The PickFu Podcast w/ John Aspinall & Kevin King

The PickFu Podcast w/ John Aspinall & Kevin King 00:00:00 And we're live. We're live, Kevin. Ta-da! Welcome, everyone, to the PickFu Podcast, the inaugural, the debut, the very first. Kevin, is there another fancy word for first? I don't even know. The premiere. The premiere. That's even better. The premiere of the PickFu Podcast. My name is John Aspinall. I'm a brand evangelist here at PickFu. Many of you have seen me around before, but yes, I'm here at PickFu now working on some brand evangelist stuff. Kevin, what do you think of, before I intro you, what do you think of the title, brand evangelist? When you hear that, I almost think a little bit religious, a little bit. Yeah, it sounds a little religious to me. It sounds like someone who's out there, Helium 10 uses that, a bunch of people use it. 00:00:50 It sounds like something. People are just espousing the brand, you know, that are getting the name out there. It's better than brand representative or brand ambassador or something like that. I feel like I should be in a pulpit with like a microphone. Yeah, you should. You need a little frock and everything. That's it. That's all I need. But anyway. Yeah, yeah. So I just want to introduce anyone that doesn't know you, Kevin. I can't imagine who doesn't know you. But Kevin King, thank you so much for kicking this off with us. Just give a rundown for the two or three people out in the world who don't know who you are. Tell us a little bit more about you and what you're doing right now. Sure. I've been selling direct marketing since the 80s. 00:01:36 So I was selling my first online order came about 1995, I think. So I was selling before Google existed, before basically since Amazon started. I wasn't on Amazon then, but obviously I was just books back then. But I've been selling. I got my start doing direct mail, so physical catalogs and flyers and stuff through the mail, advertising in the back of magazines to get people to buy stuff, and 1-800 numbers where people would call to order, that kind of thing. And then when e-commerce started evolving, I jumped on that bandwagon, started selling on Amazon in 2001, started doing the FBA model that most people know now in 2015. But I was doing basically 1P stuff before that on Amazon. Had my own websites. I've grown that. 00:02:23 I still have three brands that I operate, so I still sell on Amazon. I'm not a 10-figure seller or something like that, but I do millions of dollars a year in sales on Amazon through my brands. I host for Helium 10, the Freedom Ticket course. About 200,000 people have gone through that, learning how to sell on Amazon. It's free if you have a Helium 10 membership. I do their advanced training called Helium 10 Elite. I run my own event called the Billion Dollar Seller Summits, which is a $5,000 per person event. I have one coming up in May in Hawaii. It's basically sold out by about 150 people. I do the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. I have a podcast, AMVM podcast with EM10. I have another one with Norm Farrar. 00:03:05 It's kicking off next week called Marketing Misfits. It's not Amazon-based, but it's a pretty cool podcast. I speak at a lot of events. i got my finger in a lot of different a lot of different aspects of the amazon world so fair to say you're a little green and still pretty new at this right yeah i'm still trying to figure out what an ace yeah i i think it stands for autonomous symbiotic uh information node or something like that that's what someone told me well i'm trying to i'm trying to think of uh what And that's the kid that's home that needs to hurry up and get out of here with spring break. I don't know what's going on with schools nowadays, but my kids get off for every single holiday. 00:03:53 If the wind blows in one direction, my kid has off for school that day. Spring break at the end of April? That seems late. Exactly. Welcome to New York City, Kevin. It's a big Jewish week, though, I guess. Maybe that's why. probably plays into it a little bit my kids have off any which day that they can i'm surprised that they're getting an education to be quite honest with you but that that's for another podcast but It's great that you're here with us and kicking this off because I think it's important that people understand the importance of things like PickFu that are out there and how sellers are using them, but also how to integrate that into anything and everything inside of their Amazon business. 00:04:38 Because a lot of folks I talk to, Kevin, they say, you know, PickFu, A, B, test, image, this against that. But it's so much more like we're testing, you know, we see you know clients and partners testing logos main image, image stack a plus content flavor profiles, color variations, so the idea of testing before you invest is super powerful. So we're going to do some cool things on here. We're going to jump into a little bit more about Kevin, crack out your crystal ball and get your tarot card reader out because we're going to tap into a little bit more about what you feel the landscape is on Amazon and where it's going. But in the meantime, anyone else that's watching or tuning in: throw an ASIN to your product or a competitor's product, and we're going to pick three people throughout the podcast, and we're going to run live PickFu polls for them. 00:05:32 So we're going to be able to, and then you're going to get the feedback from me and Kevin about, okay, this works, or maybe you should pivot here or any sort of insights from there. Sound good, Kevin? That sounds good. Awesome. So we got some people hopping in. We got Justin. Preach it. The evangelist over here, I'm preaching it. Adrian saying excited to watch us. Jeff Allen's here. Hey Jeff, how are you? We got Ally uh saying hey John, hey Kevin, nice to see you together again. Another podcast, that's right, Kevin. When I was at Mag, was on the my ARL Podcast as well, Med Pat Solution says hi, John. Awesome so, Kevin, I have some questions here for you. So, I know you're a little green on the Amazon thing, but bear with me here. 00:06:11 So, so what do you think from your experience so far is the biggest struggle for someone that's breaking into Amazon in 2024? Money, money, cash flow... uh, excuse me, I've got a pretty bad flu, so uh, pardon me. Kevin was telling me that before and I said I'll take a sick Kevin King over no Kevin King, so Kevin, apologize. Yeah, I think it's cash flow. It's money. That's the biggest issue right now is people don't understand, especially with all the fees increases where when I first started FBA in 2015, it was basically the rule of threes. So it's basically a third of the cost of a sale goes to the product. A third of it goes to profit and a third of it goes to Amazon and their fees. 00:07:07 That's inverted. Now it's about 60% that goes to Amazon. And about 40% that's left over to cover your cost and your profit. And so understanding all those individual little costs is a problem that a lot of people can't get their head around. And they're not building enough margin into their products. And then the cash flow of it, just not understanding how much money it actually takes if you're successful to actually do this. And people come into it with $10,000 or something. Sorry. With $10,000 and spend too much of that on their first order. You don't want to spend more than, you want to divide that by 2. 5. So your landing cost on that first order needs to be about $4,000 at a maximum. 00:07:53 If you can get that down even lower, that's even better. Otherwise, you're going to run out of money. You're going to have to place a new order. Before you get paid from Amazon, you're going to have to do all these things. And a lot of people don't quite understand the cash flow cycle. They understand profits. They understand the numbers on a piece of paper. The cash flow is, I think, number one that kills most entrepreneurs trying to sell on Amazon. So it's interesting. So like you said, if you're doing 10K and, you know, divided by 2 . 