Rolando Rosas 4:01
Alright, and Dave on a brand has called Hampton Adams. Let’s get right into talking about our guests. Let me tell you a little bit about Steven Pope. Steven pope is the founder of My Amazon Guy, a 300 plus person, Amazon Seller agency, right out of the Atlanta area. His agency helps sellers with growth on Amazon, as well as other marketplaces with PPC, SEO design and catalog management probably the hardest thing to do on Amazon today. He’s also an Eagle Scout. Get that. And like I said earlier, a Master Guru when it comes to Amazon, and he has a weekly podcast that’s live asked me any Amazon question and he’s got a whole bunch of other stuff that he just recently launched Pope plus a service that allows you to have access to Steven and his Amazon selling process with guided coaching who wouldn’t want to have somebody like Steven at your fingertips, helping you guiding you through the process. Let’s welcome to the show Steven Pope.
Steven Pope 5:08
Wow, quite the intro. Thank you. Awesome, I’m hyped to see myself.
Rolando Rosas 5:15
We, you know, I just telling Dave, you are in this industry, the crowd and the folks that run in this industry. There’s a lot of charlatans, a lot of people right now on social media, talking Googly Ngoc nonsense about how to be successful in Amazon. But you’re actually one of those tried and true persons has been around for a while. You’ve seen it all. And you’re actually helping people make a difference in their businesses.
Steven Pope 5:44
Well, they call it The Passion of the Christ, right? Like that movie everybody’s may have seen it’s and that word passion actually means to enjoy the suffering of. There’s a lot of suffering on Amazon, by the way. So nobody in our space selling on Amazon would be doing what they do, let alone servicing the 300 brands we work with, unless they enjoyed that passion, that suffering that’s involved, because there’s a lot of it.
Rolando Rosas 6:13
No doubt, no doubt.
Dave Kelly 6:15
And we Steven, we have a lot of questions for you. Before we jump into that Rolando. I just want to do a quick read from our sponsor if I go for a Dave. All right, listen, if you are a remote worker, you know that background noise can be a major distraction, and make you sound unprofessional on calls with clients. Don’t let that be the case any longer. Steven? Don’t you hate it when you get a call and the person on the other line sounds like they have like they work in a veterinarian clinic. You hear all these dogs and people and background noise and echo. Man,
Steven Pope 6:50
I used to be a call center employee and
Rolando Rosas 6:52
I would say oh, he knows what we’re talking about with truckers
Steven Pope 6:55
and truckers don’t care. They’ll take you into the bathroom, they’ll drop a Duke while they’re on the call your truck driver this products for you.
Dave Kelly 7:07
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Rolando Rosas 7:44
Awesome read. Thank you, Dave. You know what, speaking of truckers, we actually sell quite a bit to truckers, Steven was saying that he’ll truckers will go in the bathroom and take a Duke while they’re on the phone because that’s just the Call of Duty right? You got to be on the road. And sometimes culture calls
Steven Pope 8:00
that the name of the product right? Take a Duke are the guys that made the unicorn commercial? Like the Squatty Potty marketing guys. Yes, maybe. from BYU?
Rolando Rosas 8:12
Really they weren’t. Wow, interest. I didn’t know
Steven Pope 8:15
Mormons are really funny saying this because I am one. So like, I was
Rolando Rosas 8:19
just I was just on before we got on here to do the podcast. I was just on a call with somebody in your backyard, Brandon. And we’ll Christianson out of cellar labs and did some really good people Tyler, the he’s all seller account. And all these folks. They’re your folks as well. They’re in your backyard. And I believe they’re also Mormons Correct?
Steven Pope 8:39
Everybody but Tyler? So Tyler and I started our business at the same exact time and we got to see each other grow. We actually had to go to prosper, show out west to meet each other and then come back to the Atlanta area. But yeah, like I gotta give a shout out to seller account and they sent 11 clients our way and our first 40 clients. Oh, I wouldn’t have a business if it wasn’t for Tyler.
Rolando Rosas 8:59
All right, Tyler, big props to Tyler. Keep it going man keep sending them a pipeline of customers. So I want to get into this with you. We touched on this a little bit. The last time we spoke. ChatGPT in artificial intelligence. But why I’m putting words in your mouth. But I want to ask you what technology? Are you really geeking out on it? Is it the RAI? Or is it something else that you’re geeking out on right now?
Steven Pope 9:28
There is no question about it. Right? This is a leading question for a good reason. And that is because ChatGPT is going to change the frickin world. It’s not going to just change the marketing department. It’s going to change the world. Right? My favorite saying that I’ve seen going around on Reddit and all the forums right now is you’re not going to lose your job to a robot. You’re gonna lose your job to somebody, if you’re a copywriter. That is if you’re a copywriter today, you’re gonna lose your job to somebody that knows how to use the AI better than you right like the speed the performance system things that are coming out on this is just unreal. So right now, if you guys wanted a 1000 word essay, written in the tone of voice of Spock, while he was gurgling underwater, and talk to me about how to do brain surgery, we could tell ChatGPT to do that, and it would pull up 1000 words in under 30 seconds, and it would 100% be an Xbox voice. Okay, and so the impact is immensely massive, right? It’s going to change everything as it comes to communication worldwide. Why would you ever go to Google to get the recipe for something, when now you can use AI to show you the whole meal, they’ll just deliver you the meal. And I don’t mean like cooking and going getting a recipe off Google then you make it what I’m trying to show with that metaphor is that it will not only tell you how and what to do and what the understanding of the information is, it will give you the finished products. Beat me up Scotty Star Trek style. So this is a major tech advancement now now I’m going to give you a couple of quick hacks that you can do for
Rolando Rosas 11:05
oh boy, oh, let’s do a pro tip before you give us those hacks or a full A pro tip.
