Winning with Amazon Ads: How to Rank Higher & Boost Profitability with Neil Robson – Episode 46 of the Agency Operators Podcast

Winning with Amazon Ads: How to Rank Higher & Boost Profitability with Neil Robson – Episode 46 of the Agency Operators Podcast Speaker 2: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Agency Operators Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Neil Robson of PPC Ninja. How are you doing, Neil? Speaker 1: I'm doing great, Pasha. How are you doing? Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Speaker 2: I'm doing great too, man. I'm really happy to talk with you. I spoke with Ritu not too long ago, a couple months back on the podcast, and that was a really informative show. So I'm super happy to have you here. PPC Ninja is pretty well known in our space for being some of the top leaders in the PPC on Amazon world. It's a small world, but the people who are at the top of that are really knowledgeable because what does it take to be knowledgeable in this space? Lots of experience. I'm working with lots of different sellers and different categories and seeing how Amazon changes the landscape. I personally have seen Amazon go from not having any ad platform at all to Now, they're probably making, I would argue, they're probably making more money on selling ads to their sellers than they are, you know, making their referral fees when you sell a product. So, it's become a very important thing for Amazon and so, you know, it's almost like a form of science and art for us. Anyway, I'll stop rambling, Neil, but I would love to hear your story, how you joined PPC Ninja and kind of what you do over there. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess my story starts back in, I would say, 2017. I started selling on Amazon. I sold on Amazon for like two years to two and a half years, something like that. And I ended up having to For personal reasons, I ended up closing down my brand. But when I was working on my brand, I became obsessed with PPC. And so, you know, I self-taught, took a whole bunch of courses and ended up connecting with V2. And we were kind of going back and forth a little bit and having some conversations. She said, hey, why don't you come work at PPC Ninja? So that was like late 2021. And we've been working together ever since, very closely working together ever since. So her and I, So, Senior PPC Manager, I actually just got moved up to the Director of Brand Success within the agency as well. So, really focusing on helping the brands grow from, you know, having the seller experience side of things to moving the technical side and then just kind of navigating the ins and out of this evolving platform that is Amazon, right? I like to say that we're kind of moving in a direction of late-stage Amazon, late-stage capitalism, late-stage Amazon, where it's just like everything is so driven by AI and it absolutely is the future. And so I started working with her and, you know, it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to align myself with a thought leader and have very constructive debates over the future of Amazon. And, you know, I'm excited to have a little bit of a debate today as well. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'd love that. You mentioned before the call that you kind of have a wishlist. What you would like to see Amazon roll out and some of the changes, you know, I'd love to hear some of those points and maybe we can talk a little bit about that. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So I did kind of go off the cuff here and I came up with a wishlist of what I would want to see from the platform in 2025. Just thinking through how Amazon is, where Amazon is going and some of the things that I see just, you know, working in the accounts day to day. Having conversations with small, medium enterprise level brands, as well as, you know, just the whole overarching picture of Amazon, you know, it's a pretty interesting topic. And so the number one thing I'd love to talk about is just like, right now there is a massive America first movement happening in the United States, right? And I think that, I think Amazon should honestly get on board. And what I mean by this is I would love to see Amazon. Cut some slack to native to that country sellers. So if you're from the United States, they give you a discount on the referral fee, right? Right now what we're seeing is massive competition from China. Like there's no question. The Chinese, they probably occupy 50% of the platform, if not more. And I actually have a client who is a Chinese aggregator. So he's over in China. He builds these brands and he's working directly. He's cutting deals directly with the factory. So it's two Chinese companies who have decided to come together and price fix and be like, we're going to negotiate the price of this product. We're both going to negotiate it. So we're making money, but we're priced low enough where, you know, if you're a middleman, You're going to get squeezed and you're not going to be able to compete. And so, you know, when we look at the native sellers who don't have the resources to be able to go over to China and negotiate for months on end and get these stellar deals, we're seeing all this downward pricing pressure. And it's true even on the supplement brands. I had a meet with one of my supplement brands earlier this week and they said, you know, Our producers costs are going up. Our costs are going up. We have to raise our price. We have to raise our price. But the market doesn't want to accept it. Right. The market is saying. Amazon's very well known as a price driven platform where you can get good deals. And so Amazon, like, and I've seen it firsthand, Amazon will actually punish sellers for raising their price, right? Whether it's you lose the buy box, or you experience a temporary, you know, drop in conversion rates, they throttle your impressions, your sessions, all kinds of stuff, right? Like the A9 algorithm doesn't care about external market factors, right? And so I think from like what's