5 and that's really your- If you have 10K to invest. Oh, if you have 10K, yeah. So that's another kind of question that a lot of folks that are breaking into it kind of want to know. 00:08:33 Like, is 10K even enough? No. 10K is not enough if you want to actually live off of this. If you want to have a side hustle, if you're in Pakistan, having a little business that makes $500 to $1,000 profit a month could change your life in certain countries, but not in the West, not in the US or Europe. That's beer money. It depends on what your goal is with this. If it's just to have a little side hustle and make a little extra cash, $10,000 is enough. If you're going to be trying to create a $60,000 to $100, 000 a year salary off of this, that you can take out 10k is nowhere close to enough. 00:09:10 You need more like 50 to 100k yeah, that doesn't have to all be in cash in your bank account, some of that could be money that you borrow from someone, it could be on a credit card, it could be supplier terms; there's a number of ways. But you're gonna need access to that much money if you're gonna have a... You hear all these stories a lot of times people say well I started with 5k and I'm doing 5 million a year right now. That may be true, you might start with 5k on day one but on day four your uncle gave you some money or you had a credit card; there's more to the story yeah. Anybody that started with 5, 000 and they they might have yeah I I don't believe those stories. 00:09:45 There's there's more to it um and and there's something that they're leaving out and then they might sound too good to be true. And I think that a lot of people underestimate the ad spend. That they'll need to kind of uh fork over, especially when they're first launching on Amazon. A lot of folks think that okay, my investment is going to be in the inventory, and then sure I'll do a little advertising, but I think I think it's super important to have a hefty ad spend budget when launching, but what do you think? Like, what what I think, yeah I think you need depends on it's hard to say how much you need uh it's category dependent and competition dependent, but yeah you need in most cases potentially thousands of dollars in ad spend to get launched. 00:10:32 I mean there are there are categories where you can do it for less, I have one brand That I launch with zero ad spend every year, it's a seasonal brand. But I have a list; I have a big list of customers who've been buying from me for 20 years, so I can use them as a launch pad and I don't have to use PPC to launch it. Um, but if you don't have an audience, um then PPC is you gotta buy basically pay your way to the top. And PPC is the way to do that right now. And it's pretty expensive. Or you got to use outside traffic from, you know, like TikTok or influencers or something like that, which is a whole different game and difficult for a lot of people to really get their head around and have a lot of success on as well. 00:11:10 And that's another question. I know we got an ASIN. We're going to pull it up and we're going to pop it in a second because Jeff dropped his, Jeff dropped an ASIN down here. So we're going to run that poll in a second. But before I get to that, you said TikTok. And, and a flag went up in my head because, you know, you're on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn, lots of chatter about you know Tick-Tock and where it's gonna go and how it's going to affect the marketplace and affecting Amazon sellers. I'm seeing a lot of good traction from solid like a lot of people think that Tick-Tock is just overseas, China direct sending stuff to you and stuff like that, but I'm noticing a lot more that actual brands are on Tick-Tock and they're hitting their their demographic and their customer through Tick-Tock Shop and through affiliates. 00:11:59 What are you noticing with Tick-Tock as far as that goes? Yeah, I think Timu is more than one that's more Chinese and Shine more Chinese brands shipping in the US but they are opening those up to western brands too. But Tick-Tock is getting 180 million people or so on 170 million on Tick-Tock; you got 180 million Prime members, so it's almost an even match in the United States. And you got Tick-Tock, just the way they set that algorithm up and the way that brands can Go on there, you can use influencers and you can use the Tick tock Shop, and you can use their Creator Central; it's amazing and a lot of people. People still don't trust Tick tock Shop to actually fulfill so a lot of customers still prefer to buy on Amazon. 00:12:42 Even though you can't directly link from Tick tock to Amazon, they don't they discourage that. People will see it on TikTok and go, I wonder if this is sold on Amazon. People that are running TikTok ads are seeing huge increases in brand-related search on Amazon. They're coming over and they're typing in the brand name and the product, the keyword, and they're getting massive sales and lift off of that. Some people do go into TikTok shop and buy through there, but the vast majority are still coming over to Amazon because that's their card of choice. They trust Amazon. Their credit cards are already there. They know that if they have a problem, it's easy to return it. 00:13:16 All those things, so there's a lot of big brands that are doing very well, a lot of beauty brands especially that are crushing it, some of the biggest names in the business are crushing it on TikTok and the beauty there is with their new creator center, with the affiliates, you can tap into this massive audience of people who know how to sell; they're there, there's people that know affiliates, know how to sell, influencers know how to show, and so using an influencer that knows how to show doesn't mean you're going to sell anything. But TikTok's got a whole army of affiliates that actually know how to sell, not just how to show. And tapping into that can be magic. There's a lot of big sellers right now that TikTok has become a major component of their marketing mix. 00:13:57 And they're heavily focusing on TikTok. And sellers are doing millions of dollars a month in some cases on TikTok if it's done right. There's massive opportunity. And so with everything that's happening. Biden just signed that bill. What they did is the House passed a bill banning it because they feel that the Chinese government is getting data on Americans. And they may be. TikTok denies that and says, no, everything stays on Oracle servers in the United States. But they may have access to it. And there's evidence that they do influence it some. But the power of a foreign government having influence over our citizens is pretty scary to the U.S. So, you know China bans Facebook; they ban YouTube, you know. It's tit for tat. 00:14:44 So, they the House pass it, and then they tied it to a bill with that had funding for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza-a whole bunch of other uh humanitarian stuff. So, it's hard for the Senate not to not pass it otherwise they have to kick all that stuff out. So, they passed it pretty quickly, and Biden signed it. Now, TikTok's got nine months basically by the President can extend that three months but um, basically nine months to sell or close. But I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're going to appeal it, and you're going to see some delays for uh, maybe a year or two years before anything happens. And then if they do end up selling, that's going to be interesting to see what happens because the algorithm Is created and managed by people in China, and they don't want to release that to the U. 00:15:32 S., that algorithm. It's a powerful algorithm. I saw that. I saw that they actually were talking about selling it without the algorithm. And that's like selling Google without the algorithm. Yeah, it won't be the same. It'll be the same in name, but the way it functions will not be the same. And so I don't know if they can replicate that. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. And there's a lot of people that are making their livelihood off of TikTok right now. A lot of businesses are doing well off of it. So it's going to be interesting to see. What will happen, but you're talking about Pikachu? I tell you a 00:16:02 quick interesting story is my trainer um when I'm not sick I work out three times a week at Travel Trainer comes to my house works me out three times a week and he decided to do a journal uh last year and he wanted to create this uh like a, you know, journal fitness journal and stuff and put it up on Amazon so he came naturally to me and said how do I do this? And so I kind of guided him a little bit and he created this journal and I said oh we gotta before you put this out. We need to put this on TikTok. He'd already designed, fortunately, he'd already designed it. So we put it up on TikTok and did some testing where we took his journal and compared it to like the top three or four bestsellers. 00:16:38 And he got crushed. It was humiliating for him. When the PicFu results that came back, they just, they picked his, the other ones over his every single time. So his graphic people made some design changes to more mimic the bestsellers and that helped. But no matter what he did. He actually couldn't get this journal to actually score higher and pick up food results, uh, and so um just the point of that is don't do if you're using pick food to test things, don't do it late in the process; do it early in the process, uh, not late in the process because he had already committed, already printed it, was too late. We made a few changes and we could salvage it a little bit but a lot of opportunities were missed because we waited too late in the process. 00:17:22 I do the same thing with i have one of my businesses; it's wall calendars. And the cover of the calendar makes a huge difference in the sales every year on Amazon. I've used PickFu in the past, but I actually prefer instead of using PickFu for that, I use my own customers. I don't know if PickFu has this option. I know they were talking about it where you can actually upload your own list of customers and let them do the polling. So, PickFu is basically the tech behind it. But I prefer my own customers because they're the ones actually buying versus a PickFu audience. Maybe it's a good Amazon audience, but they're not necessarily my customers. So, I actually go out to my actual customers and I'll pull a couple hundred of them and say, 'Here's different covers of the calendar. 00:18:06 Which one do you like better?' And then we'll usually run with the one that wins on that. And it's proven to make a huge difference. But just keep in mind, anytime you're running tests, what people say and what people do sometimes can be different. So when you're running something, PickFu is awesome and you should definitely be using it. But but sometimes if it's really close on the results, um if you have a gut feeling that the one that came in second might actually be better or you're you're based on your knowledge of your customer base and your avatar, you might actually want to go with it instead of the winner because the winner might actually not be your actual customers. 00:18:46 They might be just a good cross-representative of people, but not the people that are actually going to buy the product. And so, that's something to keep in mind because I've done tests in the past where I'll do some pricing tests and people say, no, I wouldn't pay this price. But when given the opportunity to not pay the lower price, they gladly paid it. So just keep that in mind when you're doing testing. It's great to do and gives you direction and guidance, but it's not the gospel. No, totally, totally. I can definitely see that. But let me ask you this, just to be a little contrarian, and I have the ASIN pulled up that we're going to do the test on. Sure. 00:19:20 When you say polling your own audience, would it be a fair statement to say that perhaps your own audience might be a little biased to your brand and a little bit loyal versus the plain Amazon shopper that hasn't seen you from Adam? You could make that argument. But the type of guy that buys what I sell is different than just a random audience of guys. You could put up here this chess board that's up here right now, and I don't play chess. And I'll give you some opinions like, oh, I think this one looks cooler because of the box or these colors or whatever. That one looks cooler. But that doesn't mean that's what I would buy if I played chess. There is a difference. 00:20:11 There is a psychological proven difference on what people say and what people do. And so I prefer always to use my own customer base on a product. I mean, if it's a brand new product, you can't do that. You don't have a customer base. So PickFu is an excellent choice. But if you have your own customer base, like I have 17,000 people, I prefer to actually sample them because they're more representative of. my buyer and i can interpolate it's like creating look-alike i was going to create a look-alike audience on facebook i would use my customer list to create a look-alike audience so that basically but i can't do that on on picfu um or something yeah yeah yes but that would be that would be awesome if yeah if uh i know john is listening here that would be an awesome feature to have is create a look-alike audience to actually narrow it down because sometimes it's just the people that are just sitting there 00:21:03 you know watching tv and they're they're voting on stuff and um that's that's that's where uh um just got to be careful a little bit yeah so adrian on our team actually said that's where the written comments and people are valuable sometimes that the second place winner is better based on written feedback if the audience seems to be resonating with your intention or gold better yeah that's a good point yeah that's a good point so brian burt over canopy Shout out, Brian. Says, how do you pull them in, Kev? How do you pull those people in? The email? How do you, I know you did a newsletter. How do I pull what in? I'm not sure what he says. Your audience. 00:21:39 So is it from, you're building your list off of sales, previous sales, or you're building them in off of-Oh, the 17,000? Yeah, yeah. We have a consumer site. So people buy off of, it's not Shopify. It's a different software program. Platform, but we have a site there where people buy; we do bounce; we do coupons in in all of our orders, they're on Amazon or wherever, and we sell in retail stores. So, we have a little four-by-six card says 'Congratulations, you've won a free calendar! Just pay $10 in shipping and handling, and we'll send you a random free calendar.' So, we get them off of that. I've gotten them in the this list has been built over 25 years, so I used to rent a list from other magazines, you know? 00:22:17 Since we're selling calendars for men, you know maybe Cigar World magazine or Cigar Aficionado, uh, supplies or something! I've done those kinds of things to build it. I've done trades; I've done inserts; I've been building that list for 20-something years, and really the only time people come off of it is if they don't buy within three years we take them off, and/ or if they Die um and people still send in checks and money orders; some of them still order online, so we built that way cool. Hey, guys, you can email me at Aspinall@PickFu. com if you want Kevin's list of 17,000 people. I'll be able to hand that out to you at no additional cost. There you go. I'm just kidding. But let me pull back my screen up here. 00:23:00 So we have from Jeff this chess keyboard. So I have some PickFu pull templates pulled up here. But first thing, Kevin, what do you think of this product? What is this, electronic chessboard? Yeah, the electronic chess board, magnetic board pieces, portable LCD display. It looks like an expensive chessboard. Yeah. It's supposed to be travel. I mean, it looks kind of small in the picture for $162. I mean, the picture, the dimensions make it look small. It may be bigger than what it is. My first impression is this is a small little handheld thing, but the price point of $162 says it's not. Yeah. So let's take a look. What would you type in on Amazon to find this? I'm going to type in travel chessboard. Travel chessboard. 