Welcome to the seller's Edge, the podcast where we throw ourselves in the fray of all things e commerce, business and technology. Today we have a very special guest joining us. Casey Harvey is an e commerce strategist with endless experience and really clever insights to share. Beyond being one of the most knowledgeable people I know in the industry, Casey has a very unique perspective and approach that stands out in a great way. In this episode, we explore the future of reviews on Amazon, a ver
y reliable ad strategy, and the secret to gaming the system. As we look ahead to the rest of this year, it's important for sellers to position themselves for success. With Q one underway, now is the perfect time to prepare for Prime Day, anticipate seasonal trends, and gear up for the surge of sales that typically come in the second half of the year. By implementing the strategies discussed today, sellers can optimize their advertising efforts, drive incremental sales, and maintain a strong pres
ence in the market. So with that, let's fast forward right to the good stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan D'Ambrosio, and you're on the seller's edge. Number one, I would say if you're jumping into a market where there's a market leader or a set of market leaders that have a very high review count, step number one is to lower your expectations. Unless, like we talked about earlier, diving into customer sentiments, you have identified an opportunity to differentiate your product where you can also ef
fectively showcase that through content and people are going to notice it and they're going to gravitate more towards your. But that, again, that's not going to happen at first with a lack of reviews. It's just the reality of selling on Amazon. It's a platform where you are quickly presented with all sorts of options. And that brings me to another great point about being a first time seller. Don't get caught up in just the seller mindset. Always make sure you have the ability to go back to looki
ng at things through the customer's perspective. The jobs I've worked in, a lot of the work that I've done, has involved coming into a listing or a product that's underperforming relative to expectations. So kind of the natural first step for that is you're looking at the numbers and the data, of course, but you're also looking at the listing itself, the competitive landscape, and you're putting yourself in the customer's shoes thinking, why would I buy? I'm trying to figure out why we're not se
lling as much as we think we can sell. Why? As a customer myself, just would I choose our product over the rest of the competition? In your head, when you're looking at it from the seller perspective, you're like, man, the numbers don't make sense. I can't figure this out. Why aren't we selling as much as we should? And then the first competitor listing I clicked on offers this extra feature and has better reviews or whatever. And if I'm being honest with myself, I would purchase that one. I pro
bably wouldn't even make it to my own listing. So always have that ability to balance looking at things from the seller's perspective or the data analyst perspective or the advertising manager perspective. But also remember that people that are shopping on Amazon aren't thinking that way. They're not thinking about, well, this listing doesn't have, they're not maxing out on the 200 character count title limit. That's not how they're choosing products. Right. It's very quickly their eyes drawn to
what's the best main image in the search results with the best combination of price value, whatever it is. Do they have the most reviews? Do they have at least the top two or three? Most reviews, are their reviews good? They're making these decisions quickly. That's how the platform is designed. It's convenience, it's great customer service. You order a product, you can send it back 30 days, no questions asked, no matter what it's designed for them. Right. And it's designed to be easy and acces
sible and user friendly because that's something as an operator I've seen, and I'm guilty of this myself, of getting too far removed from the customer mindset and just forgetting about that. So back to that example though. So I come out, I have a good product, it looks good. I have all of my keywords in my title. I obviously am going to spend an arm and a leg on paid and sponsored ads to get to the front of the pages as best as I can and then try to get influencers I know to do things on social
media, so on and so forth. It shows up top of the page of the SERP and then there's no reviews though. What's the first thing that you can do? Obviously you need to sell the product to get the reviews. So it's just like, what do you do? Just do giveaways like coupons, give it away for like one dollars. What else is there though? You just have to kind of close your eyes, cross your fingers and hope for the best. Yeah, there's some of that involved for sure. If I'm being honest, I think the answer
to this question is twofold. I think number one, the first part of the answer is if you're just talking about Amazon, you have to undercut, in most cases, you're going to have to undercut as much as you can bear on price to incentivize customers to purchase your product over an established one that has reviews that they can read through and that they get a concrete idea about what the product is and isn't and that they trust. Right. Even if you have some reviews, but let's say you got like ten
reviews, right. The reality is you're just going to be drawn as a customer to the listings that have more reviews. That's just how Amazon works. That's what it is, right. You have to differentiate in the most obvious way possible, which is to offer a great value. Hey, listen, we don't have the reviews at, we understand you're probably as a customer taking a risk purchasing our product. We'll give it to you at a great value that you're not going to be able to get for the primary competitors in th
