How to Take the Headache Out of Amazon Advertising

October 6, 2020

Onn Manelson

Co-founder and CEO of RevenueWize

Listen to the podcast

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Onn Manelson’s advice to Amazon sellers on finding the right software for their brand
The importance of choosing a software that supports your unique business goals
Why sellers should test out different software solutions
Onn’s background in e-commerce and how the idea for RevenueWize came about
Do you need to be educated on the basics of selling on Amazon before using RevenueWize’s tool?
The stage of the product life cycle when Amazon sellers should consider using RevenueWize

Onn talks about his company’s consultation services
The other e-commerce platforms that product companies should consider selling on
Where to learn more about RevenueWize and get in touch with Onn Manelson

In this episode…

With more SaaS companies coming out with advertising software geared toward helping Amazon sellers boost their businesses, it can be confusing to pick the tool that will work best for you. While every tool in the market provides some benefit over the others, the best way to find the right one for your business is to first test it out.

When trying out a new software, it is advisable for sellers to consider their product categories, their expectations, and their stage of growth. By aligning your current level of sales with your individual business goals, you can find the solution that helps you maximize your marketing and boost your brand.

Onn Manelson, the Co-founder and CEO of RevenueWize, joins Eric Stopper in this episode of Buy Box Experts to talk about how sellers can improve their Amazon advertising strategies using automated software solutions. Onn shares insider details about his company’s advertising tool and talks about the steps sellers need to take before utilizing an advertising software. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their 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 in 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.

Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:09

Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast we bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.

Eric Stopper 0:18

Welcome to the Buy Box Experts podcast. This is Eric Stopper. Today’s episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. We’ve got a team of consultants, I am one of them, reach out to us on our website, buyboxexperts.com, click on the free analysis button at the top of the screen and you’ll be connected with me or a member of my team. Today I am pleased to be joined by Onn Manelson, CEO and founder of RevenueWize, a simplified PPC advertising software solution that predicts the optimal price and advertising combination to maximize product sales. Onn has a long history of helping SaaS based and enterprise retail companies like Best Buy, eBay, Office Depot, staples, it goes on and on. He’s helped them hone in their technical acumen, while also closing deals. meeting on is not only wicked, book smart, but he also has the personal side of b2b development down so he can sell you. Many of you are looking for advertising software to scale your business. And you’re looking for an option that fits the lifestyle that you’re looking for. So I wanted to invite Onn on the show to talk about RevenueWize and the journey he has taken to get here. Onn welcome to the show.

Onn Manelson 1:32

Eric, thanks a lot. Great intro, really excited and to be here. And, you know, looking forward to our discussion today.

Eric Stopper 1:41

So I, you know, you and I have had a couple of conversations. At this point, I feel very comfortable with you. I think you’re, I think you have the best of intentions in your heart. And you have and you have a good product. I want to start this a little differently, though. So I’ve investigated probably three dozen different software’s over the time that I’ve been running this podcast. And I haven’t, I haven’t had the chance to ask your technologist. If you are selling on Amazon today, whether you’re starting or you’re currently doing it. Everyone needs the right mix of technology. What’s your shortlist? Right, what are the software’s that you just say? Look, every amazon seller needs to have at least you know, a pricing software advertising software, and then if you have some preferred ones, please throw them at us. I’d love everybody to hear what your tech stack is.

Onn Manelson 2:35

Yeah, well, you know what, I’m there are a lot of solutions out there. There are a lot of good things. I think that first of all, people need to realize, obviously that, you know, starting a journey today on Amazon is very different from starting your journey three to four years ago. I mean, the competitive landscape has really, really changed a lot of sellers. You know, and a lot of things have changed. And which makes actually there are a lot of there’s a huge ecosystem solution providers, which, you know, Amazon goes ahead and wants you to go ahead and use from, as you mentioned, you taught you touched on a few of them pricing and their split testing, and there’s image replacing, and there are a lot of a lot of technologies out there that you can go ahead and utilize. I don’t think that I don’t, I don’t think that there’s anything specific. I think that overall, when you sell on Amazon, it’s a journey, you have to use trial and error, you have to test some of these solutions yourself. We know that Amazon, heavily community and a lot of communities out there have a lot of references to different software’s and solutions. I think that it also depends with your private label seller versus, you know, selling, you know, some sort of national brand, you know, if it’s a war on the buy box, or you got to price based on private label, based on your competitive landscape, which is, which is slightly different. advertising, I think everybody that can hear us can, you know, can confirm that, you know, obviously, managing advertising on Amazon today using, you know, the solutions and the tools that Amazon provides is not ideal. But I think that overall, you know, and if we focus currently on the advertising state, I think that it also depends on the size of you know, the account and the level of involvement that you want to have in terms of, you know, achieving the results. There are great solutions out there. You know, and I think it really depends on you know, what your needs are and how it works for you. Whether you want to have full control over what’s happening in your account, you want to have as much automation as possible. There are different areas of the skill and it’s just basically up to you to know, using what fits you best so everything should be tailored and customized and you should use something that you feel very, very comfortable with. You can easily see a lot of videos and a lot of tutorials out there. You don’t even have to register and sign up to test them. You can actually spend a couple hours you can probably view a lot of the videos and a lot of the tutorials are normally 10 to 15 minutes in Get some sort of state and say, Hey, you know, this is something that like, at the end of the day, we know that sellers do so many things today and they have to control so many aspects of their business that they do need some sort of help. And, and the help that you go ahead and you adopt, it’s something that you want to know that you feel comfortable in regularly using, you know, you’re not going to go ahead and adopt a solution that at the end of the day, you’re going to come and you can say you’re struggling with a solution itself. You know what I mean? Like, you know, adopting a solution, oh, I come in today, and I have to use this and I have to go ahead and adopt this. And you basically do not use the solutions properly. So I mean, my tip to anybody that’s looking to go ahead and adopt the solution, try it out, test it out, check it out, prior look at you know, tutorials and a few things. But don’t, you know, don’t be afraid of trial and error, test it out. If you feel comfortable and work really smoothly for you. You know, go ahead. Because I don’t think that at the end of the day, there’s a major, major, major difference between the solutions, it’s a question more of an approach. And you know, specifically talking about advertising, there’s the you know, you want to have full control, you want more automation, you want something simple, you want to have all the bells and whistles, you know, some people can drive a Ferrari and others they drive a Ferrari, they’re not going to be able to drive it down there down the street, because driving the Ferrari is also complicated. So it really depends on you knowing what you’re looking for, and what your goal is and what you’re trying to achieve. So is