going on in America with the America First movement, getting rid of some of the referral fees for the small, medium sized businesses and having Amazon, you know, how would you feel if you were an American seller? If Amazon said, you know what, we're going to cut the 15% referral fee. We're going to go to the US government. We're going to say, hey, We're helping inject all of this capital into Native American sellers on the platform, entrepreneurs. Help us compete against China, right? Bring that wealth back into America and really just, you know, stand up to getting bullied because, you know, it's moving in a direction where the Chinese are just so powerful on the platform. Something can help and it wouldn't be anything for Amazon to get involved and say, you know what, this makes a lot of sense. And, you know, kind of like you hinted at in the beginning of the call there where you said, the referral fee, it's not really that much, but the ad side of things is where they're making a lot of their money, right? So it's like, That money is still going to get dumped back into the Amazon platform. Amazon's still going to make their trillion dollars or whatever it is every single year, but it's just going to come in a different form, right? It's going to allow Americans to compete at a different level and just be a little more successful than where they have been compared to some of these Chinese sellers that are coming in and doing this price fixing kind of thing, right? Speaker 2: So inherently I agree with you, of course, right? Especially I'm a US citizen and I, you know, I try myself in all the businesses that I've personally launched. I have not sourced from China in a very long time just because, yeah, I've become this middleman that China can just come and undercut super easily. So it doesn't make sense for American sellers or, you know, American brands at this stage, like new ones, to try to buy from China because of that reason. So, naturally, I agree with you. However, looking at it from the lens of Amazon, it's sort of like, aside from maybe nationalistic reasons or whatever it may be that are, you know, more, not so much money-driven reasoning, Amazon has proven to me that they are entirely optimized for the best outcome for Amazon. And almost every case, even with their sustainability initiatives, that came out as a result of a lot of pressure from outside that people were upset that they don't have clear sustainability. So what I'm trying to say is what would be the financial incentive for them to cut out all these referral percentages that they could be making. And for them, you know, they let in all the Chinese sellers because it makes money. People like cheap stuff on the platform. So they buy a lot of it and they make their referral fee and their PPC fees and whatever. It's almost like for them to do that is almost like kind of shooting themselves in the foot in some way, right? Even though you're hoping that they'll kind of make up for it with the PPC or maybe get people more inspired or you know, whatever the case may be. There might be some residual effects, but you see what I'm trying to say. Unknown Speaker: Absolutely, absolutely. Speaker 1: So I see two pretty decent arguments here. So number one, there is a deal to be made somewhere between the American government and Amazon around this, right? Where it's like, you know what, we are going to be a little more nationalistic. How about we work together and we get a little bit of a deal in some type, in some form of tax break, right? Whether it's, you know, they subsidize Amazon through like, they're already paying $0 in tax, but they could get, you know, some separate permitting process or something like that, right? Like, the US government could definitely come up with something in terms of And I'm here to talk about how they could kick it back to Amazon in order to incentivize them to allow these small mom-and-pop shops that don't necessarily stand a chance on the platform because of these referral fees. And so it could be a very easy way to kind of subsidize through the government. And they're already looking for ways to do this. And like the U.S. government, it's right there. They're saying they want to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Products that are manufactured in the United States, their costs, like they're already having to raise their prices so high because they are number one manufactured in the United States. So it's a higher manufacturing cost. And then they have to compete with the, you know, the cheaper products coming from China. And so if you were able to lower the referral fee for those made or even say made in America products, then it would definitely level the playing field because Yes, you are getting quality products when you order Made in America. But at the same time, you can get very, very comparable products from China at a relatively cheaper cost, right? So I think seeing the government come in and subsidize there. So there is a win-win relationship to be had, I think. And I think that it would really align with what is happening right now. And it would just continue to help Because I'm thinking like there's lots of small brick and mortar retail stores too, right? And so they would be able to, you know, remove those 15% referral fees and all of a sudden, it's a little more of a level playing field. It's not so fixed against them because when you're firing up on Amazon, it's so expensive too. Operating costs are just through the roof, firing up a brand. It's no longer, oh, I have an extra 5K kicking around. You need 50 to 100K to be able to start up something and making sure that You can make your dollars go as far as possible, right? We're moving at 15%. That could be an extra 15 grand in a small seller's pocket. Easy. Speaker 2: That's a lot, yeah. And I think with the subsidizing is a good solution. As long as the government has the funds for that and people see the value in it. They don't feel like, oh, we're spending potentially taxpayer money. Some people might not agree with