Is Your Amazon Strategy Up to Date? Don’t Miss These Key Tactics

Foreign.

Welcome everybody to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Mark Young and got a great guest today. We're going to talk about Amazon and Amazon is. This is interesting. We, we had a conversation. So, Drew, you don't know this. Last week we had a conversation about Amazon. And first off, let me introduce you folks. So we're gonna. Our guest today is Drew Little Jones. Drew is a really, really interesting guy because he is a. Has a company called VH Nutrition. And so he's really, really good at human nutrition and supplements and all of those things. But along the way, on his way of selling $60 million of that stuff on Amazon, being a bright guy, he also dove in and learned how Amazon operates. And there's a lot of crazy things going on over at Amazon, so we're going to talk about that. But Drew, let me catch you up on what we covered last week. So we had a guest on last week and we were talking about the issue that his research shows that up to 60% of products on Amazon are now counterfeit. That is a shocking number. That 40% of people. Yep, 40 to 80% of consumers in the course of a year will get a counterfeit production. And that almost 50% of all businesses are losing sales to counterfeit products. Now we've had this happen. One of our very own clients was getting knocked off with counterfeit products. And folks, you have to understand, they make a supplement, the counterfeit looked just like their product. It was packaged just like their product. It was in a box just like their product. Except that's not the product that was inside the capsules. And at best, the product inside the capsules was filler. At worst, it was something dangerous. Yeah, but they were getting knocked off. And it was interesting, Drew, because the address they put they gave to Amazon happened to be close to my Florida home. So I literally drove over there to find these people and it didn't exist.

Yep.

Now what our guest last week exposed was Amazon has really opened up the gates for a lot of new resellers. And he was saying that 60% of those new resellers are located in China.

You want them to sell on Amazon rather than Temu. Right.

They're on Chan, they're on Amazon, and they're from China. And I can tell you again from personal experience that in China, there's no such thing as a patent. They don't respect patents, they don't respect trademarks, they don't respect copyrights. They will knock you off. And I'll even tell you this, folks, if you've never manufactured in China, if you go to China, like, Shenzhen is a really big place for manufacturing in China. Saturday is the day off. The plants run six days a week. On the sixth day or the seventh day, it's not a point of God rested. It's a point of the back doors of all the plants open up and you can walk up and down the alleys and buy branded American goods out the back door for pennies on the dollar. Whether you want, you know, Nike shoes or a Gucci handbag or, you know, an Apple iPhone, this stuff is being peddled out in the alley right from the factory with your name on it and being sold. Now, these people are moving into Amazon. Now. This doesn't cover. I'm going to cover one other Amazon problem, and that is Amazon and ebay have now become the two biggest electronic fencing operations in the world. And we have a crazy problem going on with organized retail theft. Again, one of our clients has a product that literally organized groups hit Walmarts in entire cities. We'll go. Or Walgreens. We'll go to a city, hit every Walgreens, and just clear the shelves of their products. Especially in places like California, where you can steal $950 worth of stuff and walk out the door and wave to a cop on your way out with your bag of stuff. These theft rings, and I find this to be shocking, these theft rings are so large and so organized that they now have large warehouses, literally, with fork trucks running around inside them moving product that's being sold on Amazon. Because remember, let's say you have a $50 item on Amazon and let's say your cost to manufacture that was 10 or $15. When you steal it, you have zero manufacturing costs. So all of a sudden, you can sell the $50 product for $34.95 and you're making more money than the brand. Or you have a supplement that costs $10 to make. But in China, they can make it for 50 cents because it doesn't even have the supplement in it. It's just a bunch of nonsense capsules. So that's what we were doing last week, Drew. So I wanted to give you that background because the audience just heard that in the last episode. So that kind of. I'm giving you that. So it kind of colors where the audience's head might be great, as we.

Did you provide the solution to that problem?

We've provided some solutions. This particular guy is working on an AI chain of custody solution. One of our solutions was stop Selling on Amazon, which is not always a choice. Some of our solutions were to use a lot of language in your Amazon listing showing how you're the only official seller of this product and that products not sold through your page can't be verified or guaranteed or warrantied. The other thing that we said was you really need to do brand registry and you really need to aggressively go after anyone who is also selling your product. And the other thing that we recommended, Drew, was don't sell your products to resellers because now you lose control of yourself.

