Podcast: Social Proof, Branding, and How to Win at Amazon in 2020 with Greg Mercer of Jungle Scout
February 4, 2020
Listen to the podcast
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [01:37] How Jungle Scout uses Amazon brand analytics
- [06:01] Amazon data that sellers may not know how to use
- [07:50] Is the Amazon BSR (Best Sellers Rank) useful?
- [10:26] Is price a form of social proof?
- [14:40] How can brands garner more reviews?
- [17:11] Is there a way to build a listing to get more reviews?
- [21:43] Pricing as a perception of quality
- [25:04] Should selling on an Amazon channel get more attention than a website?
- [28:22] How often are sales lost in the transition from a website to Amazon?
- [31:36] Do Amazon buyers return to previous brands they don’t know?
- [35:15] The tools & products Jungle Scout has been working on
In this episode…
Consumer behavior over the last couple of years has shown that people care less about the brand they’re buying from, but are now more concerned with the social proof that the brand is able to showcase. This includes things like online reviews and price.
But is this a good trend? Can price be an indicator that a product is of good quality?
Greg Mercer answers these questions in this week’s episode with Eric Stopper. They talk about Amazon brand analytics, social proof, and best seller rankings.
Resources Mentioned on this episode
Sponsor for this episode
Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of clients’ business fundamentals and an in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.
The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity on the marketplace, not only producing greater revenue and profits, but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.
Buy Box Experts prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:17
Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast with your host, Joseph handsome. We bring to light the unique opportunities brands face and today’s e commerce world. And now here’s your host Joseph Hansen.
Eric Stopper 0:32
This episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. They have a team of consultants that will identify key low hanging fruit for some of your best selling cases on Amazon. So if you are an Amazon seller and you want to make more revenue, then go to buyboxexperts.com. Click on the free analysis button. It’s completely free, no strings attached. They have some limited time because they only have a handful of consultants that do this. So at some point they might decide not to offer anymore. So go to Bible x experts calm. Today we have Greg Mercer, the founder and CEO of Jungle Scout the leading software for Amazon sellers. He leads a team of over 125 employees all around the globe. Jungle Scout is all about empowering small businesses on Amazon to get to the next level. Greg and his wife Liz are travel junkies to say the least. They’ve been all over the world Burning Man Bali South America, you name it, check out his Instagram. It’s seriously just bright pictures and wonderful traveling. Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg Mercer 1:32
Eric thanks a lot for having me on. It’s gonna be a fun 30 minutes chatting with you.
Eric Stopper 1:36
Yeah, let’s let’s jump right into it. So first and foremost, I want to talk about brand analytics. It’s the most recent change that Amazon has made. As of this recording. They’ve been doing a lot of other things that are making people in this space pretty upset when it in regards to reviews and stuff like that. And I know that Jungle Scout launched keyword scout pro It’s the brand new analytics being available. And I’m sure your team is, you know, working on ways to incorporate that into the tool. Can you tell me a little bit about, you know, the process of using brand analytics inside of Jungle Scout and what kinds of insights brands can garner at a high level and then just an example of how you might have used this data to gain a competitive advantage for for some of the brands that you manage?
Greg Mercer 2:23
Yeah, great question. So a few different pieces there. I it’s, I guess, for the listeners, just real quick if you’re not familiar with brand analytics, I know a lot of you guys are but now for third party sellers who are brand registered, you can get access for free to something called brand analytics. It gives you the rank of all keywords are searched on Amazon like one through like 2 million or whatever it is in the US. And then so like right now I’m on there, like AirPods was the number one searched term in the past week on Amazon. And then another cool thing is it gives you like the top three listings, how much click share as well as how much convert conversion share That they received. So that’s pretty cool information. So like, your first question was, how do you incorporate that into the tool. So we actually don’t incorporate in the blant brand analytic stuff into Jungle Scout. And the reason for that is, Amazon doesn’t like that. So they, we have a pretty close relationship with Amazon, we always want to make sure that they’re happy. And they’re pretty particular about making sure that this information stays confidential for the people who it’s released to. And then it’s not kind of like republished, like given out to other people. So we don’t incorporate it into our tool. But that being said, it is really nice to know like this, the data because we have our own algorithms to estimate search volume on Amazon, and one of the ways that we just kind of like gut check things is it’s like, okay, we’re estimating that AirPods gets 100,000 searches per month. And, you know, iPad gets 80,000 searches per month. So like, does that like me? sense is like, okay, yeah, like AirPods is ranked over iPad and brain analytics. So we can kind of do like gut checks like that. But we don’t directly use the data inside of Jungle Scout.
