Chris Rawlings, the founder Sophie Society (former founder of JudoLaunch), answers your questions about Amazon Product Launches in US and EU.
Whether you are just starting your Amazon journey or you are an Amazon business veteran, is here to help you create the optimal product listings, automate seller account, boost product ranking – all in order to increase sales on every Amazon marketplace.
In this Expert Product Launch Q&A Session, Augustas is hosting Chris from Judolaunch who has launched over 1000 products on Amazon, to answer all of your burning questions when it comes to launching your products internationally.
Chris Rawlings is a madman who quit his New Jersey desk job impulsively one day by recklessly clicking “book now” for a flight to New Zealand while sitting at his desk. He has since built multiple successful businesses while traveling the world via motorcycle, canoe and rickshaw (and ok yes maybe the occasional plane). After building an international brand of his own, his focus shifted to helping existing businesses go international. His biggest passion now is turbocharging the revenue of existing Amazon businesses by helping them unlock the black box that is the amazon.de marketplace.
List of questions covered in this video:
00:00:30 How does JudoLaunch help Amazon sellers?
00:02:40 What is a product launch?
00:06:44 How do you define sticky on sticky launches?
00:08:49 How does JudoLaunch process works?
00:13:17 Do you get any reviews during this launches?
00:16:26 How do you get the buyers and is it against TOS?
00:19:51 What is the best 2-step URL to use to direct traffic to your page during the launch?
00:22:16 Should the main keyword that you use for the launch be in the title? Does the keyword phrase have to be one word next to each other or as long as both words are in the title, then you are good to go?
00:22:54 How do you determine how many products to giveaway per day while the launch to get to page 1?
00:24:24 What is 2-step URL?
00:28:28 Is searching and clicking against Amazon TOS?
00:29:30 How much do you charge for managing accounts?
00:30:45 How much do you charge for launching on EU markets?
00:31:27 Do the purchases which are generated by your launching service are verified purchases?
00:32:22 Question: Would I be able to set the amount of units per day for the launch?
00:33:04 Do you have audiences for all the niche available? What if we are launching something with really specific niche that you don’t have the audience?
00:36:20 Are you able to share the site your buyers use to find the products you are launching?
00:37:38 Do you think that the impact on sales velocity of highly discounted sales will be reduced or even cut completely? In the end Amazon knows that discount codes are created to manipulate ASIN’s?
00:40:01 How can you assure that you are helping to launch a good product?
00:43:34 Can you share some tips about how Chinese sellers are launching their products?
00:51:05 Can you tell us the best way to jump on your regular webinars? What’s the best way for people to join this upcoming webinars and future ones?
00:52:22 What tool would you advise to analyze the sales of the best selling competition?
00:53:14 What keyword position does JudoLaunch aim for? In your recent data, did you determine if results differentiate whether it’s more effective for one day total sales spike versus several days?
00:55:47 Does your launch include review or feedback generation?
00:57:06 What technique can you advice for the follow up of a successful launch?
01:01:39 Do you have a 2-step URL generator in mind that can generate individual timestamps on the fly?
01:02:14 Question: Let’s say you have a product that is number #2 search results for a particular search term. How do you determine number of units necessary to sell with JudoLaunch to move to number #1?
01:03:56 What services do JudoLaunch offer for Amazon sellers and how can they find you?
Transcript – Product Launches in US and EU Q&A with Chris Rawlings of JudoLaunch
[00:00:04] Augustas: Hello, everyone! Welcome to the next session of the expert questions and answers session. I am Augustas Kligys from Orange Klik. And today my guest is Chris Rawlings from JudoLaunch. Hello, Chris.
[00:00:18] Chris: What’s up guys? It’s great to be here with all of you. Can’t wait to dig into this session.
[00:00:30] Augustas: And today expert Q and A for me means that no sales pitch, there will be no presentations today, no slides. So, I brought the expert of product launches, Chris. And he will be willing to answer any of your questions. Start typing your questions in the chat box, which you see on the right side of the player. And before we start reading your questions. Chris, can you tell shortly what JudoLaunch does?
[00:01:06] Chris: Yeah, JudoLaunch is a team of people that help Amazon sellers with their product launches and we also have grown since then to help them before the launch and the launch as well. Before the launch, helping them get set up for a successful launch by optimizing their listings and translating listings and after the launch, by helping them manage their accounts and take care of the operational stuff the day to day tasks that have to do with running the business, not growing the business or owning the business. We take over that stuff too. We take it over at a very fair rate, as well. That’s what we do. We’re basically your trusted adviser and your trusted service provider when it comes to launching products on Amazon. By the way, I just have to say I’m normally way more high energy than this and I’m going to try to psych myself up by doing some kinesthetics, while we’re on this call, but it’s like mad late here and I just got back from a flight. So I’m like, just pooped. But I am psyched to be here with all of you guys despite what this may show. So yeah, don’t be thrown off by my perceived low energy. I’m definitely psyched.
[00:02:36] Augustas: Yeah, and it’s also evening now in China, so I can understand.
[00:02:37] Chris: Yeah, it’s pretty late.
[00:02:40] Augustas: All right. So, product launches. Let’s first define what is a product launch. Maybe for some people it means they create a listing and they start selling their products. So, this is their launch. But what do we mean by product launch? One we will be talking today.
