Today’s guest is a private-label guru and a law school graduate turned entrepreneur. Shaff Qureshi is the Founder of Sulazra Brands. Shaff shares his secrets to success with Amazon PPC ads, whether you should target long tail or short tail keywords, and how to construct your Product Display Page to convert.
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Today’s guest is a private-label guru and a law school graduate turned entrepreneur. Shaff Qureshi is the Founder of Sulazra Brands. Shaff shares his secrets to success with Amazon PPC ads, whether you should target long tail or short tail keywords, and how to construct your Product Display Page to convert.
Takeaways:
Quote of the Show:
Links:
Shout Outs:
Ways to Tune In:
📍 Welcome to another episode of Amazon Legends. My guest today is a private label guru. He's a law school graduate turned entrepreneur and founder Sulazra Brands. So everybody meet my guest, Shaff, Shaff Qureshi, Welcome to the
show Shaff. Thanks so much, Nick, for having me and a happy prime.
Oh yes. Well, as we are recording this, we are about to start the prime, prime day, um, activity, I guess I should
say.
It's basically, but it's basically the Black Friday of online, I guess you could say. And well, you know,
this is the thing about Amazon. These guys brought Christmas in the middle of summer, right? That's what. That's what Prime Day is, if you
think about it. A hundred percent. I mean, a lot of brands are expecting to do three x four x, you know, of their daily run rates and you know, I was just creeping on Amazon before about a day ago, looking at all the deals, all the prime exclusive stuff, and you wouldn't believe Nick, like 60% off items that were like $200.
Um, you know, even subscribe and save options were like, instead of. You know, five, 10% off. I saw some stuff for 20% off. So it, that's, that's why people go on and they buy stuff cuz hey, today is Christmas in. Well, I mean,
that's what they did because usually in the summer, shopping slows down, right? Cause people are traveling, they're going on their summer vacations.
So what does Amazon do? They say, Okay, we're gonna do something to change this. So, and then they bring
Christmas in July. A hundred percent. Yeah. Even my own business. Um, you know, although we say that we're evergreen, you know, every business has their seasonality, right? December is usually the best, but I think this is a great.
That our wonderful Jeffrey Bezos put together and said, Anyone lagging in sales? You know what? Let's collect something in July. So here it is. Now, you know, you know the,
the funny thing is, as you know, during the pandemic there was no such thing, so they couldn't have prime day during the pandemic. So what happens is, you know, as if like when Christmas is an official album, Right.
So July 4th is an official holiday. You never, there is never a situation where there is no Christmas or there is no July 4th, or there is no Thanksgiving that that never happens because they're official. But Prime Day is manmade for God's sake. I mean, they're all manmade, but it's, you know what I mean?
So, So what happens? During the pandemic here, the usual time in July, they couldn't have Friday. Oh no. What are we gonna do? What are we gonna have to Friday? So they did in October .
Yeah, they did do that. I remember they did do that. And uh, I wouldn't be surprised if a couple years from now we see them say, Hey, federal holiday, everyone, everyone take off July 12th and July 13th for Prime Day.
Yeah. Yeah. They, I had no. So when you and I first connected and then we were hitting our discussion, so you mentioned the formula to me that, uh, a very unusual formula you figured out for your success. So tell us what that formula is.
Okay. Now I hope our followers really get value from this. So basically the formula is gonna.
Let's lose money to make money. Okay. Lose
money to make money. So I mean, is that the same way of saying, Yeah, you need to spend money to make money, or this is a different version
of it? I guess it's kind of synonymous to that. But let me, let me kind of explain what I mean. So basically what I'm saying is you go to the grocery store, right, and you're looking for catch up, and you go down the catch up aisle and you see okay, directly in front of you, right?
There's, for example, a very popular brand, right? Let's go with Hz, right? Hines pays a specific premium. To be on that part of the shelf right now, Hines might be breaking even from that purchase, right? Because, you know, they spent the promotional, uh, whatever, how, however much the grocery store charged them for that.
And although they might lose money on that specific sale, A customer like me will go back to the store and even if Hines has a placement on the shelf that is way lower and not directly in my eye, right in my purview, I'm still gonna buy it. So what's end up happening is that although they lost money on that sale, Their lifetime value, their LTA increases over time because now guess what?
I used the catch up when I went home, I liked it, right? And now I'm gonna go back and look for the same brand, right? So you lose money to acquire a customer, but in reality, you're gaining value because guess what? If you sell a generally good product, the customers will come back. And I like to use the same strategy on.
So how does
that translate to Amazon?
Yeah, that's, that's definitely a good question. So basically what I would do is that I would increase my cost for clicks, right under sponsored brands or sponsored display ads. And by increasing my bids, I would try to beat out the competitors for a short tail, high volume keyword.
And so when a customer purchases my product, although I'm paying excess of what a normal bidding would be, I'm trying to regenerate another still from that customer, right? I'm trying to build my LTV off that customer. So although my a cost maybe 50%, 60%, you know, and my marches are 40, losing 10%, 20% on that specific product.
Now if I sell a replenishable or even a, you know, regular commodity, That customer, next time they need a product or you know, word of mouth, they tell someone else that needs that product, they're gonna come back. And on top of that, if my product sits in their house, right, my product has real estate on their shelves or on their table or wherever it's sitting, right?