Eric Stopper 4:11
And so today, I know you have a whole bunch of brands that you yourself have launched. And you’ve mentioned before that they’re not necessarily clustered together and specific brands, they’re just market opportunities that you’ve been able to find and create products for. Have you used the the brand analytics for for any of those brands to date? And how to use those? Yeah, great
Greg Mercer 4:33
question. You know, the brain analytics to me, it’s one of those things that it’s like, it’s cool. And like I do go ahead and check it out from time to time and it’s like interesting data to see Oh, like, wow, you know, this, whatever, this these wireless earbuds are getting a ton of clicks, but their conversions terrible, or it’s like it’s kind of interesting information like that, but that’s the Said I haven’t actually found that many ways, like directly actionable ways to like apply it to help my business. Now, of course keywords are really important, but like at the end of the day when I’m choosing which keywords that I want to target or how I want to optimize my listing, you know, like things in that area, I usually find like of course I’m like a little bit biased because I was the one that built like the Jungle Scout keyword research tool, but I think most people would actually agree with me that like it, it just makes it easier to find the keywords that are most relevant for your product just because of like it like the keyword match engine that we use is like pretty cool and sophisticated. So you know to directly answer your question I haven’t found it that useful for like directly impacting my business even though I do find myself in there reading it, but it’s more so like, I don’t know, kind of like out of fun or curiosity.
Eric Stopper 5:57
Yeah, almost like anecdotal information. Yeah. Now I’m Simon seller, right? And most of the people who listen to this podcast are Amazon sellers or their brands who are looking to sell on Amazon. And so are there any other, you know, pieces of data that maybe Amazon provides to you or even the maybe the Jungle Scout tool provides that brands might not know how to use, and they kind of look at it, and they shake their heads, and they’re wondering how to make decisions. Is there anything like that, that that you can kind of guide people through? Who may be listening?
Greg Mercer 6:27
Yeah, that’s a great question.
Unknown Speaker 6:29
Um,
Greg Mercer 6:31
course keyword search volume. And that’s, you know, kind of, it’s related to like the brain analytics, right? Like which keywords are more popular. So even if you weren’t using Jungle Scout or weren’t using a different keyword research tool, you could use Brandon analytics for that. And of course, that’s because it helps you decide which keywords are the most popular, and sometimes I even decide like, Okay, this keyword is actually the most popular, but it’s so competitive that I’m actually going to choose to put like these other like the second, third and fourth most popular ones in my time. Because I just know that I can like rank for those more easily. other pieces of data that I find really useful historical search volume and historical sales from my competitors, Jason’s those are of course, like great gauges of seasonality, obviously, the question of like, how much is this going to sell during this period of time? or? Yeah, just other information or other questions around that trying to determine like seasonality or whether a certain like Nisha opportunities kind of like trending upwards over the years are trending downwards. They’d be both like great gauges of that. So those are the two things that I use, trying to think what else are like extremely useful that a lot of like the brand or like big brands,
Eric Stopper 7:50
you mentioned, you mentioned BSR we were talking before how in this and it’s funny because I talk with brands every day right? That’s that’s my my role with Box experts is, you know, where are you at on Amazon? And how do you get to the next step? So for the for all those people that are looking at at BSR, what do you tell them? Right? Like, what do you do with this number? How do you how do you make decisions with this random number that that Amazon and these tools give to you?
Greg Mercer 8:16
Yeah, you know, I think that So, again, any listeners who like aren’t familiar bestseller a most you guys probably are about right like Amazon ranks all the products in there are almost 99% of their products in their catalog in their particular both sub category as well as main category, like one through a million or however many products are in there. Right? So if you’re ranked like number 100, you’re the 100th best seller in that particular category. Now, back in the day, like before Jungle Scout came out and similar tools and stuff to estimate sales like based off of these numbers, it was like a really valuable number, right? Because it’s like it’s kind of the only thing we had to gauge demand. I mean, maybe the amount of reviews they’ve gotten like over a period of time, over Like that maybe that would be like an indicator. But nothing was as good as like bestseller rank. But now that like, again, I’m not just trying to promote Jungle Scout cuz like there’s competitors that do this too. But like now these tools exist that can use this number to like, estimate sales to a pretty high level of accuracy. Like the bestseller rank now is like just not as an as important or like as helpful because, you know, I’ll see people who are like, oh, that it’s a BSR of 1000 and appliances. And I have another product that it’s a BSR of 1000 in sports and outdoors, and it sells 10,000 a month so it must an appliance is awesome. It’s like, Well, actually, there’s a huge difference in some of these categories like sports and outdoors, one of the biggest categories thousand, there’s probably like 10,000 units per month, whereas the BSR of 1000 appliances probably like 100 units a month, right? So that’s why that’s why it’s Just not that useful for most people or can even be misleading for a lot of people.