it. But the other thing is like, The material that we use in American manufacturing could be coming from China. That's the issue that I have with this so-called domestic manufacturing. You go and manufacture a supplement. And they'll tell you, oh yeah, this is a made in America. We make it in whatever, this state. And you're like, oh, great. What's inside of it? Oh, we have this, this, this and this ingredient. Where do the ingredients come from? Oh, we source them all over the world, but mostly China. So then you're really just buying this kind of proxy product, which says made in America, but it's actually just a that the labor is American and that product itself is kind of mostly Chinese. And to do it otherwise is just too expensive because you would have to open up tons of factories throughout the US, which have to be run by people and the labor is more expensive here and whatnot and different standards and whatnot. So things just become extremely expensive very quickly. So how do we, I don't know, this is a very difficult thing to solve. Speaker 1: That's exactly it, right? Like I was looking into like, why is American manufacturing down so much? And the American manufacturing got abandoned with the idea that You know, everyone is going to upscale, right? And so it's going to we're going to source out the manufacturing and everyone's going to upscale and get higher level jobs where we're all working at computers. And, you know, that's essentially what happened. But now there's no now it's just too expensive to manufacture in the United States. And so there needs to be some type of subsidy to, you know, And I think it's really important for us as a company, from the government to say, OK, we are going to simulate with subsidies for American made products. And it's more about just kind of, I would say, taking those manufacturing jobs back into the country where it is being produced, because there's no question, you know, like the resources required to manufacture goods come from all over the world. I think about like Himalayan salt, like how could that be anywhere but from that particular place, right? And so seeing the government just be like, okay, we are going to subsidize, we need to prioritize this and then have Amazon get on board and say, you know what? Yes, we are a trillion dollar company. We care about profits more than anything. But at the same time, you know, we can align with I'm here to talk about the movement that is happening right now and help stimulate from our side because the US marketplace is the biggest fish in the pond, right? And they definitely would lose out on those referral fees, but then I believe that that money would just ultimately get recycled back into the platform through PPC probably. Speaker 2: Yeah, awesome. Speaker 1: Yeah. And so it's a very interesting concept. So I, you know, and it's, I agree where there would be some, some people who might not be on board with that, because, you know, oh, I I don't care about American manufacturing or I just want cheap products. But at the end of the day, it would be a nice to have to help level the playing field against the Chinese, right? Because I do believe that for the most part, it's us against the Chinese. So that's a pretty interesting one. My second point for a wish list would be Review rates, like I don't know if you're seeing this, but review rates are just down, like they are significantly down. And I want to say that like back in 2018, 2016, I remember scrolling my Amazon app and Amazon would And today we're going to talk about how to put a product that I had already purchased in front of me just, you know, organically. Right. And it was just like, do you want to leave a review for this product? Yes or no. And then you would just, you know, quickly tap the five stars and you could move on or you could quickly write a review and move on. Right. It doesn't work anymore. No, it doesn't do anything right. Everyone is opted out of marketing emails from Amazon. Like I did that. I've been on it. I've been a Prime members, I think since 2015. And so like, you know, The automation software has really killed that and beat it into the ground. And so with the consumer protection laws that have come in, you know, you can't solicit for reviews, really. And so we're seeing these review rates really decline. And I'm finding that the only time customers are now leaving reviews, honestly, is when they're pissed off, right? Like, no one is really going out of their way to leave a review when they're happy. It's a lot more of, I'm upset. And so you're left with very few options, right? You have the Vine Review Program. Which is fine, but it can be really hit and miss. And those Vine reviewers, they can be pretty tough. And they don't necessarily match your ideal customer persona. Speaker 2: They don't understand your product. Speaker 1: Right, and they're just looking for free stuff, right? And it's like, I was selling like a surgery recovery product and someone snapped it up and they're like, oh, it had the surgery, but I think it would work good. Four stars, right? It's like, And that's, that's not what the program was intended for, right, is for people who actually wanted to use it or needed it. And so with these review rates, just on the decline, it's there needs to, they need some type of system I'm here to help you overhaul that type of system and just start bringing back reviews because they are so important. And like one of the big things that we're seeing right now is that shifted search rate. And so this is where I'm going to start talking about Rufus. We're seeing this twofold thing where we have Rufus come in and what it's doing is it's analyzing thousands of reviews, right? And it's giving you a very comprehensive breakdown of, you know, what is this product actually about? But if you've launched your product within the last six months on Amazon, you know, I'd say you're lucky to have 50 reviews. And so Rufus doesn't have anything to go off of. And this is one of the big things that Amazon is leaning into is the