[00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute, winning search and driving conversion of the two e-commerce victories that get the attention of the Amazon algorithm and drive the flywheel.
[00:00:27] Turns out, when brands struggle with those metrics, the cause often lies way, way down in the detailed depths of Amazon Vendor Central. Justin Leigh, CEO at Workflow Labs, joins Lauren Levack-Gilbert and me to talk about strategies to identify the root causes of friction in your Amazon funnel and how to fix them. Justin, welcome to the podcast. We are so delighted to have you on. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. I'm a long-time listener and real excited to participate.
[00:00:57] A first-time caller. Yeah, thank you. We're so delighted to have you on. So, in the work that you do, you spend your days deep in the depths of Amazon, and I don't even want to know what that looks like. But, you know so many of the pitfalls that brands run into when they're working in Vendor Central. There should be like a Darth Vader Echo or something like that around that.
[00:01:18] So, you are going to bring the knowledge today about how brands can avoid some of those pitfalls that they might run into or maybe even get the better of them. So, I hope I haven't set you up too much for success or failure, but tell us, what is the number one thing that brands can try to work on to get better results from the effort they put into Amazon Vendor Central?
[00:01:47] Yeah, I think that's a great question. And first of all, I do not claim to know all the knowledge of all the depths of the Death Star. Darn it. That's what we were hoping for. Then you can't, you can't just, you can't say with us. But I do work with a lovely team, and they have years and years and years of knowledge. And so, you know, it's better to work with good people than be good is my philosophy.
[00:02:12] So, I'll do what I can to kind of share the things we've learned about working with Amazon and what brands can do to get more out of the platform. We know it's a challenge. Prior to my current company, Workflow Labs, I'm an agency for about 14 years. So, we've seen a lot of problems on Amazon. And the words maybe I hate the most are, oh, your catalog is messed up. You have a messed up catalog. Like, I don't know. Everyone says that. I don't really know what it means after hearing it thousands of times.
[00:02:42] I think it just means that, like, there are things in your configuration of how you're doing business with Amazon that aren't correct, that you don't really understand. And so, we just call it this big messed up label and want the problem to go away. Good luck with that. Yeah. Good luck with that. Yeah, totally. Yeah. How much is it going to cost to have it not messed up? Exactly. Okay. But, you know, inside that catalog is really the operating system of how you do business with Amazon.
[00:03:07] And all of the downstream things that you plan and strategize and think about and do with Amazon is rooted in how well you have integrated your data system with how Amazon understands your products. So, you know, little errors like you have the wrong item type keywords or you have the wrong case pack cause all kinds of downstream ramifications that even the best marketing campaign in the world can't solve.
[00:03:33] So, if I had one recommendation for brands before, you know, they start spending money on things is to understand my product selection. Is it set up correctly? Is it going to work in the environment of Amazon where I'm doing business? Because if it's not, you shouldn't.
[00:03:53] So, I'd say the number one thing is to like understand the environment you're working with and are you giving it the right information to understand who you are as a brand and what your products are as items that customers want. And is it clear in Amazon what those things are or is that kind of the tricky art of the science of working with Amazon? You know, I think, no, it's not clear.
[00:04:19] And even if it was clear, it's going to change tomorrow. So, it's like you're operating in this unclear, constantly changing environment, which might sound like a pitch for services, but it's not. You know, that's like sort of like our whole lives are like that. Whatever was true last week in AI isn't true this week. So, you know, I think it's kind of getting comfortable with ambiguity and knowing that this isn't something you can just wish away or do once and be done with it.
[00:04:47] Like this is, you know, your data integration with Amazon is the reality of what e-commerce success is based on. So, it should be a constant journey, something you're always thinking about and spending time and effort on as a brand. So, can you dive into a bit of an example of what you mean that might be illuminating for our listeners? Yeah, I think that's a great question.
[00:05:12] So, one of the most obvious things on Amazon that maybe people don't think about is the way products are variated together on the detail page. So, I mean, I think a great example of this is peanut. There is M&M's. So, if you go to shop M&M's on Amazon, maybe you type M&M's or maybe a delicious chocolate candy, whatever you're going to search. You can figure that out yourselves. And you're going to get to this detail page.