Eric Stopper 6:30

that the starting point, then you just determine your goals and use that as the legend? Right,

Onn Manelson 6:36

I think I think there, I think we see a lot of you know, a lot of folks, I mean, there are a lot of buzzwords and a lot of things going on Amazon, that people and sellers, you know, don’t necessarily go ahead and they follow necessarily the buzz and you don’t follow necessarily what’s good for them. You know, just give you an example, in advertising, people come in and say, Hey, you know what, I want to have a 20% Acos why because see here 20% a cost is good, but they don’t realize that when you’re in launch phase, you know, you want to talk about a 20% a cost, that’s just not possible, you know, it’s not realistic for when you launch, you know that you have to think about the global picture, you need to look at where you are in terms, your Amazon journey when it comes to your product lifecycle. And there are different solutions related to different product life cycles, you know, when your launch phase, you should use, you can use, you know, great solutions for more for launch and for getting, you know, up to that point in getting credibility of your listing, once you’re a little more mature, there, you know, there might be different solutions to go ahead and support that different phase. There are, you know, it also depends whether you like an all in one approach, which you know, for some sellers, I can see that that can work, you know, using an all in one solution versus using three, four solutions that are more focused and have, you know, more of a zero in on specific areas that are very, very critical for your business. Um, so I think that you know, you have, you know, once you’re advanced and once you start selling, you normally realize, and you see what works for you. And I think that’s, that’s the key tip kind of like fine to get your goals, set your strategy, and then see what best supports that. And based on that, you know, that’s your best choice of, you know, going ahead and don’t, don’t be afraid to do trial and error. Yeah. And you know, that’s part of the part of the journey as well, you need to learn and sometimes you can fail, I can talk about it from an interpreter entrepreneur standpoint, it’s just like anything else, you’re building up a business, there are decisions that you’re going to make that are not going to be optimal, but it’s part of your learning processes and part of your growth. So, you know, when I use an icon to talk to a solution, and not specifically related to Amazon, then I can test three to four solutions before I go ahead and make a decision depending on how critical it is to my business. And I think that’s, you know, that’s, that’s my recommendation.

Eric Stopper 8:55

So how long should a test be using any number of these software’s?

Onn Manelson 9:00

Again, I think that at the end of the day, it depends what your goals are, and what you’re trying to achieve, because there are areas that are more complicated and complex than others that require a little more time. You know, one of the one of the major concerns or one of the major issues why people don’t want to go ahead and test multiple solutions is because you know, there’s an adoption level you got to get familiar with solution, any solution that used today, any software, anything, come on, you get in and you start losing something, say Oh man, I got to learn this. Now I got to spend hours on this, it’s going to take me time to learn initially, again, if you’re a very very savvy and advanced, then you know, you might as well go ahead and take the time to learn and look at complex solutions and you know, try to make, you know, figure them out and see if they work for you. versus if you’re more you know, closer to the starting point or somewhere in the middle. Then you probably want to go with simplicity. You know, you want to be able to come in and start using a solution, pretty much, you know, out of the gate. So it depends again, on you know where you are in that stage and where you know where your objective and goal is.

Eric Stopper 10:11

So I think that that’s probably a good transition into just just telling us about your tool and who it’s best for, and what, what are some of the qualifiers that you would use to determine if somebody is a good fit for RevenueWize? Can you just give us the rundown?