customer feedback loop from that AI to help power the shopping experience. Right. And so it's this And today we're going to talk about the negative flywheel where customers aren't leaving reviews, but this AI needs the reviews to work better. And, you know, they already have so much of your buyer information, right? Like they understand your shopping habits. They understand everything. But one of your shopping qualities might be, I do anything with less than, you know, 30 reviews. And that's something that I look for as a consumer. Like I shop on Amazon. Amazon driver does wax around the house, I'll say. Right. And so I'm always looking for, you know, greater than 50 reviews. I want over 4.5 star rating. And I like when I go to a listing, first thing I do is I go to the bottom and I sort by most recent. Right. Because if you have 2000 reviews, a lot of those don't really need anything because those could have been like that product could have been launched when there was rebate key when they were searched by my there was all these different You know, even just the giveaways right like in the glory days of 2015 where you could just you know Give away a thousand units and get a thousand reviews And so like, you know, they've gone through and they've kind of cleaned that up over the years but still seeing Those reviews stick around like looking as a consumer, we need to have fresh reviews coming in. And so they really need to look at their review system right now and figure out a way, how can we get customers leaving authentic reviews that are in line with the consumer protection laws, right? Like it can't be incentivized. We know that. So Amazon can't be like, I'm going to give you a 25 cent credit for every review. Review you, right? Like that's against the law. So they need to incorporate this to make it as seamless as possible, where it could even be like a, you know, a quick three question survey, and the app, the AI can figure out the rest. But with the direction that Rufus is going, we really need to have more reviews coming in. Speaker 2: I love that point. I actually never went into that rabbit hole myself of, wow, yeah. People are only reviewing when they're mad and that's informing the AI about your product. And so now you're just having this inflated negative narrative being played out about your product, even though there's maybe nothing wrong with it, but it's just, yeah, that's a very, very good point. I think giving people credits on their next order, giving them a $1 gift card, or even like you said, 25 cents might be enough. You know, like, Give them some kind of money for leaving reviews of their next order. I guarantee you everybody's going to start spending time on their app, leaving reviews because they're making money. Speaker 1: Right, but then that gets into that tricky, that gets back into like, oh, are you incentivizing for reviews, right? And so like you need to follow the FTC guidelines where it says you are not allowed to do anything to incentivize a customer for a review. Now is that 25 cents enough of an incentivization to be like, yes, this is a legal. Speaker 2: Amazon is doing it, number one. And number two, they're not saying what kind of star rating. They're just incentivizing people to share their thoughts. So, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I mean, the Request a Review button is exactly that, except it's free. So, just put the Request a Review button, but add a little bit of a little bonus just to bring more authenticity into the platform. I mean, I think that that shouldn't be against any kind of violation. That should not violate any kind of policy. Speaker 1: I personally agree. Like, I remember when I was selling, I had the, you know, the insert card and asking for a review. And unfortunately, Amazon tagged me and they said, hey, your review card is against TOS. You got to pull all your inventory and take this card out. Right. And they were very strict on it. And so I'm I've always just leaned against any type of like, you know, you're allowed to say, can I please have a review or please leave me an unbiased review? And that's that's about the extent of it. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: But I think if they were to put it organically, Inline search with everything else. Yes, you would be losing real estate in terms of the amount of products that you could show, but it's like if you have The AI also knows, you know, what's going on. And so one of the things that I always say is like, nothing good happens on Amazon after 10pm. No one buys, like shopping just goes down, right? It's just a lot of people kind of doom scrolling and fantasizing about products that they might want to buy. And so it could be like, you know, after this 10 o'clock spot, Our revenue is down anyways. Let's try and get some reviews here. And it's like, that's when you can start asking people for additional reviews, right? Because it's like they're already bored. Whether or not they intentionally know they're not going to buy anything, they're not going to buy anything. So the chances of them leaving a review might actually be a little bit higher, right? Speaker 2: That's a good point. Speaker 1: And so I think just with that negative feedback we're seeing on the AI, we know that the AI reads these reviews, right? That's one of the big things. And I love seeing that. And the summary at the bottom now, the AI snippet, if you don't have any reviews, what does it do? That was point number two that I really want from Amazon. I would really love to see this one come. They got to do something. There's no question they have to do something with the rise of the AIs coming. So that brings me to point number three. So within these AI, so we can see them testing right now on it. There's no question, Rufus is out there. And what's going on right now is we're seeing a deterioration on keyword-based search matching, right? And so if you put in an exact match, garlic pressed stainless steel, Amazon's bringing back garlic press made of metal, right? And they're