#470 – The Great Shift: Why the Next 24 Months Will Redefine Amazon Seller Success
Join us on this episode as we explore the journey of Anthony Cofrancesco, a trailblazer in the e-commerce industry. Listen in as Anthony recounts his experiences from founding a conversion optimization agency for Amazon sellers to becoming a prominent speaker and e-commerce expert. He shares valuable insights from his early entrepreneurial days in Asia, where he co-founded a company focused on enhancing Amazon listings through graphics, video, and copywriting services. Discover how living in the Philippines, amidst a vibrant entrepreneurial community, allowed Anthony to significantly grow his business, eventually leading to the acquisition of his agency and his remarkable success with PickFu.
In a fascinating discussion on A/B testing, Anthony reveals how integrating testing into business strategies can drive substantial growth. Hear about his journey with PickFu and how strategic A/B testing helped brands like Thrasio’s Angry Orange and Pink Miracle achieve remarkable sales increases. Anthony underscores the importance of moving beyond gut instincts, emphasizing that the initial investment in testing can yield significant long-term benefits. Learn how continual experimentation and rigorous testing can be the keys to success in today’s competitive e-commerce landscape.
The conversation also explores the future of e-commerce, highlighting the evolving role of AI in streamlining business execution for Amazon sellers. Anthony discusses the challenges faced by sellers in navigating the overwhelming amount of information and how AI can revolutionize this space, enabling more efficient expansion across platforms like Amazon, Shopify, and retail. As the market becomes increasingly complex, Anthony stresses the need for sellers to adopt sophisticated systems and processes to maintain a competitive edge. Tune in to gain a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic nature of e-commerce and the pivotal role of execution in achieving business success.
In episode 470 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Anthony discuss:
- 00:00 – From Graphics to Data
- 02:07 – Business Partnership in the Philippines
- 08:39 – A/B Testing Discoveries and Results
- 17:11 – Using PickFu for Faster Market Research
- 20:16 – Optimizing Image Order for Conversions
- 22:18 – The Changing Landscape of Amazon Selling
- 27:19 – Maximizing Execution for Business Growth
- 35:46 – Future of Amazon Business Analytics, Execution, and Education
- 44:46 – Future of Consumer Spending and AI
Transcript
Kevin King:
Episode 470 of the AM/PM podcast. This week I’ve got Anthony Cofrancesco on. We’re going to talk about his journey from creating images to doing split testing, to doing data, to education. He’s got some really good tips on how to optimize your listings on Amazon, how to do split testing, how to actually analyze the data. This is going to be a great one. He’s placed well at several of my billion-dollar seller summits. Always a popular speaker. Enjoy this episode with Anthony.
Kevin King:
Cofrancesco, how are you doing man? Finally got you here on the AM/PM podcast.
Anthony:
What’s going on, Kevin? I’m doing good. Thanks so much for having me, and I’m excited to be here.
Kevin King:
You guys, you started off like you mentioned 2016, 2017. I remember you were in Asia somewhere and you had like a what was it graphics agency or something like that, doing images, or what was it?
Anthony:
Yeah, we were probably one of the first ones to start doing conversion optimization just for Amazon sellers. So, everything from graphic design to video copywriting, like everything for the listing, and now it’s a lot more common. You know there’s a lot of different agencies out there that are, for sure, better than what we had. You know, we were just very early on and so.
Kevin King:
Was this your company, or you worked for a company, or your partners or somebody in it?
Anthony:
I was business partners with a guy named Erick Rodriguez. So, we had met in college at the University of Florida. He was running the entrepreneurship club at the time and started to get free tickets to these Amazon FBA events as college kids and then we all started launching products. I went and worked for Amazon for a year and then, after working there for a year, he’s like why don’t you quit your job, move to the Philippines and help me scale this agency? So, I was like a part co-founder in the company. He had started it a year before I got on and then, you know, I helped it grow.
Kevin King:
So how was that moving to the Philippines for a little while?
Anthony:
Freaking awesome. I mean, before I started working full time at Amazon, I had gotten to live in Cebu over the summer for three months. That’s where Eric taught me how to launch my first product. I lived with another guy, a really close friend of mine, Danny, so we just spent the summer, got an apartment and we just focused on launching products, and so I had been to the Philippines before and I had never lived in Manila, but I was kind of under the expectation that it would be similar. Manila would be similar to Cebu in the way that most areas are not very nice, but then there’s like a couple small areas that are very nice, and how it turned out is this area of Manila called BGC. Bonifacio. Global City is probably one of my favorite cities in the entire world. Upscale, modern. If you didn’t know that you were in the Philippines, you’d have no idea that you weren’t in the nicest US city, and so it was great. We lived there for two and a half years, and there was probably 20 to 30 people who were relatively young, mostly guys, running online businesses, mini Amazon FBA and you never ate a meal alone during those couple of years. You would just be walking around and, hey, let’s go get some dinner. It’s like you’re always masterminding, always talking about businesses. So, for my life, I think living there was definitely one of my favorite memories for sure.
