May 30, 2024
Steven Pope, the founder of My Amazon Guy, joins this in-depthconversation, to share his big brain thinking and offeractionable insights to take your Amazon business to the nextlevel.
Key Takeaways:
- PPC Advertising Strategies: Discover the powerof setting up auto campaigns for every SKU, even those you mightoverlook. Learn how a simple $0.05 bid can generate an extra $700 amonth!
- Product Targeting and Ad Placement: Avoidcommon pitfalls in product targeting and leverage new ad formatslike Prime Video ads to gain a competitive edge.
- Global Market Expansion: Learn why Japan is abooming market for Amazon sellers and get tips on how to expandinternationally while managing shipping costs effectively.
- Localization and Future Trends: Explore thefuture of Amazon advertising with localized keyword data andtargeted PPC strategies.
- Focus and Specialization: Steven emphasizesthe importance of sticking to your core competencies andoutsourcing tasks where necessary to build a robust, specializedbusiness.
About My Amazon Guy: My Amazon Guy is acomprehensive Amazon seller consultancy that provides a full rangeof services including PPC management, SEO, and content creation.Founded by Steven Pope, the agency is known for its expertise innavigating the complexities of the Amazon marketplace and helpingsellers achieve remarkable growth.
Don't miss this episode filled with valuable tips and strategiesfrom one of the top experts in the field. Whether you're a seasonedseller or just starting out, there's something here foreveryone.
Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more insights andexpert advice on Amazon selling!
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FULL TRANSCTRIPT:
JONATHAN: So I know that you are somebody who has manythoughts on the ongoing complexities of Amazon. I think that itcontinues to evolve. And I think even Jeff Bezos was quoted assaying that they are in the business of helping people buy things.They are not in the business of helping people sell them.
STEVEN POPE: Amazon is the most customer centricplatform in the world and sellers are left by the wayside. Andthat's a moat though, right? Like if you can overcome thatchallenge as a seller, you're going to be wildly successful. If youhave a good product and you still can't overcome that challenge,that's where the biased, my Amazon guy pitch comes in and you hirean agency and we'll help you out. But that's pretty much it. Youhave a lot of a deck stacked against you because Amazon is puttingup roadblocks. The Chinese are coming in hot, hurting margins.Amazon is adding fees, making margins hard from that side. Andthere's just a lot of people that want a piece of thatpiece.
JONATHAN: Yeah, for sure. I mean, especially with, Imean there's a lot of things going on. They're adding additionalfees right now. And that's just something that I feel like Amazonkeeps getting greedier and greedier when they don't want to helpAmazon sellers. But they're also just like, I don't even know aboutthe additional promotional sales beyond Prime Day. Is thatsomething that you think sellers will benefit from or do you thinkthat's okay and, but like Amazon will, obviously
STEVEN POPE: Yes, Amazon will crush it. They're goingto push a lot of Amazon products. They'll sell a bunch of kindles.They'll send a bunch of, sell a bunch of Amazon basics. But theaverage day, Joe, Amazon seller does not win on Prime Day at all.Yes, their sales will be higher on Prime Day. I want to be clearabout that. But if you look at the long view, if you look at theseven day stretch, they're static week over week, right. So you'restealing from Peter to pay Paul, as they say. Right. Like you'renot going to come out ahead. Now, should you take advantage ofPrime Day? Yes. Should you run a discount? Maybe. Should you addsome additional PPC spend on Prime Day? Probably. But you'll noticethat I do all that with an Eeyore saying of like, yeah, okay,Optimus prime, you know, like begrudgingly. So yes, you probablyshould pay, play the game. But it's not necessarily the top thing Iwould focus on.
JONATHAN: What do you think is the number one thingthat Amazon kind of has going against sellers? Like, is it the factthat. I mean, everything about Amazon is cumbersome for sellersfrom seller central being just the cumbersome platform that it isto seller support not being entirely efficient. I'm just curious,what's the one thing that if we could fix it would make lifeinfinitely easier?
