How to Use Your Product Listing to Beat the Competition ⎜ Thrasio & Seller Labs ⎜ EP 121

Ryan Cramer: What's up, everyone. Welcome to my corner of the internet. I'm your host, Ryan Cramer, and this is Crossover Commerce, presented by PingPong Payments, the leading global payments provider, helping sellers keep more of their hard-earned money. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in, I'm your host, Ryan Cramer, and welcome to Crossover Commerce. This is episode 121 of the Crossover Commerce. This is my corner of the internet, where I share the stage with the best and brightest in the Amazon and e- commerce space. They're going to bring the most important insights and most important aspects of selling online. No matter if you're on Amazon, direct- to- consumer, you have your own branded website, we're going to give you the best insights that we can with my network of people that we know to help you elevate your business moving forward. But selling on Amazon is a constant stream of competition. You're competing with other sellers. Yesterday was Prime Day, or the last two days were on Prime Day, so you're fighting with all this competition in the space. And as we move into Q3 and Q4, how are you going to compete for buyer's attention as the people continue to grow their online presence and their spending in the digital and e- commerce space? So with that being said, how do you ensure that you stand out? Why I brought two of my favorite people in the space that have the insights and the capabilities and the expertise to share their insights on, just analyzing thousands of product listings over the course of their lifetime being on Amazon and being in the e- commerce world. So we're going to be talking about that today. So I titled this episode, AMC Tear Down, How to Use Your Product Listing to Beat your Competition. But as always, Crossover Commerce is presented by PingPong Payments. We transfer more than$ 150 million a day for Amazon and e- commerce sellers, just like you, helping over one million customers. Now, they've helped convert more than$ 90 billion in cross- border payments, both either sending of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, VAs, you name it. We are helping save more money and put it to your bottom line. So go ahead and check out PingPong Payments in the show notes below, that way you can send them for a free account. Thank you PingPong for sponsoring this podcast. But as always, this podcast is not about me. It's about the people I bring on the show, sharing their insights and expertise in the field on Amazon. With that being said, I have two guests today. That's right. It's not just a one- on- one, it's a two- on- one. We're going to make sure that I wanted to have multiple minds on this to talk about and tear down this topic with me today. So just wanted to give a quick shout out to everyone watching live. If you're watching us, go ahead and comment your questions. If you have any insights or if you just wanted to ask a specific question to our guests, you can do that in the comments as well. But our guests today are going to be Jeff Cohen and Casey Gauss. Jeff is actually the VP of Marketing and is a globally renowned expert who educates and motivates e- commerce sellers on cutting edge ways to improve their business and grow their sales and drive profits. And Casey Gauss, is VP of SEO Thrasio, man rolls off the tongue there. He was a Founder and built Viral Launch at the age of 21 and helped 10,000 brand, I should say tens of thousands of brands generate more than$ 10 billion dollars in sales on Amazon and is currently the executive at Thrasio, which is deep in the weeds, best practices for success on Amazon. If you don't know about Seller Labs and Thrasio, Thrasio is of course, one of the fastest growing acquirers in the Amazon and third party space of acquiring brands, and Seller Labs helps Amazon sellers with data- driven facts and helping build revenue, community, and gain insights through that data software and services. With that being said, want to bring on my guest today, Casey Gauss and Jeff Cohen of Seller Labs and Thrasio respectively. Guys, welcome to Crossover Commerce. There we go. Got you both in there, right?

Casey Gauss: Ryan, you said two of your favorites, I'm kind of honored.

Ryan Cramer: Hey, man, let's go ahead and get it out there. I worked with Casey back at Viral Launch. So I learned a lot about Amazon space from Casey, but it's taken this long. It took 120 episodes to get him on here, so. But he said he was busy. So here we are to this day, I wanted to make sure you guys had a really great webinar with Seller Labs in conjunction with lot of partners. You guys just destroyed, but also enhanced a lot of people's product listings, which is really cool to do live and in person, almost blindly, if you will. So it was almost watching some of the OGs in the space kind of do their thing, if you will.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, I think it in point Casey said to me, " Wow, Jeff, that was kind of brutal."

Ryan Cramer: You feel sorry for the sellers, right?

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, I think you said something to that effect, but I think that when it comes down to it, that's where like, everybody can sit on a presentation and talk about best practices and how many characters to use and what lifestyle photos versus infographics versus main images. But when you actually start looking at these and you actually start seeing what people are doing right and wrong, you'll start to be able to identify maybe some patterns that you might have in your own business. So it was really fun to do that with Casey. I think it was something like you had said, it's been a while. Casey and I have been wanting to collaborate on commerce for a number of years. So we were both, I was very excited to have Casey on as well and be able to finally collaborate on developing some content for the community.

Casey Gauss: 100%. I mean, yeah, Jeff, Jeff's been in the space longer than I have, which Jeff's been in here a long time and seen a lot of things. So I think there's a lot of wisdom that comes from that. And yeah, it's like American Idol, your friends and family may say, " Oh yeah, this looks good. It's cool. You're on Amazon." But you may not actually be in a good position to sell. So Jeff's experience definitely brings some of that to light.

Ryan Cramer: Well, I think I even saw that firsthand as a buyer yesterday just flipping through product listings of like intriguing products, but then you get into the weeds of it and you can instantly seeing glaring holes in their products or just their listings in general looks fast, it looks sloppy and it's kind of fascinating even still to the day with all this content out there. Why people can't... There's a playbook written by both of you, I would say, why are people still struggling with this kind of basic concept, if you will?

Casey Gauss: Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to start a business. There's a lot that you have to focus on. You're running a business, but you also have to understand the nitty gritty details. There's a lot of them, the nuances to Amazon. And so to balance both of those, you're probably a solopreneur. Maybe you have a partner maybe. And so just balancing all of that, you probably also have a full time job potentially, at least. And it's just a lot to balance, and people are all always looking for the shortcuts, the hacks, how can I do this faster? How can I do this cheaper or whatever? And so you're going to cut the corners when it comes to good listing content or your keyword research process or good creative, you name it. And that's what I'd market up to.

