#722 – New Amazon Ads Features & Launch Tactics

What if you could crack the code to scaling a million-dollar business in a fiercely competitive market? Join us as we chat with Mansour Norouzi, Director of Advertising at Incrementum Digital and a passionate supplement seller from Canada, who has already surpassed $1 million in revenue and is aiming for $2 million. Mansour shares the secrets behind his success in the e-commerce world, particularly on Amazon, revealing his strategic approaches to launching and promoting products. From the importance of enhancing search query performance to the exciting new features like sponsored product videos, Mansour’s insights are a goldmine for anyone looking to boost their business in the consumer packaged goods industry.

Our conversation unfolds with a deep dive into the Canadian e-commerce market, where Mansour navigates the complexities of launching a supplement brand. He sheds light on the potential expansion opportunities awaiting sellers with the anticipated growth of TikTok Shop in Canada. By focusing on scaling his Amazon presence, Mansour explains why he’s holding off on other channels for now. We explore effective pricing strategies, the power of the Amazon Vine program for gathering reviews, and the aggressive use of PPC advertising to make a mark in competitive niches. Mansour’s experience in leveraging Amazon’s tools for product ranking provides listeners with actionable insights.

We also explore the transformative advancements in Amazon’s data analytics tools, which have become more accessible inside platforms like Helium 10. These insights allow sellers to make informed decisions, with tools offering unprecedented views into conversion rates and keyword performance. The episode also highlights the strategic use of Amazon Sponsored Product Videos, noting how advancements in technology have made impactful video content creation more accessible. Mansour’s journey and expertise offer invaluable lessons, making this episode a must-listen for both seasoned sellers and those just starting their e-commerce journey.

In episode 722 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Mansour discuss:

• 00:00 – Helium 10 Black Friday Deals
• 04:44 – Strategies for Competitive Amazon Launches
• 06:12 – Entering Competitive Supplement Market Success
• 12:13 – Maximizing Amazon Sponsored Product Videos
• 13:38 – Exciting Unboxed Announcements
• 20:07 – Amazon Data Insights and Profitability Strategies
• 21:01 – Amazon Data in Helium 10
• 27:07 – Amazon Pricing and Deal Strategy
• 30:56 – Comparison of Black Friday Deals
• 33:01 – Focus on Basic Business Principles

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, Mansour is going to help us with strategies on Search Query Performance, new Amazon ads, features like sponsored product video, AMC tips, product launch tips and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. You ever had FOMO when we talk about all these money-making features and tools that Helium 10 has. Or maybe you’re a Platinum subscriber. You want to level up to get the advanced historical Cerebro feature or the advertising things that we have on the Diamond Plan. Well, this is a deal you’ve been waiting for Black Friday all the way through Cyber Monday. This whole week you can save 35% off up to 12 months of Platinum. You don’t have to pay for the full year in advance. You can just do it month to month or 12 months. 35% off, upgrading from Platinum to Diamond. Biggest deal of the year. Now the extra money you guys are going to make by using the tools that Helium 10 has, more than what’s going to make up for what you pay on the subscription. So if you don’t have an account yet you want to sign up to Platinum, make sure to go to h10.me/blackfriday. Same link. If you already have a Platinum account, you want to sign up for the Diamond account h10.me/blackfriday to save 35% off up to one year. And you know what, as an added bonus, anybody who signs up for the Diamond Plan on this deal. And then you mentioned to customer service this podcast, or that you heard about this from Bradley. I’m going to hook you up with my personal sourcing agent that I use to get all of my Amazon and TikTok shop products in China. So what are you waiting for? h10.me/blackfriday.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we are going right now to. Are you in Toronto, still?

Mansour:

I’m in Toronto, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, and, like always, you know some people who don’t know this, but sometimes I’m very intentional with what I wear, and today I knew somebody from Toronto was coming on the show, so I am making sure to wear my Dodgers hats and some Dodgers colors here. Too soon, I know. I’m not sure if Mansour is a fan or not, but hey, it’s a-

Mansour:

I follow sometimes.