STEVEN POPE: Well, the first one that comes to my mindwould be seller support. Right? Like, I. I am so tired of gettingcopy paste garbage out of seller support. Like half the emails inChinese and like, you know why, right? Like they've sold out toChina. They don't care about us as an Amazon seller brand businessor anything. Really. That would be the easiest one to fix, too. Allwe got to do is install chat GPT 4.0 and maybe put a little, youknow, connect it over to my database at my Amazon guy with all oursops, and boom, we have better answers than Amazon does. And I knowthis because Amazon's own employees are coming to my materials toquote to each other. I've seen the emails. I've seen them on mywebsite. I have proof. I have the actual deets. But that would bethe easiest one to solve. No question about it. Here's how I woulddo it. Two sentence only responses cannot go over two sentences.Sentence one, I've solved your problem. Sentence two, here's whathappens next, right? That's it. That's like every email ever.That's how you solve it. Now, obviously social support is not goingto be solved. Andy doesn't give a flying anything about that. JeffBezos set up the company with a very strict vision. Buyer centriccompany, sellers be damned. And as proof of that, now there's morefees. Surprise. Low inventory fees. Like, what the frick? Like,what does. How does that help anybody? I'm going to charge you tonot sell your sh*t now. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it. Okay, I thinkI might pay attention to Walmart just a tiny bit more. God bless.Walmart's not going to actually help us either. Right? Let's beclear. They bought jet seven years ago, but couldn't integrate it.They did nothing with that. Have you ever done grocery pickup atWalmart? What a joke. Like you're sitting in the parking lot for 30minutes, target might have a chance. Like, you go to Target'sgrocery pickup and it's like, man, they're like waiting outside foryou. So, yeah, like a little bit of hope that Target might come andtake some market share from Amazon, but they have a closedplatform. They're not accepting sellers. So that's out. Then theChinese come along and launch TikTok and Timo. And you're like, oh,gosh. Is like, seriously, like, the Chinese are going to be oursavior from the Amazon monopoly. Take a deep breath. No, they'renot either. So we're pretty much stuck with the Amazon monopoly.That's a fact. It is just how we have to live with it. So become astoic monk and enter into the platform. Or don't. Right, make yourchoice. But it's created a lot of wealth. It's the largest wealthtransfer in my lifetime. So as much as I like to sh*t on Amazon'spolicies because they're terrible, the platform itself is actuallyquite nice. God bless the trash, man. That takes all my brown boxesaway. God bless the whole system is just benevolent. I've mademillions of dollars selling on Amazon, helping other sellers. OnAmazon, there's money to be made. Is it a gold rush anymore?Probably not. Is there still copper and nickel in them hills? Youbetcha. Do you think the playing field is leveled for both newerestablished sellers and bigger brands, or do you think it'sweighted one side or the other? I don't know how to answer thatquestion because it sucks for everybody. So I guess in that sense,yeah, it's a level playing field. The problem with big brands isthat they don't have distribution control. Right. So what happensis all of the mom and pop sellers buy your product from adistributor and show up and undercut you by 5%, so you can't have amap policy. So it sucks for brands in that sense, that are big. Itsucks for new guys because they have to go gamify reviews and lowertheir price just to even have a shot at it. And if you try andlaunch a product like a supplement, you're paying dollar five inpay per click advertising. So a lot of challenges, no matter whoyou are, but it's still a win for everybody. I want to beabundantly clear. I still think it's easier to launch and sell onAmazon than it is anywhere else. Shopify and D two C. Yourconversion rate on a website's like one to 3%. On Amazon, it's 10%.Come on. Like, it's. Even if the PPC is more expensive on Amazon by25% than it is on Google Ads, it's still four times more effectivebecause the conversion rate is four times, five times better. Soit's. There's no question that we have to work with the. Theelephant in the room, but I still like to call it a pinkelephant.
JONATHAN: I like it. I appreciate that a lot. Youbrought up the low inventory fees. I'm curious if you think thatswitching over from the weekly limit capacities to the monthly ishelped in any way.
