My Amazon Guy

Send us Fan Mail

Mark Lewyn, long time Amazon seller who just wrote a book about his journey on Amazon. Serieral entrepnuer. Former journalist. Jumped into the internet early.

As a journalist, you have no fear. When Mark was a journalist, you could reach out to people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and they'd pick up! You got immediate feedback from readers, you get that too in ecommerce.

• Tell me a little about how you ended up selling on amazon
• Why did you decide to write the book “The $500 start-up on Amazon?”
• Don't follow your gut, follow the data. Got into darts.
• Tell me about some of the crazier products you sell or decided not to sell?
• How do you sell high quality goods on Amazon
• Went into darts, did great, went into dart accessories and failed. People just wanted darts.
• Got into diaper bags/caddies, but market got saturated. 
• Product life cycle. Amazon mutual fund. Spread risk out.
• Amazon entering maturity phase, harder to sell. Busineses buying up Amazon sellers. Amazon sellers have to up their game, increase spend to be competitive. 
• Have to take on investors or debt to grow. So sometimes you sell.
• Levels of improvement. 
  • Easy layup. Just optimize the page.
  • Other forms of optimization. Supply chain optimization. Advertising. Diversification of geo locations. 
• Craziest product I didn't choose to sell: Looked at sex toys. 
• How does it feel to be getting close to 7 figures as a seller. Nervous sometimes with the risks. 
• Risk reward - from 500k to 1mil. Personal question how to do it.
• Amazon is still a great market. Lots of opportunity. Start small on interesting niches to add value.
• Make sure you excercise to keep the Amazon stress down.

Mark: "I started my Amazon business in 2015 and since I have launched all sorts of crazy products. Today I'm approaching seven figures, which only a teeny-tiny percentage of Amazon sellers ever do.

That said, I've tried to capture the flavor of my crazy ride in a book that just came out this week called "The $500 Start-up on Amazon: How a dad of three launched a business on Amazon and escaped the hamster wheel of 9-5."

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+500+start-up+on+amazon&crid=11I8SSEQ0F63A&sprefix=The+%24500+start%2Caps%2C151&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-a-p_1_13I

Below is a quickie summary of what's included:

Mark Lewyn had built a successful career as a journalist and technology executive until his last company crashed and burned, leaving him high and dry: No job, a wife and three kids, and a mortgage to boot. In the age of Covid-19, it's a dilemma facing an increasing number of people, both in the U.S. and abroad. Mark knew needed to figure something out, and quickly, and whatever he did couldn’t require a big wad of cash to get started. His answer? Amazon, specifically selling new products on the world’s biggest digital store. His initial investment: just $500. Today Mark is one of the leading sellers of products on Amazon. Not the biggest, mind you, but definitely up there. In "The $500 Start-up on Amazon,” Mark takes you on his journey of discovery on Amazon. He shares with you everything he learned along the way so that you can profit from his successes and avoid his mistakes. The $500 Start-up is the perfect read for anyone who is curious how a new generation of digital cowboys are cashing in and how you can do it too.

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

Help file: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/G200390640

Use proper case only if you sell a medical related product.

"Use Capital Letters only for the beginning of each word. Do not use all Capital Letters throughout the attribute. This applies for Product Title, Bullet Points and/or Product Description."

Get Amazon Consulting at https://myamazonguy.com/

#amazonselling #amazonseller #amazonfba

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

Everybody wants to grow their Amazon sales. That's why you're subscribed to my podcast most likely. There's two fundamental ways to grow sales. 

1. Increase your traffic
2. Improve your conversion rates

Inside of increasing your traffic are two primary methods:

1. PPC advertising
2. Search Engine Optimization

Inside of conversion rates are:

1. Cataloging
2. Merchandising
3. Design like A+ content

Simply put if you get more traffic, or improve your conversion rates, your sales are going to go up. I think it's easier to increase traffic than it is to improve conversion rates.

The fastest way to grow sales:

1. Add more products to Amazon.
2. Increase advertising

The best way to diverisfy your business:

1. Sell on new marketplaces
2. Sell in new countries

For every 3 products that launch:

1. 1 fails
2. 1 breaks even
3. 1 succeeds

In ecommerce there are 4 fundamental goals:

1. Sell more products
2. To more people
3. More often
4. For more money

Product Research:

1. Start in a category you understand
2. Find a Niche
3. Use data to THEN support your choice

There are two types of products:

1. Demand co-opt, a "me too" product
2. Demand generation, 1/10 chance of success, but 100x the payout

A core listing has the following in place, these are Merchandising strategies:

1. A strong main image with 6 supporting secondary images that have lifestyle, infographics, and product in use shots.
2. A video demonstrating the product, show me banana for scale, show off the brand and quality.
3. A title with both SEO and conversion in mind.
4. Bullet points optimized for both humans and robot SEO
5. A+ content
6. Reviews

Advanced merchadising strategies include:

1. Parentage
2. Brand name changes to match brand registry

Catalog management has never been harder:

• Amazon yanking listings via robots.
• Listing reinstatement procedures are a moving target.
• 2.5 million amazon accounts were suspended in the first 8 months of 2020 on Amazon.
• Listing errors are happening without tools to track, flag, or fix them. Hidden suppressions where your item doens't show up in search is being caused by Amazon making new categories. You have to audit this stuff often.
• Rules keep changing.
• Rules are not transparent.
• Amazon support is at an all time low.

Summary: Do continuous audits on your catalog to make sure it's running smoothly.

Always be advertising:

• Even seasonal items can put in low bids off season to keep traffic and rankings up.
• Advertise every product always, don't spend your entire annual budget in a week always. Each product can have a segmented always on budget.
• Run every single ad type. Sponsored display, brand, and products. Get custom headline ads built. Run video ads. Write text for display ads.

Continue to work on SEO:

• Set it and forget is NOT the strategy when it comes to Search Engine Optimization
• I recommend working on SEO every month. Not every sku every month, but each month continue to rework your indexed keywords, that is words you show up in search for and try to expand it, and also imrpove the rankings of words in the strike zone of ranks 20-50 to push them to the top of page 1.

Bonus opportunities:

• Amazon Social
• Amazon Live
• External traffic

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

There’s a lot of implications in an increasingly mobile world. Amazon has increasingly become mobile first. So today we talk to Wes Pomeroy, who is the Director of Digital Merchandising at Verizon Wireless. You heard that right, we landed an interview with a director at Verizon Wireless.

Data is useless, insights are priceless.

Wes and I used to work together at Moxie Interactive and we spearheaded improving conversion rates on mobile devices. In fact Wes used to be my boss. 

So Wes you have a ton of ecommerce and mobile experience, can you tell us about your background?

Questions: 

1. Tell me about your mobile experience.
2. Walk me through a short history of how mobile has changed in the past 15 years.
3. How is shopping on mobile different today than say 3 years ago?
4. Is selling online getting harder or easier? Why.
   1. How does mobile complicate this?
5. Amazon’s detail pages are getting clunkier by the day. Doing the opposite of typical ecommerce best practices. It’s like a jungle on mobile. What are your thoughts on this?
6. Amazon just released Profiles, a social media version of FB for Amazon. And it's only viewable on mobile. Do you think Amazon can play in this?
   1. Verizon has a video series of techxperts 
7. Let’s talk tik-tok. Should brands be playing their to increase sales and build audiences?

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

Payoneer continues to impress with integrations and partnerships with Walmart, Wayfair, and other global marketplaces. Today I talk to Ben Stein, partnerships manager at Payoneer about finance and what he’s seen in his ecommerce career as a business analyst.

About Payoneer: Simplify your international business transactions with Payoneer. Get paid in multiple currencies, bill your global clients, sell on marketplaces worldwide, pay your overseas business expenses at low cost and more.

Global expansion

• Ben worked at Walmart, Jet 4 years.
  • Why hasn’t Walmart/Jet caught up to AMazon? 
    • User behavior
• International staff payments
• Financial capital - payoneer. Payoneer Working Capital
  • Merchant capital
• Finance advice - pick one option over another
• What is Payoneer?
  • B2B payment portal connections
  • Working capital product
    • Been on marketplaces for 6+ months, link to Payoneer, request capital.
• Quick access
• Wayfair

About working capital: When it comes to cash flow, over 60% of businesses claim to have faced challenges, but there are ways to seize growth opportunities when funds are tight. Payoneer Capital Advance is the ideal cash flow management solution designed specifically for marketplace sellers, providing you with instant working capital to invest in expanding your business in a smart and safe way. You can use this advance to be prepared for peak periods by purchasing inventory or ads to stay on the first page for product discovery, or expand into new categories and marketplaces. Collection is gradual and in order to leave you with sufficient cash  flow to manage your day-to-day, Payoneer collects a portion of each payment you receive from the store associated with the Capital Advance, until it is fully settled. The more you grow, the more working capital you’ll be offered. Click here to learn more about Payoneer’s Capital Advance or reach out to Ben Stein at [email protected] today!

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

Watch on YouTube for demo.   Amazon advertising news and updates https://advertising.amazon.com/blog/whats-new-with-sponsored-ads-and-stores-september-2020

Sponsored Brands creative and reporting enhancements
New deal messaging options available for Sponsored Brands

Your Sponsored Brands ads will now feature deal messaging and badges, without having to create deal-specific headlines or campaigns. Sponsored Brands ads that feature products with live deals will display an updated call-to-action (CTA)—"Save up to X% on Brand." Messaging is applied automatically, based on deal availability. Visit our Support Center to learn more.


Sponsored Brands search terms now available in campaign manager
Sponsored Brands search term reports are now available to view directly in the campaign manager for Sponsored Brands campaigns. Search terms help you discover which keywords and products generated clicks and sales from your ads. You can use these insights to optimize targeting and maximize performance. You can also now view conversion rate (orders/clicks) and ROAS (return on ad spend) metrics directly in campaign builder. These metrics were previously only available as downloadable reports. You can also access search terms reports in the report center or through the Amazon Advertising API. Visit our Support Center to learn more.

Sponsored Display customization and new placement options
Headline and logo editing now available for Sponsored Display product targeting
Advertisers in the US, CA, UK, FR, IT, ES, DE, JP, UAE can now edit the headline and logo of their Sponsored Display product targeting creatives. Customization allows you to test what variations perform best, and helps you communicate your brand message to shoppers. Ads with a custom headline and logo may appear alongside product description pages, customer reviews, shopping results pages, or under the Featured Offer. Visit our Support Center and ad policy page to learn more.

Additional placements for Sponsored Display
Sponsored Display advertisers in the US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, CA, and JP using creatives with customized headline and logo now have access to additional ad placements on desktop and mobile. To access these placements, use Sponsored Display product targeting with customized headline and logo. Campaigns are automatically eligible to serve in these placements.


Get Amazon Consulting at https://myamazonguy.com/

#sponsoredads #brandheadlines #amazonseller #amazonfba #amazonppc

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

[00:00:44] I'm going to start with some examples because I feel like most people are going to think I'm crazy initially when I talk about the subject. Ticktock, great example, because it shows how there's a conflict between two nations, China and the United States. So. All the government entities are like, yeah, China is infiltrating everything with Tic-Tac and they're taking control data and they're stealing people's information. And initially what happened on that timeline was like the government's like, hey, nobody can have ticktock consulting their phones. There was leaks about Amazon doing the same thing. And basically, eventually the government's like, hey, we're going to ban Tick-Tock. Are you going to sell this platform? You can't own a China. And if you think about that, that's never happened before on a technology scale of mass adoption before. This is one large sign of what I'm seeing, there is not a single software application you can log into right now without them shoving down your throat, sign up for OTP one time password. Have you enabled OTP yet? Why? Why is that? And it's because there is so much infrastructure being attacked right now that if you don't have in place, you're you're guaranteed to have a leak. If you look at the last couple of years, this problem's been escalating where we've seen, you know, the biggest the biggest release of personal information was when one of the credit score agencies got hacked, rather.

[00:02:28] I mean, I use that word loosely, right? They didn't really get hacked so much as their security just sucked. Right. And then all of a sudden somebody just ran off with all of our information, your Social Security number, every credit source that you have available. Identity theft started spiking. They were supposed to pay people money in this big lawsuit. I didn't see a dime. I don't know if you guys did. And the list goes on from there, the situation. And like the catalyst that made me like want to talk about this was when Amazon's own system completely bonkers, broked. And and this is just one of many things that's been breaking at Amazon, of course. And if you've been listening to the podcast, you're like, OK, Steven's talking about things breaking in Amazon yet again. I get it. But this one's very unique. This is a very unique angle. So I have an agency with 30 employees and half of my agency is in the Philippines. So I had created this very intricate way of having everybody log into our accounts. Right. So I would have half of my accounts on one email address and half in another email address. And then I would have every once OTP code transfer over into my Google Voice text messages, and then I would order for that to the entire organization.

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

• Parentages no longer combining reviews, the norm is now seperation 
• Vine will start charging on seller central as early as January.
• Amazon Live - getting hot, need iphone app.
• Can no longer due partial refunds on Amazon, must do a full refund. One work around is to ask customer to open a return request and charge a “restocking fee”

Book a coaching call with My Amazon Guy at https://myamazonguy.com/book-a-coaching-call/

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

Vine Canada: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/vine/ref=xx_vine_dnav_xx
Has it's own set of 5 enrollments.

Global Export setting: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/ssof/configuration/index.html/ref=xx_fbasettings_dnav_%5E

NARF (North American Remote Fulfillment):
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/rafn/inventory

www.myamazonguy.com

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

Growing traffic to your website through SEO is a free and longterm solution to increasing your sales. Even if you don't focus on your website, and are an Amazon seller, take 5 minutes today to set your meta tags for your homepage. I tell you how.

3 Tips to Improve SEO Traffic to Your Website

1. Set the HTML Title and Meta Description of your homepage.
   1. Title tag 60 Characters
   2. Meta description 160 Characters
2. Improve your website speed. 
   1. Check your site speed and what issues to fix using Google Developer tools https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
3. Set the title tag and alt text of your photos.

Find keywords to chase as well as your own current keyword rankings using this free tool sponsored by My Amazon Guy. https://myamazonguy.semalt.global/

Support the show