matching semantic searches with keyword-based search. And they're kind of just totally ignoring what we're doing on the advertising side of things. And it's becoming a little more and more challenging, right? And a specific case I want to call out is sponsored brands. Now, Sponsored Brands is fantastic. It's an extremely powerful ad site simply because you get those creatives and you get an opportunity to tell a story, right? And when we're trying to sell these USPs within Sponsored Brands, we can use very targeted... I set up my ads very, very targeted where We all have, you know, headline aligns with the search terms that I'm typing in. So as soon as a customer types in something into the search bar, the headline they see matches it, the image they see matches it. And, you know, we're using AI to develop images for all sorts of matching. And so it's like everything matches the customer search term that they put into the bar. And when we look at new Rufus models and not really telling us how it's working, our matching isn't matching the way we want it to. And so now I'm starting to see my ads that are supposed to be extremely targeted, very well thought out, extremely targeted. I show up all over the place. And so, number one, I'm getting clients messaging me going, Hey, Neil, why doesn't this match? Right? Like, and I'm going, you know, I set this up. This is exactly how it's set up. I can see A, B, C, and Amazon's put in a point. We'll call it D to C or something like that. These are not perfectly aligning. As someone who does PPC, it becomes extremely challenging to make sure that I know the keywords that I want to show up with. But Amazon has these massive consumer data sets that they're now starting to deploy, right? And we're seeing the customization happen in real time. And there's like a disconnect that's happening between keyword-based search and semantic search, the machine learning search, right? And we're seeing I know for a fact Amazon, Rufus is now changing listings. They're changing titles. They're changing bullet points. And they're customizing everything based off of your, you know, I have 15 years of purchasing data that I've given to Amazon. And they've now built an extremely powerful model that says, hey, Neil's a remote worker. When I type in new keyboards, they're offering me a compact keyboard, right? They're not showing me And when I look at the desktop version, they're showing me something that's mobile and it fits my lifestyle, right? And that's where this AI is really starting to become powerful. And we're seeing the disconnect happening in real time. So as a PPC manager, we're seeing that disconnect and it's leading to more inefficient ad spend and it's becoming a challenge, right? To a client, hey, you know, I spent $1,000 on this keyword and unfortunately it wasn't matching the way I wanted it to. They just need to open up a little more on how as ad managers we can accurately make sure that we are targeting the way we want to. And so that's one of the big things too. What are your thoughts on seeing Amazon? Have you heard of Amazon changing listings and titles and bullets and all of those good things? Speaker 2: I've seen that, yeah. And with regards to the whole Rufus and PPC stuff that you mentioned, I did something that I've been trying to wrap my head around. How are you supposed to incentivize AI to show your product in a search result that's based on an intent query in Rufus? You go into Rufus and you say, hey, I'm going on a beach trip. Give me the best umbrella that I can get for the beach. And it's giving you results. Can they put sponsored placements in there? Can I pay off the bot to put my product in front of people when they're really trying to get research instead? So that is a huge gap which I think is wrong. That's them trying to fit a square into a hole that is circular. You know what I mean? And recently I just saw the news that they retired the whole Inspire thing. Inspire was their kind of TikTok version for the Amazon rolled out. They test things and then they redact them. And so that's a common thing that Amazon just kind of goes through when they try out a new system and they see it doesn't really have good results and they pull it back in. So I think until they have gone through enough rounds of this they won't be able to be more transparent because they themselves don't know the answer. What I've seen is statistics around the rollout of Cosmo and they are seeing positive results as a result of these rollouts for them in terms of sales numbers. Even a 0.1% Efficiency is translated to tens of millions for them. So it is working, tracking people's behaviors. I think they've probably done a little bit of that even before this whole LLM situation, just through their, you know, algorithms and deep learning and following numbers. But with LLMs available, now they're able to compute a lot more information. And they also own Whole Foods and other things. And they probably combine all that data and whatever partners they have. You start to build a character out of who you are and what you're interested in at the time of the day and time of the year and relative maybe even to your friends. Maybe they even know your network and they know that you're going on a, you know, you posted on Facebook, you're going on a beach trip and now they know that you're kind of looking up. So I'm sure it's going to go down that rabbit hole at some point where everything is just so deeply interconnected. They know so much about you, especially if you're opting into all of these data tracking services. And sharing your information, I mean eventually you'll just come on and you'll just type a couple different words that are vaguely describing what you're looking for and they're going to give you exactly, they'll know what you need better than you know what you need. So that's where it's leading to. But until then, we're just going to get these little bites that inform us. Speaker 1: Yeah. And they're going to have all that search history saved, right? Like for me, I live in an old