STEVEN POPE: Too early to tell potentially, but Iwould say the whole system is getting more confusing, more complex.You need like a calculator just to get through your day as anAmazon seller. These days, like when you first signed up back inthe day, I was getting two cent a click on ads. I didn't have to doprime, I didn't have to pay attention to anything and I could justprint money on Amazon. That day is long gone. Today you need asophisticated modeling software just to understand your profitmargins. You need to hire an account and just understand the taxlaws, right? You gotta, you gotta hire a lawyer if you wannafrickin get Amazon to like comply with their own policies or you'regonna hit your head against a brick wall. So, so I, you know, I'dsay there's a lot of things that are happening in the seller'sfavor, but it's hard to mention those in the midst of all of thethings that are getting worse, right? Like, to be clear, the UI isgetting better. To be clear, Amazon's giving us more data than it'sever given us before. I love me some ICAP search query performance,reports impressions, clicks, add to carts, purchases. I call it themarketing funnel. That is the best piece of information tech we'veever been given out of Amazon. I now know my CTR at a keywordlevel. I now know my conversion at a keyword level. I now know howmany impressions I get or how many are even available at a keywordlevel. Used to have to use outside tools to estimate any of thosethings. So the system is technically getting better in some ways,but overall the policies are getting worse.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I do love search query performance. Ifeel like I spend more time in that than any other part of Amazon.Especially because you're seeing keywords that you don't seeanywhere else and especially because you see the search volumeassociated with them, which I think everybody else is ballparking.
STEVEN POPE: They were ball parking. It was stilldirectionally helpful. You know, 80% accuracy is better than noidea, that's for sure.
JONATHAN: Absolutely. I mean, is that the one thingthat you're really looking at in seller central? Are there otherthings? Do you look at product opportunity explorer now
STEVEN POPE: The search query performance, probably myfavorite. You know, the only time you go over to the productopportunity explorer is probably to figure out your next productexpansion or see how you're stacking up but the search queryperformance report really is, is enough to understand how you'redoing, right? Like if I'm right, that click through rate is theeasiest thing to improve. And you go and look at your click throughrate and then you make a change, you can then monitor the change,you can see your results then. That's awesome. Right? Now somepeople are like, oh, everything's about conversion. Conversionthis, conversion that. Well, first of all, we've alreadyestablished Amazon's got a 10% conversion rate. So are you going todouble your conversion rate on the platform? No. So why spend theamount of time that people spend working on conversion when theycould do something easier, which is generate traffic? What's thebest way to generate traffic to improve your click through rate,right? Having the ability to go in and switch a main image, run acouple a/b tests, and all of a sudden traffic's generating out of awazoo. Like, it's just so much easier to do that, right? A coupleof tips I'll give you. Add a keyword to your main image.Everybody's got a hoopla about adding a keyword to the main image,but everybody fricking does it. HP printer does it. Go Google thatone on Amazon. Go look that one up on the search. Colgate does it.Zule kitchen does it. All the big brands do it. And if you don't doit, you're missing out on traffic. I've never seen Amazon enforceit. Oh, you added a keyword to your products, I'm gonna rent yourproduct. Never seen that, not a single time. But I do see someoccasional image suppressions. If you bleed the image or you try toadd a starburst, that's the stuff Amazon actually cares about. Soadd a keyword to the main image, add your accessories, make it sosomebody could actually understand what they're looking at. Right?So if you're selling a wallet just randomly on my desk here, so ifyou're selling a wallet and you just, you frame it like this, andit's like that's all the thing you see, then is everybody gonnaunderstand that's a wallet? I don't know. Some people will, but noteverybody. But then if you added some banner across there that hada keyword that said men's wallet, and then you could see some moneysticking out. Let's see if I have any money in here. I do. I've gotsome money. So you see some money sticking out and all of a sudden,oh, that's where I put my money. That's a wallet. That's thedifference between a good main image and a terrible main image. AndI've never done that demo before, but that's how straightforward itis.