Steven Pope 11:17
You’re going to struggle the African savannah while I give this tip out.
Rolando Rosas 11:21
Absolutely prototype Voice Pro Tip numero uno kit WhatsApp
Steven Pope 11:26
and put in the phone number for keepy. And you can get WhatsApp access while the websites down pro tip to download the app on Slack for ChatGPT. And while you’re in Slack, you can tell it what you need. You don’t even have to leave your ecosystem. There are so many different ways to access the AI now that you can program automations to get the information and write out everything you need. You could ask it to write 100 LinkedIn posts right now. You could tell it download the 1500 videos that Steven Pope has on YouTube and create 100 new blog posts. It can do all of that.
Rolando Rosas 12:03
Freaking awesome. And I took you up on something you just said. We call ChatGPT. Internally, Eddie, because it’s hard to say ChatGPT As much as we say it around. So I just asked Eddie, I took you up. I said act as the character Spock from Star Trek, and give me a brief description under 100 words about selling on Amazon. Here’s what EDdie aka ChatGPT said. selling on Amazon is a logical choice for businesses and individuals looking to expand their reach and increase profit. The platform offers a vast customer based streamlined process and advanced analytics to assist in optimizing sales. However, it is important to note that competition is fierce and adherence to Amazon’s guidelines and regulations is essential for success.
Steven Pope 12:51
We should ask it next to do a poem about how awful Seller Support is.
Rolando Rosas 12:59
Your poem and what voice Do you want? I’ve
Dave Kelly 13:01
already written
Rolando Rosas 13:02
on spots voice.
Steven Pope 13:03
Let’s do Yoda. Okay, do
Rolando Rosas 13:05
a poem Yodas voiding.
Steven Pope 13:08
How bad is Jeff Bezos and Seller Support? It’s awful.
Rolando Rosas 13:11
The voice of Yoda about how bad Seller Support is on Amazon and I’m going to put under I’ll put under 100 words. Okay, that waits.
Steven Pope 13:24
Sometimes I’ll just read a poem and I’ll just give you like the four stanzas pretty good.
Rolando Rosas 13:29
All right, here we go. It’s spitting out results right now. Here we go. Seller Support. So weak it is. Um, let me try to get Yoda. I don’t you probably could do this better than I get. So here’s what I’m gonna do. Instead of me reading it. I want you to read it. You probably could do that better. Yeah, no, you’re like that kind of thing.
Steven Pope 13:48
I picked the wrong one to do this. Before so weak, it is on Amazon and does not exist to help with issues. They do not try leaving merchants to their own devices to die frustrated and lost. They do feel Amazon’s neglect. It is real. My Gilda swish should have had him do it.
Rolando Rosas 14:09
I’ll give it I’ll give it a try. Give it my legal best. Seller Support is so weak it is on Amazon. It does not exist to help people with issues. They do not try living merchants to their own devices to die frustrated and lost. They do feel Amazon’s neglect, it is real or trying you get an A for effort. So you are right. When it comes to artificial intelligence. It is here the future is here. We’ve been talking about it. And given the other applications out there right now. You use other stuff and it’ll work it does the job for kind of writing but they did One thing that was really genius, actually I’ll give to the first is they kept the user interface. Simple, simple, not complicated, not with 100. Other things going on like a lot of other stuff, just simple. And a throwback to the DOS, where you have that flashing prompt. So if you’re old enough, you could remember that’s how computer terminals as they were called back then, and they would spit out things like that in that flashing way. In green, remembers screens were like Greenspan, computer terminal. I remember back in college, and we were all excited. Oh, my God, look at this crazy thing. Then the second part is they really upped the game, when it came to rolling this out a million users in five days. I think I took 52 days for Instagram to get there. And Instagram is a social media platform that people use to share everything, right? They did it in five days. I think nerds are back in data scientists are back in. Hey, shout out to ChatGPT and open AI for making this a wild success so far. Now. Microsoft’s gonna throw $10 billion $10,000,000.10 with a B billion.
Steven Pope 16:08
Yeah, yeah, they’re gonna take they’re gonna take Google out. This is the thing that cool. Do
Rolando Rosas 16:12
you think it’s a Google killer prediction, Steven
Steven Pope 16:14
brulee? How could this not kill Google? Why you don’t even need to go to Google anymore? Right? Let’s think about how this is going to change college. Why do I need to go to college to learn how to write a paper anymore? I don’t like like, one dude could write his entire thesis, his master’s thesis in 30 seconds. The access to information changes everything. And so a lot of the bureaucracy is just going to be cut in half by this. So the ad revenue, I think within 12 months, we’ll see a solid 25% of Google’s ad revenue go into AI. Wow. It’s just in the words of sparks. It’s logical. It’s
Rolando Rosas 16:51
it’s going to be very interesting, because Google, just as clapping back right now, they’ve had AI, but they just haven’t released it. And I think they got caught sleeping.
Steven Pope 17:03
They’re going to Kodak themselves. Let’s be honest.
Rolando Rosas 17:05
Oh, now that’s some fighting words, because Kodak was sitting on the technology, you know, this, they were sitting on the technology to do you know what we have on our smartphones today? And they poo pooed it, they said, Who wants to do that? They could have or they could have owned the photo space like Google and Apple do? And they said, No, I won’t do it. So let me ask you about this. Undoubtedly, AI is here. It’s today. It’s the future is here today, or we’re back to the future. You can use whatever terminology are. But tell me, Steven, what do you think some of the dangers are? If people ignore this technology and decide I’m going to sit back, let’s develop another year ago by
Steven Pope 17:49
robots. Yeah, I’m launching a product. Tomorrow, I need coffee today. If I tried to hire a coffee person off of Upwork, or some sort of third party service, a contractor neighbor down the street, it on average would take them five days to deliver that listing, copy back. Now, if I want to launch this product tomorrow, that’s a problem. Now, companies like MAG who embrace AI can deliver that within 30 minutes. And I’ll program it and then put in the code and then upload it. So it’s going to bring cost down for marketing deliveries tremendously. And so there’s going to be resistance to this. But the overwhelming adoption, it’s clear, right? Like you see that a chatbot going down and the access points not being available. Because it frickin works. It’s so instantaneous and associate LIS right. And so that’s the risk if people don’t adopt it literally going to be competing against something that can outmaneuver them, and do a week’s worth of work in under 30 seconds.
Rolando Rosas 18:57
Wow, wow. Wow. Dave, got it. I know we’re on it. We have a team nowhere near as big as your 300 Plus folks all over the world. I know you’ve got support folks that are based around the world. But wait,
Steven Pope 19:12
oh, Pakistan, Argentina, Spain, and everywhere in between?
Rolando Rosas 19:16
Man, boy, we could just do a show on that. That’s something that I think a lot of sellers, small and large, somewhere already dabbling with, but I don’t think they know how to really use that to their advantage today. There’s a lot of mystery. There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of contradictory stuff. And I know that you’ve launched a marketplace of sort because of your frustrations around getting talent to get rage and I didn’t want to say what did you just say that?
Steven Pope 19:45
No, I’d say I got cancelled guys. I hired 100 people through indeed and indeed, basically started claiming that I wasn’t offering real jobs. I’m like, what? Yeah, like I escalated it all the way to the top and I lost I lost I got cancelled. So I was like, if you guys I’m starting off suck. And I had 20,000 people apply to MAG in the last 12 months.
Rolando Rosas 20:09
Oh my god. Yeah. When we that’s no little religious backup 28k
Steven Pope 20:15
Yeah, that’s a real number. Like we have applications stored for 20,000 people, that’s just 12 months, that’s just the last 12 months. But until you
Rolando Rosas 20:23
find them demand, you found a market that was underserved. It even seems like by accident because they didn’t want you to do what they would you wanted to do not you found an underserved.
Steven Pope 20:33
So you’re an Amazon seller? Do you want to hire an unqualified person to run your account? Now?
Rolando Rosas 20:39
We don’t wait too long to let an amateur just jump in the reign.
Steven Pope 20:42
Exactly. Right. So there’s an overwhelming demand for Amazon skills. Now, here’s the problem. How many people have Amazon skills,
Rolando Rosas 20:49
you don’t go to school for it. So very little
Steven Pope 20:51
there is there and colleges are like 30 years behind. They’re not just five years behind, that’s 30 years behind. Right? Like Amazon’s been around forever. There’s no Amazon masters degree, which means you have to go pay your tax. That means you gotta go make mistakes. And if you are somebody that doesn’t have Road Rash, guess what happens? They make mistakes on your account.
Rolando Rosas 21:10
Right? So hopefully costly mistakes at that.
Steven Pope 21:13
So we hired 100 interns this year. Now some of you be like, Well, why would Steven want to tell anybody that oh, man, I don’t want to hire Magneto. They hired interns. But here’s the thing, I trained 100 interns and put them through my specialized program, I got MAG school got 500 SOPs, and I put them through a grueling learning process. And now they outperform the market. And so like technology, training, learning, I think there’s a shortage of 50,000 qualified Amazon experts right now. Which, you know, even in the intro, you’re like, Yeah, most Amazon experts are charlatans. Where does that sentiment come from? I think it’s because there’s nefarious actors out there on purpose, I think it’s because they just get in over their head, they don’t have the experience, the market is in its infancy, right. And so this is what happens, the same thing happened in Google, the same thing is going to happen and TikTok and all these different verticals, eventually, they’re all going to combine together combined forces, there’ll be a market standard, and then things will even out. But the fact of the matter is, businesses are gonna have to solve this problem one way or another. And so we made the number one core value of MAG learning, and we teach everything. I love it
Dave Kelly 22:19
with Amazon changing everyday, if they did have a four year degree or a six year degree to become a master Amazon seller, it would change so fast right after that anyway. So I love that you’ve put together your own courses for your own people, you’re giving people an opportunity to do something new and learn something where they couldn’t learn it somewhere else. So that’s really awesome, Steve.
Steven Pope 22:42
Yeah, I mean, you have to evolve to the market, otherwise, you die, which is the theme of the podcast today, right? You got to evolve with the tech. And what
Rolando Rosas 22:50
the tech happens, what to take happen, especially with Amazon, Amazon, you know, it seems like the pace if you were selling before the pandemic, you can expect major news once a quarter. Now, it seems like it’s coming out once a week. And not just major things that have big impact on every seller,
Steven Pope 23:10
they’re changing the list uses six systems to a PPC Auction House is you on your storage space, was a lot of my bingo card, guys. I get it, I knew the system was broken, they had IPI score, and then they had to do restock limits. And both of those don’t even make sense together. So obviously, they had to do something different. But an auction house for storage space. This is going to be a good old boy system, or if it’s going to be a capitalist system, or somewhere in between maybe a hybrid of all of the above. I don’t know why those
Rolando Rosas 23:42
changes the game, if you are all in on Amazon. And I would say and you depend on that storage of your products at Amazon. If you don’t have a three PL or somewhere else where you can park your inventory, it’s definitely going to be more of a nail biter than those folks that may have another facility or somewhere else where they could keep inventory.
Steven Pope 24:07
You know what I just realize? Amazon Seller Support, as terrible as it is, should be entirely gutted and replaced with ChatGPT.
Rolando Rosas 24:17
To a better cap, at least replace it and give you responses in the Spock of Yoda. Yoda, I would prefer
Steven Pope 24:24
that versus the 70% Fluff copy paste we get today. Well, can you imagine if they took the knowledge base? Take my knowledge base, for example, Amazon, I give you permission to use my 1500 videos. SOPs program ChatGPT To answer any Amazon question and put it into Seller Support and then got the system. All right
Rolando Rosas 24:41
here it is.
Steven Pope 24:42
I think it would work.
Rolando Rosas 24:44
Yeah, yeah. Look, that’s the working thesis behind you. It could scrape all that data and the human would be able to interact with it and they could actually do text to speech and have an actual virtual bot talk to you with a response that’s happening today. Hey, when you are in the call center space, you know that AI has been part of what the leading edge call centers are using today, they use AI on the back end to give you sentiment as well, as we heard from a guest that was on from zoom, a couple of weeks ago, he says, the software give you a response to say to that customer, they come in with a complaint or this is not working. And if they know that Johnny, last week had an answer, and the customer was satisfied, it would give you that hate prompt this as a response for the person that’s complaining because Johnny was able to solve it last week. So
Steven Pope 25:35
I think if they had that knowledge confirmed like a rating system, what Elon Musk was doing with Twitter, right with this information has been disputed by the audience, and it’s been uploaded by 7000 people. What if they did that inside a seller support? Right? How do I change a UPC? How do I change a brand name? All these things that Amazon is telling you you have to do but can’t do at the same time and created all these paradoxes?
Rolando Rosas 25:59
Yeah, you know, it, we’re going into this nerdy thing about Amazon catalog, I gotta tell you, I talked to somebody at Amazon a couple months ago. Their words are exactly. They’re frustrated with their own catalog situation at Amazon, when they try to make changes internally. And so if they’re frustrated, the employees that work at Amazon, have problems making those changes themselves, like not the India folks who can’t, they’re not empowered to make change. But internally in Brooklyn, or back in Seattle to make these changes, something’s wrong if they can’t do it. So the
Steven Pope 26:36
way that it works over to Amazon, obviously, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. That’s why they butt heads. But like the tier one, catalog support is forced to follow the rules and do copy paste garbage forms to do it. Once they get to the tier four, like the high tier. They’re told, ignore every rule, solve every problem, break every rule. And so obviously, there’s this massive amount of chaos, which is why there’s no transparency. And it’s a giant walking paradox.
Rolando Rosas 27:01
I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Maybe we’ll get a magic wand to fix that. If Jeff comes back into the home. We actually have somebody that has a question for you. Yeah, we got a special guests. A special guest. Special guest. It’s who do what special guests. Welcome to What the Teck? show. What’s your question today for our special guests or other special guests, Steven Pope.
Eddie 27:24
So thank you, Rolando and Dave, I am Eddie powered by ChatGPT in the voice of a Filipino VA.
Rolando Rosas 27:32
Oh, nice to have ya. Nice to have you man. So we ate it looks like we outsourced Eddie to the Philippines. Exactly.
Oh, right. Okay, and what’s your question today?
Eddie 27:45
Mr. Pope? If there were a Mount Rushmore for leaders in the Amazon world, I would have you, Kevin King, Chad Rubin. And who would you think would be the fourth person of this Mount Rushmore of Amazon leaders?
Steven Pope 28:02
Wow, that is a great question.
Rolando Rosas 28:07
That’s those are some serious names up there, Eddie. But he scraped the internet for them. Oh, my goodness.
Steven Pope 28:13
That’s a good one. I’m gonna put Kevin Sanderson I think he’s such a great Amazon leader. I bought his company.
Rolando Rosas 28:23
Your recent acquisition.
Steven Pope 28:24
So yeah, he’s now the new vice president of marketing. And so he has the leading. I don’t know how fast your AI can work and they put the picture up that quick. Let’s see.
Rolando Rosas 28:32
But last Kim, Kevin Sanderson, look him up.
Dave Kelly 28:34
But I guess we can do like a banner.
Steven Pope 28:37
There you go.
Rolando Rosas 28:38
There he is.
Steven Pope 28:39
But in any case, he has the leading summit for online learning and obviously the synergy with that had to pick them up. And he’s a great guy. We’ve met each other many times. Maximize e commerce and Kevin Sanderson. I would love him to be on Mount Rushmore with me.
Rolando Rosas 28:54
Awesome. Cool. Kevin Sanderson, big props to Kevin Sanderson. Awesome. I don’t know if I’ve had a we were thinking about this before you came about who would I put there? I actually would put a robot there if it was me only because like you said earlier, this is a game changer. Oh my god, Eddie. How did you do that? How did you pull that off?
Steven Pope 29:19
Yeah, you’re gonna find a hammer.
Rolando Rosas 29:24
So Eddie, yeah, I’d
Steven Pope 29:24
put arm I love this shoulder exercises. Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 29:30
we’re talking about that. Yeah, the so some shoulder. It’s there you go, Eddie. Oh, my goodness. Boy. I think we sent the outsourcing right here on this one here. Oh, boy, he could do a whole lot. And there’s even stuff that I don’t even know he could do. So, so thank you. Well, thank you, Eddie, for coming on the show today and asking our special guests your question. All right. Let’s connect the row.
Eddie 29:51
Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Steven. I’ma sign out.
Rolando Rosas 29:53
All right. Thank you for work.
Steven Pope 29:56
Get to work, Eddie. That’s right. We’ll have to bring him back to do some brick and mortar gets.
Rolando Rosas 30:04
Absolutely.
Dave Kelly 30:04
I got so many questions I know that we don’t have all day to get to a mall. No, go for it. Something I want to ask you. It has to do with returns. So I manage a team of people within the customer service and sales side of things and Returns Warehouse. We do merchant fulfilled and also FBA. I’m curious to ask returns, Steven,
Steven Pope 30:27
no matter what your question is, the answer is going to be the cost of doing business
Dave Kelly 30:31
returns. Yep, returns is a bad word. That’s the new F word. So I’m just asking, it’s about strategy. So what strategy can recover the most cost with the least amount of pain when it comes to product returns?
Steven Pope 30:46
This is changing this month, because it’s gonna it’s gonna cost twice as much to do removal orders out of Amazon. I still think it’s the best move, but it’s definitely not as good as it was in 2022. So if you look at the tears and the systems liquidation should be the last option. I’ve never met somebody that can recommend a liquidator. They are just buying things for pennies on the dollar, which is basically why using the liquidation button inside of Amazon is just as good donated to charity, whatever. But returns especially if you have a tech product, the more likely you need to personally inspect that before it goes back into the inventory or you’re going to have customer CX problems. Oh, yeah. So percent. So my current recommendation and by the way, it’s the cost of doing business, no matter how you look at this, it sucks is have all returns go back to you, you personally inspect them and then you figure out what you can salvage. And sometimes maybe the box is damaged but the item is good. And you Reeboks it. Other times, holy crap. They took my motherboard and bent the pins and then put it in a box and shipped it back
Rolando Rosas 31:52
or put the wrong product not even yours. That happens
Steven Pope 31:55
all the time. Like one out of 200 orders I think the returns so like I keep those items at my house for fun.
Rolando Rosas 32:02
I think we got a Nintendo Switch the other day that came back as a return near the box of the returns and we don’t even sell intended switches. Wow. became the new rd. Office.
Dave Kelly 32:17
You must be keeping that for yourself when I drove here on the shelf.
Steven Pope 32:23
That even happened like customers not going to willingly try and ship back a 200 $300 technology piece.
Rolando Rosas 32:30
I bet some somebody that’s at one of those facilities where they process their returns. Just saying oh I just in the box. That’s it. Just put it in that box. Don’t worry,
Steven Pope 32:43
guys. Hire a robot replace me if I don’t do this. What are we getting?
Rolando Rosas 32:48
Right? Now? We’ve gotten all kinds of weird. Do you get it?
Dave Kelly 32:51
You get a Nintendo Rolando. I saw it last time the warehouse contacted me for something that shouldn’t have been received was a pair of men’s slacks. Asked for the size and why? I’m like because if they fit me, I’m gonna want
Steven Pope 33:07
to do with it resell it. For four years, the number one traffic generator for my entire company was what is an LPN number, that article. Yeah, on the internet. So if you’re wondering, an LPN number is the barcode that they put on the
Rolando Rosas 33:26
return. And that’s the first four, it’ll say LPN, before the it’s the leading digits before they give you the actual serial number.
Steven Pope 33:34
Yeah. Yeah, it’s basically it’s a license plate number.
Rolando Rosas 33:37
It’s come from a return facility. Correct? Wow.
Steven Pope 33:41
Yeah. So if a customer ever gets something that has an LPN sticker on it that’s been returned to Amazon at least once.
Rolando Rosas 33:48
Could have been more could have been more. But yeah, that’s one of those things. I wish I had a magic wand that they could fix the grading since I’ve just saw some sentiment around the grading system of choosing what items are good to resell on the platform through the Amazon warehouse, that it’s totally broken. They’re supposed to fix a lot of this. It has not. And sellers that didn’t want stuff being resold, are seeing those products resold that are no good condition to be resold.
Steven Pope 34:19
And of course, that doesn’t make sense. Because what’s Amazon’s main prerogative? It’s not like Google do no evil, they got rid of that, by the way, at Amazon, it’s what’s in the best interests of the customer. So when a system like this is not in the best interest of the customer, it makes you wonder, why are they not fixing it? Why are they not doing root cause analysis?
Rolando Rosas 34:38
I don’t know. That’s a good question. I have no idea. Oh, that’s what I give it and oh, because I don’t understand why that is. You think they have smart people over there, but they don’t always do smart things. I’m gonna give you something that I just heard just yesterday around that. This person was telling me that not too long ago. Purina One basically made a big fuss about Purina One and other sellers that are on the platform Amazon obliged to some extent and said okay with or without this the word one because it’s part of Purina One was programmed into the bots 1000s of sellers in listings went off that were have nothing to do with dog food and a bunch of other categories because of word one
Steven Pope 35:25
I personally list witnessed three of those myself and we oh there you go. We had 57 clients get that notice.
Rolando Rosas 35:32
Can you believe that nonsense? Not even dog or dog food totally broken.
Steven Pope 35:40
Like you mentioned earlier in the podcast in the intro like you’re worried about two day prime it became five day prime last July like without two day prime there is no Amazon brand.
