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Welcome to the Million Dollar Sellers Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Shucet. Today we have a good friend on the show, Colin Raja. Colin, what's up man? I'm just gonna dive right in here and I want you to talk to me about that moment you decided to bury yourself and this rebirth you went through and you coming out of the ground and what led you to be there.
Just take us on that journey man, because it was such a cool thing to see you do.
Oh my god, that's a crazy experience actually, trust me. Oh my gosh, I buried myself for two and a half hours and I was in a three-day torture actually in my life. I'll tell you the background of where it all comes from. I went into a crazy depression because of the family issue and all the things that I went through. My depression is something different.
I was going crazy, not like sitting in one place. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going all over the place trying to figure out what my life looked like. I thought my life was done. I had a lot of suicidal thoughts of what I was going to take my life off. I thought I was done with my life. My life is over after that. At that process, I did [Tamasko] in New Mexico with Eric, an MDS guy, an amazing guy.
Then at that point, I realized that I don't live in the present. I either live in my past or live in the future. From that point, I live in the present and the shaman was telling me after the meeting, I talked to the shaman and he said Okay, we have female energy and male energy, you need to let that go, why?
Because I don't wanna cry. In Indian culture, we don't like to cry. Crying is a weakness for us. After that, I went into a depression side, very deep. Then I called my friend immediately and said, hey, I needed help. I cannot be like this, I cannot be miserable like this in my life, I need help, I need to seek help. We put together a three-day challenge.
The three-day challenge was the first day, It's like I go into submersing about what I'm going through in my life. Why? Because I don't know what is peace, I don't know what is happiness, I don't know how to connect within myself. That's the three problems we identified. After that, we created the ice bucket. Focus on me, connect within myself, connect within my inner love.
Second was heat, [the muscle], be inside and then connect with me completely. The fourth one is underground, I stayed there for two and a half hours man, you swear to god, oh my god, that was an amazing experience what I got. It's you go to the inner child yourself, the shaman was treating me like okay go back to your inner, your past child, what you want to tell him.
What is the stage you pass, It's killing all the trauma that you have and you come out and then reborn as a human, as a new experience, a new person ready to take the energy in the life and accept whatever you want in the life.
That's amazing, man. You didn't just do the in-the-ground thing. You did the cold experience. You did the heat in one of those tents. Is that what you're talking about?
It's like you're doing a muscle, your muscle workout, you do a hundred pounds first and if you go and then lift at ten pounds it's super easy for you after that. The whole goal is to be how you can able to create a different experience like a cold heat underground so you keep getting all the resistance, keeping all the resistance in your body and when you go out of that then you can be able to focus on yourself.
Super amazing. You're creating a resistance with all three layers of it and after that, you go out of your life and it will be super easy for you to connect to yourself. It's super easy to feel yourself. It's amazing when you experience it. I'm not a person who's a spiritual guy. I'm always questioning everything but I swear to God this changed my life.
I can definitely relate to that and I'm not a super spiritual or religious person either but we're all humans. We all have the ability to get in touch with ourselves and you don't hear people talk about that. We talk about the relationship with God, the relationship with the Bible, and all these other things but what about a relationship with yourself?
How can I have a good relationship with someone else if I don't have one with myself?
Oh my god, that's the biggest thing, bro. The two things I couldn't understand in my life, what is happiness? What is love? Well because I come from a background where we don't have the food. My dad makes 50 cents a month and we don't have the food on the table. That's what they say. When you don't have food on the table, you have one problem.
When you have food on the table, you have a thousand problems. Do you understand what I'm saying? I got a thousand problems after that. Before that, we just focused on making food. That's always more of what our goal is. At that point, I don't focus on myself. I don't focus on what is love. I love other people because it's super easy. Then I start asking the question what is happiness?
What is love? The point is that I recognize, you have no idea how much dead inside and alive outside. You have no idea how many people walking outside which is super dead inside and being alive outside. I was there, literally. This experience, when I think about what is happiness, and what is love, I go through certain steps. When I figured out how I love myself, I asked a question myself, How can I love myself?
