ZonRanker interview with Amazonia PPC

is yena from Amazonia PPC and in today's episode we have a very special guest today with us Jason landro from Z ranker he's the co-founder of Z ranker Tool this is a fairly new tool that's specialized in streamlining the product launch process for other sellers especially if you have multiple launches per month this can come in really useful um Jason thank you for taking the time to talk to us today and um 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 hi Elena thank you very much for for having me I appreciate it of course um can you tell us a little bit about yourself um 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 uh where you're at right now and how this tool came to be yeah um so I was actually a lawyer or barister depending where you're from uh and about two years ago I left um my job uh at a big Law Firm to um actually join a friend from law school and his growing Amazon business we started a second Amazon business um which we were able to grow to in the US market to a seven figure um Amazon business in its first calendar year um with actually fewer than than 10 SKS all under $100 average price of $50 so able to rapidly scale business and we were we took what we learned in our own Amazon businesses and started helping other established larger businesses um and one of the things that we were really successful in doing is product launches getting exposure quickly and then making sure we were putting out good products and our clients had have good products so um they had staying power once we got them to page one um desired keywords um but the process of doing all these product launches setting up all the Manny chap flows verifying all the rebates issuing all the rebates um became impossible it just took way too much time you're spending know 10 hours a day at least um so figure out a better way to automate this product launch process and that's how Z rer was born awesome how many uh products do you have in your brand um in our one brand the the newer one we have uh I think about eight now um we'll be adding a few more this year uh in our original brand we have about 15 to 20 and how many different uh products you had to test out before you actually found those eight winners so the um when we started the that business um we actually our first product we lost about $20,000 um we tried to go after very competitive um product where there were sellers who had thousands of reviews on page one um so we had to refine our our strategy and regroup um we've obviously turned it around completely but but um we had to test out uh two or or three variant s 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 um and find something that was one that we were passionate about and two um that serve the need yeah exactly that's like uh two most important uh 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 discovered works really well for some people like it's a niche product it might work really well but um the reason why I asked if you had like any failed products is because you know you a lot of people hear all these success stories and people becoming millionaires on Amazon and all of that but not very often you get to hear something like this when someone like lost 20,000 on just testing out and trying out and not not giving up and after not giving up actually succeeding it and that's I in my opinion the the success mindset is all about uh just not giving up and having this perseverance it takes uh to to hold up and especially if you have the passion in that Niche that that'll help you uh stick to that idea defin interesting my girlfriend was to kill me though I left my job my my good paying job and then had a big failure to start so but I agree you have to keep pushing through and also know when to cut your losses but learn from your mate yeah yeah definitely well that's that's how Amazon works it has this incredible potential of changing people's lives but for the better or for the worse it all depends how you use it so I guess um people should be careful and do their research first right um it'll save them a lot of money and nerves um so you decided to build this tool called Z ranker so can you tell us a little bit more about how it works and um um just like a high level overview of what the contribution uh how can you uh provide value to sellers who have a lot of product launches per month right um so if you're doing product launches you know the purpose is to um pick keywords that you want to rank on page one and then you're doing these promotional rebates so they're a full price buy uh in am as Amazon sees it and then you're re ating the the customers on the back end um you're increasing your conversion rate on your pre-selected keywords um which then moves you up in in the product rankings um so you know there's a the way to do that is using Facebook ads me Facebook Messenger um but you have to set up flows you have to verify rebates or verify order IDs verify shipment status you have to issue rebates that all takes a lot of time and it's hard to do it 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 a direct link URL so if you're not on close you know you're not on the first few pages um you can use this link that that takes you directly to the product or uh we have a search by buy flow so you plug in your information you add your product photo your product Asin and then you add your launch details how many units uh each day how many it is in total and your your discount percentage and price and your keywords and then all of that information is dynamically populated in the flows that we've already created for you so we have our own chat bot um flows um 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 and copy and paste the code that we generate um when you create a launch and you paste it into the Facebook ad it's very simple um and then the the bot more or less takes care of everything else um besides messaging you know followup some followup questions from customers from