Mastering Amazon and Beyond with Jon Tilley, CEO of ZonGuru

Oleg: Okay, so it's like, no, hello everyone, welcome to Navigators. I'm glad that we have today John Taylor from ZonGuru with us. We know each other for a while, and it's always a pleasure talking to John. So let's start with your story. Introduce yourself to our audience so people know you better. How you came to the e-commerce world, what it's like, how you ended up being a CEO of ZonGuru?

Jon: Good to be here, and yeah, always good to meet up with you. I'm based in Los Angeles, so it's actually evening here, so it's a little bit dark, apologies for the lighting. My journey is essentially, you know, I had many years in advertising, digital advertising. I'm from South Africa originally, which explains the accent. I moved to Los Angeles in 2006. Around 2013, I found Amazon at a conference in Las Vegas, which really made me realize there was a real opportunity to scale my own private label brands on Amazon. So, I did the typical story of a side hustle and built a few brands that quickly scaled. That was amazing for me to see the type of growth you can get on Amazon. I got very passionate about the space, went all in, and that was my focused gig for about a year. Through that process and my background in digital advertising, I saw the opportunity to launch a software set. At the time, I felt that with my knowledge of Amazon, I could do a lot better in terms of visualizing what needs to be sold for on Amazon. I launched ZonGuru in 2017, and we've grown it over the years. Now we have about 17 or 18 different tools, and we're an operational toolset for both sellers on Amazon and also brands and agencies.

Oleg: Amazing, so we started more or less at the same time on Amazon, and it was a wild west time; it was very easy back then. I know you guys are doing a lot of development, bringing AI to the tools, all these modern things to optimize the listings. I really suggest checking out the tool. I think you're one of the fellows that brought ChatGPT to the Amazon space, if I'm right. But I would like to have your opinion on the general trends, what's going on in the Amazon space, how these things are changing. Is it getting... what is your observation? You've been in all the hats, right, from your own brand to the tools, and you talk to a lot of agencies and brands. What do you see, the trends and the change in the space?

Jon: There's a lot changing. At a high level, one of the trends I'm seeing this side of the year is, typically on Amazon, if you were early to market and sold products early on Amazon, you were almost entrenched into Amazon's flywheel. You indexed for a lot of keywords and got a lot of traffic from Amazon's algorithm. However, the market has evolved, and Amazon is always trying to stay at the forefront of choice and cutting edge, offering the best in class to customers. So, a lot of bigger brands are having to go in and start to optimize listings and really improve them, instead of just resting on their laurels with their old listings and old ways of doing things. There's a lot more focus around continual optimization of your storefront.

Another big change is the introduction of AI, which has made a massive shift in the marketplace. We were first to market with our ChatGPT integration in January this year. It's an insanely big value add to sellers, brands, and agencies. Instead of a well-optimized listing happening in about two hours, you can now do that baseline listing and have about a 30% better optimized listing than the best listings on page one, and under one minute. This has been a huge shift in terms of the baseline of the listing and how you can optimize your listings.

We focus on the SEO content piece, ensuring that you can write content in the right way that works for the algorithm. It's not only about finding the right keywords but how you tell the story and ensure that you're adding the keywords into your listing in the right way that matches the algorithm. AI is really good at writing a listing where it can broad match for as many terms as possible, even just in the title.

In terms of imagery, we're focusing on the SEO content piece, but AI is very good at generating ideas for what kind of images you want to create. We still feel it's best to get ideas from that but then use high-quality photographers to create your images.

Amazon is still a search engine, and we need to please the algorithm to get the traffic we want. AI is absolutely crushing the text, but for image and video, it's still at a toy level. However, I strongly believe that it's coming pretty soon with all the news I follow. I'm excited every day about the advancements in AI.

Oleg: Yeah, so I hope we see it in our e-commerce space as well. Talking about optimization, Q4 is coming, and we're already doing a lot of preparation with most of our clients to get the organic rankings before etc. The biggest problem for me as an agency with sellers and brands is the expectations of Q4 and the unpredictability of reality. Q4 is what everyone is waiting for, but it's never 100% sure, and there are a lot of price wars and competition. Do you have some strategies or ideas that you guys suggest using with your tools or whatever just to make Q4 more successful?

Jon: Right now, there's a lot of unease around Q4 because we're still coming out of the back of COVID, and what that did to the industry. It's hard to predict year over year numbers because it's been all over the place in the last two years. I think this Q4 will be more steady in terms of where e-commerce is at, and there will be good results. But there's still unease from sellers who are just getting on their feet again, getting their distribution channels right, inventory right, etc. In terms of strategies, from our perspective, it's about maximizing your listing based on the type of keywords you should be putting in there, predicting seasonal keywords, and getting a head start on that. As you get into Q4, refreshing it, whatever keyword tool you're using, trying to get at what the actual keywords are that customers are typing into the localized market over the season, and finding those nuggets and keywords that you can get into your listing and index for, or into your PPC campaigns. It's about continuous focus, initial updates to your listing to give yourself the best potential, and then bi-monthly or monthly optimizations as you go through Q4 to ensure you're ahead of the game as much as possible. PPC is absolutely pay-to-play, and understanding that is critical. When updating listings, understanding that PPC is a critical part of that. If you find keywords that your competitors haven't ranked for, or you haven't found yet, you can get better conversion rates. It's about pushing your ACoS and budgets on some of those keywords to help your organic rank.