Kevin King:
It was really cheap to live there too. I mean, a lot of people know that the Filipino wage they got VAs it’s cheap, but just the cost of living in the Philippines is cheap.
Anthony:
Oh yeah, I mean, when I moved out there I was making $2,000 a month and that was totally adequate, In fact probably double what a normal Filipino rate would be. So, it’s great, and if you’re out there later I was making more money. But if you’re out there making $10,000 a month, you can live whatever kind of life you want.
Kevin King:
Yeah, you’re balling at that level. For sure. So, what happened with that company? Did you sell it or did you just move on, because you went from there to what PickFu? I think right?
Anthony:
Yeah, we sold it. I always get asked about this and I wouldn’t try to replicate it but we got acquired. We got acquired by a small aggregator in Southeast Asia called Alpharock Capital. They were growing a portfolio of brands and at a time they actually were doing quite well, they wanted to acquire the agency, not only to grow the agency services, but really as a strategic acquisition to service their own brands. And so I stayed on for about six months after the acquisition and you know acquisitions are acquisitions it doesn’t always go according to plan. I don’t want to get into any specific details, but you know, the company is still around in one form or another. But, yeah, we were able to exit the company and, yeah, it’s cool because I still go to conferences, I still go to events that I meet people who are clients from way back in the day. It’s pretty cool and so, yeah.
Kevin King:
So then I remember when I first I don’t remember where I first connected with you to actually come and speak. Was that BDSS 2021, the first time you spoke it?
Anthony:
It would have been the virtual is what I did first.
Kevin King:
Virtual?
Anthony:
Yeah.
Kevin King:
Okay.
Anthony:
Right after I started with PickFu.
Kevin King:
Okay, so after you sold the agency, you bounced around traveling quite a bit, right? I remember you were like in Brazil at one point and you were all over, all bouncing, all over the place.
Anthony:
Yeah, the story was I was, I was living in the Philippines right when we sold the agency and then, right around that same time is when COVID started happening, um, and so I traveled to uh, uh, work, you know, work event, Augustus’s event in Prague, European seller conference. And that’s when the whole world shut down, like Trump. I got a message saying that Trump was going to put travel bans. So, I was like I couldn’t at that point get back to the Philippines, so I could really only go back to the US. So, I go back to the US. The girl that I’m dating at the time is Filipina. I’ve been dating her for two years. She was in the Philippines. We couldn’t see each other for like seven, six, seven months, and so, after enough of that, anyone who’s location independent, you’re kind of like, all right, screw this, I’m not going to wait until COVID is over to see them. So Brazil was one of the only locations that we could both travel to with between visa and between travel restrictions. So we both moved down to Brazil for a year. You know, you roll the punches.
Kevin King:
All right, that’s cool. And then you ended up going over to PickFu and kind of helped them get going right?
Anthony:
Yeah, I wish I could say that I founded PickFu and I don’t think anyone has a perception of how long they’ve been around, because when I joined I think it was 13 or 15 years. Justin and John had been running it. I approached PickFu after selling the agency because we had collaborated with PickFu on a project. I really liked Justin and John, I liked the product and I thought there’s so much potential in A-B testing that just not a lot of people talk about. Back then it was still kind of a hack oh, you can use PickFu and get some feedback. So, I approached them and I pitched them hey, I will come on board with PickFu and I will make sure that everyone in the industry knows about PickFu and market research and split testing. And they were kind enough to give me a shot. And this is a few years ago when I was even less disciplined and less focused than I am now, and so I feel like I did a good job with that and now there’s a lot more competitors out there instead of just PickFu. But yeah, we grew a lot. We grew a lot over a couple of years and I’m still very close, I think, with Justin and John. I talk to them frequently, and we still work together on projects.
Kevin King:
What did you see that was, I guess, a couple of questions around the A-B testing, because you were doing a lot of experimentation yourself, because I remember on some of your presentations you were showing the results of different things. But just being able to see under the hood and behind the scenes, what was something that was shocking to you? That people were doing, that when they run a test you’re like, holy, what is this? And then, on the flip side of that, what’s something that an amazing result that you saw from A-B testing?
Anthony:
The big thing is that your gut is. It’s not that it’s always wrong, it’s just that whatever your gut tells you is probably the least important thing and not always a good indicator. Some brand owners are very good at getting a feel for what is going to work in the end, but you just don’t know what you don’t know. And so I can go through best practices, and a lot of my presentations would do that. I think this is going to work. I think this is going to work, but what I’m finding is that it’s very specific to a niche and, yeah, you just don’t know what you don’t know. You got to test a lot of different things. In terms of what actually worked well. I mean, I don’t know. I guess we’ll get into it, but-
Kevin King:
Do you remember someone that came in and they, they, or maybe it’s something you did they, they were doing, I don’t know $10,000 a month Uh, I’m just making stuff up here and then they did an AB test and the results of that catapulted them to 50 or a hundred thousand dollars a month, because they, they changed out the image. Do you remember anything like that?
Anthony:
I mean everyone knows the Thrasio angry orange example. That one was so sexy, everyone loved it. You know angry orange, the pet deodorizer has their old packaging. It’s a Thrasio brand. They go and use PickFu and we had a promo video for a while that showed this where it’s like dozens and dozens and dozens of different bottle designs. They have this big, nice orange bottle. It says instead of angry orange it says pet deodorizer. This is before people thought, hey, let’s put the main hero keywords on the front of our packaging nice, big and bold. And I don’t remember the exact numbers, but astronomical growth for the brand I want to say like 10x or 30x, just something ridiculous. And not just using that for main image but secondary image, a plus content, everything like that. So I mean I don’t know why I’m having such a difficulty pulling up all these examples, because it’s like I see it all the time. I just did a case study with Sherritt Studio and this brand called Pink Miracle, a shoe cleaner. We went from a quarter million a month to more than a million a month now. They’re rolling that strategy across the rest of their portfolio heavy and pick-through testing. I mean they had 30 different types of main images that they were testing like 50 types of secondary images, multiple versions of A-plus video, sponsor brand video. So, I don’t know why I’m blanking on that. It’s just like if you test and commit to the process, you can probably like 2x to 4x your brand if the product is good.
Kevin King:
So a lot of people when they go in and they test, they might test image A against image B and then image B wins and they’re done. But, like what you just said, no, you need to take it much, much deeper and like have 30 images. When, when uh Thrasio did that with uh agent or agent orange or whatever it’s called, create 30 images, they had to have a graphic designer sit there and create 30 different images and move stuff around. Nowadays, with nano banana or something, you can do that in about five minutes and have 30 different angle images and backgrounds and angles and stuff. So, it’s, it’s a no, it’s a no brainer. But a lot of people are like well, that that’s going to cost me a thousand bucks or 1500 bucks or whatever, whatever it may be, to do those tests. That’s just too much money. What would you say to those people?
Anthony:
It’s, I get it. I get the sentiment. And I think even more common is people get, sellers get some initial wins and then, after they get the win, they’re like, okay, sweet, I’ve won, now I’m done. I don’t think anyone realizes how much potential is still left on the table from this high-volume variation testing, going in with the expectation that the vast majority of assets you create are never going to see the light of day. But that’s okay and I don’t know. I’m trying to think of a good way to make an analogy of this.
Kevin King:
Well, in the direct mail business there’s something called the control. So in old direct mail copywriting for those older guys you remember getting in the mail like a letter, like a long. It’d be like a two-page letter or something which is now long-form content online, and they would have one letter that gets a 4.2% response rate or whatever it is, and they’re always trying to beat that. So they’re always coming up with other letters and sending those out and they’re trying to beat what’s called the control. And if one of those beats the control, then it becomes the new control and they’re constantly trying to beat it. So I think that’s maybe what you’re trying to say is like you get one, that’s doing well, and instead of stopping you, you’re constantly trying to beat it and see if you can get another one. That’s the, the control. Is that that kind of what you’re trying to say?
Anthony:
I think. I think that’s pretty point, I know. For anyone who looked at the scores of BDSS it’s like oh you know, Anthony, I might have not done as well as previous years, but the whole basis of my presentation is exactly what you’re talking about now. My recommendation to people is that you should be testing four variations of each asset class, so four versions of your main, four versions of your secondary images, four versions of your A-plus content that you’re going to test in one month. Manager experiments, test over the period of one year, one test per month.
And my whole pitch is that there’s a very, very low chance that the exact configuration of main, secondary images and A-plus content that you have on your listing right now is the best it can possibly get and there’s no chance for improvement. That if you go through the process of validating in advance using market research and you try to figure out what are the best versions of my main, secondary, A-plus content, if I test, you know, four of each of those over a period of a year you’re almost certainly going to find something that improves. And so if you would just try the first version and you say, okay, this wins, I’m going to stick with that. What if one of the other three variations of each of those asset classes or a different configuration like your V2 of your main image, your V4 of your secondary images and your V1, is actually the best? If you haven’t kind of like tested to figure out what is the best in each of those asset classes, then you’re probably leaving some money on the table.
Kevin King:
What is it? So a lot of people will go to PickFu and they’ll run an experiment on PickFu and they’ll get a winner and they just go with that winner and they consider well, the people voted and there was a clear winner. But what you just said is you need to make sure you run it through Amazon’s actually AB experiments testing, and what I found in the past is what people say sometimes and what they do are two different things. So, what do you see along those lines?
Anthony:
PickFu, Product Opinion, IntelliV. It’s not real. At the end of the day, it’s these aren’t people who are actually buying your product. It’s pretty close and it gives you a good indication of what might work, even when I was there. It’s not about which one won. It’s trying to read the feedback and determine why a specific asset won so and has been shown you can get a win in PickFu. You run it through Amazon and it’s the exact opposite. So, validation is certainly helpful, but it’s not like an Oracle that’s going to give you the answer. So, the only way you’ll really know which asset performs better is actually running it on Amazon. Manager experiments is not. You know it could be a lot better. You’re doing a main image test and they give you conversion rate as your metric instead of CTR. You know it’s not always the most well thought out. It takes a while to execute these tests. But what I see is people who are doing a lot of manager experiments tests over a period of months and months, and months and months. Sometimes the difference is going to be like very minimal, you know. But you’re just going for those little marginal gains. And if I can stack up a quarter of a percent in improvement in CVR, and I can do that every month for four months. That’s 1%, and sometimes the gains you’re going to see in CVR are even bigger.