[00:02:56] Chris: Yeah. So, what you just said is releasing a product without launching it, which some people do and some sellers actually take that route and that strategy and that’s okay for them, but others like to do a proper launch when they release a product. What that means is getting the traction that you need to start selling quickly to your ideal customers. There are a ton of ways to do product launches and they’d been done since the dawn of time. But we’re talking about a specific type of launch right now, which is I’m an Amazon product launch and the point of it is the slow way is to post your product up on Amazon and wait for sales to roll in and wait for it to prove itself organically over time. The fast way is to make your product live and immediately get a bunch of the units of your product into the hands of your ideal customers so that you can show quick increasing sales velocity and have the initial bank of social proof and ranking that you need to start selling to start being shown to your ideal customers. And you can do a product launch even after the product has been released. You can relaunch products over and over again to increase their visibility, to increase the social proof of the listing and so on. That is what a launch is. It’s the fast route to getting sales rolling, basically.
[04:40:00] Augustas: Yeah, for me sometimes it is confusing if the product was on the market for one year or 18 months and then suddenly we do a product launch. So for me it’s more like increasing the velocity.
[00:04:56] Chris: Yeah. Because if it’s been stale, you know that needs a launch again. You want to revitalize it and like inject life into it. But that being said, you have to be careful about the reason that it’s gone stale if that is the case. If you’re doing this with like a really old product that’s been there for a while and it’s like not being shown, it’s not visible than the reason could be some underlying problem. And that’s one of the biggest things that we deal with and like questions that we get is surrounding that. Like, issues that cause a launch to be like not sticky as we would say. Whereas there’s a defect in the product or something that’s not very straightforward. We’re looking at the listing you would expect something but then holding the product, you get something else. When that happens, it catches up with you eventually because the honest reviews come in and other people see that and they see that you’re not really being forthcoming in the listing and that can negatively impact your conversion rate very significantly.
[00:06:09] Chris: To remedy that, it’s actually best to be both have good sales copy and to be honest and straightforward in the listing and tell like even tell people what this is not for. Not try to sell to everybody, but sell to the people who will actually get the most value out of it. So you could say, you know, this garlic press is not for a commercial kitchen that wants to process a ton of garlic heads every day. This garlic press is for the personal chef who’s cooking for one to four people. That just as an example.
[00:06:44] Augustas: And you mentioned something sticky on sticky launches. Can you define the phrases?
[00:06:57] Chris: Yeah, by sticky, I mean you do a launch and you get a lot of visibility and you’re ranking increases because Amazon starts to see you’re increasing sales velocity. And it stays because you’re ranking increases, you’re getting high conversions, more organic people start searching for your main and long tail keywords and finding your product and they’re converting and they’re buying. So, it increases the conversion and velocity and becomes like this self reinforcing feedback loop that keeps you up there. And that’s what we call a sticky launch. When it’s not sticky, you get that visibility. And a launch, we’ll get you that. Like, that’s what it’s designed to do. You’re almost guaranteed to get that visibility. But it’s like your chance, it’s your shot. It’s like your 15 minutes of fame. And I mean the kind of the beauty and the horror of the a nine algorithm is that you can get up there, but you can’t artificially boost it forever.
[00:08:02] Chris: And you really can’t do that. You can only do it once. And then if you’re not converting well and if we’re getting bad reviews and if you’re listing doesn’t have good copy or content or images, you fall back down and then you stopped being physical because the a nine algorithm says, this is a product people don’t want, will stop showing it and then people stopped seeing it and you get stuck on the bottom of the reinforcing feedback loop again. That’s why like the fundamentals are the most important. It’s like the most boring subject, but the fundamentals are the most important to get down before doing a launch, that’s what makes it sticky.
[00:08:49] Augustas: Maybe, could you explain a little bit how JudoLaunch process works? So that we understand the process and then we have more questions. I see people already asking questions about basically how it works on your end.
[00:09:15] Chris: Yeah. So, the way it works is you log on to the platform, upload the product data, you upload discount codes for a significant discount. And then once you click launch, the JudoLaunch algorithm routes the offer of your product to the people who are most likely to be most interested in that product and most engaged. Then they see the offer and these people, by the way, these are online consumers that we have in our network. Their members and they are waiting for us to send them things that are relevant to them that they’re interested in testing out. There the type of people that like to test out products as soon as they’re released or get deals on products that they’re interested in. And, some of them are even the type that do unboxing videos on Youtube and like to take pictures of products and post them online.
[00:10:20] Chris: And we’ve actually found in our analysis that a significant portion of them tend to be stay at home moms that are shopping for their family, their husband, their kids themselves. That’s like one group of them. But what happens is the right people get sent this offer and then they are directed to Amazon to buy and then once they do they contribute to your daily sales and each day of the launch you get more sales than the previous day. That’s how we work. That’s not how every launch type of service works, but that’s how ours does. And the reason we do that is because we’ve done over a thousand launches and we’ve analyzed the data on what works and what doesn’t and what works best. And this is the sequence that works best. Objectively we can say. It runs for seven days.