Jeff Cohen: I also think Casey and I both come out of the software side of the business. And in software development, you can either choose to do an MVP, which is to get your first minimally viable product up and then iterate it over time or you can sit and you can overanalyze and over produce so that when you release it, it's perfect for the world. Most of us take the lean start of approach, which is that we're going to find pivot or persevere moments and we're going to constantly iterate on the things that we do. The failure is that people don't go back and do the iterations that they need to make. And so don't, I speak a lot about analysis paralysis and staring at data at making difficult decisions, but the same thing happens with your listing. And a lot of people put their listing up and they set it and forget it. And you can't do that. You have to come back and you have to be evolving your images. You have to be reading the data that's coming back you, conversion data, demographic data, competitor analysis data, that's going to tell you what you need to be doing to make your listing even better over time. And so that's where I think a lot of the failures come, either that or they are foreigners who don't hire US people to help them. And so it's real obvious that it's foreign generated.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, I mean, even if you know the language, like you have to, so we have copywriters for each of these markets at Thrasio. And like one of the kind of key requirements is that you like essentially lived in that country for 20 years or so. So just knowing the language, maybe your parents are from the country, but maybe you aren't, or you are only there for a few years, it just doesn't work. And so you have to understand the nuances of the culture and the colloquialisms and everything to really get it right. And there's just less and less room for, less than optimal at this point. I mean, across the board we're seeing Amazon continue to shift more and more traffic to paid placements. Meaning you're paying for more traffic or Amazon is pushing you that way. And in not only that, so you would think, okay, there's more paid placement, so there's more inventory. So therefore cost will go down, but cost is going up. And there's plenty of articles talking about CPCs going up and being on the rise. And perhaps some of it may be temporary, but in general, it's going to continue to go up and being increasingly competitive. And what helps you to get better rates in your paid? Better conversion rates, better clickthrough rates. And how do you do that? Better listing quality.

Ryan Cramer: Great, we're not-

Jeff Cohen: Go ahead, Ryan.

Ryan Cramer: I was going to say it's not, and that's a good point from Casey, but we're not talking about obviously when people start out that they can't do these quick hacks to get things launched. We're talking about going back and optimizing as often as couple months or a month in making sure that you're up to date on either seasonality, you're talking about what's converting better, how Amazon's algorithm is changing. You don't want to do too much, but you want to make sure that you're constantly making sure that you're hitting all the right check marks too. But you made a good point, Casey. Amazon has shifted this organic product listing page, if you say. There was not a lot of space for paid placements, but now all of a sudden everything on a product page is paid placement except for a frequently bought section. And even then it feels like it should be considered a paid placement spot. But that being said, is organic ranking as important now than it was a year ago, two years ago or will it shift back in the organic direction that you think?

Casey Gauss: I mean, I have a yes and no answer to that. So it is less important as a percentage of the overall pie. I think less and less of the overall sales potential pie is coming from organic. And it's just increasingly more, these sections on Amazon like high rated, but it's sponsored high rated. And so sometimes you get some very funky products because people are paying it for that. But organic is still super important from the standpoint of you... Every sale that comes through your listing is going to help your keyword ranking, it's going to help your review velocity. And so you, like organic is becoming increasingly difficult, but ais yet just as important as it ever has been. But if you were to compare them relatively, I mean, PPC is increasing its dominance over organic.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, so I think the way to say it is that PPC is increasing its dominance over organic, but that just means the value of your organic goes up, because when you do get organic listing, it's not going to maybe drive as high a percentage, but the value of those is worth more. And I think the pendulum will swing. We've seen it. We have to look at Google as where the world is going, because the pendulum has swung back and forth on Google. They've pushed out more ads, they've pulled back the number of ads. They have to have a somewhat organic world that's there. But one of the things Casey pointed out during the webinar that I think was really important to kind of remind people is that there is no silver bullet. And so how is Thrasio and good sellers successful? It's not just what they're doing. It's all the things that they're doing. And they're participating in the virtual bundles. They're participating in A + content. They're creating coupons, they're creating promotional stackable coupons. And so no one of these things is the magic bullet that just takes off with your sales. But the more of these things that you're able to do, the greater likelihood of increasing that flywheel speed by increasing your conversions. And I think that's what's really critical for sellers today is that, yeah, there's a playbook and we know how many photos we need to have. And we generally know what those photos need to look like, and we know how we need to write our listings, but that's just not enough anymore. So a couple of things that we saw from looking at the listings. We were still seeing people using their iPhone to take pictures.

Ryan Cramer: I saw that myself and I laughed to myself because their picture was, I think the first example you did was they were a barefoot in these pictures that they're trying to represent their product. It was not cropped, it was on an iPhone. It was in portrait mode as Casey mentioned. But it was super interesting, yeah, continue though.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, so when that occurs, it's okay if you need to use your iPhone to get your first images up, just come back to them. I think it kind of is baffling though, that that's still happening. I think the other one was, is that people aren't really describing what their product does. And there were some really complicated products, like horse ankles support, and you need to explain the features and benefits of your product. And so it's not about this one thing. It's about getting it down and getting it down to your audience and your buyer persona and your message to ensure that when your customers come, you have the greatest chance of succeeding by selling them your product. And, I mean, the one that made us all laugh was this person who had like some cat food that was like pictured on the floor and we were all were laughing and people were texting in, that it looked like cat poop. And so, I mean, if that's everybody's initial reaction, then you need to change those things. And I think Casey you shared some simple ways to do some testing to understand, I like to call it the mom test. But you called it the American Idol test, right?

Casey Gauss: Yeah.

Jeff Cohen: How do you know that it's good for your community not just that people are telling you it's good because they like you.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, 100%. I think being data- driven is so critical. And ideally, you're testing both pre- launch and once it's live on Amazon, so you can start to get some of that data and feedback. And I think you should be doing this around price and around your images and ideally around your copy prior to it going live on Amazon.

Ryan Cramer: So of all those places, obviously you can AB test. And I think there's great services out there, for example, PickFu. I know a lot of sellers use that post and just an audience for logo creation, photography, even competition. What are the ones that people do you think of all these thousands of listings that you guys have seen over the course of time are people falling short the most? Is it evolved over time or is now the time where people are, it's just photography or is it product listings or is it bullet points? What are the number one things that stand out to you consistently?