Kevin King:
PickFu is built into Helium 10, so what should the work process be? Should someone come up with 30 images and different A plus and all the stuff like you said you said four actually and then run those through PickFu and get some initial response? If one of them just completely tanks, don’t even run that and manage your experiments. Or do you, should you? Why do you need PickFu, I guess, now, when you can just run the stuff that and manage your experiments? What’s the workflow there?
Anthony:
Yeah, manager experiments is slow. You know. It’s a minimum of one month typically to run a test, and so PickFu market research is going to be way faster. My workflow is if I can create, this is ideal time. You have unlimited time and budget. But with AI it’s faster than ever. So if I can create six versions of the initial asset class, so six versions of a main image, is easy. It’s like product, product plus packaging, you can do all this with AI now. If I have six versions of an asset class, then I can baseline test that. So that’s just the six tested against each other. Then out of that baseline test there’s going to emerge a winner, and so the winner the top one or two, depending on budget. You would do a competitive test and now that I know the best main image out of those six, I’m going to take that and test it against my top, like two to three competitors. And then, depending on the results of that test, you’re going to go and upload to manage your experiments.
Anthony:
You could go straight into manage your experiments for people who are running on limited budgets. Like sure, go straight in. If you have a lot of variations too. This is, people have portfolios with 50 variations. You can test a whole bunch of different main images per ASIN. So it’s up to your budget and how much time you have. What I’ll say is that AI is going to dramatically reduce the barrier for asset generation. I think there’s some components of AI that are going to, I don’t want to say replace market research, but I think maybe start to estimate, and there’s already tools out there that’ll look at an image and give you some analysis as to why it’s uh, you know powerful, or going to give you a good click through rate, or something like that.
Kevin King:
For those that don’t know and manage your experiments how many experiments can you run at one time? Can I dump all six images in there and it’s spinning, rotating them around? Or is it one against two and then you got a winner, then two against three and you got a winner, or what? For those that don’t understand it, can you explain that to them?
Anthony:
It’s one at a time um per listing, per individual ASIN. So, I could like test my main image. I could test different secondary images um different A-plus content. You can also do some copy-related things, but I try to stick to the images.
Kevin King:
But within the image I understand it’s like you only want to test images and not test images and copy. You only test one element at a time, but within the images, is it only one image against another image or is it the whole portfolio of images that can be tested? When you’re just running an image test in manage my experiments?
Anthony:
Oh it’s. There’s a lot of different test types. Um, you can definitely test entire galleries. One of the highest performing test types I’ve seen is someone is testing secondary images, but they’re not even changing the images. All they’re doing is they’re just changing the image order. So, imagine I’ve got an image that I have in position four and I try let’s see that exact same gallery. But instead of that image being in four, I put it in position two because more people are going to see image two than four. And I’ve seen, like over and over again, examples of conversion rate increases just from that. And it makes sense, right, like if I can do a better job of aligning in order of priority what the customer is looking for and I show that to them earlier in the gallery, there’s a higher chance that they’re going to see oh, this is what I need to see, this is the product I’m going to convert on, versus bouncing and checking out at a competitor page. So, you know, you don’t have to overthink it. Some of the more nuanced test types are very valuable.
Kevin King:
After PickFu you moved on and you got to see inside the back end of data analytics and keywords and all this. What are some of your biggest takeaways from actually working on the inside of one of these tool companies that you just opened your eyes like holy cow? I had no idea it worked that way. Or this is a major thing that moves the needle that I didn’t, that most people don’t realize, or something along those lines.
Anthony:
Yeah. Well, one thing I’ll say is software is expensive. I think I’m okay to say that you, I know that’s more of like an industry thing and not so much of a practical for sellers. But anyone who is a seller using software, I think you should take a moment and just appreciate how much goes into building software and for bootstrap companies it’s like you put everything into it and it just is so much satisfaction when people use the tool and they’re like I get a lot of value out of this. The biggest thing that I saw is sellers. I don’t want to say that sellers don’t know where to go or what to do, but we’re getting into the phase of our industry now where before you could just do a couple of things well and do very well on Amazon, but now it is about being so dialed in on everything from sourcing to product development, to ads, to creative logistics. Everything has to be dialed in and we’re playing a game of you’re really splitting hairs to decide at the top end who’s going to maintain those top positions, and so it’s not enough to just say go out there and grow your business or go to an event and try to learn what you can. I mean, you got to run these things.
Anthony:
I don’t want to say to the level of Fortune 500 companies, but you can see a big disparity between the companies that are super well managed, and then there’s everyone else who’s struggling and they’re just never going to figure it out. And so the biggest thing I saw was, like, if you can put together some kind of system, some kind of system where I can just say it’s more than just a SOP, because it requires some creative thinking steps in between, it’s not just like you got to click here, click here, click here. It’s like you use this tool, interacting with this tool, and this is the flow to move around. Um, there’s a lot of parts about the business, I think, that are that you can teach and that you can really help people. Uh, help people with and uh, yeah, you got to give them some kind of system, cause it’s just like, uh, the teams are getting too big and there’s it’s very complex and technical now.