time to time um so we we bot automatically verifies order IDs it checks shipment statuses every four hours IT 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 order IDs or shipment statuses and your rebates and does like an average user have the at least the the ability to change these um flows a little bit according to the specifics of the audience that they are working with no but the flows are generalized so you can 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 in flow so you know if it says we have a 100% rebate offer on 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 product and then you can put in the uh you're responsible for putting in the applicable descriptors about your prodct so it all makes sense okay um I think I understand how it works for that's for the twostep URL but you also mentioned the search fine by uh sequence how does that part work the setup is exactly the same um nice thing is you can rotate keywords and weight keywords as well um so for instance if you're launching a garlic press you could put in garlic press twice and black garlic garlic press one time so as the first user comes in I'll see garlic press the second will'll be told to search for garlic press and the image of your product will appear that's the one you upload and then they'll be looking for that image when they type it in the search bar and the second person will get garlic press third person will get black garlic press so you can then wait more higher volume keywords so that you're getting more conversions on them and then the longtail keywords you know you can show less often you're still getting the conversions but you don't need as many so it's a very nice to very nice aspect of the tool but it works the same in terms of the setup um so so it's very simple um is there a way that you might show us uh how how it looks like on the interface maybe share screen yes so I will share my screen with you second um so here um this is the homepage you log in um you so you get your own account you have your dashboard we have u a a guided setup that will take you through um connecting as many Facebook pages as you want um we have recommendations about we have a a help center um where we recommend we have everything walking through getting started how to run Facebook ads optimize your Facebook ads for Amazon product launches we have um articles about how the app works we also have strategies for launches um have recommendations about whether to run your um offers through a deals page or through a um through your branded page um and when it's appropriate to do you know the deals page versus the Branded page um but you can connect as many U 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 um done that uh so this is your dashboard we issue the rebates for you so you deposit the rebate funds with us um and if you if you use a or U your bank um it's a very it's just a low transaction fee it's $6 US Dollars um so once you your rate funds are available you can start a launch um and uh the first step is to add a product so as I before you can put your product as in or Asin so if you have variations like you're selling clothing um and they're the same price you can let people choose between small medium and large so you would put in them the As for the small the As for the medium and the large um the internal name would be um something for your reference so if you're doing a a group you would put in uh right um in the short product description this is what appears in the flow so I would say uh black sweater any size if you have only three sizes and you're doing small and then you would choose upload the file and you can change this too you can add as many products as you want um so that's that's a nice feature um [Music] so give me one second I'm gonna have to uh actually paste in um an as to be able to go to the next step um oh it's going to make me upload a uh product image I'll use this so once you've added your product you can then create a launch um and here is where you select your product your price F you mention yep do any percent you want you can do one% off to 100% units per day your total units internal reference name and then you pick twostep URL of search by bu uh the max previous products this is really nice this is uh by default the app doesn't allow repeat purchases on the same asent unless you enable this but it also defaults to allowing only people have never claimed an offer from your Facebook page to claim an offer from you but you can increase it you say if they' claimed one offer from you before in a different as they're allowed to claim this up to two offers from me before on a different AG they claim this one um so this is a very nice feature especially if you're working with already existing audiences people who like your page or something y something like that M this is what I'm talking about the keyword waiting and keyword rotating um so you can weight black sweater two3 to one3 it'll rotate these keywords as well and then pick your Facebook page and we also have a a review followup is what we call it but it's a survey um and it starts seven days after the first offer and your launch is claimed um and it uh it basically confirms that the customer received the order if they engage with that message it then surveys the customer about the customer's experience um and those follow-ups are graduated so they start out one a day and they go up to two a day they go up to three a day so you're not getting a flood of requests um instead you're you're increasing the quests as your organic sales increase as a result of your launch is there an option to like choose how the frequency and when the first followup will start no but we've built a custom algorithm um so that because Amazon has automated uh thresholds um if you get too many reviews based on your total sales so it exceeds some people think it's 15 or 20% um conventional wisdom somewhere that's what I heard yeah um so we're 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 