[00:05:37] And on that detail page, if it only has like the tiny Halloween pack size and you're trying to buy them for a fundraiser or something, you're not going to buy those. The conversion rate will be 0% for that detail page. And the most important metric, I think, in the world on Amazon is conversion rate. Conversion rate is just simply of the people that come to your detail page, what percent of them result in a sale?
[00:06:03] Or in Amazon's case, how many units do you get per detail page is the definition of conversion. And increasing conversion, if you double conversion, you double sales. It's a really great, you know, fulcrum of effectivity. I just made up that word. On Amazon. And so, if you think about variation, it's the number one way to really significantly increase the conversion of your detail pages once you've kind of done the basics of images and price and titles and such.
[00:06:32] And brands do it terribly, terribly, terribly. There's so many products where it's just a single product on Amazon instead of the family of products like you'd expect in a grocery store or somewhere else where you have like the selection that a normal person would pick from all sitting right there. And so, when it comes to variations on the page, the first thing to do is understand what is my strategy? Like, what products should I put together? Understand who your customer is and are they going to pick from like different flavors? They can pick from different sizes.
[00:07:02] But what is the right shopping experience on my detail page? And then maybe the worst thing about variations is that they are so fluid on Amazon. Everybody with an offer for your product and there's third parties and other vendors in some cases, lots of different people can sell the same product on Amazon. And all of them have a right to tell Amazon how to merchandise the product they're trying to sell. There's a hierarchy of rightness and brands should be at the top of that if they've done the catalog correctly.
[00:07:33] But once you've set your variation, everybody else can like say, no, I think it should be this way or that way. So, you have to set these variations and then constantly work to keep those variations correct. So, that was a really long way of saying if you had one tactical way to improve your Amazon business on Amazon and make life better for your customers, it's to think about how my product's variated and what's my strategy for keeping them variated or merchandised the right way over time as that constantly changes.
[00:08:02] At Workflow Labs, we audit variations. And unless there's a strong strategy on the brand side to track and make sure they're correct, they're right about 25% of the time. So, the number one driver thing you can do as a brand to improve conversion is right a quarter of the time. Wow. And my previous agency, you know, somebody like, oh, our ACOS dropped by, you know, half a point. I'm like, but your variations are all messed up.
[00:08:30] Like, let's focus in like the things that matter first and then like let's get to the details. You're really going to move the needle. Yeah. Because, you know, sitting in the cheap seats here, it seems like, well, that should be a pretty obvious thing to do. What is it that, because you started out by saying brands are really bad at this. Why do you think that is? Is it just not knowing where to focus or that that can be a big driver for them? Or what is that, you know, what do you think is the barrier there?
[00:08:59] I think there's a lot of barriers here. I mean, the first barrier is just understanding what variations are and how you should think about them. Unless you're talking to someone who's been in e-commerce for a little while, if you ask them, hey, how are your hero skills variated? Like, they're not going to know what you're talking about. So, the first thing is just some basic understanding. It's not very hard. You go to a detail page on Amazon, you see a collection. I get it. It's a variation. But the second thing is understanding your customers, like what products should be on the page together.
[00:09:27] If I'm shopping M&Ms, for example, should it be different sizes of peanut M&Ms? Or should it be the same size of multiple different flavors of M&Ms, like caramel and peanut and so on and so forth? And being thoughtful around what is the right way to group those together. And then leveraging those variations to launch new products so that they have some traction before the launch. So, having a strategy is not trivial and it's very important. But then probably the hardest thing is just the sheer volume of managing these things.
[00:09:55] Once you launch them into the wild, maybe they get launched correctly. It's hard to say because it oftentimes takes a week or so for a new variation strategy to launch on Amazon. And then you have to check every detail page to say, is my variation correct? Yes or no. If you're an apparel vendor, like North Face with 150,000 SKUs, that is a very challenging prospect in front of you to make sure that every day your variations are set up correctly. And if not, what do you do about it? Like, how do you file tickets and work with Amazon correctly to get them fixed?
[00:10:25] It's really hard. So, you know, I don't want to be too hard on brands about this. Think about seasonality. Like, let's keep the M&M example, right? Like, there's Easter M&Ms. There's, I think they do Christmas M&Ms. There's all kinds of different M&Ms. Like, would you think of including seasonality in variations as well? And can that help improve, you said, like new product launches or is that something that should be totally separate? Like, how do you see that factoring in?