Kevin King:
Yeah. Well, so, speaking of that, what have you seen since 2015, 2016, when you got into this? What have you seen from then to today that’s changed the most? Is it that Amazon is now? You know, used to be like you said you could do a couple of things well and do well, but now it’s a real business and you’ve got to wear 27 different hats and actually manage those hats right. Or is it becoming more brand oriented? What is more mature? What would you say? The biggest difference between now and nine years ago is.
Anthony:
It’s just a very competitive game now. It’s a really competitive game and if you’re not ready to run a proper business, it’s going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do. I think for the longest time like back when I saw you in Hong Kong at Global Sources there has always been this arbitrage of just knowledge and understanding. If I knew how Amazon worked, I can win. It doesn’t even matter If I can create products great, If I can do advertising great, but if I just understand how Amazon works, I’m going to have a huge moat over everyone else. And you’ll see this with how do massive brands come on Amazon that have huge brand recognition? They launch on Amazon and their performance is terrible. There’s all these random people who are just destroying them you know. How is that possible? It’s because you have to understand, you have to know how Amazon works in order to win at Amazon.
Anthony:
As time goes on, that gap is going to decrease more and more, that moat is going to decrease more and more and so that’s why you can. I don’t know if you agree or disagree, but I think that we are in the last, in my opinion, two years of the industry as we know it, which is like random person with not a lot of you know, maybe not a lot of funding, not a lot of prior business experience, being able to just dominate and take these categories that do millions of dollars, sometimes a month, that over time, especially in the next two years, through agents, people aren’t going to take courses anymore. Like these agents, are going to know everything that the courses have already taught and they’re going to be able to execute on these things. Okay, I know I’m rambling here, but this is like linked into that is there’s also always been this moat around execution. So, I can do extremely well at Amazon if I can just execute better than my competitor right. There’s this laundry list of things that I need to do in the business, and the person who checks off the most their business is going to perform better than the person who checks off half the list.
Anthony:
Like we see it in Titan, it’s we give people action plans. The people who do the action plans do really well. The people that don’t do anything don’t do well, and so that barrier of, or that moat rather around execution is also going to go away because you’re not going to have to be disciplined or focused to go and execute. You still will have to do some tasks manually, but more and more you’re going to be able to execute. Click a button or you’re going to be able to hand this off to your team and say okay, I need you to click a series of buttons to go and make this happen.
Kevin King:
I see that same thing happen at MarketMasters. I mean I’ve done two MarketMasters events, doing the third one next month in November 13th and 17th in Austin. In the past ones we’ve had someone, we’ve had 24 people now sit through the hot seat process, and three of them I know of there’s several. There’s more than this. Not everybody wants to talk about it, but some of them have. It’s made no difference because they haven’t executed. They got fed a lot of good information and they just did the status quo and maybe implemented one little thing. But the ones that actually took it to heart, like Palak, she went from who’s been on this podcast. She went from a million and a half to five million and all she did was execute what everybody suggested. Another person was doing 110 million. Now he’s on track to do a billion with a B. Now we can’t I can’t take credit for all that. He had some other momentum but he implemented some of the stuff that was. And then someone else you know, speaking of you, mentioned Titan. They have they have the CM1, CM2, CM3 framework that they talk about. And we had Julie who said her CM3 was a negative eight when she came into the hot seat. Now it’s a positive 24. And so those are the people that execute, but what you’re saying is the fact that they executed is going to become less important as a human executing, because agents and AI is going to execute. That Is that what you’re saying, where they’re just going to have to kind of babysit it.
Anthony:
Not all of it and I think we’re still a couple. You know the point where you click a button and an agent’s gonna run your entire Amazon business. I think is multiple years down the road, but big chunks of it, um are it is going to happen like that. Um, even just look at creatives. Like I used to own a creative agency, we’d spend all this time concepting images and going out to shoots and booking the models and transportation and props and all of these things. And this guy, Dorian, released a product it’s not perfect but called Keplo a few, you know, maybe a couple of months ago, and it’ll like read everything make you main images, secondary images, A plus content, and it’s now. It’s not perfect, right, it’s not. You know you still do more work, but we’re talking like you click a button and within 15 minutes you’ve got full image stacks that are likely better around the same level, if not better than what our agency would do for $1,500, $2,000, like five, six years ago. So if you look on this trajectory, some of this stuff is really easy. Every single tool. They all have a listing writer. That’ll like write your listing in, you know title, bullets and description with the keywords that it needs. Then they have different versions now that’ll write it in Rufus or Cosmo or whatever format you want. So, like there’s things that we used to pay copywriters to go and write these listings that part you can already like copywriters are gone, you don’t need a copywriter anymore, and so eventually it’ll be like that for every task.