e space. And hopefully that way you're going to get some reviews, hopefully good ones, going back to square one. Right. Like you've critically thought about what's going to set your product apart and make it great and then you're getting the proof that it is by people are buying it because let's be honest, they're probably seeing a lower price and then they get into like, oh, this is great product. I'm going to leave a positive review and then hopefully it's just kind of like a snowball effect f
rom there. I would say the second part to that is at this point in the game, I would always say do not just go exclusively Amazon. So I think the, if you're just getting started on Amazon, there's kind of the established, accepted social proof, right, which is reviews like we talked about off Amazon, something like, let's say like TikTok shops, for example, is all the rage right now. Everybody's talking about it there. It's less about gamifying the algorithm in a way to rank for certain keywords
and it's more about content. So people on there, they're not weighing like four products across a search results page with reviews and price next to each other. They're seeing content for one product or one set of products served to them and they're judging it based on the content or the influencer that's advertising it. Do they trust them? Do they know them? Whatever this is speculation on my part, but I have to believe that it's much, much easier to build brand equity and to build a loyal cus
tomer base somewhere like that. Versus on Amazon, where you're just white knuckling your way to just getting reviews ASAP as soon as possible by any means necessary, even if it means you're just not even close to profitable for, call it six to twelve months, right. If you want to get into the ecommerce game, I think that you should start on Amazon. Not exclusively, but I do think you should start on Amazon because that's where the most traffic, the most buyer intent traffic exists. They have a w
orld class fulfillment system that nobody else has even come close to and probably won't for a long time, if ever. So you've got that at your disposal. But the reality is people are searching for keywords and they're looking at your product and search results versus something much more established. Versus TikTok organic, for example, where people are just seeing content and they like it and they purchase it there. And what I've seen in cases where I've been hands on and then other people's busin
esses is a lot of that off site traffic carries over to Amazon and then you see more of a branded presence start to build. So there's some supplement lines and other brands in the nutritional space and the beauty space where I've seen they've got 50 reviews, but it's showing right under the listing, 5000 bought in the last month. Because they're building their presence off of Amazon and it's carrying over because I'm probably going to butcher the statistic, but it's something like 60 70% of peop
le that are shopping online are at minimum going to do a price check on Amazon. Even if they're going to end up buying something somewhere else. It's a large portion of shoppers, whatever the number is, is the point, I would say on Amazon exclusively, which I wouldn't recommend, taper your expectations and have the understanding you're not going to make money for a while and you're going to have to undercut on price. But that's where, even though it's going to be difficult to master another plat
form and all the intricacies of that and how to operate successfully on that, where you're going to be able to accomplish something there that you're not going to be able to accomplish on Amazon. And hopefully things should just kind of compound, as far as I understand, on TikTok shops, for example, you can't pull over your reviews, but you can feature reviews in your content. So that's where the compounding effect or the flywheel comes into. Like you build it over here, that spins up the flywhe
el. On Amazon, you're getting reviews as you get good reviews or you have a rating, maybe not even the number of reviews, but maybe you have a rating that helps you to stand out. You're featuring that on your content. On TikTok, I read an article about Amazon's testing some AI to break down reviews because they're trying to get away from there being pages upon pages upon pages of reviews and figuring out a way to just boil it down to the most basic sort of how they have that keyword cloud at the
bottom. I feel like if they do that, it's going to be harder for people to do market research because going back to your point about the ways to have strong products by looking at customer pain points, that might go away. And I'm just curious, doesn't Amazon, Amazon must consider things like that. Cause like you're getting rid of reviews. And I feel like that's such an important part of, we've seen all over the course of this year, Amazon experimenting with, right. So like, the way reviews have
been displayed in search results have changed constantly over the course of the year. And it's clear they're testing this. It's also clear that they understand and know there are huge implications to changing that up. Right. But I think overall, the way that they're, so there was a time where they omitted review counts for a bit, right, or they got rid of the actual stars and it just had one star and then it listed the rating. I think that it challenges sellers to think a little bit more critic