[00:11:23] Chris: The first day you get some sales, the second day you get more sales than the first day, and then the third day more than the second and so on. So it shows that you’re getting an increasing sales velocity over time and that there’s increasing interest for your products. So now you have both the sales to show the algorithm and real customers holding and using your products, who can then, depending on how your marketing is and if you have product insert, a good packaging collateral can also be kind of your initial customer bank for that product or that product line. And especially this is really important if you’re launching into a foreign country where you really don’t know the customers or don’t speak the language or whatnot. It’s really important to have those initial customers because they will be the ones to visit your site, if you’re giving some kind of incentive in an insert. They can be the ones to go and take part in your next product launch.
[00:12:27] Chris: And we actually even have a feature where we give you their data. So then you can contact them yourself down the line and you can ask them for feedback or do God knows what with them. There’s infinite possibilities. But the main thing is to get you that visibility because once you start getting your products moving really, really quickly, the a nine algorithm starts to pick this up and show it not just for your main keyword and long tail keywords, but also for other places on the website. Like customers who bought this also bought or might be interested in like these and it just basically shows it that it’s a product that people want. That gives it the greater likelihood of showing it more to other people.
[00:13:17] Augustas: And one of the listeners is asking, how do you get buyers? Is it against TOS? Do you get any reviews during this launches?
[00:13:28] Chris: You can get reviews, but they’re not incentivized to in any way. So, that’s why it’s important for you to have your own system set up. I’m actually going to share like a golden nugget right here really, really quickly with your audience because it’s related to this question and it’s something that nobody that I know in the influencer community has talked about. But I just learned from a good friend. So the basic ways to have a feedback sequence, when you do a launch like this and just in general when you’re doing sales, these people are being contacted to say, hey, we’re a small company and whatnot, or maybe we’re a big company. Maybe don’t mention that. But reviews are very important to us.
[00:14:13] Chris: If you leave some honest feedback, we’d be grateful for that. That’s okay for you to ask that. As long as it’s not connected to any kind of incentive and we don’t connect, they’re getting a discount on the product to leaving reviews at all there. They’re not required to in any way, but you can still ask them to, through your feedback sequence. Now another way that you can do this that I’ve been hearing but haven’t implemented myself, but it’s kind of it’s a new strategy hack that’s been spreading is to take your customer data from Amazon. The names and the addresses, upload them into your Business Facebook advertising account and target only those folks and ask them to leave a review. Instead of email, which people might just, every time they see an email from Amazon, just exit out.
[00:15:15] Chris: And now the problem is with feedback sequences, you can opt out as an Amazon customer and a huge portion of Amazon customers are opting out. It’s much, much harder to do that strategy anymore, but you can target them on Facebook and I only know one person that has implemented this and they’re having awesome success, but I feel that, that the strategy has been spreading. Somebody buys your product on Amazon and then a couple days later they see it appear in their Facebook feed and it kind of jolts you. It’s like, whoa hang on. How does Facebook know that I just bought this thing on Amazon and it’s like if you make it very personal and ask like as the founder for somebody to like leave a review for your product and make it easy, they’re likely to do that and I think that’s going to grow as a strategy and hack and there may even be tools that evolved to help people do that.
[00:16:17] Chris: But I think that’s one kind of like insider hack the golden nugget that your audience can take away here, Augustas.
[00:16:26] Augustas: And yeah, the person was asking how do you get the buyers and is it against TOS?
[00:16:36] Chris: No, we don’t. Everything we do is like within TOS. We’re not violating terms of service. We’re very careful to follow like Amazon’s rules because we want to be on good terms. We actually are in conversations with part of their team in their effort to help sellers expand internationally because that’s one of the biggest things that we do. So we’re not trying to get any sellers in trouble in any way. And we act as a trusted consultant and adviser to sellers that engage with us. That’s one of the big things that we do that other launch services don’t, we like very high touch and we maintain a relationship to use us.
[00:17:15] Chris: The way we get the buyers, there’s actually a multitude of ways. One way is we do highly targeted paid acquisition towards people who are interested in specific categories. We’ll know like, hey, we’re low on folks who are interested in taking health supplements in Italy that we need to run a campaign to beef up our audience in Italy for the supplements category. It’s like that granular eyes because we need to have every major category in every country that we’re live in. And we’re very careful to make sure that we are ready for any launch that comes our way. So, that’s one way. Another way that we’ve been exploring even more recently is to partner with organizations who have an audience in a specific category and then get them to have their audience members that are passionate about a specific thing to pour that passion over to us in giving them first access to new products, enter their country that are of interest to them. And when they sign on, they have to tell us what they’re interested in and like what they’re passionate about so that we can get that initial bank of data on them.
[00:18:42] Chris: Then the more they engage, the more we learn about them and the more data we collect on them so that we can better utilize them and better route offerings to the right people at the right time. We’re most likely to actually care about this thing. Because one thing that we have to constantly do is to be very diligent and stay on top from a technical standpoint to weed out people who are trying to abuse the system. So there are folks who will try to join our group so that they can resell the product. And that’s not what we want. We want real buyers who want to use the product and care about it because those are the customers that we want to link up the sellers too. We have a lot of sophisticated strategies for targeting these folks and then removing them from the audience and kicking them out.
[00:19:51] Augustas: Okay. We have a question from Shlomo who says, What’s the best 2-step URL to use to direct traffic to your page during the launch?