00:24:00 Chessboard is probably two words. So travel chessboard, and I'm looking for the price point $100 to $200. And they're coming up um so let's say these are in the same realm so I would say actually this one for 199 and this one so what I would do if this is my apples to apples competitor per se and this let me just take a look here might be Overseas Direct. So Overseas Direct is selling a premium product. And that's, you know, for looking apples to apples, that might be it. So coming to PickFu, right, we're going to go over here, we're going to do Amazon main image optimization, competitor test, right? So I'm going to go over here, learn why buyers prefer your competitors' products or your product or your competition. 00:24:59 So we have templates built out here. So, you can very easily just click it and then fill in all your information when shopping on Amazon. All stuff populates which would you likely uh be more likely to buy? And why we're going to change the two options, I'm going to go over here, I'm going to upload the one that got submitted, I'm going to upload the competitor, so we got 50 people from the US who are Amazon subscribers and I'm going to leave it at that. Kevin, but you can segment it down to everything like age of kids number of kids if you're a listener of audiobooks favorite movie genres the list goes on... Amazon store card owner health insurance what do they have employment status? It's, I wonder if we actually have chess. 00:25:45 in here we don't just game players maybe or something So frequently purchased toys. We have games. We have lots of different stuff down here. I'm going to leave it educational games, puzzles, science. So if I was doing a little bit long, because what happens is when you put a lot of traits, it narrows the audience down. It takes longer to get the results. It takes a little bit longer. So I'm going to leave it at Amazon subscribers right now. And, you know, let's click here. 00:26:23 You guys can see how super easy it is. You just put it in, click, and then it's going to pull up the poll. And then we're going to chat. It's going to run in the background over here. It's collecting data. So we've got 50 respondents, 50 panelists. You can drill that down, Kevin, if you wanted more, up to 500. If you wanted less, if you wanted only 15, if you're looking to iterate over and over again, maybe you don't need 50 people, maybe 15 is okay. I know, but it gets statistically valid. Isn't the, you guys know better than me. I know 15 is there because it's a cheaper option, but it's 15 actually statistically valid. I thought it was 27 or 30 or something like that. And probability is a statistically valid number. 00:27:10 But correct me if I'm, I could be wrong on that. So, I've always done 50, but I know the 15 is there because it's a quicker, easier, faster, cheaper way. Is that? I've noticed when I've done a 15 before and then done a 50, the results are different, yeah. 50 is going to give you more, so 50 is more broad if you're looking to iterate over and over again, um, that's when 15 comes into play where if you're looking for slight changes or anything like that. So let me let this run in the background over here, actually let me pull this up here so let's take a look at the rest of the listing while we're going over this while waiting for the poll to come in. 00:27:46 So I know how I feel about premium A-plus content. How do you feel about premium versus standard A-plus? I'm very contrarian when it comes to that, and a lot of people are going to give me the thumbs down and say, 'boo.' But before I tell you how I feel, in case you don't already know, what do you think of premium versus standard A-plus? Most people don't do premium right. You get some extra features and stuff in there, but they're not utilizing it right. The standard A plus oftentimes is good enough. And that's how I feel. And there's a reason why I say that is because for me, and I don't know about you, Kevin, but I historically don't click on videos on Amazon. 00:28:31 I might be someone who's out there, especially if it's something that's cheaper and commoditized; I'm typically not coming here and clicking the video just because maybe because I'm in the space, maybe because I'm just a little bit more of a savvy shopper. But I don't need to see a video; um, because nine out of ten times it's not a video that's going to show me usually it's a slideshow with music playing and it's not really showing me. But if I click on this here, this video says nothing. You know, I would rather. I'll do a video if it's like something I've got to put together; it's like an explanation here so I can see how hard this thing is to put together. 00:29:14 I might watch a video like that, but a video like this, I just think is going to be a commercial. It's not going to tell me anything I would never watch. So I'm a big fan of like very UGC unboxing videos because that's the kind of stuff I look at. And, you know, when I'm, you know, personal time and just shopping. So for me, I'd like to see exactly like unboxing, putting it together, how the pieces are. But a big thing I noticed with this one is it's magnetic and it's missing some-like, this doesn't show that it's magnetic. This is just showing that it's standing up. I almost think holding it upside down and a little shake, for example, if it's that strong of a magnet is going to resonate with me that it's truly going to be magnetic versus not. 00:29:59 Give it a little Dairy Queen Blizzard shake. Yeah, right. I don't see it. Is there a picture that shows how these things are stored? Is there a baggie or is there like a little tray underneath it where you store? Nothing shows where I store all the pieces. That would be a major question I would have. Yeah, so for me, I don't see that here. I would want to see that. So Jeff actually says, please give me feedback on the gallery images on the electronic chessboard I sent you. Yeah, so that's what the gallery images he's talking about. So, you know, I've spoken to Jeff before. So travel buddy, play anywhere, portable and lightweight. This is not showing me that it's portable. This almost looks like it's just next to it. 00:30:43 Just because it's next to a bag doesn't mean it's portable. Showing me how, like what Kevin said. You know, does it come in a bag? Do I store the pieces in the back of it? Does it fold in half or is it or not um, yeah, yeah, it doesn't. And then where do I store the pieces? There's no picture. Show me anywhere where I store the pieces, but a big thing too that I don't understand from these images is what's the screen for like what am I doing with the screen because it does say smart AI like what is it? Can I play against the computer? Can I play against a friend? Will it predict my next move? Yeah, AI is a buzzword here um, it's probably actually not AI a lot of people misuse that word um, but it's probably a... 00:31:35 It probably you probably can play against it. It probably tells you where to move on that screen but that's not clear yeah so. And then the other thing down here is um, I always tell people in lifestyle images I don't know how you feel about this, Kevin. I always tell people if you're putting dogs, this has nothing to do with the dog but it kind of does if you put a dog