Exactly that. And there is the, that is the primary mechanism for this. So let me, let me just let people know kind of who I am a little bit so we get some background. I have an Amazon nutritional supplement company that I built with my partner. We are GMP certified. We're actually wrapping up our NSF GMP certification, which is quite the thing. We've done over $60 million over the last 10 years on Amazon and we have built this entire brand from scratch doing the actual American dream. We started, we did a, outsourced it, then we did went to a garage, then we figured out, started doing some of that stuff. Then we did the contract manufacturing, then we brought the manufacturing in house. There you go. And we are a digitally negative native organization, meaning that we are still actively getting into retail, but we are a lot in that Amazon brand space where if you don't know how to manage your Amazon universe, right, Then if you leave it, if you leave the Internet up to chance, the Internet will do what the Internet does, which is you. Well, just. It will disseminate everything, it will decentralize everything, it will move. All of your locus of power will completely go out of control. And so it is imperative, and this is why I, I started this whole brand manager consulting thing because by the.

End of the day, I kind of liken this to walking through the jungle undefended.

Correct. You must have a guide, the jungle.

There to eat you.

Well, it's hungry. You want to be jungle food or do you want to get to wherever it is you're going?

Right.

I mean, the amount of connections I have. So like, let's say, let's say I go to you. So I go to Mark, right. If I want to get a meeting with Kroger guy, right. It's going to take me two years. Going to take you six hours, right? Same idea. You want to, you want to get your job done in Amazon within 48 hours. We can get your IP done, we can get your brand registry done. We can get another team of lawyers done to kick everybody off. Who's got your products, who are selling them? We can keep that defended in an AI kind of way. So at any time a new counterfeiter comes up to hijack your listing, they get removed. It's just an auto, sends case logs.

Yeah, it is playing a game of Whack a mole every day.

It is. But there are systems and there are companies that handle and you want to go with multiple systems and then you want to have. The key is to have a brand manager in house. So this is like a guy that I work with, right? So you got a guy in house, he's your guy, he sells everything, he tracks everything, you know. And then you have somebody like me that whenever this guy has anything go wrong, there isn't a problem I haven't encountered on Amazon and solved encountered and solved. Anything that's new that I wouldn't know. I'm in three different masterminds that have hundreds of people in each one of them on every single thing from spatulas to supplements. If you don't have that kind of a guide, who can get you the resources you need? The Amazon, the Amazon ecosystem is designed to race to the bottom, chew you up and spit you out. Right.

That is the reason you need a Sherpa on your way up the mountain. So one of the things that we've been telling people, Drew.

Yeah.

Is when you're selling your product and let's say that you have. Let's say you're selling a supplement and you have local pharmacies buying the supplement from you and you have some medical practices buying the supplement. We've been counseling our clients to actually have a vendor agreement that prohibits them from selling on Amazon 100% or requires them to sell on Amazon at manufacturers list price.

No one is allowed to sell on Amazon except for you, ever. Period. The door is never open this way. And the reason for that is because you want to be able to communicate. And I don't mean to speak so firmly, but I'm very passionate about this. And the reason I'm so passionate about is because you need to be able to tell Brand registry, this is the contract that they signed. This is the contract. This is the contract that we sign. No one is allowed to sell our products, period. Because you have to remember when you talk to Amazon, you are always going to talk to a different customer service person every single time. You will never talk to the same person twice. That's why we. One of your, your standard operating procedures in Your company, they need to be bulletproof. Everybody in your company needs to know that nobody else sells your products, period. That's the end of that story.

That's what we prefer. We prefer that they contract people out of selling it.

Yes. So that you, and that's a difficult thing, selling in the universe. Before it was, it was normal. It was like, yeah, we're going to wholesale to you and you, you just get rid of it. You know, here's your MAP pricing and do your best. Right. Nowadays you really got to be careful with that because they might sign a MAP agreement, but what, they're going to send those wholesale products over to some other guy Right. Now you got to contend with that. And so half of the Amazon system is defending the, the, the pathway through which legitimate products flow. The other part of it is defending against when illegitimate products crop up.

Right.

Oh, while you're trying to actually make money.

Yeah. They can be knockoffs, they can be stolen. They could be being U boated or resold.