JONATHAN: I love it because I can't remember the lasttime I saw paper money. You brought up a lot of great points. Youbrought up the images. So I kind of want to pivot the conversationthere. One of the things I want to talk about was there's been arise in AI generated content, especially with the kids calling whatthe kids are calling dupe culture. Yeah. I don't know if you readabout the recent incident with the pop flexibility score withTaylor Swift. She was wearing it to promote one of her new songs,and then all of a sudden there were just a bunch of copycats thatwere trying to rip off their listing with AI generated content.Now, I've come to think of AI generated content as the new keywordstuffing. I think it's something that people find out that they canabuse. They're going to abuse it, and then eventually detection isgoing to evolve to a point where it's going to become moredetrimental than beneficial to sellers or to copycats. I know manywould argue that that's an optimistic take on it and that it's justgoing to be a burden to live with. What are your thoughts on howthat plays out?
STEVEN POPE: So, overall, yes, you need to use AI. Iwant to be abundantly clear, it's a helpful tool. Right. Most ofthe implementations that I have seen make the copy so unbearable,um, that I don't want to read it. However, to be clear, I don'twant to be a giant hypocrite coming on here and saying, opposite ofwhat all my other videos say. So let me, let me keep, let me keepthe message here. Copy is for robots, images is for humans. Andonce you understand and embrace that framework, then it's obviouslyjustifiable to use terrible AI copy and stuffing keywords. At leastyou don't have misspellings or grammar issues if you're using AI.Right? But the title needs to be humanized. The bullet points youshould really, like, reflect upon now the rest of the stuff, thedescription, the alt text, and the search terms. Better use AI forall that stuff. 100%. I think AI is a great tool, but it's in itsinfancy. What we're seeing today is nowhere close to its finalform. We're going to see lots of evolutions of this pokemon calledAI. Right? And that's good. That's a good thing right now.Hopefully they don't try and create like four mega charizards outof it, right? Like that. You know what? Once I get to charizard,I'm probably good, right? I don't need four mega versions ofCharizard Pokemon. And I've hit that metaphor too hard. But in anycase, we're going to see some improvements. You know, Chad, GPTfour coming out with the ability to understand voice and emotionand flex, and that's, that's going to be a game changer for, forrealsies. That actually is going to be a game changer. But the lastyear has been, you know, fingernails on the chalkboard for the mostpart, watching AI punt along. AI cannot build an image with text init. And all images built by AI are obviously built by AI. It needsto pass the sniff test. It needs to be like, I'm not sure if that'sAI or a real photo. I'm not sure if a graphic designer made that orAI. Once it gets to that level, that's when it's going to be like aslam dunk, no question about it. But if you see all the texts inthe last sentence says, remember, yeah, I know, that's chat GPTfour, right?
JONATHAN: I don't think there's any overkill on aPokemon metaphor, just so you know. Like, I think you're ontosomething there and you can just continue down that road.
STEVEN POPE: I will. My kids started getting somePokemon cards and I can't help the reference points. And nowthey're watching the original series and I'm like, man, I'mvindicated. Like, it's actually pretty decent.
JONATHAN: Yeah. What do you think as far as Amazon'stransparency program plays into that? Do you think that that's aworthwhile thing or do you think that's just another cash grab forAmazon?
STEVEN POPE: I don't think that particular one is acash grab. Like, cash grab would be like, them adding more ads tothe search results. Cash grab would be like low inventory fees.That was a cash grab. But transparency actually legitimately servesa purpose somewhat. Right? Like, out of the 400 brands that I workwith today, only two use transparency, and both of them are greatuse cases. They had counterfeit issues, right? So if you havecounterfeit issues, transparency is the next step. Brand registrywas supposed to help us, but didn't help us enough. And it doeshelp quite a bit. A lot of people don't realize how much it doeshelp. Right. So I've sold over 2000 trademarks. I help people withbrand registry every single day. It prevents hijackers right? So,you know, there was a brand called easy wealth. Good friend ofmine, they had hijackers switching their brand names. And I'm like,dude, man, just, just buy a trademark for me. I will fix thisproblem for you. Gets the trademark installed, brand registryslapped on. Hasn't had a hijacker in three years, right? So I knowit's helpful. Transparency is the next layer, right? So if you havea really popular brand and somebody is literally counterfeitingyour goods, transparency is a slam duck. No, no brainer.