always use a very universal dog like a lab like a golden retriever because sometimes people like this is a sharpay but people might think that dog is like depressing looking or uh might be ferocious you want to have everything be very very universal what are your thoughts on that um yeah cute a cute more universal dog is better than uh than than a oddball dog yeah i agree with that but you don't want a dog that's dripping you know um out of its mouth and all that kind of stuff even though some people find that cute um that's 00:32:39 unless your product is aimed at that. And not a lot of folks have these kind of dogs. More folks have the Labs, the Golden Retrievers, the Golden Doodles, all that kind of stuff. But coming down here to another part of the Premium A+, which is the Carousel, I always tell people that if you're having information that's hidden in the Carousel, The odds of me getting over here and getting the relevant information is limited because you're putting a friction barrier between me and the information. So if it's nice to know but not need to know, then that's okay. But something like this, which pieces can move, that's more of a need to know kind of thing. So what happens if I'm browsing on Amazon and I don't click this carousel? 00:33:25 I'm not getting any of this information. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. So I think it's important. That's why I love the wide footprint of Premium A+, but just how it looks. But using the modules properly is something that's of paramount importance. So Jeff said, here is a what's included image gallery number eight. Should I move it towards the front of the gallery? Here is a, I guess it's not. Coming across maybe he's trying to send something um, but yeah I I two of the biggest things I would need to know from this a little bit further are the the biggest value props are travel, how am I traveling with it? How is it portable? How do I store the pieces? 00:34:13 The magnetic portion because it's not resonating with me because almost in this angle over here it's just looking like the pieces are very flat, I get it why they're doing that to show that they don't slide down but like you said the Dairy Queen upside-down shake that's definitely something you'd want to do. And then also the AI thing, I'm just not it's not clear on that for me, but yeah so let's let that run and oh Adrian said there's a game genre category, yeah so just for the sake of time we want to make sure we hit it nice and fast uh Justin says depends on the results if it comes back 12 out of 15 for a certain option. It’s going to be significant, okay, that’s that’s that question I asked earlier about significant, yeah. 00:34:57 Let's take a look here. Do you guys show that on there where you have like a color or a flag that says this is statistically significant? Yeah, yeah. You do show that? Yep. Okay. Let me just pull this up here. Hang on one second. And then we have another question for you. So get your thinking hat on, Kev. What's the landscape look like for the rest of 2024 with Amazon? We've talked about breaking in. What's the big hurdles that you see? A lot of people talk about compliance being some of the biggest hurdles. What do you feel for the rest of 20? Does Amazon have any more surprises or shocks or is compliance one of the biggest ones? Do you think they're going to roll back? There's a crazy question. 00:35:53 Buckle up. You think Amazon would ever roll back? I know the answer. Would they ever roll back the fees or give more discount? Or do you think fees are going to keep on going? No, they're not going to roll back any fees. No, they have no reason to. Amazon doesn't care. I mean, there's another guy willing to step into your place. So they really don't. You know, that Jassy where he came out last week and said that we have a really good relationship with our sellers is bullshit. They don't. That's just PR crap. And a lot of sellers took offense to that. They don't care about the sellers. They've said it. They care about the customers and the experience. And most people over at Amazon have no clue what sellers go through or what they're doing. 00:36:36 And they don't care because they know that there's another guy that's willing to step in right behind him. So if this is hurting you and puts you out of business, so what? There's 20 more behind you. And so the element doesn't affect them. But going forward this year, I think. The fees are going to hurt some people, and you're going to see a few people have to make some changes and maybe even go out of business because of these fees, because they just can't get the sourcing right. But I think the biggest change that you're going to see, I don't know if it'll be this year, but I think it's going to be in the next six months to two years, is the AI, the way the search works. 00:37:10 I don't know exactly when it'll happen. They're testing with Rufus right now, which is getting mixed results, but they'll get this dialed in. But the way AI is going to affect search, right now, basically, you try to build a listing towards keywords on Amazon. You use tools like Datadive or Jungle Scout or Helium 10 or whatever to actually find opportunities on keywords, and that's how you try to rank. I think that's going to pretty much go away, and it's all going to be based on sentience and the way you write the listing. You can see some of this with Amazon Comprehend right now, if you played with Amazon's own Comprehend. You can see how this affects the listings and the way that you write it. 00:37:51 It's not just a matter of having the keywords in there with commas in between the phrases. It's a matter of how it's actually structured in a sentence that matters. And I think imagery, and this would be something that, you know, could be pretty cool to build into PickFu too, is I think imagery is going to be a bigger player in ranking than it already is. I mean, people on Amazon, there's, There's people that say that people don't buy products on Amazon. They buy photos. And I agree with that because you can't hold it. You buy photos. You don't buy products. And the photos are probably the most important thing on the listing as far as conversion goes. Not that and the price. The keywords get you discovered. 00:38:32 But I think pictures are going to start playing more of a role of actually getting you discovered. Because Amazon is actually analyzing the pictures now and taking a look at what's in the picture. So if you have. A listing, and the example I like to give is a beach umbrella. So if you're if you're trying to sell a beach umbrella. And right now you can just put all the different keywords for beach umbrella in your listing. And your title and your back end and your bullet points. And probably rank for beach umbrella. And Amazon's not paying too much attention to the photos. But I think it's going to get to where they're going to actually look at the photos. And even though you have beach umbrella in your listing, in the copy. 00:39:07 If you don't have a photo of a beach umbrella someone's sitting on a beach, uh, with umbrella over them so they don't get sun-tanned, so they don't get sun-burned. You're not going to rank very well. You're going to be penalized for beach umbrella if you the only pictures in your listing are are someone walking down the street in the rain with an umbrella but you're trying to rank also for beach umbrella. I think you're going to get penalized on the ranking. And so paying attention to what's in your images and how Amazon interprets those images. I did a test, it's not an Amazon tool, it's um, it's a third-party tool that will actually, you can upload a picture 00:39:41 and say 'tell me what's this pic what's in this picture and it analyzes the picture and so i upload i took a set my cell phone and i have on my cell phone i don't have it on this phone but on one of my other phones i have a little case on the backs for reading glasses i'm old man so it's like little reading glasses that just pop out like little folding reading glasses and so i took a picture of that and i popped them out and i uploaded that picture to to this tool and i said describe this to me they came back and said this is a mobile phone sitting on a desk And it interpreted the glasses as a key chain, not as actually glasses. 