Anthony:
Alibaba has this AI sourcing tool. It doesn’t eliminate the need to have a sourcing agent, but, like these things are just going to get better and better and better, so it’s conceivable that eventually most tasks are going to be click a button and when that playing field is leveled, it kind of brings into question what are the brands that are going to be at the top? And my hypothesis is that it’s going to be the brands that are at the top are going to stay at the top, and new people who are new entrants. It’s going to be very difficult unless you have crazy, crazy budgets to. You know you want to go and compete with Zule for a garlic press or the orange juice squeezer, and they’re dominating. They’ve got the highest reviews, they’ve got the rank. You’re going to be spending millions and millions and millions of dollars basically giving away units in the hopes of moving up ranks. To get to that point.
Kevin King:
I agree with you. I think there’s a big shakeup coming, but so you’re saying. What you said, though, is that you’re not going to need courses anymore. Um, because AI can just spill it out. But now you’re doing some stuff with Titan. Who’s actually they? They don’t really have courses per se, but they have training. So, what do you see the differences? You know that companies like Helium 10 or Titan, or whoever need to do, you know Helium 10 has a Freedom Ticket and it’s a like do-it-yourself, self-paced kind of training. Do you do you see that the training is still necessary for the people that are already in the game, to keep them on edge or to help hold their hand? Well, where do you see education just going to go in the, the Amazon world, or is it going to disappear and you can just ask GPT what to do?
Anthony:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. So, just to be clear, I don’t think we’re there yet. I think in two years or less we will be there. We’re at this step right now. I think with education that if I give someone 200, 300 hours of content and say, go watch all of this, that’s not helpful. What I need to do is, if I have a way that I can look at their business and say, okay, you don’t need to watch 300 hours of content, I need you to focus on these like three hours of content, and this is exactly how you’re supposed to go through and do this stuff. Um, that’s where education is going very specific, very prescriptive, uh-
Kevin King:
So it’s almost like a Freedom Ticket that’s you answer, answer five or ten. If it was Freedom Ticket for, let’s say, on Helium 10, you’d answer five or ten questions about your budget, your size, your capability, whatever, some qualifying questions and instead of you getting the exact same Freedom Ticket course that everybody gets, the AI behind the scenes takes all that content and mixes and matches and says, okay, here’s the three hours that you need and just watch those three hours. This is going to move the needle the most. Don’t waste your time going down all these other rabbit holes. You see, that could be a good way to do educate. I agree with you on that. I think that’s where it’s going to be is every course is going to be tailored to that person rather than just a generic one that’s all course.
Anthony:
Well, and I don’t want to, I don’t want to give too much away, but imagine a Freedom Ticket two, in addition to giving you hey, these are the modules that I want you to watch, and they’re going to take three hours. Imagine if it was like okay, first you’re going to watch this 30 minute video, it’s going to take you one hour to execute this task, and then the ROI of doing that is you’re going to increase revenue by $3,000. And then it’s giving you a list and it’s like if you spend 10 hours in the next month and then 20 hours executing, it’s going to lead to $275,000 extra, and it’s going to take you 10 hours of time, three hours of watching content, and you can motivate people or build out these simulations. I think that’s the future. It’s kind of like a little tool that’s guiding you along and going and saying this is exactly what you need. This is how you do it. Here’s the expected ROI. The future stage of that and I think most education companies are at least partnered with software tools is you start looking at what are those tasks that take the most time and give the most ROI, and then how can I have those be automated, with software or with agents. So, the things that are really long, laborious, time intensive, how can I? Maybe not automate it completely, but how can I shrink the time down while still keeping the ROI high?
Kevin King:
Yeah, yeah, I agree with. I agree with that. On the education side too, I think the companies that you can go on to ChatGPT right now and ask it how can I get reviews or how can I do certain things, but I think there’s something to the people that have massive amounts of content like Helium 10 or like me with Billion Dollar Seller Summit, or like Titan, or like, um, My Amazon guy or some of these others and actually taking that and putting it into a walled off LLM where it’s. This is instead of it going after the whole internet and catching, and maybe catching some stuff from some of these YouTube guys they’re speaking out the side of their butt, uh, and it counts that as authority, um, it’s not really and having something where you can interact with that and I’ve done that with the Billion Dollar Sellers Club, where I have my own LLM that you can interact with all the BDSS, prior BDSSs, all my newsletters, all my podcasts, everything I know. Titan’s got something like that and a couple other people are working on it. I have a free one at BillionDollarSellers.media which is keyword-based. It’s not an LLM, but it’s keyword-based. So, I think people that are sitting on massive amounts of content can still use that in a way to augment what you just said, and I think that can be an advantage.
Anthony:
Yeah, it’s the future and it’s even better if you’re able to. You know, if you’re able to pull in some real business data and have some LLN that actually understands certain metrics. I don’t, I still have to make it out to one of the Market Masters things but it’s just so cool to think that one day I know I think it was your talk in Vegas with Josh Hadley and you were saying, like hey, I want you to think from the standpoint it was the deep research. I want you to think from the standpoint of like these people. And here’s the data on my business and maybe that’s what your Billion Dollar Sellers club, AI LLM, is based on. But it’s just, this stuff is unthinkable, you know, three, four years ago, and it’s just going to get better and better and better. The question is, what does business look like when execution is no longer the big challenge? Because with business, it’s always been the idea. What I’ve always been told and what I’ve realized is the idea doesn’t matter. You know like I can come up with a million ideas in a day, but if I can actually sit down and make it happen, you know it’s not going to lead to anything. That’s an interesting, an interesting question.