JONATHAN: But most, in most cases, it's probably not.I mean, you're over your best interest. Yeah, okay.
STEVEN POPE: Yeah, yeah. It's overkill for most. Anextra barcode label on my packaging. Yeah, who cares?
JONATHAN: Yeah. And then going, I mean, tying back,I'm going to kind of pivot a little into social, because between AIgenerated content and many other factors, there's the potential ofa tick tock band. And I'm curious, how do you think sellers couldprepare for that, if that is the case? Because it seems likeinfluencers are a pretty big channel for sellers rightnow.
STEVEN POPE: TikTok is not going to be banned. Thegovernment doesn't want to ban TikTok. They just want to controlour data. Tick tock is not going anywhere. Like, the government'sin bed with Amazon. You're like, like, think about, okay, you havea conversation about having a trip down to Florida, and all of asudden, later that day, your cell phone shows you ads for Floridaand Magic Kingdom ads. I wonder how that happened. Right? Like, solet's be abundantly clear here, everybody has our data, but the USgovernment wants a monopoly on our data, so they're posturing toban tick tock. It's not actually going to happen.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I have a similar view, but I'm alwayscurious what might happen with how all these social media platformsplay out and then disregarding the TikTok ban entirely. I keepseeing products like guru Nada pop up, where it's just oneinfluencer campaign that really blows up and comes out of nowhere.Do you think it's possible for a seller to compete without that? Ordo you think that influencers are essential?
STEVEN POPE: So it depends on your product, right? Ifyou're selling a clothing item, you need an influencer, right?Because you need a brand to push that, which is why the most highlypaid influencer in the world makes thousands of dollars every 30seconds in China. And she just pulls it up on, like, screen for 10seconds and then flips it and it makes or breaks the product. Like,literally. So yes, certain products do need influencers. Theaverage day kitchen gadget, definitely not, right. Like if it's acommodity type item and, you know, you think about the last itemyou bought on Amazon, if you can't remember the brand name of anitem you bought on Amazon, that's a great example of a brand thatdoesn't need an influencer. So I got, you know, I'm fidgeting withthis off screen here with some toenail clippers that does not needan influencer. I have no idea how an influencer could get a viralcampaign pushing this, to be honest. It's possible, I guess. Butlike, I don't think so right now. Orbit gum wants to sell, sexsells gum. I bet you an influencer campaign could probably makethat work as well. Just random objects on my desk. We'll keep goingwith that if you like. But like my hot sauce bottle, like, Ilaunched this without any assistance, no influencer. I just did allthe right things. I spent money on ads and I launched this producthighly successful. Now, at the same time, for those that havefollowed me, they know that my hot sauce bottle, I did the prepwork at Amazon FBA and that didnt go so hot. In fact, the hot saucewent everywhere. Why? Because this five pound glass bottle that Ipaid Amazon to do the prep work for at FBA, they shipped it out inpadded envelopes. So even the Amazon experts, the supposed Amazonexperts, yours truly, gets things wrong. Why? Because we dontrealize Amazon is so stupid at times, just completely incompetentover there, shipping out five pound glass bottles and paddedenvelopes. And when you call them out on it, they're like, we'regoing to keep shipping it out on padded envelopes. We don't reallycare about this. And I'm like, what do you mean you don't careabout this? What's the consumer experience like? Well, we don'tactually care about the customer. We just say we care about thecustomer. So that's the life of an Amazon seller in a nutshell. Butyes, influencers could definitely help. But even if you have aninfluencer, you might still get screwed in logistics. So it's nota, it's not a silver bullet by any stretch.
JONATHAN: Yeah. Going into SEO, what do you, whatwould you say are the latest strategies for ranking highly onAmazon in 2024?