house. So it's like now when I'm searching on Amazon, I get shown antiquey stuff instead of like new modern stuff, right? And that's because all my search history is now saved and it's well documented. And they know that like this is how much I have to spend on average. And like you said, like with those The adoption of Rufus is happening. I just saw something where it was like, they just crossed over, I think it was 500 million queries on Rufus, right? And so like, they went from 30 million to 500 million like that. And so, you know, I bet you with Moore's Law, it's just going to keep doubling and doubling and doubling. And eventually it's the whole thing is going to be Rufus. And The real question is, where is that square peg around round hole? How do you fit ads on that, right? Because it all is going to be these language or these LMs that do learn. They know you. They know everything about us. We've given it to them. And so now they're going to try and hold on to one of their biggest profit centers within the business because Amazon Ads continues to grow year over year. We're seeing CPCs rise, we're seeing competition, all those kinds of good things. But now they're introducing this wildcard where keyword-based search is moving in a direction that is away from their profit center. It's a very interesting one and just seeing, you know, the communicate, I agree totally with what you said about how Amazon launches these programs and they don't know what they're doing, right? They have no idea. Speaker 2: They're just responding to some trends that they're seeing and they want to be everywhere. I think that in the short term and maybe in the long term too, My strategy to respond to this change is to have as much data about your product filled out by you as you can. Of course, reviews are reviews. People are going to say what they're going to say, but you have metadata slots. You have all text in your images. You have back-end additional info. Use it. Fill it out. It's your control. So you have the ability to put that information and inform their bot about what kind of classification your product has. Otherwise, they're just going to go off what they see and they don't know any better. So if you don't have many reviews or your listing is basic, they're not going to show you. Speaker 1: Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's one of the, so, you know, working with Ritu, it's pretty cool. She developed a tool It's just a web app script. And what it does is you just go on to any product detail page and you click this button and it's going to ask Rufus 20 questions. And then you can download it, export it, and then you can review it and look for any holes in your SEO that the bot doesn't actually understand. And that's something that we're really moving towards is Making sure that Rufus understands exactly what your product is and making sure that like you're really using, um, Pronounced nouns is a big one, right? Where it's like extremely durable, right? Extremely portable, like those kinds of things is like those really heavy descriptive words, like the Rufus loves it. And so moving towards like understanding where your holes are, and then making sure that you're speaking in the language that the bot wants to hear. Speaker 2: Cool. I'd love the URL to that tool. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll send it to you offline. It's a very cool tool. Nice. And so moving on, I know how much time do we have? Speaker 2: We have a little more time. You said you have five points, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, I got five points. So the next thing I would love to see is just better metric tracking inside of the ad console. So, you know, the big one that I would like to see is parent level tacos inside of the advertising console, right? Like that's where things One of the things that can really get challenging is when we have all these different variations and sometimes the strategy is, you know, we're only advertising one or two. And when you go into the skew economics, like everyone needs a piece of tech to track their profitability. I think like Sellerboard is a great piece of tech. There's all kinds of different pieces out there. But at the end of the day, you need some piece of tech. And where we start to get into problems is within sponsored brands because their attribution. Speaker 2: Hmm. Speaker 1: With us at the agency, we use a weighted system. So we just say, hey, you know what, like, this SKU is generating this much sales, we're going to take that spend and weight the sponsored brand spend across all the SKUs that are spending and the SKUs that aren't spending, we're not going to attribute any spend to because you're not advertising on them. So that's kind of the way we're doing it. So I know Amazon has that data, like they have the 1P data, they can tell us exactly All of that attribution and they can save us a whole bunch of time and it's nothing for them to connect a few dots in the back end to be like business reports piped into ad console. And within that dropdown, Taco's right there, right? And it's very easy to see. They can give us all of that data, but they intentionally want to make it harder and more challenging. And so people may not be as aware of their profitability. So it's in the best interest of their business to have more unprofitable products circling around out there than giving us clean attribution data. Speaker 2: That's a very good point. I think that that will, I mean, for our clients also to just understand those metrics and have the ability to really break it down like that, I think is going to be super helpful. Speaker 1: And that's where this all came about was I had a client that was sending me some of the skew economics, right? The skew economics tab inside of Seller Central. Hey, I'm losing money over here. I'm losing money over here. And it's not, We're factoring in all of the other parents and of course they're factoring, looking at the one that we're spending money on. So Amazon's attributing all this spend to one