📊 Elite Software for Elite Sellers

Part of being an elite Amazon seller is using elite-level tools like Jungle Scout. Take me for example. Do you really think I could have grown to $10 million in Amazon sales without using cutting-edge research software like Jungle Scout? No chance.

Jungle Scout was instrumental in my journey to hit my revenue goals and attain a dream exit. Jungle Scout will be your secret weapon for historic growth in 2024:

-Keyword analysis: Discover high volume, low competition keywords to boost organic traffic and drive conversions.

-Rank tracking: Monitor changes to your share of voice against competitors—improve listing and gauge the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

-Competitor insights: Benchmark your business and leverage competitive intelligence to exchange/refine and optimize your growth strategies.

Don’t take my word for it. The average Amazon seller sees an average growth rate of 367% after making the switch to Jungle Scout. 🤩

It’s time to take your product research to the next level.

🛠️ 4 Solutions Worth Checking Out

🤖 ACCURATE FBA INVENTORY COUNTS - Finale’s automation system is your secret weapon for avoiding stockouts, protecting your profit, and preventing overselling. Not convinced? Grab their FREE eBook and learn how to leverage your Amazon data and skyrocket your sales.

⚡ FAST AMAZON RANKING WITH INFLUENCERS - Stack Influence helps brands drive guaranteed external traffic by sending free products to Micro-Influencers and automating collaborations. They have turned new launches into 6-figure listings in just 2 months! Sign up HERE.

🤑 GET $1,000 IN AMAZON REIMBURSEMENTS - GETIDA has been maximizing FBA seller reimbursements (think overcharge fees and lost/damaged inventory) for over eight years, and has quickly become a seller favorite. Joining is quick and easy, get your first $1,000 in reimbursements free. It's not uncommon to see $20,000+ in reimbursements after the first audit!

📈 OFF-AMAZON TRAFFIC THAT CONVERTS - Ranking on Amazon with PPC alone is a losing strategy. Perch+ gives you access to Top 10 lists, deal sites, and more. Tell them that Amazon insiders sent you to grab 20% off your first month!

(*everything above is a sponsored ad, get yours here!)

🚀 This Week's Amazon Hack: A Call for Modern-Day Amazon Growth Guilds

Today's "Newsletter Takeover" is written by none other than Mike Mallazzo, Head of Business Development & Partnerships at Forum Brands. He's also making some waves with his weekly newsletter United States of Amazon. If you haven't signed up, you know what to do.

When Mike first approached me with this growth hack, I'll be honest, I was a bit skeptical. But, the more I read, the more it all made sense. This is going to be a game-changer for your business.

Mike, it's all yours!

Thanks Jon!

There’s an interesting divergence currently taking place in the Amazon ecosystem. As Amazon stock once again touches all-time highs, the sentiment in the Amazon seller community is the most existentially bearish that I’ve ever seen it. In FORTUNE, Jason Del Rey has an excellent writeup of highly sophisticated operators feeling that current fee changes are an “extinction-level” event.

Broadly speaking, the simple arbitrage era is over in online commerce and we don’t really know what will come next. While I believe this is a healthy long-term development for the Amazon ecosystem writ large as it will ultimately require bolder, higher quality products and brands to be shipped to the end shopper, there’s a world of short-term pain. And by and large, too many of the winners of this awkward in-between era on Amazon are Chinese entities with names like NUTSAAKK 😂.

However, if there’s a platinum lining in Amazon PPC and seller fees becoming fundamentally unsustainable, it’s that the next decade of commerce will be made multiplayer out of necessity, where Amazon operators come together to split the cost of new customer acquisition.

Luckily, Amazon sellers are among the most collaborative people on the planet. When I first got into this business, I was blown away to find everyone from nine-figure independent operators to aggregator CEOs in group chats together openly sharing their most profitable strategies for the betterment of the community. Yet despite this ethos, Amazon makes it incredibly difficult to impossible for sellers to directly do anything co-operative on the platform. It’s a single-player game played with… and occasionally against the algorithms.

Nearly every card in the deck is currently stacked against American-based operators. Chinese sellers have lower landed costs, will operate on thinner margins, and traditional advantages enjoyed by sophisticated operators in PPC, A+ content, and even basic copywriting are becoming slightly more commoditized by the day.

However, there are two unique structural advantages that American operators have over the competition:

1- Access to an ecosystem of partners that can drive high-quality offsite traffic to Amazon that for now, is mostly an unknown entity to Chinese brands.

2- A spirit and willingness to work together with other operators in the space on mutually beneficial partnerships.

This post is a playbook for how to use these two benefits in tandem and a call for partners with high-quality ASINS to join me on a few collective affiliate efforts.

The First Step

There are four entities in and around commerce that have true scale: Amazon, Google, Facebook and TikTok. And only Amazon has the luxury of built-in demand. Thus, until you are a large brand, the only growth hacks and partnerships that move the needle are those that directly reduce CAC in driving offsite traffic to Amazon. Everything else is mostly a distraction.

Thus, the first tangible examples of multiplayer commerce will be in the form of partnerships where brands work together to increase the scale of profitable offsite traffic they can drive to Amazon. A couple of months back, I went on the DON’T V LOOKUP podcast to propose a model for collective media buying. The rest of this column serves to explain this in more detail and to recruit partners for the effort.

How It Works

The basic idea here is very simple. I aim to build a consortium of brands that approach content-based affiliates with offers to underwrite the creation of new articles. With brands willing to pay commission rates of ~30%, affiliates will be able to drive significant paid volume, increasing their profits and driving scale for brands at a 3-5X topline ROAS (more on how this math shakes out below).

