#708 – Launch & Scale on Amazon: What’s New

What if you could revolutionize your Amazon product launches with insider knowledge straight from the builders? In this episode, Bradley brings together Jeff Nickerson, Director of Product from Amazon’s Brand Experience & Excellence team, and Zhen Li, Sr. Product Manager from Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer team to show how to simplify, de-risk, and boldly accelerate your Amazon launches. They unpack the newest tools, including Amazon Vine pre-launch access and AI reviewer matching, as well as Product Performance Spotlight. Explaining how early demand testing, benchmarks, and focused research turn signals into growth. Amazon is investing in better data, faster feedback loops, and tailored guidance so brands can spot high-potential products sooner and make smarter calls.

Speed and strategy work best together. Regional launches place inventory near customers for day-one delivery, while the New Selection Program eases testing with fee relief and simpler exits. On the review side, Vine now enables pre-launch distribution to Vine Voices, paired with AI that matches products to reviewers who know your niche, creating social proof on release day. Alongside performance alerts and comparable funnels in Product Performance Spotlight, these updates help you decide whether to scale, iterate, or sunset.

We blend research and execution with the latest from the Product Opportunity Explorer. Zhen details two years of niche metrics and the new Identify Market Demand experience, which surfaces underserved customer intents and translates them into development guidance and positioning cues. Add shoppable A+ Content to cross-sell and strengthen brand storytelling. Throughout, Jeff and Zhen highlight Amazon’s mission to give sellers the confidence to launch, learn fast, and grow. We close by looking ahead to more personalized AI insights and pre-validation tools and invite them back next year to share what’s next.

In episode 708 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Jeff, and Zhen discuss:

• 00:00 – Amazon Launch Strategies and Support
• 03:35 – Amazon’s Features for Seller Launching Success
• 07:20 – Regional Inventory Testing for Faster Delivery
• 10:01 – Exciting Enhancements to the Amazon Vine Program
• 14:15 – Strategies for Product Launch Failure
• 19:02 – Upcoming Amazon Seller Central Innovations
• 23:35 – Amazon’s Support for Product Launching
• 24:33 – Discovering Product Opportunities With AI
• 34:49 – Identifying Market Demand for Product
• 39:56 – Enhancing Business Success on Amazon
• 41:19 – Amazon Data Insights and Opportunities

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’re going to talk about launch and the last year and in the coming months, Amazon has come out and is coming out with a lot of new features and things that you know and love, like Vine, Product Opportunity Explorer, A-plus Content and more that are going to help you launch your first or next product on Amazon. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

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 a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And where are we in the e-commerce world today? We are in Seattle, here at Accelerate, and we’ve got a couple of guests today first-timers here on the show. First up, Jeff. How’s it going?

Jeff:

It’s going great. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Bradley Sutton:

Thanks for being here. I know your teammate, Ami was supposed to be here, but you are pinch-hitting at the last second here. We appreciate it.

Jeff:

Yeah, appreciate it.

Bradley Sutton:

Where were you born and raised?

Jeff:

Born and raised in California.

Bradley Sutton:

What part?

Jeff:

Pasadena area?

Bradley Sutton:

Pasadena. Okay yeah, my grandparents live in Alhambra, not too far away there.

Jeff:

Oh amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

You go to college out there?

Jeff:

No, I went to college in Oregon and then in New York.

Bradley Sutton:

A duck.

Jeff:

Not a duck no. Willamette.

Bradley Sutton:

A what?

Jeff:

Willamette. It’s Willamette.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, hold on. Where’s that?

Jeff:

Salem Oregon.

Bradley Sutton:

Salem Oregon, Okay, because I know the beavers, I know the ducks. Okay, so I learned a new-

Jeff:

Smaller school.

Bradley Sutton:

I learned a new school today.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s why I like to ask that question. What did you study there?

Jeff:

Physics and mechanical engineering. I think you’re doing something a little bit different than that original trajectory. What did you do when you first started at Amazon?

