On this 39th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Hymie Zebede, a seasoned veteran of the Amazon marketplace with over 12 years of experience creating and scaling brands from $0 to 8 figures in the span of 1-2 years. Listen to Hymie and Andrew as they spill all the secrets to ranking keywords and pulling in sale after sale.
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How to Build Up Sales and Momentum on Your Amazon Product Listings
SPEAKERS
Andrew Maff and Hymie Zebede
CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com | Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff
Hymie Zebede
I am a seasoned veteran of the Amazon marketplace, with over 12 years of experience creating and scaling brands. I have a proven track record of building Amazon Businesses to $20M+/Year. I Help Sellers & Brands Grow on Amazon fast. Grown multiple stores from $0 to 8 figures in the span of 1-2 years. The main focus is on Organic rank and mastering the Amazon algorithm.
Transcript:
00:03
Of course, I think images is one of the most important things I always say the customer can't touch your item you know they have to see the quality and how good it is through the picture. It's very important that you have better pictures than your competition.
00:16
Hey everyone this is Nezar Akeel of Max Pro, I am Linda
00:22
and I'm Paul and we're Love and Pebble. Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA you're listening to and you're listening and you are listening to The E-Comm Show.
00:36
Welcome
00:37
to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts. They share their secrets about how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff.
00:54
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I am here with Hymie Zebede. Hymie, I'm super excited to have you on the show you ready for a good show? I'm very excited.
01:04
It's going to be great. We're
01:06
getting we're getting super deep into Amazon stuff. Right? I know. That's probably what we're doing today, I assume? Yeah. Of course. Okay. All right. So let's, let's start this off, I love giving you the opportunity to just kind of tell everyone a little bit about yourself and your background, and we'll kick it off from there, okay.
01:24
For sure. I have been selling on Amazon, for as long as I can remember, about 12 years now. I've always been doing private labels started off doing clothing, and thanked God for a lot of success with it. And I had a few listings and they were just building them up with the monster listings. Like I lived off that I bought my house from it for many years, you know, four or five listings. And then I started messing up a little with the sourcing, I didn't really know sourcing well. I knew Amazon very well I learned from a seller, a top five seller, he was doing over 100 million a year. He taught me a lot, you know, so I owe a lot to him. And but I didn't know the sourcing. So like I brought in a container of goods once. And the leggings smell like fish. So I got screwed on that one. Yeah, and then brought in jeans, the sizing was off, I didn't know quality control and things like that. So I ended up selling my brand and the Amazon, my Amazon account. And for the past five years, I've been partnering up with people who have a lot of stock and merchandise, and they just don't know how Amazon works. You know, they think you could just list something on Amazon, but they don't know the ins and outs of the algorithm. And like what signals to send to Amazon. So I've been building up for people like very successful listings, you know, I don't focus on so many listings at once I try to make them very, very strong with all the home runs.
02:58
Okay, nice. So you actually got into apparel, which is a complicated area to get into, especially in the beginning there. So what and you also mentioned your private label, which is even more complicated because you're kind of developing a brand there. What was that whole beginning step like, like what made you get into apparel? And how were you able to scale that on Amazon alone.
03:21
So I was working, I was working in retail stores. And for a few years, I was managing stores and driving to the Bronx, Harlem queens, like every day multiple stores. And I saw that they had a lot of merchandise. So I asked them if I can take some on consignment, and I'll pay them in 60 days, 90 days. So I started doing that and in the beginning, I tried a lot of different listings and it wasn't working well as you know, just a little here a little there like sending in small quantities to Amazon, and then I saw one listing started to do very well so I just went full force in that one listing and bought a lot of stock. And my pictures were horrible at the time. You know, it was much much different than today. But it was like all pixelated but like it just started selling well and I've been like talking to Amazon sellers daily and in all the forums and in all the groups and just all day just learning Amazon Amazon. And yeah, just say stay get rid of all the bad styles that were wasting my time and I focused on the good ones and it just started building them up very strong PPC and then I started getting better into the SEO and it's just all started taking off from there.
