After his presentation at Affiliate World Europe, Zack Franklin sat down with Philipp Schoeffmann for an exclusive one-on-one interview to discuss all things Amazon. Zack reveals some key Amazon seller tips to utilise on the platform as well as why performance marketers should be jumping on it as soon as possible. Watch his full AWE19 presentation here.

This post, “Zack Franklin Reveals Must-Know Amazon Seller Tips” was first seen on the AWC Facebook page.

AWeurope Interview with Zack Franklin, CEO of AMZKungFu

Amazon Seller Tips: Third-Party Sellers

Phil:
🎙️ Affiliate World Europe 2019, what’s up gentlemen, this is Zack Franklin from AMZKungfu. That’s cool. Kungfu. How did you come up with that name? You live in China right?
Zack:
Yeah, I live in China. 80% of my customer base is Chinese, Amazon sellers and I like to come up with names that they remember. So Panda-Leap is another one, AMZKungfu. I was thinking of Cash Panda. I’ve got a lot of different ways to go with that.
Phil:
🎙️ That’s fantastic. I’m definitely going to remember this one.
Zack:
It works.
Phil:
🎙️ It does. I’m sure it does. Okay, so we’re speaking about Amazon seller tips. Any of you sell on Amazon? I do not. So I’m super, super stoked about this. Please help me out.

So you’re the pro on Amazon as well as Amazon seller tips. I’m a Facebook kind of guy, how do I jump on the Amazon ship? What are some Amazon seller tips you can share?

Zack:
So Amazon is just kind of a train that’s just rolling. I mean, it’s growing four third-party sellers at 50% every year. Right now, last year, third-party sellers like me sold $160 billion on the platform.

So Facebook is where you’re driving traffic but Amazon already has the traffic. So this is really great for affiliates that want to kind of be a little lazy because Amazon has the traffic and conversion done for you. I showed a screenshot in my speech, conversion rates on some of my accounts are more than 70%, like 11,000 people went to this site and 11,000 people bought.

Phil:
🎙️ Are you serious?
Zack:
Yeah, so look at the look in his eyes. This is real.

Amazon Seller Tips: It Is A Giant Search Engine

Phil:
🎙️ How does that work then? So, Facebook has the visitors already and your job basically is to get your product, within Amazon, in front of those people.
Zack:
So one of my Amazon seller tips is that it is just a giant search engine, that’s all it is. So you do what you do for other search engines. You need to do SEO and you need to do SEM. So when people search for like, “garlic press” you’re in the top five garlic presses. Or if they search for something else you’re right there.

So it’s also like a grocery store. You need to have space on the shelf and you need to be in the right places and you need to occupy as much space as possible. Like for garcinia cambogia, I had five spots on the first page for garcinia cambogia. That’s going to do a lot better than one spot in the front page.

Phil:
🎙️ Okay, so how do you do that?
Zack:
Alright, so one of my Amazon seller tips is you basically need to trick it into thinking that people are searching for your products using that keyword and they buy your products and so you are relevant in Amazon’s eyes because Amazon is a machine. They look at your CTR, your conversion rate, and everything else.

So you just need to work the numbers in a way that you start to initially get found and get some traction, you need to buy some ads so that your sales velocity keeps increasing and you know how your sales velocity keeps increasing and the higher your sales velocity, the higher chance you have of ranking up.

Phil:
🎙️ Okay, so that’s one of your more interesting Amazon seller tips. So it’s more as you mentioned, SEO work in a way than it is running ads. Well, it’s both, you run ads on Amazon as well.
Zack:
Yeah it’s both. You need to have a listing and sometimes, you just change your image and you might double your sales. You’ve got to figure out how to optimise all these parts of Amazon because they all feed in together and they all kind of work in this kind of synergised way. That’s one of my key Amazon seller tips.

Amazon Seller Tips: Testing On The Platform

Phil:
🎙️ Okay, so one thing that I have to think about is split testing them. So me being a paid social guy, a Facebook guy, I go nuts over split testing.

How would I do that on Amazon?