Eric Stopper 10:06
Okay, right on man misleading I you know, I’m sure there’s a there’s a ton of people who listen to this who look at BSR and just have no idea that it’s it’s almost like an archaic piece of data that is not relevant because you have a deeper level that you can get it to with, like the estimations of revenue that Jungle Scout offers, which I use every day. Yeah, I’m switching gears for a second. Now. I was listening to one of your webinars. I think it was maybe a month or so ago. And you mentioned something really specific that I want to I want to dive into that consumer behavior over the last 20 years or so has shown that people are caring less and less about the brand. And they’re, they’re more concerned with social proof that the brand is able to showcase and you specifically mentioned, reviews, and price two questions for you first one How do you See price as a form of social proof. I think that’s that’s really interesting. And second, how would you encourage brands to garner more reviews now that Amazon is steering away from using, you know, these third party tools like feedback Wiz and feedback genius, what do you think?
Greg Mercer 11:15
Yeah, great questions. So
the first one, I don’t think the price is necessarily for social proof I was saying they may still uses like a gauge of quality so a little bit more like a background of my like opinion on this that Eric had a chance to listen to his 20 years ago, before you know you were doing online shopping. brand marketing was extremely important. And this is because this the knowledge or understanding of a brand in the like either the quality or the other, just like values that they represented. Were very important, very important for your purchasing decisions. So example this right I go to the sporting goods store, I’m looking for a sleeping bag. And they have like the Coleman sleeping bag, The North Face, sleeping bag, and whatever the Marmont sleeping bag, it’s like okay, I’m familiar with all these brands like Coleman, it’s probably going to be like low price might represent like a decent value if you like, if you’re only going to use it once or twice a year, maybe like North Face is a little bit nicer. And I know that it’s gonna be more expensive to like marma maybe it’s like the the highest end sleeping bag. Okay, so like, I don’t know, the actual quality of any of these sleeping bags, like I probably can’t get him out of the box and sleep in him for a night before I buy him. But like I expect a certain level of quality from each of these particular brands. And over the years, they spent tons of money on their brand marketing to get me to believe this way. And the reason that I think that that’s a little bit of a, like archaic are starting to become an outdated thing is that
Unknown Speaker 13:00
Like we,
Greg Mercer 13:01
you know, we cared about that brand because it represented like these certain values or like quality, but like now, we we just value other people’s opinions more than like the brand marketing and it’s so much easier to get other people’s opinions now are the social proof through the review system, right? So now let’s say like, I wouldn’t even look at, you know, if I was looking for a sleeping bag, all of a sudden now like I wouldn’t even actually care about what brand makes it I would want the highest reviewed product or like the review of the highest star rating that was still like within my budget, my price range. So and I’d say this isn’t true in all niches yet. A great indicator of what categories or niches It is important or is it is like, you know, I think Amazon’s already picked on to what I’m talking about. And that is like if you search right now, for Men’s shorts or running shoes, the brand of those will be displayed on the Amazon search page. Alright, so like clothing items, or purses or like anything that’s used as like a way to represent like a little bit of a status symbol, maybe those things I think people still care about the brand about, and Amazon realizes that that’s why they display the brand on the search page. But if you search kitchen knives or sleeping bag or like whatever else, the brands not even displayed on the search page, I think it’s because Amazon’s realizing that that’s actually not very influential people’s purchasing behavior anymore. So your question was now like, Okay, so how do people get more reviews, who’s obviously a very important thing. I used to have a whole bunch of money in my brand marketing now on a ship that’s just getting more reviews. Marketing, we call it marketing. Of course, as you know, this is a everyone’s always very Very interested in this, and there are very few solid ways to improve the amount of reviews that you get that Amazon is cool with it right? You know, I don’t think anything I say there’s gonna be like a surprise, but some people will include inserts in the boxes, you have to be pretty careful and how about what those are saying because people are even getting in trouble for that. You know, it’s my understanding that Amazon still does allow one follow