[00:20:03] Chris: Okay, maybe we should get a clarification on that. For his own launch, for him to run a launch day on audience. I’m assuming that Shlomo was talking about he has his own audience and he wants to use the two-step URL with his own audience to run the launch. The best thing that you could do if you have your own audience is to ask them to search for the product category, the product keyword that you have and then have them find it themselves and then buy it. Because that’s the most organic route that across a real customer would take. Instead of a URL, giving them directions to follow in order for them to search is the best. Trust me, we know because like I said, we’ve done a thousand launches and we’ve tested hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variables.
[00:21:02] Chris: So that’s what you want to do, Shlomo. If you can. The problem with this is you need to get more sophisticated. If your product is like not ranking at all for anything, if it’s like actually invisible and it’s on page 50 or something, no one’s going to be able to find it at all. But if it’s on page two or three, then if I was in your shoes and I had this audience ready to go, I would tell my audience, hey guys, search for garlic press on Amazon. You’ll find us. Just click through a couple pages and we’ll be there and then your audience can go find you, add to their cart, purchase it, pay for it, and then use the discount code, pay for it, and then receive it. That’s the most organic type of sales flow that you can get. The most organic customer journey that you can get. So there’s no trickery there. It’s because there doesn’t have to be. Because it’s actually what a customer does when they looking for a product. They’d select the best one and then they buy it. So there’s really nothing better than that. That’s the ultimate.
[00:22:16] Augustas: Thank you. And the next question, the main keyword that you use for the launch should be in the title? Does the keyword phrase have to be one word next to each other or as long as both words are in the title, then you are good to go?
[00:22:39] Chris: No. If you are looking for a multiple words search term, you want it to be in that sequence, in the title. That is important. And also the closer that it is to the beginning of the title, the better it is and the more impact it has.
[00:22:54] Augustas: How do you determine how many products to giveaway per day while the launch to get to page 1?
[00:23:04] Chris: Here’s what you want to do, you’re going to use a product discovery or data analysis tool or if you engage with us, we do this all for you. So you don’t have to worry about it. You need to find out what the top selling products are on average selling on the position that you want the keyword to rank for per day. And that’s the number that you want to start with as you’re beginning days launch. And then increase it so that you’re showing not just that you sell as much as these folks, but that day by day you’re selling more and more than them than you were before. That you’re not plateaued like they are. You’re selling as much as they are and it’s increasing. So that’s what gives you the edge over them, but that’s the order of magnitude of units that you can expect to give away every day for seven days. It’s whoever is selling in that position, however much they’re selling.
[00:24:10] Chris: If they’re selling 20 units a day, then you’re going to want to sell to 140 units. So, that’s about it.
[00:24:24] Augustas: The previous question was about 2-step URL and I see someone wants an understanding. What is 2-step URL? Could you explain?
[00:24:43] Chris: Yeah. The very basic way to do a launch with your own audience would be to send them a link to your listing and then they buy it. They add to cart and they buy it. And that’s it. But the natural link to your listing is not what leads to the greatest increase in your ranking for a given keyword. If you go to Amazon.com and you searched for a given keyword. So let’s go back to the garlic press example. You search garlic press and then you scroll down and you click a product, you look at the URL, you’ll see that the URL has the keyword and your product isn’t in it.
[00:25:24] Chris: So it’s Amazon.com/dp/{YOUR_ASIN}/keyword=garlic+press and then a bunch of other stuff like a timestamp and a number of other things. Using a specific link to boost your keyword ranking historically has come down to artificially generating a link similar to that link the person would find if they were searching for your keyword and then clicked on your product. That was what we call the Super URL back in the day. And two years ago everyone who is doing a product launch would use this type of link and it would help you to rank your product. But then it got tougher to do that because it started working here and there or not as well. And then Amazon started paying more attention to that timestamp to find out whether or not the search and the buy happened at the same time. So you could maybe create that link and then use it for your launch.
[00:26:37] Chris: But then since that QID timestamp on the search wasn’t nearly even the same as the time that they actually visited the page, click the add to cart and then click the buy. Then I’m like, hold up, this isn’t real. This link tracking should not be counted towards the ranking. So then there were tools that would help you generate a link on the fly. And that was the 2-step URL where you have them click a link. It leads them to a tool which then leads them to another link which generates a timestamp right there on the fly, that’s accurate and has the keyword in the title your ASIN. And that’s the page that the person sees. And then they would click out to cart and then they would buy. Then that was the only way that that worked consistently.
[00:27:25] Chris: But then that stopped working as well, consistently. That strategy will still work for some products sometimes, but like I said, we’ve done a ton of launches and tested everything under the sun and in my experience, I don’t trust that method anymore. Now I feel the best way to do a product launch is to have your customers, if you can. I’m assuming again, that Schlomo is doing this with his own customer base, to have them search for the product category on their own and find you and just ask them to do that. And they might take some a little bit longer. But if they do it, you can’t beat that. There’s no link that can beat that because that is literally the most organic possible way for a customer to find a product.
[00:28:28] Augustas: Someone is trying to argue to the anonymous name. Search and click is against TOS, isn’t it? Like searching and clicking like this is against Amazon TOS?
[00:28:38] Chris: Well, if you’re asking your customers to find your product and buy it, there’s no terms that can stop you from doing that. I mean, that’s just you being lazy, basically. Like, I’m not violating anything by asking someone to Google my company and then click on it. Although it may have impacts on the ranking of my site. I can still say, hey go find JudoLaunch and not say go to “www.judolaunch.com.” I think that’s up to you to make that judgment. I don’t believe that at all. I think that’s, that’s a pretty radical.