Zack:
Well, you could test on Facebook and that’s a good metric to see your CTR and get to see your other stuff but what I like to do is I like to use MTurk, which is another Amazon company for real, American people to go on and do something for like 4 cents.

I like to do a lot of things so one of my other Amazon seller tips is I like to put up a product picture and I like to say, “What would you search to find this on Amazon?” and that’s how I do a lot of keyword research. I get a lot of really good things that no keyword tool will find, just by asking thousands of people, what would you search to find this, what is this? But then I might show them ten different pictures and ask which one are going to click on and I do rank choice, voting, play them off against each other.

Phil:
🎙️ That’s so old school.
Zack:
Yeah, it’s old school, but it’s fast. With MTurk, you can get people to start answering in 15 minutes and you’ll probably be done by the end of the day. If you go directly with MTurk, it’s dirt cheap, but there are other systems. I almost built one on top of MTurk, like PickFu, that’ll charge you like 50 cents per response but if you go directly with MTurk, it might be 2 cents. So why not do that? That’s another one of my Amazon seller tips.

Zack’s Top Amazon Seller Tips

Phil:
🎙️ So what’re the biggest leverage points then? What are your top Amazon seller tips that people really have to look into?
Zack:
Oh man, well there are a lot of Amazon seller tips. Number one, pick a good product. If you pick a super cheap product, you’re going to fight for your life all the time. If you pick a product that’s like $25 or less, you’re fighting uphill the whole way because the Amazon fees are quite high and the Amazon advertising cost will be a huge chunk of your profit if you’re selling something less than $25.

Another one of my Amazon seller tips is you need to make sure that – I know this is not a sexy thing to say, but like, you’ve got your legal bases covered and you have a product that’s in compliance. You can’t sell sh*t because you can’t hide on Amazon. If your account goes down, it’s a lot more work to get it back. So you want to do the right thing. So this is fundamental.

Number two, figure out a review strategy. And number three of my Amazon seller tips is Amazon ads are like the easiest ad platform I’ve used in my entire life. I feel sorry for you Facebook guys ’cause it’s getting ridiculous now. But Amazon ads, you can have a campaign in under a minute, and it works. Those are my top Amazon seller tips.

Amazon Seller Tips: Review Strategy

Phil:
🎙️ Okay, so I want to jump on your third point, which is a review system is what you called it. So how do I do that? I don’t just sit there and wait, I assume.
Zack:
So the best strategy for affiliates, and this would be ones who are probably selling – I mean, all my guys that I do this for are selling about $200,000 a month because that’s when it becomes viable. I like to retarget my customers because I get the name and the address on Facebook and like I said in the speech, I like to send them there to go through a review funnel and make it very, very easy for them to leave a review while saying they don’t have to leave one.

It’s very important you need to say, “You don’t have to do this” and they really don’t have to but you make it so easy to leave a review that they would be fighting to not leave one. What I used to do, I used to have a timer on a page to go to the next step was 30 seconds, like a countdown, and they had a big pulsing “click here to go to Amazon” button. So they could either just go to Amazon while they were waiting or they would just sit on the screen for 30 seconds and so everyone’s like, “okay I’m going to Amazon and leaving the review”. So little creative stuff like that.

Also, look at who’s getting reviews really fast and buy their products and see why that might be. That’s the kind of competitive research.

Phil:
🎙️ So a little bit of funnel hacking basically.
Zack:
Yeah and one of my other Amazon seller tips is you can also look on Amazon. They have customer images. So people sometimes put all the real packaging on there and they also put unboxing videos on YouTube and you can see, is there anything in the package, is there anything that you can’t see just from looking at the Amazon listing?
Phil:
🎙️ Amazing. Thank you so much for all those Amazon seller tips. So super super fascinating. So I’m definitely going to look more into Amazon. Maybe you should do that too. And what I take from here is products are at least $25 otherwise it’s hard, reviews are super important obviously, it’s an easy-ass platform, and it’s for lazy affiliates. That’s what you said.
Zack:
Yeah.
Phil:
🎙️ Check it out. Thank you so much, Zack. It was a pleasure having you here. Thanks for rocking the stage with us. Cheers.