04:39
Nice. So I know that you know you started your own your own business more or less. Do you consider it a consultancy? You're kind of an agency more on the Amazon site.
04:51
I don't really consider myself an agency just because when I work with clients, it's me working directly with them. So, you know, they have my personal cell number, I'll send people screenshots at midnight, you know, like, look at this, I get excited about it, which is why I have to be very selective about like, who I work with. Because, you know, there are only so many hours in a day, and I have a few people helping me. But yeah, I need to focus, I need to work with people who have a lot of inventory. And they understand the budget needed to really build up to something strong. Like, I'm not in it for a minute for the big wins, you know, I'm not into just getting something selling decently.
05:36
Yeah. So is the majority. Are you still selling yourself? Are you focused on this new business? It's essentially consulting for Amazon sellers.
05:48
So I don't sell my own products that I own. But I basically am because I'm doing product research. I'm doing competitive research. I'm tracking the organic keywords, I'm creating campaigns, I'm editing campaigns, and AV testing images. You know, I mean, I'm a seller, I consider myself a seller because yeah, I just don't get all you know, I don't get all the money at the end, but I believe so,
06:15
- So if someone comes to you, they want to work with you. What is your approach? Like? What do you typically see as okay, this is the biggest problem that most Amazon sellers are making? Or what is it you know, that you come in and immediately go, okay, chances are, I need to clean this up, like, what is your approach, like, and what are most of the common problems.
06:35
So what I first do is I see a lot of people, who're not tracking the organic keywords on their listing, like they're not seeing where they're placed on Amazon search results without the PPC. And when they're doing PPC also, they're not, they're not seeing how it affects the organic keywords. Or, like, for example, I had, I had got a client and he was working with the PPC agency. And they were like spending an enormous amount of money on a single word. But then I noticed the word isn't in the title, the bullets, or in the description, it wasn't in the back end. And it was like that, like a little part of the word was, but not like in the phrase and added in the phrase, and it made a very big difference, like all these little things. And like I look at the overall picture, you know, you don't want to advertise on items that have bad review average, or you don't want to advertise on an item that has a very high price, you know like people aren't going to want to buy that unless it's justified. So like, I look at everything together, you know, I'll tell the guy we got to enroll in the vine, we got to request reviews on every order, your price is too high, or you know, that we have to see, really, it's an overall picture of what's going on. But a lot of people don't look at the organic ranking. And you know, I had a guy whose sales were down tremendously. And he didn't know why. And years ago, he was just he was doing so well. And he didn't know what happened. And they just continued to do what they were doing. And I looked and I saw two years ago, they were in the top five spots for the main keyword for a few main keywords. And I think they ran out of stock, and they just dropped off and they never paid attention to it again. And it was like that main keyword was driving all their sales, but they weren't like you have to really dig into all the data. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think a lot of
08:28
what's so So you think that a majority of you know, the issue is that people don't really focus that much on organic, which I can completely agree with because you get a lot of people that assume that paid advertising is the only thing you can do. So you would also mention, though, that you know, you kind of optimize the listing and clean things up, do you do anything with the product images, or the plus content or their storefront or anything like that to kind of visually give the product a little bit more insight, because I know that the improved conversion rate, as well as, which obviously brings in more sales and more reviews, etc, can obviously help with the organic side of things. So do you have any input or anything that you usually suggest for sellers for the visual aspect?
09:11
Of course, I think images is one of the most important things. I always say the customer, they can't touch your item, you know, they have to see the quality and how good it is through the picture. So it's very important that you have better pictures than your competition. And I always suggest AV testing the images. Seeing which works best, you know, even before you put it on Amazon like before, like I don't know like you could do experiments on Amazon and switch it around. But also you can use third-party websites PickFu and things like that where you can test it out and just see what image is better. And I always ask other people, but images are huge. I always, I think every client that I work with, we end up having to fix some images around. Yeah,
09:58
you mentioned pics Whew, very familiar. So I imagine you're using that pretty much from an AV testing standpoint, obviously, until you put it up onto the platform.