I don't know how to love myself. I write down how I love my family, how I love my wife, how I love everybody, I write down all the steps. I’ll be there for them. I make sure that they are taken care of. I make sure that I take them for the trips. When they are in trouble, I will be there. When they need help, I will give them support. Then I take them to the spa.
I take them for a massage. I take them for a date. I started doing everything for myself. I take myself for dinner, just me, sit at home, and have an amazing dinner. Just have it by myself. I take my self pedicure, medicare, massage, take care of my body, I go do that one that's rejuvenation every month. That helps me to realize what real love means first of all and so far I understand that all the time what I'm having is a love that’s come from outside, not from inside of me.
It's important, man, especially I know for me and someone like yourself. If you're going through something difficult and you don't really know how to deal with it, check in with yourself because most likely no one ever taught you how to love yourself or it just didn't come naturally to you, whatever the hell it may be, but it just seems like no one says that.
Everyone just says all these other things outside of yourself. Once you get in touch with what's inside, you're in control. It's the awareness. You can make the change because it's yours versus trying to change someone outside of you or this external thing that you have no control over at the end of the day. Some of us, we have to have that.
We need that. I know I need it. My wife knows I need it. She'll be like, go on a surf trip, get out of here, go do your thing for a little bit because clearly you need to. I think that helps us show up better at work too. I don’t really believe in the work-life balance in the traditional way. It's also just another outlet for myself. I'm interested to learn how you look at that.
I know you've got a lot of great things you're gonna share today about the way that you bucket keywords and you plan these out during a launch and how you audit ASINs and some other great tactical things that you've shared. What's your view on how your business and work play a part in who you are as a person?
With respect to business, when I started the business, I literally started working from my nine-to-five job. Then I started after seven to three, four o'clock. I spent almost 19 hours learning this business first of all. I think in 18 months, we made a million dollars. Then we started growing like crazy. We started growing really well from that point.
With respect to business, I'm a data scientist guy, I'm a data engineer, and I deal with so much data in the previous things. I love digging into more details of data. Amazon gives so much data, think about 2015 and right now. Oh my God, you got so much data to discover a lot of things on Amazon. If you never worry about what data is Amazon giving and what external data you're getting if you cannot combine that, that's the area that you need to be focused on at this point.
I've been launching almost 20, or 30 products right now. I've been having a pipeline of 10 products, launching 20 products right now. We're seeing crazy growth on the ASIN ranking aspect of it. It's amazing how we use the data and then turn the data to speak for us, not making our own decision because our emotional decision doesn't work all the time.
We use that data to make our decisions actually. That works amazing, very well.
That's good information. I think it was something I overlooked for a long time. I just went with what was in my mind and learned split testing, what real split testing is, and how you have to do less. That took me a lot of time to wrap my head around to do less, wait, be patient, look at the result, adjust, and keep doing that over and over. Now I enjoy it.
I've come to appreciate it, one, because it works and it's actually easier than what I was doing before.
We are like emotional animals. We’re born to adapt to the emotional behavior that we adapt to ourselves. Before when you had to launch products, when you're launching the keywords, we are scared even touching something in the title our bullet points search terms, and all these things, but when your rankings are able to show okay all right this keyword Amazon is giving a lot of relevancy for this and you’re able to use that keyword.
Go back to the root, take that root keyword and then build that whole group of keyword and then try to rank it. That's easy. We don't need it. At that point, you can outsource that one. I call this something called keyword linking. What is keyword linking is basically when you rank three or four keywords, Amazon gives automatic juicing for certain other keywords.
For example, let's take a typical “garlic press”. When you're ranking for “stainless steel garlic press”, let's say that you have a keyword, “stainless steel press”, but there is some other keyword in the middle, or some other keyword is added. If that keyword is ranking, you can take that keyword as a main root keyword, as a browse keyword, and go and link all of the keywords.