[00:10:53] Yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of ways that brands are disadvantaged in e-commerce. So, like, for example, in the old days, if you're tied, you get this shelf placement that you want because you're tied. Now you can't go to Amazon and say, hey, I want to be in this spot because I'm a big brand. Or you shouldn't get preference. Like, you have customer views and other things that are maybe more important in many cases than brand when it comes to engaging shoppers.
[00:11:20] But one of the things that big established smart brands have in their favor is they understand their customers so much better than, like, some digitally native brand that's new to the space or from a different space. And so I think leveraging that knowledge about their customers is one of the greatest strengths that brands should really lean into.
[00:11:38] And understanding seasonality and how customers think about seasonality and adopting their strategies around variations in particular, but definitely marketing and content as well is something they should definitely be doing. Think about what should my variation strategy this quarter be or round of this holiday. And I think they can probably outpace some of the brands that are less knowledge about how their customers shop.
[00:12:06] So you mentioned North Face as an apparel brand. And I can see this being very daunting with the amount of sizes, the different variations, like pants, shirts, tops, so many different variations when it comes to apparel. How do they tackle this? Is it a people-process-technology problem? Is it, like, a strategy problem? Like, how would you suggest, especially in the apparel industry, they think about variation?
[00:12:31] Yeah, I think, like, most things I know, I first start with, like, a knowledge of, like, how the system works. And, like, once you understand how the system works, and then you can think about your products and apply strategy. And then you figure out what are the right tools to help me roll out my strategy in this given space. So if I think about apparel, the number one problem with apparel is it changes all of the time. And if you think about Amazon, the whole system is designed to maximize revenue per shopping session on Amazon.
[00:13:01] So if, you know, if you, Lauren, go to Amazon and you search with a given keyword, let's call it pants, it's going to say, well, of all the pants that have been sold in the past to people that kind of have a similar shopping behavior to Lauren, like, which are the most likely to drive a conversion or a sale in this given shopping session. And I can tell you, it is not the product that just launched because it has no data whatsoever. It has none. The likelihood of that thing being purchased on Amazon, according to their system, is zero.
[00:13:31] So you're not going to get that one. So if you're thinking about a variation strategy, you should think, well, search is the most important thing. Amazon cares about converting sessions to sales. So I need a set of evergreen anchoring SKUs that have tons and tons and tons of data over years. And I can use those SKUs to pull in my customers onto my landing page. And then I can variate in a thoughtful way. How do I take someone into kind of like your standard khaki pants, which haven't changed in 30 years or so,
[00:14:01] and start to talk about newer fashions and have like those anchoring products, drawing customers and converting them into newer selection? I think that's an excellent strategy. Now, doing that at scale and changing every season with 100,000 SKUs, you're going to need some technology systems to do that. And variations are similar to content. You know, it changes that way. You know, having a strong PIM solution that can house that information and syndicate it for you is critical.
[00:14:30] And, you know, I think those systems around content will extend into other areas that are equally critical, like variations and other back-end support systems as well. But trying to deploy 100,000 variations every quarter would be pretty impossible with people. And I have to tell you, Justin, I don't search for khaki pants. But if I did, I'm sure I would find what you were talking about. But it's a question about the content piece there.
[00:14:59] So you have different variations. We're going to stay with the khaki pant example. Let's say you have different variations of the khaki pant. Maybe it's the different colors because they're coming out with like a green or maroon or something like that. From a content perspective, each specific SKU should still have unique content to that product from like a color standpoint or a model standpoint. But are there any recommendations around making them seem like a family of products?
[00:15:27] Meaning do they have the same like image around the quality of the pant? Are there any recommendations about how you look at your content for different variations, even though the product might be slightly different? Yeah, I think this really comes into the art of sometimes I think a lot about like what is brand? What is the role of a brand in the future? Because the role of the brand in the past used to be established trust with a customer.