single SKU but they're not looking at it from the parent level. They're not factoring in the sponsored brands attribution which cannot be used inside of SKU economics at all because you have to split that across and it's just an ugly attribution thing. Amazon could definitely fix this problem, but it's not in their best interest, right? And one of the things that I do is keep a tight leash on my total advertised cost of sale, right, my tacos. And I'm a big believer in portfolios. And I would love to see part of this being a budget cap, a daily recurring budget cap And today, we're going to be talking about how to get started at the portfolio level. So if you know your average daily sales, you can say, hey, you know, I make a thousand or I do a thousand dollars total sales every single day. I'm going to put a hundred dollar budget and I know I have 10 percent tacos. Right. Continues to reset every single day. Whereas Amazon's, you know, they have all these measures in place where they're saying, hey, why don't you increase your campaign budget by 25%? Hey, inside your portfolios, campaigns that run out of budget, they can now share budget. What do you think of that? And it's like all of these little things that are not helping sellers, but they are helping Amazon, right? So just seeing a little bit more features inside the ad console, especially with conversion rate metrics too, right? Like I think seeing conversion rate in there would be a massive benefit, but again, not in Amazon's benefit. So it's a challenge from that aspect. Speaker 2: I agree with you. Like you said, they're looking out for their interests. That's what I see from Amazon. Even as a buyer, you go into the last page of your cart. I don't know if you ever have this experience as a buyer. I go into the last page right before I check out and then, oh, I messed up. I want this or I want that change. They don't make it possible from that screen. You got to go all the way back. And so they've designed their UX with so many different people looking at it and thinking about it. It's so well thought out to incentivize you to move in the direction that they want you to move and that's most advantageous for them. So you kind of have to play the game in that kind of way knowing that Amazon is a beast that is trying to Make things most efficient. Yeah, they're trying to extract value out of everybody. Mm-hmm But it's it's the game that we play and if we don't want to play it somebody else will play it So that's just the nature of the beast Absolutely. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And I mean we're playing we're playing the game but like I just want to play it better You know what? I mean? And like we deserve it. Yeah, absolutely. We're spending enough money on the platform like You know, some of the fees that sellers are incurring in a single year becoming astronomical, right? Like if you're a 10-figure brand. You're paying three million bucks to Amazon a year just in fees and that's not including your PPC, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. It's kind of ridiculous once you start counting everything. You get taxed at the end of it all. You have to pay fees here. You're locking up tons of cash and there's risks of things not moving as you want it in the logistics chain. So you might run out of inventory unexpectedly. We're overstock and get hit with fees for that. We're understock and get fees for that, and inbound placement fees, this, and something else here. And then at the end, you're just spinning all your gears, spinning all your wheels, and you're like, that's all that's left? And you're hiring an agency on top of it to help you navigate this storm, right? And then at the end, you're like, that's all that's left? Is it worth it? People ask themselves probably all the time. Amazon sellers, they're just like, is this worth it? So I think Amazon's starting to kind of get more of that type of feedback from agencies and sellers alike that this is just not sustainable. So they are doing something about it, I hope. I mean, I was looking at their fee schedule. They haven't made any additional fees. They've reduced some bulky stuff a little bit. They've increased fees for multi-channel fulfillment. But everything else is sort of what it was last year. But I mean, I agree with you ultimately, like, they got to listen to this and say, all right, you know, let's consider some giving some people a break to incentivize growth and other types of ways because, you know, there's only so much you can squeeze a sponge until there's nothing left, you know. Speaker 1: Right. And that's that late stage Amazon capital, late stage Amazon, right, where it's just like all you have to work Seamlessly inside of this system that they've built. And if you don't work seamlessly inside of the system that they built, you're paying for it, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And they're going to nickel and dime you the whole way. And so there could be, you know, that just kind of goes back to my first point, right? Where it's like they could have a little bit of some type of break for the sellers, because I think it's going to be needed, even the enterprise level clients are feeling it. Well, and so I've got to my last point here. So everyone, thanks for sticking with me here. So the last one here, I think this one is is is. Very, very common. It's a reduction of the tenfold event, like honestly. We have Prime Day coming up in July. We have Prime Day in October. So those two events are 91 days apart, right? 