Onn Manelson 10:31

Yeah, sure. You know, what, Eric, with your permission, let me just take a step back. And, you know, I like and tell you a little bit about about my journey and how it

Eric Stopper 10:38

led actually base Absolutely.

Onn Manelson 10:41

To RevenueWize, so, you know, I’ve been in e-commerce and retail for nearly 20 years. Yeah, no, it doesn’t look younger. I’m just kidding. But yeah. And in 2011, I founded a company called marketyze, which did price optimization for retail enterprise, where we helped a lot, a lot of large enterprises, price their items, based a lot based on the competitive landscape. So you know, traditional price optimization today looks at historical pricing, elasticity models and a lot of parameters that take into place, but it doesn’t necessarily look at the competition doesn’t, you know, you know, Walmart can be selling something. But how is Amazon’s price and Amazon’s offering impacting Walmart sales? Obviously, there’s an impact, you know, you know, that they all impact in the entire competitive landscape. In fact, the sales and demand. So we basically measured that, and we worked with the retailers and our company was acquired in 2016, I continued managing, basically the competitive division and competitive pricing division. And we were able, as part of our work, to go ahead and analyze huge amounts of data. So you can imagine that, you know, when BestBuy does pricing, they’re gonna look at Amazon, and they’re going to look at Walmart and Target. And basically, we used to crunch a lot, a lot of data, part of that data processing, we found anomalies in terms of, you know, you suddenly see certain cases where we scratch our head and see, hey, look at this, here’s an item that sells, you know, for $40, on on Walmart, it’s $65 on Amazon $80, on Best Buy, and I don’t know $100 on target, look at those differences. We used to find cases where you’d see huge, huge differences. And that’s where we came up. And we said to ourselves, Hey, can we do something about this? Is it something that, you know, we can do about my co founder and I, you know, at certain stage, we decided, Okay, we’re not going to retire now at this stage with, you know, in the area of price optimization, our finger started, you know, kind of getting a little itchy. What’s the next thing that we need to do? We started looking at, you know, arbitrage, you know, we said, hey, let’s go ahead and see what’s happening in that space, and how we can go ahead and leverage all our know how we figured out that, you know, in order to be successful, in order to do that, you’re going to have to pretty much a lot of cat and mouse and get to super serious volumes, based on our discussions with with sellers, eBay, Amazon sellers, marketplace, sellers in general. And that’s when a lot of sellers came back and said, you know, what, we’re really struggling with our advertising, maybe that’s something that you can go to, you guys can go ahead and deal with and start looking into it. And I don’t come from, you know, my world is enterprise. So the majority of my career, I’ve dealt with, you know, the Home Depot’s and big, big big retailers, I haven’t dealt with necessarily SMBs. And we started looking into it and and there were several complaints that were repeated, whether they’re small sell Amazon sellers, large Amazon sellers, we pretty much were able to find some sort of mutual connection around advertising between all and that’s where we decided, Hey, you know what, although, you know, surely, you know, we don’t come with a heavy, heavy Amazon background. And we haven’t been selling on Amazon for many, many years, which I see that a lot of solutions were born out of that perspective, we came from a different angle, we said, hey, there’s a challenge here. There’s a problem. Let’s see as tech intrapreneurs, if this is something that we can, you know, try to find a solution for. And we then came up and we said, okay, we’re seeing that obviously, advertising is complex. Amazon is not necessarily providing and we all know it because we’ve seen you know, what price in terms of pricing and other ecosystems that has developed over the years in multiple spaces. So advertising, although it’s Amazon’s growth engine right now, it doesn’t seem like Amazon is going to heavily invest to help sellers optimize your advertising. It just doesn’t make sense. That was a major consideration part of our doing because people say hey, you know what, why doesn’t Amazon go ahead and do it themselves. We constantly get this kind of like reaction. So we decided, Okay, let’s see, if we can go ahead and take a, you know, pretty, I’d say, pretty complex equation and try to simplify it and try to do it, you know, in a simple manner that we can go ahead and we can enable it. And we can provide access to this process in a fairly simple way to many sellers. Okay, as opposed to going ahead and doing, you know, the large enterprise, let’s see, let’s see if we can do it more for the masses and simplify the process. So we did a lot of analysis, and we spoke to many, many sellers from, you know, the entire spectrum. And we came out with five major, major, major pain points that were constantly repeated by everybody. Okay. And I’m sure that I’m not going to surprise you when I’m going to go ahead and talk about these but the first thing is lack of time, you know, all sellers, you know, that. And, you know, if we think about it, the majority of sellers are a one person operation. I mean, that’s probably around 99% of Amazon sellers and marketplace, sellers in general, you know, it’s a one person operation that has to do so many tasks, and so many things, lack of time, lack of time, lack of time, I don’t have time, I don’t have time, I don’t have time to deal with my advertising. Okay. You know, that makes sense. And then the other one was lack of clarity. Do you know what’s happening in your account? Do you understand? You know, you have any control? You know, what’s happening? No, I don’t really know what’s happening in my account, can you know, I don’t really, I don’t feel that I know, and I understand. Okay, cool. That’s another thing, um, complexity in general, um, just, you know, if you’re an e-commerce, and again, I come from strong e-commerce background, if you have today, an e-commerce website, and you have to do your advertising, who’s going to do that advertising for you, who’s going to bring you Google and Facebook traffic, probably an agency or somebody that has that expertise, right, it’s not going to be the e-commerce manager, that’s going to go ahead and do all that work? And yeah, you know, at the end of the day, PPC, and advertising in general, requires a certain set of knowledge and a certain level, and has a certain level of complexity. And, you know, that’s another one of the points, um, lack of control, lack of control, I, you know, I don’t have a lot of control, I don’t feel that I’m in control. And sometimes it’s not even the lack of control, it’s the feeling, I don’t feel like I’m in control. And then I don’t know what to do. Okay, it’s complex, I don’t feel in control, I don’t know what to do. These are the five points that we said to ourselves, these are the ones that we’re gonna, we’re gonna put our major major focus on, okay, not necessarily, you know, features and functionalities that are cool, but what is, you know, the main aspects that are impacting today, the majority of themselves, and there were obviously different reasons. So, you know, we looked at small sellers, and, you know, why did they have a lack of time, because, you know, their focus was, you know, getting in that initial, you know, traction, okay, that’s why their lack of time versus large sellers, they just had so many things that they need to handle, and their lack of time comes from a different perspective. Okay, the same goes for lack of control, you know, somebody that early stages somewhere, you know, low six figure versus somebody that’s eight figure, the reasons why they feel out of control can be different, but still, at the end of the day, they share that notion, okay, these this is a this is the notion that’s shared amongst others. And that’s when we came in, we said, you know, what, there is a, is there an opportunity, this is something that we believe that we can do. Um, and we said, yeah, we have a strong product background. Again, we’ve done these things previously, for large corporations. The only thing is, can we now do it more from you know, from an SMB direction, from that standpoint, can we take what we’ve done for, you know, the best buys of the world? And can we now bring that, you know, to six figure SMB selling on Amazon. And here we are, and we’re, you know, here we are today, having this discussion, 18 months, you know, following that decision that we made, we made some mistakes along the way, obviously, and, you know, we had to go back to the drawing board, which is, which is fine. Okay, I remember, we started off one of the, one of the interesting, we started off in, you know, we came up with a with, you know, a data state state of mind, you know, again, working with all these enterprise retailers we used to work with, with departments of you know, 20 pricing analysts, you know, like people that are constantly crunching data, and processing and what are these guys want, they want more and more data and they want all these graphs and they love it, you give them a graph, I remember we used to come and say, hey, look at this, we can do now this and this analysis and they were all excited. And when we started off here, we kind of said hey, let’s put a lot of graphs and let’s do all these cool things. And you know, when Stephanie developed it and and six months down the road when he took it to, you know, to be tested with you know, with clients and the prospect they came in and said, Hey, wow, I mean, great look at all these graphs and everything, but you know, I’m not going to sit all day and I’m gonna read this graphs, I have so many other things that I need. to do. And that’s when we understood that, you know, our initial approach was kind of like God, you know, we again, we came from that state of mind, you know, heavy data, heavy analysis, and we started stripping things off the solution. And you can imagine from a data guy and technical background to start stripping off things that you’ve developed, there’s a lot of pain around that. I mean, you know, you’re sitting there, and you said, Hey, can we move this out? Are we going to take it out? And we had all these discussions and arguments? Oh, are we going to strip this out of the solution? And how are we going to go ahead and simplify, and I’m, and I’m happy to, you know, to say that today. I think that, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re very, very close to that we have a good solid solution running, we have clients that are going ahead and talking about great results that they’re seeing. But overall, I think that, what I feel that the main achievement is that our clients are saying that they’re not scared of advertising anymore, meaning they come in with a smile, and they can look at the results, and they can understand what’s happening, the feeling control, and it’s not something that it’s scary to them, it’s not necessarily something that they come up in the sale, no, just just take it, take it away from me take it away from me, it’s like, you know, they don’t have that sense. And they don’t have that notion. So for me, that’s like a major milestone, you know, people are using the solution, and they’re having a good experience, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re advertising is now rocket, you know, skyrocketing, it means, you know, it doesn’t necessarily because we know that there are many impacts that can add, you know, that can that can go ahead and affect your advertising. It’s not necessarily, you know, you can be a guru in advertising. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have a good product, and if you’re not doing the right work, in addition to your advertising, you did not, you know, that you probably not didn’t have a lot of success around that.