STEVEN POPE: Without a doubt, click through rate.Right. Like the number one tip you're going to hear me talk aboutfor all of 2024 is going to be CTR, CTR, CTR. Like having your mainimage have a high CTR is the fastest way to rank the product. Itexpresses interest to the consumer and is easy to do. Like oneimage, that's all you have to get right. Add a keyword to it, addyour accessories, show the product, make it easy to understand.Now, since I've already hit that one home, I'll give you someadditional SEO tips. First of all, do a master keyword list and gothrough and look at the top ten competitors. Run it through a toollike Viral Launch and come out with a list of keywords. Once you dothat, put that in use. AI, put it in all of your attributes. Titlebullets, a plus content. Make sure you have crawlable text outsideof images. In the a+ content, make sure your brand story ishorizontally sexy, right? Like having the ability to stroll to theright on your Amazon brand is going to help you tremendously. AndI'll demonstrate this if you'd like. So this is an aegis age soapproduct and as we scroll down, we're going to go to the brand storyright here. Crawlable text. This helps me with SEO. I'm going toclick on a little chrome extension called image alt text viewer andyou can see text and images behind each of these photos. Now seehow far right I can scroll here. There are 90 photos maximum youcould load into a brand story, times that by 100. That's how manycharacters of alt text and SEO juice that you can flip on and helpyour product rank. This does index. It does help you with indexingnow. Same thing with a plus content, same thing. We've got imageswith alt text behind it. Fluffy clean lime, Nina. I even threwSpanish in there. Colorful oils, caffeinated leche, another spanishterm. Darkening, moisturizing. Right. Some of these are like reallyindirect keywords because when you get to the alt text you canstart putting in cursory lookalikes, all that kind of stuff. Butthere are thousands, thousands and thousands of keywords even inthe product grid right here in the a content. You can throw in alttext. So super valuable. Highly recommend, uh, putting in uh,crawlable text outside of images like this and alt text behindimages like this. And it's going to help you rank for SEO. Best SEOtip is Ctr. After that, alt text crawlable text.
JONATHAN: I love that. Great tip. You brought upadvertising. What are strategies that you think are reallyeffective in optimizing for advertising cost of sale?
STEVEN POPE: So a lot of people want to spend less andmake more and that's harder than ever to do today. PPC is theeasiest thing to outsource. It's the first thing that an agency istypically hired for and it's because it's highly technical, it'sever changing and requires a lot of things like Excel work and bulksheet file. So there's a lot of tips I could give here, but just topick an easy one that anybody can do, I like beginner tipsespecially. I would say make sure you have a campaign, an autocampaign for every single skew. Even if you're like, ah, but I got17 skus I don't care about. I don't care. Make a campaign for themanyway. Just set the bid to $0.05 in a five dollar daily budget andyou'll be surprised that I just made you an extra $700 a month justby having an auto campaign with a five cent bid. It's surprisinglyeffective and you don't even have to add negations because if youstill have a 10% conversion rate, you're going to make money.You're going to spend fifty cents to acquire a sale. Even if thekeyword doesn't make sense, it's still the math checks out. So withthat in mind, auto campaign. Never stop advertising. Easiest way tobring down your acos and get a few bucks in your pocket. A lot ofother advanced tips that I could give you. Use bulk sheets, forexample. Bulk sheets are your best friend. A lot of people don'twant to touch Excel. That's when they usually hire theagency.
JONATHAN: It always confounds me because I love Exceland I love fishing around in there.
STEVEN POPE: It's surprisingly Pokemon, though. You'rethe kind of guy that probably would use Excel.
JONATHAN: This is true. So good point. Also onadvertising, I think the automatic targeting and product targetingis a really great opportunity for sellers. How do you recommendusing something like that to really perform?
STEVEN POPE: Well, it's getting worse because you'renow seeing keyword data show up in the product targeting section,which makes no sense. I just like when I saw that, I just stare atmy screen blankly and I'm like, come on, Amazon exact match is nolonger exact match. Phrase match is no longer phrase match. They'rejust trying to take more of my money. It's obvious what Amazon'strying to do here, but. But yes, certain strategies are effectiveand can be done well if you know what you're doing. And sosponsored products should take 80% of your budget, probably atleast, maybe 90% for some brands. Uh, and then you're going todabble with some sponsored brands and some sponsored display. Whenyou're doing product targeting, there are some obvious no nos. Ifyou have a brand new product, don't advertise on the product pageof a 10,000 review product. Like that's, that's obvious, don't dothat. Um, but there's also some other easy things that they'verecently set up. Like you can set up a filter and a range and onlyhit products with a 4.5 star rating that are a certain price point.Some new features and some new ways to filter and hit advertisingen masse. Highly effective category targeting is not as good. Veryrarely do I find a product that does effectively well at largetargeting the whole category. But you should still test it at leastone time just to find out because you never know. Spend a couplehundred bucks, test, see what happens, and then reinvest the moneywhere it does work. Amazon advertising is the easiest and fastestway to test the market. There's bar none. No other better programto do that. No other better platform than Amazon to push aproduct.
JONATHAN: Good advice. I've been really curious aboutthe shopping carousel and the interactive pause ads on Prime Video.Have you seen anything really perform well with that?
STEVEN POPE: The reason Amazon is adding additionalplaces to advertise is because they're out of space on the searchterm page and they want more of your money. So it will work. And itusually works earlier, like earlier. You can engage in some ofthese new advertising techniques, right? If you want to advertiseon Prime TV right now and hit their latest fallout show and youhave a product that looks like a memorabilia item for Fallout,you're going to freaking crush it. Advertising on Fallouts videoand Prime Video and all the other things that are coming out thatyou have access to. Over time, parity will occur and then you'llwonder why you're spending time there and you'll go back tosponsored products because that's, that's the girlfriend, you know.But, but there are, and so there's things you need to do to beeffective as an advertiser. And at the end of the day, people likeGary V. Always talk about this. Every year, a different platform, adifferent technique gets hot and it makes sense to divert some ofyour funds over there to test it as an advertiser. It's very easyfor me to get on a podcast and say, test everything because youshould. And then if it works great, double down. If it doesn't, itdoesn't. At the end of the day, though, I still think thatsponsored products are going to be the easiest to predict and havea high, scalable, good return on investment and no diminishingreturns. Basically, other things like video ads and otherplacements that Amazon comes out with, there absolutely are goingto be very, very shallower cliffs for those diminishing returns tostart occurring.
JONATHAN: Amazon won't be happy until they basicallyincorporate Facebook, TikTok and every other gamification that theycan into the platform.
STEVEN POPE: They've tried. I mean, they've tried.Amazon social was an attempt, and it wasn't a very good attempt. Imean, Amazon posts weren't exactly Facebook by any stretch, but itwas, you know, it was kind of pinterest light in a way. Yeah.They're going to try and get vertical control everywhere. Nowthere. Let's be clear, though. Amazon is a logistics company. It'snot a marketing company. A lot of people don't understand this, butit really is a logistics company. They own everything from point ato point b. They own last mile, they own the middle mile, and theyown the original mile. Right? So Amazon is a logistics company.They solve two day shipping. They solved one day shipping. Theysolved fricking two hour shipment. Arrive at my house. Holy crap.Prime now, right? Like, it's not even, you know, if one day wasn'tfast enough, now I can get it same hour if I want. It's nice. Ican't even get a Chipotle burrito delivered to my house in an hoursometimes. But Amazon, for whatever reason, can get me brown boxes.I'm a little hungry right now. I've been fasting for 36 hours. Canyou tell? I don't know where I was going with that because now I'mthinking about Japoli burritos. But God bless the trash, man, thattakes away the brown boxes.
JONATHAN: Love it because there's a lot of them.You've spoken about global markets and I'm curious whatopportunities and challenges are there for sellers to gointernational and start selling their products.