10:07
Exactly. Yeah. I want to see what's I want to see what people like I don't want to waste the money and spend on ads and things like that every day that it's on Amazon. You know, we have to make sales. We can't if we're showing for if Amazon's not seeing the sales, we're hurting ourselves.
10:22
Yeah, it's good to point out. What about what the rest of your tech stack looks like? Like with your organic tracking and paid ads and all this other stuff? Obviously, everyone's got their favorites for different platforms and software and apps and all that fun stuff. Do they like to use what's your kind of go-to stuff that you're using?
10:40
I love Helium 10. I use helium 10. All day every day. Like that's my, like, my, a lot of times I'll speak to people and they're like, and I'm like, Okay, what's your Helium 10 login? And they're like, I don't have Helium 10. I'm like, How are you tracking? How are you tracking your keywords? Like, you're not tracking your keywords? How do you know, they say, Oh, I searched it on. I searched it in the search bar. Like you can't, you know, you need to see like, you need to see what's going on, I raised the price, and I lost a little rank. Or maybe I was able to raise the price. And I didn't lose rank on the keyword and I could sell it at a better price. Or we're running a deal I want to see how the deal affected the keyword. So important. I always use helium 10.
11:22
It said that's typically our go-to as well. And it's funny you say that, like people who search it and then just try to do it that way. Because I've realized that most sellers don't notice this. But Amazon has a relatively similar algorithm that Google has, in the case of, if you search a certain term, and you start looking through products, and you make and you don't interact, you do nothing. If you search that term, again, there's a good amount of times where the products will change. And it's because obviously, their organic rankings are constantly fluctuating. But be if you didn't interact with anything, Amazon thinks that okay, what you just searched isn't what you were looking for. So we're going to show you new stuff. So I find sellers who will search their own search term, they're like, why aren't we on the first page like you are for normal people, but you're the ones searching the same thing not making an order. So Amazon thinks that you're not interested in anything that you're they're showing you. So I completely agree like, you know, we'll use helium 10? Because we're Helium 10. Partners, and we actually, are you going to they're calling it s3? What does it sell, scale and sell on scale Summit, or something like that, that they're having this year?
12:29
I'm not sure yet. But maybe I'll go now if you're gonna go there.
12:32
I'm going, I'm totally going. Because it's in Vegas, you cannot go to Vegas, if every excuse, I'll take it. But what about? So from a helium 10 perspective, you know, they have that Chrome extension that you like, click and tell you like the ranking on the of the listing and all that fun stuff? Do you kind of use that as your guide for cleaning up everything?
12:54
I definitely use that, you know, it's I can see all the BSR is on the search page. And also, let's say unless I'm doing competitive research, I want to see what has the most reviews with variations, I can see, you know how each variation is doing. And this is the keyword button where I can instantly pull the keywords, I'll do it from the Chrome extension, and also from the main website. A very important tool, you know, you got to look at all the words, you got all the data. That's how you do it.
13:25
Are you helping sellers with finding additional products to add to their product line? Are you solely focused on whatever it is they have? That's what you're helping with?
13:36
So I don't I don't offer that as a service where use me to do product research for you. But when I'm working with people, they'll send me competitors. And I'll look through it or they'll tell me, hi, me, I'm sending you an email, here's 10 items, let me know what you think. And I'll look at it and I'll say, Okay, this is a good item, we need to have X amount of colors, or this is a good item, we need to start off at this price in the beginning. Because we need a route, we need to rack up reviews quickly. And I'll help the people that I work with I for sure help them with that. But I don't know for that as a service, you know?
14:12
Yeah. What are you doing for a kind of ongoing optimization? It's a common question that I tend to get about, like once you've optimized the listing and you're pretty confident with all the terms you're using and everything's filled out and you know, things are up and running. What's your approach on how to continuously make sure that you're gathering data and adjusting the listings.