Correct. And it's, and it's, it's very hard because when somebody turns around to resell. So we have Amazon instructed to not accept any returns for any reason for any of our products. There was a, I don't know if you saw, there was an article in Bloomberg the other day about a woman who. Their entire Amazon business, they were doing 2 million a year, completely crumbled because somebody returned a dirty diaper and Amazon resold the dirty diaper and their entire business went out. That one one star review got voted in the most critical review section and tanked their entire business. Sold the house. Everything went down. Right. So this just also speaks to diversification review management. You know, we have a. I've got three different companies I could call at any time. And if you say, drew, I got this review, what are we going to do with it? Well, there are 19 different variations of your review for why it could be wrong. We don't know which one it is. So we will submit 19 cases because you have to fire at every single potential option.

Does that make sense to fire. So you have to actually file 19 rebuttals.

Yeah. You have to file 19 variations for why that review could or could not be wrong.

Okay.

And so normally, what are some examples.

Of why it could be wrong? Not all 19, but what's some example?

Some example is that the project, the product arrived broken. That's not a U issue, that's an Amazon shipping issue. Right. The product was dirty. The product, when I, when I used the product or the Product worked good. Didn't work good. If it, if it lacks enough words, you can get it removed. Anything that is not a direct reflection of the product in use.

Yeah. My favorites are you see somebody get a one star review because Amazon delivered late.

Right. Normal. And those, those are relatively easy to get removed. What, what a lot of sellers don't understand is this. Sometimes some cases require over 300. Like 300 phone calls. Phone calls.

Good Lord.

At an hour a piece, that's 300 hours of talking on the phone. That's too much resolve. A single. To resolve a single issue.

Yeah. So that's one person for two months.

Yes. So. So Amazon, I have a, I have an internal map in my own kind of what I do. That is of the 13 that I have so far tracked different escalation pathways you can take in Amazon to resolve a problem. Okay, so you have 13 pathways 19 different ways just for the reviews.

How do you figure out which pathway to go? Or do you just kind of guess at it from experience and then jump to the next one?

It at some point you're just a guide in the Amazon jungle. It was a great. Is a great way to know, like how do I know there's paramus in the water? Like don't ask. Like you don't you see finger. Yeah. Assume that I. That this missing finger didn't just fall off. Assume that it was bit off at some point in time by something. And I just have a good hunch, like if you give me an issue that you're talking about there with brand registry, it may be brand registry, but it also could be catalog. Catalog could be a great way to get that thing taken down. Another great way is the different escalation pathways. They change their escalation pathways about once every three months.

Now, what's going on at Amazon with AI? How's that changing how Amazon's functioning?

Well, that's a great question. I'm stoked you brought it up because we all. One of the big problems that we've noticed that is going to be really challenging for your audience. The CPG audience is going to be the time it takes to respond to algorithm changes when they start happening in real time with AI. Right. How long does it take for you to get copy approved? That's s. That's going to be SEO'd. Well, for your listings, how long is it going to take for your, your listing image to be approved? Right. In order for the algorithms to like it. So what's happened is. And just. I'm going to give you guys, just a big, dirty kind of look at it. And then, Mark, you can kind of dive into this where you feel that it will be the most value for. For your listener base. Because I can really get in the weeds with this. St. So when. So YouTube was the pioneer of a search algorithm strategy that indicated that suggested search was more relevant and potent for. For monthly active user time on site than search. Like technical search. Right. So, for example, the average user spends 70% of their time on YouTube looking at suggested content, not at content they searched for. I can see that TikTok is like 95. Just like, nobody searches anything on TikTok. You just go on there and say, Internet, make me happy. Right? That's how TikTok works. Amazon is moving to that. So let's say that Amazon has heard you mention a backpacking trip that you're going on, and then it knows in the past that you're 40 years old, and it knows that you're a size 10 and a half shoe because you bought a pair of shoes a while ago. It knows that you have a wide toe box. You might one day go on your Amazon, just, boom, there's a backpacking shoe for you already. Because Alexa's already looked through your email. It already knows that you've got a flight going to Colorado on July 10, and so it starts sending you shoe stuff now. Right. So the new AI.

Back up for a minute there. You just said Alexa was looking through my email.

Could be.

So how does Alexa get access to that? And. And how much information do you know that Alexa is absorbing or cataloging? That just happens in conversations in my home or office.

Okay, I don't want to scare anybody here. I'm not gonna. Not gonna. We're not gonna get too weird, but we'll get. We'll get weird enough to be weird. Not weird.

Not so weird enough to make you frightened.

Anyways, okay, I went on my phone a while ago, and you go into a thing, and you say, okay, Siri, I don't want to have Siri. So you turn off Siri. Okay, that's done. I have turn off Alexa.

I don't have an Alexa.

