer. Brave is nice because you can load Chrome plugins, but there's still some things that don't work. Speaker 2: We do some of the custom automations that we build for clients in Bubble. It can do okay with Edge and Chrome, but much outside of that, the development side of it doesn't work as well. Speaker 1: It's interesting, though, that for those that remember the internet browser wars, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome were battling it out. Netscape back in the day, but now pretty much everything except for Firefox, I think, is run on Chrome. Well, Safari is separate as well, but that's pretty minimal. It's user-based, but Edge, which is the new Internet Explorer, is now Chrome-based, so Chrome has just taken over everything. Speaker 2: Have you seen Cindy Kroll's talk on Chrome and how it's using Google? It was a really fascinating presentation. She did it at PubCon and SMX. She's kind of reverse engineered to see that Google is using Chrome to render pages and using that to crawl. And so they're basically using the computer of your own thing. So it was a really interesting presentation. If you're into that kind of stuff, she's from Mobile Moxie. Her presentation was really, she's just fascinating. So she's a badass if you want to follow her. Speaker 3: I mean, I haven't seen it, but that makes total sense. Why not crowdsource the processing power of the people that are using your product? I mean, we do that with, or I should say, we've done that with Chrome plugins using the, you know, the user logged into Amazon plus logged into the Chrome plugin, makes it so that you can acquire data outside of, from their seller central that is not available through the API. Speaker 2: But you have to think about that too. That's a security risk because that means that as you load your MyChart page, your private health information could potentially be stored someplace. So it's, you know, and or if you have like private financials or Things on those sites, so it's an interesting thing. Speaker 1: Yeah, you got to be careful when you're loading plugins on a browser that you don't know or even apps on your phone because if you're clicking allow it to read all pages in your browser, whatever site you go to that app or that extension has access to all the information on the page. Yeah, so yeah, that's that's one way that you know hackers get access to things a lot of times So you definitely got to be careful. Speaker 3: Hmm tik-tok app. Speaker 1: Yes, definitely. All right, let's go ahead and jump on to the last story here. And get your opinions on these three common mistakes Amazon sellers should avoid, according to Chris Turton. So Amazon expert Chris Turton highlights three things sellers should not focus on review count obsession, day to day decision making and preserving the launch honeymoon period. Reveal volume doesn't guarantee high conversions or rankings. Sales velocity matters more and trying to manipulate reviews can get your account suspended. Making decisions on daily sales data is misleading as Amazon's data isn't fully accurate for 72 hours. Using a 30-day window yields better results. And finally, every product naturally drops in rank after launch. Don't obsess over keeping it at the top. Instead, focus on sustainable growth. Speaker 3: I've got a couple of opinions here. So some data from Amazon, not all, but some data isn't fully reconciled for 72 hours. Some of it's not reconciled for like five days. So the best way to run your business with absolute I can't say absolute certainty, but with the best possible results on numbers is going to be every two weeks when they close out their statement periods. That's what I think. But that doesn't mean that you should ignore your business on a day-to-day or a week-to-week, but I do firmly believe that You you should be running your business off of longer term Metrics rather than day-to-day because the day one day is not a trend, right? Yes a Lower sales day compared to yesterday. That's not a trend. That is a that is a single Change, but not which the direction that it's going overall. So if you're managing your business with statistics, you need to be managing on trends, not flashing the pan data. So that's number one. Review velocity. I totally agree. I think that, and this is me, I'm in the review business, you know, or the review removal business. My top selling product only has a little over 300 reviews. It's been on Amazon for nine years or something like that. It's got a 4.6 star rating and my conversion rate is absolutely insane. But with that being said, That's in part due to the fact that I'm not advertising, right? And we have brand search. So, but you know, regardless of that, my, my star rating is still really high on a supplement, mind you, right? That's hard to do. And so it's, it's not, it's not about the quantity of, of reviews you have. Oh, another thing yesterday, Somebody that I know got hit with review manipulation and Amazon stripped out literally thousands of reviews, ASIN by