Kevin King:
Yeah, that’s where you get the people that are bouncing from course to course, from seminar to seminar, from webinar to webinar and they’re not actually taking action. They’re just hoping for that one holy grail moment or something. And what do you think about that? I mean, I’m sure you get approached by every Tom, Dick and Harry to come on their summit on their stuff, to speak on their webinars and everything. It seems like there’s just way too much of that out there right now. Maybe that’s because I’m on all their lists and I’m getting all their emails, but how does someone choose? That’s either a successful seller or maybe someone listening to this. That’s just kind of getting started. How do they choose what to pay attention to and get rid of the noise and not sit through a webinar for an hour and there’s like nothing in it. There’s no value.
Anthony:
I don’t know if you agree with this or not. I’m curious to hear your take. But our industry you know, like everyone, that we know the speaker circuit, we know the events that we know. My understanding is that the vast majority of Amazon sellers know nothing about our industry. They’re not plugged into conferences, they’re not plugged into events and there’s some overlap maybe between they’re using some tools or others. But like, correct me if I, I mean you might even know Helium 10’s numbers a little bit better. But let’s just say this is not the right numbers. But let’s say there’s a million sellers. Think about how, what’s the most amount of people you’ve ever seen at our events or that are even on the people that you know their email lists? Do you know anyone with an email list of a million sellers? Like nowhere close to that.
Kevin King:
Amazing used to have like 800 and something thousand, but I don’t know if they were all sellers, but they’re interested in being sellers and I know that was one of the bigger lists. And Jungle Scout at one point had a list. Helium 10 had over a million installs of the chrome extension. That doesn’t mean people were using it, but they’ve had over a million installs on the chrome extension. It may be even 1.5 by now. I’m not. I’m not sure what that is, but I think the latest data, marketplace pulse, said uh, recently, there’s like two million people that have had a sale in the US on US Amazon. So that’s 2 million. There’s like 5 million registered sellers or something like that, but 2 million are considered active. They’ve had a sale, but was it? 100,000 of them have done a million bucks or more in sales. So, it’s a very small percentage that are moving a large number. And then if you look at an event like Accelerate that just happened last month, in September in Seattle, we only had 3,500, 4,000 people there out of 2 million or even if you count that down to get 75 percent of those 2 million, 500,000 that are doing 50 grand or something a month, that’s a very small percentage and yeah, you’re right, I agree with you. We’re in like this little click; little click and most of the sellers are have no idea who Anthony or Kevin or they might know the Amazon seller forums and that’s it. It’s reaching those people from an educational point of view and from an opportunities point of view that a lot of the service providers and education people are struggling to get those people.
Anthony:
Yeah, yeah I agree.
Kevin King:
I think that’s part of the key is because I see it. The last Prosper show I was at, people come up to my booth. There’s a guy doing $20 million a year on Amazon private label came up’s like what is, who are you guys? What’s billion dollar sellers? I’m like I’ll explain it to him and he’s like this is our first show to ever go to. We’ve been selling for nine years. We didn’t know this whole world existed.
Anthony:
Yep, I hear it all the time yeah.
Kevin King:
I was amazed, um, but speaking. So you’re saying that the education stuff and everything’s going to be a radical change in two years. What do you see AI doing? Your kind of keeping your hand on the pulse of AI, not only just in image creation, but just in general. Where do you see it going? Do you see this going to a total agentic type of selling future? Do you see AI playing a major role in not just ranking on Amazon but ranking off of Amazon? What’s your thoughts? What’s the Anthony State of the Union on AI when it comes to e-commerce?
Anthony:
I think it’s going to dramatically expand the capability of sellers to check off all of those boxes. You’re a business owner, you’re an Amazon seller, you have all of these boxes that you want to check off. AI is going to help you do that. So if for the past few years, it’s like I’m focusing on Amazon and I know everyone’s telling me I got to go multi-channel and I got to go international, I got to launch new product lines and I want to try to expand, now that I think the AI is going to allow people to do that a lot faster and with a lot more limited resources. So like, don’t get me wrong, I still very much believe in education, or else I wouldn’t be with Titan. But like, we are expanding TikTok direct to consumer Shopify. You’re going to plug in your business; get it dialed in with Amazon we’re very good at that and it works great. But it’s going to be like, ok now I’m ready to expand to Shopify, now I’m ready to go retail, and there’s going to be AI that is going to build out that whole strategy way faster than you’ve ever done before. I think your gonna see the point at over the next couple of years, where you can easily run a $10 million company with a founder and maybe, like one director of OPS, that’s basically running a team of agents and you’re going to see 30, 40, $50 million companies with less than five employees. That’s where I think we’re going.