ally. Right? Like, I can't just ride this high review count into the sunset. Like I have to be thinking about where is this market going? How are products in this market changing? What do people care about now versus what they cared about before? I think Amazon is very aware that whatever they do with reviews, if anything, it could change a lot. But I'm very much in favor of them changing things up in a way that better allow newer sellers or just sellers with lower review counts that potentially
have superior products to have more of a fair shake. I think it's a forcing function for sellers to become more sophisticated and to build and design and launch better products, market better, produce better content. It just becomes more essential to differentiate in ways other than just having the most reviews and charging the lowest price. Yeah, that's how I hope it plays out anyway. I would rather it be like that? Yeah. Like democratizing reviews for everyone to be able to play the game fair
ly. I like that there's a part of me that's always for those because we've dealt with brands that have hit those ceilings and you're looking for the incremental sales that come out of nowhere. You're looking for just fringe use cases that are in those small fractions of reviews that probably wouldn't bubble up to the top if they kind of boil everything down that way. That's a good point, too. There's going to be some cases where that's what you have to do. You are doing really well, but you're l
ooking on, how do I take this to the next level? How do I go further? You probably got to go deeper. Yeah. So if you come to a market and you see the competitor product that's leading and it's just like there's really nothing to be done and you have a product like it, what do you do? If I'm a seller, I come to you and I say, hey, I'm selling this beach ball. It's a terrible analogy, but we'll use it anyway. But there's a better beach ball on the market. What can you do at that point? How did we
land on beach ball? I don't know how we landed on beach ball. All right, so we'll go with exercise ball. Okay. All right. There we go. Much better. Yeah. So exercise ball. If there's a competitor who you can run theirs over with a tank and it just won't burst, how do you even begin to compete with that? What advice do you give to the seller? How can you start to compete if your product isn't good enough? And would you actually be that transparent with the seller and being like, listen, they're g
oing to do better than you and you just have to do this? Yeah. My honest to God answer would be find a different product to launch if their response was, I am married to this product. I'm launching it. I'm going in on Amazon. It's happening. Help me. I would say to be prepared to lose money for probably a year, I would say you're going to have to buy visibility because you're not going to have it to start, meaning you have to go heavy on advertising, shoot great content. I am more and more convi
nced that your image stack, product videos, et cetera, carry more weight than any other listing content at this point, especially when you consider the majority of people are shopping on mobile, they're scrolling through the image stack. They're probably making purchase decisions and judgments there. They're not reading little blocks of text about selling the pen. Right? Invest heavily into good content. It's not even expensive to produce good content at this point. You can get on fiver. There's
other agencies that offer specifically to produce like product videos and stuff like that. Do your research and have a deep understanding of what drives people's decision to purchase in that market. Some markets it's going to be quality. People are willing to pay more because the quality matters. Supplements is a great example. Beach ball people are probably just looking for the cheapest one with the most reviews. But I would say obviously you're at a review disadvantage. But keep in mind that
generally people, they want to pay around this price for a beach ball. And so if that means you source maybe a slightly cheaper beach ball even though it's of lesser quality, people might care about that more than they care about a four and a half star average, right? So have an understanding of what drives the majority of customers to purchase the product, cater to that as best you can and market your product outside of Amazon. The other thing that you brought up, and I just want to kind of ste
er the conversation back there because I know that you and I have spent a great deal of time talking about it, is organic versus sponsored and do you think it is worth it? And I know the answer is going to be it depends, but I want to hear your thoughts beyond that. If you have the number one ranked product organic and is it worth spending the money on sponsored ads at that point? Because I've seen so many times where sponsored ads are within a position or two of the actual product and for some
reason I imagine it's cannibalizing profits at some. Seen it. I've seen it go both ways, which is probably a different way of saying it depends. No, the answer is it's possible and you may be giving up some profit by doing that. My high level approach to advertising on Amazon is twofold. It's one, to capture incremental profitable sales. If you're in profit driving mode that does take organic rank into consideration. And so I think what I would go back and say is I would narrow my focus on what
keywords I'm concerning myself with with regards to organic rank. So I'm not tracking 400 keywords in viral launches rank tracker. Right. I'm tracking probably ten to 20. Even 20 in my opinion, is probably overkill. Right. So what are the keywords that drive the highest number of purchases for my product on a regular basis? And I'm optimizing my advertising strategy to place where I am not ranking organically for those, hence the incremental part of it. Right. So if I'm ranking top of search, if