ASIN. They went across their entire catalog, stripped out roughly between two and 4,000 on every single ASIN. Took them from like, you know, 2,000 to 5,000 reviews down to like hundreds, 200 to 700 reviews. You know what's interesting? They saw an increase in their star rating and a decrease in their BSR over the next few days. So it's not about how many reviews you have. It's about your overall star rating and by proxy, your conversion rate. That's probably the most important one, I'd say. But yeah, he says buying, faking, misrepresenting reviews is huge Amazon TOS violation. Literally last night, this guy emailed me and said, hey dude, I just had Amazon strip a bunch of stuff for me. And so I took a look. I'm like, hey, this might actually work in your favor. But day-to-day decision-making, yep. You should know what's going on, but not make operational changes based on day-to-day, but trending. Yeah, I think that's what I've got. Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: All right. Very good, Robert. Speaker 2: Um, I would say review volume is a nuanced thing. So if you are launching an iPhone case, yes, you need to be you're not going to get great conversions until you get a lot of reviews. If you are selling a, you know, something that's, you know, you're selling a Dungeons and Dragons themed hat, Then you could probably have two or three reviews and get great conversion. Amazon tells us you need about 25 reviews depending on the category and how competitive it is. That will depend on how many reviews you need. But 100%, we see products that don't have as many reviews doing really, really well as long as the listing is really good, the product quality is good, the sales proposition is really good. And as you launch that, that honeymoon period is really important. Now, if your product is not getting negative reviews, if you have a consistent ad strategy where you're focusing on campaigns that are Aimed at ranking, not incremental sales. You can 100% maintain that top position. But I agree that you don't want to be like, oh no, we dropped from number three to number five in the category or in the subcategory. That's a big panic. We want to look at things. He's 100% right about managing ads on a daily basis. It's like the stock market. There is a delay. If you make decisions based off of the ad performance that happened yesterday, you are making decisions off the wrong data. That data has not settled. You could be killing potentially really important pieces of your campaign. Speaker 3: Sorry Robyn, let me just add one thing. Not necessarily the wrong data, but the incorrect time of that data. Speaker 2: Well, so the data that you, the decision that you're basing that off of, you're right, it's not the data, the answer is not what you think it is. It's gonna change the results, right? So, you know, and the other thing to think about is that returns don't play a factor. You can't see returns coming in and how much that's gonna eat into your margins until over a longer period. That's why, you know, sometimes people come into Amazon wanting this really siloed approach. It will get you to a certain point, but it is very difficult to mean sustainable, profitable, consistent growth on Amazon without a holistic approach where you're looking at listing optimization, advertising, account health, compliance, reviews, all of those things. Going through that flywheel over and over again and looking at what is the ad data and the reviews tell us about what we need to change with the listing. Now we've made that change in the listing. What are we seeing in the ads? Let's A, B test a different title. Products will get it pretty close. We do work really hard to not have to need a lot of A-B testing, because we really focus on trying to make sure we get things right the first time. But it is natural to need to make changes to your listing. And you have to look at that with a holistic peer, because you might see, I have a better conversion rate with this title, but it causes a lot of reviews or negative customer experiences. So even though that converts better, it's converting some of the wrong people, which is a death sentence on Amazon, because Once your product gets suspended for poor performance, it's very difficult to come back from that unless you're able to prove that you've solved that issue. Speaker 1: I agree with what you guys are saying, especially on the reviews. The rating matters a lot more than the quantity. Of course, it depends on the product. Like you said, cell phone cases, you need a lot more to compete where if you're buying a composter, if you've got 100 reviews and a 4.6 star rating, that's probably plenty good. You're going to be able to compete with somebody with 1,000 reviews. No problem. So it all depends on the product for sure. Um, the, the honeymoon period that he mentions here is interesting. Um, there's been some debate as whether the honeymoon period actually exists, but you know, I think it, you definitely see a boost when you launch a new