14:36
So I'm always pulling new keywords on a fresh refresh search to see what's going on. And if there's new, especially on the competition to see if there are new trending words that are related to my product that I need to add in. If I'm not ranked for a keyword, well, I'll rearrange it. I'll put it at the beginning of the bullets. I'll put it at the beginning of the title, things like that, but if a keyword is working well for me I never remove it like I don't. I got a car fight from, you know, from rancor for the keyword I'm not moving that keyword, I'll build around that keyword. You know if there's a long phrase term that what the main term built into it, like, I'll use that. But I know, if it's not broken, don't fix it. But there are always things I could add, there's always things you could add in the description and the bullets and things like that the main keywords I try to not really touch unless, you know, unless it's not working.
15:31
Alright, so let's, let's play a little game kind of. So there are a ton of pet peeves I have. And there are a lot of opinions on whether these things work yet or not. So tell me your opinion. Let's do let's see, first thing, emojis in the bullet points, yay or nay?
15:51
I don't like it. I don't like it. Oh, Amazon tells you they don't like it either. I've experimented a little bit with it. And I had a listing that was not indexed. I don't know if this is definitely approved. But I had a listing that was not indexed for a lot of things. And I removed the guy's emojis and all of a sudden it started indexing and ranking for those really? Yeah. So
16:15
a lot of times, I hope Amazon is suppressing people. If they've got emojis, they should tell people like to move
16:21
your emoji and things like that. And they don't want to do it. But I definitely don't recommend it. Like I never build listings with emojis.
16:28
Yeah. All right. So still on bullet points. I don't know how to explain it like a lot of people, you'll see the first phase of the first sentence in all caps. And then they'll just do a regular sentence. So if it's like high quality, and then low something, they're like durable. And then they'll do this, like, do you do that? Or do you just kind of do bullet points naturally? What's your approach there?
16:53
So again, Amazon, they don't want you to do caps like that. I do start the bullets with the main keywords. Yeah, I'll do the main keyword Dash. And I'll make it into a nice sentence where it doesn't look spammy. But I don't like to do it. You know, I like to follow with Amazon saying besides for whatever, a few things like putting extra cute, you know, I like to put a lot of keywords in different spaces. But I don't like HTML, there are a lot of things that can mess it up.
17:23
Yeah, it's funny the way you just said that. You like to do what Amazon says because there are so many times where we'll work with sellers. And they'll be like, we want to do this. But well, Amazon actually publicizes that you shouldn't do this and like, Yeah, but what do they know? Like? Well, it's their business, they're gonna know if it's working or not. Alright, let's do one more alt text behind a plus content imagery. Is it indexed and benefits your organic ranking or not?
17:56
He's saying in the like, when you're making EBC, like the old text part?
18:00
Yeah. So you know, when you input imagery, you have the alt text and the back end. And also, depending on if you're just doing, you know, one of the blocks that actually has the ability to put a copy in there. Is that copy indexed and helps you with your organic ranking? Yes. Do you think it is?
18:17
Yeah. Where did you fill out the old textbox? For sure. Yeah. And also on the description box. Also, even if I'm using EBC. And even if it's not visible, they're giving you 2000 characters to fill in? Like, why would you leave it blank?
18:29
Yeah, know that I agree with the product description that you input, I know is completely indexed. But your opinion is also that the plus content copy that you use, as well as the alt text behind those images, is also indexed and helps your organic ranking.
18:44
So I never AB tested it, but I put it in because I don't think it's going to hurt me at all, you know, if anything, it'll be telling you to do it, it'll, it'll help improve it, you know, I don't think it's going to hurt me.