Casey Gauss: Yeah, if I had to boil it down to one thing, it would be the fact that there isn't one thing. So my saying has always been everyone's looking for a silver bullet. You don't need a silver bullet, you need an arsenal. And so you have to be doing everything in order to continue to push that flywheel. If I could just bullet point some items like split testing against competitors pre- launch versus just like split testing against a couple of options that you have, both of those options may actually be terrible relative to competitors. And you need to get some data to back you on that. So people will either focus a lot more on just SEO terms. So they'll keyword stuff everything, and have poorly written copy, which does not build a sense of trust or desire in the product or they swing very heavily the other way and they just focus on selling the customer and are missing a lot of keywords. And you'd be surprised at some of the listings that can do like incredibly well without that. The real trick is marrying the two. And then just focusing on all the small things. So like, as Jeff was saying, focusing on having those virtual bundles, focusing on having those, you can have those buy one get one deals where they buy multiple units of a product or they buy product A and product B, that strategy is like huge for us. We're doing some like really cool stuff with that strategy right now. Like scheduling lightning deals. I talked to so many sellers even still that aren't scheduling lightning deals or seven day deals. And especially around Prime Day, you can make some silly money. You can like really improve velocity, which helps increase ranking and helps increase review velocity. Yeah, that's my bullet.

Ryan Cramer: What are the credentials to have a lightning deal? Because I think a lot of people are concerned it's like a pay- to- play almost like a PPC model. Is there a price point that you have to, or discount that you have to instantly tell them or what are the criteria around lightning deals? Because I think that's the missing one of the missing components to standing out and instantly just going out of stock because people are deal minded consumers, and I've seen that over course of my career. What are the criteria for that, if you guys don't mind?

Casey Gauss: Jeff.

Jeff Cohen: Well, I think Amazon now makes the recommendations. You used to be able to apply for your product to have a lightning deal. Now, Amazon basically tells you if you qualify for one, and when you do they tell you how many units you need to have and what your minimum discount needs to be. So I don't think the lightning deal always, you can get away with 15% off. I think it's based off of the lowest price you've ever offered for the product before. They want it to be a better price. Something to consider, Amazon does look at that over a period of time. So-

Ryan Cramer: Do you guys have a inaudible?

Jeff Cohen: What's that?

Casey Gauss: I think it's at least 20% under lowest price in the last 30 days.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, so if you're offering a deal, you might want to be looking at a prom-, what Casey talked about this again on the podcast, like you got to look at a calendar, because if you don't plan out your calendar, then you might lose the ability to do it when you want to do it because you're going to have to go too deep in your discount. And also remember that you got to give enough of a discount to motivate people. So they might say the minimum is a 15% discount, but your product might need a 30 or 40% discount. And I think one of failures people have is they don't look at those as investments for the future. They look at them as profit centers. And I think Casey, you probably look at it as investments for the future of I'm going to sell this lightning deal at cost or maybe a loss or a very small profit, but that's going to then generate the additional flywheel that I need to get the halo effect of sales after that period of time. And so I think the mentality of sellers has to be this longer term approach to how do I make money over this whole lot of inventory that I have versus how do I make money on every unit that I'm trying to sell.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, you have to spend money to make money on it. So sometimes we have plays where we've struggled to get the best seller badge in the subcategory for our product, we run a lightning deal. We are in that bestseller badge. And then we throw a healthy coupon on the detail page to keep the momentum going, helps improve rank, gets our review velocity where we want it to go. And then we can start working on stepping that price back, sorry, that coupon back. But yeah, I mean, you have to spend money to make money. And to Jeff's point, just be a little strategic about where do you want this product to go and what is it going to take to get there and start working along those lines and like everybody has a different budget. Not everybody's going to be able to spend the same amount of money, but I think you have to understand where you're going and what it's going to take to get there or else you're going to end up nowhere.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, the easiest way I boil it down is if you look at your bid, let's say you're doing a half million this year and your goal is to do a million. Most people look at their business as I'm trying to double my business from a half million to a million. The better way to look at it is, I'm a million dollar business underperforming. And so that would then tell you, " Okay, well, if I'm a million dollar business, this is what my budgets would be. And this is what I would be targeting and trying to do." And you're actually making investments to get yourself to that point versus trying to run your business at a certain profit margin. But then also expecting the growth that you want. You have to make some sacrifices. Most businesses, even though they show a curve of it going straight up into the right, the business is much more jagged and there's seasonality and there's times of profit and there's times of loss that lead to the overall trend going up into the right.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah, with that being said, there's a lot of things that you can unpack there with, especially yesterday and the last two days being Prime Day or Days, there's a lot of competition you see bestsellers instantly be coming out of nowhere because of the investment in either lightning deals, PPC, I've seen screenshots of people's PPC budgets and it makes my wallet hurt to an extent. But that's kind of the game that you're playing if you're not investing in SEO optimization, you're investing in PPC or you're investing in inventory or product, in general, there's always sort of an investment into one or the other in the case of lightning deals, you might not be running as many PPC, but you might be gaining organic sales from a deal that could be driving results. You're just investing. The money you're investing in PPC is now investing into the loss you're taking on the" Deal." So is there a... Yeah, go ahead.

Jeff Cohen: Casey, when did you guys start planning your Prime Day promotions?

Casey Gauss: Well, I mean, you have to think about inventory as well. So we obviously didn't know the day we were hoping for summer. And so, I mean, we've been talking about Prime Day probably since Q2 of last year or Q3 of last year. But I don't know when we were able to officially schedule lightning deals. I don't remember what the date is.

Jeff Cohen: No, but what I'm saying is that you gave me the answer I was looking for, which is that, we had a client last year who was preparing into the pandemic for Prime Day over the summer, Prime Day didn't occur. They had brought in extra inventory. They had scheduled promotions using their email list and they actually saw a really great halo effect through the whole Q4 time period because they realized with their product that their product success is isn't when people buy it, it's when people use it. And so they knew that if they could get this product into people's hands, that people would then be sitting down over Thanksgiving, and during Thanksgiving they would talk about the product and the impact that it had on them. And all of a sudden after Thanksgiving, because Prime Day just happened to work out really well from them from a time perspective, so they went a heavy discount for Prime Day to get more users who all sat down at the table for Thanksgiving and talked about this product to that they bought, which then exploded their sales for the Cyber 5 weekend. But they had this all scheduled out in what they were trying to do. And they almost used Prime Day as a lost leader, if you will, to just get the momentum going. And I think that a lot of people were still scrambling with what their Prime Day promotion was in the middle, the first or second week of June. And it's really difficult to expect a return on that investment if you don't have the backup inventory, you don't have the backup process, if you're not planning to use your external list, if you're not working with maybe editorial people to get editorial post and PR post about your product and to get you listed on other things. I saw, Casey, you guys had a deal the day on Amazon's homepage, maybe a day or two before Prime Day.

Casey Gauss: Yeah.

Jeff Cohen: Like those types of things are the things that lead to the greater success on Prime Day, because you were revving up your sales to put you there. I just happen to know that's a product you talk about publicly-

Casey Gauss: We have one right now.

Jeff Cohen: What's that?

Casey Gauss: We have one live right now on the homepage.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, so I mean, those are the things that you have to do and the risk that you have to take and it has to work for your product and your product, like not everyone should do deal the day and go on the homepage because not every product will sell that way. And I think that's one of the misnomers that a lot of sellers have, they think that Amazon will just make their product successful and it won't. You have to make your product successful on Amazon.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, and-

Ryan Cramer: Go ahead.

Casey Gauss: Sorry, this is just difficult kind of for new entrepreneurs to step back, to not be entirely reactionary and to like step back and think and try to take these different factors into account. I've just seen so many folks just who focus us on one, like be so myopic around one detail. Okay, Jeff and Casey said to do lightning deals. Well, they sell out of all their inventory at a price point they weren't expecting at a discount and now they're going to struggle to replenish their inventory. So it's like we're sharing tactics. You're going to come across tactics. And I just can't encourage you enough to every once in a while, take a step back and really just try to chart things out, put some numbers down on Excel sheet or whatever, and in just like try to understand where you want to go and what it's going to take to get there and your numbers along the way.

Ryan Cramer: Casey's saying it. Yeah, don't take our word for every single thing. It's not the holy grail, but the tactics can in fact enhance your business to get to one to the other. So go ahead.

Jeff Cohen: It's about taking the words and understanding it, how to apply it to your business because you won't be successful doing it because what Casey is explaining or what I'm explaining is this part. And you have to understand all the other parts to properly apply the whole thing to your business. It's why courses are very difficult for people to be successful from, because they're trying to learn the information and then apply it and learn the information and apply it. And the course gives you a syllabus, an order in which you should do things, but life doesn't give you an order in which you should do things. And so you have to learn on your own how much you need to do and in what order. And one of the great stories I love to tell is at trade show I was at, a number of years ago, a guy was on stage and he was talking about products and product research and how to find products. And he started talking about Halloween inflatables, and everybody in the room started pulling up their computer looking up Halloween inflatables. And I literally was in the back of the room, watching all these sellers going online buying Halloween and inflatables because the guy on stage said the word Halloween inflatables.

Ryan Cramer: It's a garlic press effect.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, and he came down. That's why we started moving to things like garlic press and water bottles, because as speakers in the space, we realized that people listen to what we say, and we feel bad that they are buying Halloween inflatables because they don't realize that we just randomly pick something.

Ryan Cramer: Just one late night thought it came to fruition. And all of a sudden, some supplier in China or India is all of a sudden getting all these orders for Halloween inflatables.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, and if that's your strategy, that's a really poor strategy. And I think everybody who speaks in the Amazon space will agree with that. And I think that what, like Casey said, what we're providing are tactics. And then your job is to figure out how to put your tactics in order and test them against your product and your market and your buyer persona to figure out which ones that work, that becomes your magic bullet. Casey's magic bullet isn't the tactics that he uses. It's how he applies those tactics. And they're different for every product that they have.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah, what I'm hearing is strategy. Strategy is depending on the product, depending on the category. And I like what I heard was, it's almost like you're using an event, Casey, and you're using an event and you're circling the event because people are going to start to organically show up to Amazon, like what do I want to put on my list? What's on Amazon right now? I know I did it personally. I'm like, " I'm going to find out what I need, put it on my list and wait." But as you're searching, you're going to come across naturally listed deals, products, and whatnot. You guys are circling a bookend event that a lot of people are naturally going to go and" convert on", but you're getting the eyeballs and the traffic and brand awareness on the days of before and after, which is very smart to get cheaper placements and also ranking that's not going to just like go up on Amazon Prime Day and then fizzle out. You guys are having a sustained strategy, which is what we're trying to incorporate here.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, and we're making sure that the economics of before or during and after align with the economics we need in order to purchase inventory and pay our suppliers and all these other components that come with running the business, like you just got to be able to take it all into account.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah, that's a good segue into inventory. This year seemed very constricting on a lot of sellers because I've read plenty of articles in the space on, like CNBC and whatnot, there's lots of articles that say inventory didn't allow for sellers to give us great of a discount because of inventory restrictions. It's very frustrating that the timing worked out how it did where instantly big time sellers got slashed by 60% inventory limits. And they weren't allowed to sell their natural inventory through or at the rate at which they could or potentially want to. With that being said, how are your teams taking those kind of situations and applying it now that we're going into Q3, Q4 and some of the busier times for lots of brands?

Casey Gauss: Yeah, I don't have a ton of insight into this. I mean, one, it's a huge headache and has definitely been a barrier in general. Our primary solution is we now have a good kind of third, we're in a different position than the average. So we have a good 3PL, other providers that can essentially fulfill the inventory for us. We have seller fulfilled prime account. So we're able to still have the prime badge while fulfilling from these other warehouses, if you will. And so we don't have to adhere to the inventory restrictions on new products as we are starting to launch. But yeah, I mean, it's tough. My understanding is that they're easing up. I honestly, I don't know enough details to really speak to it.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, it's funny. I saw somebody posted a... There are 10 million seller they posted their IPI score at like 500, 550, and people were bashing them and I'm like, " Nobody really knows what a good IPI score is." They may know what theirs is compared to somebody else's. And I think that invento-... Casey and I think talked about this a year ago, like at the beginning of the pandemic, that inventory has been the story since May of last year, April, May of last year. So it was about inventory getting into Amazon at that point in time, it was people moving to the three P, then it was the IPI scores changing and fluctuating, going up to 500 down to 450 and changing right before Christmas. Now, it's inventory restrictions and limiting on new numbers. Don't forget that there's three to four times the cost to ship your products in from China right now, if you could even find a container.

Ryan Cramer: $16,000 for a container is consistent.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, and the people who are winning are the ones who are not just complaining to the press about these problems, but are figuring out solutions.

Casey Gauss: That doesn't make you more money?

Jeff Cohen: It does. It makes you a lot more money if you complain to the press. Yes, it can put some pressure on Amazon, but I had this conversation with a venture capital firm that is, they all went into this space. Casey knows that better than anybody. And I said to them, I was like, " One of the biggest problems that Amazon sellers have is that they believe Amazon owes them something." Yes, we are customers of Amazon, but Amazon really doesn't owe us anything. If I was the boutique store down the street, and I was buying products from Casey and Casey had sold me products and decided he doesn't want to sell me products anymore, I'm cut off from that supplier. If these things exist in the real world, like we can't act like they shouldn't exist in the Amazon world and the companies that are successful are the ones that are able to adapt and change and overcome when these obstacles are placed in front of them. And so, yes, it's a lot harder to launch a product when you have new inventory. I know a seller who got really hurt by that because he had 30 containers of new products he was planning to launch in Q4. And his goal was to be selling over 200 a day. And he was only allowed to put 200 in, but he overcame and he moved them to a 3PL and he found other ways to move his inventory and to sell it and to start building it up. And as he is going into the process this year, he's using this year as ramp up periods, because you can't just drop your products in the middle of October and expect to have all the inventory at Amazon that you need for a December rush. And so you just have to make adjustments to your systems and your processes to take advantage of the rules as they're currently written until they change.

Casey Gauss: Yep. Yeah, my philosophy's always been change brings opportunity as long as it's a relatively level playing field in the Amazon space and I guess kind of just in life. And I mean, if you're selling on Amazon, there's going to be a lot of change, whether it's algorithms or inventory allotments or rules on getting new brands registered, you name it, there's always going to be change and in your ability to kind of manage through those and keep a level ahead and try to focus on, okay, what is the opportunity for me to have an advantage here versus everybody else? And to just point play to the full extent of the rules, go hard at any given point. And when they change, adapt with it. But if you're sitting on your hands waiting for this rule to change or this thing to change that you know is going to change at some point, like you're letting everybody else pass you by, like no excuses at the end of the day, how much money you make is dependent on your own decisions and how you respond to external events. And yeah, if you want more money work through it, if you want to complain, then you're going to pay the price regardless.

Ryan Cramer: Right, that's great advice because a lot of people entered the space what? Back in 2014 and 15 with the notion of throw up a product on Amazon from a supplier or anywhere from Alibaba, be decent at listing your product, going back to original point and then just sit on a beach or somewhere, and just watch your money come in. But we are seeing now the barrier to entry and barriers to grow your business start to come higher and higher. And that's weeding out a lot of unsightly competition that's weeding out brands who are not doing it correctly, or people not wanting to grow appropriately when in the business world that this is kind of the blueprint that's always existed. You have to continuously be forethought if something happens to your supply chain or rent goes up or anything that's outside, you don't complain. Like you said, Jeff, to the media and fixes all of our problems. You figured out, all right, well, maybe we have to go to a cheaper facility or maybe we have to find a partner to help us grow and expand. I feel like for a simplistic term. It's been so easy for so long for so many people that now it becomes an instantly percentage harder. Everyone's like, " What the hell?" Like this isn't for me.

Jeff Cohen: I also think that I'm not knocking you, but I think that answers sometimes a cop- out, because it was always easier to do it before than it is to do it now. With everything, well, maybe some things technology makes things easier. It's easier to mow my lawn today than it was when I was a kid. And the lawnmower didn't have the automatic where I just pulled a lever and it started and moving. I had to actually had to push the lawnmower when I was a kid. It's easier to water the lawn-

Ryan Cramer: At the hill both ways.

Jeff Cohen: The sprinklers are better but technology changes and evolves and makes things easier for people to do things. But it also makes it harder for things to be done. And I would say like as a challenger brand, and most people on this are challenger brands. As a challenger brand, why did you get into the space? Why did you see the opportunity to put your product online? And maybe you just have a competitor who's now doing it better than you. And so you need to up your game. And I see that a lot because they came in and saw what you were doing and they saw your listing and they saw your pricing and they saw your lack of innovation. And they basically came in with a better, cheaper, higher profitable product. And I think that one of the hardest things to do in the Amazon space is to be like a luxury product in a commodity market. And I've seen a few people do it in like the speaker space where you're trying to compete against like the$ 25 suction cup speaker. And then some people are trying to sell the multi- hundred dollar Bluetooth speaker, and they both want the term Bluetooth speaker. Well, it's hard to compete in that space, but you can when you're the luxury brand, but you have to approach the business differently as the luxury brand. And you have to understand whether people want that. As a consumer, I saw that in the light bulb space, I needed dimable light bulbs for my kids' room. Well, I had all different price choices and needed to understand whether I wanted this really high- end light bulb that could, but the high end light bulbs weren't iridescent light bulbs. They were color changing LED longer lasting whatever they were. They had something more to them that made them four times the price. And so I think like it's something that you have to look at. And one of the pieces of advice we gave going into Prime Day was, if you didn't have a Prime Day strategy, your Prime Day strategy should be to watch your competitors and figure out what their Prime Day strategy is. And-

Ryan Cramer: That's a good point.

Jeff Cohen: ...see what they're doing and see how they're doing it so that you can then figure out what you want to be doing. And if you look at your competitors and say, " Well, that's not my buyer persona, I'm more luxury brand than what they are." That can be all and well, except for the fact that, does the consumer care? So what does the consumer care about? And that's what Casey said at the beginning, it was like, " Okay, you're trying to compare yourself to these people, to those people. Great, go test the market to figure out whether the consumer actually cares about what you consider your differentiator to be." Will they pay more for it? Because your picture is nicer and prettier, but at the end of the day, you're both selling a light bulb. And I think those are things you have to be thinking about. And if my customer is the eco- friendly millennial and my light bulb last longer and gives money back to save the ocean, then maybe they will pay more for it than the person who's just trying to put a light bulb in their room.

Ryan Cramer: Right. Yeah, there's so many different things to unpack there, but at the end of the day, knowing who your customer is, making sure that you speak to them, and it's not just me too product, it's more of a, I'm going to solve this problem. This is my customer, and I'm going to stay true to myself instead of, I even like the idea of just watching your competition, how they're going to try to target or approach a day, if you may not want to give 50% off, 70% off on these holidays, because a lot of sellers I'm hearing, just the natural, organic traffic, they're going to sit pat, they're going to not change their price. They're going to say, listen, they're going to understand that our product stands alone because of our reviews, because of our listing, because of our imagery. And that alone is going to be good enough. And they're going to find us one way or another. They're going to differentiate if I want to invest in something that's lasting or something that's just a deal for" a deal." So a lot of sellers I think are opting for just stay pat and kind of just take traffic as it comes. You're not going to see this siege-

Jeff Cohen: But that's not crosstalk. It's still a strategy. You made the decision to do that.

Ryan Cramer: Exactly, that's still a strategy.

Jeff Cohen: Right, you made the decision that you weren't going to do it versus just kind of rolling with it and seeing what happens. But you also, if you have that attitude, you can't come back and go, " Well, why didn't my sales spike that day? It was Prime Day. I should've gotten more sales." Well, the consumer on Prime Day isn't motivated to buy from you just because they're there, they're motivated to buy from you because it's Prime Day and they're looking for discounts. So you have to understand the consumer and their mindset as well.

Ryan Cramer: Right, do you guys think, and this is kind of going to consumer online versus, we're going back more into in- person events and people are getting out to the world. For once I think, even right before this, I know, we all know, Liran Hirschkorn, he posted some data that said, " Just search traffic in general for a lot of tuck keyword performers for their clients are going down." And he said, they're pointing to that because of people are naturally want to travel. They're not shopping as much online. It's still very high. Is that a trend that we're starting to see go in into summer, maybe into fall? Is that a trend that we'll start to see that this all- time high and buying and selling online is going to kind of plateau out and maybe we won't see as much sell through as we have been in the last few months?

Casey Gauss: Yeah, it's something that we've been talking about. I mean, we've been talking about since COVID started. What happens when COVID's over, if that is a thing? So, I won't make any funny jokes, but anyways, so I mean, we had a good May, but like the question is, okay, now it's summer, vaccination rates are higher, things are continuing to open up, like what happens? And I don't exactly have an answer just yet. But I think for us what's most important will be demonstrating our performance relative to the overall market. I don't think that Amazon's dominance will subside in any way. I think Amazon has established themselves in the average American household, in the mind, in building trust. I mean, it's just far too easy to return stuff, to get stuff, you understand? So I think Amazon's here to stay. Will there be some temporary change in demand as the stimulus checks kind of run up, as unemployment dries up? I don't know. We'll see. I mean-

Jeff Cohen: We might start to see inflation on Amazon as people shipping and other prices go up. The price of the goods on Amazon could start to increase.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, and you may see more people holding cash because there's volatility in the market, like, who knows? I think for us in particular, our performance relative to the market is what's most important. And I mean, as always making long- term decisions. Again, I think Amazon's in a super good place. E- commerce is in a super good place. Never been better. This space is super hot, both on the consumer side, as well as the seller side. So we're in a good position. Yeah, I don't know enough. I can't project enough that the short- term trends though.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, I think the second, if I was going to ever buy another shirt, besides the one that I wear, I would get one that says this one because I-

Ryan Cramer: Do you have one?

Jeff Cohen: I have one-

Ryan Cramer: I was going to say, " Jeff, do you have more than one, hopefully?" Because I have seen you in that shirt.

Jeff Cohen: I do crosstalk. I have like two dozen. I would get a shirt that says it depends because my first thing about that data is I have a lot of questions. Like, what's the product and what category? And if you're talking about, if he was talking about selling puzzles and coloring books, then yeah, I would expect his impressions to have declined as we go into summer months. If baking was at an all time high throughout the pandemic, I would expect baking to decrease over the summer months as people are going outside. So again, like, who are your consumers and what are they trying to do and what are you trying to match that in comparison to? It's easy to kind of look at overall trends and say, " Well, yeah, I mean, I got plenty of clients that their search volume is lower than what it was six months or 12 months ago, but their product would indicate that it should be." So is it a normal seasonality trend that's occurring or is it just that product has kind of fallen out of favor with the COVID bump than it had? And Casey, I 100% agree with you. Amazon's not going away. If anything, Amazon has converted more people to being prime shoppers that are now here to stay. Very similar to the grocery market and the people who are doing grocery.

Ryan Cramer: I was going to say, you're talking about shopping on more than just consumable goods. You're talking about grocery, you're talking about video, you're talking about everything the slate that they have to offer music so on and so forth.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, I think Jeff had a good point. And again, the comparisons, I know some numbers of other non- Amazon businesses in the e- commerce world and their comparisons for April 2021 to April 2020. And same with May is like, I mean, depending on the market that you're in super, super tough to match. Again, as Jeff was saying, if you sell puzzles, I mean, the demand for puzzles is significantly different than it was as a lockdown was starting to pick up. So you said there was this guy named Liran, was it? I'm just kidding. Yeah, so Liran-

Ryan Cramer: Shout out to Liran. He's a friend of the show.

Jeff Cohen: He's like a shock jock. He likes to put stuff out there that ask more questions than giving answers.

Casey Gauss: All right, so let me shock Liran, real quick, I haven't done the research enough. I just pulled it up because I think I saw his example was garlic press, right?

Ryan Cramer: Yeah, it was garlic press. It was from a solution that we won't talk about.

Casey Gauss: Okay, so the thing is, this started happening I think maybe I wasn't paying attention enough prior to, I think this started happening a lot like summer last year or something. So what you see happen is like, " Okay, garlic press is the primary keyword." And out of nowhere, search volume drops for garlic press. But then if you go look at some of the support terms like secondary keywords, you'll see them actually take that search volume.

Jeff Cohen: Stainless steel garlic press.