I don't either. For all these reasons I'm about to share with you. Then if you. Each individual app will indicate in your iPhone, do you want to allow this app to talk to other apps? And if one of those apps has access to your microphone? Every app has access to the microphone. Even if you've turned the microphone off for that app because it's still sharing the Data with the other apps. So all of the apps have basically developed a neural network with each other on your phone. Also, I was always really curious. I mean, okay, look at this. There's a couple of things. First of all, Amazon bought Roomba a long time ago. Right. Why did Amazon buy Roomba? Do they care about vacuums?

No, but it gives them all the square footage of your house.

That's exactly right. They know the floor plan of like 60 million Americans and where they. Not, not just where they live, but like all kinds of stuff about them.

Where the furniture is located.

That's right. What kind of furniture they might have. Right. The, the value of the home. Well, all of these aspects of AI. So you remember the patent wars with Nokia and Sprint and all those guys. Remember that? The same thing happened recently with patent filings with regard to audio. About five years ago, everybody from Google, Amazon, everybody was obsessed with audio. And I had been wondering, why is this? And it's just simply because the phone has. The main thing it's going to pick up is the 16,000 words a day that the average person spends talking.

That's why I give people an experiment. I will tell people who have Alexa or have Surrey, I will tell them, go home tonight and hold a fake conversation about a set of golf clubs that your golf club's getting old. I need new golf clubs. I'm going to start shopping for golf clubs and I'm going to buy some new golf clubs. Now tell me how long it takes for you to get banner ads offering golf clubs.

36 hours, maybe.

Yeah, if that, yeah.

There are things that I can't reconcile, which is thoughts that I think that I intentionally don't say out loud or talk about that peer on my phone. I don't even, I don't. There's things that I experience because I'm on the phone all the time. I'm on the Internet all the time. And these new Amazon AI algorithms where it basically says, okay, if Drew's, if we want to show Drew this pair of boots, Right back to our boots problem, that boot listing needs to have a picture of a bald, bearded, 40 year old white guy. Because then we know that it is flawlessly, semantically relevant to Drew. And so what we're seeing in our listings is that to appease the Amazon algorithm, we actually have to build listings designed to be interpreted by AI. You're not, you're not even building a listing for the user anymore. You're building a listing based upon whether or not the AI is going to interpret it. As the correct thing for your user. And that creates a whole nother set of problems. But what we have found in updating all of our listings in this way is that we saw an instant uptick in about 14 to 18% in sales in units.

Now, another thing that I always get concerned with with people is your phone's listening to you, the Alexa is listening to you.

Yep.

If you're using services like Gmail.

Yep.

Then your email is getting read.

Well, Gmail's free.

Nothing. I always try to tell people when, when you think of Google and Facebook and Tick Tock and all these things being free services. Understand, they're not free services. You are the product.

Yeah. They did not become product. The biggest companies in the world by selling things for free.

No, they're selling us.

That's right.

And by the way, as a guy who runs an ad agency, I buy it.

How could you not?

We buy that data all day long.

Yeah.

If I want to find women of a certain age that drive a certain type of car and they go to Target stores three times in 30 days and they also go to a gym three times a month and they eat a particular restaurant, I can do that.

Yeah, absolutely. So how do you coach your. Your current group of people that you work with with advertising? What do they do when it comes to. When they have a problem with Amazon or is Amazon just a problem? For most of these retailers, Amazon is a problem. And.

And I'll tell you why. Because here's, here's. We need to do a paradigm shift in people's thinking.

All right?

Amazon started off as a cottage industry like ebay.

Yeah. I used to get made fun of for selling on Amazon.

Right. Oh, look, I can go sell some stuff on ebay or Amazon.

Yeah.

And people still have the paradigm in their head. Amazon's easy. I just need to put up a page and ship some product over there and the money will start coming in. And they're not realizing now that an Amazon business requires an Amazon staff. It requires Amazon consultants, Amazon experts, dedicated employees to Amazon, that it's a business that needs to be cultivated on an hour by hour basis.

Yes, 100%. You have a broker for retail, you better have a consultant. You better have one. Because when your listing gets quarantined, you're gonna die. And it's gonna cost $20,000 a day.