then two a days so it's actually an algorithm based on the total number of units the length of your launch um so we've again put a lot of time and testing into it and have never ever had a problem but you can actually disable it it's enabled by default that you can just uncheck this box and if your only purpose is to launch and you're not worried about the follow-ups or you don't want them you can disable it on a launch by launch basis and uh once you've done that click submit and this is where you just copy the ad Json to your clipboard um and actually have an ad open this for garlic press but um you would just copy it in right here and you can see this is the 100% rebate on the sweater any size click get offer below it's that that simple we have a lot of resources uh in our help center for you um to train you on how to run Facebook ads for this purpose if you have some experience we have everything you need um and more if you don't have any experience uh we have the resources for you to learn we also um are starting weekly uh Facebook ads trainings uh live trainings for our members um that'll be starting on the 16th of January I believe um so that'll help out too awesome um okay you mentioned that uh you weigh keywords so that's that's a detail that stuck with me um how how do you how does this work so yes um so here the Search terms to black sweater sweater black sweater for women so this this is waiting it because you put it in twice two times to one times one time sorry um so this these are weighted 66% point6 and this is 33.3 so that for search for twep that means it'll automatically the link will use uh every out of every three times the link will use black sweater twice and black sweater for women once if it's search by by the first person who comes through will be shown black sweater the second person will be shown black sweater and the third will be um shown black sweater for women and the reason this is really useful is because I bet black sweater the search volume is extraordinary IL high with 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 uh you know have this long tail keyword that includes your high volume keyword but you don't need as many conversions to move up on this longtail keyword as you do on this high volume keyword so that's the nice thing about waiting and rotating is that you can show that balance and uh it would make sense that if you're moving up for black sweater on women you would also be moving up on black sweater because black sweater is included in black sweater do you have like any specific advice around choosing keywords for sellers yes so that's one of the features that we're building into the app that we're really really excited about um is we're so right now actually generate the reports for you manually once you're a member um but it it's analyzing your Asin and your competitor your top three competitors asens and um making recommendations about which keywords to go after um as well as the number of units to get to page one on those keywords um it's not a feature that's currently in the app but it's one that we're building into the app that can do manually right now yeah um that's absolutely necessary um a lot of the sellers space their product launch processes based on how many units they have to give away I mean uh Amazon now recently stopped uh allowing giveaways as officially like I think in December last year so it's not officially there but through these rebates if you're doing 100% off then basically that's a giveaway so you have to uh officially sell a certain amount of units per day in order to get ranked so um I know that a lot of sellers would ask you uh how long it would take from day one when you set up this campaign uh until you start getting ranked on the first page for some of the core keywords that they want that they want to be ranked for that's a tough question um really depends on search volume and competition um the higher the search volume the longer it takes what we've seen is rotating keywords is really effective and doing you know so let's say you need to do 100 um in total spreading them out over a longer period of time which shows consistency seems to be working as well um as opposed to doing you know 10 a day for 10 days um and maybe doing five a day for 20 days might be a better approach um I agree and but it is it is entirely dependent on the search volume relative competition U 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 but that's actually how we lost $20,000 we went after a product that um 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 on our product was just too short we couldn't really get cheaper product then we got stranded so it wasn't just the product launches but we learned a lot um you have to you know I'm not obviously I love this tool and put a lot into building this but it's it's not the right thing for every single product um you have to make sure that you're going to be profitable that it's worth launching the page put putting The Upfront investment to launch page one um but on the other side it's also a nice tool for moving your product from page two to page one um so and establish existing product um which we do a lot with with a few of our products is we do a launch every one or two every two months of you know 30 units to a little bit um where I see value of this um software is for bigger sellers who launch a lot of products and test out a lot of new products per month and they just need a better way to streamline this whole process of working through rebates um and avoid all that manual work that's involved and then they can release that all that additional time and maybe invest it into customer support which is some of the weakest points that are um that I hear the sellers have in their processes and systems it's almost always um not included when it comes like customer support or something like that because they have to spend so much time in uh doing all this administrative work so I definitely see the value in it um