Bradley Sutton:

It was one of the best world series ever regardless of I don’t think Toronto fans might not feel completely the same, but those who you know even if the Dodgers were the loss.

Mansour:

The city here was ready to go on fire for the last game and it didn’t happen.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yes, that was a crazy, crazy series. I was actually in Japan when it was happening and I was coming on wee hours of the morning and stuff trying to watch it. But wow, I’ve been a Dodgers fan for a long time so I can gloat. We had a while there before five years ago where we didn’t have a championship for a while.

Bradley Sutton:

But anyways, we’re not here to talk about baseball. Mansour has been on the podcast before, so we’re not going to go too much into his backstory, but if you guys want to go check his story out, you can do so. The first time he was on the podcast was episode 433, and the next one was 584. So you can probably hit up those. The short link would be h10.me/433 or forward slash 584. You can talk, you can you know listen about his history and how he got into e-commerce and what he’s been doing. So first of all, let’s just catch up. We were just talking right now how you’re both, you know a certain kind of like a you know agency slash service provider. You work for one. You’re also a seller and you’ve been building that up more in the last couple of years. How has the selling side been going for you?

Mansour:

Selling side. If you remember, I do supplements. I sell supplements and only in Canada. It has been pretty good, pretty good. Now I have six products, 12 SKUs. I passed 1 million revenue trailing 12 months, 1 million revenue a few months back, now aiming to get to 2 million in trailing 12 months. So it seems like it’s going good, but it’s very competitive. Supplement is crazy. It’s crazy the cost per clicks, the competition and pretty much I would say, two of my products bringing 80% of my revenue. It is fun. I realize that it’s so challenging and I love problem solving and the CPG branding thing. It’s kind of I find this.

Mansour:

I realize that it’s my passion because all the challenges that it has. So it’s good. Sometimes up, sometimes down.

Bradley Sutton:

You want TikTok shop too.

Mansour:

In Canada we don’t have TikTok shop. We can’t wait for it to come, but yes, we don’t have access to TikTok.

Bradley Sutton:

I didn’t know. I don’t know what. I knew it was in Mexico. For some reason, I thought it was in Canada, but I didn’t realize that it’s not there yet, okay.

Mansour:

It’s because of the legislation. We have TikTok but not the TikTok shop yet.

Bradley Sutton:

Have you thought about like hey, you know, hey, Laurent, can I borrow your social security number as an employee so I can launch my TikTok shop in USA? Or is your supplement specifically, or actually your supplement is on Amazon, USA, right?

Mansour:

It is not on Amazon USA. It’s in Canada.

Bradley Sutton:

It is not necessarily for Canada. Okay. Well, have you thought about like you know, getting somebody to you know, friend, relative, to help you to get into TikTok Shop USA?

Mansour:

Not really because the growth and the scale that I could get. I have that opportunity on Amazon Canada. And my thinking is that if I can scale and get to the goal I want in Amazon, just at CA, why I should add another channel? At the moment that I’m pushing all these products and the main thing is that the cash flow as well. I don’t want to bring any investors or anything, so I’m trying to just fund it myself and with the cash flow that business has to launch and grow. That’s why I don’t want to bring any other channel. Otherwise I would maybe go. If I want to go to the US, amazon.com would be my first choice and then TikTok shop. But if they have the TikTok shop in Canada, definitely I will expand there.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Supplements, as you said, one of the most competitive niches. This isn’t something you’ve had for 10 years. Obviously, the people like Goalie and stuff like that who started way, way long time ago, you know they’ve been dominating for years. It doesn’t matter to the competition now because they’re the OGs. How were you able to break into this such a competitive, you know, field in the last couple of years?

Mansour:

Yeah, interesting. Actually, it has been almost a year and nine, 10 months. I started last January, end of January of 2024. That’s a great question because what I realized is that the customers on Amazon are very, very open to try new brands, to try the same product from new brands, and a few things that I noticed. One, pricing If you are competitive with the market and your pricing and usually my approach when I get to any product is that any category I go with the lower price for many reasons, one of them being I want to get all of my review strategy at the beginning is just wine.

Mansour:

I don’t do anything else. No friends, no services, just wine program. I start with that and for the wine program I tried to have a lower price. So they are kind of less critical of the product and my experience has been great. All these I get like four or five stars. There has been a situation for one star, but not many. That is one.

Mansour:

The second is that, as you know, when there a new, you have a new product, low reviews. You need to incentivize your customers to purchase. So that’s another thing that I start with a very low price and then push with advertising and my only strategy for ranking is only advertising. I don’t use anything else. But I have realized that, like the way I enter to the market for this product is pretty much unlimited ad spend, so I spend as much as I need to rank for the product. I launch a new product a month ago. At some point I went to for the launch of that product. At some point, at the maximum amount I went to two thousand dollar per spin for just one product for me, for one product I’m spending per day. It was a lot, but it was pretty good and that category had a very high demand. So I would say pricing, amazing listings with, of course, SEO and overall good gallery images, good A-plus content and also good branding. When customers see your products they feel like, okay, this is it.

Mansour:

This is a real brand. It’s not just a random seller just selling one product. That is also very important. I started with one, now I have six, so I need to build more, so I showed up. Okay, this is a real brand with a good catalog.

Bradley Sutton:

You mentioned launching only with PPC advertising. That’s my strategy as well. Obviously, gone are the days of some of the other stuff we used to do, which became against terms of service, giveaways and stuff like that. What is your strategy there? How much do you budget? Are you using the low price to try and get 50% off like a big discount, big coupon, bidding top of search, crazy high budgets? What’s your strategy there? And are there any new things that maybe you haven’t done? Because, whether you’ve launched something in the last two, three months or not like, for example, the Vine pre-release update that happened. Talk a little bit about that topic.

Mansour:

Sure, let’s start with actually wine pre-release. I wanted to test it for my latest product. Then I changed my mind. I’m like, okay, I want to get that. What’s that? The sales volume from wine as well. But I made a mistake because 30 for this product, that now selling like 60, 70 per day to get to the volume I want, I’m like, oh, that was a mistake, I should have done the pre-release. So, depending on the product, if a product is very niche and 30 number of the wine orders that come could impact your ranking, could generate that sales volume for you to help with the ranking, I would. Yeah, I would not do the pre-release. Other than that, if you need a lot of sales per day, 30 is nothing. I would definitely go for the pre-release. That is one.

Mansour:

Yeah, in terms of the pricing, natural mission for supplement, what I do is that I look at the price per count, because it’s per capsule, right, for you can see what’s the pricing of the capsules. Because it’s per capsule, right, you can’t see what’s the pricing of the capsules. I try to be maybe I would say at the beginning, 20% lower than everyone else in the market. So it is very noticeable for the customers when they see their pricing and it’s very interesting that they don’t like pretty much, they don’t care. If your branding is good, they will purchase from you and it’s not sustainable if you’re keeping that pricing. That’s the issue. So I start with that up to a month. I won’t say there is any deadline. Sometimes in three weeks I get to the rankings that I want and everything is stable. I start going back up to the same price after competition, or sometimes even after a week, I see that okay, sales coming up. I try slowly getting higher up like $1, $2, not drastically just to see what happens to my conversion rate. If I see I’m still getting sales, I keep it there and after again five days I bring it up, even during my lunch. So I play a bit with the price to see if I can make it, so I can increase it, so I can lose less money. That’s about the pricing part and at some point this has happened for some of my products that when I launch and rank I go even above the average of the market because based on what I’m seeing from the market and how sales coming up. In terms of the budget for me, I realized that I don’t set a budget.

Mansour:

I just spend, like for the first three, four days. I keep it open to see how much I have the potential to spend and in my case the good thing is that I take the profit from other products and kind of I’m like I’m okay with being brink, even for the whole business, if I see potential to rank. So in three, four days, if I see the conversion rate is very, very good. That is the point that I’m like, okay, I’m going to go all in, no limit, nothing. I just want to rank this because the conversion is amazing. I have that momentum, let’s just push and go for it. Now I could do it.

Mansour:

But for my first, second, third product it wasn’t possible because otherwise you are going to go drastically in negative profit. So now that I have other five products that are profitable for any new launch. I could push it more and go on limited budget, but this new product that I launched I would say this is the highest demand across all of my category. So if I want to spend anything, I’m spending for other five products. There is a potential to spend for just one product because it’s a very high demand product and now, after Black Friday, cyber Monday I think it has been yet three weeks after Black Friday, cyber Monday I’m planning to go back down to profitability.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Excellent, excellent. A couple of weeks ago we were at Unboxed. You weren’t. I didn’t see you there, but I was at Unboxed. You were there. You know live tweeting. You’re on LinkedIn live tweeting a lot of the announcements. But let’s talk about some of those announcements. You know there’s Creative Studio, there’s sponsored product video, there’s more things with AMC, more things with AI. If I were to ask you, what is the number one thing that was released that Unboxed? That it’s not just exciting, not just like hype, but you’re like, hey, this is actually going to result in, if used correctly, in some serious you know serious changes to people’s accounts or bottom line. What would you say that would be the number one thing?

Mansour:

Definitely sponsored product videos. Now you could add up to five videos to your sponsored products. So they are not new ad type, it’s your current sponsored product ad types, the current campaigns that you have in your campaign. If you go there, click in your ad group, inside the ads there is a new. So you have this tab for products. Inside the products there’s a new tab that it says videos. So for each video, for each product that you’re advertising inside in that campaign, you could add up to five videos.

Bradley Sutton:

So do you have to start a new campaign for this or your existing sponsored product campaigns? Now you just add it to that same thing.

Mansour:

Exactly. Existing product, existing campaigns. You don’t need to add any new products. If you go to your campaign manager, all of your sponsored products have that feature now inside the ads, and so the goal of Amazon is this. The way they explain this is that they want you to show your customers your futures in these videos. So the way I think about this is I created this for one of our clients that they sell ankle brace, and my approach was that I went to Product Opportunity Explorer, the ankle brace niche, and I saw what are the futures that customers are looking for, what are the questions that they have, what is important for them. So one of them was, for instance, adjustable ankle brace. We had a video. I asked the client that here are the videos I want from you and interestingly, they had the whole video for video on what I asked them to cut them in short videos and send it to me. So the first video for me was adjustable ankle brace. You add a title as a feature, you add this title adjustable fit and you add your video. Next one was great support or whatever, I don’t remember. So for these ones I added all the videos up to. I added four. You could add up to five.

Mansour:

My recommendation is, before getting to recommendation is that now when you search on Amazon, the same sponsored product that shows up above that, you can see that oh, there is a video and there are like carousel videos below that you can click and you can see the whole video on top. It is very difficult for Amazon to search and see it. I see impressions and also the client send me a video that he’s seen it. I have searched, I wasn’t able to find it anywhere. I’m not seeing it, but the client showed me a video that it was live and I see impression coming up.

Mansour:

My recommendation is that try to focus on short videos. Don’t go with like 15 seconds for each video. But the way it plays is that it’s auto play, so the first video is playing, then it finishes, goes to the next one. So Amazon says at least it should be seven seconds and I would say seven to ten seconds is good enough because you want to show all those features and by the way customers could click and see them. I read from the documents Amazon is mentioning that in the future they will add the capability of bid adjustment, the same way that we have bid multiplier for top of search.

Mansour:

There will be a tab in the bid adjustments for these videos. You say, okay, increase for this video, increase this bid adjustments for these videos. You say, okay, increase for this video, increase this bit. Adjustments for 30%, a hundred percent. So that is, I would say it’s very, very impactful in the customer’s decision and drastically it’s going to drastically increase click-through rate.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting, interesting. Now, four years ago. If this was released which might be the reason why it was not released four years ago I don’t think it would have made much of a buzz, because people were like all right, come on. Like how am I going to make 15 videos per product or all these videos, you know? Like I don’t have the money and the time to do that. But now, thanks to something else that Amazon you know, released or at least enhanced the Creative Studio. You could potentially start rolling out a bunch of these videos without even paying because it’s free. Have you started playing with Creative Studio much, and if so, can you let people know, like what, how they should be using it to get the most out of it?

Mansour:

Yes, I created, interestingly, for the same brand. I created a video. It is good, but still I’m not sure how many of the videos you could create, because these videos that you want to create for the sponsored product ads, you want to be very specific that the customer is using the product right and in some features of the products. Now the question is that can you get that creative agents to be that detail of using the products or not? Other than that, no, you might want to just show with some simple video, just features, that it’s not in use. It’s just saying that with some takes that, ok, this is, for instance, is a coffee maker, you don’t want anyone to be using it, just showing that, ok, this has this feature. But for this ankle brace I created a video. I was surprised and impressed because, compared to the last version, has become much better in terms of what it would create, you give the. ASIN and it shows the product in a lifestyle, the  some human is using it.

Mansour:

It has become very, very good and I’m sure you could easily. There are many cases that you can create videos and if not, you just need to change your view of how that product is being used to make sure that it doesn’t mess up the use case. Other than that, I agree with you. I think you can easily just jump using Creative Agent, create those videos, or VO3, I actually I was trying something today a massage gun and it was a different strategy. I saw on X and I was using it that was saying this person said that they would nano banana. They create the first shot and create the last shot. For the first shot, this was a massage gun. I said put this massage gun in a house in the couch. So it put it. It was great. And it was the exact product and I created another shot for the end that there is this female sitting on the couch and using this massage gun, it created that. Now I asked you three that I want you to make a video. Here’s the first shot, here’s the last shot. It was very good when you go with these shots and tell them what to do. It was actually a very great video. I would test that as well. And the product actually product was actual product. It didn’t change the product because I provided the image of the product as well.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we’ll go back and talk about all these subjects, but I just want to hit another subject, at least to hop into it. You know, something you’ve been passionate about in the past is a lot of Amazon cool data points that they release, you know, like Opportunity Explorer and Search Query Performance. You know, now you can use that in Helium 10, where you can just look at all like you know, 12 months of Search Query Performance and instantly find, hey, what were the keywords that have converted for me? Or where, where did I have better conversion rates?

Bradley Sutton:

And this is, you know, newer sellers might take this stuff for granted, but people don’t understand. Like five years ago, like you know, how many of our firstborns we would have been able to. You know, we would have given up in order to get this information. And now it’s just Amazon providing it for free. But as far as Amazon data points that have come out or been enhanced over time, what are some of the, the changes in the last year or two, since the last time you’ve been on the podcast that you are actively using and or you think people out there are under using because they either don’t know what exists or they’re not using it in the right way.

Mansour:

There is one that Amazon recently launched is oh God, what’s the name the profit, the economic of the products it is. This is this table. This is the dashboard that shows everything about your product. It is under the reports I don’t remember the exact name of the report, but that’s pretty good. And because the interesting part about that is that you could even make a collection of different products and it shows you every single thing how much is your promotion, what’s your FBA cost, what is even estimated. It does the forecast showing you for the next six months what is going to happen. That is actually where it is really interesting for me to see what Amazon shows me as their forecast. I won’t say I’m daily on that dashboard, but once a week I just check it out to see what’s happening, to get some input on that. The other thing is that custom analytics. It is a report that you can drag and drop. You can create reports. That is very, very good. I think people underestimate that. There are some great reports that you can create and Amazon gives you like 80 or up to 100 metrics that you can add there.

Mansour:

Unfortunately, Amazon advertising is not one of them. It’s just everything from Seller Central, I’m sure. Unfortunately, Amazon advertising is not one of them, it’s just everything from seller central. I’m sure they will bring Amazon advertising and, in terms of what being underutilized, I would say the still Search Query Performance, because even two weeks ago, I was thinking that, like this, Search Query Performance gives away everything that is going on in keyword level for your products, how you could improve if you are declining right, it is declining, it’s improving, why it is improving, what are the opportunities? So I would say search query performance is one of them. Everyone knows about it, but still I think there are rooms like not everyone uses that correctly. Amazon, if you want to go to Amazon site, amazon Marketing Cloud, and they have added now the audience site, you have the AI agent that creates the audience for you, apart from the templates on that draft, and now they have agent for creating the query for the insights.

