[ BDSN ] 🤥 Amazon gurus are f*cking liars

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SPECIAL NOTE: The Billion Dollar Seller Summit and BDSS Level Up is underway in Kauai, Hawaii right now.

As you can imagine, I am pretty busy with the event. So this week will be “Best of” issues of some of the most clicked on stories of the past year.

Even if you read every newsletter, you probably missed some of these. Enjoy!

Here are some interesting stats of the attendees at BDSS 10 in Hawaii:

• Largest BDSS yet (149 people)

• 65% are first timers

• 10.2% are selling more than $100 million per year

• 63.7% don’t sell on Walmart

• 65.4% don’t sell on TikTok

• 30.4% have been selling 10 years or more on Amazon

💰 HOW to CRUSH YOUR PRODUCT LAUNCHES

Originally published in BDSN April 8, 2024

How would you like to crush your product launches by driving a tsunami of outside traffic to Amazon for FREE?

That’s what Josh Hadley, one of the speakers at BDSS 10 in Hawaii, showed you how to do on the recent Billion Dollar Seller hacks webinar.

His hack took first place in the audience voting. Josh and several more of the smartest Amazon sellers in the world will be sharing these kinds of strategies in Hawaii next month.

And if you think Josh is smart, just wait until you meet Becca, his wife and Amazon business partner. She placed third in the hack contest at last year’s BDSS Puerto Rico event.

Josh says sellers who are not using Amazon’s new Creator Connections tool are missing out and could get crushed by their competition.

But the problem is, almost every seller using Creator Connections right now is using it the WRONG WAY!

Note: Creator Connections is currently in a closed beta by invite only, but many sellers are still able to get instantly approved while others are put on a waitlist.

Josh recently got an insane 89% conversion rate in influencer traffic for one of his products using Creator Connections.

Josh is sharing this amazing step-by-step SOP with you so you and/or your team can replicate his success.

Implement it today and start crushing it while leaving your competitors wondering what happened!

The secret to growing on LinkedIn in 2024

The secret to growing on LinkedIn in 2024

There's a rising demand for high-quality video content on LinkedIn. This presents a major opportunity for brands (and thought leaders) ready to step in.

Here’s how you can capitalize:

1. Grab your company's existing video assets, like interviews or webinars

2. Generate dozens of clips using OpusClip

3. Schedule your whole month’s worth of video clips on LI using our new Calendar feature

4. Reply to comments on your videos to foster your new connections

Want the full breakdown, with examples from companies like SaaStr and Chili Piper? Read it for free here

😍 STUNNING PRODUCT VIDEOS in SECONDS
Holy cow → cool for product & brand videos

Originally published in BDSN on November 30, 2023

Rolling out now to users on the web and Discord, Pika Labs has taken video editing and creation using AI to the next level.

With Pika 1.0 you can:

• Create realistic product videos from text prompts

• Create videos for your brand using reference videos you like

• Embed your company logo into exiting video

• Insert your photos into a video, or make photos move and come to life

• Customize camera angles and movements

🤥 AMAZON GURUS are F*CKING LIARS

🅰️ A CHANGE is COMING to the A9 ALGORITHM

Originally published August 28, 2023 in BDSN

Keyword stuffing in your Amazon listing may soon go the way of the dinosaurs and be irrelevant for ranking on Amazon. 

A single keyword, phrase or proper flat file set up with browse nodes and optimized category attributes, along with some sales and conversions, may soon be all you need to rank on anything related to your product.

CURRENT A9 ALGORITHM

A recent deep dive published by the guys at Seller Sessions talks about how the mysterious A9 ranking algorithm at Amazon works. While generally accurate, its conclusions are based mostly on the “2016 Sorokina Paper” and testing

The article goes in depth about some key components of the A9:  Your ol’ buddy Kevin read all 10,000+ words, and here are the highlights

Key Components of the A9:

• Product Search Scores: How well products match search terms.

• Query Category Score: Gauges the relevance of a search query to a product category based on clicks, purchases, and word combinations.

• Hunger Score: Eagerness of a category to be selected after a search.

• In-Category Relevance Score: Assesses how closely a product matches a search query within its category.

Notable Insights from the Seller Sessions deep dive:

• The "Honeymoon Period" post-product launch is random.

• Cold Start Override allows for manual adjustments to rankings.

• Amazon uses data purchases, add-to-carts, and clicks for training.

• Major challenge: Showing results from multiple categories.

• A9's solution: Combine search results based on historic data and predict searcher's intent using a language model.