up email for purchase asking for review, but you have to be extremely careful that it’s not asked in any kind of biased way or you’re not like guilt tripping them into the reveal. So I think that still adds a certain level of review, like it still gives you a I believe, like, improves your review rate a little bit even though it’s pretty slim, right? Um, you know, I think that like the early reviewer program or that is worth the 75 bucks vine, I think they still charge quite a bit more for us. I don’t I don’t know if that’s quite as valuable. And then other than that, you start to get into the more gray hat or black hat type stuff, right? Like, there is a tactic that a lot of people are doing that they claim is cool with Amazon which is like sorry, this isn’t it’s not specifically for getting reviews but it’s supposed to be like for getting more sales which they’ll, they’ll get like manufacturer rebates for a product right? So it’s like they’ll give you a 90% manufacturer rebate buy for full price on Amazon, send it in or whatever, you get a 95% reimbursement
Unknown Speaker 16:35
and then
Greg Mercer 16:37
I think people so one that’s to get extra sales to I believe that that’s sketchy because I think I like you’re kind of tricking Amazon by doing so. And then depending on probably who you’re doing that with it. It does feel like to me, they’re in a lot of those areas or circles or clubs where there’s kind of unwritten rules about like leaving more reviews. So I think that one person is pretty sketchy and I haven’t done it, but I just thought I’d throw it out there that I know people are doing it.
Eric Stopper 17:06
Yeah, right on, okay. So there’s a ton to unpack their reviews are a sticky subject, man. And you have to toe this line with Amazon, because you you have this, this software partnership with them where they provide a lot to you. And you just got to make sure that you make them happy all the time. But as far as like inserts and emails, and all that stuff goes, I mean, we’ve seen we’ve seen brands get shut down for doing those things, you know, like the little request or review button popped up on the order page all of a sudden, and then Amazon didn’t really say anything about it. So there’s policy changes happening all the time that are, you know, really messing people up who have built tools around this this type of industry. My question for you though, is right, if we can’t do it, let’s assume that we can’t do product inserts and we can’t do the post purchase emails. We can’t do warranties and we can’t do manufacture For reimbursements or anything like that, then all we have left in terms of talking with the customer and engaging with the customers the listing. We’ve got our seven and nine pictures and video and the content and the enhanced brand content down below. Do you feel like there is a way to build a listing so that you get more reviews? Hmm.
Unknown Speaker 18:26
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve never
Greg Mercer 18:31
really thought about it before, to be honest. I mean, like creating an excellent user experience is always going to be a way to like get more high quality reviews, right? It’s like there’s little things that you can do there there was I was talking to one person, just something that they do is they just, like put like a little handwritten note like in each box is like a higher end item. Right. And I think They actually they were trying in a couple different ways. Like one there was a little handwritten note it did ask like leave a review and then the other one there was just like a handwritten note that just said like, you know, it was like one or two sentences just like thank you so much for purchasing theirs it means so much to me I handcrafted whatever I don’t know something like that. It’s like make you like feel a little bit more of a connection. And like actually without even asking for review they it’s really hard to track this stuff back right but they believe that they were getting more reviews from it just because it was like this little extra something that like probably made the person smile and they opened it and like as a result they just kind of liked that product of that brand a little bit more. But as far as things you can do with the actual listing i don’t know i mean i don’t know if Amazon would be cool with like putting text or things like hinting to ask to leave for even for like unbiased reviews. I haven’t really seen those on Amazon before, but maybe you have I don’t know, what do you think
Eric Stopper 19:56
I’ve got? So it’s it’s fun. Right, you’re, you’re looking at all these listings on Amazon each day, I saw one that had a picture of a dog. And there was just a hand coming down and patting the dog on the head. And it said something to the effect of good boys leave reviews or something. It was it was really striking. And all I all I could think was Wow, like, I’m gonna steal that idea, because that is a great idea. But I just don’t know how Amazon’s gonna respond to that kind of thing. Right? Is that? Are we talking gray hat here?