Rolando Rosas 35:51
I don’t know what’s going to happen with all these people being like goes obviously they’re closing warehouses down because they see an overcapacity but the promise was that drones would get this dropped in an hour or two prime you signed up under the premise that you’re getting two day delivery but I gotta tell you oh water all the time personally and part of the business for supplies and stuff. I just keep seeing fewer products in that two day transit time for delivery and more It’s like free delivery with prime and you don’t really know it’s coming two days. That’s just free could be three could be for a love Voss water, big props Voss water if you want to do something with the channel. Do you know how many times it doesn’t even come? Just flat out telling you the case never
Steven Pope 36:38
quite know is it’s not Optimus Prime. In Do you guys know that voice by E or? The original Optimus Prime was voiced by your
Dave Kelly 36:50
No kidding. Yeah. So we went from this evil evil guy to dope sick donkey.
Steven Pope 37:00
Good guy. Optimus Prime was the good guy.
Dave Kelly 37:02
Oh, that’s right. Sorry, Optimus Prime, I should have known that was my first trans prime
Steven Pope 37:05
Autobots stumble. So yeah, the death of prime is coming, guys, just like Google’s dying, Amazon’s dying. Now, obviously, I’m biased to want everybody to sell on Amazon. Now here’s the thing. I don’t know who’s going to beat Amazon. I actually don’t know what the replacement looks like. Target probably asleep or they have potential Walmart, fat chance. So Amazon is entering its maturity phase and they are starting to relax. Relaxing will lead to further innovation and somebody will take them out probably in five years. You know, number one at what they do in five years. That is my prediction.
Rolando Rosas 37:42
It’s possible that you let’s get into that TikTok is making noise about trying to do something where they could use their platform, which is the number one consumed social media app on the market right now. And adding something with fulfillment. They’re bringing people in from Amazon, do you think they have the potential or the wherewithal to really make a dent in this whole thing?
Steven Pope 38:05
Yes. Everybody is paying attention to TikTok. YouTube is pushing monetization in YouTube shorts right now. Okay, Twitter is bringing back video, and all the vine and everything else that they were doing, right. So yes, TikTok is massive. They took what I don’t even know what the right stat is. But it feels like about a third of all ad revenues going to TikTok in the general space could be off in that number. And they’re stealing it from Facebook. They’re stealing it from Google. They’re stealing it from YouTube and everywhere else. So it’s a matter of time. So I don’t know what like the physical mechanism. But there will have to be some sort of acquisition. The only thing that will stop TikTok from being a top four horsemen, as it were, is if regulation steps in. But we all know that our government’s in bed with China. And they’re not going to prevent TikTok from taking over,
Rolando Rosas 38:57
even though on its face, the banning and just me just tell you, Steven, the ban, like government accounts that can’t put them on their smartphone. That’s where the noise is that it’s the state of Florida, the state of Georgia says none of our Georgia owned smartphones can use TikTok, which in the aggregate is a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny portion of the pie. It’s really all about the optics, rather than the reality because if the state of Georgia or Florida or Texas or wherever they were really serious, they would introduce serious regulation when it comes to social media, not just TikTok and privacy concerns. So this is all about optics right now and no teeth.
Steven Pope 39:43
I have to concur. So that’s the only reason TikTok would fail it’s inevitable going to succeed without regulation interference. In Facebook might not even be a company two or three years from now. They might be MySpace within two years.
Rolando Rosas 39:57
Whoa, you are making some bold predictions. I gotta tell you some bullpens,
Steven Pope 40:01
Apple killed them apples, one of the four horsemen. So it takes a new four horsemen to knock out a current one. Facebook is lost its four horsemen status, they’re out TikTok is in.
Rolando Rosas 40:12
Right? Yes. And if they become vertically integrated, which is what I think you were talking about, with Amazon, Amazon’s vertically integrated from the last mile all the way to the platform. And everywhere in between. If TikTok is able to get vertically integrated so that they could deliver goods, use their platform for essentially advertising, then that may be a challenger, but that’s a lot. Logistics. What’s the dirtiest part of doing Amazon? catalog and logistics?
Steven Pope 40:42
No doubt about?
Rolando Rosas 40:43
How is TikTok going to pull that off logistics and keeping everything straight supply chain
Steven Pope 40:47
and partnership, merger or acquisition? Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 40:51
maybe they buy a bunch of Amazon warehouses bring a bunch of other people. Maybe they buy some other assets to beef them up. Who knows? Maybe they buy like a QVC. So they have more outlets TV? I don’t know.
Steven Pope 41:03
Who knows. Someone’s got to buy Walmart at some point. Right? You
Rolando Rosas 41:07
think the Walton family is gonna let the Chinese folks I mean, everybody’s home grown apple pies you can get right.
Steven Pope 41:13
Everybody hasn’t price. And so like Walmart tried to beat Amazon and loss, not even we’re not even talking close of a loss. It was a bloodbath, like avalanche loss. They bought jet couldn’t integrate the tech. I don’t know if you guys if you guys ever done Walmart grocery pickup.
Rolando Rosas 41:34
I have never done a pickup.
Steven Pope 41:36
I’ve never talked to somebody who thinks it’s a good service. It sucks. I’ve personally done Walmart grocery pickup and sat in my car for 45 minutes. Now, every time that I go to Target grocery pickup, I’m in and out in under five. Yeah, not a single time is that not been true? Whole Foods has
Rolando Rosas 41:53
been good, too. I’ve done Whole Foods pickup zero problems on the whole foods pickup as well.
Steven Pope 41:58
So Walmart doesn’t care about tech. And they don’t care about trying to be anything except that low price economic solution. So they’re coming in from a low price angle. So I don’t think Walmart is going to be moving up to be a competitor to Amazon ever. In fact, I think they already lost. And we’d have to go backwards in time to look at legacy platforms like eBay. There’s some niche sites like house and Wayfarer, and some of those sites do really well. But they’re also super niche. And then you got some no name marketplaces like price falls racket in and other things. And then Etsy is another really cool. Etsy is really strong, but not a single one of those is ever going to be Amazon not any of them not even if they combined forces, they wouldn’t even have the same it’d be a big
Rolando Rosas 42:42
mess. If they ended up doing that. That’s where we want to happen. Yeah. So somebody’s
Steven Pope 42:47
gonna have to come along and invest in the infrastructure or take over somebody’s bad infrastructure. Right? I don’t know, whatever happened to Sears buildings. What’s going to happen to all of this office space in the cities that nobody’s going to ever return to because I work from home and buy tech products from you guys.
Rolando Rosas 43:02
You know, maybe that’s a word for Eddie Lampert pizza guy, Sears J slash JC Penney that could pull the trigger on that maybe get a TikTok to come in, take almost all their real estate, have all the locations and or then maybe do a partnership with one of the carriers FedEx somebody else
Steven Pope 43:22
out the Halloween shop every October, like where are they getting their space?
Rolando Rosas 43:28
Put in space. Exactly. Steven, we have this segment that we call the rapid fire segment. Oh, this is my favorite. I’m going to give you a phrase or a word. And all we want is the first thing that’s in your mind. Alright, the first word or thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? Let me just look away. Here we go.
Steven Pope 43:51
FBA Amazon
Rolando Rosas 43:56
Amazon advertising expensive Chinese sellers. Go away. Die bribery. Cheating. I love you’re gonna love this one. Amazon Seller Support
Steven Pope 44:14
sucks. That was the easiest one so far.
Rolando Rosas 44:19
Amazon q&a video responses up and coming. drone deliveries
Steven Pope 44:29
might never
Rolando Rosas 44:30
happened. We touched on this one but I want to get to Walmart versus Amazon.
Steven Pope 44:37
laughable.
Rolando Rosas 44:41
Elon Musk. A good guy. Okay. The future of Alexa. Ai okay. And last one. Jeff Bezos
Steven Pope 44:59
comes started to look like him.
Rolando Rosas 45:01
Hey, there you go. There you go. All right. So we got through that very easily. Let me we got just a few more minutes.
Steven Pope 45:13
Amazon guy. Yeah, I come up before Jeff Bezos.
Rolando Rosas 45:16
Nice. That’s what do you call SEO? Right there?
Steven Pope 45:19
I’m number one. He’s number two
Rolando Rosas 45:22
more important, serious SEO Google points, but maybe not. I see AI future? Who knows? We’ll see. We’ll see what happens with that. I heard recently. Let me see if you can concur on this one. I actually just yesterday that the Jeff at Amazon, email still works, it does. One of the keys to that is two things that I heard this person say, you want to address not Jeff, dear Jeff, or any of that. Just say, Dear executive seller relations, because the truth of that work there. Understand you know what you’re talking about? That’s true. Okay. And the other thing that they said, that’s helpful for the folks that send this email, have your seller ID ready in the email. Not important. Not important.
Steven Pope 46:15
What is important is to give them the case ID. So the case ID where you’ve tried to go through the normal routine process, and you’ve escalated three times. And so support sucks so bad, that you had to escalate to them. Amazon’s a culture of escalation. So it’s acceptable to escalate. And their system is completely bonkers, broken. And they know it came out with the captive team got rid of it, they’ve come out with other special team names that came in remember, they’ll show up for six months and then go in. But the root problem is like if you talk to the people in charge of sales support, and you say, hey, what’s the number one big problem sellers have today? They can’t answer that question. They simply do not know that it’s impossible to change, a brand name a UPC change, and some of these other challenges that sellers have, even though they
Rolando Rosas 47:05
created the problem. And you know, I think part of that is that although they know their customer, they don’t know sellers, because selling on their platform is totally different than customers experiences. And so it’s just not there. The investments not obviously, it’s not there. And the people that are in charge of the programs, they don’t come from the seller side, and come to Amazon. But imagine there’s probably a teeny little fraction floating around, but they’re mostly not sellers. So they don’t operationally understand what sellers are struggling with. And so people they bring in smart people, but they don’t quite understand the nature of the problem.
Steven Pope 47:42
Which is why the Amazon aggregators, which dumped in, I don’t know, $10 billion into the Amazon space, and then bought up all these Amazon brands. And then the aggregators went and hired people who used to work at Amazon, and then they failed. Who could have imagined why? Because hiring Excel file, people that can do arbitrage in an Excel file and make up numbers are not the people that actually run accounts, Amazon sellers are made of tenacity and grit. So if you don’t hire for tenacity and grit to work on your Amazon accounts, good luck, you’re out.
Rolando Rosas 48:19
No doubt, no doubt. And that leads me into asking you, you’ve got a couple of ventures, you’ve got your live, you’ve also got your Pope plus that you just launched for sellers to get in touch with that, what’s that all about your Pope plus.
Steven Pope 48:33
So I’m going for vertical control on the space every time by the way, it’s really good business book called The Blue Ocean, right? I don’t pay attention to any of my competitors. There is not any competitor on my list that I pay attention to not a single one. All I do is I ask customers, what do you want, and then I give it to them. And customers keep telling me they want x so I give them x, they wanted to be in touch with me and my full service agency would not allow me to scale my body on 300 accounts. So what I did is I created Pope plus which you can get access over at Pope plus.com and you’ll be in a Slack community. We’re having Wednesday night weekly meetings, and I post all my SOPs and it’s a very different flavor of a service and it’s brand new, so hopefully some Amazon sellers listening sign up.