There's a continuous focus on finding opportunities in keywords, keeping the conversion rate up with PPC, and balancing that with profits. Pricing is such a critical part, and adjusting your pricing to ensure that your conversion rates and sales are profitable is important. There are pricing automation softwares and intelligence around that, which is a big part of AI today. You really need someone as an expert, like an agency, to balance that between listing updates, keyword focus, PPC, competitor tracking, and adjusting and flowing pricing to beat competitors, stay profitable, and keep the conversion rate up. It's a balancing act for sure, and staying in stock is also crucial.

Oleg: So basically, you're saying you have to be really with your hand on the pulse 24/7 all through Q4 to be precise?

Jon: Absolutely, it's a real-time game. For example, we had one product that is Mother's Day focused. We crushed Mother's Day last year and this year. This year specifically, we had one of the top keywords in the middle of the season change from the top performer to the match. Luckily, we checked it a few times a day, so we spotted it and changed the PPC accordingly. It's getting like a real-time game, interestingly.

Jon: Big time, because to be extremely successful, you have to drive a lot of that traffic and optimization with PPC. If you don't have your finger on the pulse and things go awry, you can spend a lot of money in the wrong areas and miss out on opportunity, but also overspend. It's much more of an art and a science now, with a lot of impact. It's going to be interesting, and being clear on competitors, having software that can track competitors, and being proactive around that is critical.

Oleg: Let's hope for amazing numbers this Q4. Just a general question, I always try to ask and see because I believe e-commerce evolves very fast, especially with all the trends and AI, not only AI, but also platforms like TikTok. They run the TikTok shop nowadays, and we see some amazing results with it. Where do you see the e-commerce space in three to five years, maybe three is enough, five is too far?

Jon: Sometimes I try not to think about it. I think the blend between marketing by influencers, live shopping, and having your brand at the grassroots level of thousands of influencers is a really interesting area to explore. TikTok is starting to figure that out in terms of how you can get influencers to sell products in a genuine way, but also ways that they can make affiliate fees and drive that industry. If they can really get that to work well and track it in the right way where both parties benefit based on actual success of sales, not just on branding or brand awareness, that's good. It's going to change drastically and fast, and it's not as easy to predict.

The channel is growing and will keep growing more and more. With change comes opportunity, and even small opportunities are huge in terms of volume and sales. In the software space, every idea is an extreme niche with a small problem that it's solving, but because you have such access to mass markets, it's a massive business. As brands, it's about solving and really understanding your target audience at a deep level and adjusting your product for that. Things are getting more and more niche by the day and will continue in that direction. AI, whether it's marketing or storefronts, is going to continue to drive in that way, but it also pushes us to be more genuine, to be at a high creative level.

Jon: To be more authoritative, you know, to again, really truly understand the customer, whether it's blog content or storefront content or products. The more you can really push the boundaries to connect in a genuine way with those customers, the better opportunity you're going to have to get in front of them and stand out from everything else. Everything is getting similar with AI, so that's a big takeaway. With technology, it pushes us as humans and creators to be more creative and more experts. That's going to start to come through in our product and our marketing, to be able to stand out.

Oleg: Yeah, I always use it myself. I totally agree with you. We are definitely on the same page that tools provide us the ability to be more creative. Whatever product we sell, it's all about our product and the end users. As we mentioned, the connection, if we use all the tools, all the platforms, doesn't matter if it's Amazon or something else, it's all about providing the greatest value to the end customer, loyalty, and so on. It's very interesting. I like the time we are living in; it's very fun.

Jon: So, what is the best way to reach out to you and find out more if people want to continue this conversation?

Jon: Number one, we can provide you with a link with a discount, so if anybody wants to sign up and try ZonGuru, you can try it; it's got a free trial in there. At least get in and test your listings for Q4, make sure that you maximize versus your competitors. We are a tool for brands but also for agencies. If agencies want to connect with us, we'd love that, and we truly can help you scale. We have some features that are available at the agency level that are much more created for scale when you're managing hundreds and thousands of listings across hundreds of brands. You can reach out at zonguru.com, as well as my LinkedIn profile, John Tilley, T-I-L-L-E-Y. You can get in touch with me there. We have a chat and a lot of sellers on our team, so we're all there, no matter what level you're at, we would love to help and help you navigate this interesting e-comm world that we're in.

Oleg: Thank you, John, it was an amazing conversation, very valuable for me and I believe for our audience as well. Thank you and see you next time.

Jon: Good to see you, Oleg. Thank you.