[00:29:30] Augustas: So, we got few questions directly about your services. Andy, was asking how much do you charge for managing accounts?
[00:29:50] Chris: For the account management, we take over customer service, we take over seller support communication, we take over a listing optimization for a certain number of them per month, at least. And we take over the invoicing, if it’s in Europe. We basically take over all data day to day operations of the account. It allows you to focus on growing the business instead of being in the business. And what we charge for that is a base of $500 per month, which is way less than you would ever pay any employee plus a per ASIN amount that’s tear down from $80 per parent ASIN. And then the more ASIN you have the cheaper it gets to add ASIN’s.
[00:30:45] Augustas: Next, we would like to know, how much do you charge for launching on EU markets?
[00:30:59] Chris: On EU markets the launch costs $497 and that also includes your listing optimization for that market.
[00:31:05] Augustas: And I think if they would use link below this video they might get 10% discount.
[00:31:15] Chris: Right. Yep, that’s true. As long as they know you, Augustas. They’re going to get a good deal on anything.
[00:31:27] Augustas: Nexus is asking, this purchases which are generated by your launching service. Are they verified purchases or not?
[00:31:35] Chris: No, they’re not. Because now Amazon’s definition of a verified purchase is not less than 50% off. And the discount that you have to give to our audience is greater than that. So Amazon does not count that as a verified purchase
[00:31:56] Augustas: And someone is asking. It’s Shlomo, again.
[00:32:06] Chris: Well what I was going to say is that the point is that it gives you the visibility for the organic sales to start rolling in themselves. And then all of those sales that you get as a result of the launch are verified purchases. That’s the idea.
[00:32:22] Augustas: And Shlomo wants to know if he would be able to set the amount of units per day for the launch?
[00:32:42] Chris: You can. It’s not in our user interface. But if you have a specific request that you want, like I said, we’re very high touch and we’re in constant communication with you. You just say, hey, I want this. For whatever reasons, I have my own sequence and you can just give us that and will play right in.
[00:33:04] Augustas: Ash would like to know. Do you have audiences for all the niche available? What if we are launching something with really specific niche that you don’t have the audience?
[00:33:21] Chris: By now, after doing the number of launches we do. We have pretty much everything that being said, we have had some like crazy launches that we’ve done. And what happens is if you have a product that’s very specific and we don’t have the audience for that specific thing, if it’s like a product for a person with a very rare disease or something like that and we don’t even have that data point. It’s not like, do they have scoliosis? yes or no. That’s not even in our data fields that we have in our audience. But if that happens, then we release it to the most engaged members of our audience. And it’s just the ones that we know are most likely to be engaged in purchase. If there is no really specific audience will match it as well as we can with the data that we can and then compare. Also used our engagement score with our audience and that’s how we choose who gets what you get.
[00:34:33] Chris: So we’ve had some really tough launches. And the funny thing is certain types of companies tend to gravitate towards us for launches. We launch every category, but there are certain categories that tend to come more often. And one interesting pattern that we’ve seen is that there’s companies that have little to no other options come to us. And it’s been a pretty hard challenge. Like for instance, it can be really tough for sex toy companies to sell adult toys to do marketing because they’re banned from showing because it’s graphics. They can’t show that on most of the major platforms. We’ve had like a significant number of those types of launches. We’ve also had really niche launches. Like we once had to do a launch, that was Disney princess stickers for a specific model of Keurig coffee machines. So then if you backdate that and you’re like, wow, okay, this audience has to be only people with Keurig machines and this specific model and then they have to be willing to defile their Keurig machine with these princess stickers. That’s like a very nice audience. So, the answer is yes, that can be done. It’s just gets adapted.
[00:36:20] Augustas: All right. Jemsose is asking, are you able to share the site your buyers use to find the products you are launching?
[00:36:27] Chris: No, we can’t. And the reason is because we’re like the trusted adviser to the sellers that launch with us and many times it ends up being a very long-term relationship. We don’t want sellers to start obsessively, competitively spying on each other. Because we’re at the point now where we’re likely to be doing multiple launches and in multiple categories and sometimes at the same time. We want the sellers to trust us that we’re not going to give their competitor data about what they’re launching and when. So that they can potentially respond to that and they could end up being just a lose, lose battle. And for us, we keep doing the launches and that’s great. But really we more care about the long term success of sellers that use us. So, to protect everyone, we don’t share the name of it.
[00:37:38] Augustas: Great. Sascha wants to know a very interesting question. She says, don’t you think that the impact on sales velocity of highly discounted sales will be reduced or even cut completely? In the end Amazon knows that discount codes are created to manipulate ASIN’s?
[00:37:55] Chris: Yeah. This has come up like over and over again in the past couples of years. Yet launches continue to work and be the best strategy to aggressively grow sales if you have quality products. And the reason is this, I can tell you about the fact that we’re running dozens and dozens of launches every week that it works. It hasn’t stopped working at all. It works very well and the reason it does and the reason it will continue to work is because it’s actually an efficient value product finding function for Amazon. Because like I was saying in the beginning of this Q and A, if your product is not quality and it’s not converting and it’s making promises that it doesn’t live up to, it falls back down very quickly. So this is actually a way to give products better quality but not visible chance to go where they belong quicker.