Dave Kelly 49:20
That’s awesome.
Rolando Rosas 49:22
You are one of the busiest guys I know you keep launching like you said you keep launching services, you got your podcast, you’ve got other things going on, man, I want to know what’s the secret sauce that keeps you
Steven Pope 49:36
going? System building and you got to know your why. Right so I got four kids seven and under. I’m making an Amazon brand for every single one of them. So my daughter is gonna get ages sage my oldest son’s gonna get Hunter’s high jinks and Bruce is gonna get Bruce box and we have trademarks and we have product lines and we’re building out all these cool different things. And so at the end of the day, like if I hold on to All of my entities and all of my assets, I have protection, nobody can tell me what to do. I don’t have to answer to the man. And if the Chinese government and the US government have a trade war, it doesn’t matter, I pivot my services over to wherever we can. So I also own my warehouse guy, My Refund guy, and the list goes on. So it’s about vertical control. It’s about having relentless autonomy. And obviously, not every single one of these business ventures makes me money. Some of them are just a work in progress.
Rolando Rosas 50:29
Well, kudos to you, because you got to be you’re brave in taking those risks. And it leads me to just ask the natural question, you work with so many Amazon accounts, so many brands, you’ve met so many people? What would you say if you were to sum up a few phrases about what are the traits of those companies that do really well on the platform? What are those like or, and then what are the ones that crash and burn,
Steven Pope 50:55
so the seller needs to have tenacity and grit, and then the brand needs to offer value. So as simple as that, and we only practice the basics of traffic and conversion elements, and the sellers and the brands that practice the Blackhat stuff, they do really well for a time and then they burn out. And so those are the ones that get just totally beat up by the algorithm change. But if we just summarize the pillars of Amazon traffic in the form of PPC and SEO, and then design and catalog management in the form of conversion elements, and you could pepper in some logistics and finance and all that stuff, too. But that’s the marketing pillars of Amazon. So that’s what you got to do to be successful. The ones that don’t do well, are me two products that offer nothing to the customer. They don’t bring a brand, they don’t bring a luxury, they don’t bring an experience. And they don’t do anything different. That is the Alibaba model, drop shippers. Also, that model is now completely broken. Amazon’s hostile to your model. And you need to go private label that this day and age in 2023
Rolando Rosas 52:01
Very interesting words of wisdom, words of wisdom from Steven Pope. Dave, was there anything else you wanted to add?
Dave Kelly 52:09
I have 100 Other questions, but we don’t have time. But listen, if I can ask one quick question, though. Who has the advantage? sellers who have expertise in the products that they sell,
Steven Pope 52:23
and the mountain wins, whatever you’re about to say that one wins.
Dave Kelly 52:27
And then the other was just sellers that are able to procure and sell at a low cost.
Steven Pope 52:32
expertise will always win. And that there’s so many reasons why that we don’t have time to go into but experts who stick to what they know, do better. Do you want to be the bunny rabbit that tries to learn to swim? No, you want to do the bunny rabbit that is faster than a jack rabbit on the Safari. Right? Just stick to what you know. Now, if your expertise happens to be procurement, you might win the debate. But in terms of like your knowledge set, stick to products you understand if you’re a nationally ranked chess player, sell chess sets. If you are guy who programmed MS DOS back in the day, stick to tech products. Stick to what you know, best advice I’ll ever give anybody trying to sell on Amazon
Rolando Rosas 53:17
100% I can’t agree more with concur. And don’t listen to the idiots that tell you to go to a tool. Look up the highest ranked category and the interesting one Alibaba. Don’t do that you’re going to crash and burned and just burned money just burned money. Steven Pope, you have said so much today. I mean, I think enjoyed the time we spent together today. And we’ve been talking to Steven Pope, Master Guru, subject matter guest expert, when I’m just
Steven Pope 53:54
an Amazon guy, guys. Oh, no,
Rolando Rosas 53:55
no, no, no, no, no, no, you can be polite and not brag record. Yeah, no, you’re not a braggadocious kind of guy. But in talking to other people, and how you’ve helped them and a bunch of other sellers, and what you do with your information and being just way I think way more because you could keep those secrets to yourself. There’s a lot of stuff that you put out that I’m like, holy crap, he’s given away the kingdom. Don’t say that. Inside behind the gated group, there’s got to pay for that. Right. But you share that with the entire world. So I’m grateful for you because we’ve taken some of what you’ve said, and it’s made a big difference in our business. So
Steven Pope 54:34
that’s all I need in return is just hearing that we helped make the world go round because it’s not me against you. It’s all of us against the Amazons
Rolando Rosas 54:44
no doubt. And so we’ve been talking to Steven Pope. If folks want to get a hold of you or your agency, where can they go?
Steven Pope 54:51
MyAmazonguy.com You want to send an email over to us you can also email us at podcasts at myAmazonguy.com that does go directly to me. Pleasure guys. Thanks for having me on.
Rolando Rosas 55:01
All right. Thank you, Steven, I appreciate you coming on today. And if you want to listen to more of this episode, just hit the replay button. And you got a lot of nuggets today from Steven Pope. Go ahead and do that. But if you want more, we touched on other past guests like Chad Rubin, and Seneca Hampton. You’ll find all of those guests@circuitloops.com or wherever you consume your podcasts. And we’ll see you there. And thanks again for tuning in today. We’ll see you guys. All right. Thanks.
Outro 55:31
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