You don't need your intelligence to go and check what keyword you want to rank. It's whatever you ranked before, Go back to the root and check two matches, which there is something called the loose match and straight match, loose match and a strong match, which is a loose match is nothing but if you have “garlic press”, if you take only “garlic” and then map with the other keywords, your relevancy is much looser.
You need to take “garlic” + “press”, two keywords along with the other keyword, and then you have higher relevancy to rank other keywords. That is called keyword linking. You keep linking the keyword until you rank for all the keywords.
I like it, man. That's a great example. Now I imagine as you do that process, are you also thinking about relevancy along the way in adding an adjustment there, or are you still just looking at the data?
Relevancy is basically when you are building your listing, you need to be indexed for all the keywords. First of all, before relevancy, we need to go behind two more steps. One is a browse node and category. There is a lot of difference between browse node and category which needs to be matched up with your product type and item type.
You need to place all the keywords in the right place, then you will automatically get indexed right now. Once you're listing as a number of people, the relevancy is built by the clicks, the relevant clicks, and also the conversion, and the people talking in your listing. For example, Q and A's, and also for example, in the reviews, people say “garlic press”, you automatically index for “garlic press”.
You have the higher relevancy for “garlic press”. In that way, you can be able to enforce the relevancy, and relevancy can build ongoing as well. Basically when I said all the brands, all the congestion, and everything is automatically indexed and has a relevancy for your keyword. Basically, you just make sure that you put up a plan in such a way that group the keywords and also use the keyword linking strategy to get relevancy for your keywords automatically.
You keep linking your keywords. Your two keywords, two words are indexed and you’re bringing the other two words to get more relevancy and rank and again bringing in two other keywords to bring index and rank and then you keep moving forward until you rank for the end of the whole keyword completely.
How are you rotating and placing those keywords? As you identify a new opportunity, where are you swapping a keyword in the title out for a new one and then treating this old one a different way, what's your process like for that?
You don't need to change anything when you're launching the keyword as long as your keywords are already indexed. That's more than enough for you at this point and you don't need to change any title until otherwise you get into some other issues. I divide the keywords. This is one of the best hacks we found in our operations. We divide when we launch a keyword, we divide those keywords into C1s.
Complexity 1, complexity 2, up to complexity 5. Basically how we do it is when your keyword is able to rank without just a social signal that you're sending it and you call it a C1 keyword, which is a “complexity one”. It's not so complex. When you're running a PPC and you're able to rank the keyword just with the PPC and that's called a C2 keyword, “complexity two”.
When you're getting your add-to-carts, let's say that you're running a Google traffic. In Google traffic you're giving the coupon, people coming and then looking for a coupon that gives add-to-cart, a lot of add-to-cart for you. At that point, you're checking that when you rank for that, that's a C3 complexity. Fourth is you're doing all the things plus giveaways, some of the influencer giveaways, or anything that you're doing, that's a C4 keyword which you rank for.
The C4 keyword is a typical keyword, it doesn't matter what you do, you rank, or you go down. You don't want to focus on those keywords for super long. It's a long-term strategy, which is you need to stay behind. I call them as like, oh, you be with a friend with a girl and then a friend with a girl and then you're waiting for the relationship to break.
When the relationship breaks and then you want to sneak in and pick the girl. That's how it is. You want to be friends with those keywords. You stay there until the guy makes a mistake. When the brand makes a mistake, you automatically go and then take the position automatically. You need to wait for that keyword until somebody makes a mistake.
They're going to make a mistake. Either they're going to make a mistake or Amazon is going to make a mistake. At that point, you got to go in immediately go run a five-day or seven-day campaign to take over their position.
Nice. Do you have any advice on how to catch that right away? How are you setting up that alert about a competitor that got suppressed, went out of stock, or whatever?