Greg Mercer 20:35
Yeah, I don’t I don’t really think that’s like grey hat. I, I think that’s probably just the type of thing that there’s a few people doing it. It’ll fly under the radar. If you start seeing those on everyone’s Amazon listings, then they’ll be a policy change saying that you can’t do that. Right. Ultimately, that’s not great for the Amazon user experience. Right? You know, I don’t think you’re really going to get in trouble for that one, or I don’t even think they’d suppress the listing. But, yeah, I mean, I’d say that if it’s effective, and you start to see a lot of it, that they’ll probably be a policy change around it. Right. But I mean, that’s kind of part of this, right? Like, you kind of have to like, find the little areas where you can get ahead, you know, while play inside of the current ecosystem or current rules, so yeah, I wasn’t I haven’t seen them one of those yet. That’s cool.
Eric Stopper 21:21
Yeah, I saw similar once I bought that product, and they had an insert in it as well. And it was the same picture of that dog on the little product insert and it said the same exact thing, and I left the review. Nice.
Unknown Speaker 21:35
I’ve worked on you cool. I
Eric Stopper 21:36
think they I think they flagged me though, because I work for an agency so it didn’t even come in as verified. Um, okay. The other question that I have for you is, right, pricing as this perception of quality. Hmm. I mean, you look at like the weighted blanket category, or running compression socks. These are very, very saturated markets. And the pricing is is fairly ubiquitous. I mean, if somebody wants to make their product appear more luxury, and let’s say they have a really great listing, do you think that simply increasing the price is going to is going to buy them into that that higher end of the market even though the people that they’re listed next to or at a lower price?
Unknown Speaker 22:25
Yeah, good question.
Greg Mercer 22:28
I think it very much depends on the market. This is a market that people really are willing to pay more for, like a higher quality is something they care deeply about, then I think it could, assuming you have like, five out of five like five star reviews, right? So it’s like, you know, I mean, if you have like four star reviews, your competitors are half the price a four and a half stars or five stars. It’s like it’s probably not going to work out for right. But actually an example of this is, man I saw these bamboo Mark ballistics I started as a case study like for three or four years ago. And they have, let’s see 332 five star reviews. And if you search like bamboo marshmallow sticks and my marshmallow sticks are priced at 2995, whereas like everyone else on this entire page is 1499 and 21 1919 1514. So minor, like double the price of a lot of other people on this page. And what’s crazy is I still sell almost as many as everyone else is the wildest thing and this is like a three or $4 item. But Amazon fees are like 12 bucks. But I mean, I used to sell this thing for like 19 bucks and you know, I margin was only like 20%. Now my margins like 70 or 60% or something. It’s crazy. And I don’t know if this is like the best example of a category that people care about but it does go to show that assuming you do have great reviews that there are some customers that are happy to pay more for items but man it’s like it’s really hard like on a podcast like this to give like I think general advice around this because I think he cares so much about your niche how your listing looks like whether or not looks like a high end really nice item and a lot about the reviews. So But yeah, I don’t know like, I don’t know why people are purchasing this for like the one next two minds. 15 bucks right back, same thing. My 30 bucks. And there’s now a lot of people purchasing mine.
Eric Stopper 24:40
Yeah, man and it looks like people have even copied some of your branding as well with SGI x. You got jungle sticks in here and then you got bamboo sticks down below. Marshmallow sticks, Rose sticks, they all got that ti x so everyone’s stealing foody sticks. They’re all still
Unknown Speaker 24:57
interested in.
Greg Mercer 24:58
Surely I just use sex. Good. The domain wasn’t available for ck. Yes.
Eric Stopper 25:04
That’s, you know that actually that segues into another important point, right. So on that same webinar where you’re talking about pricing and reviews and social proof. You, you mentioned that, and I don’t and I don’t want to misquote you on on this at all. But you mentioned that the Amazon side of your business for a product company should should get the bulk of your attention as opposed to your website. And that might sound like a huge misquote. So I kind of want to clarify with you, because all these people that I talked to you, man, they’re like, yeah, my sales are 90% on my website, and I don’t want to cannibalize sales by leveraging Amazon. And so first, you know, what are your What are your thoughts on that and give you a chance to clarify and then what is the actual breakdown? What What should these brands be doing?