18:56
So okay, that's, that's a good way to look at that. So, I got into it with someone on LinkedIn, I can't remember who it was. But there's Amazon publicizes that the alt text behind your images on a plus content is not ranked like it doesn't help your ranking. However, what they also say in another article is the things that do help your listing, right. And the basics are obviously, you know, sales rank, which is typical because you're getting a good amount of sales and reviews and all that stuff. And the alt text is normally at least from a traditional website perspective, is there for people with disabilities they can so that the image can be described to them. And so if those people are shopping, they're more likely to purchase from you thus increasing organic ranking. So I don't think that alt text is indexed to the point where you should keyword stuff the back of it and it sounds ridiculous, but I think that providing a good experience For the customer that is about to be hopefully shopping on your listing is all you have to do. And then you'll rank just
20:08
fine. For sure. Like and like you said, if you said it's helping certain people, like every sale counts, you know what I mean? Why would I want to leave it empty?
20:16
Yeah. Completely agree. So all right, so now what about some of them, I don't want to call it Blackhat. But like some of the gray areas with Amazon. So there are a lot of people that have theories around you, you do a search for your product. If you take that URL you do off Amazon traffic and tell people to you know, buy this certain product. And hopefully, it's right at the top there because you're running your ads. And it's supposed to help your organic ranking because it looks like people have searched your product, when in reality, you're just running paid ads to that search result. Have you done anything? Crazy wheat, like there are so many sellers out there that do like these tiny little things so that they can get like one extra percentage point when I feel like there's so much more work than you could do outside of that to benefit but What's your theory on some of those little tips and tricks that people have kind of been preaching?
21:12
Listen, so like I said, I've been in this for over a decade. So I know all of these tricks, some of the work. But if you don't know how long they're gonna work, you don't know when Amazon's gonna penalize you for it. Do you know what I mean? Like the best way, like, make sure you have a good listing, like check everything fair use all the tools Amazon gives you, instead of doing something like that, you can start off at a nice low price at an aggressive price. And just to rack up the sales like that, why do you need to do Blackhat things where Amazon, you know, maybe it works a little bit now. And then in a few months, they're gonna start, you know, they sent out and they sent out an email, I think, October on October 17. I remember I got an email with things like, we are not allowing people to search, manipulate and search find buys and things like that, like if they cracking down why are you gonna mess with that you can make so much money on Amazon.
22:05
And it's risky.
22:09
Yeah, you don't want to you know, they don't care who they suspend. There's nobody, there's nobody bigger, they'll suspend anyone, they don't care how much money bringing them because the next guy underneath you is gonna go right up and they're not losing money. They don't care. They just want to give you the body or a good, safe marketplace.
22:26
Yeah, it's very, it's a very strong point. I mean, there's a lot I can think of off the top of my head for eight-figure plus sellers that were suspended for at least two weeks for either a doing something dumb like that. And Amazon flagged them and just basically suspended them for a little while. And then another one was just ridiculous to the guy. His credit card was just about to expire for his advertising. So he just switched out his credit card. And Amazon some reason flagged it as fraudulent. And shut his whole account down for like two weeks. And he was solely focused on Amazon. So his business was basically shut down for two weeks. What's your theory on diversifying outside of Amazon in case stuff like that happens?
23:13
Definitely good to diversify. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Even though Amazon is huge, you can make so much money I was once suspended years ago. And the reason was I had a buyer message go out to all the people that bought from me and said thank you so much for shopping with us. Here's a 10% off coupon for your next purchase. Because I wanted to get repeat customers and it was working. I was getting a lot more sales but at the end of it, I said please leave us an honest review. I said please leave us an honest review. And I got suspended I got a phone call from Amazon. I was on vacation with my family. I got a phone call. Hi. You were doing review manipulation. When we hang up this phone call your account is going to be suspended. And I was like No, please. Now I was like freaking out. Because I What did I do wrong? I didn't know what I did wrong. And then I figured it out. It was buyer-seller, they said because I had the word. Leave us a review because I told them to leave us a review. And I also had a coupon code in the same email and the same message that was considered incentivized but for me it was I was telling them like Thank you for shopping with us. Here's a coupon towards your next purchase just everyone and if you'd like leave us an honest review wasn't depending
24:41
incentive that's
24:43
I was suspended for like a month it was horrible income and so definitely it's good to diversify because you never know even like you said credit card issuers like create like little things. It's all bots, you know, you know you don't Yeah,
24:55
I wish Amazon would develop like Even if it was like a, like a three strike policy towards things that you might have been, you might be doing wrong, you don't know. They always get so mad when they're like, oh, you can't do this. Like how am I supposed to know that when you don't and you have your all of your information? All Yeah, all the information you put out is kind of vague. And it's like it's not as specific as you'd like it to be. It's spread out all over the internet. It's on like, six different support website. So you never really know like which one you're supposed to follow. And but they'll suspend you in a second. If you're doing something wrong. And you're like, I don't even know why, like, what am I doing wrong?