When you label that as a C5, I track that, I put up a notification every single day. When I see the moment is going up, that day somebody is falling. That day I am going all in at that time. Most people get stressed out, oh, that keyword is ranked, I don't stick. Why are you focusing on that one keyword? You have thousands of keywords. If you don't have more than 20, or 30 keywords, you're in the wrong niche.
You're in a bad product. First of all, you need to have a minimum of 50 to 60 keywords with a search volume of about 300. If you don't have, you're definitely in a deep hole that one day somebody is gonna come over and beat you, take over your position. You don't want that kind of niche, first of all. Basically audit all these things before even launching the product, labeling all the keywords properly, and that one will help you with the maintenance side of it. On the maintenance side, whoever maintaining the product, they don't have to be worried about like, okay, this keyword was going down. Okay, this is a C3 keyword.
All I need to do is run extra PPC, and then I just have to make sure that it makes enough click-through rate, and then a conversion, then I'm good. If it's C4, oh, you know what, that's a predicted result, it's happening, all right, fine, what do I have to do? I need to wait, I need to run small giveaways, I need to do a little bit of a conversion aspect of it, then wait, I do a double purchase or whatever it is.
At that point, I will be able to rank that keyword. Most of the time, it's like in our life, it's making a decision is the most important thing. I'm trying to avoid making a lot of decisions on a day-to-day basis so that I can make major decisions in my life. Think about it, every time you're going to hit keywords and then we need to decide what decision we need to make.
It's crazy. It's like every day you need to go through that one. When you label it, you already know this is a known result. I know how to deal with that. My team knows how to deal with that. I don't have a problem with that one.
Nice. Is there any more context you can give to the ranking? Are you C1 through C5? Is a C4 or C5 typically like a short-tail keyword, one or two words? Maybe it's more of a browse intent versus purchase intent.
I don't think I’ve seen a pattern right now. Amazon also introduced auto suggestions, like a boost on your previous history, so because of that, there is a lot of keyword shuffling happening. All the browse keywords became purchase keywords and purchase became super crazy. I was like, what the heck is happening? Huge volume keywords are going down like crazy.
If you go on and check your search query performance data, three months ago, the search volume and impression had a huge gap. When you go and check those data, you label it like, damn, we cannot make any decisions. It's stupid that we're making decisions. We need to let the data speak to you, you make the decision out of that. That's the difference.
Basically, I divide the keywords into browse and purchase keywords. When you talk about the browse, everybody asks questions like, Oh, short tail is a browse keyword, long tail is a purchase keyword. No, that's not true. Go to the brand analytics, and take all your conversions. If your conversion is below 15% it's a browse keyword. Well, because it required 8 clicks to make one purchase.
If it’s a purchase keyword, it will be above 15% which is a 4 to 1 ratio. Every 4 clicks, you need to make one sale. That’s a purchase keyword. You don’t need an odd assumption to make a judgment about what keyword it is at that point.
That's good information, man. It seems like the real solution to this is you really just have to be on top of it every day.
That is correct. It is not tough. It's super easy right now in the search query performance data, you can get a what is the top 10 acquisition keyword acquisition. It's super easy. Then the banner you get the top three and you can be able to find out what a search query, what a search frequency rank value can be. It's super easy to find out all this data.
When you have a product manager, when you have a launch manager, somebody who you’re dealing with, and if he doesn't know how to deal with this, it's today or tomorrow it's gonna fall apart. Why? Because the competition could be not right, not really well for your niche, but tomorrow it's gonna get strong. How many products went through like that?
Today, there's not a lot of competition there. You rank and you make money. Tomorrow, there's another new guy coming, put up like a freaking crazy offer, and then it's gone. We were talking about okay, we were at the top before, one year ago. Right now, we were down. I get a lot of clients who come to me basically like Hey I was selling on top, right now we were in 10th position.
There are so many things that went through a problem in the two years, the product type and item type introduced are crazy for all their categories. Their browse node has been crazy with all the categories. I recently went through one. I helped one of the MDS members recently. Their browse node is a brand keyword. The brand keyword I'm talking about. I'm
That's crazy.