Greg Mercer 25:56
Yeah, so, a little bit of clarification there. The majority of people that I typically like interact with or work with are either like kind of like Amazon first type brands or Yeah, I’d say most of the small businesses that like we work with, they’re like Amazon first type companies like they got into this because of Amazon opportunity and the power of it. These are typically not like existing brands and have been around for a while. And for this particular group that I’m talking about, they say like anyone you talk to you like an e commerce who the majority of their sales are on Amazon, they’re all like so passionate about getting off Amazon and you know, like doing all this work to try to like really improve their off Amazon presence and their own e commerce site. For all the reasons that like totally makes sense that you don’t want to be fully relying on one channel and that like you don’t own the customer there and you can’t do upsells or remarketing or whatever else like all these rules really valid and good reasons. But I also find that most of these people who are like Amazon first and are trying to get off, you know, it’s like, all right, what percent of your day do you spend on your own e commerce store? And you know the retargeting ads and like, you know, your email marketing, whatever else is like, Oh, 60% hundred days, like, Okay, what percent of your sales are off Amazon now? Like, oh, 5% it’s like, everyone’s just so scared about being all in on Amazon, that, like, they’re so passionate about getting off Amazon. But just like the hours devoted to that to results ratio is like so skewed from the sellers that I work with, right? That it’s like to just stop being afraid of being all in on Amazon and just just do more of what’s worth
Eric Stopper 27:52
double down play to your strengths.
Unknown Speaker 27:54
Yeah. Hmm.
Eric Stopper 27:56
Well, and it’s interesting, right? You tell somebody who’s Especially those who are like 95%, brick and mortar, you know, they’re like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to piss off my distributors, I don’t want to upset my website flow. That’s a hard sell for them a lot of the time, especially with, you know, Amazon changing policies and some people’s products getting shut down. And so, for these small business owners, the the main question that I have around this topic is, let’s say that I run an Instagram ad. And they end up on my website, right? You know, I’m trafficking straight to my website, because I don’t have fees on there. And I’m an Amazon Prime member that you just took from Amazon to your website. How often do you think that sales are lost in the transition from website to Amazon, right, because I’m a Prime member. I’m going to go check. I’m going to go check amazon for your product. How? Yeah, how many sales Do you think people are losing from that transition?
Greg Mercer 28:54
Man, so actually, I was just working with someone. Last week. He’s actually a friend of mine. He he invented this really cool
special tripod for, like vloggers. And
Unknown Speaker 29:09
he,
Greg Mercer 29:11
at first he was, I think hesitant to get on Amazon because like he wanted kind of full control of his customers and the experience and he he built it to be like, like pretty high quality and high end as nice packaging and he really cared a lot about like the overall customer experience, what emails they’re going to get after purchasing and you know, just stuff like that. And it’s like his websites great, you know, like everything about it was like a great user experience. So he was like, man, I don’t want to like give that up. He’s like, pretty good job with the like influencer marketing and yeah, primarily influencer marketing. They’re all linking back to a site that was fine. So he didn’t think that he was like losing many sales by not being on Amazon because like, oh, they’d have to go to the website. So then, like he reached out to me because he’s like, hey, someone else is selling my product like one of so he also sells it to, just like a handful of other retailers is like, hey, one of my retailers on Amazon, like, how do I report that to Amazon and get them kicked off? And I was like, well, like, you can’t. Yeah, that’s fair game like they’re selling your product as new. And it was. It wasn’t prime. It was fulfilled by merchant. And when I showed him like Jungle Scout, you could see like, this thing was selling like 10 a day on a pretty high margin item that didn’t have prime and no seller fulfilled. I was like, dude, you have to get on Amazon. They’re making 10 sales a day. Like this is like, you know, this profit margin like 30 or 40 bucks on one of these things. So it was like a significant amount of money in daily sales. Someone else was capturing all of them. And you know, they were just, they were one of his retailers. So they were just ordering them from him and like they’re capturing all this profit and all these sales. And I’m like, yeah, you You could so easily, like just do way better than what they’re doing. So, you know, that’s just kind of like one story about that everyone’s situation is a little bit different but it’s like man, I feel like pretty much everyone needs to be on Amazon unless you just have like such a powerful brand that people will jump through hoops in order to get it like it makes sense to me that Apple wasn’t on Amazon for a little walks like if I wanted to AirPods man the fact that that air pods were for sale on Amazon that had to go to Apple’s website like whatever I wouldn’t say I didn’t want these crappy knockoff Bluetooth ones.