[00:15:54] Trust now is conveyed so much by customer reviews as it is to brand. Like we can say, I trust that product more than I trust that brand. And I trust that product because a billion people gave it four stars. So now I think about like over time, like how do brands adapt to this and how should they be thinking about the world and leveraging their strengths and getting ahead? Of folks that don't have as much experience with products and are in that space in the same way. And so I think this is a great example of one of them.
[00:16:21] The first thing you should think of, like you need a strategy and each product is going to have a different strategy. A great strategy could be, well, I have this anchoring product that has a million people hitting it every single day. They're khaki pants. I'm going to launch some pants that are really maybe not like khaki pants at all, but they're new and they're innovative and they're cool. And I'm going to let its content be 100% different than the khaki pants, but I'm going to vary them on the same page.
[00:16:45] Because I know just enough people will click on this other version and start to give it some data and give it its own traffic. And as soon as it has some sales and data traffic, I'm going to spin it out and create its own detail page and vary it with its family of more like items because now it has enough data to stand on its own. So in that case, like maybe it's a premium product kind of variated against a khaki pants, which maybe isn't.
[00:17:10] And the content should be 100% different to, you know, let customers know that this is not the same product. Other times, like I think in M&Ms, for example, like they sort of have this movie line. And I think in a variation where it's the movie line in M&Ms, it should be really constant content across that family. And just let the family stand out and the variation or the flavor kind of set become secondary.
[00:17:36] But those are all sort of like strategic initiatives, I think, support the brand's objective. And there's just different ways to go to market on Amazon about that. That's part of what I was wondering as I was thinking about this, you know, as I'm listening to this conversation.
[00:17:52] It seems like Amazon is a crap ton or any retailer really is a crap ton of details that are constantly being executed at a high rate of speed. And ultimately, there needs to be a decision of focus. Like, where can I get the biggest bang for the buck? Where should I be put in?
[00:18:21] Today, we're talking a lot about variations. And maybe sometimes it's variations. And I guess where I'm going to is you keep bringing back, and rightly so, the strategy. What are you trying to achieve with this product or across your catalog? And that often might be sort of what's missing? Because that begins, and I want to know if that's true with, you know, the clients that you work with.
[00:18:47] Is it that you start to dive in on some detail, and then you need to back out and realize, oh, we actually don't really know what we're trying to achieve here. Am I misreading sort of what you're saying? Or is there a fair point there to be made? Yeah, you kind of made me think about a bunch of things in there. So maybe if I could put it into three. I feel like the answer is always three. If I could put it into three things.
[00:19:13] The first thing of the three things is every brand should understand its funnel of value. I guess that's so I'll come back to that. And then the second thing you made me think about was that the world is constantly changing. You have to do so many different things. So the idea, and we have so many more tools to do that than we used to. So brands should also be focusing on creating systems so they can stop doing as many things and let the systems do more things. And let's just go to two on this.
[00:19:43] Let's go to two. We'll get to the third one. So the first one is this funnel of value. So if you think about what's most likely to drive a sale, the top of the funnel is availability. If the product is out of stock, it will drive zero sales. And, you know, this funnel kind of keeps coming down to get to a very fine point at the end. You're talking about maybe more strategic broad scale marketing that are creating like awareness and perception. You know, you kind of go from just sheer availability down to like some preference drivers.
[00:20:12] And I think every brand every week should look at their funnel and say, where do we have problems in this funnel? Is it supply chain? Is it product con? Is it price? Is it product content? Is it variations? You know, and keep driving, driving down that. And after you do it for two or three weeks, it can be a real fast process. Like, you know, you have a nice dashboard. It tells you where your problem is and you should focus on that. And I would say probably 80 to 90% of brands don't do that. They mostly ask their agency, why did my ACOS get worse?
[00:20:43] And, and why isn't my title or why aren't my titles correct? Like, well, you're out of stock. Why don't we start there? Because you didn't ship any PLs. Right. So, so I think, do you think you're right? Like we kind of focused in on these details where you should start every conversation, big picture Mondays, how does our funnel look? And then wherever the problems are, dial into there. It's probably the right way to think about your Amazon business. Second one I want to, I want to just sort of mention is, is systems. Something I think that is near and dear to all our hearts.
[00:21:12] And when you say, just to make sure, when you say systems, do you mean processes that then technology can help? Not systems. Because I was just not sure if you were talking about actual technology or really having the right sort of process. So, so just would love you to include that in your, in your answer. Absolutely. Having the right technologies, doing things for you across the stack.
[00:21:35] And I think that's sort of the message of 2025, which will only ring louder in the years to come is, is AI and automation takes over so many more of the monotonous things that we do. So, but we're here at Workflow Labs. We're in the business of understanding how expensive monotonous activities are, not just in terms of labor and time, but the things that keep you from doing. So, so if you think about North Face with 150,000 SKUs, all of those have titles and bullets and descriptions and colors.
[00:22:05] And those things change over time, rapidly, seasonality, all of those things. And if they're cutting tickets to Amazon and doing that manually, you know, it's roughly 25 to 35 minutes per interaction with Amazon. If people are doing it manually, if I'm going, if they go to Amazon to change the title or update an image, because you have to do it. You have to make sure Amazon does it. You have to check on it later, really time consuming.
[00:22:28] So having teaching organization to use a PIM correctly, one of the hardest things I've seen in the world across organizations, but you have to get people to use it because otherwise you're getting so many errors. Using the right technologies to be managing your marketing bids, right technologies to be managing your invoices and all of that so that you really can just check the box and say, yep, it's great. I can see this metric says my things are correct. Now I can be spending my time on marketing strategy and how I'm going to become more and more relevant to customers.
[00:22:58] Otherwise, you know, brands will only be bogged down in the minutia of managing the details rather than growing the business. Love that. So one of the things that Amazon has asked brands to invest in has been the brand store. And I hear a bunch of differing thoughts about whether that's really helpful to the brand or is it helpful to Amazon or, you know, what is it?
[00:23:25] So what is your point of view on do you need a brand store? What does it do? How do you make it, you know, produce to your point? How does it take friction out of your fund? Yeah, I think the great question. And I was at Amazon back 2005, 2008, kind of when brand stores are still pretty new. And we were kind of shocked what brands would pay for brand stores. I managed traffic for the consumables category. That was my role.
[00:23:53] And so my job was to figure out where are customers? Where do they convert? What does conversion look like in different areas and what drives conversion? One thing I can tell you, at least back then, brand stores did not. And that really hasn't changed strategically for Amazon. Because, like, as a normal customer on Amazon, like, I don't know, you could just go on Amazon, check it and watch yourself in a session and see how many times you go to a brand store. My guess is it will be zero. But they were great revenue drivers for us back in the day.
[00:24:23] I'm sure it's a great revenue driver for Amazon today, which doesn't mean that they're worthless. It just means that if you are giving money to Amazon for a brand store without a strategy, you are wasting your money. Full stop. And you probably didn't do the work to fix your catalog and make sure that your brand is harmonized. So even if you did spend the money and customers aren't going to find your brand store because your brand sometimes is M space and space M. And other times it's M ampersand M.
[00:24:53] Sometimes Zim ampersand M apostrophe S. All of those things create a link that goes to a different brand page. And so they can't even find your brand store unless you did the work upfront to make sure your catalog is correct and that your brand is represented the same across all of your products. But let's say that you are a brand that's done that work and that you do have a strategy for why a brand store is worth it. Then I think that begs the question of when is a brand store worth it?
[00:25:22] And brand stores can be worth it if you have a brand that is driving traffic from somewhere else. You got a Facebook page or your own website or something else where you're capturing traffic and you want to send them to Amazon to convert into sales, which I think is a great strategy. This is a three for one kind of strategy because if you take a customer from like a brand store or brand page, it's not a store, M&M's for example. Customer goes to M&M's.
[00:25:50] That customer is highly engaged. They're not out there asking what the weather is. They are M&M's customer if they're willing to go to the M&M's website. If they go from the M&M's website to Amazon, the probability that they will convert to sale is somewhere around 45 to 50%, which is awesome. If you put that customer onto your detail page on Amazon, that does wonders for your Amazon business because Amazon says, oh my gosh, look at these awesome customers on Amazon's detail page.
[00:26:18] I should put more or on M&M's detail page. I should put more customers on M&M's detail page because the conversion rate is through the roof. And this is a great way to jumpstart new products and grow your business. If you are a brand where it's weird to put a customer on a detail page because you have a full selection of products and maybe you don't know what they're interested in yet, like North Face, you put them on a backpack page detail page on Amazon. That's a weird experience.