I'm in the top three or four, let's be honest, that is top of search, anything beyond that is a couple of finger scrolls down or if you're on desktop it's even further. But I would say if I am ranking top of search, I'm probably going to advertise away from top of search placements, right? So I want to advertise where I'm not showing up organically. If for whatever reason someone scrolls past me, if I'm ranking well at the top, I want them to see my product again further down, maybe that pushes
them over the edge to click or purchase. Right? So number one, optimize for incremental, profitable sales. Number two, if you're in a growth phase. So if I am trying to push my overall organic rank, and again, my main KPI for that is our number of organic sales, I am not paying attention to individual keyword rank for every single keyword. That's not to say I'm not checking in on it or monitoring it every now and then, but I'm not looking at that on a daily basis. As long as I'm seeing my numbe
r of organic sales overall going up, I can assume that my organic rank is improving. Right. So that's the growth approach, which is going heavy on advertising to increase your number of sales, which in a lot of cases, and there's going to be some people out there that are like, no, you cannot use sponsored to drive organic rank and there's going to be other people that agree with me. I have seen many cases where I've been able to drive organic rank improvements successfully using a heavy sponsor
ed presence. Number three is defensibility. I've also seen a lot of cases where even though I've got a product that's very well established, it's got a lot of visibility organically, it's been kind of a mainstay at the top of search results for its relevant keywords for a long period of time, even those review lead everything. I've seen instances where it's like, oh, we can just cut out sponsor and make more money that way. Right? We don't need those sales. We're ranking really well. Got a ton o
f reviews almost every single time. When you, I'm going to use the word recklessly, I'm going to go that far. When you recklessly cut out advertising, spend drastically. Like if you're cutting out 50, 60, 70% of spend all at once. I've almost always seen that result in a decline in organic position. Almost always. And so I also use advertising spend as like I said, defensibility. Like kind of a baseline, right? So even though I may be cannibalizing some organic sales here or there, I'm typically
maintaining like a five to 10% tacos baseline of spend keeping that number of sponsored sales. I'm getting pretty as steady as I can. And over the long term what I've seen that usually result in is a more steady amount of sales, right? So not that volatility of organic rank going up and down. My sales are seeing the same thing. As a result, my approach to advertising is incremental sales growth. When you're trying to drive growth and then defensibility which is kind of like that always exists,
right. That doesn't really ever go away in my opinion. But again, there are other products that I've seen, especially highly seasonal products where it's like there are so many sales to go around right now during peak season. We're going to keep trickling that advertising spend back because we continue to see those organic sales going up every single day. And we also know that we've had plenty of success re ranking our products in the off season as well. So we know we can get it back to where it
was. But right now we're reaping the profit, we're raking it in, we're making those granular adjustments to just get as much money as we can while the getting is good. I like it. I'm curious if somebody's looking for a specific branded product, my assumption is they're going to buy that product. That is their intention. Do you waste money on buying your sponsored placements for branded keywords or what are your thoughts there? Are you going to tell me? It depends. Again, probably. I don't reall
y think that it depends here. I think if you have legitimate branded search on Amazon, I think that's a signal that you have some brand equity that you've built, you've got some customer loyalty that you've earned. And I agree. I've been a part of tests, incrementality tests where we reduced spend drastically on branded keywords and monitored our purchase share of those keywords. And in almost every instance we stayed right in the same range of like 85% to 90% purchase share on those branded key
words. I totally agree. If people are looking up your brand that is a strong signal that that's what they intend to purchase. One other way I think you can leverage branded search through advertising is to use that for new products that you're launching. So products that they don't know yet, that don't have reviews. I think advertising those through your branded search, people already know your brand. They trust it. They're buying from it regularly. I think that's a good way to really ramp up sa
les on a newer product that needs some help getting sales. But generally speaking, yeah, I think the defense approach to branded search terms through advertising is overrated. I think it largely cannibalizes profitability. Wow. I feel like we've had a breakthrough. I feel like we've just. Yeah, I'm curious if I'm a new seller and this is how I've thought about it, but maybe my basic assumptions are wrong. I'm a new seller. I obviously can't compete with aspirational keywords because they're just
like through the roof. You need to have escape velocity when you're at that point is the best approach when you're a new seller to look at the least competitive keywords, even on an organic level, and focus on those rather than worry about anything else. And then once you start kind of boxing your weight class, like move up to every other keyword weight class after that, or should you keep it varied, do you think? Yeah, that's another good question. Another one that I have a lot of opinions on.