Casey Gauss: So it's level. So, yeah. So looking at some tool, I guess we don't need to name names. The search volume for a garlic press stainless steel has gone up from, in May it was at 6, 000 searches a month to June, it's at 18 and a half thousand. So it's probably taken a decent percentage of that difference that Liran was showing. And so maybe we need to do a training with Liran on how to do keyword research, but crosstalk-

Ryan Cramer: As I said, it could be another person that would look at those trends too, that I would trust. But this is a-

Jeff Cohen: I think this loops us back to the beginning. If your keywords are the keywords, and you haven't changed your keywords, and you haven't looked at new keywords within your space, and you haven't looked at your competitors and seen what's driving from them, well, first off you might not have a stainless steel garlic press. So you can't use the word stainless steel, but if the market has shifted and your keywords haven't shifted, then you may be optimized for the wrong term.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, would the record show that, I'm just teasing with Liran, I talk to him all the time. We're very good friends, but-

Ryan Cramer: That's why I bring him up, exactly.

Casey Gauss: So I see this happen actually often. And so it's important to stay on top of your keyword research to Jeff's point because like it can happen like in a month, as it has in this case. A lot of times it goes back to the mean or whatever it was previously. I think it's Amazon making changes to auto- complete, so as you start typing in garlic press, it's actually garlic press stainless steel that is showing up. You can influence this, but it's happening so much that I think Amazon's doing it intentionally or not. But I think the search bar, auto- complete inaudible.

Ryan Cramer: That's something I don't know the answer for either of you. If Amazon auto completes your term, does that ringing go towards the term that the user put in or is that the term that Amazon will complete for you?

Casey Gauss: They track-

Jeff Cohen: They'll give a rank.

Casey Gauss: But it's the full term.

Ryan Cramer: So in that regards, if they happen to accidentally, if Amazon auto completes it and I'm actually wanting to look for garlic press-

Jeff Cohen: Like if you drop down in the garlic. You mean like if it's on the dropdown and you pick the third one down. Yeah, then your search term becomes that term.

Ryan Cramer: Okay, yeah, in that regards, if it fulfills for me and accidentally click enter or something like that, and it just takes me to whatever, the first thing that was autocompleted, that's what it'll give me the term for interesting.

Jeff Cohen: Remember, Amazon only cares about the term that ultimately drives to the conversion. So their data is going to wash out the misclicks that occur along the way.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, if you think about it, a lot of your clicks into a suggestion are going to be these incomplete terms, garlic P inaudible. So it's there, I don't need to keep typing, I'll just click. So that'd be weird if you're now getting all this rank attribution for incomplete where it's.

Ryan Cramer: Absolutely, yeah.

Jeff Cohen: I also think that goes back to another one of our points was like, you can't just read this and say, " Oh, this is why my sales is down." You need to go figure it out specifically for your own. Exactly like a knowledgeable person in the space identified a trend, is sharing that trend. You now need to go figure out how that trend impacts you and your business. You can't just assume that he identified that trend. And therefore that trend is why something for you is working or not working. You have to go figure it out. And I think that it creates the squirrel syndrome of like, " Oh, that must be my problem. Oh, that must be my problem."

Ryan Cramer: Chasing the problem.

Jeff Cohen: And this is also where, like, Casey and I, when we did our listing tear down, we didn't have access to people's data. So we were just literally going through and just telling them what we saw wrong with their listing when we saw it. But a lot of times we were like, well, the first thing we would do is we'd look at your data and determine whether we should even be tearing apart your listing, because if you're at a 30% conversion, then I don't know if I can really make a substantial impact on your business. And so data has always been the lead for both Casey and I of like to figure out where your problem is, use data. And then as you have your data, solve the problem that's ahead of you and then figure out the next problem along the way. Don't just say, " Oh, Casey said go redo all my images. I'm going to go redo my images." Because what Casey said was test to see whether you need to redo these and see how one performs compared to the other and understand before and after, before you do them, you can't just go in there and wholesale change things.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah, that's the takeaway that I'm having is obviously any screenshot of a moment in time in a perfect world can point to many different things. It can go for you or it can go against what your thought processes is. Always look at data and then take a step back and take a step back further, look at the whole picture and ultimately where you trying to get, and maybe why these nuances are happening because ultimately, everyone in this space can be a speed boat. You can ebb and flow too quickly. And then obviously capsize. And when major corporations, they have to take a more, like if you're at Thrasio and you're$1 billion dollar entity, you have to take a more steady approach of like, " This is actually the way we want to shift because of data." All right, perfect. And we're going to set sail that way. So that being said, I guess, moving forward into the rest of the year, what are the most important aspects that sellers need to just remember not to get frantic if you're listening to this and they've got all of a sudden, like I got to look at the ground up, I don't think I'm doing the right thing. What do we need to remember moving forward into Q3, Q4, and now moving forward? Casey, you're on mute.

Jeff Cohen: crosstalk tell him.

Ryan Cramer: It's okay. For audio purposes I don't want to have to go in and edit this too.

Jeff Cohen: I wanted to watch and see how long he went, it will be like, " That was amazing."

Ryan Cramer: It was great stuff.

Casey Gauss: What a rookie mistake. The dog was barking. Yeah, no, there's a lot there. So I guess like relative to this, again, I think not trying to find that silver bullet, everyone used to think it was giveaways, then it was, I don't know, PBC. Like it's always something. There's no silver bullet that's going to help you get to where you want to go. You need an arsenal. You need to focus on kind of knocking down as many of these components that are going to feed the flywheel as possible. That flywheel drives better rankings, which drives more sales. A flywheel drives better, review velocity more sales, drive more reviews. If you're using a tool like Seller Labs, for example, which then helps to drive more sales. So feeding that, and it's a lot of things that you may not be paying attention to. It's these buy one get one offers, lightning deals, virtual bundles, you name it, anything that you can do to increase the velocity of your sales is going to be helpful short- term and longterm. And then just trying to take everything in scope. I mean, right now, you should have a strong plan for Q4. You are like coming up on your deadline for ordering inventory if you aren't hitting it depending on your suppliers and so forth. It's just difficult to get stuff in Amazon's warehouses. You should be looking at third party fulfillment providers to be able to actually fulfill your product if it's a new product or if you have a bad IPI score inventory restrictions. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot, it wasn't as concise as Jeff is going to do for us. Let's hear Jeff.