Kevin King:
I do too. I think that’s exactly where we’re going and, I think, becoming multi-channel. You know Helium 10 now integrates with TikTok. You can just hit a button in your listings from Amazon; they translate them to the TikTok world and then the Shopify. I think those are the three. Some people would throw Walmart or retail into that mix, but if you’re going to start, I think it’s TikTok shop and for discoverability, and then for the standalone and branding Shopify, and then after that maybe consider Walmart or retail or, unless an opportunity just presents itself, you know, in the middle of that. But I think that’s where people need to go and be omnichannel. It’s a whole new world. And then AEO, I think, is huge too optimizing, not just on Amazon but optimizing off of Amazon and Google, and I think you’re going to start seeing ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude and those guys driving a lot more of the top of funnel traffic over to Amazon than just people going straight to Amazon and typing, and I think that’s going to be an important place for people to optimize too.
Anthony:
Can I say one more thing?
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Anthony:
I also think there’s a big possibility, and even Jeff Bezos has. I know he doesn’t run Amazon anymore, but he’s alluded to this. I think there’s also a world where Amazon actually gets. I don’t want to say completely goes away, but you think about this right? People have very strong attachments to their political beliefs or certain causes or whatever. And if I say you know, you can already see Cracker Barrel change your logo, stock drops like American Eagle does this jean ads people don’t like it.
Kevin King:
Cracker Barrel changed it back.
Anthony:
I saw, I saw right. And there’s all this public pressure. People want to consume not just based on cost and quality, but they have, like, some kind of connection to a brand. So, if some point someone’s able to put together, hey, you know what? Screw Amazon If I’m buying a product. Most people buying products online don’t realize that when I buy a product for $30, only $10 goes to this seller and $10 goes to ads and $10 goes to Amazon as fees, giving me the option to say, hey, I want to support US businesses, even if the product’s not made in US. I want to support US businesses. I want to know where my money’s going. Screw Amazon. I have issue with Amazon. I don’t like Amazon. I don’t want 30, 40, 50 percent of what I’m spending on a product going to Amazon. That there is going to emerge, whether it’s an AI agent that does the shopping for you, or a new platform that is going to give a lot more control to the customer in terms of where the money is broken down, in terms of how they spend, and I don’t think something like that would be possible without AI. Amazon has such a dominant position, but I think you’re going to see certain platforms totally swap because of AI. I’m not saying Amazon will ever go away completely, but it’ll be different.
Kevin King:
No, Amazon’s got their hands in too much stuff, from TV to entertainment to AWS, to everything. But I do see where people go to Amazon first to do a search. If they very specifically know what they want, they’re going to do that. But for discovery and for recommendations, I think less and less people are going to go to Amazon. That’s why Rufus they came up with Rufus but I think more and more are going to go to their browser, where you have fully integrated agentic browsers and they’re going to ask questions there. They’re going to then direct to Amazon. Amazon is going to become more of a fulfillment type of thing and their fulfillment infrastructure you can’t duplicate that. You can’t beat that. So, I think that’s their biggest moat. But I do think you’ll see an increase, a decrease in traffic to Amazon itself for the initial search. I think that’s going to be slowly diminishing and diminishing. But cool, Anthony, this has been awesome having you on man. If people want to follow you or reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to do that? LinkedIn or where do they go?
Anthony:
I mean, I don’t want to set any false expectations, so you guys can send me messages and I’ll do my best. If you just follow up over and over, I’ll probably get back. But I’m on Instagram at Anthony Cofran. You can find me on LinkedIn, just, I think it’s Tony Cofrancesco. Facebook just look around, you can find me. If you ever see me at an event or in person, feel free to come up. I just am not great at answering my phone, as Kevin knows, but I’m a really, you know, fun guy to be around. I don’t mind talking to anyone and I’m so happy to be in this industry, so happy to know you, Kevin. It’s been a wild ride, man. Like seriously, it’s been freaking fun.
Kevin King:
It’s, it’s been. It’s always changing. That’s what I like about it it’s never the same, never the same. Well, cool man, I’m sure I’ll see you. Maybe I’ll see you at Market Masters next month, you never know and here in November. But if not, I’ll see you at some other event somewhere along the way.
Anthony:
I’m sure we will, Kevin. Thanks again for having me on and have a great day.
Kevin King:
Appreciate it, man.
Kevin King:
I agree with Anthony that we’re going to see a lot of change in the next two years selling on Amazon. It’s going to be exciting times to see where this goes, but I think it’s going to become much more efficient and much more profitable for those that can survive. It’s exciting times, like I said. Exciting times also to be listening to the AM/PM podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We’ll be back again next week with another awesome episode next Thursday with Rob Stanley. So be sure to check that out and go back and check out some of the past episodes as well. If you like this one. Be sure to make sure you didn’t miss something. There’s been a lot of awesome guests over the last three and a half years, I’ve been doing this. Go back and peruse that library here on YouTube or on Shopify or Apple Podcast and check those out as well. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com, and check out Market Masters happening November 13th to the 17th in Austin. You can get information at BillionDollarSellerSummit.com. We’ll see you again next week.
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