And it's funny, when people, when I hear, say, target keywords, what do you mean when you say target keywords? You mean you're throwing it in your listing content and you're running ads on it. That's literally what you can't do anything else. Right. And so, yes, you should start with less competitive keywords. And in my mind, another way of saying that is the keywords that are absolutely most relevant to your product, right. So they're longer tail keywords, they're lower search volume. They are
most specifically describing your product. If you've got like a flashlight. Right. There's the search term flashlight, which is going to be really competitive. Right. It's going to serve you results of probably all different kinds of flashlights, different quantities, different brightness, different color temperatures, all that. Right. Versus I've got a flashlight that's 600, it's got three lighting modes and it's black. Right. So what's a keyword that's going to be more relevant to that than f
lashlight? Well, bright black flashlight, we're really butchering the examples here. But you get the idea I'm not a fan of the. This seems like more of a trend in the last couple of years of the fixation on aspirational or broader keywords. Outside of maybe using gray hat ranking tactics, how are you targeting an aspirational keyword? So, like for flashlight, an aspirational keyword could be camping accessories. Okay, so I'm going to throw camping accessories in my title and I'm going to target
the keyword camping accessories. Your advertising performance is going to be terrible on that. You're going to lose a bunch of money advertising on that keyword. You're not going to see any positive rank results, most likely, or any that actually matter. And again, I don't believe that optimizing exact match for certain keywords in your title matters now as much as it did ten years ago. I just don't think it has the same impact. Gurus have been talking about this for 15 years. At this point, eve
rybody has the term camping accessories in their flashlight title. Most people do. Right. You're not going to put that in your title and automatically just start ranking better. I don't believe that's how it works. That's not how I've seen it work with all the products I've worked on. It's like, did the chicken or the egg come first? Right? You see a competitor that ranks for a number of outlier aspirational keywords and it's like, well, how did they get there, right? Did they drive ranking for
that first and now they're ranking well for it and now they get a bunch of sales and they have a ton of reviews? Or did they master their more relevant keywords first, get a bunch of reviews, create a great product, and then they started ranking for those keywords. I'm almost certain it's the latter of the two, especially for a newer seller. I would never recommend trying to target those keywords, especially if you're advertising because you're going to waste your money. It won't be worth it. Yo
u've brought up the guru thing a couple of times. And it's funny because I will always see if you want to grow your business to like a nine figure business, follow these three things and I don't think I've ever found, you know, me and we've been to the bottom of the SQP and back. I will try to find any sort of golden rule that you can apply to any type of situation, but I don't think that exists. So I'm curious. I challenge anyone out there to bring me a rule that will work 100% of the time. And
if you want to argue with me, my email address is Jonathan dambrosio@viralaunch.com. You can cc me, too. Yes. I would just love to hear if anybody has that golden rule, but there isn't one anywhere that I can think of. So those people are obviously just trying to get people's attention. But it seems to work because people are always I go on YouTube and those videos get like millions of views or hundreds of thousands of reviews. So I guess it's just people looking for that shortcut. But the only
truth with the shortcut is to just keep yourself in your lane and figure out what the data is. Yes, I love the question. I could not agree with you more. I have so many thoughts about this. I do think there was a time, I also have to say, I think this was before my time on Amazon. I do think there was a time where there was more of a blueprint that did work for a lot of people. This is back in the 2010 to 2015 range, I would say, where you had a much greater chance of successfully gamifying the