product, of course. Um, and I think he's correct here that you don't want to try to, you know, keep it alive, so to speak. Because people are buying off of reviews, so you're going to have a natural decline potentially after the honeymoon period. But I'm curious, what are your thoughts, Robyn and Danon, on using Vine to get that kind of artificial boost of reviews? I've used it successfully for products and semi-unsuccessfully for other products, depending on the ratings that come back in. Speaker 2: I have a pretty strong feeling on this and we actually warn our brands. We try to remember to warn our brands before they talk to any Amazon ad rep or business development rep that we want to do fine in most cases. After, you have five reviews come in. We wait until the first five reviews come in. We want to make sure that they're positive because even if you've been selling D2C and you know your packaging product is everything, you feel like things are good, you know your customer message, you're all tuned in on that. We had a thing that was like a bath stone. And when they shipped it to Amazon, they've been doing it D to C but that packaging wasn't to the level it needed to be for the warehouses and there was some breakage. So if we had done buying right out of the gate, it would have destroyed their launch, right? We always recommend waiting for the first five reviews. Amazon will tell you the opposite. They say go, go, go. But what I tell people is that the buying is great. They are very, very, very honest reviewers. So the problem is they are very, very, very honest reviewers. And if you're a small brand that's launching with a small quantity, it can be a pretty big hit to the margin. If you're a niche product, it might not even be that necessary because you're gonna get some natural reviews. We tell them one to 3% of customers will leave a review on their own. We're gonna use that request to review button as part of our account maintenance process. We don't recommend it for every brand depending on You know, things like how many units they have in stock, how quickly their velocity, and how expensive that product is. We have a product that's $2,500 to give away 30 of those and only be guaranteed five reviews. That's a pretty big, you know, it doesn't necessarily make sense for that product. Speaker 3: Yeah. A little bit more on this is I've actually reviewed the contract for Vine reviewers. They are contractually required to give a diversity of ratings. So they can't just say, hey, it's great. It's crap. They actually have to contractually go give two stars, three stars, four stars. So if you have the best product ever, And you know it. And all your customers know it. And you go to Vine. You're still hyper liable to get a three or a four star, likely a four star, but even a three star. Because I see a lot of three stars on Vine. Like, this product's great. I love this and that and the other. I don't really have anything bad to say about it. But it's a three star. Right? And so you have to be aware that So Amazon doesn't allow you to utilize other companies to do reviews. You know, even they may be honest or whatever, right? So you have to pay Amazon to get your reviews and Amazon makes these reviewers give a variety of reviews that may not actually necessarily reflect their true feelings. Speaker 1: Yeah. That's a good point. It makes sense that Amazon would put that in there because they're wanting to make sure someone's just not like five stars, five stars, five stars on everything, even if it's garbage just because they want to get more free stuff. So they're trying to tell them that, hey, don't just give five stars if you don't think the product is worth five stars. It makes sense that in someone's head they might be thinking, okay, I need to leave a three or four star so I don't get kicked off of here. And your product might just happen to be the one that they decide to leave a three or four star on. Speaker 3: Exactly. Speaker 2: And I haven't seen a lot of reviews that were lower than a four star that maybe weren't warranted. But the other thing I would like to stress to brands is, we'll get a young brand and it is their baby. It is like their baby going into the world and they get a bad review and they are just decimated. It's okay to occasionally get a bad review. In fact, sometimes It can actually help conversion. If I see all five-star reviews all at the same time, all telling them they're great, then I don't really believe these reviews are authentic. So having some reviews that are negative, that's okay. We just want to make sure we're addressing any issues and really coming at it from whether or not you think their critique is reasonable. From their perspective, how did they get there? Was it a fluke or is this something that really does need to be addressed in the listing? Speaker 3: I find that three stars are the most helpful reviews for whatever needs to be fixed or what's wrong with it. One stars are typically now, mind you, I'm in the business of finding the crap reviews that don't belong there, right? But, you know, so if I see a bunch of one stars saying, arrive, broken, right, broken, right, broken. over a diverse period of time, then cool, I know that they've got some shipping issues, right? If I see a bunch of one stars or two stars saying, yeah, yeah, this didn't work, this piece broke off of it within the first X amount of time, like, because I've got clients that reach out to me, like, hey, I need you to remove these reviews. I'm like, bro, you got a product issue. I'm not removing those reviews. This is legit, you know? Besides, they're not even eligible for removal. I don't take those customers on if that's all they want me to do. I'm not in the business of, yeah, anyhow. Speaker 2: I would say that's also why it's so important that if you're a brand owner, you need to be in voice the customer one to three times a week depending on your velocity. We say one person's a crazy lady, two person's a coincidence, three person of the same issue, that's stop, drop, and roll. Even if you're selling 10,000 units, that means we need to really aggressively look and see. If three people all say it arrived broken or they all say they got the wrong unit, then that's when we really need to start looking at things because, and you might say, well, I'm selling 10,000, what does three people matter? When that first three happen, only maybe 10,000 people have that product. So it's a small percentage. But if you wait till 50,000 people, you're going to get a bunch more negative reviews. So to stop those things, you have to be proactive. That's why it's part of our service is that we go through and do that because you have to be on it. So if you're not doing that, if you're picking up one thing, make sure you're watching Voice of the Customer. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely a nice screen to look at and see. You know, a lot of times it's just people putting the wrong thing in there to get the free return, but then you start seeing those trends and, you know, I've had it where my warehouse put the wrong sticker on the wrong product and you send it in and you start getting those and if you catch it early enough, you can pull those out and hopefully save the product and save a lot of headache. Keep an eye on Voice of the Customer. Definitely agree on the reviews and everything. I look at the reviews frequently when I'm buying a product. If you see those three and four stars and you read them, sometimes there's people that that person's just being picky or whatever. But other times, yeah, it could be an issue with the product that could push you to buy something else. It might get me to buy that product if I just see, oh, all these negative reviews are just people using it in the wrong way or using it for the wrong thing or whatever. So yeah, you got to look deeper in the reviews than just quantity and even star rating in some points. It can be variable depending on, now if you drop below four, then you're really going to be hurting. But yeah, well, I think that's above four, close to that four and a half, you're sitting pretty good. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's actually, so the fulcrum point for any brand is that 4.2 to 4.3, because as soon as you lose that half star, you lose up to 50% of your conversions. Speaker 1: You start getting skeptical as soon as you see those four stars instead of four and a half. Speaker 3: But that's dependent upon the area that you're selling. If you're selling a fat burner and you've got a 3.8, well, you're at the top of the game. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, that's true. Speaker 3: But typically, that 4.3 to 4.2 is that fulcrum point. And actually, Robyn, I'm interested to know this. If you've seen this, I have two products that are totally different, different brand, but they're the only two I've ever seen where they were a 4.2 star rating and displayed four and a half stars. Have you ever seen that? Speaker 2: Yeah, because some reviews can be weighted differently, so that can happen. The other thing I'll say on the reviews, the difference between four and a half and four and how it impacts conversion. If people say the product was X, the product was X, and then you've adjusted your listing to say you've addressed that problem, so it's very clear, that can dampen some of the impact. Now, we don't want to lie. We want to make sure that we're solving the problem, but that can help if you're in that position. Speaker 1: Definitely. All right, cool. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap it up there. I appreciate Robyn and Dane and you guys coming on the show. Yeah, buddy. And everybody out there watching, I appreciate you as well. We do this every Friday, 1 p.m. Eastern. So feel free to join us next week. But until then, everybody have an awesome weekend and get ready for Prime Day. It's coming. 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 1: 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.