Mansour:

On a side note, actually, I wanted to mention something. I’ve noticed that some people still in the industry they are misinterpreting the data in AMC. For everyone to know, AMC gives only data related to your category and brand. There is nothing related to the other categories. So AMC is the interaction of the customers with your brand something, because few of the things I see cost on eggs, I’m sorry. On LinkedIn or webinars people talk about that. Oh, you can query customers who purchased your competition and competitor’s product and create audience around that. No, with AMC you can’t do that Anything. Any interaction with your product.

Mansour:

And finally, about the report from Unbox there is one more report for Amazon. That is awesome. It is a report we have a new dashboard. It’s called Reports. Then you go there you could go off to 15-month bank and get daily data of your Amazon advertising. You know, for instance, for search term, it couldn’t go up more than 60 days. But now, with this complex reporting, there are so many metrics. Amazon brought this from BSP because it combined the dashboard so you could go granular. You could combine all the ad types instead of going just downloading from sponsored product specific the predefined reports. Amazon gives you one dashboard and says, okay, just add all the metrics any time period that you want. That’s actually very, very strong.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, yeah, that was one of the ones maybe that flew under the radar, maybe you didn’t get as much press as some of the more sexy releases. Regardless of the year, something that’s always top of mind for Amazon sellers is profitability and rising costs and fulfillment and, right, you know, FBA fees are going up in 2026 and advertising rarely have ever gone down. If anything, cost per click goes up. Inflation and tariffs and everybody always has a deal with one or the other or multiple things. Sofor you and your business, for your clients, what do you see as working on this world of increasing costs? How can you stay ahead outside of just, you know, raising prices? You know, because there’s a limit to how much you can, just you can just do that.

Mansour:

Right, that’s a great question because I I deal with this as well and I’ve noticed something that people might talk less about and it’s in contrary to every thing that people talk about. Is like, for instance, for the events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. One thing that I would suggest if you are a, if you have a brand, that you have a great visibility, you have a good organic ranking and when you are running a deal. By default, don’t think you have to increase your ad spend. And actually I would say, either keep it there or even try test reducing your ad spend.

Mansour:

And my thought around this because I tried this with my own brand and it’s working and my thought behind this is that if you have visibility, if you are organically ranking, you don’t need to push your ads on the top. Customers will see your deals and since you are organically there, they will purchase. Yes, everyone is running deal, but you are ranking organically, you have a great discount. Don’t think that you have to push ads, because what I see from these events is the balance of how much you are running spending on ads and how much you are giving deals. If you are giving 20% and discount and increasing your ad spend, the chance of you becoming negative or going very, very low in profit is very high. So my suggestion is that test and see experiments with lowering ad spend for the deals.

Mansour:

And sometimes I have noticed that with these good products, since Amazon favors them, even when you lower bid, you still show up in the premium placement. So that’s another thing that I do I lower the bid. I go actually against everyone else that they are increasing the bids. They are increasing the budget for my product and I would say it is product by product right. If your product is not ranking or it’s a new product, you need to put your deals in front of the customers. You have to push that. But if you have a good positioning, you don’t need to do that. I have seen this times and times and I would really recommend you experimenting with that. Then going after all these low-hanging fruits. If going back to Amazon, just talking about Amazon advertising all these long-tail keywords that you could generate, making sure you are covering all those keywords, sometimes your own shopper is just trying to cross-sell your products to the existing customers and increasing your lifetime value, getting the customers to purchase more and more. 

Mansour:

Of course. I think external traffic, Bradley is one of the best ones because it’s going to help you to uh bring customers who directly come purchase from you. So that awareness outside Amazon is going to help you to kind of not just pay per play, it’s just bringing the customers at the commons on to purchase from you. So all those external efforts can help with all these costs.