Eric Stopper 21:53

So. So there are there are a bunch of criteria that need to be checked. boxes that need to be checked before somebody can even say that they have an advertising problem, right, they gotta make sure that their listing looks good, they got to make sure that their product is good. They have to have some sort of feedback loop for their customer service to the route that that insight into the advertisements and into the listing. So what I’m curious about is, under, under what circumstance like do the majority of people coming to you? Do you have to educate them about those things before they’re actually ready to take on your software? Do they just take on the software? And then, you know, I feel like, I feel like, that’s a fact for pretty much everybody, no matter no matter what the software solution is, there’s got to be a few things in place before it’s going to work, especially on the advertising side. And so have you combatted that, you know, how have you both educated and then provided this tool to people and, or does it fall short sometimes because of the fact that people haven’t checked those boxes.

Onn Manelson 22:59

So, again, as as we just stated, if you don’t have if you didn’t do the basics, and you didn’t, you know, your listing is not, not a you know, okay, and we have even those that come in with, with products that come on, you know, they’re in a very, very competitive environment, come up, you know, and they’re just trying to launch an item in an extremely competitive environment. And not a lot is going to help in those cases. I mean, you have to have people, people today, especially, we’re seeing people that are, that kind of see they want results quick, they want results quick. And in general, when you come to sell today on Amazon, and especially when you come to advertising, there’s no magic, okay, you know, if you know, if you talk about, hey, let’s plug and play magic, it’s gonna happen, then people have to, you know, a lot of sellers that we talked to, they have to come in, they have to realize what reality is, you know, because, again, you go out there and you hear all sorts of stories, and I go a lot on Facebook and LinkedIn, you see these graphs and look at this and look at the Acos and look at the ad spend. And you know, people are looking at that and trying to benchmark and trying to repeat that where, you know, at the end of the day, it’s not that realistic. So

Eric Stopper 24:04

that’s, I mean, that would be to, to most people looking at a case you’re talking about case studies, right? Or just right.

Onn Manelson 24:12

Case studies and reports and we’re seeing constantly people share some information and look at my ACOS. And and you know, I think to myself, okay, so you have a 15% ACOS. So what does it mean? How many impressions are you losing? And we don’t we don’t even know I mean, how is it impacting the organic also we don’t you know, so people are taking pieces of information and and and and you know, are making turning it into certain facts and they want to go ahead and copycat them, and that it’s a lot related to lack of knowledge. At the end of the day, we’re seeing a lot of lack of knowledge. And we try to educate and we try to you know, we do a lot of webinars

Eric Stopper 24:52

Yeah, Onn I was gonna say, I don’t have I don’t have time. I don’t have time to get the knowledge and it seems really complex and I don’t know what to do. Right? I feel like it’s this constant loop.

Onn Manelson 25:05

It’s, it’s a constant loop. And that’s why it’s interesting. So here it is. So here’s how I see a little bit about, you know, specifically where we are, and where we position ourselves. And that’s, and that’s also something that we spent a lot of time thinking about. So, on the one hand, you have early, early starters, and those that did, you know, some sort of Amazon course, and they selected a product, and they’re using, you know, great tools like Jungle Scout and others to go ahead and pick their product and, and, and do their analysis. And then they go ahead and they, and they get it and the manufacturer or some sort of private label in China, and they bring it to Amazon. And they’re starting their journey. And then it hits them that they need to advertise as well. What a majority of these do they do, hey, I need an automated solution, something plug and play. Okay, let you know a lot of solutions come, they come out and they’re fully automated. Great. You tell us your target ACOS. And that’s it? Well,

Eric Stopper 25:58

well, I think we skipped a step though. And I think it’s a step that is accidentally skipped a lot of the time. So I had three conversations just last week, where they were coming to me and they’re saying, Hey, you know, we’ve been selling, you know, we’re selling on Amazon, and we’re trying to get started with some advertising. And I said pump the brakes and said, Hold on a second, getting started with advertising, have you found that a lot of people will just like a list. And then as soon as they realize that they need to start an advertising base, they look for a software instead of just advertising, right? What percentage would you say, of the people that come to you looking for a solution would be better suited to just like, try advertising? Right, what percentage of them have actually liked, tried their hand on it and put some money in their campaigns?

Onn Manelson 26:48

I think that none, no, wow. None, I think that typically our those that come up to us, usually are those that automation doesn’t work for them. And they’re not gonna, and they understand that they realize that. And on the contrary, you know, they’re not going to spend 1500 to $2,000. North of that, in terms of having somebody, you know, do their advertising for them. So, and that’s, you know, a lot of how we see and where we chose to position ourselves specifically around that, you know, you have those solutions that, you know, they want to take things off your hand, because, again, you know, as we said, advertising is not simple. And you know, if you look at it, it can be very, very frustrating, frustrating. And you see, let’s plug and play put in your targeting calls. And what we realized is that people even don’t even know how to set your targeting, forget about it.

Eric Stopper 27:44

I’m really curious as to I mean, I think this depends greatly on the stage of business that you’re at. But personally, I’ve said on this podcast, I hate Acos I think that it’s barely useful to tell me the efficiency of a keyword or keyword group. But like, I’m really interested in how much it improves my rank, right? If I spend, if I spend $5, and I only make $5. Right? How did that $5 actually impact my organic rank for the keyword that I was that I was listing for? And so I’m more interested in return on ad spend.