We checked and then they immediately started ranking for all the keywords. We need to know how to look for these small things that are going to bring bigger results for you. That's the whole problem right there.
You mentioned earlier to me about the category in the browse node being different in the item type. I think you mentioned the was at the category type.
Yes, okay, we recently discovered this last week. Not last week, two days ago. We have a couple of people to test how this works. Basically what’s happening is Amazon puts your product listing on freeze. You cannot change your listing. Is that is that what you're asking?
Well, yes somewhat. I know what you're talking about. It's not taking contributions and stuff, right?
No, it's like basically they freeze your listing, and they will not allow you to change anything there.
Ah, okay. Yeah, I mean, just like starting out from a general perspective, how you define those things. If someone feels like they're stuck in the wrong category or node, or they just wanna get into another one, how they can make that happen?
Before, I think five, or six years ago, we had only category change. We just have a category, we put up in any random category to get the bestseller batch and after that we change, and Amazon comes up with the compliance saying that okay, no, you cannot go into another category, lowest category, and get the bestseller to make the highest sales because bestseller rank would make you a minimum 30% hike in your sale.
What they come up with is basically, they wanna do a category-based keyword. Each keyword, as certain keywords, that's all you can rank about. See, I'm talking from my experience, I'm not talking about the whole thing. I learned out of my old system and some of the algorithm stuff that I went through and tested. Amazon is trying to be only certain categories that can rank for certain keywords. How they implement it is by providing the product type and item type. Product type and item type are bound with the browse node.
Category, this one is completely different. The category that Amazon shows, but the browse node and then the product type and item type is the one that it's gonna show up, you can choose in your listing actually, by the way. If you have a browse node, sometimes what happens is your browse node and item type changes. If that is a mismatch, if it's an older product, you're okay.
You don't want to change it right now. If it's a new product, if you're putting it up and then you made a mismatch, then you end up not getting relevancy for certain keywords, and not being able to index. You can index also, but you're not going to get a higher relevancy. You are not able to rank. How you can able to check this is you get indexed for all the keywords, but you're not going to be organically showing up.
You show for all the PPC, you're not going to be ranking, or going anywhere. You'll be in Helium 10, Datarova, or any other cube product, you'll be able to have a dash in that 100%. Also, you go and then try to change your listing, and you are not able to change it at all. That's called listing freeze. When that happened, you almost get fucked up already.
You need to make sure how to change it, and after that, you need to make sure that you can be able to rank the keywords. One time, there was a guy who was running 300 giveaways per week through influencers and then he was in third position, third page. I was like, what are you doing? Why are you giving away that much? He was making close to $20,000 per day on that one listing he was dropping.
When we checked that product and then we were like, your freaking item type and everything was collapsed, you're not in a proper browse node. Why have you not done any audit for your listing? You need to do an on-page optimization really clearly to make sure that you can rank this keyword. Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense.
Let's try and wrap this up for some people that are listening. Maybe they have a declining product or they're trying to rank for a keyword they think is relevant and they want to go look and see if this is an issue. Could you walk them through an example and where they would go?
The first thing you need to do is remove your canonical URL. When you click on the listing, you will be able to see your keywords there. Take down “amazon.com/dp/[your ASIN]”. If you put that down, you will be able to see your browse node. At that period you will see the browse node. Then your category and browse node could be completely different.
You could have multiple categories, but your one category is there. That's the first thing you need to check. Take the browse node, go to your product upload feature, and go manually to check if the product type is matching with your listing. If you click on that, you'll able to find out your product type and item type, and you need to go and then check if your listing has the same thing.
If that's not the same thing, it's a problem. That's the first thing. Second, Amazon, you will see anytime that you put up your keywords, Amazon will see, there are two layers there. One you can edit, and the other one is Amazon agreed, Amazon agreed element.
It's above the little box, and it’s gray.