These partners will create high-quality content that features all of the products in a format that doesn’t directly rank the items or make any SKU out to be better than others in the list. The publishers here will be selective, only featuring items that they organically think are best in class or fit their broader content strategy. The end result will be articles with editorial framings like:

• Best gifts for new moms

• 12 can’t-miss items with more than 10,000 5-star reviews

• Six can’t-miss products that hit shelves last month

• 25 best things you can buy on Amazon under $35

Done correctly, this is one of the last corners of digital marketing arbitrage left in our ecosystem where brands can pay at a guaranteed (albeit aggressive) affiliate rate and partners can drive a ton of scale by buying cheap, broad traffic.

On the brand side, this is largely a variation of some common themes that have been prevalent in the industry for years. It’s essentially a mashup of advertorial-style landing page campaigns, social whitelisting, and conventional affiliate deals with content partners. At the end of the day, the core innovation here is simply being in it together with like-minded brands.

Buying traffic has been a part of the commerce media playbook for years. Several of the large publishing houses have quietly built high eight and nine-figure businesses off of Google and Meta buying funded by affiliate commissions. But it has never really been done collaboratively with a consortium of like-minded partners ALL helping to foot the bill in one shot.

While the unit economics of paid traffic are getting tougher, savvy publishers are also driving historically high conversion rates, and with several brands kicking in a significant percentage of sales, there’s a tipping point that will allow publishers to buy orders of magnitude more paid traffic than they could just working with 1-2 partners on an article.

The Media Partner Equation

OK, so how the heck is this profitable for affiliate publishers? Without going too much into the nitty-gritty, there are two variables here that make the unit economics particularly interesting for sophisticated publishers:

1. When publishers send paid traffic that is subsidized by brands to high performing commerce articles, they earn not only increased affiliate commissions but also additional ad exposure and possibly even a pathway to more paid subscribers.
2. When brands are willing to send the traffic to Amazon specifically, publishers can receive full cart value on Amazon Associates commission + brand side incentives. If several brands are all adding generous incremental rates, you can see how the overall yield economics are VERY favorable.

Today, the rate-limiting step to most commerce media buyers being able to scale is the velocity at which they can do direct deals. Rates that can be sourced through networks are way too low and doing one-off deals with brands is not scalable.

But it has never really been done collaboratively with a guild of like-minded brands who present a unified offer, radically shortening the deal flow. So let’s build one.

Putting This to the Test

This is not strictly an academic post– I have media partners standing by waiting for me to bring them brands in addition to those owned and operated by Forum. For this first run, here are the criteria of like-minded brands I’m looking to partner with:

• Willing to send traffic to an Amazon PDP at 30%+ commission (ideally leveraging Amazon Attribution) where you will receive 10% back in brand referral bonus. Effectively, it’s net 20%…or a guaranteed 5X ROAS test.

• <$50 AOV for most products you sell. I’m particularly excited to get a few $20-30 products into this test to challenge the prevailing wisdom going around eCommerce Twitter that it’s no longer possible to be profitable at this price point.

• Reasonably short purchase funnel/lowish consideration impulse buy.

• Strong Amazon conversion rate and fully optimized listings with strong copy and A+ content

• ANY category will be considered but I’d be most excited about parenting and wellness brands as there likely will be additional collaboration opportunities on other co-op growth dreams and schemes of mine :)

If you’re interested in participating, please fill out this Google Form. If I’ve piqued your interest but you’d like to learn more, I'm happy to hop on a 15-minute call.

If this initial run is successful for all parties involved, I’d love to run many more like it off Amazon, both to Shopify listings and potentially other marketplaces. In general, higher AOV items will perform better in this model so if we can drive scale at the $30 price point, imagine what we can do together with upmarket brands.

What starts as simple collaborations on affiliate partnerships will be the spark that ignites a much broader fire in how we think about partnerships living at the center of offsite customer acquisition Overall, my endgame here is to create something of a modern-day guild among like-minded brands that could comprise broader shared media buying, audience & data swaps, shared loyalty programs, joint newsletter ad deals and possibly even publishing houses built together by eCommerce operators.

Let’s go build the future of multiplayer commerce on Amazon.

🔥 Hot Amazon Seller News: ATTENTION Supplement Sellers

Veteran sellers have been calling for stricter testing requirements for supplements for years. Amazon listened!

If you sell any type of edible supplement for humans, you must now verify your products through a third-party Testing, Inspection, and Certification organization.

This is GREAT NEWS for established sellers and BAD NEWS for newer sellers and Chinese sellers who are notorious for filling their supplements with fillers and dangerous chemicals.

💡 Head on over to your "Manage Your Compliance" dashboard and see which of your listings require action. You'll initiate a test of your supplements and the results will be sent over to Amazon. Simple enough!

If this update scares you, shame on you for selling garbage products. You deserve any pain coming your way via testing.

This is a MASSIVE step in the right direction to ensure not only that consumers are protected but will also protect brand owners against scammers who never seem to get caught by Amazon.

🤝 Whenever You Are Ready

Here are 2 ways I can help you:

1. ​Get In Front of My Audience - With more than 18,000+ newsletter subscribers, 30k+ Twitter followers, and 8k+ LinkedIn followers, I work with dozens of Amazon partners in unique ways to help them grow HERE.
2. ​Get Amazon Coaching - I work with Amazon sellers of all sizes and help them scale faster, expand into new markets, and exit for millions of dollars. If you're ready to take your brand to the next level, book your free discovery call!

Jon Elder

Forwarded this email? Sign up here​

Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn​