Amazon Product Launch Tool - ZonRanker Review

miss Jelena from Amazonia PPC and in today's episode we have a very special guest today with us Jason Landrieu from Jean Van Kirk is the co-founder of song banquet oh this is a fairly new tool that's specialized in streamlining the product launch process for other sellers especially we have multiple launches per month this can come in really useful Jason thank you for taking the time to talk to us today and to share a couple of more details about the the product and in general some tips and advice that Amazon sellers might find useful for product launches yes can you tell us a little bit about yourself I know that you mentioned that you're an Amazon seller and if you could just tell us a little bit more about how you started and where you're at right now and how this tool came to be so I was a lawyer barrister depending where you're from - about two years ago I left my job at a big law firm to actually join a friend from law school and his growing Amazon business started a second and it's on business which we were able to grow - in the US market to seven-figure the Amazon business so its first calendar year with actually fewer than ten SKUs all under $100 an average price of $50 so it will rapidly scale business we took what we learned in our own Amazon businesses and started helping while they're established larger businesses and one of the things that we were really successful I'm doing is product launches getting exposure quickly and then making sure we're putting out good products for clients that have good products so they had staying power once we got them to page one so our keywords by the process of doing all these product launches setting up all the manage chef flows verifying all the rebates assuring all the rebates became impossible it just took way too much time they're spending 10 hours a day at least figure out a better way to automate this a product launch process awesome how many products do you have in your rent in our one brand the newer one we have about our original brand and how many different products you have to test out before you actually found those eight winners huh so we when we started the business actually our first product we lost about twenty thousand dollars we tried to go after a very competitive product where there are sellers thousands of reviews on page one so we had to refine our strategy regrouped turned it around completely beans but we had to test out two or three variations that were similar in ways but but different but there that brand is in the food category so we decided to specialize a little more and find something that was one that we were passionate about to serve yeah exactly that's like two most important things to think about when you're doing product research especially if it solves a problem then or if it feeds a passion that's what I've discovered works really well for some people like it's a niche product it might work really well but the reason why I asked if you had like any failed product is because you know a lot of people here all these success stories and people becoming millionaires now Amazon and all of that but not very often you get to hear something like this when someone like lost twenty thousand I'm just testing out and trying and not not giving up and after not giving up actually succeeding it and that's I in my opinion the success mindset is all about just not giving up and having this perseverance it takes to hold on and especially if you have the passion in that match that they'll help you stick to that idea that interesting job big failure to start self but I agree you have to keep pushing drilling and also no one to cut your losses yeah definitely well that's that's how I was all works it has this incredible potential of changing people's lives but for the better or for the worse that all depends how to use it so I guess people should be careful and do their research first it'll save them a lot of money in nurse so you decided to build this tool called song maker so can you tell us a little bit more about how it works and just like a high-level overview of what the contribution how can you provide value to sellers who have a lot of product launches per month right so if you're doing product launches you know the purpose is to pick keywords that you want to rank on page one that you're doing these promotional rebates there are four price five names as Amazon sees it and then your rebaiting the customers on the back end you're increasing your conversion rate on their pre-selected keywords which then moves you up the product rankings so you know there's a way to do that is using Facebook Ads Facebook Messenger but you have to set up flows you have to verify rebates or IDs verify shipment status rebates that'll takes a lot of time it's hard to do it's scale it's hard to do more than one of those at once so what we've done is automate that entire process we have a direct link you are so if you're not on clothes not in the first few pages you can use this link that that takes you directly to the product or we have a search by by flow so you plug in your information your product Aysen and then you add your launch details how many units each day total discount percentage of price your keywords and then all that information is dynamically populated in the flows that we've already created for you so we have our own chat pod and we've launched hundreds of thousands of units through these flows at this point and we update them constantly so they're high converting so you're responsible for setting up the Facebook ad mm-hmm copy and paste the code that we generate you create a launch you paste it into the Facebook ad it's very simple and then the bot more or less takes care of everything else besides messaging follow up some follow up questions from customers from time to time so we order ideas and checks shipment statuses every four hours at issues rebates every four hours a half an hour after the order status check so it's doing all of that for you so that you no longer have to set up chat flows or verify with ideas or statuses and does like an average user have you know at least the ability to change these flows a little bit according to the specifics of the audience that they're working with no thought the flows are generalized so you can't you put in your product description so that's one of the things you have every single product so what you say about your product appears in the appropriate place so you know if it says we have a 100% rebate offer along your what you say about your product will appear in the flow so it's it's generic in that it'll apply to any products and then you can put into the you're responsible for putting in the applicable descriptors so it all makes sense okay I think I understand how it works but that's for this to step you're a but you also mentioned the search find by sequence how does that part work the set up is exactly the same last thing is you can rotate key words and wait key words as well so for instance if you're watching a garlic press you can put in garlic press twice and black garlic garlic press one time so the first user comes it'll suit garlic press the second will be told the search for garlic press and then image of your product will appear that's the lucky upload and then they'll be looking for that image search bar and the second person will get garlic press third person will get black garlic press so you can then we will higher volume keywords so that you're getting more conversions on them then the longtail keywords you can show less often you're still getting the conversions but you don't need as many so it's a very nice tool very nice aspect of the tool but it works the same in terms of setup is there a way that you might show us how how it looks like on the interface maybe share screen so here this is the homepage you log in you so you get your own account you have your dashboard we have a guided setup that will take you through connecting as many Facebook pages as you want we have recommendations about you have a Help Center where we recommend we have everything walk with your getting started how to run Facebook ads optimize your Facebook ads for Amazon product launches we have articles about how that works we also have strategies for launches recommendations about whether to run your offers through a deals page or through a through your branded page and when it's appropriate to do you know the deals page versus the branded page but you can connect as many Facebook pages as you want and then we walk you through connecting your seller central account so that we can verify the order IDs and order statuses for you so this is your dashboard we issue the rebates for use to deposit the rebate funds with us if you use ACH or your bank so various transaction fees six US dollars so once you get your rebate if funds are available you can start a watch and the first step is to add a product so or you could put your product Aysen or a since so if you have variations like you're selling clothing and they're the same price you can let people choose between small medium and large so you would put in a small ways PBM of the large internal name would be something for your reference so if we're doing a group a short product description this is what appears in the flood so I would say black sweater size then you would choose upload the file and you can change this to you can add as many products as you want so that's that's a nice feature so [Music] be one second I'm going to have to so once you've added your product you can then create a lunch and here is where you select your products your price too much yeah do any percent you want to do one percent off to 100 percent units per day your total units reference name and then you pick two step URL and search by by max previous products this is really nice this is my default the app doesn't allow repeat purchases on the same a set unless you enable this but also the false to allowing only people who never claimed an offer from your Facebook page to claim an offer from you but you can increase it say if they've claimed one offer from you before and a different a cent they're allowed to play this up to two offers from me before of a different age something like this one so this is a very nice feature actually p.m. working with already existing audiences people like your page or something like that this is what I'm talking about the keyword waiting rotating so you can wait black sweater two-thirds to one-third it'll rotate these keywords as well and then pick your Facebook page and we also have a review follow-up is what we call it but it's a survey and it starts seven days after the first offer and he launches claimed and it basically confirms that the customer received the word if they engage with that message that surveys the customer about the customers experience and those follow-ups are graduated so they start out one a day and they go up to two a day 3 day so you're not getting a flood of requests instead you're increasing their requests as your organic sales increase is there an option to like choose how the frequency and when the first follow-up will start no but we've built a custom algorithm has automated thresholds if you get too many reviews on your total sales so some people think it's fifteen or twenty percent so we're ensuring that that's why it doesn't start until seven days after the first offer is claimed and that's why it increases for one a day that two days it's actually an algorithm based on the total number of units the length of your launch so we've again put a lot of time on testing it ever ever had a problem but you can actually disable it it's enabled by default that you can just uncheck this box your only purpose is to launch not worry about the follow-up so you don't want them disable it on launched by launch basis once you've done that like submit and this is where you just copy we got JSON two foot board and actually have an ad open for a garlic press but you could just copy it in right here and you can see this is the other percent rebate size like get offer below it's better that's simple we have a lot of resources in our Help Center for you to train you on how to run Facebook that's its purpose if you have some experience we have everything you need and more you don't have any experience we have the resources for you to learn they also are starting weekly Facebook ads trainings live trainings for our members okay you mentioned that you wait keywords so that's that's a detail that stuck with me how do you how does this work so yes so here the search terms to black sweater sweater so this this is waiting it as you put it in twice two times two one times one time so this these are weighted sixty six percent twenty six and this is thirty three point three so then for search for two-step that means it'll automatically the link will use every time every three times the link will use black sweater twice black sweater for women wants if it's search by by the first person who comes through OB show black sweater the second person will be shown black sweater and the third will be black sweater for women and reason this is really useful is because I bet black sweater the search volume is extraordinarily high the black sweater for women it's probably not even half of the overall search volume that as compared to black sweater so I kind of when I'm approaching anything on Amazon I think how would Amazon think about this it's usually pretty logical right so you want the you want a proportionate increase you don't want to just spike on one keyword it would make more sense that you would you know have this long tail keyword that includes your high volume keyword but you don't need as many conversions long tail keyword as we do on this keyword so that's the nice thing about weighting rotating is that you can show that balance it would make sense that if you're moving up for black women you would also black sweaters mm-hmm do have like any specific advice around choosing keywords for sellers yes that's one of the features that we're building really really excited about is so right now actually generate the reports for you manually once you remember but it's analyzing your race and your competitor your top three competitors asons and making recommendations about which keywords to go after as well as the number of units to get to page one on those keywords it's not a feature that's currently in the app but it's one that we're building into that yeah that's absolutely necessary a lot of the sellers base their product launch processes based on how many units they have to give away no I mean Amazon now recently stopped allowing giveaways as officially like I think in December last year so it's not officially there but through these rebates if they're doing 100% often basically that's a giveaway so you have to officially sell a certain amount of units per day in order to get right so I know that a lot of sellers would ask you how long it would take from day one when you set up this campaign until you start getting ranked on the first page for some of the core keywords that they wanted that they want to be ranked for that's a tough question really depends on search volume petition the higher the first search volume the longer it takes what we've seen as rotating few words is really effective and doing so let's say you need to do 100 total spreading them out over a longer period of time which seems to be working well as opposed to doing you know 10 a day for 10 days maybe doing 5 a day for 20 days might be a better approach but it is it is entirely dependent on a search volume relative competition and that's one of the factors you have to evaluate in launching a new product product launches are sexy and that you can get traction quickly by that's actually how we lost twenty thousand dollars we went after a product that had so much competition on the first page that we needed to get hundreds of reviews and we also had an expiration issue where the shelf life of our product was just too short we could really get cheaper product then we got stranded so it wasn't just product launches but we learned a lot yeah you have to yeah I'm not obviously I love this tool put a lot of into building this but it's it's not the right thing for every single product you have to make sure that you're going to be profitable that it's worth launching the page putting putting the upfront investment to launch the page one fine the other side is also a nice tool for moving your product from page two to page one so the establish existing product which we do a lot with a few of our products as we do launch every one or two every two months of 30 units when I see value of this software is for bigger sellers to launch a lot of products and test out a lot of new products for months and they just need a better way to streamline this whole process of working through rebates and avoid all that manual work that's involved and then they can release that all that additional time and may be invested into customer support which is some of the weakest points that are that I hear the sellers have processes and systems it's almost always not included when it comes to like customer support or something like that because they have to spend so much time doing all this work and for some products like for example I've seen when you measure the competitive product and that someone has to think through the whole process before they even enter it like I'm seeing some of the products work after a couple of months being extremely unprofitable and then then you just leave them jamas on salary just decrease the price and then be patient over the course of a couple of weeks and then they start selling one two units a day and then two three units a day and then it ramps up and then this product starts selling even without doing PPC or Facebook ads or anything else but it took time and still doesn't reach its full potential in terms of revenue the way that some sellers might want it to have it but it's it's one way to go and then there's another way like for example for my own product as I'm also selling on Amazon we have a very seasonal character to that product so we kind of like latched on to the q4 momentum where a lot of people are purchasing for other people and there is this big season of everyone buying everything on Amazon and we just kind of like latched onto that increased traffic which builds a good momentum for our product which took something about two months we didn't use rebates right I think we sold it at full price and it still works so I guess that for tools like these that can be really really awesome if someone has a higher volume of units that they have to manage somehow but still save time in in terms of workforce or being able to release their own time yeah completely and I've had we've had some beginner sellers reach out to us and I've actually told them you know there are better options to start out where you can conserve your money launches can be a great way to get traction very quickly but there is the upfront cost you pay for the rebate we get so you're basically eating the product cost and Amazon fee and then getting back here at profit so there's that in addition you know whether you're paying a premium fee for a launch service or using our software and paying a fee as well as ad spend so there are these costs that you can recuperate but if you're a new seller you only have one or two products there are other strategies that don't require the upfront investment but then teh as you said take a little longer required patient but it's it's smarter than actually it is and it also saves a lot of time to sellers who are more experienced and know this process from scratch and know how it looks like and how long it takes when you're doing it manually so they can actually understand the value in it yeah definitely so when in terms of pricing structure I can see that there's some credit based pricing structure and I wanted to ask you how exactly it works and simply put how can someone calculate for intake the spent they yes the way we work is on a credit system so one credit equals 1 unit to watch so on a professional plan you get 25 credits a month and these credits if you don't use them they roll over so this credits are as low as $2 and they're as high as $4 so the more you buy it once more the cheaper they are and any credits that you purchased never expire so as long as you remember they keep on rolling over so again these 25 base credits each month that's that's the $4 credit price if you don't use them they roll over so you're if you're only doing about 75 minutes every 3 months that they would roll over and and then we pay the PayPal transaction fee for use as I mentioned before you to PA's my rebate you have to pay a transaction fee by credit card or an ACH deposit we're switching over to Braintree as a payment processor which is on my paypal so later this year you'll be able to deposit with PayPal as well the transaction fee for ACH is much lower obviously it's $6 so if you buy a bunk you save for the credits and if you need multiple if you have more than one seller account enough to contact us if you want customized flows we can do that that's part of enterprise plan and for the agencies we're using a software relief the biggest benefit is that you're able to aggregate your credits across all all of your accounts every month so that you paying a flat fee but just meeting a minimum essentially mm-hmm I see so if I understood correctly under $99 per month you can actually launch 25 products correct 25 units yeah unit you and also that your all of your systems are compliant with Terms of Service so you have like any specific advice for sellers what they should pay attention to in order to stay compliant with Terms of Service yes so one never condition you they don't even mention the word review from the time the customer enters the flow at the time that they get through the gate and that is the biggest thing by far you shouldn't be launching a product that we don't have a good product product launches aren't a solution for a bat - a bad product so your point of launches to get increase your conversion rate but also get more exposure so if you need to condition your review on a rebate I'm sorry rebate on a review that probably means you have a bad product it should be doing product launches and it also violates Amazon's Terms of Service people there's a concept called reciprocity if you do something angry reciprocate and be more inclined to be positive and leave you feedback so if you're giving someone a rebate on a good product that they're gonna be much more inclined to just leave you a nice review I agree in general you have to think about good quality products building good quality products if you're building your brand to last otherwise is just not going to it's not going to work long term whichever method you use okay you also mentioned a couple of features that you will roll out in the next six months is there anything else that you will intend on rolling out yeah so we're building in again those recommendations for birds and the amount of minutes to launch to get to page one we're also building in keyword track you can see the progress of your launches we're building in some ads automation so right now you have this automated daily giveaway counter so that if you do ten units a day you hit number 10 your thoughts you get an email notification that'll tell you how you've all your units for the day they claimed you may turn your your pause or Facebook ad if you'd like but we're actually gonna build an ad automation that pauses it for you you can check that option and the nice thing actually that happens is that anyone who comes into the flow even if you leave your hat on or if it's shared they'll be given the option to notified the next day the more offers are available so you're not wasting that person coming through that's all automated so we're building an ad zone or automation the keyword tracking the recommendations right now we're only available in the US market but we'll be expanding to other english-speaking markets in 2020 and depending on our growth hopefully - speaking markets after that but I don't have a timeline for not English okay interesting updates especially the one for tracking your ranking for specific keywords they'll be super useful for people using the this tool to actually understand how it contributes to their success and definitely see the value at that especially because all the other they're also other software that where you can actually track your products over time so this is going to be specifically useful at product launch keyword tracking so when we roll out some of these new features the price might increase it at some point but anyone who signs up now before we make that increase or the grandfather did at the $99 a month awesome awesome okay and in general when it comes to product launches now outside of speaking about the tool just in general what is your experience about with the rebates and does it still work as well as it did in 2019 yes definitely we're not too far into 2020 yet at the end of last year it's work it worked really well for us we actually did a lot of launches right before the Q the heart of Q for Christmas the holidays and they were very very effective and I think one of the trends is doing less than a hundred percent and that's a nice thing is that you can do that the flexibility to connect your multiple Facebook pages and to do different rebate percentages so I think if you're more focused on review sticking it's better to do to warm up your audience sending them to an article that related to the problem of your product solves and then marketing them with a rebate offer for the solution that is your product so like at the end if you sell diet food you tell them yay send them to an article about the diet it takes a long time to prepare all these foods and then you target the people engage with that ad with a 50 percent rebate offer on their product that could be very very effective and those reviews will be more likely to stick long-term yeah I agree just about taking different approaches to doing product launches like I know for sure that Amazon will also favor eyes those listings that drive external traffic from external sources to Amazon because this also see that there's a leaving that even though conversion of such traffic are not going to be as high as when you do them through you know search find by sequence but still I'm still always use like a combination of both and other types of traffic especially coming from employers that already have their existing audience to see something that you're probably already familiar with yes yeah I think that's a great recommendation to have multiple external traffic sources Amazon does wait all of that so it is really important at the end of the day they want you to spend money to get customers spending money on Amazon's platform so that they'll give preference to sellers you're doing that yeah that's that's number one reason but also they want to be it's basically like a backlink work it works like a backlink to Amazon which then raises their own rankings on Google and they're they're just like a website I mean they're a platform but at the same time they still want to feel ranked for as many millions of searches that they have products in so it all makes a lot of sense okay anything else you'd like to add in terms of advice or any any tips that you have for sellers in general I just think what we've talked about in the beginning making sure that you're passionate about your products at scaling responsibly and effectively with a plan is you know the best advice for the beginners the people are more advanced is getting out of the day to day of your business being able to grow it and that's that's why you really built this tool it's nice because it's diverse for health beginners as well as the advanced sellers and but but that's something that we've focused on throughout 2019 this is automating our business with SOPs with this contractor and because if you're if you're in the day to day too much focus off growth that's absolutely true and it's a repetitive like for example I I know the difference when I work with some starter level sellers versus professional sellers we'll be selling for years and really growing their accounts the difference is that really big sellers already have systems and processes in place that are very well defined and documented and people who stick to it like a team that's a very coherent team that realistic so their operating procedures some of them are more perfect a song that needs improvement but they're always there for people who are successful in Amazon so that that would be also like an added advice from my aunt to start documenting everything you do and think in that direction of streamlining the process especially for the things that you do on a day-to-day basis multiple times like rebase for example yes okay Jason thank you for being a guest on our today's interview if anyone has any questions about the tool you can reach out to Jason Montreux and ask him directly and he'll be happy to answer any of that and thank you for watching today's episode thank you very much for having me