• Power Law Distribution affects how products are ranked based on the popularity of search terms.

• Query Ranking Module structures and understands user queries, breaking them down for the algorithm.

• Behavioral features, like sales and user context, play a significant role in product rankings.

• Brands should prioritize keyword relevance, especially when launching.

COMING SOON TO THE A9 ALGORITHM

Seller Sessions’ breakdown is good, but a very recent paper gives sellers better insight into what’s probably about to happen with Amazon search results.

In a nutshell, Amazon is working on both physical GPU based technology and its own unique e-commerce LLM. It can process massive AI-related search analysis to serve up results in the blink of an eye.

This could take away the need to be indexed for everything and pretty much eliminate keyword stuffing and how we try to optimize listings to rank today.

Let me introduce you to my friend ‘BERT’ (buy him a beer so he talks more).

BERT was explained by Amazon this past May in Osaka Japan at the 27th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

You need to have a PhD in data science to deeply understand what they are talking about.  But let me break it down for you in simple language.

Traditional methods of matching products with search queries just look for exact words or phrases in the product data & descriptions. This is fast and simple but has some problems. For example, if a customer makes a small spelling mistake or uses a synonym, they might not get the results they want.

To fix this, newer methods use something called "semantic matching." This is like understanding the meaning behind words rather than just the words themselves. It's like if someone searched for "sneakers," the system would also know to show "running shoes."

Now Amazon will soon be launching a new method to improve search results using a language model called BERT.

There is a four-step method to train an e-commerce LLM model that can efficiently match queries to products to buy:

• Domain-Specific Pretraining: Train it on e-commerce data. E-commerce language is different, so a general model won't work well.

  • They created a special vocabulary from around 1 billion product titles and descriptions from 14 languages, fine-tuning with 330 million query-product pairs using AWS data, taken from multiple countries in at least 4 languages.

  • Tools like Deepspeed and PyTorch were used, and training was done on AWS P3DN instances.

• Query-Product Interaction Pre-finetuning: They improve the model by making it understand how search queries relate to products. They use a dataset where the queries and products have a strong relation, and they mask parts to train the model to predict the missing parts.

• Finetuning for Matching: This stage trains the model to match queries to products. They employ a bi-encoder system which is efficient for large-scale data. The training uses a scoring system that labels pairs as positive matches, hard negatives, or random negatives.

• Knowledge Distillation to a Smaller Model: The final step is to transfer the knowledge from the large, well-trained model to a smaller one that can work quickly in real-time for product search.

Bottomline:

A single sentence in a product listing could soon match hundreds of search phrases without keywords needed explicitly mentioning them all.

Tools like Helium 10, Jungle Scout and Data Dive will need to pivot with their keyword tools, or they could become irrelevant.


As Sam Cooke sang in 1963 …

Then, I go to my brother

And I say, "Brother, help me, please"

But he winds up knockin' me

Back down on my knees, oh

It's been a long

A long time coming, but I know

A change gon' come

Oh yes, it will

📛  AMAZON’S CHOICE or BEST SELLER?

Originally published BDSN on March 25, 2024

Amazon badges are crucial in creating a sense of trust and perceived value to help your products stand out in search.

Many different kinds of badges can help you with conversions on Amazon:

• Amazon’s Choice Badge 

• Best Seller Badge 

• Climate Pledge Friendly Badge 

• Coupons and Sales 

• Prime & Fresh Badges 

• Limited Inventory 

Check out this really good primer on all the badges and how to obtain them.

🚀 HOW to LAUNCH with 100+ REVIEWS

Originally published in BDSN on March 18, 2024

Steve Rolle has done $30 million on Amazon since 2018. Watch the video he shared below on how to launch variations but keep each of them on their own ASIN first. Enroll them to Vine and max out the 30 reviews each. Then combine them back together.

👛 MASSIVE PPC CONVERSION HACK

Originally published in BDSN on November 9, 2023

8-figure seller and former Billion Dollar Seller Summit speaker Aaron Cordovez posted a MASSIVE AMAZON HACK on Linkedin.

If you are brand registered, you need to check your benchmark conversion rates.

He says this is HUGE.

If your brand is not at the bare minimum at the “median” conversion rate for the category, you are fighting an uphill battle and will likely fail until this is fixed.

Aaron says until you address this, your PPC strategy doesn’t matter, your product quality will NOT save you.

Watch this step-by-step 90 second video he made to compare yourself to the minimum performance for your product.

See you again on Thursday with part 2 of the Best of BDSN …