and for some products like for example I've seen when when you mentioned the competitive product and um that someone has to think through the whole process before they even enter it like I've seen some of the products work after a couple of months being extremely unprofitable and then then you just leave them uh to Amazon's algorithm just uh decrease the price and then be patient over 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 start selling even without doing PPC or Facebook ads or anything else but it took time and still uh doesn't reach its full potential uh 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 uh seasonal character to that product so we kind of like latched on to the Q4 momentum where a lot of people were purchasing uh for other people and there is this uh big season of everyone buying everything on Amazon and we just kind of like latched on to that increased traffic uh which built a good momentum for our own product um which took something about two months we didn't use rebates or anything we sold at a full price and it still works so um I guess that uh for tools like these they can be really really awesome if someone has higher volume of units that they have to manage somehow but still uh save time in in terms of Workforce or uh being able to release their own time yeah I completely agree and I've had we've had some beginner sellers reach out to us um and I've actually told them you know there are better options to start out where you can conserve your money um launches can be a great way to get traction very quickly but there is The Upfront cost you pay for the rebate you get uh so you're you're basically eating the product cost and the Amazon fee and then getting back your net profit so there's that in addition to you the um whether you're paying a per unit fee for a launch service or using our software and paying a fee um as well as ad span so there are these costs that you can recuperate but if you're a new seller you only have one or two products um there are other strategies that don't require The Upfront investment but that take as you said take a little longer required to be patient but it's it's smarter financially yep it is and it's 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 exactly yeah definitely um so uh when in terms of pricing structure I can see that uh there's some credit based pricing structure and I wanted to ask you how exactly it works and um simply put how can someone calculate uh predict the spend they yes so um the the way we work is on a credit system so one credit equals one unit to launch um so on the professional plan you get 25 credits a month call these Bas um and these credits if you don't use them they roll over so this the credits are as low as $2 and they're as high as $4 so the more you buy at once the more the cheaper they are and any credits that you purchase never expire um so as long as you're remember they they keep on rolling over um so you get these 25 base credits each month that's the $4 credit price and if you don't use them they roll over so if you're if you're only doing doing you know 75 units every three months that they would roll over um and and then uh we pay the PayPal transaction fee for you so as I mentioned before you deposit the for the rebate you have to pay the transaction P by credit card or you can do anac deposit um and we're switching over to brain tree as our payment processor which is owned by PayPal so later this year you'll be able to deposit with PayPal as well um but the the transaction fee for a is much lower obviously it's $6 so um you know if you buy and bulk you save for the credits um and if you need multiple if you have more than one seller account you have to contact us um if you want customized flows um we can do that that's part of the Enterprise plan and for the agency um who are using a software we the biggest benefit is that you're able to aggregate your um credits across all all of your accounts every month um so that you paying a flat fee but just meeting a minimum essentially I see so if I understood correctly under $99 per month you can actually launch 25 products correct 25 units yep unit okay um you mentioned also that your uh all of your systems are compliant with terms of service so you have like any specific advice for sellers what they should uh pay attention to in order to stay compliant with terms of service yes so one never condition the rebate on a review so that we have do not condition rebate on review they don't even mention the word review from the time the customer enters the flow from the time they get the rebate um and and that is the biggest thing by far um you you shouldn't be launching a product if you don't have a good product um product launches aren't a solution for a bad to a bad product so your point of the product launch is to get increase your conversion rate but also get more exposure so um if you need to condition your uh review on a rebate I'm sorry rebate on a review that probably means you have a bad product and shouldn't be doing product launches and it also violates Amazon's terms of service people there's a concept called reciprocity if you do something I agree reciprocate and be more inclined to be positive and leave you feedback um so if you're giving someone a rebate on a good product then they're going to be much more inclined to just leave you a nice reveal I agree um in general you have to think about good quality products building good quality products if you're building your brand to last otherwise it's just not going to it's not going to work long term right whichever method you use exactly okay um you also mentioned a couple of features that uh you will roll out in the next six months is there anything else that um you intend on rolling out yeah so we're building in again those recomendations for keywords and the amount of units to launch to get to page one we're also building in keyword tracking um that you can see the progress of your launches um we're building in