Bradley Sutton:

Something I don’t think we talk about enough here on the podcast is pricing. There’s different aspects of pricing. How much do you experiment with your own pricing, Finding the right price point? And then what’s your discount strategy? We just had Black Friday, Cyber Weekend and there’s key shopping dates. You might just want to discount your product just because you know that Rufus now can auto-purchase products for people. There’s some people who might add your stuff to the cart and say, hey, only buy it if it lowers in price or something. So all these reasons that somebody might want to experiment with pricing. But so, first of all, what is your general pricing strategy and if you change it? Second of all, what do you do now that everything almost is more expensive as far as discounting goes, you know, because deals are so expensive. Price discounts, you know, cost $250. If you’re doing it on a special week. Coupons the whole pricing structure change. What are you using and not using as far as that goes?

Mansour:

That’s a great question because we had this discussion around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, comparing the running deals versus the price discount, because with both of them you could get the badge for the Black Friday Cyber Monday. Now what’s the difference? With the deals, you have to pay $1,000 per ASIN, one parent ASIN. With the price discount, you could run the same deal but pay 250, add all of your products. Now, for anyone hearing, the main difference is that price discount is only for Prime members, the deals is for everyone.

Mansour:

Now the question becomes is that if we move toward price discount, how many of these customers will we will use? From the latest data I saw, it seems like 70% of the purchasers, 70 to 80% of the purchases are Prime members. Now if you go with the price discount price discount you’re going to lose that 70%. I would say. The way I look at it is that doing something hybrid, meaning for your hero products that bringing $1,000 of sales and $1,000 for this might not make sense and you want to make sure you are visible. You are visible to all members. Go run the deals but for slow-moving products, products, that $1,000 is a very, very drastic number, I would try running price discount instead of the deal.

Mansour:

So that’s one thing that I don’t know. Probably, if you have talked about that, that’s one strategy that I think it should be hybrid and using both of these to make sure that you’re saving. Other than that, $1,000 for each parent is a lot of money for many sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, before we get into your last strategy, how can people find you on the interwebs? Follow you around there, maybe reach out to you if they have more questions about what your company does?

Mansour:

LinkedIn is the best place to reach out to me. I’m active posting there and you could message me on LinkedIn.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Do you have a last 30 or 60 second strategy you’d like to share?

Mansour:

I would say it’s not necessarily strategy. It’s something that I always follow and it’s that first principle thinking that I’ve realized many times with all these advanced tools, the managers, brands, they try to make everything complicated, but the way I think about is that at the end of the day, the basics are the same. Instead of getting lost in all these shiny objects and trying to focus your 80% of your time to all these shiny objects that they come in, you’ve got to 80%, focus on the basic stuff and then, yes, 20% of your time to spend on all these new features, experiment with anything coming on, and even for your discount, for instance the question you’re asking me about discount. For me it’s very simple.

Mansour:

I’m going to go to the basic in terms of financial. What’s my profit? How much I’m spending, how much this is going to what percentage if I give let’s say it doesn’t bring any extra sales, how much I could give and still be profitable. So for me it’s very simple calculation. And the way I look at it is that the worst scenario case for me is to be if I want to experiment for the pricing, if I don’t want to lose money. If I want to be break even, what is that percentage and how much I’m spending? How much it could I could give the discount just to experiment to get to that number that is making sense in terms of discount. Sometimes you got to go slowly up and see what happens. Maybe if you go one box, two box, $3 up higher gradually, you will not see a drop in sales.

Bradley Sutton:

I had just mentioned that you’re one of the last solo experts who are going to be on the podcast that we’re recording remotely. In a few weeks there’s going to be a podcast kind of like format change between SSP and AMPM. What that is you guys will have to tune in to find out. But kind of historic moment here. He’s the last expert, so happy for you to join us here and we’ll be definitely seeing you in the future on one of our podcasts. We’ll definitely have you back. But thank you so much for adding your expertise and really appreciate you coming on the show with us.

Mansour:

Thank you for having me.

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