STEVEN POPE: Yeah. Japan is the sleeper that came outof nowhere in the last couple of years. It's 26% the size of theUnited States market. Now. I don't know how to sell on Japan. Idon't have a single client that sells there. But I got to tell you,if I was trying to launch internationally and I'd already doneEurope, I would go to Japan next. Brazil, South Africa, Ireland.Those are new other marketplaces that Amazon's recently announcedthat you can start selling in, if you so dare. But Germany and theUK are the easiest expansion. But I don't really like that. Thatmakes it very hard to run a profit, especially when you're shippingacross the seas twice because you're shipping from China to theUnited States and then your first time, you ship over to the EU andthen you're paying that. I don't know how to make a margineffectively at scale. Most of my clients don't either. But I haveto tell you, if I'm going to expand, it's going to be the UnitedStates, Canada, then into the UK, Germany, and then probably Japan.And then after that I'll figure out the rest of the world.Australia, not the greatest.
JONATHAN: I like that strategy. And those are goodcall outs. I mean, as far as localization concerns, going back tocontent, how crucial do you think that is? Because I feel like wedon't see as much, I haven't seen as much keyword data in othermarkets, although the markets aren't as big as the US.
STEVEN POPE: I think that might be like what we see in2025 is instead of seeing the keyword data, we see local keyworddata, which is what Google has been doing. I don't, I don't knowfor how long. 610 years, somewhere in that range. If Amazon comesout with local geography targeting and local keyword impressions,that will be the biggest evolution of PPC or even SEO on the Amazonplatform we've probably seen in ten years. And it's inevitable in asense. But I think Amazon's trying to hold out on that as long asit possibly can. But as soon as they stabilize and PPC costs aren'tgoing up and they don't have more real estate, you better believethey're going to go for local SEO targeting. There's noquestion.
JONATHAN: I love that outlook for 2025, no less. Like,I really like that. You heard it here first, folks, or you may haveheard it in other places first.
STEVEN POPE: No, this is the first time I've said itanywhere. Okay. I'd say a strong majority of the things I said onthis podcast I haven't said before. So you got some uniquecontent.
JONATHAN: I love it. Thank you. Is there anything thatI didn't call out that you think sellers should know?
STEVEN POPE: No. I think you got a really good pulseon things, honestly. Sellers are conflicted. Right. They have somany things they can do at any given moment and there's so manytools out there and there's so many gurus and videos they canwatch. It's overwhelming as an Amazon seller in 2024. So my bestpiece of advice is to stick to what you know, and, and just becomean inch wide and a mile deep and stick to what you know. It's this,it's the same reason why I sold my Amazon brand, so I could focuson my agency. Like, I wanted to be all in on one thing. And a lotof people are gonna be like, ah, diversify. And I'm like, no,that's a distraction. Right? So if you've spent the last 5, 10, 15years sourcing products, but you don't understand how to use exceland bulk sheets, then fricking outsource that and stick to what youknow and stick to product sourcing, you don't need to learn newthings in 2024. You need to leverage new things. Leverage can beoutsourced, but knowledge is, is painful to gain. Like, it's not assimple as plugging yourself into the matrix and saying, teach mekung fu, morpheus. Like, it doesn't work like that. It takes yearsto master the stuff that most Amazon sellers take for granted. Likeit's, it's very difficult work. So stick to what you know. Don'ttry and recreate the wheel, uh, and, and the, the bigger the moatyou build, the better because of that. Yeah, I think I learned thatlesson again and again. Having worked at an aggregator that justproved that, like, if you're trying to do everything, it reallydoesn't amount to anything. Yeah. And then you go bankrupt. Thankyou all the aggregators, it was nice seeing you. Bye. They tried,they tried their best.
JONATHAN: This has been great. I've learned a lot, Ithink. I really thank you for taking the time. It means alot.
STEVEN POPE: Yeah! Good luck in your journey and itwas a pleasure being on. I like joining fresh takes, people whohaven't monotonously done the same thing hundreds of times. So itwas a nice fresh start. You had great questions. Thanks for havingme on, Jonathan.
JONATHAN: All right, thank you. Have a good day.