And that's your advantage. So you have your broker for Walmart and something goes wrong at Walmart. Well, the first call you make is to the broker, hey, we got a problem over Here, the broker jumps in. He knows who to contact. He knows how to fix the problem. Maybe it was a mistake in EDI for shipping. He knows how to fix the problem and make the problem go away. So that you don't risk your business at Walmart, you now need to do the same thing in Amazon. We're getting to that level now. But I got to tell you, Drew, many, many companies think they can run them run it themselves. And I'll tell you the other place we see this, we see this with the website. Well, I've got. I've got a nephew who knows how to put up websites. Oh, my God, we, we see that all the time.

Well, that's nephew, right?

Is your, is your, is your nephew a human factor expert, a graphics expert, a AI expert, a programming expert, or are they an expert in sales or they a copywriter? Because all these different skill sets go into making that website. And it'd be very rare to find someone who has them all. But. Well, my nephew knows how to put websites up. That's the same thing that happens with Amazon. Well, my, my nephew can handle Amazon because he knows how to put an Amazon page up.

Yeah. What you need in that situation, and not to be overly prideful, you need somebody like me. You need somebody who's a digital native. I was born on the Internet, like in the Matrix, Right?

Right. I am a. A digital immigrant.

Right? You are. And I can see your generation. You're digital immigrants. I'm a. I started doing search engine optimization for Google in 2006, before the iPhone was a thing. I was there in the yellow page industry when Dex. You remember when Dex went bust, Yellow Pages, super pages, I predicted they would go.

That would. That the yellow Pages would go bankrupt. I predicted that five to 10 years.

Before it happened, I was there. I saw all the RH Donnelly employees come in to the office where I was selling. So I've been in this industry for a long time. I started doing search engine optimization a long time ago. I've been selling on Amazon in some way, shape or form since 2011. Literally. I was laughed out of most rooms when I was 31 initially and 28 by the time I was 32. I was working four hours a week most of the time. And so what we have to look at is when you've got this issue. And I grew with Amazon. So one of the benefits that I have of being such a digital native is that I was there. I was there when seller central changed. I know when Brand registry was launched. I've Been there for every ad change, every policy change, every listing violation change. I've been there to watch every single one of these departments crop up. So, so to me, they actually make some sense because I underst. Because I lived in the center of the city and watched the urban sprawl happen. But if you just showed up to Los Angeles and you had no frame of reference for how Los Angeles was built, you'd be lost right now.

By the way, Amazon claims that they've committed billions of dollars in resources to getting rid of all these counterfeit products. But in reality, Amazon doesn't benefit by getting rid of all the counterfeit products.

Products eventually. In the long game, you are correct. In the short term. In the short, in the long game, eventually Amazon will have to subject itself to being a normal retailer. We're seeing that right now with supplements. If you want to sell a supplement on Amazon, it has to be NSF167 certified, made in a 455. 2 facility. Back in the day, you do whatever.

You want, but they're still letting the counterfeits bleed through.

They are. They are letting it. It is. It is. And again, that's why it's so important to have one source that flows into Amazon that sells your IP that no one else is allowed to sell. And then to make sure that you've got somebody that you can call 247 and when you call them and say, look, there's a counter for listing, they just say, no problem. Or better yet, they just send you an email, say, look, we saw a counterfeit listing pop up. We took care of it. See you later. Have a good day.

So how, how exactly is the search and AI issue changing how people should interact with Amazon and, and, and even how they should interact with the Internet in general?

Well, the biggest thing you know, I'm, I, I'm in the middle of my PhD thesis and part of that work is on the impact of AI and humanity. Right. What you've just asked is a very human question, which is, hey, Drew, when I, when I touch the source that contains all of the knowledge of mankind, how should I think about that? Well, you should probably approach it carefully.

I always tell people when we think about AI, and our audience has heard this before, you're not going to lose your job to AI, you're going to lose your job to someone who knows how to leverage AI.

That's correct.

And AI is a great repository of human knowledge. It is not the creator of something new because it can't create new. It can only Collect existing.

Yes.

Real ingenuity is always going to lie with humanity.

Correct. So AI is actually going to wind up creating just, it's, it's going to create as many jobs as it destroys. Because for every one guy who's really, really good at writing code, who uses AI to write the code, and then AI writes garbage code, you're gonna have to hire 10 engineers to come in and clean that code back up.

I have found AI to be super helpful.

Yeah.

If I'm talking with. Because I sometimes help people with their medical issues and if somebody gives me a list of eight pharmaceuticals they're taking.

Yeah.

I'll go to AI, I'll type in all eight pharmaceuticals and instructed to give me all interactions. And it does amazing job of that.