Eric Stopper 31:33
Yeah, well, so so brand though. Let’s say that I’m in a category where I don’t care. You know, I I’m not. I’m brand agnostic, and I come in I’m doing my evaluation. I’m using social proof as you as you talked about before. Let’s say I make a purchase for a product that I’ve I don’t know the brand, and which is pretty typical, right? A lot of people they buy their, their first product from a brand with having no experience with it. When that person comes back to Amazon to buy, are they likely going to move towards that brand? Or does it just reset? You know what I mean? Do they they’re they’re not out for a new search new social proof and they just don’t care about the previous brand that they bought.
Greg Mercer 32:17
Hard to say. But to be honest, like, I’m just thinking in my experience, man, that search kind of starts over like unless you know unless somebody’s like really wowed you and you know, I guess if it’s kind of a, you know, an item you have to reorder each month and like, okay, I knew I had, you know, like, I like that water filter that came in I’ll try to find the same one. But I don’t know I mean, to be honest, me like I don’t really go back in my orders and try to find something I’ve ordered before I just search again and see if there’s something that’s rated better and better price now.
Eric Stopper 32:50
Yeah. And I almost wonder like, you know, the going back to the example of the Instagram to the website, you know, I land on the website, Amazon. I’m an Amazon Prime. Remember, so I’m on my phone, right? I leave my Google Chrome app. And I touch Amazon, my Amazon app. And then I have to do a new search hmm and then I have to look through all those products to find your right there’s probably tons of people who are losing who are losing sales in that in that part of the funnel. I just wonder if there’s a way to to mitigate that right just put something on your website that links straight to Amazon
Unknown Speaker 33:27
but that’s
Eric Stopper 33:28
that’s like heresy to a lot of these brands. What do you think Yeah,
Greg Mercer 33:32
I do know that some people do that though. I so I know a few people who have had good success with
they don’t necessarily do it long term but they’ll do that like to launch a new product like drive a bunch of extra sales or drive some of their sales to Amazon to Yeah, like kind of get it going on Amazon like blow replace the by now, essentially, with a link straight to the page on Amazon. And yeah, I think they know that it converts quite well. Um but man that’d be a really interesting test I gotta run some
Eric Stopper 34:05
data run run the numbers on that and see what the actual the bounce rate becomes.
Greg Mercer 34:10
Yeah and you could now that they have the the attribution program you could pretty effectively like run that test. But man I bet you a lot of brands would be pretty surprised with the results of that that like even with setting the customers author website straight to Amazon, just have them check out their like, if that’s what they were. I bet a lot of these brands lose a lot more to the exact situation that you described than what they think
Eric Stopper 34:36
right? A sales a sale, you know, in my mind, you might as well monetize it, don’t want to lose them.
Greg Mercer 34:41
Yeah, I guess the argument is, okay, what’s the what was the lifetime value of that customer you know, the follow up emails, all that kind of stuff, like, assuming you have other products for sale, you think the same customer good, or, you know, like the lifetime value of a customer to us pretty high. Like, you might not be able to justify it with all that being said, but yeah, I mean, It’s if you have like a one skew business, you know, like, just like this tripod and talking about like this invention that he had, like, I don’t know. And I would actually probably encourage them to try that test you’re just talking about.
Eric Stopper 35:10
Yeah. And then you’re you’re all about launching more more products too. So don’t just stick with one skew. We’re coming to the end of our time. Thank you so much for coming on. Greg. tell tell everybody what what jungle scouts working on some of the new tools that you guys are launching or have launched in the last couple in the next couple months?
Greg Mercer 35:28
Yeah, so I’ve been really stoked with all of our releases in the past the past few months, like we’ve had so many teams working like all summer long, it was really cool because a lot of this stuff is ready to kind of the same time. So for the past eight or 10 weeks we’ve been doing, or we did like a product launch every feature launch every single week, which was really cool. So we came out with some new functionality to find products. Some better keyword research functionality, keyword rank tracking or Releasing, we’ve already released some really cool analytics stuff for your business, but we’re coming out some new stuff in the next few weeks. So, you know, a lot of people still think of Jungle Scout as like a product research tool, when in reality, it’s a transition to a lot more than that. So yeah, it’s really cool.
Eric Stopper 36:14
Right on Jungle Scout dot.com. Go and check it out. Greg Mercer. Thanks so much for coming on the show, man.
Greg Mercer 36:20
Thanks a lot for having me on. Appreciate it.
Unknown Speaker 36:23
Thanks for listening to the buy box experts podcast. Be sure to click subscribe, check us out on the web, and we’ll see you next time.