And so my branding is even stronger because now it's sitting in their house. They might come back, they might purchase it again. And so this is kind of the mentality that I have, but you know, kind of like, you also need to make sure that you have a very good. , you know, so a lot of, a lot of product focus as well is that you're selling something good where, where customers will come back and not only we're depending on the marketing.
I hope that kind of makes sense. So,
okay, so let's unpack this. You have a good product. So let's say that. Let's say, let's say given you have reviews or everything else, whatever, and it's a good product, and then you went and bid on keyword. That has high volume. Cause usually you target smaller volume keywords, but many of them, Right.
Uh, because it's much easier to stand out. So in your case, you focus on shorter keywords with a lot of volume, and then you increase your bid. When you increase your bid, you show up right at the top. So you increase your visibility. When you increase your bid, you increase your visibility. Exactly. And people buys and it costs you.
A dollar for a $2 sale. Exactly. So the customer bought it. So the next customer, same deal. So you keep making sales, you're bleeding. So how long does this last?
Well listen to this. So you go one season, right? Where you kind of use that strategy, but keep in mind, for example, if you have SNS on your Amazon listing, or otherwise, you don't even use SNS the following year, right?
Those customers, they're coming back to buy from you when they're organically searching that specific product. You know, so for example, the first year they might be typing in, you know, a short tool key where like garlic press, right? Which is high volume, right? And they see that, okay, you know, your sponsored ad is all the way at the top, okay?
And you're paying, for example, $6 a click, right? And uh, your margins are $4, right? So you acquired the customer, you lost $2, right? Guess what? Next summer, their garlic press, they need another one. Now, this time they remember your brand name, right? Next time they come. Now they're searching up your brand name and they're buying it organically, which is awesome.
And so this allows you to get the organic profit right as well as it affects your best seller ranking. And keeping in mind, if you go on H 10 and you look up the keyword tracker and keyword search volume, you'll see that your brand is also gonna increase in the search volume for your specific, you know, product and as well as the.
So that's another great way to brand and get customers back.
Okay. So you just, you just highlight the real value. So, so I, I think, you know, you are, you, you are a lawyer, turn entrepreneur, but I think you still talking lawyer language because you're not doing justice to yourself. The real value is not because, at least to me, the way it looks.
You paid a dollar to generate a $2 sale, fine. You do so many of those in a short period of time, so you gonna get orders, right? That's a given. That's why you're doing this. You're gonna get orders. When you get orders, the real value of that effort is not because your product, you know, now you're smiling, you know what I'm, what I'm going with , so, So it's, the real value is not your product sitting on their table or on the shelf at home, so that next year they're gonna know the real value is.
As those orders come in, your order flow rate has gone up, and that's gonna push your best seller rank up, and therefore you are gonna improve your ranking in the Amazon ecosystem so that way other people coming in searching that product, you're gonna get their orders without even advertis. So in the short term, but you can't do this like slow drip, drip, drip.
You have to do this like concentrated like a, you know, push the, the whole campaign in a short period of time to generate the maximum number of orders for a specific set of keywords, and then you start dominating those keywords and you get organic traffic. Okay. So that means that's right.
So you listen, you got it.
Perfect. That's exactly it. But let me tell you. It's, it's, it's a universal idea that we take a bunch of low volume keywords, right? And we bid for them, right? And guess what? The low volume keywords, you know, the bidding's gonna be low. And because the bidding's low, we have more money to spend. And guess what we're gonna be ranking for way more keywords, right?
What I think is happening these days in 2020 July, is that I've tested and we've strateg. What ends up happening, if you use a lot of long tail keywords and you bid for those keywords, is that your click through rate might not be that well for a lot of long tail keywords. And so if your click-through rate is not good for a lot of long tail keywords, then what ends up happening is that it takes your bsr and it shocks it.
And so what's happening is that your BSR is increasing, right? And so, After testing, we've understood that if we take a couple of short tool keywords, right, like three to five short keywords with very high volume, and we increase our bids for those, right? And they have good CTR rates, right? What ends up happening is that your BSR actually goes down, and the reason why it goes down is.
That keyword is a very good match for that product that you're selling. Although it's high volume and although you know the cost per click is super high, your click through rate is actually has really good advantage. And because, like I said before, in turn, your BSR goes down and so what ends up happening is that although you paid a high cost for click to get those orders because your BSR is going.
Well, guess what? For example, you spent a thousand dollars on PPC for one specific keyword. You might be generating another $2,000 a day for that product because the BSR is going down because your click through rate is at such a phenomenal, you know, place. And so I totally agree the long tail keyword strategy was good.
But I think that strategizing the shorttail keyword strategy, right, where you have a bunch of those and you just increase your CPCs. That is something that, you know, has been successful for us. So yeah, so I
think, I think there are two things that we're talking about here in the end when you really break it up into pieces.
One is increase the bid for the purposes of getting more click through, more people clicking through your listing. Short tail or long term doesn't matter. So don't worry about what you are saying is don't worry about the cost of those high bit clicks. Exactly. Stay focused on what kind of an impact it's gonna make on your bsr, BSR being best seller rank.