Exactly. You cannot change that one. That's a mismatch. Then there is Amazon accepting you for that item type of that browse node, but whatever you update, it is not accepting. If that happens to you, you need to create a case to unfreeze your listing first. When you create unfreeze your listing and after that, you can ask them to change the category.
The quick hack I can share right now is very crazy. I just found it. For example, if you put “garlic press”, if you have a garlic-related, any kind of related product category there, you go on and change that one first. Very easy. You can ask your Seller Central what keyword I should be in. This is not right. What keyword? They say you can be here.
If they say that you put that one and then get approved and after that, you can change it on your own. That's a hack. If you try putting up in a very complex structure, a complex browse node, and people there are not going to approve. Well, because they don't know. They don't know anything about it. Once you need to unfreeze it, and after that, you can freeze it there.
I will post that one in MDS actually, about a quick hack value add soon, for sure.
Nice. Sounds good, man. That's a good one that I think a lot of people probably don't know about, and it's a little difficult to check. If you're not a spreadsheet person, those flat files are a little difficult to navigate so it would be great to see that written out. Um, let's see.
It's a nightmare.
It's tough, man. It's things I've been able to figure out, but I don't live in those spreadsheets so then you lose it If you're not messing with it on a regular basis.
That's what it is. That's what you need to be staying on top of. All these things are the most important thing that you need to do.
I think you can get notified. Is there a way to know if your browse node got changed?
No. That’s the problem.
Not even on a Keepa graph or something?
Nope. If the category changed it'll change, but the category may not be changed, the category could be the right category. See, the browse node is the major issue as to why you don't have the BSR.
Yep, I’ve had that one happen before.
At certain times, you may not have the BSR and you will be like, oh my gosh, why don’t I have the BSR? That's a major key, that's the first checkpoint of what I would do, when you're going and then checking what's happening in my listing. Our first process is any time that we launch the product on our own or launch for somebody else, the first ticket, go in and check 250 points check, it's like a car checkpoint.
We have a checkpoint, we go through the whole checkpoint and say that make sure that, okay, this is right. Also, we think about it. Amazon provides attributes. The attributes are a filter for all your Amazon listings, and the right side filter for your niche, if you click on anything, if your product is not showing up, you're losing 20% of sales.
I know what you're talking about in the attributes section in the back end, but you're saying from the customers and on the front end, those are search filters in a category?
That is correct. Yeah, it's like a search filter. Sometimes we're like, OK, this product is expensive. I want to put $100 to $150. I want it in a black color. I want it in this material. When you go through that filter, that is almost 10% to 20% of people looking for it, using that huge volume there, literally. Also, it is not for somebody who is trying to be doing that.
The point is you're missing the big, algorithmic aspect of it. You're missing the whole attribute of what needs to be there. Those are things we check when we take down the listing, we check okay, if the browse node is right, product type and item type, and then attributes are right, or did they put up in the right place or did they have 250, 230 words?
Right now, we don't put a title more than 170. We keep below 170. It's like I feel like it's getting better results for us. We check all these things and then we come up with a comprehensive plan of how are we going to approach this launch right now.
That's solid, man. I like those tips that you're dropping. I'm thinking about these fields. I know in that product attributes field, there's usually a drop down and there's some stuff you could select. I think it'll let you put other stuff in there.
Alright, do you want a quick hack on that? I mean nobody followed us actually. Nobody followed us. We have been doing this for a while right now. If you go to the inventory, there is something called “improve product listing”, but here is the thing, they will all have that. They will always have that to improve the listing. On the right side corner, there is a bulk sheet there.
You download the bulk sheet, and then you edit all the things and upload them there. The one time you've gone down, everything is taken care of at the same time.
I didn't know you could do that in bulk. Geez.
That's what I'm telling you. It's a quick hack. You can do that one.
That's wild. I love that you're talking about the internal Amazon tools, and I know we talked about how they've gotten better, but even back in the day, Amazon was still providing some solutions, and then people would make this software, and I'd be like dude, you can just go in Amazon and do it right there. Why are you paying for the software?
Now, dude, the stuff they're coming out with is pretty damn good.
Also, people don't understand how to use it.
The only thing they're not doing, which I think is hard for them to do, they're not looking at it from our perspective. I was in, what was I in yesterday? I think the product opportunity explorer, had great click-through data, but no conversion data.
You wanna hear another thing? I'll show you another hack, that's the last hack I'm gonna share right now.
Hack city baby, let's go!
You take your brand analytics data, the keyword, go to the product opportunity explorer, and in the product opportunity explorer, you go to the search terms, and you see all the impressions and clicks for that keyword. You download that, then you know the value of each search query frequency ranking. You can pull what monthly such query frequency ranking it is.
Then if you take ten keywords, which is, for example, I take a keyword of five thousand, ten thousand, I take fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, hundred thousand, I can predict what is the middle. It's just a little bit of math that you need to put up. For example, if it’s 5,000 to 10,000, it's 100 clicks I get, which means 5,000 is 100 clicks, 10,000 is 50 clicks.
What is in the middle? There are 75 clicks in the middle, in between. That's what it is. We can able to figure out what the volume is and you can able to approach your rankings based on that.
Nice, and so you're doing that at launch time? When are you doing that?
All the time. They also show the ranking last 30 days change, like 40% down or 180 days just a 40% up. Based on that, you can be able to push your keyword clicks up and down. It also changes all the time if you go on and check it out this month and go and check it out next month, it changes. You always track those data, you can be able to have a solid ranking strategy.
You can have a solid how many keywords, how many units you need for that product, and all the things you can derive out of that.
Nice man, that's super good. I'm gonna pull one more hack out of you because you mentioned it earlier. You mentioned the inventory, and it's not even really a hack. It's a good business practice. You really wanna get more inventory in and I'll let you finish it and why that's important, but I think you make a really great point.
When you're launching the product, when you're sending a new product, Amazon will not distribute it to all the places. Let's say that you're launching a new brand. Amazon doesn't know anything about your niche or anything. They don't send it to the major things wherever you need to send it. At that point, what will happen is you launch the product, and you don't have certain places that are available for two-day shipping or one-day shipping available.
When two-day shipping, one one-day shipping are not available, you and I know that you lose 30% of sales there. Also, one of the major things that happens is one-day shipping, if it's not available, that's a different story. If the inventory is not available, your one-day shipping is not available, and your keyword is going to be shown differently.
We have a geo-ranking process right now, so basically each and every location based on your inventory level, your keyword shows up there. If you have more inventory there, you have more ability to rank that area. When you're ranking the product, you need to make sure all the places have better inventory access. The best way to do it is to go to your Helium 10, go and find out your inventory data mapping.
If you are techie enough, if you are guru enough in Amazon report, there is a report you can download: What are the FCs holding your inventories? Also, you can find out what the places you are selling more actually are. You take down the location and make sure those locations have your product. If the product is not there then you end up losing a lot of ranking juice there on those places.
That's huge, man. It makes so much sense. People want one-day shipping. I think this is where people get mixed up and it's what AI is reaching at is this predictive thinking technology, how consumers are going to act and behave based on what's in front of them and what they need at that moment. There are so many things. You don't know why someone would need one-day shipping.
It's not always about it just being a better number. Maybe they just really need that thing right now today
I'll tell you a real example. We were making 170 sales on one of the products, that's a stop seller of that we have. One day all of a sudden, our product sales went down to 50. I was freaking out. What the fuck? What's happening? We have 280 checkpoints we do on an everyday basis, we also download the reports, and we have an aggregated dashboard of how to take to the data, why the sales went down, why the sales are up.
We can be able to figure out all these things super easy, but because we have a history of data, we keep it. We have four years of history of data right now. We dug into deeper details and we found that one of the FCs, the inventory put on hold for some reason, because when we reached out to them, they said the truck was locked. They could not open the truck.
I was like, how stupid is this? The inventory was on hold for a week. We found out that because of that reason. That is a major FC that we have. We went down in sales a third time. We went down three times. Once we fixed it, we created a case. We created everything for them. All that we could involve, the SaaS base, we wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos and everybody.
Immediately in 48 hours, we changed it completely. Our sales went back to 170 again. How many of us know how to track this data? It’s super simple, small FC, one FC that doesn't have my inventory, but my inventory has 3,000 there, and my inbound 2,000 was there, and my FC transfer was 1,500 there. It's super stupid, but since we have the data and information of what we need, we were able to track it in the right way and able to address the issue right away.
Otherwise, think about it. We lose the ranking. We will end up losing the ranking everywhere, and sales losing. Once the BSR loses, once your sales lose, you will be put down in all places. After that, your ranking will lose. Your Amazon charge will be lost. Your bestseller batch you will lose. 30%, 10%, 15%, then you were banged into a crazy place and you were not able to re-rank.
If you don't know how to re-rank your product, the problem is you're never going to come back after that.
That's huge, man. How many people are really thinking about inventory at a specific fulfillment center is why their sales are down? I would probably accidentally stumble upon that if I was really digging in, but I would never think about that in the beginning. I think that really just goes to say if you have an Amazon business, you need an Amazon expert.
I think a lot of people in MDS as we grow our business and we try and do less in the business, we stop being that expert, but you still need someone there.
For sure.
Because everything is changing just like you said, the auto-suggest, inventory at a fulfillment center, there are all these different things happening and then you throw people on top of that and the way that they think and what they need and how they're changing and how the algorithms reacting to that, you need someone with eyes on that stuff every day.
That's one of the biggest learnings I had, was giving SOPs to your team. It's a fucking nightmare. If you give the SOP, they come and say the SOP doesn't work. You give it to me. It doesn't work. What do you want me to do? I don't give SOP to my team. Okay. This is a basic instruction. It doesn't matter what it is. Go out and figure it out. Don't come back and tell me, okay this SOP doesn't work.
You don't put the blame on yourself. This is the basic thing. Why? Because it's super changing right now. Every month your launch process changes. For example, think about it. Your browse keyword and purchase keyword have changed drastically right now. For people who were already ranked for all the big keywords, the sales might have gone down because of the search volume auto-suggest, it went up right now.
All the unimportant keywords become important right now. If you don't focus on all the small keywords already, it's time for you to focus on it. If you're launching new, you're freaking going to take advantage of it right now. It's a super amazing hack you can be able to go and check, what was the last 3 months or 1 year ago, what was the search volume, what we have in the search query for frequency ranking, and what is it.
Now, compare that whoever is not ranked for those keywords, go and rank it right now, then it's freaking amazing.
Amazing man. I know you've dropped so much knowledge. I know people are going to probably want to reach out and hit you up. I know you're able to help people out with these ASIN audits. As we wrap up, why don't you just let people know what you've got going on that you can do for other people, how they can reach out to you, and then we'll wrap up the podcast, man?
For sure, amazing. If you're going through one of these issues, just shoot me a message to colinkamesh(at)gmail.com. I can do a quick audit and show what exactly you're going through. We can schedule a call, 15 to 20-minute call, completely for free for the MDS audience who's coming there right now. I'll take a look at the product. I'll give you the exact situation of what you're going through.
Then you go and help yourself. You can be able to do that on your own. You're already there. If you need help, we can also help you how to launch and relaunch your product as well. I'm not selling you anything.
Amazing. Cool, man. We'll make sure we share your email and the notes so that people can get a hold of you. Colin, thanks for coming on, man. I love you, man. You're one of my favorite people. I can't wait ‘till we hang out again. Thanks for coming on and dropping some knowledge, man.
Thank you, man, I appreciate it. Thanks for being amazing always, all the time. I learned a lot of things, we had an amazing conversation, and we still had an amazing conversation. Thank you so much.
Absolutely. Alright, brother.
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