Jeff:

I started I was a Product Manager, so I launched Seller Fulfilled Prime was my first project at Amazon. So you know, for the first time back then, you know, I had this vision of like what if we let the sellers that ship themselves be able to make their products prime eligible and built and scaled that program from idea to launch for about three and a half years was an incredible journey, and then, for the last over eight years, I’ve been on this team, setting out with an idea back in 2018 when I joined the team.

Bradley Sutton:

And what is this team called?

Jeff:

It’s called Brand Experience and Excellence, and so really set out on this mission of how could we make Amazon the very best place to be able to build a brand and so built out a lot of the capabilities that you know sellers have available today, and I’ve, you know, built an incredible team that’s, you know, been able to help make that happen through you know technology and, more recently, with AI, and, you know, really, really done a lot for sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

I think that’s the coolest department name there. We add the and excellence. I need to think I’m going to be like no, I’m the director of training at Helium 10 and excellence. That’s really cool. Not many people can say they have excellence in their title. I love that. Now we’re here to talk I mean, you cover a wide variety of things. I believe even Amazon Vine is under the umbrella there. But I wanted to talk today specifically about launching. I actually just did a special episode back in episode 700 that I do yearly. I dedicate an entire episode about launching products because it’s so important to the journey. Of course, arguably every aspect of the Amazon journey is important, but if you don’t have a good launch, you might be dead in the water before you start. So let’s focus the conversation about that. Now, taking a step back just how does Amazon view the seller’s launch process?

Jeff:

First off, just launching products is so vital to brands growth right? I mean, it drives a huge amount of the sales growth on Amazon, and our vision is we really want to be able to make it simple and lower the risk for sellers and brands to be able to invent products and bring them to customers and start to experiment and try things.

Jeff:

And so that really starts with getting your product right at the beginning with great product research. Obviously, inventing a great product is going to go so far towards making it inevitably a success. And then the next stage is you’ve got to get it listed and start to test your demand signals, and so we need to do that really quickly and get that early customer data in your hands. And then, at that point you’ve got those early signals, you’re either scaling it up or you want to be able to fail fast, and part of innovation is that some products aren’t going to work out, so fail fast and pivot to your next idea and then, if you’re really successful, you know for a lot of brands it really means kind of translating that success beyond Amazon and, you know, really building a brand that’s much, much bigger, and you know we want to help you do that too.

Bradley Sutton:

There are challenges involved with not just launching but then scaling, so can you talk about your viewpoints on that and what Amazon can do to help?

Jeff:

Yeah, I mean there’s challenges at every step of the way and most products at launch are not a smashing success. And so Amazon has lots of data and we’re really inventing a lot to try to get as much of that data into the hands of sellers and help them interpret it to be able to make better decisions about where there’s really going to be a strong opportunity and real sales growth. So we’re investing a lot there in the early parts of the launch process. You’ve got to go get reviews, you’ve got to go get traffic, you’ve got to get your product set up so you’re ready to be able to convert. So we’ve really got a lot of exciting investments that we’re making through that entire process that we’re excited to announce this year at Accelerate.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s a lot of costs involved whenever we’re talking about launching a new physical product, and rightfully so sellers are worried about these kind of costs, and so what is Amazon doing to help sellers, at least maybe with the testing process before they go all in on something? How is Amazon helping that part of the process?

Jeff:

Yeah, there’s actually a lot we’re doing. So one really important feature that we already have available is called a new selection program. You register once and all your products will be available for it, and with that, we waive a lot of the fees and the complexity of launching new products when you send them into FBA. So we’ll offer rebates on your referral fees. On your first 100 units, we’ll waive the storage fees, and then also, for products that don’t work out, there’s some of the returns costs and liquidation costs that we also make much, much cheaper and simpler. So this is a really powerful way. We know innovating on new products can be expensive, and so we want to encourage that innovation and help offset those costs. So sellers are willing to kind of take that risk and put the inventory into FBA. And then the other program I want to talk about and this is brand new and we’re really excited about it.