[00:39:01] Chris: So it actually makes the whole market more efficient because then every product gets a shot. Amazon’s getting better at measuring the real conversion rate over time and the sessions, the clicks and all of the data on the product and responding to that very quickly. It gives the products the shot and if they’re good then they stay and that’s good for the whole marketplace and if they’re bad then they drop back down and that’s kind of like a smack on the wrist. Like, hey, don’t waste your money on a launch until you have a good product and a good listing. And I think that seller then learns that lesson and is likely to focus on the fundamentals before doing the next launch. So the whole marketplace as a whole, it gets better because of this process. It speeds up the rate at which good products end up being shown more and bad products end up being shown less. Which is what Amazon wants.
[00:40:01] Augustas: How can you assure that you are helping to launch a good product? Maybe, it’s a bad product.
[00:40:13] Chris: To be honest, in the very beginning of JudoLaunch days, we were taking any launch that came our way. I mean we’re bootstrapped and taking whatever business we could. We did have times where we launched a product that was providing bad or even horrible customer experience. I won’t say it online because it would be obvious what the product was. But we’ve had a couple disasters with our audience and then we learned to actually filter those out. Here’s one of the things that’s different about JudoLaunch than other launch companies. We actually care about the audience that’s getting the product and we do a lot to ensure that they are well taken care of. They’re more likely to engage and be like really passionate users and customers and hopefully loyal brand followers, if you’re a brand in the future.
[00:41:19] Chris: Because we don’t send them shitty products. Like when you post a launch on JudoLaunch, it goes into moderation for a period of 12 to 24 hours before the actual launch itself starts. If the moderator scans the launch and deemed that this product is definitely bad then the launch is denied and it doesn’t go through. That’s the price that you pay for going with a launch service that actually cares about the members. There are sellers that get denied and then they have to go to another launch service and we’re happy to push away that business because that’s the business that we don’t want. We’ve been able to as JudoLaunch grew, we’ve been able to be not picky but more rational about the launches that come through the platform. And it’s a very small fraction of launches that don’t get approved.
[00:42:25] Chris: But yeah, that’s how we do it. It actually gets checked by human. Every single launch gets scanned by human before being approved and being started. Then again, there is some things that we can’t see by looking at it. It’s possible that this is what can happen is account manager will have direct contact with the business owner or the person who’s doing the lunch and if they’re not straightforward that there’s some kind of defect in the product or that they’re making some kind of promise that they can’t live up to for the customer, then the negative reviews will start rolling in. And that product launch won’t be sticky. I’m only saying this honestly because launches aren’t magic. They are the best way to do a product release, but they’re not magic.
[00:43:14] Chris: You have to have the fundamentals down in order for it to be successful. I’d love to say that it’s all you need because it’s what we provide. But, it’s really not. The fundamentals need to be there for it to be successful. And that’s just the cold hard truth.
[00:43:34] Augustas: Right and then now I see some people waiting for the tips you promise to share. You said that you are in China and you know some things how Chinese sellers launching products. Maybe you can talk about this a little bit.
[00:43:55] Chris: Yeah. So, this is actually for people that want to dig into that a little bit more. We’re going to be having a dedicated webinar on this specific subject next week with my friend Gary, who’s like one of the biggest influencers, if not the biggest influencer in the Amazon seller community in Shanghai. So, that’s that. But basically how it works here in China is that the entire like mental model or like ethos around building an Amazon business or building an eCommerce business is completely different. And I think the most common thing here is that they can dump an inordinate amount of human labor on something. So whereas you might be using jungle scout to identify the competition for a given product and then getting prototypes from Alibaba and then sourcing them out and picking your supplier to work with and then choosing them and blah blah blah.
[00:45:03] Chris: In China everything happens at like 20 times the speed. They have like a team of like 10 or 20 like doing this analysis. And they’re not only finding what’s selling well, but they’re finding the velocity at which this product is selling, this product category or this product type is selling well and selling more and more. And that’s how they’ll establish a trend and they’ll try to grab the trend before the trend hits. And once they do that, since they have the price power they have the ability. If you’re a western seller, you don’t have this ability because you’re not close to the source. You’re not either the supplier or the trader. So what they do is get ridiculously aggressive on the units, like sending out a ton of units to just flood the market.
[00:46:09] Chris: And they’ll even do a number of different brands for the same product. So that they can take many different spots on the same page. It’s like the Proctor and Gamble’s strategy if you go to the shelf to buy your detergent and you have like 10 different options, but like six of them are Proctor and Gamble. That’s something that you see here a lot. There’ll be a factory that produces a product, then they have like six different brands for the same one. So they take up more of the eyeball space and they’ll launch them all concurrently. So then you’re getting squeezed out not only buy one listing but buy three. And that much more of the real estate that you don’t see. Another thing is what I wouldn’t recommend, but it’s extremely common here. I don’t engage in this myself by the way, it’s very more common.
[00:47:27] Chris: It’s not a Facebook. In China we use WeChat. WeChat is basically like Facebook, Whatsapp, PayPal and like every other app you’ve ever used in one app. It’s like the one app that everyone in China has and uses. So, WeChat groups that are private, that sellers enter and their whole sole purpose is to find people who will buy their product at full price plus and then they’ll refund that person through PayPal or other transfer some other way and pay them more. And they pay like some large amount for each verified purchase, full price per purchase. And they’ll in many times make them leave a review as well and sometimes write it for them. So that they can stuff all the keywords that they want in there.