[00:26:42] So you're much better off taking a North Face customer to a North Face brand page where the customer can then select, hey, I'm into shirts or jackets or backpacks or whatever. And then they go to a detail page.
[00:26:53] That's an excellent strategy, in my opinion, around using a high value traffic source, putting them onto a page that appropriately funnels them into their selected area and driving them to somewhere where it's not only going to create traffic now and sales now on Amazon, it's going to have a multiplier effect and grow your Amazon business tremendously over time because you're just feeding such rich data into Amazon.
[00:27:16] So in that aspect, if they have the right strategy, it goes back to your earlier question, Peter, or observation, if they have the right strategy, they can be great. If you're just buying one, you're wasting your money. I mean, that's great advice. I think a lot of people need to reassess what they're paying for and really kind of have a clear strategy and ask the right questions. I love that point. And I'm going to double click on that for everyone listening.
[00:27:42] So, Justin, I know if you truly knew what Amazon was going to do next, you'd be a bajillionaire living on an island somewhere. But if we could ask what you think is going to change this year on Amazon or what brands should really be watching out for, whether it's with Rufus, with AI, with changes that they're going to make, what are the things top of mind for you? Yeah. And a big disclaimer on all of this is I'm almost always wrong.
[00:28:10] So, do the opposite of what Justin is about to say. Do the George Kazanda. Do the opposite. Exactly. Yeah. Because just to give a little bit of background on that, when I started Amazon, the stock price was $30. This is pre-split. When I left in 2008, it was $30. I was like, this company is going nowhere. I'm doing way better off. I start a company to help brands do well on Amazon. And obviously, I was wrong about that. And so, I'll probably be wrong about this.
[00:28:35] But some things I'm pretty sure that are going to stay the same this year on Amazon is co-op asks will go up. Fees for noncompliance will go up. The amount of attributes they're looking for on products that you need to fill out to set them up to have Amazon's search engines be able to find the right customers for your products will increase. All the complexity will increase and the help to manage your business coming from Amazon will probably decrease.
[00:29:03] I think that's happened every year for the last, well, 20 years, 30 years. Not to be a negative Ned there. But I think this, I mean, it's kind of great. Like, it means that if you understand those things and are managing your business well, you're going to do a lot better than people that don't understand those things. And there are a lot of great big businesses on Amazon that are doing well despite all of those challenges. Everything has challenges. It's nice to know what Amazon's challenges are, I guess.
[00:29:33] But I think one thing that is going to change, I don't know if it's going to be this year or next year, but it will definitely change and it's going to be awesome, is product search. And that is the most important thing on Amazon after being in stock and content. But that's how customers find their products on Amazon is search. And we've definitely seen that iterative search is so much better than static search. Natural language search is so much better than keyword-based search. Amazon's obviously been experimenting with it.
[00:30:03] And sooner or later, this thing is going to roll out. And everybody's strategy for how they're bidding on keywords and how they've developed content in the past is going to have to adapt. And I know it's going to happen. It's going to be exciting. It's going to be great. But it's going to cause change in how you develop content strategy and do your whole Amazon traffic strategy, which I'm pretty excited for, frankly. How do you think it's going to affect the category?
[00:30:29] Because I have this idea of, like, you said natural language search. I've heard it called mission-based search, occasion-based searching. Like, the idea is like, hey, I'm trying to get ready for Easter for my five-year-old. Like, what do I need? And then it can have multiple items from multiple different categories, right? So it kind of breaks down those barriers of, like, I'm going to buy candy or I'm going to buy Easter baskets or I'm going to buy toys.
[00:30:53] How do you think that will impact where you put your items on Amazon from a category perspective? How you include taxonomy around those items? Like, do you think it will change any of that? Or do you think it will be more of a kind of user experience change?
[00:31:11] I've never cared much about categorization of products on Amazon, with the exception of, like, gated categories like luxury beauty or something like that, where unless you categorize your product into it, you just don't. You get excluded from the shopping experience. With the exception of those, the categories have never really mattered much on Amazon. Maybe you get, like, a slightly better seller rank or, you know, Amazon sales rank if you're in a smaller category or something like that.