00:40:18 And so I had to go back in and modify the picture the way that I set the angle, the way I positioned the little glasses popping out of the case to where it actually could recognize what they were. And so that's some of the stuff that I think is going to happen. And right now, you have to straddle a line. You have to sell. The old way is still what works. Amazon's doing enough testing on AI. I think at some point they're going to flip a switch. And I think there's sellers that are doing $5 million a year right now that are going to go to $500,000 within a month and be out of business because it's coming because they're not paying attention or they're ignoring this thing. 00:40:55 That's never going to happen. I'm not worried about it. But it's going to be where you're not going to be able to game the system. You see what's going on with Google search right now, where SEO and backlinks are becoming way less important. On ranking and Google is using AI they're testing it and it's like you got you're gonna have to sell to the AI Not not sell to keyword not sell based on keywords, but actually sell to the AI and Amazon has so much data You can request this data on my file was 760 megabytes of data from Amazon when I requested it has everything I've done since 1998 on Amazon every did every prime video I've ever watched how much of it I watched what it was what device I was on Everything I've ever put in my cart and taken out of my cart, everything I've ever bought. 00:41:38 I mean, it was my entire my screen resolutions, my entire history of every IP address I've ever logged in from around the world. Everything is in there. They know all this stuff. And when they combine that with artificial intelligence, they know that this is Kevin's profile. This is John's profile. They can say, these guys, they like this type of product, and they're going to show me that type of product rather than me gaming the system because I have the keyword in there that someone else didn't have the keyword in. So this gaming the system, I think, is going to go away in its current state. It'll be a new way of doing it. I don't know what that is, but I think it's going to catch a lot of people with their pants down. 00:42:19 Let me ask you this. There's OpenAI. And then there's a lot of other LLMs right, large language models. I've been defaulting personally to using Claude AI, Claude is anthropic, Amazon has made a four billion dollar investment into anthropic, probably using it for a lot of its AI, um if not other things as well. What's your typical go-to? Are you more of a ChatGPT OpenAI or have you used Claude? I've used Claude, Claude is good for writing. I use a mixture of Claude and then ChatGPT-4. It's all based on the prompting and in the data set that you give it. So, a lot of times, I'm actually feeding it my own data set. So, I'm saying here's 12 different PDFs, summarize these 12 PDFs. And, that one, it's not so important as to which one you're using. 00:43:20 But if you're saying, describe to me the nature of nuclear science. And it's just more of a general research-type question, Claude might actually give you a little bit better description back than Chat GPT right now um but there's perplexity that's people are using for search there's Yama from uh from Facebook there there's tons of these Amazon themselves has one called Odyssey that's under development supposed to come out in August their own LLM um that they're saying is going to be pretty powerful as well there's tons of them what What you're going to see though is these are all more general-purpose LLMs. So they're like general-purpose. They're like Google. It's a general-purpose search. But if I want to go and I want to search legal cases, I'm probably not going to use Google, go to Google and type in some sort of legal case. 00:44:09 I'm going to go to specialized legal database that has like way more information, access to way more information. That's where you're going to see a lot of these AI tools go. They're going to be highly specialized. So you're going to have some generalists like ChatGPT and Claude. But I think you're going to see a lot of individual specific use um LLMS that are specifically for law or specifically for e-commerce or specifically for Amazon, maybe even that are going to be developed and that's that's where the magic is going to really start happening. Yeah, like I agree with you, Claude is really good for writing; I use it for a lot of LinkedIn formatting, I feed it PDFs of my previous posts and cadence and tone and all that kind of stuff. 00:44:51 Where it lacks a little bit is where OpenAI picks up with like DALL-E um they don't do image generation they really can't read images as well. One interesting thing that someone said on LinkedIn was when now that AI can actually read, I think it's OpenAI that does it maybe other stuff as well but that they can read text on images, it's going to be even more powerful for you to have a good hero image, a good image stack, and good A+ content. Because if the AI can read the words that are on the image, it's going to help you better rank if they start to use that for SEO and stuff like that. But what's something interesting, little gray hat, little black hat, I don't know. 00:45:34 Someone said, what happens if you put text, white font on white background, to keyword stuff a photo with text that can't be seen, can the AI still read that text that's on there? Yeah, I think it can read it. It's pixels. So I think it can read it. The human eye might not, but it's pixels. But you already have Amazon Recognition, R-E-K-O-G-N-I-T-I-O-N, that's doing exactly the same thing right now. You can go play with it. But it can actually tell if there's a celebrity in the photo. It can tell. You know, if it's a child that's you know for child pornography if it's a child that's not wearing clothes or if it's a sexy model it can do OCR it can read everything on there 00:46:19 During the pandemic there were people that were trying to get away with selling hand sanitizer and putting claims and some supplement people have done this too on their bottles and not putting it in their listing They'll just put it on the bottle and they're getting shut down because Amazon's actually reading. The text on the on the photos using their record, it's called Amazon Recognition, um yeah so it's out there so we got some, we got some, some polls coming in, we already got 25 responses, so head to head this one of that one looks like the competition is winning here by by 11 or so. The great thing about this, the poll's still running, so we got 16 more panelists responding, but the people that chose it they like the better layout, It's a bit more polished and more modern. 