Yeah.

Or I'll put in four disease states and yes, they get overlapping problems. What these four disease states, what are the protocols that fit these four disease states that do not interfere and interact with each other's disease state. And it'll do a great job. Yeah, but you can't go there and ask it to solve a problem that hasn't been solved.

No. And most of the problems that the average human encounters is a problem that hasn't been solved. I mean, we're talking about with deep specificity. Right, Right. And so when you're approaching say the, the Amazon issue, Amazon has one AI that manages everything that Amazon knows about Amazon. It knows all about you policies. Well, that's a different one. So that, so, so Cosmo is the one where Amazon knows everything about Amazon and it knows when it updates a policy and it says we are inspecting every single testosterone booster to make sure that it has an NSF certification. And then it will just go through and say you've got a women's product that is an anti testosterone booster. Right. It will flag that as a testosterone booster because you have that word in the title. And now your women's anti testosterone booster is going to be flagged because that AI is going to flag it. Right. So, so AI, so they, they deploy a, an AI contained in the Amazon ecosystem to manage all these listings. That's why the counterfeits don't get caught very often because they have to get caught by AI. Unless you know the proper channel through brand registry under which to call through. And this is critical. What time of day to call. The time of day indicates whether or not you get where you get where you want to go.

And the AI misses a lot. I'll give you an example. I just launched a new website for my apartment Complex. Google flagged. Google flagged my new apartment complex website as a gambling site.

Nice.

As a gaming site. There is nothing. There is nothing on that site that would indicate that there is gambling or gaming going on when you rent an apartment.

So who are you going to call now that you know that you've got this problem with Google?

Well, see, that's the beauty of it. We have an entire team in house. So our team immediately got to work.

Yeah.

And we were able to fix the problem in, you know, probably three hours. It probably took us three hours to get it fixed.

Yeah.

But had we not had all the contacts and the people we have it, that site could have been down for three months or never.

Or, or you would have just gotten discouraged, never really done it, and then it just gone by the wayside.

Right.

Which is what happens to so many retailers on Amazon. So you see this? Oh, gosh, I watched one of your. The Gummies. I watched your Gummies podcast last night.

Okay.

And. And just enjoyed listening to that. And, man, when they were talking about their Amazon experience, Mark broke my heart for two reasons. One, that you didn't just have them give me a call. Like, give them my number. Have them give me a call. I mean, I am sure right now. All right, well, make sure that they reach out. And then the other thing was, is that I thought, man, these, these guys, um, that when you discussed the, the, the diabetic niche versus the keto niche, there's so many things that they can do from a packaging, repackaging, rebranding, relaunching. Same. Because remember, in Amazon, you get an infinite amount of space. But what happens is you get all these zombie products because once you hit that, once you, once you collapse below 4 stars, you are now you. You might as well just delist. Honest. Generally speaking. Really? Because now you're going to get into that zombie space. Yeah. Because unless your category allows for three and a half stars. Does that make sense? If your category allows for three and a half stars, that's fine. If your category does not allow for, like, if, if you go and you search your main keyword and you see that the average product is four and a half stars, you're done this time to retire the upc, Recall the product, you have put a new FBA sticker on it and get a new fresh launch going with vine or whatever products you want to do. But yeah, if you hit that three and a half star and you're over a recoverable amount. Right. Get above 150star. 150 reviews. And you're a three and a half star. What people don't realize is one one star is equal to 35 five stars.

Really?

If you want to mitigate a one star, you need 35 fives.

Wow.

It's, it's unrecoverable in many ways. And even if you get the negative reviews removed, and that does not guarantee under any circumstances that Amazon will recalibrate the review listing, it often will keep the the score and not update the actual star rating. And that is something I have seen many times. So, yeah, there is a. And then there's also just a strange, probable, odd too, which is just that one in three products you launch on Amazon is going to be good and one in five is going to be great. And then the other, you know, eight are going to just fail for no reason other than just that. They do.

The bottom line on this, folks, is if you have a dedicated staff to Amazon that is experienced.

Yep.

Then you're okay.

Probably.

If you have a consultant or a broker who is assisting you with Amazon, you're okay. If not, the two things I'm going to recommend is you consult with someone like Drew. And I'm also going to suggest that you take Amazon training classes like Travis Marzani sells programs and has Amazon seller issues, which I think are good, even if you have a consultant, because it at least gives you the skills to have the language skills to be able to understand what I don't understand.

Yeah.