So there's one other thing that, that you, you mention. Best clarify when BSR goes down, that's a good thing, right?
Of course. It's like
everything. Number one is the lowest number, so, So you want your BSR to go down. So you are basically banking on the fact that I wanna pay whatever it costs to increase my exposure so that.
I get many, many, many orders, and as I get many, many orders, my order flow rate is gonna go through the roof, and that ultimately will get your BSR better. And when your BSR is better, your exposure is much better, and therefore you are getting organic orders. So that's one concept you're talking about.
Yeah. The other concept is don't worry about looking at long tail keywords because the cost is. Hundred percent go after the short. You know, short take keywords. Don't worry about the volume, just bid on it. Because those keywords convert or click through at a higher rate.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yep. And so what, so what, So what ends up happening is that a lot of players in the market.
They don't strategize this method because they're afraid that, Oh, we're spending X amount of dollars on ppc. You know, we're spending, you know, our budgets are, you know, $400, $500, and they used to be a $100. And you know, as we see Amazon grow and become this, you know, giant behemoth that controls almost, I think it's what 43% of all online retail sales are done on Amazon as it grows, grows, grow.
You know, Amazon's understood that, okay, we've even achieved being third highest at spend, you know, company. Basically, I think in the world it is right after Google and YouTube and so they've even given us a lot of metrics for specifically marketing. Just this year, Nick, we've started to see metrics on very accurate impression shares.
They've launched many tools under brand analytics and so this kind of shows us. That they're becoming a little bit more, I would say, synthetic on making the advertising space stronger. And so, and by the way, I don't wanna, you know, drive the idea that advertising is the only thing that's important. But, you know, product development is also a very important part.
And that's obviously the most, the most important. If not say, because if you don't have a good product, you're not gonna have good marketing. Right? And so if you can strategize both of these, And deep dive focus in 2022 on marketing. You will, you can successfully sell. Because like I said, you know, I started selling in 2019, right?
I launched my product. I launched two products at the end of 2019, around October. And the reason why I was able to scale up to the seven figure level was because I did a lot of product testing. Worked with a ton of factories. Understood. Kind of like, okay, you know, if XFactor is offering, for example, paint tape, if, if XFactor is offer.
This type of tensile strength, can I get a different type of tensile strength from B factory? You know? So making sure that my products are good, working with a few suppliers, and then ordering or sourcing for that matter from that specific supplier, and then pushing the marketing after believing that, okay, this product will be able to compute with my sellers.
This product will be able to kind of be the uh, category leader. And so, you know, I don't want you to think that, you know, the major, major proponent here is gonna be the marketing. You gotta battle with it, this and that, blah, blah, blah product. You know, research and identifying what the market needs and also what the market is missing is gonna be the most important thing.
Yeah. And there
is no end to it because you are in the universe of keyword. So I always say this. Amazon is not a marketplace or products. It's a marketplace of keywords, and there is no end to it a hundred percent. So you can always find a niche and then create a product for that niche. You just need to.
Know how to look at numbers and how to figure out, you know, what, what are the trends and what is it? What is the competition doing? And then once you identify that niche, then you can easily put a product there. And then the next thing is, you know, that's how you're gonna market focus on those keywords.
Yeah, so that's a very good point you bring up, because I have this one test that I call the two up. And the way that the test works, Nick, is that you go on Amazon, right? You find a category, okay? That you think that, okay, there's a couple of private label sellers that, that are getting sales. There's, you know, one or two big brands, but the split, the volume split of products is not that much.
So you're able to generate sales, right? So what you do in the two up test is that you identify the products, you know, take four or five products, and then out of those products, They're gonna be very similar. You wanna identify two features, which is the two up, that you know that okay, if I add one of these two features, or even both of them is gonna be even better, that you'll be able to get the market cap that you know you should be getting, right?
And now the follow up question on that is, okay Sha, how do you know what the two up is? What do you know as you know the two best features you should get? So what you should do is, now this is, this is gonna require a lot of like manual labor. So what you should do is go into your competitor's products and go to their one star reviews tool, star reviews, and even four or five star reviews.
I would go through all of them, but start with one or two star reviews and just understand what the customers want. You know, if they're complaining that, Oh, I wish this wasn't black, I wish this, uh, you know, had a handle here, I wish that the handle was a little bit more towards the left. Right? You wanna.
A pattern of a feature that's missing between a couple of bad reviews. You know, you don't wanna just take bad review, one bad review and say, Okay, I need to add this feature because there's one specific person in Wyoming said that, you know, this product's missing. You want to get a bunch of those, you know, kind of like pattern of.
Once our reviews that say that, okay, this feature's missing, and apply that towards your new product and see whether your manufacturer is gonna be able to do it, but you wanna be able to do it where you can really be able to capitalize on it by having like, I guess, like making that feature really strong, you know?
And what I mean by that is when the manufacturer builds it, and also when you present it in your photos, Yeah, make sure that the customers can see that really well. And I know you agree with me, so what do you think about that? No, I mean, look, look, I, I'm also
smiling as you talk about it because I do that all the time in the sense that when I say all the time, I don't wanna like make it.