Onn Manelson 28:20

All right, I am completely on ad spend. That is that is the language. I think that a lot of times we speak to sellers, and we tell them Okay, guys, let’s say that, you know, you don’t have an online store on Amazon, let’s say that you have a physical store around the corner. Okay, nobody knows you, you’re starting to build your credibility. Okay, what is the business plan? A business plan includes advertising budget, to get people to start even knowing the meaning, that’s pretty much money that you’re setting aside without expectation of getting an immediate return off it in the short term, okay? It’s something that you need to realize that you are planting the seeds right now, in order to start building yourself up and that, you know, unless you’re really, really a category leader, or you know, you’re pretty much off the charts there. And then, you know, in that case, still, you know, we’d recommend to go ahead and, and continue advertising, but overall, during the certain stages, you have different tactics and you have different goals, okay? And, and most others don’t necessarily realize that it’s just like any other business, okay? It’s not, you know, you can’t say, hey, Amazon is different from any other business, you have a business, you want to get credibility, you want to get noticed, you have to know you have some sort of business plan that needs to be put together. A lot of sellers that we speak to, they don’t necessarily have, you know, business plans that they put together and they said, Okay, here’s what I need to do right now. This is, you know, they know what’s being pretty much the common things that are being said to them. Okay, I’ll set my listing. I’ll bring somebody over to help me out with my listing optimization. Good. They don’t look at it from you know, at the end of the day, you’re kind of like doing a marathon. Okay, and there are different stages during that marathon that, you know, when you’re selling on Amazon. And, you know, there are different tactics and different objectives that you want to reach during a marathon run, you know, your, for the long run, short term is not going to work again, you know, I’m, you know, maybe now during the COVID, somebody just bought inventory of something that’s, but it’s not, you know, it’s not something that you can sustain over a long period of time. And, and that’s, and that’s part of the lack that we see, when we get a lot of the clients that come in, they’ve used automation, they said, Hey, it didn’t work for me, well, I don’t know much about advertising, I wouldn’t be able to educate now I understand that I need to get more involved. Okay. Okay. So now that you need to get more involved, what are you doing about how you go? And how do you go off about, you know,

Eric Stopper 30:46

please help me shorten the curve for you a little bit, right, like, help me filter because there are people listening, I guarantee who feel out of control, like it’s too complex, like they don’t have enough time, and they don’t know what to do? Right? Like, plenty of people like that. So describe the steps that they should take. Right, before they come to you. Right, right. Before they come to RevenueWize, what are the things that in the best case scenario they have already worked out? before they come in, and utilize your software?

Onn Manelson 31:22

I think the main main thing that you need to understand as a seller on Amazon, is where the product life cycle stage that you are, okay. And this is, again, this is something that’s related to any business, if you know, there’s a product life cycle curve, that, you know, that’s something that anybody can look into. And it’s, you know, common knowledge. Are you now at the stage that you’re, you know, launching? Are you trying to gain credibility? Are you going towards a certain maturity, and when is that decline, you have to identify where you are. Now, it’s not identified, it’s identifying within the category, that your product and what you’re trying to sell to promote is, so you have to constantly look at what’s going on in general, in your general environment and your competitive landscape. And to that, you know, go ahead, look into it. Get realistic, wishful is good. And you want to, you know, you want to go ahead and you want to try to be aggressive and everything, but you need to be realistic. You know, people come in, and they’re just not realistic. They come in again, hey, 20% 20% equals or this and that, and, okay, how did you? How did you get to that?

Eric Stopper 32:32

Yeah. How did you arrive at that?

Onn Manelson 32:33

I heard, I just heard you know, that that’s how it is, and 20 is a good number.

Eric Stopper 32:37

I hear it all the time.

Onn Manelson 32:39

Yeah, you’re,

Eric Stopper 32:40

like, no consideration for the cost of the product, the price of the product, the average order value, the competition

Onn Manelson 32:47

I looked at, right, so I look at a, you know, recently I had somebody come in, they have five, they just launched recently, they have five reviews, they’re in a category that their competitors have 4000 reviews, plus, okay, what are you gonna do there, you want to talk to me about a 20% a cost, I mean, you’re gonna have to probably spend a lot of money before you’re gonna have to stay. But that’s something that you have to think about as part of your planning. So you need to plan, you know, planning is key, you really, you know, it’s not just, hey, let’s, you know, use the momentum here. And let’s just get the ball rolling. You know, today, in order to be a professional, you need to plan things out, you need to plan the stages out. And you need to know, what are you going to do during each stage? And if something doesn’t happen, based on your trajectory, what are you then going to do? Just like any other business, I think that overall, people think that hey, selling on Amazon, just selling online, I’ll do this and that, but this is a business like any other business? Well, there’s no

Eric Stopper 33:44

talk, talk to me about. Because let’s say I determine that I’m in the introduction stage, like the launch stage. And by the way, for any of you guys who missed it, the product life cycle was defined like in the 1930s. Actually, I think it’s the concepts that have been around for a long time, a good introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. And there’s a chart that everyone uses for the amount of sales that you get over over time. That’s that’s the simple plot. And we can and we can include a chart in the show notes for this. So for easy reference. So let’s say I determine I’m in the intro, right, low amount of sales for a longer amount of time. Is that the stage where I come and use RevenueWize? Should I be better suited in the growth stage? How do you approach this problem?