Because in a lot of cases, I can't even ask you to fix something if I don't even know what I'm asking for.

Right.

How do you work with somebody, Drew? Like, you come in and start by analyzing their existing Amazon business.

Yeah. If you're going to work with somebody, you're going to take them in. The first thing is just to find out what their pain level is. You know, is this an acute injury or is this a chronic injury? And, and, and if it's an acute injury, those are great. Those are like, man, you just hand me, hand me the broken thing. If you want the explanation, great. If not, we can just handle the broken thing. That's fine. What we want to look for is, we want to look for some of the chronic, the chronic issues. You know, do you, do you have three and a half stars? Right. Is that your average rating? Do you know how to talk to Amazon's customers in a terms of service compliant way that still is in some regard to your benefit? You know how to do it. Do you know what the best practices are and each one of these best practices is for is industry specific. So what supplements do as best practices is different than what spatulas do for best practices. Right. So have you gone onto your competitors listings and purchased. The first thing I do is buy all of my competitors listings and just buy one unit. To see what. To see what their customer experience is like. Does that make sense? It's a critical aspect. The most important thing in an Amazon sale is what happens after the consumer has received the product, which indicates whether or not they will or won't leave a review. Your average review rate is somewhere between 1 and 1.8%. What you want to do is you want to get to 3%. What do you got to do? What are your, what are your customers doing? What are your not customers? What are your competitors doing? So we'll look at that. I mean that's one of the big things. Will analyze all of the listings just to make sure that they're SEO compliant. Right. And there's a lot of tools for this, but there's not a lot of tools from the AI side. Right. And then it's just, you know, it's all the other branding stuff that you would look at, but it gets missed. Maybe we updated a listing here, but the company we used that we had do that, maybe they didn't adhere. Maybe we updated our brand identity since then. So now you got colors that are off, your branding is off, the story is off, right. So when you update your listings, you do them in a bulk setting, make sure everything gets updated correctly, make sure the brand store gets updated, make sure that you're so you, you. And it's funny because in Amazon you have to do a full brand refresh in my experience, about every six months.

That's a lot.

The Amazon algorithm wants to see that. They want to see that you are updating your listing. And then the other thing too is are your products seasonal, are they tech based or are they evergreen? That's going to really dictate how your business should run if you're a drone company, right. Do you need to have the newest whiz bang every Christmas and every and every Memorial Day? Maybe you do. And in which case how do you port your listing over? How do you get those products back? You know, because say you got a drone listing 4.8 stars and you know we can recover that, right? This is why a lot of reviewers like to hijack products that have a high star rating, right? Because they know that it'll get moved. Right. And so when working with a Customer, you finding out what is going on with their business, what kind of business are they maximizing the potential for their business? What is their holiday strategy if they need one? You know, do they, do they start ranking for Prime Day, start getting stuff in stock and for Prime Day in May, Right. Are they preparing for Christmas now? I mean, you should be, as you know, in CPG land, like you're. You started preparing for Christmas three and a half months ago, right?

Yeah, we were practically selling Christmas in January.

Exactly. And so in Amazon, Christmas season starts after Prime Day. And so those are all the things. Then we look through their performance notifications, right. Look through their FBA inventory. There's so many metrics for health. Once we've established that the brand is healthy, the listings are healthy, the story is healthy, the cohesion is healthy, and they have the standard operating procedures to handle bad things that happen all the time in Amazon. Once that is done, now you have a secure business where you can notice I say the word, can run ads, hire influencers, and try to grow that organic ranking through relevancy, conversion, rates, velocity. All of that comes into play only if you have a healthy business on the back end.

Now, Drew, I'm going to throw one last thing at you here before we wrap up, all right? And that is we've had several clients that have had really big, robust Amazon businesses. And once they got that business to be significant, Amazon became their biggest competitor because Amazon did industry. Some of it was bedding and housewares. And, and we found that Amazon, Amazon Basics, that Amazon figured out that this product is easy to manufacture and a good price and a good money maker. And then a year later, year and a half later, all of a sudden there's an Amazon store brand that's directly knocking them off.

Right?

How much, how big of a problem is that? How widespread of a problem is that? And is there anything you can do with it?

There is something you can do about it. Nothing you can do in the short term unless you have ip. You know, if you've got a patent protection, right, for your, for your elastic, if you're the purple mattress, I suppose, you know, but most things that are in that commoditized business aren't going to have that kind of thing.