Uh, something. No big deal. This is a big deal. So what I do is, as I'm sure that you know, there's a tool called HE 10, right? So in HE 10, you can go and use your browser extension on a particular product, pick the best seller, and then you can go to your medium 10 browser extension and download the reviews.
You can select for a time range, four star, five star, three star, two star, one star. So what I typically do is I pick the best seller and then I download all the reviews, but two sets, One is three stars and up. And the other is one and two stocks, whatever is in the, in the high rated reviews, there is a tab called review analysis.
Yes, sir. That gives you a list of the keywords across all those reviews. So that may be 10,000 reviews. Right. And that's not uncommon. 10 out of 10,000 reviews. Your report is gonna say. Zipper breaks, 53 times. Okay. And let's say you selling, uh, a pillowcase. And if you say, if you see zipper breaks 53 times, you know what I do?
I tell my client, Put a picture, one of the alternative pictures, and then make up an i a seal. No broken zippers. .
Exactly. Yep. That's one way to do
it. That's called subliminal message. So that's what you were talking about. So that's what I do. But you taken into all different level. You taken it to the level where you are actually creating the product with the kind of, uh, terms that are used as a.
That people are complaining about.
Yeah, so that's a great point. Um, I use that tool a lot. The, uh, Helium 10 where one you're talking about the, uh, the, uh, extension and I really do enjoy using that one. Um, but let's, let's caveat off that and let's kind of, and let me explain how I take advantage of that even further.
So before you didn't need to be, uh, brand register. To run, you know, sponsored brand ads or whatever. But I mean, actually vice versa, before you need to be brand registered, now you don't. But that one up or two up feature that I'm talking about to kind of promote it even further and get something that I called an eyeball test, try to get as many as eyeballs on that specific feature as possible.
I've run ads for sponsored video ads, right. And what they do is that I'll get some sort of influencer. Right, Or I'll get some content creator, and what I'll do is I'll have them make a video for that specific feature, and I'll run sponsored video ads. So I get the word out that, hey, my customers are not offering this.
I, I mean, uh, my competitors are not offering this, but hey, guess what? We can offer this feature, right? And so when customers are scrolling on that short tail, high volume keyword, and you know, they see my specific ad, my video ad, I'm getting impressions that. I know that all these other products don't have this specific color or feature, but wow, look at this seller.
He has that feature, right? And guess what? Let me go on that listing. And you just gained another, uh, you know, another customer because now you have another feature that you know you're offering and Awesome. Another additional sale. Right? Well,
this,
this brings me to my favorite point, uh, the two magic bullets that I talk about for success on.
Two magic bullets. First one is click through rate. Click through rate is how do you get more and more people to click on your listing? And that may be because of the ads. It may be your organic appearance, you know, whatever. If you can increase the number of people clicking on that listing, you are basically increasing the audience.
That you will bring to your individual product page. So you figure that out, that's gonna be your chances of increasing your sales will be much higher. Now, of course, that are analytics that will help you do that. You mentioned the brand analytics, so the second magic bullet, I'll leave that to you. What is the second magic
bullet?
Second mallet magic bullet impressions. It follows
from the click through
rate. Oh, uh, your, your unit session percentage. Conversion rate. Conversion rate. There
you go. Conversion rate is everything. That means that you brought the people to the page, and now it's a matter of getting more of them to buy it.
Right? So, and that's the conversion rate or unit. They call it unit session percentage. So that's another analytics. So all these are conceptually the things that will give you success, but each and every one of them has, uh, a metric associated with it for you to track on. So, uh, tell us how you, how you make use of these things yourself.
Yeah, sure. So before I get right into conversion, Like, I just wanna mention a small thing that I was testing with impressions, right? Mm-hmm. . Um, so with impressions as we talked about before, was where, okay, we have video ads that we're running, right? And I like video ads running for a lot of long till keywords.
And the reason why I like video adss running for a lot of specific keywords is because clicks cost money, but impressions are. and getting the exposure from impressions of a video ad is an awesome way to brand on. So if customers go on, even though they don't wanna buy it, it's okay. They can still see the video, they can watch, you know, the couple of seconds that I have to offer, right?
And so that's another way that I get the brand to have more favor, favorability in front of my customers, or even customers that I don't have yet by just running as many as impressions than I, as I can on all my video. So that's just one little tip that I had. Um, well that's very
valuable because you're not paying for it.
Why not use it and of course, use it as broken
as possible. Exactly. Yeah. Cause keep in mind, clicks, cost, money, impressions will always be free. Right. Um, okay. So kind of, uh, going back to the thing that you said about conversion rates. Yeah. So now conversion rates are very important for your bsr, Right. You know that.
Okay. Yeah. And the reason why it's important is, . It just kind of tells Amazon that, Hey, this product is a really good product, or otherwise, you're a pdp. Your product display page is really good right now. To get good, good conversion rates, your PDP must be amazing and how to make it amazing. The first best thing is gonna be your images have awesome images, right?
Images. Explain what the product is. Uh, kind of a video that shows the product itself, right? Whether you use a model or whatever you want to use. And, uh, having really good images and a really, really good video, obviously prevent returns. Cuz if a customer sees that, okay, this is what it looks like, this is how the product, you know, when you hold it looks like this, they're gonna be less likely to return it cuz they know what they're buying, right?
Another way. Is having, uh, good bullet points. A lot of customers don't read bullet points. Um, I might be a little bit, I guess, ignorant here because I don't really read bullet points. I don't know if you do, Nick, do you? Well,
bullet points are, so you write about images. So basically when somebody lands on the page, they're looking at the pictures first.
And by the way, one little, uh, disclosure here, your title. Has no real value. Once they are on the page, because they read the title, they looked at your main image, they clicked on it, they're not gonna read the title anymore. So title doesn't matter. Once they're on the page, once they're on the page, pictures first, that's, I would say 60% of the deal.
30% of the deal is the bullets, except bullets are the closers. That's like, imagine you sitting in front of the, you are in a store salesman and somebody walked in, they saw something in the window that's clicking through, right? . They saw something in the window and said, Oh, I like that they walked in. So now the first thing they're gonna do is they're gonna go to the shelf, grab the product, and start, you know, touching and feeling it, smelling it, whatever.
Right? So that's your product pictures. Now they have a pretty good idea. They want this a hundred percent, but they are not yet sure. Now, at that point, they turn to the salesman and say, Does it do this? And the salesman says, No, it doesn't, but it does this. Oh, but it also does this. Oh, then I'm definitely buying it.
And then they buy. Those are the bullets. Yeah. Is the closes and the fundamental point about bullet. Is they have to, they are not features and benefits. They have to make emotional connection. Yeah. So
another thing, another thing that I guess like we kind of. Forget is how important the EBC is on how important.
That's the 10%.
That's the 10%. So, you know, I said 60 30,
I thought you said 40. I'm like, uh,
pictures. 30% bullets, 10%. Everything else, everything else being obviously your, uh, ebc. Now they call it a plus. Uh, but it's the, it's that page that you can design custom, and then that's where you establish the, the brand and the product and everything
else.
So, Well, let me ask you a question there. Where do you, you so hold, so, so you think that the bullet points are more important than the evc? Yes. You know why? It's above the fold. Ah, okay. That's, that's interesting because I don't have a direct statistic on the value of the bullet points, but I do know that if you have good A plus content or ebc, your unit session percentage conversion rate goes up by between two to 3%.
You got good abc. Okay,
so I don't have numbers to give you. This is the reason why I bullet. However, what I can tell you is this, Statistically speaking, people don't like scroll. So anything above the fold is likely to get more exposure, a hundred percent. So therefore, anything about the fold is more likely to play a role in conversion.
So therefore, anything about the fold is going to be more valuable than anything below the fold, however, I totally agree that your a plus pages are very valuable, but as you know, Amazon does not index the a plus pages, but Google does. So because you have a plus pages, you may be bringing more external traffic and therefore pushing up the, the number of orders and the number of conversion that way.
I, I, I don't know. I could
not tell you. Yeah, no, that's a good point. It's definitely valuable for external traffic. I actually didn't even know that Google, um, indexes, ebc. As opposed to Amazon. So that's, That's actually a very good point. I really had no idea. And now it looks like now I need to go back to myc, what I have logged on there.
Just make sure we're good. Yeah, I mean,
Amazon does not index plus pages. Google does. There's one other thing. The images that you use in the a plus content, they are old tags. You need to stop your keywords in the old text because
they get indexed. Yes. Okay. So that, that I'm familiar with. I've done that trick before.
And that, and that's a damn good one. Cause um, before I wasn't doing that until I think like two years ago, one, one of my friends, uh, he's an eight figure seller, and he was like, Hey, you know, I gotta do meta tags, I gotta, you know, stuff, my texts. And I'm like, Dude, what are you, what are you talking about?
And so we sat down for like two hours and he explained to me, You know, all that stuff is indexed, um, which is pretty awesome. But let's talk about another feature that I've been using like crazy. And when I mean crazy, I almost use this feature about every day, and it's on Amazon. So a lot of people kind of ignore the tools that we have under the brand analytics.
Because, you know, a couple years ago, two years ago, it was like, okay, like a lot of softwares were doing what Amazon should have been doing. And so split testing images, split testing titles. I mean, let me tell you story, when I was, okay, so there's one time like, I think like three months ago I was running my PVC and I saw that, okay, like for this one keyword I was, I had really good, you know, click through rates.
It was converting well. Um, my impressions were off, so my a cost was super low, and so I decided that, hey, let me put this keyword like in my title and see if I can generate more sales, right? But I said, Hey, you know what? I'm not gonna be able to quantify the sales that I'm getting. So you know what? Let me use the managed experiments tap on under the brand analytics, right?
So I went on there and. I, I added the word right, and I was split testing A and B, so the old title versus the new title, and I'm like, Dude, this is working really well. So then I took all my skews and I just started wildly split testing the titles, split testing B images. And it's amazing because you can run a test for like six weeks, 10 weeks, and Amazon will tell you, This keyword or this image is 97% more likely to generate sales, or it's, you know, 63% probability to generate more sales.
And if it stinks, it'll tell you, Okay, 20% more likely, whatever. And after you are done testing that you can test a different image, different title. And as you go up, you know, the Rolodex of experiments that you want to use, you'll start to see that your BSR is slowly dropping, you know, and it's. The ad is now being seen in front of the right keywords and the right images, right.
And so it's, it's almost like a, it's almost like a, uh, a circle effect. You know? It's getting better and better and better and better and better on the back end on the SEO side of it. So this is under brand analytics? Yes. Manage experiments. Manage experiments. Yes. And hi. Highly say that you e everyone should use it.
It's a great, excellent tool and it's very effective. Well, there is
also something else that I, I re. So we talked about images being so important, and the most important image is the main product image because it plays two roles, Which one is for your click through in the search results. The other is when they land on the product page, that's the first image that they are looking at.
So that's the first impression you're making. What image to use is a big decision. So there's this website called Pick f u. Are you familiar with that?
So, Oh, I use Pfu all the time. Yeah. .
So it sounds a little bit funny, but uh, it stands for, picked for you, right? So it's supposed to, So, uh, that's a great site because you can really create your own audience for polling.
And you can say, I want women between the ages of 25 and 35, that makes so much money and blah, blah, all those things. And then you can say, I want so many people. And then suddenly you got your audience and then you put up two pictures and say, Which picture would you. Click the
most. Yeah. Yeah. I, I've used that many times.
I think it's so effective. Um, there's also another website that I use, uh, actually, excuse me, I haven't used it yet, but I have friends that use it and it's cheaper, way cheaper than PI food. Um, the volume of people on it is obviously lower than pig food because pig food just has, it's like one of the first ones, biggest ones in the game.
And so they have a lot of people, but, um, a bit expensive. Let me tell you something. For all my launches, any new product that I'm working on, even thinking about developing, I always run a pig food test. I look at brand analytics. I understand what Amazon is telling me about my specific customers, right?
Whether it's their gender, it's their age, it's their, you know, education. I take those metrics. I put those identical metrics into Pfu and then so I have a better idea about who the customers are, cuz I don't wanna run a test on, you know, random people. That way I'm able to get way better results because those are my customers.
Exactly. Exactly. You, you're creating a collection of your customers and then you're asking them, which one would you buy? . Yeah. It's a no brainer. So tell me, how do you track the conversion rate? What report do you use and how do you make use of?
Yeah, that's a good question. So if you go under business reports, right, You can check by skew level.
You're us p percentages, right? Which is basically a conversion rate. Uh, I don't know when Amazon's gonna start using conversion rates, which I think they already have. They're testing it under some people's brand analytics because one of my accounts that has it, another account doesn't have it, which is kind of strange.
Um, so basically I, if I make a change on a Monday, I wait at least two and a half weeks until I'm running the experiment. Right? And then what I do is I'll go back in after two and a half weeks and I will go back to business reports, type in the date of the two and a half week increment, and I'll, and I'll compare, I'll manually compare what the results were.
But what's been kind of like a way easier way is using the manage experiments. You know, the manage experiments. If it's not titles or images, I'll use the manual way. If it is title images and you know, other SEO stuff, then I'll use the manage, uh, experiments under the brand analytics. Yeah, so this is
what I tell my clients.
Great. All of them. When you're driving your car, you are looking at your dashboard, right? So you can't say, look at your speed. At it 50 miles an hour, and then that's it. Don't look at it again for two hours. Doesn't work like that, right? Look at your gas. You look at it and then don't look at it again for an hour and a half.
It doesn't work like that. Your eyes need to be on it all the time. So therefore, I tell people, your entire catalog, what is your composite commercial rate? Your top sending items, what is their composite conversion rate and atcu level, and then the rest in perspective over time associated with the events that affected those fluctuations.
You've got to understand that data, but in order to understand it, first you had to. And it's not available unless you do what you described. You go to business reports, put in the start date, put in the end date, download it, and then what? It's a bunch of roles. You open into the CSV file and then you have to, to make sense of it, you have to in perspective and do some intelligent stuff.
You have to process Excel or whatever. So what happens is in my earlier years, I built these collaborative, uh, Excel files with all kinds of visualizations, but the data had to be gathered. I would be exhausted by the time I put the data in. I just didn't have the time to all the energy to, to look at it.
And that's exactly what these business reports are. Unfortunately, it's, that's, but that's what you need to do in order to be.
Right. I mean, you're totally right. It's super time consuming. But if you wanna run through my process, which I can totally share, what I do is make an Excel sheet. Right. And as you're saying, I check my, I would say my conversion rates every week.
Every week. I wanna, so I, I just wanna see what's fluctuating, what's not fluctuating. If I remember I made any changes, if I'm, if I'm testing anything specific, I just want to know, even if I'm not testing it on a specific product, I just wanna see, you know, any metrics dramatic or like materially change, right?
So what I'll do is that I'll go into. And for example, I started testing two years ago. So in the two year past, there's 52 weeks every week on a skew level, I'll have the impression numbers, the CTR numbers, the usps, the total orders, sales order numbers, et cetera. And every week, every skew I'll add, you know, underneath you.