[00:48:25] Chris: It’s really common here. Now, it’s because it’s so common Amazon has gotten a better at cracking down on it and they’re getting way more sophisticated, which is good for everyone else. Because it means that the seller’s focusing on fundamentals and providing value to the customer and doing things the right way. In other words, are more likely to see success in the black hat guys. But Amazon is very quick plea like keeping up with this and they’re now spotting the people who tend to leave reviews and only five star reviews, like hundreds of them every week. And just blocking them from leaving reviews because those are the guys that are most likely engaging in this type of service. And then they’ll find the sellers that get reviews at a rate that’s significantly different than other sellers, selling the same type of product who have released their products.
[00:49:22] Chris: So they’re keeping track of the averages of each product and then comparing them with how many reviews your product got over the same period of time. And if you got too many, whether or not they were full purchase, straight up real product purchases, they’ll stop you from being able to get any more. Refused or even remove and refuse. So now, the Chinese sellers have to slowly improve and slowly by the reviews. But Amazon is even catching onto that. It’s like a constant war. I don’t want to spend the whole time talking about this because I have a dedicated webinar just for this subject happening next week. And by the way, Augustas. I hope you’re not upset with me for saying that. I’m only saying that because your person asked. I’m not trying to make anybody come to that, but if that person is interested in that, feel free to attend that Webinar with Gary because he’s the expert. He’ll jump into all that.
[00:50:26] Augustas: First of all, we don’t encourage this kinds of PayPal review stuff. It’s probably gray or black method.
[00:50:33] Chris: No, definitely not. Like I said, I don’t do that and I wouldn’t recommend that. But there’s crazy stuff happening here. I mean the other thing though having multiple brands that’s fine. You’re allowed to have so many brands that you want. There’s actually all kinds of strategies.
[00:51:05] Augustas: So yeah, we do have a few more questions. But before we move on, you mentioned this Webinar and some people will be watching this recording weeks later, might be that Webinar will be gone, but can you tell us the best way to jump on your regular webinars? I know JudoLaunch is doing all the time a content like this. What’s the best way for people to join this upcoming webinars and future ones.
[00:51:33] Chris: Yeah, if you just go to JudoLaunch.com and scroll down on the blog, then there’s a little field where you can input your email address and then we just notify you every time there’s a new webinar. And we try to do one every week. In the past month we haven’t been living up to that. But up until then we were doing just about one per week. And we’re getting back on the rhythm there. They’re all on some subjects with like an expert in that subject. We did tax with TaxJar. We did logistics with Flexport. We did payments with Payoneer. We did PPC with PPC Entourage. We bring in the people who know this stuff best. It’s pretty fun.
[00:52:22] Augustas: All right. So let’s move on to one of the last questions. Gerda wants to know, what tool would you advise to analyze the sales of the best selling competition?
[00:52:41] Chris: You want to use Amachete. Amachete is a great tool. Best one out there in my opinion. By Phil. I know you know Phil, Augustas. Phil is a great guy and he’s obsessively dedicated to the product. So, I recommend that over any other product analysis tool. I think that’s the best that you can get.
[00:53:14] Augustas: Perfect. And then another viewer is asking, what keyword position does JudoLaunch aim for? In your recent data, did you determine if results differentiate whether it’s more effective for one day total sales spike versus several days?
[00:53:32] Chris: Yeah, seven days to be specific is the best. Seven days increasing product sales every day for a period of seven days is the best sequence that we quantitatively decided on from our analysis. And we’ve done every sequence in the history of the business over a thousand launches that we’ve done. We can say definitively that is the best sequence. In terms of the keyword position, it depends on your level of competition that you have. Because maybe you are on page 20 and you’d be happy with being at the bottom of page one because you’re selling an insanely high competition product in the US market, which is the most high competitive market as well. Or maybe you’re more of the spread wide type of seller like Chris Davey does this. I don’t know if you know Chris, Augustas. But Chris strategy is to sell various specific niche products, but a lot of them have a unique designs for each one and unique type products for each. That it’s not a high enough competition for like a ton of other sellers to come in and compete with them because it’s niche enough.
[00:55:03] Chris: And nobody’s going to copy him because it’s nice enough, but he has a differentiated product so he can dominate that niche. He’s kind of got the best of both worlds, which I love. So for him, if I was in that opposition, I’d be going for spot number one, but like I said, whatever spot you are going to decide the units that you need to distribute in order to get there, you want to look at the average daily sales of the seller who is there and you want to match or exceed that. So that’s the strategy you’re going to want to use despite whatever position it is. That’s what you want it to.
[00:55:47] Augustas: Great. Zydrunas, would like to know, does your launch include review of feedback generation? We already touched that at the beginning, but you can repeat them.
[00:55:58] Chris: Yeah. No, it doesn’t include reviews because it’s against Amazon’s terms of service to incentivize a review, even if it’s not a positive review. So the consumers in the network that we have, the members are not required to leave a review. That said, you have a feedback system in place. Like, Feedback fiber, Feedback Genius and etc. I would highly recommend having something that asks for review just for nothing. Because you want them to leave one. We also touched on that strategy of uploading your product data into Facebook and targeting those people and asking them to leave review. I think that’s a really cool strategy that I think will end up being pretty hot among the seller community soon. But right now, only a couple sellers are doing it.