[00:31:40] But even those don't really affect search or conversion or sales to any meaningful degree, in my opinion. So I don't think that matters. But keywords have always sort of created their own categories on Amazon. So if you think of the word toner on Amazon and you search toner and you're expecting a skin product, you're going to get a lot of printer toners. I've got printers. I came from consumables. So, you know, we were trying to sell toners.
[00:32:06] And all we could, we couldn't get on the page because it was dominated by toners, which is a bigger business on Amazon than skin toners. So you would kind of lose, your products would lose in these keyword categories because the keyword really had become the category. Natural language search or whatever we want to call it this week frees us from that because it allows us to pick up, it allows Amazon to pick up the intent from the rest of your prior search, your prior history,
[00:32:36] and any other keywords you include in your search to say you're not looking for printer toner. Some of these other words indicate that you are probably, it understands the intent much better. And so it can put you into skin products as opposed to a printer toner. Other retailers are very different. Like Walmart's so category driven. If you don't have the right category, you're excluded from search. So definitely a different strategy there. But for Amazon, you know, I think this is all goodness for brands because they get more access to the relevant customers.
[00:33:06] But it will require changing their content strategy to however the future of this is actually going to work. And we don't yet know. Yeah, I mean, the good news is, is that, you know, for those on the podcast that have been working on it for a while, the ones that have been building their content strategy and are doing the systems and the processes that you're talking about will be in, you know, relatively good shape for whatever is going to be required there.
[00:33:33] I think, and when you layer in AI to be able to make that happen at larger volume and larger, you know, more variations of content to fit the context and the purpose, then that raw data will be the foundational fuel for those moments. And that's what's, to me, that's what's sort of exciting is that we've been working on this for a while.
[00:34:00] Now, a lot of that work might pay off in more ways than you expect because of this is what is my hope. I don't know if you agree that that hope is well-founded. No, I totally agree, Peter. And I think another thing that's going to happen is it's going to expose folks that didn't invest in the processes and the systems because it only speeds up. Like, this thing just goes so much more, so much faster. So if you're a company out there and your content is in everyone's different PCs and different spreadsheets
[00:34:29] and you have people logging in directly to Amazon to do stuff and other people doing their own, like, you're so scattered in your process that you won't be able to maintain the speed of what's required in the next version of content development. Well, depending on category, a lot of what's on people's minds, at least what I was hearing at the summit, is the amount of their market share that is cumulatively being taken from them through the smaller sellers
[00:34:56] that are able to come in and steal a portion. And it feels like in this future, this might sort of shift some of the balance of power back in terms of category dominance because those larger companies that have been investing in these processes will be able to adapt more quickly,
[00:35:22] but at least show up in more ways, assuming they continue to get the systems in place. I think that could be true. You know, I love the dynamic nature and the sort of freedom that e-commerce created for young brands and just the amount of selection it gave to customers. And like the power it gave customers, it shifted from brands more to customers, like in e-commerce. It just did. And I think that's good.
[00:35:49] And so I think that brands that invest well in content and invest well in products, read the reviews, are focused on delivering value both through price and quality to customers are going to win. The ones that expect being a big brand will enable them to just have momentum and continue that momentum to win will continue to be eroded by small sellers and newer brands in the marketplace.
[00:36:16] I don't think there's any moat you get as a brand really anymore other than quality of execution. But you're absolutely right in that like this new wave of content will give them the ability to like use the weight of great systems and innovation to deploy, I think, a better content strategy than maybe someone who doesn't have the ability to test concepts and interact with more customers.
[00:36:41] May the battle go on because the consumer is the one who hopefully benefits in the end. Well, Justin, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on here and sort of lifting the lid on some of these secrets that are hidden under the Amazon. Oh, now I'm going down a sewer analogy. I'm just going to let all of that go. Lauren's giving me the okay. I would say I would have done, but I don't know if we need that now.
[00:37:10] Thank you so much for bringing the secrets up into the limelight and letting our folks think more strategically about the work that they're doing with Amazon and how to get control over that funnel of value. I think that's a really good analogy to take away. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Thanks again to Justin for all the insights. Get more of that by becoming a member of digitalshelfinstitute.org. Thanks for being part of our community.