Onn Manelson 34:31

So, again, I think that it’s a good question. I think it also has a lot of dependency on your, you know, on your category and where you are, um, I think that if we do come in we have an early stage and beginners that are coming during the introduction stage. And we do help them out during that stage in terms of getting that initial credibility. I think the problem is less, how do we help them? I think it’s more of helping them get into That state of mind and understanding. Okay, I think that’s the key, basically, because once somebody realizes that, okay, I’m now on the introduction stage, and we talk to them in the end, they understand they say, do you know what you’re right? You know, I didn’t specifically Think about that. And I understand now based on your explanation that I need to do, and I need to look at it from a different angle.

Eric Stopper 35:21

So it’s, so it’s less about, it’s less about them, validating whether or not they can use the tool and more, helping them set their expectations for what they should use the tool for.

Onn Manelson 35:35

Yes, and once they know what their expectations are, and what they fit, then you know, that they set up their, you know, they set up their strategy, and the solution is going to support them, you know, if you’re going to come in, and you’re gonna, you know, if you’re currently at a 60% Acos, and you want to be, you know, very much wishful and you’re not realistic, and you’re going to put 20%. And obviously, you know, nothing’s going to help you out there. So, so again, so part of that conversation that we have is okay, guys, you’re at this specific stage, what are your expectations? Or how do you think you’re going to achieve that, and I think that has to do with any solution, not specifically, RevenueWize, it you know, any solution that you go ahead and use, you have to be in the right state of mind and understanding of where you are, in order to get optimal results. And again, the majority of our clients are those that already had some sort of experience in terms of advertising. They’re not the ones that just selected just recently selected a product and are just really, really launching it right now. Because one of the lessons that we’ve learned is that many sellers have an issue with the fact that solutions go out there and generate a huge amount of campaigns and ad groups that are out of their control. If you remember, we talked about being in control. And our strategy is not going ahead and just creating immense amounts of ad groups and all and touching your campaign structure. It’s rather looking at your current campaign structure and working off of it, okay, so we don’t go ahead and a peer plus a button, you click on it, you your play you’re in, and the solution starts just starts running and creating, okay, you need this in this ad group, you need to change your structure, we consult, and we provide you with tutorials of how to build a proper solid campaign structure. But it’s up to you to set that up. Okay, just for the specific reasons that we see clients of ours have come in, and you know, have used certain solutions, and they have hundreds of ads, and they’re not even able to find out and figure out what the logic is because some sort of solution went ahead and created automated ad groups and campaigns. And now they have duplicates, and they have a lot of things out there that they don’t really know how to deal with. So our approach, again, is, look come in with your current campaign structure. And based on your current campaign structure, we’re going to run an analysis, and then we’re going to generate the recommendations what you actually need to do based on your current campaign structure,

Eric Stopper 38:03

and is this like a consultation process that you take people through? Do you guys have like a sales consulting team that will that will help folks out? or right

Onn Manelson 38:11

So first of all, you know, we like to have initial onboarding calls, we like to talk to each of our clients, have an initial conversation, and just make an understanding. At the end of the day, we’re not looking to sign up clients that, you know, two, three months down the road are gonna say, hey, this didn’t work for me. And we don’t even know why. Because they just didn’t use the solution properly. They weren’t in the right state of mind, or their expectations were, as we mentioned, 20% acos which wasn’t realistic. So we like to, you know, bring these things and have this kind of initial discussion, we generate a lot, a lot of content, a lot of video tutorials, where you can go in, you can, you know, look at two, three minutes and understand, you know, how to build a proper campaign structure, and then it’s up to you to go ahead and do it. And again, we know that for some, some, some sellers are going to come and say, Hey, you know, what, if I don’t want to do it, I want you to do it for us, then maybe our solution is not ideal for them. But we as part of that, educate a lot of the sellers, we see a lot of our clients, really, really good getting educated as part of the process. And they’re, they’re coming in, they’re making decisions out of knowledge, and knowledge is power. Okay, you know, what’s happening in your account, you made that decision out of a certain sense of knowledge, you changed your campaign structure, because you realize that the way you initially built it wasn’t the right way. So go ahead and change it. And we’re going to support your new structure, which is completely fine. Um, and that’s, that’s the, that’s the sense that has been leading us, you know, you want to make a decision, we’re going to support you, we’re going to give you a recommendation, we’re going to be able to execute it through the solution. But at the end of the day, it’s up to you to make that decision out of knowledge. Okay, and we’re going to feed you all the necessary information. We can tell you what’s happening. We’re going to give you what it might be causing it. If you can execute the recommendation, you can do anything else. You don’t have to go ahead and adopt it. Because at the end of the day, we think that your judgment at the end of the day knowing your product, knowing your solution, knowing your starting here, your landscape, knowing all of that, you’re probably the best person to make that decision.