[00:57:06] Augustas: Similar question related is given by Gerda. She’s asking what technique can you advice for the follow up of a successful launch?
[00:57:19] Chris: Okay, yeah. That’s where all the other fancy stuff comes in. So as soon as you’ve done a launch and it’s successful, you want to maintain that momentum in every way possible. So the most basic thing you need to do is ramp up your PPC and you’ll first want to ramp up PPC for both your automatic campaigns. If you’re doing this new launch, you wanted to run your automatic campaigns concurrently with a pretty high cost per click so that you can get high volume and as quickly as you can usually you have to give it about two weeks, suss out the most high performing keywords that are fairly high volume and then do individual keywords for each individual campaigns for each of those and a campaign for the keyword that you’re trying to boost. So that way there’s even more of a chance. Even if you are ranking well just to keep that momentum going for a while.
[00:58:20] Chris: It’s good to kind of do these extra strategies and give it a little bit more of an artificial boost. Do the PPC aggressively on that keyword for a couple weeks after your launch ends. And then also do everything else you basically have in your arsenal. So you can run a campaign to your email list that leads them to that product and you can ramp up your Facebook advertising and even just communicate any way possible with your buyers. Whether it’s that Facebook re-targeting by pixeling them or adding their product data to Facebook or it’s by sending out an email and having just stellar customer support. If you’re actively following it up with everything that can possibly do to encourage more positive reviews and more sales to that product. It’s going to give it a better chance because Amazon’s looking at the average of the past daily sales.
[00:59:22] Chris: It’s looking at the trailing seven, the trailing 30, the trailing 90 of the sales of the product. So it’s important over time to keep that up. And then once you hit like enough past data for Amazon to know, without a shadow of a doubt, this is the best product for our customer to buy, searching this term. Then you’re pretty much set. Like, other people can come in and do launches, but you have that long data history. So they can come in and draw back down, if they’re not as good as you. And you’ll keep that for the foreseeable future and you’re pretty aggressive with it. Another big thing that I do that’s just a little sort of loophole is a lot of people will tend to accidentally leave seller feedback. That’s a review. So they’ll leave a review in your seller feedback and I like to keep these in the bank.
[01:00:26] Chris: So that when I do a launch like this and I want to follow it up with more proof to the algorithm that yes, it is the best product. I can go into my bank of seller feedback and one by one, contact those people and say, hey, by the way, thanks for everything you said that was also about that product. I’m glad you liked it. It just so you know, you actually left seller feedback, not a review. They’re not really the same thing. If you wouldn’t mind just click here to leave an actual review for this product. I copied and pasted what you said into this email for you to make it as easy as possible for you so that you can just copy and paste it right into the the review. So copy this, paste it right into this link. And then you can do that all at once, but not a ton of them. But you can keep those in the bank so that you can trigger them whenever you want. And that’s a really nice way to generate reviews on command. And I use that to help follow up with launch myself, that would be very successful.
[01:01:39] Augustas: Great. Tash is asking, do you have a 2-step URL generator in mind that can generate individual timestamps on the fly?
[01:01:48] Chris: No. Not really. Since we’re using our own, I don’t use 2-step URL services at all, anymore. So I think I’m probably not the best one to ask about that. Everything is internal now for us and for my own brand I use JudoLaunch. Maybe somebody else in the community could provide that to you.
[01:02:14] Augustas: I’m not sure. Maybe, Helium 10 you can check. But I don’t remember exactly. So one of the last questions by Jemsose, let’s say you have a product that is number #2 search results for a particular search term. How do you determine number of units necessary to sell with JudoLaunch to move to number #1?
[01:02:50] Chris: Well, it sounds like the strategy that we already went over wouldn’t work for him because maybe number one, selling less for whatever reason. In that case I would use the sales that the competitor is making as the benchmark and if it’s lower than yours then use yours with a margin of increase. And likely what are account manager would do that was assigned that launch wouldn’t be doing analysis on the rest of the page and find out what the top dogs are doing and likely. There’s different main keywords for this type of product. It sounds like by the wording of the question. So they do an analysis to get an average across the couple of major keywords that the top sellers are doing for that type of product. And then use that as the benchmark of the day one sales and then ramp up from there. But you’ll get a recommendation for that. You don’t have to actually choose.
[01:03:56] Augustas: All right. We don’t have any more questions. So maybe once again you can present your company. What services do you offer for Amazon sellers and how can they find you?
[01:04:12] Chris: Sure, dude. Yeah, it’s already midnight here on Friday. I guess it’s time to crack open my first beer. So, JudoLaunch is launch company for Amazon sellers looking to increase sales of their products and we help them to execute product launches and then handle with the operational load for after they’re launched is successful by automating their basic account operations over time. And then we also helped them, before the launch by helping translate and optimize their listings by writing sales copy that speaks to the human beings that are reading the listing. And providing the keywords necessary that speak to the robots that who reads the algorithms that are reading the listings. So, it’s everything that you need before, during, and after your product launch to increase the sales of your product.
[01:05:17] Augustas: Perfect. Thank you very much. People will find the link to your company below this video, in the description. And good luck in the business and bye bye.
[01:05:32] Chris: Thanks Bro. Great talking to you guys. Have a good day/night.