system and the algorithm to rank. And that was at one time what set a lot of people apart. I don't believe that's the case anymore. I've experimented and I've tested with these tactics on and off over the past seven years, and it's been mixed results. And a lot of the time, what I see prevail and what works is just, well, it did work, but also we have a really high review count in the market or we've got a favorable unit, econ, that allows us to charge a good price. It is what it is, but I've b
een involved in a number of initiatives where there have been attempts to scale some of these tactics across a large set of products and brands, et cetera. And it's not the sexy answer. And people, for whatever reason, don't want to accept it or they don't agree with it. But the answer to me is it always depends. There's an unlimited amount of nuance from product to product, niche to niche, market to market. And if you want to get ahead and you want to be successful and you don't have the abilit
y to just undercut everybody on price, you have to have the context. You're layered on top of the operation. So I think there have been attempts that I've seen and I've personally been a part of where it's like we're going to take this thing that we hypothesize works and we're going to scale it. It's going to be a one size fits all solution across hundreds or thousands of products. It doesn't work because the reality is because there are so many sellers on Amazon, right. Whatever market you play
in, unless you strike gold and find one of those vacuums like you mentioned earlier. Right. For whatever market you're competing in, you're always going to be up against the scrappy sellers that are layering on that extra 1020 percent that you're not because you just think that it can be automated or it can be plug and play. This is the strategy that's worked for everything else. That's what we're going to do for this, this and this. And you fall behind is what I've seen in almost every single
case other than listings that have hundreds of thousands of reviews or whatever. And another point I should make that I think is important is I'm not arguing against economies of scale and scaling operations using AI in automated ways. Those are going to be essential to larger Amazon operations today, yesterday, and especially moving forward. But if you are not also layering on that extra 10%, even just 10%, I'll call it, if you're not layering on that extra 10% of expertise and context and know
how that's tailored and custom to that product or that brand or whatever it is, you're not going to win. I've seen a lot of examples of that happen and the vast majority of those cases, they did not win or they are not winning. Right. Because I mean, one of the perfect examples, I don't remember if you and I saw this. I know that a group of us saw this, but there was a product that for the percussion, massage guns, which run about like seventy dollars to one hundred dollars, I think on average
there was a seller one day that was selling them for like seventy cents or something and we thought it was a mistake. Like somebody forgot to enter a couple of zeros in the price, but their strategy was to drop it below a dollar, sell a ridiculous amount to get the sales velocity up, get the best seller badge and then raise the price like overcompensate the price to make up for what they lost, which is a great strategy. You can't really pull that off anymore. But sellers are doing that stuff all
the time. So if you're in a market where the average price is $25 and somebody comes on and throws a $5 product on there, that throws everything that you tried to think going to disrupt everything. Right. So I guess it could be automated and there could be a golden rule if everybody else was following the exact same golden rules. But nobody is. Nobody is. All right. This has been a great conversation. You are amazing. I feel like I've kept you well over time, so thank you for being a good sport
. Oh, wow. There you go. Yeah. But thank you. I appreciate it. And, yeah, man. Talk to you soon. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. That is a wrap on this episode of the seller's Edge. I want to thank our guest, Casey Harvey, for taking the time to come on the show and share his expertise. Casey is always a pleasure to talk to, as I always walk away having learned a lot. And I hope all of you did as well. And thank you. We appreciate you coming back for more. And don't forget to hit that subscrib
e button so you can get a notification when we release the next episode. While you're at it, go follow viral. Launch on YouTube, Instagram, and all other social media platforms as well. I'm Jonathan Dembrosio. Until the next time, stay curious, stay inspired, and I'll see you on the edge.
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