25:38
It's ridiculous that they don't help you. They don't want to if you teach us what we're doing wrong. So we don't do a longer game. Don't make it a guessing game.
25:47
Yeah, did you see they're releasing this, I saw this about a month ago, they're releasing this functionality, or at least right now they're testing it, and they just tested it with the PlayStation, that you can actually give, invite only access to customers? So sellers can actually get a code. And let's say to have an email list, and they want to do a brand new product launch, they can actually do an invite-only code for people who can place orders before it's released to the public. And essentially, it's kind of to me, it's like a preorder option. It's also kind of a cool, product launch option. Have you started? Have you started to see anything about that? Is anyone testing that yet?
26:31
I haven't. But I'd love for you to send me the link after this podcast. I definitely want to look into that now.
26:36
Yeah, I'll send it it's pretty cool because I saw it. So they released that. And then I just did. I did a podcast yesterday with a privy. And I was talking to them too about they're, they're releasing now the Buy with the prime button. So you can actually take the JavaScript code from your listing, and put it onto your DTC website. So let's assume Shopify and it will actually link to your Amazon. So it will actually allow people to purchase your product from your website. And then it will actually ship via prime from Amazon. So it's kind of like merchant fulfilled except it takes you directly to Amazon to purchase. So all of these websites that are like DTC where you can only buy with the website are now going to start offering these options where skirts just go straight to Amazon because we know you're doing it anyway. And then you can get the product in two days. So Amazon's doing a great job of just grabbing that off Amazon traffic and just doing what they can to pull in more people.
27:32
They're taking over, they're really taking over.
27:35
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Cool, man. So alright, so let's assume someone wants to work with you. I know you mentioned you're relatively selective with the sellers you work with. So what is what defines a good seller for you to work with?
27:52
So they don't, they don't necessarily have to be such a big seller in the beginning. I want them to want to get big, I don't want them to, you know, yeah, I don't want somebody who wants to a few sales a month just playing around. Like, I'm not, we're not here to play around that you want to you if you believe in Amazon, and you see what the competition is doing. And you see how much money can be made. Let's go for that. Let's go for the gold. You have if you know you have to have a nice amount of stock, you can send in six units of something 12 units in a run PPC, you're gonna sell out, you're gonna kill the whole snowball effect has to be like a, you know, somebody who really wants to build it up. And I'll guide them the right way. And let's build it up strong from the beginning. Yeah,
28:37
I completely agree. Awesome. Hi, we really appreciate having you on the show. I would love to give you a second here and just let everyone know where they can find out more about you more about your business and we'll wrap things up from here. Okay.
28:50
For sure. And it was great being on the show. So I love this. You can find me on LinkedIn, Hymie Zebede, and also on my website hymiezebede.com. And you can email me at hymie@hymiezebede.com
29:01
Hymie, thank you so much for being on the show everyone who tuned in as usual, thank you so much as well. Please make sure you rate review and subscribe on whichever podcast platform you want YouTube or head over the ecommshow.com to see all of our other episodes. But as usual thanks again for joining us and we will see you all next time. Have a good one.
29:24
Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by blue tusker, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to BlueTuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.
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