Eric Stopper 40:18

Yeah, I mean, it almost sounds like there’s a questionnaire that you could probably send everybody to, to get to the bottom of the position in their business that they’re at, I kind of want to put that together. Now, you’ve you’ve told me, and this is this, the last thing that I want to touch on with you, you’ve told me that in the next five years or so maybe even next year, sellers need to make sure they’ve transitioned to other platforms as well write a lot about Walmart and eBay on on this podcast. But are there any other platforms that you would encourage product companies to begin selling on? And how do they even become aware of them? You know, what’s, you know, what, why do you? What do you? Where do you think people should go for the new platforms?

Onn Manelson 41:03

Right, so so so obviously, you know, there’s no question that Amazon is, you know, is, is the biggest and most dominant player today, around that, again, if you look at the Far East, and obviously, you know, Alibaba and others are making a major leap, particularly into Europe, because I’m going to so dominant right now in the US. But I think that there are great, very, very niche marketplaces out there, that can work very, very well look at Etsy, Etsy is showing immense growth, and, you know, Etsy, Pinterest, Etsy, Pinterest. But I’ve been following Etsy, and, you know, they’re doing a really, really great job, you know, they’re not, you know, they’re not rushing things, they’re doing things that are good scale, they introduced advertising as well, for example, you know, it’s something that the, they’ve also included, they go in, and they make these small steps, and you see that they’re constantly growing, because they also, you know, provide some sort of experience in Amazon, as we know, with as a company goes ahead and grows, and Amazon does a million other things apart from, you know, the Amazon Marketplace. And, you know, the question at the end of the day is their month or 30 years, you know, historically looking at it, there aren’t going to be other players that are going to start getting into that, and regulations and all sorts of things that are trying to limit Amazon flow. And recently, we had, you know, this whole Facebook Shopify thing. And, and that’s where we get a lot of questions about, Hey, what do I do if I have a Shopify store and what I do around that, and, and the main issue around that it’s bringing trust, because it all comes down to traffic. So on the one hand, you know, Amazon brings you the traffic, but then you have to, you have to appear somewhere. And if you have a Shopify, your own software platform, you have your own dedicated store, then you have to go ahead and bring your, you know, your Google Facebook or whatever sources that you want to go ahead and bring traffic. But I think that, you know, as we go along, we’re going to see more and more of these niche marketplaces which provide a different experience. I don’t necessarily know if Walmart is going to do that. And Walmart has its own advantages. But I think that if we look at marketplaces that are going to be similar to Etsy, which work on specific categories and verticals, then we’re going to see more and more growth around those. And we’re going to see more and more of these, you know, slowly, slowly progress. So I just think that people should keep out, keep an eye out, look at their verticals outside and the category that they’re playing on outside of Amazon. See if there are other sources.

Eric Stopper 43:40

Yeah. I mean, the thing that you mentioned at the beginning, right, especially with international, basically, if you list in Germany, and I think the Netherlands just opened up, you get sales, it’s like you’d like the cost per click is like pennies. Right? Right. So there’s, you know, there’s much more Amazon territory. etsy is a big player, Instagram stores, Facebook stores, you’ve got platforms like Zulily and Jane, I think that are really

Onn Manelson 44:07

Right. Right, right. Yeah.

Eric Stopper 44:08

And so my philosophy is if if you’ve got a little bit of inventory moving around, or that that’s, that’s sitting that maybe isn’t moving as quickly as you’d like, just just list everywhere, you know, just try it out, see what see what works and make sure that you keep the pricing consistent, I would say on it has it has been a an absolute pleasure to talk with you. I know that we’ll talk at length on maybe other episodes and webinars, but where should I send people? How do they get in touch with you and your team?

Onn Manelson 44:37

Yeah, they can just go to our website. I mean, it’s all there, revenuewize.com. Come visit us. Come get you know, your own experience. See it. You know, we’re happy to chat with people. We’re happy to learn. We’re constantly learning more and more again, you know, we’re constantly doing our own improvement and as things and based on what we hear from our clients and our prospects. And I think that’s the key here. We’re constantly evolving. And it’s a journey, just like it is for any Amazon Silver’s just the same journey for us as a company. Well, it’s been great being here. I really, you know, really, really enjoyed it. You know? And yeah, we’re gonna we’re gonna speak again soon.

Eric Stopper 45:21

Thanks. come on the show.

Onn Manelson 45:23

Yeah, thanks for having me over.

Eric Stopper 45:25

To finish today’s podcast, I want to share some final thoughts. For large brands who are seeking to wholesale product to a trusted Amazon reseller, we at Buy Box Experts are big fans of the team over at Pattern. They’ve helped hundreds of large brands to capitalize on the Amazon channel while also helping implement channel governance best practices that allow the brands to have consistency across all their sales channels. For more information, go to pattern.com and reach out to their team there and they’ll be able to help you. We hope to see you soon on the Buy Box Experts podcast.

Outro 45:56

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.