some ads automation so right now we have this automated daily giveaway counter um so that if you do 10 units a day day and when you hit number 10 your you actually get an email notification um that'll tell you hey you've all your units for the day have been claimed you may turn your you may pause your Facebook ad if you'd like um but we're actually going to build an ad automation that pauses it for you you can check that option um and the nice thing actually when that happens is that anyone who comes into the flow even if you leave your add on or if it's shared um they'll be given the option to be notified the next day when more offers are available so you're not wasting that person coming through that's all automated um so we're building an ads automation the keyword tracking the recommendations um and 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 to non-english speaking markets after that but I don't have a timeline for non- English speaking markets at this point okay interesting updates uh especially the one for tracking your ranking for specific keywords that will be super useful for for people using the this tool to actually understand how it contributes to their success um definitely see the value in that um especially because all of the other there are also other software that uh where you can actually track your progress over time so um this is going to be uh spefic specifically useful with product launches yeah I do want to say anyone that keyword tracking um will be included as part of the $99 a month um so when we roll out some of these new features uh the price might increase it at some point uh but anyone who signs up now before we make that increase will be grandfathered in at The $99 a month awesome awesome um okay and in general uh when it comes to product launches now outside of uh speaking about the tool just in general uh what is your experience about with the the rebates and does it still work as well as it did in 2019 for you yeah definitely we're not too far into 2020 yet but yeah uh it's at the end of last year it's worked it worked really well for us we actually did a lot lot of launches right before the Q the heart of Q4 for Christmas and the holidays um and they were very very effective um and I I think one of the the trends um is doing less than 100% um and that's a nice thing about our is is that you can do that you have the flexibility to connect your multiple Facebook pages um and to do different rebate percentages so I think if you're more focused on review sticking um it's better to do to warm up your audience sending them to an article that's uh related to the problem your product solves and then yeah targeting them with a rebate offer for the solution that is your product um so like if you have a if you sell a diet food you tell them you you send them to an article about the diet um and how it takes a long time to prepare all these foods and then you re target the people who engage with that ad um with a 50% rebate offer on your product um you know that can be very very effective and um and uh those reviews will be more likely to stick long term yeah I agree well it's just about taking different approaches to to doing product launches like um I know for sure that Amazon uh also favor ASE those listings that drive external traffic to from from external sources to Amazon because this also I see that there's a added value in that um even though conversion such traffic are not going to be as high as when you do them through you know search find by sequence but still I would still always use U like a combination of both and other types of uh traffic especially coming from influencers that already have their existing audiences you something that you're probably already familiar with yes yeah I think that's a great recommendation to to have multiple tra external traffic sources uh Amazon does weight all of that so it is um really important and 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 who are 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 uh to Amazon which then raises their own ranking 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 be ranked for as many millions of searches uh that they have products in so it makes it all makes a lot of sense okay um anything else you would like to add uh in terms of um advice or any any tips that you have for sellers in general um I just think that what we talked about in the beginning making sure that you're you know passionate and about your product and scaling responsibly and effectively with a plan is is um you know the the best advice for the beginners and on the people are more advanced um is getting out of the day-to-day of your business being able to grow it um and that's that's why we really built this tool um it's nice because it's diverse for it can help beginners as well as the advanced sellers um and but but um that's something that we've focused on throughout 2019 is is automating our business um with srps with this with on ranker um and because if you're if you're in the day-to-day too much you can't focus on growth that's absolutely true and it's repetitive like for example I I know the difference when I work with some uh starter level sellers versus professional sellers who have been selling for years and really grown their accounts uh 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 really sticks to their uh operating procedure some of them are more perfect some of them will need Improvement but uh they're always there for people who um are successful on Amazon so that that would be also like an added advice from my end to start documenting everything you do and think uh in that direction of streamlining the process uh especially for the things that you do on a day-to-day basis multiple times like rebates for example yes um okay Jason thank you for being guest on our today's interview um if anyone has any questions about the tool you can reach out to uh Jason landro 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 um