Week one, underneath that week two. Okay. These are the changes, you know, and I know it gets confusing on Excel where everything is kind of white, the same color. So change the colors. Gray and yellow. Gray and yellow, gray, yellow. So line by line, you, you,
you, you spent the time, you built it. And, uh, you know, it's, it's, but not everybody, everybody's like you.
So that's, uh, that's the challenge. Usually
it's a challenge. Yeah, it's a challenge. But let me tell you, it's so useful cause you really get an idea of what your business is doing, how your products are compared to your competitors. Because you can use softwares like Stack Line that will tell you conversion rates of your competitors and you can, Yeah, you can also get conversion rates of your competitors under brand analytics, which is pretty awesome.
Um, that's another manual way to do that. Oh, let's click through rate. You can also get click through rates as well, but you can also get conversion rates as well on brand analytics
to act actual what they purchase.
Yeah. For products, product conversion rates. You can get them under brand analytics as well.
For
each keyword
per Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I, I see that you have to click through. Right, and for these different keywords, but you know, I, I studied that report. It doesn't show you everything because it's impossible to show everything. So you plug in the ASIN and you plug in the date, says no data about,
So yeah, that happens.
That happens all the time actually. Um, and I think it has to do with not having a volume of sales for your own product. Or it can be able to collect the data that it needs to compare to your, for example, if you're doing a thousand units of something a month, Right. And I mean, if you're, if your competitor's doing a thousand seals of something a month, right?
And you're doing 50 seals a month, Amazon's not gonna pick up 50 seals because for them, that's like, you know, that's like a piece of sale, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well that's why, you know, I've seen. And my own experience. Yeah. So,
uh, anyway, my, my favorite is the, is tracking the conversion rate. I also track, uh, buy box detention rate, how long you've been in the buy box because as you know, Amazon sometimes will show up as another seller on your listing as Amazon Warehouse.
And then the next thing is you're no longer on in the buy box and sales. So that also,
Yeah, that's a good point. I used to, I used to use that in wholesale. I also had a wholesale business two years ago and we were tracking the buy box and that's when I learned about a tool called Kipa, you're probably familiar with.
It has been my best friend ever since I use that tool. Most, I would say.
Yeah. So that's great. So let's talk a little bit about you. So you know, tell me about, The interest in Amazon being a law school graduate.
Very random story. Um, so I did my undergraduate in political science and sociology. Actually, I wanted to be a doctor, so I did microbiology and my fourth year I changed it to political science.
Then I went to law school and, you know, I did corporate compliance, graduated, but during law school I decided I, hey, I wanna start a business. What is, you know, the least frictional way where I can start a business And Amazon at that time was bumping, right? Like if you knew the business, you knew that people were making money.
And so, but I was never a data oriented person. You know, the only like numbers oriented class ever took in my undergraduate and law school career was precalculus. Right. . Which was when I was like 19 years old. Right. I'm in my late twenties now. Anyways, started this business on Amazon and I really like, I really enjoyed the fact that I can understand numbers and make decisions based off those numbers.
Everyone in this world would lie to you. Your mom, your dad, your sister, your brother would numbers. Nick will never lie to you, you know? And I love that you can make data driven decisions you. And so, you know, after understanding what the USP is, what CTRs are, impressions and all these wonderful things that we talk about on Amazon, and kind of understanding on how the algorithm works on how your competitors kind of are on the platform, how other brands that have been selling for 30, 40 years in brick and mortar stores after you divulge in all of.
You can make data driven, uh, you know, like data driven decisions and, you know, it's, it's, it's a whole realm. You know, at first you're a generalist on Amazon and then you find specialists, right, that are good with Amazon PPC, that are good with product sourcing. And so kind of understanding all that, I really enjoyed the, the entrepreneurial journey.
And I said, You know what? This is it for me. And so I just stopped completely with law in general and said, Hey, this is amazing. I wanna have fun. I'm making way more than how much a first year of graduate would be making my second year in law school. And I said, Let's, let's, let's go with it and then I
just picked out it so you didn't know this part of yourself growing up?
I had no idea. I literally had no idea that I was even good with data and numbers. I always thought I sucked at numbers, but that's just because I didn't pay attention in math class.
Cause I didn't. Your grades were no good for things like math and, uh, chemistry and physics or anything
like that? No, my grades were always, In math and chemistry, I, the only a that I probably got in my entire educational career was that one pre-calculus class in college where I ended up getting an A.
But besides that, I never had good grades in math, physics. Uh, I only had good grades in public history. In English because I, you know, I actually actually like it. And we always talk about stuff like that, right. And, uh, so yeah, my grade's always low on that, but actually, so did
you, did you have, did you like the teachers who taught the math and physics classes and chemistry classes?
Um, probably, I mean, I, talking to them, I just didn't enjoy the subject and so, you know, because, because it's nice on Amazon, Nick, because. You can understand a number, make a change, and in the short term you see the change that you made using that number. So I like seeing the results, right? And Amazon's very dynamic.
If you make a change right now, in the next two hours, you'll see a difference that happen, you know? And so, So wait a minute. I, I, I'm
hearing something else here. I'm, I'm hearing that it's not necessarily the numbers that you like, it's the fact. The results are pretty quick. You can see the impact you're making fairly quickly.