Jeff:

We’ve known forever how important delivery speed is to the success of your products. Right, if you can make a lightning fast delivery promise to customers, they’re so much more likely to buy. It makes you so much more competitive with the other products that you know you might be trying to compete with. And so speed, speed, speed. It’s just so important. But if you want to have really fast delivery speeds, you’ve got to have the inventory located close to customers. And that means you got to take a really big investment on inventory to be able to spread it through the network and get all that inventory close to customers.

Jeff:

And so the new thing that we’re doing now is, as a brand, you’ve got an option and you can launch your products regionally, and so by doing that, you’ve got the inventory that’s located very close to customers, you’ve got very fast delivery speeds within that region, and so you can really test the demand with how fast those delivery promises are going to go in the long run when you scale it up and it’s successful and you have inventory spread everywhere. And it’s a great way to be able to test demand and you can do it with much less inventory investment up front. And this is very similar to a very common practice in brick and mortar stores where you might launch in 50 stores to test at the beginning and you use that decision and that data and then you decide whether you scale it up or whether you kind of pivot the product and work on your next thing.

Bradley Sutton:

I love that. I love that, all right, cool. Now, one of my favorite things is that’s not new, or it’s new as far as maybe it was like four or five months ago, but probably one of my favorite announcements about the Vine program since I actually had Ami on the show two years ago at Accelerate.

Jeff:

Oh amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

And we had dropped the new tiers where you can do what is it like five free or two free, and then there’s 10.

Jeff:

Two free, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And then up to 30. That was kind of like what we dropped. So that was a pretty cool announcement and this is probably my favorite Vine one, because I’m so passionate about launch that’s like. You might not know this, but that’s how I even got in the Amazon game was I was a launch specialist. Yeah, I was a launch specialist back in the day, and one of the hardest things for me always when entering a new niche is the reviews. I’ll come in on day zero. I could have an amazing product, but I’m not Nike or a big brand. I have no brand awareness. If it’s a new brand I’m launching and I’ll have zero reviews and I’m going up against people who have hundreds or thousands. It’s really hard to get buyers to be convinced like no, take a chance on my product, and so I would have to like lower the price you know really low just to get them to interact. But now there’s something where I don’t have to launch with zero reviews. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jeff:

Yeah, there’s a few like really exciting enhancements that we’re making to the Vine program this year. And just for maybe those in your audience who may not know, vine is a program you can offer products free of charge. There’s this community of reviewers who kind of collect these samples and they’ll write really in-depth, kind of high quality reviews, and that’s how these reviewers are kind of selected to come into the program is because, you know, they kind of have this like passion for writing just really in-depth reviews of the products, and it gives them this great vantage point to be able to write insightful reviews, because they’ve reviewed lots and lots of products, and so there’s a couple of things that are new. So first, as you said, on launch day it used to be that you could launch and then the Vine voices could claim these products only after you launched, and then your reviews will come in maybe a week or a couple of weeks after, depending on how many units you offer.

Jeff:

But now you can set a pre-launch date, but you can make your product exclusively available to Vine Voices early, and so the advantage of that is you can have these big bang launches where you get your reviews they’re already on launch day and then, at launch, you can really put your marketing resources behind it, your social media, and really make for this exciting launch to your customers to say, hey, we’ve got this great product out here and it’s got reviews and it’s really ready to convert from day one.

Jeff:

So another really exciting enhancement that we’ve just made is we’ve got AI matching, and so we’ve got lots and lots of these fine reviewers who claim many, many products, and so what we can do is we can match with your brand. Who are the reviewers who have the most affinity for your brand or have the most expertise on your specific products, and by getting the product in the hands of those customers, they’re really going to understand the nuances of your product and they’re going to be in the best position to write a really relevant, high-quality review that can really help your brand grow. And it’s just really powerful and exciting.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now I’ve launched the product. The question is all right, was it a success or not? Of course, I can look at how many units I’ve sold and things like that, but what are some other things I can be looking at that Amazon has developed that will help me, kind of like, judge the successfulness or lack thereof of something. So I know I need to maybe pivot and go somewhere else.

Jeff:

Yeah, there’s so much data available at Amazon and you know there’s a lot you can monitor. But we’ve got a lot of really exciting enhancements to product performance spotlight that can really help brands to try to make that decision and kind of understand what to focus on. And so one really exciting feature that we’ve just launched is you now have the ability to compare your product to a set of similar products and so you can understand the trajectory that you’re on and kind of how you’re doing in each kind of critical phase of the funnel compared to, you know, kind of the most similar products and brands. And so this really helps you understand and where are you doing well and you know what are the areas that you need to focus on. So, for example, you might have a product and the conversion is great. You’re getting customers and if you just get them on your page, they’re converting and that’s doing really well compared to your benchmark.

Jeff:

But it may be that you just don’t have that much traffic and so that tells you, okay, now we need to focus on that. And the product also has integrated recommendations so we can help you focus on the right things and really accelerate your product more successfully. And the other thing that we have is now you can also set up performance alerts, and so you can choose the metrics that are most relevant, the products that are most relevant, and you can set up the thresholds so you get alerted if something goes out of band and it needs your attention right away, you can now set that up in product performance spotlight.

Bradley Sutton:

I think it’s important that that brands, sellers out there, know that, hey, not all your launches are going to have 100% success and that’s fine. That’s the whole reason why we’re talking about validation or why we’re talking about looking at metrics, because sometimes you have to pivot and like, hey, let me try a different product. So let’s say we’re in that scenario we have this product that we launched and the numbers aren’t looking as good as what we had wanted. What are some options now that sellers can do in a situation like this?

Jeff:

Yeah, inevitably failure is part of innovating and if you’re not failing sometimes it probably means you’re not taking enough risk and you’re not kind of swinging big enough in terms of where the opportunities are. But we really want to encourage that entrepreneurship and try to minimize that risk and that pain for brands as much as we can.

Jeff:

And so one thing we’re doing we’re launching a number of ways to try to help improve the markdown process so we can help you figure out what’s the optimal markdown strategy that you might want to use to be able to increase the value recovery that you have on these products, should you have to mark it down and have to clear out excess inventory. And another thing that’s really important is with the new selection program that you can sign up for. You know you can liquidate up to 50 units with Amazon covering, you know, those fees free of charge as a part of the NSP benefit. You can also returns fees are waived as part of NSP, and so that’s also a really important program to help reduce the cost and help encourage you to innovate. Bring your products, try it and you know, hopefully most of them are working and they’re a smashing success. But when they don’t work out, then you know you can quickly kind of recover that capital and start to pivot to your next idea.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, on the flip side, let’s say, hey, I’ve got a winner winner chicken dinner product here. What is the next step is scaling, yeah. What can Amazon do to help with the scaling process?

Jeff:

I mean, there’s so much we can do, and you know a lot of this your sellers are doing every day. You know things like ads and promotions are great ways to scale, but there’s some other things that are, you know, I think, really important to think about. You know you might want to start to think about new types of customers that you can reach if your product is really successful. So, for example, are you reaching your business customers with Amazon? B2b or business to business can be a really powerful new set of customers where you can increase your sales. Or another one is expanding internationally. There’s billions of people in the world, and if you’re just selling in one country, you might be missing out on lots of opportunity for your brand to truly be a global brand, and so that’s another opportunity that you can think about.

Jeff:

Another really important area is how are you thinking about using your off Amazon traffic and customers? And so you know there’s the brand referral bonus program that you can do. So if you have your own audiences outside of Amazon, we’ll actually offer you referral fee credits. If you bring that traffic into Amazon. You know, if you have social media followings or your own email traffic, or you know lots of applications like that, and if you don’t have your own, that’s fine too. You can use creator connections, and that’s a great way we can match you with these really incredible influencers and creators who can go promote your brand and your products and drive traffic back into Amazon.