00:47:05 I feel it makes more sense to have the controls on the side rather than facing one of the player sides. So someone likes this format where it's more universal versus only one player gets to see the screen and the controls versus this. That's actually kind of interesting. i knew people were going to say this i like the transparent chess pieces i like the crystal looking pieces i like the clear pieces it's more colorful the general aesthetic but then if i go here uh i think the controls in this option are easier to understand that's a better angle so it's interesting right so kevin if you were looking at this and you were looking to get in the chess space forget about it this was an already launched product and let's say these are your two competitors and you're like okay 00:47:56 should i should i replicate what this guy has or what this guy has i would do the one right yeah why tell me why well for some of the same reasons they said i i like that screen is not just On one side, yeah, that's in the middle, so people can see it. I'm assuming it maybe it flips or inverts but just the layout of of the way it's done actually in the photo too, you have what I like is the contrasting flips so you have the box where the the the game is facing one way, facing left, and then you have the the slightly different angle of it sitting on the table or whatever, those contrasts actually draw the eye uh and and those type of things you know too many times people when they're doing stuff um the flip side of this excuse me because it may be looking off the page so this picture is on the left-hand side, 00:48:51 you actually would want to flip that on the actual Amazon listing because you always want to look into the, into the fold. You never want to look off the page unless there's some, you're doing it for dramatic effect or something. But, but you always want to look in inward into the middle of the page. So that would be the only, but when you're looking at it like this, it's looking into the middle of the page because it's on the right. You understand what I'm saying? But positioned on the right, but that was positioned on the left hand side of this. If you flip these two images, it would be looking off the page and 00:49:21 that you don't want to do that and that's the thing too like I, I've done a lot of research that could affect these people that are analyzing this picture; the exact order of where you put your pick food testing can affect the results uh so keep that in mind because because of exactly what I just said where that's looking inward I wonder if you actually reverse these pictures and put the competitor first and then him second if the results will be slightly different. I might do that after and duplicate the poll and just swap the places. But one thing I wanted to say was I agree with you because, you know, naturally people read left to right, right? So when you look left, they're going to go to the right. 00:50:02 So exactly how you said that angle is super important for looking inward. Let's see. We got some more responses here as well. Yeah, they're hitting it by a landslide. And the cool thing is I'm able to pull up and at the end, once the poll's over, we get an AI summary. So we get an AI summary, we get some AI highlights for a sentiment and that kind of stuff. So if you don't want to go through all these responses, we do it for you. But the cool thing is understanding the demographics. So seeing here, what's the age range? If it's a prime member, yes, obviously that's already a standard. Education level. right so it 00:50:40 looks like most folks that that voted or have bachelor's degree so maybe you want to drill down a little bit further where if someone only has a high school or associate degree maybe that's not your customer avatar maybe you don't want to target those guys maybe you're looking for more people that are you know higher education so females to males maybe if female if you notice you're getting females that are you know let's say leaning towards b more than a And that's not your demographic. You'd want to redo it again and just focus on males. So it's important. We just did a generalized one. But it's important to take this data and see exactly who your avatar is. So down here, hobbies and interests. Right. So we're seeing what people are doing. 00:51:22 So, OK, the people that chose the B, the competitor, a lot of them are into photography and videography. So stuff like that is super important to them. So maybe they're skewed or a little bit biased because of that. The transparent glass element for the pieces or anything like that, so just wanted to give here's home ownership I don't know how relevant that is if there's kids um and online marketplaces, so you can see here um trying to see yeah, so Overstock. A lot of people that that shop on Overstock seem to like this, by the way. What do you think of the the whole thing? Not Best Buy, but uh, Overstock. And um, I forgot the name of the store already that went out of business that they purchased. 00:52:05 Oh uh uh, Bed Bath and Beyond! Bed Bath and Beyond, they almost said bye-bye. They made a mistake changing the name from Overstock to they're switching it back now. They realized that they rebranded Overstock as Bed Bath and Beyond and uh, and that was a mistake. And so they're they're actually reversing that now um, but that was interesting! I did see two recently, you guys are now in the Japanese market, PIFU. Which is pretty cool. And there's an interesting thing to show there. I was just at a conference in Japan. And, you know, in Japan, something to keep in mind, if you're selling in multiple markets, you definitely want to do pick food tests because the way imagery is displayed in different markets is different. In Japan, everything is busy. 00:52:50 In the U. S., we like to keep things white space, clean lines, you know, make it look polished. In Japan, it's the exact opposite. Fill as many colors, as many graphics, as much stuff as possible. And, make it look super busy, and that's actually what works, um, and so an important thing I just want to remind everybody is: if you're actually are you're speaking of overstock and other platforms, actually are selling on other platforms, don't just assume what worked on Amazon is going to work on Walmart, even in the US, it's different customers, um, and they may analyze things differently. So, if you're gonna, gonna be selling your products that you've been selling on Amazon onto Walmart, you should actually redo your picfu test for it for your SKU and actually make sure that you're identifying what that customer base wants, and I think you guys do you have guys have a way to actually select Walmart customers. 00:53:40 Or is it just Amazon customers on PicFu? Uh, I believe so, so we're actually able to... yeah, there's Walmart, there's Wayfair, uh, eBay, Rakuten, Overstock, Etsy, and Amazon-the one. Oh, cool, awesome, um, yeah! Make sure you do that because there are differences between marketplaces. It may be the same, you may see the same results, but a lot of times I think you might be surprised, especially when you go to into Europe or Japan or other marketplaces, the way they they prefer to see their images can be completely different. Yeah. So we have LinkedIn users here; someone stealthy and sneaky, but this is John Lee, one of the co-founders. I know it's him. Loving the podcast, but of course he's biased, of course. 00:54:25 He had to take a call, but I thought he had a discussion about putting option B first in the poll. Remember when you said flip them and it might be different? So he's saying we randomize what our respondents see to remove the bias, so no need to do that. Okay, cool. Awesome. It's randomized, so it kind of rotates round-robin between people. Okay, that's good. So that helps. You can pick US, Australia, Mexico, Spain, UK, Japan, Germany. We're going global, Kevin. We're everywhere and anywhere. And if we're not there, we're going to be there soon. You're going to be in Antarctica soon? That opens up a whole other conversation for you and I, Kevin. I've gone down the rabbit hole of flat earth people. That's perfect. If you get the flat earth people, that's perfect. 00:55:10 I've gone down the rabbit hole and I'm just, I'm going to ask you this because we're about to wrap up in a second. We only got to one of the polls. So anyone that, that didn't get a chance, feel free to email me at hospital@pickfood. com. Yes. I didn't get John at pickfood. com when I came to this company because there is already a John at pickfood. com. Thanks a lot, mom. You couldn't name me something else, but just email me and I'll be happy to do that poll for you as well. But, but yeah, so let me pull this off here, but yeah, so. Have you i've gone down the rabbit hole of flat earth people not to make this a conspiracy podcast but it's so interesting it's so Kevin I need to know where you stand on this do you believe the the the people that are out there saying flat earth or are you a round earth kind of person I'm a round earth kind of person, round earth. 