It's so dynamic, Nick. It's so dynamic. That's
that because you, you used the word dynamic a few times now, so it's not, The numbers are just the vehicle for you to see the results of something you are working on quickly. You think, Do you think that that's, that's the reason why you like this?
A hundred percent.
I mean, we were talking about Amazon PPC before you tell me, Nick, if you change a keyword bid from $2, for example, you, it's at four o'clock, it's $2, and at four 30 you change the bid of that keyword for $4. What do you, what do you think would happen? Well,
I mean, obviously that's a, that's a, it's a huge, You'll get Yeah, yeah.
It's a, it's a
thrill, Right? Your impressions gonna change. Yeah. Your impressions are gonna change because your impressions are changing. People are seeing the add more. They're coming onto the add more. Your clickthrough rate is changing. Your conversion rate is changing. The numbers are
telling you to do those
things.
Exactly. That is the wonderful part about it, but I'm gonna
suggest to you that is your attraction. You don't really care about numbers. You care about what numbers are giving you as an experience and the
outcome a hundred percent. I would not, I would not disagree with that. The thrill of kind of like understanding that, Okay.
I've read this somewhere, and by the way, you have to be reading all the time to have an Amazon business about what's happening in that industry. What's happening, this industry, what's happening in brick and mortar. You know, I'm always watching NBC to understand what's going on in the markets. And so when you kind of have all these ideas running in your head, you have to be able to test them.
And the way that you test them is through the translation of numbers. Yeah.
Yeah. Numbers are the, the means to the final outcome that gives you the truth.
Yeah. It's very, it's very data oriented as you. So that's
all it is. Amazon, See, everybody thinks that, Oh, Jeff Bezos created this, uh, this online retail business.
That's not what he created. He created their business machinery that is process oriented and data driven. That's it. You can apply that to anything. All they do is as soon as they start something new, the first question is, Okay, how are we gonna measure this? Once they figured out the most complex things, I mean, when I started, I started on Amazon in 2004.
Wow.
So, so that's 18 years ago now. So those days, the number of metrics, In fact, I went to Amazon, well when I say I went to Amazon, we had an account executive and I said, Listen, I see a lot of reports here. And those days reports were nowhere near what we had today. But uh, they were still quite a few reports, fairly complex reports.
I wanna know how to make use of these reports. Can I pay? Do you have like a tutorial or do you, can you recommend a resource that. Teach how to use these reports. You know what they told me? No, there is no such thing. In fact, she said even we don't know how to use those reports because we had developers who came up with the idea of the reports and they created the reports, but they no longer with the company, so nobody knows how the reports work,
So that's how it was. But at the end of the day, that's what it was. It was always data driven, process based operation. Nobody comes in and says, Okay, I am ordering everybody to do this. Everybody stopped doing. It doesn't work like that. There's an over rack. You know what all rights when somebody says something like that.
The system does. Yeah. I see all the time. I have, like I had a client and they didn't need a UPC because it was a custom product. So I had an account executive assign and, and I said, Can you get a waiver for them for the entire account? It's always gonna becomes no problem. He got the waiver in, we were able to submit and then we start, we listed the item and it start selling plan.
It's the listed. Why? So I go back to the, I go straight to the account exhibit, Can you see that this thing is, is offline? And he goes in and he comes back, says, you know, sorry, the system over, over system override because there's no upc. He says, I'm gonna have to get, uh, an approval from higher up. To get the system settings changed.
So I mean, that's what it is. The systems control everything. Yes. And of course people are looking at the data and they're saying, Okay, this is what we need to do. That's what we need to do. And so that's how they decide.
So that's the best. Yeah. And uh, just a caveat off that, I feel like Amazon has been delivering more data recently, as we talked about before, and I think another reason for that, Is that the aggregators, the ones that are Yes.
You know, building these, buying these businesses, trying to build these businesses. They have a lot of professionals that are data analysts, very data oriented people on their teams that are requesting from Amazon that, Hey, we need to see this number. We need to see this number. And so because they're kind of asking these questions to Amazon, Amazon doesn't want to just roll it out to the aggregate.
They're giving it to all these, you know, uh, select, uh, not even select all the individual sellers and businesses that hey, the aggregators ask for. It let's
you, our brand registered. You
have access. Yeah, exactly. Which is nice. So,
so this is great. Well, I mean, you are, uh, you are like Energizer party. You are always running around trying to get something and then make changes and see the
results.
Yeah. Testing is, Testing is the most important thing on Amazon. If you can test. Lose fast fail, fast test again, keep testing and just funnel down to what works, right? That's Amazon.
Do more of what works and less of what does.
A hundred percent. Yeah.
So tell us how can people reach you and give us your contact information, which will be on our website and on YouTube, but uh, tell us how people can
connect with this.
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm on. You can type in my name, s h A f f Sha, and then last name Cari, Q U r e s h I. And then same thing for Instagram, sha dot cari. Uh, you can DM me, message me if you have any questions, some free to help anyone out.
Great. Thank you, Sha, this was great. You delivered a
lot of gold.
Absolutely. You got it Nick. Thank you. And
that brings us to the end of another episode, and I'll see it on the next
one.