91 days apart. Then we have BFCM week. Last year, it was 10 days. This year is 12 days. Next year, or this year coming up, it'll probably be 14, right, where it just gets longer. And now we have the big spring sale coming up in March and these big tentpole events are just causing buyer fatigue. Buyer fatigue, like that's the only way to put it is you think you want something and you think that there's a deal going on. But sellers are so compressed that they can't offer a deal for 14 days and sustain the ad costs. You just lose money hand over fist and Amazon continues to want to see these low prices and now they've introduced reference price and all of those things. So before there was a lot of price manipulation, right? So I'm going to increase my price and then I'm going to offer the discount and we're going to trick customers, right? I can understand why Amazon put that reference price in place and I agree with it. But I don't agree with the frequency of these big tentpole events and how the duration that they're going for. So they need to space these out better is really what I'm getting at. Speaker 2: They're again taking advantage. Like they're squeezing more juice by doing that out of everyone. And I agree with you. I mean, look at this dynamic, right? I've observed this very closely. Same as you. I mean, I'm very frustrated. Look what happens. People know it's coming. So they stop buying stuff that is not essential and they wait and so sales go down. Then all of a sudden you get this surge and sales spike up and then after they go down again because people are done buying the things that they wanted to buy. Your sales numbers don't really do that much. This is more of an assertive ranking change event between Amazon sellers more so than it is for your sales to get increased or your rank to get increased. It's not really what's happening. I've actually seen adverse reactions where if you have a seller that you're working with and they just can't do the deal or they don't want to do the deal and somebody else has done the deal, they will steal their rank in that event and it will be hard to get it back afterwards. It's almost like they're forcing you to participate otherwise you're going to get your rank swept from under your feet. And when you're doing a 12 day, like that 12 or 10 day deal that they did at the end of last year was ridiculous because they were not taking inventory in very quickly from their sellers. Like I'm a seller, I send an inventory. My goodness, it's weeks and weeks and weeks and you're waiting for your stuff to arrive. I'm even sending UPS boxes over LTL because it's cheaper or I'm sorry, because it's more expensive. And typically faster in most cases because they're receiving boxes and not breaking down pallets. Depends on the product. But in my case, I've noticed that UPS boxes get checked in faster. So I'm like, yeah, just send the UPS boxes. They're not coming in on time because they're so overloaded, right? They even announced that like, October 15th is the cutoff. We're gonna be prioritizing something else. So. Speaker 1: And AWB was full too, right? Like AWB was full. Speaker 2: Everything is packed to the top so you have all of this like crunching at one time. Sellers are selling at a loss just to have their stock depleted and not being able to replenish it fast enough. So you end up going out of stock. You have inventory locked somewhere in transit. It's a disaster. I really don't think anybody's really benefiting from it that much except maybe some consumers getting a good deal and mostly Amazon of course. Speaker 1: And I don't remember. So for the 2024 October Prime Day, I don't remember seeing sales numbers for that one. Amazon is usually pretty good about releasing their sales figures for these big tech poll events. And I don't remember seeing any numbers for this particular event. And I think that's because And I think that their numbers were actually lower than what they expected. And so, of course, they don't want to report that their numbers are down on their big sales, right? They want to make sure that everything is growing. But like when you think about some of the other platforms out there, like there's Teemu and then there's Taobao. And I think there's one more out there. But they literally have these events every single month. And it just becomes like the consumer just gets so beaten down and it's nothing special anymore. And it just is a way to erode And so, you know, I'd like to see them just kind of steer away from this. You know, the first Prime Day in July makes sense. And then BFCM week in November makes sense. I would say shorten it up, you know, make it a true week, seven days, not 10 days. Even still, that's too long. And I would say get rid of the October Prime Day. Like it doesn't do anything aside from increased referral fees, increased inventory fees, increased all of those other fees, right? Like they're just creating more volume and work for their employees. But there's no real benefit to anyone else. And if the sales numbers are going down, then I think it would be good for them just to, you know, take a look and say, hey, what are we actually doing here? Speaker 2: Nice. Let's start a petition. Send it out to all the sellers and agencies. Speaker 1: Yeah. So I've spoken to Rita about this and I told her to get vocal about it, but she said, no, no, no, we got to play nice with Amazon. So we continue to play nice with Amazon because we don't want them punishing us at the same time. Speaker 2: Yeah. We have to play the game. Speaker 1: Absolutely. We have to play the game. Speaker 2: Neil, thank you for sharing all these points. I appreciate you taking the time to prepare that. It's been really insightful and really great food for thought. Any final comments before we close the live stream? Speaker 1: You know, Amazon is just getting harder and harder. And so I think making sure that you're staying at the, what I call the tip of the spear of information is more important than ever. And so, you know, we had conversations around AI, Great conversations around reviews and just any type of competitive edge. So just staying on top of everything is more important now than ever. And I think, you know, being on, listening to this podcast is a great way to stay on top of everything. So, Pasha, thank you so much for having me on the call today. Really had a great time coming out and having a conversation. Speaker 2: Thanks, Neil. I appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for watching. We'll catch you on the next one. Bye-bye for now.