00:56:00 I'm gonna send you some I'm gonna send you some articles all right all right you do it, see if you can change my mind. John says, Kevin, if you need Antarctica, we'll get them. If you want flat earthers, we'll get them. So listen, you and I will tap into the flat earthers and we'll make sure we get their demographics in there as well. But yeah, so let me just wrap this up. But Kevin, it's been amazing having you on. I always love having you on a podcast. So again, you could do PickFu for not just Amazon, everything in between. Ideation of your logo, of your brand, concept, publishers, video games. Kevin, if you want to know what to have for dinner tonight and you're not too sure in your house, you're arguing, just pick through it and let the people tell you exactly what you should have for dinner on a nice Friday. 00:56:48 Is it going to be steak? Because I'm having steak tonight. I think it might be some barbecue tonight. I might be doing some barbecue. It depends on what I'm, what I'm feeling-you know when you have a cold, you don't like to eat as heavy or eat as much uh so it uh, luckily I've gotten through this with only two hacks uh, I'm two-two coughing hacks not not Amazon hacks but you gotta you gotta clarify for people they might think Kevin's giving out some hacks exactly but you know you guys come here we have you know demos to walk through different use cases a ton of cool stuff. I could talk about this on and on and on. But, Kevin, it was truly a pleasure, man, having you on the very first podcast, the PickFu podcast. 00:57:32 You are. They scream your name to the high heavens here at PickFu because you kicked us off years and years ago and spoke our good name, and we just had to have you. I know you and I have been going back and forth, and I had to pin you down on a date because you're like a busy, busy dude. Although I don't know what you're busy on. You just got started with Amazon, so I don't really know. I'm studying. I'm doing course after course after course after course. I've been running PickFu polls. I've got like 20 of them. All my monitors right here, I got like 20 of them going right now. It's like you're a stock trader and you've got the monitors everywhere. That's right. I have all my little PICFU polls going. 00:58:10 But sometimes what I'll do is I'll do – I think sometimes people just do one poll on PICFU. But some of the things that I do is I do multiple polls where I'll almost have my own little – I know you guys have an option where you can do like a contest, but I'll almost do it with myself where I did this with a logo before. And I'll put up – 20 logos, you know, I'll go to 99designs or something and have 20 logos designed. I'll screenshot them before I pick a winner and I'll put them into PickFu and get feedback. And then I'll take the top four that are voted the highest. And then I'll pair two of them against each other and then two of them against each other and then pair the two winners against each other. 00:58:50 And I'll do stuff like that. So you can get pretty granular with what you can do on PickFu and you can really narrow it in. And, I found that I get really good results doing that. So, pick food is an amazing tool; I'm glad uh that uh the guys put this out, and and and uh everybody that's not using it should be using it for sure. And that's a great thing that you said, that we're gonna actually do more videos on because a lot of people think it's just a one-and-done type thing. But there's a whole process to it, right? So that whole iteration, this or that, now this versus the competitor, now this versus different colors, all these different kinds of things. What I tell people is it's a trifecta, right? 00:59:35 There's three different things: you're testing before launch, you're testing during the product being live, and then you're testing it post-launch. And then people ask me, John, what's post-launch? Like, what's when I'm sunsetting the product? And then I explain to people, sometimes if the lifecycle of the product has run its course, right? And if you're not the next big thing, you're not keeping up with the Joneses. You want to see potentially is my product really innovative after two or three or four years, and if not, then maybe before I re-up my inventory, maybe it's time to sunset this product and go to iteration 2. 0, you know what I mean? Yeah, another cool thing that you can do is you can do stuff with AI now. 01:00:14 You can create mock-ups, you know, of your product using AI and then put those into PickFu and actually say, which of these, I don't know, new wave A toasters do you like the best? And one of the things I do is once I actually get a winner, so if I look at the comments and it says, oh, I think this section over here should be a little bit bluer, or I'm just making this up or whatever, then I'll go and I'll have that fixed in the image, and then I'll run another poll to actually confirm that that's actually true. So I'll look at the comments. I'll make some adjustments to the image. The winner, or maybe it could be a comment off the loser that someone says, well, I would have voted for this one. 01:00:51 If, if this would have been the case, you know, the way it, and I'll make those changes and I'll run it again and see if I get the results. So don't just think that you got to run one pick food and you're done. I mean, that's better than nothing for sure, but use the tool to the maximum of its ability and the results and your, your results on your sales will be dramatically different. Kevin King guarantees it. And if you don't see a 400% increase in your sales after using PickFu, Kevin, where can everyone email you? I'm just kidding. But Kevin, I know you plugged a little bit more and I appreciate you for hopping on. What's the next big thing that you can promote that you're at that everyone could go find you? 01:01:36 Besides your newsletter, which is fantastic. I appreciate it. You have the newsletter, BillionDollarSellers. com every Monday and Thursday. Like a $25, 000 mastermind for free, um my next big thing is I have my Big Billion Dollar Seller Summit happening in Hawaii in uh less than less than four weeks, um that's that's my next big one, and then I'll be at a few events uh this summer and fall and I'm sure you'll see me around. Yeah, I heard now don't quote me but I heard from the grapevine that if this live stream podcast goes well that John and Justin, the co-founders of PickFu, are flying the entire team of PickFu to Hawaii to hang out with you on the beach. That's what he told me. 01:02:20 He did reach out to me the other day and say, 'Are there any rooms left?' I told him, 'I'm sorry, the rooms are sold out,' but we do have a really cool Airbnb. It could be the PickFu Airbnb. It's right on the beach. Just amazing views. It would be incredible. It would be a great place to host a little party one night... yeah, you know, for everybody to to show them all the new cool stuff on Pick Food and what's happening... uh, but yeah, I don't know what's going to happen with that, but yeah, he did reach out and just was a, you know, poking the bear and seeing uh what might be possible. I'll tell you what. I'm shacking up with you. You better have a bunk bed because I want to stay where the party's at, where the mecca is of everything. But, Kevin, I appreciate it again, man. I hope that you join us again on another episode down the road. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, man. Take care, everybody. Take care. Bye.