Jeff Cohen: I'll make it really simple. Go back and listen to what Casey just said and write it all down. And I think that you did an awesome job there, Casey, of just kind of rambling off things, but remember they weren't in order and you have to figure out your order and your priority order. And if you struggle with understanding your data and you struggle with understanding exactly where your business is and what you need to do, and in what order, then that's where you should start, plain and simple. That's where you should start. And I think that you want some analysis and you want some help, reach out. We do a free data analysis where we'll send you back a whole day of spreadsheet with Google Data Studios, giving you a whole bunch of charts and stuff about your business to kind of visualize how your business is doing. We do that for free. Reach out to people on LinkedIn and see if somebody can maybe help you or if you reach out to me, I can't speak for anybody else. If you reach out to me on LinkedIn I probably did about 20 additional listing tear downs where people said, " Hey, will you do this? You didn't get to mine, will you do mine?" And I did a three minute video and I sent them the video. It doesn't take a ton of time for us to do, just to understand, like, I'm not going to respond to you, like within an hour. It took me a week or so to get through everybody. But they're fun. Like, they're fun for me to do.

Casey Gauss: They are fun.

Jeff Cohen: So reach out, we're here. We're willing to help. I mean, I'll be at Prosper. Come up to me, tell me you heard this, ask me questions. I think that's my last piece of advice that I'll give is if you do in- person events, it's the number one opportunity you have to get free consulting for your business. And so you can find somebody like Casey, or you can find somebody like me or find somebody like Liran, who normally would charge, potentially charge or not have time to talk to you, who will sit out for five, 10 minutes and talk to you about your business and give you suggestions. Casey and I sometimes it shows we'll start talking and we get a crowd of people that are around us, who just want to listen in to whoever we're talking to, because they know that they're going to get value from listening. So think of those as opportunities, as you're learning, how to grow your business and put more into, and I think you called it your arsenal. So I like that. I'm going to steal that at the end there.

Casey Gauss: I stole it from a Viral Launch copywriter. I'm more of a introvert. I've definitely become a more of an extrovert as I was running Viral Launch and going to these events and stuff. But definitely don't, you may be nervous, but please come up talk to us, talk to anybody. I mean, that's why people are there, is to talk to other people. Everybody's, you know, going through something relatively similar, you probably don't have these kinds of entrepreneur friends in your community that your network that you grew up with. So it's fun. You get to learn a lot. You can provide value to them and you may not even realize, so.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, I always say offer to buy offer to buy somebody dinner or a drink. Now, you don't have to offer it to Casey or I just like-

Ryan Cramer: It would be nice.

Jeff Cohen: If you hear somebody and if you hear somebody in a, yeah, offer it to Ryan.

Ryan Cramer: Yeah, and I was like, " Hey, I'll be the first time for anything." So I'm down. I'll just talk forever.

Jeff Cohen: If you hear somebody in a session, ask a really good question, go up and talk to them and say, " Hey, where are you going after this? Can I buy you a drink at the bar? I'd love to chat with you about this." Like, those are the things that start lifelong friendships and relationships that allow you to take your business to the next level, or again, virtually, if you're not going to an event, reach out on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, and just reach out and ask, you'd be shocked by how many people just don't do that. And if they did, would realize the door opens for them.

Casey Gauss: Yeah, the amount of like meaningful connections that I've made from these events, it's difficult to quantify. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life in one way or another as a dramatic as it sounds.

Ryan Cramer: To use the cliche, your network is your net worth. So I've always heard the saying the five people you connect with or talk with the most is, like that's the level you're going to be on. So always talking-

Jeff Cohen: The value of those people is the value you aspire to be.

Ryan Cramer: Absolutely. Yeah, and that's the thing is, even in this position, just social listening to people and constantly trying to learn, all three of us, I would say is, I definitely didn't know what I know now a year ago, two years ago and I'm assuming with you guys is that you've just been around a long time to understand and see, a lot of this process has changed. So you can tell that story of what worked, what doesn't and kind of move forward. And people just don't have that experience yet, but that's kind of the beauty of blazing the trail, if you will, whether it's starting a software solution or running it, a multi- million dollar or billion dollar entity like you guys are now is that you guys have just seen the bad, but also have seen the good and help people get there. So that's great for events. That's great for digital content and just building your network in general. Is there other ways that people should be able to reach out to you directly or email or should they go to your website? Because I know this tear down we'll link to it and make sure it's already in our comment section and it's in the tear down. I know Caroline mentioned it earlier in the comments section. If you want to look and watch the entire one hour and 22 minutes, I think that you guys broke down some of these things, it's there on that page on Seller Labs. Is there otherwise people should reach out to you both or just through websites or LinkedIn or anything?

Jeff Cohen: Sellerlab. com or LinkedIn is the best is the best way to get ahold me.

Casey Gauss: Linkedin or Instagram. It's an area of opportunity to improve for me, but probably LinkedIn or maybe Instagram.

Ryan Cramer: Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for taking the time. I know this is a long time coming for getting Casey on the show and Jeff coming back, obviously to impart his wisdom. I'm always writing down notes like you guys should see my note book. It's not blank. It's just a very glary set up in here, but it's always full notes when both of you talk. So thank you so much for hopping on today as always, and follow them on social media we're linking to you guys and all that content. So thanks for hopping on and just imparting your wisdom of tearing down and hopefully not breaking down the dreams of some of these sellers as you were ripping them apart, but it is what it is, your growing process, right?

Jeff Cohen: Yep, it is.

Ryan Cramer: Awesome. Well, thanks guys. I appreciate it as always. And thank you again for hopping on Crossover Commerce. This is episode 121, again, where we bring the best insights and experts to the Amazon and e- commerce space so that you, the listener, if you're listening to this or watching this, we want to make sure that you improve your business moving forward. That's why we do this. That's why I bring my network on to help you out in these capacities. So hopefully you learned something today, but make sure you tune in and subscribe to our channels on social media. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn. Reach out if you have questions or if you have questions and watching this later. Go ahead and tag Casey or Jeff as well. And I'm sure they'll get back to you as well. Check us out again tomorrow. We'll go live again talking about inventory limits. We're going to be talking with James McConnell Jr. As well, he has a lot of insights and data in terms of inventory limits, supplier pay. Just seeing what the data is showing in terms of those limits for lots of sellers out there and helping them grow in that capacity and kind of adjusting as we're moving forward. But that being said, this is Crossover Commerce. Make sure you guys take care out there and we'll catch you guys next time.