Jeff:

And you know, at Accelerate I’ve been talking to lots of brands over the last few days and I’ve heard so much excitement about creator connections and how impactful that is as a strategy. And I want to talk about one final thing, and this is brand new at Accelerate this year as well, and so we have this new feature in A-plus content. So, A-plus, you can build these really rich detail pages and communicate your brand story, and what we’re doing with that is we’re helping, we’re giving the power to brands to make all that content much more shoppable. By doing that, you can cross-sell, you can upsell and you can really help introduce customers to the collections of your products and find the right product for them from within your portfolio. And that’s going to be another really powerful way to help raise visibility and build your brand with Amazon. So we’re really excited for that launch here, as well.  

Bradley Sutton:

That sounds exciting. We’ve talked a little bit about new launches when it comes to on the Amazon side, especially that being what we’re here for at Accelerate. Anything else, I know you can’t give us your entire product roadmap here, but what’s some things that you can leak here to our not necessarily leak, I’m sure you can approve to say it but what can you get people excited about that’s coming in the pipeline?

Jeff:

You know, launching new products is hard and you know one of the things that you’re going to start to see more and more over the next several months is you know how we’re using AI. You know, in new ways to make it easier and improve the seller experience. To make it easier and improve the seller experience, and one of the things that you’re going to be able to do is Amazon’s going to help communicate to you which of your products show the most potential and give you the confidence to be able to invest in making the customer experience of those products right. Get your marketing strategy right, because what you know is, if we’re telling you that product’s high potential, we’re actually gonna be driving the early discovery of that product and the early customer engagement, experimentation, and so we’ve been doing a lot to increase visibility of these products in search, in advertising, with creators, with personalization on the site, and so all of this is really going to help give that confidence.

Jeff:

Get these early signals so you really quickly understand is this a product that’s resonating with customers and it’s really starting to take off? Or, hey, we thought it was going to be great, but we got it in front of a bunch of customers and it just wasn’t, and you can just pivot really quickly or start to adjust the right inputs and make your product a success. So I think this is going to be really exciting. And then the other piece is we’re doing a lot to invest with Gen AI and so, you know, make the whole seller experience much, much easier to be able to adopt the right programs on the right products and really do that in a much more tailored way. So you’ll see much more on this in the coming months.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right. So thank you so much for sharing all these great tips, especially around launch and some of the new stuff around Vine and A-plus content. Excited about all this, I’d love to have you or Ami back, maybe next year, accelerate, to tell us what’s in store.

Jeff:

Would love to. Thanks so much for having me on the pod.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you very much.

Jeff:

Thanks.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So next up we have another first-timer to the show, Zhen. Welcome. How’s it going?

Zhen:

Doing good. How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good. Where were you born and raised? I always like to ask everybody.

Zhen:

Yeah, I was born and raised up in Shanghai, China.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. We have an office in Shanghai, which is there a few weeks ago. We have an office in nearby Wuxi. It still amazes me. It’s kind of far away, Wuxi and Shanghai. I can get there in like 30 minutes with that fast train.

Zhen:

You got that high-speed train.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my goodness. Did you go to school in that area too?

Zhen:

Yes, I went to one of the universities I just located in Shanghai, Fudan University, and I studied computer science there.

Bradley Sutton:

Computer science. And then did you continue studies here in the United States.

Zhen:

Yeah, I went to University of Georgia, so that’s the southeast state.

Bradley Sutton:

Bulldogs, I think is the mascot there.

Zhen:

Yeah. Bulldog is our mascot. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I spent over five years there get my PhD. Also, I teach a lot in the university, so that has been a great time.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. And now, do you live still in Georgia or here on the West Coast?

Zhen:

Well, I’m here in Seattle for almost 15 years I think.

Bradley Sutton:

15 years?

Zhen:

Yeah, since I first moved here.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you get your PhD when you were 10 years old, or what’s going on?

Zhen:

I’m much older than, yeah, but I’ve been here for quite some time six years at Amazon and before that at Microsoft. So, yeah, what worked in the tech industry all the time.

Bradley Sutton:

Where do you, what department did you start at Amazon?

Zhen:

I actually started at it’s called the supply chain optimization technology, which is kind of the big back end that really controls a lot of like inventory and shipping transportation for the Amazon machine to run smoothly, yeah. And then I spent a couple years at AWS, as I have some experience working in the cloud, and then I moved back to the retail part of the business and work on tools that help our sellers. So that’s my journey at Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right, in this episode we’re talking a lot about product launching either launching your business for the first product or maybe your just next product. So what are some things of how Amazon views that process, how it can help?

Zhen:

Yeah, so Amazon’s vision is really to help every seller, big or small, to confidently launch new product, as you said, whether it’s the first product that they’ve ever launched or maybe just the next product they add to their product portfolio. We want the sellers to feel confident in creating those products, bring them to Amazon and then quickly get signals and scale the winning ones.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, when we talk about launch, when we talk about scale, it’s not always necessarily a 100% smooth process. There’s challenges that sellers, brands, face. What are some things that Amazon and your team in particular are doing or have developed to help sellers through this process?

Zhen:

Yeah, we see that there are essentially three key challenges that the sellers are facing. One is, when they start thinking about launching a new product, they obviously need to know what is that product right. So we hope that Amazon could really surface our deep understanding of the customers and what they are looking for in Amazon stores and what they are looking for in Amazon stores and so that our sellers get those signals and can better ideate new product and build the product in the right way.

Zhen:

So that’s definitely the first challenge and a lot of the tools that we are building helping them. Second is we do see like there could be a lot of upfront investment from the seller to create those new products, build up the inventory. So we are thinking how to make this process with the reduced risk and maybe not that much upfront investment tied into it. So we are definitely innovating on our FBA programs and also other tools and programs to help sellers assess the potential of their new product and have some trial launch that could reduce the risk in that step. And finally, after launch, definitely not every product will be a bestseller, but we want to help the sellers quickly get the signals and understand which ones are the winning ones, double down on those, and then which ones doesn’t fly with the customer, and then they can sort of stop investment on those.

Bradley Sutton:

So one of my favorite features of Seller Central is Product Opportunity Explorer, or the short it’s AUX, I believe is the colloquial term for it. So with Product Opportunity Explorer, what are some new features you can talk about that help sellers with that first part of things about finding a product to potentially sell.

Zhen:

Yeah for sure. Product Opportunity Explorer launched in 2021, but this year we are really giving it a little bit more revamp or brush up. We have two new features that I would really like to call out. One is that we now provide two years of metrics for the niches, that we now provide two years of metrics for the niches that we show up in the product opportunity explorer. That include the ones that sellers used to get, like search volumes and average selling price. But also we are including more metrics like top 5, 20 product click share that can help the sellers to understand how the competition landscape sort of evolved over the years. That we think will definitely help them better understand sort of the market and demand change and finding a better entry time if they are building a new product and even planning for the inventory.

Zhen:

So that’s one feature. The other one is we greatly expand the coverage of Insights into many more stores. So Opportunity Explorer used to only have Insights for seven stores. Now we are. This year we add 11 more stores to that tool. So now you can see the market and consumer preferences in quite a few emerging stores Canada, Mexico, Brazil. We add Netherlands in Europe and then Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey. So definitely much more stores that we cover. We think that today’s a lot of sellers they are considering building their business, sell across the country board and sell globally from day one. So we hope, regardless of whether the sellers are launching their first product or adding new product to their portfolio, they could consider across Amazon stores and find the best opportunity that works for their next product.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. That’s exciting to see. So, historically, I’ve used Product Opportunity Explorer in a variety of ways. I like looking at the niche and looking at the keyword niche, looking at the product niche, seeing how many clicks and also looking into some of the review insights that it gives. But I heard a rumor there’s something new that Product Opportunity Explorer has, and so what is it and how can it help sellers?

Zhen:

Yeah, so we are introducing a brand new experience in the AUX. It is called Identify Market Demand. So comparing to niche, where you could get a wide range of sort of fine granular segment of the market where some are quite saturated, we want to provide a way for sellers to systematically find those customer needs that are currently underserved in our store.

Zhen:

So customers are looking for certain products, yet they might not find the right ones that have the features that they are looking for or have the designs and package size or the price point that they are looking for. So we think those are the opportunities for our sellers to really break and enter the market. That’s how we provide this brand new experience where the sellers can use the storefront product category that they are familiar with, go to the related categories that they are selling in and then see all the market demand that we see the customers are looking for products, yet not finding satisfying ones. Yeah, so this is the new experience we provide. It is powered by a science model that we build in the back end that analyzed the customer’s search and purchase behavior and aggregate all those customer purchase intent that are not well satisfied at the moment.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, I was kind of doing that when I was using AUX Opportunity Explorer in a rudimentary way. What I would do is I would look at the conversion data yeah and I’m like all right, on average in this niche. I see, oh, this keyword, six percent, six percent, five percent, seven percent, and all of a sudden I’d see something 0.3 percent right and then now I’m like oh okay, obviously people are searching it, but they must not be finding what they’re buying. So you’re saying like now there’s going to be like a much better way than me just looking line by line.

Zhen:

Exactly we don’t want every seller to do what you are doing, right, and then that’s very time consuming and it’s not like they need to spend hours to do that. And also by spotting like just a keyword, that’s just one keyword, right, there could be similar keywords and then you get better understand like what’s the entire search volume of that similar purchase intent. So we actually do those heavy lifting works for the sellers now.

Bradley Sutton:

And this works, guys. You guys know, maybe you heard me talk on the podcast before I actually had a real experience. One of the products I sell is these funny looking shelves shaped like coffin.

Zhen:

Yeah, coffin shelves. 

Bradley Sutton:

So, the main keyword is coffin shelf. But then what I noticed when I was looking at my own niche, I was just doing some other research in Opportunity Explorer. I noticed that there was a keyword coffin bookshelf that my product was not because it’s only this one. You can’t put any books there. And then I saw it had a really terrible conversion rate. And then so, sure enough, I was like let me go ahead and develop this. Nobody had it on Amazon. I made a coffin bookshelf sold out of that product in one month, so this strategy works but obviously you can’t just be like oh, I just happen to see it, so that’s cool that there’s something that can look at it.

Zhen:

Yeah, so we want to provide this in a more systematic way that the sellers can just find right now. Think about you. Go into a product category, say bookshelf, and then you’ll see coffin bookshelf. It’s something that customers are looking for, yet not finding the product.

Bradley Sutton:

Perfect. So yesterday here at Accelerate, Dharmesh was interviewing Andy Jassy and one of the topics was, he said, the very famous two-letter word was AI. How is Opportunity Explorer integrating AI? Either now or coming soon.

Zhen:

Yeah, so we are definitely leveraging and harnessing the power of AI for Opportunity Explorer. We are actually launching two features this year. One is we call it Niche Insight. So, as you must have known, Opportunity Explorer has a wealth of data in it. However, to really get the insight, you need to go through the data, as the example you gave, right. Oh, I looked at all the conversion rate and then I see one word that must be something the customer looking for but not finding it. So this requires sellers to have a lot of knowledge about what metrics indicates what right, and then do some stitch in the Excel themselves and calculate some numbers and then find out the insight. But you don’t need to worry about all those anymore. We do the calculations for you and then we leverage the Gen AI to synthesize all those data and provide insight on market trends what are the trending search terms, what are the features that are in the product niche, what are the pricing, segments and packaging designs, so more and summary of the customer reviews. So, as a seller, when you now go into a niche, you no longer need to browse through all those data. You can quickly look at the insight widget, get all those summarized insight and then have a 20-80 kind of decision whether this is a niche I would need to explore more or I should just pass by this and instead explore some adjacent niches. Yeah, so that’s the first feature we introduced.

Zhen:

And then the second one is I talk about the identified market demand. Right, so you identify the coffin bookshelf, but how do you know, like, what are the colors or sort of size right and other corresponding design and product features to have for your new coffin bookshelf, right? In addition to this identified market demand, we also provide you a new product sort of development insight that covers who are the customers that are looking for this product, so the personas of the customers, their preferences, what are the top features to consider to include in the product, what are the price ranges that could make your product competitive, Some listing and marketing positioning considerations. So we really want to make that market demand that we identified very actionable for you. So now, after reading that, you can jump in and start thinking about your next new product design.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. You know, a mistake that people, I think, in general, make in using AI is like oh, I’m just going to ask this or prompt this and then whatever it says, I’m just going to go with it. But there’s a balancing act that needs to happen. I’m sure you agree that has to happen when we’re talking about Amazon sellers as well. So, all of these AI insights, how should sellers be balancing it with other things?

Zhen:

Yes, for sure. We think that we bring the data and then we harness sellers to also bring in their expertise in the product domain that their business are operating in. Sellers need to balance it with their own understanding of their supply chain or manufacturing capabilities. Who are their target customers, right, and ultimately, what is their business goal, so that the insight becomes a great assistant to their business plan? But not in the driver’s seat.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. so, you’ve already talked about some cool things that are coming to Opportunity Explorer, Anything else that’s going to come that can help either launch, pre-launch any of those phases.

 Zhen:

Yeah for sure. So, looking ahead, obviously we’ll continue enhancing the identify market demand feature. So we are thinking definitely we’re going to cover more store with that insight and also a lot of times we need to synthesize more data and signals on and off Amazon to provide more precise and sort of more insightful ideas for our sellers to create new product and understand sort of where consumers are going consumers are going. Second is that we are definitely thinking it will be super valuable for us to provide more personalized insights to our sellers. So we expect that as sellers interact more with our tools, we’ll get to understand our sellers better and then have the more relevant insight provided and surface toward each seller. So you spend less time in the tool or you spend the same time in the tool but get more effective insights. Finally, we do think that there are much more enhanced pre-validation that we can provide to sellers.

Zhen:

We are thinking directionally to provide sellers a way to assess and evaluate the potential of their new product ideas. So basically, the sellers can tell us what is the product that they are thinking about launching and then we can synthesize those product features and where are the current customer demand, how strong is the seller’s brand and so on, so forth, multiple signals to provide like a directional range of the potential sales. We are also enhancing many of our programs to help set a better match with their early customers so they can get some validation before launch. So polls, surveys or even sending out like a test product to get feedback.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. So to wrap up this conversation about looking for products, product discovery, product research, however people call. Actually, in some countries the term is product hunting. I kind of like that one, like they’re hunting for a product.

Bradley Sutton:

But whatever you call that process, any last messages for sellers out there who are either going through this for the first time or going to find their next product that you can share.

Zhen:

Yeah, for sure. I think it gets back to Amazon’s mission, where we really want to help business of all size to be successful on Amazon, right. So the tools and programs that I talked about in this session they’re not just helping our sellers to sort of launch new product and build new product we really hope that all those tools, regardless of its insight, like analytics tools like Product Opportunity Explorer, or the content building tools like A-plus Content and our FBA programs we hope sellers could use those and then we do the heavy lifting for the sellers, right, and then you can focus on building the innovations and the next best selling product and grow your business really from there. So that’s definitely what is our mission and vision and that’s also what attracts me to work in this space. 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for, first of all, being on the show, but then also all the work you’re doing behind the scenes. I love data points such as Product Opportunity Explorer I know we didn’t talk about it much today, but very closely related to search query performance and so I have a lot of respect for the teams that work on that, because I remember the time when we were kind of blind not completely blind, but compared to now, I consider it blind.

Bradley Sutton:

With the amount of data that Amazon is showing and giving sellers, there’s like no reason for you guys not to take action. So I know there’s a lot of people out there. They’ve been, you know knowing about the opportunity of selling on Amazon and like, oh, I’m not sure if I want to do it. But, guys, what are you waiting for? Amazon is simplifying the process so much and giving you data that will help you make these decisions. So I want you guys to use these tools that we talked about and launch your first product on Amazon. So thank you so much for joining us on the show. Next year at Accelerate, I’d love to have you back and let’s talk about all the new fun things that are coming to the tools that you’re working on.

Zhen:

Thank you, Bradley, it’s definitely my pleasure.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much.

Zhen:

Thank you.

---

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.