We've seen Amazon cake decorating, kitchen device.

Amazon, they cannot do good customer service. You have to win overtime with customer service and be willing to compete on the pricing side. It's a, it's a frustrating aspect.

We have the same problem in retail, by the way. If you've Got a great product in Walgreens. And, and it's going to hit a certain level. Walmart doesn't matter who it is, once it hits a certain threshold, they're probably going to do a store brand of your item.

Yeah.

And in many cases come to you to ask if you want to make the store and brand, which Amazon, I don't think does. Most of the big retailers will come to you first and see if you want to make the store brand.

Well, they have to respect the fact that if they destroy you as a business, then they destroy the relationship, the innovation, and they kill the store brand. Exactly.

The store brand survives when the real brand is next to it.

Right. Right. So in Amazon, one of the biggest things that you're going to have to win on is customer service, reviews, ratings, influencers. I don't know how much you're getting into the influencer side of influencer marketing side of things that critical. Right. We have seen. Now let's say that Amazon ranks number one. This is. If I was to get really cute and get really funny and you gave me a budget for this, here's how I would solve this problem. I mean, just as a shot in the dark, we had a product that was an appetite stimulant. It helped people who are elderly increase their appetite. Well, the influencers on TikTok got a hold of it and they changed the entire keyword marketing. So remember, when Amazon launches a product, they're going to have a keyword in that title. Right. And if that keyword in that title changes, then that entire listing goes belly up. So you can influence the dropdown in Amazon. Right. When you go to type of thing and it creates the dropdown listing, you can influence that through things like TikTok. TikTok will completely change how that works. And if the, the. And if the dropdown menu changes, whatever Amazon ranks for will change too.

So Amazon's dropdowns are not just from the Amazon universe.

Correct. They are actually influenced by the semantic, probably trends data, Fast Moss data, TikTok data. Amazon's dropdown menu is heavily influenced by the activity on the Internet.

Now, I will find that sometimes you could begin to type a product into Amazon that Amazon doesn't carry. But the Amazon dropdown will pick up the product even though Amazon doesn't have it. Is that from other sources or is Amazon literally conquesting your brand even though they don't care?

No, it's, it's. Are you talking about, like if I was a type? Like, you see this a lot in Amazon with like, like pharmaceuticals. Right?

Yeah. If you typed Apple iPad into.

Right.

Amazon, it will auto fill even though Apple's not on Amazon.

That's right. And so the reason for that is it's just pulling, it's just aggregating that trend data to predict what you're trying to search for. For. It'll even give you things like Viagra and stuff. Like it's not a thing. But, but Amazon can't sell Viagra unless you go to their prescription side, Right? Right. So Amazon is just going to try to give you. And so one of the, one of the. And back to the new AI thing. One of the biggest things in AI is actually giving them a substitute. That this product is a substitute for that product. And now as, as users, as, as people, I actually now am informing Amazon what the substitute should be. Now the companies that know how to do this, we're already winning. The companies that don't know how to indicate to Amazon what a substitute is, they're already losing. So this whole Amazon thing and getting ahead of the, the AI space, knowing how to respond in real time. Because in Amazon, when something happens, it's not like where you get sent a letter and then you've got two months to comply. When something happens at Amazon, it happens. Now you start losing sales today.

Yeah, it's instant feedback for sure. Well, folks, if you want to talk to Drew in the future, go to the show Notes for CPG Insiders. We'll have Drew's information there and contact info if you want to reach out to him and talk to him. That's it for today on CPG Insiders. Drew, appreciate you being with us. That was, and it was just great timing coming after the, the counterfeiting show and enrolling into Happy Prime Day. That's right, it is Prime Day, isn't it?

Happy Prime Day. You also can take a look at my website, which is amzfixer.com yes, Amazon Fixer. Yeah. So if you need something, if you got a question, feel free to reach out. Mark, thank you so much for having me on. I, I really appreciate it.

Appreciate it. Folks, if you like today's show, make sure you go leave us five star review wherever you get your podcast. And if you're not subscribing, hit the subscribe button because that helps us deal with our AI overlords who comb over all of the podcasts and decide what podcast is important. Oddly enough, in the world of consumer packaged goods, this podcast actually rates pretty much number one or number two in all of the podcasts. Yeah, and all the podcast search engines. So in regards to this podcast, we're doing something very correctly. Anyways, that's it for today. We'll see you on the next episode of CPG Insiders. If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllhideagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800500 followers 42 10.